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An attorney by training and a former member of the European Parliament, Kallas was in a tenuous position when she met with Yahoo News on July 8, so much so that she nearly had to cancel her interview. "There’s a chance I won't be here tomorrow," she said, referring to the collapse of her coalition government days earlier and her round-the-clock negotiations to cobble together a new one, something she managed to do on July 18 after briefly resigning.
Despite the turmoil in her own government, Kallas was intent on sending a message to the rest of the world about yielding to Russian demands on Ukraine.
"I think a fundamental mistake was made after the Second World War," she said, sitting beneath a painting of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments. "While the Nazi crimes were widely condemned, the communists' crimes never were. So we see a strong revival of Stalinism right now in Russia. Seventy percent of Russians support Stalin, despite his having murdered 20 million people, despite the deportations, the prisons camps, war, everything. History books in Estonia were rewritten after communism, whereas Russians are still being taught the same history that we had to read during the Soviet period, which was total crap."
Kallas is Estonia’s 13th prime minister since the Baltic country declared its independence in 1991, although arguably the 45-year-old, who was 12 when the Berlin Wall came down, has already proved among the most troublesome for Moscow.
Her government has been staunchly supportive of Ukraine since Russia launched its invasion on Feb. 24. In fact, Estonia, the smallest of the three Baltic states with a population of just 1.3 million, has so far sent more than $270 million worth of military assistance to Ukraine, the equivalent of more than 30% of its annual defense budget.
In addition to armored personnel carriers, antitank mines and a wide variety of small arms, Estonia has been an eager supplier of the U.S.-made Javelin antitank missile system, one of a slew of extremely effective shoulder-launched weapons that have helped Ukraine withstand the initial thrust of the Russian invasion.
Now that Ukraine has moved from a strategy of mobile defense into a grinding artillery war against the Russians, Estonia, a NATO member state since 2004, has helped modernize Kyiv's arsenal with a number of FH70 155-millimeter towed howitzers, plus the MAN Kat 6x6 heavy trucks to tow them. When considered alongside their humanitarian and financial assistance, the Estonians donated the equivalent of 0.81% of their gross domestic product to another nation at war, a staggering metric.
Kallas is keen to emphasize that security assistance is not charity. "I was asked in Parliament by our far-right party why we’re doing this," she told Yahoo News. "And I answered that Ukraine is literally fighting for us. When Russia is at war with them, they're not at war with us. And we have peace here."
Maintaining that peace is of existential necessity for Estonians, who share an uneasy 182-mile border with a revanchist power currently occupying 20% of Ukraine and threatening to permanently gobble up much, if not all, of that territory. Estonia itself was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 when Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler agreed to the mutual carve-up of Eastern Europe under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Then it was invaded and occupied by the Nazis when Hitler double-crossed Stalin and launched Operation Barbarossa in 1941, his doomed World War II attack on the Soviet Union that included modern Ukraine.
Until 1991, the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania — remained under Soviet rule. Tens of thousands were killed, imprisoned or deported to Siberia. Among the deportees in 1949 was Kallas’s mother, just 6 months old at the time, who was dispatched in a cattle car along with Kallas’s grandmother to the Russian tundra and raised in exile until she was 10.
Kallas’s great-grandfather Eduard Alver was a commander of the Estonian Defense League during the 1918-20 Estonian War of Independence, which resulted in the country’s first emancipation from Russia. Her father, Siim Kallas, served as both foreign minister and prime minister of Estonia in the 1990s, after the country gained its independence a second time.
Since then, Estonia has often found itself struggling against geographical fatalism. One can drive the length of the country in just over two hours, and it could be quickly overrun again by its much larger next-door Russian neighbor. In 2004, Estonia joined the European Union and NATO to be firmly in the Western camp and insusceptible to a recurrence of past victimhood — the very ambition that Ukrainians are dying on their native soil to achieve.
Kallas’s sense of history is inextricably wedded to her own genealogy; her family’s suffering can be read in every bullet and flak jacket her government has shipped to Ukraine.
She caused a moderate stir in late June, just before the NATO summit in Madrid, when she told reporters that the alliance had to revamp its plans for fortifying its eastern flank. Under the current strategy, NATO views Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as trip-wire states that could be occupied for up to 180 days before the alliance moved in to defend them. As Kallas pointed out, Ukraine at that time was only 100 days into its defensive campaign against Russia and thousands of civilians had died, millions had been displaced (including as many as 1.6 million Ukrainians who had been deported to Russia) and cities such as Mariupol had been reduced to rubble. Kallas’s point was obvious: Given that Estonia is one-13th the size of Ukraine, she might not have a country to lead after 180 days of occupation. Wasn't that the contingency that NATO membership was meant to forestall?
"When I was in Paris, driving around, I saw all those monuments to Napoleon and it made me think: For a small country, war always means destruction, pain," she told Yahoo News. "But for a bigger country, it's not always so. War also means glory, new riches."
Her allusion to France hardly seems accidental. Kallas has been an explicit critic of French President Emmanuel Macron's insistence that the West not "humiliate" Vladimir Putin, something she sees as a dangerous non sequitur. In a March 24 op-ed in the New York Times she wrote, "Putin cannot win this war. He cannot even think he has won, or his appetite will grow."
"I keep reminding my colleagues who want to pick up the phone and talk to Putin," she said, in another unmistakable reference to Macron, "OK, fine — talk to him. But don't forget he is a war criminal. Right now he's stealing Ukraine's grain and threatening famine to get sanctions lifted. His state propagandists talk openly about hunger as Russia’s last hope. This is who you’re dealing with."
The prime minister wholeheartedly agrees with historian Timothy Snyder’s argument that Putin doesn't require any face-saving concessions to withdraw from Ukraine. He rules in "virtual reality," she said, and because Russia’s information ecosystem is his plaything, he can pack up his army and go home whenever he chooses and dress up military defeat as a popular victory. "His people will believe him," Kallas said. "Don’t worry about Putin's feelings."
