12 May 23
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Michael Flynn and Jeffrey Clark were leading figures in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Of course he wants them at his side if he retakes the White House
In any other era, scandals like that would be enough to send those men off into immediate political retirement. But this isn’t one of those eras.
Trump is now the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican primary and remains the leader of the GOP, and he’s been telling those close to him how much he wants both of those fellow coup plotters officially at his side in a potential second term in office.
The former president has privately noted on several occasions over the past several months how he’s seriously considering names like Flynn and Clark for high-level positions in a potential second White House term. That’s according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, as well as another person briefed on it. The two worked hard to overturn the election with Flynn lobbying the president to institute martial law, and then-President Trump hoping to fire the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, and swap in the more agreeable Clark.
In at least one of these conversations, Trump was self-aware enough to say that any senior role for Flynn would “probably” have to be a non-Senate-confirmed appointment, one of the sources with direct knowledge tells Rolling Stone. Flynn’s comments calling for martial law in the wake of the election prompted some Republicans, like Sen. Mitt Romney, to criticize him, potentially leaving any Senate-confirmable position effectively out of reach for the retired Army general.
“[Trump] has said he believes they are both ‘strong’ candidates for senior positions. He’s mentioned that, and some other names, a couple of times that I know of … We’ll see if it happens,” the other person with direct knowledge recalls. “President Trump calls Gen. Flynn a ‘hero’ all the time. Why wouldn’t he want a hero working for him?”
There are, of course, reasons why people not named Donald Trump wouldn’t want either of these men working for the leader of the GOP ever again.
“Bringing these two back into government in high-level positions would be tantamount to a declaration of authoritarian principles by a presidential administration. To even consider it would be disgraceful and anti-American,” says Walter Shaub, a senior ethics fellow at the Project on Government Oversight and the former director of the Office of Government Ethics.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung wrote that “President Trump is running to drain the swamp and bring prosperity back to America. That’s why he’s dominating in the polls — both in the primary and general elections— and Americans are rallying around his campaign.”
Flynn, who famously invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked by the January 6th Committee whether violence at the insurrection was justified, is “unfit for public service” and “no one should ever place him in a position of trust again,” according to Shaub. “I’m surprised [Clark] is even still allowed to be a lawyer, much less a public servant.”
The moves are part of Trump’s professed inclination to make his theoretical second term something of a revenge tour to revive the people and policies that even some members of his own party deemed too extreme. Over the past year, Trump has mulled intensifying his first term’s historic federal “killing spree” with group executions, gallows, and firing squads, invading Mexico, and bringing back an expanded version of his “Muslim ban.”
He’s also doubling down on his attacks on the democratic system. Ever since the violent end of Trump’s presidency, the former president sought to turn his baseless propaganda about widespread election fraud into Republican Party dogma. In many cases, Trump has already succeeded, accelerating the right’s past crusades against voting rights. The fact that Trump is giving serious thought to bringing back figures such as Clark and Flynn also highlights how much Trump remains fixated on his lies about the 2020 presidential election — which led to the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot — and how unlikely he is to move on, if he gets another shot at running the country.
Clark, in particular, embodies that instinct. The former assistant attorney general from the Justice Department’s environmental division allegedly sprung into action in the wake of the 2020 election with ideas on how Trump and his administration could undermine it. In particular, he pushed Justice Department leaders to send a letter to the Georgia Legislature claiming that the department had discovered “significant fraud” and urged it to create alternate slates of electors. The effort — stopped by senior Justice Department leaders — would’ve effectively endorsed bogus conspiracy theories about election fraud and given an air of official legitimacy to efforts to overturn the election.
Clark’s devotion to the cause of Trump’s election lies almost landed him one of the most senior jobs in the former president’s first administration. Trump unsuccessfully tried to make Clark his new attorney general in the final weeks of his presidency. Today, Clark is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, an increasingly influential, Trump-aligned think tank. He’s also a devoted poster on the president’s own social media network, Truth Social, where Trump shares his criticisms of former Attorney General Bill Barr being insufficiently dedicated to investigating claims of voter fraud in the 2020 electron.
Trump’s enthusiasm for Clark comes in spite of his mounting legal troubles, which are directly related to his and Trump’s schemes to subvert the democratic order. FBI agents searched Clark’s home and seized his phone as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, played an outsized role in the Trump and other Republicans’ attempts to overturn the 2020 election and stop the count of electoral votes on Jan. 6. The retired Army lieutenant general was an early and loud voice calling for Trump to “declare limited martial law” and “temporarily suspend the Constitution” and lobbied the then-president to do so in a tense Oval Office meeting alongside Sidney Powell. As Trump’s legal options to overturn the election fizzled, Flynn supported the “Stop the Steal” movement and spoke at a rally for the group alongside Alex Jones and Ali Alexander the night before the insurrection in early 2021.
More recently, Flynn has devoted his time to speaking at the Christian nationalist “ReAwaken America Tour,” which has hosted a range of MAGA luminaries who attempted to overturn or challenge the election results, like pillow magnate Mike Lindell and attorney Powell.
Trump has continued to stay in touch with his former national security adviser since leaving office, calling in to his Christian nationalist prayer meetings, and even publicly hinted that there may be a job for him waiting in a future Trump administration. During a speech at a Republican gathering in Florida in April, Trump gave a shout-out to his former national security adviser, who was in attendance. Flynn, he told the audience, is “a friend of mine” who “went through hell” and “handled it like the brave man he is.”
