09 June 23
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Isolation leads to dread and paranoia and though COVID has abated, people are still choosing to work from home rather than commute to the office, a trend that if it continues will fill our streets with thousands of delivery boys on e-bikes and turn office buildings into vast dormitories and bring an end to proximitous creative collaboration and make America a nation of menial technocrats and your doctor will examine your prostate by Zoom. Personally, I hope not.
Even though I live in New York City, I go back to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for health care, not only because it’s excellent — I was due to expire twenty years ago and Mayo has extended my life — but also because you get to mingle with interesting people such as farmers and truck drivers whom you’re unlikely to meet in Manhattan and the nurses and technicians are everlastingly amiable.
Ordinarily I’m very cautious striking up a conversation with a woman I don’t know but when she has poked a needle in me and is drawing blood, it feels like we’ve established a relationship. So:
ME: It feels like you’ve done this before.
HER: Once or twice. Where you from?
ME: New York.
HER: You sound like you’re from Minnesota.
ME: Used to be.
HER: What do you do in New York?
ME: Walk in the park, go to plays and concerts, eat in restaurants.
HER: I mean, for work.
ME: I’m a writer. But I don’t live there for that — I live there because my wife loves New York.
HER: Smart man. How long you been married?
ME: Thirty years.
HER: So it worked.
I love this exchange. It’s simple ordinary civility, shared good humor. She’s from the town of Zumbrota not far from Mayo. She’s heard all sorts of guy nonsense, she can give as good as she can get. I drop in on my ophthalmologist and complain of blurred vision (duh, I’m 80) and he does a laser procedure on me and three days later my vision clears up significantly, which is a miracle, and I write him a limerick:
My eye doctor, good Dr. Chen
Did magic recently when
He lasered one eye
Briefly, now I
Who couldn’t read signs
Or books or the Times
Can read them clearly again.
And this, for me,
Who am literary
Is a miracle, God bless. Amen.
I go to church in New York and it’s Youth Sunday and teenagers give the homily and lead us in prayer for the sick and the oppressed and for our planet home. I can now read “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee” out of the hymnal and I am joyful all the way home, walking down Columbus Avenue through throngs of young people shopping at Trader Joe’s, sitting in outdoor cafes, hanging out, giving an account of themselves — it’s a great time in my life when everyone I encounter is younger, I’m in a sea of youth and vitality and my vision is good enough to read the sign on the turtle’s tank in the pet shop window, “Do not tap on glass. This turtle is 40 years old and deserves to live in peace.”
I like peace up to a point but I need to get out on the streets and soak up the tumult, the flutter of small talk. You can read about declining test scores in public schools and conclude that the world is sliding into darkness , but get out on the street and you feel the curiosity and enthusiasm and sociability and other qualities that standardized testing doesn’t measure. A person who only gets his views from the news will inevitably want to head for the woods. I’m tapping on your glass now. Don’t leave town. Go out on the street. Join the crowd. You’ll be smarter, probably happier.
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Within minutes of Trump's indictment, supporters lit up social media platforms with violent threats and calls for civil war. (photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
Within minutes of Trump’s indictment, supporters lit up social media platforms with violent threats and calls for civil war.
“We need to start killing these traitorous fuckstains,” wrote one Trump supporter on The Donald, a rabidly pro-Trump message board that played a key role in planning the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Another user added: “It's not gonna stop until bodies start stacking up. We are not civilly represented anymore and they'll come for us next. Some of us, they already have.”
Trump has been indicted on seven counts following an investigation by special counsel Jack Smith into classified documents taken by Trump from the White House in 2021. The indictments have not been released, but Trump’s attorney Jim Trusty told CNN that his client is facing a charge under the Espionage Act, as well as “charges of obstruction of justice, destruction or falsification of records, conspiracy and false statements.”
Trump announced the news himself on Truth Social, writing that he had been indicted in the “Boxes Hoax” case, as he put it, and said he would be arraigned on Tuesday at Florida Southern District Courthouse in Miami. Within minutes, his supporters lit up social media platforms with violent threats and calls for civil war, according to research from VICE News and Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan think tank that tracks online extremism.
Trump supporters are making specific threats too. In one post on The Donald titled, “A little bit about Merrick Garland, his wife, his daughters,” a user shared a link to an article about the attorney general’s children.
