23 January 23
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Waiting for details to emerge, there was the familiar apprehension and dread experienced by so many Asian Americans since attacks against them began to soar during the pandemic.
While brushing my teeth, I looked at my phone and saw a news alert about a mass shooting in Monterey Park, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. It felt like an electric circuit had snapped closed inside me, with its corresponding current of fear. Monterey Park’s population is heavily Asian––Taiwanese and Chinese, in particular. Saturday night had been the eve of the Lunar New Year. During the late nineties, when I was a young reporter at the Los Angeles Times, I’d regularly go to Monterey Park to shop at the Asian grocery stores. I opened the newspaper’s app and there it was. A gunman had killed nine people on Saturday night. (The death toll would soon be updated to ten.) The shooting had taken place in the vicinity of a local Lunar New Year festival that had ended earlier in the evening.
Soon after, I watched a news conference held in the predawn darkness of Monterey Park, with Captain Andrew Meyer, from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Meyer described, in the clipped cadence of law enforcement, the facts that were known. “When officers arrived on scene, they observed numerous individuals, patrons of the location, pouring out of the location, uh, screaming,” he said. “The officers made entry to the location and located additional victims. The Monterey Park Fire Department responded to the scene and treated the injured and pronounced ten of the victims deceased at the scene.” The suspect was still at large. When Meyer took questions, the first one was obvious. “As far as motive,” he said, “it’s too early in the investigation to know what the motive is.”
Yet it wasn’t too early for that familiar feeling of apprehension and dread, shared by so many Asian Americans, since anti-Asian hate crimes began spiking during the pandemic. Just last week, my family and I had been at the Barclays Center, in Brooklyn, for a middle-school basketball game, when the girls behind us began getting rowdy. They had just played against my older daughter’s team and gotten off the court. The boys were playing; the game was close. “If we lose, I’m going to smack one of those Chinese girls,” one of them burst out. I turned around to speak to her. She was a child, so I was restrained. This was a teachable moment, I hoped. Then the child’s mother came over. I told her what had happened. Her daughter loudly denied it. The parent sided with her child and began to raise her voice. My wife tugged at me to walk away. Afterward, we discussed what had occurred with another Asian family that had been seated nearby. We talked about the palpitating fear we had all felt.
On Sunday morning, as I waited for more details of the shooting to emerge, inevitably, strands of history began converging in my mind. I thought about a massacre that had taken place about a hundred and fifty years earlier in Los Angeles, just a few miles west of the site of the Monterey Park shooting. On the evening of October 24, 1871, an angry mob, bearing knives, pistols, and clubs, surrounded the city’s Chinese quarter and began dragging out terrified residents. By the end of the rampage, eighteen Chinese men had been killed, fifteen of them hanged, according to most accounts, in one of the worst mass lynchings in American history.
In Monterey Park, at about half past eight o’clock in the morning, the authorities held another news conference. They revealed that the suspect was an Asian male. So that, it seemed, was that. Apparently just another mass shooting in America, the latest evidence that the country is overrun by guns. I thought about the emotions that I’d just experienced. Had I been paranoid? Too quick to believe that a racial motivation might be the cause? I returned to the history in front of me.
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Jackson Women's Health Organization in Mississippi. (photo: Gabriela Bhaskar/NYT)
Last summer, a Mississippi woman sought an abortion after, she said, a friend had raped her. Her state prohibits most abortions but allows them for rape victims. Yet she could not find a doctor to provide one.
In September, an Indiana woman learned that a fetal defect meant her baby would die shortly after birth, if not sooner. Her state’s abortion ban included an exception for such cases, but she was referred to Illinois or Michigan.
An Ohio woman carrying triplets faced a high risk of dangerous complications, including delivering too early. When she tried to get an abortion in September through Ohio’s exception for patients with a medical need, she was turned away.
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Police officers stand near the Star Ballroom Dance Studio where a gunman killed 10 people and injured another 10 in Monterey Park, Calif., on Saturday. (photo: Philip Cheung/WP)
It’s home to mandatory waiting periods and background checks for firearms purchases. It bans so-called military-style assault weapons, one of just eight states, plus D.C., with such a law. And in 2016, it became one of the first states to enact a red-flag law, which allows authorities to remove firearms from someone believed to be a danger to themselves or others.
