CounterVortex

BLOCKADE!

Dockworkers Worldwide Respond to Israel’s Flotilla Massacre

by Greg Dropkin, LabourNet, UK

Three weeks after the massacre on the Freedom Flotilla, ILWU dockworkers in the San Francisco Bay area delayed an Israeli Zim Lines ship for 24 hours, the Swedish Dockworkers Union began a week-long blockade of Israeli ships and containers, dockers in the port of Cochin, India, refused to handle Israeli cargo, and the Turkish dockworkers union Liman-Is announced their members would refuse to service any Israeli shipping. In South Africa, Durban dockers had already boycotted a Zim Lines ship in response to the invasion of Gaza last year. On the fifth Anniversary of the United Palestinian Call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions, Israel faces the prospect of targetted industrial action to implement boycotts. How did it happen, what does it mean, and how can the solidarity movement respond to the new opening?

Oakland
At 5 AM on June 20, 800 trade unionists and Palestine solidarity activists from the San Francisco Bay Area marched to the SSA (Stevedoring Services of America) terminal at Berths 57-58 in the Port of Oakland, where the Zim Shenzhen was due. Zim Lines is the main Israeli shipping company, with services connecting Israel to the world. The ship sailed from Haifa, calling at Piraeus, Livorno, Genoa, Tarragona, Halifax, New York, Savannah, Kingston, Panama Canal, Los Angeles before reaching Oakland.

When longshore workers turned up for the day shift a mass demo was in place at four gates chanting “Free, Free Palestine, Don’t You Cross Our Picket Line,” “An Injury to One is An Injury to All, Bring Down the Apartheid Wall,” “Open the Siege, Close the Gate, Israel is a Terrorist State.” As union members spoke to drivers, pickets sat down in front of cars. The San Francisco Labor Council and the Alameda County Labor Council had passed their own resolutions and mobilized hundreds of trade unionists to back the demo called by the Labor Community Committee in Solidarity with the Palestinian People. It was an unprecedented show of strength from the local and regional AFL-CIO, affiliated unions and their members side by side with Palestinian and Arab-American activists.

The Gaza ships were originally organized by Paul Larudee from San Francisco, and Bay Area residents had sailed with him. Now everyone came together for a united action organised in just two weeks. Local 10 and Local 34 (clerical) are militant sections of the International Longshore Workers Union. The ILWU organizes longshore (dockers) and many other industrial sectors on the US West Coast and Hawaii. With a history stretching back to 1934, the ILWU has faced the employers in countless disputes on the docks, carried out industrial solidarity action with other workers, fought against racism, adopted resolutions which characterize the Israeli oppression of Palestinians as “state-sponsored terrorism,” and on May 1, 2008 shut down
every port on the US West Coast against the war in Iraq.

Labor laws in the US like the Taft-Hartley Act make it illegal for unions to organize solidarity actions. The Oakland longshore workers arrived for the day shift and refused to cross the picket line on grounds of “health and safety.” The Pacific Maritime Association, on behalf of the employer SSA, immediately called in the arbitrator (a joint union-management procedure for first-line response to disputes on the docks) hoping he would order everyone to work. The arbitrator considered the PMA demand that the police use force to open access through the picket line, to make it “safe” for workers to enter the terminal. The union argued that the Oakland police are a threat to the security of workers and demonstrators.

In 2003, as the US attacked Iraq, Oakland police fired so-called “non-lethal” weapons at longshore workers and anti-war demonstrators alike, injuring scores and sending many to hospital. In 2010 the arbitrator agreed with the union. As per their contract, the dockers were sent home with pay for standing by, however the employers have refused to abide by the arbitrator’s decision and have paid out nothing, leaving the issue in dispute.

The Zim Shenzen had left Los Angeles around 2:30 PM June 20, and could have could have arrived at the San Francisco pilot station in as little as 18 hours, plus two hours to the dock. The ship’s tracking system was removed from the nautical GPS system, leaving the demo guessing when it would arrive. But with several hundred marching at 5:30 AM—swelling to 800 as the morning progressed—the company decided to hold up the docking until 6 PM. By then, SSA Terminal realized that the mass picket line would return for the evening shift and the arbitrator would make the same decision, so they gave up and prudently chose not to call longshoremen to report for work. The ship sat at the quay, untouched. Establishing the mass picket line early and preventing longshoremen and clerks from working the terminal was critical in this victory.

This was the first ever boycott of an Israeli ship by workers in the US, where Zionism has counted on influencing the traditional stance of the mainstream labor movement, as well as elected politicians. “An Injury to One is An Injury to All” is the slogan of the ILWU. It is also an emblem for South African workers. The Zim action was recognized as a direct echo of Local 10’s fight against apartheid in 1984, when members refused to work South African steel and coal for 11 days until the employer obtained a Federal injunction to break the boycott.

Interviewed on video during the Zim picket, Local 10 Executive Board member Clarence Thomas stated, “This is a historic occasion. Everyone remembers the action taken by the community and labor in 1984 at Pier 80 in San Francisco, where the Nedlloyd Kimberley was picketed.”

Retired Local 10 longshore worker Howard Keylor, a co-organizer of that action, recalled: “This was the result of over a decade of education within the Local on the horrors of the South African apartheid regime. South Africa arrested the entire leadership of the black miners union [the National Union of Mineworkers] and charged them with t reason, and was threatening to execute them. I made the motion in Local 10, which passed unanimously, not to work the cargo in the next ship that came in. It was the longshore courage in deliberately violating the Taft-Hartley law and the union contract that made that successful.”

Clarence Thomas set out the current strategy: “People are lacking food, people cannot rebuild in Gaza, construction supplies are not allowed. They haven’t even been allowing chewing gum! The thing that is going to make Israel and the United States both understand that this cannot continue, is the whole question of commerce and trade. Israel is very vulnerable on that question. This was critical in building the mobilization in 1984 against apartheid, with three prongs: Boycotts, Sanctions, and Divestment.”

Jack Heyman, also from the Local 10 Executive Board: “If longshoremen decide they’re not going to cross the picket line, then the Zim ship that’s coming in is not going to be worked, and that‚s going to be repeated around the world, in Norway, Sweden, South Africa. I think people are beginning to understand that the Israeli government is going to have to be sent a message loud and clear, that their policies towards the Palestinian people are unjust and they’re going to suffer the consequences. It’s not business as usual when they commit acts of murder like this.”

Monadel Herzallah, of the Arab American Union Members Council summed up the impact on the labor movement: “It’s indeed a significant turning point in the work with labor, and it’s significant because ILWU has honored our picket line, it is something that we cherish, that we think will make an impact not only in the United States of America but also worldwide. The Labor Councils in Alameda and in San Francisco, responded to the call by encouraging labor unions, members, activists, to support this, with dozens of other community organizations who have worked to make this picket successful. People have wanted to tell this government and the government of Israel that they cannot be above the law, they have to be held accountable for what they did against these unarmed civilians on the flotilla ship in the Mediterranean.”

Palestinian unions appeal
On June 7, the Palestinian trade union movement had produced a united appeal to dockworkers unions worldwide. It was signed by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), the General Union of Palestinian Workers (GUPW), the Federation of Independent Trade Unions (IFU), and 11 other Palestinian union and labor movement organizations. It concluded “Gaza today has become the test of our universal morality and our common humanity. During the South African anti-apartheid struggle, the world was inspired by the brave and principled actions of dockworkers unions who refused to handle South African cargo, contributing significantly to the ultimate fall of apartheid. Today, we call on you, dockworkers unions of the world, to do the same against Israel’s occupation and apartheid. This is the most effective form of solidarity to end injustice and uphold universal human rights.”

This appeal was doubly significant. It gave the basis for dockers to respond, knowing that the call came from fellow workers. And, it showed exceptional unity on the Palestinian side, a big step in its own right. The joint union appeal developed the call from the Palestinian Boycott National Committee (BNC) issued on June 1, which included: “We call specifically on transport and dock workers and unions around the globe to: Refuse to load/off-load Israeli ships and airplanes, following the historic example set by the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) in Durban in February 2009 and endorsed by the Maritime Union of Australia (Western Australia).”

The ILWU Local 10 Executive Board met on June 8, and heard from members of the San Francisco Labor Council, a Palestinian speaker and solidarity activists. The Board unanimously adopted an Executive motion citing the Palestinian union appeal which they had received, and noting that the flotilla massacre had been condemned by the International Dockworkers Council (IDC), the International Transportworkers Federation (ITF), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), the Confederation of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and British union UNITE. The Executive motion joined in condemning the massacre and concluded with a “call for unions to protest by any action they choose to take.” The ILWU also noted that Swedish Dockworkers were planning an action, scheduled to begin on June 15.

Sweden
Even before the Palestinian unions issued their appeal, the Swedish Dockworkers Union had announced plans for a week-long blockade of all trade with Israel. The union is a key member of the International Dockworkers Council formed during the Liverpool dockers battle from 1995 ˆ 1998 to regain their jobs after being sacked for refusing to cross a picket line. Former Liverpool dockers and Swedish dockers discussed the possibilities for action and alerted the IDC and its affiliated unions when the Palestinian BNC made contact through BDS organizers in both countries on May 31. The Swedish Dockworkers Union set out the aims of the blockade and discussed strategy in detailed briefings to the membership and press articles.

Their blockade was designed to last one week, a temporary measure to be evaluated with the possibility of further action. It aimed to influence the Israeli government to: “1. Lift the illegal and inhuman blockade of Gaza, which has been going on for over three years. 2. Allow an independent, international inquiry into Israel‚s boarding of the Freedom Flotilla [of which the Swedish Ship to Gaza was a member] in international waters, when nine people were killed and at least 48 people were injured. The requirements are clearly defined and conform fully with the demands that the UN and the EU have made to Israel.”

After the initial announcement, the employers‚ association Ports of Sweden threatened to sue individual union members, deduct from their wages, and demand compensation for participation in the blockade. The dockworkers postponed their action for a week, to dovetail with plans by the Norwegian Transportworkers Union. The Palestinian unions issued their appeal and Sweden would now be acting in response. In the event, the Norwegian blockade did not take place—yet—but Sweden went ahead. “From the 23rd of June we will no longer handle containers with Israeli wines, vegetables or fruits branded Jaffa, Carmel or Top, vegetarian pre-fabricated foods from Tivall or the carbonation-machine Soda Stream. Neither will we contribute to the Swedish export of Volvo buses, which were used by Israel to transport hundreds of human right activists from the Freedom Flotilla to Israeli prisons.”

The union was directly involved in the original plans for the Swedish Ship to Gaza, which the dockworkers intended to load for free. When the Sofia was eventually purchased jointly with a Greek solidarity organization, the Swedish Dockworkers were in touch with the Greek Port Workers Union who loaded Sofia with electric wheelchairs and cement at the port of Pireus, free of charge. The Swedish also approached the IDC to ask affiliates to protect and handle voluntarily all ships carrying supplies to Gaza.

Björn Borg, chairperson of the Swedish Dockworkers Union, and Erik Helgeson, ombudsman, Local 4 Gothenburg, stressed the significance of the Flotilla. “We could see how the eyes of the world were finally turned towards the isolated population of Gaza. Even the night before the Israeli military violently stormed the Freedom Flotilla, this international initiative had done more to bring attention to the catastrophic situation of the people of Gaza, than all the diplomatic moves, declarations and resolutions put forward in recent years. That also inspires us and our colleagues in ports around the world to take action.”

When the blockade began, the dockers identified and isolated 10 containers full of goods to or from Israel. Erik Helgeson commented: “We thought the flow of goods would be much lower considering the blockade had been announced for twenty days. Our ambition is of course that our action can be one of many grassroots initiatives that will keep the eyes of the world focused on the 800, 000 children living isolated in Gaza. The Palestinian civilian population must be allowed to rebuild their economy, their infrastructure and freely integrate with the rest of the world. The war on Gaza and Israel‚s brutal blockade have made all this impossible for over three years.”

