05 August 22
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It was a good time, my time. Back in the country I grew up in, namely this one, men didn’t go into schools and shoot little kids, we never imagined such a thing, and what’s the reason? Fewer psychiatric medications? Fewer therapists? No. If drugstores sold licorice-flavored cyanide in drinking glasses, we’d see more of that. I plan to expire before the Supremes decide the Second Amendment guarantees the right to carry knapsacks of dynamite aboard airliners. Why should we give up our rights on the Jetway?
On the other hand, I do admit there have been improvements: I was in the Detroit airport, Concourse A, the other day and a man sat at a real piano on a low platform and played music, a very graceful jazzer, nothing about man’s downfall, very danceable, and I put a ten in his jar. It was worth it. It made me feel all cheery in the midst of a merch carnival to hear genuine individual talent. It reminded me of that country I grew up in, when more musicians worked the streets.
I wish hitchhiking would make a comeback. In my youth, I was picked up by various men, some of them drunk, and in return for the ride, I listened to whatever they wanted to tell me, which sometimes was a lot. A fair trade. It was an exercise in mutual trust. Then the Seventies came along when young men affected the derelict look and when you look like an outlaw there are no free rides to be had, even if you’re very nice down deep.
With age comes a degree of wisdom. You learn to choose your battles carefully and not expend anger on hopeless causes such as fairness and equality and getting your home nice and neat. My battle is against the words “monetize” and “monetization.” What tiresome phony weirdo words they are. Just say “sell” or “cash in” or “earn a truckload of bucks from”! Even “exploit” is better. “Monetize” is an attempt to dignify with pseudo-techno-lingo the common ordinary money grubbing that we all do. Stick “monetize” up your Levis. I am going to the mat on this. I refuse to be friends with or share a cab with or sit on a plane next to a monetizer. “Flight Attendant, take me back to Tourist, a middle seat next to weeping children would be preferable to listening to this idiot vocalize.”
And now that I have demonetized you, dear hearts, let me move on to the next battle, which is to establish kindness and amiability among friends and strangers alike. I admit I’m still happy about that cashier at Trader Joe’s who said, “How are you today, my dear?” It reminded me of a bygone time. She was, I believe, a woman and I am, to my way of thinking at least, a man though of course there is fluidity involved, and as we all know, the rules of social exchange between W and M have tightened, so I didn’t ogle, I looked at my shoes and said simply, “Never better.” Which is inoffensive, though untrue.
I wanted to hug her and did not. My people weren’t huggers. We were Bible-believing Christians who avoided physical contact lest we contract the religious doubts of the embracee and who knows but what it could be true? My brother was a Bible believer who married a girl who then catholicized him. I could say more but I don’t want to cause trouble. I’m a harmless old man, nattering in the corner. I’ll stop now.
Inmates of a Russian prison camp for women. (photo: Reuters)
The basketball star’s attorneys plan to appeal, as the Biden administration urges Moscow to accept a deal to free Griner and former security consultant Paul Whelan, an American serving a 16-year sentence in Russia. Washington has declined to say whether the two could be released in exchange for imprisoned Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.
If diplomatic efforts or the appeal fail, Griner could be sent to a penal colony, a Russian prison facility known for brutal conditions.
Here’s what to know.
What is a penal colony?
The penal system in Russia, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in a European country, oversees nearly 520,000 inmates, the Associated Press reported last year. Most of the prison facilities in Russia are known as penal colonies because inmates are required to perform labor during their sentence.
These institutions inherit many of their practices from the gulags, a network of forced-labor camps that stretched across the Soviet Union. Soviet leaders from Joseph Stalin onward wielded the gulags as a tool of political repression and exploited prison labor to kick-start the country’s industrialization and later build major infrastructure projects. Among the best-known documentation of this period is “The Gulag Archipelago” by Nobel Prize-winning novelist and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who spent eight years in the camps.
Modern-day Russian penal colonies have become moneymaking enterprises, according to Olga Romanova, a Russian journalist and founder of a prisoners’ rights organization. She wrote in 2017 that every correctional facility has a production unit such as a sewing factory or a woodworking or metalworking shop, with most of the profits going to intermediary companies buying and selling on low-cost goods, or to the prison authorities “through kickbacks by companies that purchase the goods directly.”
What is life in a penal colony like?
Among the most prominent figures in recent years to toil inside a Russian penal colony is opposition politician Alexei Navalny, who was jailed after recovering from a poisoning attack. An outspoken Kremlin critic, Navalny was sent to Penal Colony No. 2, east of Moscow, before he was reportedly transferred in June to a high-security facility, which his spokeswoman described as “a monstrous place.”
Through social media posts from his allies and family, Navalny painted a grim picture of life inside Penal Colony No. 2, calling it “our friendly concentration camp.” He accused guards of denying him proper medical care or the chance to sleep and described dehumanizing surveillance.
Media investigations have reported abuse of prisoners at such facilities. In 2017, Russian news outlet Novaya Gazeta published a video that prompted outrage, showing guards beating an inmate with truncheons. The chairman of the U.N. Committee Against Torture said in 2018 that nearly 4,000 deaths were recorded at detention centers in Russia. Last year, the independent newspaper also released clips of uniformed guards striking inmates, including a man whose family said he later died of liver damage.
