On June 22, American warplanes crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs.

The attack was not in response to a provocation; it came on the heels of illegal Israeli aggression that took the lives of more than 600 Iranians.

This was a return to something familiar and well-practised: an empire bombing innocents across the orientalist abstraction called “the Middle East”.

• READ MORE: Eugene Doyle: Why Asia-Pacific should be cheering for Iran and not US bomb-based statecraft
• Other Israeli war on Middle East reports

That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two state secretaries, told the world: “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.

There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion.

But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?

In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers.

Victimhood serving narrative
Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.

And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.

Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.

Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV.

Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.

Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”.

Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as “the truth”.

Bias over Palestinian deaths
A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.

Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat — not a people, but a problem.

The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.

Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order.

Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission.

It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.

And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.

Fear over false ‘nuclear threat’
But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.

This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.

Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.

But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war.

After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment

The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed.

They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.

Low social justice spending
At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance.

And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.

Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.

They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli “self-defence”.

The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.

The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war.

‘Don’t drop bombs’
And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.

Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.

But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky.

Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.

Ahmad Ibsais is a first-generation Palestinian American and law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Works of dystopian fiction, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, once seemed like dark fantasies of an authoritarian future. Their themes were warnings, not forecasts. Now, in 21st Century America, with the political landscape being fashioned by Donald Trump, MAGA, the Republican Party, Elon Musk’s DOGE, and their Christian nationalist and white supremacist allies, literary nightmares are no longer speculative.  What once was fiction is now the stuff of daily headlines.

Dystopian themes such as: Big Brother watching; censorship threatening; women’s rights eroding; history rewritten; and violent white gangs roaming the political landscape, once viewed as hyperbolic, are now today’s reality.

American politics is being shaped by hundreds ofexecutive orders, social media rants, and an alarming number of reactionary proposals by Republican controlled in states across the country. Some of these actions are more horrifying than plots cooked up by the best of our speculative fiction writers. And while dystopian legislation is being crafted, right-wing domestic terrorist groups are metastasizing.

The election of Donald Trump, with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint at his fingertips, has set these disruptive events into motion. And the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a woman’s right to abortion opened the floodgates to proposals that were once thought of as pure fiction.

Big Brother is Watching—And Tweeting

The Orwellian surveillance state has evolved in real-time. But it’s not just government agencies monitoring citizens; private tech giants, partisan watchdogs, and shadowy right-wing influencers are mining data, tracking dissent, and amplifying disinformation. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter—rebranded as “X” — turned the site into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and extremist propaganda. This once dystopian future, now present, isn’t just being surveilled; it’s being promoted, curated and manipulated by billionaires and bots.

In MAGA’s America, Trump is attempting to stretch surveillance society, as dissenters are targeted, reporters vilified, and protesters charged as criminals. And as state governments push for laws that would allow tracking of women’s pregnancies and menstrual cycles, Orwell’s vision seems almost quaint by comparison.

Burning Books Without Flames

Bradbury envisioned a world where books were burned to control thought. In today’s America, while book burning is rare, books are being removed from the shelves of public schools and libraries, and military academies. Conservative lawmakers and school boards are banning books en masse—particularly those that discuss race, gender, sexuality, or America’s darker historical truths. Librarians are being harassed, even doxxed.

The control of knowledge and information is power, and the MAGA movement knows it.

Reproductive Dystopia

The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade opened the floodgates to extremist legislation that was once confined to the realm of dystopian fiction. In Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, women are stripped of autonomy and used as vessels for reproduction. Today, in America, state legislators openly float proposals to track pregnancies, criminalize miscarriages, and prosecute women for seeking abortion care. Some have even suggested the death penalty. The right’s Rolling Thunder project aims to outlaw the use of mifepristone.

No longer a slippery slope—it’s a full-on sprint toward theocracy. Red cloaks and white bonnets are no longer costumes for protest. They are warnings of what’s to come.

Rewriting the Past to Control the Future

“Who controls the past controls the future,” Orwell wrote. In some states slavery is being reframed as “involuntary relocation” or a jobs program! “Don’t Say Gay” laws muzzle teachers from acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people. AP African American Studies is gutted. Teaching truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Disappearing or re-written school textbooks and on government websites, history is being edited, erased and repackaged to fit Trump and his acolytes white nationalist agenda.

A Clockwork Orange America

Meanwhile, political violence is becoming normalized. From the January 6th insurrection to armed extremists intimidating voters, the American far-right is increasingly militant and unrepentant. Anthony Burgess’s vision of a violent youth culture run amok feels unnervingly familiar—except now it’s grown men in camo, tactical gear, and MAGA hats, and ramping up talk of civil war. The MAGA movement is a coordinated ideology that seeks to replace democracy with an authoritarian state.

Project 2025: The Authoritarian Blueprint

The blueprint for much of what we are seeing is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a roadmap for dismantling the administrative state, purging government agencies of dissenters, and centralizing executive power in the White House. After claiming during the presidential campaign that he knew nothing about it, Trump has peopled his administration with Project 2025 contributors including Russel Vought Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Navarro, Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, and Brendan Carr, of the Federal Communications Commission. Trump’s goal: a government loyal to him above all else.

We Are Living the Plot Twist

What were once speculative fantasies, are now the substance of our daily news. The line between fiction and reality has blurred. Orwell, Bradbury, Atwood, and Burgess wrote to warn us. They hoped their worlds would remain on the page. But in Trump’s America, the 20th century’s worst literary nightmares are becoming the 21st century’s political reality.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

Departing from a policy from trying to speak with a unique voice and not being derivative, I prefer to publish a view that is similar to my own but has been already published, is highly informative, and is eloquently expressed.

The secret sauce of Chinese industrial success
Smart state planning plus ferocious market competition
Hua Bin, May 23

The planning function is carried out by the China State Planning and Development Commission, which assembles the best minds in the government, academia, think tanks, and industries and goes through multi-year research, studies, and survey to understand and predict key technological trends and future market demand. Then they iterate and socialize the plans until there is broad buy-in.

Once top-line state planning priorities are set, central government empowers local governments to implement the policies. At the implementation level, fierce market competition becomes the norm.

Local governments compete with each other. Each local government is powerfully incentivized to create local tech and industrial champions as career advancements are typically tied in with achievements of national priorities.

Local governments unleash suites of policy support measures to attract and help businesses succeed, including

• Preferential tax
• Land use priority
• Preferential bank loans, even venture capital financing from government agencies (e.g. Shanghai and Shenzhen each has multi-billion dollar semiconductor funds)

Other policy support even extends to

• Establishing educational programs at universities to train and develop scientific and technical talents specifically for identified industries and technologies (e.g. AI, robotics, hypersonics, rare earth mining and refining, rail, ship building, etc.)
• Rolling out talent acquisition programs to provide housing, allowances, and compensation equalization schemes to attract talents to move to their cities. Some governments even provide WeWork type of office facilities to startups for free.
• investing in infrastructure upgrades including 5G coverage, EV charging stations, high speed rail, ports, bridges, etc. to enable smooth operation of large industrial enterprises.
• Investing in local parts and components supply chains that can be plugged into specific manufacturing sectors.
• Promoting successful technical leaders and executives in critical industries into senior government positions (e.g. the head of AVIC, the leading aeronautic business in China, was promoted to become a provincial governor)

The central government went so far as to crack down on monopolistic consumer tech companies such as Alibaba and Tencent in 2019 as these companies were consuming too much financial and talent resources and preventing startups from emerging. The main goal of the crackdown was to redirect resources (funding, talent) to more productive directions such as AI and hard tech.

As a result, in the key technological and industrial hubs across China, from Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuhan, Chengdu to Hefei and Changsa, you will find hundreds of EV companies, solar energy companies, AI and robotics startups, ship builders, and drone companies that are developing innovative technologies, building production capacity, and engage in intense competition for consumers.

In the competition, there are private businesses, state owned enterprises, and foreign companies as well. All have to compete for customers on price and quality and operate with razor thin margin. Innovation and cost efficiency are prized in the never-ending loop of hyper competition.

The Chinese industrial and technological ecosystem is often described by insiders as “arena for gladiators”. In a survival of the fittest environment, the winners of such competitions emerge as world class champions.

The same model is replicated in industry after industry from EV, smart phones, solar energy, robotics, ship building, AI large language models, drones, chip making, and biopharmaceuticals.

Many people mistakenly assume the Chinese state planning model means the government picks the winners and losers. That cannot be further from the truth. State planners pick the priority industries, define the swim lane, provide policy incentives, and then market takes over to decide the winner.

In contrast, the US industrial policy is more guilty of government picking winners – just witness how both Biden and Trump surround themselves with senior executives of incumbent tech giants when they announce policies such as the Chips Act, Inflation Reduction Act, or the Stargate program. Almost by definition, the main beneficiaries of these industrial policies will be the companies in the room. Market competition doesn’t seem to play the same decisive rule as in China.

As China accelerates the third mixed-economy phase of its industrial development, we can expect to see more Chinese companies will innovate faster, scale in the largest single market in the world, and become world-class competitors in their industries. Profit margins will be kept low as competition will never rest. However, more consumer surplus will accrue to customers, leading to improvement of living standards for all.

Hua Bin details the advances in China’s economy and describes why those advances will continue and cannot stall ─ the government apparatus plans ahead, outlines alternative directions to roadblocks, and facilitates shifts in production, enabling government industry to step in when private initiative falters. No matter how the U.S. contends China, the PRC will find a way to deter the contention and, in the end, the U.S. will lose, and lose until, as a last resort….

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

Peace activists who scaled the roof an an international weapons company operating from Christchurch yesterday say the company links New Zealand to the deaths of children in Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Barricaded by protesters, the building nestled in the outskirts of the city’s suburb of Rolleston, appeared eerie yesterday. Silhouetted on the rooftop two protesters passionately shouted about the deaths of child after child in Gaza.

They were supported by protesters holding banners and chanting “NIOA supplies genocide”.

• READ MORE: Activists scale NZ building in protest against global weapons company
• Other Gaza genocide protests

Joseph Bray, one of the fresh-faced Peace Action Ōtautahi activists who scaled the roof, later said the group was protesting against a “sinister company” trying to establish an extensive presence in New Zealand.

The action which resulted in two arrests, had been undertaken by the concerned citizens after months of planning.

“The killing of civilians, and especially children, with weapons from the NIOA, should be a cause of extreme concern for the people of Canterbury where NIOA’s headquarters have recently opened,” Bray said.

Watched in horror
Globally, people have watched in horror as children who once laughed and played were robbed of life.

A muscular police squad arrived at the protest with an arrest van and moved in a line towards the protesters, striding over chalk drawings depicted flowers and the names of Palestinian children killed by Israeli snipers.

Police manhandled John Minto, co-chair of the Palestinian Solidarity Network of Aotearoa (PSNA), during the peaceful protest outside the NOIA New Zealand headquarters.

“Please get your hands off me,” Minto responded.

NIOA is an Australian armaments and munitions company, headquartered in Brisbane, Queensland. Owned by the Nioa family, the company supplies arms and ammunition to the sporting, law enforcement and military markets.

It supplies weapons to military forces around the globe. In 2023 the global munitions company acquired Barrett Manufacturing, an Australian-owned, US-based manufacturer of firearms and ammunitions.

According to the company’s website, its weapons are sold to 80 countries across the world.

‘More civilian casualties’
The company’s New Zealand base signals another cause for public concern, said the Peace Action Otautahi spokesperson.

“If the New Zealand Police force carries arms we can expect to see more civilian casualties.”

Peace Action Ōtautahi has called for the NIOA to terminate any partnership with the company “Leupold and Stevens,” whose scopes are reportedly used by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) and implicated in violations of international law, and war crimes, said Bray.

The group also urges the company to voluntarily evict itself from the premises at 45 Stoneleigh Drive, Rolleston, stating that this proximity to Christchurch jeopardises the title of “Peace City” granted to the city in 2002.

It seeks the termination of distribution of any product manufactured by Barrett Firearms Manufacturing within New Zealand, a company which NIOA owns and supplies the IDF with three different types of sniper rifles.

Surgeons in Gaza have testified in court about seeing bullet holes between the eyes, and in the chests of children. IDF snipers have also been seen clambering over rubble to kill children at close range in Gaza and the West Bank.

Death toll estimated at 64,000 plus
Analysis by the Lancet medical journal estimates that the death toll in Gaza by end of June 2024 was 64,260, with 59 percent being women and children as well as people aged over 65.

The Lancet study used death toll data from the Health Ministry, an online survey launched by the ministry for Palestinians to report relatives’ deaths, and social media obituaries to estimate that there were between 55,298 and 78,525 deaths from traumatic injuries in Gaza up to 30 June 2024.

Reporting on livestream, PSNA’s John Minto said that it was “unconscionable” that New Zealand had allowed a company that produced sniper weapons to Israel’s military — an army responsible for genocide — to operate from the “humble suburbs of Christchurch”.

“The PSNA 100 percent supports the action by these brave Peace Action activists,” Minto said.

“We urge all New Zealanders to get behind this and stop this heinous company operating this death chain from our motu, our country.”

Saige England is a journalist and author, and member of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA).

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Protesters have scaled the building of an international weapons company in Rolleston, Christchurch, in resistance to it establishing a presence in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Two people from the group Peace Action Ōtautahi were on the roof of the NIOA building on Stoneleigh Drive, shown in a photo on social media, and banners were strung across the exterior.

Banners declared “No war profiteers in our city. NIOA supplies genocide” and “Shut NIOA down”.

• READ MORE: Other genocide protests

In late December, the group hung a banner across the Bridge of Remembrance in a similar protest.

In 2023, the global munitions company acquired Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, an Australian-owned, US-based manufacturer of firearms and ammunition operating out of Tennessee.

According to the company’s website, its products are “used by civilian sport shooters, law enforcement agencies, the United States military and more than 80 State Department approved countries across the world”.

In a media release, Peace Action Ōtautahi said the aim was to highlight the alleged killing of innocent civilians with weapons supplied by NIOA.

NIOA has been approached for comment.

Police confirm action
A police spokesperson said they were aware of the protest, and confirmed two people had climbed onto the roof, and others were surrounding the premises.

In a later statement, police said the people on the ground had moved. However, the two protesters remained on the roof.

“We are working to safely resolve the situation, and remove people from the roof,” they said.

“While we respect the right to lawful protest, our responsibility is to uphold the law and ensure the safety of those involved.”

Fire and Emergency staff were also on the scene, alongside the police Public Safety Unit and negotiation team.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

Photograph Source: Nancy Pelosi – CC BY 2.0

John Ralston went into bargaining with Transco last fall intending to negotiate one of the strongest union contracts in his three decades with the company.

Carmakers urgently wanted to get new vehicles to market. The railroads needed to get more autoracks—enclosed rail cars used to transport vehicles—into service.

And Ralston said he and his co-workers, who maintain autoracks and other rail cars at a sprawling yard in Logansport, Indiana, had “more work than we could handle.”

He and other members of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 7-00007 ended up exceeding their expectations, winning wage increases of 24 percent over three and a half years along with important benefit enhancements.

It’s one more example of the significant gains that workers across the country are making as the nation continues to add jobs, invest in manufacturing, and meet the growing demand for products ranging from aluminum and steel to automobiles, appliances, and many other kinds of goods.

“They knew they were going to have to offer a pretty substantial wage increase in order to hire more people and keep them there,” Ralston, the local’s recording secretary and a bargaining committee member, said of Transco management.

“I think they knew they were going to have to do something. They really want to add a second shift. They really want to expand our operations,” added Ralston, who repairs the air brake systems on rail cars.

The hiring buzz at Transco reflects a nationwide trend.

Employers created 15 million jobs, hundreds of thousands of them in manufacturing, over the past three and a half years. The nation added another 272,000 jobs in May alone, beating economists’ projections, and workers are benefiting with strong wage gains that outpace the cost of living.

“The American middle class is seeing their economic standing improved. The strong wages and improving living standards are the main takeaway from this very strong jobs report,” Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting firm RSM US, explained to The Washington Post.

“The labor market remains tight, and firms have to compete and offer higher wages to attract and retain workers… This really is the best labor market since the 1950s,” he said.

Transco’s business depends on the fortunes of the auto and rail industries. Both are thriving.

Automakers increased production to meet customer demand in the wake of the pandemic, only to see tens of thousands of vehicles left stranded on factory lots last year amid a shortage of the autoracks needed to get them to dealerships. Car industry officials demanded more autoracks and the railroads pledged to put thousands more into service this year.

While Ralston and several dozen colleagues maintain various kinds of rail cars, autoracks—cars with galvanized steel sides and two or three tiers for holding vehicles—account for the lion’s share of Transco’s business in Logansport.

He and his co-workers perform routine repairs, ensuring the autoracks meet safety standards, and overhaul cars severely damaged by derailments or other incidents. They also convert the three-level autoracks into the two-tier models increasingly needed to move the larger pickups and SUVs most popular with U.S. consumers.

The workers went into negotiations realizing that demand for their work gave them leverage they hadn’t enjoyed in previous years. Now, the new, stronger contract benefits all of Logansport, said Ralston, noting he and his colleagues have some of the best manufacturing jobs in town and support local businesses, schools, and other community essentials.

Dave Martin sees similar growth in the Ravenswood, West Virginia, area, where ongoing construction of a $3.1 billion sheet steel mill for Nucor and the development of a factory and solar energy field for titanium parts manufacturer Timet will create thousands of production jobs in the coming years.

But the investments are already paying dividends right now, observed Martin, a longtime USW member who serves as president of the Mason-Jackson-Roane Labor Council.

For example, USW-represented construction workers have a hand in the factory construction. And the burgeoning demand for factory workers already prompted another employer, Constellium, to significantly increase wages for USW Local 5668 members who make aluminum at the company’s Ravenswood plant.

“It’s benefited us a lot,” Martin said of the growing need for workers.

Union-backed legislation—including the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act—unleashed customer demand and sparked the needfor additional manufacturing capacity in the Ravenswood area.

The IIJA and Inflation Reduction Act also allocated up to $75 million for upgrades to the Constellium plant, creating additional production jobs and ensuring that facility’s future, said Martin.

“It’s a big transformation,” Martin said, referring to the local economy. “There’s not been this kind of potential for new jobs for quite a while.”

Like workers in many industries, the pandemic dealt a severe blow to John Martinez and his colleagues, members of USW Local 12-593 who make carbon fiber at Hexcel in Salt Lake City, Utah.

But Martinez, the USW unit chair, said the nation’s astonishing leap forward over the past three and a half years not only brought employment roaring back but enabled the union to negotiate a major mid-contract wage increase for new hires.

He said high demand for carbon fiber also enabled the company to expand from its traditional customer base—in the aerospace, defense, and recreational equipment industries—into new sectors like computers and car parts.

Even better, many other workers have similar opportunities to forge brighter futures, Martinez said, noting Texas Instruments last year announced an $11 billion investment in a new semiconductor factory projected to create hundreds of manufacturing jobs near Salt Lake City.

“I feel the economy is in a really good spot,” he said.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The post How Workers Are Winning as the Nation Adds Jobs, Manufacturing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David McCall.

Shai Davidai.

After throwing a foot-stomping tantrum earlier this morning, Shai Davidai, an untenured Columbia University business professor, was denied access to campus.

A self-proclaimed Zionist, Davidai is an Israeli-American who served in the IDF (“proud of it”) and has continually harassed Pro-Palestine protestors at Columbia, labeling them as anti-semitic, pro-Hamas “terrorists.”

On several occasions, Davidai called for the National Guard to be brought in to brutalize pro-Palestine students. He’s even gone so far as to characterize Columbia protestors as “Hitler-youth.”

Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine have started a petition to get him fired.

There is a laundry list of complaints lodged against Davidai, most recently by the 15 Jewish students at Columbia who were arrested and suspended last week during their occupation protest, calling on the school to divest funds from Israel.