Under the post, another user replied: “His children are fair game as far as I’m concerned.”
In a post about the special counsel conducting the probe, one user on The Donald wrote: “Jack Smith should be arrested the minute he steps foot in the red state of Florida.”
In addition to threats of violence against lawmakers and politicians, many were also calling for a civil war.
“Perhaps it’s time for that Civil War that the damn DemoKKKrats have been trying to start for years now,” a member of The Donald wrote. Another, referencing former President Barack Obama and former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said: “FACT: OUR FOREFATHERS WOULD HAVE HUNG THESE TWO FOR TREASON…”
Others on similar social media platforms made general calls for an armed uprising. “The entire Republican Party should flood the courthouse and demand real justice here,” one supporter wrote on Truth Social. It wasn’t just anonymous users saying this, however: Right-wing talk show host Charlie Kirk called on all Trump supporters to descend on Miami on Tuesday to protest the indictment.
“This is the JFK assassinaton all over again,” right-wing personality and Pizzagate promoter Michael Cernovich wrote, claiming that the “deep state” had killed JFK and were now using the Justice Department to take down Trump.
Other right-wing lawmakers and commentators also pushed the idea that this was a politically-motivated prosecution ordered by Joe Biden. Republican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy echoed Trump’s own words, calling Thursday “a dark day for the United States of America.” In a statement, he also claimed that Biden was directly behind the indictment of Trump in a bid to remove the leading GOP candidate for the 2024 election.
On right-wing media, hosts echoed the messages posted on social media, boosting the same baseless claims while using war-related language and providing no evidence to back up their allegations.
Fox News host Sean Hannity, for example, told his viewers that the U.S. justice system has “been weaponized beyond belief” and that the country is “in serious trouble,” while former Trump aide Stephen Miller appeared on Fox News and said he hoped the “whole of the Republican party, the whole of the conservative movement, the whole of the country that cares about the rule of law coalesces around President Trump.”
Later, one of Trump’s own lawyers Alina Habba appeared on Fox News and said she was “embarrassed to be a lawyer at this moment. Honestly, I'm ashamed to be a lawyer.”
And just like Trump’s last indictment in April, many of his supporters said they believed that these indictments would actually be a benefit to Trump’s campaign.
“It's the biggest campaign contribution ever, thanks Dims,” one user wrote on The Donald. “This will actually help Trump get re-elected by a wide margin. Then he will go on a rampage. These communists don't know when to quit,” another wrote.
Alternatively, some even believed that the latest indictments were the result of Trump’s failure to get January 6 prisoners released from jail while they awaited their trial, something the former president has no power over.
"Karma is a bitch isn't it, you rich fuck asshole,” a 4chan user wrote. “Leaving innocent people to be abused in the DC jail then catch hard time for supporting you on Jan 6th 2021, has consequences.”
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Demonstrators hold placards supporting former U.S. intelligence analyst Edward Snowden during a protest against government surveillance on October 26, 2013, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP)
The historic leaks prompted legislation: yet governments are finding new ways to monitor us. The UK’s online safety bill is one of them
Snowden’s revelations sparked outrage and anger. Bulk interception was being done without a democratic mandate and with few real safeguards. When the scope of this surveillance came to light, officials claimed most of the information was not “read” and therefore its collection did not violate privacy. This was disingenuous; the data could reveal an intimate picture of someone’s life – a fact that was upheld in later legal challenges, which proved the surveillance violated privacy and human rights law.
After the leaks, three reviews took place in the UK. The first was done by parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC). It did little to interrogate what the spies were actually up to, even while acknowledging that new legislation was required. A review by David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, was more circumspect and suggested a series of improvements. Finally, the Home Office convened a panel (of which I was a part, alongside an ex minister, former security chiefs and Martha Lane Fox) that produced a report and a series of recommendations.
These three reports eventually led to the 2016 passage of the Investigatory Powers Act, which clarified what types of state surveillance were allowed and how these needed to be authorised. The act allowed bulk interception – much to the dismay of many privacy campaigners – but changed the process governing how this interception was authorised. This meant that while a secretary of state could sign off a warrant justifying the most intrusive powers, that warrant must also be approved by an independent judicial commissioner.