Members of Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in labor colonies in 2012 over a protest performance at a Moscow cathedral, before escaping the country more recently. One of them, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, went on hunger strike in 2013 to protest what she described as slave-like labor — including 16 to 17 hours of work a day — and threats to her life at Penal Colony No. 14, The Washington Post reported at the time.
Why was Brittney Griner in Russia?
A two-time Olympic gold medalist, Griner played for the UMMC Ekaterinburg team based in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg during the WNBA offseason.
During the trial, she called Yekaterinburg her “second home.”
She said she was moved by the comradeship she found with her teammates there and by the enthusiasm of her fans, especially the young girls who would wait outside the team’s change rooms to greet her. “That’s why I kept coming back,” she said.
What drugs did Brittney Griner take to Russia?
The Phoenix Mercury player was detained in February over vape cartridges with less than a gram of cannabis oil and pleaded guilty last month to carrying the cartridges into Russia — where carrying the substance is illegal. The prosecution contended that the 0.702 grams of cannabis found in her luggage after she landed at a Moscow airport was a “significant” amount.
Ahead of the sentencing, Griner said through a court interpreter that she never intended to break Russian law. She said she had made “an honest mistake under stress” as she rushed to pack, unaware that the vape cartridges were in her baggage before flying to Moscow.
Griner testified that she uses cannabis oil in the United States for treatment of chronic pain from injuries but knew that carrying cannabis into Russia was illegal. She also said she flew to Russia despite U.S. State Department travel warnings because she did not want to let her Russian team down.
What are Russia’s drug laws?
Griner’s sentence would be a harsh outlier in many countries, but is in line with Russia’s strict drug penalties.
Griner was convicted of violating article 229¹(2)(c) of the Russian criminal code, which prohibits smuggling narcotics in a “significant amount,” defined quite aggressively, and carries with it “a minimum sentence of five to 10 years ‘deprivation of freedom’ along with the fine,” William E. Butler, an expert on Russian law at Penn State University, wrote in an article for the Conversation, a news and analysis site. Sentences at “the upper end of the spectrum seems to be common.”
“To many in the U.S., nine years’ imprisonment may seem like a harsh penalty for cannabis possession,” Butler wrote. “But in Russia, it is par for the course for this crime.”
Critics of Russia’s drug laws have accused the country of enforcing draconian, punitive measures that violate human rights. Russia has had a serious illicit drug problem since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with far higher rates of drug addiction and drug-related mortality than its European neighbors.
Abortion-rights and anti-abortion activists confront one another in front of the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C. (photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A Harvard law professor on the evolution of the Court and what Congress can do to make it more democratic.
We’re more than a month removed from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, a massively consequential decision and arguably a watershed moment for the Court.
Whatever your politics, and whatever you think of abortion, this much is clear: The Court made a choice to unsettle established law and shake up the tectonic plates of American society.
Now that we’ve had some time to process not just this case but some of the other extreme opinions from the Court’s most recent term — on everything from gun rights to environmental regulation — I wanted to bring on an expert to help us think it all through.
So I invited Niko Bowie, a Harvard Law professor and a former clerk for Justice Sonia Sotomayor, to join me for an episode of Vox Conversations. He writes about the issues at the core of this conversation, and last year he testified before President Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court to discuss potential ways to reform the highest court in the land.
We discuss the history and role of the Court, whether these conservative justices sacrificed the Court’s legitimacy for the sake of political power, and if he sees any path to reform that might save the Court from itself.
Below is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sean Illing
It’s been a few weeks since Roe was overturned. We all knew this was coming, but what was your reaction when it actually happened?
Niko Bowie
My immediate reaction was sadness, sadness that rights that millions of people had taken for granted for the past 50 years have suddenly been taken away. And that people’s lives are about to be upended and it’s only gonna get worse. So as far as just the practical effects of the opinion, it just felt really sad.
Legally speaking, it was expected. The conservative members of the Supreme Court have been saying for almost the past 50 years that this was their objective. It’s why they were selected to join the Court in the first place, and so when they got the opportunity, I think it would’ve been a surprise had they not taken it.
Sean Illing
I’d like to ask you to briefly steelman the conservative legal case. One of the things I have heard the most from defenders of this decision is that it simply returns power to the states and that’s it. What’s your response to that?
Niko Bowie
Well, abortion is one those issues like, “what should our democracy look like?” or “how are we gonna respond to climate change?” — a fundamental issue that all of us care about very deeply. And for these really fraught, fundamental issues that the entire country has an interest in, I think the basic question is: Which institutions or which forums will be responsible for resolving these questions?
In a democracy, you would expect that this would be resolved democratically. And there might be some reasons why the democracy would delegate certain questions to an un-democratic group. But in general, you would think that the most important questions facing the country would be resolved by the country in which every person is treated as a political equal.
So Congress has weighed in here. Congress drafted a 14th Amendment in which it guaranteed the equal protection of law and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of citizenship, and the due process rights of all people. The amendment the American people ratified in 1868 gave Congress power to enforce its terms. Congress passed a law, that’s currently known by 42 USC 1983, in which it tells federal courts to prohibit states from depriving these federally guaranteed rights.
