Notice: Trying to get property 'ID' of non-object in /code/wp-content/themes/thenation-2023/functions.php on line 3332 The Chicago Teachers Union Wants to End Student Homelessness at the Bargaining Tablehttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/chicago-teachers-union-homelessness/Sarah LazareMar 25, 2024

In its next contract, the CTU is demanding housing for up to 15,000 unhoused students.

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Activism / March 25, 2024

The Chicago Teachers Union Wants to End Student Homelessness at the Bargaining Table

In its next contract, the CTU is demanding housing for up to 15,000 unhoused students.

Sarah Lazare
Chicago Teachers Union Rally in Downtown Chicago
Thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in a show of support for the ongoing teachers strike on October 23, 2019 in Chicago, Ill. (Scott Heins / Getty Images)

At the high school where Kevin Moore has taught social studies for seven years, there is no way to separate Chicago’s housing crisis from teachers’ working conditions—or students’ learning conditions. Of the roughly 1,500 students at George Washington High School, on the far southeast side of the city, about 60 students are housing insecure, he said. But that number is expected to rise this year, with an increasing number of migrant newcomers temporarily staying with family or friends, deprived permanent residence, a status referred to as “doubling up.”

“If you’re a child and you don’t know what your living situation is going to be by the end of the week, much less by the end of the day, school is not going to be your top priority,” Moore, 45, said of the high school, which is 88 percent Latino. “We want to give our students the most joyful day possible,” he said, adding that it’s “difficult to do our jobs when a child is struggling, when their attention is elsewhere.”

Now, as chair of the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) housing committee, Moore is trying to change that. The union, officially AFT-IFT Local 1, has made a national name for its willingness to fight—and strike—for demands that consider the broader good of the communities where teachers work and often live. With the contract representing roughly 26,000 educators in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) set to expire on June 30, the union is including bargaining proposals that address the crisis of homelessness among Chicago’s children.

Chief among them is the proposal that the city of Chicago and the board of education agree to become “partners in a pilot program to house homeless families of 5,000 students in Chicago Public Schools with plans to scale that up at the end of the pilot period to house the families of up to 15,000 homeless students,” according to one of the housing proposals, read out loud to Workday Magazine and The Nation. “We will work together with the pilot partners with the goal of eliminating homelessness for families of students in Chicago Public Schools within five years.”

The proposal calls for the board and city to “create 10,000 new affordable housing units. Residents of the city shall have access on a lottery basis, but priority for new public housing units shall be given to CPS students and families.”

Within the CPS system, there are roughly 20,000 students in temporary living situations (STLS), a term that refers to students who themselves or whose parents don’t have a lease or a mortgage. They might be doubling up or living in shelters, cars, hotels, or outside. “What better solution is there than to actually get housing?” said Jhoanna Maldonado, CTU organizer and liaison for the union’s housing committee. “Other than that, you’re just Band-Aiding the problem.”

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This would not be the first time a teachers’ union used a contract to try to house students. In its 2021 to 2024 contract, the Boston Teachers Union (Local 66 AFT Massachusetts) won a measure to partner with the city and the school district on a pilot program “to house homeless families of 1,000 students in Boston schools with plans to scale that up at the end of the pilot period to house the families of up to 4,000 homeless students.” That contract states that the union “will work together with the pilot partners with the goal of eliminating homelessness for families of students in Boston schools within five years.”

The exact pathway to housing CPS students would have to be forged through the process, but teachers have no shortage of ideas. Maldonado, who was a teacher before working as an organizer for CTU, said in an interview on March 15 that there are a number of legislative initiatives that could help achieve these goals. “Support public housing, fully fund ‘Section 8’ vouchers, expand other housing programs,” she said. “How do we change policies, laws? That’s something they had refused to do in the past.”

On March 19, Chicago held a referendum over Bring Chicago Home, a measure to increase revenue for affordable housing and homeless services by an estimated $1 billion over 10 years through a progressive amendment to the city’s real estate transfer tax. The effort was supported by a broad coalition of faith groups, community and service organizations, people facing homelessness, labor, CTU, and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who is himself a former CPS teacher and CTU organizer. It was fiercely opposed by real estate and developer interests, which mounted a legal challenge in an attempt to remove the measure from the ballot. While this legal effort eventually failed, “many local media outlets ran with the real estate industry’s misleading messaging, which suggested that the ballot question was removed completely,” Asha Ransby-Sporn reported for In These Times. This was in addition to a host of misinforming ads, Ransby-Sporn added, “intended to scare and confuse voters.” In some cases, landlords contacted tenants and warned them against voting for Bring Chicago Home, according to South Side Weekly reporter Jim Daley.

On the night of March 22, the Associated Press declared that the Bring Chicago Home referendum had been defeated in the polls approximately 53 percent to 47 percent, with 100 percent of precincts reporting, and mail-in ballots unable to significantly shift these numbers.

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In response to this electoral outcome, Moore said the CTU’s housing proposals are more important than ever, and the union has no intention of backing down on them. “It doesn’t change our objectives,” he said. “It could energize us.”

Jackson Potter, the CTU vice president, agreed. “We knew any effort to address big and systemic issues like racism and homelessness would require struggle,” he said, in remarks made after the Associated Press called the vote. “And now the real estate industry has picked a fight we intend to win, through our contract, through legislation, through street actions, coalition-building, and growing our movement.”

The union’s housing proposals include other pathways to address the housing crisis. CTU is proposing to establish a working group to identify unused city and Board of Education–owned spaces that could be transformed into affordable housing, Moore summarized. “School buildings that were closed in 2012 and 2013, sitting there vacant, could be rehabbed and modified,” Moore said. “You could identify vacant lots in neighborhoods to identify places where housing could be built.” (Shuttered public schools have already been turned into luxury lofts in Chicago.)

There is precedent for these measures, as well. In the appendix of their 2022 to 2025 contract, the United Teachers Los Angeles won a memorandum of understanding that says the district and the union would establish a joint task force to identify vacant school district ”land parcels that could be used for the development of affordable housing for low-income students and families.” And a 2023 memorandum of understanding says the Oakland school district will work with the Oakland Education Association to identify “possible locations that could be developed into housing for unhoused and housing insecure” students. Both of these agreements were preceded by strikes.

The union is also proposing a partnership with trade unions to create a Career and Technical Education program to construct housing for STLS students. And the CTU wants a pathway for members of the community to become STLS advocates, who help housing-insecure students and their families connect with resources and maintain access to public education, and are allocated to schools based on the number of homeless students who go there. This paid position was won in the last contract for the first time, after teachers also proposed housing for all homeless students, and went on strike in 2019.

Moore said teachers have a special responsibility to curb homelessness. “In the wealthiest nation on the planet, there is definitely enough money to house everyone who needs housing. No one should go without shelter, even for one night, especially children.”

Over the years, Moore said he has known a few students who ran away from home. One, who couch surfed with friends and neighbors, was able to graduate and is in college now. But there are many other students whose housing precarity he may not be aware of. Often it is up to teachers—themselves overworked—to report any concerns to STLS advocates. “I think a lot of the students who are unhoused are doubled up, living with other families, couch surfing, bouncing from family to family member,” he said.

The union’s proposals don’t stop with housing. The CTU is calling for cost of living adjustments, improved bilingual education services, better staffing, improved case manager ratios for special education, and a movement toward greener, more climate-just schools—including removal of all lead pipes.

Bargaining proposals are aspirational documents, and in the case of the CTU, they emerged from an intensive—Moore called it “bottom-up”—process of soliciting feedback. Moore said proposals started being formulated last fall, crafted by committees that are chaired by active teachers, and also include CTU organizers. The union sent surveys to members, and discussed proposals at union meetings. “As part of a summer organizing institute, we fanned out and went to communities throughout the city,” Moore said. “We talked to CTU members and community members. Community members would tell us if they had a chance to reimagine how a school could look in their community, what would they want to see.”

Once the committees compiled their proposals, there were three rounds of proposal meetings, where the executive board, committee chairs, and leadership discussed and debated the language. On March 6, hundreds of members of the union’s House of Delegates gathered for more than six hours to debate the 142 pages of proposals that had made the cut, in a meeting that was open to any CTU member, before the proposals were finally put to a vote.

One of the next steps is negotiations. Maldonado said that, historically, the district has been reluctant to engage in serious negotiations until the union has shown willingness to strike. Teachers are hopeful it will be different this time under the Johnson administration.

When discussing the union’s housing proposals, Moore referenced bargaining for the common good, the idea that contracts can be used to win broader social goods and that labor and community groups can—and should—work together. This concept is related to social-justice unionism, which has been present at various points in US labor history: the United Packinghouse Workers of America, which fought racist hiring practices in the 1950s and opposed racial segregation; ILWU Local 10, which refused to unload cargo delivered from apartheid South Africa; and CTU itself, which struck in 2012 in part to oppose corporate education reform.

An estimated 82 percent of the more than 68,000 people facing homelessness in Chicago are people of color, with Black communities disproportionately bearing the brunt and Latino Chicagoans also heavily affected, according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. “The issue is equity,” Moore said. “The lack of affordable housing is the number-one cause of homelessness in Chicago. We’ve seen years of redlining.”

Of course, the CTU has its opponents, among them the anti-union, billionaire- and corporate-funded Illinois Policy Institute, which has sought to frame the union’s ambitious bargaining demands as examples of teacher overreach. (The think tank obtained and published some summaries of bargaining proposals.) But Moore said that communities admire the CTU for its very willingness to fight hard for its members and the neighborhoods in which they labor. “They are going to do anything to try to make us look bad and break up our union,” he said. “We have power; we’re well organized; we have support. We are fundamentally trying to reimagine and change how public education looks in Chicago. There will always be pushback against that.”

“People come at us and say, ‘Do you think housing is something we should be fighting for?’ Absolutely. We have almost 20,000 homeless students. That is unacceptable.”



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The Auto Workers Who Stand With Gazahttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/auto-workers-unions-labor-gaza/Sarah Lazare,Sarah LazareFeb 28, 2024

More than half of organized labor in the US is part of a union that has called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. One worker explains why.

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Activism / February 28, 2024

The Auto Workers Who Stand With Gaza

More than half of organized labor in the US is part of a union that has called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. One worker explains why.

Sarah Lazare

Marcie Pedraza pickets near an entrance to Ford’s Chicago Assembly plant during UAW’s stand-up strike on September 29, 2023.

(Oscar Sanchez)

When asked why workers in the United States care about people in Gaza, Marcie Pedraza immediately brought up the animating principle of labor organizing: solidarity. The 48-year-old autoworker told me, “Workers are always being attacked by companies or being exploited,” and the only antidote is banding together. This, she said, was reinforced during the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) strike, when she and her colleagues at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant joined thousands of workers who walked out in rolling, surprise strikes against the Big Three automakers. Why, she asked, wouldn’t this same concept apply to people being targeted in a lethal military campaign in another part of the world, who are suffering unimaginable levels of persecution and loss?

“Whenever someone is being oppressed, we should stand with them.”

Workers like Pedraza are, increasingly, the face of a US labor movement that is publicly disagreeing with President Joe Biden’s unwavering political support and arming of Israel’s military operations against the coastal enclave of 2 million. Four months in, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza is now over 29,000, including more than 12,000 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. And Israel’s siege has caused famine and medical collapse and displaced more than 80 percent of Gaza’s population. Israel is killing Palestinians at a rate unparallelled in modern conflicts, and the International Court of Justice determined in January that it is “plausible” that Israel is committing acts of genocide.

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The majority of unionized workers in the United States—at this point, at least 9 million—are now members of unions that have directly called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, and major national and international unions, like the UAW and the National Education Association, have joined the new National Labor Network for Ceasefire. Roughly 12.5 million workers, many of whom overlap with the 9 million, are in unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which has also called for a cease-fire. The longer Israel’s campaign grinds on, the more mainstream this demand grows.

The leadership of the US labor movement has frequently hewed close to the foreign policy positions of the US State Department, with notable exceptions and some consistent outliers (including, at times, within the UAW). So the divergence on Gaza is remarkable, with growing numbers arguing as union plumber Paul Stauffer did in In These Times: “The War on Gaza Is a Labor Issue.” And as labor historian Jeff Schuhrke recently noted in Jewish Currents, networks of workers organizing in solidarity with Gaza are pushing their unions to escalate their actions beyond cease-fire statements. They want unions to directly pressure lawmakers, cut economic ties to Israel, disrupt the flow of weapons and intelligence to Israel, and make any endorsement of Biden contingent on the president’s support for a permanent cease-fire.

Pedraza pushed for a cease-fire resolution in her UAW Local 551 relatively early, coming off of a difficult and high-profile strike. Yet, when we discussed this feat at a community center in Chicago’s north side, she came across as humble and unfazed. A mother to a 13-year-old daughter, she has shoulder-length brown hair with a smattering of pencil-thin streaks of gray, and wears glasses that fade from blue to green to beige. I was struck by her willingness to dive into any topic I brought up in a manner that was both friendly and forceful. It is easy to imagine her being disarming and convincing in conversations on the shop floor or in the union hall—and it seems that’s exactly what she had to do.

After the UAW international executive board called for a cease-fire on December 1, 2023, Pedraza said, “I was like, I’m going to see if we can do something at our local. If you put them all together, it can be a trickle effect. Eventually someone will have to listen to us.”

At a general membership meeting on January 21, she came prepared with a statement she had pieced together by combining themes from resolutions passed by other locals, and by referencing an October 16, 2023, call to action from Palestinian trade unions, which urges global unions to refuse to supply weapons to Israel and “pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel,” alongside other demands. “Right before the union meeting,” she explained, “we had committee meetings. I table-hopped, went to the skilled-trades meeting, went to the organizing committee table, and said I’m going to make this resolution. They said, ‘Yeah, OK.’”

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When it came time to present her proposal formally at the meeting, she was nervous, she said. “I started talking about how I want to put it in terms workers can relate to. Our tax dollars are paying for this genocide. The government says we have no money for public education, for fixing our roads, for infrastructure, for the unhoused, no money for universal healthcare. But we have billions to spend on military aid for Israel. That’s something people can relate to.” Her proposal got a second, followed by brief discussion and “a little hesitation,” she said. “One guy tried to table it until the next meeting.”

But the resolution passed overwhelmingly, and when she circulated it publicly a few days later, it was praised in some corners of the Palestine solidarity movement for its strength: The text referred to Israel’s campaign as a “genocide,” directly referenced Palestinian trade unionists, and called for refusal to build and transport weapons to Israel.

Labor’s calls for a cease-fire are in line with public opinion in the United States: Polling shows that a majority of Americans, and more than 70 percent of Democrats, want a cease-fire. Yet the voices of people like Pedraza are often excluded from public debate about the issue—or outright denied. In an article published on February 2 in New York magazine, the prominent liberal pundit Jonathan Chait criticized UAW members who opposed their union’s endorsement of Biden while the president was backing the onslaught against Gaza. Chait framed these union members’ concerns as a fringe position adopted by graduate students (roughly 25 percent of UAW members are academic workers). Chait took issue with the idea that the labor movement, at its most “visionary,” should consider foreign policy a union issue. “It may not be surprising,” he wrote, “that the graduate-student wing of the UAW has a more visionary understanding of its mission than do the people who work in car factories.” (Chait, it’s worth noting, has been a longtime critic of teachers’ unions and has had to disclose, on a number of occasions, that his wife works for a charter-school advocacy group.)

Pedraza said that, for the purposes of this article, she didn’t want to get into the issue of UAW’s Biden endorsement. But she did want to make two things clear: It is “condescending” to say autoworkers are incapable of visionary, complex thought that grapples with the global nature of workers’ struggles. “They just assume we’re all uninformed,” she said, “that we are not knowledgeable about world events and all we’re here to do is just clock in and clock out.” And she said it’s wrong to drive a wedge between graduate students and other sectors of the working class; graduate students are highly exploited wage earners and are no less legitimate than any other worker.

As a blue-collar autoworker, Pedraza had been doing visionary organizing long before her local’s cease-fire statement. She has been a UAW auto worker since 2013, and a worker at the Chicago Assembly Plant, in the far south of Chicago near the Indiana border, since 2016. Trained as an electrician, she currently does preventive maintenance planning for the paint department, which involves generating work orders to keep the equipment and plant in good condition. “If they find something wrong, like a leaky pump, I make the work ticket and make sure it gets to whoever it needs to,” she explained. (She wanted to make sure it’s clear that she does not give people work and is not a supervisor.) She likes her role because it allows her to spend weekends with her daughter, in contrast to the years she spent on call for any trouble on the assembly line, when she had to work 12-hour shifts, both days and nights.

She grew up in the working-class neighborhood of South Chicago, where her grandparents came from Mexico to work in the railroads and the steel mills. Her dad, who had also worked in nearby steel mills, died when she was 9, leaving her mom to take care of five kids, a flock that would eventually expand to six, while working as an administrative assistant at the American Bar Association. Her family wasn’t particularly political growing up, she recalled, “but I saw Chicano Power buttons in my house, and I remember going to events with Harold Washington,” a progressive Chicago mayor in the 1980s.

Her high school ecology club got her interested in activism, but her first foray into organizing happened at University of Southern California, which she attended for two years, where she threw herself into a grape boycott campaign in solidarity with the United Farm Workers. She moved back to Chicago, and got jobs as a union electrician, and in construction, before becoming an autoworker, work that went hand-in-hand with union activism. “My daughter has been to protests with me since she’s been a baby,” she said. “Her first big demo was the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012. I remember marching with other friends pushing strollers.”

Pedraza is active in campaigns against environmental racism as the board president of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, serves on the Local School Council, and is part of Unite All Workers for Democracy, the grassroots UAW rank-and-file reform movement that got Shawn Fain elected to the presidency as a reform challenger in March 2023. The only elected position she has ever served in her union was on the election committee; currently, she serves on several other committees—women’s skilled trades and organizing. She is also involved in UAW Labor for Palestine, which has a large and active group chat that she has a hard time keeping up with. Asked about her political affiliations, Pedraza said she is a “leftist.” Her life’s work and her penchant for weaving together complex political arguments for international solidarity is a refutation of Chait’s claim that visionary thinking does not happen on the factory floor.

Pedraza said she is eager for the labor movement to take robust action to make the growing cease-fire calls a reality, as the situation for people in Gaza grows increasingly desperate. Reports are emerging of Gaza residents forced to resort to eating animal feed and of disease spreading as Israel turns hospitals into attack zones. Civilians face escalating lethal attacks, reporting that there is nowhere safe to flee. Despite rising global calls for a cease-fire, including from major humanitarian organizations, Biden’s material support for Israel has not faltered. In the months following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that killed around 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, Biden has been pressing Congress to send $14 billion in military aid to Israel, and has repeatedly circumvented Congress to send more weapons. On February 20, the Biden administration for the third time vetoed a draft resolution for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire at the United Nations Security Council, instead calling for a temporary cease-fire conditioned on the release of 134 Israeli and foreign-worker hostages who remain in Gaza.

Pedraza does not wish to equate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza with the hardships US workers face. “Our schools don’t have working heat or air conditioners, but at least my kid has a school structure,” she said. “These kids in Gaza don’t even have a house.” But she does think that workers’ experiences of being exploited and mistreated can open a door to increased global solidarity. This doesn’t always come easily, she said. Just like anyone else, workers “can be only concerned about what’s going on in their own families or their own communities.”

But she noted, “People at work are always trying to survive. Things cost so much more. Everyone has side hustles. People are always trying to sell something at work. This is one of the reasons our strike was so successful.”

“There’s no money to do anything about the problems we have here,” she added, “but there is always money for war.”



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These Teachers Want the Largest Union in the Country to Rescind its Biden Endorsement Over Gazahttps://www.thenation.com/article/society/nea-union-biden-endorsement-gaza/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah LazareJan 22, 2024

A rank-and-file campaign inside the National Education Association is demanding the president stop “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel.”

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Politics / January 22, 2024

These Teachers Want the Largest Union in the Country to Rescind its Biden Endorsement Over Gaza

A rank-and-file campaign inside the National Education Association is demanding the president stop “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel.”

Sarah Lazare

President Joe Biden speaks during a National Education Association event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2023.

(Ting Shen / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

When Israel escalated its military operations against Gaza in October, Rahaf Othman was so distraught, she said, she “couldn’t think straight.” The 45-year-old Palestinian American, who teaches social studies at Harold L. Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Ill., recalled that she “started getting nightmares from my own experiences when I was in Palestine. I was functional at work, but barely functional. My brain was mush. I was getting traumatized every time I turned on my phone.”

“For the first month, people were asking me what we should do, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t focus.” While in this state, she said she discovered that she could lean on some of her colleagues. “Educators rallied together and created this group, Educators for Palestine. I am grateful they brought me along for the ride.”