California’s patchwork of gun laws has been judged the strongest in the nation by the gun-control advocacy group Giffords.
But Saturday night’s horrific mass killing at a Monterey Park dance hall shows how the state’s strict gun laws are incapable of fully preventing gun violence in a country where gun ownership is widely considered a constitutionally protected right, firearms move freely between states with vastly different regulations and gun-control measures are dotted with exceptions.
Yet California’s problem with gun violence does remain significantly smaller than in most other states, which advocates credit to the rules that are on the books.
Authorities had not said Sunday afternoon how the gunman in the mass killing obtained his weapon or what kind of firearm was used.
California’s more stringent gun safety measures stemmed from an explosion of shootings decades ago, including the 1989 slaughter of children in a Stockton schoolyard and a 1993 mass killing in a law office in downtown San Francisco.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was among the main advocates of a 10-year national assault weapons ban passed in 1994. The federal measure was not renewed after it expired in 2004.
Still, with its restrictive state laws, California has among the lowest firearms mortality rates in the nation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It ranked seventh lowest nationwide with 8.5 deaths per 100,000 people in 2020 — well below the nationwide average of 13.7. Texas posted a rate of 14.2. Georgia had a rate of 17.7. The highest rate was in Mississippi, at 28.6 deaths per 100,000 people.
The Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan organization that studies the state’s policies and politics, found the state’s death rate from large-scale shooting incidents from 2019 to 2021 was below the national average.
“Compared to citizens of other states, Californians are about 25% less likely to die” in those kinds of events, according to the institute.
California lawmakers continue to push to tighten gun laws, making the state a laboratory for firearms regulations and a frequent target of criticism from groups such as the National Rifle Association. The NRA earlier this month issued a warning that the California’s new state legislative session appeared to include the “Usual Appetite for Gun Control.”
Last year, the strongly liberal state legislature passed a bill that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who deals in illegal firearms — a deliberate echo of the controversial Texas law permitting citizens to pursue abortion providers in court.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) championed the legislation opening the door to private lawsuits against gun dealers. It would have allowed plaintiffs to sue those who illegally trade in assault-style rifles, high-caliber rifles, guns without serial numbers or so-called ghost guns, which are manufactured without serial numbers or other ways to track them, sometimes in home workshops.
But in December, a federal judge in San Diego blocked the law from taking effect. The judge, Roger Benitez, has blocked several other state gun-control measures, including efforts to limit the size of ammunition magazines. An appeals court placed a hold on Benitez’s ruling for ammunition magazines.
After Benitez issued his injunction last month in the dealer lawsuits case, Newsom called him a “wholly owned subsidiary of the gun lobby and the National Rifle Association.”
Last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined 17 other attorneys general in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a New York law making it easier for citizens to sue gunmakers. The decision could affect the status of California’s effort to do so.
At the same time, gun-control activists are worried about the aftershocks from last year’s Supreme Court decision that the Second Amendment generally protects the rights of law-abiding Americans to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense. The ruling in New York State Rifle … Pistol Association v. Bruen has resulted in easier access to concealed-carry permits nationwide. In California, the ruling led to a spike in permit applications and uncertainty from local officials about how to proceed.
California’s assault weapons ban also has faced court challenges. But, like many firearms regulations, the ban carries less weight than its name implies.
State law defines the banned weapons as semiautomatic guns with certain technical features, such as a flash suppressor. It also requires guns to have magazines that hold no more than 10 bullets — the industry standard is a 30-round magazine.
But that has not stopped gunmakers from selling what is commonly seen as military-style weapons — including AR-15-style rifles — in states with an assault weapons ban.
Major manufacturers produce a range of “California-compliant” AR-15-style firearms that mix and match features to avoid violating the law.
Smith … Wesson sells versions of its popular M…P 15 rifle that are designed to be legal in California by modifying either the grip or the magazine. An M…P 15 was used to kill seven people at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Ill., in 2022.