And so to suggest that when a Court just returns an issue to the states as though state legislatures are the default forum for resolving these questions, I think begs the question: Why should state legislatures resolve this rather than Congress or the Courts?
Sean Illing
The conservative justices seem very eager to have people believe that the Court is actually maintaining a position of neutrality on the question of fundamental rights here. Again, they insist they're just throwing it back to the states. Is neutrality actually possible in a case like this?
Niko Bowie
No. I mean, keep in mind what is being decided is whether some words that were drafted 150 years ago — that Congress 150 years ago told courts to interpret — protect abortion rights. And those words are like, equal protection of law and due process, or deprivation of liberty, or life without due process of law.
There’s no neutral answer to the question of whether the deprivation of liberty without due process of law, or denying or abridging the privileges and immunities of citizenship, or denying the equal protection of the law, requires or prohibits an abortion ban. The words just don’t say anything about it.
And so to suggest that neutrality would lead to an answer, I think, is misguided. I think any interpretation is going to be justified by certain normative principles. Like, do you believe in the dignity and equal citizenship of pregnant people? Do you think that fetuses are individuals who should have rights of citizenship? Do you think that what equal protection requires is whatever a state legislature thinks?
I mean, these are just the normative principles underlying any interpretation of this language. And so to suggest that one is more neutral than the others is just to put your thumb on the scale and say my normative principles are neutral to me, and yours are activism.
Sean Illing
Is it fair to say that the Court had a choice between exercising power and preserving its legitimacy and it chose to exercise power?
Niko Bowie
I would not adopt that framing because I think the term legitimacy needs to be defined.
So when the Supreme Court itself has discussed legitimacy, the case in which the Court gave its longest discussion of the term legitimacy before Dobbs was Planned Parenthood v. Casey — the opinion that had upheld the essential holding of Roe in the early 1990s.
And in that case, three Republican appointees, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor, authored this joint opinion in which they asked the question, why do people listen to the Supreme Court? Why don’t they just treat our opinions as no different from a press release by a conservative senator, or a liberal senator? Why do they take our opinions and do things with it?
And their answer to that question was legitimacy. They defined the term legitimacy as basically, the general understanding among the American public, that when the Court issues an opinion, what it is doing is engaging in this principled analysis, as opposed to just exercising the individual views of the justices.
I think what’s most significant about the Court’s definition of legitimacy is, it’s not based on the Court actually being neutral. It’s based on the public’s perception that the Court is neutral, or engaged in something different from politics.
So this Court’s self-definition of legitimacy is, what does the public think we’re doing?
From that perspective, yes, today’s Court had a choice of, do we want to cultivate this public perception that what we are doing is different from, say, what five Ted Cruzes would do if he were on the Court? Or, you know, you can get a Supreme Court of former clerks that are currently in Congress, like Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz, and then like Mitch McConnell, you take five of them, give them robes and a gavel — is what we’re doing different from what they would do?
And to the extent that the public believed there is this distinction between the two, then yes, I think that today’s Court basically does not care about that distinction. In the Dobbs opinion, Justice Alito explicitly said, it’s not our job to care about public opinion. We shouldn’t take that into consideration at all.
But I think what the Court is realizing, especially in the last few weeks, is, if you do not care about public opinion, and you do something that’s extremely controversial, you risk the public turning on you. And eventually at some point, if you anger enough people, the public will stop listening and start doing something to reform your power.
Sean Illing
There has been a lot of conversation in recent years, mostly on the political left, about potential reforms to the Court. People talk about everything from abolishing judicial review to court-packing to setting term limits for justices. Do any of these reforms make sense to you? And perhaps even more importantly, do you see a viable path to passing any of them?
Niko Bowie
Let me start by saying, yes, I do see a viable path to a good outcome. So, I don’t wanna hide the ball — I think we don’t have to live in this world.
But before getting there I guess I would just sort of start with first principles. Which is, if we live in a democratic society, we have these fundamental disagreements about questions like, how many guns should be available, and who should be able to obtain abortions in what context, and what should we do about this impending climate catastrophe?
Which institutions should be responsible for resolving these fundamental disagreements? And it’s no answer to say, well, whatever the Constitution says. In part, because the Constitution just does not provide clear answers about it. And in part, because I think even that has to be justified. Like, why should we in 2022, responding to 2022 crises, turn to a document written by people who really did not have any way of anticipating what we are currently undergoing?
So for me, looking around, what do other countries do? In most other democratic societies, national legislatures are responsible for making these determinations, particularly democratically responsive national legislatures. From the United Kingdom to France and Germany and New Zealand — in general, these sorts of questions are decided by national legislation. And national legislation enacted through far more democratic legislatures than the United States Congress.
So I would love to see a more democratic Congress. I would love to see reforms to Congress to make it more democratic.
But even the Congress we have now, I think, is a better answer to the question of who should resolve these questions than another institution like state legislatures, or local governments, or neighborhood associations, or federal or state courts.