The flip side of Putin's capricious fail-safe is that he can also drag out the war as long as he wants and suffer little to no domestic blowback, Kallas added.
"In the Western world, we'd want to recover every one of our soldiers on a foreign battlefield; our instinct is not to leave anyone behind," she said. "In autocracies, they don't care because soldiers' mothers aren't going to protest as they would in democracies."
To drive those points home, at a recent meeting with a top foreign diplomat, Kallas offered as a gift a copy of "The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics," by political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith. The book’s underlying message is crystal clear: You can’t deter or outplay the tsar by assuming he will act as you would under similar circumstances.
While debate has erupted in Estonia about how much money and weaponry the government should be sending to Ukraine, Kallas still enjoys overwhelming domestic support on her handling of the situation. "We were thinking eventually that people would get tired and start asking, 'Why do you do all this for Ukraine when we need help over here?'" she said. "But if you look at the surveys we've done, it's something like 91% of Estonians say we have to support Ukraine, we have to help refugees. This is so very clear."
She is markedly less confident that the rest of Europe agrees. For the past five months, the European Union has managed something approaching unity about sanctions against Russia and aid for Ukraine, even as it stares down a particularly cold forthcoming winter owing to Russia’s energy blackmail. Putin may be fighting one war of attrition on the battlefield, but he’s fighting another against the longevity of European resolve.
"I won’t mention any names, but the leader of one big country who is very supportive of Ukraine told me, 'My political situation back home is that the overall view is that the war is NATO’s fault,'" Kallas said. "It’s hard for him to keep the support going because the public pressure is 'give in, stop this.'"
Kallas is particularly sensitive to the moral ambiguities and geopolitical contradictions that the West has trafficked in since the war started. "It’s very interesting. We went from saying, 'Ukraine must not lose,' to saying, 'Ukraine must win and Russia must lose,'" she said. "But let's be clear about something: if we stop helping Ukrainians militarily, then they won't be able to defend themselves. So on the one hand, we say it's up to them to decide their fate, but on the other, we are making that decision for them with our own policies."
Another concern for Kallas is what will happen politically in the United States — both at the congressional and presidential levels. Could Estonia, along with Lithuania, Poland and the United Kingdom — other stalwart defenders of Ukraine with large degrees of domestic consensus on the issue — supply Kyiv with sufficient weapons and ammunition on their own, should Washington's patronage dry up?
"Probably not," she said.
A nurse with a patient at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Austin. (photo: Erich Schlegel/The Texas Tribune)
The supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe has created a vast new public health crisis, as abortion bans complicate once-standard care for pregnant women
For one thing, there are the miscarriages. Care for patients experiencing spontaneous pregnancy loss has been dramatically reshaped in hospitals across Republican states. The treatment for a miscarriage is to evacuate the contents of the uterus, either with a minimally invasive surgery or with medication, and these interventions, as it happens, are identical to those used in voluntary abortions. But with ambiguous, as-yet-uninterpreted but strongly worded laws now in effect in anti-choice states, providers don’t know what they are permitted to do for miscarrying patients. Many bans have so-called “life of the mother” exemptions, but these are vaguely worded, and carry strong penalties for providers if they get it wrong. How sick does a patient need to be before a doctor can abort the pregnancy that is killing her? Does she need to be dying? How close does she need to be to death?
These are not hypotheticals: since the Dobbs decision, accounts of dangerously delayed miscarriage care have been reported with alarming frequency. Providers are postponing life-saving abortions, often until a fetus dies on its own and cardiac activity can no longer be detected – an emotionally fraught and physically painful process that can take days or weeks. One woman in Texas told CNN about having to carry a dead fetus that her body would not expel for two weeks, as she searched in vain for a provider who would take the legal risk of giving her a D&C.
Meanwhile, a miscarrying woman has a softened cervix, putting her at heightened risk of infection, and she is vulnerable to hemorrhaging or even sepsis as the pregnancy tissue inside her begins to break down. Dr Jessian Munoz, an obstetrician in San Antonio, told the AP about his attempts to treat a patient who had developed a uterine infection while her fetus still had signs of cardiac activity. Constrained by Texas laws, there was little he could do until it was almost too late. “We physically watched her get sicker and sicker and sicker,” Munoz said. The woman lost multiple liters of blood, needed emergency surgery, and had to be put on a breathing machine – all because the law of her state considered the hypothetical life of her fetus to be more valuable than her own. So far, we have not seen reports of women’s deaths from these delayed miscarriage treatments. But the deaths are coming.
Then there are the ectopic pregnancies. In approximately one in 50 pregnancies, a fertilized egg will implant somewhere other than the uterine wall – usually in the fallopian tube, but sometimes elsewhere in the abdominal cavity. In these cases, the pregnancy is never viable; it is always life-threatening to the pregnant patient. As with miscarriages, the treatment is abortion. But providers in conservative states aren’t sure what they’re allowed to do under the law, or what they can do without incurring punishment from zealous anti-choice colleagues or vigilantes newly empowered to bring ruinous lawsuits.
In Michigan, for now an island of legal abortion in a deep anti-choice midwestern sea, a woman presented at a hospital emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy that could have killed her; she had travelled there from another state, where doctors had turned her away. Another woman wasn’t so lucky: her central Texas hospital advised her doctor not to intervene in her ectopic pregnancy until it ruptured, at which point her life was in immediate danger.
The more highbrow denizens of the anti-choice movement insist that the deluge of draconian misogynist laws that have been brought into effect by the supreme court should not really create these disastrous outcomes, despite the brutally obvious fact that anti-choice laws have clearly created a rapidly more dangerous landscape for women’s health.
These voices claim that the vague wording and narrow circumstances permitted by the laws’ “life of the mother” exemptions are not the real problem, but rather that the real problem is the way hospitals and their lawyers are reading the law. “I have seen reports of doctors being confused,” John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life, told the New York Times, “but that is a failure of our medical associations.” The National Review pundit Alexandra DeSanctis Marr wrote, “Abortion supporters are the ones conflating abortion with miscarriage care and care for ectopic pregnancy. Pro-lifers know the difference between necessary women’s health care and intentionally killing a baby. It’s abortion supporters who won’t distinguish.”
