Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Predicting non-native invasions in Antarctica

A new study identifies the non-native species most likely to invade the Antarctic Peninsula region over the next decade. It provides a baseline for all operators in the region to look at mitigation measures.

A replacement for exercise?

Researchers recently found that Sestrin, a naturally occurring protein in the body, mimicked the benefits of exercise in flies and mice.

We Tenatively Oppose War on Strictly Procedural Grounds

You can always count on the Democratic Party to oppose war, until the Republicans ask them to approve of them.

There's a well-known African proverb: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." What Moxie's centralization talk misses is that the faults in early decentralized protocols came because dotcoms wanted to capture the market.

https://invidio.us/watch?v=Nj3YFprqAr8

America’s Long History of Meddling in Russia

            Russia — OK, not the actual Russian government but a private click-farm company located in Russia — bought $100,000 worth of political ads on Facebook designed to change the outcome of the 2016 election. Except that only a small fraction of those ads were political. Also except that that small fraction was divvied up […]

10 Years Ago, We Pledged To Help Haiti Rebuild. Then What Happened?

THE EARTHQUAKE THAT STRUCK HAITI ON JAN. 12, 2010, unleashed one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. In hard-hit places like Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital and most densely populated city, schools and medical centers collapsed. More than 300,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. The disaster is estimated to have killed at least 220,000 Haitians and displaced 2.3 million—about a quarter of the population.

The crisis also unleashed an unprecedented humanitarian response. Charity groups, private individuals and governments around the world offered support. At a United Nations conference in New York on March 31, 2010, 58 donors pledged more than $8.3 billion to help Haiti “build back better,” reducing the nation’s vulnerability to future disasters. The United States made the biggest pledge of any nation, promising $1.15 billion. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton emphasized Haiti’s urgent needs: safe homes, food security and basic services that were not broadly accessible even before the earthquake—including healthcare, potable water and a national system of sanitation.

A decade later, for many, conditions are still worse than before.

The U.S. Congress ultimately approved more than $1.6 billion for emergency humanitarian relief and more than $1.14 billion for recovery. The United States went on to finance other Haitian development projects, bringing the total in post-earthquake commitments to almost $4.16 billion. 

But relatively little of the housing that was destroyed in hard-hit areas like Port-au-Prince has been rebuilt. More than 34,000 Haitians who lost their homes still live in displacement camps, and more than 300,000 Haitians have migrated to new slums just north of the capital that lack healthcare services and potable water. Many Haitian families have even less access to food. And there is still no functioning national sanitation system; more than 10,000 have died of cholera since the earthquake.

So where did all that aid money go?

To find out, In These Times reviewed U.S. government spending records and spent three weeks on the ground in Haiti in July 2019. Of the $1.6 billion committed to humanitarian relief, we found all of it bypassed Haitian institutions—and more than a third went directly to the U.S. military.

Of the $1.14 billion for recovery, more than a fifth was earmarked for the partial cancelation of debt to multilateral organizations such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank. Another $10 million went to overhead for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the agency that channeled much of the recovery money.

Nearly a quarter of what remained—$202 million—was allocated to infrastructure projects, but not to rebuild Port-au-Prince or other hard-hit areas; they were to provide electricity, transportation and housing for a new industrial park in Caracol, a community in northern Haiti untouched by the earthquake. To date, the United States has committed $160 million of these funds and given an additional $15 million to the State Department to help build the park itself.

In These Times visited Caracol, where Haitian workers are paid $5.25 a day to sew clothing for American brands like Gap, Walmart and Target. We found it has introduced a host of new problems, including increased food insecurity, exposure to pollution, unlivable wages and workplace sexual harassment.

Rather than addressing Haiti’s needs, much of the recovery aid has instead made Haiti even more vulnerable to environmental disasters, including severe droughts intensified by climate change. As climate change exacerbates disasters around the world, this raises questions about the potential consequences of U.S. disaster aid for many other countries.

AS THE HAITIAN GOVERNMENT acknowledged at the 2010 UN donors’ conference, the deadly toll of the earthquake was not caused by tremors alone. The dangerous conditions that followed are, in many ways, inseparable from the ongoing dynamics of Haiti’s colonial past.

Modern Haiti was founded in 1804 after the world’s only successful slave revolution, winning its independence from France after a century of brutal slavery. But France refused to recognize Haiti’s sovereignty until the nation paid its former colonizer an indemnity of 150 million gold francs, compensation for French “property” lost—including the enslaved people who won their freedom. Haiti paid the debt with high-interest loans—sometimes devoting 80% of its national budget to repayment—until 1947, which hamstrung the development of basic infrastructure and services.
 The United States, for its part, failed to recognize Haiti’s sovereignty until after the Confederacy seceded. Since the U.S. first occupied Haiti—from 1915 to 1934, as part of a broader strategy to secure exclusive influence in the area surrounding the nearby Panama Canal—the United States has worked to reorient the country’s economic and political system to better serve U.S. and transnational corporations.

To this end, the United States supported the Duvalier dictatorships from 1957 to 1986. Then, in 1991, when the Haitian military ousted Haiti’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the United States covertly supported death squads targeting his supporters. The United States eventually agreed to Aristide’s return, on condition he implement neoliberal reform recommendations from the World Bank—a reversal of the platform Aristide campaigned on. Such policies, pushed on Haiti since the 1980s by aid donors and multilateral financial institutions, have undermined Haitian public services by slashing social spending and privatizing state enterprises. These reforms have also undermined the livelihoods of Haitian farmers by removing tariffs on food imports that previously protected them from unfair competition from U.S. agribusiness. These reforms, commonly referred to in Haiti as Plan Lanmò—“the death plan” in Creole—had catastrophic effects on Haitian agriculture, and precipitated a mass migration of Haiti’s rural population to cities like Port-au-Prince, thus contributing to the urban population density that has been cited as a factor in the earthquake’s deadly toll.

When Aristide was reelected in 2000, the United States successfully pressured the IDB to block a series of loans it had promised for Haiti, earmarked for healthcare and basic services, including potable water and education. 

In 2004, the United States supported a second coup to remove Aristide and sent troops for another occupation, later supported by a UN stabilization effort known as the Mission des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en Haïti, or Minustah.

Living in dangerously constructed homes in the overcrowded capital, without reliable healthcare or potable water, Haitians were, thanks in large part to years of neoliberal policy and ongoing U.S. interference, particularly vulnerable during both the earthquake and the cholera epidemic that followed.

At the 2010 UN donors’ conference , Clinton emphasized the need for donors to avoid bypassing Haitian public institutions. “It will be tempting to fall back on old habits—to work around the government rather than to work with them as partners,” she cautioned.

Despite Clinton’s warning, much aid exemplifies the same pattern. Of the $1.6 billion relief budget, none was allocated directly to any public Haitian institutions, according to the Congressional Research Office. By far the largest portion of this aid, $655 million (about 40%), was earmarked directly for the U.S. military, which received an additional $40.5 million from USAID.

The overwhelming majority of international donors followed suit. According to the UN Office of Paul Farmer, UN deputy special envoy for Haiti from 2009 to 2012, less than 1% of relief aid disbursed by donor nations and multilateral organizations by 2012 went to Haiti’s public institutions.

