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ALSO SEE: The Colorado Massacre Cannot Be Blamed on Mental Illness. It's Rooted in Hate.
What happened in Colorado Springs this weekend was part of a trend of escalating violence targeting gay spaces
There’s a grim routine, these days, to the mass shootings in America. Some elements remain constant from shooting to shooting. Usually, the gunman is a young white man, and usually, he has a history of violence against women. There will have been mental health episodes, or previous run-ins with police. But none of this history will have stopped him from getting a gun. American mass shooters tend to use automatic or semi-automatic long guns, the kind that aren’t available to civilians in other countries. Almost always, they purchased them legally.
In the aftermath, the public makes a grim calculus. How many dead? How many wounded? The initial numbers that trickle out through the media tend to tick upward in the following hours and days, as more of the injured arrive in local hospitals and some of the wounded pass away. Americans compare the latest massacre to the others, rationalizing to keep the panic and despair at bay. “That one wasn’t so bad,” we tell ourselves. “Only three were killed.” This has become the price of being in public in America, a psychic tax that we all pay when we leave the house: that the next time, when the next gunman opens fire in a school, or a church, or a grocery store, that one of the anonymous numbers printed in the newspaper will be someone we love.
In the hours after a gunman stormed into Club Q, a morbid kind of box checking began. Yes, it was a young white man who committed the rampage – this time a 22-year-old. Yes, the shooter had a history of violence against women: the attacker was arrested last year after an hours-long standoff with police after making a bomb threat against his mother. He was charged with multiple felonies, but, yes, he still had access to guns. Yes, the killer used an AR-style long gun to murder his victims. And yes, the killer appears to have rightwing ties: he’s the grandson of a far-right California state assemblyman who supported the January 6 insurrection. On Monday, the shooter was charged with five counts of murder and several hate crimes.
There’s a morbid randomness to American gun violence – that fatal combination of scarce mental health treatment and superabundant firearms that makes America, and only America, a place where mass public massacres are common even when the nation is ostensibly at peace. But if the Colorado attack was enabled by America’s pervasive gun violence problem, it seems to have been prompted by the tenor of rightwing media, both broadcast and online, which over the past years has turned a virulent, conspiratorial and obsessively hateful eye towards the LGBT community.
In the coming days, the massacre at Club Q will be cast as an isolated tragedy, and those who point out the right’s complicity in the violence will be accused, with predictable cynicism, of politicizing the tragedy. But what happened in Colorado Springs this past weekend was the foreseeable continuation of a trend of escalating violence targeting gay spaces, and drag shows in particular.
Egged on by conservative politicians, like Lauren Boebert, social media figures, like Libs of TikTok, and traditional media scions, like Tucker Carlson, conservatives have spent the past months consuming the lie that gay and trans people are “groomers” – that is, perverts and pedophiles who want to molest children, or sterilize them, or confuse them into leading different, wrong and lesser lives. In the face of this supposed harm to the innocent, any vengeance can be justified.
The lie that gay people are “grooming” children has provided cover for violent and bigoted displays at LGBT community spaces across the country. Over the past year, drag performances and other LGBT events have been targeted with protests and violent threats in California, Idaho, Georgia, Texas, Florida, Indiana, Oregon, North Carolina and New York. Violent rightwing militia groups, like the Proud Boys and a group calling itself Patriot Front – who wear masks, because they are ashamed to show their faces – have appeared at these events, menacing gay people with threats. Just last month, in Eugene, Oregon, violence erupted outside a drag show when rightwing goons appeared and began throwing rocks and smoke bombs. At that hate rally, as at others, the anti-gay protesters carried semi-automatic rifles. It was only a matter of time before they started using them.
Like most bigots, homophobes know little about the groups they target, and their hatred doesn’t hew to logic. But when pressed, they will say that gay and trans people lack the virtues that they associate with traditional masculinity – virtues like honesty and integrity; courage, discipline and willingness to protect the innocent. But it was patrons, several of them gay themselves, who subdued the attacker at Club Q. According to the New York Times, a drag queen at the club helped by stomping on the man with her high heels
Meanwhile, in Uvalde, police officers armed to the teeth – the paragons of hegemonic masculinity that the right is always insisting we worship – stood by, cowardly and immobile, while a gunman slaughtered little children. If the right sees “manliness” as a virtue, a willingness to risk yourself to help the vulnerable, then you’d think it would be clear to them who the real “men” were.
Donald Trump announcing that he will once again run for U.S. president in the 2024. (photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
The end of the process will make the materials seized from Mar-a-Lago available for the criminal investigation of the ex-president
The hearing is particularly consequential for Trump: should he lose, it could mark the end of the special master process on which he has relied to delay, and gain more insight into, the investigation surrounding his potential mishandling of national security information.