Would that these distinctions were so clear and apparent as Seago and DeSanctis believe they are. The truth is that while any moral movement for choice must defend women’s rights to control their own bodies without reservation, in these tragic medical crises, the line between an “elective” and an “emergency” abortion is not so easy to distinguish. The difference between abortion and “necessary women’s health care” is ambivalent because medicine and the body do not conform to the strict moral lines that the anti-choice movement tries to place them in. When pressed, even Seago admits this. Soon after declaring that the laws championed by his group pose no danger to women’s health, he acknowledged that complying with the law would indeed require providers to delay emergency care. “He acknowledged that such delays could cause medical complications for women,” the Times said.
Not that the likes of Seago and DeSanctis are in touch with their movement anyway. The base of the anti-choice movement seems alarmingly comfortable with dispensing of “life of the mother” exemptions, much as that same movement has largely dispensed with their professed support for rape and incest exemptions. In Wisconsin, anti-choice groups have called for amending the state’s long-dormant 1849 abortion ban to grant fewer exemptions for maternal life and health. In Idaho, a recent Republican party convention amended its platform to support an abortion ban with no exemptions at all. When a proposal to include an ectopic pregnancy exemption was proposed, it failed by nearly four to one.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that the anti-choice movement would insist on a false dichotomy between abortion and women’s healthcare. It seems in keeping with the other false binaries that the movement is so enamored of: like that between women who have children and women who have abortions; or between those who deserve be in control of their lives, and those born with a uterus.
Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-GA, in Washington, D.C., Sept. 28, 2021. (photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty)
Sen. Jon Ossoff is the first Democrat to subpoena a member of the Biden administration, BOP Director Michael Carvajal, over reports of neglected and frequent suicides.
The scene was one of several alarming accounts of conditions at U.S. Penitentiary Atlanta detailed Tuesday during a Senate subcommittee hearing. Public reporting has described several years’ worth of security and health issues at the facility, including deaths, escapes, corruption, and a smuggling ring. According to congressional investigators who spoke at the hearing, senior officials at the federal prison complex and at the federal Bureau of Prisons were aware of the issues for years and failed to adequately address them, amounting to gross misconduct.
The findings are part of an ongoing 10-month bipartisan congressional investigation into allegations of corruption and abuse at the Atlanta facility. Started last September by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the investigation has focused on the Atlanta complex to highlight broader issues in the federal prison system — in part because of its location in Georgia, the home state of the subcommittee chair, Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., who was previously an investigative journalist. The facility has the highest number of suicides by detainees at any federal prison over the last five years, according to internal documents and security assessments obtained as part of the investigation. Previous reporting has documented at least 13 suicides at the facility between 2012 and 2021, including five between October 2019 and June 2021.
Ossoff, who chairs the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, subpoenaed Bureau of Prisons Director Michael Carvajal to testify at Tuesday’s hearing after the Department of Justice refused to make him available voluntarily. The hearing, which represents the first instance of a Democrat subpoenaing an official of President Joe Biden’s administration, painted a damning picture of a bloated federal prison system run by well-informed and willfully inactive leaders. Ossoff hammered pointed questions at the BOP director, who often avoided giving direct answers and claimed ignorance, and at other times put the blame on his subordinates.
Carvajal, a 30-year BOP veteran who has led the bureau since February 2020, announced in January that he would resign amid reports of corruption and abuse at BOP facilities around the country, in addition to complaints over the bureau’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. On July 12, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that Colette Peters, director of the Oregon Department of Corrections, would take over as BOP director. Peters will be sworn in on August 2.
“The investigation has revealed that gross misconduct persisted at this prison for at least nine years, and that much of the damning information revealing misconduct, abuse, and corruption was known to BOP and accessible to BOP leadership during that period,” Ossoff said during Tuesday’s hearing. The committee detailed internal reports written by BOP staff repeatedly warning about misconduct and other potential civil rights violations at the facility, which went unaddressed by senior officials.
Carvajal said Tuesday that he had not been aware of issues at the facility until the summer of 2021 and immediately took “appropriate actions” beginning that July, including temporarily closing housing units and removing the warden, associate warden, and the entire management team. He called for additional funding to BOP for approximately $2 billion in necessary repairs throughout the bureau. (BOP receives an average of $95 million annually for modernization and repair projects.)
“Respectfully, Director Carvajal, you’re continuing to drive responsibility down the chain of command,” Ossoff said. “You spend two years as the assistant director of correctional services, in your words, responsible for implementing policies and procedures at the national level. You’re then the director of the Bureau of Prisons. And you haven’t familiarized yourself with any of these issues. You were unaware of any issues at USP Atlanta. It’s clearly your most troubled facility. You were ignorant of these problems until the middle of 2021. That’s your testimony today?”
“Senator, things like that, because of the delineation of authority, wouldn’t normally rise to my level. We have a chain of command and procedures that were followed,” Carvajal replied. Ossoff interrupted: “So yes, you were ignorant of this until [the] middle of 2021?”
“It was obvious that there was a breakdown that did not reach my level,” Carvajal said. “And that is why we took the action that we took. There is a delineation of authority, and we trust people — these are senior executive service people at the highest level who have that responsibility. We have very good policies, senator, when they’re followed. The breakdown here is that people consciously chose not to follow the policy.”
The findings presented at Tuesday’s hearing came from thousands of pages of internal BOP documents and dozens of interviews with current and former BOP staff, whistleblowers, federal judges and defenders, and former senior BOP leaders.
An August 2020 security assessment by the BOP Central Office, obtained by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and referenced in reporting in late 2021, found pervasive and extensive security failures — including inside the facility — and identified USP Atlanta as a security threat to Atlanta and the southeast region of the U.S. Carvajal testified that he had not seen the security assessment and said that “normally would not rise to my level.”
