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The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
Elon Musk, the platform’s new owner, said that the policy was designed to “curate a world-class collection of the most prominent paranoiacs working today.”
“We will be vetting conspiracy theorists to insure that they have an established track record of disseminating falsehoods,” he said. “For the benefit of our users, we want to make a clear distinction between the Dinesh D’Souzas of the world and some rookie crackpot hoping to become a major-league crackpot.”
Musk’s announcement, however, drew howls of protests from the baseless-theory-spreading community, with some members complaining that Twitter was discriminating against no-name fabulists looking for their big break.
“I recently tweeted that John Wilkes Booth killed Lincoln as part of a drug deal gone bad,” @OptimusTruthBeacon911 said. “If that doesn’t get me a blue check, what will?”
Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, speaks during a news conference following a Federal Open Market Committee meeting in Washington, D.C., Nov. 2, 2022. (photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg)
Kansas City Fed President Esther George should be celebrated for being honest about how the Federal Reserve works.
All 12 members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee voted for the increase. One of them was Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. George then did something unusual in an interview with National Public Radio: She told the truth about what the Fed does.
“We see today that there is a bit of a savings buffer still sitting for households, that may allow them to continue to spend in a way that keeps demand strong,” she said. “That suggests we may have to keep at this for a while.”
In other words, the problem today as seen by the Fed is that regular Americans have too much money. And the Fed is going to keep bludgeoning the economy until this is no longer the case.
This is essentially what Paul Volcker famously said in 1979 soon after he took over as chair of the Fed: “The standard of living of the average American has to decline.”
To the ears of normal people, statements like those of George and Volcker sound appalling and outrageous. And perhaps they are. But George is not a monster; she also expressed concern that the Fed was going too far, saying, “I have been in the camp of steadier and slower [rate increases], to begin to see how those effects from a lag will unfold.” You could honestly argue that she should be celebrated rather than blamed for her words: She was being honest about the Fed’s mission and how it functions.
In 1977, Congress formally instructed the Fed that its mission was to “promote effectively the goals of maximum employment [and] stable prices.” But what does this mean? And what happens when these two goals conflict?
In theory unemployment could get so low that regular workers could bid up their wages so fast that inflation would skyrocket. Definitely in practice we know unemployment can be so high that the workers can’t get higher wages, and as the economy grows, all the gains flow to the top.
The Fed sits directly on the fault line generated by the oldest, most fundamental conflict in history: that between rich creditors and working-class debtors.
In any society with huge wealth disparities like the U.S., creditors are always terrified that debtors will get control of the monetary system, print tons of money, and destroy the value of the creditors’ financial assets.
Right now, U.S. households have about $16 trillion in debt, $11.4 trillion of which is mortgages. Another $1.59 trillion is student debt. But thanks to the 14 percent cumulative inflation over the past two years, this $16 trillion today is only worth what $14 billion was this time in 2020. I.e., $2 trillion has been effectively transferred from creditors to debtors.
This is by no means a straight $2 trillion transfer from the rich to the poor. It’s complicated. Lots of rich people have big mortgages, for instance. But on net, it is indeed a big loss of wealth for the affluent, and a gain for people further down the income scale.
The Fed’s job is to mediate between these two directly opposed interests. Creditors generally want lower inflation and higher unemployment; debtors generally will benefit from the opposite. The Fed’s preferred approach is to pretend that these interests are not opposed. But George just busted out with the truth: They are.
After a huge increase over the past several years, poorer Americans now enjoy a higher net worth than they’ve ever had in U.S. history. This gives them a little unaccustomed leverage, some wiggle room, the chance to quit their job for a better one, even while, as George puts it, they “can continue to spend in a way that keeps demand strong.”
This is a nightmare for rich creditors. They want this working-class leverage eliminated ASAP and inflation crushed.
The Federal Reserve responds to pressure from rich creditors with alacrity, in part because rich creditors are mostly the only ones who understand the Fed and yell at it. So the Fed is now purposefully trying to slow the economy until people’s savings are gone and they can’t afford to keep buying stuff.
This truth about how the world works is an ugly one. The journalist William Greider explained this in his book “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country”:
The economic liquidation, in fact, resembled the form, though not the content, of a primitive religious practice — the pagan ritual of human sacrifice. Some individuals were chosen to serve as victims for the good of the entire society … in moral terms, the process was sadistic, an example of what Thorstein Veblen called the enduring barbarism of modern society.
The economic victims were chosen at random, but mostly from among the weaker groups in the society. The methodology employed by the Federal Reserve to induce contraction … insured that the strongest individuals and enterprises would be able to evade selection. There was this hierarchy within democracy — a hierarchy of vulnerability.
There almost certainly are better and fairer ways of dealing with inflation than human sacrifice. For instance, the central tension between debtors and creditors at the heart of the Fed’s mission would be greatly reduced if we were a more egalitarian country. But we’ll never be able to figure this out unless we’re willing to look directly at reality.