Farmer cautioned in 2011, “With ... relief funding circumventing Haitian public institutions, the already challenging task of moving from relief to recovery—which requires government leadership, above all—becomes almost impossible.”

THE EARTHQUAKE DESTROYED MANY PUBLIC BUILDINGS, undermining Haiti’s already weak public sector. Some Haitian institutions, however, did survive, and were arguably better positioned than the U.S. military to provide relief. For example, Haiti’s most important medical facility, General Hospital, remained standing. Haitian NGOs could likely have distributed food and water more quickly and to greater numbers than the U.S. military, whose operations were limited by language barriers and its self-imposed restriction to operate only in zones it deemed “secured.”

The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) deployed 22,000 personnel, more than 300 aircraft and 33 ships to Haiti, instructed to “save lives” and “mitigate human suffering”—but the goals of military security and control seemed to take precedence. One of the military’s first actions was to seize control of air traffic at the main Port-au-Prince airport, a move the military claimed was necessary to ensure order—but also, as Haïti Liberté reported, blocked life-saving humanitarian relief supplies and emergency search and rescue personnel. As the New York Times reported, U.S. commanders turned away World Food Program flights “so that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety.” One search and rescue team from the U.K. was blocked from landing, as were five planeloads of supplies for Doctors Without Borders, whose staff resorted to buying a saw from the local market for amputations. 

More than a week after the earthquake, General Hospital still hadn’t received supplies and medicines needed to treat hundreds of dying patients. One doctor identified the disproportionate emphasis on security as “our major block to getting aid in.” While the U.S. military and the international response saved Americans and Western expats, journalists and researchers reported much of the work of digging out Haitian survivors from collapsed buildings was done, in fact, by other Haitians, often with bare hands.

About 6% of the U.S. relief money, $96.5 million, went to the U.S. State Department, which funded more soldiers and police for Minustah. Minustah’s infamous contribution to the relief effort is a deadly cholera epidemic, cholera being unknown in Haiti before October 2010. Despite the well-documented fact that Haiti lacked a basic sanitation system, cholera-infected Minustah soldiers from Nepal were housed at a military base whose sewage UN contractors dumped near important water sources, triggering the outbreak. After denying its role for years, the UN apologized in 2016. 

The U.S. Coast Guard, which received $50 million for its role in the disaster response, deployed 16 cutters to patrol Haitian and international waters—to ensure, as Lt. Cmdr. Chris O’Neil, a Coast Guard spokesperson, told the Washington Times, that no one “try to enter the United States illegally by sea.” Meanwhile, the DOD flew one of its cargo planes over Haiti five days after the quake, broadcasting a loud, pre-recorded announcement in Creole: “If you think you will reach the U.S. and all the doors will be wide open to you, that’s not at all the case. They will intercept you right on the water and send you back home where you came from.” 

The United States also awarded the private prison corporation GEO Group more than $540,000 to prepare for a “Haiti surge” through operations in Cuba, where the U.S. had recently prepared a migrant detention camp on its naval base in Guantanamo Bay. But Haitians did not flee their country in droves and, in fact, the number of Haitian migrants intercepted by the Coast Guard decreased the year after the disaster. More than 1.5 million homeless earthquake survivors, however, formed camps throughout Port-au-Prince during that same time. Many reported they received no humanitarian assistance whatsoever.

ILNA SAINT JEAN REMEMBERS ALL THE CROPS HER FAMILY USED TO GROW where the Caracol Industrial Park now sits. On her half-hectare plot, the 60-year-old peasant farmer recalls, “We had yucca, corn, black beans, pigeon peas, okra, peanuts, all kinds of stuff.” This plot, in the farmland area referred to by locals as Tè Chabè, allowed Saint Jean to support her nine children. The community was untouched by the 2010 earthquake.

One year later, however, in January 2011, “everything was lost,” Saint Jean says. A Haitian government agent arrived without warning and removed her fence. The yucca, beans and other plants were soon entirely destroyed by roaming animals.

“They told us the land doesn’t belong to us, it’s the state’s land, it’s the foreigners’ land,” Saint Jean says. “They came and took the land, they cemented it, and they made that industrial park on it.”

Saint Jean is one of 442 peasant farmers who lost their crops and their farmland in the evictions for the industrial park. 

While supporters describe the industrial park as a flagship project of post-earthquake recovery, the plans for it had actually been discussed months before the disaster, at a trade conference convened by the IDB and the William J. Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit founded and directed by former President Bill Clinton. Such industrial parks are central to the neoliberal economic model the U.S. government has pushed for decades. This model has long held that low-wage sectors like garment manufacturing are a necessary stepping stone to prosperity for countries like Haiti, and that governments should offer tax breaks and incentives for private corporations to set up shop. Unfortunately, because these factories pay workers so little, they can also exacerbate pre-existing economic and social inequalities. Moreover, garment manufacturing is often detrimental to local communities and environments, given its high water requirements and polluting waste.

The U.S. government has championed garment manufacturing as a viable economic development strategy for Haiti since the 1970s, proclaiming Haiti could become “the Taiwan of the Caribbean.” With U.S. support, employment in the garment industry—which, at the time, had largely been concentrated in Port-au-Prince—peaked in the 1980s. Partly because of the extremely low wages, however, these factories never kickstarted the promised economic boom. They also spurred the rise of slums, attracting tens of thousands of job-seekers to Port-au-Prince who could not afford standard housing.

Despite these problems, the U.S. continued to create incentives for the Haitian garment industry. HOPE II, a 2008 trade deal between the United States and Haiti, allows Haitian-made textiles to enter the U.S. without tariffs, an attractive lure for companies from around the world. 

The Haitian government’s Action Plan for National Recovery and Development, unveiled at the March 2010 UN donors’ conference, articulated a vision of reconstruction based on a more just society, capable of meeting Haitians’ basic needs, with an emphasis on housing and environmentally sustainable projects. But it also included more industrial parks for such sectors as textile production. 

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, an international body mandated to ensure accountability in the post-earthquake rebuilding and co-chaired by Bill Clinton, approved the construction of the Caracol park. Hillary Clinton’s State Department recruited Sae-A, a major Korean garment manufacturer, as its anchor tenant.

The Haitian government agreed to provide the land, the IDB offered $100 million for construction, and the United States pledged $124 million for a power plant, a new port (later cancelled), and a housing project. Sae-A committed $78 million to the project and predicted 20,000 new jobs, scoring free facilities and tax breaks in exchange. 

Before the deal was signed, the AFL-CIO warned the U.S. government about Sae-A’s record of “ acts of violence and intimidation” in Guatemala, where it closed its flagship factory in 2011, after threatening to leave the country following a dispute with a local union.

Environmentalists also raised concerns about water and waste, given the site was on some of Haiti’s most fertile farmland and close to Caracol Bay, a fragile marine ecosystem home to critically endangered species and an important source of food and income for many in Caracol. The mayor of Caracol was not informed of the project until after the site had been decided. The U.S. consulting firm that proposed the site, Koios Associates, later admitted it had not carried out an environmental assessment; upon review, the consultants rated the project “high risk” and recommended either a change of location or to just end the project altogether. 

The project’s backers charged forward.