Othman is a member of the Illinois Education Association (IEA) Local 218, which covers an area to the south of Chicago, part of the 3 million–strong National Education Association (NEA), the largest labor union in the United States. She is now part of a member effort to press the NEA to put real muscle behind supporting a cease-fire, one prong in a small-but-growing campaign within the US labor movement.

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But the rank-and-file campaign goes beyond demanding an end to Israel’s military operations, which have killed at least 22,000 Palestinians, 12,000 of them children. Othman and other members want the NEA to revoke its endorsement of Joe Biden for the 2024 presidential race until the president secures a “permanent cease-fire,” stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” and commits “to a fair due process for asylum-seekers and refugees.”

“Until NEA takes this step,” a member petition states, signatories are planning to withhold voluntary donations from the union’s political action committee, which is used to support candidates. (Signatories are not planning to withhold their union dues.)

The demand is eye-catching, because Biden appeared to really want the NEA’s endorsement: The president addressed the union by video at its last representative assembly in July 2023. And first lady Jill Biden has made her long-term membership in NEA a key part of her public political identity. “You—all of you—make me proud to be a longtime member of the NEA,” Jill Biden said in an August 2023 address to educators.

The NEA, in turn, has had a supportive relationship with the Biden administration. The union’s endorsement of Biden for the 2024 presidential race came early—in April of 2023 for the Democratic primary, and in July of 2023 for the general election.

Biden’s identity as a “union man” was central to his presidential run in 2020, and he is setting a similar tone during the current race: He held the first big political event of his reelection campaign at a union rally in Philadelphia, in what the Associated Press said is an indicator of “just how much Biden is counting on labor support to carry him to a second term.”

For members of the NEA who are desperate to stop the killing of civilians in Gaza, making this support contingent on the Biden administration’s meaningful push for a cease-fire is the best leverage they have. The goal, they say, is not to help former president Donald Trump win but the opposite. “Getting President Biden to change his position on Israel will help him to beat Trump,” reads an explanatory document, circulated with the petition. “People who vote Democratic are overwhelmingly in support of a permanent ceasefire and disapprove of Biden’s handling of the situation.” Polling shows the majority of Americans want a cease-fire, including more than 70 percent of Democrats.

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The organizing effort to rescind this endorsement is just getting started, and it’s too soon to know what base of support it has. But its backers point to momentum they have already achieved: This same group of members successfully pressed 19 local, state, and regional bodies of the NEA to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, including the National Council of Urban Education Associations, a caucus comprised of 251 large NEA locals and UniServ Councils, which are associations of several locals. And the members behind these resolutions claim credit for NEA President Rebecca Pringle’s December 8, 2023, tweet in support of a cease-fire. “With the end of the temporary truce,” she wrote, “the need for a ceasefire in Gaza is growing.”

And there are at least some supporters of the presidential un-endorsement in NEA’s board of directors. Among them is Aaron Phillips, a 41-year-old fifth grade teacher and NEA board member from Amarillo, Tex. “There’s a growing group of board members that support it,” he said, referring to the effort to revoke the presidential endorsement. “If I were to make a motion, I’m confident I would have a second and would have a growing group of board members stand with me.”

For Othman, the campaign is personal. “As a Palestinian American, it hurts,” Othman said, “because our union has been very focused on racial and social justice, and supporting him when he is not only funding but also sending weapons killing my people sends me the message that we don’t matter, and that we are collateral damage and that’s OK.” She has been a teacher for 27 years, at Richards High School for 19 of them, and boasts a roster of NEA titles: To list just a few, she is secretary for her local, vice chair for her region, vice chair for the Arab American caucus, vice chair for the IEA ethnic minority caucus, and facilitator for the NEA’s Leaders for Just Schools.

Israel is killing Palestinians at a rate that is unparalleled in modern conflicts, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is openly calling for the forcible transfer of the Palestinian population out of Gaza. And in an 84-page complaint, South Africa has formally accused Israel of genocide at the the International Court of Justice. On October 16, 2023, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions released a statement urging labor unions around the world to “end all complicity” and “stop arming Israel.”

The United States has been Israel’s biggest supporter in this military campaign since October 7, when a Hamas-led surprise attack killed 1,139 Israelis and foreign workers and took approximately 240 hostages (132 remain in Gaza). Two separate times in December, the Biden administration bypassed Congress to approve weapons sales to Israel, and it vetoed a call for a cease-fire at the UN General Assembly. The Biden administration has maintained this support, and pursued a new front in Yemen, even as supporters of a cease-fire say the White House should use US leverage to demand that Israel immediately and permanently stop its military operations.

Within the union, Othman said, “we’ve had so much progress as an organization over the last two years when it comes to Palestine. When I first started getting involved with the union at the national level, we couldn’t really say the word Palestine.” When introducing new business items (NBI) at the union’s representative assembly, Othman explained, “mentioning Palestine meant automatic objection.”

But that has started to change. In 2022, the representative assembly passed an NBI that the union “will protect members and local affiliates that educate students about the history, geography, and current state of the Palestinian people.” And in 2023, two NBIs related to Palestine passed, focused on using “existing digital communication” to recognize Palestinian history and culture, as well as Palestinian students and members.

Othman is part of an Arab American caucus within the NEA, which helped these NBIs get approved. Stephen Siegel, a high school special education teacher at Reynolds High School in Troutdale, Ore., said it was through these national efforts that a rank-and-file informal grouping began to form within the NEA. “That group stayed small and mostly focused on the representative assembly,” he said.

Then Israel unleashed its current military operations in Gaza. “Some of us wanted to get together and meet, and then other people heard about us who had never been to an NEA assembly,” said Siegel. “So that small Signal group of 12 or 15 of us grew to about 100, and those are educators who are pretty spread out.”

Participants in this effort are heartened by the flurry of cease-fire resolutions that have passed, which represent a fraction of NEA membership bodies, but nonetheless mark a significant shift in the union.

Among them is the Oregon Education Association (OEA), which passed a resolution to sign on to a cease-fire letter first organized by United Food and Commercial Workers International Union 3000 and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. The resolution also calls for the OEA to directly urge Pringle to “use her voice and the NEA resources at her disposal to push President Biden to demand a ceasefire” and calls for the lobbying of Oregon’s senators and representatives.

“What’s going on over there right now is that children are being killed. School-aged children are being killed by the thousands. And schools are being bombed. So there are two very direct connections specifically to our union,” said Siegel, who is one of three regional vice presidents for the OEA. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “352 schools have sustained damage across the Gaza Strip, affecting the education of 400,700 students.”

Olivia Katbi is a track and cross-country coach at Parkrose High School in Oregon, represented in NEA by the Parkrose Faculty Association. She said that President Pringle’s tweet supporting a cease-fire “is a good first step, but people aren’t satisfied by that.”

“There’s definitely more of a push within this Educators for Palestine group to get this to be official NEA policy and, beyond that, rescind the endorsement of Biden,” said Katbi, who also organizes with the Palestinian BDS National Committee.

Phillips said he is “a little unclear” on the process for revoking the presidential endorsement. “I have asked and am waiting to hear,” he said. “As a board member, I am ready and willing to make the appropriate motions to set that forward. We at least have to have the conversation.”

In the meantime, members are focused on building a base of support. “We are hoping to get some motions passed for locals or states to share the petition with their members,” Siegel said. And NEA members are planning an in-person protest at the NEA’s board meeting in February, in conjunction with members of the American Federation of Teachers. On December 30, AFT president Randi Weingarten tweeted out a qualified statement of support for a cease-fire.

While the US labor movement has historically been supportive of Israel, largely in line with broader US foreign policy, there have been notable detractors, and that number is growing as the Palestinian death toll rises. Major national unions have joined the call for a cease-fire, including the United Auto Workers, National Nurses United, the American Postal Workers Union, and the Association of Flight Attendants–CWA, and across the labor movement, members at other unions are mobilizing to expand this number. While the effort hasn’t shifted the position of the AFL-CIO, it has thrust this cause into the limelight as an issue workers care about—and are divided on. These developments come amid sustained public protests against US support for Israel’s actions, led by Palestinian American communities, progressive Jewish organizations, and people of conscience across the country.

NEA members hope that, by going a step further and calling for the union to rescind Biden’s endorsement, they can escalate this push. “The NEA is the largest union in the country, and for so long we’ve seen many of these massive unions just go along with the status quo,” Katbi said. “But if anything is going to change that, surely it must be witnessing a genocide in real time.”

Othman said this issue is important to the significant Palestinian American community in Oak Lawn and surrounding areas. She was born in Jerusalem, and her mother’s family is from Beit Iksa, a small village just outside of the city. “When we were younger, we would go back every five years or so,” she said. But the last time she went was in 2008, when her family endured an experience that she said “traumatized” her children.

On the way to Nablus, she said, “I was pushing my 1-and-a-half-year-old in his stroller at a checkpoint, and five soldiers surrounded my husband, mother, myself, and three kids. They weren’t pointing their guns at the adults. Instead, all of them had guns pointed at my baby in the stroller.”

Her family, which has since grown to four children, has not been back since.

Othman said teachers have a special responsibility to stand up for the rights of children everywhere, and this responsibility is intensified right now. “The union is the one that taught me to best organize and do this work, and I thought we advocate for everybody,” she said. This principle, she explained, has informed her own advocacy for the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQ rights.

“As teachers,” she said, “we are all about the kids and what’s best for kids—and not just kids in our classes, but all kids. We go into this field because we want what’s best for kids. Everything we stand for and everything we believe in says we should be involved and should be doing something about this.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nea-union-biden-endorsement-gaza/
This Union Is Famous for Opposing South African Apartheid. Now It’s Standing With Gaza.https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/ilwu-unions-ceasefire-israel-gaza/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah LazareNov 21, 2023

In 1984, ILWU Local 10 refused to unload goods shipped from South Africa. Today, it’s demanding a cease-fire.

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Activism / November 21, 2023

This Union Is Famous for Opposing South African Apartheid. Now It’s Standing With Gaza.

In 1984, ILWU Local 10 refused to unload goods shipped from South Africa. Today, it’s demanding a cease-fire.

Sarah Lazare
An ILWU supporter holds a sign in 1984 at the pier where the Nedlloyd Kimberly was anchored. (From the archive of Candice Wright)

In 1984, Larry Wright and his coworkers in International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 refused to unload goods shipped from South Africa in solidarity with that country’s anti-apartheid movement. This boycott at the San Francisco pier, which lasted 11 days, sent reverberations throughout the US labor movement, where major players like the AFL-CIO still were not yet willing to endorse the anti-apartheid movement’s boycott campaign.

Now, nearly 40 years later, 81-year-old Wright is involved in another effort to move the labor movement toward global solidarity: As a retiree who can speak but not vote at union meetings, he was part of a successful push within the same Local 10 to pass a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The measure passed unanimously at a November 18 general membership meeting of the union, which is based in the Bay Area and has around 1,700 members.

“It’s really important that as many people as possible are opposing what’s happening, and Local 10 is one of the unions that leads the way with supporting a struggle like this,” he said over the land line at his house in Oakland. “So I think it’s really important that the unions come out and oppose this terrible violence on the Palestinians.”

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The resolution, which was sent to Workday Magazine and The Nation, cites the appeal from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) for union solidarity with Palestinians. Over the past 45 days, the Israeli military has killed at least 13,300 people in Gaza, including 5,600 children, according to the Health Ministry, which amounts to one out of every 200 people in Gaza. Local 10’s resolution sends “a message to the PGFTU expressing our solidarity and determination to take action in their defense consistent with our actions in the past and the ILWU’s principled position of defending Palestinian rights.”

The resolution calls the October 7 Hamas-led surprise attack that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis “indefensible,” and states that “the UN calls Gaza an ‘open air prison’ of 2.2 million Palestinians. Under such repressive conditions it is no surprise that there would inevitably be a rebellion but this in no way justifies Israel’s genocidal bombing of civilians in Gaza.”

Three members of Local 10’s South African Liberation Support Committee (SALSC) gather in 1984. SALSC was formed in response to the 1976 Soweto uprising. (From the archive of Candice Wright)

“We additionally call on other trade unions both nationally and internationally to support PGFTU, a ceasefire and an end to Israeli apartheid oppression,” the resolution says. (Numerous human rights groups say Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounts to apartheid.) A Local 10 official will read the resolution to the Oakland and San Francisco city councils, and the union will encourage the ILWU international and district councils to pass similar resolutions, the resolution states.

Trent Willis, a current member and former president of Local 10, voted in favor of the resolution at the general membership meeting, which was attended by roughly 200 people. “Our members are very concerned about news we’re hearing about innocent civilians being killed in the Gaza Strip right now,” he said over the phone. “And it’s not only our membership, but there are protests going on all around this country for a cease-fire.”

A growing number of local, state, regional, and even some national unions have issued similar calls for a cease-fire, a demand that is supported by a majority of people in the United States. The United States is supplying and politically backing Israel’s actions, and the Biden administration is seeking a significant increase in US military aid, even as humanitarian groups warn that Israel is indiscriminately targeting civilians. Among US labor’s supporters of a cease-fire are the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and the leadership of the American Postal Workers Union. Yet most national unions, and the AFL-CIO, have so far declined to follow suit.

Peter Cole, a professor at Western Illinois University and the preeminent historian of Local 10, says dock workers are well-positioned to push this effort forward. “Maritime workers, dock workers, and sailors look outwards, not inwards,” he said over the phone. “They are constantly interacting with people and cargo around the world.” Local 10 members operate cranes that take containers on and off ships, drive trucks that move containers within the port, load and unload cargo from international shipping vessels, and secure containers on those vessels, among other jobs.

“Back in the ’90s, the San Francisco Labor Council called Local 10 the conscience in the labor movement,” he said. “I think that holds true.”

Local 10 is perhaps best known for taking a principled stand against South African apartheid. This organizing goes back to at least 1962, when Local 10 refused to cross a community picket of South African goods at San Francisco Pier 19, in what Cole wrote was very possibly the “first anti-apartheid action ever taken by a labor union in the United States.” In response to a 1976 uprising in the Black segregated Soweto Township, when police opened fire on Black students, killing an estimated 176 to 700 people, Local 10 members formed the Southern Africa Liberation Support Committee. Led by Leo Robinson, a Black longshoreman in Oakland, this committee was endorsed through a rank-and-file vote, which provided infrastructure for anti-apartheid organizing in Local 10, alongside other solidarity with liberation movements.

Wright, who was active on this committee, remembers “setting up literature tables in union halls, and collecting clothing, food, and books” to ship to African liberation movements in South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and Namibia, as a show of material support. These donations were a physical presence in union life, he said, which also made them an “educational opportunity.”

Wright said that “for me, personally, I was involved in supporting the struggles in southern Africa because they were struggles against imperialism and colonialism, against the exploitation of peoples in those countries.”

Local 10 organized a series of actions in the late 1970s, but its biggest protest came in 1984. For 11 days, members boycotted South African goods carried aboard the Nedlloyd Kimberley, docked at San Francisco’s Pier 80. “We voted at a union meeting that we wouldn’t work this ship,” said Wright. “We had support from churches, from the gay community, from other unions. We had community supporters come picket. It’s easier to refuse to work if there’s a picket line. But even if there hadn’t been a picket, members wouldn’t have worked, because it was union policy not to work that ship.”

The union took this move even though its contract did not permit such a work stoppage, putting it at risk of retaliation. As word spread, crowds of community supporters flocked to Pier 80, “singing, chanting, and making witness,” Cole wrote in a historical essay. For the duration of the boycott, all of the South African cargo remained in the hold of the ship, even as workers handled goods from other countries. It was only when a federal judge threatened an injunction, which could include prison times, that the boycott ended. “The workers, having made their point, unloaded the cargo,” Cole noted.

A Local 10 member talks with a community supporter. (From the archive of Candice Wright)

By taking this action, Local 10 was ahead of the leadership of the AFL-CIO. While the federation opposed apartheid, AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland “was hesitant to support a full-blown boycott and divestment campaign against South Africa, worried about the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela being too far left,” explained Jeff Schuhrke, an assistant professor of labor studies at SUNY Empire State University in New York City, who has written a book about the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO, which will come out next year. “Meanwhile, the whole South African anti-apartheid movement was saying we want you to boycott and divest, this is a tactic that will help us end apartheid.”

Local 10 was not alone. Other unions in the AFL-CIO—like the United Mine Workers, United Auto Workers, and AFSCME—would soon be stepping up their boycott and divestment efforts. These efforts almost certainly played a role in pressuring the AFL-CIO to eventually endorse the boycott and divestment strategy in 1986, alongside pressure from Black South African trade unionists, Schuhrke explained. In 1990, speaking at the Oakland Coliseum, Nelson Mandela saluted Local 10 for the 1984 boycott, declaring that the workers “established themselves as the front line of the anti-apartheid movement in the Bay Area.”

This 1984 action is part of a longer history that continued through the 2000s. “The ILWU has been one of the more internationalist-oriented unions, recognizing the importance of solidarity around the world and standing up for freedom and justice and against imperialism and colonialism and apartheid,” Schuhrke explained. On May Day 2008, workers at 29 West Coast ports launched a one-day strike to protest the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and ILWU members refused in 2010, 2014, and 2021 to handle cargo on Israeli ships, in response to community pickets against the repression of Palestinians. As labor journalist Kim Kelly reported for In These Times, “In 2020, the ILWU also shut down ports for eight minutes and 46 seconds in solidarity with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and all other victims of racist police violence.”

Today, opposition to Israel’s military actions in Gaza is animating protest movements throughout the world. This includes mass marches and a flurry of direct actions throughout the United States, where union members have been numbered among those taking to the streets, and demanding that members of Congress support a cease-fire. Lara Kiswani, a Palestinian American and executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, said that “we are particularly heartened by Local 10’s commitments to put its resolution to action.”

“For generations, our movement has found inspiration in Local 10’s commitments to social justice and internationalism—from its militant fights for worker power here in the US, to its unrelenting support of the South African anti-apartheid struggle, to its refusal to work Israeli ships profiting from the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

Throughout his organizing, Wright spent years working out of Local 10’s union hall, where he was dispatched to a variety of jobs, from laboring in the hull of the ship to latching containers, before switching to operating cranes and moving containers once he obtained more seniority. (He eventually switched to ILWU Local 91 after a promotion.) He saw how his union held moral power, because of their long history fighting against oppression.

“The ILWU is so respected,” he said, “that when it makes a call for people to join in opposing what’s happening to the Palestinian people, I think it carries a little extra significance, because of our history of supporting people’s struggles.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/ilwu-unions-ceasefire-israel-gaza/
Why These Teachers Unions Are Demanding a Cease-Firehttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/labor-teachers-union-ceasefire-gaza-israel/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah LazareNov 16, 2023

A flurry of state and local teachers unions have passed cease-fire resolutions, but few national unions have followed.

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Activism / November 16, 2023

Why These Teachers Unions Are Demanding a Cease-Fire

A flurry of state and local teachers unions have passed cease-fire resolutions, but few national unions have followed.

Sarah Lazare

Students, teachers, and pro-Palestinian allies march through Midtown Manhattan during a Student Walkout protest calling for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas on November 9, 2023 in New York City.

(Michael Nigro / Sipa)

When asked why her union voted to call for a cease-fire in Gaza, Marcia Howard, a teacher of 24 years, turned to an education metaphor. “It’s an object lesson for the nation and for other laborers,” she said over the phone, ahead of classes at a Minneapolis area high school, where she teaches language and literature to 11th graders. “The challenge has been for the entire working class to move the nation to do the right thing.”

Howard is the acting president of the teachers chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) Local 59. On October 25, her chapter voted at a general membership meeting to pass a resolution urging an immediate cease-fire, rejecting violence against civilians on all sides and condemning “the role our government plays in supporting the system of Israeli occupation and apartheid, which lies at the root of the Palestinian Israeli conflict.”

The resolution also calls upon the Minnesota State Legislature to repeal laws opposing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, because such legislation “stifles free speech and discriminates against Palestinian refugees, their families, and their supporters.” (The union of 3,700 members also includes an education support professional chapter, which passed its own cease-fire resolution on November 2.)

The statement is part of a flurry of cease-fire resolutions from US locals, state and regional unions, and labor councils, among them a number of teachers unions, including the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the American Federation of Teachers–Oregon, and the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Personnel. Teachers are also participating in protests. “Our members are diverse and dynamic, and they are already out there. The moment the resolution passed, it was read at a rally to tears, because members were already in the streets,” said Howard.

Israel’s bombing, siege, and ground invasion of Gaza have been met with increasingly urgent protests across the United States, whose government is supplying and politically backing the offensive. In just over a month, Israel has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians—or one out of every 200 people in Gaza—including at least 4,609 children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. (Hamas-led fighters killed roughly 1,200 Israelis in a surprise attack on October 7.) Concerns are mounting that Israel’s military actions are aimed at depopulating Gaza. “Israel is seeking to justify what would amount to ethnic cleansing,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory, said in an October 14 statement.

