31 May 22
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A man stands in front of a burning house after shelling in Lysychansk, in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas. (photo: Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)
Exclusive: Lawyers to target assets of Russian state, military contractors and affiliated business figures across globe
The team, made up of hundreds of lawyers and several major law firms, plans to bring “multiple actions in different jurisdictions against different targets”, including the UK and the US, said Jason McCue, a London-based lawyer who is coordinating the initiative, in an interview in Kyiv.
The plan is to use UK and US judgments to seize Russian assets across the globe.
Targets are likely to include the Russian state and private military contractors such as the Wagner Group, which is believed to have been active in Ukraine. But McCue said they would also include business figures linked to these contractors, and to the Russian war effort more broadly. He believes that it will be possible to go after assets that have already been hit by sanctions as well as those that have not.
The class action will be a private case, independent of the Ukrainian state. But according to McCue, they will need access to Ukraine’s evidence and intelligence.
The Ukrainian MP and businessman Serhiy Taruta is supporting the initiative by facilitating meetings for the lawyers and investigators with Ukrainian officials.
Taruta, who is from Mariupol and had investments in the city, lost a large chunk of his business when Russia and its proxy forces took more than half of the Donbas region in 2014. This time he lost friends, colleagues and a cousin as Russia destroyed Mariupol while attempting to occupy it.
“Ukrainians have waited 20 years for the prosecution of [Pavlo] Lazarenko, and now eight for MH17,” said Taruta, referring to a case against Ukraine’s former prime minister who embezzled millions, and to an ongoing case in The Hague over the downing of a Malaysian Airlines flight in 2014.
“We need to develop a quicker mechanism [for compensation],” said Taruta. “The normal routes are too slow.”
Ukraine has already begun prosecuting captured Russian soldiers for war crimes in criminal cases, and other war crime cases may later be tried in international courts. But claims for reparations for the war damage are trickier, and McCue said part of the idea behind speedily launching the case was because reparations on a state-to-state level are rarely possible.
“Often when it gets to the negotiations, the issue of reparations is put to one side to focus on the sustainability of peace,” he said.
According to Taruta, individuals who have suffered the loss of a loved one or property or who have been injured will be the primary recipients of the compensation, followed by state and local institutions, and only then businesses. He estimated the total potential claim could be no less than $1tn (£793.9bn).
A number of teams of investigators have come on board to help the team find assets of businesspeople they believe to be complicit in Russia’s war effort. They include Bellingcat, which has been investigating the activities of the Wagner Group and other Russian private military contractors for some years.
“We are closely monitoring the activity of Russia’s mercenary units in Ukraine,” said Christo Grozev, Bellingcat’s executive director.
“We believe that a deep dive into the [Wagner Group’s] chain of command and its links to official Russian authorities would not only help bring justice for the victims and their families, but also will bring more public awareness and transparency on how Russia is conducting this war,” said Grozev.
A key part of the case will involve pleading that Russia’s invasion is not just an aggressive war but also falls at least partially under the legal definition of terrorism, which would make it easier to go after assets.
“All the legal teams from different countries are satisfied that we have what we need,” said McCue. “It’s very solid.”
McCue has extensive experience in similar cases on a smaller scale, the first of which was won on behalf of victims of the 1998 Omagh bombing, in which four men were found liable for the bombing and ordered to pay compensation to families of the victims.
“The evidence was with the police but nobody was prosecuting because of the peace process,” said McCue, who described how the families approached him. “So, we did a civil action, and we won, and we managed to take houses off two of them.”
The Ukraine case, which is much bigger in scale, is likely to operate on similar principles, though it will be more focused on winning financial compensation for people who have suffered the loss of their loved ones, property or businesses.
“The Omagh case wasn’t about money, it was about proving who did it. This case is about money,” said McCue.
He conceded that there would be enormous work ahead to verify and rank cases and create a “victim hierarchy”, and that targeted figures were likely to work hard to move or cover up their assets. However, he said he believed the case had a good chance of succeeding.
“What we know is that if we don’t do this, people are less likely to get something. This increases the chances,” he said.
Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer who represented the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016, arrives at a federal courthouse in Washington on May 16. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
“Politics were not a factor,” the jury forewoman said after a courtroom defeat for special counsel John Durham, appointed three years ago by then-Attorney General William Barr.
The verdict, coming after less than a full day of deliberations spread over parts of Friday and Tuesday, was not a close call or a hard decision, two jurors told The Washington Post.
“Politics were not a factor,” the jury forewoman said. “We felt really comfortable being able to share what we thought. We had concise notes and we were able to address the questions together,” she said, declining to give her name as she left the courthouse.
“Personally, I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she added, saying the government “could have spent our time more wisely.” A second juror told The Post that in the jury room, “everyone pretty much saw it the same way.”
Sussmann was accused of lying to a senior FBI official in September 2016 when he brought the FBI allegations of a secret computer communications channel between the Trump Organization and Russia-based Alfa Bank. FBI agents investigated the data but concluded that there was nothing suspicious about it.
Durham, appointed three years ago during the Trump administration to find possible wrongdoing among federal agents who probed Trump’s 2016 campaign, alleged that Sussmann had lied to the FBI when he claimed that he was not bringing them the information on behalf of any client, when, the prosecutors alleged, he did so on behalf of the Clinton campaign and Rodney Joffe.
Sussmann, the first person charged by Durham to go to trial, said outside court that “justice ultimately prevailed in my case. … I’m looking forward to getting back to the work I love.”