That’s the real question: Which of these institutions should be responsible for resolving these fundamental questions in a democracy? I think a national legislature is what I would turn to, particularly one that is the beneficiary of democratic reforms enacted by that national legislature, like a Voting Rights Act.
From that first principle, I think the best methods of advancing Court reform are federal laws enacted by the national legislature that both make it more democratic, as well as reduce the power of other institutions that are not as democratically representative, that do not treat all members as political equals, and prevent them from interfering with the national legislature’s output.
The history of the Supreme Court’s evaluation of federal legislation is just ... it’s a terrible track record. And so in practice, I don’t think there is a reason why we should necessarily give a federal court the power to invalidate national legislation.
From a theoretical perspective, I don’t think there’s any democratic reason why you would want unelected officials making determinations that, you know, I’m sorry, but a Voting Rights Act is not, quote-unquote, appropriate. There’s just nothing about being a judge or going to Harvard Law School that gives you any expertise as to whether a Voting Rights Act is appropriate or not. It’s just fundamentally a question that in a democracy should be resolved by a community of political equals.
So getting there is just gonna require Congress over time to enact legislation that protects fundamental rights that makes itself and the rest of the country more democratic.
And that also keeps other institutions, whether state legislatures or federal courts, from advancing their own more parochial or anti-democratic views and trying to enforce those over the will of the American people.
I think what that sort of legislation will likely look like is, when Congress enacts laws like a new Voting Rights Act, or like the Women’s Health Protection Act or like a new Clean Air Act, that it just prohibits Courts from undermining that legislation. So the Constitution that we currently have gives Congress the power to regulate the jurisdiction of federal courts; gives Congress the power to regulate what a federal court can do when it sees a law that the individual judge doesn’t like.
In the 1930s, when federal judges were going around enjoining labor unions, Congress thought this should not be what federal judges do. So they just took away the power of judges to enjoin labor unions, absent certain conditions. Congress could do the same thing when judges review federal laws, or when it tries to interpret laws like the Clean Air Act.
So I think there’s a lot that Congress could do to limit the power of courts to interfere with the will of a democratic nation — just like almost every other peer democracy does. This is not a radical position anywhere else in the world, except for in the United States of America.
Drivers at Brooklyn's Foster Avenue facility head to work after demanding "Safety Not Surveillance" at a rally on July 28, 2022. (photo: Alex Moore)
UPS drivers are facing dangerously hot working conditions this summer. But instead of installing AC, or making changes that would reduce exposure to extreme heat, the company is installing cameras to surveil workers on the job. Now drivers are fighting back.
When the weather forecast shows temperatures pushing into the high nineties at the peak of New York’s humid summer, we UPSers brace for extreme conditions. But try as we might, it’s hard to stay cool. Many drivers bring coolers full of ice and put them in the back of the truck, but by lunchtime all the ice has melted and the cooler has become a bucket of warm water.
And we need that ice. The cargo area of the package car is like a sauna, with temperatures reaching 120 or 130 degrees. On any given day, we step into the cargo area over a hundred times to retrieve packages. All it takes is a few seconds before you’re sweating bullets. To make matters worse, packages are almost always loaded into the trucks out of order. Every package needs to be sorted in the order it is supposed to be delivered, which is technically the job of the preloaders, but the task is usually shifted onto us drivers. It can take an additional thirty minutes to an hour to complete, and if we don’t do it we can be disciplined. I have personally been issued a warning letter by management for not having my truck perfectly sorted when stopped during an observation. (Management personnel follow drivers in their personal cars and film us with their personal phones.)
When choosing between disorganized cargo and dangerous heat, many workers will sweat it out, even at risk to our own safety.
Management’s Mess
Some drivers blame the preloaders for the messy cargo area, but the issue can be better understood as a consequence of UPS’s management strategy. UPS chronically understaffs the preload shift and cracks the whip to get as much productivity out of each worker as possible. Instead of assigning preloaders one or two trucks each, they assign four or five. They run the belt at an unreasonable pace, and supervisors bark at workers, threatening discipline if too many packages go by and pile up at the end of the belt.
Just like the trucks, the warehouses aren’t air conditioned. So not only are the preloaders harassed and overworked, but they’re also trapped in a hotbox. Anyone who spent a day in the shoes of one of these inside workers would immediately understand why trucks go out with disorganized cargo. It’s impossible to load each package in order without letting a ton of other boxes go by and stack up at the end of the belt. The blame for messy cargo should fall not on preloaders, but on UPS management, who could fix the problem by hiring more workers and slowing the pace of the belt.
In the absence of these changes, however, the burden of organizing the work falls farther down the line of production onto us drivers, who are forced to sort the packages ourselves in the sweltering heat. We can open the back and bulkhead doors to air out the cargo area, but not all of the heat escapes. In addition, this extra effort extends our workday, which means more time toiling in the heat. While regular package car drivers have contractual overtime protections, management regularly violates said language by instructing drivers to stay out and finish their over-dispatched routes.