The industrial park opened its doors in 2012. Seven years later, In These Times visited Caracol to find the labor and environmental concerns were well founded. Through interviews with factory workers and evicted peasant farmers, union reps and a local environmental group, it emerged that this U.S.-backed project created a host of new problems for thousands of Haitians.

LAND RIGHTS HAVE BEEN A FOCAL POINT OF HAITI’S LONG STRUGGLE to maintain its independence since 1804. In the first U.S. military occupation (1915–34), authorities rewrote Haiti’s constitution to remove a popular provision that limited land ownership to Haitian nationals. Thousands of peasant farmers were subsequently displaced in areas such as Tè Chabè, where the Caracol Industrial Park now sits, so that large swaths of land could be deforested for U.S. agribusiness plantation crops like sugar and sisal. Haitian farmers finally reclaimed the land after the 1986 uprising that led to the fall of the brutal U.S.-backed Duvalier dictatorships.

Many of the farmers evicted for the Caracol Industrial Park had been farming there since the late 1980s. The site’s 608 acres had provided a living for 442 families, supporting an estimated 4,000 people in the area.

While a few farmers owned their plots, most simply had customary rights to the land—which should have been respected under Haitian and international law, according to ActionAid, a U.S.-based nonprofit that has been working to support the displaced farmers. For most of these farmers, the land seized for the park was one of the only forms of financial security available, according to Wilson Menard, a 53-year-old peasant farmer and representative of a community organization the farmers founded, Kolektif Peyizan Viktim Tè Chabè. One’s access to a piece of land could always be traded for money, Menard explains, acting like an insurance policy or emergency savings. For this reason, Menard, who was himself evicted from the land, says, “Losing a piece of land, it has a huge consequence.”

The seized land was some of Haiti’s most fertile. Dense green foliage of mango and plantain trees peeks over the top of the concrete perimeter wall surrounding the park. Many farmers used this land not only to grow a rich array of crops, but to keep livestock—another crucial source of financial security, Menard explains, as a cow can always be sold.

Since the park opened, the price of the remaining land in the area has skyrocketed, making it impossible for most of the displaced farmers to rent or buy a piece. Moreover, the remaining land is much less fertile than what was paved over. While Menard has been able to sublet a small plot outside the park, two of his three cows died in the drought of 2018–19; he is adamant the animals would have survived on the Tè Chabè land, where there was enough foliage to sustain grazing animals even during drought. Before the evictions, he says, “Animals didn’t die like that.”

Residents told In These Times that the remaining land has also suffered environmental degradation from the manufacturing itself—air pollution, aquatic pollution and waste dumps. As Milostène Castin, of the local environmental group AREDE, gazes at an enormous pile of trash from the park, just a few miles away in the community of Madras, he says, “It’s a wrong they’re doing to the community, which will have a big impact on generations [to] come.” 

Local fishermen report that catching fish is more difficult since the industrial park opened, and that some species seem to have disappeared altogether. Saint Jean, whose family lives less than five miles from the industrial park, as well as from the mountains of factory garbage, reports that air quality has deteriorated. As some of the garbage from the factories is burned, a “huge smoke rises in the air and then comes down,” she says. Several others also confirmed this. 

The Haitian government promised to “look for land” for the farmers it evicted, llna recalls. Instead, more than 10 months after the eviction, the farmers were issued cash payments as compensation for lost crops.

This money has long since run out, according to the Kolektif, and families are growing increasingly desperate. “It’s become worse,” Saint Jean says. “We wake up hungry, we go to bed hungry.”

In 2017, the Kolektif filed a complaint with the accountability office of the IDB. After more than a year of negotiations, they arrived at a settlement, which was originally supposed to take effect in March 2019. Most of the compensation promised to the displaced farmers, however, had not been delivered as of December 2019, according to ActionAid.

Under the terms of this agreement, one member of each family is “eligible” for employment in the industrial park. The rest must choose between other forms of compensation, which could include specialized technical support, microcredit programs, vocational training or land. Of the 442 farmers who lost their land, no more than 100 may receive new land.

According to ActionAid, just 12% of these families have managed to secure employment in the industrial park. And the value of that employment is unclear.

THE BACKERS OF THE CARACOL INDUSTRIAL PARK have claimed it will create up to 60,000 local jobs. At the ceremony that established the Caracol Industrial Park in September 2010, Hillary Clinton assured the public that the jobs at Sae-A’s new factories would be “not just any jobs; these are good jobs with fair pay that adhere to international labor standards.” 

So far, just 13,000 of the 60,000 projected jobs have been created, and most pay unlivable wages. Haitians who do the physically demanding and repetitive work of sewing and assembling clothing in the new industrial park earn the Haitian minimum wage of just 500 gourdes (about $5.25 U.S.) a day—three times less than the estimated cost of living in Haiti, according to the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center.

The park’s largest employer is S&H Global, Sae-A’s wholly owned Haitian subsidiary, whose biggest customer is Walmart. Other Caracol factories include Taiwanese firm Everest Apparel and Sri-Lankan-owned Mas Akansyel, both of which manufacture clothing for Nike and Puma. According to the International Labor Organization’s Better Work Program, these three companies have all repeatedly been found to violate Haitian and international labor laws, with numerous breaches of health and safety regulations, wage theft, temperatures that exceed safe levels, verbally abusive bosses and sexual harassment.

When Philogène Nelange, now 35, heard about the opening of the new industrial park in Caracol, he had high hopes. He had grown up in the nearby commune of St. Suzanne, where there were few viable prospects for young people. “I thought that, with the arrival of the factory, things would be better,” Nelange says.

He landed a job at S&H Global. Three years later, the salary he makes is barely enough to cover a single worker’s expenses. Sitting on the porch of the tiny two-room home he rents in Trou-du-Nord with his wife and three kids, he says he often can’t sleep at night because he’s so worried. “It’s not even enough for food,” he says bluntly. Yet he also has to cover the costs of rent and utility bills, drinking water and school tuition (water and education being largely unsubsidized by the government). While S&H Global built a school in Caracol that provides free schooling to 500 local children, Nelange says this is insufficient to serve its more than 10,000 employees, many of whom have young children.

One young seamstress at S&H Global spoke with In These Times on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution. She says she was suspended without pay for refusing her boss’s unwanted sexual advances. “He asked me to sleep with him,” she explains. “I didn’t agree.”

Another young woman, who applied for a job at S&H Global in the summer of 2019, tells In These Times that a manager offered to push her application forward in exchange for sex.

Unité Technique d’Exécution, the Haitian government office responsible for managing the industrial park, says it has a zero tolerance policy on sexual harassment and requires companies to have procedures in place for workers to report such violations.

Karen Seo, senior public relations manager at Sae-A, tells In These Times via email that Sae-A takes a proactive stance to detect and address workplace problems, including sexual harassment, through trainings and disciplinary actions.

A Haitian government spokesperson added that a 2018 report of sexual harassment at the park resulted in disciplinary action against a perpetrator.

Yet sexual harassment remains endemic across the factories, according to a representative from one of the unions working at the industrial park, who feared retaliation if their name was used. “Each week, you hear a different complaint,” they say, adding that discipline and even firings are common if a worker refuses a superior. They estimated more than 60 workers have been fired the past four years at their factory for this very reason.