Durham did not speak outside court, issuing a statement that said: “While we are disappointed in the outcome, we respect the jury’s decision and thank them for their service.” Durham plans another trial in the fall, of a researcher accused of lying to the FBI about his research into Trump.
Gregory Brower, a former U.S. attorney and senior FBI official, said the acquittal was “not a surprising result given the lack of evidence” and the way false statement laws have historically been applied.
“The special counsel was only appointed because the former president wanted an investigation that he could point to for political reasons during the campaign, and (former attorney general William P.) Barr gave him one,” said Brower, noting that much of what Durham was tapped to investigate had already been exhaustively examined by the Justice Department’s inspector general. “This quick acquittal,” he said, “should mark the end of this chapter.”
In closing arguments, prosecutors told the jury that Sussmann thought he had “a license to lie” to the FBI at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. Sussmann’s attorneys countered that the case against their client was built on a “political conspiracy theory.”
Over two weeks of testimony, the case rehashed some of the bitter controversies from the Trump-Clinton contest.
The jury ultimately rejected the prosecution claims, apparently swayed by the argument from Sussmann’s attorney, Sean Berkowitz, who said the prosecution was trying to turn a brief 30-minute meeting more than five years ago into a “giant political conspiracy theory.”
Jurors were tasked with answering a fairly simple legal and factual question — whether Sussmann lied about his client and whether that lie was relevant to the FBI investigation. Prosecutors argued Sussmann’s lie was just one part of a larger scheme by Clinton loyalists to use the FBI and news reporters to launch a damaging, last-minute revelation against Trump that would tip the election to Clinton.
“You can see what the plan was,” assistant special counsel Andrew DeFilippis told jurors in D.C. federal court. “It was to create an October surprise by giving information both to the media and to the FBI to get the media to write that there was an FBI investigation.”
Despite the trial’s frequent references to Clinton, Trump and other political figures, the prosecutor insisted that “this case is not about politics, it’s not about conspiracy, it’s about the truth.” Sussmann lied, DeFilippis said, because if he’d told the FBI that he was acting on behalf of Clinton, the FBI was less likely to consider his evidence or open an investigation.
Prosecutors showed the jury emails, law-firm billing records and even a Staples receipt for thumb drives to tie Sussmann to the Clinton campaign. But Berkowitz said much of the witness testimony showed that the Clinton campaign did not want the Alfa Bank allegations taken to the FBI, because they preferred to see a news story about the issue and feared an investigation might complicate or delay such stories.
“There is a difference,” Berkowitz said, “between having a client, and doing something on their behalf.”
He ridiculed prosecutors for painting as nefarious efforts to dig up damaging information about Trump for a campaign.
“Opposition research is not illegal,” he said, adding that if it was, “the jails of Washington, D.C., would be teeming over.”
Berkowitz readily conceded that Sussmann talked to reporters as part of his job, including journalists for The Washington Post and Reuters. He said prosecutors brought the case because they suffered from “tunnel vision” over news articles in Slate and the New York Times that appeared on Oct. 31, 2016, and — he argued — had little impact on the campaign.
“That’s the story? That’s the leak? That’s the conspiracy? Please,” Berkowitz said.
The key witness of the trial was James Baker, who was the FBI’s top lawyer when he met with Sussmann on Sept. 19, 2016. Baker told the jury he was “100 percent confident” that Sussmann insisted to him he was not acting on behalf of a client and that if he had known, he would have handled the conversation differently and perhaps not even agreed to the meeting at all.
Since Sussmann did not testify, Baker gave the only direct witness account of the conversation. Sussmann’s attorneys repeatedly challenged Baker’s credibility, noting that in one earlier interview, Baker said Sussmann was representing cybersecurity clients; in another, he seemed to say he didn’t remember that part of the talk. In response to questions on the witness stand, he said he couldn’t remember 116 times, according to Berkowitz.
Baker, who now works for Twitter, testified that Sussmann told him that a major newspaper — he later learned it was the New York Times — was preparing to write about the allegations. That apparently worried Baker, who said he knew a news story would probably cause any suspicious communications to stop, so he wanted the FBI to be able to investigate before an article appeared. Prosecutors say it was Sussmann himself who had provided the allegations about Trump to the Times.
DURHAM, a political hack, appointed by BILL BARR, a political hack....now that's credible!
BARR pardoned all of the IRAN CONTRA criminals, gave Ollie North immunity to testify before Congress to a sanitzed version in order to protect the Senile pResident and CIA DIR VP from impeachment.
Robert Parry continued to investigate IRAN CONTRA until his sudden passing.
FOX NEWS = FAKE NEWS & the Murdoch tabloid NY POST are already blabbering 'but HILLARY....'
Anyone who expects TRUTH & INTEGRITY from Republicans is delusional.
The WASHINGTON EXAMINER, known for its bias is blabbering at great length with misinformation.
BARR SAYS.....
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/justice/barr-says-durham-uncovered-seditious-activity
A rack of Sig Sauer rifles on display at the company's booth during the NRA meeting in Dallas in 2018. (photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg/Getty Images)
In New York, a judge ruled that gunmakers can be held liable under public nuisance statutes.
The ruling, delivered Wednesday by Judge Mae D'Agostino of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York, rejected a claim by gun manufacturers that a 2021 New York state law aimed at regulating their industry is unconstitutional.