That extra time in the heat could make the difference when it comes to safety. I’m a 22.4, which is the second-tier driver job created in the last contract, and we don’t have any overtime protections other than the fourteen-hour workday limit enforced by the Department of Transportation. It doesn’t matter how healthy and hydrated we are; moving hundreds or thousands of pounds of cargo for up to fourteen hours in temperatures ranging between 95 and 130 degrees is dangerous. Period. In one week alone this summer, at least four drivers went to the emergency room from within my union Teamsters Local 804’s jurisdiction in New York and Long Island, and surely many more drivers suffered from heat exhaustion but didn’t report it.
Just as the warehouse shifts are understaffed, so too are the driver shifts. And just as preloaders are assigned more trucks to load than they can handle, so too are drivers assigned more packages to deliver. UPS chooses to force us to work overtime rather than hire more drivers because it reduces costs via benefit contributions for each additional employee. And just as they bark at the preloaders, they do the same with drivers, pressuring us to finish the over-dispatched routes as quickly as possible.
Every move that UPS makes is guided by a profit maximization strategy. The heavy workload and management-by-stress exacerbate the dangerously hot working conditions that already jeopardize our safety. Meanwhile, UPS is more profitable than ever before. Why can’t they spend some money on air conditioning? We know why. It’s because what matters most is not worker safety, but the corporation’s bottom line.
Safety Not Surveillance
Around the same time that news of UPS drivers collapsing and even dying from heat exhaustion began circulating, a picture started circulating on UPS driver WhatsApp chats and Facebook groups. It showed a driver facing a “Lytx” camera in the cab of package cars. The cameras arrived without notice to the union, catching drivers completely off guard. UPS also began installing forward facing cameras on the windshield of trucks. It is unclear whether or not they have audio recording capacity.
One morning during the heat wave, a driver approached me to ask if I had any idea what the camera does or if it is even working at the moment. Nobody in management had informed him that the camera would be installed or how it would work. One day it wasn’t there and the next day it was. He worried that the camera had a microphone allowing the company to listen to his conversations with his wife. Other coworkers have expressed concern that the company might be able to listen to them when speaking with their union representative. Drivers with the Lytx camera in their trucks have said that if they reach for their water bottle while driving, the camera sounds an alarm: “Distracted driving, distracted driving!”
Whatever its capabilities, the mere presence of the camera has stoked fear and paranoia among my coworkers, because we have all experienced how UPS management uses technology and surveillance to gain leverage over employees through the implicit threat or outright use of discipline. These cameras take that threat to the next level. A supervisor once told me during a disciplinary hearing, “The logistics industry is all about speed.” Most management personnel are more cunning with their choice of words, especially during disciplinary hearings, but this one said the quiet part loud: surveillance and discipline are used to make us work faster.
It’s not in our interest to work beyond a safe and steady pace. We are paid by the hour, so more work during the same period of time means the same amount in wages for us — plus more exhaustion and greater safety risks. But us working faster is in the interest of the company, which wants to maximize revenue while minimizing costs.
Insurance companies offer lower rates for commercial vehicles with cameras, so these cameras will save the company a lot of money. But where will this extra cash go? If UPS has their way, it will line the pockets of corporate executives and major shareholders. Workers will see nothing but a decline in our working conditions.
The Union Fights Back
This shameless prioritization of profit over people prompted Vinnie Perrone, Teamsters Local 804 president and IBT Eastern Region package director, to issue a statement calling for rallies across our local. The main rally took place at my facility on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn before work on July 28. Management peered out from their air conditioned offices while we demanded “Safety Not Surveillance”: no to installing cameras, and yes to installing AC.
Leading up to the rally, I and other stewards across the local created “fan request lists” and collected signatures and truck numbers from drivers who want a fan installed in their truck. As per our contract, such a request cannot be unreasonably denied. But when one driver made a written request for a fan to be installed in his truck last month, the mechanic responded that UPS corporate had decided that fans could not be installed. We understood that the demand for AC may be a longer-term fight than fans, but we wanted to take action on both short- and long-term goals.
On July 29, New York City–based UPS driver Elliot Lewis and I tweeted a call for the public to make complaints to the UPS customer service hotline, demanding UPS take worker safety seriously. Our tweets received thousands of responses. When I called, a customer service representative nervously said that she had heard many complaints about the topic and, before hanging up, informed me that UPS planned on installing air conditioning in the trucks next week. I took her words with several grains of salt, but I do believe that UPS is beginning to get the message: we are a new, fighting Teamsters union and the public is increasingly supportive of our struggle as essential workers.
This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1997 UPS strike and one year out from the expiration of our current contract. Despite the great success of the 1997 strike, the years following Ron Carey’s ousting from Teamster leadership have been marked by Jimmy Hoffa’s class collaboration. Our current contract, which established a two-tier system for drivers despite majority opposition from the rank and file, was undemocratically forced upon members by Hoffa, who utilized an archaic bylaw in the Teamsters constitution to get the contract ratified.
But times have changed. Decades of organizing by militant rank-and-filers and members of the reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union have finally started to bear fruit. At the 2021 Teamster National Convention, workers won the eradication of the two-thirds rule that Hoffa used to force the 2018 contract, strike benefits on day one, and the inclusion of rank-and-file members on the bargaining committee. In November of 2021, we elected Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters United slate to International leadership in a landslide vote. O’Brien campaigned on issues such as the elimination of the two-tier system and higher part-time wages in our 2023 contract. He has said that if UPS won’t give us what we want in 2023, we will strike.