In a 40-page brief filed in advance of an expedited afternoon hearing in the 11th circuit court of appeals, the department argued that Trump should never have been able to get an independent arbiter because the federal judge who granted the request misapplied a four-part legal test in making her judgment.
The department also argued that the 11th circuit should terminate the injunction preventing federal investigators from examining the documents in the special master review since Trump appeared to drop his claims that some of the materials are subject to privilege protections.
“Absent any likelihood of any success in the merits of the claim, there is no justification for an injunction,” the department wrote in its brief, as it sought the appeals court to reverse the entirety of the Trump-appointed US district court judge Aileen Cannon’s special master order.
At issue is the original rationale for the special master. Cannon determined Trump failed to satisfy the first Richey test – whether he suffered “callous disregard” to his constitutional rights when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago – but granted Trump’s request since she felt he met additional tests.
The department – echoing the 11th circuit’s own reasoning in an earlier appeal – has said Trump’s failure to satisfy that callous disregard standard alone should have resulted in the denial of the request, though the former president’s legal team contested that interpretation.
But even if Cannon had correctly applied Richey, the department argued, she was wrong to prevent it from accessing the materials under review.
The injunction was handed down on the basis that if Trump was able to show that a proportion of documents were protected by executive or attorney-client privilege, then they could not part of the evidence cache obtained by federal investigators in the event of prosecution.
Yet in the course of the special master process, the department noted, Trump’s lawyers have claimed the documents were not so much privileged, but personal. If that was true, the trouble for Trump is that then they would have been lawfully seized in the FBI search.
Trump requested the appointment of a special master to examine the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago – including 103 bearing classified markings – shortly after the 8 August search because, his lawyers claimed at the time, some of the materials could be subject to privilege protections.
The request was granted by Cannon, who gave exceptional deference to Trump on account of his status as a former president in deciding that he satisfied the four-part Richey test, and temporarily barred the department from using the seized materials in its criminal investigation.
But the department appealed part of Cannon’s order to the 11th circuit, which sided with the government and ordered the 103 documents marked classified to be excluded from the special master review and returned to investigators, criticizing Cannon for granting the review in the first place.
That prompted Trump to unsuccessfully appeal to the supreme court – while the department then appealed the entirety of the special master order, incorporating the 11th circuit’s rulings and its scathing rebuke of Cannon as having “abused her discretion” in court filings.
“This court has already granted the government’s motion to stay that unprecedented order insofar as it relates to the documents bearing classification markings,” the department wrote in an October filing. “The court should now reverse the order in its entirety for multiple independent reasons.”
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Rapides Parish Sherrif's office deputy Rodney Anderson pulls over Derrick Kittling on November 6. (photo: Louisiana State Police)
Law enforcement finally released videos, including body and dash camera footage, in the fatal shooting of Derrick Kittling in Alexandria, Louisiana.
This weekend, Louisiana State Police, in coordination with the Rapides Parish District Attorney’s office, provided the first look at multiple videos, including body and dash cam footage, from the Nov. 6 shooting. The update, which included a press conference Sunday as well as a 12-minute video dissecting the footage, also revealed the name of the officer involved—Rapides Parish Deputy Rodney Anderson—and why the routine stop escalated in the first place.
In the videos, Kittling doesn’t appear to know why he’s being stopped.
“What is wrong with you, why are you grabbing on me, man?” Kittling asks Anderson as the officer grabs him by the wrist.
“Turn around and up your hands behind your back,” the deputy says.
“For what? For what bro?” Kittling asks.
On Nov. 6, Anderson reportedly pulled over Kittling’s pickup truck for the window and exhaust violations, according to Louisiana State Police Col. Lamar Davis. Three different videos were released of the incident: dashboard camera footage from Anderson’s patrol car, Anderson’s police body camera footage, and cellphone video recorded by a bystander. (This video is different from the one shared with VICE News last week.)
The body cam footage shows Anderson pulling Kittling over and stepping partially out of his patrol car. The dash cam shows Kittling stepping all the way out. Anderson then orders Kittling nine times to step closer to the back of his truck before he makes his way to the rear of the Silverado.
The dashboard video shows Anderson approach Kittling and asking him to face the truck.
“What’s the issue?” Kittling asks twice as the officer grabs his wrist.
“You’re agitated, you’re turning, and you ain’t following directions,” Anderson says.
“I am following directions,” Anderson says. “I don’t hear you. Can I get my phone, sir?”
“We’ll get to that, just turn and face the truck,” Anderson says.
After Anderson asks twice more for Kittling around, Kittling asks why he’s being stopped. Anderson then draws his taser with his right hand and Kittling immediately grabs the deputy’s wrist before the officer’s arm could be fully extended to point the weapon. Holding each other, the two fall to the ground and the taser can be heard going off.