In her ruling, D'Agostino noted that although a 2005 U.S. law grants the industry broad immunity from lawsuits, it could still be held liable when "a manufacturer or seller of a [firearm] knowingly violated a State or Federal statute applicable to the sale or marketing of the product."
Opponents say they will appeal the decision, potentially taking the case to the Supreme Court. But if the ruling is ultimately upheld, cases brought against gun manufacturers may be deemed allowable despite the existence of the U.S. immunity law, called the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA).
The New York law could become a pathway for victims — and prosecutors — to bring serious legal challenges to the gun industry, said Timothy D. Lytton, a professor of law at Georgia State University who studies gun violence.
“Other states could now leverage the New York statutes to suggest there was a violation,” Lytton said in an interview. “It blows a large hole in PLCAA immunity.”
The New York law allows gun violence victims, their families and the state of New York "to hold bad actors in the gun industry accountable for their role in fueling the epidemic of gun violence," according to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control and against gun violence.
“This ruling should put members of the gun industry on notice: accountability is coming,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president of law and policy for Everytown, said in a statement this week.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation and 14 members of the gun industry, including Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co., challenged the New York law. In a statement, a representative for the foundation said it was "disappointed" by the ruling, adding, "We respectfully disagree with the court’s decision and plan to appeal.”
Signed by President George W. Bush in 2005 and enacted with the help of the National Rifle Association, the PLCAA law gave the gun industry nearly blanket immunity against being charged by victims of their products. The law was created in part over fears of the gun industry that it would face the kinds of lawsuits that brought Big Tobacco to heel.
During his 2020 election campaign, President Joe Biden called for the PLCAA to be reformed, saying his administration “will not rest until they’re able to sue the gun manufacturers and get a ban on assault weapons.”
“We’ll take them on," Biden said at the time, "remove the immunity and allow those parents who are trying now to sue for the pain and mayhem they have caused."
Anger over issues such as the mask mandate galvanized families - like these seen at the Hillsborough County School Board in Tampa, Florida, last year - into running for school board. Progressive groups are taking a leaf out of their playbook. (photo: Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
"I have a lot of like, really close experience to a big chunk of the people that we are supposed to be serving as a school board," she said. "And just because of my age, people automatically know that I have a unique perspective, whether they've heard it or not."
Zafar is a student at the University of Texas-Austin, and also a 2020 graduate of McNeil High School, in the Austin, Texas, suburb of Round Rock.
"I am really privileged to have gone here; it gave me a lot of opportunities, but it wasn't always a healthy or safe space for me and my friends, especially in regards to sexual harassment and assault," she said in the courtyard of Round Rock High School on a recent spring afternoon, as students left school for the day. "I was in ROTC, which was the Air Force program in my high school. And so one big part of my job that I kind of undertook as my responsibility, was in trying to handle any sort of harassment case that came up."
That experience, she says, made her want to be a school board member in that district. To prepare for her run, Zafar has done trainings with the progressive group Run for Something.
The group has for years recruited people to run for many different offices, but cofounder Amanda Litman says they are putting new effort into school boards.
"One of the things we realized after 2020 was we have to focus in on these local positions like school boards," Litman said. "There is such a need for broad progressive focusing on these local positions. There are more than 80,000 elected school board positions across the country. About 21,000 of them are up this year."
A spike in attention on school boards
Interest in running for school board is up nationwide. Only 25% of school board races are unopposed this year, down from 35% last year and 40% in 2018, according to Ballotpedia.
Because school board elections are overwhelmingly nonpartisan, it's hard to quantify who or what is behind all that energy.
But then, there has been an undeniable groundswell of conservative enthusiasm around school politics in the last few years, most notably around national issues like race, LGBTQ issues, and COVID. Groups like Moms for Liberty and No Left Turn in Education are among the groups working to harness parents' frustration.
Progressives like Litman, at Run for Something, are hoping to make sure they have their own source of organization — not to mention funding — to counter the enthusiasm from the right.
"The far right is investing a ton in outside PAC spending. We have seen that the Leadership Institute, which is the Koch Brothers-funded nonprofit that does conservative training for operatives and activists, has been running for programming on school boards all year long," Litman said. "Moms for Liberty is focusing hard on school board positions and candidate support. So they're doubling and tripling down. Here we have to as well."
School board politics get more partisan
It's not totally new for national-level politics to become a part of school board elections — in the '90s, conservative parents targeted the teaching of sex education and evolution. Likewise, opposition to the No Child Left Behind policy galvanized some parents during the George W. Bush presidency.
But the political landscape has vastly changed.
"What's different this time is the coordination, the financing and then social media really being able to spread a very consistent message to so many school districts so quickly," said Rebecca Jacobsen, professor of educational policy at Michigan State University, "whereas in previous eras, before internet and social media, these things happened, but at much slower paces. And in some ways, that slower pace gave rise to alternative voices, voices that maybe moderated the discussion."
And she says she fears that that kind of polarization at the local level could have worrying long-term effects for the public school system.
"Schools really are sort of the last holdout in our support for a big public institution, "Jacobsen said. "And so I think that that is maybe the more important impact of this than anything else, whether the policy becomes X or Y. I think whether we continue to believe that our local schools are good for all kids and that I want to continue sending my children there and supporting taxes. That, to me, is the bigger question."
Round Rock has seen national-level tensions play out locally – one turbulent September meeting, where parents and board members clashed over masking, culminated in two arrests.
Zafar says that she's worried about meetings having been politicized.