The legacy of Snowden’s leaks is mixed. Bulk interception and surveillance hasn’t stopped, despite there now being greater transparency and more oversight. “There are a few more safeguards, but mostly it continues,” Caroline Wilson Palow, the legal director at Privacy International (PI), told me. The greatest legacy of Snowden’s leaks are the legal challenges they have made possible. Until these revelations, it was nearly impossible to bring a legal case challenging state surveillance. There have now been several successful lawsuits.
Beginning in 2013, civil rights organisations, including PI, Liberty and Big Brother Watch, began challenging bulk interception and surveillance in the European court of human rights and English courts. The human rights court rulings set a precedent across Europe that such spying requires prior independent or judicial authorisation that must be meaningful, rigorous and check for proper “end-to-end safeguards”. Earlier this year, MI5 was found to have acted unlawfully by the investigatory powers tribunal in retaining huge amounts of personal data after a case was brought by PI and Liberty. None of these cases would have been possible if Snowden’s information hadn’t come to light, and hopefully they put pressure on the intelligence agencies to pay attention to the legal safeguards.
As technology evolves, so too does surveillance. States have found new ways to spy on citizens, particularly using the mobile phones we all carry around. Intrusive spyware such as Pegasus, sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, can turn a person’s phone into a 24-hour surveillance machine. A 2021 investigation by the Guardian and other media organisations showed how activists, journalists and lawyers had been targeted by malware bought by countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Hungary and India.
Too often, security services conflate protection of those in power with protection of the public. Politicians have long used their security services and surveillance powers to stifle protest and dissent by targeting anyone who might legitimately challenge (or even question) their hold on power. This is why the interests of the security services so often come at the expense of the public. Even so, the rallying cry of protecting the public is often used to justify such invasive surveillance.
We can see something similar happening with the UK’s online safety bill. Discussions about this have conflated the public’s legitimate concern about bad online behaviour with the security services’ agenda of breaking end-to-end encryption. Gaining a backdoor to encrypted chat has been on spies’ wishlist almost since the internet was invented. But there is no guarantee this will make the internet safer or free from harm.
In its current form, the bill would effectively deputise spying activities to technology companies, which could scan users’ messages and social media posts for evidence of harms that they could then report to the authorities. Understandably, there’s huge demand for more accountability online, where bad and dangerous behaviour often goes unchecked. But the proposed bill will allow intelligence agencies to spy on ordinary citizens via technology platforms.
The fact is, the majority of online abuse isn’t happening in secret. It’s in plain sight and still nothing is done about it. Bad behaviour online has few consequences. Women face rape and death threats simply for daring to speak out online. Any teenager can access radicalising messages from racists and misogynists or watch extreme pornography showing physically violent, hostile depictions of sex. They don’t need cryptography to view such things.
This raises the elephant in the room around any discussion about online safety: the business model of big tech. It, too, relies on mass surveillance but of a different kind, where users’ behaviour is watched by machines in order to build algorithms, so that social media can serve up posts they think we’ll engage with. The monetisation of users’ attention has incentivised tech companies to create algorithms that tend toward extreme, radicalising content as that is the kind that draws the most engagement. Breaking encryption does nothing to solve this problem.
Snowden’s leaks put paid to any doubt we live in a surveillance society. But thanks to the revelations, the security services themselves came under scrutiny and were found lacking. Mass surveillance was checked, if only through more accountability. Now we face another push by the state to spy on us under the guise of online safety. Let’s not be fooled that surveillance makes us safer. The reality is nothing puts us in more danger.
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Photos taken by investigators with the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor show employees of Packers Sanitation Services, Inc. working in meatpacking plants in Nebraska and Minnesota. (photo: U.S. Department of Labor)
A federal investigation into Guatemalan children working in the U.S. in violation of child labor laws has expanded to include firms across the country, from Virginia to Colorado.
Investigators from the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations and the Justice Department, as well as White House officials, are participating in the expanded inquiry, the officials said. The meatpacking and produce companies under scrutiny for possible child labor violations operate across the country in locations from Virginia to Colorado, the sources said.