In a Jewish Voice for Peace Instagram post, the students called out Davidai directly, writing:

“Futhermore, the disgraceful Shai Davidai publically called us Judenrat Kapost, and told us we would be on ‘the last train to Auschwitz.’ We do not feel safe with this professor still teaching on campus, having access to the Jewish community spaces we cherish, much less portraying himself as a valiant protector and spokesperson of Jews on campus while insulting our ancestors’ memory. Almost every suspended Jewish student los family members in the Holocaust.”

Davidai comes from a long line of assholes. His father, Eli Davidai, is an Israeli business executive who has served as General Manager of ARC, which describes itself as a “leading global advanced manufacturing service provider.”

According to ARC’s 2018 SEC filing:

“Eli Davidai, [ARC’s] General Manager of Operations as of May 2017, has been a Managing Director at QMI [Quadrant Management Inc.] since 1992, where he is responsible for making investments and overseeing companies at the firm.  Additionally, Mr. Davidai was elected to the Company’s Board of Directors on June 5, 2018.”

Among other things, ARC manufactures weapons parts, including “polymer magazine for NATO Compatible weapons,” “triggers and hammers,” “precision guided munitions components,” and more.

In 2016, ARC won an award for an AR-15 component and, in 2010, scored a prize for an “explosive device made for a Department of Defense application.”

ARC also makes parts for MCX and MPX rifles, which are used by the Israeli military.

As you probably guessed, Shai’s parents are extremely wealthy. Eli and his wife, Zohara Davidai, have sponsored the Arrhythmia Center in Tel Hashomer, Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu was fitted for a pacemaker last year.

Interestingly, as @cholent_lover exposed on X, Eli Davidai has had a long business relationship with Alan Quasha, CEO of Quadrant Management, who also serves on the Board of Directors of ARC. Quasha is an interesting character—an international businessman and venture capitalist who is worth billions.

Quasha has been involved in everything from Harken Energy (where George W. Bush was accused of insider trading as he sat on Harken’s Board) to his dealings with the Saudis, US intelligence, and even the Clintons.

Quasha is also the founder of Quadrant Security Strategies, which “makes equity investments in innovative and emerging private companies that support US National Security.”

To top it off, Shai Davidai’s grandfather, Benny Davidai (a founder of El Al Airlines), was a notorious strikebreaker.

The apple doesn’t fall far, as they say.

Meanwhile, as pro-Palestine protests spread across US campuses, Columbia faculty walked out this afternoon in a massive show of solidarity with student protestors.

Image by Columbia University, Associate Professor Hiba Bou Akar.

The post Columbia Professor Shai Davidai’s Family Tied to Weapons Manufacturing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Joshua Frank.

Image Source: Holcomb SO – An 1855 issue of a Boston magazine – Public Domain

Tom Bixler and several hundred of his co-workers produced top-quality glassware at the Libbey Glass plant in Toledo, Ohio, over the years while keeping the aging equipment there operating through sheer grit.

They even set efficiency standards despite the steep odds and carried the company through Chapter 11 bankruptcy, all to ensure the sprawling manufacturing complex remained viable and a centerpiece of the local economy.

But while they’re rightly proud of all they’ve done to sustain the facility, Bixler and fellow members of the United Steelworkers (USW) know they need to continue innovating to build a more secure, sustainable future. They’re now embarking on a critical transformation of their plant that will not only safeguard Northwest Ohio’s glassmaking jobs for decades to come but help forge a new frontier in American manufacturing.

Bixler, president of USW Local 65T, joined U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary David Turk and U.S. Representative Marcy Kaptur last week as they highlighted a federal grant award of up to $45.1 million that will enable the plant to install a pair of larger hybrid electric furnaces intended to boost efficiency, reduce pollution, and expand employment.

The cutting-edge furnace technology—combining the advantages of oxygen fuel and electric melting to process the raw materials for glassmaking, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by up to 60 percent—has the potential to set a new standard for the industry and revolutionize glass production nationwide.

And this commitment to the glass industry represents just one part of President Joe Biden’s initiative to grow the manufacturing economy with clean energy and union jobs. In all, his administration this month announced $6 billion for 33 decarbonization and modernization projects, deploying a range of new technology, in iron, steel, chemicals, refining, cement, pulp and paper, and other industries.

Historic union-backed legislation—the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act—will fund the grants.

“This is something that’s going to blaze a whole new trail,” said Bixler, a mold maker at Libbey for 41 years, who considers the federal grant, to be matched by the company, as Biden’s investment in workers who have worked so hard to preserve the plant and keep the community strong.

“The technology in the furnaces has not changed for eons,” explained Bixler, noting the 12 mold-makers in Local 65T work with members of USW Locals 59M and 700T, as well as co-workers in the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, to produce drinking glasses, stemware, and mugs.

“We all work together to keep the plant operating and the glass flowing off the line with very antiquated equipment.”

He and other workers made sacrifices to bring Libbey through bankruptcy a few years ago. While the financial crisis temporarily jeopardized the century-old plant, Bixler said, the new grant and furnace innovation will help to ensure the facility’s survival “for our grandchildren and great-grandchildren and on down the line.”

The USW wrote a letter of support for Libbey’s grant application and now intends to help the company expand apprenticeship opportunities, ensuring good jobs for community members and dedicated union workers for the plant.

“One of the best things our country can do is to get back to having a union workforce in every aspect of the economy,” said Bixler, noting Biden awarded many of the grants to union-represented employers and start-ups pledging to respect workers’ labor rights. “The biggest thing is safety. We also get better paid for everything we do, compared to anybody non-union doing the same job.”

Among other grants to USW-represented employers, Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) awarded up to $500 million to National Cement Company in Lebec, California, for pioneering the use of agricultural byproducts and other new technology to produce carbon-neutral cement.

It’s slated to provide Century Aluminum up to $500 million for the nation’s first new aluminum smelter in 45 years, a facility in the Ohio/Mississippi River basins that will greatly increase U.S. production capacity and create more than 1,000 USW-represented jobs.

It awarded U.S. Pipe in Bessemer, Alabama, up to $75.5 million to install electric induction melting furnaces that will not only reduce pollution but cut costs, add jobs, and increase manufacturing capacity.

The investment in increased efficiency comes as the IIJA, the national infrastructure program, ramps up demand across the country for the kinds of water and sewer pipe that USW members produce at U.S. Pipe.

Together, the DOE and IIJA investments provide a foundation for the more-than-100-year-old company to remain a vital linchpin of numerous manufacturing supply chains as well as a driving economic force in Bessemer.

“Normally, if you get a job at U.S. Pipe, you retire from it,” said USW Local 2140 President Ron Woods, noting union contracts provide family-sustaining wages and other essentials that enable workers to live middle-class lives.

Woods anticipates that the new furnace will not only lead the company to hire more workers but also give dozens of existing union members the opportunity to learn new skills and take on additional responsibilities.

“Naturally, they will get paid more. When you make more, you spend more. We have some new people here, and this will help them buy houses and cars,” Woods said, adding that new jobs and higher wages not only benefit local businesses but pay the taxes needed for strong schools and other amenities.

During his visit to Toledo, Turk observed that the grants will better position U.S. companies to compete in the global economy. That remark struck a chord with Bixler, who noted glassmakers continually face overseas threats.

“We’re looking forward to getting this grant and implementing this new technology, so we can preserve the future,” he said.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

The post How Unions Are Launching a New Frontier in American Manufacturing appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David McCall.

Nearly 75% of factories accused of workplace violations are owned by Chinese nationals, according to the March 30 report in Myanmar Labour News. 

Reports increased from 164 to 438 in just one year, and factories committing these workers’ rights abuses jumped from 124 to 166, said Kyaw Gyi, founder of the Myanmar Labour Society. That trend in foreign investment surged by as many as 100 factories between 2022 and 2023.

“The workers have lost trust in the complaint mechanisms and it resulted in more abuses on the workers. Various forms of abuse in the workplaces have risen,” Kyaw Gyi told Radio Free Asia. “For example, before the coup, if apparel factory workers had to complete 100 orders, the workloads have been tripled now.”

The seizure of ministries and other government roles by Myanmar’s military during the 2021 coup d’etat has caused a lack of oversight for much of the manufacturing sector, union leaders told RFA. In addition to driving down wages and union-busting, junta-affiliated labor officers have created a lack of accountability for managers, who often rely on junta soldiers to intimidate workers attempting to negotiate or protest. 

In response to ongoing allegations of dismal working conditions and a public outcry, several large international brands have already vowed to begin withdrawing from the country in the three years following the coup due to deteriorating conditions. 

Despite vowing to withdraw from the country, factories supplying brands like H&M, Zara and Primark continued to be among the most frequently cited by workers for reducing wages, forcing employees to work overtime and endure verbal abuse by management. 

However, these brands are among the most affected by public pressure, providing an incentive to improve working conditions, union leaders and labor advocacy groups said. 

“To the extent that Western brands have pulled out unquestionably this has given carte blanche to factories to drive down labor conditions and increase violations of Burmese labor law and trade union rights,” said Dave Welsh, Myanmar country director of labor rights group Solidarity Center. 

“In a climate where the rule of law and industrial relations are absent, there is leverage in having Western brands that are vulnerable to pressure, present,” Welsh said. 

To stay or to go

Despite these challenges, workers are still concerned about the absence of the major manufacturers, who they say are more invested in finding a resolution than smaller local firms, where breaches of contract are rife.

“I understand, it’s a controversial issue, the brands staying in the country or leaving from Myanmar,” said Thurein Aung, a labor activist in Myanmar. “My concern is that when the multinational brands leave Myanmar, it is almost impossible to protect worker rights.”

Multinational brands that have chosen to stay in the country after the coup have similarly collected a laundry list of complaints from workers.

German sportswear company Adidas was cited in relation to four supplier factory violations in 2023, while other factories producing for European brands have been documented as repeat offenders. A factory for Denmark’s Bestseller was accused of eight different violations, including forcing pregnant women to resign and bribery between factory staff and labor officials. In spite of that, the factory will continue to supply Bestseller in 2024. 

Bestseller did not respond to RFA’s enquiries by the time of publication. 

Violations continue to rise

In the past, collecting and publishing evidence of abuses could result in positive action from brands and factories, even if it was only temporarily. But in 2023, many factories stopped responding to complaints at all, said Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar president Khaing Zar Aung.

“The factories come to understand the brand will not leave the country because they are making a profit. So the factories now do not care about their violations in the media,” she said. “So we cannot have many changes and improvements in the factories after posting [about these issues].”

And while 2023’s numbers concern labor advocacy groups, reports in the first three months of 2024 look set to be on track to surpass them.

As of March, the Industrial Workers Federation of Myanmar had received 114 complaints of labor and human rights abuses involving 169 brands, the vast majority stemming from the country’s garment sector.

“Violations are the same, the verbal abuse, illegal dismissal, not paying overtime or not paying minimum wage, forced labor, sexual assault, giving pressure and intimidating and the violation of the employment contract,” Khaing Zar Aung said. “The data shows us that the situation is worse and worse, day by day.”

Edited by Mike Firn and Elaine Chan.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kiana Duncan for RFA.

Image by Craig Manners.

In the more than 100 days since the Israeli Defense Forces began their operations in Gaza, its ‘unity’ government has resorted to many distortions of language, some new, some long standing, with what seems to be the goal of dehumanizing all Palestinians.

It shows just how much the world has been changed by the unfiltered immediacy of camera phones and social media that Israeli propaganda seems much clumsier and is clearly less influential than it’s been in the past.

One of the chief arguments used to excuse the relentless slaughter of innocents, more than 25,000 as of this writing, is that Hamas, which has controlled the enclave without a vote since 2006, uses civilians as ‘human shields’. Even hospitals have been targeted by the Israeli Defense Forces under this pretense and the evidence presented after the fact would be laughable if the results of these attacks on these and other vital institutions weren’t so grim.

There have also been reports in the past of IDF forces using Palestinian civilians as in precisely this way in Gaza and in support of settlers on the West Bank, a fact that never seems to get mentioned amid all the hand wringing in the Western press about Hamas’ use of residential areas to launch low tech, usually ineffective attacks from one of the most densely populated places on earth.

As much as we might wish it weren’t so, the use of civilian areas by guerrilla groups engaged in asymmetric warfare is hardly novel, including in the context of the creation of the state of Israel.

In a very interesting piece in the London Review of Books, Neve Gordon noted that two separate Zionist paramilitary groups stored weapons in civilian locations when the Palestinian territory was under the British Mandate. The first place she mentions was a synagogue, the second an elementary school. Rather than burying this history, there are plaques at both locations celebrating the part they played in the creation of the country.

At times, what is omitted from language is just as important as the euphemisms used to excuse the inexcusable. Israel’s government no longer uses the term ‘colonization’ to describe the creation of the Zionist nation-state but this term was a point of pride in an earlier era.

As author Isabella Hammad and historian Sahar Huneidi explained in the Nation magazine:

“Until the 1960s and the first wave of successful anti-colonial independence movements, Zionists were not ashamed to call their project colonialism. Established with the aim of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine, their institutions from 1897 onward included the Jewish Colonization Association, the Society for the Colonization of the Land of Israel, the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, and the Jewish Colonial Trust.”

The erasure of, or at the very least, removal, of Palestinians has always been at the heart of this colonial project.

When it comes to all too common violations of international law, regardless of the perpetrators, we should at least be able to call things what they are, rather than finding convenient distortions to legitimize ethnic cleansing and even genocidal behavior.

Hamas and the IDF both violate humanitarian laws and rules of warfare. Slaughtering civilians is simply a war crime.

Murdering young people at a music festival is not an act of liberation. Killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians and destroying vital infrastructure with military force while also denying over two million people food, water and access to medicine has nothing to do with ‘self defense’.

The many tragic images coming out of Gaza reveal this simple truth.

The post Manufacturing Excuses for the Inexcusable appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Derek Royden.

Like many folks I have spent a fair amount of time the last few days in front of a television watching the US cable news stations – primarily CNN and MSNBC with an occasional look at FOX – cover the Israel-Hamas war. I am struck by the extreme and unabashed imbalance in humanitarian concern demonstrated by these news outlets.

Twp nights ago, CNN broadcast an Israel soldier who says that Hamas is “pure evil” because it kills children, infants, women, and old people. I hold no brief for the murderous Islamist outfit Hamas, but the problem here is that the US-backed Judeo-fascist, racist, apartheid, terror and occupation state of Israel has long murdered Palestinian children, infants, women, and old people with impunity. Beneath and beyond the episodic terror of United States (US)-backed Israeli shootings and bombing raids, the Palestinians live under miserable daily conditions of extreme poverty, disease, and trauma imposed by decades of US-backed occupation and apartheid.

That other, far more empowered US-backed evil and terror, is essential context for Hamas’s despicable attack. The other and far more empowered terror, backed by the most world’s leading imperial aggressor (the US), is for all intents and purposes deleted from in the frankly warmongering and racist coverage one sees on CNN and MSNBC, where a retired US general practically salivated two nights ago as he enthused over the sending of a US naval flotilla to back up “our valued ally” while (in the former general’s words) “the Israeli Defense Forces go into Gaza high and hard.”

The cable news is brazenly demonstrating the imperial and racial selectivity of its moral sentiments. It is taking the Noam Chomsky-Edward Herman thesis on the Western media’s propagandistic distinction between officially worthy (US and US-allied) and officially “unworthy” (those on the “wrong” side of the US American Empire and its network of allies) victims to GROTESQUE extremes. It parades the airwaves with one gut-wrenching and highly personalized story of Israeli victimization after another, replete with grieving relatives and photographs and biographies of murdered and captured Israelis and Americans. It is of course impossible for any decent human being not to feel sadness and disgust what has been done to these people by the monsters of Hamas.

The problem is that there is no serious balance when it comes to the lives of Palestinians. For every terrible story of Israeli victimization, there are multiple other examples of Palestinian victimization by the terror imposed by the US-sponsored state of Israel, and here, it is important to note that there two kinds of terror experienced by the Palestinians, especially the two million plus Palestinians stuck in the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. There’s the immediate and sudden terror of a bomb or artillery shell destroying one’s home, school, park, or hospital, creating mass bloodshed. (An award-winning Israeli documentary released in 2013 exposed how Israel turned millions of Gazans and other Palestinians into literal human laboratories for the testing of new weapons.) And then there’s the ongoing dull terror of savage poverty and hyper-ghettoization imposed by the US-backed racist, Judeo-fascist, apartheid and ethno-state of Israel. The US media, essentially a propaganda arm of the American Empire, has nothing to say about the savage contrast between the opulent First World lives enjoyed by those on one side of the Israel-Gaza border and the severe Third World wretchedness endured by those on the other side. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency:

“The Gaza Strip has a population of approximately 2.1 million people, including some 1.7 million Palestine Refugees. For at least the last decade and a half, the socioeconomic situation in Gaza has been in steady decline. ..A[n] Israel-imposed and US-backed] blockade on land, air and sea was imposed by Israel following the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007. There are now very few options left for the people of Gaza, who have been living under collective punishment as a result of the blockade that continues to have a devastating effect as people’s movement to and from the Gaza Strip, as well as access to markets, remains severely restricted….The blockade and related restrictions contravene international humanitarian law as they target and impose hardship on the civilian population, effectively penalizing them for acts they have not committed…Food security in Gaza has deteriorated with 63 per cent of people in the Gaza Strip being food insecure and dependent on international assistance. The continuing intra-Palestinian divisions exacerbate the humanitarian and service delivery crisis on the ground. With 81.5 per cent of the population living in poverty, an overall unemployment rate of 46.6 per cent (48.1 per cent for Palestine Refugees living in the camps) at the end of the third quarter of 2022 and an unemployment rate of 62.3 per cent among youth (15-29 years, refugees and non-refugees), the already fragile humanitarian situation in Gaza threatens to deteriorate further. The economy and its capacity to create jobs have been devastated, resulting in the impoverishment and de-development of a highly skilled and well-educated society. Access to clean water and electricity remains at crisis level and impacts nearly every aspect of life. Clean water is unavailable for 95 per cent of the population. Electricity is available up to an average of 11 hours per day as of July 2023. However, ongoing power shortage has severely impacted the availability of essential services, particularly health, water, and sanitation services, and continues to undermine Gaza’s fragile economy, particularly the manufacturing and agriculture sectors.”

These are the ongoing “realities on the ground” in what I heard an MSNBC reporter in Israel call “the so-called open-air prison” that is Gaza. We can drop the “so-called.” Gaza itself is a giant human rights crime, imposed by the US-backed occupation state of Israel. It might be considered almost as a concentration camp.

His genocidal anti-Semitism aside, Adolph Hitler would admire the nightmare that Israel has created for the people of Gaza and Palestine. He and his propaganda minister Goebbels would appreciate the massive racial and imperial hypocrisy of a media that portrays Hamas as “pure evil” and “animals” for murdering white-skinned Israeli civilians but won’t say the same for the Israeli officials and military personnel who regularly murder Palestinian civilians and who create and enforce lives of pure misery for the brown skinned masses of Gaza.

Israeli pain and suffering pales before that of the Palestinian people and the Gazans. The comparisons of Israeli and Palestinian distress aren’t even remotely close, truth be told. Where are CNN and MSNBC’s heartfelt and highly personalized portrayals of Palestinian and Gazan lives subjected to the “pure evil” of Israeli torment and violence? Where is the Vanderbilt heir and former CIA staffer Anderson Cooper looking close to tears as he asks a Palestinian mother how it feels to see her children murdered by Israeli snipers and buried in rubble caused by Israeli bombs? When does Al Velshi cross into Gaza to interview a Hamas member who has seen his mother die from Israeli-imposed medicine blockades, his sister killed in Israeli bombardments? The US media puts up Israeli Defense Force soldiers who tell personal stories of loss at the hands of Palestinian “animals” but refuses to broadcast the other side of the lethal Israel-Palestine coin.