"I have definitely seen that here," she said. "We've had a lot of disruption in our school board around mask mandates, and it's there has been a lot of legal action taken about that, and it's been a disruption to focusing on student outcomes and on the health and wellness of students."
At a Board of Trustees meeting this spring, Christy Slape said that social media and YouTube have helped galvanize area parents like her. She came to the meeting to speak about books she thought were, in her words, too sexual. She had first heard about the books when a fellow parent complained to the school.
"That just launched a whole basically like a snowball of parents wanting to know more about what books were in the classroom, and then other books being available in the libraries," she said. "And so across the country, there has been just a snowball effect of parents wanting to check their libraries and see what books are available in their libraries."
Intensely local fights
Slape did speak, but books were not on the agenda that night. Overwhelmingly, this board meeting was not about cultural flashpoints but instead, district concerns like student recognition and staff pay increases. That's a point that can be obscured by viral video clips of rowdy school board meetings: local school-board politics are very often not about national cultural conversations but instead, more mundane yet vital local topics, like bond issues.
Along those lines, Litman says she advises candidates to stick to concrete local fixes, as opposed to debates over things like critical race theory.
"You want to, like, really get to the heart of the matter, which is people are anxious about the quality of the school. What can you do to solve for that?" she said. "And usually it's quite boring. But it's also the things that are very specific and tangible that you can fix."
But then, school board members may confront problems they can't fix. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, has put gun violence top of mind for Zafar, who grew up in the era of school lockdowns.
"It's been a really important issue to me since I was a kid – I used to have nightmares about being shot," she said.
But she's also realistic about how much a school board member can do about shootings.
"I don't think we can do much about guns themselves," she said. "I think all we do is safety policies and locking people down and making sure people have the education to know what to do in a lockdown."
Meanwhile, Litman says she hopes members can have influence beyond their schools.
"I really think in many cases, the place for school board members is what can they do to push state legislators? How can school board members use their political platform and their bully pulpit to help advocate for broader statewide change?" she said.
While national politics have filtered down to school boards, in other words, her hope is that some members' political views will filter upward.
Starbucks employees celebrate after the votes are counted, on December 9, 2021, in Buffalo, New York. Employees of three Starbucks cafes in Buffalo created the first union at outlets owned by the retail coffee giant in the United States. (photo: In These Times)
Workers are leading. Unions should support them or get out of the way.
“The checklist that staff organizers have — get a list, identify leaders, make sure the organizing committee is diverse and represents all departments and classifications — these workers are coming to us and they have already done all of that. I haven’t had four successful worker-generated organizing campaigns in my entire career and we just had four in four months.”
At one of those shops, Union Kitchen, a D.C.-based grocery store, workers went on a three-day strike before their union was even certified, a level of militancy that seemed all but extinct but has now begun reappearing in nascent organizing campaigns. After the strike and before the election, four Union Kitchen activists were fired, Hanson says — a scorched earth union-busting tactic that is usually the death knell for a certification vote — but workers voted overwhelmingly for their union anyway.
“People getting fired during a union organizing campaign isn’t having the same impact it had in the past,” Hanson says. “Most of these workers are moving from one shitty job to another anyway, so they figure that they might as well organize to make them better while they are there.”
Union Kitchen workers are just one small part of a much larger organizing wave that is being spurred on by workers all across the country, including at Starbucks, Dollar General, Verizon Retail stores, Trader Joe’s and Apple retail stores. According to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), union elections were up 57% in the first half of 2022.
We’ve seen a similar level of energy for a few years in media organizing, where the NewsGuild-CWA, the union I work for, has organized 7,486 new workers at 160 workplaces since the beginning of 2018, according to the union’s president, Jon Schleuss.
The bosses have noticed the rising organizing wave as well. In a recent earnings call with Starbucks investors, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz noted, “There is a movement in the media and across multiple industries, including the service sector, whereby fellow citizens have begun turning to labor unions as a means of gaining voice, representation and improved working conditions.”
“This movement is not related to any specific company,” Schultz continued, but is rooted in “the frustration and anxieties that Gen Z Americans are facing, having come of age during turbulent moments in our history: the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, The Great Recession and now The Global Coronavirus Pandemic. These young people have completely valid concerns given today’s uncertainty and economic instability. They look around and they see the burgeoning labor movement as a possible remedy to what they are feeling.”
Even yacht-owning billionaires like Schultz can see that something is stirring in workplaces everywhere, but how do we explain this new level of worker self-activity? Especially since many of these recent examples do more than defy the odds — they defy the tenets of the slow-and-steady, methodical approach that experienced union organizers, myself included, have relied upon and taught to others.
The Structure-Based Approach
The nearly overwhelming power of employers in the workplace and in society makes it very hard for workers to organize and win. To confront this power, union organizers rely on a no-shortcuts, structure-based approach that is incremental and methodical: Organizers have endless conversations with workers, map the workplace, identify and recruit respected shopfloor leaders to a representative committee, get a supermajority of workers to sign union cards, and then go public and file for an election. Ideally, workers are actively encouraged to organize around widely and deeply felt issues in the workplace and to aggressively confront the boss as part of the campaign — acting like a union before officially having a union.
Under this model, you wouldn’t dream of taking a vote to unionize or call a strike if you hadn’t already assessed a supermajority of workers as being in support.