Daniel Defense also offers a version of its DDM4 rifle that can be sold in California. A gunman used a DDM4 to kill 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., in 2022.
The California-compliant versions of these AR-15-style guns appear largely identical to the guns sold in other states.
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An Amazon fulfillment center in Staffordshire. (photo: Nathan Stirk/Getty Images)
The world’s super-rich have amassed so much wealth since the pandemic that even a Tory minister can see something is amiss
But a roaring 20s is actually happening, just not for most of us. According to Oxfam’s annual inequality report, released to coincide with the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, the richest 1% of people have captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world combined since the pandemic. Their fortune soared by $26tn, increasing their share of new wealth from 50% to two-thirds.
The breakdown of these figures exposes how on a global basis, extreme wealth is accumulated not by innovating or increasing production, but by taking advantage of rising prices and exploiting labour. In this effort, wealthy people are enabled by lack of regulation and taxation. The result is a bonanza of plunder with no sheriff in town.
This has been happening for a while, but the pandemic accelerated the trend. Rich people benefited from everything – every positive intervention from the state and negative impact of the crisis somehow still ended up increasing their wealth. They benefited from rising costs by using them as an alibi to charge higher-than-inflation prices, then distributing the rewards as dividends instead of higher wages. Food and energy corporations made a killing, making $306bn in windfall profits in 2022, then distributing 84% to shareholders.
They benefited from stimulus packages that pushed up asset prices. They benefited from low interest rates that helped them to expand their property empires. According to Credit Suisse, lower interest rates and government support programmes resulted in “a huge transfer” of wealth from the public sector to private households, which saw their debts lowered and the value of their assets, shares and properties, rise.
The obscenity of the system is made possible by the dramatically diminished bargaining power of labour. Weak labour is cheap labour. More lucratively, the world’s workers can increasingly be mobilised according to employers’ precise needs, so not a penny is wasted. The purpose is to transform the human worker into a machine that can be switched off when not in use (although at least machines are tended with maintenance). In 2020, Amazon’s UK sales soared by half to £19.4bn. In 2021, an investigation in Britain found that the company was bypassing its own employment standards by hiring thousands of zero-hours workers through agencies. These workers have no employment protections, their shifts can be cancelled at the last minute, and there is no guarantee of tenure of employment.
But it is successful tax avoidance that is the strongest pillar propping up global inequality, and its dismantling would be the quickest solution. There is little chance of that happening soon. Tax regimes, like much of the conventional economic wisdom about the benefits of wealth creation to all, are increasingly out of step with not only the needs of poor people, but with what is required for the health of our economies. The political class has been captured by the outdated ideology of trickle-down economics. And if any of those politicians have dissenting thoughts and consider raising taxes, financial elites threaten to abscond with their wealth, or protest that their entrepreneurial ambitions will be extinguished. The media framing redistributive policies as radical or destructive is a powerful shock collar, too. Oxfam found that 143 of 161 countries actually froze tax rates for the rich during the pandemic, and 11 countries reduced them.
What’s most striking about the post-pandemic profit boom is the truly global nature of the problem. It’s not only the hope of a world recalibrated by Covid towards stronger public infrastructure that is turning to dust in our mouths. An older dream is dying too: of a post-cold-war globalisation that was supposed to bring us all closer, usher in a utopia of free trade, growth, employment and sustainable development. What this model of globalisation ended up achieving was standardising ways for wealthy people to pay as little as possible, concentrating economic activity on those with purchasing power and hanging the rest out to dry. Our lives are indeed becoming more similar across the world. In the global south, affluent people now all have access to the same consumer goods and services, from Netflix to Vitamix, and live in new-build developments with names like Beverly Hills (Cairo), and Bel Air (Nairobi). Poor people are pushed to the margins, the public services they depend on dismantled.
None of this has happened by accident, according to Peter Goodman, the author of Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World. “It’s not an accident,” he tells me, “that our economies have concentrated greater wealth in fewer hands. Quite simply, wealthy people have used their wealth to purchase democracy, to warp democracy in their own interests. They’ve done that through a global template that involves lowering taxes, privatising formerly public attempts to deal with common problems, liquidating the spending that went into things like social services, and then putting that money into their own pockets.” The main power of the billionaire class, Goodman says, is in their creation of values, not value, that maintain a friendly political climate. Davos, he says, is “a prophylactic against change, an elaborate reinforcement of the status quo served up as the pursuit of human progress”.