Turkey
As the Swedish began their blockade, news emerged that the dockworkers union Liman-Is intended to join the fast growing movement for boycott sweeping through all levels of society after the murder of Turkish aid volunteers aboard the Mavi Marmara. Alongside the Physicians‚ Association of Turkey and the Chamber of Agricultural Engineers, the Liman-Is Central Committee
stated:

…The attack that was protested throughout the world and condemned harshly by the UN also brought people out to the streets in Turkey. The government’s announcements indicate that further sanctions against Israel are to be expected.

However, Israel needs to be answered not only through the channels of government, but through all institutions and social organizations, most of all, through NGO’s and unions. Our union Liman-Is, has decided to boycott the ships from Israel, which has become a machine of death and torture. In the framework, no member of our union will give service to Israel in any docks where we are organized.

Liman-Is union invites all unions and NGO’s organized in our country and throughout the world to join this boycott and protest campaign.

Turning this declaration into an actual boycott will require the active involvement of other unions in Turkish ports.

India
A few days before the Oakland action, unions in the Port of Cochin, in the state of Kerala, India, had agreed to boycott Israeli ships and cargo. The boycott began on June 17 on receipt of information that cargo unloaded at Colombo Port from Israeli ship MV Zim Livorno was bound to arrive at Cochin Port in a feeder vessel. Similar consignments unloaded at Colombo from Israeli ships were set to arrive in feeder vessels. On June 23, trade unions held a joint protest rally in Cochin Port near the office of Zim Integrated Shipping Services (India) Ltd—the Israeli shipping line. Addressing the rally B. Hamza, general secretary of Cochin Port Labor Union (CITU) condemned the flotilla massacre and expressed the Port workers‚ solidarity with Palestine. Leaders of at least five port unions and the Water Transport Workers Federation of India expressed the unity of Cochin Port workers with the growing world-wide boycott.

South Africa
The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) had already responded straight after the attack on Gaza in December 2008—January 2009. In three weeks, Israeli forces killed 1400 Palestinians including over 300 children. In the midst of the carnage, the International Committee of the Red Cross had to wait four days before the Israeli military allowed ambulances to reach children huddled next to their dead mothers in a house shelled by Israeli forces. A UN compound was attacked with white phosphorus munitions. Schools, hospitals, ambulances, sewage treatment plants, all came under fire.

Long before the UN launched their own investigation of possible war crimes (the “Goldstone Report”), South African workers knew enough to act. Members of the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU), affiliated to COSATU, refused to work the Zim Lines Johanna Russ—which sailed from Haifa at the height of the invasion—when it arrived in Durban in early February 2009.

On the eve of that action, COSATU wrote:

SATAWU’s action on Sunday will be part of a proud history of worker resistance against apartheid. In 1963, just four years after the Anti-Apartheid Movement was formed, Danish dock workers refused to offload a ship with South African goods. When the ship docked in Sweden, Swedish workers followed suit. Dock workers in the San Francisco Bay Area and, later, in Liverpool also refused to off-load South African goods. South Africans, and the South African working class in particular, will remain forever grateful to those workers who determinedly opposed apartheid and decided that they would support the anti-apartheid struggle with their actions.

Last week, Western Australian members of the Maritime Union of Australia resolved to support the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and have called for a boycott of all Israeli vessels and all vessels bearing goods arriving from or going to Israel.

This is the legacy and the tradition that South African dock workers have inherited, and it is a legacy they are determined to honor, by ensuring that South African ports of entry will not be used as transit points for goods bound for or emanating from certain dictatorial and oppressive states such as Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Israel.

Five COSATU officers were amongst the 1400 internationals who converged on Cairo last December, hoping to enter Gaza for the Gaza Freedom March. Zico Tamela, the International Secretary of SATAWU, was on the delegation. Interviewed outside the UN buildings by the Nile, he called on transport workers throughout the world

…to assist in the struggle for the liberation of our brothers and sisters in Palestine. We must support and actively participate in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign. This means the total isolation of Israel in terms of arms embargo, economically, culturally, socially, and otherwise. Just like you fellow workers did with apartheid South Africa. This also means that the Israeli labor movement, which is Zionist to the core, must be kicked out of the progressive international trade union movement. It’s not a question of fighting Jewish workers, no, no, it’s a question of isolating Zionism within the labor movement. Just like it was not a question of fighting white workers, but of fighting racism and isolating it within the international progressive trade union movement.

The action we South Africans took in relation to an Israeli ship and a Chinese ship that docked in Durban, when we refused to offload the consignments those ships carried, the Israeli ship carried civilian goods, the Chinese ship carried arms for Zimbabwe, we didn’t offload those goods. As transport workers throughout the world, we need to be at the forefront of the struggle to implement Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign, because we are the ones who transport goods to and from Israel throughout the world.

Israeli Consulate rebuffed by ILWU Local 10 Executive
Israel is taking this seriously. Their San Francisco based Consul for the Pacific Northwest Akiva Tor sought to meet with the ILWU Local 10 Executive Board on July 6, hoping to persuade the union to change course. When the PGFTU found out, they wrote to the Executive Board on July 2, saluting the union’s boycott, their history of international solidarity, and the risks taken by African-Americans in the civil rights movement.

They appealed to the union to stand firm

…Although we do not live in the United States, we find it highly unusual and somewhat uncustomary that a paid foreign representative of a racist and apartheid regime can demand and get a meeting with the executive board of a local union no less than the ILWU… Our civil society has risen and said that justice is universal. We supported the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, the struggle for civil rights in the United States, and the struggle for international solidarity. We remember that May 1st commemorates a labor struggle that took place in Chicago, IL, in the US and on May Day 2008, your union the ILWU, shut down all west coast ports to oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, setting a precedent in the US Labor movement. We humbly ask of you to hold steadfast in the face of backlash and revenge against your union. The call for a meeting with your union by a foreign paid emissary is intervening in the domestic affairs of local community grassroots action in the United States. Israel, an apartheid state, maintaining an illegal war against our people, should not be given the platform at your union house. That platform should be reserved for heroes who champion justice and equality for all.

The Consul may have scented danger, and July 6 his Deputy Gideon Lustig turned up to head the delegation. Lustig spent 10 years in the Israeli Defense Force and attained the rank of Major before turning to a diplomatic career. The Consular delegation was joined by Dr. Roberta Seid, an academic at University of California Irvine who believes the IDF was not responsible for the death of ISM volunteer Rachel Corrie, run over by an IDF Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza on March 16, 2003 while trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian doctor’s house. Why? Because an official Israeli investigation concluded her death was an accident. In a major diplomatic rebuff for Consular staff, the Executive Board refused to allow the delegation to enter the meeting, in line with the appeal from the PGFTU.

Dr. Seid was given permission to speak. To general amazement, she defended the murderous attack on the Freedom Flotilla. Perhaps she anticipates the official Israeli investigation will clear the Navy of responsibility. What differences would the Israeli government have with her presentation, she was asked. None, apparently. Had not the journal Foreign Affairs recently exposed Israel‚s offer to supply South Africa with nuclear weapons during the apartheid era? Seid admitted they had, but claimed the story was untrue. A former ILWU official recalled his own experience of visiting Palestine in 1989 and described the expansionist aims of the Israeli state in detail. When it was over, the Executive reaffirmed the union‚s position opposing the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the apartheid wall in the West Bank, the continuing bloody Zionist oppression of Palestinians and the murderous Israeli attack on the aid flotilla.

What does it mean?
In the past, with a few very important exceptions, unions have focused on adopting national policies in solidarity with Palestine, donated funds, sent delegations to the West Bank and occasionally to Gaza, invited their Palestinian counterparts to address conferences, but without engaging in any dispute with their own employers over this issue. Although unions have adopted policies in support of BDS, and even overcome strong internal opposition before doing so, these policies have mainly remained paper committments. These small steps are essential preparation. As Howard Keylor remarked, it took years of education within Local 10 before the boycott of the Nedlloyd Kimberley became possible.

The first sign of another strategy came in 2006, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the largely secret war in Gaza that same year. Tram drivers in Dublin were instructed to train their Israeli counterparts on how to operate the planned Light Rail system connecting Jerusalem to the illegal Settlements. In line with the policies of their union SIPTU and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, they refused, risking their jobs.

At the same time, an appeal from sacked Liverpool dockers entitled “Sanctions on Israel: If not now, when?” concluded “If you can, intervene directly to stop trade with Israel while the carnage in Lebanon and Gaza continues.”

Possible action against Zim Lines was discussed in San Francisco a few months later. During the bombardment and invasion of Gaza in winter 2008-9, Greek dockers threatened to boycott a shipment of US arms to Israel, which was then re-routed, eventually reaching Ashdod in March.

Now, for the first time, Israel faces the prospect that their trade links are no longer secure as unions across the world are willing to go into dispute to implement the boycott. This is not a dockers issue, it is an issue for any union which wants to make BDS a reality. And the dockers are only able to act because they know there is a strong basis of support in the wider labor movement. This is exactly what happened to South Africa from about 1978 onwards. Workers at the computer manufacturing firm ICL (now Fujitsu) in Manchester refused to dispatch the machine they had built for administration of the hated Pass Laws.

Air France pilots were poised to refuse to fly uranium illegally mined by Rio Tinto Zinc in South African-occupied Namibia. The trade was suddenly switched to sea. But a decade later Liverpool dockers blockaded containers to interrupt the export of processed South African and Namibian uranium, touching off an outcry in Japan where electricity contracts with RTZ were cancelled. Dublin shopworkers refused to sell Outspan oranges, and were sacked.

Oakland dockers refused to offload South African steel and coal, and survived. It all coincided with the emergence inside South Africa of militant independent trade unions ready to strike against the employer and the apartheid system, eventually forming the Congress of South African Trade Unions in 1985. That was the moment when the South African ruling class knew it would have to find a way out of apartheid. Even so, it took another nine years.

These were not the only factors which brought down the apartheid regime. No one should imagine that a week of blockades spells the end of Israeli apartheid, or even the end of the siege of Gaza. But the dockers have broken through the consensus that trade union solidarity begins and ends with resolutions at trade union congresses, education, fund-raising and delegation work, important as these are in laying the basis for action.

The blockades connect Palestine to the class struggle which workers live through every day of their lives. In Oakland, Sweden, Turkey, India, and South Africa, a new generation of dockers has joined a fight with echoes of the 1980s. Clarence Thomas:

Today what you witnessed was the current young membership of ILWU Local 10 answering the call of the brothers and sisters who came before them. We understand what international solidarity means. It is not an empty slogan. You have to give something up. Our members were willing to give up a day’s pay today. That’s what solidarity means. This is indeed a people’s victory, and remember, just because it‚s not on the front page of the New York Times, just because it’s not on CNN, we have to get the word out. We claim no easy victories and tell no lies. Solidarity to the Palestinians. Solidarity to the working class around the world.

Whatever the immediate consequences, Israel’s murderous attack on the flotilla has landed the Zionist regime in very dangerous waters.

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Greg Dropkin is based in Liverpool and is active in the LabourNet.net group, on whose site this report first appeared.

Resources:

Global BDS Movement
http://bdsmovement.net

From our Daily Report:

Israel opens one Gaza crossing; siege remains the same
World War 4 Report, June 21, 2010

Iraqi port workers to strike in support of ILWU
World War 4 Report, May 1, 2008

See also:

ISRAEL & PALESTINE: COMBATANTS FOR PEACE SPEAK OUT
by Bassam Aramin, Sara Burke and Yaniv Reshef, Peacework
World War 4 Report, January 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Aug. 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBLOCKADE! 

BP: THE CASE FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

by Billy Wharton, In These Times

If arrogant disregard for humanity and the natural world were qualities that triggered the seizure of assets, BP would have been under public ownership long ago. It still isn’t.

But BP’s criminal act of polluting the Gulf of Mexico with an estimated 2.5 million gallons of oil per day—easily the worst environmental disaster in American history, and on the verge of becoming the worst ever in the Gulf—is only half the reason that US assets of the global energy giant should be brought under public control immediately. The other is the increasingly desperate crisis of global warming triggered, in large part, by a suicidal dependence on pollution-producing fossil fuels. Public ownership is the answer to both the short-term crisis caused by BP and the longer-term threat to the ecological stability of our planet.