Whence the massive shock and surprise the bloody rebellion of some among a population of desperate and trapped people? You consign millions to a living Hell and wonder why all Hell breaks loose? Where in US war and entertainment media is the elementary observation that racist and material violence, torture, and oppression on the scale of what Israel has done to Gaza and Palestine more broadly since the 1948 Nakba[1] naturally produces violent hatred, a desperate urge to liberation, and a bloody thirst for revenge on the part of a segment of the Wretched of the Earth?

And now of course the US client state Israel has responded to the Hamas attacks by intensifying the Hell caught by the Gaza masses. Tel Aviv has imposed a state of siege on the already blockaded Gaza Strip. As The Irish Times reports:

“Israel’s decision to cut off food, water and electricity to the blockaded Gaza Strip is against international law, the European Union’s chief diplomat has said, after foreign ministers met to discuss a response to the spiraling conflict with militant group Hamas. ‘Israel has the right to defend itself, but it has to be done accordingly with international law,’ Josep Borrell told media. ‘Some of the actions… cutting water, cutting electricity, cutting food to a mass of civilian people, are not in accordance with international law.’ His comments came a day after Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, announced a ‘complete siege’ of the narrow strip of land that is home to two million people, saying that ‘no electricity, no food, no water, no gas’ would be allowed to reach Gaza. Mr Borrell described the humanitarian situation as ‘dire’, as 150,000 Palestinians are now internally displaced, while intense Israeli air strikes caused a rising death toll.”

Where in US war and entertainment media is the proper denunciation of this clear human rights crime? And where CNN and Woke Imperialist MSNBC’s shock and horror at the language of Israel’s genocidal fascist prime minister, the corrupt authoritarian Benjamin Netanyahu, who has vowed to reduce Gaza to rubble in a display of “mighty vengeance” that will be remembered “through the ages”?

Where is CNN and MSNBC’s shock and horror over Israel warning the people of Gaza to “flee” when Israel has trapped them with nowhere to go and has even bombed the one crossing out of the open-air prison to Egypt? By the time this essay appears, my guess is that Israel will have already doubled Hamas’s kill count and will be well on its way to killing at least ten times more Palestinian civilians than the number of Israelis butchered by Hamas.

The retired US general who went on MSNBC to rave about the IDF’s coming attack on the oppressed Gazan masses used his time on the “left” (LOL) network to tell Iran to “restrain your creature Hezbollah,” It is unthinkable that the network would bring on someone to tell Washington to “restrain your creature Israel” from killing tens if not hundreds of thousands of Gazans!

I saw no shock on the face of CNN and MSNBC hosts when they reported that the White House had explicitly “NOT URGED RESTRAINT” on Israel when Biden spoke to Netanyahu on the phone after the attack.

One darkly amusing thing I heard on cable news was the claim that an Israel ground incursion into Gaza would be “unprecedented.” Really? As professor Anthony Zenku has noted: “In July 2014, Israel’s military invaded Gaza and killed 1,881 people, including hundreds of children. US politicians and mainstream media didn’t call it terrorism, the attack wasn’t labeled as ‘unprecedented,’ and the US and its allies didn’t demand that Israel be held accountable.” Prior to that, Israel invaded Gaza, killing many thousands, on January 3, 2009, and November 14, 2012.

Also missing on “liberal” US cable news is of course the basic historical fact that Israel has carried out its torture of the people of Gaza and Palestine with the support of the United States, which provides Tel Aviv billions of dollars’ worth of military aid every year. As the Arab Center reported six weeks ago:

“If there is one thing that characterizes American-Israeli relations more than any other it is US military aid to Israel, which currently amounts to nearly $4 billion dollars a year. Few things in Washington have seemed more guaranteed than this US aid, as well as congressional approval for it. This support has been so sacrosanct that any critical conversation around it has long been considered taboo…US Military aid to Israel, or more precisely US military financing for Israel, functions through the United States’ Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. Israel is the single largest recipient of US military financing through this program, at $3.8 billion a year. Egypt comes in second at $1.3 billion. Together they make up the majority of the nearly $10 billion annually allotted for this purpose. Egypt’s military financing itself was a product of negotiations to bring the country under American influence as part of the Camp David Accords in the late 1970s. The peace accords, sealed with financing for the Egyptian military and economy, brought an end to hostilities and recognition of Israel by Egypt. In other words, the majority of the FMF program serves Israeli interests.”

US sponsorship and funding of Judeo-fascist Israel, a hyper-militarized ethno-religious state based on the violent theft of Palestinian land and the brutal oppression of the Palestinian people, goes back many decades. The US is a critical force behind the misery of Gaza, where recent brazen Israeli provocations including the opening of a cherished Muslim mosque to Jewish prayer have made a bloody conflict seem inevitable in recent months.

Now that Hamas has struck, inflicting what is being called “Israel’s 9/11,” the cable talking heads don’t flinch as the imperial hawk Joe Biden announces that Washington gives “rock solid and unwavering support” to Israel. Biden’s statement amounts to giving the far-right genocidal fascist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check as he acts on his pledge to respond with “mighty vengeance” and tells Gazans to “flee” from an Israel-made penal colony they can’t escape – a place where every day is 9/11. Indeed, the US is sending advanced weaponry to help Israel kill Gazans en masse and positioning a naval war flotilla to warn off any regional forces (above all Hezbollah and Iran) who might be moved to try to protect the people of Gaza from horrendous assault.

The mainstream media treats it as a normalized and apparently approved fact that Israel is going to kill untold thousands of Palestinians in response to a Hamas attack for which little if any real historical context is permitted. The Black misleader and imperialist US House Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) advanced his party’s sickening line by going on MSNBC four days ago to say that “right now Israel has to do what it’s got to do.” The MSNBC host asked, “so level the place?,” meaning Gaza, and Meeks didn’t flinch.

Other Democratic Congresspersons went on MSNBNC to say that “We’ve got to give Israel room” to “act decisively here” – that is to generate mountains of rubble and Palestinian corpses.

The conversation about Israel’s role in the Hamas attack on CNN and MSNBC has turned on Israeli intelligence failures; little or nothing is said about Israel’s savage oppression and torture of Gaza.

There, to bs sure, some concerns expressed by a US cable news talking head or two (e.g. Lawrence O’Donnell) about the possibility that Israel could “overreact” and thereby hurt US interests in the Middle East and around. The death of Palestinians is incidental to that strategic concern.

And so it goes with US war and entertainment media, where images of death and incitements to massive imperial assault appear between a regular parade of infantile drug, car, insurance, and financial service commercials. It’s called Manufacturing Consent.

Endnote

+1. The Nakba, a critical piece of history that imperialist CNN and MSNBC won’t tell viewers about, “means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic…[it] refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba,” the United Nations explains, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. However, the conflict between Arabs and Jews intensified in the 1930s with the increase of Jewish immigration, driven by persecution in Europe, and with the Zionist movement aiming to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.” Further:

“Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee. The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, with the end of the British Mandate and the departure of British forces, the declaration of independence of the State of Israel and the entry of neighboring Arab armies. The newly established Israeli forces launched a major offensive. The result of the war was the permanent displacement of more than half of the Palestinian population… 75 years later, despite countless UN resolutions, the rights of the Palestinians continue to be denied. According to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) more than 5 million Palestine refugees are scattered throughout the Middle East.   Today, Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and displaced by Israeli settlements, evictions, land confiscation and home demolitions.”

Home to masses of Palestinians fleeing Israeli occupation, Gaza was seized by Israel from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War. Over the last 56 years Israel has turned it into an appalling monument to human cruelty under different nominal authorities, including civilian Palestinian servitude, the Palestinian National Authority, and (since 2007) Hamas, whose rise to “power” elicited Israel’s criminal blockade.

“In the wake of the horrors of the Vietnam War and the unconscionable lies used to justify it,” the renowned physician and social critic Gabor Mate writes, “I…had to arrive…at the heartrending realization that the dream that had been a balm to my soul, that of a triumphant Jewish national rebirth in my people’s ancestral biblical home, had been achieved by imposing a nightmare on the Palestinian inhabitants of the land, a nightmare that continues to this day. When the truth struck home, I was once again astonished that my imagined universe could have been such a distorted version of the real one. Visiting the West Bank and Gaza, I wept every day for two weeks.”

The post Manufacturing Consent: The Western War Media’s Selective Outrage and Imperial Amnesia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Paul Street.

Photograph Source: shizhao – CC BY-SA 2.0

The United States suffered from a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in the 00s. This has come to be known as the “China Shock,” since it was associated with a flood of imports, especially from China, and a rapid rise in the U.S. trade deficit.

In the decade from December of 1999 to December of 2009, the economy lost more than 5.8 million manufacturing jobs, or more than one in three of the manufacturing jobs at the start of the decade. The vast majority of this job loss took place before the start of the Great Recession in December of 2007.

This sort of job loss was not typical for the manufacturing sector. While it lost jobs in the 1990s also, the drop was just 601,000, a bit more than one tenth as much as in the next decade. Since 2009, the manufacturing sector has actually been adding jobs, so the plunge in jobs in the manufacturing sector in the first decade of this century really was an anomaly.

The loss of manufacturing jobs, which had been more highly unionized and better paying than most jobs in the private sector, also had a devastating impact on many cities and towns across the industrial Midwest. When the manufacturing jobs left town, so did much of the tax revenue and purchasing power.

A recent piece in the Guardian implied that the job loss associated with a green transition could provide a comparable hit to the labor market. This is not true.

The number of jobs plausibly at stake in a green transition is almost certainly less than one-tenth as large as was the case with the China shock. The basis for the Guardian piece is a recent NBER paper by Mark Curtis, Layla Kane, and Jisung Park, that looked at what happened to workers who transitioned out of jobs in fossil fuels or related industries. The paper found that a relatively small share of these workers found jobs in green sectors of the economy. It also found that a large share of these workers ending up taking jobs in occupations that paid considerably less than the jobs they lost.

While this is not a good picture, it is important to get a sense of the number of workers involved. The paper analyzed just over 1.7 million transitions from jobs in fossil fuels and related industries, over the 21 years from 2002-2022.[1] By comparison, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey indicate that there were more than 44 million instances where workers left or were fired from manufacturing jobs, in the nine years from 2001 through 2009. (The Survey starts in December of 2000.)[2]

These figures are not entirely comparable, since presumably people who retired or dropped out of the labor force were not counted as making transitions in the Curtis, Kane, and Park piece.  Also, some of the people in the JOLTS data likely appear multiple times from the same job. For example, if a worker was laid off more than once from a job, they could count two or more times in the JOLTS data, whereas they would not be counted as making a transition unless they found a new job with another employer.

While recognizing these inconsistences, it still likely the case that the number of people leaving manufacturing jobs in the nine years from 2001 to 2009 was close to 20 times as large as the number of people transitioning out of fossil fuels and related industries in the 21 years from 2002 to 2022. Adjusting for the differences in the number of years, the job loss in manufacturing is close to forty times as much on an annual basis as the transitions associated with the shift to a green economy.

The job loss associated with the conversion to a green economy should not be trivialized. For many workers and their families, the loss of a good-paying job in the oil or gas industry can be traumatic. In many cases they will never find a job that pays a comparable wage. But it is a mistake to imply that the number of jobs at risk is comparable to the number of manufacturing jobs lost to trade in the first decade of the century.

It would be great if government support can facilitate the transitions for the affected workers, but the downside risk here is nowhere near as large as what we saw due to the opening of trade in manufacturing goods in the 00s. It would be unfortunate if the fossil fuel industry used this risk as an excuse to slow the transition to a green economy.

Notes.

[1] This number was obtained by using the percentage of transitions from each sector in tables 2a and 2b.

[2] Job turnover is much less than net job loss because new workers typically fill jobs that other workers left, and job creation in factories that are growing offsets job loss in factories with declining employment.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.  

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

• President Biden touts manufacturing and clean energy in swing through New Mexico.
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• SF safe drug use sites lose support among Supervisors.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – August 9, 2023 President Biden touts manufacturing and clean energy in swing through New Mexico. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• President Biden touts manufacturing and clean energy in swing through New Mexico.
• Wildfires rage on Hawaiian islands of Maui and Big Island.
• 90-year-old Senator Feinstein falls in her home, briefly hospitalized.
• White House voices concern for health of Niger President ousted in coup.
• Anti-nuclear activists commemorate Nagasaki bombing anniversary.
• SF safe drug use sites lose support among Supervisors.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – August 9, 2023 President Biden touts manufacturing and clean energy in swing through New Mexico. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

• President Biden touts manufacturing and clean energy in swing through New Mexico.
• Wildfires rage on Hawaiian islands of Maui and Big Island.
• 90-year-old Senator Feinstein falls in her home, briefly hospitalized.
• White House voices concern for health of Niger President ousted in coup.
• Anti-nuclear activists commemorate Nagasaki bombing anniversary.
• SF safe drug use sites lose support among Supervisors.

The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – August 9, 2023 President Biden touts manufacturing and clean energy in swing through New Mexico. appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Photograph Source: Steve Jurvetson – CC BY 2.0

The first decade of this century was pretty awful for manufacturing workers. In December of 1999 we had 17.3 million manufacturing jobs. This number had fallen to 11.5 million by December of 2009. This amounted to a loss of 5.8 million jobs, or one-third of all the manufacturing jobs that had existed at the start of the decade. That looks like a pretty big deal.

It’s also worth pointing out that most of these jobs were lost before the onset of the Great Recession. We had lost almost 4 million jobs by December of 2007, the official start date of the Great Recession. The obvious culprit here is the explosion in U.S. trade deficit that we saw in this decade. If we’re buying more goods from other countries, in general, that means we are producing fewer goods here.

It’s also worth noting that even the manufacturing job loss that resulted from Great Recession may have a substantial trade component. Manufacturing is always highly cyclical. We lose manufacturing jobs in a downturn, but get them back when the economy recovers. That didn’t happen with the recovery from the Great Recession.

This matters because manufacturing was traditionally a heavily unionized sector. Due to its high unionization rate, manufacturing jobs paid a wage premium over jobs in other sectors. This was especially important for workers (primarily male workers) without college degrees. Manufacturing was an important source of high-wage jobs for workers with less education.

The lost jobs in this period were disproportionately unionized jobs. In 2022, the unionization rate in manufacturing was just 7.8 percent, only slightly higher than the 6.0 percent rate for the private sector as a whole.

Anyhow, that’s the story from the standpoint of someone who thinks our trade policies have done real harm to a large group of workers. It is possible to paint a different picture.

Suppose we look at manufacturing employment as a share of total employment. Here’s that picture.

It doesn’t look like anything special is going on in the first decade of this century. The manufacturing share of employment had been dropping for decades. The 00s don’t look very different from 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. What is there to complain about?

This is the graph that proponents of U.S. trade policy like to tout. But there is another graph. This one just shows manufacturing employment since 1970.

While there are cyclical ups and downs in the prior three decades, there is only a modest downward trend over this period. That changes in a big way when we get to the 2000s. You can’t look at this graph (or at least I can’t) and say that the 00s were just more of the same.

This was the period where we saw a massive loss of manufacturing jobs in places like Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The economy looked very different in these states at the end of the decade than it did at the start of the decade.

I will make one other point here. No one should say that the issue here was “globalization.” There are an infinite number of ways that we can increase the integration of the U.S. economy with the rest of the world. For example, we could reduce our patent and copyright protections so that U.S. technology, especially in areas like health care and climate, can be more easily shared with the rest of the world.

We can also focus our trade deals on standardizing licensing requirements for professional services, so that foreign doctors, dentists, and other professionals from the rest of the world can more easily practice in the United States. This would offer the textbook “gains from trade,” but the losers would be workers in highly paid professions and the rest of us would be gainers.

But we chose not to go this route with our trade deals. Trade deals were focused on making it as easy as possible to import manufactured goods, putting our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low paid workers in China, Mexico, and elsewhere.

This had the predicted and actual effect of costing millions of manufacturing jobs and sharply reducing the pay in the ones that remain. But this was not a story of “globalization.” It was a story of crafting trade deals in a world where doctors and other professionals have much more political power than manufacturing workers.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Dean Baker.

The plant workers in Erie, two hours north of Pittsburgh, manufacture locomotives for Wabtec Corporation. Locomotives are the engine of the train and generally run on diesel fuel. 

Manufacturing workers have been on strike since June 22 and are represented by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America union, or UE. Initial conversations to renegotiate working contracts began in April. Scott Slawson is the president of the local 506 UE chapter in Erie and said there are currently 1,400 workers on strike.

“The members are dug in for the long haul,” Slawson said. “This is a passionate fight for them and they’re willing to go the distance if required.” 

He said his union and train operator unions are working together to push for better environmental standards and greener technology in the industry. 

Trains aren’t massive polluters, but the industry is trying to reduce emissions. The transportation industry is responsible for the highest amount of greenhouse gas emission of all industries in the country, with rail being responsible for two percent of the sector’s emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Compared to other options, both freight and passenger rail lines emit fewer pollutants than automobiles or planes. 

Still, trains are known to release air pollutants in the communities they operate in. For example, diesel emissions from locomotives are responsible for 70 percent of cancer risk in California and the rail industry releases 640 tons of air pollutants every year in that state alone. This reality recently pushed California regulators to create the nation’s first emissions regulations for trains.

To prevent pollution, train companies would purchase and use emissions-reducing locomotives, commonly referred to as Tier 4 locomotives, from manufacturers like Wabtec. 

These machines decrease emissions by an estimated 70 percent more than their counterparts, according to industry projections. Top rail companies Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific have made pledges to reduce their emissions (30 percent by 2030 and net zero by 2050, respectively) and adopt some of these greener locomotives. 

The industry is moving slowly to make this change, according to a report from the investigative labor outlet Workday Magazine and the progressive public policy organization American Prospect. The Environmental Protection Agency told Workday that, as of 2020, 74 percent of all of the locomotives operated by major rail companies are Tier 2 or lower, with almost all smaller rail companies operating outdated, polluting technology.

Read Next

Railroaded

John McCracken

Slawson wants to speed up this industry shift and said workers are using their voices to get it done. A report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that manufacturing green, Tier 4 locomotives at the Erie plant would create between 2,600 and 4,300 estimated new jobs, and additional several thousand in the region. 

“It’s not just about building the locomotive; it’s about requiring the rail industry as a whole to make this switch,” Slawson said. “Even though rail is one of the least polluting things out there, there still has to be a push to adopt the newest technologies.”

Organized workplaces and strikes are on the rise across the country. Industries across the nation are now dealing with the realities of what the transition away from fossil fuel dependency logistically looks like. The UE has said its industry is deeply tied to fossil fuel usage to power the cars they create and they want to break ties with the polluting past. 

“The company is not willing to make commitments towards assisting us in this venture and they’re not willing to make commitments to the workforce to allow us to do this,” Slawson said, “and that’s a problematic piece of this.”

In a statement to Grist, a Wabtec spokesperson said the company is disappointed the union has engaged in a strike and that “no one benefits from a walkout.”

“The company is a leader with a proven track record in developing environmentally zero or low-emission locomotives for the rail industry,” Tim Bader, Wabtec spokesperson said.

In addition to the Tier 4 locomotives, Wabtec also manufactures a green technology locomotive that is 100 percent battery-powered, known as a FLXdrive. Bader said Erie engineers, who are not striking, do significant design work for these locomotives, but the manufacturing is done on a “case-by-case basis factoring in plant capacity, location, cost competitiveness, and schedule.” 

Bader said most of the Tier 4 manufacturing is being done in Fort Worth, Texas.

Past labor battles over a green transition have been rooted in anxiety that as industries try and pivot away from fossil fuel use or polluting machinery, workers would be left in the lurch. This has played out before when offshore wind came to Texas and oil workers worried the transition would leave them behind. 