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A resident looks out the window holding a candle for light inside her house during a power outage, in Borodyanka, Kyiv region, Ukraine. (photo: Emilio Morenatti/AP)
To see what this war looks like for many of us, you just have to step into an elevator. Natalia Horban, 36, and her 18-month-old daughter Alina returned to their apartment building after a late morning walk last week. They arrived 10 minutes before noon, when a scheduled blackout was supposed to start. But no sooner had they entered their elevator than the power gave out. The emergency button didn’t work, and neither did the phone. Natalia began to bang on the door, and the concierge downstairs heard her and called the emergency services. If things had gone differently, the mother and her child could have spent up to five hours in the elevator. As it happened, they only spent two.
It was no fun, to be sure. But at least they had a bit of support: a box left in the elevator containing some food and sedatives. They didn’t end up using any of the supplies, but just having the box in the elevator was a great comfort. “I didn’t use the box, but psychologically it made the whole thing a lot easier,” Natalia told me.
Earlier this month, Russia launched a bombing campaign specifically targeting civilian infrastructure all across Ukraine — including cities close to the western border. Since then, Ukrainians have been adapting to radically changed conditions. President Volodymyr Zelensky said that about 4 million people were subjected to electricity rationing only on Oct. 28. It might be worse as Russia has attacked even more electricity facilities since. Recently, as much as 80 percent of Kyiv residents have found themselves without running water.
Ukrainian roads, even national highways, have lost their lighting; there is little light on the city streets. Villages, towns and cities don't have electricity for hours almost every day.
So how do ordinary Ukrainians fight back? We are stocking up on warm clothes and candles and giving each other batteries and power banks as gifts. We are turning off appliances to economize on electricity. In our building, it was the local barber shop that started the emergency box in the elevator, filling it with cookies, water, garbage bags and medicine. On the first day, people in three entryways of the building got stuck in the elevators during power outages. The next day, residents filled the boxes with bottled water, chocolates, fruit and makeshift first-aid kits.
No one would claim that we’re enjoying this. Karyna Kadun is a doctor who lives in Irpin, which was destroyed by the Russians during the initial invasion. She told me that it’s still hard to remain connected with the world since the latest blackouts started: “When the power goes out, everyone switches to mobile internet, and then the connection is so bad that it’s impossible to even read the news. We don’t even know what’s happening around us. Yesterday, something exploded nearby — we didn’t even know what it was.”
For many Ukrainians, some of these hardships feel familiar. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, electricity became a luxury. I remember doing school homework by candlelight. No one could watch TV or listen to the radio, and neighbors would get together to share what news there was. Our neighbor Halyna sometimes knitted sweaters in our kitchen; that’s how we entertained ourselves without light and saved candles.
In my hometown of Kherson, we couldn’t even imagine that the taps marked “hot” could ever have warm water. We had cold water twice a day — one hour in the morning and one in the evening. If we got more running water than that, it felt like a holiday. And this was happening in almost every region, except in Kyiv, where things were better.
But there is a fundamental difference between then and now. What happened then was because of the poverty that ensued from the collapse of the U.S.S.R. What’s happening now is the direct result of Russia’s war. Perhaps paradoxically, these new blackouts and the loss of heat and running water underscore just how much progress Ukraine has achieved since the Soviet days.
Ukrainians are not giving up. We believe that this crisis will end. We know that Russian President Vladimir Putin is the leader of a poor, extremely corrupt and unequal country, whose soldiers in Ukraine steal toilets and washing machines. Now, he is trying to bring the dysfunctional 1990s back to Ukraine — but we’re not going to let him. We refuse. We know that we can win the war, and we don’t want to go back to the past. We’ve been fighting for our independence for 31 years, and we know that it’s the most precious thing we’ve achieved.
“We just need to go through this,” Natalia told me after her elevator adventure. “It makes no sense to go to western Ukraine, because it’s the same everywhere in the country. And I don’t want to leave the country. I want to stay at home. I hope that everything will be over soon.”
Millions of Ukrainians share her wish. Perhaps the Western countries that are considering whether to send us more modern air-defense systems can take it into account.
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Abortion rights protesters in Louisville, Kentucky. (photo: Jon Cherry/Getty)
An anti-abortion constitutional amendment identical to one Kansas voters rejected this summer is on Kentucky’s November ballot.
Now comes the next test: Kentucky, which is already enforcing a near-total ban on the procedure.
Voters this month will weigh in on a measure nearly identical to what Kansans rejected. A yes vote would specify that the state’s constitution does not protect the right to an abortion. A no vote would leave the constitution as it is, allowing for the possibility that the state’s Supreme Court could strike down Kentucky’s abortion ban.
Currently, Kentucky’s abortion providers are challenging the state’s abortion ban in court, but the case is on hold until the election results come in. At the time this article was originally published, the state’s two clinics had already stopped offering abortions, but circumstances may have since changed.
There is so far no public polling available on the race, which has already drawn more than $3 million, with the vast majority of money going to abortion rights organizations. If Kentuckians reject the measure, the result could strengthen the argument that abortion providers are making: Voters of all political stripes oppose laws banning abortion.
“It would really drive home the narrative that abortion is a winning issue,” said Tamarra Weider, the state’s director of Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates, an advocacy organization. “We have a real opportunity to change what, nationally, people think about Kentucky. And hopefully they’ll reconsider not only abortion rights in Kentucky but look across at those other red states that people don’t invest in.”