Congressional hearings have indicated that BP management deviated from standard safety procedures and that its anti-worker culture prevented whistleblowers from halting production. BP CEO Tony Hayward’s continual evasion of questions stands as a shocking symbol of corporate arrogance and disregard for public oversight.

In the days immediately after the April 20 explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, which killed 11 workers, BP focused resources on what it understood as its most pressing problem—public-relations damage control. Early plans to stem the tide of the oil flow were confused and prioritized media strategies. The company blocked scientists who wanted to estimate how much oil was flowing into the Gulf in order to develop a more precise cleanup plan. It quickly became apparent that BP had no established plan or protocol to deal with the gushing oil and that they were reluctant to shift resources toward stemming the flow of the oil and cleaning the environment. There was no profit in it.

BP employed various domes and caps on the gushing pipe because, if successful, they would serve the company’s dual corporate purpose of stemming the immediate flow and preserving the well for future drilling. Only after these failed, and millions of gallons of oil were released, did BP move to more invasive measures such as the failed “top-kill” attempt. And only significant government pressure forced BP to carry out more costly strategies such as digging relief wells around the site.

Meanwhile, environmentalists protested BP’s use of the toxic oil dispersant Corexit, claiming that it may do as much environmental damage as the oil itself. Even after the Environmental Protection Agency issued an order for BP to use a less toxic alternative, the company took weeks to comply, preferring to pay the fine instead of buying a less toxic agent.

BP has also continued to employ its standard anti-worker tactics. When clean-up workers complained about dizziness, nausea, headaches, and a lack of safety equipment, company officials claimed that the symptoms were probably the result of food poisoning. Internally, BP sent a directive to clean-up workers stating that future complaints about illness would result in termination.

BP must be placed under public control because its botched attempts at closing the well, its use of toxic dispersants and its negligent treatment of workers are evidence that BP is incapable of managing this catastrophe. Why? Not from lack of resources or expertise, but from the absence of any profit motive to act. It’s against the company’s one-dimensional corporate interests to do so.

Public ownership, and the road to a new energy system
The US government should immediately seize the U.S. assets of British-based BP. After the clean-up is completed and claims against the company are settled, a hearing can be held to propose compensation for BP. Until then, the company’s American arm, BP America Inc., should be operated as a publicly owned company that provides employees with full worksite protections and a significant voice in the day-to-day operations through a program of workplace democracy. Public ownership would put the full resources of BP to work stopping the oil leak and engaging in an effective clean-up of the Gulf. Such a measure would be unprecedented in the United States, but has proven, in other nations, to be an effective tactic in transforming industries acting against the public interest.

However, merely exercising public control over BP would, in effect, empower the very same officials who facilitated the oil explosion by granting waivers to BP and accepting campaign contributions. Prior to the April 20 explosion, BP benefited from a series of “categorical exclusions” from safety studies by the Minerals Management Services (MMS). Officials in the MMS relied on promises from BP management that the likelihood of a major spill was “minimal or non-existent.” Such lax regulation represents a major continuity between the Bush and Obama regimes. Big energy companies lavished handsome campaign contributions onto President Barack Obama and Department of the Interior (DoI) head Ken Salazar in order to ensure business as usual continued. And it did, to the tune of more than 250 waivers for energy companies per year.

That is why public ownership must come along with the immediate removal of Ken Salazar as head of DoI and the removal of any official involved in the granting of waivers to energy companies engaged in resource extraction.

It is important to note that the concept of public ownership differs from the idea of “temporary receivership” being circulated by liberal economists such as Robert Reich. Under the receivership plan, government officials would operate BP until the crisis is resolved, at which time it would return to private control.

In contrast, public ownership would transform BP America Inc. into a linchpin of a national energy policy moving the country away from its reliance on fossil fuels, and toward an eco-socialist agenda. BP and other energy companies have used foot-dragging and campaign contributions for years to prevent the transition to renewable energy sources. For them, the shift represents a costly endeavor that endangers their current market position. But for our planet, the transition to renewable energy could be the difference between life and death.

BP has the resources, expertise and infrastructure necessary to affect such a shift. Retrofitting existing facilities and developing new green infrastructure could spring out of public ownership. Just like with the Gulf cleanup, the main roadblock to moving in such a direction is corporate profit-motive. Taking BP into public control would be a necessary first step to taking the entire energy sector away from private hands and placing it into the public trust. Public ownership of all energy companies is the single most efficient way to create a green energy transition and, in the process, renew a natural world spoiled by capitalist production.

Why Obama won’t do it
Of course, neither Obama nor Democratic or Republican congressional representatives will enact the plan outlined above, despite the fact that they hold the legal power to do so. Significant authority was provided to the executive branch as part of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. Obama could use the implicit rights in this law to take immediate control of BP America Inc., while Congress prepares legislation to take the company into public ownership.

However, it is likely that even a significant amount of grassroots pressure would not force mainstream politicians in this direction. Obama and nearly every member of Congress is so desperately dependent on energy companies’ campaign contributions that public control is not even a topic of conversation. Instead, Obama will likely flounder along, holding press conferences and giving speeches about how regrettable the incident is while praying that BP finally plugs the hole. There may be a glitzy announcement about a toothless green initiative, but don’t expect any substantive change.

If the American people want change, change that can save and protect the environment while strengthening workplace rights, we will have to do it ourselves. One place to begin is by picketing a local BP station, beginning a petition drive to demand the kind of public ownership described above, or even by beginning the difficult, but necessary, process of challenging the two major political parties at the ballot box.

A solution to the great crime perpetrated by BP can come from the source that has generated so much of what is good about America—the efforts of everyday Americans organized to challenge the powerful. But we have to move quickly. Oil is still flowing into the Gulf, and the environmental crisis is graver than ever.

—-

Billy Wharton is co-chair of the Socialist Party USA. His articles have been published in the Washington Post, Counterpunch, Spectrezine and the NYC Indypendent.

This article first appeared July 1 in In These Times.

From our Daily Report:

BP facing fraud lawsuits over oil spill
World War 4 Report, June 29, 2010

See also:

NATIONALIZE THE BANKS!
by William Wharton, CounterHegemonic
World War 4 Report, December 2008

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Aug. 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingBP: THE CASE FOR PUBLIC OWNERSHIP 

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We have a very important question for you.

Do you exist?

No really, we need to know. We work hard on World War 4 Report every day. A month ago, with our June issue, we both asked for reader response on an Exit Poll (as we do every month) and announced our annual Summer Fund Drive (our first this year). We received no responses to either.

We ask our readers to show they are engaged with our project by either sending a small donation once a year, or by answering our Exit Polls, or both. If we are going to continue this project (which is about to enter its ninth year), we need to know that somebody is paying attention.

Now, we are not completely discouraged, because our benefit bash on the Lower East Side on June 18 was a big success. But we remain struggling with debt following the travel that brought you first-hand reportage on indigenous struggles in Peru and Bolivia over the past year.

So, let’s try again. Our Exit Poll, now extended into a second month, is: Will future generations note April 20, 2010 as a greater turning point than Sept. 11, 2001? (In case you’ve forgotten, that is the date the Gulf of Mexico disaster began.)

And once again, World War 4 Report receives NO foundation sponsorship. We depend on our readers to survive. Plenty of Idiot Left websites with bad politics and no editorial standards (we’ll refrain from mentioning any names for the moment) routinely rake in thousands in their fund drives. All we’re asking for is hundreds. And right now, we’re at snake eyes.

Is anybody out there?

Please let us know.

Bill Weinberg

Editor, World War 4 Report

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Continue ReadingDoes World War 4 Report Have Readers? 

COLOMBIA’S PRESIDENT RAILS AGAINST JUSTICE, CLINTON STANDS BY

by Lisa Haugaard, Colombia Peace Update

Colombia’s outgoing President Alvaro Uribe has launched an assault against his country’s courts for taking some initial steps to bring high-ranking military and government officials to justice for their role in murder, illegal wiretapping, disappearances and torture. This is no abstract political debate. When the President takes to the airwaves to denounce those working for justice, the judges, lawyers, witnesses and victims’ families know that death threats, and sometimes murder, often follow. The threats and attacks usually appear to be from paramilitary groups. Colombia’s Supreme Court made a call for help: “We make an appeal to the international community to accompany and show solidarity with the Colombian judicial system which is being assaulted for carrying out its duties.”

These tirades come just as Hillary Clinton makes her first trip to Colombia, announcing in a June 9th joint press conference with President Uribe that, “The United States has been proud to stand with Colombia and we will continue to stand with you in the future.” The Secretary sought to assure the Colombian government that US military assistance would flow, and that the Obama Administration supported a trade agreement, seeming to signal that concerns about human rights and labor rights came from the Congress rather than the White House.

“The security threats have not completely been eliminated and therefore the United States will continue to support the Colombian military, the Colombian people and their government in their ongoing struggle,” Clinton said. “There is no resting until the job is done.”

On June 10, President Uribe went on national television surrounded by the military’s high command to denounce the justice system for a verdict against Colonel Luis Alfonso Plazas Vega for the disappearance of 11 people in 1985 following the army’s storming of the Palace of Justice. The M-19 guerrillas had seized the Palace, taking hostages and demanding to put the President on trial. In the army’s no-holds barred retaking of the Palace, more than 100 people were killed, including the guerrillas and 11 of the 24 Supreme Court justices. The colonel’s conviction, however, was not for the methods used when the army retook the palace. Instead, it was for the disappearance of 11 people, mainly cafeteria workers, who left the Palace alive and then disappeared, “allegedly tortured and killed because they witnessed heavy-handed tactics by the army as it stormed the building.”

Uribe blasted the verdict part of a “panorama of judicial insecurity which conspires against the maintenance of public order in Colombia.” But to the families of the disappeared cafeteria workers, justice is finally at hand. “With this groundbreaking ruling the victims’ families, who for almost a quarter of a century have campaigned for justice, have begun to break the silence that has for so long protected those responsible,” said Marcelo Pollack, Colombia researcher at Amnesty International.

On June 1, President Uribe attacked the Prosecutor General’s office for investigating his ex-director of the Special Administrative Unit for Financial Information and Analysis (UIAF), who was allegedly implicated in the DAS scandal regarding the illegal wiretapping of judges, human rights defenders, and journalists. He labeled the ex-director “an innocent, good man who has only served the country.”

A few days later, Uribe blasted the Prosecutor General’s office and lawyers for bringing General Freddy Padilla de León in for questioning. Padilla was summoned to testify regarding the system of armed forces’ incentives which are believed to have driven soldiers to commit abuses in order to up their body counts. “I raise my voice against the accusations against
General Padilla de León. They are useful and useless idiots of terrorism who don’t do anything more than make false accusations… Terrorism now wants to win via ink-stained wretches who want to stop the advances of democratic security.” Uribe called for new legislation to protect the military’s high command from accusations regarding the conduct of their troops.

Clinton’s one-day trip included a much-commented visit to a Bogotá restaurant, which was used to demonstrate that the country’s improved security situation now permitted her to have a “wonderful meal” in safety.

—-

This story first appeared in the June edition of Colombia Peace Update, publication of the Fellowship of Reconciliation Colombia Program. It also appeared on the website of the Latin American Working Group.

From our Daily Report:

Colombia: US documents on Palace of Justice affair reveal army massacre
World War 4 Report, June 20, 2010

Colombia: scandal-tainted Freddy Padilla is new defense chief
World War 4 Report, May 25, 2009

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCOLOMBIA’S PRESIDENT RAILS AGAINST JUSTICE, CLINTON STANDS BY 

THE WILDCAT STRIKES IN CHINA

Towards an Independent Labor Movement?

by Lance Carter, Insurgent Notes

The wildcat strike at the Nanhai Honda factory which formally ended on June 4 with a partial victory for workers, has subsequently inspired two other Honda factories in the Pearl River Delta to go on strike. In addition, workers from several Taiwanese-owned factories have adopted similar tactics, holding a sit-in in Jiangsu and blocking roads in Shenzhen.

The initial Honda strike began on May 17. It took place in a transmissions factory in Foshan, Guangdong. The strike lasted over two weeks and received considerable coverage in mainland Chinese newspapers. At its height, around 1,900 workers (almost the entire factory) walked off the job. Because the Nanhai factory is responsible for making car transmissions, the strike eventually stopped production at four other Honda assembly plants. In total, Honda’s losses amounted to 2,500 cars per day.