But, this doesn’t mean that workers in these industries don’t support the change. In 2021, 4,500 California oil workers signed on in support of renewable energy projects like wind and solar. That same year, the nation’s largest coal mining union announced its support for clean energy projects, albeit with a few caveats. 

Liz Ratzloff said the ongoing strike in Pennsylvania is an example of how industries not directly operating in fossil fuels are moving towards greeners solutions and their workers are demanding they be active participants in any sort of transition. 

[Read next: The shared history of unions and the environmental justice movement]

Ratzloff is the co-executive director of the Labor Network for Sustainability, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on the intersection of labor organizing and climate action. She said as the nation pushes for more renewable technologies in transportation, it makes sense the frontline workers creating those products are organizing.

“These companies are using this point of transition as a way to undo a lot of labor standards that have been won,” Ratzloff said.

Right now, the auto industry is preparing for a round of labor negotiations. The United Auto Workers, or UAW, are advocating for a guaranteed transition for workers who currently manufacture gas-powered vehicles to the manufacturing of EVs. The union, which represents roughly 400,000 active workers across the country, has criticized the lower pay associated with EV production. UAW has also called out the Biden administration for not requiring union laborers and fair pay standards when giving federal subsidies to EV manufacturers.

She said the strike in Pennsylvania echoes similar pushes in auto manufacturing to decarbonize and manufacture electric vehicles, all with fair pay. Auto industry workers who manufacture electric vehicles are often paid less than their legacy coworkers who create gas-powered vehicles, she said. For example, a battery cell manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio currently has a starting wage of $16.50 an hour, with the chance to make up to $20 per hour after seven years. The plant, a General Motors project, replaced an assembly plant that closed in 2019 where GM union workers made double the current starting pay.

Ratzloff said the fight in Pennsylvania goes behind a push for a green transition and is ensuring that workers continue to have rights and a say in their jobs as the industry changes.

“[The Wabtec strike] shows the potential power of workers, communities, and the labor movement in addressing the climate crisis where companies are uninterested and unwilling, and the government is seemingly unable,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Pennsylvania locomotive manufacturing workers are striking for greener jobs on Jul 18, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by John McCracken.

Robert Howey has worked at the Hanwha Qcells solar manufacturing plant in Dalton, Georgia since it opened in 2019. But like many of the factory’s other employees, he used to work in a completely different industry: carpet manufacturing. The Qcells plant is located in what Georgians affectionately call ​“the carpet capital of the world.”

For two years, Howey was a creeler, knotting together rolls of yarn, so that as one roll finished getting fed into the weaving machine, the next could seamlessly follow.

Before Howey started at Qcells, ​“I had no idea about solar,” he said. He was hired to be a ​“tabber operator” on the production line, where his role would be to watch over machines that solder silicon wafers together, an early stage in the making of a solar module. But he didn’t understand how his particular task fit into the overall process, which made him uncertain about how to do his job well. ​“I was really nervous about it,” he told Canary Media.

Georgia Quick Start, a state-funded workforce training program, gave him the guidance he needed. In a week of on-ramping, trainers walked him through all the steps of making a solar panel, instruction that gave him the confidence to start his new career. Quick Start, he said, was ​“a lifesaver.”

What is Georgia Quick Start?

Clean energy manufacturing in the U.S. is poised for explosive growth; the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 will infuse more than $47 billion in the buildout of clean energy technologies and spur an estimated 900,000 manufacturing jobs over the next decade. But for that ramp-up to be successful, hundreds of thousands of workers like Howey will need training and reskilling.

Georgia Quick Start, which provides customized job training for companies free of charge, has a track record of tackling that challenge — and could serve as a model for other states preparing their workers for jobs in clean energy manufacturing.

Quick Start was founded in 1967 with the goal of attracting manufacturers from northern Rust Belt states to Georgia in order to diversify the state’s agriculture-based economy, according to Rodger Brown, executive director of Quick Start. The program was designed to prepare a workforce accustomed to seasonally dependent, sunup-to-sundown farm labor to industry’s regimented 8-hour workdays.

Over the following decades, Quick Start steadily grew to serve a broad range of industries. By the 1980s, for example, the program was training workers for automobile manufacturer Ford Motor Company and aircraft companies Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin), Boeing and Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation. In the 1990s, it scaled up to serve the booming carpeting industry around Dalton, Georgia.

Today, Quick Start continues to train workers for jobs in these industries as well as for ones in the manufacturing of food, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, vinyl flooring — and, increasingly, clean energy technologies such as EVs, solar panels and batteries.

A division of the state’s technical college system, Quick Start has achieved national recognition for its effectiveness. A panel of experts surveyed by Area Development Magazine has named it the top state workforce development program in the country for nine years running.

Since its founding, the program has helped prepare more than 1.8 million Georgians for new jobs, according to Brown. Now, it’s applying much of that accumulated know-how to training workers entering the clean energy manufacturing workforce. Clean energy companies and their suppliers currently make up the majority of Quick Start’s clients, Brown said. And he expects that trend to continue, with companies bringing billions of dollars to the state and growing fast:

• Rivian is investing $5 billion in an EV plant in east Georgia with plans to hire 7,500 workers. 
• Hyundai Motor Group is investing $5.5 billion in an EV and battery plant and has plans to hire 8,100 employees.
• SK Battery America, which since 2019 has invested $2.6 billion in two Georgia manufacturing plants to provide lithium-ion batteries for EVs, including the Ford F-150 Lightning, has so far created 2,600 jobs and aims to add 400 more. 
• Qcells, the top supplier of U.S. solar panels, announced in January that it’s investing $2.5 billion to expand its operations and build its own solar panel supply chain — from ingots to modules — in Dalton and Cartersville, Georgia, creating 2,500 new jobs.

Cleantech companies are setting up shop in Georgia for many reasons — generous tax incentives and the fact that Georgia is a ​“right-to-work” state with legislation that weakens labor unions are certainly among them. But Quick Start is also a big part of the equation.

The program was a major factor for Qcells, said Lisa Nash, the company’s senior director of human resources. Quick Start developed training materials for the South Korean manufacturer’s first U.S. plant in Dalton, the one Howey was hired to work in, which meant ​“we didn’t have to invest the thousands of hours of making classroom and video training that was necessary to get this factory started,” Nash said. That was ​“a game-changer for us.”

Steven Jahng, director of external affairs of South Korea–based SK Battery America, echoed those sentiments in Site Selection​’s 2023 Workforce Guide: ​“The key incentive for SK Battery is the Georgia Quick Start program. They know exactly how to train the average person off the street.”

Retaining new workers

Like most advanced manufacturing facilities, factories that produce clean energy technologies are filled with powerful, highly automated machines and robots. Even a single wrong move, such as tripping a sensor that starts a machine whirring when it should stay off, could be dangerous.

In its weeklong Qcells training course and subsequent follow-up sessions, Quick Start teaches new hires how to stay safe, including requirements from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. That’s hugely important, said David Uribe, who started working as a Qcells equipment technician in February.

New employees could be straight out of high school or coming from service roles at McDonald’s or Walmart, said Uribe, who has been a mechanic for decades. ​“It’s a big difference working with machines that could potentially kill you.”

By acclimating people to this unfamiliar environment, Quick Start training actually helps retain new workers, said Howey, the former tabber operator who is now a training coordinator at Qcells. He estimates that he was seeing about four out of 10 newly hired Qcells employees who didn’t receive Quick Start guidance dropping out ​“because they were overwhelmed.”

But with Quick Start, only one or two out of 10 new hires quit — ​“if that,” Howey said.

A recipe for success

One reason Quick Start is so effective is because it tailors trainings to the needs of each company it works with, said Brown, the program’s executive director. To begin, it closely studies every detail of a company’s manufacturing process.

For example, to develop training for SK Battery, a team of instructors flew to South Korea in 2019 to observe the company’s facilities firsthand. ​“We took photographs and video, and took lots of notes and asked lots of questions,” Brown said. ​“It’s very rare to be allowed that kind of access.”

Based on that deep dive, Quick Start, which has 75 full-time staff members, designed a training program for the company’s U.S. operations within months. As soon as SK Battery had recruited employees, Quick Start was able to begin training them, covering core modules on safety and SK Battery’s process, as well as providing job-specific training. 

Quick Start’s trainees are able to gain direct, hands-on experience before they even step onto the factory floor. In 2019, the program opened a 50,000-square-foot facility in Savannah so that trainees can practice using advanced-manufacturing equipment, including automated robotics, sensors and programmable logic controllers, which are computer systems for industrial processes. 

As it trains clean-energy workers on its equipment, Quick Start has been able to draw from its decades of experience with other industries, Brown said.

For example, part of the lithium-ion battery production process involves slurries of graphite, cobalt, nickel and other metals, which are mixed in enormous vessels that are similar to those used in food manufacturing to mix milk, salt and sugar. Workers monitor and troubleshoot the vats in the same way, he said.

It’s not all technical training, though, Brown noted. Quick Start also develops trainees’ soft skills, offering programs in leadership training, data-driven process improvement methods (such as Six Sigma), and with Korean companies such as SK Battery and EV manufacturers Hyundai and Kia, ​“cross-cultural training, like different work and communication styles.”

Another factor in Quick Start’s success, according to Brown, is that it’s wholly state-funded. 

Federal dollars ​“come with a lot of reporting and strings and complexity,” he noted. Quick Start, by contrast, can adapt quickly to train workers however needed, he said.

“If you’re creating 1,000 jobs, we will train them until you have 1,000 people qualified and working in your plant — whether that means we only train a couple of hours and they go into the facility, or we do 60 hours,” Brown said. ​“As long as [a company is] creating net new jobs, we will be their training partner.”

Federal funding does have its advantages, of course: It sends ​“a lot of dollars to programs that are absolutely necessary,” said Cynthia Finley, vice president of workforce strategy and innovation at the Interstate Renewable Energy Council, which has developed trainings for a multitude of clean-energy jobs, including in solar and energy efficiency.

Federal funding opportunities can funnel much-needed money to underserved communities or groups, such as women or veterans. And because it requires quantitative benchmarks of success, Finley said, ​“You know you’re moving the needle.”

What’s clear is that Quick Start is able to grow rapidly to meet the demands of the clean energy boom. The program, which currently operates five training centers, is expanding the one for advanced manufacturing and is also designing three new facilities for clean energy manufacturers and suppliers.

One of those training centers will be a $70 million facility for Hyundai in Bryan County, where the EV manufacturer has committed to the single-largest economic development project in Georgia’s history. Hyundai broke ground on its new plant last October and is slated to open in January 2025, starting with a few hundred workers and, over the next several years, growing to more than 8,000.

Once its new center is ready, Quick Start plans to train about 300 to 400 new Hyundai hires a week, Brown said. When companies need to go fast, ​“we go fast.”

This story is part of Canary’s special series “Made in the USA: Ramping up clean energy manufacturing.” Read more.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This Georgia program is training a huge cleantech manufacturing workforce on Jul 3, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Alison F. Takemura, Canary Media.

Worse yet, the politicians themselves begin to change. They become more distanced from the supporters who first put them in power. They aspire for a higher office and assert their "independence" by bucking their base and playing to the center. They make amends with key commercial interests in their district. They become apologists for "the way things work," and they criticize those wanting bolder action as naive and unduly impatient.

But does this have to be the case?

In recent years, social movements have taken increasing interest in engaging the electoral system and electing champions to office. They have done so with the recognition that we need inside players to amplify and respond to pressure generated by activists on the outside. And yet, we know that many inside players—even ones who initially seem sympathetic—end up getting co-opted and becoming part of the system.

Facing this reality, movements do not need to give up on the prospect of an inside-outside strategy. But they do need to look carefully at a central problem: How do we keep those we send into the den of Beltway politics from selling out? What factors allow for an exceptional minority to remain true to their democratic base?

The goal for progressive groups seeking to intervene in electoral politics has been to elevate "movement candidates" or "movement politicians"—people who can operate differently than the typical politicians who are prone to careerism and driven by oversized egos. And yet, the idea of what constitutes a movement candidate can be amorphous.

In giving the concept more clarity, it is important to emphasize that a movement candidate is not just someone who speaks up in support of causes of social and economic justice, or whose innate integrity makes them stay true to their values. Nor is it simply a matter of an individual's background, with the politician coming out of a marginalized community. Fundamentally, what defines someone as a movement politician is more structural. Movement politicians do not act alone. Rather, they rely on grassroots organizations as an institutional base of strength and support to help them reject the ingrained norms and culture of mainstream politics. They stay accountable not just because they are believers, but because movements offer them an invaluable foundation from which to operate.

In order to effectively combat the corrupting pressures of mainstream political culture, it is first necessary to name these forces—to account for why so few are able to navigate the norms of Washington politics without being pulled into treacherous currents. With a detailed concept of the institutional pressures at work clearly in mind, we can then understand how movements can help politicians resist.

How Washington Co-opts

For his 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, renowned linguist and political thinker Noam Chomsky teamed up with University of Pennsylvania professor Edward Herman to analyze the culture and institutional structures of mainstream media in the United States that dominated during the Cold War. Chomsky and Herman sought to determine how—in the absence of formal systems of state censorship—the mass media could nevertheless be relied upon to serve the interest of dominant elites, making sure that viewpoints that were truly critical of corporate capitalism and Washington militarism would remain ostracized.

Sketching what they called the "propaganda model," Chomsky and Herman argued that five "filters" were in place through which "money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public." First, the media was owned by the rich, with mergers consolidating firms into ever fewer hands. Second, publications relied on ad revenues as a primary source of income, making them dependent on corporate advertisers for their sustenance and profit. Third, the media accepted a culture of "expertise" which deferred to official sources from business and government. Fourth, reporters who stepped out of line would be disciplined by flak from those in power. And finally, the ideology of anti-Communism could be used to push certain viewpoints off-limits for mainstream discussion.

With these filters in place, there was no need for oligarchs or government officials to officially censor the press. Instead, the filters created a media culture that would do this for them. In spite of occasional exposés that revealed corporate or political misbehavior, expressions of dissent from the tenets of the "free enterprise" system or the assumptions of Cold War foreign policy could be kept to a minimum. In Chomsky and Herman's words, the filters worked effectively to "fix the premises of discourse and interpretation."

For each of the five filters that Chomsky and Herman identify in their analysis of the mass media, an analog can be found in the ways mainstream political culture bolsters status quo norms and places constraints on politicians seeking change. These norms can be found throughout U.S. politics, including at the state and local levels. But they are most pronounced in Washington, D.C.

So what, then, are the filters in mainstream politics that weed out dissenters?

1. Party structures

A first filter in Washington political culture is the formal structure of the two-party system. Although U.S. political parties are weak compared with many European ones, the Democrats and Republicans still have carrots and sticks they can use to discipline their members. The parties control committee assignments in Congress, with senior members securing powerful chairmanships. Newly elected officials who aspire to greater influence quickly learn that deference to party leaders can result in valuable perks, while outspoken criticism brings impediments to career advancement.

An obsession with having "access" and being on good terms with powerful people does not affect only junior party members. It shapes the entire milieu of progressive advocacy in Washington, D.C. In a 2022 Twitter thread, Evan Sutton, a Democratic political operative and former trainer for the Obama-era New Organizing Institute, described how such preoccupation becomes toxic: "Access is a plague," he wrote. "During the Obama administration, I sometimes attended meetings organized by the White House Office of Public Engagement. The groups invited would almost never say boo, because in D.C. the most important thing is being invited to the meetings and the Christmas party."

The slights that come when an upstart politician refuses to defer can impose significant costs. The parties run big-money committees to oversee efforts to win seats in both the House and the Senate—bodies such as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC. These institutions have influence in determining which candidates will be recruited and backed in various districts, and whether they will be deemed worthy to receive millions of dollars of support for their campaigns.

In addition to determining priority races and giving their blessing to selected candidates, the parties' campaign committees help to determine who can get jobs working in politics—at the level of campaign managers, strategists, and media consultants. In 2018, shortly after veteran Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley was defeated by the insurgent campaign of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York, and after incumbent Mike Capuano similarly lost to Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, the DCCC implemented a new rule designed to send off such grassroots primary challenges. Specifically, it announced a ban on doing business with political consulting operations that took on incumbents—effectively freezing out some of the most mobilized forces at the party's base.

Ocasio-Cortez would later rail against the logic of the decision: "If you are the DCCC, and you're hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms," she said. "But instead, we banned them. So the DCCC banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing."

2. Campaign finance

The second filter that colors Washington culture is money, specifically the massive amounts that fuel U.S. campaigns and end up infecting the political system as a whole. Officials in both major parties havedescribed the current structure of American democracy as "a system of legalized bribery and legalized extortion." The costs of contesting for elected positions in the United States is astronomical. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the combined total of all spending in House and Senate campaigns came to more than $4 billion in 2016—almost double the inflation-adjusted total from 2000. Tasked with raising thousands per day throughout the length of their terms, sitting representatives spend lengthy sessions "dialing for dollars" from wealthy donors at party-sponsored call centers just blocks from Congress.

In a 2016 interview with 60 Minutes, then-Rep. Steve Israel explained that these demands sharply escalated after the Supreme Court's Citizens Uniteddecision opened the floodgates for spending in elections: In the early 2000s, "I'd have to put in about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, at most, two hours a day into fundraising," he said. "And that's the way it went until 2010, when Citizens United was enacted. At that point, everything changed. And I had to increase that to two, three, sometimes four hours a day[.]"

Elected officials themselves widely dislike such fundraising burdens, and beleaguered staff members often have to cajole their lawmakers to stick to scheduled "call time." Nevertheless, if politicians wish to rise through the ranks of their party, they must excel at the task. In addition to raising money for their own campaigns, elected officials are expected to contribute to organs such as the DCCC or its Republican equivalent—payments known as "party dues."

A 2017 report by the reform group Issue One explained, "although they do not often admit it publicly, party leadership, in private, explicitly ties congressional committee assignments to members' dues." The report quoted Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, who stated: "They told us right off the bat as soon as we get here, 'These committees all have prices and don't pick an expensive one if you can't make the payments.'"

Trey Radel, a former Republican representative from Florida, described the none-too-subtle mechanisms through which expectations are conveyed: "Every time you walk into a [National Republican Congressional Committee] meeting, a giant goddamn tally sheet is on prominent display that lists your name and how much you've given—or haven't," he writes. "It's a huge wall of shame. The big players, people in leadership positions and chairs of powerful committees, always dominate the board, raising millions[.]"

To secure these funds, lawmakers lean on not only wealthy individuals but also on businesses. As the Issue One report further argued, "chairs are often reliant on money from lobbyists and special interests, frequently pressuring and cajoling those working in the industries they regulate to donate generously to their campaigns." The impact, as former Democratic Rep. Jim Jones of Oklahoma described it, is that "Big money doesn't come in casually. It wants to have its point of view prevail, whether it's to block legislation or to promote legislation."

In principle, politicians are not personally enriched by campaign contributions: the money goes to fund their campaigns, and it is not bribery in the sense that the cash is pocketed by an overtly corrupt official. Yet financial largesse both enhances their job security by allowing them to get reelected, and it heightens their power and standing among their peers. Moreover, should they ever decide to "retire" from public service, cozy relationships with lobbyists mean that plush boardroom appointments and handsome consulting contracts await them through Washington's infamous "revolving door."

In the end, money permeates nearly every aspect of Beltway culture and profoundly shapes the strategic vision of the major parties, including how they relate to their bases of support. "I go to the Democratic caucuses every week," Sen. Bernie Sandersexplained in a 2013 interview, "and every week there is a report about fund-raising … In the six years I've been going to those meetings, I have never heard five minutes of discussion about organizing."