But the disparities are becoming too stark for these branding efforts to work as well as they used to. Even rightwing politicians are beginning to point out that the promise of social mobility no longer has purchase. Last week, in a speech that very much sounded like the observations of someone who has awoken from a decades-long slumber, UK cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt said that “many people think things don’t work, at least for them”, adding that “for those with the least, the whole system can seem rigged against them”.
So close and yet so far. The system doesn’t seem to be rigged. It is rigged. I guess it’s a step in the right direction that terms which in the past would have consigned a speaker to the pile of conspiracy theorists and commies are making their way into the mainstream. Mordaunt went further. “The very continuation and success of capitalism,” she said, “hangs in the balance.” But for the powerful tiny minority that owns half the world’s wealth, this sort of capitalism is succeeding better than ever before. What hangs in the balance, as the billionaires’ riches increase, is their ability to argue that it’s working for us too.
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A school librarian looks through titles at a book giveaway held for educators in Florida last summer. The mothers who organized the event hoped to make it easier for school librarians to get their hands on titles amid a near-total block of book orders under state law. (photo: Phelan M. Ebenhack/WP)
Schools are struggling to keep their shelves stocked as oversight by parents and school boards intensifies
And throughout Florida, many school librarians have been unable to order books for nearly a year, thanks to their districts’ interpretation of a state law requiring librarians to undergo an online retraining program on “the selection and maintenance of library … collections” — which was not published until this month. Julie Miller, a librarian for the Clay County School District, has not been permitted to order a book since March 2022. In a typical year, she would have ordered 300 titles by now. Instead, she has had more than a hundred conversations with disappointed students seeking fresh titles, she said, especially the latest books in their favorite fantasy series.
“It puts me in a terrible position,” Miller said. She has had to brainstorm a novel use for the 40 percent of her budget formerly devoted to books: “This year, I’m going to replace all of our chairs in the library.”
States and districts nationwide have begun to constrain what librarians can order. At least 10 states have passed laws giving parents more power over which books appear in libraries or limiting students’ access to books, a Washington Post analysis found. At the same time, school districts are passing policies that bar certain kinds of texts — most often, those focused on issues of gender and sexuality — while increasing administrative or parental oversight of acquisitions.
Typical are the new rules in the Keller Independent School District in Texas, where, starting this school year, librarians who hope to order books must complete a Google form asking them to flag any problematic content, including “passionate and/or extended kissing” or “discussion or depiction of gender fluidity,” according to a copy of the form reviewed by The Post. Then, librarians must submit the list of requested texts to the school board for a 30-day public viewing period, during which parents can investigate and challenge the proposed purchases. Finally, the full school board will vote to approve or reject every item on the list.
Students are upset, especially LGBTQ students, said a Keller employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retribution. “They want to see themselves in books, they want to see themselves reflected, and they’re not able to.”
The district wrote in a statement that the book selection “process we have in place … allows librarians to take the lead in curating our libraries, while inviting our community to provide input and to partner with staff to protect our students.” It continued: “Books are not removed simply because they feature LGBTQ characters, and there are still books available that include these characters.”
Some praise the more stringent book-purchasing guidelines. A school librarian in Florida noted that staffers in her district, Osceola County, are poring more regularly and extensively through professional reviews of the books they want to buy.
And Rick Stevens, a Florida pastor who serves on a book-reviewing subcommittee of conservative education advocacy group the Florida Citizens Alliance, said school librarians should welcome the extra pairs of eyes, which he believes will lead to more “pristine” school libraries, stocked solely with texts devoted to the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic.
“Sexual issues and sexuality — our children don’t need to be introduced to that,” Stevens said. “We don’t have to feel a responsibility to provide every kind of material for students.”