The investigation is part of a broader push by Biden administration agencies, including the Labor Department, to crack down on child labor violations. The Labor Department has documented a 69% increase in children employed in violation of child labor laws since 2018.
Earlier this year, NBC News reported that according to two U.S. officials familiar with the investigation, DHS and the Justice Department were trying to determine whether a human smuggling scheme brought migrant children to work for multiple companies in the meatpacking sector nationwide. The officials said the companies themselves were not targets of the investigation.
The investigators would not name any of the companies currently under investigation. Penalties could range from civil fines to criminal charges, the officials said, but no charges have been filed.
“I think it’s a huge positive step forward,” said Wendy Young, president of Kids in Need of Defense, a legal aid organization for migrant children. “Now we need to make sure that the federal government really invests resources to follow through and sustain this effort. But I’m heartened by the fact that we’re now seeing multiple agencies work together and really take this issue seriously,” Young said.
Spokespeople for Homeland Security Investigations, the White House and the Labor Department declined to comment. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
When a Labor Department investigation found Wisconsin-based Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI) had more than 100 children working across 13 locations in eight states, the company paid $1.5 million in civil penalties. A company spokesperson maintained that any child hired by the company used fake documentation to get the job. “We have always taken rigorous steps to comply with the law, including use of the government’s E-Verify system for new hires, extensive training for all hiring managers, multiple audits, and use of biometrics,” the spokesperson said.
The company said in April that it was launching a $10 million fund to “enhance the well-being of children in the communities we serve and help reduce the prevalence of the rising problem of underage workers.”
One official told NBC News that there is a sense that the underage migrants have unfairly paid a steeper penalty than the companies.
Previously, some of the parents of child employees at PSSI faced child abuse charges and children were left afraid to talk to investigators out of fear of deportation, according to community advocates and court filings.
Child labor, particularly among Guatemalan teenagers, is on the rise in the U.S. due to worsening economic conditions in the Central American country, increased migration by unaccompanied children in 2021 and 2022, and a U.S. labor shortage. The teenagers often provide falsified paperwork, including stolen identities, to show they are 18 or older and legally authorized to work in the U.S.
More than 260,000 unaccompanied migrant children have been released into the country in the past two years and almost half have been from Guatemala, according to federal figures.
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Workers and unions are beginning to speak out in support of people protesting Cop City. Some major companies, like Home Depot, are backing the forces driving Cop City. (photo: Miguel Martinez/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
“Cops are the first line of defense for business owners and employers, so I think it makes sense for labor to be opposed to Cop City.”
For Quiles, this also means speaking out against his former employer: Home Depot.
When he was fired from a Home Depot store in northeastern Philadelphia in February, Quiles was already struggling to support his toddler son on his salary, which he says never felt like enough, given the meager benefits. He says he was forced to lean on his “very strong support system.” This was despite his demanding job as a receiving supervisor, he notes, in charge of tasks like tracking incoming merchandise and overseeing maintenance of machinery in the store.
Quiles had been with the company for almost six years and played a leading role in a unionization drive that sought better pay, staffing and training. The drive was inspired by the successful unionization of an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island. His store’s effort, he says, was met with a “vicious union-busting” campaign from Home Depot management and culminated in an unsuccessful union election in November. Quiles, who comes across as friendly and direct, is adamant that he was fired about three months later in retaliation for trying to organize what would have been the first union in a Home Depot store. He says he is currently pursuing a wrongful termination charge with the National Labor Relations Board.
“The company would dispute this,” he says, “but I was fired for organizing.” Home Depot did not return requests for comment about Quiles’ claims.
But Quiles is not only concerned with his own situation — he is deeply upset about how the company’s policies and priorities are playing out in a city 800 miles away. Tax returns show that the Home Depot Foundation is a funder of the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), the private entity driving the fiercely opposed plan to build a $90 million police training center in the South River Forest, which protesters refer to by its Muscogee name, the Weelaunee Forest. Cop City is slated to include a shooting range, a driving course, and a mock city to train police from across the country in urban warfare, as activists put it, and would raze an important ecosystem and carbon sink in a majority-Black part of the Atlanta metro area.
“So Home Depot has money to allocate toward things like this, things that many people in that community don’t want because of the harm to the environment,” says Quiles, “but you can’t pay people more for the measurable value they bring to your company?”
