29 March 22
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28 March 22
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Internal email shows that despite its anti-war stance, the company bowed to Kremlin decrees.
The internal email, obtained by The Intercept, was sent by management at a firm that translates corporate texts and app interfaces for Google and other clients.
The email passed along instructions from Google with the new wording. The instructions also noted that the word “war” should continue to be used in other markets and that the policy change was intended to keep Google in compliance with a Russian censorship law enacted just after the invasion of Ukraine.
Asked about the guidance, Google spokesperson Alex Krasov told The Intercept, “While we’ve paused Google ads and the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia, we remain focused on the safety of our local employees. As has been widely reported, current laws restrict communications within Russia. This does not apply to our information services like Search and YouTube.”
According to a translator who spoke to The Intercept, the orders apply to all Google products translated into Russian, including Google Maps, Gmail, AdWords, and Google’s policies and communications with users. (The translator asked for anonymity to avoid reprisal by their employer.)
The internal memo helps explain why some Google web pages, including an advertising policy and video help document found by The Intercept, use euphemistic terms like “emergency in Ukraine” in their Russian version but “war in Ukraine” in the English version.
The censorship law, signed by Russia President Vladimir Putin on March 4, created harsh criminal penalties of up to 15 years in prison for disseminating so-called false information about the Russian military. This is widely believed to include referring to Russia’s assault on Ukraine as a war or invasion, given that the Kremlin had previously drawn a hard line against such terms. The Kremlin calls the war a “special military operation,” and its internet censorship board has reportedly threatened to block websites that use terms like “invasion.”
Like many other American companies, Google swiftly declared its support of Ukraine and opposition to the Russian invasion after the attack began. And like several other Silicon Valley titans, it also implemented new policies to stifle the Kremlin’s ability to propagandize. A March 1 company blog post by Google global affairs chief Kent Walker stated, “Our teams are working around the clock to support people in Ukraine through our products, defend against cybersecurity threats, [and] surface high-quality, reliable information.” Walker added that Google had “paused the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia,” including sales to Russian advertisers, sales of advertising directed at Russian YouTube viewers, sign-ups for Google Cloud in Russia, and “payments functionality for most of our services.”
Western commentators have generally lauded Google’s efforts related to the invasion. But the email and translations in Google’s Help Center suggest that its principled stand against Russian state propagandizing is to some extent outweighed by the company’s interest in continuing to do business in Russia.
In an English language version of a Google advertising policy update note titled “Updates to Sensitive events Policy,” dated February 27, 2022, the company explained it was freezing online ads from Russian state media outlets because of the “current war in Ukraine,” considered a “sensitive event.” But the Russian version of the post refers only to the “emergency in Ukraine” rather than a “war.”
In the Video Help Center, the post “Restricted Products and Services” repeats the warning: “Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we will temporarily pause the delivery of Google ads to users located in Russia.” In the Russian version, the warning is again changed: “Due to the emergency situation in Ukraine, we are temporarily suspending ad serving to users located in Russia.”
Another help post found by The Intercept shows a Russian-language version written in compliance with the new censorship law:
In some cases, Russian help pages include both a reference to “war” and a state-sanctioned euphemism; it’s unclear why.
It’s possible an automated translation system is at fault. According to the translator, most translations are done automatically via software. In more sensitive cases — community rules and support pages — there is usually human oversight to ensure accuracy. This source added that any potential usage of the term “war” in the context of Ukraine would be censored across all Google products still available in the Russian market. They also said the euphemism policy would hypothetically apply beyond support page text to other Google products like Maps.
The move is only the most recent instance of acquiescence to Russian censorship demands by Google and its major Silicon Valley peers. In 2019, Apple agreed to recognize the Russian annexation of Crimea in its iOS Maps app in response to Kremlin pressure. In 2021, Google disclosed that it had complied with 75 percent of content deletion requests it had received from the Russian government that year; that same year, both Google and Apple agreed to remove apps affiliated with prominent Putin critic Aleksey Navalny.
Maria Mezentseva, head of Ukraine’s delegation to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, said cases needed to be recorded, as ‘justice has to prevail.' (photo: Ukrinform/Rex/Shutterstock)
Maria Mezentseva said Ukraine will ‘not be silent’ about the attacks, which are considered war crimes
In a TV interview, Maria Mezentseva referenced one case in Brovary, an eastern suburb of Kyiv, where a woman was raped in front of her child.