This week we kicked off our contract campaign with rallies held outside UPS facilities across the entire country. We are finally feeling the power of a union ready and willing to stand up and fight against the greed of corporate America.
Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Andrew Warren, an elected Democratic state attorney, had pledged not to enforce the US state’s 15-week abortion ban.
DeSantis announced on Thursday the suspension of Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren in the Tampa Bay area, accusing the prosecutor of “ignoring the law”.
Florida had imposed a 15-week abortion ban earlier this year, even before the United States Supreme Court revoked the federal constitutional right to the procedure.
At a news conference on Thursday, DeSantis said local officials cannot have “veto power” over issues decided by the entire state.
“The constitution of Florida has vested the veto power in the governor, not individual state attorneys. And so, when you flagrantly violate your oath of office, when you make yourself above the law, you have violated your duty, you have neglected your duty, and you are displaying a lack of competence to be able to perform those duties,” the Republican governor said.
“And so, today we are suspending State Attorney Andrew Warren effective immediately.”
Democrats denounced the decision, saying that DeSantis – who is a possible candidate for the 2024 US presidential election – is subverting the will of the voters who elected Warren.
“The governor’s actions constitute an extreme abuse of power – a new low for DeSantis who fails our great state with his mean-spirited, selfish and fiscally-irresponsible focus on his political ambitions alone,” Democratic Congresswoman Kathy Castor, who represents the Tampa Bay area, said in a tweet.
Fentrice Driskell, a Tampa Democrat and leader-designate of the Florida House Democratic Caucus, called Warren’s suspension a “shocking political attack” on an elected official.
“Andrew Warren is being removed because he assured our community that he will not be a foot soldier in Ron DeSantis’ extremist agenda,” she said in a statement.
But DeSantis rejected the charge that he overruled the voters who elected Warren, saying that the now-suspended prosecutor’s conduct fell “below the standard of the Florida Constitution”.
“I don’t think the people of Hillsborough County want to have an agenda that is basically woke, where you’re deciding that your view of social justice means certain laws shouldn’t be enforced,” DeSantis said.
In June, Warren signed on to a statement by dozens of prosecutors across the country vowing to “refrain from prosecuting those who seek, provide or support abortions”.
Warren’s suspension comes amid an intensifying nationwide debate about abortion rights after the top US court overturned Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that ensured the right to the procedure.
The abortion issue is already becoming a major topic for the November midterm elections that will decide which party will control Congress for the next two years.
On Tuesday, the largely conservative Midwestern state of Kansas voted against repealing abortion protections from its constitution in the first direct vote on the issue since the Supreme Court’s decision.
On Thursday, DeSantis replaced Warren with Hillsborough County Judge Susan Lopez for the duration of his suspension.
“I have the utmost respect for our state laws and I understand the important role that the state attorney plays in ensuring the safety of our community and the enforcement of our laws,” Lopez said in a statement.
Waorani women in Ecuador. (photo: Kimberley Brown/Mongabay)
In the aftermath of Ecuador's longest-running national strike organized by Indigenous movements, activists now face a wave of criminalization.
After a year of attempts at discussion with the Ecuadorian government, CONAIE took to the streets on June 13, locking down Ecuador’s major cities and petroleum wells with blockades. Since president Lasso’s 2021 election, IMF-mandated gasoline price increases, the expansion of petroleum activity into Indigenous territories, and deepening household debt has intensified livelihood insecurity for Indigenous nationalities and for the urban and rural poor.
The national strike has been a historic moment for Ecuador’s Indigenous movements, who in the face of intense repression and violence proved themselves a still powerful and effective force in Ecuadorian politics. After the country was brought to a standstill for 18 days, Lasso finally conceded to popular demands and sat down with CONAIE to initiate a negotiation process.
The Lasso government’s first act under the pretense of negotiation was to charge CONAIE president Iza with “illegal disruption of public services” for road blockages and interruption of petroleum production, an infraction under Article 346 of the penal code. The Regional Foundation for Human Rights Advisory (INREDH) reports 403 open cases against protesters as of July 6.
Iza’s trial and other violent attacks on the right to protest have defined Lasso’s strategy for the duration of the strike. One day into the protests, Lasso ordered Iza’s arrest without publicly stating the charges or where he was being held. A video of Iza’s arrest soon went viral, and he was released after public outcries denounced his capture as arbitrary and illegal.
During the ensuing strike, the government’s repressive measures progressed. Lasso declared a state of emergency in the first week, then expanded it to six provinces and authorized increasing and lethal use of force against protesters. These tactics resulted in six deaths, 335 injuries, and 155 detentions, the Alliance for Human Rights of Ecuador reports.
Although the court postponed the case against Iza until August, these investigations—along with repeated antagonistic media statement from Lasso and Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo—put into question the government’s motives and jeopardize the negotiation process. A good faith negotiation process is imperative not only for Lasso, who barely survived a recent no-confidence vote in the national assembly, but also for addressing the root causes of the strike.
Roots of the Strike
The Lasso administration’s failure to address a deepening political, economic, and security crisis is at the heart of the national strike.