It is difficult to gauge exactly how much school book orders have plunged amid this wave of added regulation, but the available data suggests a significant drop. Steve Potash, president and CEO of OverDrive, which supplies e-books and audiobooks to more than half of the nation’s roughly 16,000 school districts, said his company lost millions of dollars in sales in 2022 as school library orders took a nosedive. He declined to be more specific.
Potash noted the dips were especially steep in Texas and Florida, where debates over what children read and learn — about race, racism, history, gender and sexuality — have been fierce. Potash said he is girding for a further drop this year: “It’s troubling. It’s impacted not only our business, but the authors and the readers and the students.”
Conversations with 37 school librarians across 21 states suggest they are facing heightened scrutiny and a thicket of red tape — where before they had wide latitude to choose the books they thought would best supplement the curriculum and stimulate students’ literary appetites.
And librarians say they are less willing, these days, to buy books dealing with difficult aspects of American history, race, racism and questions of gender identity, especially texts focused on the experiences of transgender people. Potash said OverDrive sold far fewer of these kinds of books last year.
John Chrastka, head of library political action committee EveryLibrary, warned that the impairment of librarians’ ability to purchase books will lead to out-of-date collections that do not match school curricula and are less likely to spark students’ enthusiasm for reading.
“We know very clearly from the research that a key driver for individual reading success is self-directed reading, when kids pick up a fun new book that interests them,” he said. “There will be gaps in learning.”
‘They used to say, “Just buy the books”’
Hurdles to book ordering have emerged across the country. Most systems replace setups that allowed librarians — who must obtain master’s degrees, teaching licenses or both in all but three states — far-reaching autonomy over text selection, so long as they consulted peer-reviewed journals to establish books’ literary merit and age-appropriateness.
In Virginia, the Roanoke County district now requires that several staffers read and review every book suggested for purchase before allowing parents two weeks to scrutinize the titles. In South Carolina, the Horry County school system is mandating that a special committee, including four parent members, sign off on all book orders. In Pennsylvania, the Central Bucks School District debuted a policy this fall under which librarians must publish lists of desired books online “for parental review” before obtaining purchasing permission from an administrator designated by the superintendent.
In other places, informal changes to book-ordering policies have taken root. One Tennessee school, for instance, is “no longer allowed to have a book fair,” the campus librarian wrote in a survey conducted by her state librarians’ association. And Melissa Corey, the president of the Missouri Association of Librarians, said several librarians have told her this year about “submitting a book order for approval, and the principal hands the order back with multiple titles crossed out.”
Ciro Scardina, a school librarian in Brooklyn, said that frequent delays or denials of book purchases also make it harder for librarians to prune their collections of inaccurate information, as well as replace worn-down classics with fresh copies.
“What do people do when they’ve read those books already, or they’re out-of-date, or they don’t look very attractive?” he said. “No one is going to want to visit the library.”
Lack of enthusiasm for the written word can have consequences spanning students’ lives. As a U.S. Education Department review of decades of research into independent reading concluded, “students’ reading achievement has been shown to correlate with success in school.”
One school librarian in Florida’s Monroe County, who has not been allowed to purchase books since last year, said her district is already seeing decreased student interest in and demand for books. The librarian, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing her job, said circulation is down “dramatically” this year compared with last year because she cannot give students the just-published titles they desire: Students checked out nearly 3,000 titles between August and December 2021, but just 1,800 between August and December 2022.
“The kids who asked for books back in September are still waiting, and they’re just not reading in the meantime,” she said. “I feel like I’m handcuffed.”
On her desk, the librarian keeps three pages of paper that students have covered with the scrawled titles they’d like to read, if only she could order them.
Still, Michelle Jarrett, president of the Florida Association of Supervisors of Media, which supports school library administrators and programs statewide, said the rethinking of book ordering processes, although worrying to her in many respects, has had some upsides.
For one thing, she said, school librarians have become very diligent about ensuring every text they purchase boasts a favorable review from a professional library journal. “That’s something they should have been doing all along,” Jarrett said.
“And the realization that library media specialists are important has really come to light through this,” she added. “They used to say, ‘Just buy the books.’ And now they’re realizing that requires a lot more in-depth work.”