On Wednesday, the prosecutor general, Iryna Venediktova, said the attack was being investigated by the authorities and Ukraine had told Russia that an arrest warrant had been issued for the serviceman.
Speaking on Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday, Mezentseva said: “There is one case which was very widely discussed recently because it’s been recorded and proceeded with [by] the prosecutor’s office, and we’re not going into details, but it’s quite a scary scene when a civilian was shot dead in his house in a small town next to Kyiv.
“His wife was – I’m sorry but I have to say it – raped several times in front of her underage child.”
After the attack, the soldier is believed to have threatened the child.
Mezentseva, the head of Ukraine’s permanent delegation to the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, said that cases needed to be recorded, as “justice has to prevail”. Rape and sexual assault are considered war crimes and a breach of international humanitarian law.
She said cases were being underreported, and added that she hoped that the UK could pass on expertise on how to support victims in the aftermath of crimes.
“There are many more victims rather than just this one case which has been made public by the prosecutor general,” she said. “And of course, we are expecting many more of them, which will be public once victims will be ready to talk about that.
“That’s why you know, when we’ve been talking to Boris Johnson, when we will be talking to your Home Office, when we’ve been talking to MPs of UK, we’ve also raised this issue that this aftermath, which we are dealing with right now, the aftermath of war, has to be taken very cautiously, very seriously, and to take into account the UK experience and experience of other countries, which can help us in dealing with psychologists, and how to help these people to actually live over these cases, to keep going afterwards, to keep living.”
She added: “We will definitely not be silent.”
Her words echoed those of fellow Ukrainian MP Lesia Vasylenko, who addressed UK MPs earlier in March and said Russian soldiers were sexually assaulting and raping women.
She said: “We have reports of women being gang-raped. These women are usually the ones who are unable to get out. We are talking about senior citizens. Most of these women have either been executed after the crime of rape or they have taken their own lives.”
President Biden delivers a speech about the Russian war in Ukraine at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Poland, on Saturday. (photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
It also calls for additional defense spending and ongoing support for Ukraine's effort to repel Russia. And it includes elements of Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda, which is stalled in Congress.
In essence, the 157-page budget — not including its hundreds of pages of tables and graphics — is a bigger, numbers-heavy version of the vision Biden laid out in his State of the Union address earlier this month.
"Budgets are statements of values, and the budget I am releasing today sends a clear message that we value fiscal responsibility, safety and security at home and around the world, and the investments needed to continue our equitable growth and build a better America," Biden said in a statement released by the White House.
Presidential budgets are vision documents that almost never become reality, certainly not in whole. In recent years, even when the president's own party controlled Congress, the president's budget failed even to get a vote.
Biden's $5.8 trillion fiscal year 2023 budget includes items that were part of his "Build Back Better" agenda, including reducing energy costs and combating climate change, cutting prescription drug costs, funding free community college, continuing the enhanced child tax credit and high quality preschool. But it doesn't include precise information about how much any of that would cost.
"Because those discussions with Congress are ongoing, the budget does not include specific line items for the investments associated with that future legislation," said Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Instead, there is a "deficit neutral reserve fund to account for a future agreement," according to a White House document.
As Democrats face a challenging midterm election environment later this year, this budget document is the kind of thing the president and his party can point to as an expression of their vision for the country. Among the proposals you can expect to hear more about:
- $32.2 billion to put "more police officers on the beat" through state and local grants and community violence intervention programs.
- Hundreds of millions of dollars for programs to improve supply chains and move goods more quickly through the nation's ports.
- A "billionaire minimum income tax," which would require households worth more than $100 million to pay a minimum tax rate of 20% on their full income, including unrealized appreciation.
- An increase in the corporate tax rate on profits to ensure, the White House says, that large corporations "pay their fair share."
The White House emphasized that this budget, based on current economic projections and proposed spending, would cut the deficit to less than half what it was in the 2021 budget year, which included massive pandemic spending and economic contraction.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget praised Biden's budget for proposing to reduce the deficit by a net $1 trillion over the next decade. But, it said ultimately, the White House plan would still set the debt on an "unsustainable path."
"Substantially more deficit reduction will need to be put in place over time, and sooner rather than later," the group said in a release. "We hope that Congress and the President work together to produce such legislation, which could help to tackle near-term inflation and support sustainable long-term growth."
Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, arrives to watch Amy Coney Barrett take the oath of office on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Oct. 26, 2020. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni, has drawn scrutiny for her text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in which she repeatedly pressed Meadows to work aggressively to overturn the 2020 election and keep President Donald Trump in power in a series of urgent exchanges in the critical weeks after the vote, according to copies of the messages obtained by The Washington Post and CBS News.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez meets with Starbucks Workers United members who are working to unionize their store in Astoria, Queens, New York, on March 27, 2022. (photo: Starbucks Astoria Blvd/Twitter)
A Starbucks union drive is sweeping across the country. In an industry that has been all but impossible to unionize, these baristas have created an organizing model that can be replicated at similar corporate chains everywhere.
The Starbucks workers currently spearheading the SB Workers United drive have charted a way forward for organizing corporate chain stores. Their strategy should be carefully studied and implemented across other corporate chains and adjusted according to context.
The story of SB Workers United begins in Elmwood Park, Buffalo, in 2019, when some Starbucks workers, many of them inspired by the Bernie Sanders campaign and affiliated with socialist organizations, reached out to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)–affiliated union Workers United to talk about unionizing.
After over a year of underground organizing, the campaign went public on August 23, with the workers posting a declaration of the intent to unionize to Starbucks Corporate on Twitter through their own account. The workers chose to call themselves Starbucks Workers United and created a website with basic educational resources for Starbucks workers across the country about why they should form a union, as well as contact information for workers seeking to organize.
With their declaration made public, the union drive drew the coverage of various corporate media outlets and entered into public consciousness. Interest in unionizing Starbucks was sparked across the country, with workers reaching out to Starbucks Workers United and Starbucks customers directly talking to workers about the importance of unions.
With the victory of the first NLRB election at the Elmwood Park store on December 6, 2021, the first Starbucks store in the United States was unionized. This generated enormous media attention, and Starbucks Workers United received a flurry of unionization requests from workers around the country. The media attention of the union effort generated mass interest from workers, and the website allowed for this interest to be converted to action.
After the NLRB ruled on February 26 in a decision involving the Mesa, Arizona, Starbucks that organizing a union in a single store is appropriate, SB Workers United’s particular method of organizing through rapid NLRB elections was legitimized, paving the way in the short term for similar drives to take place. This must be exploited.
Baristas Take the Lead
From its beginning to the present, the SB Workers United union campaign has been a worker-driven project. The union staff of Workers United, the union which SB Workers United is seeking to join, have played a critical but supporting role during this drive. Workers United is given the leads of workers seeking to unionize by Starbucks Workers United. The staff organizers set up meetings with the union-interested workers, taking them through the process of charting their stores, preparing themselves for management backlash, and filing for a union election.
In stark contrast to some other union campaigns in fast food in which the staff organizers handle the bulk of organizing activity, in the case of Starbucks Workers United, the staff function as an educational resource for the Starbucks workers. The primary organizers of the SB Workers United campaign are the Starbucks workers themselves.
As of this writing, workers in only six stores are members of the Workers United union, but all of the Starbucks workers who have filed NLRB petitions and many more who have begun the process of organizing are all members of SB Workers United. SB Workers United is independent of Workers United. While not legally recognized, SB Workers United is already a union with over a thousand members across the country.
The SB Workers United union has its own national steering committee and various working groups that direct the strategy of the campaign. Through the creation of a space that encourages the creative talents and energies of enthusiastic workers, SB Workers United has been able to create a wealth of material, including community support guides, various social media outlets, and pro-union artwork, to build a highly resilient and capable movement that only continues to grow.
Though SB Workers United represents a small minority of all Starbucks workers, it has enough of a force to compel Starbucks to spend millions of dollars in its growing anti-union campaign, announce wage increases to try to head off the threat of a union contract, and even force former CEO Howard Schultz out of retirement. With a recent strike in Denver and the organization of rallies around the country in defense of fired pro-union workers, SB Workers United has already demonstrated that it can use weapons like strikes and community mobilization to win its demands.
A Reproducible Method
If we boil the SB Workers United Campaign down to its essentials, we’re left with a worker organizing method for corporate chains that can be sparked by any organization with sufficient labor and resources. The SB Workers United organizing history is summarized as follows:
- A core group of class-conscious workers reaches out to a local union to take steps towards winning legal union recognition.
- Workers create a separate, independent, and informal union called Starbucks Workers United, which handles media strategy and creates a central point of contact (a website) to which inspired workers around the country can reach out.
- SB Workers United goes public with the notice of NLRB elections, which draws media attention.