Federal prisons and detention facilities have a long and documented history of abuse, neglect, and violation of constitutional rights reported by detainees, staff, and current and former officials. The Covid-19 pandemic brought renewed attention to deteriorating conditions inside jails and prisons across the U.S. that have persisted for decades, but received more media coverage as the number of infections and deaths from the virus spiked in 2020. But federal officials have known about ongoing patterns of gross misconduct since well before the pandemic, according to the subcommittee investigation.
At least six people detained at USP Atlanta died by suicide during the tenure of the facility’s former chief psychologist, Erika Ramirez, who is now BOP chief psychologist at FCI Seagoville in Texas. Ramirez worked at the Atlanta facility from 2018 to 2021, when she was involuntarily transferred to the Texas facility as part of what she described as illegal retaliation for reporting “ongoing and uncorrected gross mismanagement of suicide prevention practices which I believe were allowing needless inmate suicides to happen,” she testified Tuesday.
“To put this into perspective, federal prisons typically see between one and three suicides over a five-year period,” Ramirez said. “Any loss of life is tragic and unacceptable, which is why it is particularly devastating to see such disregard for human life at USP Atlanta.”
Testimony from Ramirez and another retired BOP official, Terri Whitehead, former jail administrator at USP Atlanta, detailed unsanitary and inhumane conditions, neglect of suicide prevention efforts, and retaliation for their efforts to report them. Carvajal said he visited the facility in April and observed that staff were addressing issues. He said that as a result of corrective actions taken by BOP, the facility had “increased staff training; enhanced security measures, internal controls; improved internal auditing, and strengthened inmate and staff accountability.”
Whitehead started working at the Atlanta facility in August 2020 and retired in December, earlier than she had planned. She testified that during her time at USP Atlanta, “there were so many rats inside the facility, dining hall, and food preparation areas, that staff intentionally left doors open so that the many stray cats that hung around the prison could catch the rats. It is never a good idea to leave prison doors open.” The facility had no professional pest control service in place, Whitehead said, “because management officials could not work together and determine which departmental budget was responsible for the cost.”
Ossoff entered into the record a January letter obtained by the committee written from federal Judge Timothy C. Batten, chief judge at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, to the warden at USP Atlanta. In it, the judge asked for answers regarding conditions at the facility’s jail, which holds people pretrial, “with respect to reports of rats in the building; roaches in the food; poor nutrition and emaciation of inmates; lack of access to hygiene products; lack of access to medication; lack of access to mail, limited access to tooth brush and toothpaste; no change of clothes for several weeks; a month of 24-hour solitary confinement with only a bible for entertainment or reading; a week, as you mentioned, with only a paper jumpsuit and paper blankets for an inmate on suicide watch without mental health treatment; only being permitted 15 minutes out of a cell every day to bathe, make phone calls, and use the library; blockage of written and other communications between attorney and client; difficulty arranging interview between inmate and psychologist.”
Carvajal told Ossoff he had not been aware of Batten’s letter until Tuesday’s hearing.
Carvajal testified that the bureau “continually strive[s]” to improve suicide prevention efforts, and that the rate of suicide by people detained by BOP “historically run lower than those of the general public.” He was BOP’s assistant director for correctional programs from August 2018 to February 2020, when he was named director. During that time, he received reports investigating each suicide at the facility. Ossoff repeatedly asked if Carvajal was aware of the issues at the facility prior to 2021 — including reports he received directly via email.
Carvajal said he wasn’t “aware specifically” of each individual issue, but he claimed he had reviewed the reports on investigations into the suicides and took appropriate action. He repeatedly blamed his ignorance of issues at USP Atlanta on the sprawling bureaucracy at BOP, siloing of top officials, and a failure of other staff and senior officials to follow policies for documenting and reporting misconduct and neglect.
Later in the hearing, Carvajal acknowledged that he had not taken appropriate action to address known issues at the facility.
“You took no action, and the buck stops with you, correct?” Ossoff asked. Carvajal responded: “Correct.”
Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias, 42, had a fatal heart attack during his July 13 shift at Amazon's Carteret warehouse known as EWR9. (photo: unknown)
Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias died in a sweltering Amazon warehouse on Prime Day. His family and co-workers remembered him as an selfless man doing a “demanding” job.
Rafael Reynaldo Mota Frias, 42, had a fatal heart attack during his July 13 shift at Amazon’s Carteret warehouse known as EWR9. In tributes on Facebook, several family members noted that Mota Frias, who is from La Romana, died of cardiac arrest.
“You will never be forgotten,” a niece wrote in a post. “We will always remember you as the selfless man that you were. Always worrying about people’s health and stability. He was hardworking, funny and affectionate.”
While Mota Frias’ family grieves, coworkers told The Daily Beast they suspect working conditions within the warehouse might have contributed to his medical emergency.
A cousin of Mota Frias told The Daily Beast she felt similarly.
“He was accomplished at his job but it was too demanding,” said Marlen Frias in Spanish.
Marlen declined a formal interview, but said her cousin was a family man and “great person” who “always thought about everyone else.”
Last week, amid reports that an unidentified Amazon worker died at the facility, it was revealed that federal investigators with the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) were investigating what happened to him.
The Carteret warehouse isn’t the only one facing scrutiny. OSHA and New York federal prosecutors also said last week that they were inspecting Amazon warehouses in New York, Illinois, and Florida for safety issues. According to CNBC, the Civil Division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan was probing possible workplace hazards and whether Amazon was hiding injuries from OSHA and other agencies.
Employees of Amazon’s Carteret facility told The Daily Beast that they believe that Mota Frias was overworked and overheated when he went into cardiac arrest, and that they fear the fast-paced environment inside the warehouse, which lacks air conditioning in the main work area, is putting employees’ health in danger. (Data from AccuWeather shows a high of 92 degrees in Carteret that day and a low of 74 degrees.)
But Amazon spokesperson Sam Stephenson said suggestions that Mota Frias’ job led to his death are merely “rumors” and “false.”