Factory workers have also filed complaints with Haitian authorities, saying that company grievance procedures had failed to address their reports of physical violence at the factory and of bribes being demanded in exchange for employment, according to the government spokesperson.

Even IDB’s Haiti department manager, José Agustín Aguerre, admitted in an interview with the New York Times before the park opened its doors, “Creating an exclusively garment maquiladora zone is something everyone—I wouldn’t say tries to avoid, but considers last resort.” He also defended the decision, calling this “last resort” strategy “a good opportunity” because of Haiti’s very high unemployment.

But with such low wages, the garment factories have little capacity to stimulate the economy. As Haitian economist Camille Chalmers put it in an interview with Haiti Grassroots Watch: “It’s a big error to bet on slave-wage labor, on breaking the backs of workers who are paid nothing while [foreign] companies get rich. It’s not only an error, it’s a crime.” 

Of the total of $4.16 billion the U.S. government awarded for aid projects in post-earthquake Haiti, for-profit U.S. corporations received a greater share than any other single group: $1.86 billion, about 45%.

ANTI-CORRUPTION PROTESTS HAVE SWEPT HAITI for the past two years, precipitated by evidence that the U.S.-backed governments of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and his predecessor misappropriated hundreds of millions of dollars from a Venezuelan aid program for subsidized oil.

But for Castin, of the environmental group AREDE, who has played an active role in these protests, the fundamental issues at stake—in the anti-government demonstrations and the ongoing struggle around the Caracol Industrial Park—are, in many ways, the same. In both cases, Haitians are fighting for greater accountability in how aid money is spent, and for a future that serves the needs of Haitian communities.

At the 2010 UN donors’ conference, which was called “Towards a New Future for Haiti,” similar aspirations were voiced. Hillary Clinton acknowledged that years of prior aid to Haiti had failed to address basic needs, and emphasized the need for donors to “hold ourselves accountable.” Clinton warned, “We cannot retreat to failed strategies.” Yet U.S. aid in post-earthquake Haiti has been premised on longstanding imperialist assumptions, including the belief that Haiti’s most viable path of development is through foreign corporations taking advantage of devalued Haitian labor—even as Haitian export manufacturing workers continue to be paid less than any other workers in the hemisphere—and the related belief that military control of Haiti’s population is required to ensure stability for foreign investment.

Of the nearly $918 million Congress approved for recovery projects, more than $302 million (almost a third of the budget) was earmarked for “governance and rule of law.” In addition to funding the expansion of Minustah and prison construction, this U.S. recovery aid was used to strengthen the Haitian National Police (HNP), including support for its SWAT and civil order units. Since 1995, the United States has provided extensive support for this domestic police force in Haiti, which the Haitian government uses to “keep the peace”—most recently, to put down the anti-corruption protests. More than 40 Haitian protesters have been killed in clashes with the HNP since August 2019.

The failures of the neoliberal policies that have long guided U.S. aid have never been more apparent than they are today in Haiti, a country that once produced enough food to feed its population in the 1980s and is now almost entirely dependent on U.S. food imports.

Nelange places much of the blame on Haiti’s low minimum wages. Caracol factory workers like Nelange face U.S. prices for many food staples while earning a minimum day wage—which was 420 gourdes, just under $5, until November 2019.

Garment manufacturing companies in Haiti and their allies in the U.S. government have long fought wage increases. When Haiti’s lower parliament voted in March 2019 to raise the daily wage to about $8.25 for export manufacturing workers, S&H Global canceled an expansion at Caracol that would have created 10,000 jobs, choosing instead to send those jobs to the Dominican Republic.

In the end, garment workers won only a modest increase, effective November 2019, to 500 gourdes (about $5.25 today). A spokesperson for Sae-A confirmed to In These Times that the company is nonetheless “building a factory in D.R. as a backup now.”

Meanwhile, soaring inflation, combined with rapid devaluation of the gourde, has made basic necessities even more unaffordable. Reached by telephone in December 2019, Nelange said his family can now barely even afford potable water.

“You can’t live,” he says.

Castin has some advice for future aid donors “so as not to repeat the same mistakes as the Caracol Industrial Park.” He emphasizes the need for a more participatory and transparent approach; advance assessments of the economic, social and environmental risks of aid projects; and mechanisms of accountability, including grievance offices in affected communities.

At minimum, Castin says, the United States should not “use American people’s tax money to finance projects that forcibly displace Haitian peasants from fertile land that is their principal source of revenue.”

The print version of this article incorrectly stated that the $202 million allocated by the United States for projects to support the Caracol Industrial Park represented a third of the U.S. Congressional funds for Haiti’s recovery that were not earmarked for debt relief of USAID operating expenses. The correct figure, indicated in the online version of the article, is nearly a quarter. The print article also incorrectly stated that Milostène Castin had been arrested and jailed in anti-corruption protests. In These Times regrets these errors.

This story was supported by a grant from the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.

ISABEL MACDONALD is an investigative journalist based in Montreal who has traveled to Haiti frequently since 2005.

JEREMY DUPIN Jeremy Dupin is an Emmy-winning journalist and filmmaker.

Increases in bad copyright lawsuits hurt all of us, including artists. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/music-copyright-lawsuits-chilling-effect-935310/

Austin: Join Electronic Frontier Alliance group @EFFaustin on January 14 for a discussion with the @techworkersco about unionization in the Tech industry. https://www.eff.org/event/tech-workers-coalition-organizing-tech-workers-rights

@mitchstoltz Everyone benefits from the public interest .ORG domain. Join the fight to #SaveDotOrg!
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The number of individuals in prison around the world for raising their voices online is on the rise. To learn more about some of these individuals, visit Offline: https://www.eff.org/offline

Omg it's a MUD! By @emsenn
https://grapevine.haus/games/Teraum/play

To Build a Left-Wing Unionism, We Must Reckon With the AFL-CIO’s Imperialist Past

Two days after Bolivia’s socialist president Evo Morales was forced from office in a right-wing military coup last November, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka condemned the coup on Twitter and praised Morales for reducing poverty and championing indigenous rights. In doing so, Trumka joined Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent figures of the Left in countering the US political and media establishments’ dominant narrative that Morales’s violent ouster was a win for democracy.

While it’s fitting for the president of the nation’s largest union federation to denounce a right-wing coup against a leftist foreign leader — which was endorsed by the State Department and CIA — it also represents an important break from precedent for the AFL-CIO. Though rarely discussed, the federation has a long record of supporting the US government in disrupting leftist movements around the world, including through coups d’état in Latin America.

Throughout the Cold War, the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council and International Affairs Department were run by zealous anticommunists determined to undercut the rise of left-wing trade unions overseas. Like their counterparts in the US government, George Meany, AFL-CIO president from 1955–1979, and Lane Kirkland, his successor who served until 1995, understood that if allowed to thrive, class-conscious labor movements would pose a serious threat to global capital.

Meany, Kirkland, and other AFL-CIO officials subscribed to a philosophy of “business unionism,” meaning they had no desire to topple capitalism but instead promoted the idea that class collaboration and limited workplace bargaining over “bread and butter” issues would bring workers all the prosperity they needed. They championed economic nationalism over transnational labor solidarity, reasoning that US workers would see higher wages and lower unemployment as long as US corporations had easy access to foreign markets to sell products made in the United States — a version of the kind of nationalist ideology that has fueled racism and xenophobia among segments of the US working class and aided Trump’s rise to power.