Over the two week period of unrest Honda presented four different offers to the workers, all of which were rejected. The offers were designed to divide the more skilled interns from the bulk of the regular workers by offering the former more. Interns make up one third of the Nanhai factory workforce. Because interns do not sign contracts, receive no insurance plan, and are not protected under Chinese labor laws, their grievances were particularly acute.

However, Honda interns are young—many having not yet graduated from school—and so were seen by management as more susceptible to persuasion. At one point student representatives from the interns’ schools were sent to the factory to convince interns to return to work. In the end, all attempts to divide workers failed.

On May 26, after management’s second offer was rejected, workers banded together to come up with a list of coherent demands which reflected their collective interests. Thus, on the following day of May 27 workers presented Honda with the following demands:

(1) an increase in wages of 800 renminbi per month (roughly 75% raise) for all workers.
(2) additional cash bonuses based on duration of employment—a cumulative wage increase of 100 rmb every year for ten years.
(3) an immediate return of worker ID cards to workers upon resumption of work; workers cannot be fired or pressured to resign after returning to work; those already fired will be reinstated; a promise that workers will not be held legally or financially responsible for the strike.
(4) all wages lost, dating from May 21st up until the resumption of work, will be repaid to workers.
(5) within a month of returning to work management shall respond to the various suggestions posed by workers on May 17.
(6) a reorganization of the local trade union; reelections should be held for union chairman and other representatives.

Workers at the Nanhai factory organized themselves independently of the local trade union. E-mail and text messaging seem to have played an important role in facilitating communication. On several occasions over the two week period, workers decided to elect representatives to negotiate with management. This representative structure seems to have developed naturally out of the needs of the struggle and was not originally connected to any specific political goals. However, over the course of the struggle many workers began to demand a restructuring of the local unions along such democratic lines. Later, workers from a different Honda factory in Zhongshan, Guangdong who began a subsequent strike on June 9 reasserted this goal as one of their primary demands.

The official unions in China (under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions—ACFTU) are state-controlled. In the Nanhai factory strike, the unions played only a “mediating” role and refused to openly support the workers. On May 31, members of the local Shishan Town trade union even physically attacked a group of forty workers, causing seven or eight seriously injuries. However, the incident seems to have instilled more solidarity among workers than fear. The following day, the local unions issued a public “apology” to the workers in which they tried to play down responsibility for the assault.

The Nanhai strike formally ended on June 4. A settlement was reached between the worker-elected negotiating committee and the general manager of Honda Motors in China, Zeng Qinghong. Workers won a partial victory. Honda agreed to raise all employee wages by 500 rmb per month (around 33%), as well as agreeing to regular cash bonuses and other demands. The issue of restructuring the local union was not reported on. Towards the end of the strike the sixteen-member workers’ negotiating committee issued two letters to the public which were published by the Chinese media amidst much fanfare.

Media coverage of the initial Honda strike was surprisingly broad and in-depth. Although, the state-censored media received orders to stop reporting on any labor disputes as early as May 28, coverage by local Guangdong media continued well up until June 4.

However, since the conclusion of the Nanhai strike, mainland media has remained completely silent in regard to the subsequent wave of wildcat strikes that have rocked other parts of China. This tacit approval of coverage of the initial Nanhai strike seems to reflect a desire on the part of the CCP to see domestic consumption rise. On June 4, coinciding with the resolution of the Nanhai strike, the Beijing Municipal Government announced it was raising Beijing’s minimum wage by 20%.10 Later on June 9th, the Shenzhen government followed suit and announced a minimum wage increase of 10%.11 Since January, a total of fourteen Chinese provinces have declared 10%-20% increases in the minimum wage.

As the Nanhai strike was coming to a close, another dispute erupted on the other side of the country. On June 4, workers from the Taiwanese-owned (KOK International) rubber factory outside Shanghai began a sit-in to protest low pay and intolerable working conditions. Workers complained of being subjected to toxic fumes and having to labor in temperatures well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. From the beginning, the strike received almost unanimous support from workers. Though the sit-in started on June 4, reports did not reach Western media until June 7 when striking workers clashed with police. Around fifty workers were injured and dozens arrested in the clash.

Back in Guangdong, a third incident broke out in Shenzhen. On June 6, between 300 and 500 workers from a Merry Electronics factory—a Taiwanese audio components manufacturer—staged a walkout and blocked roads for the better part of a day. The company immediately responded by announcing a significant wage increase, though a spokesperson denied that the increase had any relation to the strike.

As the week proceeded, two more strikes erupted in Honda factories based in Guangdong.

The second, like the initial, was in Foshan. On June 7, workers from Honda’s Fengfu exhaust system factory folded their arms and demanded the same concessions granted the Nanhai workers. Around 250 workers, out of a total about 500, joined the strike. Production at the Fengfu factory had not been affected by the events of the previous two weeks, but workers had learned about the Nanhai strike through media reports. The Fengfu strike, though only lasting three days, forced production to stop at two of Honda’s four assembly plants—which had just returned to work after being paralyzed by the initial strike. An agreement was finally reached on the evening of June 9 which granted significant concessions to the workers.

Earlier in the day on June 9, a third Honda strike broke out in Xiaolan, Zhongshan. The Xiaolan Honda Lock factory is responsible for supplying key sets, door locks, side mirrors, and other components for Honda automobiles. The strike apparently began when several employees were beaten up by security guards for allegedly planning an industrial action. Though demanding wage increases similar to the Nanhai and Fengfu workers, it is this third strike at Honda Lock that seems to have briefly taken on more radical dimensions. According to the New York Times, in addition to an 89% wage increase, Honda Lock workers at one point also demanded the right to form an independent labor union based on elected representation. Workers elected a ten-member “factory-wide council” to enter negotiations with management on the first day of the strike. Though Honda agreed to consider the workers’ wage demands, it said it had no authority to approve an independent union. “Management said that a government labor board would decide on the workers’ requests by June 19, and asked that the workers return to their jobs in the meantime.”

On June 11, around 500, out of a total of 1,500 workers, took to the streets outside the Honda Lock factory to demonstrate. Workers encountered several lines of riot police who sealed off the street, surrounding the protesters for nearly two hours. In the days following the demonstration, workers have held several rallies outside the plant while waiting for management to present an acceptable offer. However, Honda Lock appears to be taking a hard line. Because the Honda Lock factory relies on mostly unskilled labor, management has repeatedly insulted workers by offering a wage increase of 100 rmb and attempting to bring in strike breakers. As of June 15, the vast majority of workers remain on strike while about 100 have returned to work.

Beijing has maintained a strict silence over the past month. Though no doubt welcoming higher wages as a boost to internal consumption, the CCP does not want to see workers become too emboldened. Calls for autonomous and democratic trade unions, if granted only at the local level, would have far-reaching consequences. But workers seem to have backed away from this demand. No doubt what is of most significance in these strikes is the worker-elected negotiating committees that have sprung up in place of the unions. The Chinese media refereed to the initial Nanhai factory committee as an independent union. However, these committees clearly lack the bureaucratic character of the ACFTU. If workers continue to demand a restructuring of the unions, will the committees we have seen spring up over the past month serve as a model for this restructuring? If so, this would have truly radical implications for the Chinese working class.

—-

This story will appear in an upcoming edition of Insurgent Notes: Journal of Communist Theory and Practice.

Resources:

More Honda Labor Trouble in China
New York Times, June 9, 2010

A Chinese Alternative? Interpreting the Chinese New Left Politically
Lance Carter, Insurgent Notes, June 2010

All-China Federation of Trade Unions—ACFTU
http://www.acftu.org.cn/

From our Daily Report:

China: Gansu under siege after riots
World War 4 Report, Nov. 22, 2008

China: workers revolt at Mickey D’s contract factory
World War 4 Report, July 30, 2006

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE WILDCAT STRIKES IN CHINA 

PRIVATE PRISONS, PUBLIC PAIN

In prisons run by private companies, the bottom line is the only thing that matters.

by Peter Gorman, Fort Worth Weekly

Reeves County straddles Interstate 20 in far West Texas, between Odessa and El Paso. The county seat is Pecos, a town anchored in cowboy mythology. Tiny homes, many of them 100 years old and made of stone, line several dozen downtown streets; beyond them, sandy soil dotted with clumps of short grass and tumbleweed surround the town for miles. Oil crickets are more commonplace than trees on the landscape.

It’s the home of the world’s first rodeo and the former home of the legendary Pecos Kid and Judge Roy Bean. Just around the block from the Sheriff’s offices is a replica of Bean’s office and the single cell jail the building housed.

Times change, and these days, a newer prison sits in the southwest corner of town. The Reeves County Detention Center is bigger than Bean’s, with a capacity of 3,700 inmates, most of them non-violent illegal immigrants. The facility is owned by the county and run by the GEO Group, formerly a division of Wackenhut—the giant security firm—a company that runs more than a dozen prisons in Texas, nearly four dozen in the US, and another 10 in Australia, England, South Africa and Cuba. All told, they are in control of over 60,000 inmates worldwide. They’re also a company that has one of the worst track records imaginable in inmate care: the horror stories range from prison rapes to suicides to murder to death because of inadequate medical care.

It’s a company that once put a convicted sex offender in a guard’s position at a facility for juvenile females. It’s not as if something goes wrong occasionally at GEO-run prisons; something goes terribly wrong on a regular basis at GEO’s facilities, and the only explanation is that the corporate atmosphere tolerates prisoner abuse. With GEO, it’s not a question of “Will prisoner abuse occur again at a GEO prison?” It’s simply a question of when, where, and how terrible will it be. Texas alone has twice removed all its inmates from a GEO-run facility because of deplorable conditions. Despite that track record, the company is still supported by the state and federal governments, a testimony to GEO’s connections and enormous lobbying efforts.

And GEO’s work in Texas has been the company at its worst.

“They have simply been horrendous,” said said Bob Libal, coordinator of the Texas division of Grassroots Leadership, an organization aiming to eliminate privatized prisons.

The sprawling prison complex—the largest private prison in the world—sits at the far southwest corner of Pecos, on County Road 204, just past a small cluster of double-wides and a juvenile detention center run by the county. Beyond the complex is a cemetery dotted with colorful plastic flowers.

The minimum-security detention center is made up of several squat, drab buildings surrounded by twin chain-link fences that are covered in roll after roll of razor wire. Most of the inmates are illegal immigrants. Some of them have been convicted of criminal charges; a lot of them, according to Reeves County Sheriff Arnulfo Gomez, are simply immigration violators. Gomez insists it’s not a bad place to be locked up, as lockups go. “They get plenty of time in the yard, good food, good treatment, lots of programs and great medical care.”

Not everybody feels that way: five inmates have died there since August, 2008—three from inadequate medical care, according to the inmates, and two from alleged suicide—resulting in the complex being the site of two major riots in the not too distant past. The first one took place in December, 2008 and the second in February, 2009. The first caused $1 million in damage to the complex; the second, which burned large areas of the prison, was estimated to have caused between $20 and $40 million in damage. Areas of the detention center are still under reconstruction. According to the families of inmates, the immediate cause of the riots were the result of the death of an epileptic who died while in solitary confinement, without medication, just prior to the first riot.

“When an epileptic dies in solitary confinement from seizures—and the allegations are that he asked for his medications and was denied them before he was put in the hole—well, that doesn’t sound like great medical care to me,” said Dotty Griffith, Public Education Director of the ACLU of Texas.

“Prison riots are rare. And in this case, these were mostly non-violent prisoners in a mimimum security prison. It strains the imagination that they would riot without cause.”

The epileptic who died was Jesus Manuel Galindo. He was serving 30 months for illegally crossing into Texas from Mexico at El Paso in 2007. Though he’d grown up in the United States since the age of 13, he remained “illegal” and was deported in early 2007 to Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso. Not having family or friends in Mexico he returned to the states several weeks later. Unfortunately, he had a seizure in a convenience store, and when law enforcement arrived to help, Galindo was arrested and eventually tried and sentenced for illegal re-entry.