“We’re deeply saddened by the passing of our colleague and offer our condolences to his family and friends,” Stephenson said in a statement. “There have been rumors suggesting that his passing was work-related—those statements are false. Our internal investigation has shown that this was not a work-related incident, and instead was related to a personal medical condition. OSHA is currently investigating the incident, and, based upon the evidence currently available to us, we fully expect that it will reach the same conclusion.”
Stephenson said that Amazon conducted an internal investigation which revealed that a colleague said Mota Frias had reported experiencing chest pains the evening before his shift but didn’t notify his coworkers or managers of his symptoms.
One colleague told The Daily Beast that Mota Frias and other workers pleaded for fans to be placed in their work area hours before he died. “It’s crazy because I was right there. I feel like Amazon as a whole could have done way more about the situation,” said the person, who asked to remain anonymous because they feared losing their job.
Coworkers said that after personnel with Amazon’s on-site first-aid clinic, AmCare, transported Mota Frias away from his station, employees were instructed to keep working. “They are trying to say he had a heart attack, even if that was the case, everybody was saying it was too hot inside to be working,” the employee added.
A second employee agreed. “They honestly need to do much much better,” the worker said of Amazon. “It’s a trillion-dollar company. There is no reason why these facilities should not have fully air-conditioned facilities.”
“The cafeteria area and the offices are all air-conditioned, but where the real work happens, we get fans,” the person said, adding that some employees have started to leave work early during heat waves. “When it’s hot outside, you already know it’s going to be hot inside.” The employee said they witnessed one person pass out last week from what they believed was exhaustion. AmCare personnel helped the individual up and escorted them to the warehouse clinic. “It’s becoming an unfortunate common thing that should not be happening at all,” the employee said.
Both workers said that after Mota Frias died, the company began handing out bottles of water and Liquid I.V. electrolyte packets. A third employee told The Daily Beast, “Why after his death have they started giving out bottled water at our stations if it [the warehouse temperature] has nothing to do with his death?”
“The next day, managers started telling us to drink water and stay hydrated,” they said.
Other EWR9 workers expressed concerns on the company’s private online message boards for warehouse associates. According to one image reviewed by The Daily Beast, an employee asked, “How many more of us have to DIE before Amazon realizes that these working conditions are TRASH?” An Amazon HR representative replied that “our deepest sympathies are with Rafael’s family and loved ones during this tragic time.”
“Our focus continues to remain on everyone’s safety and well-being and making sure everyone has the resources and support they need,” she added.
After Mota Frias’ death, the company shared his first name and photo on a TV monitor with the heading, “Remembering Our Rafael.” The sign indicated Mota Frias had worked at the Carteret facility for five months.
Stephenson said that the deceased worker was a “water spider.” In the fulfillment center terminology, a water spider is responsible for keeping work stations stocked with boxes of goods, hauling heavy pallets from the loading dock to employees called “stowers,” who place the items on merchandise racks. Workers have described the water spider role as physically demanding and requiring miles of walking each day.
“He was a very hard working associate always looking to help out where needed,” the bulletin added. “His team and the entire EWR9 family are deeply saddened by this loss. We will remember Rafael and give our condolences to his family. The family is not planning on having services in the United States at this time and will have services for him at home in the Dominican Republic.”
Meanwhile, one employee leveled serious accusations against Amazon in relation to Mota Frias in a complaint submitted to OSHA’s Avenel office.
“A person at our facility died of a heat stroke on July 13,” the person claimed, according to a copy of the complaint reviewed by The Daily Beast. “He was telling the managers that in the area he worked was too hot. Many others complained as well.”
“They just told employees to work through it, they would be fine,” the individual continued. “Two hours later he was dead.” The person then referred to AmCare, which has come under fire in recent years for allegedly covering up employee injuries, sending workers back to work without proper treatment, and failing to send them to hospitals or doctor’s offices. In 2019, OSHA issued a warning letter to an Amazon warehouse in Robbinsville, New Jersey, after finding that AmCare’s EMTs were “working outside their scope of practice, without proper supervision,” according to Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
“This is the kicker,” the employee continued in the Carteret complaint, “the AM-Care people just came, put him on a wheel, put a mask on his face, and wheeled him through the facility like nothing happened! We were all in shock. Now management is telling people that he ‘died in the parking lot’ and that I [sic] we talk or mention anything about it we will get fired! This incident was the last straw for me with this company.”
Asked to confirm this particular submission, an OSHA spokesperson said that the agency does not comment on employee complaints. The representative did, however, confirm that OSHA still has an open investigation into the Carteret warehouse fatality.
Chris Smalls, president of the grassroots Amazon Labor Union (ALU), posted a tweet Thursday with more accusations about Mota Frias’ final moments at Amazon. (Earlier this year, the ALU made history by securing enough votes to make a Staten Island warehouse known as JFK8 the company's first unionized workforce. Smalls visited EWR9 last week to speak with workers in wake of Mota Frias’ death.)
“Learned some disturbing details about the worker who passed away,” Smalls tweeted. “I was told not only did they take nearly a hour to call 911 he was unconscious on the floor for over 20 mins. He warned management of chest pains they kept him working in path as a waterspider in heated conditions.”
Still, Stephenson said that Amazon’s on-site medical expert began emergency treatment immediately after Mota Frias collapsed. “In addition, 911 was immediately called and arrived at the site within 16 minutes of when the medical incident occurred,” Stephenson said. “We’re thankful for the quick actions of our own teams and the first responders.”
“This has been a tragic situation for our employee’s family and for our colleagues at EWR9 who worked with him,” Stephenson added. “We are in contact with his family to offer support and are providing counseling resources to employees needing additional care.”
To Smalls, Mota Frias’ health emergency is a call to action for ALU to organize workers in Carteret. “In regards to the worker who passed away I personally will be filing a complaint with the local OSHA,” Smalls tweeted. “[O]n top of that we will be organizing EWR9 @amazonlabor this one’s personal #Hotlaborsummer.”