Approved by the Atlanta City Council in 2021, the plan has been met with months-long opposition from neighbors and protesters concerned with the destruction of the forest at a time of intensifying climate change and environmental racism. Protesters are also alarmed by the expansion of policing and its associated violence, and “Stop Cop City” has become a national rallying cry for environmental and racial justice movements. Law enforcement, in turn, has responded with a ferocious crackdown that has left one forest defender killed (Georgia state troopers riddled 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán with 57 bullets in January) and 42 charged with domestic terrorism. Three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund, are now facing money laundering and charity fraud charges, following SWAT arrests at the end of May.
Quiles is not alone in expressing concern; his voice is part of an emerging labor effort publicly speaking out against police repression of the “Stop Cop City” protests. He is flanked by two unions — United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), a list that activists hope will grow — and quickly.
Quiles, meanwhile, is the president of Home Depot Workers United, an independent union which he says is in touch with workers at 25 stores around the country, some of which are actively planning union campaigns. He declined to disclose the exact number because he was concerned about retaliation and union busting tactics from the company. Home Depot Workers United released a statement in early April calling on Home Depot “to pull their support, both financial and otherwise, from the Atlanta Cop City project.”
The Home Depot Foundation gave $25,000 to the APF in 2021, $35,000 in 2020, and $50,000 in 2019. When asked about these payments, Terrance Roper, a spokesperson for Home Depot, said over email, “I can tell you we haven’t donated to the Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposed training facility. We have specifically donated to the Atlanta Police Foundation’s veteran housing program.”
But Maurice BP-Weeks, a fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, says “This doesn’t pass the smell test. A dollar is a dollar, and Home Depot’s dollars have helped enable APF’s programs. Cop City is the signature program of APF at the moment.”
The corporate relationship goes beyond funding: As LittleSis pointed out, Daniel Grider, Home Depot’s vice president of technology, sits on the APF’s board of trustees. (Grider is also on the leadership team of the Home Depot Foundation.)
“Corporations the size of Home Depot don’t have executives join boards like this by accident,” says BP-Weeks. “They are sophisticated political actors, and when you see someone on a board, it’s a sophisticated action. Home Depot clearly expects something out of the relationship.”
Grider isn’t the only connection. Arthur Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot, has a family foundation that pledged $3 million to the “Public Safety First Campaign,” which is the term the APF uses for the project. (In a statement to In These Times reporter and editor Joseph Bullington, the foundation sought to distance itself from the project by claiming the funding went to a different project of the APF.) Furthermore, Derek Bottoms, vice president of employment practices and associate relations for Home Depot, is the husband of Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta who supported the construction of Cop City.
I spoke with a Home Depot worker and organizer who played a lead role in drafting the Home Depot Workers United statement — he requested anonymity to protect himself from retaliation. The worker said he was especially outraged to learn about these direct donations. “Home Depot’s profits come from my labor,” he says, “and we get a tiny fraction of that. The rest they get to decide what they do with. So often, what they do with that money is they enrich themselves or they give it to organizations or other things that don’t help the associates, and that actively harm workers.”
Some union leaders say the fight to stop Cop City has significant stakes for the labor movement as a whole. “Working people always have to be wary of any repression against protesters, because there is a history in our country that once it’s used against anyone protesting government policies, it can be turned against workers in their union,” Carl Rosen, the general president of UE, says over the phone from Erie, Pennsylvania, where 1,400 UE members who work for Wabtec Corp. could soon go out on strike.
This is especially concerning amid increasing enthusiasm about unions, even if density remains low. “At a time when workers across the country are increasingly willing to strike and use other militant tactics to oppose rampant corporate greed, working people must remain vigilant and united against any attacks on our right to peacefully protest against injustice,” UE officers, including Rosen, wrote in a June 2 statement. UE says it represents at least 30,000 workers.
The leadership of IUPAT was the first major union to weigh in, a significant development from a construction trades union that says it represents “over 100,000 workers across the United States, including across the Atlanta metro region.” A late March statement from general president Jimmy Williams Jr. emphasized racial justice issues at the heart of the matter.