“It’s only a year and a half,” Trump said. “Just stay healthy.”
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Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a concurring opinion — on which Thomas signed off — that a federal anti-bribery law wasn't clear enough.
The case involved Joseph Percoco, a former aide of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo who was accused of taking money from a local developer and convicted in 2018 of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud.
Percoco's lawyers argued he couldn't be prosecuted because the payments happened while he wasn't working for the government. At the time, he had quit his government job to join Cuomo's reelection campaign.
His attorneys said the law only applied to government workers, not people who don't hold actual political power.
The majority of the Supreme Court sidestepped that claim, but Gorsuch and Thomas tackled it head-on.
"To this day, no one knows what 'honest-services fraud' encompasses," Gorsuch wrote. "And the Constitution's promise of due process does not tolerate that kind of uncertainty in our laws — especially when criminal sanctions loom."
"The Legislature must identify the conduct it wishes to prohibit," he later added. "And its prohibition must be knowable in advance — not a lesson to be learned by individuals only when the prosecutor comes calling or the judge debuts a novel charging instruction."
In April, a ProPublica report found Thomas had accepted gifts, including lavish vacations, yacht travel, and school tuition for a child in his care, among other things, from GOP megadonor Harlan Crow over the course of years. Crow described Thomas as a friend and insisted he never sought to influence the conservative Supreme Court justice.
In the wake of the ProPublica report, a group of 15 Democratic senators called on Sen. Chris Van Hollen — the chair of a subcommittee in charge of the Supreme Court's budget — to withhold $10 million from the Supreme Court's budget until it institutes a public code of ethics.
Additionally, the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Crow for a list of any gifts he's given to a Supreme Court justice or their family.
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U.S. President Joe Biden and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, July 16, 2022. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP)
Despite the White House’s rhetoric about supporting global democracy, the U.S. sold weapons in 2022 to 57 percent of the world’s authoritarian regimes.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the world’s biggest weapons dealer, accounting for about 40 percent of all arms exports in a given year. In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales. There are two pathways for the latter category: foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.
The U.S. government acts as an intermediary for FMS acquisitions: It buys the materiel from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient. DCS acquisitions are more straightforward: They’re the result of an agreement between a U.S. company and a foreign government. Both categories of sales require the government’s approval.
Country-level data for last year’s DCS authorizations was released in late April through the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. FMS figures for fiscal year 2022 were released earlier this year through the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. According to their data, a total of 142 countries and territories bought weapons from the U.S. in 2022, for a total of $85 billion in bilateral sales.
How many of those countries were democracies, and how many were autocracies? That question can be answered by comparing the new U.S. arms sales data to political regime data from the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, which uses a classification system that’s called Regimes of the World.
The system classifies regimes into four categories: closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, and liberal democracy. For a country to be classified as a democracy, it must have multiparty elections and political freedoms that make those elections meaningful. According to this methodology, the dividing line between democracies and autocracies is whether a country’s leaders are accountable to their citizens through free and fair elections.
Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48, or 57 percent, of them. The “at least” qualifier is necessary because several factors frustrate the accurate tracking of U.S. weapons sales. The State Department’s report of commercial arms sales during the fiscal year makes prodigious use of “various” in its recipients category; as a result, the specific recipients for nearly $11 billion in weapons sales are not disclosed.
The Regimes of the World system is just one of the several indices that measure democracy worldwide, but running the same analysis with other popular indices produces similar results. For example, Freedom House listed 195 countries and for each one labeled whether it qualified as an electoral democracy in its annual Freedom in the World report. Of the 85 countries Freedom House did not designate as an electoral democracy, the United States sold weapons to 49, or 58 percent, of them in fiscal year 2022.
These findings contradict Biden’s preferred framing of international politics as fundamentally a struggle in which the world’s democracies, led by the United States, are on “the side of peace and security,” as he called it in last year’s State of the Union address. Opposing the United States and its democratic allies are the autocracies that collude to undermine the international system, Biden has stated. In a speech in Warsaw last year, he said the battle between democracy and autocracy is one “between liberty and repression” and “between a rules-based international order and one governed by brute force.” The White House’s 2022 National Security Strategy adds, “The most pressing strategic challenge facing our vision is from powers that layer authoritarian governance with a revisionist foreign policy.”
Despite that rhetoric, a review of the new data suggests instead a business-as-usual approach to weapons sales. Former President Donald Trump based his arms sales policy primarily on economic considerations: corporate interests above all else. In his first foreign trip as president, he traveled to Saudi Arabia and announced a major arms deal with the repressive kingdom. Trump’s business-first approach resulted i
In Biden’s first full fiscal year as president, weapons sales from the United States to other countries reached $206 billion, according to the State Department’s annual tally, which uses an opaque but seemingly broader accounting of yearly FMS and DCS figures; Biden’s first-year total surpasses the Trump-era high of $192 billion. The multibillion-dollar effort to train and equip Ukraine doesn’t fully explain the dramatic rise in total arms sales last year, let alone to autocracies. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t occur until five months into fiscal year 2022, and much of the assistance from the United States to Ukraine took the form of grants (not sales) and the transfer of materiel from Pentagon stockpiles through the presidential drawdown authority.
Rather, the new figures reveal the continuity between Republican and Democratic administrations. While Biden signaled early on that his arms sales policy would be based primarily on strategic and human rights considerations, not just economic interests, he broke from that policy not too long after entering office by approving weapons sales to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other authoritarian regimes.