According to reports, Galindo’s seizures increased in frequency while in Reeves, and when he demanded to see a doctor to get his anticonvulsive medication he was instead taken to solitary confinement in the Segregated Housing Unit of the prison. He arrived in the hole on November 12, 2008. A month later he was dead, without having seen a doctor.

When two other inmates also in the SHU saw his body being taken out in a body bag—The Texas Observer wrote that it was purple and that rigor mortis had already set in—they started a fire in a mattress using electrical wires. Guards responded and tried to put the fire out but the mutiny spread quickly. Guards used rubber bullets, stun grenades and other non-lethal weaponry; the inmates forced their way into the yard areas of the prison, covering their faces to prevent identification from surveillance cameras. Two prison employees—non-guards—were taken hostage. That evening, the inmates sent a delegation to meet with negotiators. They demanded less crowded conditions, better food and better medical care. When the negotiators promised to consider the inmate complaints, the hostages were released unharmed and the riot was over.

But the negotiators didn’t follow through, and seven weeks later, on January 31, 2009, a second riot broke out—that time because another inmate, Ramón García, 25, was put into solitary confinement after complaining that he was sick and unable to get attention. That riot lasted until February 5 and burned a large section of the prison, reducing available bed space to 3,000. However, the county expects the complex to be running at its full capacity of 3,700—a figure inmates and their families say is well over reasonable capacity—by August, 2010.

The ACLU has repeatedly requested information from GEO concerning the facility and the events leading up to the riots, but according to Griffith, their requests have gone unanswered. Their requests for an investigation by the Office of the Inspector General for the Bureau of Prisons have similarly met with silence.

“When we speak with the inmates and their families, we’re told of horrendous conditions; when we speak with the sheriff we get an entirely different picture. We just want to get at the facts,” Griffith told the Fort Worth Weekly.

According to Lisa Graybill, legal director for the ACLU in Texas, private prisons simply invite problems. “Any time you try to take a layer of profit from the basic cost of housing an inmate, you are going to have to cut that from somewhere.”

But some private contractors have a lot more problems than others, and GEO stands at the top of the list in Texas.

“There’s no question that GEO’s performance in Texas has been markedly worse than any other company running private prisons there,” said Libal. “GEO’s had a number of facilities closed due to horrendous conditions in this state alone.”

The problems GEO’s had at its Texas facilities read like teasers from upcoming potboilers.

* Seven youthful offenders at the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in Bronte, Texas, sued the GEO group in 2007 over unfit living conditions. The Texas Youth Commission investigated, found feces on the walls and floor of the facility, bug infested food, filthy bedding and subsequently pulled all of its nearly 200 juvenile detainees from the facility.

In 1999 at the same facility several female juvenile detainees claimed they had been sexually abused by a Wackenhut—prior to the change of name to GEO—employee who had a prior conviction for sexual abuse of a child. GEO settled the suit for $1.5 million.

That same year a female detainee committed suicide following the settlement of an even earlier lawsuit stemming from sexual abuse at the prison which allowed Wackenhut to avoid accepting responsibility for the actions of their employees there.

* At the Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur, Texas, an Idaho inmate committed suicide in 2007, prompting an investigation by the Idaho Department of Corrections Health Director, who called the prison the worst he’d ever seen and removed all of Idaho’s inmates from it. GEO no longer runs the facility.

Idaho also pulled all it’s prisoners from the Newton County correction center in 2006 after widespread reports of prisoner abuse.

* In 2007, at the Frio County Detention Center in Pearsall, a female detainee sued GEO after being denied necessary medication, being put into isolation, stripped, ridiculed and having her crutches taken away by guards.

* in 1999, 11 guards and a case manager were indited on felony charges of sexual assault and improper sexual activity, as well as the misdemeanor charge of sexual harassment at the Travis County State Jail in Austin.

* At the Val Verde Detention Center in Del Rio, TX, an African-American guard sued GEO for racial discrimination in 2005 after his superior posed for pictures in Ku Klux Klan garb and had a noose in his office. A year later, the GEO group and Val Verde County were sued by a civil rights organization after an inmate who was denied medication and was sexually abused committed suicide.

The worst single case of abuse at a GEO facility occurred at the Willacy County State Jail in Raymondville, Texas, in 2001, when a prisoner just four days shy of release was beaten to death in front of the warden and guards.

“Two inmates at a GEO Group-operated facility in Willacy County stuffed prison-issued padlocks into socks and beat Gregorio de la Rosa on his head, neck, ribs and back, striking him dead,” wrote journalist Matt Pulle in a 2009 story for texaswatchdog.org.

The family of De la Rosa, an honorably discharged National Guardsman imprisoned for 1/4 gram of cocaine, filed a wrongful death suit and their lawyer was able to show that the GEO Group had destroyed a videotape of the killing. They were awarded $47.5 million, an award upheld on appeal.

The prosecutor on that case was Juan Angel Guerra, then District Attorney for Willacy County. “I was the one who looked into that case from the beginning,” Guerra told the Weekly. “I prosecuted the two inmates who committed the murder and got 25-year sentences for each of them. But while I was prosecuting them I realized that the case was bigger than just an inmate killing. I realized that GEO’s guards and the warden were involved as well.”

Guerra said he called for federal help with his investigation and decided to go after GEO in the family’s civil suit. “By 2006 we had a solid case against the company, and the jury found the death to have occurred due to the ‘malicious acts’ of the company. That means intended, planned actions.”

Guerra, who served a total of 16 years as Willacy’s DA, is now a defense attorney in private practice in Pecos and Laredo. One of the cases he’s working on is the death of José Manuel Falcón, 32, who allegedly committed suicide while in solitary confinement at Reeves a month after the second riot ended.

A GEO statement released at the time said, “On March 5, 2009, at approximately 6:40 PM, inmate Jose Manuel Falcon took his life by self-inflicting numerous lacerations with a disposable razor blade. At the time of the incident the inmate was in a single cell and there is no evidence of foul play…”

Guerra doesn’t believe GEO’s suicide story. “Listen, this guy Falcón had already served nearly his whole sentence of five years. He had two months left. And he winds up with cuts on his arms and hands, and then his throat is slit. The cuts on his arms and hands indicate he was in a defensive position. That makes it murder.”

Like Galindo, Falcon grew up in the US, close enough to the Rio Grande to nearly see it. “Well, when the federal crackdown on illegals started,” said Guerra, “Falcon was caught and deported to Mexico, just across the river. Naturally, because he lived here on the U.S. side, he came back. Three years later he was stopped for speeding and his name came up as having been previously deported, so he was prosecuted and given five years. That was his only crime. And then he has no problems in prison and decided to kill himself by cutting his throat just before he gets out?”

Guerra, who claims to have nearly 200 clients in the Reeves facility alone—clients pay a one-time fee of $100 and nothing further—said that the prison is worse than described by most. “I’ve got one client in there who got an eye infection. No one would treat it and it kept getting worse. Now he’s blind.”

He also said that corruption is not just rife, but part of the system. “When the first riot at Reeves ended and the inmates were checked for contraband, over 400 phones were confiscated. Where do you think 400 phones came from?” he asked. “Inside, the going rate from the guards can go as high as $500 a phone and $100 to charge it.”

He also noted that when the first riot broke out the staff was short 200 guards. “That’s the private prison industry. You’re getting paid per inmate, but if you can save on the salaries of 200 guards, you’re making a lot of money. It’s like its own mafia.”

How is a company with that track record still be able to do business with both the state and federal government? The answser to that can be traced to the company’s roots, which date back to the 1950s. George R. Wackenhut, the company founder, was a former FBI agent who left the bureau to start his own company, Special Agent Investigators, with three former colleagues in 1954. A year later, he split with his associates and formed The Wackenhut Corporation, which specialized in creating and selling dossiers on US citizens to the FBI. According to Sourcewatch, by 1966 the corporation had produced “over four million files, or one for every 46 adults in the country.”

The Wackenhut connections with the US government are apparent in a glance at some of the corporation’s early board members. Those included General Mark Clark, former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci; former Defense Intelligence Agency director General Joseph Carroll, and prior to his becoming the director of the CIA, William Casey was its outside legal council.

In 1967 Wackenhut took the company public, and at about the same time formed a division known as Wackenhut Services, Inc, which quickly went on “to become the largest contract security provider to the Federal government,” according to official Wackenhut history. The company would grow to provide security at nuclear installations, at federally sensitive federal installations and for multinational corporations. Its employees were culled primarily from former military forces.

The unofficial record had Wackenhut operatives also acting as strike breakers in both the US and overseas and as a key element in getting arms to the Contras in Nicaragua during the Reagan era.

In a 1992 Spy Magazine article, CIA analyst William Corbett noted that “For years, Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA and other intelligence organizations, including the Drug Enforcement Administration. Wackenhut would allow the CIA to occupy positions within the company [in order to carry out] clandestine operations.”

In return, said Corbett, Wackenhut was given plum contracts throughout the Reagan presidency, and by the time prison privatization was introduced in the mid-1980s, Wackenhut was in a prime position to become a pioneer in the field. In 1984 the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was formed as a division of The Wackenhut Corporation. The company won its first contract in 1987, to run the Aurora Processing Center in Denver Colorado, giving it care and custody of 150 illegal detainees for the Bureau of Immigration. (The facility is now the Aurora ICE Processing Center).

By 1992, Wackenhut expanded overseas, developing the Australasian Correctional Management PTY to run prisons in Australia and a year later won a contract to design, build and operate the first privately run jail in New South Wales. In 1996 the company was awarded Scotland’s first private prison project—a contract it has since lost—and shortly afterward formed another subsidiary to provide residential drug treatment services to state and local government agencies. The company would later move into running private prisons in South Africa, New Zealand—the company no longer operates there—and the Guantanamo Bay Migrations Operations Center in Cuba, as well.

The Wackenhut Corporation was eventually acquired by the Danish-based Group 4 FALCK, which in turn merged with Securicor in 2004, becoming Group 4 Securicor, the largest security outfit in the world.

But not wanting to lose its lucrative private prison contracts, the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation bought all of its stock from G4S in 2003, becoming an independent company with the new name The GEO Group, Inc.

The politically connected roots of GEO also run into lobbying and local political connections. Wackenhut was a contributor to both George and Jeb Bush (the company’s headquarters are in Boca Raton, FL), and former Sen. Phil Gramm, who urged prisons to be privatized and the inmates put to work “so that we can produce component parts in prisons…now being produced in places like Mexico, China, Taiwan and Korea.”

While he was still in office, Tom DeLay was a major backer of GEO. More recently, Matt Pulle’s 2009 story for texaswatchdog.org detailed financial links between State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, and state Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville and the GEO Group. “Zaffirini’s husband, Carlos, is a lawyer and advocate for the firm,” he noted, and Oliveira’s “Brownsville law firm serves as its local defense council.” Further, Pulle wrote that Oliveira’s cousin, David, a partner in the firm, “represented the company [GEO] in a lawsuit alleging misconduct that one judge described as ‘reprehensible.'”

Zaffirini, who purportedly makes $600,000 a year from GEO, insists that his senator wife would never let his position as a lawyer for GEO influence her lawmaking.

For lobbying, GEO annually spends more than any other private prison company in Texas. In 2007, at the height of the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center scandal, GEO upped its Texas lobbying fees from $60,000 to over $600,000, leading Texas’ Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire (D-Houston) to tell the Dallas Morning News, “Now enters GEO with their paid lobbyists attempting to put a good face on this. I’m saying the corporation should back off. They’ve run a very poor facility that probably violates the youths’ civil rights. Kids were stepping in their own feces. The sheets were such that a cat or dog wouldn’t sleep on them.”

Among GEO’s leading lobbyists are Ray Allen, the former Texas State Representative from Grand Prairie, who chaired the House Committee on Corrections—and a longtime proponent of prison privatization—and his former chief of staff, Scott Gilmore. And when Reeves County threatened to default on $39 million in bonds used to build its third housing unit and the feds didn’t immediately fill it with inmates, the county hired Tom DeLay’s brother to go to Washington to lobby for federal prisoners to fill the new beds. Shortly thereafter, the feds came through with a contract to fill the extra 960 beds.