“The IUPAT was proud to stand in solidarity during the height of the pandemic with the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington D.C.,” according to the statement. “Today we stand in solidarity with the protesters in Atlanta who are facing egregious and unnecessary violence by the Atlanta Police force and others for simply disagreeing around matters of public policy.”
When Williams became president in September 2021, he was hailed as a progressive new leader, unafraid to talk about tough issues like racism.
The unions that have spoken out in defense of activists only represent a tiny fraction of the labor movement. But BP-Weeks says, “We are at the very beginning of reaching out, and the support we have is really exciting — good on them for getting out in front.” BP-Weeks is part of an effort to circulate a sign-on letter so that unions can show their solidarity.
“Larger institutions generally don’t move as quickly, so we are continuing to reach out to the rest of labor, and we expect more sign-ons in the future,” BP-Weeks continues. “And we also realize not all of labor is in the same place on that. This moment can be a tool to organize and do some political education with unions as well.”
But even where union leaders — or their memberships as a whole — have not signed on, some workers and union members are involved in Stop Cop City organizing. Among them is Bill Aiman, a part-time United Parcel Service (UPS) worker who is a member of the Teamsters and is also involved in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a rank-and-file movement for improved democracy and militancy. He is based in the Atlanta metro area and says over the phone that he has “been attending protests, and trying to organize where possible.”
“When I talk to coworkers,” he says, “the Cop City project is extremely unpopular.”
“Cops are the first line of defense for business owners and employers, so I think it makes sense for labor to be opposed to Cop City,” he says. “These cops are being trained at Cop City and will use the tactics they learn to crush our strike if we go out.” The UPS contract will expire on July 31, and around 350,000 Teamsters could go on strike.
Some union leaders say, in addition to the immediate interests of labor, there are bigger principles at stake. In their statement, UE officers noted that, “In a democracy, decisions about the use of publicly-owned land and public funds should be driven by robust public debate, including the right of members of the public to peacefully protest. Instead, Atlanta has chosen repression.”
Early Tuesday, Atlanta’s city council approved the allocation of $67 million in public funds for the project: around $31 million in public funds for the construction of Cop City, along with $1.2 million a year over 30 years for use of the facility. This was approved despite an outpouring of impassioned public opposition. The rest of the funding will be raised privately. The APF’s board is filled with a host of Georgia-headquartered corporate leaders, ranging from Delta Air Lines to Waffle House to UPS. Protesters say that the supporters of Cop City — in government, the corporate world, and police-aligned nonprofits — are ramming through the project without meaningful democratic input. Emory University conducted a survey in March which found that a plurality of Black Atlanta residents oppose Cop City. Many protesters say the funds should instead be invested in public programs that improve human and environmental wellbeing.
Kerry Cannon, the interim vice president of Home Depot Workers United, says, “Home Depot has a set of core values they like to say they live by, and their financial and other support of Cop City is in complete contradiction of their values, from destroying a forest to ignoring the will of the people of that area.” The company advertises a wheel of “core values” on its website — these include “respect for all people” and “taking care of our people.”
Cop City is not the first time Home Depot has come under fire for the actual values it promotes. Another co-founder, billionaire Bernie Marcus, has donated to the campaigns of far-right politicians, including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In 2021, a coalition of Black faith leaders called for a boycott of the company, which is headquartered in Georgia, for its “indifference” to a sweeping law to curb voting rights, even as other corporations spoke out. Numerous Home Depot employees have also spoken out about a host of nightmarish working conditions, ranging from sexual harassment to timed bathroom breaks.
After losing his job, Quiles is organizing for Home Depot Workers United in a strictly volunteer capacity, and says he is having to “limit expenses in the household” and is “cutting it fairly close.” The “current corporate culture in the country” is what inspires him to keep organizing, he says, and speaking out about Home Depot’s links to Cop City is a critical part of that.
“The point of labor organizing,” he says, “is to improve society as a whole.”
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Members of the Myanmar military take part in a parade, 27 March 2023. (photo: AFP)
Company sent shipment to Myanmar in 2019, after Israel announced it would no longer send weapons to the country
A report published by the rights group Justice for Myanmar says the shipments were made in 2019. The report includes a letter by Israeli attorney Eitay Mack that was sent to Israeli attorney general Gali Baharav-Miara.
