14 July 22
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The more we learn, the worse it gets.
We struggle to keep the mantra: steady, steady, steady. But in doing so may we follow the lead of the January 6 committee whose methodical, steady — admirably steady — pursuit of the facts has brought into the light a perfidy perhaps unmatched in the modern history of this nation.
When one must reach for comparisons to the Civil War to bring context to our current moment, it is to acknowledge the gravity of what we are learning.
Another day of hearings, and yet more details in a tableau of rampant law breaking. It is at a scale that is beyond what anyone could have imagined. Those who screamed into the void about what this man did and what he was capable of were often dismissed as histrionic. But even the most outrageous of suppositions have turned out to have been too restrained. The truth now has far outpaced the speculation. And the probability is that we have more to learn.
Take the news that ended today’s hearing, that there is new evidence raising questions about witnesses and a Trump telephone call. Did the president of the United States directly engage in witness tampering? It is impossible to be shocked anymore, yet it remains shocking to even have to ask the question. I’ve said something of this nature many times before; it only becomes more accurate with each new revelation.
And let us note with emphasis the new revelation that the president indicated that he wanted the U.S. military to seize voting machines as a means of keeping him in power past an election which he had clearly lost.
Perhaps if the reality of what took place was less abhorrent we might be able to process it more easily, and thus be less stunned.
Can this really be happening? Did all of this really occur?
Above all, one question looms for which we must demand answers:
There must be soul searching at all levels.
The cowardice of those who saw this unfold in real time and said nothing is a permanent stain on their characters. Those who would explain it away, or who sought to sabotage this investigation — and that includes almost every elected Republican in Congress — have put their narrow party’s unquenched thirst for power ahead of the country.
We must ask: What was happening at the Department of Justice? And what is happening there now?
It brings me no joy to include the press as an institution in this tally of systemic breakdown. How could this story have been so widely missed? And is the full scale of it being given enough prominence? A story of this scale and far-ranging nature is bigger than just the White House press corps. Everyone should have been asking questions. It is not too late to dig into it with more investigative journalism. And while doing so, false equivalence should be banished from every newsroom.
Let us not forget that President Trump was impeached for what happened on January 6, and in the Senate trial that followed, we didn’t come close to learning the full truth of his actions. The moment passed without sufficient scrutiny. No longer.
When this House committee was formed, there was a belief among many that the investigation would shed little that was new for those who had been paying attention. Sort of like crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Yet these patriotic members of Congress, and patriots they all are, have greatly exceeded expectations with professionalism and steely resolve. How stark their example stands in contrast to so many others who were perfectly happy to stay in the shadows in a moment when their country needed them to shed light.
Finally, thought turns tonight to the justices on the Supreme Court who claim to be “originalists.” Three of them were appointed by perhaps the most dangerous man to ever have held the office of president. In their decisions blowing up established rights, these justices like to claim to base their rulings on what the Founding Fathers thought.
I wonder what those founders would have made of a would-be dictator who sought to use force to overthrow the will of the people in order to set up dynastic rule. Actually, I don’t have to wonder. You can read about it in the Declaration of Independence, and it infuses the U.S. Constitution. It is the words that all of these people swore to uphold and then defiled in a craven play for power over justice and democracy.
Russian servicemen stand guard at the destroyed part of the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works in Ukraine's port city of Mariupol, May 18, 2022. (photo: Olga Maltseva/Getty)
“The unlawful transfer and deportation of protected persons is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians and is a war crime,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrote in a statement referencing a United Nations agreement to which Russia is a signatory.
The 1949 Geneva Conventions define international legal standards and protections for humanitarian treatment during wartime and explicitly prohibit mass forced transfers of civilians.
Blinken said the U.S. suspects that between 900,000 and 1.6 million Ukrainian citizens, including 260,000 children, have been detained and deported from their homes to Russia.
“Russian authorities must release those detained and allow Ukrainian citizens forcibly removed or coerced into leaving their country the ability to promptly and safely return home,” Blinken wrote.
The nation’s top diplomat also called on Moscow to allow third-party observers into so-called Russian “filtration camps.”
The filtration camps, which have been previously described as large makeshift tents, are initial reception areas where deported Ukrainians are photographed, fingerprinted, stripped, forced to turn over their mobile phones, passwords as well as identification, and then interrogated and sometimes tortured by Russian authorities.
Blinken accused Moscow of ordering the “disappearance” of thousands of Ukrainian civilians who do not pass the dehumanizing “filtration” process of the deportation procedure.
“Those detained or filtered out include Ukrainians deemed threatening because of their potential affiliation with the Ukrainian army, territorial defense forces, media, government, and civil society groups,” Blinken wrote.
He also said that the Kremlin’s filtration program appears to have been premeditated and mirrors similar operations carried out by Russian forces during other conflicts, including in Chechnya.
Blinken also outlined “mounting” evidence of Russian forces deliberately separating Ukrainian children from their parents, abducting children from orphanages, confiscating Ukrainian passports and issuing Russian passports for what is an “apparent effort to change the demographic makeup of parts of Ukraine.”
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet warned last week that her office has gathered a staggering amount of evidence that indicates Russian forces have carried out unlawful killings and summary executions of Ukrainians.
Bachelet said that U.N. investigators have recovered more than 1,200 civilian bodies from Kyiv and that her office is working to corroborate more than 300 allegations of killings by Russian forces in situations that were not linked to active fighting.
Earlier this year, the U.N. voted to strip Russia of its membership in the Human Rights Council following accusations that Russian troops tortured and killed Ukrainian civilians in Bucha, a suburb near Kyiv.
The bodies were discovered after Moscow withdrew its troops from Bucha. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the aftermath as a “genocide” when he visited Bucha on April 4 and accused Russia of war crimes. Similar reports of what unfolded in the Kyiv suburb have since emerged in cities throughout Ukraine.
The Kremlin has previously described its military actions in Ukraine as a “special operation” and has denied all claims that its forces target and kill civilians.
After a bombshell Jan. 6 revelation this week, more details surrounding the person Trump allegedly tried to call have come to light. (photo: Anna Moneymaker/Reuters)
After a bombshell Jan. 6 revelation this week, more details surrounding the person Trump allegedly tried to call have come to light.
Trump’s attempts to contact the witness were revealed by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) in a statement at the end of Tuesday’s hearing. The identity of the individual was not released, but Cheney said Trump tried to call the individual following the committee’s last hearing on June 28.
It is believed the individual was a witness who would be able to verify aspects of Hutchinson’s testimony. The witness didn’t answer the call and immediately passed it on to their lawyer, who then “supplied that information to the Department of Justice,” Cheney said.
According to CNN, the individual would not normally have come into contact with the former president and “was concerned about the contact.” Sources told CNN “the position of the witness Trump tried to call, but not the person’s name.”
At the time of the bombshell announcement on Tuesday, Cheney warned: “We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.”
Representatives for the House select committee along with a Trump spokesperson have not commented on the matter.
Speaking to CNN on Tuesday, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-CA), who is on the committee, said: “We take it very seriously when individuals reach out to potential witnesses for the Jan. 6 committee. We’re not going to let them be intimidated.” He said the White House staffer handled Trump’s attempted call “exactly how we would want them to handle it.”
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council speaks at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. (photo: Bill Clark/AP)
The FRC, a staunch opponent of abortion and LGBTQ rights, joins a growing list of activist groups seeking church status, which allows organizations to shield themselves from financial scrutiny.
From its perch at the heart of the nation’s capital, the FRC has pushed for legislation banning gender-affirming surgery; filed amicus briefs supporting the overturning of Roe v. Wade; and advocated for religious exemptions to civil rights laws. Its longtime head, a former state lawmaker and ordained minister named Tony Perkins, claims credit for pushing the Republican platform rightward over the past two decades.
What is the FRC? Its website sums up the answer to this question in 63 words: “A nonprofit research and educational organization dedicated to articulating and advancing a family-centered philosophy of public life. In addition to providing policy research and analysis for the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government, FRC seeks to inform the news media, the academic community, business leaders, and the general public about family issues that affect the nation from a biblical worldview.”
In the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service, though, it is also a church, with Perkins as its religious leader.
According to documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and given to ProPublica, the FRC filed an application to change its status to an “association of churches,” a designation commonly used by groups with member churches like the Southern Baptist Convention, in March 2020. The agency approved the change a few months later.