From aiding US-backed military coups in Brazil and Chile to cheerleading ruthless counterinsurgency wars in Vietnam and El Salvador, the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy during the Cold War was fundamentally geared toward the interests of US empire. By the 1970s — just as capital launched a renewed, decades-long attack on workers’ rights around the globe — the US labor federation had lost whatever credibility it might have had as a vehicle for international working-class liberation, derided by anti-imperialists at home and abroad as the “AFL-CIA.”

As we enter a new decade, the prospects for a rejuvenated US labor movement are strong: a new generation of exploited workers are eager to unionize, the number of workers on strike just hit a thirty-year high, the rapidly growing Democratic Socialists of America is aiming to pull unions leftward through the rank-and-file strategy, longtime labor ally Bernie Sanders has plans to double union membership if elected president, and militant labor leaders like Sara Nelson (who could be the AFL-CIO’s next president) are rising in prominence.

It’s a good time, then, for both labor activists and left labor leaders to reckon with the history of US labor imperialism — a history largely unknown to younger labor activists and leftists who came of age in the early twenty-first century. Wrestling with that history can help ensure that a resurgent US labor movement plays a positive and effective role in building global worker solidarity rather than one that props up an imperialist order that hurts the working class both within the United States and around the world.

Why Labor Imperialism?

Though decades of corporate propaganda have tried to tell us otherwise, there is power in a union. Not only the power to raise wages or win paid time off, but the power to overthrow governments and bring national economies to a screeching halt. During the Cold War, the US government understood this very well. To US officials determined to preserve and expand international capitalism in the face of an increasingly influential global left, trade unions around the world posed a serious threat.

Unions abroad therefore became a crucial target of US imperial intervention: rather than allow them to mount an effective challenge to capital by radicalizing workers and fueling leftist political movements, unions would need to be turned into instruments for containing the revolutionary potential of the working class. In the process, organized labor’s most powerful weapon — the strike — would be co-opted and used to pursue reactionary goals, namely, to undermine leftist governments.

To subvert overseas unions for their own imperial ends, the State Department and CIA found an enthusiastic ally in the AFL-CIO. The Cold War largely coincided with the period when the US labor movement was at its strongest. More US workers were unionized in the 1950s and 1960s than at any other time in history, giving labor leaders like Meany considerable political clout.

As anticommunists, AFL-CIO officials chose to use this power to assist the US government in undermining leftist influence in foreign trade unions. In practice, this meant interfering in the internal processes of other countries’ trade unions, stoking internecine rivalries, creating and financially propping up splinter labor organizations, grooming cadres of conservative business unionists, and using the power of the strike to sabotage progressive governments.

After decades of such imperial interventions, organized labor across the world was left divided and weakened, making it easier for transnational capital to exploit workers in the era of neoliberalism.

The AFL’s Early Cold War

Thanks to the Left’s steadfast resistance to fascism, the Communist parties of Western Europe won widespread popular support during World War II, especially among the working class. By the end of the war, labor federations like France’s Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and Italy’s Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro (CGIL) were led or heavily influenced by Communists.

In 1945, the labor movements of the Allied nations — including Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States — formed the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), a sort of United Nations for labor. At this time, the AFL and the CIO were still separate, competing entities. Established in 1886, the politically conservative AFL included unions of skilled, craft workers, while the CIO — founded in 1935 as a breakaway organization from the AFL — represented workers in mass industries like auto and steel. The newer and more progressive CIO, which owed its growth to the work of Communist and other leftist organizers, readily joined the WFTU. But the larger and staunchly anticommunist AFL refused to have anything to do with the new global organization because it included unions from the USSR.

AFL leaders like Meany argued that leftists — particularly Communists — were inherently “totalitarians,” and that any unions they led were illegitimate as representatives of workers. He and the AFL’s other anticommunist internationalists contended that only “democratic” or “free” trade unions — that is, pro-capitalist, business unions — had any claim to legitimacy.

The irony of “free” trade unionists was that they frequently trampled on union democracy and autonomy while claiming to champion these very principles. Whenever Communists or other leftists attained leadership positions in foreign unions through democratic methods and with rank-and-file support, outsiders from the AFL would jump in to make sure their own handpicked, anticommunist unionists would have the resources to mount a robust, disruptive opposition.

In 1944, before the Cold War battle lines had even been drawn, the AFL established the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC) with the goal of undermining Communist-led unions in Western Europe. Tapped to run the FTUC was Jay Lovestone, who had once been a leader of the Communist Party USA but was expelled in 1929, because Stalin believed he was too close to his Politburo rival Nikolai Bukharin.

Lovestone made his way into the labor movement in the 1930s through the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Eager for revenge against his ex-comrades, he then went to work for the UAW’s anticommunist president Homer Martin, using his intimate knowledge of the party to help Martin red-bait and oust his intra-union opponents. This experience made him the perfect choice to run the FTUC.

As FTUC director, Lovestone sent his associate, Irving Brown, to be his point man in Europe. From an office in Paris, Brown set about dividing the international labor movement by loudly accusing the WFTU of being a Soviet-dominated organization. He particularly worked to split the French CGT by backing its internal, noncommunist faction, Force Ouvrière. While Force Ouvrière started as a small CGT caucus willing to coexist with Communists, Brown helped transform it into a separate, anticommunist labor organization in direct competition with the CGT, propped up more by US funds than popular support.

By 1947–48, the US government caught up with the AFL on the Cold War, creating the CIA and launching the Marshall Plan to ensure the “containment” of communism by reconstructing Western Europe’s war-shattered economy within a capitalist framework. Recognizing the labor movement as a crucial Cold War battleground, the CIA was drawn to Lovestone’s FTUC. In 1949, the Agency agreed to finance the FTUC’s efforts to subvert Communist unions abroad in exchange for intelligence on foreign labor organizations. AFL leaders Meany, David Dubinsky, and Matthew Woll were in on the new partnership, as were Lovestone and Brown, but other AFL officials and rank-and-file US unionists were kept in the dark and knew little of what the FTUC was up to.

That US union leaders forged a secret alliance with the CIA to undemocratically divide unions overseas may justifiably be difficult to understand. But AFL leaders and the CIA shared the belief that Left-oriented unions were literally capable of bringing about proletarian revolution.

To prevent this from happening, the CIA needed the expertise of the AFL. Since the AFL’s pro-capitalist, anticommunist officials were already working to undermine leftist labor movements before the CIA was even established, they didn’t need any convincing.

Now flush with CIA money, in the early 1950s, Brown was reputed to carry around suitcases full of cash, buying the loyalty of union officials in France, Italy, West Germany, and elsewhere. Wherever Communist unions were strong, anticommunist splinter unions were created and financially backed by the FTUC/CIA. The AFL similarly partnered with the State Department, which developed a corps of labor attachés and stationed them at US embassies abroad. Often plucked from the ranks of AFL unions and vetted by Lovestone, the State Department’s labor attachés used their diplomatic leverage to isolate and discredit Europe’s Communist-led unions.