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Humanitarian organizations, human rights groups, the head of the World Health Organization, progressive Jewish organizations, and Palestinian civil society are demanding an immediate cease-fire.

The only national unions in the US to explicitly echo this call are the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), and the leadership of the American Postal Workers Union, though the president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades did call for “an immediate end to hostilities,” and the leadership of the National Writers Union condemned the “actions of the Israeli military.” The AFL-CIO has so far not publicly supported a cease-fire, even as some of its affiliates take a different tack. The American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association (of which first lady Dr. Jill Biden is a longtime member) have also declined to support a cease-fire on the national level.

“It’s important to talk about US complicity, the role of our tax money, and the role of politicians who rank-and-file members have gone door to door to elect in this massacre, said Jeff Schuhrke, an assistant professor of labor studies at SUNY Empire State University in New York City, who has written a book about the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO, which will come out next year. “This needs to be out in the open and discussed.”

For some teachers, who have been inundated for weeks with images of children being pulled from rubble, this urgency of a cease-fire resonates on a personal level. “The news that is coming out is horrific,” Howard said. “We mourn the innocent lives in Israel and occupied Palestine, and a cease-fire is the only reasonable thing to be asking for right now.”

These pleas, while popular across the US, have yet to break into the mainstream of Congress. Only 30 out of 435 members of the US House of Representatives have called for a cease-fire, and just one senator, Dick Durbin, made an ambiguous statement seemingly in support of a cease-fire, but he has not signed on to any legislation to this effect.

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The Biden administration and its supporters have, instead, used the language of a “humanitarian pause,” but activists and some humanitarian groups criticize this phrase as ill-defined, insufficient, and not backed by real political muscle. “It makes no sense to briefly pause the war to allow in limited humanitarian aid, only to then resume the intense bombardment that is driving massive humanitarian needs. An immediate cease-fire is the only humane option,” said Avril Benoît, executive director of the US branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian medical organization, in a recent statement.

The Biden administration brands itself as pro-labor, and a handful of national labor leaders have a direct line to the White House. Some in the US labor movement hope that rising pressure from this sector could help convince Biden to reverse course from unqualified support for Israel’s actions and significantly increased military aid.

“As a union of educators dedicated to empowering the next generation, we are deeply concerned by the loss of civilian life and indiscriminate bombing throughout Gaza, where half the Palestinians living there are children,” Jackson Potter, the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has around 30,000 members, declared at a November 13 demonstration in Chicago, where more than 1,000 Jews and allies disrupted the Ogilvie Transportation Center and closed down the Israeli consulate to demand a cease-fire.

He was speaking with institutional weight behind him: The CTU passed a resolution on November 1 to sign on to a statement, organized by the UE and the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union 3000, which “call[s] on President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza.” The statement also says that “the basic rights of people must be restored,” including allowing “water, fuel, food, and other humanitarian aid” into Gaza. And it goes on to state, “Hamas and Israel must adhere to standards of international law and Geneva Convention rules of warfare concerning the welfare and security of civilians.”

Teachers unions that operate democratically must vote on statements, and not all have voted in favor of a cease-fire. Successful resolutions are often preceded by internal debates and sometimes difficult discussions with colleagues. Potter has been a teacher in Chicago Public Schools for 20 years, most recently as a social studies teacher at the high school level, though he has been on relief for a year and a half while serving as vice president. He said over the phone that maintaining decorum and setting ground rules for debate at the union’s monthly meetings “helped a lot.”

Potter said CTU president Stacy Davis Gates, who chairs the union’s monthly meetings, “did an expert job at pushing people not to fall into their tribal selves…and not use it to make definitive judgments about people overall and what they stand for and believe in.”

The resolution passed with roughly 95 percent in favor at CTU’s house of delegates, the union’s most powerful body of elected representatives, which has around 750 members. Among those who objected, some believed the language was not strong enough in its condemnation of Israel, said Potter.

The union also passed a resolution to provide “social emotional supports for members and students during world conflicts,” which includes a commitment to “share and distribute resources to help students and school communities process the impact and trauma of violence at home and abroad.” According to Potter, the union is talking about going broad with the resolution’s mandate for education and teach-ins to include discussions about the displacement and mistreatment of migrants and refugees.

“Political education is necessary moving forward,” he said, “to give people opportunities to share their personal experiences and perspectives, hear and share with others, to enhance understanding and diminish divisions that can easily erupt and cause irreparable harm within a democratic organization.”

The MFT 59-teacher chapter resolution, too, passed by a large margin at a general membership meeting. “It was brought to the floor, spoken to, and passed after a vote,” said Howard. “There were people who voted no and abstained, but we followed parliament procedures and it passed overwhelmingly.”

“There are people who feel tender-hearted about anything that suggests that, frankly, Israel could be in the wrong,” said Howard. “But if you look at the resolution as it stands, the language is clear, and it resonated with enough members at our meeting that it passed. It doesn’t mean we are dismissing the concerns of other members: Those are conversations that can be had, and that’s why we meet as a membership on a regular basis. Islamophobia and antisemitism are real and present and cannot be easily dismissed.”

Howard’s own leadership in her community was forged in a deeply embattled movement. “After George Floyd was killed 263 steps from my house, his death was filmed by a former student of mine, and I wound up being in the streets and part of an occupation against systemic racism,” she said, referring to an ongoing protest in which community members maintain a presence at the intersection where Floyd was killed, known as George Floyd Square. “I stayed outside, and my union came to me. And there were objections from all corners of society saying they were not supposed to stand with Black Lives Matter or a ragtag group of occupiers. Yet they stood beside me and modeled what it is like to use collective action for good and for change.”

“What I’m hoping with our resolution,” she added, “with our words on a page that signify our sentiment when it comes to war, what I’m hoping it does is allow labor, whether autoworkers or actors or teachers or baristas, to understand we are the backbone of the United States. And our voice matters.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/labor-teachers-union-ceasefire-gaza-israel/
It’s Time for Dems to Stop Hand-Wringing and Demand That Israel End Its Bombinghttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/democrats-israel-gaza-bombing/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam JohnsonOct 16, 2023

Palestinians don’t need crocodile tears and lawyer-speak. They need a cease-fire.

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World / October 16, 2023

It’s Time for Dems to Stop Hand-Wringing and Demand That Israel End Its Bombing

Palestinians don’t need crocodile tears and lawyer-speak. They need a cease-fire.

Sarah Lazare and Adam Johnson
Palestinians in the rubble of their homes after continued bombing that has killed over 1,000 children

Palestinians look for their belongings among the rubble of their destroyed houses as Israeli attacks continue in Gaza City, Gaza, on October 16, 2023.

(Mustafa Hassona / Getty)

Nine days after Hamas fighters killed 1,300 Israelis and took 150 hostage in a surprise attack, the Israel military has dropped more than 6,000 bombs on Gaza, a densely populated strip that is home to 2.4 million people. As the Palestinian death toll surpasses 2,750 and worries grow about a potential ethnic cleansing, there are increasing calls for the United States to stop its financial and political support for Israel’s siege and to use its influence to end the bombardment. Protests have targeted Senator Chuck Schumer’s home in Brooklyn, Representative Nancy Pelosi’s office in San Francisco, and Senator Elizabeth Warren’s office in Boston. Thousands of Jewish people and allies are expected to converge in Washington, D.C., on Monday and Wednesday for mass protests and civil disobedience demanding “an immediate ceasefire” and an “end to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” according to a press release from Jewish Voice for Peace. This action follows demonstrations across the country that swelled in numbers after the Israeli government gave orders last Friday for an estimated 1.1 million people to evacuate to south Gaza, a likely sign of an imminent and bloody ground invasion.

But while a smattering of national lawmakers have issued meaningful demands for a stop to Israel’s bombings, most Democrats are resorting to vague hand-wringing about “unnecessary harm to civilians” and “international humanitarian law,” calls for more humanitarian aid, and declarations that they are “deeply concerned.” This is all fine enough, but absent are calls to stop what is actually causing the crisis: Israel’s bombing and siege of Gaza.

Most conspicuous is a letter sent to President Joe Biden by Representatives Jan Schakowsky, Mark Pocan, James McGovern, and Pramila Jayapal—the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus—alongside 55 of their colleagues, on October 13 that expressed “deep concern” for the evacuation order and the cutting off of food, water, fuel, and electricity, but did not call for Israel to end its bombing of Gaza. Instead, its focus was for the bombing to be carried out “according to international law and take all due measures to limit harm to innocent civilians,” which is to say this body does not oppose the bombing campaign.

Other high-profile statements from Senate Democrats took a similarly weak-kneed tone. Take, for example, these tweets from Senators Chris Murphy, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey, that vaguely expressed concern for civilian life but avoided the taboo “cease-fire” word.

These Bomb Nicer statements are more watered down than that of House progressives. They don’t call for an end to the Israeli government’s bombing campaign, blockade, or collective punishment. They rely on process criticisms that demand the Israeli government carry out its potential war crimes with more grace and charity. “Deep concerns,” “minimize civilian harm,” “comply with international law”—they ask for nothing that is actionable. The mode is one of a passive spectator, an observer like an Amnesty International volunteer with a clipboard, rather than a sitting US senator with a direct line to the most powerful person on Earth. Nothing specific is being asked, only that we all sort of watch and look Deeply Concerned and take the mass death down from a 10 to an 8.5.

The fact that a few lawmakers are calling for a cease-fire shows that it can be done. On Monday Representatives Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, André Carson, Summer Lee, and Delia C. Ramirez announced a House resolution urging Biden to “immediately call for and facilitate deescalation and a ceasefire.” Endorsers include Representatives Jamaal Bowman, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Jesús “Chuy” García, Jonathan Jackson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Nydia Velázquez. Bush and Tlaib have already faced immediate backlash by AIPAC and other pro-Israel groups for their previous calls for de-escalation and cease-fire.

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These positions are relatively strong, but the time has come to call out the president himself. Given the moral urgency of the issue, partisan niceties should take a back seat to naming names, specifically that of the party leader himself. President Biden has unequivocally backed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military campaign, with only minor criticisms around the margins. He is pledging to hike this support for Israel’s military, with no requirements for restraint of any kind. This is on top of the $3.3 billion the United States already gives Israel annually. Democrats and Democratic-aligned media have spent this week calling out the genocidal rhetoric coming out of the Republican Party. This is the necessary and moral thing to do, but it’s also fairly low-risk. What isn’t low-risk is calling on the head of one’s own party who, while he may not as overtly be trafficking in direct incitement, is arming, funding, and supporting the Israeli right, which is. To say nothing of the actual violence of the Israeli government’s real-world siege of Gaza, all of which is far more deadly to the average Palestinian than even the most bloodthirsty rhetoric on Fox News.

Israel’s orders for Gaza residents to evacuate to the south of the strip have touched off panic, as Israel bombs evacuation roads, and some doctors refuse to leave their sick patients in the evacuation zone. An estimated 1 million people have been displaced, and the World Health Organization is warning that evacuation orders given to 22 hospitals in the north are a “death sentence for the sick and injured.” Israel has cut off food, water, and fuel to Gaza’s civilian population of 2.4 million, which is more than half children. The Israeli government is killing an average of more than 300 Palestinians a day, almost all of them civilians, and has killed at least 1,030 Palestinian children. (Hamas’s attack killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, among them children.) Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, described the assault on Gaza “as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes,” according to an article published on October 13 in Jewish Currents.

Calling for the US to stop supplying this grim reality will create conflict with the Biden administration. In a State Department memo, first reported on October 13 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed at HuffPost, staff said press materials should avoid key phrases: “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed,” and “restoring calm.”

And the Biden administration has an assist from J Street, which has tried to rebrand as more progressive in recent years. As reported by Ryan Grim, Prem Thakker, and Akela Lacy at The Intercept on October 13, there was a rush last week by J Street to make calls for a cease-fire or de-escalation off-limits. There was space for generic appeals for the Israeli government to “follow international law” and “minimize” civilian deaths, but anything pushing for an end to the bombing campaign––or potential invasion of Gaza––was forbidden, on pain of losing J Street’s support. The organization’s hard line is not without dissent: On Sunday night, The Intercept reported that over 100 “former J Street staffers and representatives from its network of university groups are pushing their former organization to join mounting calls for a ceasefire.”

Yet there are growing calls for a stop to the bombings. UNICEF is calling for an immediate cease-fire, alongside a host of humanitarian organizations. But the Center for International Policy, a think tank with a relatively progressive reputation, is declining to fully join this call. In an October 15 memo, the CIP urges the Biden administration to push for “at minimum, a temporary cessation in fighting to allow for the delivery of direly needed food, water, medical supplies, and other critical aid immediately necessary to the preservation of life.” While this would be an improvement, it leaves open the door for the Israeli government to continue bombing and invading Gaza. Notably, the president of CIP, Nancy Okail, did call for a cease-fire on October 13, stating on Twitter, “Anything short of calling for an immediate ceasefire will be contributing to an impending catastrophe.”

Obviously, a cease-fire is the floor. The issues of apartheid, dispossession, and occupation—all supplied and politically supported by the US—need to be discussed. For now, the moral minimum should be to demand that the Israeli government stop its relentless pummeling of a defenseless, largely civilian population.

As the injured die in hospitals cut off from power, the living bury their loved ones in mass graves. Israeli forces are killing on average one Palestinian child every 15 minutes. And with water and food rapidly running out, the situation is poised to get even worse. For anyone claiming the moniker of “progressive,” it’s way past due to call for a cease-fire and an end to the collective punishment via blockade and cutting off electricity and supplies.

In a few months’ time, every Democratic member of Congress, no matter how progressive, is going to try to convince young voters and a base that’s increasingly sympathetic with the Palestinian plight that a second Biden term is essential to advance a fairer and most just vision for the world. How they will square this circle with Biden’s virtually unchecked backing of Netantayu’s siege and bombing of Gaza isn’t clear. If moral concerns don’t move the needle, perhaps the cold, hard reality of alienating a great deal of the Democratic base will. Watching a president give a speech on the importance of human rights and democracy one day, and the next giving a blank check to Israel’s dropping white phosphorus and wiping out entire civilian families is a hypocrisy and cravenness that even the most pragmatic voters won’t be able to stomach. The question is: Do members of Congress want to right the ship now and push for a cease-fire—or do they want to wait until after thousands more Palestinians have died amid the Democratic Party’s collective cowardice?



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/democrats-israel-gaza-bombing/
“Your Body Suffers”: The Unremarkable Pain of an Auto-Assembly-Line Workerhttps://www.thenation.com/article/economy/auto-worker-repetitive-stress-injuries/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah LazareOct 2, 2023

Vehicle-manufacturing jobs grind down workers’ bodies. Is it time for a 32-hour week?

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October 2, 2023

“Your Body Suffers”: The Unremarkable Pain of an Auto-Assembly-Line Worker

Vehicle-manufacturing jobs grind down workers’ bodies. Is it time for a 32-hour week?

Sarah Lazare

Line workers work on the chassis of full-size General Motors pickup trucks at the Flint Assembly plant on June 12, 2019, in Flint, Mich.

(Jeff Kowalsky / AFP / Getty Images)

Daniel Carpenter was one month past his 40th birthday when he suffered neck pain so severe that he thought he was having a stroke. “I was up north with my girlfriend at the time at a wedding,” said the autoworker, who has been employed for nearly 19 years at General Motors, almost all of it at the company’s Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center in Michigan, which produces the Hummer and Silverado. “We were staying at a cabin. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t move.”

There was no single catastrophic incident that led to what he believes is a workplace injury, but rather, a series of small, unremarkable incidents, performed over and over, what he described as “constantly moving, fixing things, bending. It comes back to the repetition of the job. It’s nonstop. There’s no other way to explain it.”

The pain, which struck the summer before Covid, was so excruciating he could not sleep for three days, he recalled. Relatively young, he had been physically active, with a passion for long-distance running, but soon had to undergo a surgery known as an anterior cervical discectomy. “They put a titanium plate in the back of my neck,” he said.

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A member of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 22, Carpenter is one of around 150,000 workers affected by their union’s “stand-up strike” against the Big Three automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis. Knowing that his location may be called on to walk out in a series of expanding strikes, he said the pain he has endured is a key working condition that must be addressed, not only for himself but for his coworkers too. “When workers say they’re in pain, I always say they’re telling the truth, because I felt that pain for many years. I still do.”

As autoworkers make demands for improved pay, the elimination of tiers, ending the abuse of temporary workers, more paid time off, and cost-of-living adjustments, companies have sought to portray them as overreaching. “The fundamental reality is that the UAW’s demands can be described in one word—untenable,” wrote General Motors President Mark Reuss in a recent op-ed in the Detroit Free Press.

But unlike the presidents and CEOs of the Big Three, the workers who manufacture and distribute vehicles and parts work jobs that grind down their bodies over the course of years. Many sacrifice their lower backs, rotator cuffs, hands, wrists, or just the pleasure of waking up without pain. Two separate polls found that the US public is overwhelmingly on the side of striking UAW members against the bosses. Even still, workers say there is a gap in public awareness about the pain and injury that comes with repetitive work performed over long hours.

“People don’t really get it,” said Carpenter, “but we definitely earn our pay.”

Thomas Armstrong, a professor of industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, said musculoskeletal injuries are “inherent” to this kind of work. “Working on a car, working on something that is big, you have spaces that are hard to reach. You end up with a combination of postural problems and stressors, if those are repeated regularly.”

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Pinning down the exact prevalence of these injuries is difficult. Musculoskeletal disorders refer to a range of issues, Armstrong explained, from aches and pains to nerve and tendon problems, and lack the conspicuousness of other injuries, like amputations. “A lot of people don’t report these problems,” said Armstrong, sometimes out of fear of retaliation. “These aren’t the problems people die from.” But while musculoskeletal disorders may lack the shock effect of more immediate, gruesome workplace injuries, they erode quality of life, both at work and outside of it, and can be harbingers of serious and long-lasting problems, Armstrong said.

Union workplaces have more protections against workplace injuries than their non-union counterparts, a UAW source said, but some contractually protected programs have suffered from concessions, just as wages and other provisions have. The Big Three used to have full-time ergonomic representatives who were appointed by the union and paid by the company, the source explained.

But, the source said, some time after 2006, oversight of ergonomics was assigned to workers with other responsibilities, like industrial hygiene technicians who sample the air for chemicals. Now, there are no longer full-time positions solely dedicated to ergonomics, which the union source said has reduced the responses to injuries and complaints.

According to Armstrong, ergonomics have improved in the industry “since 1976 when we started these studies,” thanks to factors like changes in tooling, workplace layout, and mechanical assistance. But, he said, “that doesn’t mean there still aren’t stressors. It takes a lot of physical activity to assemble a car.”

Dawnya Ferdinandsen, 54, is an assembly-line worker at the Toledo, Ohio, General Motors propulsion plant, which makes transmissions. She said the only way she knows how to describe repetitive motion is by suggesting a challenge: “Take all your clothes, put them in a basket, pick up the basket, take them to the wash area, put the basket down, lift the lid, put in detergent, bend down, put them in the washer, shut the lid,” she said. “Then reach into the washer and pull the clothes back out, stand back up, bend back down, put them in the basket, carry them to the dryer, put them in. Repeat that for half an hour nonstop.”

“If you do that for half an hour with no break,” she said, “then tell me how you’d like to do that for 12 hours, six or seven days a week, week after week, month after month, year after year after year. And as you’re doing it year after year, you’re getting a year older. The body can only do that for so long, then you get back problems, wrist problems, hip problems. We have all that.”

Carpenter said he believes that the job that caused him the greatest injury was one he performed at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant in his 20s for about five years: installing brake pedals. He said the easiest way ergonomically to perform the job was to climb into the vehicle, sit on the frame cross-legged, line up the bolts, shoot them, and secure them. But, he said, “after so many times doing it, our knees would get sore, our backs would get sore. So we started installing brake pedals outside the vehicle without getting in.”

“Doing that put pressure on our lower back,” he said. “We were bending over constantly, leaning our neck in to install it.”

Chris Viola, 40, is one of Carpenter’s coworkers, and has been active in Unite All Workers for Democracy, a rank-and-file movement within UAW to improve internal democracy and accountability. UAWD backed the presidential campaign of Shawn Fain, who won in March as a reform challenger calling for a more member-led and militant approach. A few years ago, Viola said, he had the job of putting glass for windows into doors. “You think, ‘I’m going to grab this with my thumb and fingers.’ But if you do that several hundred times a day, it will ruin your hands.”