The FRC is one of a growing list of activist groups to seek church status, a designation that comes with the ability for an organization to shield itself from financial scrutiny. Once the IRS blessed it as an association of churches, the FRC was no longer required to file a public tax return, known as a Form 990, revealing key staffer salaries, the names of board members and related organizations, large payments to independent contractors and grants the organization has made. Unlike with other charities, IRS investigators can’t initiate an audit on a church unless a high-level Treasury Department official has approved the investigation.
The FRC declined to make officials available for an interview or answer any questions for this story. Its former parent organization, Focus on the Family, changed its designation to become a church in 2016. In a statement, the organization said it made the switch largely out of concern for donor privacy, noting that many groups like it have made the same change. Many of them claim they operated in practice as churches or associations of churches all along.
Warren Cole Smith, president of the Christian transparency watchdog MinistryWatch, said he believes groups like these are seeking church status with the IRS for the protections it confers.
“I don’t believe that a lot of the organizations that have filed for the church exemption are in fact churches,” he said. “And I don’t think that they think that they are in fact churches.”
The IRS uses a list of 14 characteristics to determine if an organization is a church or an association of churches, though it notes that organizations need not meet all the specifications. The Family Research Council answered in the affirmative for 11 of those points, saying that it has an array of “partner churches” with a shared mission: “to hold all life as sacred, to see families flourish, and to promote religious freedom.” The group says there is no set process for a church to become one of the partners that make up its association, but it says partners (and the FRC’s employees) must affirm a statement of faith to do so. It claims there are nearly 40,000 churches in its association, made up of different creeds and beliefs — saying that this models the pattern of the “first Christian churches described in the New Testament of the Bible.”
Unlike the Southern Baptist Convention, whose website hosts a directory of more than 50,000 affiliated churches, the FRC’s site does not list these partners or mention the word “church” anywhere on its home page. The FRC’s application to become an association of churches didn’t include this list of partner churches, nor did it provide the names to ProPublica.
To the question of whether the organization performs baptisms, weddings and funerals, the FRC answered yes, but it said it left those duties to its partner churches. Did it have schools for religious instruction of the young? That, too, was the job of the partner churches.
The FRC says it does not have members but a congregation made up of its board of directors, employees, supporters and partner churches. Some of those partner churches, it says, do have members.
Does the organization hold regular chapel services? According to the FRC’s letter to the IRS, the answer is yes. It wrote that it holds services at its office building averaging more than 65 people. But when a ProPublica reporter called to inquire about service times, a staffer who answered the phone responded, “We don’t have church service.” Elsewhere in the form, it says that the employees make up those who attend its services.
The organization’s claim to be an association of churches is disingenuous, said Frederick Clarkson, who researches the Christian right at nonpartisan social justice think tank Political Research Associates.
“The FRC can say whatever bullshit things they want to,” he said. “The IRS should recognize it as a bad argument.”
Three experts told ProPublica that the IRS is failing to use its full powers to determine who gets the special privileges afforded to churches. And when a group like the FRC appears to push the limits of what charities are allowed to do — particularly relating to their partisan political activity — the IRS doesn’t often step in to crack down. The IRS did not answer a list of detailed questions for this story or make anyone available for an interview.
David Cary Hart, an activist and writer who received the FRC’s reclassification documents via a Freedom of Information Act request, wrote a letter to the IRS questioning the decision, saying the approval “defies regulatory logic.”
When ProPublica relayed details of the FRC’s new church designation to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., he decried the loss of transparency and lax IRS oversight. “It is far too easy for powerful special interests to hide their donors using webs of nonprofits,” he said in a statement. “Form 990 filings provide valuable, and often the only, insight into a tax-exempt organization’s income and spending. But lax enforcement at the IRS and DOJ encourage more game-playing, which leaves the door wide open for enterprising dark-money schemes to exploit the system further.”
A Wave of Conversions
The current wave of nonprofit-to-church conversions appears to have gained steam after 2013, when the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association accused the IRS of targeting BGEA and another charity he heads with audits after the group took out newspaper ads supporting a North Carolina constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. The groups, BGEA and Samaritan’s Purse, retained their tax-exempt status, and in 2015, they applied for church status and got it.
In 2018, Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based legal nonprofit, was reclassified as an “association of churches” — though it had been categorized as a “church auxiliary” affiliated with Jerry Falwell’s megachurch since 2006, granting the organization many of the same exemptions that churches get. The organization represents Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue licenses for same-sex marriages. Just days after the Supreme Court cited a Liberty Counsel brief in its June decision overturning Roe v. Wade, a staffer for the organization was recorded saying she prays with conservative justices inside the court building — raising questions about conflicts of interest. (Liberty Counsel denies that the staffer prayed with justices.) In a written statement, founder and chairperson Mathew Staver said that the organization’s legal work is just one part of its activity, and that it made the change “to accurately reflect the operation of the ministry.”
The American Family Association, a Tupelo, Mississippi-based group that runs the influential American Family Radio network, as well as a film studio and magazine, changed its designation to a church in early 2022, according to IRS data. The association sends out frequent “action alerts” to subscribers asking them to sign petitions opposing government appointees or boycott media and brands that it has identified as supporting LGBTQ rights or abortion access. The organization declined to respond to a request for comment.
In its letter to the IRS, the FRC argued that the classification change would protect its religious liberty rights. As an example, it pointed to Treasury Department rules exempting church organizations from the mandatory coverage requirements for contraceptives.
Churches also have a “ministerial exemption” to hiring discrimination laws for religious leaders — meaning, for example, that a Catholic church may exclude women when hiring priests. Courts have interpreted this protection broadly, shielding churches from claims of discrimination for sexual orientation as well. Recent Supreme Court rulings have broadened the umbrella of staffers who may be included under the exemption.
According to IRS data, the FRC has submitted a 990 tax return for its 2021 fiscal year, but the agency has not yet released the filing. The organization is also a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a voluntary membership organization that collects revenue, expenses, assets and a small number of other top-line financials from its members. The organization does not collect more detailed financial data reported on the 990.
Over the five years ending June 2020, the FRC saw average revenues of $15.9 million each year, and it spent an average of $15.6 million. In its fiscal year 2021, the FRC reported to ECFA, it brought in $23.1 million and spent $20 million. In the most recent 990, Perkins made about $300,000.
The IRS did not answer questions about how many groups apply to become a church and how many applications it denies. Samuel Brunson, a law professor specializing in religion and tax exemption at Loyola University Chicago, said the federal government, and especially the IRS, are typically very cautious when it comes to making judgments about defining religion.
“The First Amendment makes [defining a religion] really hard,” he said.
Brunson pointed to the Satanic Temple, which received IRS church recognition in 2019, as an example of an organization that people may not consider one. The group has made headlines over the years for mounting First Amendment challenges such as suing to have a statue of the goat-headed occult icon Baphomet placed next to statues of the Ten Commandments in public places. The temple is now suing Texas, claiming that the state’s abortion restrictions inhibit the liberty of the organization’s members to practice their religious rituals.
Lucien Greaves, a founder of the Satanic Temple, said groups like Liberty Counsel and the FRC have for years implied his organization is too political to be a church — one of the reasons the group finally sought official recognition. The fact that those same organizations are now themselves churches, he said, is hypocritical.
“People act like ... we’re trying to get away with something: ‘Look, these guys want to be a church, and yet they’re active in these public campaigns,’” he said. “And they never apply those same questions to the other side.”
Politics and the Pulpit
The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the FRC, Liberty Counsel and the American Family Association as hate groups for their anti-LGBTQ stances and advocacy. But Clarkson, the researcher, said focusing on that designation misses the larger sphere of the FRC’s political influence. In recent years, he said, the FRC’s rhetoric and actions have influenced politics away from democracy and in a direction that is “distinctly theocratic.”
“Abortion and LGBT issues are not the war,” he said. “They’re battles in the war.”
IRS rules prohibit public, tax-exempt charities including churches from “directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” That rule, known as the Johnson Amendment, dates back to 1954. Short of explicit political endorsements, these groups may participate in what’s known as “issue advocacy” including voter education. They can also lobby for political causes connected to their core missions, as long as the lobbying activity is not a “substantial part” of their activities.
To run its more direct political activities, the FRC has another tax-exempt organization, called a social welfare organization, that actively endorses candidates and lobbies for legislation — Family Research Council Action. The arms separate out messaging on two websites, with the FRC hosting issues-based content supporting its Christian worldview and linking to the Family Research Council Action website for content that explicitly endorses candidates.