Lovestone also dispatched FTUC operatives to Asia. After the 1949 Communist revolution in China, FTUC representative Willard Etter set up shop in Formosa (Taiwan). With resources provided by the CIA, Etter supported the Free China Labor League, which served as a front for espionage and sabotage activities. Teams of anticommunist Chinese agents secretly traveled from Formosa to mainland China, where they not only reported intelligence back to Etter via radio transmitters, but also blew up fuel supplies (causing substantial civilian casualties) and attempted to stir up worker unrest in state-owned factories.

Through the FTUC’s China operation, then, the AFL became complicit in CIA-sponsored terrorist activities, straying far from its basic purpose of empowering workers. Most of Etter’s agents were captured and executed by the Chinese government after the CIA lost interest and abandoned them once the Korean War started.

The relationship between the AFL and CIA was fraught. Lovestone chafed at the Agency’s bureaucracy and oversight, continuously demanding greater independence for his FTUC. For their part, some in the CIA’s top ranks — typically Ivy League-educated WASPs — looked scornfully at their AFL contacts, who were mostly Jews and Irish Catholics with immigrant and working-class upbringings. The feeling was mutual, with Lovestone frequently ridiculing his CIA partners as “fizz kids” in letters to Brown. Such acrimony though was a trivial byproduct of the unsavory partnership between the nominal voice of the US working class and the US imperial state.

Despite the interpersonal tensions, the FTUC-CIA alliance in Western Europe achieved its main goal of splitting the WFTU in 1949. Increasingly pressured by Cold War geopolitics, the CIO and British Trades Union Congress disaffiliated from the WFTU early that year. The break came down to disagreements over the Marshall Plan, which the Communist-led unions opposed on grounds that it constituted an attempt to undermine their influence and reconsolidate the international capitalist system with the United States at its center.

1949 was also the year that the US labor movement fell victim to the same divisions the AFL had been sowing abroad. Wanting to stay in the government’s good graces, CIO leaders took a decidedly rightward turn that year, purging Communist organizers from their ranks and chasing out their Left-led affiliate unions. The result was devastating. The CIO — which had previously been at the center of a multiracial, working-class movement for social and economic justice — was rendered a shell of its former self without its dedicated leftist organizers. Facing obsolescence, the CIO was absorbed into the larger, more conservative AFL in 1955, and the US labor movement began its decades-long decline.

In December 1949, the CIO and British Trades Union Congress joined the AFL and other anticommunist national labor centers to found the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), which presented itself as the “free” world’s alternative to the WFTU. Thanks to the machinations of the AFL, CIA, and State Department, the international labor movement was now divided into two hostile camps, with US labor leaders more fixated on fighting the Left than fighting capital.

Targeting the Third World

Following the reconstruction of Western Europe, US labor leaders and their allies in the US government increasingly turned their attention to the developing countries of the Global South, or what was then called the Third World.

In the Western Hemisphere, Lovestone had a minimal presence. Instead, the AFL’s “Inter-American Representative” was Italian émigré and former socialist Serafino Romualdi. Forced to flee Italy for opposing Mussolini, Romualdi settled in New York. Like Lovestone, he found his way into the labor movement through David Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in the 1930s, working for the union’s news service.

During World War II, Romualdi toured Latin America on behalf of Nelson Rockefeller’s Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs before briefly returning to Italy as an operative with the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA — where he attempted to sideline Communist influence in the CGIL.

In 1946, Romualdi became the AFL’s chief representative in Latin America and the Caribbean. Much as Irving Brown worked to divide the WFTU, Romualdi’s mission was to weaken the Left-led Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL), which had been founded by Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano in 1938 to unite Latin America’s class-conscious trade unions.

The CTAL served as an authentic voice for pan-American labor, led by Latin American unionists and free from US imperial dominance. Like the WFTU with which it was affiliated, it brought Communists and noncommunists together around the common purpose of improving the lot of workers. Romualdi and the AFL sought to undermine the CTAL and replace it with a US-led inter-American labor confederation, ensuring the Latin American working class would not become a strong, independent force capable of challenging North American control.

With the support of Latin America’s social-democratic parties and the State Department’s labor attachés, Romualdi succeeded in convincing many Latin American worker organizations to break from the CTAL, bringing the region’s anticommunist unions together in 1948 with the establishment of the Confederación Interamericana de Trabajadores. Three years later, it was reconstituted as the Organización Regional Inter-Americana de Trabajadores (ORIT) to serve as the ICFTU’s regional arm in the Western Hemisphere. Under Romualdi’s influence, ORIT would battle leftist, Peronist, and Catholic trade unions across the region throughout the 1950s, with the result that the Latin American working class remained fractured.

In the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Meany, like his allies in the US foreign policy establishment, quickly made Latin America his new priority for “containment.” Unfortunately for him, the FTUC had recently been shuttered at the insistence of UAW president Walter Reuther, after Reuther’s CIO merged with the AFL.

Though an anticommunist in his own right, Reuther believed there could be peaceful coexistence between East and West and didn’t wish to escalate tensions with the Soviet Union. Despising Lovestone for his divisive tactics in the UAW years earlier, Reuther wanted the AFL-CIO to conduct its foreign policy through the multilateral ICFTU and not Lovestone’s FTUC. Although the ICFTU was formed at the urging of the AFL, during the 1950s, Meany had become disenchanted with the European unionists who ran it, believing they were not belligerent enough in their anticommunism.

Hoping to refocus labor’s Cold War in Latin America after the Cuban Revolution, but not willing to rely on the ICFTU, Meany wanted a new, unilateral organization in the mold of the now-defunct FTUC. He would get it with the creation of the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD — usually pronounced “A-field”). AIFLD would become the AFL-CIO’s most significant instrument for waging the global Cold War.

The idea for AIFLD was first proposed by Communications Workers of America president Joseph Beirne, who held a seat on the AFL-CIO Executive Council. In 1959, Beirne brought sixteen ORIT-affiliated union officials from Latin America to Virginia for a training course on how to be an effective business unionist. Beirne sought to scale up this program and turn it into a permanent organization, persuading Meany to get behind the plan.

Meany then convinced the incoming Kennedy administration that the proposed organization, AIFLD, would serve as the perfect labor auxiliary to the Alliance for Progress — a Marshall Plan-type initiative to provide generous US aid to anticommunist Latin American governments to prevent the outbreak of another Cuba-style revolution. As it had in postwar Europe, US labor would once again willingly assist the US government in carrying out its Cold War objectives.

In 1962, AIFLD went into operation. Almost exclusively funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to the tune of several million dollars per year, the Institute quickly extended its presence into nearly every country in Latin America, coordinating its activities with the US foreign policy apparatus.

AIFLD’s main activity was labor education, particularly training participants on how to combat left-wing influence in their respective unions. Trainees who were considered to have exceptional potential would be brought to a facility at Front Royal, Virginia for a three-month residential course — a kind of School of the Americas for trade unionists — before being sent back to their home countries with nine-month stipends to fund their anti-leftist organizing efforts.

The Institute also used its USAID funds to carry out development projects across Latin America, including the construction of affordable worker housing for members of ORIT-affiliated unions, signaling to workers the benefits of joining the US-sponsored “free” trade union movement (though the AIFLD often overpromised on how quickly it would complete its housing developments and how many units would be available). Prospective residents were required to fill out long, detailed questionnaires about their unions, information possibly supplied to the CIA.