3. Experts, consultants, and staffers

Mainstream political culture takes cues from a relatively small network of think tanks, legislative advisers, and technocrats. This class of policy experts, staffers, and political consultants create a third filter that enforces politics as usual and screens out wayward viewpoints. They make up the "adults in the room" whose sensibilities help set the " Overton Window," or the range of policy positions that are regarded as realistic for elected officials to pursue.

Not surprisingly, within these ranks, representatives of poor and working-class people tend to be few and far between, as are critics of the military-industrial complex. Meanwhile, business leaders and economists directly or indirectly backed by corporations are considered credible voices on a wide range of public affairs, and the selection of Wall Street veterans for government posts related to the economy is regarded as reassuring to markets. Foreign policy positions are passed between neocons and reliable centrists who can be counted on to endorse American exceptionalism and support the spread of "free markets."

In December 2018, newly elected members of Congress were invited to a week-long training at the Harvard's Institute of Politics meant to ease their transition into Washington life. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted of the event: "Invited panelists offer insights to inform new Congressmembers‘ views as they prepare to legislate: # of Corporate CEOs we've listened to here: 4. # of Labor leaders: 0"

In a 2018 article in the Nation, journalist Joseph Hogan cited former U.S. representative and current Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who cautioned that constantly standing up to consensus opinion can be a wearying prospect: "You are surrounded 24-7 by colleagues and lobbyists who are constantly telling you how things work. You know they're wrong but after a while you halfway believe their BS."

Community organizing leader George Goehl echoed the sentiment: "[P]rogressives who get elected and go into the halls of power quickly realize that neoliberalism is the baseline, the dominant politic. Quickly, their radical imagination starts to fade," he explained. Elected officials "need to learn to be able to spot the way neoliberal assumptions and compromises can creep in," he argued. "Otherwise, we elect people with great intentions, good politics, who still get swept up by the machine."

Even with Democrats in power, neoliberal economic groupthink has prevailed at critical moments. In her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance, Sen. Elizabeth Warrenwrote of the Obama administration's failure to create any serious accountability for the financial sector in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis: "The president chose his team," she argued, "and when there was only so much time and so much money to go around, the president's team chose Wall Street."

In retrospect, Obama himself has been willing to acknowledge that the biases of prevailing wisdom in Washington limited the policy options his administration was willing to consider. "I think there was a residual willingness to accept the political constraints that we'd inherited from the post-Reagan era—that you had to be careful about being too bold on some of these issues," he stated in a 2020 interview with New York magazine. "And probably there was an embrace of market solutions to a whole host of problems that wasn't entirely justified."

Of course, many progressive groups—including ones that contributed to the unusually robust grassroots drive that put Obama into office—were telling the administration at the time that Wall Street's irresponsibility in creating the financial crash should be the occasion for a major break from past economic orthodoxy. But these people were not seen as the "serious" voices that the president needed to heed.

Elizabeth Warren relates that she was explicitly warned against disparaging those in power upon arriving in Washington. In April 2009, when she was serving on the congressional oversight panel monitoring the Treasury Department's economic rescue plan, Warren was taken to dinner by President Obama's chief economic adviser, Larry Summers. "Larry leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice…" she writes. "I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders."

4. Flak

The fourth filter in Chomsky and Herman's model, known as "flak," consists of the negative responses that a reporter or news organization would receive if they stepped out of line. Advertisers could pull their sponsorship. Access could be withdrawn. And irate administration officials could complain to a reporter's editors. All of these served to illustrate that it was less painful to follow the path of least resistance.

A similar type of flak can be directed at officials who place themselves at odds with the norms of mainstream political culture. While the first three filters can be subtle and preemptive, setting boundaries so as to stop wayward action from ever taking place, flak comes later and is less subtle. It is the retribution experienced by those who persist in spite of implicit warnings. It is losing a committee assignment, being denied campaign funding from the DCCC, or, as per Larry Summers, being expelled from the circles of "insiders" given influence over policy deliberations.

Evan Sutton notes that "The Biden White House has made no bones about its willingness to cut people off" and that having the "temerity to publicly challenge the president lands you on a permanent shitlist." He adds, "The Hill is no better. Pelosi's office and many others will burn your number for stepping out of line. Funders will cut you off if you're perceived to be crossing the president or the speaker." As a result, Sutton explained, "very few are willing to risk it."

Industry produces flak of its own. In describing the system as "legalized bribery and legalized extortion," Sen. Russ Feingold emphasized that the second part was just as relevant as the first: those who refuse to play along face a threat of something bad happening. Often, this takes the form of opposition groups funding primary challenges by rivals, or running well-resourced recalls or referendum campaigns that cripple efforts to pursue progressive policy.

In a 2013 interview, Bernie Sanders described situations in which fellow lawmakers would express sympathy for legislation he proposed, but were cowed by the promise of flak. "If there's a tough vote in the House or the Senate—for example, legislation to break up the large banks—people might come up and say, ‘Bernie, that's a pretty good idea, but I can't vote for that,'" he explained. "Why not? Because when you go home, what do you think is going to happen? Wall Street dumps a few million dollars into your opponent's campaign."

Nor can those who are challenged count on the support of their party. There have been numerousincidents where Democratic organs have opted not to endorse their own incumbents who are seen as too progressive. And although flak is not always decisive, the constant need to combat it can be a serious drain on time and energy—as well as a deterrent to others who are not willing to brave the same treatment.

5. Ideologically imposed limits to debate

A final filter identified by Chomsky and Herman pertains to how ideological labeling and scaremongering could be used to impose boundaries on public debate and mark certain positions as impermissible. Specifically, writing in the 1980s, they highlighted how the ideology of anti-communism was deployed. The fact that left-leaning policy aims—whether foreign or domestic—could be denounced as signs of creeping socialism "helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism," they argued.

Twenty years after the original publication of Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman revised their framework slightly to note how other ideologically laden charges—particularly those related to "anti-terrorism" and the "war on terror"—could be used to push dissenting opinions outside the bounds of acceptable debate.

In today's context, the filter of ideology might be applied to a diversity of issues—limiting what is acceptable in discussions of immigration, policing, and prisons, or a range of other topics. Examples would include the ways accusations of radicalism were used to force the resignation of "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones from the Obama administration. Or one could point to the concerted attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar, which sought to characterize her criticisms of Israeli policy and objections to AIPAC stances as antisemitic and beyond the pale.

While this filter can be interpreted in a more expansive way, the extent to which specifically anti-communist dogma and red-baiting tactics have lingered long after the Cold War is noteworthy. Among Republicans, the line of attack remains ever-pertinent. Just in the past few years Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has used red-baiting language to denounce everything from the Green New Deal (a " radical, socialist" policy) to student debt forgiveness ("student loan socialism") to statehood for the District of Columbia ("full-bore socialism") to pandemic social spending ("a Trojan Horse for permanent socialism"). In early February 2023, House Republicans made a point of passing a resolution stating that "Congress denounces socialism in all its forms, and opposes the implementation of socialist policies in the United States of America."

Perhaps more distressing is the number of Democrats who play into the attack—or fumble when responding to it. While the success of Bernie Sanders and the Squad in recent years has changed the political landscape, party leaders remain defensive and fearful. In 2017, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a point of stating, "We're capitalists, and that's just the way it is." And, for their part, 109 Democratic members of Congress voted with the Republicans in support of their February resolution.

How movements break the filters

Chomsky and Herman argued that the filters on the mass media rarely needed to be imposed in an overt manner. Over time, the biases they created became so embedded in the professional culture that practitioners internalized them. "The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news ‘objectively' and on the basis of professional news values," they wrote.

Likewise, within Washington politics, the cultural norms are pervasive enough that those who are primed to succeed are the ones who have habituated themselves in advance. They have accepted the way in which the game is played, and they are comfortable embarking on a quest to gain power within the confines of the existing system.

Meanwhile, those who try to retain their integrity by denouncing the system find themselves constantly repulsed. In November 2020, as she reached the end of her first term, Ocasio-Cortez had been remarkably successful by conventional standards, solidifying her support in her district, achieving widespread celebrity, and gaining a large platform from which to advance her views. Yet she stunned a New York Times interviewer by reporting that she regularly considered getting out, saying "I don't even know if I want to be in politics."

"Externally, there's been a ton of support," she explained, "but internally, it's been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive." She made clear that it was not just violent threats and demonization from the right that were disconcerting, but also the behavior of fellow Democrats: "It's the lack of support from your own party," she said. "It's your own party thinking you're the enemy."

When we wonder why once-hopeful political champions bow out, or why politicians elected to take on the system acculturate themselves to it over time, the combined power of the five filters provides a compelling explanation. Left on their own, individual elected officials have slim hope of standing up to the institutional forces arrayed against them. Although some exceptional individuals may be able to sustain themselves, most need significant help if they are to survive.

This is where movements come in. Having a base of grassroots institutions to back movement candidates gives them a grounding they can use to sidestep Washington norms, wage insurgent campaigns, and govern in a manner that shows accountability to their core constituencies rather than to wealthy elites. Instead of relying solely on personal values to remain principled, they make this challenge into a collective task. With regard to the five filters, movements provide tools for resistance, offering infrastructure, resources and conscious strategy for counteracting each of them in turn.

In terms of party structures, movements help politicians form effective factions and allow them to join organized attempts to create realignments in party composition and ideology. While groups including Justice Democrats work at such tasks in Washington, D.C., more developed structures exist at state and local levels. In some cities, central labor councils have significant influence in nominating or approving candidates for party leadership. In some instances, progressive caucuses have created unity and allowed for mutual support among elected officials who may be to the left of their party's local leadership. In others, bodies such as the Working Families Party or New York DSA's Socialists in Office committee have provided alternate quasi-party structures that can provide a home for lawmakers who may otherwise be marginalized.

When it comes to campaign finance, technologies of small donor fundraising have given grassroots campaigns the ability to compete with more conventionally funded candidates. (Bernie Sanders, for one, raised more than $231 million from 2.8 million donors in 2016.) Furthermore, the ground game and volunteer muscle of movement field operations—drives that knock thousands of doors to reach local voters—have sometimes given progressive candidates the edge over more lavishly endowed opponents who rely on the "air war" of political attack ads. While neither solution is perfect, movements offer candidates the option of trying to win by energizing the base, rather than triangulating toward the center.

To disrupt a culture of insider expertise, movements can both inoculate incoming officials and elevate alternate sources of policy know-how. Networks such as People's Action have invested in political education trainings for rank-and-file members and prospective candidates alike. Others, such as Movement School and re:power (formerly Wellstone Action), have invested in creating pipelines for campaign managers and legislative staffers rooted in movement values. Finally, community-based groups can organize progressive academics to craft alternative proposals for public policy.

When flak comes in, having a movement at your back can make the difference between robust defense and abandonment by your own party. And, ideologically, movements create a new sense of the possible. They work to move the Overton Window and bring ideas that might initially be considered verboten into acceptable public discussion: Same-sex marriage, millionaires' taxes, the Green New Deal, a $15 minimum wage, and student debt cancellation are just a few such ideas.

As bolder demands are mainstreamed, attempts to ostracize their advocates as radical extremists lose their potency—to the point where even politicians who were once fearful to be associated with a cause may suddenly " evolve" in their consciousness, as a wave of public officials did in 2013 after same-sex marriage was shown to be a winning issue. Movement politicians who share in a set of collective beliefs are less likely to back down from principled positions, because they have a clear sense that these stances are rooted in the values of their community.

A basic tenet of social psychology is that if someone is surrounded by others who accept the same set of norms and rules of behavior, that person will find it very difficult to avoid internalizing this dominant set of values. "Honestly, it is a shit show. It's scandalizing, every single day," Ocasio-Cortez has reported of her experience in Washington. "What is surprising to me is how it never stops being scandalizing. Some folks perhaps get used to it, or desensitized to the many different things that may be broken," she says. And yet she emphasizes the need to guard against such desensitization and resist deferring to the supposed "adults in the room" who have made their peace with the system. "Sometimes to be in a room with some of the most powerful people in the country and see the ways that they make decisions—sometimes they're just susceptible to groupthink, susceptible to self-delusion," she notes.

That this conventional groupthink prevails is no accident. It is a product of political economy and cultural influence, the forces that make up the five filters. Movements provide a structural counterbalance that makes resistance possible. The institutional support of grassroots organizations gives movement politicians a chance to avoid being absorbed into the system. And for those interested in social change, it is likely the best chance we have.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Paul Engler.

Clean energy manufacturing jobs will more than double by the end of the decade if countries worldwide live up to their climate and energy pledges, according to a report published Thursday by the International Energy Agency.

"The energy world is at the dawn of a new industrial age—the age of clean energy technology manufacturing—that is creating major new markets and millions of jobs but also raising new risks, prompting countries across the globe to devise industrial strategies to secure their place in the new global energy economy," the IEA report—entitledEnergy Technology Perspectives 2023—asserts.

The publication is a "comprehensive analysis of global manufacturing of clean energy technologies today—such as solar panels, wind turbines, EV batteries, electrolyzers for hydrogen, and heat pumps—and their supply chains around the world, as well as mapping out how they are likely to evolve as the clean energy transition advances in the years ahead."

According to the paper:

The global market for key mass-manufactured clean energy technologies will be worth around $650 billion a year by 2030—more than three times today's level—if countries worldwide fully implement their announced energy and climate pledges. The related clean energy manufacturing jobs would more than double from six million today to nearly 14 million by 2030—and further rapid industrial and employment growth is expected in the following decades as transitions progress.

The report cautions that "at the same time, the current supply chains of clean energy technologies present risks in the form of high geographic concentrations of resource mining and processing as well as technology manufacturing."

For example, the three largest producers of technologies like solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, electrolyzers, and heat pumps "account for at least 70% of manufacturing capacity for each technology—with China dominant in all of them."

"Meanwhile, a great deal of the mining for critical minerals is concentrated in a small number of countries," the analysis states. "The Democratic Republic of Congo produces over 70% of the world's cobalt, and just three countries—Australia, Chile, and China—account for more than 90% of global lithium production."

IEA executive director Fatih Birol said in a statement that the new global energy economy "has become a central pillar of economic strategy and every country needs to identify how it can benefit from the opportunities and navigate the challenges."

"We're talking about new clean energy technology markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars as well as millions of new jobs," Birol continued. "The encouraging news is the global project pipeline for clean energy technology manufacturing is large and growing. If everything announced as of today gets built, the investment flowing into manufacturing clean energy technologies would provide two-thirds of what is needed in a pathway to net-zero emissions."

"The current momentum is moving us closer to meeting our international energy and climate goals—and there is almost certainly more to come," he added.

"The encouraging news is the global project pipeline for clean energy technology manufacturing is large and growing."

Birol also stressed that "the world would benefit from more diversified clean technology supply chains."

"As we have seen with Europe's reliance on Russian gas, when you depend too much on one company, one country, or one trade route—you risk paying a heavy price if there is disruption," he noted, referring to Russia's ongoing war against Ukraine.

An analysis of U.S. federal data published earlier this month by the sustainable energy development nonprofit SUN DAY Campaign concluded that wind and solar alone could generate more electricity in the United States than nuclear and coal in 2023.

A separate report released this week by the Rhodium Group, a New York-based nonpartisan research firm, found that while U.S. carbon emissions rose for the second straight year in 2022, renewable energy surpassed coal as a power source in the United States for the first time in more than 60 years.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

This has led to widespread applause on the left for aspects of President Biden’s agenda that can be considered industrial policy, like the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the infrastructure package approved last year. While these bills have considerable merit, they miss the boat in reducing income inequality in important ways.

First, the idea that we had not been doing industrial policy before Biden, in the sense of favoring specific sectors, is wrong. We have been dishing out more than $50 billion a year to support biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health and other government agencies. If that isn’t supporting our pharmaceutical industry, what would be?

We also have a whole set of structures in place — most obviously Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but also many other financial institutions — as well as tax policies to support home ownership. We also support the (bloated) financial sector through tax policy, deposit insurance, and all but explicit too-big-to-fail guarantees.

Even the subsidies for the shift to clean energy in the IRA were not new. They hugely expanded and extended subsidies that had already been in place. This was a good policy from the standpoint of saving the planet, but it was not a sharp break from what we had previously been doing.

The government has always favored some industries, implicitly at the expense of others, so we are not doing something new if we declare “industrial policy.” But, there is an argument for making the subsidies explicit so that they can be debated.

For example, it might have been easier to move away from fossil fuels if we had to debate whether we would continue to subsidize the industry by not making it pay for the damage it was doing to the environment. If someone proposed subsidizing a new development by letting it dump its untreated sewage on neighboring properties, there would likely be less support than if the city let the development do the dumping without any explicit policy. So, there is an advantage to having subsidies be explicit, even if the idea of subsidizing specific industries is hardly new.

Biden’s Industrial Policy and Income Inequality

There are a variety of motives for the industrial policy measures Biden has pushed through. The climate ones in the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure bill are both obvious and important.

There is also the belief that these measures will hasten economic growth. There is a good case for this. Much research shows that infrastructure spending increases productivity and growth. There are certainly visible bottlenecks that can constrain the economy, which became clear with the supply chain problems during the pandemic.

There is also a national security issue. This can be overplayed. We don’t really need to worry about being cut off from supplies of key inputs from Canada, and probably not from Western Europe, in the event of a military conflict. On the other hand, being heavily dependent on semiconductors from Taiwan, in a context where a conflict with China is, unfortunately, a possibility, is a problem. For this reason, some reorientations towards domestic production make sense.

However, one of the main motivations for these measures is to reduce income inequality by increasing domestic manufacturing. This is not likely to be the outcome.

Manufacturing and Inequality

One of the great tragedies of the last four decades was the war on manufacturing, pursued by politicians of both parties, that centered on a policy of selective free trade. While we continued to protect doctors and other highly paid professionals from foreign (and domestic) competition, our trade policy was quite explicitly designed to put our manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world.

This competition had the predicted and actual effect of costing us millions of manufacturing jobs and putting downward pressure on the wages in the jobs that remained. Since manufacturing had historically been a source of relatively high-paying jobs for workers without college degrees, our trade policy had the effect of increasing wage inequality.

It also decimated many towns and cities across the country that had been heavily dependent on manufacturing. There is no shortage of places, especially in the industrial Midwest, where the major employer closed up shop and left a community without a viable economy.

It is easy to identify villains in this story – NAFTA, the high dollar policy pursued by Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and admitting China to the WTO all contributed in a big way to the loss of manufacturing jobs. They also placed downward pressure on wages in the jobs that remained, but that doesn’t mean that getting manufacturing jobs back will be a step toward reducing inequality.

The problem is that the wage premium in manufacturing has largely disappeared due in large part to U.S. trade policy. The graph below shows the average hourly earnings for production and non-supervisory workers in manufacturing and the private sector as a whole.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author’s calculations.

As can be seen, the average hourly wage in manufacturing used to be higher than the average wage in the private sector as a whole. In 1980, it was 4.1 percent higher. They crossed in 2006 and have continued to diverge in the years since. The average hourly wage for production and non-supervisory workers in manufacturing is now 8.9 percent less than the average for the private sector as a whole.

This is not a comprehensive measure of the wage premium since we would have to also consider benefits, which have historically been higher in manufacturing, and also specific worker characteristics, like age, education, and location, but this sort of change in relative wages almost certainly implies a large reduction in the manufacturing wage premium.[1]

A big part of the reduction in the manufacturing wage premium is the decline of unionization in manufacturing. In 1980, close to 20 percent of the manufacturing workforce was unionized. This had fallen to just 7.7 percent by 2021, only slightly higher than the private sector average of 6.1 percent.

Furthermore, while the Biden administration has been very supportive of unions, there is little reason to believe that the return of manufacturing jobs will mean a substantial increase in unionized manufacturing jobs. From the recession trough in 2010 to 2021, the manufacturing sector added back over 800,000 jobs. However, the number of union members in manufacturing actually dropped by 400,000 over this period.