It’s an uphill battle. A 2018 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that Kentucky voters are evenly split on abortion, with about half believing it should be legal in most or all cases and half saying it should be banned in most or all cases.
“I don’t think Kentucky’s voters are as likely to express pro-choice preferences as Kansas voters did,” said Steven Voss, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in state politics and voting behavior. “Yes, they’re both red states with typical Republican preferences. But the extent to which ‘moral conservatism’ — conservatism on moral and cultural issues — drives Republican affiliations here is stronger than you see in Kansas.”
But public opinion on abortion appears to have shifted since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and abortion bans moved from a theoretical possibility to concrete reality. Nationally, abortion bans appear less popular than before, and more voters are likely to say abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Bans without exceptions for health, rape or incest are especially unpopular — a pattern abortion rights advocates hope to leverage this fall.
Polling conducted this summer for the Democratic Governors Association suggested that the vast majority of Kentuckians oppose a total ban on abortion, and that they generally oppose the state’s current law, which prohibits abortions with no exception for cases of rape or incest.
“Kentucky has already banned abortion,” said Rachel Sweet, campaign manager for Protect Kentucky Access, an abortion rights coalition opposing the amendment. “That being the case is in some ways changing the way I think Kentuckians are feeling about the ballot measure — because they’ve already seen the bad stuff that can happen when you support these extreme abortion restrictions.”
Sweet came to Kentucky this August, after leading the Kansas effort to defeat its proposed constitutional amendment hoping to replicate abortion rights groups’ success in Kansas.
For two red states with Democratic governors, Kentucky and Kansas remain incredibly different. In Kansas, abortion remains legal, and in Kentucky, it is not. Kansas has more registered Republicans. But Kentucky, Voss noted, has a larger share of socially conservative Democrats. There is a deeper running evangelical culture, a group that polling shows is less likely to support abortion access.
Still, Sweet suggested, there may be some similarities in how to approach the issue.
“My job is not to convince someone who is adamantly pro-choice that Roe being overturned is bad. That’s not who I’m talking to because that’s a person who is already going to vote,” Sweet said. “This campaign is extremely targeted to you if you are somewhere in the middle, because that is most of the country, and it is a voting bloc that is very concerned about the state of affairs at the moment.”
The campaign is still in its early stages. Protect Kentucky Access has begun sending people door to door, and has so far run one TV ad highlighting a woman who could not receive an abortion after a wanted pregnancy developed unspecified medical complications.
Kentucky’s abortion ban technically has an exception if terminating a pregnancy will save the pregnant person’s life. But doctors across the country have reported that, even when abortion bans have life-saving exceptions for the pregnant person, the language is too vague for physicians to feel comfortable providing that care.
The emphasis on medical emergencies is deliberate, Sweet said, and will be a theme of the campaign.
“These are the cases that all these extreme restrictions don’t make an exception for,” Sweet said. “These laws really do impact situations and circumstances that are universally understandable. These laws are really outside the scope of everyone’s values.”
So far, Yes for Life, Kentucky’s main campaign arm supporting the amendment, has organized rallies across the state in favor of the amendment. It’s not clear what other activities they have planned, and when asked for comment, Yes for Life did not offer further specifics on campaigning, other than to say they are working “around the clock” to get people to vote for the amendment.
If the amendment passes, abortion is likely to remain unavailable in Kentucky. There will be few nearby options for people seeking one to travel. Only two of Kentucky’s neighboring states — Virginia and Illinois — do not have abortion bans on the books, though Ohio’s six-week ban and Indiana’s total prohibition are currently blocked by courts.
If the amendment fails, it’s still not clear what happens next. The state’s courts will still have to weigh in on whether to allow Kentucky’s abortion ban to stay in effect. And even if the state’s abortion ban is struck down, state lawmakers could pursue other restrictions when they return to Frankfort next year.
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Demonstrators protest outside a closed Starbucks location in Seattle on July 16. Starbucks insisted the closures weren't related to the unionization drive but were due to safety issues. (photo: David Ryder/Bloomberg)
An NBC News analysis found complaints over closures and other alleged retaliation jumped nearly 80% from before the pandemic. Federal officials this week sided with Starbucks workers in a case in Ithaca, New York.
But by early 2022, the group of about 20 were out of their jobs.
The company, G…D Integrated, had closed the factory, saying it had suddenly lost its decade-old contract with a Japanese company, workers said. The welders saw another motive: retaliation for the union effort.
“They’ve been building these decks for over 10 years,” said Rhoades, 46. “And then two months after we organize, they’re taking everything away from us.”
The welders filed complaints about the closure to the National Labor Relations Board, part of a sharp increase this year in worker grievances alleging retaliatory shutdowns and other illegal anti-union activity. Overall the numbers are still small, but organizers say store closings are one way companies have tried to tamp down union drives amid post-pandemic worker frustration and rising economic pressure.
G…D Integrated denied it violated labor laws.
“The Company denies the charges that were filed, and has cooperated with the NLRB in its investigation of these unfounded allegations,” spokesman Curt Fisher said in a statement, noting that “no findings of any violations have been issued.” The case is still pending.