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A worker at an Amazon warehouse. (photo: Helen H. Richardson/Getty Images)
Working at Amazon isn’t just physically taxing, it’s dangerous. Despite years of scrutiny and years of company spin, Amazon still has a serious injury rate more than double the rest of the industry.
This began to change two years ago, for an ominous cloud had appeared over the company’s carefully managed reputation. A September 2020 exposé by journalist Will Evans had revealed to the public what had long been apparent to the hundreds of thousands of Amazon’s warehouse workers: the firm’s novel techniques of labor extraction were inflicting a terrible toll on the health and well-being of its legions of pickers and packers.
As Evans reported, the rate of serious injury in the warehouses had steadily climbed in recent years, reaching an unprecedented peak of 7.7 per hundred workers in 2019, nearly double that of the industry standard. A second independent analysis, released by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC) in June 2021, further demonstrated that the company’s extraordinarily high clip of worker injury is directly related to the punishing work rate inflicted on its workers.
Thus Bezos’s 2021 letter, his last as CEO, as well as Andy Jassy’s first effort as new CEO, issued last April, were distinguished by a new tone of defensiveness, as company leadership attempted to respond to a gathering storm of negative press.
Over the past two years, Amazon has focused its defense on three particular arguments, none of which stand up to even casual scrutiny.
“We Don’t Set Unreasonable Performance Goals”
First, the firm simply disputes the statistics compiled by the SOC, instead providing its own set of alternative facts. A particularly clumsy example is that the company includes its own workforce when computing the “industry average,” permitting Jassy to insist that the firm’s injury rates are “about average.” In 2022, for example, Amazon employed 36 percent of US warehouse workers, yet was responsible for no less than 53 percent of recordable injuries. A far more honest assessment would compare Amazon’s serious injury rate (6.6) and that of the remainder of the industry (3.2).
Second, when the company does acknowledge the safety problem, it brazenly denies what is obviously its source: “we don’t set unreasonable performance goals,” Bezos claimed in his April 2021 letter. And even more counterintuitively, the company has consistently maintained that the solution to a problem caused by innovative techniques of labor extraction is . . . more innovation. Thus Jassy, in his 2022 letter, asserts that what is needed is “rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent,” and further reassures investors that the firm will continue “learning, inventing, and iterating” until the problem is resolved. What he did not own up to is that Amazon’s rate of serious injury actually rose in 2022 by 13 percent.
Third, and most invidiously, Amazon has resorted to blaming workers themselves, in particular the hundreds of thousands of new people brought on during the past few years of rapid expansion. Since the great majority of the new hires are “new to this sort of work,” and since Amazon’s number crunchers have determined that most injuries occur within the first six months of employment, it is only natural that, as Jassy informed shareholders at the 2022 meeting, “your rates tend to go up.”
If this is indeed true, then it would seem that the company would have every incentive to retain as many of its warehouse workers as possible. Why expend so much effort to train up “industrial athletes” if most of them don’t stick around for the long haul? And yet turnover rates in the warehouses are astronomical; as the New York Times reported in 2021, even before the so-called Great Resignation, the company’s rate reached as high as 150 percent annually, meaning the entire workforce is replaced every eight months.
A measure of Amazon’s commitment to “Burn and Churn” is the “Pay to Quit” program that Bezos introduced in 2014, in which hourly employees are annually offered a payout — $1,000 initially, increased yearly up to a maximum of $5,000 after five years — to move along. (Facing the prospect of running out of human fuel, Jassy suspended the program for most employees in January 2022.)
Profits Over Safety
In retrospect, the May 2022 Amazon shareholder meeting probably represents the high tide of criticism of the firm’s labor practices. The blowback had reached such intensity that Amazon faced a record fifteen shareholder proposals, many of which concerned labor and safety issues. These included a call for board representation from an hourly worker, a request for a report on the company’s compliance with freedom of association standards as established by the International Labor Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a proposal for an independent audit of working conditions in Amazon warehouses, and something of a Hail Mary demand from an enterprising Texas warehouse worker for the immediate suspension of all productivity quotas in the interest of safety.
But all fifteen proposals, each vigorously opposed by company leadership, were comfortably defeated — the demand to overturn the whole system of labor extraction was voted down by no less than 99.8 percent of Amazon investors.
If a solid majority of Amazon shareholders were untroubled by the company’s disgraceful safety record, they found the matter of the stock price more concerning. Although the firm had posted record profits for 2021 — more than $33 billion — disturbing trends had begun to appear in the second half of the year, triggering a precipitous fall in the stock price, from a peak of $186.12 in July 2021 to $104.10 by the May 24, 2022 meeting.
While there were many reasons for the plunge, much of it can be attributed to the lifting of COVID restrictions. Company leadership appears to have presumed that the meteoric, lockdown-driven growth in its consumer division was here to stay — that US consumers would not return to Walmart or Kroger. When the opposite happened, retail sales plummeted, and suddenly all that feverish expansion in the fulfillment network had become a burdensome drain on profits.
It should be stressed that criticism of the company’s injury mills has hardly abated in the twelve months since the May 2021 meeting, generating increased scrutiny from the government. At present, the company is under investigation from an unprecedented array of state institutions, including numerous state Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) branches, the federal OSHA office under the Department of Labor, and the Southern District of New York. Wherever these agencies have looked they have found an abundance of violations; federal investigations in five states between December 2021 and February 2022 netted the company a raft of citations, but Amazon has dug in its heels, appealing each and every one of them.