I was taught to approach new organizing drives cautiously and to assume that if the boss holds captive-audience meetings, threatens to close the workplace and fires workers, the union should expect to lose at least 10% of its support. So unions typically file for an election with at least 70 – 80% of workers publicly in support of their union. Organizers fight hard to maintain the support they have under pressure from the boss, but don’t expect it to grow.
No one I know in the labor movement would encourage workers to go to a union vote with only 30% support on union authorization cards or to organize a walkout without overwhelming support. So it’s a good thing the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) didn’t listen to me — or anybody else I know.
Sometimes Shortcuts Are the Right Route
In the early days of the pandemic, when the coronavirus was just starting to rock workplaces, Amazon worker Chris Smalls told media outlets that hundreds of Amazon employees were going to “walk out” of an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island to protest the company’s dangerous Covid policies. Smalls timed the event to coincide with lunch breaks on a nice day, knowing that many of his coworkers would go outside to eat, stretch and see what was going down with the announced action.
In the end, dozens of workers milled around the parking lot, but only a few were courageous enough to hold up signs or speak to the press. It didn’t matter. The action was widely featured in national media outlets, amplifying the issues that Amazon workers faced, and Smalls was illegally fired.
Undeterred by his firing, and building on the wave of publicity, Smalls and his coworkers kept going. They maintained a constant presence at the bus stop outside, talking to workers as they came in for their shift and got off work. Importantly, in December 2021, Amazon and the NLRB reached a settlement over the company’s unlawful union-busting practices, in a case resulting from complaints from New York and Chicago workers. The agreement required Amazon to publicly commit to follow the law and not obstruct workers acting on their right to organize their coworkers during non-work times in non-work areas of Amazon’s property.
Suddenly, ALU organizers could talk to their coworkers outside and inside the warehouse. ALU organizers now spent up to 10 hours at a time in the break room on their days off, talking to coworkers and handing out lanyards, shirts and ALU authorization cards.
In October 2021, ALU filed a petition for a union election, but the NLRB rejected it because ALU had not collected signatures from 30% of the 8,200-person workforce — the amount required to legally compel a vote. The union refiled in December, the NLRB accepted the petition, and the election was set for late March.
Shortly after the NLRB announced the date, Amazon had Smalls and two other ALU organizers, both employees, arrested as they tried to deliver food to workers in a drop-off area of the parking lot. One of the many seismic shifts that have taken place in the wake of the 2020 racial justice uprisings — likely the largest protest movement in U.S. history—is the public’s anger elicited by police violence. Video of the arrest was shared widely among the predominantly young and largely Black and brown workforce.
“[Amazon] lost the election right there,” Smalls told The Daily. “[Amazon workers] saw me giving away stuff, food, whatever, every single week, every single day. So for them to see me getting arrested for giving them food, the people that were undecided or on the fence about the union, they was like, full-on, ‘We with y’all.’ That was the turning point.”
“Every time [Amazon] made a bad decision, we would find a way to use it,” ALU organizer Justine Medina told Current Affairs. “We were just always looking out for that and for how to strategically use that against them.” Following the arrests, Medina and others sprung into action. They printed thousands of flyers and handed them out the next morning. The arrests “got people taking flyers from me, who had never wanted to take flyers from me — because a lot of people were kind of ignoring us.”
One of the people who stopped ignoring ALU after the arrests was Pasquale “Uncle Pat” Cioffi, a former dockworker and widely respected shopfloor leader who is credited, by Smalls and other ALU leaders, as turning the tide in the union’s favor. “In four weeks, I must have flipped four to five hundred ‘noes’ to a ‘yes,’” Cioffi said at an ALU press conference.
Trigger Events & Whirlwinds
A little more than a month after the arrests, Amazon workers won their union by a 500-vote margin. ALU clearly relied on tried-and-true organizing practices, like having face-to-face organizing conversations, identifying and recruiting shopfloor leaders, and courageously taking over captive-audience meetings to challenge the company’s hired union-busters. But they also took shortcuts that defied the orthodoxy of union organizers like myself: They didn’t file for an election with a public showing of support from a supermajority of workers, and they weren’t systematically tracking support from coworkers.
At least part of the disconnect between theory and practice here is the failure to understand the potential of a different organizing approach, what some social scientists and movement organizers call “momentum organizing.”
“It’s a whole different method of organizing,” says Paul Engler, co-author of This Is An Uprising: How Non-violent Revolt Is Shaping the 21st Century. “In mass protest organizing, how people are radicalized is based on trigger events and moments of the whirlwind. Trigger events are highly publicized moments that mobilize people outside of existing structures. That happens mostly through the media. If the trigger event is big enough, then there is an outpouring of decentralized energy that emerges. That is what we call the ‘moment of the whirlwind.’”
Momentum organizing often relies on external events, Engler argues, but it isn’t random or determined by blind luck. Momentum organizers rely on moments that capture the attention of people on the sidelines and draw them into the fight. The time is ripe for mass protest or to build to a strike or a successful union vote because grassroots organizers have put in the work; there is a core group of activists ready to seize on the event as an opportunity for mass action. ALU organizers used such events — like the initial walkout, Smalls being fired, and the arrest of ALU organizers — as trigger events to further polarize their workplace, which resulted in even more active support.
The goal of momentum organizers is to foster a virtuous cycle of building to trigger events and then absorbing the subsequent explosion of energy through mass trainings and decentralized structures, while then building to another, future, trigger event. Police violence can be a trigger event, such as in the case of the murder of George Floyd, but so can worker victories. It’s not difficult to see this virtuous cycle being unleashed at Starbucks, where dozens of stores have successfully won union elections and hundreds more are seeking to vote.