To showcase the AFL-CIO’s commitment to class collaboration, AIFLD invited US businessmen with interests in Latin America to serve on its board of trustees, including the heads of the Anaconda Company, Pan-American Airways, and W.R. Grace & Co., among others. These companies were no strangers to union-busting, which made the AFL-CIO’s eagerness to partner with them especially disturbing. That they agreed to be part of AIFLD demonstrates how US capitalists saw no threat — only opportunity — in the kind of unionism the Institute was encouraging.

Romualdi directed the Institute for its first three years until his retirement, when he was replaced by William Doherty, Jr. Doherty, whose father had been both president of the National Association of Letter Carriers and US ambassador to Jamaica, was an alleged friend to the CIA and would serve as AIFLD’s director for the next thirty years.

In the early 1960s, AIFLD helped undermine the democratically elected, leftist government of Cheddi Jagan in the tiny South American nation of Guyana, which was then a colony called British Guiana. The colony was on the path to a planned transition to independence, and Jagan hoped to reorganize the economy along socialist lines. But the Kennedy administration, fearing Jagan would be another Fidel Castro, pressured the UK to stall the transition until he could be driven out of power.

In the summer of 1962, eight Guyanese union officials from a labor federation tied to Jagan’s political opposition participated in AIFLD’s training course in the United States, returning home with stipends provided by the Institute. The following spring, they helped lead a general strike to protest Jagan’s government. The three-month strike crippled the colony’s economy and escalated into a race riot pitting the Afro-Guyanese opposition against Jagan’s Indo-Guyanese base.

Representatives from two AFL-CIO-affiliated unions — AFSCME and the Retail Clerks — went to British Guiana to aid the strikers by coordinating food relief and replenishing the strike fund, using CIA money secretly channeled through private foundations. What turned out to be one of the longest general strikes in history was sustained by the US imperial state, with help from US union officials, in order to weaken a democratic, progressive government.

Elections were held a year later, with British Guiana still reeling from the strike. Again using secret CIA funds, a representative from the AFL-CIO-affiliated American Newspaper Guild traveled to the colony to saturate the electorate with anti-Jagan propaganda. After the bitter divisions sowed by AIFLD, the AFL-CIO, and CIA, Jagan’s People’s Progressive Party was unable to win a majority of parliamentary seats, losing the election. The British then allowed the transition to independence to move forward. The new leader, Forbes Burnham, soon revealed himself to be a corrupt autocrat, remaining in power until his death twenty years later.

AIFLD also played an important role in the US-backed military coup against Brazil’s left-wing president, João Goulart. Like their fellow travelers in the US government, AFL-CIO leaders believed Goulart was too close to the Brazilian Communist Party and needed to be replaced. In 1963, AIFLD’s training program hosted an all-Brazilian class of thirty-three unionists. Their course included fifty hours’ worth of instruction on how to fight Communist influence in their unions, taught by Lovestone and Romualdi.

When the coup against Goulart was executed on April 1, 1964, the AIFLD graduates helped ensure it went smoothly. While leftist unionists called for a general strike to disrupt the coup, the Institute-trained union officials convinced their fellow workers to ignore these calls and allow the military takeover to proceed unobstructed. The new military regime put allegedly Communist-led unions into trusteeships, sending “intervenors” — some of them AIFLD graduates — to purge these unions of leftists and Goulart sympathizers.

Three months later, Doherty boasted in a radio interview that AIFLD’s Brazilian trainees “became intimately involved in some of the clandestine operations” of the coup. “Many of the trade union leaders — some of whom were actually trained in our institute — were involved in… the overthrow of the Goulart regime,” he said. Doherty also defended a wage freeze that was imposed by the new government, arguing the Brazilian poor would need to “suffer” no less than the rich in the pursuit of national economic growth. The coup regime turned into a nineteen-year dictatorship, imprisoning, torturing, and murdering untold numbers of trade unionists.

The State Department and USAID were so pleased with AIFLD’s work that they gladly accepted the AFL-CIO’s proposal to create similar institutes for Africa and Asia. In late 1964 to early 1965, the African American Labor Center was established, and in 1968, the Asian American Free Labor Institute was launched. Like AIFLD, both of these nonprofits were almost entirely funded by USAID to carry out training and development programs in order to prop up anticommunist, anti-Left unions. In 1977, a fourth nonprofit — the Free Trade Union Institute — was created to focus on Europe.

Internal Dissent

At the 1965 AFL-CIO convention in San Francisco, Meany presented a resolution, written by Lovestone, pledging the labor federation’s “unstinting support” of President Lyndon Johnson’s policy of escalating the Vietnam War. When the resolution was about to be voted on without discussion or debate, a group of college students, observing the proceedings from the balcony, stood up and chanted “Get out of Vietnam!” and “Debate!” Meany responded by having them thrown out of the convention hall, dismissing them as “kookies.” The pro-war resolution was then adopted unanimously.

A handful of independent unions, union locals, and mid-ranking labor officials had already expressed skepticism about the war, if not outright opposition. After witnessing Meany’s hostility toward the anti-war movement and his unwillingness to allow debate, more union leaders — particularly from the UAW — began to openly voice their disagreements with the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy.

Reuther, president of the UAW, tepidly opposed military escalation in Vietnam, wanting to see the war end through peaceful negotiations. Further, he disliked Meany’s aggressive, go-it-alone approach to international issues, preferring to work through the ICFTU. Reuther also did not trust Lovestone, who by now was the director of the AFL-CIO’s International Affairs Department. Still, he was reluctant to make his disagreements public, not wanting to create a rift between the UAW and AFL-CIO.

Instead, Victor Reuther — Walter’s younger brother in charge of the UAW’s foreign relations — decided to speak up, telling reporters in 1966 that Lovestone and the AFL-CIO were “involved” with the CIA and criticizing AIFLD’s role in the Brazilian coup. The following year, a series of journalistic exposés helped substantiate Victor’s claim by revealing the CIA’s ties to the labor federation and its affiliates going back to the FTUC. Of course, Meany and the AFL-CIO’s other internationalists vigorously denied any relationship with the CIA.

Along with Meany’s hawkish stance on Vietnam — which included attempts to bolster South Vietnam’s anticommunist Confédération Vietnamienne du Travail — the CIA revelations badly damaged the AFL-CIO’s credibility among liberals and members of the New Left. Disagreements over foreign policy, as well as several domestic issues, finally led the UAW to disaffiliate from the federation in 1968. (The union would return to the AFL-CIO in 1981.)

Despite these controversies, Meany, Lovestone, and AIFLD did not alter course. When the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, they decided to assist the Nixon administration in destabilizing his government. While the Chilean working class was overwhelmingly behind Allende, AIFLD supported gremios — associations of right-wing, middle-class professionals — along with the country’s conservative union of maritime workers. In 1972, at least twenty-nine Chileans attended the Institute’s training course in Virginia, far more than had ever attended in previous years.