While all this was dutifully reported by the business press, the orientation of coverage began to change in the second half of 2022, as more and more reports of the company’s falling profitability began to appear. Shortly after the meeting, for example, Amazon announced a net loss of $2 billion for Q2, compared to a 2021 Q2 profit of $7.8 billion. With little improvement in the third and fourth quarters — the firm would reveal a net loss of $2.7 billion for 2022 as a whole — rumors began to swirl that Bezos himself would soon return to save the day.
Somehow, some way, mighty Amazon had become a money-losing operation again, and it was Jassy himself bearing the brunt of the blame. But at the same time, all the bad financial news served to distract from the issue of injuries, and if he had failed spectacularly in resolving the latter, there were many relatively easy measures he could take to address the former.
Like so many of his fellow tech chieftains, Jassy began to respond in November by announcing a plan for mass layoffs in the corporate sector: by April 2023, the company had eliminated no less than twenty-seven thousand employees, and a new round is currently underway. Wildly cheered on by Wall Street, the stock price — which in December had dipped all the way into the eighties — began to recover, and by the end of March it was back above $100, where it remains as of this writing.
“In Denial”
And yet the matter of the company’s shameful injury record was still out there, and given how poorly the firm had responded the past two years, a new strategy was needed. One of the cleverer moves of the SOC had been releasing its 2022 report on April 13, thereby preempting Jassy’s first shareholder letter, published the following day. Learning from its mistakes, this year Amazon preempted the preemptor, issuing a new edition of its own safety report on March 14. An exercise in spin, statistical manipulation, and outright lying, the “Delivered With Care” report managed to garner little if any attention, although as shall be discussed, this was probably the intention.
The SOC responded on April 13 with its own annual report, “In Denial: Amazon’s Continuing Failure to Fix Its Injury Crisis,” providing a comprehensive critique of “Delivered With Care” and managing to drum up at least some interest from the business press. Based on its own analysis, the SOC had to concede that Amazon can claim a reduction in its rate of serious injury, from 6.8 in 2021 to 6.6 in 2022 — a little less than 3 percent lower.
But there is significant reason to be skeptical of even this modest improvement, since the joint federal OSHA/Southern District of New York investigations found significant evidence of underreporting, resulting in a raft of subpoenas for documents relating to potential fraud (Amazon continues to fight the subpoenas in court). And even if the 6.6 figure holds up, it is still more than double than the rest of the industry.
Meanwhile, the content of Jassy’s second shareholder letter, published on April 14, suggests that the CEO has moved on to other concerns. Nowhere does the matter of workplace safety appear, nor does any mention of employee relations in general, save for an announcement that corporate employees must return to the office for a minimum of three days a week. First come the excuses: souring macroeconomic conditions, heightened competition, headwinds over at Amazon Web Services, etc. Then come the typical reassurances that company leadership is on top of things, that every effort is underway to return the firm to profitability.
As always, the emphasis is on “invention,” on the new sectors the company will soon come to dominate. Amazon is getting in on the chip boom. Advertising revenues are about to explode, as the firm’s ingenious algorithms outpace those of its competitors. Our own satellites will soon illuminate the not-yet-wired world.
Rather more concerning, at least to the multitude of warehouse workers, is the other side of the profitability equation, i.e. the reduction of costs. A year ago all the talk was of the herculean efforts — backed by $1 billion of new investment — to address safety issues. Here’s Jassy, summarizing his obsessive commitment to task:
When I first started in my new role, I spent significant time in our fulfillment centers and with our safety team. . . . At our scale . . . it takes rigorous analysis, thoughtful problem-solving, and a willingness to invent to get to where you want. We’ve been dissecting every process path to discern how we can further improve. . . . we’ll keep learning, inventing, and iterating until we have more transformational results. We won’t be satisfied until we do.
One year later, priorities have clearly changed. All that energy is now to be devoted to a very different enterprise, that of restoring profitability:
Over the last several months, we took a deep look across the company, business by business, invention by invention, and asked ourselves whether we had conviction about each initiative’s long-term potential to drive enough revenue, operating income, free cash flow, and return on invested capital.
The deep look certainly did not spare the warehouses, which are singled out as particularly egregious offenders:
A critical challenge we’ve continued to tackle is the rising cost to serve in our Stores fulfillment network (i.e. the cost to get a product from Amazon to a customer) — and we’ve made several changes that we believe will meaningfully improve our fulfillment costs and speed of delivery. . . . Over the last several months, we’ve scrutinized every process path in our fulfillment centers and transportation network and redesigned scores of processes and mechanisms, resulting in steady productivity gains and cost reductions over the last few quarters. There’s more work to do, but we’re pleased with our trajectory and the meaningful upside in front of us.
Another Year
That these efforts to boost productivity might conflict with the firm’s purported number-one priority in its warehouses — the safety of its workers — is a question no longer of concern to Jassy. If at the upcoming shareholder meeting, scheduled for May 26, he is once again asked about the matter, he’ll surely say something like this: “The safety team is all over that. See their recent report.”
Herein lies the heart of the problem: even operating a fulfillment network twice as dangerous as its competitors, Amazon simply cannot turn a profit on rapidly delivering packages for free or with minimal fees. For the consumer division to make money doing so, it will need to tighten the screws on its workers even more, extracting ever-more labor from their ailing bodies.