Family Research Council Action is registered at the same address as the FRC and shares all five of the part-time employees it lists on its tax form, including Perkins. This is legal so long as the organizations are careful to separate activities and accounting, such that tax-deductible charity dollars aren’t supporting political work by the social welfare organization, said Philip Hackney, a tax law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Experts say ideally a group like Family Research Council Action would have at least one independent staffer to indicate that it’s actually operating as an independent entity.
But FRC Action lists zero full-time employees on its most recent tax filing. When Perkins — who is president of both organizations — is speaking, he rarely makes a delineation about whether he is speaking as the head of the FRC or the head of Family Research Council Action.
But even for charitable operations, the lines around political activities are open to interpretation. While the FRC and other evangelical groups have pushed for the removal of all restrictions on political speech by churches for years, the FRC also releases guidelines encouraging pastors to discuss political matters while staying within the bounds of the law, noting that “there are legal limits to what churches may do, but your hands are not completely tied. In fact, you may be surprised at how much influence you can have.”
On Perkins’ radio show, “Washington Watch,” he hosts a bevy of pro-Donald Trump lawmakers and political figures every day. Its annual Pray Vote Stand Summit, formerly known as the Values Voter Summit, is one of the largest and most influential gatherings for those on the Christian right, where politicians, including Trump during his presidency, talk strategy with religious organizers. In 2021, the event’s schedule included “The Battle for America’s Classrooms: Fighting Indoctrination on a National Scale,” “The End of Roe and Beyond: The Outlook for the Unborn in America” and “A Mandate for Disaster: How States Are Fighting Biden’s Vaccine Tyranny” — the last event featuring the Ohio and Arkansas attorneys general and Perkins. The event was hosted by both the FRC and FRC Action.
In December 2020, Perkins — reportedly a close confidant of Trump’s during his presidency — signed a letter containing the false claims that state officials violated election laws and that “there is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election.” The letter called on state lawmakers to appoint a new slate of electors to override the election President Joe Biden won. Perkins signed as “President, Family Research Council.”
Experts say it’s not clear whether seeking to influence an election after it’s already happened would run afoul of the nonprofit campaign prohibitions.
But it’s rare for a nonprofit to face a challenge for political campaign speech. A 2020 Government Accountability Office report found that, between 2010 and 2017, the IRS examined just 226 of more than 1.5 million tax-exempt organizations for political activity. It sent a written warning to 56% of the organizations it examined and took additional action in just 10% of cases.
Scrutinizing the fuzzy line between FRC and FRC Action, or getting involved in how far out of the gray area a charity may have strayed, is not something that authorities are keeping a close eye on, said Frances Hill, a law professor specializing in tax and election law at the University of Miami. “It would take some sort of an earthquake to make the IRS use its time looking into these matters,” she said.
Family Research Council is terrible, and its president Tony Perkins just got appointed to an international commission
Fox Invites Tony Perkins To Peddle “Gays Are Pedophiles” Myth Over Boy Scouts Ban
Advocates of the AMA resolution said voting is consistently associated with better health, across dozens of studies. (photo: Octavio Jones/Getty)
Some advocates suggest AMA could partner with civic groups to encourage voting, which correlates to better health outcomes
The American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates adopted a resolution calling voting a social determinant of health, a term used to describe non-medical factors that affect health and wellbeing. Co-sponsored by the National Medical Association, the resolution also recognizes that gerrymandering limits access to care and leads to worse health outcomes.
The AMA’s move follows the 2020 election, in which Republican campaigns questioned election results, and a redistricting cycle where hyperpartisan districts were proposed in several states.
Recent supreme court decisions have also pushed abortion, climate change, and other health-related policies to the states. Aliya Bhatia, executive director of the civic health organization Vot-ER, said that makes it “even more important that communities vote in local races in their upcoming elections”. But healthcare organizations have long shied away from civic engagement work within their communities.
In the past, the AMA hasn’t focused much policy over voting. In 2010, it advocated for the right to vote for people with mental illness and, in 2021, supported safe, equitable voting conditions. “This is taking it one more step,” said Luis Seija, an internal medicine and pediatrics resident at Mount Sinai in New York who introduced the resolution into the House of Delegates, “and actually coming down to the fundamentals and the principles of it all.”
Another advocate, Jasmin Eatman, who is an MD-PhD student at Emory University in Atlanta and helped draft the resolution, emphasized that voting is consistently associated with better health, across history and dozens of studies. It’s estimated that women’s suffrage decreased child mortality rates by 8-15% while the Voting Rights Act reduced economic inequality and increased health spending.
One recent study found that an increase in voter restriction barriers was correlated with a 25% higher probability of not having health insurance. In another, researchers linked a higher voter turnout rate with significantly reduced risk of cancer death. And finally, after following adolescents for 14 years, voting was found to be associated with improved mental health, as well as greater socioeconomic status. “Voting can influence many different health outcomes,” Eatman said, “whether it be through access to resources in one’s community, whether it be through insurance.” The sickest patients are the least likely to vote but most in need of good health policy.
Bhatia thinks that healthcare workers are uniquely positioned to restore fractured trust in democracy because they’re considered some of the most honest and ethical professionals in America. “Your doctor, your nurse, your social worker has a different type of voice than somebody you would run into every ten years at a DMV,” she said, the agency where voter registration often takes place. The law, Bhatia notes, allows nonpartisan voter registration wherever public funding, such as Medicare and Medicaid, is provided.
Despite its declaration of voting as a social determinant of health, the AMA isn’t sure how the new resolution will be put into action. The association’s media and editorial director, Josh Zembik, said the actual steps have yet to be determined.
But Seija and Bhatia have some ideas. For one, they both believe the AMA should partner with civic health organizations already engaging the community and encouraging patients to vote. This August, for instance, Vot-ER is hosting Civic Health Month. Hospitals across the country take part in a Healthy Democracy Campaign, with teams of healthcare workers competing to register as many patients to vote as possible.
Beyond supporting community-based organizations, Seija believes that the AMA should also be speaking out against systems of power and oppression in order to protect voting rights.
Bhatia, however, is more hesitant about institutional messaging. “There’s historical incidents of mistrust,” she said, “where Black and Brown communities in America have very real reasons to be concerned about what ‘Health’ tells them to do.” Instead the message around voting might be better delivered by patients’ healthcare providers, who are more familiar and personable.
“In our work, we would not recommend that the AMA be the messenger to patients directly,” Bhatia said. “That would probably not be an effective use of their time and energy.”
With the 2022 midterms fast approaching, Seija is concerned “that we will continue to politicize Blackness, that we’ll continue to politicize people of color and the communities we serve, that we’ll never actually say that voting is a right.”
A worker packs products at an Amazon Fulfillment Center in Wroclaw, Poland. (photo: Kacper Pempel/Reuters)
After Amazon workers in Germany began striking, the company expanded eastward, where looser labor laws brought record productivity.
A third of the workforce was off the job at the three centrally located fulfillment centers — a surge of collective action Amazon had never before faced anywhere. “It felt like a historic day,” said Andreas Gangl, who started at Amazon’s warehouse in Bad Hersfeld, Germany, in 2008 and worked in the returns department. “I think it was the best day in the world.”
Amazon, which has consistently opposed unionization efforts throughout its history, appeared to be reeling. The strikers, who had unionized two years earlier under their country’s robust labor laws, won significant concessions: Hourly wages rose from 9.83 euros to 11.62. The company decreased its reliance on temp agency employees, by the union’s estimate, from around 75% of the workforce to 25%, supplanted by employees with full company benefits and longer entry-level contracts. And Amazon agreed to stop firing workers for failing to meet productivity quotas in all three striking warehouses.
But the retail giant had another plan brewing. Two months after the first German strike, Amazon announced that it would expand into central Europe for the first time. Over the next eight years, the company opened 12 fulfillment centers across neighboring Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia. More than 30,000 workers in those three countries now pump out products for Western European customers for less than half the wages of their German counterparts, and with none of the labor protections the Germans had just won.
A BuzzFeed News investigation based on documents and dozens of interviews has found that working conditions at Amazon facilities in central Europe resemble a pressure cauldron where staff often work past the point of exhaustion to meet ever-increasing quotas to avoid termination. Polish government inspectors have found that workers were under more physical strain than legally acceptable. Internal data showed production expectations rising every week for at least a third of warehouse jobs. Staffers in three central European facilities told BuzzFeed News they regularly witnessed colleagues fainting from exhaustion. Four employees said they were reprimanded for trying to organize or advocate for better working conditions. One former HR officer in Szczecin, Poland, said he fired hundreds of people in the course of one year, including some for using more than three sick days in one month.