When asked specifically why the shop had been closed, Fisher responded by email, pointing a reporter to the company’s statement.
The issue would most likely have remained under the radar but for the rise in similar complaints following store closings at some of the nation’s most prominent companies. Starbucks closed multiple stores this year following union activity. In Maine, bosses shuttered a Chipotle outpost that was on track to become the first to vote on a union.
This week, NLRB officials sided with Starbucks workers in Ithaca, New York, finding the company had violated multiple labor laws during the closing of a store there. And in a separate complaint, they agreed with workers in the Chipotle case, saying the company had unlawfully closed the store and laid off employees to discourage organizing. In both cases, officials asked that the companies reopen the stores.
A spike in anti-union closure complaints
So far this year, workers have filed 34 unfair labor charges under the legal category for complaints about retaliatory shutdowns, relocations and work subcontracting, according to an NBC News analysis of NLRB data. (The NLRB doesn’t isolate shutdown data specifically.) That number more than doubled from 2021, NBC found, and jumped about 80 percent from 2017-2019, the three years before the pandemic, when complaints ranged from 16 to 23 annually.
That rise comes as worker complaints about unfair labor practices more generally were up 19 percent as of September, compared to the same period in 2021, according to the NLRB.
Many businesses say the closings are not directly related to union efforts but reflect new financial constraints in the economy. Trader Joe’s, for example, abruptly closed a wine shop in the center of New York City where workers had been organizing. Spokeswoman Nakia Rohde said the Manhattan closure had nothing to do with the organizing and that the wine shop was one of its “least profitable stores.”
Chipotle said that the closure in Maine also had nothing to do with union activity at the store and that the company respected its employee’s rights to organize. A store in Lansing, Michigan later voted to unionize with the Teamsters.
“Our operational management reviewed this situation as it would any other restaurant with these unique staffing challenges,” Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s chief corporate affairs officer, said in a statement.
The vegetarian food maker Amy’s Kitchen, which closed a Bay Area factory in July after employees and a local union filed charges of unfair labor practices, said its costs had gone up significantly. Spokeswoman Felicia Collins said that the facility was losing more than $1 million a month, and that the tight labor market, supply chain backlogs and rising prices of goods, like sunflower oil, had made business tough.
“We unconditionally respect our employees’ rights and freedoms regarding unionization,” she said in a statement. “While this was a difficult decision, it was necessary for the business so we could continue to support the rest of the company.”
Like many other aspects of labor law, closure violations can be hard to prove and enforce. Employers are forbidden from explicit retaliation for unionizing but are allowed to close stores if the legitimate economic consequences of unionization force it. And there aren’t significant financial penalties for companies even when they are found to have committed wrongdoing: Companies have to pay back wages for dismissed employees, minus any income those workers earned in the meantime. In rare cases, companies can be required to reopen a closed location.
“It’s almost impossible to get a smoking gun,” said John Logan, a San Francisco State University historian who has written extensively in support of labor rights.
Grease traps
At Starbucks, the poster child for the current organizing uptick, the closing of stores with union activity has been particularly pronounced. Workers at more than 315 stores held union elections in the last year, with a wide majority — 80 percent — voting in favor.
But Starbucks has pushed back forcefully –– aided by the law firm Littler Mendelson, which states on its website “we excel in union avoidance” –– prompting workers to file hundreds of unfair labor practices complaints to the NLRB.
Starbucks announced the closure of at least 19 stores over the summer, mostly in urban areas, citing safety issues. More than 40 percent of the stores had union campaigns, according to data from Starbucks Workers United, the union that has been organizing the workers. Meanwhile, stores that have filed for union elections, including the more than 250 stores where workers have voted to form unions, make up less than 4 percent of the companies’ approximately 9,000 corporate-owned stores.
“It’s because we had such a loud voice,” said Evan Sunshine, 20, a student who worked at the Ithaca store, which abruptly closed in June. “They wanted to turn us into an example to crush any other efforts.”
In an email to NBC News in October, Starbucks said that it had closed 29 stores since July, and that fewer than a quarter were unionized.
More broadly, workers have filed 402 unfair labor charges against the company, alleging retaliation like firings, write-ups and other discipline for organizing work. NLRB officials have so far issued 45 complaints, in which they found merit in 149 of these charges, spokeswoman Kayla Blado said. Those complaints, except for two that judges have already ruled on, will be heard by administrative law judges at the NLRB.
Starbucks has denied union busting in Ithaca or at any of its stores. “We have and will continue to follow the established law and the NLRB processes for all negotiations. We respect our partners’ voices and their right to be represented by a union,” the company said in part in a statement from spokesman Andrew W. Trull. “When we close stores, it is done with deep care and urgency, our goal is to ensure that every partner is supported in their situation.”
At its Ithaca store, Starbucks cited issues with the facility in a memo to workers in June, including a lack of enough ice bins and a faulty grease trap that dated to the previous tenant of the building, according to a copy reviewed by NBC News.
Workers at the store had been the ones to raise the alarm about the grease trap in the first place, two of them said. They had even staged a one day strike — the first by workers at the company — over the issue in April. And the ice bin issue had been resolved months previously, they said.