Perhaps the company can defy the laws of nature. Perhaps it can reengineer “scores of processes and mechanisms” in the interest of efficiency without simultaneously inflicting a greater toll on its pickers and packers. But it will be another year until we find out.
In the meantime, we have clearly reached an impasse. In a couple weeks, the shareholders will gather again, and the same activist groups will present their proposals for change. But it’s difficult to see how results could be better this year, given the firm’s financial struggles, which will surely take center stage. A better bet would be state intervention — new legislation, a serious clampdown from OSHA — but Amazon has thus far fended off these challenges with relative ease.
The ideal solution would be unionization across the entire fulfillment network, which would enable workers to negotiate a reasonable, safe, and humane work rate. But from the company perspective this simply cannot be allowed to happen, for even under the current regime of brutal labor extraction, Amazon appears to be incapable of turning a profit.
Amazon is operating injury mills — more than thirty-six thousand of its workers suffered serious injury last year. The company has clearly determined that such numbers are acceptable. Do the rest of us agree?
Amazon Responds
Since Jacobin started reporting on Amazon’s shareholder letters back in 2021, we have annually reached out for comment. After two years of ignoring our requests, the company came through this week. Here are our inquiries and Amazon’s responses:
1) In his 2020 shareholder letter, former CEO Jeff Bezos indicated that he was introducing a new leadership principle, that of making Amazon “Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” But when the leadership principles were updated on July 1, 2021, this was changed to “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility.” Why was this change made? Is Amazon no longer committed to being Earth’s Safest Place to Work?
- When Jeff introduced the ideas of “Earth’s Best Employer” and “Earth’s Safest Place to Work” in the letter, he did not say anything about these being leadership principles. He talked about them as a “vision for our employee’s success.” Here’s what he said, lifted directly from the letter: Despite what we’ve accomplished, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for our employees’ success. We have always wanted to be Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company. We won’t change that. It’s what got us here. But I am committing us to an addition. We are going to be Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.
- Separately, three months following the shareholder letter, Amazon announced our two new leadership principles. If you read the description of the leadership principle “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer,” you’ll find that safety is included in the definition, which states “Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment.”
- Our commitment to continuous safety improvement is reiterated in Amazon’s 2022 safety report, which was released in March. The report states “Our goal is to be the safest workplace within the industries that we are typically designated.”
- Andy Jassy has also underlined the importance of safety numerous times, including at the Bloomberg Tech Summit, in a CNBC interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and with CNBC’s Jon Fortt.
2) Also in his 2020 letter, Mr. Bezos noted that in his new role as Executive Chair, he was eager “to work alongside the large team of passionate people we have in Ops and help invent in this arena of Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work.” But we have been unable to find any media reports that Mr. Bezos has indeed devoted any of his time over the past two years to the matter of worker safety. Could you provide details on his activities in this critical area?
- Amazon has done significant work to improve safety performance. We began releasing Delivered With Care, our safety, well-being, and health report, in 2022 and released it again this year (which you can download here). The report includes some of the following highlights:
- From 2019 to 2022, we saw our recordable incident rate improve by almost 24%. This includes an 11% year-over-year decline in our recordable injuries from 2021 to 2022.
- Since 2019, we reduced the number of injuries resulting in employees needing to take time away from work by 53%.
- In 2022, we engaged with over 1.4 million employees to understand safety sentiment and areas of improvement.
- From 2019 to 2022, we invested $1 billion in safety initiatives unrelated to COVID-19, and in 2023, we are investing another $550 million in safety initiatives. This is in addition to the $15 billion in COVID-related costs we incurred to make more than 150 significant process and procedural changes to help protect our employees and partners during the pandemic.
- We have reduced collision rates in our U.S. Delivery Service Partner network by 35%
- In 2023, Amazon became one of the first to sign on to the Department of Transportation’s nationwide call to action to reduce deaths on the roadways. Amazon committed another $200 million to continue upgrading safety technologies across our fleet of trucks and vans, including additional investments in collision avoidance technologies, strobing brake lights, and in-vehicle camera safety technology — just to name a few.
3) Since we began reporting on Amazon’s workplace injury record, the company has regularly referred to the fact that it employs more than 6000 safety professionals; Mr. Bezos cited the figure of 6200 in his April 2021 letter. Given the recent mass layoffs at the company — 27,000 roles eliminated with a new round currently underway — is this figure still accurate? How many positions have been eliminated in the safety division? What is the current figure?
- Amazon’s current number of workplace health and safety professionals is more than 8,000 globally.
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Edward Bronstein died after being held down by police officers on March 31, 2020. Nearly two years later, a video documenting the harrowing incident was released by the court. (photo: Courtesy Bronstein family and California Highway Patrol)
Bronstein died as several CHP officers and a nurse were attempting to forcibly draw a blood sample as part of a DUI test. The incident was caught on videotape and Bronstein can be heard repeatedly screaming "I can't breathe" before he goes limp.
The incident occurred two months before Floyd's murder.
“This was a case where the state had no defense,” said Annee Della Donna, attorney for Bronstein's three minor children. She said Bronstein never posed a threat to the officers.
Della Donna expressed hope the large payout will send a message. “Everyone in America is done with this,” she said. “We need to stop what’s going on with police departments where they are killing innocent people.”
Last month, Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón filed involuntary manslaughter charges against seven CHP officers and the nurse in connection with Bronstein's death.