As the two struggle out of sight of the dashboard camera, Kittling can be heard asking, “What’s wrong with you bro?” on the body camera footage.
Kittling’s hand can then be seen grabbing the taser laying next to them, and the taser sounds off once more. The struggle continues for a few more seconds, as bystanders begin filming. From this angle, Kittling can be seen on top of Anderson. The Black man briefly gets to his feet before falling to the ground again in the struggle. Less than two seconds later, the deputy fires his gun. Only one shot can be heard on body camera footage, and police confirmed it struck Kittling in the head.
State police say Anderson called for emergency services, but Kittling succumbed to his injuries after being rushed to the hospital.
State Police confirmed during Sunday’s press conference that Kittling’s family was shown the police video before it was released to the public.
Last week, in an interview with VICE News, Haley questioned why Anderson chose to shoot Kittling after he grabbed a taser, considering that the cartridge in the taser had already been fired. On Sunday, Davis said that state police are in touch with the taser manufacturer and are verifying that this model, like many other traditional tasers, can only be fired one time per reload.
As previously reported by VICE News, Kittling was a mechanic who’d been visiting a friend in the Lower Third neighborhood of Alexandria to work on cars, according to his family’s attorney Ron Haley. In other bystander videos shared with VICE News last week, residents in the neighborhood can be heard saying Kittling was a frequent visitor to the neighborhood.
Anderson was in the Alexandria area, which lies outside of the Copseriff’s Office jurisdiction, because of prior reports of individuals “carrying weapons,” according to Davis. The Rapides Parish sheriff requested additional units go to that area to investigate but did not elaborate further.
Kittling’s family spokesperson, local community activist Tony Brown, told VICE News Monday that they still have questions about why Anderson was patrolling outside of his jurisdiction. They also question why Anderson didn’t explain to Kittling the reason for the stop, as Kittling asks in the video.
“I've never encountered in my 50-plus years of being on this planet, a police officer who did not let me know why I was being pulled over before he started putting hands on me to arrest me,” Brown said on the family’s behalf. “For this stop to take less than one minute ... from the time that officer got out of his vehicle to the time Derrick was killed is unconscionable and deserves an explanation.”
Davis said he doesn’t know when the state police will have another update for the public but promised to keep information flowing as the investigation continues. He asked the public for patience.
“There is an expectation that we can wrap up an investigation of this magnitude in a week or two, and that’s just not the case,” he said. “And you’re going to get the facts as we get them. And then we’re going to turn them over to the district attorney’s office and allow them to do their jobs.”
While traffic stops are considered routine police action, they can turn deadly, particularly for non-white people. From January 2017 through April 2022, officers killed 589 people during traffic stops, 28 percent of whom were Black, The Guardian reported. Earlier this year, in a case strikingly similar to Kittling’s, 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya was shot in the head by a Grand Rapid, Michigan, police officer after the two scuffled during a traffic stop. Last month, a Michigan judge ruled the now-former officer will stand trial on murder charges.
Critical Incident Community Briefing Rapides Parish Sheriff’s Office Deputy Involved Shooting
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Mamadou Diop, 52, stands in front of the strawberry farms where he does seasonal work in Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on October 16. Born in Senegal, Diop speaks more than five languages. He lives in makeshift housing near the farms, and he sends money back to his wife and children in Joal Fadiouth, Senegal. (photo: Ricci Shryock/NPR)
Spain a prolific producer of strawberries, and the jurisdiction of Huelva is where 80% of the country's berries are grown, in an industry that is increasingly demanding.
The work is year-round and requires field workers who take on the repetitive task planting seedlings and then harvesting when ready. This job usually falls on migrants, many from Africa.
They describe challenging conditions in the fields and with their bosses, who are often slow to give them work papers. When they are not working, they have to worry about ducking the police and danger in a nearby settlement where most of them live.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST: The U.N. Climate Change summit ended with a promise - to help developing countries deal with the impacts of a warming planet. Many people on the front lines of climate change have decided it's not worth waiting to find out whether countries keep those promises. Some of them are leaving.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: We're tracing a path from Senegal to Morocco to Spain, connecting the dots between climate change, migration and the political far right. Near the end of our journey, we arrived in southern Spain, where many people who came from sub-Saharan Africa discover the distance between their dreams of Europe and the reality.
HOPE JOSEPH: Because, you know, I don't have documents. I walk anywhere I got to walk.
SHAPIRO: There are two ways of looking at the life of Hope Joseph. First, you could see her through the eyes of her family.
JOSEPH: Everyone respect me in my family now.
SHAPIRO: To them, the 29-year-old is a provider, a pillar.