“Why do they build warehouses in Poland?” the HR officer said. “Because it’s not Germany.”
The expansion across central Europe was unprecedented. For years, Poland, Czechia, and Slovakia were the only countries with Amazon warehouses but no Amazon website — and though a Polish site went up in 2021, the other two nations still have none. For the first time, the company entered countries solely for their labor, without an interest in their consumer markets.
The plan paid off. Within a year, the warehouses in Poland became the corporation’s most productive in the world, delivering hundreds of thousands of packages every day to Germany and other Western European countries. The strategy’s success reflected a model Amazon has honed for years; the company had developed its highest volume fulfillment centers by exploiting weak enforcement mechanisms in countries with labor standards similar to the place where Amazon first rose to dominance, the US.
In Poland, Amazon is able to run an operation “more close to what the US is doing,” said a former senior manager in Poland who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. Amazon’s most productive warehouses had long been in the US; as the company expanded through Poland and across central Europe, it exported efficiency tactics honed under American labor laws.
Many workers in those countries welcomed the Amazon fulfillment centers, which are among the biggest warehouses in central Europe, with a forest of yellow shelves boasting the company's unparalleled inventory and a state-of-the-art cafeteria featuring big-screen TVs, video game consoles, and colorful chairs. For a generation of workers who grew up after the Cold War, Amazon’s arrival was emblematic of a new stage in their countries’ transition from the former East Bloc communism to Western-style capitalism. Amazon pays higher than minimum wage in each country, offers to cover up to 95% of schooling or vocational programs for employees with more than a year on the job, and provides bus service even more than 100 miles away — free in Poland and Czechia, 24 euros a month in Slovakia. More than a dozen central European workers who spoke to BuzzFeed News expressed pride at being a part of one of the most successful companies in the world. “For me, this is America,” said a worker in Poznan who requested anonymity because they feared losing their job. “This is America in Poland.”
As in America, in Poland Amazon benefits not just from looser workplace requirements, but lesser consequences for breaking labor laws. Judges in at least three cases in 2018 and 2019 ruled that the company used wrongful firing practices, though under Polish law local judgments can influence future lawsuits but not force a change in business practices. From 2014 to 2018, according to a BuzzFeed News review of Polish court documents, the inspectorate observed 117 violations on 12 of its visits to Poland warehouses and issued fines totaling $4,609 — equivalent to less than six months of wages for its lowest-paid employees.
“In 30 years, I’ve never seen a company that has avoided regulations as effectively as Amazon,” said Jarosław Łucka, a former corporate compliance director who was commissioned by a Polish court to inspect the Poznan facility in 2018. “They don’t care about the law here. They’re willing to just pay the fines.”
In response to a list of questions for this story, Amazon spokesperson Stephan Eichenseher said that the company selects fulfillment center locations “based on multiple factors such as transport infrastructure, the local labor market, business needs and construction timelines.” He disputed allegations that the company has mistreated employees in central Europe. “It’s in our interest to create the best working conditions and retain the best talent,” he said. “While we always strive to do our best for our employees and our customers, we know we always have more work to do. It is our priority to always be fully compliant with all applicable labor laws, and if something isn’t, then we investigate and act immediately.”
In the US in recent months, Amazon workers have begun breaking through the company’s efforts to prevent unions: A facility in New York voted to unionize in April, and two other facilities are contesting close losses by filing charges with the National Labor Relations Board accusing the corporation of violating labor laws.
Workers organizing in Poland, though, have continued to hit walls that their counterparts in Western Europe have been able to bypass, according to union representatives and five employees. As unionizing efforts in America have gained steam over the past three years, managers in Poznan “started to act more and more aggressive toward us,” said Magda Malinowska, a union organizer who began working at the Poznan facility in 2014. “Managers tell us that those they find out are in the union will get the worst jobs on the floor. Many people are scared to join.”
Though she had been part of organizing efforts for nearly eight years without suffering any repercussions, Malinowska said she suddenly sensed a target on her back in the months after the pandemic started, with managers reprimanding her for spreading union information while she was on the clock. When a coworker died during a night shift in September, Malinowska said, she stepped outside the building to call the union’s lawyer. Her managers accused her of taking photos of paramedics transporting the body into an ambulance, which they called a violation of company policy. Eichenseher, the Amazon spokesperson, declined to specify what policy Malinowska violated but said that she “refused to follow appropriate social behavior,” describing the incident as “an unacceptable and disrespectful action.”
Two months later, Malinowska received notice that she was fired.
Shortly after Amazon opened a fulfillment center in Poznan, Poland, in 2014, a group of its senior managers traveled to the US to tour the company’s most productive warehouses, in Tennessee and Delaware.
“We were there to see how they did it,” said a senior manager on the trip who requested anonymity to preserve his relationship with the company.
Unlike in Germany, where any group of at least 10 employees can form a union and hold a legal strike, in Poland more than half of a workplace, regardless of union membership, must approve. While individual fulfillment centers in Germany and elsewhere in Europe are registered as stand-alone entities, the ten warehouses in Poland collectively exist by law as a single workplace, which means any strike would require approval from at least 10,000 employees across all the country’s facilities.
In Germany — where companies with at least 2,000 workers must apportion half of their board of director seats to nonmanagement employees, giving rank-and-file workers an equal say in warehouse policies — none of Amazon’s 15 facilities employs more than 1,800 people. Similar “codetermination” laws apply to Amazon warehouses across Western Europe, where only one fulfillment center employs more than 3,000 people, a contrast to central European countries where even the biggest companies don’t have to grant employees more than a third of board seats. In Poznan, as well as in Wrocław and Prague, each fulfillment center employs around 7,000 workers during peak weeks — a scale matched by its US facilities.
With the American-like size came an onslaught of orders and pressure to clear them as quickly as the facilities across the ocean did. As he observed the US warehouses, the senior manager was impressed by how much bigger they were than those in Germany, with rows of long packing stations and multistory “picking-towers,” the library of shelves holding thousands of assorted products. He took notes on how the Americans kept the flow steady. Upon returning to Poznan, he installed a longer chute for outgoing parcels and a manual address-stamping station.
The equipment upgrades in Poznan were completed in time for the 2014 pre-Christmas rush. In a conference call with top Amazon officials, including Steve Harman, the director of European operations, a senior operator at the warehouse remarked that he believed Poznan could break the productivity record set in the US, according to the former senior manager from Poland, who was on the call. The top officials agreed. When the peak period hit, the senior manager said, Amazon’s upper management in Europe redirected more orders than usual to Poland to see how much its fulfillment centers could process at full capacity. “They wanted this win,” the senior manager said.
The Poznan warehouse shipped 1.02 million packages in 24 hours at its highest point that winter, the first in Europe to hit seven figures in a day and just short of the Delaware record of 1.1 million, according to the former senior manager. The following December, with orders again funneled to Poland fulfillment centers, the Poznan warehouse exceeded the American mark, a record that lasted three days before the Wrocław facility surpassed it. “We smashed it,” said another former manager, who was based at the Wrocław facility.
For their efforts, the workers at the record-breaking facilities were rewarded with Amazon-branded T-shirts.
“The worst days were when we have to hit a record,” Malinowska said. Managers pushed them harder, she said, by raising voices and reminding them their jobs were on the line. “For us, it’s hell.”
As strikes swept Western Europe in 2015, Poznan and Wrocław picked up the slack. Anticipating work stoppages in Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Spain during the mid-July Prime Day peak, managers in Poznan announced a mandatory hour of overtime for all employees. In an act of solidarity with the strikers, a group of Poznan workers organized a brief slowdown. For the 11th hour of their shift, they placed only a single item — rather than several to a dozen — into each bin that left their station, triggering backlogs on the conveyer belts that carried items to the packing area. The slowdown caused a 30% dip in processing speed, the former senior manager said.
Amazon’s system is tightly monitored, with items scanned by employees at every stage, and it didn’t take long for managers to identify 16 people linked to the single-item bins. All were fired or signed mutual termination agreements, according to the facility’s union stewards.
“There are situations in which we do not see the possibility of further cooperation with the employee,” Amazon spokesperson Eichenseher said in response to a question about the incident. “In this case we have no choice but to exercise the right to terminate the employment contract.”