Sixteen civil rights groups have filed a federal complaint against the U.S. departments of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement about the Baker County detention center. (photo: DHS)
The 102-page complaint, filed by groups ranging from the Americans for Immigrant Justice and Freedom for Immigrants to the Florida Policy Institute and Black Alliance for Just Immigration, was done on behalf of 15 people currently or formerly detained at the federally run facility at the Baker County Sheriff's Office.
The complaint states there is "extensive evidence" that Baker County is unable to safely house immigrants in compliance with national detention standards.
The action demands that the Office of the Inspector General and Homeland Security "permanently terminate" its agreement with the county to house the immigrants. It also asks for immediate release of all immigrants "suffering at Baker while closure is considered," with priority to those detained over 180 days and medically vulnerable.
"Ensure protection from retaliation for all complaint participants, including stays of deportation for those remaining in ICE custody at Baker and protection from re-detainment for those living in the community," it said. "Ensure accountability by investigating the abuses at Baker through unannounced inspections; interviews with impacted individuals; and a thorough review of medical records, video surveillance footage and any and all other evidence substantiating the complaints."
Federal customs officials said they were working on a response to Times-Union questions Friday about the complaint but still have not responded.
The Baker County Sheriff's Office could not comment on the complaint. But Undersheriff Randy Crews said the detainees comprise less than half of its jail population, which also includes people arrested by the U.S. Marshals Service.
While his staff runs the ICE facility, it is overseen by the federal agency. Crews said the facility has "inspections upon inspections, including one less than two months ago" with no issues.
ICE in Baker County
The Baker County Sheriff’s Office began detaining immigrants for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2009 under a contract with the federal government, the complaint said.
Illegal immigrants arrested by federal or local law enforcement in Northeast Florida are housed there as investigations and deportation procedures are worked on. The facility is one of dozens ICE operates across the country, some housed in county or city jail centers.
There are four in Florida: Miami, Pompano Beach, Moore Haven and this one at 1 Sheriff's Office Drive in Macclenny.
Conditions violate standards, complaint states
The complaint was filed on behalf of men and women from the Bahamas, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Tobago, Guatemala and El Salvador. The entire complaint, which includes letters from some detainees, can be accessed at bit.ly/3yW2PbX.
It states the immigrant testimony demonstrates that conditions at the Baker detention center place people’s lives in danger. It cites abuses including "excessive use of force," lack of proper hygiene and food, and immigrants' inability to access legal counsel.
Immigrants also faced "beatings and unwarranted use of pepper spray and restraints." And some of these immigrants ended up trying "multiple suicide attempts," while the complaint states there are "unresolved" investigations of death in Baker custody.
The complaint gives some examples like the 2018 case of a Russian man detained there who died of cardiac-related issues and Kellen Dupree's April 26 death still under investigation, the complaint states.
Immigrants who complained of treatment were met with retaliation that the complaint said included shutting off running water, solitary confinement, assault and "seemingly retaliatory deportations." One such incident in May said guards shut off the water after about 100 people launched a hunger strike to protest abusive conditions, a news release from one of the complaint's co-filers states.
"For days Baker staff placed participating units on lockdown and denied people access to both drinking water and toilet water," according to the Freedom for Immigrants. "Some individuals who participated in these strikes are named complainants who have since been deported in alleged retaliation, underscoring the severe consequences for whistleblowers."
The California-based organization works to abolish immigration detention and end what it calls "the isolation of people currently suffering in this profit-driven system."
Further issues in the complaint concern guards who it says discriminate against Spanish speakers, telling them to “learn English or don’t speak at all.”
Issues witnessed by civil rights groups
Andrea Jacoski, a director with Americans for Immigrant Justice, said her team saw abuses during site visits and heard more during interviews with clients detained there.
"We have authored reports and complaint letters throughout the years alerting ICE and the Baker County Sheriff's Office staff, who oversee the detention center, of the egregious human rights violations occurring at the facility,” Jacoski said in the Freedom for Immigrants news release.
“The continued disregard of the rights and welfare of people detained at Baker proves that ICE and Baker County Sheriff's Office are unable and unwilling to address these abuses that have been ongoing for years," she continued. "The only way to protect people from further harm is for ICE to immediately release all detained there.”
Eric Martinez, an organizer with Immigrant Action Alliance who has been deported after being detained at Baker, said it is "a place where nobody should be held.”
“I have witnessed and experienced firsthand how the treatment of people by officials at Baker is beyond inhumane. It's a living hell," he said in the news release. "During my 10 months at Baker, I didn't see the sun."
Three United Nations peacekeepers and at least 12 civilians were killed during a second day of anti-U.N. protests in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Tuesday, authorities said. (photo: Reuters)
The protests were spurred by complaints that the U.N. mission, known as MONUSCO, has failed to protect civilians against militia violence which has raged for years.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the violence, deputy U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq said in a statement, adding, "He underscores that any attack directed against United Nations peacekeepers may constitute a war crime and calls upon the Congolese authorities to investigate these incidents and swiftly bring those responsible to justice."
Demonstrations began on Monday in the city of Goma and spread on Tuesday to Butembo, where a U.N. soldier and two U.N. police with the mission were shot dead, Haq told reporters in New York.
In both cities U.N. peacekeeping troops were accused of retaliating with force as hundreds of protesters threw rocks and petrol bombs, vandalized and set fire to U.N. buildings.
A Reuters reporter saw U.N. peacekeepers shoot dead two protesters in Goma, where government spokesman Patrick Muyaya said at least five people were killed and 50 wounded.
In Butembo at least seven civilians were killed and an unknown number wounded, said the city's police chief Paul Ngoma.
U.N. peacekeeping missions have been beset by accusations of abuse for years.
"Obviously if there's any responsibility by U.N. forces for any of the injuries, or any of the deaths, we will follow up on that," Haq said.
U.N. forces were advised to use tear gas to disperse protesters and only fire warning shots if needed, he said.
The protests were called by a faction of the ruling party's youth wing, which has demanded the U.N. mission withdraw over what it describes as its ineffectiveness.