Workers said seeing those issues as a reason for closing the store made them feel like the company was using their work against them. They said the store, on a busy corner across from Cornell University, was clearly profitable, according to Sunshine.
“None of us thought they’d do it,” 22-year-old Nadia Vitek, another worker at the store, said. “They admitted to us that profit had nothing to do with the closure. … The reasons didn’t really make sense to me. I don’t see how it could be anything other than retaliation.”
Starbucks did not respond to questions about the Ithaca store’s financial stability.
The NLRB is asking the company to reopen the location.
A timeless tactic
Jennifer Abruzzo, the general counsel for the NLRB, said in an interview that illegal threats of plant or store closings had been found to be one of the most effective tactics at quelling union activity and that it was one of many the board sought to regulate.
Shutdowns serve “as a reminder to employees that every time that they try to improve their working conditions, they’ll be met with complete destruction of their livelihood,” Abruzzo said.
Logan, the historian, said closing stores that are unionizing has contributed to the offshoring of domestic jobs in recent decades, particularly in sectors like manufacturing, as companies have sought cheaper labor abroad.
“For several decades the threat was always like, ‘We’ll move the plant to Mexico or some other low wage country if you guys form a union,’” he said.
A Cornell University study in the years after the 1996 North American Free Trade Agreement found that employers made threats to close all or part of a facility in the event of a union win in 51 percent of union campaigns. In industries where jobs could easily be moved overseas — manufacturing and call centers, as opposed to nursing homes, for example — those threats were made in 68 percent of campaigns.
“It’s not magical or mysterious. It’s quite strategic,” said Jane McAlevey, a veteran organizer and fellow, at the University of California at Berkeley.
‘We were going to vote yes, no matter what’
Workers at shops that were shut down said the resulting job losses were crushing.
In Augusta, Maine, after Chipotle closed its store on July 19 — the same day a federal hearing was scheduled on the vote to unionize –– workers accused the company of blacklisting them from getting other jobs at Chipotle.
Brandi McNease, 38, a leader of the Augusta organizing effort, said she believed she had been blocked from applying for other jobs on the company’s jobs site. She kept getting a message that her password needed to be reset, but the email to reset it never came.
She says she was only able to apply for a job after making a new profile with a different email address on the site. And even then, she said she was told by a hiring manager that someone at the company had said that she was not supposed to be rehired.
“Chipotle brought in $7.5 billion last year during Covid. But they are so unwilling to let 18 people have a say in one store,” McNease said.
NLRB regional director Laura A. Sacks wrote in the complaint issued Thursday that Chipotle refused to rehire McNease because of her involvement in organizing in another violation of labor law.
Chipotle did not comment on McNease’s claims about her job application.
Rhoades, the welder in Illinois, said the closure of his shop was “devastating,” sending him and his co-workers scrambling to line up other work after a decade of stability. Still, he doesn’t regret their efforts.
“Somebody was going to end up getting killed if we didn’t get some stuff fixed,” he said. “Every worker deserves some kind of representation.”
Nayib Bukele in 2019. (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Three decades of U.S. intervention and opposition policies have helped Nayib Bukele monopolize power.
Only one detail marred the occasion: El Salvador’s constitution prohibits immediate reelection. Not only do multiple articles forbid it, but one demands “insurrection” against violators.
Bukele’s announcement marks another stage in El Salvador’s slide toward authoritarianism. Since March, the country has been in a “state of exception,” and officials have arrested over 50,000 civilians in ruthless anti-crime sweeps.
The Biden administration and local critics have justly condemned Bukele’s policies as a menace to democracy. Yet in many ways, his rise to power equally implicates the United States and opposition parties. For three decades, U.S. immigration and security schemes, neoliberal reform, and punitive law enforcement practices have weakened Salvadoran democracy. Rather than an anomalous renegade, Bukele and his authoritarian program reflect a painful history of foreign intervention, failed policies, and frustrated hope.
Bleeding Shadows
Authoritarianism previously sank roots in El Salvador in 1932, after General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez orchestrated La Matanza, slaughtering around 30,000 civilians—many of whom were Indigenous—to suppress a popular uprising. Political scientist William Stanley concludes that a “protection racket state” arose in the massacre’s blood-streaked wake. Businessmen ceded state power to the military, while officers wielded it to protect the class structure.
The Cold War kindled elite fears of another leftist uprising, while slotting the country into the United States’ strategic architecture for the hemisphere and cementing the repressive status quo. When citizens briefly ousted military rule in October 1960, U.S. officials cautioned the new junta against progressive reform before backing a counter-coup that January.
By the 1970s, a potent fusion of liberation theology and Marxism galvanized social movements demanding democracy and economic justice, which radicalized as officers rigged elections in 1972 and 1976, blocking the path to reform. In 1980, the left formed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and mobilized to sweep the military from power.
Yet again, the United States intervened, turning El Salvador into the third largest aid recipient, funneling some $5 billion in assistance over 12 years to frustrate the revolution. As tensions spiraled, the chain-smoking colonel Roberto D’Aubuisson assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero, a leading liberation theologian and critic of intervention. In popular memory, his assassination became the immediate catalyst of the war.