At least two sued the company for wrongful termination but lost. Polish law wasn’t on their side.
As is the case at Amazon warehouses everywhere, the company’s management in Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia rely on a constant stream of new workers to cycle in.
To fill its new operations in the region, Amazon recruited far beyond the cities closest to the facilities, running promotional campaigns in towns within a 100-mile radius. Daniela, who lives around 30 miles from the warehouse in Slovakia, learned about the job from a man handing out flyers at a bus station. Henryk, who lives in Lobez, around 55 miles from the Szczecin facility, heard about the job from a neighbor. Kate, who lives about 50 miles from the Prague warehouse, saw an ad online. One worker in Prague and another in Szczecin had been living in Ukraine when they came across a posting on Facebook from a temp agency. Others saw ads on buses and billboards. The former HR officer in Szczecin said he found on the bottom of a stack of cash he’d withdrawn from an ATM a slip of paper announcing openings at the city’s new facility.
Gabriel, a 57-year-old who got a job at the Slovakia facility, lives in Nové Zámky, a rural village where job options are more limited than in bigger cities like Bratislava. He worked in the returns department, where workers unpack boxes, inspect items for damage, then sort them based on whether they can be resold.
Though he performed the same duties that Gangl did in Germany, he was unaware that he worked under different conditions than his counterparts to the west. While Gangl and his returns teammates in Bad Hersfeld sit in chairs while working their eight hours, Gabriel and colleagues in Bratislava stood through their 10-hour shifts. While Gangl no longer had to meet productivity requirements, Gabriel struggled to make his quotas.
“Everything was about productivity,” he said. “It was hard for me. It was all so stressful, working under that kind of pressure.”
Gabriel hoped to keep the job as long as he could, but to do that he had to raise his numbers. He remembers Oct. 22, 2017, his 19th day as an Amazon employee, as being a particularly stressful shift. A manager, bearing a stack of papers listing the required numbers, “kept coming back to us to check how are we meeting the productivity targets,” he said. “All the time.” And so Gabriel moved faster, unpacking the boxes arriving on a conveyer belt and placing the items inside into bins nearby, three or four times each minute.
Halfway into his shift, Gabriel started to feel “really sick,” he said. He was dizzy, lightheaded, and suddenly fatigued. He felt a pain in his chest. He said he went to the infirmary, but there was no medic in that night, so he described his symptoms to a manager and an HR rep, who gave him coffee. “I suppose they were concerned to some extent, but it felt inadequate,” he said.
The fatigue and pain only increased as he sat there. He told them that he wanted to go to the hospital. They called him a cab. “As soon as we step into the emergency room, I passed out, and the doctors had to resuscitate me,” he said. “Then they told me I had a heart attack and that I literally came there at the last minute.” A coworker and a union representative corroborated his account.
He was off his feet for five months. Then he returned to his job at the Amazon warehouse. “And again, I ended up in the hospital,” he said. It wasn’t a heart attack this time, merely a bout of exhaustion. He left the job after that and now works as a security guard for less pay than what he made at Amazon. “Maybe if I was 100% healthy,” he said, “I would be able to hang on at Amazon.”
The quotas are announced every fourth Wednesday. Minimum rates are set each week based on the 80th percentile of performers the previous week; in other words, the bottom fifth of workers had to increase their productivity to avoid a reprimand, which is called “feedback” in company language. As the employee handbook warned, a worker would be recommended for termination if they received six feedbacks in a year.
During one 12-week stretch, from March 7 to May 30, 2018, according to internal rate sheets reviewed by BuzzFeed News, hourly processing quotas increased for 37 of 93 jobs in the Poznan warehouses, including from 104 items to 116 for small-/medium-item packers, 107 to 120 for small-item pickers, 269 to 322 for small-item stowers, and 472 to 500 for sorters on the rebin team. Minimum rates decreased for only four jobs.
“Like most companies, we have performance expectations for every Amazonian — whether they’re a corporate employee or fulfillment center associate — and we measure actual performance against those expectations,” Eichenseher said. “The vast majority of our employees easily achieve their goals.”
From the start, Amazon workers in Poland have to compete with their colleagues to hold onto their jobs. Applicants searching for entry-level associate jobs in Poznan or Wrocław on Amazon’s website are redirected to temp agencies, which supply the company with workers who start on one-month contracts. In Poland, 39% of “low-status” workers are employed through temp agencies, triple the rate in Germany. Temp workers who complete three straight one-month subcontracts, the maximum under Polish law, get a chance at a full-time one-year contract with health insurance and other company benefits, as long as they make it through a three-month trial period during which Amazon can legally fire them for any reason. Those retained at the end of their one-year contract graduate to a permanent contract, which offers more protection from termination, as required under European Union regulations limiting the use of fixed-term staffing.
Experienced associates on permanent contracts learn to keep a pace that just barely hits the week’s quota to help minimize its growth. Some hold informal competitions over who can get closest to the minimum rate without going under, two workers said. But those on short-term contracts, who make up more than half of the Poznan warehouse’s staff some months, don’t know what rate they need to hit to get rehired when their end date comes — only that Amazon will retain an undefined number of the top performers among them, based on the latest shipping projections.
“I try to work at 150% rate because I know they won’t prolong my contract if I don’t,” said one Poznan worker on a short-term contract who declined to be named because she feared losing her job for speaking publicly. “They really wear us down.”
In 2018, the country’s National Labor Inspectorate, known by its Polish acronym PIP, ordered a test to measure the energy expended by Amazon workers. Officials from PIP’s Work Environment Research Section in Gdańsk arrived in Poznan on June 20; over two days, they hooked up workers at five stations to a device called a MWE-1 meter, a rubber mask attached to a tubular machine that measures breathing to calculate the kilocalories burned during a shift. Similar tests were scheduled at other facilities across the country. In all, the agency aimed to measure energy levels of 11 different Amazon warehouse jobs.
Jobs that burn at least 1,500 kcal in men or 1,000 in women are classified as “heavy” and require certain conditions under Polish labor laws: Night shifts can’t be longer than eight hours, employers need to provide at least one free meal, and workers must have at least 11 hours of rest time between shifts. Amazon claimed, based on its own measurements, that none of its jobs were heavy.
By the time of the inspectorate’s June 2018 examination, Amazon’s Poznan and Wrocław warehouses had already undergone at least one energy measurement each, on court orders tied to wrongful termination complaints. Conducted by Envilab, a private research laboratory, the tests determined that 18 of the 20 jobs measured in Wrocław on April 27, 2015, and nine of the 36 jobs measured in Poznan on April 12, 2018, were classified as heavy. A woman in the rebin department in Poznan expended 1,068 kcals, a man in the Wrocław stow department 1,986, and associates on the sort team in both warehouses more than 1,600. By law, the findings could be used as evidence in individual court cases but not for any wider enforcement against the company’s practices.
The inspectorate’s test found even higher levels. Of the 11 jobs assessed, seven were classified as heavy, which the agency said “exceeded permissible standards” for a 10-hour night shift. A rebin worker clocked 2,087 kcals, a packer 3,056.
Danuta Rutkowska, a spokesperson for the National Labor Inspectorate, told BuzzFeed News that “representatives of Amazon show willingness to cooperate,” but that the agency has no evidence that the company has addressed the energy expenditure issue. “This problem remains in the sphere of further interest of PIP,” Rutkowska said.
Amazon presented a different view of the inspectorate’s findings. “We disagree with the assessment by PIP,” spokesperson Eichenseher said. “As of today, there are no workplaces where the energy expenditure has been exceeded.”
When it was time to terminate workers, the HR officer at the Szczecin warehouse would break the news to each of them in a small, barren room on the ground floor. The process played out the same at Amazon warehouses across central Europe. At the Bratislava warehouse in Slovakia, workers call the small windowless room on the ground floor “samotka,” the Slovak word for a solitary confinement prison cell.
The HR rep would slide a sheet of paper across the table and tell the employee that it was probably best if they signed it. The document stated that the parting was mutual — a voluntary resignation, not a firing, and therefore not subject to a severance payment, notice period, or legal challenge.
“We were pushing people to sign the mutual agreement,” he said.