JOSEPH: My mother's called me that, say, this is my pillar. They say, my daughter, I cannot have problem with you because you are my pillar.
SHAPIRO: Her older sister says the same thing, and that's a big deal. As a younger sister, Hope is supposed to be secondary, but her whole family in Nigeria looks up to her. They depend on her, especially her 10-year-old boy.
JOSEPH: The other day, he said, when are you going to come back? I said, when I have document, I can go. For now, no.
SHAPIRO: She hasn't seen any of them in years because Hope Joseph has been working in the strawberry farms of southern Spain, sending half of every euro she earns back to Nigeria. We're sitting in her makeshift home built of wooden shipping pallets wrapped in tarps to keep out the rain.
This is beautiful. You have so many, like, pink and blue and flowered sheets...
JOSEPH: My color.
SHAPIRO: ...On the walls - your color.
JOSEPH: This my favorite.
SHAPIRO: The blue.
JOSEPH: Yeah.
SHAPIRO: Yeah, nice.
The floor is concrete. There's no electricity or plumbing. So here's the second way you could look at Hope's life.
JOSEPH: Life is very difficult.
SHAPIRO: She struggles every day just to survive here.
Is it difficult to be a woman here in the camp? We hear about people drinking, people violent.
JOSEPH: You can't sleep. Just yesterday, around 2 o'clock in the night, there is fire here. Everybody have to wake up and stand. They take drugs. They take smoke. They drink a lot. But I don't fight. I don't drink. I don't smoke. I look for my daily bread. That is it.
SHAPIRO: Life is difficult for everyone living in this settlement, even more so for a woman on her own. She has a big dog named Guapo to keep her safe.
Do you ever think, life was better in Africa - I should not have left?
JOSEPH: It's not better because I live there. It's not better. It's better here because at least my mother won't be hungry. I can feed her. Back in Africa, I cannot feed anybody. Here, I can feed somebody.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS CRUNCHING)
SHAPIRO: When you step outside of Hope's shack, you see hundreds of structures like hers.
FRANCISCO VILLA: (Through interpreter) This is a village. It's a village inside of a village.
SHAPIRO: Francisco Villa is with a nonprofit organization that works with the people who live here.
VILLA: (Through interpreter) So the population is very difficult to estimate because it fluctuates a lot. Right now, we're in the planting season.
SHAPIRO: He says the population could be between 200 and 800 depending on the time of year. And there are other settlements like this one across the region. Everything here hinges on the season. Strawberry farms stretch for miles in every direction. On one side of the settlement, endless rows of raised planting beds reach to the horizon. Sprinklers irrigate new seedlings.
(SOUNDBITE OF SPRINKLER RUMBLING)
SHAPIRO: On another side of the settlement, warehouses with load-in docks sit still and quiet, waiting for harvest season. When we began this journey back in Senegal, we met people who'd been to Spain and returned home. They warned young men how hard life in Europe can be. This settlement makes the point. There are piles of trash everywhere. But people living here have gotten creative.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED SPORTSCASTER: (Non-English language spoken).
SHAPIRO: In one hut, where someone hooked up a TV to a solar panel, everyone's watching a soccer game. There's an ad hoc garden just a few houses down.
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS CRUNCHING)
SHAPIRO: Just growing among the trash is a bunch of squash - like, pumpkins. And then there's a little plot of mint where there's just tons of mint. And I guess when people eat squash, they throw the seeds there, and then people can harvest the squash when they grow.
People secure their homes with padlocks on the doors.
(SOUNDBITE OF LOCK CLINKING)
SHAPIRO: One man from Senegal has a couch in his two-bedroom structure. On the wall behind him, he's written, VIP ghetto. He left home in 2014 and spent years getting here, passing through many countries on the way.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Togo. After Togo, I come in Niger, Niger entering Algeria, Algeria to Morocco.
SHAPIRO: He asks us not to use his name because he doesn't want his family to know how he's living. They still think Spain is the promised land.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) If one is living in a good house, a nice house, yeah, it's OK. But if you're living in a camp or in a house like this and then the family sees how you're living, they're going to say, well, it wasn't worth it to go to Europe in the first place.
SHAPIRO: Spanish law says people are eligible for permanent residency after they've been working three years as long as they meet certain conditions. That's more generous than the U.S. and many other countries. But the reality for guest workers in Spain is that it often takes much longer. This man has been at it for four years and still doesn't have his papers.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) I speak Spanish. I can write Spanish. I'm searching from - with my - the bosses I've worked with here to give me a contract for a year. But I don't have it because they think if they give you a contract and you get your papers, you'll leave. And they don't want you to leave. They want you to work and continue working for them.