- Each victory is highly publicized, drawing in new worker leads through the SB Workers United website, which then sends them to professional union staff for training and support in organizing local stores.
The key to the success of SB Workers United is that they have built an independent organization of workers seeking to unionize, so that the workers themselves are the ones who lead the campaign. The critical role of outside organizations (Workers United) is to provide the Starbucks workers with the strategic advice and the technical tools necessary to win.
How can their strategy be utilized to spark strong union campaigns for other corporate chains?
The answer to this question is that a method must be developed to build a core of class-conscious and militant workers across the corporate chain and to develop those workers to be effective organizers and leaders of the campaign. The greatest barrier to organizing chain stores is that class-conscious workers are isolated from one another. For this reason, developing a central point of contact should be the first step to unionizing, so that the workers who have the greatest interest in organizing will reach out to the central organizing body.
The method to organize corporate chains is as follows:
- Build a central point of contact that workers seeking unionization can reach out to (like a website, email address, and social media accounts).
- Focus on worker education, arming workers with knowledge of the steps to form a union and methods of creating support for unions within their workplace.
- Having gathered and developed a core group of worker-organizers, connect the workers to each other to create the formation of a union outside the bounds of legality. At this stage, the workers must be prepared to take leadership of their union.
- Build methods of public outreach for the new union group. Every chance to increase the visibility of the campaign, such as high-profile NLRB election victories, must be seized so that the most militant and inspired workers begin to reach out to the newly formed union.
With these basic steps, a new union will be birthed into existence. The nuances of the organization — its strategy, its ultimate mission, its leadership, its working groups — must be decided democratically by the workers themselves and are always subject to change depending on the changing conditions of the campaign.
Workers Themselves at the Helm
There are practical reasons why workers must be the ones driving and leading the unionization drive. For one, they are the ones who best understand and feel the numerous ways they are exploited by their management and thus are best able to develop tactics to use their shared conditions as a point of unity. Second, the common driving factor for workers seeking unionization is a lack of agency, which manifests itself in numerous forms: management abuse, poor pay, and unstable schedules. By creating a space where the workers are able to exert control over their workplace, through leadership of their unionization campaign, a space of empowerment is created that can bring forward the best from every worker. To create a force of highly motivated worker-organizers, worker control over strategy is an absolute precondition.
The SB Workers United drive is a clear reminder of what a union is in its essence. A union is formed not when the state recognizes it, but when the workers recognize it. A union is formed when workers have connected with each other and created an organization that reflects their collective will.
It is important to note that Workers United has only a handful of staff to help assist the Starbucks workers. With the ongoing success of the SB Workers United drive, volunteer- and resource-rich organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) could take it upon themselves to apply this model to other unorganized chains. Through initiatives like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and numerous successful electoral campaigns, as well as DSA’s presence throughout the United States, the organization’s skilled members could help create a central point of contact for aspiring pro-union workers, provide education for the workers to organize and protect themselves from retaliation, fundraise for the workers, help workers with legal issues, and use its media expertise and connections to make sure the workers’ voices are heard far and wide. DSA could thus help workers organize across corporate chains, as EWOC has already begun to do.
The stunning growth of the SB Workers United movement has attracted support from labor unions, socialist organizations, community activists, and progressive forces throughout the country and has inspired numerous workers to challenge their bosses and reclaim their dignity. As this movement gains momentum, we can and should put our foot on the gas. Who knows where it could lead?
A woman watches over a group of children on a train station bench, after they arrive in Hungary from Ukraine. (photo: Reuters)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has prompted an exodus of nearly 4 million people and an outpouring of support for many of the refugees. But a new report finds some of the nonwhite people who fled Ukraine are being held in detention centers in Poland and Estonia. An investigation by Lighthouse Reports with The Independent, Der Spiegel, Radio France and others documented how some African students who crossed the border to escape the war were detained in a long-term holding facility outside Warsaw. One of the students described his ordeal to an activist. The sound is bad, so listen very carefully.
DETAINED AFRICAN STUDENT: My mental health, I’m just scared. We escaped Ukraine. It was very, very horrible experience. And, you know, it’s very — the most biggest risk of my life. Now we’re under detention. At the beginning, I thought I was kidnapped.
AMY GOODMAN: the detained student says, “My mental health, I’m just scared. We escaped Ukraine. It was very, very horrible experience. It was the worst week [sic] of my life. Now we’re under detention. At the beginning, I thought I was kidnapped,” he said. This is the brother of another student, who says he was detained when he fled from Ukraine to Poland.