The Covid-19 pandemic hit Ecuador hard. A month into the outbreak, Ecuador had one of the highest death tolls in the world, exposing serious problems in the country’s health infrastructure. The pandemic triggered a recession and impacted household incomes, leading to an increase in poverty, inequality, and unemployment.
Ecuador’s dependence on oil exports is another key factor. Oil is the main source of Ecuador’s revenue and a volatile commodity, rendering Ecuador’s economy vulnerable to fluctuating market values. Resource politics are a driving force in national and international policy-making in Ecuador, and increasingly have resulted in violent state-society clashes since the late 1990s. As a case in point, plummeting oil-prices in 2014, coupled with high debt, led former president Lenín Moreno to implement austerity measures that included the reduction of gas subsidies to meet IMF loan demands. The resulting backlash produced a surge of mass protests in Quito and other major cities in 2019 that prompted Moreno to declare a state of emergency. Moreno backtracked on scrapping fuel subsidies.
During the pandemic, oil-barrel prices plummeted to record lows, leading to the IMF’s approval on September 30, 2020 of a new $6.5 billion loan to Ecuador. On October 19, 2021, Lasso’s government renegotiated with the IMF to unlock $800 million in undisbursed payments through a new round of austerity measures that included the end of gas subsidies.
With the cost of gas for consumers rising, CONAIE organized protests that October. The public outcry prompted Lasso to institute gradual monthly gas price increases instead of a sudden removal of subsidies.
After his election, Lasso pledged to double oil and mining operations to eliminate fiscal deficit and address poverty. After a year in office, his government seemed poised to begin a new round of licensing to expand the mining industry and increase oil production from 500,000 to 550,000 barrels a day by the end of the year.
By June 2022, gas prices had doubled in Ecuador, driving up the cost of transport and all basic goods including staple foods in urban areas. For the poor, these price increases meant food insecurity. As of the strike’s start, the only campaign promise that Lasso had fulfilled was to speed up Covid-19 vaccinations.
Lasso's extractive and IMF-driven policies have particularly impacted Indigenous communities. The wanton expansion of petroleum and mining activity is pushing Indigenous populations further into food insecurity and health crises, causing rural poverty to spiral out of control.
In the face of economic pressures, plummeting popularity ratings, and a growing security crisis linked to narcotrafficking and escalating homicide rates, Lasso responded with quick and violent repression against protesters. Techniques of criminalization during and after these protests are a sign of Lasso’s efforts to reassert his weak hold on power.
Institutionalizing the Criminalization of Protest
Lasso’s actions are nothing new. The criminalization of protest has long been a familiar tactic of Ecuadorian presidents, who—irrespective of left- or right-wing affiliations—follow similar patterns to justify repression against mass mobilizations and dissent.
Patterns of criminalization have been on the rise since the mid-2000s and are closely linked to the commodities boom that saw oil prices reach record highs. The state expanded the extractive frontier into large-scale mining and increased oil production to exploit this boom. In turn, affected groups organized resistance movements in response to ecological damage threatening health, food, and cultural survival. Successive governments have followed by institutionalizing the criminalization of protest through the use of courts and penal processes.
The three-term presidency of leftist leader Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2017 restricted the right to protest in multiple domains. Foremost, Correa’s administration increased persecution and judicialization of individual protesters through arbitrary arrests, detentions, and lengthy penal processes. Furthermore, he oversaw attacks on nongovernmental organizations, limited press freedom through the controversial 2013 Communications Law, and discredited activists as “terrorists” and “saboteurs.”
Indigenous and campesinos protesters have been primary targets. As the most directly affected populations, they challenged Correa’s policies to expand extractive industries and the promises of his Citizens' Revolution to end poverty through oil revenues. They questioned at what price and at whose expense, and they exposed the underlying contradictions of Ecuador becoming the first country in the world to grant nature constitutional rights, while at the same time expanding natural resource extraction.
Correa’s successor and former vice president, Lenín Moreno, continued these patterns to more deadly effect during the 2019 protests. Moreno’s administration oversaw the violent repression of demonstrators that resulted in 11 deaths, 1,228 detained, 1,507 injured, and over 400 criminal investigations.
After two decades, the legacy of criminalization is vast, familiar, and clear in purpose: to paralyze the work of activists and eliminate pathways of social dissidence.
Lasso: A New Imaginary of Criminality
While Lasso has shown himself no different than previous leaders, his actions also demonstrate the intractable nature of criminalization as a tool for governance. A case in point are attacks on the Indigenous guard and new discourses of criminality that link Indigenous protesters to narcotrafficking.
In 2018, the A'i Cofán community of Sinangoe brought a case against the Ecuadorian government to halt mining activities on their lands, spanning 15,000 square miles of rainforest near the border with Colombia. The government had granted 20 illegal large-scale mining concessions, with more pending, thereby infringing on Cofán rights under Ecuadorian and international law to free, prior, and informed consent for any resource policy decisions on ancestral lands. These concessions were discovered by the Indigenous guard, an institution created under Cofán law to provide for territorial monitoring and compliance.