While there will undoubtedly be some good-paying manufacturing jobs associated with the reshoring efforts in these bills, there is no reason to think they will have a major impact on income inequality. The impact of trade on manufacturing over the last four decades is not reversible. Losing millions of jobs in the sector was terrible from the standpoint of income inequality, but getting some of these jobs back will not be of much help.

Intellectual Property: Where the Real Money Is

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these bills is the fact that there is literally no discussion of who will own intellectual property being created through government spending in these areas. For some reason, there is virtually zero interest in policy circles in discussing the impact of intellectual property on inequality, even though it has almost certainly been a huge factor.

Just as Republicans don’t like to talk about climate change, Democratic policy types don’t like to talk about intellectual property. They are much more comfortable just making assertions like “inequality is due to technology,” rather than discussing how some people have been situated to get most of the gains from technology.

The idea that intellectual property derived from government-supported research can lead to inequality should not sound far-fetched. The Trump administration, through Operation Warp Speed, paid Moderna over $400 million to cover the cost of developing a Covid vaccine and its initial Phase 1 and 2 trials. It then paid over $450 million to pay for the larger Phase 3 trials, in effect fully covering Moderna’s cost for developing a vaccine and bringing it through the FDA’s approval process.

It was necessary for Moderna to do years of research so that it was in a position to quickly develop an mRNA vaccine, but even here the government played a very important role. Much of the funding for the discovery and development of mRNA technology came from the National Institutes of Health. Without its spending on the development of this technology, it is almost inconceivable that any private company would have been in a position to develop an mRNA vaccine against the coronavirus.

In spite of this massive contribution from the public sector, Moderna has complete control over its vaccine and can charge whatever price it wants. It is likely to end up with more than $20 billion in profit from sales of its coronavirus vaccine. According to Forbes, the vaccine had made at least five Moderna billionaires by the middle of 2021, with the company’s CEO, Stephane Bancel, leading the way with an increase in his wealth of $4.3 billion. In addition, there were undoubtedly many others at Moderna who made millions or tens of millions due to this government-supported research.

And, it is important to recognize that the money for the Moderna billionaires comes directly out of the pockets of everyone else. Its control of intellectual property associated with the vaccine allowed it to charge around $20 a shot (much more for boosters) for vaccines that would likely sell for less than $2 in a free market without intellectual property protections. Higher drug prices reduce the real wage of ordinary workers.

The wealth of Moderna’s nouveau riche also has the effect of pushing up housing prices for the rest of us. When the rich can buy more and bigger houses, it raises house prices for everyone, effectively reducing their real wage. So, the issue of inequality is not an abstraction. More money for those on top means lower living standards for everyone else.

If we see many more Modernas from the funding in the CHIPS Act and the other bills, it will not reduce inequality in the economy, it will make it worse. Serious people cannot pretend to not notice the huge amounts of money redistributed upward when the government pays for research and then lets private actors get property rights in the product. This is almost literally giving away the store.

A Progressive Alternative

There is a different route the government can follow with its research spending. It can pay private companies to do work developing technologies in important areas, but it can insist that the products be in the public domain. (Where there are security issues at stake, the government can control the technology.)

This would allow private companies to profit from research, which would be awarded through a competitive bidding process, and it would also allow them to make profits off the manufacture of the finished products. However, there would be no profit to be made from ownership of the technology itself. That could be freely used by anyone with the capability to benefit from it.

This path would avoid having our industrial policy make inequality even worse. It also is exactly what we should want to see with climate technologies. We should want the technologies to generate wind and solar power, as well as to store it, to be available as cheaply as possible. This will maximize the pace at which it can be adopted.

We should also want the whole world to have access to this technology to hasten the rate at which other countries can adopt clean energy. (Ideally, we would negotiate reciprocal agreements whereby they commit to funding research in some proportion to their GDP, and also make the technology freely available.) We should go the same rate with biomedical research.

Industrial Policy Should Not be More of the Same

We have to recognize that the upward redistribution of the last four decades was not something that just happened, it was the outcome of deliberate policy choices. Trade and government policy on intellectual property are a huge part of that story.

It’s great that we are finally getting some honest discussion of the role of trade in increasing inequality, but we still need to get recognition of the impact of our policies on intellectual property. If the Biden administration and members of Congress insist on ignoring its impact, their policies are virtually certain to make inequality worse. The talk about bringing back manufacturing doesn’t change the picture.

[1] In a comprehensive analysis of the manufacturing wage premium, Mishel (2018) found a 7.8 percent straight wage premium for non-college-educated workers for the years 2010 to 2016, after controlling for age, race, gender, and other factors. That compares to a premium for non-college-educated workers of 13.1 percent in the 1980s.

The analysis found that differences in non-wage compensation added 2.6 percentage points to the manufacturing wage premium for all workers, but the compensation differential may be less for non-college-educated workers since they are less likely to get health care coverage and retirement benefits.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Dean Baker.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna on Wednesday amplified his vision for what he calls a "comprehensive set of policy actions designed to restore American manufacturing and technology leadership" while centering respect for the "workers who will help our country achieve that goal."

In what some observers view as a messaging test run ahead of a potential presidential bid in 2024 or beyond, Khanna (D-Calif.) published a Boston Globe opinion piece laying out details of his New Economic Patriotism Plan.

Khanna's plan has three main planks.

"The federal government must partner with the private sector [by financing] factories at zero-interest loans and commit the purchasing power of the federal government to support American-made products and materials like batteries, electric heaters, steel, and aluminum," the congressman wrote.

Additionally, "the departments of Commerce and Education should work with companies, community colleges, and universities to invest in the next generation of workers," while "the federal government should provide grants to support new manufacturing process innovation and productivity enhancements so that we can bring back manufacturing of major consumer goods like refrigerators, microwaves, and pharmaceuticals."

"As part of this vision, the president should set a bold goal to achieve a trade surplus again by 2035," Khanna asserted. "This is a proxy and metric for new industry, exports, and good-paying jobs. Germany maintains nearly 25% of its workforce in manufacturing jobs by investing in export industries to counteract the decline from imports and running a trade surplus. "

"Coordinating these efforts will take work, and the government can't do it alone," he continued. "To scale up this vision, it should create a National Economic Development Council to bring together different agency heads, economists, and business and education leaders."

"Embracing a New Economic Patriotism plan isn't just about jobs," Khanna added. "It's about unifying Americans—from the coasts to the heartland—with a shared purpose. Together, we will build the prosperity that is foundational to become the world's first truly multiracial democracy."

Khanna's vision—which reminded some observers of the Plan for Economic Patriotism unveiled by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) during her 2020 presidential run—comes amid a debate among Democrats about who will bear the progressive torch after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Warren exit politics.

"Khanna has quickly risen to the top of progressives' preliminary draft lists as an appealing alternative to Sanders, whose presidential campaign he co-chaired and with whom he still enjoys a close relationship," Hanna Trudo, senior political correspondent for The Hill, wrote Wednesday.

"The California congressman has fine-tuned Sanders' populist vision to address the nation's income inequality as voters continue to rank the economy as their top concern," she added. "He has made the argument hit home by focusing on innovation in industrialized parts of the country that he believes don't get enough attention, including in struggling areas of the Midwest and some cities."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna on Wednesday amplified his vision for what he calls a "comprehensive set of policy actions designed to restore American manufacturing and technology leadership" while centering respect for the "workers who will help our country achieve that goal."

In what some observers view as a messaging test run ahead of a potential presidential bid in 2024 or beyond, Khanna (D-Calif.) published a Boston Globe opinion piece laying out details of his New Economic Patriotism Plan.

Khanna's plan has three main planks.

"The federal government must partner with the private sector [by financing] factories at zero-interest loans and commit the purchasing power of the federal government to support American-made products and materials like batteries, electric heaters, steel, and aluminum," the congressman wrote.

Additionally, "the departments of Commerce and Education should work with companies, community colleges, and universities to invest in the next generation of workers," while "the federal government should provide grants to support new manufacturing process innovation and productivity enhancements so that we can bring back manufacturing of major consumer goods like refrigerators, microwaves, and pharmaceuticals."

"As part of this vision, the president should set a bold goal to achieve a trade surplus again by 2035," Khanna asserted. "This is a proxy and metric for new industry, exports, and good-paying jobs. Germany maintains nearly 25% of its workforce in manufacturing jobs by investing in export industries to counteract the decline from imports and running a trade surplus. "

"Coordinating these efforts will take work, and the government can't do it alone," he continued. "To scale up this vision, it should create a National Economic Development Council to bring together different agency heads, economists, and business and education leaders."

"Embracing a New Economic Patriotism plan isn't just about jobs," Khanna added. "It's about unifying Americans—from the coasts to the heartland—with a shared purpose. Together, we will build the prosperity that is foundational to become the world's first truly multiracial democracy."

Khanna's vision—which reminded some observers of the Plan for Economic Patriotism unveiled by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) during her 2020 presidential run—comes amid a debate among Democrats about who will bear the progressive torch after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Warren exit politics.

"Khanna has quickly risen to the top of progressives' preliminary draft lists as an appealing alternative to Sanders, whose presidential campaign he co-chaired and with whom he still enjoys a close relationship," Hanna Trudo, senior political correspondent for The Hill, wrote Wednesday.

"The California congressman has fine-tuned Sanders' populist vision to address the nation's income inequality as voters continue to rank the economy as their top concern," she added. "He has made the argument hit home by focusing on innovation in industrialized parts of the country that he believes don't get enough attention, including in struggling areas of the Midwest and some cities."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Brett Wilkins.

Last week, two media polls announced results that seemed almost willful efforts to portray the public as extremists.

The Economist/YouGov poll (8/18/22) announced that “Most Americans see the US/Mexico border situation as a crisis,” with 59% of Americans accepting that characterization, with just 22% who do not. The same day, NPR/Ipsos (8/18/22) reported that “a majority of Americans see an ‘invasion’ at the southern border.”

Both of these polls reinforce the larger narrative being promoted by Fox News and Republicans that the increased number of migrants being stopped at the border represents a serious threat to the United States. And Biden and the Democrats are to blame. Yet the poll results are based on faulty polling questions that seem designed to produce extreme results.

Unbalanced questions

Economist (8/18/22)

The question posed in the Economist/YouGov poll was simple: “Do you think the current situation at the US/Mexico border is a crisis?”

For any experienced pollster, that wording screams of malfeasance. First of all, it is “unbalanced” because it provides no negative counter.

In his 1951 book, The Art of Asking Questions (Princeton University Press), Stanley Payne showed how much an unbalanced question can distort results. In one poll, half the sample of respondents were asked whether in general, manufacturers could avoid laying off workers during slack periods. The other half of respondents were read the same question, but with the added line, “or do you think the layoffs are unavoidable?”

With the unbalanced question, respondents agreed by a margin of almost three-to-one that companies could avoid the layoffs (63% said they could, 22% disagreed). With the balanced question, the margins changed in the opposition direction: 35% said the companies could avoid layoffs, 41% said the layoffs were unavoidable.

That represented a 47-point swing in opinion (41 points in favor to 6 points against), simply by changing the question wording to make it balanced.

And pollsters have known about the problem of unbalanced questions for the past seven decades.

Ensuring an extreme response

The Economist (8/18/22) showed that you can get most people to describe the border situation as a “crisis”—if you don’t offer them any other way to describe it.

But the Economist/YouGov question is also so vague, we really don’t know what people might mean when they agree there’s a crisis.  As opposed to what? Do the reporters want to know if people think there is a crisis as opposed to just “serious problems”? If so, they need to provide both options and ask which one the respondents think is more applicable. But they didn’t do that.

They could have asked if people thought there were “serious problems” at the southern border. But how exciting would the resulting headline be? “A majority of Americans think there are serious problems at the US/Mexican border!!”

No. Not worth a screaming headline. Better to ask if there’s a “crisis.” By not providing a counter factual option (such as, “there are problems but no crisis”), the pollsters all but ensured a majority choosing the extreme response.

When I was the managing editor of the Gallup Poll in the early 1990s, we wanted to know how seriously the public viewed the healthcare issue in the country. In 1994, we asked three questions to address that concern, with the results below:

• In your opinion, is there a crisis in healthcare in this country today, or not?

It was an ostensibly balanced question, because it added the “or not” phrase. But it, like the Economist/YouGov question, provided no context. The results showed 84% saying yes to the “crisis.”

• Which of these statements do you agree with more: 1) the country has a healthcare crisis, or 2) the country has healthcare problems but no health care crisis?

Here 53% chose “crisis.”

• Which of these statements do you think best describes the US healthcare system today: 1) the healthcare system is in a state of crisis, 2) it has major problems, 3) it has minor problems, or 4) it does not have any problems?

Just 17% chose “crisis.”

The number of Americans believing the health system was in a crisis went from 84% to 53% to just 17% as respondents were provided with alternative ways of looking at the issue.

The people at the Economist/YouGov poll aren’t necessarily aware of the Gallup results just cited, but they should be aware more generally of the problems with unbalanced and vague questions as outlined decades ago, and certainly included these days in any basic lessons on poll question design.

What is the best way to measure the public’s opinion about the problems at the southern border? The four-part Gallup question about healthcare is a good model for the border issue, because it provides for a fuller understanding of the varieties of views that Americans might hold. Getting at the nuances of public opinion may not provide dramatic headlines, but it’s a more honest way of reporting what Americans are actually thinking.

NPR manipulation

NPR (8/18/22)

The NPR/Ipsos poll is perhaps worse than the one just analyzed. It reeks of manipulation. The question is written in a true/false format, which itself is problematic. And it clearly favors the “true” option.

The poll question: “To what extent, if any, do you believe the following are true? — The US is experiencing an invasion at the southern border.” The answers provided were: “Completely true, Somewhat true, Completely false, Don’t know.”

True/false questions are inherently biased in favor of true, because of a phenomenon called “response acquiescence.” As described in this carefully researched Wikipedia article:

Acquiescence bias, also known as agreement bias, is a category of response bias common to survey research in which respondents have a tendency to select a positive response option or indicate a positive connotation disproportionately more frequently. Respondents do so without considering the content of the question or their ‘true’ preference. Acquiescence is sometimes referred to as “yea-saying” and is the tendency of a respondent to agree with a statement when in doubt….

Acquiescence bias can introduce systematic errors that affect the validity of research by confounding attitudes and behaviors with the general tendency to agree, which can result in misguided inference. Research suggests that the proportion of respondents who carry out this behavior is between 10% and 20%.

In addition, the NPR/Ipsos question is unbalanced, providing two responses for “true” (completely, and somewhat), while only one response for “false” (completely). It’s not at all clear what “somewhat true” means, but if that option is given, a balanced approach would also offer the option of “somewhat false.” But for the “false” option, the question included only the “completely” category.

And then the media pollsters combined the “completely true” percentage (28%) with the “somewhat true” responses (25%) to produce a “majority” of Americans saying there is an “invasion.”

Designed to support a view

NPR (8/18/22) counted people who said it was “somewhat true” to say that there was an “invasion” at the border as agreeing that there was an invasion—although their answer implies that it’s also somewhat false to call it an invasion.

Why did the pollsters ask the question in this biased way? It appears to me as though they wanted to show that “extreme rhetoric” about the border issue has become widespread.

According to the NPR report (italics added):

Republican leaders are increasingly framing the situation as an “invasion.” Immigrant advocates say the word has a long history in white nationalist circles, and warn that such extreme rhetoric could provoke more violence against immigrants.

Still, the polling shows that the word “invasion” has been embraced by a wide range of Americans to describe what’s happening at the border.

Note I said the pollsters wanted to “show” that extreme rhetoric has become widespread, not that they wanted to find out if it was actually the case. They seem to have had their minds made up before the poll was conducted, and designed a questionnaire that would support their view.

Had they wanted to investigate whether most people embraced “invasion” as a way to describe what’s happening at the border, the pollsters could have avoided the simplistic and biased true/false format, and the unbalanced question construction that favored “true,” and instead asked a more objective question.

One such series of question could have been worded this way:

How much would you say you know about what’s happening at the US/Mexico border these days: a great deal, a moderate amount, not much or nothing at all?

From what you’ve read or heard, which do you think better describes what’s happening at the southern border: 1) There is an invasion of immigrants into this country; or 2) There is not an invasion of immigrants into this country, but rather an unusually large number of immigrants seeking legal asylum – or 3) are you unsure?

The first question would allow an analysis to see whether people’s perceived knowledge of what’s happening is correlated with people’s use of “invasion” to describe the border events. The “unsure” option is to let respondents know that it’s okay to admit they don’t know.

In 1994, when Gallup’s polling partners were informed that the percentage of people saying the healthcare system was in “crisis” was only 17% (with the new wording format), the on-air pundit at CNN said he didn’t want to use that question. He wanted a simple result—crisis or no crisis. It was easier, he said, to describe on air. It mattered not that the question forced respondents into extremist positions, even though few people felt that way.

That seems to be the problem with the two polls analyzed here. Dramatic results showing an extremist public are far more “newsworthy” than what the public is really thinking.

The post Manufacturing ‘Crisis’: How Polling on the Border Exaggerates Extreme Opinions appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David W. Moore.

Last month, Cooper Electronics, based in Guangdong's manufacturing hub of Dongguan, announced it would close this month.

Hong Kong-owned toymaker Dongguan Kaishan Toys has announced it will follow suit, while Dongguan Jingli Plastics and Electronics will suspend production on Aug. 31 after laying off all of its staff, according to ChinaToysNet.

Other private businesses have told RFA they plan to furlough all staff for six months after a massive slump in new orders made it impossible for them to meet their payroll bill.

The moves come as foreign-invested manufacturers are increasingly relocating to Vietnam, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries, as costs continue to skyrocket in China.

Financial commentator Cai Shengkun said the hollowing out of Dongguan as a manufacturing base has been a long time coming.

"Dongguan used to be China's manufacturing base, and in its heyday was the production base for products sold by the world's largest companies," Cai said. "During its heyday, Dongguan maintained high GDP growth for over a 20-year period ... and accumulated enormous wealth."

"But now with the relocation of some industries and the continuous migration of foreign capital, there are not many high-end factories in Dongguan left," he said.

Cai said CCP leader Xi Jinping's insistence on a zero-COVID approach, meaning individuals and entire cities can be placed under lockdown at a moment's notice, with mandatory quarantine and testing for all, have also struck a major blow.

"Rising shipping costs and the impact of the pandemic have meant that [these] industries are no longer profitable," he said. "With shipping costs getting higher and higher, these products will no longer have any export advantage."

Kaishan Toys, established in 1998, was once one of Hong Kong's most prestigious toy manufacturers, with more than 2,000 employees.

But the company has seen a sharp drop in orders since 2021, with most toy production now outsourced to Southeast Asia. At the time of its closure announcement, just 100 employees remained.

Meanwhile, Dongguan Jieying Precision Hardware Products has also announced it will close at the end of the month, citing additional costs and logistical challenges under the zero-COVID policy.

Other companies are pausing operations, in the hope of making a comeback if business improves.

Huizhou Wanzhisheng New Energy Technology announced a five-day furlough for most departments, citing the impact of disease control and prevention restrictions.

The problem isn't confined to Dongguan or Guangdong province, either.

Shandong Guangfu Group, a private iron and steel joint venture established in 1983, suspended production on July 19, with no date for resumption given.

And a technology company based in the eastern province of Anhui furloughed all of its staff from July 14 to Jan. 22, 2023.

Financial analyst Guan Min said the government has failed to offer any policy incentives or financial support to private enterprises hit by the zero-COVID policy, and that this could be a deliberate choice.

"This is a great opportunity for the state sector to expand, and for the private sector to shrink," Guan said. "Private enterprises have good technology and so much equipment, which can benefit state-owned enterprises if there are mergers."

Retreat from market economics

Guan said he has been warning of a total retreat from market economics under Xi for the past decade.