He said his hands became swollen and painful, and started waking him up in the middle of the night. “I don’t think I was playing video games anymore,” he said. “I had to be careful about cleaning up around the house, washing dishes, and cooking. I had to hold things a certain way.”

He eventually figured out that he needed to cup his hands around the glass, rather than pinch it. While the pain subsided, he said he is troubled by the knowledge that some of his coworkers, who have been there longer, suffer from more severe and lasting injuries.

During the course of the strike, UAW has not publicized demands related to ergonomics. But it has insisted on measures to improve work-life balance, like more paid time off. It’s common for workers to do 12-hour shifts, sometimes with a mix of overnight and day time, and the prevalence of mandatory overtime has been a key complaint from striking workers. Earlier in bargaining, Fain captured headlines when he called for a 32-hour work week, with no reduction in pay.

“Clearly a 32-hour week, less hours a week you are doing repetitive motion, would help,” said Susan Schurman, professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University.

According to Armstrong, “A lot of workers are working a lot of overtime. A lot of times, they are working back-to-back shifts. Recovery is important, but it’s important for that recovery time to be integrated into the work shift, too. Workers need recovery time throughout the workshift.”

Carpenter, who voted for Fain in the presidential election, said, “More time off would wholeheartedly help with the repetitive issues. You can have all the ergonomics out there, but when you’re working between eight to 12 hours a day, six days a week, that’s tough on you.”

Carpenter said he never bothered to report his neck injury to the company as work-related, worried that it would be too difficult and time-consuming to prove. He took four months of medical leave, which meant significantly reduced pay, and then went back to work. The surgery was a success, he said, though he still experiences some tingling in his hands. He doesn’t find his injury particularly remarkable, and said a lot of his colleagues have it worse than he does.

These days, he works from 4 am to 4 pm, six days a week with mandatory overtime, repairing vehicles that come off the assembly line.

Carpenter has a 10-year-old daughter, who he said he “couldn’t be more proud of,” and he is on good terms with her mother, who also works in his plant. He likes to spend his free time hanging out with his daughter and family, as well as his “buddies,” and he is also an avid exerciser and runner, which he is able to continue despite his injury. But, he said, “It’s always in the back of my mind that that [the injury] could happen again.”

“I’m all for the strike,” he said. “We have to get back all the things that we’ve lost. Everybody should be tier-one, wholeheartedly. Everyone is working the same, working just as hard. Eeveryone should be getting paid the same. We should be getting raises.”

“It’s a tough job. We get up when it’s dark, and we leave when it’s dark. It’s a great job, but it comes with a price. Your body suffers.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/auto-worker-repetitive-stress-injuries/
Biden Says There’s No Blockade. Tell That to Yemenis Who Need Medical Care.https://www.thenation.com/article/world/yemen-blockade-medical-care/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah Lazare,Shuaib Almosawa,Sarah LazareJul 27, 2023

There are just three flights leaving Sana’a every week. But Yemen has an estimated 71,000 cancer patients who need out-of-country care.

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World / July 27, 2023

Biden Says There’s No Blockade. Tell That to Yemenis Who Need Medical Care.

There are just three flights leaving Sana’a every week. But Yemen has an estimated 71,000 cancer patients who need out-of-country care.

Shuaib Almosawa and Sarah Lazare
Image ID in caption
A patient suffering from kidney failure receives dialysis treatment at a hospital in Sana’a, Yemen, on November 27, 2022. Yemen’s health ministry said that a result of a blockade, more than 5,000 patients suffering from kidney failure will die unless provided with required medical supplies. (Mohammed Hamoud / Getty Images)

SANA’A, Yemen—Raneem Isa Muhammad Jaber dreams of swinging in a playground or participating in a popular pastime called sahlilah, in which children use cut plastic containers to skate down a hill. “I want to play all the games, but I can’t,” said the 11-year-old, who has suffered since birth from a skin condition that leaves black spots all over her body and an itchy and painful black tumor-like growth that covers her backside. “I can’t sit down, I can’t walk, and I can’t sleep.”

She lives in the Yemeni port city of Al Hudaydah, which opens to the Red Sea. Her family is poor, but used to scrape together funds—often provided by local donors—to travel to India, the most affordable nearby option for medical care after years of war decimated Yemen’s health system. There, surgeons would excise growths from her body. Her medical providers say that she should return every six months. But her father, Isa Muhammad Jaber, said the last time she went was in 2018.

The closest international airport that doesn’t require Raneem to make the dangerous and expensive journey from the Houthi-controlled areas where she lives to those under the authority of the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) is in the city of Sana’a. A Saudi-led military coalition, which includes the United States, bombed that airport multiple times during the war, and closed it to commercial flights.

In April 2022, Saudi Arabia entered into a truce with the Houthis and, working with the United Arab Emirates, another country on the Saudi side of the war, established the PLC. This eight-member council came to power without an election, replacing President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The United States now considers this the “internationally recognized government” of Yemen. The truce was supposed to reopen Sana’a airport to commercial air travel, a development that has been touted by the Biden administration as proof of progress in a humanitarian crisis for which the US bears considerable responsibility.

Raneem Isa Muhammad Jaber
Raneem Isa Muhammad Jaber, 11. (Courtesy of the Jaber family)

But there are so few flights that the truce hasn’t changed anything for Raneem’s family. The PLC permits only three round-trip flights a week from Sana’a airport (down from six in June). They are all operated by a single airline, Yemenia Airways, which charges around $720 for a round-trip ticket to Jordan. (Yemenia is partially owned by the Saudi government.) And the flights only travel to and from Amman, Jordan, save for some limited trips for pilgrims to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. In Amman, medical care is much more expensive than it is in India and Egypt. Of Yemen’s 30 million people, an estimated 80 percent “require some form of humanitarian or protection assistance,” according to the United Nations.

For those who do not have the funds and need medical care outside of the country, those flights might as well go nowhere.

The PLC obtains its legitimacy and firepower from the Saudi-led military coalition that bombed Yemen for eight years, and imposed an aerial and naval blockade on the country. The Biden administration says that this blockade does not exist. “For one year, Yemenis have benefitted from a halt to airstrikes, regular civilian flights from Sana’a airport, enhanced and unrestricted humanitarian and food assistance, and the increased flow of fuel to northern Yemen,” said Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department, in an April 2023 statement marking the first anniversary of the truce.

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And while some incremental improvements have been made, particularly with respect to fuel and food imports, they fall far short of meeting the needs of a country devastated by a war in which the Saudi-led coalition repeatedly targeted civilian infrastructure like mosques, schools, hospitals, and markets. Today, Yemen is the site of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises: 21.6 million people need humanitarian assistance; 17 million are food insecure; and 2.2 million children under 5 need treatment for acute malnutrition, according to the World Food Programme.

And crucially, freedom of movement remains curtailed for the majority of Yemenis. Raneem is one of tens of thousands of people essentially trapped inside a country where they cannot get the medical treatment they need. The blockade may not exist for the Biden administration, but it exists for her.

“I wish I could be healed,” she said over the phone.

An arduous journey

Raneem is not alone. According to the Health Ministry of Sana’a (where the Houthis are the dominant power), some 71,000 cancer patients and 8,000 kidney-failure patients need care outside of Yemen. In August 2019, the Norwegian Refugee Council, a humanitarian organization, reported that in the three years since Sana’a airport was closed to commercial flights (starting August 9, 2016), “as many as 32,000 people may have died prematurely because they were unable to travel abroad for treatment, according to the Ministry of Health in Sana’a.” The extremely limited United Nations mercy flights permitted to leave Sana’a airport in 2020 barely began to meet these needs.

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Following the truce, the first commercial flight in nearly six years took off in May 2022 from Sana’a airport to Amman. Since then, a few flights between Sana’a and Amman have been allowed each week, and in June this number increased to six. But the director of Sana’a airport said July 14 on Twitter that flights out of Sana’a are back to three a week, and records kept by the UN Office of the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for Yemen show a reduction in flight frequency in July that corresponds with this announcement. Before the war, there were around 30 flights a day, with 29 destinations and 14 airlines operating, according to the Aviation Authority in Sana’a.

For poor and working-class people, the flights are now inaccessible. Renata Rendon, advocacy manager in Yemen for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said the flights constitute an improvement over no flights at all. But, she warned, “given the dire economic situation in Yemen, the lack of livelihoods and that more than two-thirds of the population is in need of some kind of humanitarian assistance or protection services to survive, most cannot afford this option,” referring to flights to Amman.

There are other airports in Yemen that have international flights, but these are in areas that are under the control of the PLC. The biggest such airport is in Aden, but distances are far and expensive to traverse, and the travel comes with risk and hardship. For those who live in Houthi-controlled areas, which account for roughly two-thirds of Yemen’s population, traveling to airports in PLC territory may not be an option.

Marc Schakal, a Middle East program manager for Médecins Sans Frontières, said, “Some patients are not comfortable to travel to the south, because they have to go by road to Aden, and a lot of them are not comfortable to go across the line and go to the government authorities. It has happened that they are kept, they are not arrested, but they are kept for many hours for interrogation.”

Yet the lack of flights from Sana’a forces many to make this journey. Rendon explained, “The trip by road crosses front lines, check points, and passes through rugged mountainous terrain on bumpy dirt roads. A private trip in a rented or personal vehicle may take 12 hours whereas a trip via public transportation can take up to 18.” Before the war, the trip used to take around six hours.

And then there is the issue of destinations. Amman is an expensive city to obtain medical care, let alone pay for food and board. “While the direct flight enables people to avoid the long, dangerous road journey to Aden,” explained Rendon, “increasing mobility directly to Jordan to then move onwards to destinations where medical care is less expensive, the cost of movement alone, through two, as opposed to one international flight, may be prohibitive.”

Isa used to have a motorbike that he used as a taxi before he sold it to buy food for his family. Ever since, it has been difficult for him to earn money. He previously made the long journey to Aden to transport his daughter to India for treatment, but the family is poor, and the journey is daunting.

Isa said that if Sana’a airport offered direct transport to either Egypt or India, it would be much easier for him to find local donors to contribute. The Sana’a airport is also much closer; it takes around four hours to get there, as opposed to 18. “I hope that the [Sana’a] airport could be open. It may encourage people to help. Otherwise, I appeal to God to cure my daughter, which is the only thing I want from this life. She can’t sleep, complaining from itchy skin and overall pain. She keeps crying and I can’t help but keep praying for her.”

A devastated medical system

Throughout the war, the Saudi-led coalition repeatedly bombed hospitals. (The United States provided arms, intelligence, training, maintenance, and political support for the coalition. While the Biden administration said it suspended support for “offensive” operations in 2021, the United States continued to send arms.) In November 2015, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that it was aware of “close to a hundred” incidents where the Saudi-led coalition attacked health-care facilities over an eight month period. In January 2016, an MSF-supported hospital in Razeh, in northern Yemen, was hit with a coalition projectile, killing six people. Another bombing of an MSF-operated hospital in Hajja province in August 2016 killed at least 11 people.

“The country’s fragile health system is severely overburdened and edging closer to collapse,” Dr. Annette Heinzelmann of the World Health Organization warned in April 2023.

MSF has a reconstructive surgery program in Amman for victims of violence in the region, which treats around 250 Yemenis a year, paying for their transport, board, and medical care. But Schakal said “the medical needs for Yemenis are beyond what we offer.”

“The health system in Yemen has completely collapsed,” he said. “Very few public hospitals are operational.”

Raneem goes to the poorly equipped and short-staffed al-Amal Unit for Oncology to receive psychological support. There, Obaidah al-Sahili is the psychological support specialist who has overseen Raneem’s case for many years. Al-Sahili said that Raneem is now reluctant to socialize and go out with friends for fear of being laughed at. The black spots in her face, as well as her enlarged backside, are painful and uncomfortable, and friends and strangers have made fun of her appearance. “She’s confined herself to her home now,” said al-Sahili.

Raneem’s family provided a medical document showing she has been diagnosed with “compound giant congenital nevus,” and also provided photos of the growth on her backside. The black growth covers the entire area from her upper back to her lower thighs. In one photograph, it appeared swollen and lumpy.

Rami al-Hakimi, a general physician at al-Amal, said it’s not possible for Raneem to get the care she needs in Yemen, because it requires cosmetic surgeries conducted by highly specialized surgeons, which Yemen lacks.

Dr. Abdulrahman Alhadi is head manager in a childhood leukemia unit and a member of an oncology team at al-Kuwait Hospital in Sana’a, and is also an associate professor in pediatric medicine at Sana’a University. He wrote over WhatsApp that “the war has severely impacted Yemen’s healthcare system, including access to cancer medicines. Many essential medical supplies and cancer medicines are either banned or in short supply due to the blockade and import restrictions, forcing us to use alternative treatments that may be less effective or have more side effects.”

The difficulty of traveling outside of the country, he said, “has led to delays in treatment and, in some cases, the inability to receive treatment altogether.”

Key materials used to treat cancer are either unavailable or in extremely limited supply. For example, Dr. Alhadi said radioactive iodine, commonly used to treat thyroid cancer, “is not widely available in Yemen due to the ongoing conflict and blockade.”

The Health Ministry of Sana’a told us that radioactive iodine has been banned from import into Houthi-controlled areas.

When we reached out to the State Department to confirm this ban and to request a full list of items that are prohibited from import, a spokesperson referred us to the United Nations Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM) for Yemen.

UNVIM, which did not respond to a request for comment, is the UN inspection body tasked with facilitating the transport of non-humanitarian goods into Houthi-controlled parts of Yemen, by verifying that these goods do not violate United Nations Security Council Resolution 2216. That resolution, which was drafted by Saudi Arabia, places an arms embargo on the Houthis. Once UNVIM grants clearance, the “internationally recognized government of Yemen,” now the PLC, gets the final say over which goods can enter ports in Houthi-controlled areas.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have exerted considerable influence over the “internationally recognized government of Yemen” since this resolution was implemented at the start of the war. The resolution has been a key means these countries have used to impose the blockade, alongside the bombing of airports and ports, and the placement of Saudi warships in Yemeni waters.

Shireen Al-Adeimi is an academic and nonresident fellow at the Quincy Institute who has campaigned to end US support for the Saudi-led war and blockade. She said that, given the role of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in influencing the PLC, and given past coalition action to block humanitarian aid, this amounts to foreign control over what goes into and out of Yemen’s ports in these areas. “A blockade is an act of war,” she said.

UNVIM publishes some data about which goods enter, but it is not clear which items the PLC has banned from import. (Other ports—for example, Aden—have also faced a cumbersome process for imports.)

Humanitarian crisis

The truce has been a period of relative calm and de-escalation of cross-border attacks, though there have been some skirmishes. There is, however, no formal, lasting agreement, and the truce itself expired in October 2022, leaving some worried that hostility could resume at any time. The stakes are high: Eight years of war directly killed more than 150,000 people in Yemen, but that toll climbs to at least 377,000 when including the indirect consequences of war, like hunger and disease. (The Saudi-led coalition is responsible for the vast majority of these deaths.) At least 85,000 children under 5 years old in Yemen have starved to death since the war started in 2014.

The war has been defined by a lack of accountability and transparency, including from the United States, a fact acknowledged by the US government’s own internal watchdog. A June 2022 report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the departments of Defense and State “have not fully determined the extent to which US military support has contributed to civilian harm in Yemen.”

This lack of transparency extends to the aerial and sea blockades imposed during the war by the Saudi-led coalition, choking off the supply of food, medicines, and fuel. (Houthi corruption has contributed to inflated oil prices, intensifying the consequences of restrictions for ordinary Yemenis.) These blockade tactics have been condemned by humanitarian groups and United Nations leaders. And it’s not just Houthi-controlled areas that are suffering: Southern areas under the authority of the PLC have faced a currency collapse, and a tremendous crisis of poverty.

In the truce, Saudi Arabia agreed to a slight loosening of restrictions on Yemen, and data from UNVIM shows there has been a modest increase in fuel and food imports into Houthi-controlled areas. In January, shipments of containerized cargo went above zero for the first time in many months. UNVIM reports say this containerized cargo includes things like cement and timber, but the body does not provide an exhaustive list of all of the items.

And then there is the difficult-to-measure chilling effect created by these restrictions, and the requirements surrounding inspection and approval. Ships carrying non-humanitarian commercial goods into Houthi-controlled areas, for example, are prohibited from then journeying on to other ports. This restriction creates a financial disincentive to ship to Yemen, since vessels are limited in where they can travel afterward, and this may be dissuading imports.

“Despite the U.S. and U.N. narrative of the truce’s success, many Yemenis living in Houthi territory have expressed disappointment that the truce has done little to improve their living conditions,” Annelle Sheline wrote in a February 2023 report for the Quincy Institute, where she is a research fellow. “Funding cuts for humanitarian aid have actually reduced the amount of assistance Yemenis have received during the truce, while prices for basic goods remain extremely high. The Houthis continue to manipulate the flow of aid for their own benefit.”

Lifting the blockade

There is a lack of clarity about the exact mechanism used to enforce airport restrictions, and what actions Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would take if they were violated, given the coalition’s previous bombings of Sana’a airport.

When asked for an explanation, a State Department spokesperson said, “The internationally recognized Yemen Government authorizes commercial flights into and out of Sana’a airport. Flights between Sana’a and Amman resumed as part of the UN-brokered truce between the parties in April 2022, a signal of commitment from the Yemen Government to the truce.”

Hassan El-Tayyab—the legislative director for Middle East Policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a peace organization—called this statement a “denial of the role Saudi warplanes play in enforcing a de facto no-fly zone over the airspace of another country which requires ongoing US operational support. There’s a level of US complicity here that needs to be acknowledged and ended.”

Because of the influence US allies hold over the PLC, some activists want the Biden administration to more actively push for the lifting of restrictions.”The administration should build on the progress made with opening flights to Jordan,” El-Tayyab said, “and work to add regular flights to other destinations, including Cairo and Mumbai, leveraging the United States’ diplomatic relationships, economic ties, and military aid to the Saudi-led coalition, India, Egypt, and other countries, to compel them to increase movement and access.”

Asked whether the United States is pushing for more flights, a State Department spokesperson said, “The United States strongly supports and works to implement the expansion of commercial flights to/from Sana’a to facilitate the freedom of movement of Yemenis, including the many Yemenis in need of medical care.”

The spokesperson added, “The United States has engaged with partners to encourage expanding commercial flights from Sana’a.”

But Dr. Aisha Jumaan, president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, a humanitarian aid and peace organization, and other activists are skeptical. She told us she “would like to know what the US had done to expand commercial flights to and from Sana’a. What practical steps has the US implemented to facilitate that?”

There have been some reports that the United States may be “slow-walking” peace negotiations by introducing conditions for a deal. The Biden administration, meanwhile, has signaled that it remains a partner of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and in August 2022 approved $5 billion in total arms sales to both countries. This comes on top of at least $54.6 billion in military support to these countries from 2015 to 2021, according to the GAO.

In the April 2023 statement celebrating progress since the truce, the State Department’s Patel criticized the Houthis for post-truce attacks on the Yemeni cities of Ma’rib and Taiz, as well as on oil terminals. (The Houthis are allies of Iran.) “We remain seriously concerned, however, about Houthi actions that threaten this extraordinary progress and exacerbate the suffering of Yemenis,” Patel stated.

But some activists and members of Congress argue that Houthi violence and abuses do not justify restrictions on freedom of movement, because people like Raneem should not be used as leverage. In May, 39 members of Congress signed a letter calling on the Biden administration “to pressure the Saudis to lift the blockade unconditionally—not use it as a bargaining chip in negotiations.”

With a presidential campaign ramping up, Biden has an incentive to emphasize relief and openness in Yemen; the US role in the humanitarian crisis—including rolling out the red carpet for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman last year, and ongoing weapons sales—goes against the president’s claims to embrace human rights as a foreign policy principle.

But activists say it’s not clear how the stories of people like Raneem fit into the president’s narrative. Blockade tactics may not shock the conscience as much as the bombing of a school bus or water-bottling plant. But they, too, kill in large numbers—as well as give rise to extreme poverty and malnutrition and degrade the quality of life for millions.

The hot weather makes Raneem’s body much more itchy. While many poor people in Yemen do not have electricity, her family does, but it is expensive, so they keep their air conditioner on for only two hours during the night to help Raneem sleep. Even still, she said, “I can’t sleep because it’s so hot. I want a cool breeze.” This summer, the temperature in Al Hudaydah has regularly climbed above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity has been stifling.