‘Censorship from within’
Over the past two school years, the number of attempts to remove books from schools has skyrocketed to historic highs. Of the thousands of titles targeted, an overwhelming majority were written by or about people of color and LGBTQ individuals, according to the American Library Association and PEN America.
OverDrive’s Potash said the book banning movement, in combination with increased oversight of library purchases, is shifting librarians’ purchasing habits: His group sold fewer titles dealing with race, racism, LGBTQ issues and especially transgender characters in 2022.
“Unfortunately, even the categories in some markets on American history and the impact of slavery are also down,” Potash said. (More than a dozen additional school book suppliers contacted by The Post did not answer or declined to answer questions about trends in school book ordering, citing proprietary sales data or saying they did not track school library purchases.)
Kirsten Slungaard Mumma, a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University studying education, spent roughly six months reviewing the school library catalogues of 6,600 districts across the country. She used web-scraping tools to check the catalogues for book titles that “have been labeled as contentious.” Brown University published her working paper in December. Among her findings are that school libraries in states with laws circumscribing instruction on race and LGBTQ issues are less likely to stock books addressing those topics.
And she found that librarians in school districts that witness book challenges are less likely to order titles featuring LGBTQ characters.
“This is strong evidence of a chilling effect,” she said in an interview.
Anecdotes gathered from nearly two dozen states suggest an atmosphere of creeping fear in which librarians are second-guessing themselves, removing anything likely to elicit disapproval or controversy from their book lists. Many school librarians shared their stories on the condition of anonymity because their districts do not permit them to speak with reporters.
A librarian in Pennsylvania said she no longer feels as if she’s able to order books mentioning violence, guns or mass shootings, even though students’ interest in those matters is spiking after the mass killing in Uvalde, Tex.
Kansas City Public Schools librarian Rebecca Marcum Parker said that, despite intense student demand for manga books, she is reluctant to order the graphics-heavy books because she will have to inspect every single drawing within, hunting for images that could be construed as sexual, to comply with state law.
Heather Perkinson, president of the Maine Association of School Libraries, said this is not how most librarians want to do their jobs — or how they used to do their jobs, just a few years ago. Many librarians chose the profession because they believe books are both “mirrors and windows,” she said, referencing a well-known argument from academic and children’s literature researcher Rudine Sims Bishop that books must reflect children back to themselves while exposing them to other lives.
“These are all new defensive behaviors,” Perkinson said. “It’s quiet censorship. It’s censorship from within.”
Meanwhile, in Florida’s Clay County, Miller is mourning the loss of her most avid reader.
The student, a sophomore, checked out 301 books last year, far and away the most of any child at school. He spent every lunch inside the library, bent over a book. When she told the boy he was “top patron,” he blushed and smiled. Enamored of the title, he began swinging by the circulation desk every few weeks to ask whether he was still “number one.”
But this year, the student — a huge manga fan — ran into a problem. He finished all of the school’s manga books, and Miller, constrained by her district’s interpretation of state law, was unable to order more. At first, the 10th-grader tried rereading his favorite titles, but that soon grew stale.
After a few weeks, he stopped coming to the library.
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These workers were promised green cards following Hurricane Katrina. Instead they were issued temporary visas that bound them to a single employer. (photo: Ted Quant/Workman)
Labor organizer Saket Soni first heard about the situation when he received a midnight phone call from an Indian man who was too frightened to give his name. Soni is founder and director of Resilience Force, a nonprofit that advocates for workers who rebuild communities after weather disasters. He was used to fielding dozens of calls a day from workers who needed help, but this was the first Indian worker he'd ever heard from.
"I thought, 'What was an Indian worker doing in the Mississippi Gulf Coast?'" Soni recalls. "What I discovered was that he was one of 500 Indian laborers who had been lured to the U.S. on promises of good work and green cards."
The men had been convinced to pay $20,000 each — an enormous sum in India — to come to the U.S. to rebuild storm-damaged oil rigs. But instead of receiving green cards, they were issued temporary H-2B visas that bound them to a single employer. That employer — Signal International — forced them to work round-the-clock shifts and to live squalid work camps, where they were fed frozen rice and moldy bread.