Resurgent clashes between local troops and the M23 rebel group in eastern Congo in recent months have displaced thousands. Attacks by militants linked to Islamic State have also continued despite a year-long state of emergency and joint operations against them by the Congolese and Ugandan armies.
"We have been doing our utmost, not just for years, but really for decades to try to bring stability to Eastern Congo," said Haq, adding that U.N. peacekeeping chief Jean-Pierre Lacroix is expected to travel to Congo as soon as he can.
MONUSCO took over from an earlier U.N. operation in 2010. MONUSCO had more than 12,000 troops and 1,600 police deployed as of November 2021, and has been gradually withdrawing for years.
Protesters also stormed the houses of U.N. workers in Goma, spurring the mission to relocate its staff to camps. A Reuters reporter saw staff being evacuated in a convoy with army escort.
India's foreign minister said two of the peacekeepers who died were Indian. Ngoma said the third one was Moroccan.
The U.N. Security Council was briefed on the situation behind closed doors on Tuesday, diplomats said.
MUST READ!
Energy poles by Florida Power and Light from Turkey Point nuclear generating station in Miami, Florida. (photo: Jeffrey Isaac Greenberg 5+/Alamy)
One industry consulting firm has influenced politics across Florida, Alabama and at least six other states
“I want you to make his life a living hell … seriously,” FPL’s CEO Eric Silagy wrote in a 2019 email to two of his vice-presidents about state Senator José Javier RodrÃguez, who proposed the legislation.
Within minutes, one of them forwarded the directive to the CEO of Matrix, LLC, a powerful but little-known political consulting firm that has operated behind the scenes in at least eight states.
RodrÃguez was ousted from office in the next election. Matrix employees spent heavily on political advertisements for a candidate with the same last name as RodrÃguez, who split the vote. That candidate later admitted he was bribed to run.
Hundreds of pages of internal documents – which are only coming to light now because Matrix’s founders are locked in an epic feud – detail the firm’s secret work to help power companies like FPL protect their profits and fight the transition to cleaner forms of energy.
The Matrix saga illustrates the political obstacles policymakers and experts face as they attempt to cut climate pollution from the power sector, one of the biggest greenhouse gas contributors in the US.
The ongoing clash between Matrix’s founder Joe Perkins, 72, and former CEO Jeff Pitts, 51, is exposing the firm’s decades of extensive influence peddling on behalf of utility clients.
The issue extends to several states. Records obtained by Floodlight and the Orlando Sentinel show that Matrix consulted for FPL, as well as another Florida company, Gulf Power, and Alabama Power. Matrix affiliated groups have also worked to advance power companies’ interests in Arizona, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and in front of the Environmental Protection Agency, public records show.
In Florida, Matrix’s work touched almost every level of politics, from influencing local mayoral and county commission elections to combating attempts to reshape the state constitution. In each of those cases, Matrix was working against politicians or policies fighting to curb the climate crisis by encouraging renewable power.
Matrix employees had a Jacksonville journalist spied on after he wrote critically about FPL. And in 2020, Matrix even harnessed the power of the press for itself, when its employees acquired control of The Capitolist, a Tallahassee-based political news site which it used for favorable coverage, leaked records show.
“I find this to be horrifying and undemocratic,” said Gianna Trocino Bonner, former chief legislative aide for RodrÃguez, after reviewing some of the leaked documents. “It’s unfortunate that our process allows for something like this to exist without accountability.”
Big power companies operate as monopolies with captive customers in much of the south-east US. They are supposed to be closely regulated, but their profits and unchecked political spending makes them some of the most powerful entities in a state.
Howard Crystal, an attorney for the environmental group Center for Biological Diversity, said that US utilities are allowed monopoly power “because they are supposed to expand the public interest.
“[But] now we have this incredible corruption and a reversal of that because they are using their advantage to hang on to power and undermine democracy,” he said.
So far, there have been two criminal investigations into the campaign against RodrÃguez and another Democratic state senate candidate, leading to charges against five people, though authorities have not accused Matrix or FPL of wrongdoing.
Matrix’s principal, Perkins, says he discovered only after Pitts left the firm that he and other now-former employees had been conducting “shadow activities and operations” dating back to 2016. He is suing Pitts in Alabama for fraud and conspiracy.
“For many years and without my knowledge or approval, Pitts abused his power and position to benefit himself and his cronies,” Perkins said in a statement. “Upon realizing the extent of Pitts’s shadow operations and abuses of power, we filed our lawsuit against Pitts and those few rogue employees.”
Pitts, who left Matrix in December 2020 to start his own firm, Canopy Partners, did not respond to a request for comment by deadline. He is also suing Perkins, alleging defamation and extortion. A spokesperson for FPL said it stopped working with Canopy in late 2021.
FPL’s CEO Silagy in a recent interview denied knowing about or participating in the scheme against RodrÃguez but said that Matrix had done “good work” for his company. Records show FPL trusted Matrix operatives with millions, including giving $14m to a single Matrix-run nonprofit in 2018 alone.
Silagy said the email in which he told his team to make RodrÃguez’s life “a living hell” was “a poor choice of words”.
Digging for dirt
In Florida, FPL and Matrix demonstrated how a utility and its consultants can work in tandem to resist clean energy reforms. FPL deployed lobbyists to the capital, while Matrix hired private investigators to dig for dirt and had operatives funnel dark money and order attack ads.
Few examples are clearer than the case of South Miami. When the small south Florida city’s mayor helped pass an ordinance in 2017 mandating rooftop solar panels on new construction, a network of 10 FPL-aligned operatives mobilized to ensure his ouster.
The team decided an effort to repeal the ordinance would probably fail. So they opted instead for “Mayor Stoddard’s electoral defeat and changing the makeup of the board”, according to a 2018 memo from Dan Newman, a Matrix contractor who was similarly involved in the campaign against RodrÃguez.