"Based on the indicators 10 years ago, I said that only large state-owned enterprises would still be operating in China 20 years down the line," he said.

The government does appear willing to boost the property market, where a slump fueled by a massive backlog in unfinished buildings has started to affect the economy.

Since Xi Jinping's recent comment that "housing isn't for speculation," a number of local governments have announced preferential policies for homebuyers, encouraging rural residents to buy in cities.

Homebuyers across China are withholding mortgage payments in protest at stalled construction of properties by major developers across the country until developers resume construction of pre-sold homes, local media and social media reported.

Japan's Nomura has estimated that developers have only delivered around 60 percent of homes sold before actual construction between 2013 and 2020. China's outstanding mortgage loans rose by 26.3 trillion yuan during that period.

Social media posts have indicated that, far from moving to ensure that unfinished property is completed, local authorities may be hiring actors to make it look as if work is being done on abandoned construction sites.

"Hiring: actors for a construction site, 100 yuan/day," reads a screenshot of a job advertisement that RFA was unable to verify independently.

"Requirements: To bang on the steel pipes, pull trolleys around and pretend to be engaged in construction work if someone comes to check," the advertisement reads.

Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting and Tang Yuanyuan for RFA Mandarin.

The post Surviving America’s Industrial Manufacturing, Quality Centric Health Care System appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by John Stanton.

We see the hospital as a factory and our hospitalist group as an assembly line that is in the business of manufacturing perfect discharges.”1 These words are not hyperbole. They are the exact words written by David J. Yu, MD, MBA, Medicare & DSNP Medical Director, Presbyterian Health Plan, Albuquerque NM. Yu cites the work of management guru W. Edwards Deming as a major authority for this approach to patient care. Deming’s business principles have been given much of the credit for Japan’s industrial revival after World War Two…Theory is not practice. Ever since management and business school “experts” took charge of health care in the 1970s and 1980s not only have medical costs not decreased they have skyrocketed. There was no health care crisis in the 1970s and 1980s.2 It was manufactured by the medical industrial complex composed of hospitals, insurance companies and drug companies for their own financial gain.

—Arthur H. Gale, MD, “The Hospital as a Factory and the Physician as an Assembly Line Worker“, Missouri Medicine, January-February 2016.

I recently spent 12 days in a large hospital in the state of Virginia and 16 days in a rehabilitation center in the same state. I had contracted COVID and went to the emergency room on July 3 at the suggestion of a doctor at a walk-in clinic. An EKG screening showed that I had atrial fibrillation and I was admitted to the hospital for observation and treatment. Another illness (colon cancer) reared its head and I ultimately went into hypovolemic shock and required emergency surgery to remove a tumor, clean up infected lymph nodes,and generally repair my insides. I now have colon cancer with liver metastasis in addition to prostate cancer with metastasis which has traveled to portions of my skeletal system.

You might say I’ve “doubled my pleasure and doubled my fun.” Hey! You have to have a sense of humor about these matters!

The hospital care system is, in fact, an industrial, assembly line operation. Because of this, doctors and nurses do not have time to develop relationships or spend a lot of time with patients. Doctors must make rounds that allow maybe 5-10 minutes of time with the patient. Floor nurses are overworked having to respond to calls from different patients and they must prioritize those calls based on critical need. Wait times for assistance from a nurse can feel like a long time when you are sick.

The time that the health professional has with the patient, and the time spent communicating with the next health professional in the chain (often a significant part of the overall cost of a distinct episode of care) is now rationed to that which is deemed essential. This hinders professionals’ ability to establish a significant therapeutic relationship with the patient. Concerns that may arise with the patient that are not easily quantified, and consequently not documented, may also be lost.

— Sarah Winch and Amanda J. Henderson, “Making cars and making health care: a critical review“,  Medical Journal of Australia, July 6, 2009.

Total Quality Madness

The hospital system has become a depersonalized manufacturing process based on Total Quality Management (TQM), or some form of quality control, deriving from Toyota’s Lean Engineering or Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing popularized in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Health care these days is truly an industrial manufacturing process which is tied in many cases to Medicare requirements and billing. TQM/Quality Control Practices are supposed to “manufacture” increased customer/patient satisfaction but the hospital experience made me feel like I was little more than a damaged automobile traveling the assembly line and being worked on by different mechanics.

TQM is described as this:

Total quality management (TQM) is an administration attitude of uninterruptedly refining the quality of the goods/services/processes by concentrating on the customers’ (patients’) requirements and anticipations to augment consumer (patient) contentment stable performance. Successful TQM implementation leads to improved organizational performance success.

— Devika Kanade, Shailendrakumar Kale, “Significance of total quality management practices in improving quality of services delivered by medical and dental hospitals”, Journal of Dental and Medical Research, October, 2021.

If the goal is to improve the organization’s quality/patient manufacturing process, a baseline of measurements must be created. It is likely that unmeasurable metrics; for example, wellness, family access, intangible mental states are too nebulous to measure, as opposed to surgical procedures performed (every procedure aligns to a numerical code), exiting the patient in x amount of time from the hospital, recovering fees from the US government/patients, etc.

The continued equating of quantity with quality and the redesign of work processes leads to continued fragmentation of health care work, loss of autonomy for the health professions, and a potential increase in hospital misadventure. The very act of breaking up an episode of care into a number of steps that may, or may not, add value to the overall process allows for parts to become lost. Of particular concern is the appraising of value so that perceived non-valuable aspects of care can be discounted.

— Sarah Winch and Amanda J. Henderson, “Making cars and making health care: a critical review“, Medical Journal of Australia, July 6, 2009.

How can a healthcare system that views patients as pieces of a manufacturing process be personal or caring? It can’t. Doctors and nurses are not to blame. In TQM, Lean Engineering or JIT,  time is of the essence in producing a product, or patient exit, before your competitors can. Hospitals are pushing the notion that they are more competitive than other health care systems nearby in the state of Virginia. How do you measure competitiveness: How many patients did you see today? How many calls did you make for patients “on the floor.” What was the amount of time you spent with the patient and how does that correlate to TQM? How many patients live or die? How many patients do you push out the door?

My Experience

It is likely that were it not for one of the many nurses badgering her colleagues and physicians, I would have bled out. Earlier, another nurse noticed my bleeding and suggested a colonoscopy which I initially refused but I ultimately relented which proved critical to my survival.

My blood pressure nearly hit the deck. As I was wheeled into surgery, I vaguely remember that the nurses in the operating room were incredibly coordinated in their individual tasks akin to a perfect offensive play in US football where all 11 players know their assignments and execute them to near perfection. I uttered something to the surgeon about sewing me up which he was able to honor. Then, the anesthesia took full hold and I was out in the darkness somewhere.

When I awoke I was in the intensive care unit (ICU) being looked after by the nurses. I had a device which allowed me to inject pain killers into my body every few minutes. The time I spent in the ICU was like being trapped n in dense fog bank with a face appearing out of the gloom every now and then. Ultimately, I was moved to a room where I could be safely isolated as I had COVID. The room seemed to me to be at the far end of the hospital. My family could not visit me or even look through plexiglass windows at me. The experience was terrible.

My primary physicians visited with me as much as they could and those visits were most welcomed. My prognosis is not good and so palliative care physicians came to visit and spoke with me about the limited options available to me.

As the hours dragged by, I  began to feel like I was, indeed, on an assembly line.

The nurses and their assistants that came with my treatments all had specialties. For example, a different nurse each time would open the door and say, “I’m with Respiratory and I’ve come to give you your inhaler.” I would take one hit from it and then the nurse would lock it away and leave. At other times someone from Respiratory also would show up to give me a ten minute treatment with a nebulizer. Those treatments could take place at any time of day and night. I received nebulizer treatments sometimes at three o’clock in the morning after being awoken from a sound sleep.

On that note it was impossible to get a decent night’s sleep. Nurses would come into the room to administer medications seemingly every four hours. And then blood work was done sometimes three times a day to include the early morning AM hours.

Other nurses would take care of other matters such as changing sheets and bed pan issues. I was not presented with any physical therapy options to be able to get up and walk to the in-room bathroom which I really didn’t know was there.

And so I lay there in bed stewing, not watching the junk on television, with a dead cell phone and no options to get out, at least I thought. I did have an in-room phone which I could use to talk with my wife and son.

Is Anyone Out There?

Buzzers seemed to go off repeatedly and not be turned off for sometimes a half hour. And if you needed to call a nurse using a device akin to a remote that controlled the bed, call device and television, it would invariably take what seemed like an eternity for the nurse to arrive. I had little appetite and didn’t eat much during those twelve days but no one offered me any alternatives for nutrition.

Perhaps the saddest, and humorous, event happened when I received a Transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE), designed to check out the heart function. They put me to sleep, of course, and when I awoke I was alone in the procedure room. They had put me in a fetal position buttressing me with cushions and tie down straps so that I couldn’t really move. I figured it would be a matter of minutes before they came  to get me but the “matter of minutes” turned into 20 minutes. I began to yell out, calmly, “Hello, hello, is anyone out there,” (borrowing from Pink Floyd). My shoulder began to cause me some pain and so I kept repeating my words but still, no one came. I could see people walking by so I figured they could hear me. Wrong. So I increased the decibel level until someone opened the door and asked, “What’s wrong?” I said my shoulder hurt and I’ve been stuck in here for 45 minutes with no clue as to what went on during the procedure. I received a sort of “whoops!” look and finally was brought back to my intolerable hospital room having been forgotten.

Escape!

I had no idea how long I would be stuck in the hospital but then on July 15 a nurse came in the room to remove my stitches. She said, “Did you know you are going to be released today to a rehabilitation facility?” I said I had not been told by any one of the news, which I viewed with caution. But I was excited to learn that I’d be off the assembly line. I was scheduled to leave at 4:30 PM that day but as that time rolled around I had not been cleaned up or changed into my street clothes. As the clock struck 5:00 PM, I heard a commotion outside the door. The medical transport driver was reading the nurses the riot act as he was on a tight schedule to pick up other patients. Two males nurses in shirts and ties rushed in and got me all set to get transferred to the rehab facility. Right up to the very end, I was forgotten, like a lost part, that fell off the assembly line.

The rehab facility was like heaven. I got full nights of sleep, physical therapy, decent food and very personalized care. I was up and walking within ten days and doing the little things (making the bed, brushing teeth, shaving, showering) that we all take for granted. My family and grandson were able to visit and it was just great! That went a long way to bolstering my recovery.

A friend from a family of doctors told me that: “It is not safe to get sick in America. It’s a crap shoot,” he said.

Another buddy commented that: “I’m not too high on the medical profession. It used to be a vocation but now it is just a job, all process oriented.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John Stanton.

The Biden Administration intends to fully lift the Title 42 border restrictions, which have been in place since March 2020, on May 23. A federal judge appointed by Donald Trump, however, has ordered a two-week halt to the phasing out of those restrictions.

In the meantime, three media polls—Politico/Morning Consult, Fox and CNN—have conducted surveys to get the views of the public on this proposed change.

As the graph below indicates, all three found majority opposition to lifting the restrictions: Politico by a 19-point margin (35% favor, 54% oppose), Fox by 36 points (27% to 63%) and CNN by 14 points (43% to 57%).

The public’s widespread lack of information on political matters has been amply demonstrated over the years. (See here, here and here.) Yet Politico and Fox are able to coax opinions on this rather obscure policy from 90% of their samples. CNN is even more talented, with fully 100% of its sample expressing an opinion on whether Title 42 border restrictions should be lifted or not.

Fox News‘ subhead (5/3/22) said Title 42 “limited illegal immigration”—when it actually barred seekers of asylum, an internationally guaranteed legal right.

Before asking about Title 42, both CNN and Fox asked their respondents how attentive they had been to the issue. CNN found just 12% of their sample who said they had been following the news about Title 42 “very closely.” Another 29% said “somewhat closely.”

Fox reported 29% saying they had heard “a great deal” about the Biden administration’s decision to end Title 42 restrictions. Another 32% said they had heard “some” about the decision.

It’s the 12% and 29% figures that are of most interest, because only people who paid a great deal of attention might have a genuine sense of the issues at stake. People who have heard of the issue only casually (followed the issue “somewhat” closely, or heard “some” information) are highly unlikely to know much.

Yet somehow all three news organizations report 90–100% of the public with a meaningful opinion on the issue. Clearly these results are illusory.

Points of information

Here are some relevant points one might want to know about and consider in determining whether to support lifting the Title 42 border restrictions.

• The US has a legal obligation to hear asylum seekers about their reasons for seeking asylum, based on US law and as signatory to international protocols.
• Toward the start of the pandemic, the Trump administration invoked Title 42 to allow the US to return asylum seekers to their home countries without a hearing. The justification was that it would help prevent Americans from getting Covid.
• The CDC initially refused to comply with the order, because the scientists argued there was no evidence that such restrictions would slow the coronavirus. The organization was overruled by Vice President Mike Pence.
• As a consequence, 1.7 million people have been denied a legal hearing, and will be ready to apply for asylum as soon as Title 42 is lifted. Some people argue the flood of migrants could overwhelm the ability of Customs and Border Protection (CBP) to process all asylum claims.
• Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas predicted that up to 18,000 asylum seekers could cross the border per day once the restrictions are lifted: “We’re not projecting 18,000, but what we do in the department is we plan for different scenarios, so we’re ready for anything.”

Eliciting opinion

CNN (5/5/22) connected polling numbers to a fears of a “mob” of migrants prepared to “surge” into the US.

Media pollsters typically use two techniques to elicit opinions from respondents who might otherwise admit they have “no opinion.”

The first is to ask forced-choice questions—whether the respondents favor or oppose a policy, with no explicit “unsure” or “don’t know” option. Respondents who have agreed to participate in the poll feel obligated to please the interviewers, to do what is “right,” what is expected of them. So if at all possible, respondents will try to find something in the question itself to help them come up with an opinion. Very few will insist on volunteering they don’t have an opinion.

The second tactic is to simply give respondents a limited subset of knowledge about the issue, and then immediately ask whether they support or oppose the policy.

The limitations here should be obvious. First, once respondents have been given specific information, they no longer represent the larger population they are supposed to represent—because the general public has not been given the same information.

The second limitation is that almost any given issue is too complex to describe fully. So pollsters have to decide how to limit what information they give. The result cannot help but be biased.

Fox, for example, told their respondents that the border restrictions were enacted during the pandemic to “enable the US to block migrants from entering the country based on public health concerns.”

If you didn’t know anything about the issue, of course you would be against lifting the restrictions—since, according to the poll interviewer, they’re “based on public health concerns.”

The other two polls also informed their respondents that the restrictions were implemented for health reasons. No mention was made of the United States’ legal obligation to have hearings to judge whether asylum should be granted, nor the CDC’s initial evidence-based refusal to comply with the Trump administration’s invocation of Title 42. Nor did they mention that the Homeland Security Secretary specified that numerous steps had been taken to deal with the expected surge of migrants.

Had some or all of that information been provided, the polls might well have produced quite different results.

Still, even then, those samples would not represent a cross-section of the general public, which would not have been given the same information.

The polls simply do not represent the US public.

What do polls really measure?

It’s clear the poll results cannot be interpreted literally, as though the vast majority of the US public has come to a conclusion about lifting Title 42 restrictions.

But the results do indicate that emphasizing health concerns as the reason for Title 42 resonates with the public.

CNN asked a few additional questions, with these results:

• 68% of adult Americans believe the situation at the Mexican/US border to be a “crisis.”
• 73% disapprove of the way migrants are being treated in the US.
• 56% favor allowing refugees from Central America to seek asylum in the US.
• 74% are not confident that once Title 42 is lifted, the Biden administration will be ready to handle the increase in the number of migrants who will try to enter the US.

Each one of those questions is seriously flawed, yet overall they indicate the public’s top-of-mind reaction to be generally positive toward migrants, but concerned about the ability of the government to deal with large numbers of asylum seekers.

How many people are actually engaged enough to hold those opinions, however, the polls don’t tell us.

The post Manufacturing Opinion on Lifting Title 42 Border Restrictions appeared first on FAIR.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by David W. Moore.

The wood-pellet industry has full-scale operations smack dab in the heart of British Columbia’s Inland Temperate Rainforest, the last rainforest of its kind in the North.

The fabled rainforest contains cedars of up to 12-15 feet in diameter and up to 2,000 years old. Its extraordinarily rich ecosystem is home to 2,400 plant species and numerous wildlife species.  It is one of only three inland temperate-boreal rainforest in the world. The others are in southern Siberia and Russia’s Far East.

Of significant concern, according to criteria by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) BC’s inland rainforest is endangered, susceptible to ecological collapse within only one decade, assuming current logging rates continue. Remarkably, a study found that 95% of the rainforest’s “core habitat” has been lost since 1970. ¹

However, the wood-pellet industry says, “not to worry.” Pacific BioEnergy, the major wood-pellet manufacturer in the rainforest, claims the wood-pellets are made from low-grade timber. Accordingly, they claim to make pellets that are, “sustainable by-product of forests already being cut by using lumber waste such as sawdust and slash.” meaning larger debris left by loggers.

But, according to the independent NGO Sustainable Biomass Program, the use of whole logs has ballooned from 6% in 2019 to 50% in 2020. That is not slash or sawdust as represented by the company.

Moreover, satellite imagery by the Living Atlas of the World “confirmed a shift to whole trees.”

A 2021 Google Image shows log piles around the wood-pellet plant that’s equivalent to four soccer fields, which is an eye-opening 6xs the area of wood residuals on the property.

According to IUCN, ‘despite evidence to the contrary,’ the pellets are marketed as ‘clean, renewable energy’ by Pacific Bioenergy located near Prince George, BC and by bioenergy facilities in Europe.” ²

The Inland Temperate Rainforest is called the “forgotten rainforest” because, unlike its coastal counterpart, which is protected by the “Great Bear Rainforest Agreement” with 85% under conservation protection, it is does not have conservation protection status. It’s wide-open for development.

The Inland Temperate Rainforest needs similar protection. It’s a key part of Canada’s efforts to meet climate mitigation objectives, notably Article 5 of the Paris ’15 climate agreement that calls for conservation measures to enhance “carbon sinks,” especially forests.

Then, what purpose does woody biomass serve… other than as a profit source for private industry and serving as a faux alternative green energy source for electricity plants in Europe?

Wood-pellet manufacturing, a multi-billion dollar global industry, is expected to double again in the next five years. “European power plants have been among the biggest consumers—pellet-fired power plants are uncommon in North America—but demand from Japan and South Korea has also increased in recent years.” ³

Canada is knee-deep in the woody biomass industry. According to the Wood Pellet Association of Canada, BC’s forests produce more pellets than anywhere else in the world.

But, how is it possible with a straight face for anybody to claim burning trees is a substitute for fossil fuels? Wood-pellets emit carbon the same as coal. And, it’s pure poppycock to claim that new trees are planted to replace the cut downs to sequester the carbon released when the pellets burn. The science does not supp0rt that flimsy argument; it’s not even close!

“A forest of saplings may take a century or more to mature into an ecosystem that holds as much carbon as the one it replaced. An open letter from 500-plus scientists and economists sent last year to world leaders warned that burning pellets ‘is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as using fossil fuels.’ Nearly 800 scientists and academics, including two Nobel laureates and three winners of the US National Medal of Science, signed a similar letter in 2018.⁴

The whole thing boils down to the obvious fact that burning things emits carbon quickly and regrowing things to sequester carbon takes a long time, according to Mary Booth, director of the Partnership for Policy Integrity, a US-based environmental nonprofit critical of the pellet industry: In other words, climate change will have wreaked havoc long before those young trees mature into an ecosystem that holds as much carbon as the one they replaced. ⁴

The UN and several nations classify woody biomass as “carbon neutral”. Yet, it is not carbon neutral, which isn’t even a scientific term. It is a carbon emitter, plain and simple!