In the landmark 2018 Sinangoe decision, Ecuador’s constitutional court sided with the community. The court nullified 52 mining concessions, halted mining operations, and affirmed the status of the Indigenous guard as a legitimate authority within their ancestral territories. For their efforts, guard leaders and case activists Alexandra Narváez and Alex Lucitante were awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.
Despite constitutional recognition, Lasso and Interior Minister Carrillo repeatedly painted the Indigenous guard as violent criminals. In the opening days of the 90-day dialogue, Carrillo condemned the Indigenous guard in Ecuadorian media as an “armed group” and part of “urban guerrillas.” Furthermore, state rhetoric sought to connect Indigenous groups to narcotrafficking. In a July 7 interview, Lasso claimed drug traffickers working in coordination with former president Correa were financing protests to the amount of “15 million dollars for 18 days.”
Through its association of Indigenous movements and institutions like the Indigenous guard with narcotrafficking and urban guerillas, the Lasso administration expands Correa’s imaginary of criminality of Indigenous protesters from “terrorists” to “narcos.”
To insert Indigenous protest into this imaginary is problematic. One need only turn on any news source in Ecuador over the past few months prior to the protests to know the state of fear and anxiety the security crisis and rising homicide rates has produced in the Ecuadorian public. As an Alliance for Human Rights report denounced, these are stigmatizing discourses that “promote a message of hate, discrimination, and segregation,” exacerbate racism, and put the rights of Indigenous peoples, their lives, and practices at risk.
Precarious Prospects for Dialogue
The first few weeks of the dialogue process have not looked optimistic, with Lasso’s government on the media offensive to link protesters to criminal elements and frame the strike in relation to the economic loss from blocked petroleum production. With 1,096 wells blockaded during the strike, and the Iza case as a precedent, Indigenous activists believe that the “paralyzation of services” pretext will be used extensively to target Indigenous leaders. "Ecuador’s petroleum production has halved… I think the government is going to focus on these cases," Andres Tapia, head of communication with the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE) said in an interview.
Moving in this direction contradicts the spirit of compromise in the peace accord agreement. In the agreement, the government conceded to a 15-cent reduction in combustibles and notably revoked Executive Decree 95, which would have expanded petroleum production.
During the strike, Lasso proved himself time and again as a bad-faith negotiator, fueling conflict with increased militarization and violence, organizing “shadow” negotiations with Indigenous leaders not affiliated with the strike, mobilizing misinformation campaigns, and calling in sick during negotiations on account of an alleged case of Covid-19. If Lasso persists in his use of the legal system and media to continually discredit and criminalize Indigenous protesters, it will undoubtedly have chilling effects on the dialogue process, raising the possibility of a new cycle of social unrest.
Carbon emissions due to tropical deforestation are accelerating. (photo: Bruno Kelly/Reuters)
“Unprecedented” logging, mining, and agricultural expansion are razing forests faster than they can replenish, report finds.
The study authors warn that this deforestation is already impacting 1.6 billion people worldwide who depend on forests for their livelihoods. If deforestation continues, they say, it could also jeopardize international goals to preserve biodiversity and limit global warming. “[T]he continuous loss and degradation of forests affect the integrity of forest ecosystems, reducing their ability to generate and provide essential services and sustain biodiversity,” the scientists said in a press release
The research, which was led by an international team of 10 scientists, used global land-use data, including from satellites, to document the planet’s loss and gain of forests for each decade between 1960 and 2019. Although Earth gained forest cover between 1960 and 1970, the study documented losses every decade after that, with deforestation accelerating rapidly starting in the 1990s. By 2010 to 2019, the world’s total forest cover was shrinking by nearly 1 million acres per year, thanks in large part to “unprecedented” commercial logging, new mining projects, and agricultural expansion.
In the Amazon, for example, illegal cattle ranching is helping drive record losses in forest cover as farmers clear large swathes of land for their herds to graze on. Devastating wildfires last year devoured tens of millions of acres of Russia’s boreal forests. And the Democratic Republic of Congo is raising new concerns with plans to auction off parts of its vast rainforests to oil and gas developers.
The research also found that low-income countries, particularly in the tropics, were more likely to lose forest cover than their wealthy counterparts. This supports the so-called “forest transition theory,” which holds that forest cover expands as a country’s socioeconomic conditions improve, perhaps because urbanization and development can draw workers away from rural areas.
Indonesia, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Paraguay, and Colombia are among the countries that have seen the greatest deforestation since 1960. Notably, these nations are home to some of the world’s largest rainforests, which not only suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere but also create planet-cooling clouds and control global hydrological cycles. According to a study published earlier this year, tropical forests can cool the planet by an entire degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit).
Forests have other benefits, as well, like supporting millions of plant and animal species, many of which people use for medicine, energy, food, construction, and cultural practices. But there is increasing concern that these benefits could be eroded by unchecked deforestation, and that forests are losing their ability to bounce back after logging or natural disasters.
The study authors said in a press release that action is urgently needed “to reverse, or at least flatten, the global net forest loss curve by conserving the world’s remaining forests and restoring and rehabilitating degraded forest landscapes.” As first steps, they called for more monitoring of the world’s arboreal ecosystems and for wealthy nations to reduce their dependence on products imported from tropical forests.
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