SHAPIRO: We spoke with a farmer who leads an organization of small strawberry producers in the area, and he denied that farmers take advantage of the workers. But we also spoke with a local prosecutor who handles crimes against migrants, and he confirmed that farmers have all the leverage, and some of them abuse workers. The Senegalese man in the VIP ghetto says it's just the luck of the draw.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) That just depends on the boss. Sometimes there's people who come after you who only work a little bit, and then they give them their papers. I work a lot, and they haven't give me the papers.
SHAPIRO: Then, he says unprompted...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) I want to see my wife. I want to start a family with her. But I can't go back because of the papers. That's why people here, you know, become crazy - because they're thinking about these things all the time, and they can't go.
SHAPIRO: He says that's why fires break out all the time around here. Sometimes someone's careless with a propane cookstove, but often people just snap from all the stress.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: (Through interpreter) My mom - you know, she messages me sometimes. She says, I really want to see you. I want to see you before I die. I want you to come back. I hope that you have your papers so you can come back.
SHAPIRO: The fires and the violence have provided useful talking points for far-right politicians.
RAFAEL SEGOVIA: (Through interpreter) We're sorry to see the situation that many migrants experience in Europe.
SHAPIRO: Rafael Segovia is local president of a Spanish political party called Vox. The party offices are full of green balloons with the Vox logo. A banner on the wall lists their agenda for Spain. It talks about fighting the globalists, defending Western values and upholding traditional families. In Segovia's talking points, you hear some of the same phrases that like-minded politicians use all over the world.
SEGOVIA: (Through interpreter) Vox, just like other political leaders around the world such as Trump in the U.S., Orban in Hungary - we're all patriots. We are not against regulated immigration, but we are against the illegal migration we are seeing in all these countries, which the globalists support.
SHAPIRO: He specifically worries that international refugee law will begin to recognize people displaced by climate change.
SEGOVIA: (Through interpreter) If we hope to defend our cultural identity, we need to reject the idea of the climate refugee. If that notion is accepted, all these illegal migrants would have to be admitted because they would legally be considered refugees.
SHAPIRO: Vox is still a minority party in Spain, but it's growing fast. And all over Europe, right-wing politicians are winning elections on similar platforms. Segovia believes that informal settlements are a threat to stability, security and the culture of Spain. He accuses his political opponents of advocating for open borders.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: (Non-English language spoken).
SHAPIRO: A young man from Senegal named Seydou Diop takes a different view. Borders are already open, he says - just not for everyone.
SEYDOU DIOP: (Through interpreter) I ask you, how could it be that you were able to travel to my country with your passport? And me with my passport - I can't just go to the United States and travel with dignity.
SHAPIRO: Seydou Diop runs a community center for people who live in a nearby settlement of strawberry farm workers. For a membership fee, they get access to hot showers, Wi-Fi, even legal help and Spanish language lessons. It's all paid for by the migrants themselves.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: (Non-English language spoken).
SHAPIRO: People watch TV while they wait for their turn to do laundry. On this journey, we've asked dozens of migrants, what drove you to leave your home? Why did you make such a dangerous choice? Seydou Diop reframes the question. Why shouldn't anyone be able to travel for any reason or for no reason?
DIOP: (Through interpreter) I think that traveling is part of being free.
SHAPIRO: And now that you are here, how does the reality of Spain compare to the dream that was in your heart?
DIOP: (Through interpreter) I was speechless when I saw the reality here. I couldn't quite understand that the situation was so, so difficult. I became an activist the moment I arrived in this country because I felt hungry in this country. I slept on the streets in this country. And this is happening in societies that are supposed to be supportive and democratic.
SHAPIRO: While far-right politicians accuse immigrants of polluting Spanish culture, Seydou Diop views it differently. As he sees it, he's trying to help the country live up to its ideals.
(SOUNDBITE OF TINO DI GERALDO'S "POR DIGERALDINAS")
SHAPIRO: Tomorrow, our journey concludes in Madrid. We'll meet a man who grew up in a Senegalese fishing town, worked for years in Spain without papers and is now an elected political leader, one of very few Black people ever to have succeeded in modern Spanish politics.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: (Through interpreter) Honestly, it is a lot of pressure. That's why I have to think carefully about every single word, every step I take - because it's not just me. It's the whole community.
SHAPIRO: And you can find all of the stories from this trip at npr.org/climatemigration.
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Hundreds of members of the United Mine Workers of America march to the Manhattan headquarters of BlackRock, the largest shareholder in the mining company Warrior Met Coal on November 4, 2021, in New York City. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Stock buybacks are a major way the rich can hoard their wealth instead of investing in workers — which is why a coalition of unions is demanding an end to such buybacks.
Oil companies’ massive and record profits, together with an apparent disregard of the presidential threat of windfall tax legislation, highlight how the ability to affect economic change may not primarily lie with politicians at this point, but rather in the hands of US workers and their labor unions. Take the issue of oil company stock buybacks.