Gascón said CHP Sgt. Michael Little and CHP officers Dionisio Fiorella, Dusty Osmanson, Darren Parsons, Diego Romero, Justin Silva and Marciel Terry were all also charged with one felony count of assault under the color of authority.
"These officers had a legal duty to Mr. Bronstein," Gascón said. "He was in their custody. We believe that they failed their duty, and their failure was criminally negligent, causing his death."
The DA's office also charged registered nurse Arbi Baghalian with involuntary manslaughter. Baghalian attended to Bronstein during the incident.
Della Donna said the DA's case is crucial. “Until there is accountability in the criminal courts for the officers, we are not done with our job,” she said.
Bronstein's father, Edward Tapia, said of the charges, “I’m glad it came to this point where they get prosecuted so they can’t hurt nobody else." The family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the CHP.
He was not immediately available for comment on the settlement.
What the video shows
On March 31, 2020, Osmanson and Terry pulled the 38-year-old Bronstein over on the 5 Freeway in Burbank on suspicion of driving under the influence, according to the DA's office. They then took him to their Altadena station and obtained a warrant to draw his blood.
Last March, a judge hearing the family’s wrongful death lawsuit ordered the release of a video of what happened at the station.
In the video, officers lead a handcuffed Bronstein into what the Bronstein family's lawyers say is the station’s maintenance garage. An officer is heard telling him they have a court order to obtain a blood sample, and asks him to consent, which he is reluctant to do. Seated on his knees, Bronstein keeps asking why he has to go through the procedure.
One officer says, “This is your last opportunity. Otherwise you’re going face down on the mat and we’re gonna keep on going.” A few seconds later they start to force Bronstein face down on the mat, at which point he starts repeating, “I’ll do it willingly.” An officer is heard saying, “It’s too late."
As five officers pin him to the ground, Bronstein begins screaming as Baghalian works to take blood from his arm.
Bronstein screams “I can’t breathe” at least eight times as officers continue to forcibly restrain him. He can also be heard calling for help. After roughly two minutes, Bronstein goes silent, and Baghalian checks his pulse and injects him with something. He and the officers spend several minutes watching Bronstein, with officers at times calling out to him and gently slapping his face.
Several minutes later, one officer is heard saying, “Is he breathing? If he’s got a pulse and he’s not breathing, he still needs rescue, bro. Get some air in him.” Baghalian begins using a small bellows-type device to force air into Bronstein’s mouth. A couple minutes after that Baghalian begins chest compressions, and officers are seen preparing a defibrillator when the video ends.
You can watch the video here
(Warning: The footage is disturbing and may not be suitable for everyone.)
If convicted, the seven CHP officers each face a maximum of four years and eight months in prison. Baghalian could face four years in prison.
CHP says they've made changes
We have not yet reached the officers or Baghalian.
In a statement, CHP Commissioner Sean Duryee said, "I am saddened that Mr. Bronstein died while in our custody and care."
The CHP said all seven officers have been placed on administrative leave per agency policy, and that it has taken corrective measures in response to the incident.
"CHP leadership updated agency policies to prevent officers from using techniques or transport methods that involve a substantial risk of positional asphyxia," it said in a statement.
In addition, it said "the agency conducted training for all uniformed employees to help them recognize individuals experiencing medical distress."
Finally, the CHP said it "is exploring alternatives to administering mandated chemical tests when people arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence refuse to submit to testing, as required by law."
Gascón has taken a more aggressive approach towards alleged law enforcement misconduct. Since he took office in December 2020, the DA has charged 11 officers with a crime in connection with a shooting or other use of force. In the two decades prior, only two officers were charged in connection with shootings.
(A new California law requires the state attorney general to investigate all law enforcement killings of unarmed civilians, but it took effect July 2021 and only applies to cases that occurred after that date.)
Coroner's report
The coroner’s report said the cause of Bronstein's death was “acute methamphetamine intoxication during restraint by law enforcement.”
While noting that “a review of the circumstances and surveillance footage, indicate a temporal relationship between the restraint and cardiac arrest,” the report said "due to absence of autopsy findings of asphyxia or fatal trauma, and the presence of methamphetamine, the role of the restraint could not be definitively … assessed in contributing to death. Therefore the manner of death is undetermined.”
Bronstein family attorney Della Donna said an independent medical exam found the methamphetamine in his blood had nothing to do with his death.
“The reason why his heart stopped, the reason why he became brain dead was a lack of oxygen from the restraint by the officers and nothing else,” she said.
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Honduran and Cuban migrants cross the Rio Grande River on the U.S.-Mexico border, June 26, 2019. (photo: Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times)
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
As Title 42 ends, officials say they expect to see more asylum seekers from many countries, including Cuba and Venezuela. On Wednesday, a group of 21 House Democrats urged President Biden to lift sanctions on both countries, calling them failed and indiscriminate, and adding that, quote, “experts widely agree that broad-based U.S. sanctions — expanded to an unprecedented level by former President Donald Trump — are a critical contributing factor in the current increase in migration,” unquote.
Well, for more, we go to Francisco Rodríguez, a Venezuelan economist, author of a new report for the Center for Economic Policy and Research titled “The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions.” Rodríguez is a professor of public and international affairs at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies. He headed the Venezuelan National Assembly’s Economic and Financial Advisory Office under the late President Hugo Chávez.
We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Francisco Rodríguez. Can you lay out what you feel how these sanctions connect to the migration to the United States from Venezuela and Cuba?
FRANCISCO RODRÍGUEZ: Yes. Good morning, Amy. Thanks for having me on the show.