Her father says Raneem can often be seen leaning against a wall to scratch herself. When asked what she does in her free time, Raneem said, “I keep scratching all my body. There’s a lump in my back and it’s bleeding.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/yemen-blockade-medical-care/
Inside a Teamster Rebellion: This Is What Union Democracy Looks Likehttps://www.thenation.com/article/activism/teamsters-tdu-ups-iowa/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah Lazare,Shuaib Almosawa,Sarah Lazare,Sarah LazareMay 15, 2023

In the early morning of April 12, members of International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 90 rallied in the parking lot of the United Parcel Service distribution hub in Des Moines, Iowa, to prepare for what could be the largest strike against a single company in US history later this summer. The sun was shining as the union distributed “hot dogs for breakfast” to a crowd that started small but quickly ballooned to over 100, workers said. People were standing on trucks giving speeches to their coworkers. “We had workers talking about working six days a week, talking about getting written up for calling in sick,” said Tanner Fischer, the 26-year-old president of the local, who has been working for UPS since he was 18.

Managers came outside to monitor the rally, Fischer said. “Some were standing 100 yards away, then moved to stand in the crowd and see what’s going on. They were making everyone uncomfortable.”

Surveillance is a common intimidation tactic used by management to make workers fearful about participating in protests. But instead of being cowed, Fischer fought back. “I filed an Unfair Labor Practice a few days later for them spying on our rally,” he told me with a smile, referring to a formal charge that an employer has violated the National Labor Relations Act. “It was easy. I did it myself. I wish I knew how to file a ULP when I was a steward.” (UPS corporate communications said of the incident, “We respect our employees’ rights to assemble and we comply with the NLRA.” The case is still ongoing.)

This episode illustrates the combative stance promised by Local 90’s new leadership, which hails from Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), a movement within the union to build stronger democracy and militancy. That slate came to power in Local 90 at the beginning of this year, just in time to pick up the organizing for a nationwide UPS contract battle. The UPS contract with roughly 350,000 Teamsters is, according to the Teamsters, the biggest private-sector labor contract in North America, and it will expire on July 31. Negotiations are already underway. Beyond Des Moines, the new leadership of the international union came to power in March 2022 with the endorsement of the TDU, and has repeatedly declared, “We are not afraid” to strike.

Fischer doesn’t seem afraid either. We sat in the bar of a Hilton in downtown Chicago, where he had traveled for a regional grievance panel, part of the process for resolving deadlocked complaints that the employer violated the collective bargaining agreement. He looked young—he was carded when ordering a Bud Light—but he exuded confidence. Dressed in a gray Teamsters pullover, he had a trim beard and short light-brown hair, and politely repeated himself when I had trouble hearing him over the chatter of the establishment. But that polite demeanor gave way to exuberance—and increased volume—once we got going on the subject of workplace organizing.

There was much to discuss; the UPS contract isn’t his only battle. Local 90, based mostly in the Des Moines metro area, has six more contracts to negotiate in 2023, said Fischer, including one with a Pepsi bottling and distribution center, the local’s second-largest shop. And union leadership, he told me, is working through a backlog of hundreds of grievances, dating back to 2018. But out of 1,100 members, around 600 work at UPS, which guarantees that their fight will be a focal point in the months to come.

Iowa is a “right to work” state, which means that a worker can reap the benefits of a union contract without paying dues or being a member. While right-to-work status was designed to—and often does—obliterate union power, Local 90 has pushed back by aggressively organizing workers. According to Fischer, around 90 percent of UPS workers in the area are in the union.

Alano De La Rosa holds the top office in Local 90 as the secretary-treasurer and is also a member of TDU. He told me over the phone that he attributes the success of the recent organizing drive “in large part to the fact people are activated by the potential of a nationwide work stoppage. We’ve even picked up members who were longtime nonmembers.”

Chased by dogs, stuck in snow

In 2015, it was De La Rosa who first signed up Fischer, then a teenage UPS loader making $10.50 an hour, to be in the union. It helped that Fischer, who grew up in the Des Moines area, had some familiarity with the concept. “My uncle was in unions as a firefighter and an electrician, and I know he has done well with his life because he’s in a union,” Fischer said. But despite union protection, Fischer told me that at the beginning, “pay was very low. I always had to have another job while working there.”

In February 2018, before the current contract, Fischer became a full-time driver, which meant higher pay: $18.75 an hour, he said. But the switch also had its challenges: He recalled the terror of “qualifying” when, during the first 30 days, a driver is tested on their ability to deliver a truck’s load within rigid time standards. “That was one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done,” he said. “On any given day you could be fired. It’s snowing, and I’m driving a truck, and I have to be done by five.”

Like any UPS driver, Fischer has a trove of stories about misadventures and warm interactions with the public. “I’ve been chased by more dogs more times than I can count,” he said. “I’ve been stuck in snow and had the whole neighborhood dig me out. I had a customer buy me a portable air conditioner thing to keep me from overheating—probably the best customer gift I’ve ever gotten in my life.”

Jody Gelner, who has been working at UPS for 35 years and became a member of TDU around two years ago, serves on the executive board of Local 90. He said that he still “gets pretty emotional” about the interactions he has had with customers.

One holiday season, early in his role as a full-time driver in the early 2000s, he had to deliver a kid-sized jeep with power wheels, “the type of toy that you give a little kid to ride around in with a battery,” he said. Gelner knew what was in the box because there was a picture on the side.

He was delivering it to a house with a big window. “I got out the back door and grabbed this big box with the picture of the toy,” he said. “And as I’m coming up to the door, I can see the kid jumping up and down and yelling with excitement. He was maybe 5 years old. And here comes the mom saying you just ruined the surprise for my kid’s Christmas.”

“She was furious,” he remembered with a laugh. “She tore into me. Now I’ve kind of learned that if the picture is on them, you hide them a little bit.”

But Gelner said the job also has its nasty side. “For upper management, it’s all down to seconds. You have 19 seconds to stop the truck. You have 18 or 19 seconds to get a box and get out of the truck. It’s so micromanaged.”

“Back in the day, I could run like a gazelle,” Gelner, who is 60 years old, said. “But now my knees hurt. I’ve been doing it so long. It wears on you.”

UPS has multiple mechanisms to track workers’ progress throughout the day: The company knows when a worker opens their door, how long the door is open, when a package is scanned, and where a worker is driving. But it is the union’s position that workers are under no obligation to follow the company’s time parameters. “The company can have their standards of what they think we should do, but we as a union do not acknowledge their production standards,” Fischer said. “There’s nothing in our contract that says we have to work for their numbers.”

A forced contract, a coming fight

But there is plenty in the workers’ national contract that is distasteful. The 2018 contract that UPS employees are currently working under garnered a “no” vote of 54 percent. But the union’s leadership at the time—helmed by longtime President James Hoffa, whose father, Jimmy, led the union from 1957 to 1971—invoked a constitutional loophole that says union negotiators can impose a contract if fewer than half of the membership votes, unless that vote is two-thirds “no.”

That loophole had been vociferously opposed for years by TDU and other Teamsters, and in June 2021, delegates overturned it at the union’s national convention. And then, around five months later, the opposition slate headed by now–General President Sean O’Brien and General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman won. Alexandra Bradbury wrote in Labor Notes about the election outcome, “It’s the first time in almost a quarter-century that a coalition backed by TDU has taken the driver’s seat in the international union.”

Now, under that leadership, Teamsters across the country are looking to overturn some of that contract’s biggest disappointments. Paramount is the 22.4 position, which was created in the 2018 contract. This designation creates a second—or lower—tier of drivers, justified by the fact that these positions “may include inside jobs.” But in reality, 22.4 workers often perform tasks that are nearly identical to that of regular full-time drivers, except they work on the weekend and receive lower pay. These 22.4 workers are also excluded from the already meager protections from excessive forced overtime that exist for regular full-time drivers. (Only 25 percent of drivers per center can be 22.4s, per the contract.)

The demand to eliminate the 22.4 position has emerged as a rallying call, and O’Brien and Zuckerman have both said they are willing to strike to scrap this designation. (O’Brien split with Hoffa over the 2018 contract and has since built an alliance with TDU.)

But life isn’t easy for regular full-time drivers either. Fischer said that these workers in Local 90 are frustrated with forced overtime and the lack of paid sick days. “[Regular] full-time drivers have overtime protections against working over nine and a half hours a day more than two days in a given week,” Fischer said. “But the company can violate it—they just have to pay a penalty.”

Regular full-time drivers in Local 90 frequently work six days a week and are often forced to power through sickness, Fischer said. They don’t, after all, get paid sick days, and the state of Iowa does not have a guarantee for these either. (Some regional supplementary agreements in other locations do include paid sick days, but the central region supplement—which is the largest supplement and includes Iowa—doesn’t.) Vacation days have to be scheduled at the beginning of the year, which means that these workers have few opportunities to get an urgently needed day off. While management’s flexibility on this requirement varies from shop to shop, Fischer described local bosses as punitive: “If you were to get sick or need the day off, you end up with attendance issues.”

“It’s a little bit like the rail workers,” Fischer said. Rail workers have been vocal about brutal work conditions created by precision-scheduled railroading, in which they are denied time off to be at the bedside of dying family members, see their children born, or attend to urgent medical issues.

When asked about these conditions at Local 90, Matthew O’Connor from UPS corporate communications said, “We don’t want any of our employees to work six days in a row unless they want to.”

“In 2018, no one could have predicted the rapid increase in volume due to Covid-19 and changing customer demands for weekend service,” he continued. O’Connor stated that the 25 percent cap on 22.4 drivers has functioned to “prevent us from hiring enough Tuesday-Saturday drivers in some locations.”

But Fischer said that UPS can’t dodge responsibility. “If they didn’t want to have the six-day work week, they wouldn’t have it. They have the power to stop that immediately. It’s like driving a car and saying, ‘I don’t want to keep driving,’ but not pulling over and stopping. They’re the ones behind the wheel.”

UPS made record profits in 2022, bringing in $100 billion in revenue. But pay inequalities extend well beyond the 22.4 positions, something workers would like to rectify. The starting rate at UPS for both part-time and full-time jobs working inside—unloading, bagging, and sorting—is significantly lower than the rate for drivers. And then there is the issue of subcontracting—or, as Fischer put it, “giving away good union jobs.”

Workers want more full-time inside jobs, and they are fed up with the company’s efforts to impose monitoring systems, like cameras and sensors. This investment in surveillance is especially offensive, workers say, given the lack of measures to keep workers cool, as temperatures climb in a changing climate and, in some cases, place their lives in danger. Workers, too, are watching with concern as UPS pursues automation at some facilities.

Fischer’s mother, Adrianne Fischer, is a part-time air package driver; she picks up packages early in the morning from the airport and delivers them to customers. Her son encouraged her to get a job at UPS almost five years ago after her divorce. “I was working three jobs at the time, and had two little boys at home,” she said. “Health insurance is so expensive. He knew I needed benefits.”

She has complaints related to Article 40 of the national contract, which says that, unlike regular part-time workers, she doesn’t get extra pay if she works six days in a row when hours are beneath a certain threshold. She is also only guaranteed three hours a day. This is despite the fact that air package workers are often delivering and moving highly valuable products, or even medically urgent items, like corneas for transplant.

While the job gave her health insurance, Article 40 puts a cap on her quality of life, she said. “I’ve prepared myself financially for a potential strike. If this is what we need to do to have our voices heard, then we’ll do it.”

Organizing transformations

Fischer joined TDU around the forced passage of the 2018 contract. He said he remembers “being at a TDU conference in a room with people who were really pissed off. I was not totally understanding what was going on, but knowing we were getting screwed.”

Todd Hartsell, a senior steward in his building at the time, was the one who first pointed Fischer toward TDU, which was formed in 1976 to advance union democracy and root out corruption and mob influence (then an issue) from the union. Now a retired UPS worker, Hartsell has been a member of TDU for almost 40 years and was president of Local 90 in the mid-to-late ’90s. For three months, he said, he was on the national negotiating committee for the contract fight that resulted in the last nationwide UPS strike in 1997, which took place under the leadership of Ron Carey, who won the presidency with the support of TDU. The strike involved 185,000 workers and lasted for 15 days. Labor journalist Alex Press noted this year in Jacobin, “The United States has not seen a strike of that magnitude since.”

Hartsell said of Fischer, “Other people planted the seeds in me, the seeds of knowledge and information, and I shared it with him.”

During his presidential campaign, Fischer got married in September to Jacob Sales, who works as a server while going to school. They now live together in Bondurant, a suburb of Des Moines. “It’s stressful to plan a wedding and run for president at the same time,” said Fischer. “I would be doing 4 am shifts at Pepsi talking to Teamsters, then sleeping in my car for maybe an hour, then going to work all day.” Luckily, Fischer says, his now-husband did “most of the wedding planning.”

A handful of Teamster coworkers came to their wedding, and now Fischer is a union leader alongside them, at a juncture with huge implications for the labor movement. As rank-and-file reform movements win power in the United Auto Workers and rise up in the United Food and Commercial Workers, major contract battles become an opportunity to showcase a more aggressive approach that—many hope—will result in stronger contracts and internal democracy, as well as new organizing campaigns. While union enthusiasm is resurging, density is low in relative historical terms.

There are signs, meanwhile, that UPS is feeling the heat from workers. On a January 31 UPS earnings call, Amit Mehrotra, an analyst for Deutsche Bank, expressed concern about the negative press attention the contract battle is generating: “It seems like every day we wake up, there’s a new big article about it.” On that same earnings call, UPS CEO Carol Tomé sought to assure investors that UPS and Teamsters are “not far apart on the issues.”

But Local 90 members are readying themselves for a fight. De La Rosa said, “There is a lot of positive buzz. They are asking how it’s going. We connect people with the Teamsters app. We try to be at the gates as much as possible, try to be at the building leafleting. People seem thirsty for information.”

Fischer isn’t sure when he’s going to get a break from organizing, and it doesn’t seem like he wants one. The national UPS contract says top officers get an unpaid leave from UPS during their tenure (Local 90 member dues pay their salaries), and can return with all of their seniority intact once their term is finished. When asked what he does in his free time, he told me, “This is it,” gesturing with his hands toward the conversation we are having. He does enjoy bike riding, he said, and Packers football, though he acknowledged he should not admit the latter too loudly in a Chicago bar. He’s been thinking a lot, he said, about how “servers are a marginalized group of workers, and making less than minimum wage is insane.”

“Maybe when I have some time, we can stir up some trouble at Jacob’s work.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/teamsters-tdu-ups-iowa/
Preparing for War in the South China Seahttps://www.thenation.com/article/world/philippines-balikatan-war-games-us-military/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah Lazare,Shuaib Almosawa,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah LazareApr 7, 2023

magine you have a visitor who comes into your house,” Corazon Valdez Fabros said over Zoom from Quezon City in the Philippines. “You welcome this visitor. But this is a visitor who has all the guns, all the materials, that basically you cannot object to because they are fully loaded. And you cannot even tell this visitor to get out of your house when you want them to get out.”

“That is the US,” she said.

Valdez Fabros has been organizing against the US military presence in the Philippines since the 1970s, when the US-backed dictator President Ferdinand Marcos was in power. Now, at the age of 73, she is ramping up her efforts again, this time under the presidency of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the former dictator’s son.

On February 1, President Joe Biden’s Department of Defense announced that it had struck a deal with the Marcos administration to establish a foothold at four new “agreed locations” in the country. Then, on April 3, the DOD revealed that three of those sites are in the north, near Taiwan, a source of rising tensions between the United States and China. The new sites bring the number of known US military locations to nine—the largest presence in the country since the Philippine government kicked out the US military three decades ago.

The announcement comes just ahead of massive joint war games; an annual exercise called Balikatan, or Shoulder-to-Shoulder, is slated to begin on April 11. It will be the largest of its kind, with 17,600 troops expected to participate, 12,000 from the United States. (About 100 troops from Australia, and observers from Japan are also expected to attend.) Balikatan 2023 spokesman Col. Michael Logico told news outlets that the event will include the first live-fire water exercises between US and Filipino troops. In one exercise, participants will even sink a naval vessel.

For Philippine social movement leaders who oppose the US military presence, the developments are deeply concerning. The Philippines, the largest recipient of US military assistance in the Indo-Pacific, is just to the south of Taiwan and touches the South China Sea, parts of which are also referred to as the West Philippine Sea in the Philippines. The US has seized on—and escalated—territorial disputes in the South China Sea between China and some of its neighbors to justify an expanded regional role and presence, part of a bipartisan push for an increasingly confrontational stance toward China. But US lawmakers rarely discuss how a military buildup in the Indo-Pacific region affects countries like the Philippines, where the US military has already left a trail of harm, from sexual assault to child abandonment. Tobita Chow, the founding director of Justice Is Global, a group that advocates for military de-escalation, said that people in the Philippines “do not even exist to 99.9 percent of the US foreign policy world.”

But if the well-being of its people is being disregarded, its strategic location is not. In addition to the new sites, the United States is doubling down on existing ones. The Department of Defense said on April 3 that it “intends to expand funding” of infrastructure investments at five preexisting military locations, on top of the $82 million already announced on February 1. The Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) between the United States and the Philippines, implemented in 2014, says that the US can store weapons (except for nuclear arms) and build and operate facilities at “agreed locations” provided by the Philippine military, effectively placing US sites within Philippine military camps or bases. Washington is getting a sweetheart financial deal: Under the agreement, the US does not have to pay “rental or similar costs.”

Roland Simbulan, a professor of developmental studies and public management at the University of the Philippines and author of The Bases of Our Insecurity, a study of US military bases in the Philippines, cautions that the publicly known US locations may not tell the whole story. “In our long history of our relationship with the US, especially the military, they have used a lot of secret facilities that are not publicized,” he said over Zoom from Manila.

The Philippine Constitution states that “foreign military bases, troops, or facilities shall not be allowed in the Philippines except under a treaty duly concurred in by the Senate.” To get around this, US officials like Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III have avoided using the word “base” to describe known sites.

But David Vine, a professor of anthropology at American University and author of three books about US military bases, including The United States of War, underscores, “The US military has frequently used a kind of linguistic subterfuge to disguise the presence of US bases and US forces around the world, often with the help of local governments that also have an interest in disguising or downplaying the US presence.”

Likewise, the United States claims that its troops are temporarily rotating through the country. But Vine said this framing obscures the fact that the United States is maintaining a consistent presence. “On a de facto basis, the US has had many hundreds of troops, and at times thousands of troops, in the Philippines since 2002,” he said.

The Pentagon reports that as of December 2022, there were 211 active duty US service members and 13 civilians employed by the Department of Defense stationed in the country. This number, however, is incomplete; not only is it old, but it does not include Army service members. (When asked for an accurate figure, the public affairs office of the Department of Defense referred The Nation and Workday Magazine to the December report. The public affairs office of the US Army suggested contacting the public affairs office of the US Army Pacific, which did not respond.) With the upcoming Balikatan military exercises, the number of US troops is about to increase dramatically, as is the presence of US military hardware.

This US expansion in the Philippines is part of a larger picture. The United States is pursuing a military buildup in an arc around China: There are at least 313 US military installations in East Asia, according to a list provided by the Pentagon and cited by the Overseas Base Realignment and Closure Coalition. (The US has roughly 750 military bases around the world.)

China has one base in Djibouti and several in the South China Sea, bringing the country’s total foreign military bases to around eight, according to Vine’s count. (China claims its sovereignty extends to where its South China Sea bases are located, but The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration disagrees with this claim, which has been a point of friction with the Philippines and other nearby countries.) And China’s coast guard has, at times, harassed and displaced Filipino fishers. While both China and the United States conduct military exercises and other maneuvers aimed at projecting power in or near the South China Sea, Vine says the US military has pursued a far greater buildup in the region—near China’s borders. US expansionists, meanwhile, have been quick to exploit concerns among China’s neighbors over China’s increased economic and soft power, to promote a narrative of great power competition.

Amid this climate, Valdez Fabros, who is copresident of the International Peace Bureau, an anti-war network, said she is concerned that any spike in the US military presence makes war more between the United States and China more likely. “This may not be something that for sure is going to happen. But the mere fact that the US is here makes it more likely something can happen. Maybe there’s a miscalculation. These things happen.”

“Why can’t they do this training in their own country?” she said. “That makes more sense. Of course, they’re doing it here to be aggressive.” Were a hot conflict to erupt, she said the US military presence guarantees the Philippines would be dragged into it.

Simbulan shares this fear. “The biggest danger is the fact that the US presence in the Philippines will put us in danger of possible attacks on our territory and people in case there is a war between China and US forces,” he said. “We are the first line of defense in the US strategy.”

For Renato Reyes Jr., secretary-general of the left-leaning coalition Bayan, the US presence itself inflicts harm, regardless of whether it leads to war. “It violates our sovereignty,” Reyes said over the phone from Manila. “It’s a clear sign that we are not really free.”