With the help of AIFLD, in 1972 and 1973, truck-owners and merchants across Chile staged a series of strikes aimed at creating economic chaos and subverting Allende’s government. As in British Guiana nine years earlier, the strikers were supported with funds from the CIA. US efforts to undermine Allende culminated in the violent military coup on September 11, 1973. The new military dictatorship AIFLD helped bring to power by using traditional working-class tactics like the strike would ironically — and tragically — trample workers’ rights, jailing and murdering thousands of Chilean labor activists.

After researchers like Ruth Needleman and Fred Hirsch helped expose the Institute’s role in the Chilean coup by obtaining documents, conducting interviews, and circulating their findings, rank-and-file union members across the United States began demanding more transparency around AIFLD in the mid-1970s. Several union locals and local labor councils called on the AFL-CIO to fund its foreign programs independently instead of relying on USAID. While these demands went ignored, Lovestone finally retired in 1974, with Meany following suit five years later.

Upon Meany’s retirement, his longtime lieutenant Lane Kirkland became president of the AFL-CIO. Like his predecessor, Kirkland was a hardline anticommunist. Groomed to be a diplomat at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, he was a close personal friend of Henry Kissinger, spending every Thanksgiving with him.

Under Kirkland, the AFL-CIO applauded the Reagan administration’s aggressive foreign policy aimed at reigniting the Cold War, even as Reagan ushered in a new era of union busting by firing 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981. At the AFL-CIO’s urging, Reagan oversaw the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in 1983, a government-funded grant-making foundation to disburse monies to the same kinds of overseas anticommunist organizations previously funded covertly by the CIA. With Kirkland serving on NED’s board of directors, AIFLD and the AFL-CIO’s other foreign institutes became core grant recipients.

Kirkland backed Reagan’s Central America policy of arming repressive state security forces in El Salvador and terroristic counterrevolutionaries in Nicaragua. AIFLD was especially active in El Salvador in the 1980s, playing a critical role in the development and implementation of an agrarian reform program meant to undercut rural support for the leftist revolutionary movement. El Salvador’s counterinsurgency government — entirely propped up by generous US military aid — combined the agrarian reform with a state of siege that saw thousands of campesinos brutally murdered in a wave of massacres.

Alarmed by Kirkland’s support for Reagan’s foreign policy, rank-and-file US union members became active in the Central American peace and solidarity movement, demanding the AFL-CIO change direction. In one of the most significant developments for US labor internationalism since the start of the Cold War, the presidents of several national unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO came together to form the National Labor Committee in Support of Democracy and Human Rights in El Salvador (NLC).

The NLC openly opposed Kirkland and the Executive Council, lobbying Congress to cut off US military aid to the Salvadoran government. The NLC also sent delegations of US union members to El Salvador and Nicaragua to witness first-hand how US assistance was helping rightists murder and intimidate Central American workers. The NLC would later evolve into an anti-sweatshop organization, helping expose the complicity of major clothing brands in worker rights abuses in Central America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

While facing internal opposition to its Central America program, the AFL-CIO gave financial and political support to Solidarność, the Polish trade union led by Lech Wałęsa that eventually helped bring down Poland’s Communist government. Opposed by foreign policy officials who feared stirring up hostilities with the Soviet Union, the AFL-CIO’s foray into Poland has since been touted by interventionists as a case study in the heroics of “democracy-promotion.”

Though Kirkland claimed a victory for “free” trade unionism in Poland, by the 1990s, the labor leaders associated with the NLC were convinced the federation badly needed to improve its overseas image. What’s more, several union presidents on the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council believed the federation had become lethargic in the face of years of declining union density.

Following the AFL-CIO’s failure to stop the passage of NAFTA, a group of labor officials led by SEIU president John Sweeney gathered enough support to force Kirkland to retire and take control of the federation in 1995. Calling themselves the “New Voice” slate, Sweeney and his allies aimed to revitalize the AFL-CIO by organizing new workers and abandoning outdated anticommunist priorities.

Under Sweeney, in 1997, AIFLD and the other foreign institutes were shut down and reorganized into a new NGO called the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, or Solidarity Center, which continues to be the AFL-CIO’s operational arm in the Global South.

Centering Solidarity

Active in over sixty countries, the Solidarity Center does good work, helping to improve safety standards in the Bangladeshi garment industry, amplifying workers’ voices at the International Labor Organization, and bringing workers from the United State and the Global South together to share stories and strategies.

But like its predecessor organizations, the Solidarity Center is primarily bankrolled by the US government, particularly USAID, the State Department, and NED. It is one of only four NED core grantees. NED is known for meddling in the democratic processes of other countries and promoting “regime change” to maintain US global dominance, including in Venezuela, Haiti, Ukraine, and multiple Central American nations.

Given the history of the FTUC and AIFLD, the Solidarity Center’s dependence on government funding and association with NED should be a cause for concern in the labor movement and merits closer inspection. But there is virtually no discussion about it within the AFL-CIO.

This is not especially surprising considering the federation has yet to formally acknowledge or apologize for the significant role it played during the Cold War in dividing labor movements abroad, undermining foreign democracies, and endorsing militarism — all of which only served to strengthen transnational capital and weaken the power of workers.

In 2004, the California Labor Federation passed the “Build Unity and Trust Among Workers Worldwide” resolution, which called on the AFL-CIO to “clear the air” by fully accounting for its record of hostile foreign interventions and renouncing its CIA ties. The resolution then headed to the national AFL-CIO convention in Chicago the following year, where it was effectively killed in committee. Since then, there has been no coordinated, sustained attempt to confront the federation’s imperialist history.

In 2006, the ICFTU merged with the traditionally more progressive World Confederation of Labour to form the Brussels-based International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), of which the AFL-CIO is an affiliate. Meanwhile, the WFTU, now headquartered in Greece, continues to be led by Communists as it has been since the 1949 split. Today’s WFTU routinely accuses the much larger ITUC of being class-collaborationist and pro-imperialist.

While the ITUC is far from being an explicitly radical organization, it frequently levels strong criticisms of the World Bank and IMF, has repeatedly condemned Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and wasted no time in denouncing not only the recent coup in Bolivia, but also Juan Guaidó’s attempted coup in Venezuela and the US assasination of Qassem Soleimani. That the AFL-CIO is a prominent member of such an organization is a positive sign given the history described here.

Whether the trade unions of the world can ever be truly united remains to be seen. But perhaps hope for transnational labor unity lies less in the politics of large bureaucracies like the ITUC and WFTU, and more in the ability of workers to put class solidarity before national allegiance and to take action with our fellow workers, whoever and wherever they may be, for our collective liberation (and, in the context of a planetary ecological crisis, our collective survival).

Discovering the extent to which the AFL-CIO is willing to use its resources and influence to encourage this kind of solidarity-driven consciousness — which would necessitate a thorough reckoning with its own ugly history of assisting US imperialism — will be crucial in determining whether the federation serves any real purpose for the working class.

This story was first published at Jacobin.

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https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/jan/09/worlds-fastest-driverless-automated-bullet-train-launches-beijing-china-olympics

#Engineering #Technology

Plants' 'organic' wounds improve produce

Scientists found benefits of insect leaf-wounding in fruit and vegetable production. Stress responses created in the fruits and vegetables initiated an increase in antioxidant compounds prior to harvest, making them healthier for human consumption.