According to the report, in July 2019 the Israeli arms producer CAA Industries shipped equipment to manufacture arms to a supplier of the Myanmar military. The two-tonne shipment included molds for injecting plastic polymers which could be used to manufacture rifle parts like grips and handles.
Middle East Eye reached out to CAA Industries for comment on this report but they did not respond by the time of publication
"CAA Industries has a responsibility to respect international human rights and humanitarian law. Under international human rights standards on business and human rights, CAA Industries has a responsibility to conduct due diligence and prevent or mitigate and remedy any negative human rights impacts linked to the end-use of their products and services," Justice for Myanmar said in a statement.
"Justice For Myanmar calls for CAA Industries to immediately halt any collaboration, including shipments of accessories for specialised machinery and injection moulds, to Myanmar."
The rights group published images of rifles manufactured by the Myanmar military's arms industries, including assault rifles, sniper rifles, and light machine guns, and have identified grips and stocks with the identical design that CAA sells.
CAA told Haaretz that "most of the company’s products are for civilian use" and that when dealing with defence-related items, it "operates according to the law and according to Israeli Defense Ministry permits and regulation".
"CAA has never conducted defense related deals with countries not approved for defense exports," it said, adding that the information in the report is false.
It added that the company's "plastic products are exempt from defense export controls".
However, according to Mack, the human rights lawyer, the equipment that was sent to Myanmar is defined as dual use, for both civilian and military purposes. The letter he sent to Israel's attorney general demands Baharav-Miara open an investigation into "who approved the sale to Myanmar".
"CNC machining and plastic injection molding are both commonly used and cost-effective ways to produce parts for small arms and other weapons," said the letter.
"The arms produced with the help [of] CAA Industries Ltd equipment, could help the Myanmar's military manhunting and extermination campaign against democracy activists, journalists and the general public."
Providing Myanmar military with know-how
The Justice for Myanmar report says the group which purchased the equipment is the Star Sapphire Group, which Haaretz previously reported had acted as a broker between Israel's defence contractors and the Myanmar military junta. Earlier this year, the US imposed sanctions on the entity.
In 2017, Middle East Eye reported that Israel continued to sell Myanmar weapons and arms as thousands of Rohingya refugees fled the military's violent crackdown in the Rakhine state.
The weapons sold to Myanmar included over 100 tanks, weapons and boats used to police the country's border, according to human rights groups and Myanmarese officials. This was despite Israel officially saying that year that it would stop exporting weapons to Myanmar.
Rohingya Muslims have been fleeing Myanmar en masse since 2017, at the start of the country's most recent army crackdown against the minority group.
In August 2017, Myanmar's military forced 700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, in a campaign the UN described as "genocidal".
Satellite images show dozens of Rohingya villages burned to the ground by the Myanmar army.
"What makes this deal particularly problematic is that it provides the Myanmar military with the tools to upgrade their small arms and this know-how will remain. It is not a one-off shipment of weapons, but products and tools that can be kept and used for a lot of things," Mack wrote in his letter.
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Artisanal miners carry sacks of ore at the Shabara artisanal mine near Kolwezi, October 12, 2022. (photo: Junior Kannah/AFP)
A report released Wednesday faults the U.S. and other nations for providing incentives for the mining of rare metals like lithium and cobalt without enacting adequate labor and environmental safeguards.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Center said the alleged abuses involve global mining for copper, lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel and zinc, all used in critical renewable technologies like solar panels, vehicle batteries and windmills.
The abuses, the report concluded, stem from the failure of the United States and other nations to develop appropriate labor and environmental safeguards for resource extraction critical to the green energy transition, a key aim of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act.
Beyond alleged incidents of assaults, child labor, arbitrary arrests and detentions, the report’s database of 510 alleged violations includes environmental crimes involving the pollution of drinking water and other natural resources, and violations of communities’ rights to be consulted about projects that affect them.
The report includes allegations against 93 companies operating 172 large-scale mining sites between the years 2010 and 2022.
Richard Pearshouse, director of the Environment and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, called the report’s findings “incredibly concerning” and said governments need to act quickly ahead of the anticipated acceleration in demand and need for clean-energy materials.
Pearshouse, who was not involved in the creation of the report but who is familiar with its findings, said governments and businesses need to quickly address gaps in environmental and human rights regulations to prevent an escalation in abuses as the energy transition accelerates.