"This was an international conspiracy spanning from Mumbai to Mississippi," Soni says. "They were sold an American Dream but dropped into an American nightmare."
Over the course of many months, Soni and the men developed a plan for the workers to flee their camp and get the Justice Department to charge their employer with human trafficking. In his new book, The Great Escape, Soni tells the story of that daring campaign, which included a march to from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., and years of hardship and legal wrangling before the workers finally got their day in court.
"Eventually, the jury found that the company, the attorney in New Orleans and the Indian labor recruiter had committed forced labor and trafficking and mail fraud and wire fraud and a number of other things. The jury awarded [the] plaintiffs millions of dollars in damages," Soni says. "And maybe the most extraordinary part of this was that ... the CEO of the company issued an apology. It wasn't everything the workers wanted, but it was an apology for how the workers were treated."
Interview highlights
On the living conditions in the labor camp in Pascagoula, Miss.
Conditions were atrocious. There were no apartments, there were no decent living quarters. The men lived 24 to a single trailer in a company "man camp" — that was actually what the company called it. And this "man camp" was built above a toxic waste dump. ...
They could come in and out of the labor camp. Usually they were taken on chaperoned visits where they were surveilled by a company official, put in a company van, taken to Walmart to buy groceries and other things and [brought] back to the camp. They were heavily surveilled. And while they were theoretically allowed in and out, they could never do it without a company official with them. The more important thing was their fear of deportation kept them in the camp. For some amount of time, they were in the camp legally and on these legal visas, but after a certain time, their visas lapsed. But the company kept using them on these 24-hour shifts that they would rotate on, the day shift and the night shift. And they couldn't leave the labor camp because of their own fear that they would be picked up and deported if anyone discovered that they were now undocumented.
On how the workers were charged rent to live in squalid conditions
The senior vice president who had the idea to build the labor camps thought that workers would be only too happy to get up, roll out of bed and be able to walk to work. This is a man who had never been to India, but somehow he thought that compared to conditions in India, these workers would be "happy campers." That's the way he put it. The company ended up charging the workers enormous amounts of money deducted from their paychecks to pay for the millions of dollars it took to construct the labor camps: $1,000 a month.
On the so-called "Great Escape"
The night before the Great Escape, the guards were in their usual place, confident that the next day would be like every other day. Company officials were sleeping tight, unaware that anything was afoot, but workers were slowly streaming out of the labor camp. They were doing it quietly. ... In exchange for flavored cigars and small little bottles of bourbon, [guards would] let workers go out and have their night on the town. Meanwhile, there was a hotel owner who believed that he was hosting a large wedding, that we'd rented out the hotel to carry out a large Indian wedding. In fact, we were cramming the ballroom of this Pascagoula, [Miss.] hotel for a mass meeting, the biggest mass meeting yet. ...
The men would [then] march back to the company gates [after] having escaped. And that's exactly what we did. We got to the company gates, hundreds of workers, the workers were chanting, the press was there. And the men, in an extraordinary moment, took their hardhats and threw them up in the air over the gates of the company in a symbolic show that they no longer wanted to work for this oil rig welder. We then got word that police was on its way and clambered into buses and drove to New Orleans, where we hid out in a New Orleans hotel.
On the workers marching from New Orleans to D.C.
Hearing no word from the Department of Justice, we decided to march from New Orleans to D.C. to confront them directly. There were beautiful scenes of these men marching along highways through Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia. They were holding signs that said "dignity" and "I am a man." And they were sometimes jeered or pelted by bottles from passing cars, but that only spurred their faith. They really believed that as soon as they got to D.C., they'd be vindicated by what they called the Department for Justice. What could go wrong?
On the 2015 civil suit against the company
The trial was a massive undertaking. The company had disclosed more than two and a half million documents during discovery. Depositions took hundreds of hours. The attorney at the center of the case, his deposition alone was five days. And the company's legal team basically brought a kitchen-sink approach to its defense. It argued that our entire campaign was a nefarious plot by a political hitman — me — to bring down the government's H-2B visa program. It presented its own Indian workforce as a happy family. They talked about a company cricket match they held where a raffle ticket holder got a new TV. And the company's lead attorney really framed the leaders of the campaign, the characters in my book, as noisy malcontents, people who were just not living in the real world and should be grateful for what came to them. That was the company's strategy.