After U.S. officials dismissed evidence of D’Aubuisson’s culpability, the conservative hardliner founded the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), a leading political party. Meanwhile, the United States advised Salvadoran forces, while concealing a cascade of human rights violations.
In 1981, the U.S.-trained Atlácatl Battalion slayed around 1,000 civilians in the El Mozote Massacre. In the aftermath, Washington blamed the FMLN to protect the flow of military aid. An embassy officer later admitted, “The United States was complicit.”
Ultimately, the FMLN refused to surrender, compelling the oligarchy to negotiate and ushering in the country’s democratic transition in 1992, when it became a political party. Yet the war left El Salvador with an immense legacy of violence and thwarted demands for social justice, a layered history of repression that hung over society like bleeding shadows.
Peace Atrocities
For most Salvadorans, the postwar period was a time of collective vertigo and catastrophic continuity. Under the direction of the U.S.-funded Foundation for Social and Economic Development (FUSADES), successive ARENA administrations embraced neoliberalism, drastically shrinking public expenditure, privatizing state assets, and pursuing dollarization. Anthropologist Ellen Moodie argues that El Salvador became a neoliberal laboratory, as the oligarchy exploited the dislocation and shock of war to restructure the economy.
Wealth seemed to appear out of thin air—the proliferating businesses of anonymous investors, remittances from citizens residing abroad, new mansions with soaring walls and concertina bramble. Yet as social exclusion persisted alongside political liberalization, inequality and violence became defining features of Salvadoran democracy. Migrant labor turned into a leading export, as citizens sought jobs abroad. By 2004, 22 percent of homes received remittances, which constituted 16 percent of the GDP and a leading source of foreign exchange.
Even as U.S. officials propounded economic liberalization, they deported immigrants—including gang members (maras) from Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, formed by desperate refugee youth in Los Angeles. Deportations further overwhelmed El Salvador, while conspiring with structural poverty to fuel gang activity and violent crime. By the time UN forces left in 1995, homicide rates approached wartime levels.
In 2003, President Francisco Flores announced his Mano Dura (Iron Fist) policy, promising to eradicate crime with uncompromising force. An ARENA memo later revealed that the policy was a plot to boost the party’s appeal before the 2004 election.
The national press echoed Flores’s penal populism, stoking a climate of moral panic. “Gang members have a mental illness called murder,” Police Chief Ricardo Menesses asserted. El Diario de Hoy reported that gangsters “participate in satanic rites,” while La Prensa Gráfica depicted them as “vampires.”
Incessant footage of tattooed prisoners—theatrically stripped, manacled, and paraded before news cameras—became a biopolitical spectacle, converting maras into embodied abstractions that the government exploited to secure both the fear and allegiance of scandalized citizens.
Meanwhile, the United States heavily subsidized Mano Dura. The Bush administration established the International Law Enforcement Academy in San Salvador, and the LAPD and FBI trained security forces, expanding a police exchange program and accompanying operations.
Still, the policy failed. Indiscriminate arrests resulted in few convictions and massive human rights violations, while raids encouraged gang members to adopt more complex forms of organization. Studies indicate that the government has often manipulated homicide and violence-related statistics for political ends, making the actual role of gangs in fueling violence less clear than commonly believed. At peace, El Salvador remained one of the most violent countries in the world.
Democratic Disenchantment
Bungled development and anti-crime policies gradually eroded Salvadoran democracy. Yet when Antonio Saca became president in 2004, he again claimed that free trade would ensure general prosperity, while unveiling his recycled law enforcement program: Súper Mano Dura.
The U.S. embassy lauded Saca for his “unabashedly pro-American administration” and safeguarding “an exceptionally-close and cooperative bilateral relationship.” “Saca acknowledged frankly that El Salvador was in the United States’ zone of influence,” one diplomat confided.
In 2008, the Great Recession throttled El Salvador with special severity, dramatizing the perils of economic dependency on the United States—and fueling further violence and gang activity. At this critical juncture, the FMLN backed Mauricio Funes for president in the 2009 election. A moderate social democrat, Funes championed the right to a “vital minimum” of food, work, education, and healthcare.
From Washington, U.S. legislators threatened mass deportations if citizens elected Funes. But he still won, receiving 81 percent approval ratings by inauguration day and a clear mandate for reform. Over the next decade, Funes and his successor, Salvador Sánchez Céren, slashed poverty rates from 40 to 26 percent and promoted social inclusion.
Yet high homicide rates persisted. By 2010, one poll reported that 72 percent of civilians would accept any form of government that resolved the crisis. Forty-five percent would even back a coup.
In response, the FMLN strengthened punitive law enforcement policies, consolidating a cycle of secret negotiations with gangs, periodic truces, and indiscriminate police operations. The independent journal El Faro ironically concluded in 2016 that since the end of the war “military officials never had such a prominent role as during the two FMLN governments.”
That year, Funes fled the country for exile in Nicaragua to evade money laundering charges. By then, authorities had already arrested former presidents Flores and Saca for embezzling public funds, welding the stigma of corruption to both parties.