“We have serious concerns about the lack of investment back into facilities, particularly given the profits reported by the oil industry as a whole and the amount of announced stock buybacks,” explained Mike Smith, chair of the United Steelworkers’ (USW) National Oil Bargaining Program.
Oil company stock buybacks exemplify economic trends that a majority of Americans believe help the wealthy while hurting the working class and the poor. With rising consumer prices and decades of stagnant wages cutting into workers’ household budgets, Americans have consistently expressed concerns about governmental leadership on economic issues and low economic confidence over the last year.
Smith signaled that USW’s future bargaining and campaigns in the oil sector will mobilize workers to confront these corporate practices: “Rather than focus solely on shareholders, it’s essential for companies to commit to resources like safer technologies and decarbonization that will provide longevity and stability for the energy industry and its workforce. We intend to continue pushing for these types of investments.”
USW is not alone in this push. To fill a void of adequate governmental regulation or reform that would address corporate greed as a driving force of economic inflation, labor unions representing workers in a variety of employment sectors are organizing campaigns that expose the underlying causes of economic inequality and address Wall Street stock buybacks, dividends, and ownership in companies.
Workers Confront Wall Street Corporate Ownership
A handful of Wall Street asset management firms known as the Big Three — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — together comprise the largest shareholder in approximately 90 percent of S…P 500 firms and 96 percent of Fortune 250 companies. This concentration of ownership alarms both sides of the political spectrum for different reasons. But legislative regulation has yet to rein in Wall Street firms that arguably violate antitrust laws.
A recent Duke Law Journal article, “Agents of Inequality: Common Ownership and the Decline of the American Worker” by Zohar Goshen and Doron Levit, examines how the rise of powerful institutional investors like the Big Three impacts workers. The study finds that common owners — defined as “a few powerful institutional investors controlling large stakes in most U.S. corporations” — have contributed to a trend where “workers are bringing greater returns to their employers [and] shareholders are taking a larger and larger cut of each corporate dollar, suggesting that common owners have the market power to reduce hiring and keep wages down.”
Perhaps nowhere in the US labor movement is this battle for workers against Wall Street capital more visible than in Brookwood, Alabama, where the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) are engaged in a nineteenth-month strike with Warrior Met Coal.
Warrior Met, a company organized by Wall Street private equity funds during the US bankruptcy process, demanded significant cuts in pay and benefits from its workforce, then pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars as it took the company public. Now owned primarily by Wall Street management funds, Warrior Met spent $7.1 million during the third quarter of 2022 in expenses related to the interruption of business partially attributed to the labor dispute. It continued to post a net income of $98.4 million last quarter and has paid $1.3 billion in dividends to its shareholders over the last six years, according to UMWA.
“Warrior Met has the profitability to reach a fair contract with the union. It is simply choosing not to,” emphasizes Phil Smith, UMWA chief of staff and executive assistant to the president.
The extended labor dispute may be influenced by the fact that the Warrior Met Board has little accountability to its Wall Street shareholders, and company executives are able to cash in on this lack of oversight.
“Warrior Met is currently 96 percent owned by Wall Street investment funds. After the largest shareholders, where Vanguard has recently overtaken BlackRock, many funds own just a few percent. Ownership is very diluted among dozens of funds. No entity holds more than 15 percent of the stock, meaning there is no strong force bringing the company’s Board of Directors in line. The Board is essentially answerable to no one, leaving them free to take any action it wishes,” explains Smith.
The Warrior Met Board’s actions parallel a forty-year trend of an ever-widening gap between CEO and median worker pay that contributes to expanding and accelerating economic inequality in the United States. US Federal Reserve data shows that in the second quarter of 2022, the top 1 percent of earners held more wealth than the entire middle class in the United States combined (40th to 80th percentiles).
“Executive compensation is way out of proportion to worker pay and business operations,” Smith details. “In BlackRock’s report issued when it was Warrior Met’s largest shareholder, they highlighted this and voted against Warrior Met’s proposed Executive Officers’ Compensation Packages.”
Overall, stock ownership in the United States continues to be concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest, whitest, and most educated Americans, with 89 percent of stocks owned by households making over $100,000 a year. This means that both stock buybacks and dividend payments exacerbate racial and ethnic economic disparities, with black or Latino households owning only 1.6 percent of the total stock market value, according to US Federal Reserve data from the second quarter of 2022.
According to Goshen in an interview with Columbia Law School, “employees of public corporations are resigning themselves to depressed hiring and stagnant wages, even as their productivity — and consequently their value to the corporations — surges to record levels. Relatively richer investors get most of the benefit of higher stock prices.”