The Philippines was a colony of the United States from 1898 to 1946, subject to US military rule and violent repression of anti-colonial rebellion. From 1899 to 1902, the United States waged a brutal war against an independence movement, burning down entire villages. Up to 20,000 Filipinos were killed in combat, and as many as 200,000 civilians died as a result of starvation, disease, and violence related to the war, while around 4,200 people on the US side died. After the Philippines won independence, the US military maintained two large bases in the country, Naval Base Subic Bay and Clark Air Base. Throughout this long relationship, the United States has used the Philippines as a springboard for military actions in the region, from the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion to the Korean War to the Vietnam War.

Following an anti-bases movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, the Philippines ousted the US military from the country. By 1992, the United States had left both Clark and Subic bases.

In its April 3 statement, the Department of Defense sought to put a positive spin on the local impacts of today’s increasing US presence, stating that US infrastructure investments would “spur economic growth and job opportunities in their respective provinces.” But activists say they are troubled by the fact that when the United States employed tens of thousands of Filipinos at the Clark and Subic Bay bases, those workers faced exploitation and wage discrimination, a dynamic intensified by US assertions that it could override Philippine labor law. Inequality between Filipino and US civilian workers on bases fueled labor organizing—and was a contributing factor to major strikes. A New York Times article documenting a 1986 strike that saw massive pickets and blockades at US bases and installations notes that Filipino workers’ salaries were “about one-seventh that paid to Americans.”

Valdez Fabros says another aspect of the US track record troubles her: The United States is moving to expand its military presence in the Philippines when it has not rectified its past environmental harms.

These harms are not disputed: The US General Accounting Office acknowledged its environmental destruction in a 1992 report addressed to Senate leadership in the Subcommittee on Defense and Committee on Appropriations. “Environmental officers at both Clark Air Base and the Subic Bay Naval Facility have identified contaminated sites and facilities that would not be in compliance with US environmental standards,” states the report. At Subic Bay base, it states, “Lead and other heavy metals from the ship repair facility’s sandblasting site drain directly into the bay or are buried in the landfill.” Among those pollutants acknowledged in the report were “unknown amounts of polychlorinated biphenyl” at the Subic Bay power plant. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PCBs “are probable human carcinogens.”

The report concludes that the United States has no legal obligation to rectify the damage, and the cost of restoration “could approach Superfund proportions.”

There is evidence that proximity to the US base locations in the Philippines is associated with a higher incidence of health problems, like cancer, leukemia, heart conditions, and miscarriages. Valdez Fabros said that, in light of this, she is concerned about the environmental impact of the new US military locations, “which could be more spread out, so more civilians could be affected.”

Not everyone in the Philippines has historically opposed the US presence, said Valdez Fabros, who describes a media environment where “we are bombarded” by pro-US spin. But for the country’s robust social movements, the US military foothold has long been a source of grievance—and a subject of close scrutiny.

In recent years, these activists have had plenty to investigate. Not long after the US military was ousted from the Philippines, it began making a stealth return, enabled by formal agreements. The Visiting Forces Agreement, implemented in 1999, allows the United States to send troops and civilian personnel for “official business,” as the State Department puts it, and says that, in most cases, US troops have immunity from the Philippine legal system. EDCA, which has a life span of 10 years, further entrenched the US role.

The US War on Terror, too, was used to beef up the US presence. The United States deployed special operations forces in the Philippines to assist in the country’s domestic “war on terror” (framed as a “rotational” deployment, as the scholar Walden Bello recently explained in The Nation). The Philippines was also used as a launch pad for US wars in the post-9/11 era.

As the US presence stretched into the 21st century, it brought its own harms—and opposition. In January 2013, the USS Guardian minesweeper, a naval ship, ran aground on Tubbataha Reefs, a UNESCO World Heritage Site located in the Sulu Sea, damaging over 25,240 square feet of coral and provoking an outcry. And in 2014, protests swept across the Philippines when a US Marine, Joseph Scott Pemberto, murdered a transgender woman, Jennifer Laude, in Olongapo City. (Then–Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte pardoned Pemberton in 2020.)

Simbulan said that, given the current expansion, the issue of US immunity is particularly concerning, as it evokes the country’s long “experience of the US asserting extraterritorial rights.” And there is the secrecy around what, exactly, the United States is doing. “It’s not for public consumption what happens to these military facilities,” he said.

It is too soon, Valdez Fabros said, to provide any documentation of the harms of the ongoing US buildup. But, she said, groups are extremely worried—and monitoring closely.

The US “visitor,” she said, brings danger. “We don’t want any part in a war.”



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https://www.thenation.com/article/world/philippines-balikatan-war-games-us-military/
How to Get Serious About Ending the ISIS Warhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-get-serious-about-ending-isis-war/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah Lazare,Shuaib Almosawa,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Foreign Policy In FocusFeb 11, 2015A long-term alternative to war can only be built by popular movements in Iraq and Syria. These movements deserve our solidarity—not our bombs.

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This article is a joint publication of TheNation.com and Foreign Policy In Focus.

The expanding US-led war on the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, has largely fallen off the radar of US social movements.

Many (but not all) who were active in anti-war organizing over the past decade have turned away from this conflict. The dearth of public debate is conspicuous, even as the US government sinks the country deeper into yet another open-ended and ill-defined military operation. The refrain “it will take years” has become such a common utterance by the Obama administration that it slips by barely noticed.

There are many reasons for the relative silence in the face of this latest military escalation. I would venture that one of them is the sheer complexity of the situation in Iraq and Syria—as well as the real humanitarian crisis posed by the rise of ISIS, the many-layered power struggles across the wider Middle East and the difficulty of building connections with grassroots movements in countries bearing the brunt of the violence.

But the answer to complexity is not to do nothing. In fact, great crimes and historic blunders—from Palestine to South Africa to Afghanistan—have been tacitly enabled by people who chose not to take action, perhaps because the situation seemed too complex to engage. When millions of lives are on the line, inaction is unacceptable.

The task is to figure out what to do.

The most important question to ask is this: Do we really think that the US military operation against ISIS will bring about a good outcome for the people of Iraq and Syria, or for US society? Is there any evidence from the more than thirteen years of the so-called “War on Terror” that US military intervention in the Middle East brings anything but death, displacement, destabilization and poverty to the people whose homes have been transformed into battlefields?

The answer to these questions must be a resounding “No.”

But there are also many things to say “Yes” to. A better path forward can only be forged by peoples’ movements in Iraq and Syria—movements that still exist, still matter and continue to organize for workers’ rights, gender justice, war reparations and people power, even amid the death and displacement that has swallowed up all the headlines.

Now is a critical time to seek to understand and build solidarity with Iraqi and Syrian civil societies. Heeding their call, we should strengthen awareness here at home of the tremendous political and ethical debt the United States owes all people harmed by the now-discredited war on Iraq and the crises it set in motion.

“U.S. Military Action Leads to Chaos”

“A rational observer of United States intervention in the swath of land that runs from Libya to Afghanistan would come to a simple conclusion: U.S. military action leads to chaos,” wrote scholar and activist Vijay Prashad a month after the bombings began.

More than thirteen years on, there is no evidence that the “War on Terror” has accomplished its stated, if amorphous, goal: to weed out terrorism (defined to exclude atrocities committed by the United States and allied countries, of course). According to the Global Terrorism Index released by the Institute for Economics and Peace, global terrorist incidents have climbed dramatically since the onset of the War on Terror. In 2000, there were 1,500 terrorist incidents. By 2013, this number had climbed to 10,000. People in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria suffer the most, the index notes.

The so-called “good war” in Afghanistan, which is now entering its fourteenth year and has not ended, illustrates this failed policy (President Obama’s recent claim that the combat mission is “over” notwithstanding).

In contradiction of the Obama administration’s “mission accomplished” spin, Afghanistan is suffering a spike in civilian deaths, displacement, poverty and starvation, with 2014 proving an especially deadly year for Afghan noncombatants. The Taliban, furthermore, appears to be growing in strength, as the United States forces Afghanistan into long-term political and military dependency with the Bilateral Security Agreement signed last September by Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

The Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan is one of numerous civil society groups in Afghanistan that have no illusions about the US track record so far. “In the past thirteen years, the U.S. and its allies have wasted tens of billions of [dollars], and turned this country into the center of global surveillance and mafia gangs; and left it poor, corrupt, insecure, hungry, and crippled with tribal, linguistic, and sectarian divisions,” the organization declared in a statement released last October.

The current crisis in Iraq and Syria is another piece of this puzzle. It is now well-documented that the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 played a critical role in fueling Al Qaeda in Iraq, which would eventually become ISIS. Emerging as part of the insurgency against the United States—and now thriving off opposition to the sectarian Shiite government propped up by Washington—ISIS did not even exist before the United States invaded Iraq. Its ranks were initially filled with Sunnis who were spat out by the brutal, US-imposed de-Baathification process, and later by those disaffected by a decade of negligence and repression from Shiite authorities in Baghdad.

In neighboring Syria, the United States and Saudi Arabia backed anti-Assad fighters that were, as journalist Patrick Cockburn put it, “ideologically close to al-Qaeda” yet “relabeled as moderate.” It was in Syria that ISIS developed the power to push back into Iraq after being driven out in 2007.

Ordinary people across the region are paying a staggering price for these policies.

Last year was the deadliest for civilians in Iraq since the height of the US war in 2006 and 2007, according to Iraq Body Count. The watchdog found that 17,049 civilians were recorded killed in Iraq in 2014 alone—approximately double the number recorded killed in 2013, which in turn was roughly double the tally from 2012. And more than 76,000 people—over 3,500 of them children—died last year in Syria, according to figures from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, recently warned, “The Syria and Iraq mega-crises, the multiplication of new crises, and the old crises that seem never to die have created the worst displacement situation in the world since World War II,” with at least 13.6 million people displaced from both countries.

But instead of reckoning with these legacies, the US government has taken a giant leap backward—toward another open-ended, ill-defined military operation in Iraq and Syria.

President Obama vowed in his recent State of the Union address to double down in the fight against ISIS, declaring yet again, “This effort will take time.” His remarks came just days after the United States and Britain announced a renewed joint military effort, and the Pentagon deployed 1,000 troops to Middle Eastern states to train “moderate” Syrian fighters. That comes in addition to the 3,000 soldiers ordered to deploy to Iraq, with more likely to follow. Meanwhile, the rise of Islamophobia in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attacks is feeding war fervor abroad and at home.

And so the Obama administration—which falls into the political realist camp and has, at times, pressed for a moderate retrenchment of US war in the Middle East (in part to enable a disastrous pivot to Asia)—is now leading a military response to a crisis that the president himself has acknowledged cannot be solved by the US military. To do so, Obama has repeatedly sidestepped congressional debate by claiming authority from the post-9/11 war authorization against the perpetrators of those attacks—the same legislation he once denounced for “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.” (He vowed in his State of the Union address to seek explicit authorization from Congress for the war on ISIS, but has claimed in the past not to need it.)

“As if Further Militarization Ever Brought Peace to Iraq”

As the US government makes unverified claims that American lives are under threat from ISIS, it is Muslims, Arabs, Kurds, Yazidis and Christians in the Middle East who are being killed, raped and displaced. “The occupation of the city of Mosul started a new chapter of women’s suffering in Iraq,” wrote the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq in a statement published last December. “Daesh [ISIS] reawakened the ancient tribal habits of claiming women as spoils of war.”

Meanwhile, Kurds are fighting and dying to beat back ISIS in both Iraq and Syria but are not even offered a seat at the international table. This was highlighted in the recent exclusion of Kurdish groups from an anti-ISIS conference in London of representatives from twenty-one nations.

At this conference, US Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the coalition had “halted the momentum” of ISIS fighters, while other US officials insisted that half of the “top command” of ISIS had been killed. While global media outlets ran with this “news,” Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel publicly expressed serious doubt about such claims, describing the body count as “unverified.”

Furthermore, the ability of the US military—the most powerful in the world—to blow up and kill is not in question. But in a complex geopolitical arena, that’s simply not a valid measure of success. The histories of the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars are tragic examples of the vast difference between killing a lot of people and winning a war.

Over five months in, US military operations in Iraq and Syria are neither alleviating the humanitarian crisis nor meeting any of the shifting goals of US officials (containing ISIS, destroying it, etc.). The perception that ISIS is primarily at war with the United States is, in fact, critical to its growth. The CIA estimated in September—just a month after US-led bombing began—that ISIS had tripled its ranks, from 10,000 to over 30,000. As Patrick Cockburn reported in early January, “The territories [ISIS] conquered in a series of lightning campaigns last summer remain almost entirely under its control, even though it has lost some towns to the Kurds and Shia militias in recent weeks.”

So while the expansion of ISIS’s frontiers may have slowed, the intervention has failed to prevent the group from consolidating its control in Iraq and Syria. “Extremism thrives during foreign interventions and military actions,” said Raed Jarrar of the American Friends Service Committee in an interview for this article. “Bombing different groups who live in the same areas as ISIS has helped unite ISIS with more moderate groups, more reasonable groups, who could have been persuaded to rejoin the political process. In Syria, bombing ISIS and other extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, has helped them unite, although they have been killing each other for the past two years.”

In addition to the crimes perpetrated by ISIS, US-backed and –armed Iraqi forces, sectarian Iraqi militias and “moderate rebels” in Syria are also committing brutal war crimes.

In July, for example, Human Rights Watch condemned the Iraqi government for repeatedly bombing densely populated residential neighborhoods, including numerous strikes on Fallujah’s main hospital with mortars and other munitions. And in October, Amnesty International warned that Iraqi Shiite militias, many of them funded and armed by the Iraqi government, are committing war crimes that include abductions, executions and disappearances of Sunni civilians. In Iraq, Cockburn writes, “The war has become a sectarian bloodbath. Where Iraqi army, Shia militia, or Kurdish peshmerga have driven ISIS fighters out of Sunni villages and towns from which civilians have not already fled, any remaining Sunni have been expelled, killed, or detained.”

In other words, US military intervention is not advancing the side with a clear moral high ground, but militarizing what Raed Jarrar calls a “bloody civil conflict with criminal forces on all sides.”

And now, of course, Iraqis must contend with the return of a far more powerful fighting force guilty of numerous atrocities and war crimes across the globe, including torture, massacres, use of chemical weapons and cluster bombing of civilians in Iraq: the US military.

In a recent statement, the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq slammed the US-led military campaign for, in the midst of this humanitarian crisis, “providing further military arms and bombing only, as if further militarization ever brought peace to Iraq.” Neither the international coalition nor the Iraqi government, the statement continues, is concerned “with the enslavement of more than five thousand women who are being bought and sold in broad daylight in Mosul, Raqqa, and other ‘Islamic State’ cities.”

None of this is to overstate the coherence of the US strategy in Iraq and Syria, nor even to confirm the existence of one.

Since the bombings began in August, the United States has waffled and balked, going from support for “moderate rebels” in Syria to the announcement that it would create its own proxy force. The United States initially hesitated to militarily back Kurdish forces holding out against ISIS in the Syrian town of Kobani, and many people bearing the brunt of ISIS’s repression on the ground seem to doubt that the United States is seriously trying to stem the group’s advance. The US government has trumpeted its broad military coalition, yet seemingly turns a blind eye as its allies go on directly and indirectly supporting ISIS.

In truth, the US and global publics are kept in the dark about what the US-led military coalition is doing, how long this war will last, where its boundaries lie and what “victory” means. Obama and Kerry have both indicated that the war on ISIS will take years, but Pentagon officials repeatedly refuse to reveal basic information, like what specific duties troops on the ground in Iraq are tasked with and who is dying under US bombs in Iraq and Syria. Just last December, a US coalition bomb struck an ISIS-operated jail in the town of al-Bab, Syria, killing at least fifty civilians detained inside, according to multiple witnesses. Yet while the Pentagon has demurred that civilians “may have died” during its operations, it has refused to actually acknowledge a single civilian death under its bombs.

Alternatives to US-Led War

Some people in the United States have thrown their support behind the military operations, or at least not opposed them, out of a genuine concern for the well-being of people in Iraq and Syria. However good these intentions, though, all evidence available suggests that military intervention won’t make anyone safer.

“The first level is stopping the US from causing more harm,” Jarrar told me. “That is really essential.” According to Jarrar, a US push to stop the bombing is solidaristic in itself. In fact, he said, we can’t talk about solidarity, reparations or redress for all the harm the United States has done in the now-discredited 2003 war “while we are bombing Iraq and Syria. It doesn’t make any sense to reach out to people, ask them to attend conferences for reconciliation, while we are bombing their neighborhood.”

However, stopping the United States from further harming Iraq and Syria requires far more than simply halting the bombing and troop deployment. Washington must demilitarize its failed war on terror, not only by pulling its forces from the Middle East but by putting out the fires it started with proxy battles and hypocritical foreign policies—including its alliances with governments that directly and indirectly support ISIS, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey.

In a recent article in Jacobin about the courageous struggle of the people of Kobani against ISIS, Errol Babacan and Murat Çakır argue that the United States, and the West more broadly, should start with Turkey. “Western governments must be pressured to force their NATO partner Turkey to end both its proxy war in Syria as well as its repression of political protest,” they write. “Western leftists could also work for goals such as the removal of foreign soldiers (as well as Patriot missiles) stationed in Turkey and demand sanctions against Turkey if it continues to support” the Islamic State.

Phyllis Bennis, senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, argues that US power to pressure allies to stop supporting ISIS extends beyond Turkey. “A real coalition is needed not for military strikes but for powerful diplomacy,” she writes. “That means pressuring US ally Saudi Arabia to stop arming and financing ISIS and other extremist fighters; pressuring US ally Turkey to stop allowing ISIS and other fighters to cross into Syria over the Turkish border; pressuring US allies Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and others to stop financing and arming everyone and anyone in Syria who says they’re against Assad.”

Meanwhile, it’s critical for the US left to step up its opposition to further escalation of the military intervention, including the upcoming White House bid to win bipartisan authorization. It will also be important to fight back against congressional efforts to sabotage diplomatic talks between the United States and Iran, which could embolden hard-line forces in both countries and open the door to further escalation in Iraq, Syria and beyond.

Toward a Politics of Solidarity

A long-term alternative to war, ultimately, can only be built by popular movements in Iraq and Syria. While we in the United States are inundated with images of death and victimization, surviving grassroots efforts in both countries tell a different story. These countries are not mere geopolitical battlefields—they are hotbeds of human agency and resistance.

Iraq saw a blossoming of nonviolent, Sunni-led movements against repression and discrimination by the US-backed government of Iraq in 2013. But the Iraqi military brutally crushed their protest encampments. This included the Hawija massacre in April 2013, discussed by scholar Zaineb Saleh in an interview last summer, in which at least fifty protesters were killed and over 100 were wounded. In a climate of repression and escalating violence, civil society organizations from across Iraq held the country’s first social forum in September 2013, under the banner “Another Iraq is Possible with Peace, Human Rights, and Social Justice.”

Amid siege from ISIS, repression from the Iraqi government and bombing from the United States and its allies, popular movements survive on the ground in Iraq. Groups like the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq are organizing emergency aid for women and families fleeing ISIS—while at the same time demanding US withdrawal, an end to Iraqi government oppression and reparations for the US-led war.

The Federation of Workers Councils and Trade Unions in Iraq, meanwhile, continues to organize workers against Saddam Hussein–era anti-labor laws that were carried over into the new government and backed by the United States. Right now, the Federation, alongside OWFI, is mobilizing within the country’s state-owned industries, which are undergoing rapid privatization and imposing lay-offs, firings and forced retirement on hundreds of thousands of workers.

Falah Alwan, president of the Federation, explained in a recent statement that the gutting of the public sector is the result of austerity measures driven, in part, by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. “We are in daily confrontations with the government, by demonstrations, sit-ins, seminars, [and] agitating the other sectors to take part,” Alwan told me over e-mail. “At the same time, we are preparing for a wide conference next March, for all the companies across Iraq, that will need support from our comrades in the U.S. and worldwide.”

Both of these organizations are collaborating with US groups—including the War Resisters League, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Iraq Veterans Against the War and Madre—under the banner of the Right to Heal Initiative to press for reparations for the harm from US policies in Iraq dating back to 1991. Along with damages from the last war and the sanctions regime that preceded it, their grievances include environmental poisoning in Iraq from the US military’s use of depleted uranium, white phosphorous, burn pits and more.

Likewise, “There are still people and groups in [Syria] who are working through nonviolent means,” said Mohja Kahf, a Damascus-born author and poet, in a recent interview. “And they matter. They are quietly working for the kind of Syria they want to see, whether the regime falls now or in years.” As Kahf argued in a 2013 article, it is critical for the US peace movement to connect with movements on the ground in Syria, not only when they are threatened by bombings, and not only when they are used to win arguments against US-led military intervention.

We in the US left must take a critical—if painful—look at the harm US policies have done to the Middle East, press for a long-term shift in course and seek to understand and build links with progressive forces in Iraq and Syria. The United States has a moral obligation to provide reparations to Iraq for its invasion and occupation. But these things must be demanded now, before Washington spends one more day waging a new armed conflict based on the same failed policies.