By signing, the employee would remain in good standing with Amazon and could apply for a job again after three months; their work certificate, a résumélike report card that follows workers in most blue-collar industries in central Europe, would show that they left on their own accord and hadn’t been dismissed for performance or disciplinary reasons. Many cried in the room, he said. One man threatened to kill him. “Did I feel guilty? Yes. There were many cases that I felt guilty,” the HR rep said. “The job killed a lot of humanity in me.”
The HR officer said he had no say in who got fired. Terminations and contract renewals are dictated by an algorithm that measures only productivity rates and absences. Near the end of each month, he and other managers consulted a spreadsheet listing names and statistics. Those highlighted in green were safe; those in red would lose their jobs.
Over his first year in Szczecin, the HR officer estimates that he terminated 350 workers. He fired workers who used more than six days of sick leave in three months or three in one month. He fired anyone who accrued three unexcused absences over any stretch. He fired workers for missing their quotas six times in a year or four weeks in a row, even if they were consistently reaching 90% to 99% of the mark.
“We had older people, 60 years old or more, who hit good rates and were trying their best and wanted to work, but it was just physically impossible for them to make the same numbers as younger people,” said the former HR rep, who requested anonymity to preserve his professional relationship with the company. “I was never proud of this.”
He said that he had asked workers to read the documents but didn’t explicitly tell them what legal rights they were signing away. Union stewards in Poland, Slovakia, and Czechia described receiving phone calls from freshly fired workers hoping to reverse their dismissal or collect a severance payment, only to find out there was nothing they could do. “People mostly don’t know their rights, and Amazon exploits that,” said Ivo Mayer, chair of the ZO OSPO union, which represents around 100 Amazon workers in Czechia.
In response to questions for this story, Amazon defended its termination policies. “We would never end someone’s employment without a clear and valid reason,” spokesperson Eichenseher said.
At least three workers in Poland who didn’t sign mutual agreements have sued Amazon for wrongful termination and won. In the case of Joanna Piotrowska, a Poznan associate who was fired in 2016 after her fourth unexcused absence in 10 months, a judge found that Amazon’s decision “does not constitute a valid reason for termination of the employment contract” because the company couldn’t prove that her absences had created additional costs to its business, according to the court ruling. Amazon was ordered to pay her $1,241 and give her her job back. In the case of Agnieszka Kukułka, a Poznan worker who was fired in 2017 after a manager caught her passing out union pamphlets, a judge ruled that the termination be reversed because Amazon had falsely claimed that her actions had created a safety hazard. After Maciej Gorajski, a packer in Poznan, was fired in 2016 for failing to hit productivity quotas, a judge ruled that Amazon’s practice of terminating employees for not hitting ever-increasing standards determined by the performance of other people “should be considered unlawful” because it is designed to ensure the slowest workers are regularly fired based on constantly changing expectations.
“It is already assumed,” Judge Michał Włodarczak wrote, “that not all employees will reach the ceiling calculated using such a method and serve to eliminate the least efficient people. With such a structure, it is not possible for all employees to achieve a minimum that is not known to the employee.” The policy, Włodarczak stated, was “an example” of an employer who cared “only for profit.”
On his fourth shift at Amazon’s warehouse in Szczecin, Poland, Stanisław Jankowski was working slower than usual. He was 69 years old and he was falling behind. Jankowski had been hired just eight days earlier, according to Eichenseher, the Amazon spokesperson.
Two Amazon managers who reviewed security footage from that night in February 2018 said that Jankowski appeared increasingly lethargic throughout the night shift, and that his supervisor approached him at least three times to encourage him to work faster.
The Szczecin warehouse stood as Amazon’s most technologically advanced warehouse in Europe when it opened in 2017, the biggest one on the continent to be fitted with a robotics unit that sped up the shipping process, increased storage capacity by 50%, and eliminated the most notorious task in the company’s logistics operation — instead of workers walking 10 to 15 miles a day to pick items from shelves, the 3,000 robots would bring the shelves to them. In its announcements unveiling the new warehouse, the company presented it as a glimpse into a future where production goals and working conditions were aligned, but workers in Szczecin soon found that wasn’t the case.
Jankowski worked as a picker, spending his shifts in what employees call “the cage” because of the steel fencing that isolates workers in a station about the size of a motel bathroom. With a computer monitor in front of him and yellow shelves rolling up to the cage, he reached up or crouched down for an item, recorded its barcode with a handheld scanner, then turned and placed it in one of the black bins on a rolling belt beneath the computer, a cycle of movements he repeated hundreds of times through his 10.5-hour shift, only interrupted by two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch. “It’s just so tiring, extremely strenuous,” said a picker in Szczecin who requested anonymity because they feared losing their job.
After his shift ended at 4 a.m., Jankowski marched to the locker room alongside dozens of other associates, one face among many. As those around him stripped off their work vests, grabbed their phones from their lockers, and made their way out toward the buses in the parking lot, Jankowski sat on the wooden bench and leaned forward with his face in his hands, the two managers who viewed the footage told BuzzFeed News. Within minutes, the room had emptied except for him. Suddenly, he collapsed to his side and tumbled to the ground.
A loss prevention staffer found him lying on the ground of the locker room at around 4:30 a.m. Paramedics took him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. After the medical examiner ruled that the death was due to heart failure, the local prosecutor’s office closed the case, concluding that the death was accidental, clearing Amazon of criminal liability.
In the years since, at least two other Amazon workers in Poland, both in Poznan, have died while on the clock. In both cases, prosecutors also ruled the deaths accidental.
On the day of Jankowski’s death, managers informed workers of the incident, and the company provided grief counselors. There would be no memorial at the facility. The work continued.
A few days later, his wife and eldest daughter arrived at the warehouse to pick up his belongings from his locker. A senior manager and the HR chief greeted them in the lobby, expressing their condolences. They were met with anger, according to a witness to the encounter.
“You killed our father!” Jankowski’s daughter said to the Amazon officials, who responded with stunned silence.
The women tearfully entered the locker room, gathered his cellphone and keys, and then made their way back to their car for the long drive home.
One afternoon more than a year later, dozens of workers crowded under an awning in front of the Szczecin warehouse, smoking cigarettes before their shift. Few had been on the job long enough to remember the day Jankowski died. None knew his last name, which town he was from, or even what he looked like, but as one worker put it, “Everybody knows what happened to him.”
In interviews with BuzzFeed News, neither the HR rep in Szczecin who hired Jankowski nor the senior manager who oversaw his department could recall any interactions with him. “These people become anonymous,” the HR rep said. “They’re just numbers.”
President Biden is in the kingdom this week to strengthen ties. Meanwhile, a U.S.-Saudi joint venture on the Texas coast is pumping out toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases. (photo: Julie Dermansky)
President Biden is in the kingdom this week to strengthen ties. Meanwhile, a U.S.-Saudi joint venture on the Texas coast is pumping out toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases.
Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, or GCGV, a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames, and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.
The plant is the first joint venture in the Americas between Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a chemical manufacturing giant tied to one of the world’s richest royal families, and Exxon Mobil, America’s biggest energy company. Exxon Mobil built its wealth on drilling for and refining oil, SABIC by making petrochemicals. As climate concerns lead to a slow but steady decline in the demand for oil, the companies’ collaboration represents a shift by the fossil fuel industry. Rather than transforming the fossilized remains of organisms into gasoline and other motor fuels, the Texas plant breaks apart the molecular structure of oil, through a process called cracking, which turns it into the primary ingredient for car seats, single-use plastic bags, plastic coffee cups, and much more.
“It became apparent to me that the fossil-fuel industry is moving toward plastic because they’re losing market share in transportation and energy generation,” said Judith Enck, a former regional administrator with the United States Environmental Protection Agency who now leads the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and teaches at Bennington College.
One primary player in this shift is the House of Saud, the royal family that has ruled since 1902 and named Saudi Arabia in 1932. The family has moved to diversify its economy and the products that come from its vast reserves of oil. The costs and consequences of this diversification ripple far beyond Riyadh, to Texas’ San Patricio County and communities abutting other SABIC facilities in the U.S.
SABIC is a $40 billion company that manufactures chemicals, fertilizers, and plastics and is owned by Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. In May, Aramco became the world’s most valuable company — generating tens of billions of dollars in profits yearly to the Saudi royal family and its kingdom.
How the Saudi royals leveraged their way into American plastic is an indicator of the blurring between state and family that has long characterized the kingdom.