In particular, Pearshouse took aim at existing mineral supply-chain auditing and certification schemes that are voluntary, and sometimes led by mining companies themselves. Human Rights Watch has documented problems with those schemes, whereby companies state that their supplies of raw materials have engaged in no improper conduct. In some cases, he said, auditors are paid by the companies being audited.
Such self-policing is problematic, Pearshouse said, especially in light of incentives governments are pouring into the procurement of more clean-energy materials.
“That’s where we’re particularly concerned,” he said. “You’re seeing a scale up of the means to access these critical minerals, but not yet a corresponding scale up to ensure supply chains meet sustainability and human rights standards.”
In the United States, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act directs over $250 billion in new federal spending toward clean-energy, including the procurement of critical minerals and metals. The legislation is aimed at helping the United States meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement, which seeks to limit global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally, less than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.
The Inflation Reduction Act’s incentives, along with similar legislation being developed in the European Union and elsewhere, are spurring an increase in demand that the International Energy Agency has said will need to increase six-fold by 2040 for the world to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—a key goal post to advert the worst impacts of global warming.
As for human rights and environmental safeguards, the Biden administration has taken some action, launching an Interagency Working Group to suggest updates to the 150-year-old U.S. mining laws and issuing an executive order directing governmental agencies to review climate, environmental, human-rights and forced-labor risks, among other things, in supply chains.
But human rights experts, including Pearshosue, say binding, independent and transparent safeguards on the procurement of minerals and metals need to be significantly and quickly enacted to meet the moment.
Caroline Avan, one of the authors of the report, said she and her co-authors’ were not anti-mining. Responding to climate change is itself a human rights imperative, she said.
“We have to move away from fossil fuels and that requires minerals to manufacture renewable technologies,” Avan said. “There is no way around that, but it should not mean we have to mine everywhere without any sort of safeguards.”
Avan and her co-authors recommend policy changes including the enactment of mandatory human rights due diligence laws, which would require companies to identify, prevent and remedy human rights violations. While several non-binding frameworks exist, like the United Nations Human Rights Council’s 2011 Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, transnational companies have remained stubbornly opposed to mandatory legal requirements.
Human rights defenders also need stronger legal protections, Avan said, citing the report’s count of 133 alleged attacks on people who work to protect individuals’ and communities’ rights.
“We’re seeing lawmakers adopting legislation to incentivize mining, but they should also be working on reducing demand and promoting the recycling of minerals to reduce pressures on local communities and the environment,” she said.
Some affected communities have offered their own solutions. The Indigenous Huancuire community, which is impacted by China Minmetals’ Las Bambas copper mine in Peru, has called for a community-equity model of ownership whereby local communities have a degree of co-ownership in mines that affect them.
That model, they argue, would provide financial stability for local families and give affected communities a seat at the table when decisions about the mine are made. Avan said ideas like the community-equity model are about “reimagining” the mining industry and the broader extractive sector “based on respect for human rights.”
The data analyzed by the report, aggregated from public sources like news reports and court documents, also tracks incidents of corruption tied to net-zero mineral and metal mining. Compared to the preceding 11 years, incidents of corruption increased nearly 24 percent in 2022, with 10 cases that year compared to 42 cases from 2010 to 2021.
Human rights experts have long argued that relying on the justice systems of countries where resource extraction takes place is inadequate, as some of those countries have weak rule of law where corruption has festered.
The Berlin-based watchdog organization Transparency International found that most of the materials critical to the energy transition are located in countries that rank poorly on indicators of corruption, including about 70 percent of the world’s cobalt, which is used in wind turbines.
The Business and Human Rights Resource Center report highlighted a $1.1 billion fine paid in 2022 by Glencore International A.G. and Glencore Ltd., both part of a Swiss mining company, following U.S., Brazilian and U.K. investigations that found Glencore had engaged in bribery and corruption in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Brazil, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including by making concealed payments “through intermediaries for the benefit of foreign officials.”
“Increasing global demand for minerals may incentivise companies to cut corners on environmental regulations and effective public participation, suggesting corruption may be closely connected to many human rights abuses in the context of mining,” the report said.
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