Grassroots movements did offer an alternative to endless war following the 2003 invasion, and that needs to happen again. This dark time is all the proof we need that the United States must get out of the Middle East once and for all, and the pressure to do so is only going to come from the grassroots.

Next Steps

Building international solidarity takes time, but you can get started today. Here are a few suggestions for productive next steps anyone can take.

Direct Support. Donate to relief efforts on the ground in Iraq and Syria that are orchestrated by grassroots organizations seeking to help their communities survive in the face of ISIS. The Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq has been working to provide food and winter survival gear to people fleeing ISIS and maintains shelters in Baghdad and Karbala. Furthermore, they have created a “Women’s Peace Farm” outside of Karbala, which provides “a safe and peaceful community” for refugees, according to a recent OWFI statement. Direct donations to this work can be made at OWFI’s PayPal account.

Learn. Now is a critical time for US-based movements to educate ourselves about both the histories and current realities of struggle and resistance in Iraq and Syria, as well as Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and beyond. A forthcoming book by Ali Issa, field organizer for the War Resisters League, will be important reading for anyone interested in learning more about Iraqi social movements. Titled Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq, the book is based on interviews and reports highlighting environmental, feminist, labor and protest movement organizers in Iraq.

In the process of learning about civil societies in Iraq and Syria, it is important to avoid simplistic equations that reduce all opponents of Assad to agents of the US government, and likewise regarding opponents of ISIS. As Kahf emphasized in her interview, “It is racist to think that Syrians do not have agency to resist an oppressive regime unless a clever white man whispers in their ear.… Syrians can hold two critiques in their minds at the same time: a critique of US imperialism and a critique of their brutal regime.”

There is also a great deal to learn from US civil society, including the powerful movement for black liberation that continues to grow nationwide. From Oakland to Ferguson to New York, people are showing by example that justice and accountability for racism and police killings will not be handed from above, but rather must be forced from the grassroots. This moment is full of potential to build strong and intersectional movements with racial justice at their core—a principle that is vital for challenging US militarism.

Make this live. Talk to your families, friends and loved ones about the war on ISIS. Encourage conversations in your organizations, union halls and community centers. Raise questions like, “How does US policy in the Middle East relate to our struggles for social, racial and economic justice here at home?”

The Stop Urban Shield coalition—comprising groups including Critical Resistance, the Arab Organizing and Resource Center, the War Resisters League and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement—powerfully demonstrated the connection between domestic and international militarization when it kicked a global SWAT team, police force and mercenary expo out of Oakland last September.

Ultimately, solidarity with Iraqi and Syrian people will require more than a push to end the US bombings, but long-term pressure to end US policies of endless war and militarism, in the Middle East and beyond. Building consciousness across US movements is critical to this goal.

Pressure the US government. Grassroots mobilization can play a vital role in preventing lawmakers from charging into war. This was recently demonstrated when people power—including overwhelming calls to congressional representatives and local protests—had a hand in stopping US strikes on the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2013. Mass call-ins, as well as scattered street protests, also had a hand in preventing war hawks from passing new sanctions in the midst of talks with Iran last year. It will be important to closely track any Obama administration attempt to pass explicit authorization for the war on ISIS, as well as congressional efforts to sabotage diplomacy with Iran.

OWFI wrote in a December 11 post, “With the help of the freedom-lovers around the world, we continue to survive the ongoing attacks on our society, and we will strive to be the model of a humane and egalitarian future.”

We must strive alongside them.

Members of War Times/Tiempos de Guerras contributed to this report.



]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-get-serious-about-ending-isis-war/WikiLeaks in Baghdadhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wikileaks-baghdad/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah Lazare,Shuaib Almosawa,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Foreign Policy In Focus,Sarah Lazare,Ryan HarveyJul 29, 2010Soldiers involved in the "Collateral Murder" video have come forward to tell their story.

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One by one, soldiers just arriving in Baghdad were taken into a room and questioned by their commanding officers. "All questions led up to the big question," explains former Army Spc. Josh Stieber. "If someone were to pull out a weapon in a marketplace full of unarmed civilians, would you open fire on that person, even if you knew you would hurt a lot of innocent people in the process?"

It was a trick question. "Not only did you have to say yes, but you had to say yes without hesitating," explains Stieber. "In refusing to go along with the crowd, it was not irregular for somebody to get beat up," he adds. "They’ll take you in a room, close the door and knock you around if they didn’t like your answer," says former Army Spc. Ray Corcoles, who deployed with Stieber.

According to these former soldiers, this was a typical moment of training for Bravo Company 2-16 (2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment), the ground unit involved in the infamous "Collateral Murder" video, which captured global headlines when it was released in April by WikiLeaks, the online clearinghouse for anonymous leaks. (In late July WikiLeaks dropped another bombshell with its release of more than 90,000 secret US military documents from the war in Afghanistan, including detailed reports on Pakistani collusion with the insurgents—who have successfully used heat-seeking missiles against allied forces—US assassination teams, widespread civilian casualties from US attacks and staggering Afghan government incompetence and corruption.)

The graphic video from Baghdad shows a July 2007 attack in which US forces, firing from helicopter gunships, wounded two children and killed more than a dozen Iraqis, including two Reuters employees and the father of those children. The video quickly became an international symbol of the brutality and callousness of the US military in Iraq. What the world did not see is the months of training that led up to the incident, in which soldiers were taught to respond to threats with a barrage of fire—a "wall of steel," in Army parlance—even if it put civilians at risk.

Now three former soldiers from this unit have come forward to make the case that the incident is not a matter of a few bad-apple soldiers but rather just one example of US military protocol in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, where excessive acts of violence often stem from the chain of command. This comes at a time when the top brass in Afghanistan are speaking openly of relaxing the rules of engagement. After Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recent ouster for publicly criticizing the Obama administration, his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, has asserted that military protocol in Afghanistan should be adjusted because of "concerns" about "the application of our rules of engagement," a move that critics fear will cause civilian deaths to skyrocket.

The story that Stieber, Corcoles and former Army Spc. Ethan McCord tell provides crucial background for the incident that WikiLeaks made famous. Bravo Company 2-16 deployed to Iraq in February 2007 during the "surge" ordered by George W. Bush. Their spring arrival in New Baghdad, a dangerous neighborhood in eastern Baghdad bordering Sadr City, coincided with the start of the deadliest three-month period for US forces during the Iraq War.

"I had the idea that I was going over there to help the Iraqi people—you know, freedom and democracy," says McCord, an expectation that Stieber and Corcoles say they shared. They learned quickly that the reality was very different. All three of these former soldiers describe a general policy of, in McCord’s words, trying to "out-terrorize the terrorists" in order to establish power in a neighborhood that clearly did not want US troops there. The next months would be spent raiding houses, responding to sniper fire and IEDs, and, as Corcoles says, "driving around just waiting to get shot at." All of them would witness the abuse, displacement and killing of Iraqi civilians.

When Bravo Company 2-16 arrived in New Baghdad to establish its Combat Outpost (COP) in an old factory, hundreds of angry residents gathered in protest. In grainy video footage brought back by McCord, residents can be seen converging around the soldiers and chanting, and McCord is seen standing in front of the crowd with his weapon drawn. Corcoles, behind the camera, was guarding the gate of the new post. "The first sergeant told me to shoot anyone who tried to rush the soldiers outside the gate," he says. Some Iraqis were then dragged inside, beaten and questioned. When the crowds dispersed, construction crews came in to begin building a wall around the new post. To clear the area, the military forced people to leave. "We were kicking people out of their homes," says McCord. "People who didn’t want to move, we would basically force them to move…pretty much making them leave at gunpoint."

From then on the violence escalated. Corcoles describes the first IED death his unit suffered. "We did a mission that night till like midnight, and we were actually just sitting down…. I hadn’t even got three or four drags off my cigarette and an IED went off…. We watched the Humvee burn, but we didn’t realize [someone] was still in it."

The IED attacks left the soldiers angry and scared. McCord recalls one mission to impose curfews. Earlier that day, a popular soldier had died in an IED attack, and the troops took it out on the Iraqis. "There were a lot of people who got beat up that night," he says bluntly. This anger was turned into policy by the chain of command. "We had just lost three guys to an IED when the battalion commander came out to the COP," says McCord. He went on to explain that the commander gave orders to shoot indiscriminately after IED attacks. "He said, ‘Fuck it, this is what I want…anytime someone in your line gets hit by an IED…you kill every motherfucker in the street,’" McCord testifies.

"When one [IED] went off, you were supposed to open fire on anybody," says Stieber. "At first I would just fire into a field. Then I wouldn’t fire at all." He describes an IED that went off near a crowd of teenagers. "I said I wouldn’t fire," even though "other people were firing," he recalls. Like Stieber, Corcoles describes incidents in which he purposely aimed his gun away from people. "You don’t even know if somebody’s shooting at you," he says. "It’s just insanity to just start shooting people." Stieber pointed out that in incidents like these, it was very rare for US military vehicles to stop to help the wounded or assess how many people had been injured or killed.

Stieber was intimidated and reprimanded by his command for refusing orders to shoot. "One time when I didn’t fire, people in my truck were yelling at me for the rest of the mission. When we got back, one or two leaders got up in my face and kept yelling at me and stuff," he says. The command eventually stopped sending him on missions as a gunner, and Stieber says he "faced a lot of criticism for it." Corcoles saw this too. "One night our truck got hit by an IED and Josh didn’t fire, and another soldier didn’t fire," he says. "And they were getting yelled at: ‘Why aren’t you firing?’ And they said, ‘There’s nobody to fire at.’"

Corcoles recalls another "wall of steel" incident: "Our first sergeant was with us, and after we got hit by an IED, people started shooting everywhere, and they were also actually shooting at him." He explains that his sergeant happened to be within range of indiscriminate fire coming from US soldiers. After almost getting shot by the soldiers, "our first sergeant told us not to do this anymore," says Corcoles.

Excessive acts of violence were woven into daily missions, house searches and prisoner detention, says McCord. "This one time, in the summer of 2007, we were in a barbershop and my platoon leader was asking the barbershop owner about the local militia," he says. "The interpreter kept saying the owner didn’t know anything. The platoon leader said, ‘He is fucking lying,’" says McCord, explaining that it was always assumed that Iraqis who said they didn’t know anything were lying. "I remember my platoon leader punching him in the face. When [the barbershop owner] went to ground, he was kicked by others in the platoon. Many other Iraqis were in there to get their hair cut. They were up against the wall watching him get kicked."

McCord says that when others in his unit saw this kind of behavior condoned by the leadership, they followed suit. He describes multiple instances in which soldiers abused detainees or beat people up in their houses. In one case, he says, someone was taken from his house, beaten up and then left on the side of the road, bloodied and still handcuffed.

In this setting, the "Collateral Murder" incident does not stand out as a drastic departure from the norm. That morning, Corcoles and McCord prepared for a "Ranger dominance" mission, "a clearing mission to basically go through every house, top to bottom, from one end of town to the next," says Corcoles. Stieber, who had been pulled off these missions because of his refusal to fire at crowds, was not with them this time. For the rest of the unit, what started as another day of house searches became a four-hour battle with militia members, say Corcoles and McCord. McCord was searching houses near Corcoles when he heard two Apache helicopters open fire nearby. He knew these helicopters were assigned to guard forces on the ground, so he knew something serious was occurring. "I heard over the net that we needed to move to that position," he recalls. He ran four or five blocks to the scene. "I was one of the first six dismounted soldiers to arrive there."

"It seemed unreal," says McCord, who describes running up and "seeing the carnage of what used to be human beings on the corner." A passenger van sat nearby, pocked with bullet holes and littered with bodies. Corcoles arrived on the scene shortly after McCord, who soon discovered two critically wounded children in the van and was able to pull them to safety. These moments would later be broadcast around the world in harrowing detail. McCord is seen in the video rushing wounded children away from the van. Photos that McCord took at the scene show mangled corpses lying in the road and one of the children, crouched in the front seat of the van next to a dead body.

Immediately following the incident, McCord was threatened and mocked by his commanding officer for pulling the children from the van. He says his platoon leader "yelled at me that I need to quit worrying about these ‘motherfucking kids’ and pull security." McCord later approached a staff sergeant and told him he needed mental healthcare after the incident. "He told me to stop being a pussy…to get the sand out of my vagina," he says. "I was told there would be repercussions." Fearing punishment, McCord did not ask again.

After conducting an internal investigation, the military cleared the unit of any wrongdoing. An "Investigation into Civilian Casualties Resulting from an Engagement on 12 July 2007 in the New Baghdad District of Baghdad, Iraq" found that "the proceedings comply with legal requirements" and "contain no material errors or violate any individual’s substantial rights." The US Central Command refused several requests for an interview. And now Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who is accused of leaking the video to WikiLeaks, is facing heavy charges punishable under the Espionage Act. The 22-year-old was transferred to Kuwait for a military trial that could lock him away in prison for decades.

In the months following the July 12 events, violence in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood subsided as the political winds shifted. After Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr declared a cease-fire and the United States moved toward a strategy of alliance with the Sunni Awakening Councils and some Shiite militia members, the soldiers began working with the very people they had once been told to fight, Stieber explains. "Things were pretty calm for most of the rest of the time, until like the last couple weeks that we were there," he says. As the troops finished their tour, some factions broke with Sadr’s cease-fire and resumed fighting, and Bravo Company 2-16’s COP was burned to the ground. "All hell broke loose," says Stieber. "The quick surge in violence at the end of our tour, when peace treaties were broken…show[s] that any progress that was made was [made] through negotiation as opposed to brute force." He says he found it contradictory that soldiers would end up legitimizing the people they had once fought.

McCord would return home early, suffering long-term injury from IED attacks that left him with a shattered lower spine and traumatic brain injury (TBI). He says the military at first tried to deny him treatment but eventually agreed to grant him back surgery after civilian tests showed serious injury. Despite TBI and severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), McCord says the military refused to grant him a medical discharge and instead discharged him with a pre-existing personality disorder, a distinction that precludes him from receiving disability benefits from the military [see Joshua Kors, "Disposable Soldiers," April 26].

The three soldiers returned to the United States disillusioned with the war they had once volunteered to fight. "From my experiences in Iraq, we shouldn’t even be in these countries fighting wars. This is a war of aggression, of occupation. There is nothing justifiable to me about this war," says McCord. "And this isn’t someone sitting back saying ‘I think’ or ‘I believe.’ This is from someone who was there."

Three years after their deployment to Iraq, these former soldiers were forced to confront that war when the WikiLeaks video was thrust into the limelight. They watched as the familiar scene became a media sensation, making international headlines and raising the ire and disgust of people around the world.

By this point, Stieber, now 22, had become an outspoken peace activist. When he heard about the video, he was in the midst of planning a speaking tour with a man from Iraq with the goal of "showing that we have more in common with the people we’re told are our enemies than those telling us who our enemies are," he says. After WikiLeaks posted the video, Stieber e-mailed several people from his former unit explaining that he was going to speak out about the incident. McCord, now 34 and raising two children, and Corcoles, 35 and raising a child, have both decided to join Stieber’s effort.

The three have decided to go public to let the world know the context behind the acts caught on film. "If people don’t like that video, then the entire system needs to be re-examined, and I think it illustrates why we shouldn’t put soldiers in that situation," insists Stieber. Corcoles, now suffering from severe PTSD, says he wants the public to understand that "war kills civilians first." He says, "I think Americans…need to take responsibility. If you pay taxes, you pay for that soldier’s wage. You’re just as guilty as the soldier pulling the trigger."

"What was shown in the Wikileaks video only begins to depict the suffering we have created," reads an open letter from McCord and Stieber to the Iraqis who were injured or lost loved ones in the July 2007 attack. "From our own experiences, and the experiences of other veterans we have talked to, we know that the acts depicted in this video are everyday occurrences of this war: this is the nature of how U.S.-led wars are carried out in this region."

Of course, these three are not the first soldiers to break the silence about the rules of engagement in the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the March 2008 Winter Soldier hearings in Maryland, more than fifty veterans and active-duty service members publicly testified about the orders they were told to carry out in these countries, sharing stories of excessive violence, as well as of abusive and threatening treatment they endured from their superiors [see Laila Al-Arian, "Winter Soldiers Speak," April 7, 2008; and Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, "The Other War," July 30/August 6, 2007].

The three former soldiers say they support the decision to leak these videos to the public. "Avoiding talking about what’s going on is going to make us continue making the same mistakes and not learning our lesson," insists Stieber. About the most recent WikiLeaks revelations, Stieber says, "People all over the world have been confronted once again with the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," adding that the latest release "confirms what veterans like Ethan, Ray and I, and so many other veteran witnesses, have been talking about."

But the occupations drag on, with President Obama continuing a Bush-era plan that will leave 50,000 "noncombat" troops in Iraq until at least the end of 2011. And top military brass have suggested that the August 31 deadline for withdrawal of "combat" troops may be extended. Meanwhile, Obama is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, bringing the total force there to more than 100,000, in what is now the longest war in US history. June was the deadliest month for NATO forces in Afghanistan, with 102 deaths, and as of press time July had become the second deadliest, with seventy-eight deaths.

All three soldiers say they hope Americans will learn the right lessons from the WikiLeaks video. "We acknowledge our part in the deaths and injuries of your loved ones as we tell Americans what we were trained to do and what we carried out in the name of ‘god and country,’" write McCord and Stieber in their open letter. "The soldier in the video said that your husband shouldn’t have brought your children to battle, but we are acknowledging our responsibility for bringing the battle to your neighborhood, and to your family. We did unto you what we would not want done to us."

"Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny."



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wikileaks-baghdad/
Preparing Undeployables for the Afghan Fronthttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/preparing-undeployables-afghan-front/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah Lazare,Shuaib Almosawa,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Foreign Policy In Focus,Sarah Lazare,Ryan Harvey,Dahr Jamail,Sarah LazareNov 9, 2009

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

As the Obama administration debates whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan, an already overstretched military is increasingly struggling to meet its deployment numbers. Surprisingly, one place it seems to be targeting is military personnel who go absent without leave (AWOL) and then are caught or turn themselves in.

Hidden behind the gates of military bases across the United States, troops facing AWOL and desertion charges regularly find themselves in the hands of a military that metes out informal, open-ended punishments by forcing them to wait months–sometimes more than a year–to face military justice. In the meantime, some of these soldiers are offered a free pass out of this legal limbo as long as they agree to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq–even if they have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In August 2008 at TomDispatch.com, we reported on the deplorable conditions at the 82nd Replacement Barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There, more than fifty members of Echo Platoon of the 82nd Airborne Division’s 82nd Replacement Detachment were being held while awaiting AWOL and desertion charges. Investigations launched since then–in part in response to our article–have revealed that the plight of members of Echo Platoon is not an isolated one. It is, in fact, disturbingly commonplace on other bases throughout the United States. And it is from these “holdover units,” filled with disgruntled soldiers who have gone AWOL, many of whom are struggling with PTSD from previous deployments in war zones, that the military is hoping to help meet its manpower needs for Afghanistan.

Nightmare in Echo Platoon

On August 16, determined to put an end to unbearable mental and psychological pain, Private Timothy Rich, while on twenty-four-hour suicide watch, attempted to jump to his death from the roof of Echo Platoon’s barracks (where he had been held since being arrested for going AWOL). Prior to his suicide attempt, Rich had been offered amnesty by the military in exchange for agreeing to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq.

He had already been through a hellish year awaiting a discharge and treatment for mental health problems. “I want to leave here very bad,” he explained. “For four months they have been telling me that I’ll get out next week. I didn’t see an end to it, so I figured I’d try and end it myself.”

He fell three stories, bouncing off a tree, before hitting the ground and cracking his spine. The military gave him a back brace, psychotropic drugs, and put him on a renewed, twenty-four-hour suicide watch.

While he has recently been discharged from the military, Rich was not atypical of the soldiers of Echo Platoon, some forced to wait a year or more in legal limbo–in dilapidated buildings under the authority of abusive commanders–for legal proceedings to begin, and many struggling with mental illness or PTSD from previous deployments. As Specialist Dustin Stevens told us last August: “[It’s] horrible here. We are treated like animals. Some of us are going crazy, some are sick. There are people here who should be in mental hospitals. And the way I see it, I did nothing wrong.”

Shortly after our story was published, Stevens told us that at least half a dozen soldiers in the platoon, including him, were suddenly given trial dates. Although he was likely to be found guilty and face punishment, Stevens claimed to be “relieved” to have an end in sight. Soon after, according to Echo Platoon informants, their barracks were condemned as a result of a military investigation of the site and, on October 19, the platoon itself was disbanded.