When the whirlwind comes, what was once seen as a risky long-shot action or fringe idea — going on strike, organizing a union, running for political office as a socialist, advocating for policies that divest from police and prisons and invest in communities — suddenly snowballs into a series of independent, self-organized actions.
Among structure-based organizers, “mobilizing” is often described, somewhat derisively, as turning out everyone who already agrees with us, while “organizing” is seen as the more difficult work of systematically convincing those who don’t yet agree with us. This approach underestimates the power of movement moments — the whirlwind — where, very suddenly, the number of people who actively agree with us skyrockets. In the structure-based approach, organizers often spend months having organizing conversations, building committees, and assessing workers in the lead up to a union vote. They often spend even longer painstakingly building the confidence of workers through small, workplace actions to build to a strike. But in a whirlwind moment, those kinds of actions can suddenly be jump-started by the workers themselves.
“In most conditions, momentum organizing is not the way to organize unions,” Engler says. “The elders in the structure-based tradition know what they are doing and their advice is solid under normal conditions, but they don’t have the skills or the way of thinking that can take advantage of moments when those conditions radically change.”
Engler is not surprised that Amazon was organized through the self-activity of workers outside the mainstream labor movement.
“It’s not structure-based mass organizations that can step into the void and absorb momentum quickly,” Engler says. “It’s the people coming out of nowhere. Often by people who don’t even know how to do it or by those who are rooted in the mass protest tradition. It’s the unusual suspects.”
Triggering events are radicalizing and can give birth to all-new organizational structures. In fact, this is how the Congress of Industrial Organizations itself was born.
Labor’s New Millions
After decades of bloody repression and a litany of lost strikes from the 1880s through the early 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) burst onto the scene and the labor movement grew, not with slow and steady progress through millions of systematically tracked one-on-one conversations, but by the whirlwind.
At their 1935 convention, when the leaders of the craft unions in the American Federation of Labor voted against organizing the mass production industries — the biggest and most powerful companies of their day — leaders of the industrial unions (including John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America, then the nation’s largest union) broke away from the AFL. This group formed the CIO.
As Mary Heaton Vorse, one of the greatest labor journalists of the 20th century, noted in Labor’s New Millions, her seminal first-hand reporting on the CIO drives of the 1930s, the newly formed organization’s struggles were successful because of new tactics (like the sit-down strike and consumer boycotts) and new federal laws (that emboldened workers), but also because CIO’s campaigns were capable of unleashing and absorbing widespread mass support for unions and their struggles.
“It cannot be said it was the CIO alone which organized the workers which stormed into its ranks,” wrote Vorse. “The young CIO did not have the means for such accomplishment. A great force like a force of nature had been pent up, partly by the open shop employers, partly by the inadequate form imposed by the AFL leadership. The CIO undammed a channel through which the ‘desires and aspirations of millions of workers’ could flow.”
Nowhere is this interplay between ripening conditions and organizing skills made clearer than in the 1936 – 1937 sit-down strike against General Motors in Flint, Mich., which the United Auto Workers won not only because of the risks taken by the sit-down strikers and aid from the Women’s Auxiliary, but because of political support from Michigan’s newly elected Gov. Frank Murphy. Murphy defied injunctions and mobilized the National Guard to protect the striking workers, rather than evict them.
In 1936, prior to Flint, the UAW had only 30,000 members and 16 contracts, 10 of which were in one local in Toledo, Ohio. After Flint, by the end of 1937, the union had more than 400,000 members and more than 4,000 contracts with auto and parts companies.
Flint sparked a strike wave that rippled far beyond the auto industry. As Vorse noted, the UAW’s victory resulted in “an epidemic of sit-down strikes” which “turned Detroit upside down for weeks.” All over the Motor City, everyone from hotel workers to department store employees sat down on the job to win union recognition and a contract — and they often succeeded. According to labor historian Jeremy Brecher, nearly 400,000 workers from across the nation participated in sit-down strikes in 1937.
“Organizers changed their approach after the Flint sit-down strike,” Engler says. “They didn’t do house visits. They just dropped thousands of cards at the gates and the workers just organized themselves. This was a moment when workers were self-organizing in hot shops and the movement started behaving more like mass protest organizing than structure-based organizing.”
Engler continues, “Right now, we are in an interesting historical moment and the question we are all asking is: Are we in a moment where the rules governing hot-shop organizing have once again radically changed?”
Seize the Whirlwind
Because employer power is so overwhelming and the consequences of losing a union organizing drive or a strike can be so devastating, there is enormous pressure within unions to play things safe and always follow the structure-based playbook. After the ALU lost its union vote at a second Staten Island Amazon warehouse on May 2, it’s likely that some observers will argue that the historic success of the first election was just a fluke — and take the loss of the second election as an affirmation that organizers should continue following the largely staff-driven, structure-based organizing gospel to the letter.
This dogma creates an institutional culture that is highly resistant to recognizing and seizing on the potential for momentum organizing. But some unions are rising to the occasion, putting resources into fanning the sparks of discontent inside workers and helping them spread the resulting organizing fire.
Surprisingly, one of those unions is Workers United, the relatively little (and little-known) Service Employees International Union affiliate behind the wave of Starbucks organizing. Their biggest and most important resource? The workers themselves.