BROTHER OF DETAINED STUDENT: He stayed at the border for close to three days. And the last day that he left the border, there was — he had issues with the Ukrainian police, that were forcing them to go back into Ukraine to fight. But I think, as a student, he couldn’t stay back, because he is not a Ukrainian, and he doesn’t know anything about the country. So he decided, after the confrontation, the harassment from the Ukrainian police, he ran and ran and ran. They took away his bag with his laptop, with everything. But he succeeded to get into Poland. So, when he got into Poland, he immediately reported himself to the police. I was pretty sure that after signing this paper, he would be given some freedom, but limited freedom within Poland. But when he finished signing the paper, the next information that we got was that they were taking them into a camp.
AMY GOODMAN: Polish border police confirmed some 52 Ukrainians who fled to Poland, quote, “were admitted to guarded centers for foreigners,” unquote. The International Organization for Migration, the IOM, says non-Ukrainians who have fled the war are being detained in at least three facilities in Poland.
For more, we’re joined by Maud Jullien, investigations editor at Lighthouse Reports, which just published this package of stories last week.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! Can you tell us where the students were in Ukraine and how you located them in these different detention facilities, from Estonia to Poland?
MAUD JULLIEN: So, the students that we’re aware of, that we’ve been able to confirm are being held in Poland currently, there’s four of them. And when I say “confirmed,” it’s because we have their student identification, but we’re aware of six credible cases, actually, and we think that there’s probably a lot more. But these students were studying in different cities in Ukraine — in Kharkiv, in Lutsk, in Kyiv. They were studying telecommunications, management, language, languages, so in various fields. There’s actually a total of over 75,000 foreign students in Ukraine. And we were able to confirm, for these four students that I was mentioning, that they’re held in one long-term detention facility that’s 40 minutes away — a 40-minute drive from Warsaw, the capital of Poland.
Initially what happened is that we were contacted by activists who were saying that they were in touch with foreign students claiming to be in detention. We were given the address, and I went to this detention center. I said that I was press. I gave the four students’ names. And the guards of that detention center told me to wait. They went in, and then they came back out and told me, “Yeah, these four names are inside. And actually, there are 20 other African — young African people who fled Ukraine who are in this camp.” And then, later on, we managed to obtain a letter, an official letter, from the Polish border guard confirming that there were 52 people, third-party nationals who fled the Ukrainian conflict, in detention. And that was on March 15th they confirmed 52 people. There could be more. And we’re aware of six people having been recently released.
AMY GOODMAN: This letter you obtained from Poland’s border police admitting 52 third-country nationals who had fled Ukraine had been taken to detention facilities in the weeks after Russia’s invasion, if you can talk more about that? And you’re in Dakar, Senegal, now. Where are the students from, around Africa? Are they from Senegal? Are they from Nigeria?
MAUD JULLIEN: So, the students that, you know, we’re very much aware of and whose — we’ve also been speaking to their family members. We’ve spoken to several of them inside the center. They’re from Cameroon and Nigeria. We don’t know where the other people being held in that camp are from.
What we do know, and what I’ve heard very, very recently, is that there is also at least one African family that was held in one of the long-term detention centers. So, that family was a Nigerian man, their child and a Kenyan woman. They’ve been released, as far as we know, a few days ago, but that is to say that there is reason to believe that there may be other families held, held in detention, in long-term detention centers.
We’ve also been speaking to the Cameroonian and to the Nigerian embassies in Poland and in Berlin. And they’re saying that they do not know why their nationals are being detained. They’re working toward securing the release of their citizens. And it seems that they’ve been able to get — to secure the release of six Nigerians so far.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the temporary protection directive that was invoked by the EU on March 4th, what it means, and does it apply to students of African origin?
MAUD JULLIEN: So, the temporary protection directive is historic in the sense that all of the European countries agreed for the first time in 20 years to open their borders and to protect and to grant residency, to grant also allowances, to all of the Ukrainians fleeing the conflict. That temporary directive doesn’t lay things out quite as clearly for third-party nationals. It recommends that EU countries should facilitate their passage, their safe passage back to their country of origin, if that country is safe, and that they should provide humanitarian protection.