Effectively, there is significant evidence, surveyed in the report that I just authored, as well as in other academic studies, that economic sanctions have an adverse effect, a major adverse effect, on living conditions in targeted countries. Some of the studies find that the imposition of sanctions by the U.S. leads to a decline in income per capita of up to 26%. That’s the equivalent of causing a Great Depression. Another study found increases — or, declines in life expectancy of between 1.2 and 1.4 years. That’s the equivalent of the mortality effects of the COVID pandemic.
So, when sanctions are imposed on a country like Venezuela and like Cuba, they lead to a major economic contraction. In Venezuela, GDP per capita has fallen by 72%. And this has generated a massive exodus. Almost 25% of the population has left. And many of them are trying to make their way to the border and trying to enter the United States. So, definitely, we have economically induced migration in both of these countries, and there’s a strong contribution of economic sanctions. In the case of Venezuela, sanctions have targeted the oil industry. The oil industry produces 95% of the country’s foreign currency revenue. So, if the country can’t sell oil, it can’t import basic goods, it can’t import food, it can’t import medicines. So living conditions deteriorate markedly. And that’s why people want to leave.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the Biden administration has said it’s willing to lift some sanctions against Venezuela in exchange for steps taken by Nicolás Maduro’s government, such as not banning opposition candidates from running against him. But most of the sanctions that Biden inherited from Trump remain in place. Your response? And talk about how the humanitarian crisis is increased at home, as well, in Venezuela by these sanctions.
FRANCISCO RODRÍGUEZ: Yeah. Well, I think that that response is basically making vulnerable Venezuelans, those who are more oppressed by Maduro, pay the cost of the sanctions. So, to say we’re going to lift sanctions, which are hurting Venezuelans, if Maduro takes steps toward democracy, well, Maduro is probably not going to take those steps, and the people who are going to pay the cost are the Venezuelans, and more vulnerable Venezuelans. And you’ve seen huge deteriorations, huge increases in levels of malnutrition, of mortality, both adult and child mortality in Venezuela. You’ve seen deteriorations, a decline in wages, where wages have fallen below $5 a month.
And all of this, I must stress, is driven by a decline in oil revenues. So, Venezuela’s economy shrank by 72% in the same period in which oil revenues declined by 93%. And while the cause of the decline in oil revenues — I mean, there are several causes. I’m not claiming in any way that sanctions are the only one, but there’s research showing that sanctions have a major effect on oil production. Sanctions — the imposition of sanctions in August 2017, in January of 2019 and February of 2020 is, in every single instance, associated with accelerations in the rate of decline of oil production. So it’s clear that Venezuela doesn’t have the foreign currency revenue that it needs in order to keep its economy working and feed its people, and a great part of the responsibility of this lies on U.S. economic sanctions.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you also talk about how last year London’s High Court ruled against Venezuela’s President Maduro in a $1 billion gold battle? What effect does that have?
FRANCISCO RODRÍGUEZ: Yeah, yeah. Well, it has a significant effect, but it’s symptomatic of a broader problem, which is that one of the reasons why the Venezuelan government has been unable to deal with the pandemic and unable to deal with the recession is that it doesn’t have access to its international funds. And those funds, it’s barred from access to them not just because of sanctions, but because of the decision of the United States and the United Kingdom to recognize the government of Juan Guaidó, an opposition leader who claimed that he was the legitimate president of Venezuela.
And the U.S. and the U.K. broke completely with diplomatic convention when they did this. Typically what governments do is that they recognize the government that has de facto control over the territory, even if you don’t like it, because you realize that that’s the government that you need to engage with. So, the U.S. recognizes many dictatorships around the world. It recognizes the government of North Korea. It recognizes the government of Iran. But it decided to recognize the Guaidó government, and so did the U.K., therefore handing it over control over assets such as the international reserves of the Central Bank, which is what Venezuela needs to address its economic crisis.
Venezuela made a proposal to use those resources in the Bank of England to buy vaccines in the midst of the COVID crisis, but that was rejected because the court is trying to clarify whether — well, what will be the result of that suit, which is a lawsuit between the Central Bank board that was appointed by the Maduro government and an alternate Central Bank board that was appointed by the Guaidó government.
We have a similar problem in the International Monetary Fund. Venezuela did not have access to the funds to fight the COVID emergency that were created by the issuance of special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund, and that’s because the U.S. has blocked recognition of the government that has control of the territory, which is the Maduro government. It’s insisted that the legitimate government — even though the Guaidó government has already been dissolved, it’s still insisting that the Maduro government not have access to the resources that the IMF approved for all countries to be able to fight the pandemic.
So, the U.S. spent 25% of GDP in dealing with the pandemic. Latin America spent less than 5%, because it didn’t have access to the same resources. Venezuela was able to spend less than 1% of its GDP, because it was unable to tap the resources that the international community had created and allocated to deal with this emergency.
AMY GOODMAN: We don’t have much time left, but your report also not only looks at sanctions against Venezuela, against Cuba, but Syria, and what that meant especially with the earthquake that just hit.
FRANCISCO RODRÍGUEZ: Yes. The result surveys 32 studies, of which 30 find negative consistent effects of sanctions on indications — on indicators ranging from GDP per capita to mortality, life expectancy, living conditions in general.