GEO’s lobbying efforts have aimed at keeping its prisons full—which means pushing for major ICE raids periodically if bed space becomes available. But it also has worked to keep their prisons in Texas from being monitored and held to Texas Commission on Jail Standards, according to Grassroots Leadership’s Bob Libal.

“Prior to 2003, Jail Standards would go into facilities like the one at Reeves—which is county owned but filled with federal Bureau of Prison inmates—and inspect it. But after heavy lobbying, a bill was passed that took away that purview.”

At Reeves and several of its other Texas prisons, what GEO has is a contract with the county—which owns the prison—to administer the facility. That contract calls for all of the prison beds to be filled with federal inmates; in Reeves and elsewhere, they are almost exclusively immigration-related inmates. But with the state having no oversight, the Feds depend on a county appointed monitor who inspects the prison and reports back to the federal BOP.

“What that means,” says Libal, “is that if that monitor says things are fine, that’s what they are, even if conditions are atrocious. At Reeves, they’ve always been understaffed, which has led to a number of problems. But since no one from jail standards can inspect the complex, that is just ignored.”

A bill was introduced in the Texas legislature last year which would have reversed the 1993 law and given inspection responsibility back to the Texas Commission on Jail Standards, “but that bill was defeated, and we’re told it was defeated largely because of the lobbying effort of GEO,” said Libal.

The prison complex GEO runs in Reeves County is both the county and Pecos’ biggest employer. It wasn’t always that way. Thirty years ago, Pecos had nearly 20,000 inhabitants and Reeves County that many more. Oil was everywhere; there was enough agriculture that a frozen food plant kept a lot of people working. Firestone ran a tire testing track; the Duval sulfur mine was the county’s largest employer.

But oil booms go bust once the wells are all drilled. And a protracted drought dropped the water table so low the farmers couldn’t afford to water their crops. With no crops to process, the frozen food plant shut down. Firestone moved its track, and finally, the sulfur mine was closed when the price of sulfur dropped, putting hundreds more out of work.

These days, Reeves County has a population of about 9,000, most of whom can be found in Pecos. But even Pecos has been largely abandoned: it’s population is down to 7,000; its two movie theatres closed down years ago, and there are only two bars left in the town, down from about 20 according to locals.

“If it wasn’t for Wackenhut and the Detention Center,” said Linda Clark, Reeves County treasurer, “this county would have blown away by now.”

“This used to be a thriving place,” said Sheriff Gomez, a thick man with a big features, a good smile and mitts for hands. “I had a good time growing up here.”

So how did Reeves, and Pecos, wind up with a prison in the first place?

“Well,” said Clark, “everything was shutting down around here, everybody was out of work and we were near finished. But some of the town fathers spoke to some legislators and found out the Bureau of Prisons needed a prison in Texas, and Pecos was ideal because we’re so isolated out here. So we raised bonds and built one.”

The first prison building opened in 1986 with 400 beds that were filled on a contract by the BOP. The county built it, staffed it and ran it for two years, then turned over the administration to the Corrections Corporation of America.

“In 1990 the county got mad and got rid of them and we went back to running our own prison.”

The county continued to run the prison until 2003. During that time they built a second prison and expanded the first, raising their total bed number to 2,000.

GEO was brought in to administer the prisons in 2003, at the recommendation of the BOP. A third prison was added to the complex in 2005, and expansions on the first two have brought the bed total to 3,700.

“Well, that’s only about 3,000 now, because of the riots,” said Clark. “But we’re told we’ll be completely filled again by August of this year.”

The contracts between Reeves County and GEO call for Reeves to hire and pay all of the guards and general staff at the detention center, build and maintain the complex, and provide medical services for the inmates. GEO hires its own warden and the other administrators—as well as screens all employees—and sees to the day to day operations. The 2006 contract—the most recent the Weekly could get—calls for Reeves county to pay GEO $362,000 monthly—$4.34 million annually—on top of administrative salaries and any other expenses incurred. The county share of the funds the BOP pays per prisoner daily was a net of $3.1 million last year—the BOP paid nearly $70 million all told to Reeves—despite having heavy riot damage that cost tens of million to repair and having lost 700 inmates a day. “We’ll be well over that when we’re full again,” said Clark.

For a sparsely populated county such as Reeves, that’s a windfall, considerably higher than all county property taxes combined. “To be honest, we’d prefer not to have a prison here. But we would not have survived without it,” said Clark.

According to GEO’s website, the company currently runs 14 correctional facilities in Texas—though others put that number as high as 19. They range from the minimum security short term offender North Texas Intermediate Sanction Facility in Fort Worth to state jails, maximum security prisons and several immigration detention centers run for the federal Bureau of Prisons. Reeves County Detention Center falls into that last category. Its inmates are nearly all immigration violators, who will be deported following the conclusion of their sentences, which range from one-to-5 years. Most of those inmates are Mexican, though there is a smattering of blacks, whites and other Latino races among the population. Some are imprisoned simply for having been deported for illegal entry and subsequently caught trying to reenter the US or while living here. Others were deported following conviction of a crime—mostly small drug crimes, said Sheriff Gomez—and then caught trying to illegally reenter. That crime, aggravated reentry, can bring as much as 20 years.

GEO claims the Reeves facilities offer “Classes in electrical repair, typing, basic computer skills, basic home wiring, GED classes and ‘English as a second language’ classes. There are also vocational programs such as auto mechanics and horticulture… high quality drug and alcohol counseling… Recreational activities available to inmates include leather and hobby crafts, the opportunity to play in one of several inmate bands and the opportunity to participate in sporting tournaments.”

“They are inmates,” said Sheriff Gomez, “but they have it very good. We basically pamper them, give them whatever they want.”

But organizations including the ACLU of Texas and Grassroots Leadership question whether those programs exist on anything but paper.

“I’ve never heard of any of that,” said the ACLU’s Graybill. “None of the inmates we’ve interviewed ever mentioned those things. Which doesn’t mean they’re not there, but if they are, how many inmates have access to them? Generally, because these inmates are mostly due for deportation, the federal government doesn’t want to spend money on them, so I’d be surprised if those programs are in place.”

Gomez insists they are—or were—before the riots. “They really hurt themselves. Those guys burned down the gymnasium, the crafts shop, everything.”

Still, when asked about teachers for the various programs, Gomez wasn’t sure how many there were or who hired them, and GEO didn’t return phone calls to respond to questions for this story. Clark said she thought that was done through GEO, but didn’t think most of the teachers were actually certified. She tried several times to get the information from the administration but she said they were too busy to get it for her.

Christina Fernández, one of several inmate family members contacted by the Weekly, said everything on the GEO site was a lie. “My husband, who is Cuban, has been in the Safe Housing Unit—segregation—for over five months because of a racial incident that happened on the basketball court between two Mexicans and a Cuban. All three were sent to the SHU but as days passed the Mexican population”—which greatly outnumbers the Cuban population—”started to get more and more aggressive with the Cubans, until the Cubans asked to put in the SHU for their own safety.”

Fernández says that the food has always been poor quality, and that the medical treatment has always been awful. Reeves county did hire another doctor after the riots, but to see him “an inmate must file a request form and wait until the doctor consults him through a window on the unit door, and then, if necessary, the doctor will put the inmate on a list of patients to see physically.

“As for the music and classes, I’ve never heard of them.”

Another family member who says the medical treatment is far from adequate is Anna Maria Alfonso García, the mother of an inmate. “You have to make a request to see the doctor. But the request has to be in English. My son doesn’t speak English, so the doctor wouldn’t see him. But he had a terrible earache in his left ear and needed to see the doctor. By the time he finally got someone to write the note in English, the earache had gone from his left ear to his right ear. And the doctor said he couldn’t look at his right ear because the request said the earache was in his left ear. That’s treating a person worse than a dog. If anyone says the prisoners have a good life there, they’re lying.”

“It’s things like that which make us want information,” said the ACLU’s Griffith. “You hear one thing from the people in the county, but something entirely different from the families of inmates.”

It’s not surprising that Clark and Sheriff Gomez would think the medical treatment is fine: Reeves county pays more than $7 million annually to the Physicians Network Association, out of Lubbock, to handle the medical, mental health and dental needs of inmates. But for that money, they don’t appear to get a lot. Their contract for the 2,700 inmates in the facility’s original two housing units calls for a doctor to be on site less than a single eight hour shift only four days a week. A dentist is on site less than a single shift five days a week. There’s a 40 hour-per-week dental assistant and a 32-hour per week hygienist. With the contract mandating that the hygienist see each prisoner twice a year, it’s hard to imagine a thorough teeth-cleaning for everyone in that time. There are two mental health workers five days a week for one shift each—but no psychologist or psychiatrist on staff; two nurses and two medication aids on duty seven days a week, for most of all three shifts; and one EMT on duty seven days a week on the second and third shift only.

PNA came on board at Reeves in 2002. Their specialty is inmate care, having control of about 17,000 inmates in two dozen facilities across the US. But care is a considered word here: less than four months after the company arrived at Reeves, the warden at the time, Rudy Franco congratulated them at a county commissioners’ meeting for slashing the number of surgeries, outside visits and other services inmates received.

“That care, if you can use that word, has abused a lot of prisoners,” said Guerra. “The reports say five men have died—including the two alleged suicides—in Reeves alone since August, 2008. But we have evidence that people who were going to die are removed from Reeves to die elsewhere to keep the numbers down. We’ve found three inmates at Reeves that are not included in the death toll because they were taken elsewhere to die. And reporters don’t catch on because local hospitals aren’t used. They send them to Dallas or somewhere just as far away and nobody can make the connection. But those men were abused at Reeves, and their deaths are the result of that abuse.”

Over the years, PNA’s poor track record has resulted in numerous lawsuits and at least one Justice Department investigation at a private prison in Santa Fe, NM, in 2003 which found, “We find that persons confined suffer harm or the risk of serious harm from deficiencies in the facility’s provision of medical and mental health care, suicide prevention, protection of inmates from harm, fire safety, and sanitation.”

The Santa Fe detention center was not a GEO prison, but the lack of medical care by PNA appears to be similar to that at GEO facilities all across Texas and the US.

“Let’s be honest,” said Ken Kopezynski, of the Private Corrections Working Group, which collects information on private prisons from around the world. “The truth is that in for-profit prisons you do whatever you can get away with. You give inmates the least amount possible of everything, doing just the minimal to make sure they don’t rot. Anybody who tells you differently about a private prison is misinformed or lying.”

Nobody in Pecos is ready to apologize for building the prisons and bringing in GEO. And they probably aren’t apologizing in Montgomery County for building the Joe Corley Detention Center and having GEO run it there. Or in Laredo or El Paso or anywhere else across the state where GEO runs facilities.

In Pecos, everyone who was asked said they wished they were working at Reeves. They said it was the best paying job around. When asked why they didn’t apply, some said they had minor criminal records; others said they didn’t have a good enough credit score and that the BOP insisted that everyone who works at facilities that house BOP inmates needs a good credit score so that they’ll be less tempted to get involved with corruption. Others said they were afraid to work at a place that housed murderers and rapists. Told that no one in the entire facility had committed those types of crimes, and that in fact most of the inmates were doing time simply for illegally crossing into the US, no one believed it. “If they weren’t criminals they wouldn’t be in prison,” was the general response.

And despite the problems Reeves has had with prisoner abuse and inmate deaths, Linda Clark isn’t about to apologize either. “We were desperate and that prison was our chance and when you don’t have a choice you do what you have to do to survive.”

Even if it’s a deal with the devil.

—-

This story first appeared March 10 in Fort Worth Weekly.