In an interview with anthropologist Ralph Sprenkels, a former guerrilla summarized the general discontent. “This shitty peace,” he asked, “what has it been good for?”
Rewinding History
The apparent exhaustion of the political system enabled Nayib Bukele of Nuevas Ideas to vault to power in 2019. With Bonapartist flair, Bukele posed as the savior of the country, advertising himself as a dynamic alternative to the soiled two-party establishment (he was expelled from the FMLN in 2017). Although the scion of a business dynasty, his youthful vigor and arresting charisma lent force to his promise to restore national dignity, secure prosperity, and, most of all, eradicate crime—skillfully exploiting both the pent-up hopes and frustrations of voters.
Yet while lambasting the policies of his predecessors, Bukele largely replicated them. His administration aggressively liberalized the economy, announcing to investors that “dinner is served.” He also accepted President Trump’s immigration policy, even after the Republican labeled El Salvador a “shithole” country. And he imitated the same corruption, stacking his government with family members and allowing colleagues to pilfer state assets.
Most alarmingly, Bukele rolled out a new mano dura program, exploiting the social crisis to accumulate power, bolster his popularity, and silence adversaries. In February 2020, he invaded the Legislative Assembly with a phalanx of soldiers in order to push through his security budget. “Now I believe that it’s very clear who has control of the situation,” he icily observed.
During his first years in office, he adopted a slew of draconian measures: enforcing his Covid-19 quarantine policy by arresting hundreds of citizens, slamming dissident voices on social media, and joking that he was the “coolest dictator in the world.”
After his party captured the assembly in 2021, Bukele stacked the Supreme Court with supporters, rapidly concentrating power in the executive branch. To decrease violence and solidify approval ratings, he also announced unsustainable defense expenditures, planning to double the size of the army. Hoping to turn the country into a financial hub, he made bitcoin legal tender, later bragging that he invested state funds in cryptocurrency while on the toilet. Behind the scenes, his government reportedly secured gang support for a truce with sex workers and cellphones.
In March 2022, the ceasefire collapsed, igniting another round of violence. Bukele exploited the failure of his own policy to declare a “state of exception,” deploying the military and arresting over 50,000 supposed gang members. This September, his autocratic ambitions became transparent: leveraging the popularity of his anti-crime campaign, he announced plans to illegally run for reelection in 2024.
Despite his legal transgressions, Bukele’s irreverent political style, well-oiled publicity machine, and success in cutting homicide rates have won him stunning levels of support. This October, his approval rating reached 86 percent, further enabling his monopoly of power.
Decades of U.S. policy and ARENA-FMLN rule created this populist moment, while denying alternatives. Rather than rupture, Bukele represents extreme continuity, personifying the market fundamentalism and systemic violence that brought him to office. Ironically, the last president to seek immediate reelection was General Hernández Martínez. And the poor youth that his administration packs into prison represent the very social groups that his predecessors targeted in La Matanza and the civil war. As Bukele accumulates power, his state of exception seems to suspend time itself, trapping Salvadorans between an elusive future and interminable past.
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PacifiCorp's Hunter coal fired power plant releases steam as it burns coal outside of Castle Dale, Utah, Nov. 14, 2019. (photo: George Frey/AFP)
EPA coal ash regulations issued in 2015 allow polluting utilities to self-regulate. And a giant loophole exempts coal ash piles that stopped receiving coal plant waste before that year.
The Environmental Protection Agency waited until January to take its first significant enforcement actions to protect communities from the hundreds of polluting piles of coal ash and other coal-burning waste scattered across the country, often leaking toxic contaminants.
But only half of 265 power plants with ash ponds or landfills that are known to be contaminating groundwater agree that cleanup is necessary, and 96 percent of these dissenters are refusing to propose any groundwater treatment, according to the 212-page report, “Poisonous Coverup: The Widespread Failure of the Power Industry to Clean Up Coal Ash Dumps,” by the Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice.
The report, released Thursday, claims that some power companies are illegally manipulating data and monitoring systems to avoid cleanup requirements and proposing inadequate strategies that will not restore groundwater quality.
Lisa Evans, a senior Earthjustice attorney, described the EPA’s task as immense and blamed that reality in part on the nature of the regulations, which were designed to be “self-implementing,” without requiring any action by a regulatory agency, according to EPA.
“The industry cannot and does not police itself,” said Evans, co-author of the report. “Left to its own devices, the utility industry has chosen every off-ramp it could find to avoid safe closures and comprehensive cleanups. The Biden EPA is trying, but they are hampered by insufficient resources. State agencies are mostly missing in action.”
Climate change only adds to risks of pollution spreading from ash sites, from increasingly frequent and severe storms and flooding, the report noted.
A “glaring hole in the current rule” does not help, said Abel Russ, a senior editor with Environmental Integrity Project, also a co-author. The 2015 rule excluded dumps that stopped receiving waste before 2015, and ash ponds that were completely dried out by then and had also stopped receiving waste. “In my experience, most power plants have at least one or two coal ash dumps that are not covered by the current rule. This obviously makes groundwater cleanup much harder.”