Moreover, “At present, Congress, to all appearances, does not have the political will to break up institutional common owners, as institutional investors have effectively ‘captured’ Congress through political spending. Since the 2008 financial crisis, institutional investors have drastically ramped up their campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures.”
While Wall Street investment in corporations has accelerated economic inequality and Congress has yet to pass overarching legislation to address this, unions are strategizing how to represent their members in labor disputes with companies that have Wall Street firms as major shareholders, and address the profit flow from workers into the pockets of wealthy investors.
Stock Buybacks as a Tool of Wall Street Greed
US families and workers struggled with financial hardships coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, including shifts in the job markets and increased costs for food, gas, and other necessities. At the same time, Wall Street lined the pockets of wealthy investors and corporate executives with record-breaking stock buybacks in 2021 worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Consumers still confront this corporate “greedflation,” in which unfettered and under-regulated accumulation of profits is concentrated in the hands of a privileged few able to increase consumer prices, suppress employee wages, and authorize stock buybacks for personal and shareholders’ financial gain.
Stock buybacks occur when a company purchases its own stock shares on the open market. Companies do this for two main reasons. First, stock buybacks are one way that companies distribute profits to shareholders who pay minimal taxes on buybacks versus dividend payments. This means that shareholders amass more personal income instead of paying more taxes that support schools, firefighters, libraries, and other shared public services.
Second, stock buybacks reduce the number of shares on the open market, and the value of the remaining shares typically increases due to reduced supply. Because of this, before 1982, stock buybacks were generally considered a form of market manipulation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.
“Stock buybacks were once illegal, and the practice should be outlawed again. After the pandemic slump, corporations across the economy have resumed this greed tool while citing ‘inflation’ and ‘supply chain’ issues for raising prices while racking up record profits,” explains Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA-CWA), representing fifty thousand flight attendants at nineteen airlines.
The AFA-CWA is part of an eight-union coalition that launched an aviation industry No Stock Buybacks campaign calling for airlines to “invest in the people on planes and all the workers who make them fly.” The goal of the campaign is to have airlines fix operational issues, provide enough staffing to meet the public’s travel demands, and conclude contract negotiations before any profit is sent to Wall Street through stock buybacks.
In aviation, as in other sectors of the economy, stock buybacks prioritize the short-term distribution of profits to a privileged few over reinvesting the money in the longer-term stability, growth, and operations of the company, particularly in preparation for unforeseen circumstances and market changes. From 2010 to 2019, major US airlines spent 96 percent of free cash flow on stock buybacks.
In the five years before the COVID-19 pandemic, United, Southwest, American, and Delta spent more than $39 billion in stock buybacks. Thus, as airlines spent profits enriching wealthy investors for over a decade, when hard times hit the airline industry in 2020, travelers and workers immediately felt the impact of the aviation industry’s investment in Wall Street instead of employees, operations, and cash reserves.
Sean M. O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, emphasizes that the campaign goals benefit both workers and consumers: “Greedy corporations would rather divert profits to Wall Street through stock buybacks than focus on workers and the flying public. We cannot allow this to happen. Our unions came together early in the pandemic to secure the Payroll Support Program (PSP) relief package which protected workers and also barred airline executives from stock buybacks.”
O’Brien refers to how aviation unions successfully paused airline stock buybacks by intensively lobbying for PSP legislation that met the needs of their members, while recognizing that travelers also benefit from airlines’ investment in operations and staffing. Money that airlines received through the PSP, initially part of the 2020 CARES Act and extended under subsequent legislation, set financial regulations on airlines receiving program funds, including capping executive compensation and banning stock buybacks for one year beyond the relief period. However, that ban on stock buybacks concluded on September 30, 2022 — directly after a “summer of airline chaos” with increased flight cancelations, delays, and prices.
Through union-endorsed PSP legislation that “included strong labor protections,” president of the Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA) Captain Joe DePete explains that “U.S. carriers and their crewmembers were well positioned for the increased travel demand we are experiencing today. However, some airlines failed to properly plan, resulting in the operational issues and increased cancellations causing significant frustrations for passengers and airline employees alike.”
The No Stock Buybacks coalition channels public frustration over airlines’ recent unpredictable operations and mobilizes union members to pressure the aviation industry at a time when, according to Nelson, “nearly 700,000 aviation workers are at the table bargaining for our next contracts. . . . Our efforts have successfully stopped the return of stock buybacks in aviation for now.”
New legislation has yet to address windfall profits or stock buybacks; the No Stock Buybacks coalition has effectively deterred airlines from reengaging in this practice. Together with UMWA, USW, and other organized workers that demand their unions engage in creating a more equitable economic system, labor is challenging Wall Street power.