Recently, due possibly to the attention his story drew to the mistreatment and indefinite detention soldiers were facing in Echo Platoon, Stevens was informed by the military he would be “chaptered out”–in other words, given an administrative discharge from the Army–and will not be forced to serve formal prison time.

James Branum, Stevens’s civilian lawyer, as well as the legal adviser to the G.I. Rights Hotline of Oklahoma and co-chair of the Military Law Task Force (MLTF), summed developments up this way: “After repeated complaints and congressional inquiry, Echo Platoon was shut down. The whole place was shut down. Everyone was scattered to other units. If your old unit still exists, they are sending you to your old unit. We know that at least one of the NCOs [non-commissioned officers] in charge of Echo Platoon was fired. I think this is a positive thing.”

Echoes of Echo

The troubling state of affairs in Echo Platoon may only have been the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Army holdover units. Evidence suggests that soldiers being held on other bases in the United States for AWOL and desertion face similar apathy or intentional neglect–and that they, too, are often left with the choice between living in legal limbo or agreeing to be sent to a war zone.

Scott Wildman, a former Army Specialist, went AWOL in 2007 when he was unable to receive adequate help for severe PTSD sustained after a fifteen-month deployment to Iraq. In February 2009, he finally turned himself in at Fort Lewis in Washington State, only to find himself lost in a labyrinthine bureaucracy. For the first four months, he was not allowed to leave a confined area and was forbidden even to walk around by himself.

Here’s how he describes his experience: “I was flipping out. My wife had left me while I was over there. I hadn’t seen my kids in a couple years. I came home and tried to get help. At Fort Lewis, they do not care about you. I had been diagnosed by civilian and military doctors with severe depression, PTSD and severe anxiety. When you are at the unit, they make fun of you. They crack PTSD jokes. They all have it too, but they’re too cool.”

During the eight months he has been held at Fort Lewis, Wildman claims he has suffered verbal abuse and substandard mental healthcare. “The command treated me like dirt. My commander ignored me for the first couple months until my roommate jumped me. They’ll make sure you’re in the room and call you a ‘bunch of PTSD pussies.’ ”

Four weeks ago, Wildman was informed that he would be court-martialed, but was not given a trial date. Feeling he had no other choice, he went AWOL again and remains so today.

“I’d been going to see some military counselors, but we weren’t making progress on the real problem…. They give us classes on calm and peacefulness, but they are right near the shooting ranges. There’s gunfire and explosions all around, people being screamed at all the time because it’s infantry. It’s not a good place for someone with [mental health] issues.”

At one point, despite a confidentiality protocol that should have prevented it, Wildman’s commanders went through his medical evaluations and found out that he had been involved in the accidental killing of two little girls in Iraq. They proceeded to needle him by threatening to write him up for war crimes.

Explaining why he once again went AWOL, Wildman says, “I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I had to remove myself from that situation.”

“Examples of how the military is treating soldiers, like the case of Wildman, are common,” comments Kathleen Gilberd, co-chair of the MLTF. She also points out that the Army, stretched thin by years of multiple deployments to two war zones, has taken to downplaying potentially severe medical conditions to keep soldiers eligible for service overseas. It is commonplace, she reports, for formerly AWOL soldiers to be “bribed” with offers of having all charges, or potential charges, dropped, as long as they accept deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan.

“A lot of folks who are under-diagnosed or misdiagnosed are being deployed second and third times,” she adds. “Barrier mechanisms that should prevent this from happening are being routinely ignored…. If someone is on psychotropic medication or is diagnosed with a fresh psychiatric condition, there should be a ninety-day observation period and delay, under DoD [Department of Defense] policy.”

Remarkably, that sometimes-ignored ninety-day hold period for military personnel on psychotropic medications does not always apply to soldiers who are diagnosed with traumatic brain injury (TBI) of a sort commonly caused by roadside bombs. According to an Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center analysis, reported in the Denver Post in August 2008, more than “43,000 service members–two-thirds of them in the Army or Army Reserve–were classified as nondeployable for medical reasons three months before they deployed” to Iraq. The process, if anything, only seems to be accelerating when it comes to Afghanistan.

Deploying the Undeployables

Not all soldiers go AWOL in order to save their minds and bodies. Some are trying to save their families. One soldier held in Bravo Platoon, a holdover unit of the 3rd Brigade, 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs (who did not want his name made public) disclosed that, having returned from service in Iraq, he was told he would soon be redeployed there. Because his mother was ill, he refused and was threatened with a court-martial.

“When I turned myself in, I submitted a binder with letters from my mom’s doctors and state officials that made clear that I needed to be home to take care of my mother. At that time, they had me on restriction and lockdown 24/7 to keep me from leaving again. Later they punished me. I was assigned extra duty and received a rank reduction from E3 to a private. I was treated like crap.”

He and the other soldiers in his holdover platoon were subjected to verbal abuse and made to do menial jobs. He claimed that he was threatened daily with being sent to the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the military’s maximum security correctional facility–and then was urged to agree to go back to Iraq instead. It made no difference that he had “no-go” orders from doctors at Fort Carson exempting him from overseas deployment.

His commander promised him a clean slate if he would redeploy to Iraq, insisting that the only alternative was a court-martial. Despite a regimen of humiliation, he stood his ground and was finally discharged for family hardship in September 2008. There were at least eleven other soldiers then in Bravo Platoon. Like their counterparts in Echo, most were told that their records would be wiped clean once they agreed to redeploy. The alternative was a non-judicial punishment, followed by a court-martial some months down the line.

As he tells it, Sergeant Heath Carter, originally based at Fort Polk, Louisiana, found himself torn between pressing family needs and an indifferent military command. On returning from the invasion of Iraq, he discovered his daughter living in what he believed to be an unsafe environment. Heath and his new wife started consulting attorneys in order to secure custody of the child. Precisely during this time, the military began changing Carter’s duty station. He was moved from Fort Polk to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, then on to Fort Stewart, Georgia, reducing his chances of gaining custody.

Convinced that this was a crucial matter for his daughter, he requested compassionate reassignment to Fort Leavenworth, Missouri, about two hours away from her. His appeals to the military command, to his chaplain, even to his Congressman failed. In May 2007, having run out of options, he went AWOL from Fort Stewart, heading home to fight for custody, which he won.

This January 25, however, he was arrested at his home by Military Police, who flew him back to Fort Stewart where he has been awaiting charges for the past eight months. Being a sergeant, he is in a regular unit, not a holdover one. Initially, his commander assured him he would be sent home within a month and a half. Several months later, the same commander decided to court-martial him.

Carter feels frustrated. “If they had done that in the beginning, I would have been home by now. It’s taken this long for them to decide. Now I have to wait for the court-martial. If we had known it would take this long, my family could have moved down here. Every time I ask when I’ll have a trial, they say it’s only going to be another two weeks. I get the feeling they’re lying. They’ve messed with my pay. They’re trying to push me to do something wrong.”

His ordeal has forced Carter to reflect on America’s wars. Once, he admits, he was proud of his mission in Iraq. Now, he sees things differently. “I don’t think there is any reason for us to be there except for oil.”

His wife, who witnessed her husband’s callous treatment, says, “He’s been there [Iraq], done that, and seen horrible, terrible things, so of course he doesn’t want to go back.”

While the Obama administration decides how many thousands of troops to send to Afghanistan, servicemen and -women are already facing repeated deployments, oftentimes while having already been diagnosed with medical conditions that should render them unfit for deployment.

Nothing has changed for these beleaguered troops, except the venue of their maltreatment and the desperation with which the military is now struggling to make the necessary deployment numbers as it continues to fight two endless wars.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/preparing-undeployables-afghan-front/
Warehousing Soldiers in the Homelandhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/warehousing-soldiers-homeland/Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Adam Johnson,Sarah Lazare,Shuaib Almosawa,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Sarah Lazare,Foreign Policy In Focus,Sarah Lazare,Ryan Harvey,Dahr Jamail,Sarah Lazare,Dahr Jamail,Sarah LazareAug 10, 2009

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

Echo Platoon is part of the 82nd Replacement Detachment of the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Soldiers in the platoon are relegated to living quarters in a set of dimly lit concrete rooms. Pipes peep out of missing ceiling tiles and a musty smell permeates beds placed on cracked linoleum floors.

For soldiers who have gone AWOL (Absent Without Leave) and then voluntarily turned themselves in or were forcibly returned, the detention conditions here in Echo Platoon only serve to reinforce the inescapability of their situation. They remain suspended in a legal limbo of forced uncertainty that can extend from several months to a year or more, while the military takes its time deciding their fate. Some of them, however, are offered a free pass out of this military half-life–but only if they agree to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq.

Specialist Kevin McCormick, 21, who was held in Echo Platoon for more than seven months on AWOL and desertion charges, was typically offered release, subject to accepting deployment to Iraq, despite being suicidal. “Echo is like jail,” he says, “with some privileges. [You are] just stuck there with horrible living conditions. There’s black mold on the building [and] when I first got there, there were five or six people to a room, which is like a cell block with cement brick walls. The piping and electricals are above the tiles, so if anything leaks or bursts, it goes right down into the room.”

Specialist Michael St. Clair went AWOL because he could not obtain treatment from the military for his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). On turning himself in, he ended up consigned to Echo Platoon. As he recalls it, “The number fluctuates all the time, but on an average you have fifty people sharing two functioning toilets and a single shower…. Except for a couple of rooms none have doors, and there is minimal privacy with four or more people to a room. It’s stressful not knowing what’s going to happen to you.”

Former military recruiter Staff Sargeant Jeffrey Nelbach went AWOL in 2004 in hopes of salvaging his family life. (It is not uncommon for soldiers to remain AWOL for years at a time.) Now, he’s paying for it with a stint in Echo. He confirms the awful conditions. “It is an old, moldy building with bad ventilation. Fifty-plus people use the same latrine. And more and more people are going there.”

Nelbach, who is quick to say that he’s “not really for the war and not really against it,” has lost his house and is struggling to support his children with no income during his first few months in Echo, a limbo-land where even military pay can be suspended. His experience has convinced him that “military justice is arbitrary and if your chain of command is bad, it means everything up is bad.”

“Not Many Have This Opportunity.”

According to Major Virginia McCabe, spokesperson for the 82nd Airborne Division, AWOL soldiers are confined to the holdover section at the 82nd Replacement Detachment at Fort Bragg if they are deemed a flight risk. She offered no criteria, however, for just how that is determined. “Each AWOL soldier has his or her own special circumstances,” she said. “They stay in a holding platoon until a legal decision is taken. Or they might say they made a mistake and return to serve.”

Normally, soldiers on a legal “hold” of some kind end up in platoons like Echo. It may be because he or she is seeking a medical discharge, switching assignments or waiting for a court martial to be convened.

Echo Platoon, however, seems to be made up of a contingent of wayward soldiers the military does not know what to do with. Captain Kevin Thaxton, commander of the 82nd Replacement Detachment, of which Echo Platoon is a part, offers this explanation: “While the entire replacement detachment contains 500 soldiers, there are forty AWOLs in Echo and about twenty in for holdovers/personnel issues and post-UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] Punishment, totaling about sixty people.

“Some are given the opportunity to go back with their unit and deploy. Those who accept do not exactly have their records cleared, but they do get to start over, keeping in mind we know this person has had problems before. We don’t advertise that they went AWOL, but the commanders and the NCOs know about it. Not many have this opportunity. It depends on how long they’ve been AWOL. You have to say OK, would I trust a person who decided they didn’t want to serve at one time, someone who is always on the fence?”

“Having a Head Full of Insanity”

One soldier in Echo Platoon, Specialist Dustin Stevens, had gone AWOL before the invasion of Iraq, and did so because he was opposed to all wars. On turning himself in, he’s been in the holdover section for six months now awaiting AWOL and desertion charges. He may not be halfway through his purgatory. Others in the platoon have been held for more than a year in a no man’s land of small-scale arbitrary punishment in which, according to soldiers in Echo Platoon, officers in charge regularly verbally abuse them as well as make physical threats.

Kevin McCormick describes his experience this way: “You’re less than human to the commanders. [They act as if] you don’t deserve to be alive. A sergeant told us he wanted to take us out and shoot us in the back of the head. We get threatened all the time there.”

On being questioned about such threats, Captain Thaxton played it safe. “I can’t confirm or deny verbal abuse,” he responded. “It depends on if a person is angry after something has been done.”

On average, two new soldiers are assigned to Echo Platoon every week, according to Stevens. Resigned to a long wait, Stevens sums up life in the platoon this way: “I’ve been here almost seven months, and only a few people have gotten out during that time. There was a Purple Heart veteran who was here and is now serving a fifteen-month jail sentence. One guy, gone for 10 years, got two years in prison without pay, although he had a newborn daughter. It doesn’t make sense. Unfortunately, our sentence does not take into account the time served here. Some of us get paid, albeit the E1 or entry level wages, but I’d gladly give them the money back if I could go home….

“[Soldiers in Echo Platoon] don’t…get the benefits others get. You are pretty much a prisoner. You can’t do anything. They say you are not confined, but you can’t go more than fifty miles off post. It’s almost impossible to get leave unless in dire emergency, so we’re just sitting here, day by day.”

Downplaying the punitive nature of the platoon, Captain Thaxton admits only that “people who get in trouble are restricted to post. It keeps them from getting in fights with other soldiers. However, they are allowed access to Post Exchange [shopping], the chapel and dining facilities along with a fifty-mile radius for travel.”

Thaxton repeated several times that soldiers in Echo Platoon “can go to behavioral health[care].” While the soldiers themselves admit this is true and that they do have access to mental-health care, they say it is of very poor quality. Doctors, they claim, just focus on “drugging them up,” rather than giving them adequate therapy in order to help them deal with their specific problems. The platoon’s soldiers regularly confide suicidal urges to one another.

In Echo Platoon the deleterious effects the US occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are having on ordinary soldiers are clearly visible. By December 2006, it was already estimated that that 38 percent of all Army personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan had served multiple tours of duty. By October 2007, the Army reported that approximately 12 percent of all combat troops in Iraq were coping by taking antidepressants and/or sleeping pills.

In April 2008, the Rand Corporation, a military-affiliated think tank, released a study stating: “Nearly 20 percent of military service members who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan–300,000 in all–report symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression.”

Like others who have turned against America’s wars after multiple deployments to Iraq, Michael St. Clair has his regrets: “I had always idealized the military, like we were going out to fight the Nazis, and had real moral high ground. When I got over [to Iraq], I was shocked by the brutality. My whole first tour, I can honestly say I never saw an Iraqi guy who deserved to die, who had weapons or was attacking us or anything. In many instances American soldiers took really bad decisions that killed innocent Iraqis. I had a hard time reconciling that with what I had thought I would be doing. By the time my second tour was over, I had morphed into a killer. A lot of people don’t understand what war actually is. I don’t know what’s worse: being charged with felony or having a head full of insanity.”

On St. Clair’s return from his second tour, the military did a post-deployment health assessment, and six months later a reassessment. That is when his PTSD symptoms began to appear, and he was prescribed medication for depression. According to St. Clair, when he reported a panic attack, he was told he would not be sent to sniper school, and that he would not be given any further training because he was considered too unstable, which made him a danger to the country. Nevertheless, his military psychiatrist was, he claimed, pressured by higher ups to declare that he had a pre-Army personality disorder and was not suffering from PTSD. In despair, he went AWOL for ten months before turning himself in.

His story is one more instance of the troop-unfriendly and skewed practices of the military machine. Diagnosed with PTSD, he was finally given a medical discharge for a personality disorder in an effort by the military to continue their systematic denial of the psychologically destructive effects of war.

Staying AWOL

After his deployment to Iraq, Kevin McCormick went AWOL because he felt suicidal and wasn’t getting the help he needed. While in Iraq, he says, “I had a lot of problems back home. My mom had recently passed away. When I asked for help it got pushed back in my face. Even the Inspector General denied me treatment.” (Essentially, the Inspector General represents a soldier’s last recourse in attempting to correct a problem. If the IG refuses to help, there are few alternatives available.)

When, after four-and-a-half-months AWOL, McCormick turned himself in, he was offered absolution if he agreed to serve again, an absurdity not lost on him. “They offered me that deal,” he exclaims, “when it was a known fact that I had issues with my mental care. They offered me a chance to go back to the unit!” His refusal to do so left him languishing in Echo Platoon for eight months until he finally received a medical discharge.

Even though his decision to go AWOL was in no way a protest against the US occupation of Iraq, he is now opposed to it. “I personally don’t feel we need to be in Iraq and I’ve been there and seen it firsthand. I think the US being there is pointless.”

His blunt advice to soldiers who go AWOL and intend to turn themselves in is, “If you’re AWOL, fuck going back.”

Staff Sergeant Nelbach will have spent over nine months in Echo Platoon by the time he is tried in October. His court martial will in all likelihood bring further punishment. Due to his higher rank and the fact that he was a platoon leader, Nelbach is in charge of making sure that soldiers in the platoon follow through on their work assignments. He also accompanies people to medical appointments and does necessary paperwork. He is thus seen by other platoon soldiers as the one who runs the place. Yet he is aware that none of this will help him when he comes to trial. “It’s inhuman,” he insists. “There’s no fairness to it. It’s always been mass punishment there.”

Warehousing Soldiers

Assigned to Echo Platoon in January 2009, Dustin Stevens continues to bide his time awaiting charges that might still be months away. “[It’s] horrible here. We are treated like animals. We’re all so lost and wanting to go home. Some of us are going crazy, some are sick. And the way I see it, I did nothing wrong. By reading or talking to people all of the time I try to stay out of this place in my mind…. There are people here who should be in mental hospitals.”

James Branum, Stevens’s civilian lawyer, is also the legal adviser to the G.I. Rights Hotline of Oklahoma and co-chair of the Military Law Task Force (MLTF) which offers training to the legal community and information about GI rights and military law to service members and their families. He says AWOL troops make up three-quarters of Echo platoon and that medical cases are the bulk of the remainder. Accustomed to inordinate delays from the military, he says, “People are in this unit for months and months. The [authorities] take forever to do anything. You are going to be there six months if you’re lucky, twelve if you’re not.”

On the legality of such detention without trial, Branum comments: “I think there are some illegal elements about how they are running the place, but the general concept is not illegal. You have people there with legitimate medical and psychological issues, but instead of proactively helping them, the military shuffles them off to this replacement [detachment] to be treated like dirt. They are told they have no rights when they do have a right to talk to their commander, to have an attorney, and to talk to Congress. Echo, if run properly, would be a good thing. Not so when people are being warehoused and told repeatedly they have no rights. That is illegal.”

As for the military’s goal in running Echo Platoon and other similar units at military bases around the country: “To me it doesn’t seem productive. Oftentimes, the military doesn’t know what it is doing. There isn’t a logical explanation for this. Maybe deterrence is one. Other soldiers see these guys being ill treated and don’t want to resist. They also want to break and wear people down so they’ll deploy rather than keep resisting. The Army isn’t true to its own processes at times. If their goal is to get folks deployable, this isn’t the way. You don’t want guys with physical or psychological issues to deploy.”

In 2008, USA Today revealed that more than 43,000 troops listed as medically unfit had been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan anyway.

A Yardstick of Desperation

In a discussion of her group’s role in dealing with the legal holding of solidiers, MLTF co-chair Kathleen Gilberd commented: “Fort Bragg is not an isolated situation. Placement in legal-hold [detachments] where soldiers languish for months is common to all the services. What we’re seeing is the command not making up their minds. Their indecision has severe consequences for those with open-ended medical issues because they cannot avail themselves of help until their legal situation is resolved.”

Chuck Fager, the director of the Fayetteville Quaker House (the town of Fayetteville adjoins Fort Bragg) claims that the military is primarily focused on “making numbers” for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “Orders from the Pentagon say you have to send X [number of] troops,” he points out. “The military does not have them and is constantly looking around for where to get them. One potential pool is the mass of soldiers gone AWOL. Eventually they either go back or get picked up…. We are guessing [military officials] think they can persuade a significant number of these AWOL soldiers to deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. ”

The US still maintains more than 130,000 soldiers in Iraq and, by year’s end, will have at least 68,000 in Afghanistan, a figure likely to rise in the years to come.

Think of Echo and other platoons like it as grim yardsticks for measuring the desperation in which a military under immense strain is now operating. Looking up at that military from Echo’s airless limbo, from a world of soldiers who have fallen through the cracks of a system under great stress, you can see just how devastating America’s two ongoing wars have been for the military itself. The walking wounded, the troubled and the broken are now being pressured to reenter the fray.

If Chuck Fager is right, the future is bleak for the members of Echo Platoon who endure deplorable conditions with little idea about whether their future involves charges, trial, deployment or medical release. It is a painful irony that some of those who volunteered to serve and defend our nation are now left particularly defenseless and vulnerable as a direct consequence of its ill advised foreign adventures.



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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/warehousing-soldiers-homeland/