In August, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of the Environmental Integrity Project, the Sierra Club and several other organizations to close the loophole in the agency’s rules regulating the management of coal ash dumps that have leached toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes across the country.
The environmental advocates, combing through records posted by utilities on their websites as required by the 2015 regulations, had identified buried ash from power plants dumped in open pits in nearly 40 states, often with no liner systems to protect groundwater, or dumped in old landfills—all still unregulated by EPA.
The failure of the vast majority of power companies to follow the 2015 Coal Ash Rule, providing a set of safe disposal requirements, has serious consequences for water quality and public health, according to the new report.
Monitoring data that included additional power plant records confirmed a 2019 report led by Russ that 91 percent of U.S. coal-fired plants have ash landfills or waste ponds that are leaking arsenic, lead, mercury, selenium and other metals into groundwater at dangerous levels, often threatening streams, rivers and drinking water aquifers, according to the new study.
The Edison Electric Institute, a trade group that represents investor-owned utilities, has long maintained that electric companies are managing coal ash “in ways that put safety first, protect the environment, minimize impacts to the community, and manage costs for customers.”
A spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Dan Chartier, executive director of the Utility Solid Waste Activities Group, a trade group representing utilities that manage coal combustion waste, said that the environmental groups’ report “represents a gross mischaracterization of both the (coal ash) rule and industry’s implementation of the rule. Our industry is committed to the safe operation and closure of (coal ash) disposal units, in compliance with the (coal ash) rule.”
Further, he said, the report “falsely asserts that facilities are ignoring contamination and not acting quickly enough.” Rather, he said, they are following a process established by EPA “to ensure that contamination is appropriately and transparently remediated. If there are impacts to groundwater, rest assured that the law requires that corrective measures will continue until groundwater protection standards are met and affected areas are cleaned-up.”
An EPA representative said the agency was reviewing the environmental group’s report.
In January, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said he understood the problem with coal ash, one of the long-term legacies of burning coal, announcing an enforcement crackdown after four years of effort by the Trump administration to relax the coal ash regulations.
“I’ve seen firsthand how coal ash contamination can hurt people and communities,” he said. “Coal ash surface impoundments and landfills must operate and close in a manner that protects public health and the environment. For too long, communities already disproportionately impacted by high levels of pollution have been burdened by improper coal ash disposal. Today’s actions will help us protect communities and hold facilities accountable. We look forward to working with our state partners to reverse damage that has already occurred. EPA will support communities with stakeholder engagement, technical assistance, compliance assistance, and enforcement.”
EPA’s 2015 coal ash regulations were spurred by 160 cases of water contamination at coal ash sites and two major disasters, including one in North Carolina. In 2014, tens of thousands of tons of coal ash spilled from a Duke Energy power plant into the Dan River at Eden, North Carolina, affecting 70 miles of the watershed downstream.
In 2008, there was also a catastrophic ash spill near Knoxville, Tennessee, when a levee that was holding a mountain of sodden ash suddenly broke loose from the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston power plant. Some 300 acres were smothered. The ash flowed into two rivers. Three homes were destroyed, and dozens more were damaged. In the years since hundreds of cleanup workers fell ill and many have died.
Still, cleanup presents challenges and a balancing act, utility grid operators have said. In April, two of the nation’s grid operators warned the EPA that enforcement of coal ash regulations poses risks to the reliability of electrical service over a large part of the country.
The comments came from PJM Interconnect and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, or MISO, buried deep in government dockets used by the EPA to share public records and collect comments on the agency’s enforcement of the coal ash regulations.
PJM and MISO warned that actions taken by the EPA could at least temporarily shut down coal plants when there is a need for their electricity.
The new report from environmental advocates credited the 2015 regulations getting coal plant owners to monitor groundwater and publicly report the results. Those reports are what the environmental groups examined to come up with their findings.
Among them: 70 percent of the plants with ponds closing with ash in or near groundwater are located in disproportionately low-income neighborhoods or communities of color. And of the 38 plants that have committed to at least one cleanup action, 27 are not actually treating groundwater, but are instead relying on “monitored natural attenuation,” which means the companies will just watch as the pollution continues to seep into the groundwater and flow offsite, according to the report.
The report also identified what it determined were the ten most contaminated coal ash sites in the country, based on the extent of the contamination. They were found in Texas, Nevada, Wyoming, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Mississippi, Utah, and Tennessee.
“In sum, none of these plants are on track to complete an adequate, comprehensive remedy,” the report found. “In fact, the selection of a final remedy has been delayed in most cases. Moreover, all ten sites appear to be violating the Coal Ash Rule with inadequate groundwater monitoring and analysis, failing to address all known sources of contamination, or otherwise avoiding comprehensive cleanup.”
The report made several recommendations to the EPA, including better enforcement, tightening of coal ash regulations, more environmental monitoring, and prohibiting the practice of allowing utilities to leave ash in place if the waste is sitting in groundwater.
“Enforcement is needed immediately to ensure coal ash ponds are not closed in groundwater, that effective cleanup actually occurs, and that coal plants are conducting honest monitoring and assessment of their contamination,” Evans said. “None of this is occurring now.”
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