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Pablo Beltrán, representing the National Liberation Army, left, shakes hands with Iván Rueda, Colombia's peace commissioner in Caracas on Monday. (photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP)
Negotiations with leftist guerrillas in Caracas are part of President Gustavo Petro’s promise to bring ‘total peace’
Petro, a former member of the M-19 insurgency who took office in August, has promised to bring “total peace” to Colombia by negotiating with rebels and crime factions involved in drug trafficking and illegal mining.
“We cannot see each other as enemies, the labor we have is of reconciliation,” said the ELN negotiator Pablo Beltrán. “We hope not to fail these expectations for change.”
The talks – which began in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas – will rotate among guarantor countries Venezuela, Cuba and Norway, according to the Colombian government.
“We are committed to talks with an organization that also wants peace,” said the head government negotiator, Otty Patiño. “We are going to reach safe port … a real peace.”
The delegations had their first meeting on Monday, Colombia’s high peace commissioner, Danilo Rueda, said.
Previous attempts at negotiations with the ELN, which has about 2,400 combatants and was founded in 1964 by radical Catholic priests, did not advance partly because of dissent within its ranks.
The group is believed to have about 4,000 fighters in Colombia, and is also present in Venezuela, where it runs illegal goldmines and drug trafficking routes.
The organization became Colombia’s largest remaining guerrilla group after a 2016 peace agreement disbanded the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as Farc. Since the historic deal was signed, the ELN has increased its activities in territories formerly under Farc control.
Leaders have said the group is united, but it is unclear how much sway negotiators hold over active units. Much of the ELN’s negotiating team is decades older than many of its fighters.
The negotiations do not mean a suspension of military operations against the rebels, Colombia’s defence minister, Iván Velásquez, said earlier on Monday.
Talks between the ELN and the government of Juan Manuel Santos began in 2017 in Ecuador, later moving to Cuba, but were called off in 2019 by Santos’s successor, Iván Duque, because the ELN refused to halt hostilities and killed 22 police cadets in a bombing.
Petro has also promised to fully implement a 2016 peace deal with the now-demobilized Farc rebels. More than 450,000 people have been killed in Colombia’s six decades of internal conflict.
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West Africa. (photo: Getty Images)
A new study says climate change also made the weather 20 percent wetter.
The study from the World Weather Attribution, or WWA, also concluded that 2022’s seasonal rainfall in two major West African water regions, the Lake Chad and Niger Basins, was 20 percent wetter due to the impacts of climate change. Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, all of which have territories within either of the two basins, were the most impacted by the flooding.
The team of researchers used historic weather data and computerized climate models to compare the likely intensity of seasonal rainfall in the Lake Chad Basin with and without human activities altering the climate. They found that the region’s extreme rainfall would have been unlikely without human-caused warming. Now, such rain is likely to occur once every 10 years.
In September, Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world, experienced its heaviest seasonal rainfall in over 30 years; Thousands of residents of N’Djamena, the capital, were forced to flee their flooded homes. Lake Chad had received rain earlier than the seasonal norm, causing the lake’s water levels to rise higher than the two rivers that feed it. The excess water then flooded surrounding towns and villages. That same month, in Nigeria, more than 600 people died and nearly 1.5 million were displaced as a result of flooding, particularly in already vulnerable fishing and farming communities along the Niger River.
West Africa’s monsoon season occurs from May to October and frequently causes severe flooding in much of the region. However, the devastation caused by the historic flooding, the WWA’s researchers noted, was far greater due to the proximity of human settlements and agriculture to flood plains. High rates of poverty, as well as political instability in the region, has increasingly driven communities to settle in geographic areas that are more vulnerable to flooding and other natural disasters. Somewhat paradoxically, the climate in the Lake Chad and Niger River Basins is also getting drier due to desertification, as the Sahara desert to the north continues to encroach south. This phenomenon is also contributing to impoverished communities moving closer to flood plains in order to survive.
Flood vulnerability has also increased the risk of water-born diseases being transmitted to communities. Cholera outbreaks were feared in Nigeria in the aftermath of September’s flooding. In Pakistan, where the summer’s monsoon rains displaced millions and submerged a third of the country, malaria, diarrhea, and other diseases spiked in flood-ravaged communities.
The disproportionate impacts of climate change on the developing world have become a rallying cry for activists from Africa, Asia, and parts of the Americas as this year’s United Nations climate conference, known as COP27, continues in Egypt. Lake Chad and Niger Basin countries are among the nations least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, which are the largest contributing factor in human-caused climate change.
“Africa accounts for only four percent of global emissions, so polluters should not be allowed to influence decisions for their good,” said Adenike Oladosu, a Nigerian climate activist who attended COP27. “Rather, decisions should be taken in favor of vulnerable countries, like mine, that are affected the most by the climate crisis.”
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