In the case of Syria, we have seen also very significant negative effects. And, in fact, sanctions have interfered with earthquake relief. Earlier in the year, GoFundMe actually suspended any attempts — any account requesting the raising of funds for Syria earthquake relief. And that was as a response — it’s a phenomenon known as overcompliance. It’s not — the U.S. claims that there are humanitarian exceptions, and it puts humanitarian exceptions in the regulations that it publishes, but the reality is that the exceptions are so vague and so hard to follow that most financial institutions say, “We’re not going to take the risk of getting into trouble, and we’re not going to process transactions for countries like Syria.”
And therefore, you see that — and you see this systematically across the board — the humanitarian exceptions are not effective. And in the case of Iran, for example, you found that the medicines that were not available in Iran during the periods of sanctions, out of 73 medicines, 70 of them were in the OFAC exemptions list, but it’s still the case that no bank would process the transactions, given that the country was a sanctioned country. So, sanctions impede the access to funds that are necessary to cover humanitarian aid in cases of emergency relief, such as those of the Syria earthquake.
AMY GOODMAN: Francisco Rodríguez, I want to thank you for that very quick analysis of the effect of sanctions, from Venezuela to Syria, Venezuelan economist. Thank you so much for being with us, from the University of Denver, speaking to us from Aurora. He headed the National Assembly’s Economic and Financial Advisory Office under Venezuela’s late President Hugo Chávez. His new report for the Center for Economic Policy and Research is titled “The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions.”
Coming up, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been freed, after his arrest sparked mass protests and a number of deaths. Stay with us.
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Last week the Stockholm Convention agreed to add three new chemicals to a list of globally banned substances, including the plastic additives UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus. (photo: Lillian Suwanrumpha/AFP)
But exemptions mean the chemicals will not completely disappear.
Those advocates scored a victory last week when parties to the Stockholm Convention — an international treaty regulating hazardous pollutants — agreed to add three new chemicals to a list of globally banned substances, including the plastic additives UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus. The move is expected to safeguard people and the natural world, although a handful of exemptions mean the chemicals will not completely disappear as a threat.
World governments “took an important step today toward protecting human health and the environment,” Sara Brosché, a science adviser for the International Pollutant Elimination Network, or IPEN, said in a statement. “But we are disappointed that financial interests caused unnecessary and dangerous exemptions that will lead to ongoing toxic exposures.”
The decision came out of a two-week-long conference in Switzerland on the Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions, a series of United Nations agreements to regulate waste and hazardous chemicals. The Stockholm Convention, which will control the three new chemicals, was first passed in 2001 to phase out or restrict the global production of “persistent organic pollutants,” hazardous pesticides and industrial chemicals that don’t break down naturally. There were 12 chemicals on the original list, but it’s since expanded to cover more than 30. More than 150 countries have ratified the Stockholm Convention and are subject to its restrictions; the U.S. is not among them.
The most recently banned chemicals include a pesticide called methoxychlor, as well as two plastic additives: UV-328, which absorbs UV light and is widely used in transparent plastics products, and Dechlorane Plus, a flame retardant that’s added to plastic coatings and electrical wires. All three chemicals have been shown to persist in the natural environment and bioaccumulate up the food chain, and have been linked to health concerns ranging from neurodevelopmental damage to endocrine disruption. These concerns are particularly acute for people who work in recycling workshops, where plastics are exposed to high heat and other processes that encourage chemical leaching.
By placing the chemicals in a category known as “Annex A,” parties to the Stockholm Convention have agreed to take steps to eliminate them from global use and production — with a handful of exemptions, in the case of the two plastic additives. Until 2044, both UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus will still be allowed in spare parts for motor vehicles and agricultural equipment, among other uses. Strangely, Dechlorane Plus will also be allowed indefinitely for use in medical imaging devices and aerospace products — even though the chemical’s production is projected to end globally by 2026 due to a national-level bans that are already on the books.
“We are quite disappointed” with the exemptions, said Jitka Straková, a project manager for the Czech nonprofit Arnika. Although there are fewer exemptions than there have been for previous chemicals, she said any ongoing use or production of UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus will harm recyclers in the developing world — especially because countries could not agree on rules for labeling contaminated products. This means that, even though the Stockholm Convention now bans the recycling of products containing UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus, recycling workers could unwittingly accept plastics containing these chemicals into their workshops.
“Exempted uses mean that the products will still be contaminating waste streams when they reach their end of life,” Straková said. A recent study she helped conduct with IPEN found alarming Dechlorane Plus contamination in and around e-waste recycling sites in Thailand, where much of the world’s plastic waste is exported. The study showed that a group of 40 Thai recycling workers had blood serum concentrations of Dechlorane Plus that were more than 39 times higher than those of a control group.
“Everyone has a right to know when toxic chemicals threaten their bodies, their food, and their health,” Thitikorn Boontongmai, toxic waste and industrial program manager for the watchdog Ecological Alert and Recovery – Thailand, said in a statement.
UV-328 contamination is also widespread, thanks to the chemical’s ubiquity in consumer products. An IPEN analysis of 28 hair accessories and toys from Russia, China, and Indonesia found UV-328 in every item. A separate study from IPEN found UV-328 in recycled plastic pellets from nearly two dozen different countries, suggesting that UV-328 travels into recycled products even if they were never meant to contain the additive.
“We are essentially losing track” of where UV-328 and Dechlorane Plus are going or what type of products they’re reaching, Strakova said. She said companies should immediately switch to safer alternatives despite the Stockholm Convention exemptions, and that countries should set strict limits for those chemicals in waste, banning them from being recycled into new products.
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