The jury didn't really buy it. Worker after worker in the trial hit back against the company's defense, and really they did an extraordinary, courageous job of holding their own. The workers' testimony, in fact, was devastating for the defendants.
On why many immigrant workers don't come forward when they're exploited
These Indian workers were among the first in a rising workforce that we call "the resilience workforce." These are the people who rebuild America after hurricanes, floods and fires. They're overwhelmingly immigrant workers. Many, many of them are undocumented. And they're doing the crucial work that lets us come home after extreme weather events. ...
What I've seen is that across the board, immigrant workers are afraid to come forward and report abuse even when they're forced to work in the rain and might fall off a roof. Even when workers are not paid for weeks. They're afraid to come forward because complaining to the authorities could lead to deportation. Contractors, employers could come in and hand them over to law enforcement. That's what workers are largely afraid of. The workers who do rebuilding and repair work after climate disasters are living in their cars. They're waking up in the morning in Home Depot parking lots. They're climbing up on roofs and doing extraordinarily difficult work in the hot sun. ... And they face many of the same issues that immigrant workers in the U.S. face across the board, you know, abuse, exploitation, nonpayment of wages and conditions that in some cases do rise to the legal level of forced labor.
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Pesticides. (photo: Manish Swarup/AP)
A new report highlights the link between pesticides and climate change.
According to PANNA, the pesticide-climate change connection is a loop: Pesticides add emissions to the atmosphere that accelerate climate change, warming climates stress agricultural systems and increase the number of pests and insects, requiring more pesticides.
Compared to agriculture chemicals like nitrogen fertilizer, with well-known negative environmental impacts, greenhouse gas emissions from pesticides are understudied and underestimated. Producing one kilogram of pesticide requires, on average, 10 times more energy than one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer. Some pesticides, like sulfuryl fluoride, used on insects like termites and beetles, are themselves greenhouse gases: emitting one ton of sulfuryl fluoride is the equivalent of emitting nearly 5,000 tons of CO2. Researchers also say that oil and gas companies add to the issue and profit from it: 99 percent of synthetic pesticides are derived from petroleum.
California uses nearly 20% of the pesticides applied annually across the United States. The state grows fewer commodity crops than other regions, but supplies a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts. Because fruits and vegetables have such high value any losses would be significant and expensive – causing California farmers to use nearly five times more pesticides than the national average to avoid losses.
“Over the years, billions of pounds of pesticides have been used in California alone, which can spike greenhouse gas emissions, especially when synthetically made,” said Asha Sharma, Organizing Co-Director at PANNA and co-author of the report. “Nearly all – 95% – of California farmers are farming conventionally. Only 5% is organically farmed. With pesticides, this scale is important.”
Rising temperatures have led to a drop in crop resilience: heat stress, changing rainfall patterns, and more insect pests in more places creating higher demand for synthetic chemicals and pesticides. Some research reports that less than .01% of pesticides reach target pests, which means the excess chemicals end up on other plants or in the soil, water, and air. Hotter temperatures make this problem worse, vaporizing pesticides into a toxic gas, poisoning those exposed.
Researchers say the solution is agroecology. Agroecological farming emphasizes conservation agriculture, ecological processes that adapt to local conditions, and practices like intercropping, where two or more crops grow together to increase biodiversity and promote plant health. It also prioritizes the health and decision-making power of farmers and agricultural workers, which has been shown to improve crop yields, profitability, and resilience against climate impacts.
The report says agroecology leads to better public health, improved food security and sovereignty, and enhanced biodiversity and social benefits, such as better cooperation between farmers and communities. Researchers add that a shift across the entire food production system would be costly, but that there are ways to incentivize the transition through subsidies, similar to support for adopting green technology.
“Conventional farming methods don’t account for environmental externalities and health costs. Organic food is more expensive because it accounts for those things,” Sharma said. “A different system would cost more, yes, but the critical role of government is to make sure that people, regardless of income level, can afford food without pesticides.”
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