In January 2016, Mohammed bin Salman, then the deputy crown prince, announced that Aramco would be open for the first time in history to an initial public offering, or IPO; 5 percent of its shares would be made available on international financial markets. But in 2018, in a rare rebuke to his son and now his designated heir, King Salman reversed the crown prince’s plans. The king was wary, it was reported at the time, of opening the kingdom’s economic flagship to the transparency and scrutiny required of publicly traded companies. Efforts in motion by some of the world’s largest financiers, eager to profit from what was claimed to be a trillion-dollar asset, were stopped in their tracks.
Aramco pivoted from the thwarted IPO and announced its intention to purchase a 70 percent interest in SABIC, already a major global producer of plastics and petrochemicals, for $69 billion. SABIC was owned at the time by the Saudi Public Investment Fund, or PIF, whose board chairman is the crown prince. The deal would shift funds from one royal-controlled arm of the government, Aramco, to another, the PIF. Karen Young, an analyst at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., has characterized the fund as “the crown prince’s parallel Saudi state.”
By the end of 2019, Aramco would go through with a far more limited IPO, in which 1.5 percent of its shares were made available for purchase only on the Saudi stock market, the Tadawul, which has less rigorous disclosure standards than other international exchanges. That IPO plowed almost $30 billion into Aramco. Thus the crown prince and the royal family profited on both sides of the deal: Almost $70 billion was channeled into the PIF, of which the crown prince is board chairman; and new investments worth billions were channeled into Aramco, of which 98 percent of the shares are owned by the government of Saudi Arabia.
Aramco, the company sitting on the world’s second-largest pool of oil reserves, took majority control of SABIC, one of the world’s top five petrochemical companies, in June 2020. After the deal was completed, a company news release stated that the transaction “enhances Aramco’s presence in the global petrochemicals industry, a sector expected to record the fastest growth in oil demand in the years ahead.” Indeed, the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2030 petrochemicals will account for more than a third of the growth in world oil demand, and for almost 50 percent of demand by 2050.
The GCGV facility in San Patricio County is called an ethane steam cracker because it heats light hydrocarbons such as ethane and propane to as much as 1,560 degrees Fahrenheit, a process of intense compression and decomposition that “cracks” apart the molecules to create ethylene. Ethylene is converted into polyethylene, a basic ingredient of tiny plastic pellets known as nurdles. Nurdles are molded and reheated into a variety of shapes to create products, such as plastic bags and beverage containers. After what is often a single use, these non-biodegradable products can clog waterways; drift on ocean currents, entangling marine mammals and birds; and accumulate in landfills.
Even before the Texas complex opened, SABIC owned seven manufacturing plants in five U.S. states. SABIC facilities in Indiana, New York, Illinois, and Alabama reported leaks of chemicals associated with cancer, fetal mutations and respiratory ailments, according to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory, also known as TRI. In Ottawa, Illinois, for example, according to the TRI, between 2016 and 2020, a SABIC facility producing plastic resins released an average of 120,512 pounds of styrene each of those five years. Styrene is classified as a possible human carcinogen by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, and can cause problems such as memory loss, confusion and slowed reflexes, even at low levels.
Last September, the New York State Office of Emergency Management was forced to grapple for days with a plume of styrene vapor leaking from a train car at the SABIC Innovative Chemicals facility in Selkirk. The plant makes, among other things, the plastic additive bisphenol-A, or BPA, a neurotoxin and an endocrine disruptor that can contribute to declining sperm counts in men. After an investigation, the agency levied a $322,400 fine in April against the company for the leak.
In Mount Vernon, in southern Indiana, the SABIC Innovative Plastics facility released an average of 22,690 pounds of ethylbenzene each year between 2016 and 2020. Ethylbenzene is used in the production of styrene and can cause nose and throat irritation and damage to the inner ear. IARC defines it as a possible human carcinogen. The same facility was cited by the EPA for corroded valves and pipes, from which leaked BPA and phosgene, developed as a nerve gas during World War I and now used as an ingredient in the manufacturing of pesticides and plastics.
Altogether, between 2016 and 2020 the company’s facilities in the U.S. were among the top emitters of at least seven toxic substances documented by the TRI. Those substances include BPA and 1,3-butadiene, a byproduct of plastic resin production classified as a known human carcinogen by IARC.
Over the last decade, SABIC has paid over $1 million in fines for violating EPA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations for toxic releases at its facilities in Selkirk, Mount Vernon and Burkville, Alabama.
Susan Richardson, a SABIC spokeswoman, said in an email that the company “is committed to protecting and improving the environment in which we operate. As part of this effort, we adhere to the EPA’s TRI reporting requirements and submit the required data to the EPA. As a company we value and are committed to safety.”
In Texas, since the end of December, the GCGV plant has reported eight “emission events,” defined by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, as “unscheduled” and “unauthorized” releases of air contaminants. One event lasted for 24 hours, another for 74, another for more than 300. The most recent was on June 16, when the facility reported releasing 478 pounds of nitrogen oxides, a potential contributor to respiratory disease. On May 3, it released 572 pounds of benzene, a known carcinogen.
Richardson referred questions about the events to a spokesperson for Exxon Mobil, the day-to-day operator of the facility. The spokesperson, Julie King, said in an email that Exxon Mobil “is continuously optimizing our processes to minimize emissions, enhance energy efficiency and maintain the highest standards for environmental care. We operate under a stringent state and federal regulatory system, and report emissions to the EPA and TCEQ in a consistent and timely manner in accordance with all applicable laws, regulations and permits.”
Eight emission events in six months, according to Neal Carman, a former Texas air pollution investigator who now works for the Sierra Club, doesn’t bode well for those who live near the plant. “When you’re breathing this stuff,” he said, “it’s microscopic, less than 2.5 microns in diameter, very tiny. It can fly through your nose, right into your lungs” and “into the most sensitive part of your lung tissue, the alveolar sacs.”
The reported events, he emphasized, were in addition to emissions allowed under a permit issued to GCGV by the TCEQ. That permit states, for example, that 5,944.74 pounds of volatile organic compounds may be released by the facility hourly. Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, include benzene and 1,3-butadiene, as well as toluene, a chemical that can lead to liver and kidney damage and can harm the fetus of a pregnant woman exposed to it.
“The people who live in these frontline communities face a cocktail of pollutants due to their proximity to the facility,” said Dr. Philip Landrigan, a professor of biology and director of the Global Public Health Program and Global Pollution Observatory at Boston College. “People who live near a chemical or plastic plant are not just exposed to one chemical in isolation. If a person is exposed to two or three carcinogens at the same time, the aggregate risk is at least as great as the sum of the individual risks.”
Plastic is toxic at every stage of its life cycle, from the volatile compounds used in its creation to its disposal. Many of these synthetic substances are, in the words of one study, “difficult or impossible for nature to assimilate” and degrade the environment. At least 2,400 of the chemicals commonly used in the manufacturing of plastic, according to a study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, are considered “substances of potential concern” by the European Union’s chemical governing body because of their toxicity, persistence in the environment or capacity for accumulating in humans’ and animals’ bodies. At least 35 have earned the EU’s highest levels of concern due to their status as “very persistent and very bioaccumulative”; hundreds more substances commonly used in plastic production have not been studied.
Plastic producers are also potent greenhouse-gas emitters: The more than 30 ethane crackers in the U.S. — of which GCGV is the largest — together released 70 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2020, according to Beyond Plastics. That amounts to the annual emissions of at least 35 average-sized coal-fired power plants.
While greenhouse gases do their destructive work in the atmosphere, plastic does its damage on Earth. Remnants can be found in the tissues of humans. Nurdles can be found bobbing on ocean currents, clogging the bayous in Texas and Louisiana and polluting almost every beach on the planet. Along the Texas Gulf Coast, a volunteer group embarks on regular “nurdle patrols” to pick up the pellets littering the coastline.
Nor is the toxicity spread evenly. Pollution from plastic production in the U.S. is highly concentrated: Just 18 communities, mostly along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana, absorb the bulk of the contamination, according to a study conducted last year by Bennington College researchers associated with Beyond Plastics. People who live within three miles of these facilities, they found, “earn 28 percent less than the average U.S. household and are 67 percent more likely to be people of color.”
A study by the Environmental Integrity Project revealed that even in the case of clear violations in Texas communities, the TCEQ rarely enforces emission limits. Less than 3 percent of excess pollution violations — collectively responsible for 500 million pounds of illegal air pollutants — resulted in penalties between 2011 and 2016, the group found.