“The wood pellet industry is a monster out of control… Burning wood puts out more carbon dioxide per unit of electricity produced then coal does.” ⁵

A letter from 500 scientists and economists: “Overall, for each kilowatt hour of heat or electricity produced, [burning] wood initially is likely to add two to three times as much carbon to the air as using fossil fuels,’ refuting the policy and industry claims of biomass zero emissions.” ⁶

“Because the combustion and processing efficiencies for wood are less than coal, the immediate impact of substituting wood for coal is an increase in atmospheric CO₂ relative to coal. This means that every megawatt-hour of electricity generated from wood produces more CO₂ than if the power station had remained coal-fired.”⁷

Stop woody biomass: (1) “The influx of 1/3 more trees would buy humanity time by adding 20 years to meet climate targets.”⁸; (2)  Carbon is emitted in the biomass combustion process, resulting in a net increase of CO2 ⁹;  (3) Woody biomass power plants actually produce more global warming CO2 than fossil fuel plants. ¹⁰

An article entitled “The ‘Green Energy’ That Might Be Ruining the Planet” appeared in Politico in March 2021:

Here’s a multibillion-dollar question that could help determine the fate of the global climate: If a tree falls in a forest—and then it’s driven to a mill, where it’s chopped and chipped and compressed into wood pellets, which are then driven to a port and shipped across the ocean to be burned for electricity in European power plants—does it warm the planet? Most scientists and environmentalists say yes.

Yet, as the article suggests, governments around the world, as well as the UN, have embraced “biomass power” as a legitimate zero-emissions renewable energy. Europe now generates more energy from burning wood that from wind and solar combined, even though solar produces 100 times as much power per acre as biomass.

Biomass power is now a $50B global industry and growing fast, as it is now spreading to Asian countries. Policy-makers throughout the world believe they’ve discovered an answer to meeting carbon mitigation goals. Eureka! Burn wood!

But, what if woody biomass, like fossil fuels, causes global warming?

Academics and scientists say, yes, it does. Woody biomass blends with fossil fuels as a radical enhancement of global warming emissions.

It’ll put global warming on a rip-snorting bender. Buckle up!

1. Brian J. Barth, “Burning Up: The Controversial Biofuel Threatening BC’s Last Inland Rainforests”, The Whale, 2022,
2. “Primary Forest Case Study – British Columbia’s Forgotten Inland Temperate Rainforest”, IUCN.
3. The Whale
4. The Whale.
5. Bill Moomaw, emeritus professor Tufts University and co-author of several IPCC reports — 2019 Mongabay interview.
6. 500+ Experts Call on World’s Nations to Not Burn Forest to Make Energy, Mongabay, February 16, 2021.
7. John Sherman, Complex Systems Analyst, MIT.
8. ETH Zurich
9. Columbia University
10. Earth Institute

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

The post Wood-Pellet Manufacturing in a Rainforest appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Robert Hunziker.

On January 24th, Burkina Faso bore witness to its third destabilizing coup in less than a decade. It also marked the eighth successful putsch American soldiers launched in multiple West African countries since 2008. The Intercept reports that Ouagadougou’s new leader, Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, took part in many United States led AFRICOM (Africa Command) exercises and an American sponsored military intelligence course. This disturbing pattern raises serious questions about what the U.S. army is teaching its African allies.

The U.S. developed an alarming habit for training individuals likely to commit horrendous crimes after the outbreak of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. The School of the Americas (renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001) based in Fort Benning, Georgia spent decades teaching the dark arts of torture and counterinsurgency warfare to thousands of Central and Latin American soldiers and aspiring dictators keen to annihilate socialist or peasant movements. Distinguished alumni include Bolivian autocrat Hugo Banzer, Panamanian strongman turned drug lord Manuel Noriega, and El Salvadoran Colonel Domingo Monterrosa. Monterrosa led battalions that slaughtered a thousand civilians in the village of El Mozote, according to anthropologist Lesley Gill.

Guatemalan SOA students enjoyed exceptional careers as well. Proud graduates like dictators Efraín Rios Montt, General Fernando Lucas García, and various members of Guatemala’s feared D-2 intelligence agency terrorised the indigenous and impoverished Mayan community into submission over a nearly four decade-long civil war. Devastating scorched earth campaigns, which reached their apogee in the early eighties, wiped out hundreds of Mayan villages and almost all their inhabitants. Journalist Zach El Parece noted that a member of the infamous “Kaibiles” Special Forces, a unit that bludgeoned children to death with hammers for being communist sympathisers in the village of Dos Erres, among many others, later became an instructor at the SOA.

The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) concluded that the Guatemalan army was responsible for displacing 1.5 million people and murdering or vanishing most of the war’s 200,000 victims. The CEH deemed the army’s atrocities so severe that they amounted to acts of genocide against the Mayan population. The report even singled out the United States’ crucial role in reinforcing Guatemala’s homicidal “national intelligence apparatus and for training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations…”

The U.S. government also paid millions to train Indonesian soldiers implicated in Jakarta’s barbaric occupation of East Timor. Amnesty International revealed that approximately 7,300 Indonesian officers took part in IMET (International Military Education and Training) courses at U.S.-based army, navy, and air-force schools between 1950 and the early nineties. Washington promised to cancel military aid to Indonesia after the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, during which Indonesian troops killed 271 protesters at a peaceful pro-independence rally in the Timorese capital of Dili. However, they secretly continued to train elite Kopassus troops. This regiment, according to the Guardian, indulged in “some of the worst human rights violations in Indonesia’s history”.

Prabowo Subianto, Indonesia’s current Minister of Defence, trained at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, finished first in his class, and re-joined the Kopassus after returning home. Historian Gerry van Klinken and journalist Jill Jolliffe believe it is highly likely that Subianto participated in the brutal suppression of the East Timorese uprising of 1983-84. A former Indonesian intelligence employee alleged that Subianto directed anti-insurgent operations that butchered hundreds of innocent civilians. Soldiers executed surrendering women and children on sight, while countless others endured starvation, torture, sexual abuse, and arbitrary detention in overcrowded concentration camps. Moreover, reporter David Jenkins claims the Kopassus eagerly adopted tactics the shadowy U.S. Phoenix program perfected during the Vietnam War—a program that assassinated thousands of Vietnamese peasants with impunity. The abhorrent methods of U.S. trained “Contra” death squads in Nicaragua proved quite influential among the Kopassus as well.

Scholar Noam Chomsky asserts that Jakarta’s invasion of East Timor incurred “perhaps the greatest death toll relative to the population since the Holocaust…” Approximately 200,000 East Timorese perished in the Indonesian onslaught, while survivors still suffer the long-term effects of napalm and chemical weapon poisoning. The Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor issued a damning verdict: the U.S. backed Indonesian military deliberately imposed unbearable conditions of life which almost exterminated the East Timorese. A genocide in paradise, to borrow Matthew Jardine’s haunting phrase.

U.S. Special Forces also trained the Tutsi RPA (Rwandan Patriotic Army) in the late nineties as it decimated refugee camps and massacred Hutu exiles fleeing into the jungles of eastern Congo. Many of them were sickly and starving civilians that had nothing to do with the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Le Monde and The Irish Times cited French intelligence findings and Pentagon papers stating that U.S. instructors and mercenaries provided combat training to dozens of Rwandan officers. Some reports even alleged that U.S. advisers accompanied the RPA as it expanded its rampage into the Congo. These destructive incursions marked the opening salvo in the DRC’s (Democratic Republic of the Congo) endless “world war”—a cataclysmic conflict that has caused, thus far, the deaths of millions.

Historians and authors like Filip Reyntjens, René Lemarchand, and Judi Rever largely agree that the RPA, along with the Ugandan and Burundian-backed AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire) rebel group, killed tens of thousands of Rwandan and Congolese Hutus in the DRC between 1996-97. A United Nations report released in 2010 insisted that in most cases perpetrators did not carry out these atrocities unintentionally in the heat of battle and may be guilty of “crimes of genocide”.

Yet the U.S. is not alone in enabling, unwittingly or otherwise, regimes prone to committing egregious crimes. In December 2008, Guinean Army Captain Moussa Dadis Camara spearheaded the “German Coup” which brought a military junta into power in Conakry. Deutsche Welle reported that Camara and his co-conspirators received extensive training from the German Armed Forces in Bremen. German-trained paratroopers unleashed a wave of extreme violence against peaceful protestors in Conakry Stadium less than a year after Camara suspended the Guinean constitution and threadbare republican institutions.

Amnesty International said that security forces murdered more than 150 people, wounded hundreds more, and raped or assaulted dozens of women and girls with sticks, bayonets, rifle butts, and batons in broad daylight. A failed assassination attempt quickly disposed Camara, only for another ruthless soldier—the Moroccan, French, and Chinese trained Sékouba “The Tiger” Konaté—to take his place. To this day, undiscerning European Union member states continue to provide military training and weapons to African countries hampered by weak civilian governments and very powerful armies. It is a recipe for disaster.

Ideally, massive grassroots movements in both the U.S. and West Africa should try to convince representatives to bring a permanent end to these borderline colonial military exchanges. Following that, Congress must enact more legislation that would strengthen background checks for future trainees. Furthermore, any manuals, textbooks, or instructors advocating torture and other unlawful or inhumane tactics need to be removed and replaced with courses that seek to improve civic-military relations.

However, adding human-rights awareness or international law modules to military curricula is by no means an effective solution. Political scientist Jacob Ricks worries that promoting courses or practices geared towards professionalizing and enhancing the social responsibilities of the military is a lackluster strategy. Survey data demonstrates that many high-ranking Siamese soldiers, already among the largest recipients of US IMET programs now replete with professionalizing courses, are statistically more likely to support a coup or greater military interference in Siamese politics and society. Thailand has weathered 19 coup attempts since 1932. Teaching soldiers to respect the sanctity of human life, democracy, and the rule of law, although necessary and beneficial, is clearly not enough to curb such vicious tendencies.

West African politicians and civil society groups need to be more creative and ambitious if they ever hope to tame their often unruly armies. Professor Kwesi Aning, head of academic affairs and research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana, told University World News that African states keep sending troops abroad for training because they do not possess the resources or facilities required to properly train them at home. This breeds a dangerous imbalance of power as foreign-trained troops, imbued with delusions of superiority and entitlement after studying in the U.S., France, or Germany, could return home with a burning desire to take control. Depending on the lessons, especially in the U.S., foreign-trained soldiers might begin to perceive fellow citizens not as ordinary people who need protection but as potential or internal enemies to be eradicated.

Constructing homegrown, truly sovereign, and well-funded military academies, devoted to teaching civic-military cooperation and unencumbered by harmful relations with exploitative armies in the Global North, would be a step in the right direction. To paraphrase Colonel Jahara Matisek, West African nations must develop military institutions steeped in their own histories and cultures. Only then can trustworthy armies emerge and the coup curse finally fade.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jean-Philippe Stone.

The post From the Political Conventions to Civil Unrest: Corporate Media Still Manufacturing Consent appeared first on Project Censored.

This content originally appeared on Project Censored and was authored by Project Censored.

Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed “great negotiator” and author of The Art of the Deal, promised to use his bargaining skills to help the American worker.

Trump vowed to rewrite trade deals, stanch the offshoring of U.S. jobs and reinvigorate American manufacturing.

His behavior tells a different story. Both of the trade deals he produced so far—the original United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and the “phase one” agreement with China—failed American workers.

Bad trade costs millions of American jobs. Trump’s brand of deal-making won’t bring them back.

Make no mistake, Trump inherited real trade problems. For more than 20 years, politicians of both parties failed to fix a broken system.

Corporations exploited trade agreements to shift family-sustaining manufacturing jobs to Mexico, China and other countries that pay workers low wages and deny them the protection of labor unions. They made boatloads of money offshoring jobs, but in the process, they robbed U.S. workers of their livelihoods and hollowed out countless American communities, decimating their tax bases and exposing them to epidemics of crime and opioids.

Cheating compounded the job losses. China subsidizes its industries, manipulates its currency and then floods global markets with cheaply priced goods, severely damaging U.S. manufacturing in steel, aluminum, paper, furniture, glass and other products.

“Work just started to dwindle,” recalled Bill Curtis, who eventually lost his cloth-cutting job at a Lenoir, North Carolina, furniture factory swept under by cheap Chinese imports.

Trump made fair trade—and standing up to cheaters—a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign.

He railed against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which empowered corporations to shift more than one million manufacturing jobs to Mexico. He excoriated China for illegal trading practices that siphoned off more than three million American jobs, and he vowed to stop the bleeding.

The labor movement was prepared to work with him to achieve its long-sought goals. But as president, he let workers down. America needs a comprehensive trade solution, but Trump’s policy lacks vision.

The omission of enforceable labor standards in the original NAFTA enabled U.S. corporations to move manufacturing jobs south of the border and take advantage of Mexican workers.

Mexican workers make a few dollars an hour, much less than their U.S. counterparts, and they lack the protection of real labor unions. Companies make deals with protection unions to muzzle complaints about wages and dangerous working conditions. Workers have no voice, and U.S. corporations get rich gaming this system.

But Trump’s version of the USMCA also lacked specific mechanisms to enforce labor standards. Because he failed to deliver, labor unions and Democratic members of Congress stepped into the breach and did the hard work of fixing the deal so that it provides real protections for workers and jobs in all three countries covered by the agreement.

Congressional Democrats traveled to San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to visit a Goodyear plant that pays some workers less than $2 an hour, exposed them to hazardous conditions and fired dozens who dared to strike. Goodyear, which laid off workers in Virginia and Alabama while operating the low-cost Mexican plant, refused to let the Congress members through the door.

But the visit showed the importance of incorporating worker protections into the USMCA. Prominent Democrats, including Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. refused to pass the legislation until it represented a significant improvement over NAFTA.

Under the revised version of the USMCA, Mexico must follow through with promised labor reforms, such as giving workers the right to organize, or face enforcement actions. When Mexican workers join unions, their wages will rise, giving U.S. employers less incentive to relocate jobs.

In addition, the revised version makes it easier for the U.S. to initiate complaints against Mexican companies for trade violations, provides for multinational inspections of Mexican factories and gives the U.S. the authority to impose significant penalties and ultimately to block violators’ goods.

That’s real enforcement.

Congress passed the revised version of the USMCA, not Trump’s toothless version. The deal is far from perfect, but it’s a significant improvement over NAFTA.

Trump’s failure to follow through on labor standards in the USMCA showed his murky strategy on trade. His use of tariffs does, too.

In 2018, he slapped steel and aluminum tariffs on the whole world—alienating global trading partners—when the right approach would have been a strong, surgical strike against China’s dumping. While the tariffs had some positive effects, they’re no substitute for big-picture fixes Trump has yet to deliver.

On January 15, Trump unveiled “phase one” of a new trade deal with China. It’s little more than window dressing and an effort to defuse bilateral tensions during an election year.

The deal removes some tariffs on Chinese goods and theoretically commits China to purchasing $200 billion in pork, jets, energy and other U.S. products. It gives new market access to U.S. financial firms, allowing Wall Street to line its pockets. But it does nothing to address job loss.

The U.S. lost 3.7 million jobs to China since 2001, 700,000 of them during Trump’s presidency, and the trade deficit actually increased during the first two years of his term.

The loss of American jobs is no accident. It’s part of China’s policy to destabilize competitors and boost its own power.

China subsidizes its industries, giving companies raw materials, land and cash. Then the companies sell their products abroad at prices that U.S. companies—lacking government handouts—can’t match.

In addition, China allows its industries to overproduce and flood global markets, further driving down prices with gluts of steel, aluminum and other products. And it artificially depresses the value of its currency to encourage still more overseas sales.

These are the major problems that U.S. trade policy must address, but Trump’s phase-one deal doesn’t resolve any of them.

Instead, before announcing the phase one agreement, he backpedaled. He rescinded China’s designation as a currency manipulator.

Now, just like they did with the USMCA, labor unions and Democratic members of Congress must be ready to wade in and demand improvements to the China deal.

More jobs will disappear unless Trump pursues a cohesive trade strategy that prioritizes the American worker. Now, he’s just helping to perpetuate the broken system he bitterly criticized.

This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.

Tom Conway is the international president of the United Steelworkers Union (USW).

Friday’s snapshot from the Labor Department showed hiring slipped from robust gains of 256,000 in November, which were given a boost by the end of a strike at General Motors. For the year, employers added an average of roughly 175,000 jobs per month, compared with about 223,250 per month in 2018.

Annual wage growth fell in December to 2.9%, down from an annualized average of 3.3% a year earlier, a possible sign that some slack remains in the labor market and that unemployment could fall even further from its current half-century low.

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The picture of a slowly-but-steadily improving economy – plus low inflation – likely gives the Federal Reserve comfort in keeping interest rates low, which has been a boon to stock markets. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell a slight 0.34% in Friday afternoon trading, but it briefly climbed to a record-level of 29,000 in the morning.

“We’re starting 2020 in very good shape,” said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial Services. “We should see continued economic expansion throughout 2020 driven by consumers.”

The state of the job market has become a pivotal division between President Donald Trump and his Democratic challengers. Trump can campaign on the low unemployment rate and job growth as he seeks a second term. Democrats, seeking to oust him, will point to wages that have not taken off in a meaningful for many Americans coping with high costs for medical care and higher education.

This is the last jobs report before the Iowa caucus in February that will serve as a first step for choosing the Democratic presidential nominee.

The prospect of a stable job market, a pick-up in global growth, supportive central banks, an easing of trade tensions and U.S. economic growth of around 2% should be a positive for this year.

“We really have the wind at our backs going into 2020,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the employment marketplace ZipRecruiter.

Yet job growth has failed so far to translate into substantially better hourly pay. There is the potential that wages jumped in January as many states adjusted their minimum wages.

Some businesses in competitive industries are already taking steps to prepare for wage competition this year. The Big Blue Swim School based in Chicago vies with day cares, learning centers and gyms for its instructors. The chain has five sites employing on average 30 people and plans to open five more schools this year and 17 in 2021. But it had to dramatically boost wages in order to attract staff for that expansion.

“We gave all of our front-line employees a 10% or 11% raise because of the fear we have about the wage pressures in the economy,” said CEO Chris Kenny. “We can’t meet our business goal without great staff.”

Irina Novoselsky, CEO of the jobs site CareerBuilder, said that more employers are offering non-wage benefits such as the chance to work remotely to potential workers and becoming less focused on educational credentials when hiring.

“The major fact that is pushing the trend is the labor shortage in America,” she said. “Companies are being forced to provide that flexibility.”

The U.S. economy added 2.1 million jobs last year, down from gains of nearly 2.7 million in 2018. Hiring may have slowed because the number of unemployed people seeking work has fallen by 540,000 people over the past year to 5.75 million. With fewer unemployed people hunting for jobs, there is a potential limit on job gains.

The steady hiring growth during the expansion has contributed to gains in consumer spending. Retail sales during the crucial holiday shopping improved 3.4% compared to the prior year, according to Mastercard SpendingPulse. This likely contributed to a surge of hiring in retail as that sector added 41,200 jobs in December.

The leisure and hospitality sector — which includes restaurants and hotels — added another 40,000 jobs. Health care and social assistance accounted 33,900 new jobs.

Still, the report suggests a lingering weakness in manufacturing.

Factories shed 12,000 jobs in December, after the end of the GM strike produced gains of 58,000 in November. Manufacturing companies added just 46,000 jobs in all of 2019.

Manufacturing struggled last year because of trade tensions between the United States and China coupled with slower global economic growth.

Safety problems at Boeing have also hurt orders for aircraft and parts and that could restrict hiring at factories in 2020. While the jobs report painted a healthy picture of the economy, the manufacturing sector took a blow Friday as the Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems announced layoffs for 2,800 workers in Kansas.

This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader Radio Hour.