“If Starbucks workers in the northeast region are thinking about unionizing, I’m often the first person they meet,” said Kylah Clay, a 24-year-old barista in Boston and one of the organizers who spearheaded the successful unionization of the first Starbucks store in Massachusetts in April.
With so few union staff to assist the hundreds of Starbucks stores that are seeking to unionize, workers like Clay have stepped up to teach other workers how to prepare for management’s anti-union campaign, how to file for a union election and even how to help prepare workers to give testimony at NLRB hearings. The first handful of union stores in various regions of the country — from Tennessee and Florida to Seattle, Boston and Buffalo, N.Y. — have emerged to become leaders in their areas, providing guidance and trainings to the baristas in other stores.
And the more stores keep winning, the more stores keep reaching out.
In Massachusetts, seven stores have unionized and, as of Friday morning, nine more have filed for elections, according to Clay, who attests to having worked with all of these shops.
“I didn’t know what a union was before October 2021, so all of this has been on-the-spot learning,” Clay says. “We are not super experienced organizers or labor lawyers, we are just baristas who saw other baristas organizing and believed we could do it too. Now I’m being contacted by stores all across the country where baristas have already talked with each other about organizing and are eager to form a union. The biggest barrier for them is just preparing for the boss’s campaign and navigating the Labor Board. So we’ve taken it on ourselves to teach one another and we’ve streamlined the process to make it as easy as possible.”
In the NewsGuild-CWA, the union has launched an intensive member-organizer program based on the principle of “Learn It, Do It, Teach It.” The goal is to demystify and democratize organizing so that NewsGuild-CWA members can lead new organizing and contract campaigns themselves. Through this program, the organizing wave in media has been able to scale up quickly, as more and more members join.
“The 2008 economic collapse, the decline in the media industry and the sense that journalists were under attack following the election of Trump has resulted in a shift in consciousness among media workers, and now they all want to organize and are increasingly willing to go out on strike,” says Stephanie Basile, NewsGuild’s national organizing coordinator. Basile, alongside other staff and union members, is a founding architect of the member-organizer program. The national training program develops the organizing know-how of rank-and-file members by having them work side-by-side with staff and veteran member-organizers. It utilizes Zoom to connect media workers with NewsGuild locals across the country, so they can brainstorm with and learn from each other.
“Each organizing success has made the next campaign easier, to the point that, when many media workers reach out to us, they just believe that unionizing is a foregone conclusion,” Basile says.
If the labor movement hopes to grow in leaps and bounds, like it did in the 1930s, then it will require this kind of commitment to rank-and-file unionism — workers teaching other workers and building democratic structures to support that initiative and development.
“The spirit of organizing is that anyone can learn to do it and everyone can get better at it over time through experience,” Basile says. “Workers just need opportunities to organize, to run trainings, to plan actions, to bargain their own contracts, to do all of those things that union staff do all the time and to come together to discuss how to keep doing it better. If unions build structures that reinforce those conversations and experiences for workers, that can snowball into a movement.”
Did Joe Manchin Block Climate Action to Benefit His Financial Interests?
Recent revelations that Democratic West Virginian senator quietly made millions from his coal business could come back to haunt him as he eyes a run for re-election
The property, at the top of a rise on the road out of the small city of Fairmont, bears a large sign: “Manchin Professional Building”. Nameplates announce the offices of accountants, financial advisers and insurers. But there is no mention of the most profitable and influential company registered at the address – the Democratic senator’s own firm, Enersystems.
Manchin was recently revealed to have quietly made millions of dollars from Enersystems over the past three decades as the only supplier of a low grade coal to a high-polluting power plant near Fairmont. That came as news to Hilsbos and just about everyone else in the city.
“What surprised me was that we didn’t know it. One of the most shocking things was that I’ve driven by that place thousands of times in the last 30 years and I had no idea that’s where his business operation was headquartered because there’s no sign,” said Hilsbos.
“I wonder why he’s not prouder of what he’s done. Why doesn’t he have a big sign that says Enersystems?”
In 2020, Manchin earned nearly half a million dollars from the company, and $5.6m over the previous decade.
But Hilsbos, who worked underground for 13 years and was also a union activist, is less bothered by the senator keeping the source of his wealth shielded than by what else may have been hidden from view.
For years, Manchin has justified voting against curbs on the burning of fossil fuels and other measures to tackle the climate crisis on the grounds that they were bad for West Virginia, whose economy and culture are rooted in coal mining. Last year, he used his vote in a hung US Senate to block President Biden’s $3.5tn economic plan in part because he said he was “very, very disturbed” that its climate provisions would kill the coal industry.
But after the revelations that Manchin has made what most West Virginians would regard as a fortune from the Grant Town power plant, Hilsbos was left wondering if US climate policy, and by extension the global response to the crisis, has been held hostage to the senator’s financial interests.
“If he used it to slow the responsible addressing of climate change issues then that’s an international responsibility,” she said. “What’s wrong is him throwing so much weight against the public interest when he has so much to gain by the continued existence of this kind of facility.”
Hilsbos is not alone in her concern.
Christopher Regan, a former vice-chair of the West Virginia Democratic party who worked as an aide to Manchin, recalled a time when the senator painted prominent Republican officials in the state as “involved in self-service as opposed to public service”, a line Regan then promoted.
“This thing with the coal plant turns that around on him. What’s he doing? Is this for West Virginia? Or is this just strictly for his own narrow pecuniary interest?” he said.