Along with a private investigator, the group delved into Stoddard’s past for episodes to weaponize against him, such as a South Miami commissioner’s claim on Facebook that Stoddard had forcibly kissed her. Documents show Matrix operatives arranged for the commissioner to record a robocall in which she called Stoddard “a creep”. Pitts at the time forwarded a draft of the script to two FPL executives. Newman in his memo also took credit for a Miami Herald story about the allegation.
Meanwhile, Matrix-led non-profits funded a blizzard of ads against Stoddard, accusing him of using public money for “vendettas” and placing him alongside infamous sex offenders Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein.
The plan ultimately failed, and Stoddard was re-elected. He has denied the allegations.
“An organization that acts like a mafia should be treated like one,” Stoddard said.
In a statement, Newman acknowledged managing the campaign against Stoddard and hiring a private investigator to look into the former mayor’s personal life. He said what he found was “deeply disturbing”.
FPL did not respond to requests for comment by deadline.
Matrix’s influence was felt on matters small and large, from Stoddard’s city of less than 12,000 to statewide fights over the Florida constitution. In 2019, when the electric utility industry was up in arms about a constitutional amendment to open up competition in Florida’s energy market, a Matrix-linked non-profit poured more than $10m into groups fighting it.
Matrix also exerted political influence through the press, with its operatives acquiring control of a Tallahassee-based politics news site, The Capitolist. That gave Matrix consultants and FPL executives input on Capitolist stories.
The site’s publisher, Brian Burgess, a former top spokesperson for past Florida governor Rick Scott, also suggested in emails that Matrix should lure prominent Florida journalists to a new site or buy local papers owned by media giant Gannett Company and then lay off most of the “clown reporters” to “inject content” into publications without anyone knowing who was “pulling the strings”. That proposal was forwarded to Silagy at FPL but never came to fruition.
Burgess said he “never pitched nor solicited feedback from FPL executives on any story or business venture”, and FPL spokesperson Chris McGrath said acquiring a news organization would not have made sense as a business deal for FPL.
Headquartered in Montgomery, Matrix has been described there as “the closest thing Alabama politics has to a non-governmental secret agency”.
Perkins and Pitts worked together for more than 25 years, expanding the firm into a national operation with dozens of clients in myriad industries.
But wherever the pair went, indictments often followed.
An Alabama governor the company worked for was convicted of federal felony corruption charges. A Birmingham mayor who employed Matrix got 15 years for bribery, conspiracy and fraud. And a former regional administrator for the EPA who did business with Pitts pleaded guilty to violating state ethics law multiple times.
From the beginning, Matrix showed no aversion to unsavory political tactics. In 1998, the firm distributed copies of a video in which a sex worker falsely alleged she had been sexually assaulted by a candidate for lieutenant governor. The sex worker later testified the allegations were untrue, and that she had been paid by a Birmingham businessman to make them.
In 2015, Matrix distributed fliers for a suspicious charity in a predominantly Black neighborhood in North Birmingham. The fliers warned residents not to let the Environmental Protection Agency test their soil for the presence of contaminants left by a coal plant.
The charity was a front established by a state representative. A local law firm and the company that owned the coal plant used the charity to pay the representative. Three people were federally convicted for their role in the ploy. Matrix was never accused of wrongdoing.
One of Matrix’s oldest clients is Alabama Power, which employed Perkins’ personal consulting firm as early as 1999. In 2018, Perkins Communications received at least $1.49m from Alabama Power, a leaked contract shows.
Those who provoked the utility’s ire suffered a harsh response.
In 2013, Terry Dunn, a Republican electricity regulator at Alabama’s Public Service Commission made moves to hold formal hearings on how customers’ energy bills were calculated – something that hadn’t happened in three decades. Customers at the time were paying some of the highest rates for electricity in the south-east.
Soon, Dunn faced attacks in the rightwing press and online, while Matrix-affiliated groups – some of which received millions from a non-profit run by a contractor for Alabama Power – filed a motion to intervene in the proceedings. Meanwhile, groups aligned with the utility falsely tied Dunn to the Obama administration’s efforts to reduce the use of coal.
The tactics worked. Dunn lost his 2014 re-election campaign by a 19-point margin to Chip Beeker, a catfish farmer who is still in office. Months after he was elected, Beeker voted in favor of an energy price hike for consumers. Alabama Power still hasn’t had a rate case.
“Southern Company and Alabama Power run the state of Alabama,” Dunn said. “They work off intimidating. You gotta bow down and kiss the ring.”
A spokesperson for the company declined to comment on the firm’s activities. Perkins called Matrix’s work for the utility “confidential”.
Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School said the “whole purpose” of firms like Matrix “is to conceal that it’s the utility doing this. The utility doesn’t want to be associated with this campaign.”
Things start going ‘sideways’
Matrix grew so large that by 2015 it was operating several private aircraft to whisk Pitts and Perkins to client meetings. Flight data shows Matrix’s planes made more than 130 flights to five states in 2020 alone, frequently crisscrossing the south-eastern US but also traveling as far west as New Mexico.
In Perkins’ telling, he was getting ready to hand over leadership of Matrix in December 2020 when Pitts surprised him by leaving the firm, taking three employees – as well as most of Matrix’s Florida-based clients – with him to launch Canopy.
At the Birmingham office where Pitts and the others had worked, Perkins said he found a backup server that “appeared to have been beaten with something”. The firm later recovered more than a million files, according to Perkins, who said they reveal years of hidden, “shadow work” in Florida. Perkins and Pitts sued each other, with Pitts claiming his former mentor had “never followed through” on handing over the company despite years of discussions. Once he left, Pitts said Perkins smeared him to clients in an attempt to extort millions.
As their feud escalated, internal documents started to arrive in reporters’ email inboxes from unknown sources. Many of the documents have since been verified by additional reporting, public records or Perkins himself.
Silagy, the FPL CEO, says the pair initially told him they had come to an amicable agreement about parting ways. He says he told them that he was disappointed, but there was enough work for both of them, “based on the good work they had done”.
“And then apparently, somewhere along the way, Jeff and Joe got sideways,” Silagy said.
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