The permitting process for petrochemical facilities offers a glimpse into the amounts of pollution that are legally, and routinely, allowed in places like San Patricio County. Jane Patton, a New Orleans-based organizer with the Center for International Environmental Law, an organization that uses litigation to force compliance with environmental laws, characterizes the regulatory bodies in Texas and Louisiana as little more than rubber stamps for the oil and gas industry. Polluters, she said, “tell the state regulators who issue permits what they’re going to emit, and then they go about emitting it.”
In May 2021, the TCEQ issued a permit to GCGV. The permit includes a 15-page list of maximum allowable emission rates for chemicals and gases that the company is allowed to release. The plant can legally release hundreds of pounds an hour of substances like nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, 1,3-butadiene and benzene, from various vents and flares. “The permit allows a huge amount of pollution in this plant,” said the Sierra Club’s Carman. “These are not vitamins and minerals we’re talking about. These are all toxics.”
Errol Summerlin, co-founder of the Coastal Alliance to Protect Our Environment, or CAPE, who testified at public hearings opposing the project, says that on some days, he can hear “the grumble of the factory.” On clear nights, he says, he can see the flares burning, releasing a gas cocktail of carbon monoxide and methane.
A resident of Portland, Texas, who lives within a few blocks of the plant, said he can smell its discharges from inside his house. He worries about “the stuff you can’t smell, the particulate matter that gets absorbed into your bloodstream.” The resident requested anonymity because he may need to take advantage of a new Exxon Mobil-sponsored program to buy the homes of those who can’t coexist with the plant. Some neighbors have already taken the money and left.
“There are some Third World countries that have better regulations than we do here in Texas,” said Elida Castillo, a community organizer with Chicanos por la Causa, a nonprofit that fights for equity in health and education in Texas and throughout the Southwest. She lives in Taft, which abuts the rail line that delivers trainloads of nurdles from the GCGV plant to the port of Houston. She is constantly finding nurdles on her lawn and in surrounding neighborhoods. Neighborhood Witness, a group she co-founded, is a coalition of organizations that encourages people living near petrochemical plants to monitor and report unauthorized emissions.
The TCEQ did not install any air monitors in the area, according to spokeswoman Victoria Cann. She said in an email that the agency relies on three monitoring stations supported by GCGV and Cheniere Energy, which operates a liquefied natural gas export facility in the area. The monitors are administered by the University of Texas at Austin. “We do not own, operate or maintain the data in these monitors,” Cann said.
The monitors do not offer real-time readouts of emission events, said Jennifer Hilliard, an architect who lives in Ingleside, a city on the coast about nine miles from the GCGV facility, and who volunteers with the Ingleside on the Bay Coastal Watch Association, or IBCWA, a nonprofit environmental group. Rather, she said, they aggregate the data every two days, which means they could miss individual releases that could be potentially harmful to residents.
To fill the gap, a citizen-science initiative was launched by two local nonprofits, CAPE and the IBCWA. “We’re forced to do this ourselves because the [TCEQ] has refused to do it,” said Patrick Nye, president of the IBCWA.
The groups hired Jackson Seymore, who is on a Ph.D. track in atmospheric chemistry at Texas A…M University, Corpus Christi. He set up a half-dozen monitors in Portland, Gregory and other locations near the GCGV facility, which started delivering data in mid-May. By early June, the monitors registered a three-hour spike in ozone levels, which, if sustained over time, Nye said, would exceed federal guidelines. Ozone is an ingredient in smog and a respiratory irritant.
The ability to monitor in real time is critical, Hilliard said. Unlike the three monitors sponsored by the companies, the community’s monitors can cross-reference events as they’re happening. “If someone smells something strange or we see an unusual flaring, we can correlate that with the prevailing winds and the monitoring data,” she said.
But the community faces a challenge with its improvised monitors: The sensors they could afford — about $5,000 each — are not nearly sophisticated enough to meet the legal requirements for EPA or TCEQ enforcement. Those monitors can cost 10 times as much, Seymore said. The community groups hope their data can persuade the EPA or the state to install high-quality monitors in the area, now being populated with petrochemical facilities. “In realistic terms, there’s not going to be a magic bullet to solve the community’s fight with the industry,” Seymore said. “But our monitors could be the burglar alarm to get larger interests involved.”
In May, the two groups, along with five other Texas-based environmental nonprofits, submitted comments on the TCEQ’s Annual Monitoring Network Plan, which must be filed with the EPA each year. They demanded more substantive government monitoring of the substances that could present a danger to their health, and accused the TCEQ of doing the “bare minimum” to ensure compliance with federal law. “The Coastal Bend region of South Texas is experiencing rapid petrochemical industrial expansion that threatens both air and water quality in residential areas along Corpus Christi Bay,” the filing reads. “This expansion is affecting the city of Corpus Christi and several smaller Texas cities and towns whose citizens may not be aware of the impact of these plants on their health and the environment. … [W]e are concerned that TCEQ is not taking a holistic and equitable view of the state” in the plan, “leaving many communities who lie in the path of this unprecedented petrochemical expansion unmonitored or under-monitored.”
It angers Castillo that Exxon Mobil and SABIC — two of the world’s richest companies — received major tax abatements, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, from San Patricio County as an inducement to establish the GCGV facility.
In 2017, before construction began, the San Patricio County Commissioners Court agreed to give SABIC and Exxon Mobil a three-year window in which they would be exempted from all county taxes. In years four through 10 of the agreement, they will pay 30 percent of what would otherwise have been assessed.
Gary Moore, a county commissioner whose precinct includes the GCGV plant, said that when SABIC and Exxon Mobil first approached the county, “They wanted discounts all the way through history.” The commissioners court insisted on a 10-year limit for the tax breaks. “I didn’t want to let these big guys run all over us,” Moore said.
The companies relented. The area, with easy access to rail lines and the nearby port in Corpus Christi, was well suited to their plans for an ethane cracker. The county is divided roughly evenly between whites and Latinos, with a median family income of about $56,000 in 2020 — 17 percent below the U.S. median.
Now that the plant is up and running, Moore said, “There’s real cooperation. They’re real community-minded.” GCGV, he said, funded a water-treatment facility in Gregory and contributed to cleaning up a nearby bird sanctuary. Asked about pollution from the plant, he said, “If the TCEQ isn’t upset about it, I’m not going to worry about it.”
In a separate agreement with the Gregory-Portland Independent School District, SABIC received an abatement deal that guaranteed the company a reduced property tax for the first 10 years of the project that would max out at a $30 million valuation, although the facility itself is valued at more than half a billion dollars. Exxon Mobil signed a separate and similar deal with the county.
Spokespeople for the school district, Exxon Mobil, and SABIC did not respond to questions about the tax abatements.
Castillo is still angry about the deals. “They’ve got billions of dollars,” she said. “That’s nothing like the average person has here.”
Construction of the GCGV plant, composed of 30,000 metric tons of modules built in China and Mexico, involved a partner – the China State Shipbuilding Corp., or CSSC – sanctioned in an executive order by President Biden last year for its ties to the People’s Liberation Army. The order, issued just after the biggest modules arrived in Texas, prohibited U.S. persons from buying securities issued by CSSC and 45 other entities to “ensure that U.S. investments are not supporting Chinese companies that undermine the security or values of the United States and our allies.”
Biden promised a similarly hard line against Saudi Arabia while running for president, when he suggested during a debate in November 2019 that he would make the nation’s leaders “pay the price” for their role in the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden said there was “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.”
Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, had criticized Crown Prince Mohammed for his repressive human-rights policies in several Post op-eds.
Khashoggi was beheaded and dismembered at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018.
In June 2019, Agnes Callamard, a United Nations human rights investigator, announced the results of her inquiry into the Khashoggi murder and asserted that it had been carried out by Saudi agents at the direction of the crown prince. It “is inconceivable,” she concluded, “that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr. Khashoggi, was being launched.”
When candidate Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” the following November, the royal family was already expanding its U.S. footprint. Its fossil-fuel legacy now stretches from the Ghawar oil fields in Saudi Arabia to the Coastal Bend of Texas and beyond.
Biden is to meet with the crown prince Friday in the Saudi port city of Jeddah to discuss increasing oil exports to offset the impacts of the war in Ukraine, and, as he put it in a Post op-ed, “to strengthen a strategic partnership going forward that’s based on mutual interests and responsibilities, while also holding true to fundamental American values.” The public health and climate fallout from the Saudis’ big bet on plastics does not appear to be on the agenda.
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