Resources:

The GEO Group Inc.
http://www.thegeogroupinc.com/

Wackenhut Corp.
http://www.wackenhut.com/

Source Watch page on Wackenhut
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wackenhut

Grassroots Leadership
http://www.grassrootsleadership.org/

Texas Watchdog
http://www.texaswatchdog.org/

Private Corrections Working Group
http://www.privateci.org/

From our Daily Report:

Immigration detainees revolt in West Texas jail —again
World War 4 Report, Feb. 4, 2009

Cheney indicted in Texas prison scandal
World War 4 Report, Nov. 20, 2008

Somali ex-detainee wins damages from NJ prison farm
World War 4 Report, Nov. 26, 2007

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingPRIVATE PRISONS, PUBLIC PAIN 

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Continue ReadingPlease Support Our Summer Fund Drive 

HAITI: STRUGGLE AND SOLIDARITY AFTER THE CATACLYSM

An Interview with Batay Ouvriye

by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report

It is now more than four months since a 7.0 magnitude earthquake hit Haiti, leveling much of the Port-au-Prince area and killing nearly a quarter of a million people. Haiti has dropped out of the headlines—predictably—but the crisis hasn’t gone away. Earthquake survivors still have very limited access to food, employment, and medical care; most of the 1.7 million people left homeless by the earthquake (according to new figures from the United Nations) go on living in the hundreds of improvised encampments in and around the capital.

I had an email conversation in April with Paul Philomé, a spokesperson for the leftist group Batay Ouvriye (Workers’ Struggle), about grassroots organizing in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake. Batay Ouvriye is best known outside Haiti for its unionization efforts over the past two decades in the tariff-exempt apparel assembly plants—the sector that the “international community” is again promoting as an engine of economic development.

Raising the Level of Exploitation
I asked Philomé how the earthquake had affected his group’s members and the assembly plant workers generally. “We have been fortunate not to have lost active members” or their immediate families, he answered, but the damage to homes was significant. “Most of us continue to sleep outdoors, our houses being dangerous in the case of aftershocks.”

The situation for workers remains desperate. Factory owners “have raised the levels of exploitation,” Philomé wrote, “demanding factory workers…produce more for less.” For example, management has used piece rates and quotas to circumvent last summer’s increase in the minimum wage for assembly plants, which nominally went up from 70 gourdes (about $1.75) a day to 125 gourdes (about $3.10).

Many assembly workers were killed in the quake, which struck during working hours, a little before 5 PM. Some 500 employees died in just one plant, the Palm Apparel T-shirt factory in Carrefour, southwest of the capital.

I asked what Palm Apparel owner Alain Villard had done to compensate the victims’ families. Nothing, Philomé said. The Haitian Labor code “stipulates that all and every damage caused to workers, independently of all causes, [is] the responsibility of the owners,” but the courts “are bought off by business. We don’t expect much to be done at this level.”

There are serious obstacles to organizing for workers living in the spontaneous settlements. They are often scattered in different camps and constantly face the threat of displacement by the government or property owners. Conditions have worsened with the approach of the rainy season. “We have to pick ourselves up from the camps, often drenched wet from the rain, and drag ourselves to work,” Philomé wrote.

“Positive Response”
At the same time, Philomé said, the failure of the Haitian government and the international institutions to respond to peoples’ needs since the earthquake has “inevitably heightened the constant class antagonism.”

Long before the earthquake people faced “the revolting class inequalities pre-existing in Haiti and the related corruption, anti-popular governments, and widespread abysmal poverty.” Now they see “the Haitian government’s total absence during the first moment” and the “so-called humanitarian assistance taking so long to be distributed, as the NGO employees drive around high-profile, without the decency of realizing their excesses.”

The situation has “dictated positive responses,” according to Philomé. One example is “the spontaneous reaction to create organizing committees in the camps in order to better handle questions of food distribution, sanitation, security and other everyday issues.”

In statements on Feb. 7 and March 12, Batay Ouvriye encouraged the creation of autonomous camp committees and called for the committees in different camps to coordinate their work.

But “much must be done to transform these objective factors of rebellion into the subjective material needed to go beyond,” Philomé told me. “This is where a different, higher level of organization is required, combining militancy, organizing and deeper analyses.”

According to Philomé, some of the camp committees have suffered from opportunism on the part of their leaders, “in a country where already several previous governments fostered this betrayal of class solidarity. To counter this, we’ve chosen to move towards a new strategy, that of setting up worker committees in the camps (not just camp committees, that are too general and vague).” Batay Ouvriye holds that because of their experience organizing in the factories, the workers have developed a “better consciousness of the enemy” and can take this back with them to the organizing in the camps.

Batay Ouvriye has joined with some camp committees to mobilize for a number of protests, including a march on April 28 and participation in protests on May 10 and May 18 (Haiti’s Flag Day) against the government of President René Préval.

Paradoxes of International Solidarity
I asked about Batay Ouvriye’s assessment of international assistance after the quake. Aid from progressive South American countries like Ecuador and Brazil, while welcome, has had the paradoxical effect of hurting organizing efforts in the camps, Philomé said. In contrast to the United States, South American governments showed enough respect for Haitian sovereignty to channel aid through the Haitian government from the start.

But this, along with visits by South American presidents, has helped the Préval government’s public standing, “to the point that in the past few weeks, despite its loss of legitimacy, it was able to access the camps, weakening the autonomous organization and strengthening a new ‘institutionalized’ opportunistic wing that has even come to throwing rocks at opponents and countering the popular movement openly.”

“For the Haitian workers, the rise of left governments in Latin America, while absolutely positive in itself, needs to be correctly oriented,” Philomé wrote, “with regard to each social formation as well as to international solidarity.”

Batay Ouvriye itself has received strong support from Brazilian unionists and activists since the earthquake, with more than $90,000 coming through the leftist Conlutas (Coordenação Nacional de Lutas, or National Organization of Struggles) solidarity movement. Much of this was from thousands of General Motors workers in Sao Paulo state, who voted in February to approve a one-time donation of 1% of their pay to Batay Ouvriye and other grassroots organizations in Haiti.

Contributions from US unions have been much smaller. The largest, according to Batay Ouvriye’s website, was a donation of $2,620 and some material aid from the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center.

Solidarity From the North?
In 2005 there was considerable controversy in the North American left over Batay Ouvriye’s acceptance of at least $90,000 from the Solidarity Center, money which ultimately came from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Supporters of former Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide implied that this was a payoff for Batay Ouvriye’s longtime opposition to Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas Family) party.

Batay Ouvriye subsequently broke off relations with the Solidarity Center, but the controversy continues to weaken the group’s support in Canada and the United States. In March, for example, the Young Democratic Socialists chapter at Indiana University decided not to send funds to Batay Ouvriye on the grounds that it “reportedly called for the overthrow of former Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide and then had financial support from a US-funded pro-democracy program.”

Philomé noted that the Solidarity Center has a “relationship with most other Haitian unions,” including pro-Lavalas federations like the Conféderation des Travailleurs Haïtiens (CTH). (The Solidarity Center seems to have very friendly relations with the CTH, and Narco News reported in March that the CTH is “now receiving major funding from the Solidarity Center.”

What should North American unionists and other progressives be doing to support Haitian organizing?

People here could help by “assisting the battle such as the one we waged for the minimum wage,” Philomé said, referring to last summer’s fight to raise the minimum wage to $5 a day. He said Haitian workers need support now in organizing at a “free trade zone” near the Dominican border at Ouanaminthe and in exposing US maneuvers—like the Haiti Economic Lift Program (HELP) Act—to build sweatshops in Haiti under the guise of “humanitarian assistance.”

“This support should be principally based on political relations but also financial,” Philomé wrote, citing the Encuentro Latinoamericano y Caribeño de Trabajadores (ELAC, the Encounter of Latin American and Caribbean Workers) as an example of international union solidarity.

“But for us the deeper relations that should exist are those of common struggle in which those of the dominated countries should be one with those of dominating countries,” Philomé added. Mobilization against capitalism in the dominant countries is crucial, “and that’s where not only all the unions should focus [but also] all progressives.”

—-

David L. Wilson is co-author, with Jane Guskin, of The Politics of Immigration: Questions and Answers (Monthly Review Press, 2007) and co-editor of Weekly News Update on the Americas.

From our Daily Report:

Haiti: government suspends forced evictions
World War 4 Report, April 27, 2010

Haiti: capital residents protest and organize
World War 4 Report, Feb. 16, 2010

See also:

IGNORING THE GRASSROOTS IN LATIN AMERICA
Powerful Popular Movements Invisible to Mainstream—and “Progressive”—Media
by David L. Wilson, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, May 2010

“REBUILDING HAITI”: THE SWEATSHOP HOAX
by David Wilson, MRZine
World War 4 Report, April 2010

——————-

Special to World War 4 Report, June 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingHAITI: STRUGGLE AND SOLIDARITY AFTER THE CATACLYSM 

VENEZUELA: THE MYTH OF “ECO-SOCIALISM”

Ecological Contradictions of the Bolivarian Revolution

by Maria Pilar Garcia Guadilla, El Libertario

Venezuela is a country with a mining and extractive industry economy, whose model development has been based on the exploitation of oil and other non-renewable resources that cause strong impacts on the environment. Over the past decade, the government has blamed the “savage capitalism and neoliberal policies” for the environmental problems—despite the fact that current exploitation of these resources supports the so-called Bolivarian Development Model. This model reproduces these practices labelled as “neoliberal or savage,” causing negative environmental impacts as strong or even stronger than in the past.

Citizen organizations, indigenous communities and human rights organizations have continued to press environmental demands, basing their struggle on the 1999 Constitution, approved by a constituent process, that did incorporate participatory democracy and environmental rights. Many of these rights have been violated, and participatory democracy has not resulted in an
environmental democracy. Conflicts related to resource extraction in fact have
been multiplied since Hugo Chávez became president of the republic.

Persistence of Grievances
Some of the most significant socio-environmental conflicts of this decade in Venezuela have to do with the negative impacts of oil exploitation, mining, and other energy mega-projects. These are proposed both nationally and internationally, to supposedly reduce US dependence and achieve the integration of Latin America and the Caribbean through the Bolivarian Alliance for Our Americas People (ALBA).

The Bolivarian Development Model has been defined by government spokesmen, including President Chávez, as “sustainable, endogenous, equitable and participatory.” The electoral promise made in 1998 by the then-presidential candidate Hugo Chávez to support the struggles that environmentalists and indigenous were waging at the time, along with his environmental discourse and criticism of the “neo-liberalism and savage capitalism,” created an expectation among the social movements that if he became president he would pursue a vision more consonant with environmentally sustainable development.

However, these expectations were frustrated. According to the announcement made in 2005 by President Chávez, oil production was to double by 2012 through the exploitation of 500,000 square kilometers of marine platforms and over 500,000 square kilometers on the mainland. Construction of new refineries and a gas complex in the Gulf of Paria was announced. New mining projects in the Imataca Forest Reserve, a substantial increase in coal mining in the Sierra de Perijá, and increased hydro-power production for export to Brazil were all proclaimed. The economic crisis, along with government inefficiency, have delayed or halted those plans—but if they ever go ahead, it will affect almost the entire national territory, including areas that are now environmentally protected by law. These include Canaima National Park in the Gran Sabana, Imataca Forest Reserve, and the basins of the country main rivers. These plans reflect continuity with the policies of previous governments, branded by President Chávez as “neoliberals, capitalists and predators of the environment.”

Venezuela is also one of the 12 member states of the Initiative for the Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure (IIRSA), which covers 507 projects with high environmental and socio-cultural impacts, involving construction of major new roads, dams, gas pipelines and waterways. The Great Southern Gas Pipeline, a mega-plan to achieve energy integration between Venezuela, Brazil and Argentina, must cross 8000 kilometers, so it would effect extremely fragile and biodiverse areas. These mega-plans are also paralyzed or delayed due to the economic crisis, but if they’re activated, the impacts on the environment could be compared with the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which ALBA was conceived as an alternative to.

Resistance Beyond Rhetorical Discourse
The development model based in the exploitation of hydrocarbons that the Venezuelan government has proposed has been strongly questioned by the environmental, indigenous and human rights movements. In various discussions on the subject made at the World Social Forum at Caracas in January 2006, indigenous movements and environmentalists from Venezuela and the world expressed strong criticism of the negative effects of oil exploitation. The largest mobilization at the Forum was a march against expansion of coal development in the Sierra de Perijá.

Currently, there are frequent protests against the negative effects of oil and gas in both Ecuador and Venezuela, frequently via national and international digital networks such as oilwatch.org, maippa.org, soberanía.org and amigransa.blogia.com; but these spaces are privileged and globalized electronic hubs of resistance against the negative impacts of oil and gas exploitation in tropical countries.