We’ve been speaking to lawyers about what’s been going on now, and they’ve been saying that it goes against EU law to detain people, because this temporary directive does say that countries should facilitate passage, should give humanitarian access, and that holding them in long-term detention facilities, where they are not provided with legal help, where they’ve been made to sign documents that they haven’t been able to understand, and where they’re — I mean, these are in fact — these are prisons, that this is contrary to EU law. But this temporary protection directive is not as clear when it comes to the rights of third-party nationals. And I think that that’s also where the issue lies, that it doesn’t guarantee the same rights to these people, and it allows European countries to sort of pick and choose who they let in and to decide how they treat these people.
AMY GOODMAN: Even Austria was holding some of these students?
MAUD JULLIEN: Yes. So, the latest information that we’ve been getting from the Nigerian diaspora is that, in Austria, one student was detained; in Estonia, one student was detained. And there’s reason to be concerned that we’re going to be hearing more and more of these cases —
AMY GOODMAN: I mean —
MAUD JULLIEN: — because there’s a lack of EU clarity on what —
AMY GOODMAN: The —
MAUD JULLIEN: — you know, how these people be treated.
AMY GOODMAN: The contrast between how Ukrainians are being treated — I mean, the pictures of the kindergarten children going into a school, and the whole class standing up and applauding them; you know, President Biden going to Poland to applaud the Polish government for being so welcoming to millions of Ukrainians. Have you heard — if you can comment on that and, finally, the conditions in these jails?
MAUD JULLIEN: It’s absolutely striking to all the people who have been working to help the thousands of people that have been trying to enter the EU for the past years, that have been fleeing conflicts in Syria, in Iraq, the difference in treatment. It was interesting in Poland, and striking in Poland especially, to speak with people who have been assisting refugees from the Belarus border. And, you know, near the Belarus border, it’s basically a situation where you have Polish border guards that are pushing people back into the Belarus — freezing Belarus forest. Just last week, there were Syrians, Iraqis who were pushed back. We know that at least one more person died. At least 20 people have died at that border. So, for people seeing this difference in treatment, these double standards based on where people are from, just the Ukrainian crisis has sort of left a lot of these people breathless. And now the fact that people are being treated differently based on where they’re from, even if they’re fleeing the same exact conflict, just makes these double standards even more obvious.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will continue to follow this. Maud Jullien, I want to thank you for being with us, investigations editor at Lighthouse Reports, which published this investigation with The Independent, Der Spiegel, Mediapart, Radio France, about African students fleeing Ukraine being detained by European border officials. Maud Jullien was speaking to us from Dakar, Senegal.
Next up, we go to Jamaica, as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have just wrapped up a weeklong visit to former British colonies in the Caribbean. The royal visit was met by protests and demands for reparations. We’ll speak with a Jamaican MP. Stay with us.
Environmental activists rally on Capitol Hill after a march from Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Students march for their future in 750 cities across the globe
Friday’s protests, the largest mass youth climate strike since 2019, show that the movement is rebounding from the setbacks posed by the pandemic, which forced young people to do most of their organizing remotely.
In Stockholm, Sweden — where Greta Thunberg’s solitary 2018 strike ignited an international movement — protesters chanted “We are unstoppable! Another world is possible!” In Feni, Bangladesh, young people stood waist deep in water and one boy held a sign that read: “Like the sea, we are rising.” In Nairobi, Kenya, activists marched through the street, accompanied by blaring music and car horns. Even in Antarctica, researchers posed on the snow with signs urging the world to stop climate change.
The rallying cry that united all of these demonstrations was “people not profit.” While youth activists still insist that we must cut carbon emissions in line with what scientists say is necessary, in recent years, they have also placed a strong emphasis on climate justice.
Fridays for Future, the youth-led organization that coordinated the strike, wrote, “The catastrophic climate scenario that we are living in is the result of centuries of exploitation and oppression through colonialism, extractivism and capitalism,” and called for climate reparations.
In a recent opinion piece, Bangladeshi climate activist Farzana Faruk Jhumu agreed: “Climate reparations are the compensation that the Global North must pay the Global South for the destruction they have caused through huge carbon emissions.”
The first wave of international climate strikes in 2019 attracted an estimated 6 million people in thousands of cities and towns across the world. While Friday’s protests weren’t as large, they do signify a resurgence of the youth climate movement now that many countries have eased pandemic restrictions.
Liv Schroeder, national coordinator and policy director for Fridays for Future U.S., told Inside Climate News, “We’ve been incredibly isolated and while the climate movement has continued during Covid, we need to reignite hope and strikes to push our leaders to act.”
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
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