Regan said that’s a question that could haunt Manchin as he considers a run for re-election in two years.
Manchin founded Enersystems in 1988 with his brother, Roch, at about the time the state was considering an application to build a power plant in Grant Town, a small former mining community less than 20 minutes’ drive north of Fairmont.
Manchin, then a state senator, helped clear the way for the construction of the power plant while negotiating a deal to become the only supplier of its fuel. Not just any fuel but discarded coal known as “garbage of bituminous”, more popularly called “gob”, which is even more polluting than regular coal.
When the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) raised concerns that the Grant Town plant was too close to other coal burning facilities, increasing pollution levels in the area, Manchin intervened and the objections went away. Later, as his state’s governor, Manchin used his political influence to win approval for an increase in the rate charged for electricity charged by the plant, which increased bills for ordinary West Virginians. The New York Times reported that, in a highly unusual arrangement, the senator has been getting a cut of those bills.
After his election to the US Senate in 2010, Manchin sat on the energy committee, and then became its chair, from where he has blocked environmental regulations that would have hit the Grant Town plant and other gob-burning facilities. Manchin also stood in the way of Biden’s multi-trillion dollar Build Back Better plan which could have threatened the power plant with tighter federal climate regulations. The senator defended the move as necessary in the midst of the Covid crisis, economic uncertainty, and with fuel supplies threatened by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
But the suspicion remains that he was, at least in part, acting in his own interests. Hilsbos said that the first she knew about the source of Manchin’s wealth came from recent revelations in the Intercept and later the New York Times. They prompted demonstrations outside the power plant in April to demand its closure because of the additional pollution caused by gob.
Although Hilsbos said she sympathised with the protesters’ concerns, she also understood the fears of people in Grant Town, once home to the largest underground mine in the world by the amount of coal produced. The mine closed in the mid-80s, shedding hundreds of jobs. Now the power plant, with about 50 workers, is the only large private employer in a town without a gas station or convenience store.
“Some neighbours came forward and said, I’ve always hated that place. But when we went to the town council meeting and tried to explain to them why people were coming from everywhere to demonstrate here, they said, ‘We don’t want you here, don’t come,’” said Hilsbos.
“A lot of the people involved in the town council have worked in the mines themselves. They feel like this is what we can do to hold on to our homeland, not have to move away, have this little plant as long as we can.”
While few in neighbouring Fairmont knew where Enersystems was, Manchin maintained a highly visible campaign office opposite the county courthouse in the heart of the city, between Bill’s Bail Bonds and a yoga studio. From there, he built a strong loyalty among West Virginia voters as a conservative Democrat prepared to stand up to the liberal wing of his party and to defend coal.
Regan said the senator spent years cultivating an image of himself as his own man, above party politics.
“He’s done a good job of it. He had his famous rifle ad, shooting the climate bill during the Obama administration, that he used to gain distance from the Democratic party on the national scale. But the effectiveness of that strategy may be running out. The magnitude of the shift within the state is too large for it to work any more,” he said.
In 2010, Democrats had a firm grip on the West Virginian legislature. Today, the Republicans are in control and they hold the governor’s office.
All of West Virginia’s congressional seats have fallen to the Republicans, leaving Manchin as the last Democrat holding statewide office. Manchin won his Senate seat in 2012 with nearly 61% of the vote, beating the Republican candidate by more than 24 points. Six years later, his margin of victory was just three points and he took less than half the vote after openly criticising Donald Trump in a state where he was hugely popular and remains so.
For all that, Greg Thomas, a prominent West Virginia Republican operative and Manchin opponent, does not think the coal plant revelations will damage the senator with most voters.
“If you’re a West Virginia politician and you’re not under some sort of investigation, you’re not trying hard enough to help your people,” he said. “No one here cares about environmentalists protesting Joe Manchin’s personal financial holding. It’s gotten to the point where it’s like, who cares if he does? We assume they’re all corrupt.”
Thomas said that Manchin’s political stands against his fellow Democrats have reinvigorated support.
“His popularity in West Virginia is coming back after it dropped over his fights with Trump. Pushing back against Biden has helped. His position on energy issues has been big,” he said.
Manchin’s approval rating among West Virginia voters has surged to 57% from just 40% early last year – and is even higher among Republicans.
Regan disagreed, saying that suspicions about his actions over the power plant are “threatening” to the senator because they come on the back of disenchantment among the state’s dwindling band of Democratic voters over his failure to support Biden’s agenda. Manchin’s vote against establishing abortion rights in federal law as the supreme court appears poised to strike down Roe v Wade will further alienate some Democratic voters in the state.
Regan said the last election left Manchin with a margin of victory of fewer than 20,000 votes – a narrow cushion to soak up the loss of angry Democrats who will not turn out to vote for him. He said the Grant Town power plant revelations are likely to stoke the dissatisfaction within that part of the electorate.
“Those Democrats he has alienated by being against Build Back Better and the child tax credit, and those very, very popular provisions among Democrats, may cost him in terms of people who don’t vote or people who just simply won’t vote for him any more. That may cost him the margin he has left and leave him in a bad situation in 2024.”
Then there is Trump. West Virginia voted for him in both presidential elections by the largest margin of any state except Wyoming.
“I think anybody in 2024 who is not prepared to say that Trump won the election is not going to be an acceptable candidate any more,” he said. “He can’t walk into the Republican camp, and he’ll have alienated too many Democrats to win.”
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