In Venezuela, as in the rest of the globalized world, the logic behind social movements is to confront “neoliberal policy”—regardless of whether the government has an “anti-neoliberal discourse.” Therefore, the Bolivarian Development Model, like those of other governments that are called left, can generate resistance and mobilization.

In the case of Venezuela, such resistance can come both from within and outside Chávez circles, because of the broad ideological heterogeneity of the groups supporting the president. Venezuelans environmental and indigenous movements are by definition anti-neoliberal, and many of their members support the President Chávez. Some transcend the dichotomy between “neo-liberal” and “anti-neoliberal” discourse by questioning the model of “civilization,” and demanding transformation on the political, cultural, gender, social and environmental levels.

So far, the great ideological heterogeneity and class differences among environmentalists has hampered the formulation of collective proposals and contributed to the estrangement of social movements that in the past had strategic alliances with environmentalists. The lack of an objective reading on the socio-environmental crisis and of a joint strategy around alternative collective proposals have contributed to this weakening of protests against the predator model.

For a Consistent Eco-Socialism
The anti-neoliberal discourse of the Bolivarian Development Model can be a first step towards the implementation of a more fair model; nonetheless the rplans and policies of “21st century eco-socialism” in Venezuela militate against it, since the productivist, instrumental and developmental logic has not changed. Can we speak of justice, social equity and solidarity when the development model does not take into account the environmental dimension or intergenerational equity? When it sacrifices the welfare and the right to cultural identity of its indigenous communities? When the model do not recognize the negative impacts of mega-projects such as gas pipelines, oil pipelines, or large infrastructure development? Can we speak of a revolutionary model that does not stimulate more equitable practices and relationships with the environment?

The construction of 21st century eco-socialism in Venezuela must, first, overcome the deep gap between the rhetoric discourse and the reality of the development model; secondly, it requires that the desirable model of civilization is built collectively and not imposed from above as in the present; and, finally, that its source of inspiration is the transition to a post-petroleum society—such as the one envisioned by Salvador de La Plaza, an eminent Venezuelan historian and politician, who warned about the harmful effects of oil and the need to control them to achieve national sovereignty. He noted that for the oil industry to be sustainable requires that the environment costs arising from the exploitation of hydrocarbons needs to be listed in the “accounting”—not only economically but also in the cultural and
socio-environmental spheres.

This view is not very different from Kovel & Lowry (2002), who in their Eco-socialist Manifesto indicate that a society with a high degree of harmony with nature should lead to “the extinction of dependence on fossil fuels,” which they considered attached to industrial capitalism. Getting rid of this dependence “can provide a material base for the liberation of countries oppressed by oil imperialism” as well as reducing global warming
and other problems arising from the ecological crisis.

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This text first appeared in the March-April issue of El Libertario, the Caracas-based anarchist journal. It was adopted from a longer article that appeared last year in Spanish in the Journal of Economics and Social Sciences (Universidad Central de Venezuela) entitled “XXI Century Eco-socialism and Bolivarian Development Model: the myths of environmental sustainability and participatory democracy in Venezuela.” Translated by El Liberatio’s Julio Pacheco, it was further edited and condensed by World War 4 Report.

Resources:

Oil Watch
http://www.oilwatch.org/

Movimiento de Afectados por la Industria Petrolera en Países Amazónicos (MAIPPA)
http://www.maippa.org/

Sociedad de Amigos en Defensa de la Gran Sabana
http://amigransa.blogia.com/

Soberanía.org
http://www.soberania.org/

Venezuela: Government plan endangers the Imataca forest
World Rainforest Movement, October 2003

Salvador de la Plaza, un pensador revolucionario venezolano en el olvido
World Rainforest Movement, Dec. 25, 2009

An Ecosocialist Manifesto
Joel Kovel and Michael Lowy, International Endowment for Democracy, September 2001

See also:

VENEZUELA: VOICES OF PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY
by Hans Bennett, Upside Down World
World War 4 Report, February 2010

VENEZUELA: DEMARCATION WITHOUT LAND
Criminalization and Death for Indigenous Struggle
by José Quintero Weir, El Libertario
World War 4 Report, November 2009

IIRSA: THE FTAA’S HANDMAIDEN
South American “Infrastructure Integration” for Free Trade
by Raul Zibechi, IRC Americas Program
World War 4 Report, July 2006

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingVENEZUELA: THE MYTH OF “ECO-SOCIALISM” 

MEXICO’S OTHER DISAPPEARED

Demanding Justice for Missing Migrants

from Frontera NorteSur

A Mexican lawmaker is demanding that government authorities pay more attention to a case of 31 missing migrants. Juan Fernándo Rocha Mier, a state legislator for the National Action Party (PAN) in the central state of Querétaro, said the same “emphasis” should be placed on locating the disappeared migrants as on safely returning former presidential candidate and millionaire lawyer Diego Fernández de Cevallos.

Presumably kidnapped near his Querétaro ranch earlier this month, the disappearance of Fernández de Cevallos, a historic leader of the center-right PAN, touched off the latest political crisis in Mexico.

Receiving far less attention, a crisis has enveloped families in the indigenous Sierra Gorda region of Querétaro since last March, when 17 local men joined 14 fellow migrants from the states of San Luis Potosí and Hidalgo on an apparently ill-fated journey to the United States. None of the men has been heard of since they left in a bus connected to immigrant smugglers known as coyotes.

“This is worrisome. We are not certain the [government] is looking for them,” said Rocha. “With the disappearance of Diego Fernández de Cevallos, we believe that insecurity in the state is getting worse. If this happens to a political figure like him, what can the rest of us common citizens expect?”

According to relatives of the missing men, their loved ones each paid $2,500 for transportation on a bus to the US border. Based on the account of one of coyotes, family members told a Mexican reporter the vehicle was intercepted by armed men dressed in black before it arrived to the municipality of Miguel Aleman, Tamaulipas, across the Rio Grande from Texas.

If the coyote’s account is true, it means the men vanished in a region of Tamaulipas which has been in turmoil since all-out war broke out between the Gulf and Zetas drug cartels last February.

The Zetas reportedly had long controlled a stretch of the route in which the missing men traveled, charging a fee of 1500 pesos for each migrant who passed through the area. However, the wife of one of the missing men said immigrant smugglers insisted the men who halted the bus were not Zetas but members of another “mafia.”

According to the story attributed to smugglers, the men could have been kidnapped to work in the drug industry. Alternatively, it is not publicly known if the migrants could have been mistaken for gunmen sent to reinforce one of the cartels. The warring groups have brought in outsiders, including Guatemalans, to serve as foot soldiers in the bloody conflict over economic and political control of Tamaulipas.

The vanished men set out from an impoverished region that is increasingly dependent on dollars from migrants working in the United States. In the municipality of Landa de Matamoros, from where the migrants originated, jobs, schools and basic infrastructure all are in short supply. Nearly half of all young people 15 years of age or older have not finished elementary school, and 22 percent are illiterate.

In Tres Lagunas, home of three of the missing migrants, at least one member of the 300 families inhabiting the community has migrated to El Norte. According to Mexico’s National Population Council, migrant remittances received in Querétaro soared from $71 million in 1995 to $364 million in 2009.

A woman identified only as Socorro, mother of a missing 17-year-old who went on the bus trip, said some family members did not file formal complaints because of fear they might be killed for exposing the disappearances.

In the aftermath of the mass disappearance, Queretaro Governor José Calzada Rovirosa said he contacted the governors of San Luis Potosí, Tamaulipas and Nuevo Leon to aid in the search for the migrants.

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This story first appeared May 24 on Frontera NorteSur.

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: narcos declare open season on politicians
World War 4 Report, May 17, 2010

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingMEXICO’S OTHER DISAPPEARED 

THE CLIMATE JUSTICE GROUNDSWELL

From Copenhagen to Cochabamba to Cancún

by Karah Woodward, The Indypendent

TIQUIPAYA, Bolivia — Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke for many developing nations last December when he rejected the United Nation’s Copenhagen Accord as “an agreement reached between the world’s biggest polluters that is based on the exclusion of the very countries, communities and peoples who will suffer most from the consequences of climate change.”

Many of those most disappointed in the talks were enthusiastic participants in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change called by Morales from April 19 to 22. With an emphasis on the inclusion of indigenous voices and the “rights of Mother Earth,” people from over 120 nations and organizations gathered in Tiquipaya, on the outskirts of Cochabamba, to debate how to confront the climate crisis.

“We are here to establish a different position that maybe will influence the processes in the future,” said Vera Mugittu, a representative of the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, “so that Africa can have a better deal.”

That deal was developed during four days of intense meetings among 17 working groups, where genuine dialogue was encouraged. Topics varied from the rights of Mother Earth and harmony with Mother Nature to climate debt and climate justice. “Whether we agreed or whether we disagreed, it didn’t matter,” said Shetal Shah, who worked with the Bolivian Mission to the United Nations to organize the summit, “we’re having the dialogue.”

Bolivia—a multiethnic socialist state—shaped the talks by fostering a critique of the capitalist system and its push for market- based solutions to solving the climate crisis. “Either capitalism lives or Mother Earth lives,” said Morales on the opening day of the summit. Many participants agreed. Projects to protect the environment “cannot ignore the structural changes that have to happen,” said Ruth Kaplan with the Alliance for Democracy. “Otherwise, it’s like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And yes, it’s a revolution and we need that kind of revolution.”

Other participants argued anti-capitalist rhetoric would stall progress in negotiations with wealthy countries. “The climate change movement needs to be an environmental movement” and not a social revolution, said Adam Zemans, director of Environment Bolivia. He said trying to overthrow capitalism while combating climate change is “counterproductive.”

Many of the working groups benefited from learning about regional struggles, and became more familiar with the diverse points of view held by their colleagues. While not in total consensus on all points, they reached agreements that will be useful rallying points for future climate talks.

An unofficial working group, known as Table 18, included a critique of Bolivia’s strategies for economic development that include mining and drilling for oil and gas. Among the participants were residents of Salar de Uyuni, who were protesting a transnational mining company at the same time of the conference. The group’s final agreement questioned “predatory and consumerist logic—the logic of death based on developmentalism and neo-extractivism.”

There was general support for the creation of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal. The tribunal would punish states, transnational corporations or people who violate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, which currently lacks an enforcement mechanism. However, such a tribunal would require deep reform within the United Nations, leading some to favor an arbitrative body that would resolve disputes over biodiversity, fresh water access, habitats and health.

Ultimately, the People’s Agreement presented at the conference’s closing ceremony identified the capitalist system in wealthy countries as the main driver of climate change. It called for restorative justice through an Adaptation Fund—financed by 6% of the Gross Domestic Product of developed nations—that would assist countries in dealing with the impact of climate change. This includes reduced food security, the loss of water due to retreating glaciers, more frequent and intense “natural” disasters, an increase in mosquito-borne diseases, and more forest fires. The agreement also demanded the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to a level that will prevent global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius.

“By aggregating the voluntary commitments in the [failed] Copenhagen Accord, we are talking about a temperature increase of at least four degrees,” said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International. That “increase in temperature clearly means a death sentence to Africa, to the small island states, to the Arctic states and to all the vulnerable nations.”

After the World People’s Conference, it is unlikely such an agreement can be forced on these nations again. President Morales, along with an international delegation representing civil society, formally delivered the People’s Agreement on May 7 to UN General Secretary Ban Ki Moon—the first step toward influencing talks during the next UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, this December in Cancún, Mexico.

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Karah Woodward produces the Bolivia Transition Project website.

This story first appeared May 12 in The Indypendent, publication of the New York City Independent Media Center.

Resources:

World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth
http://pwccc.wordpress.com/

Pan African Climate Justice Alliance
http://www.pacja.org/

Alliance for Democracy
http://www.thealliancefordemocracy.org/

Friends of the Earth International
http://www.foei.org/

From our Daily Report:

Evo Morales delivers Cochabamba climate summit resolutions to United Nations
World War 4 Report, May 10, 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, June 1, 2010
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingTHE CLIMATE JUSTICE GROUNDSWELL