RSN: Bernie Sanders | The US Has a Ruling Class - and Americans Must Stand Up to It
02 September 22
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In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. This is unsustainable
We know how important these issues are because our ruling class works overtime to prevent them from being seriously discussed. They are barely mentioned in the halls of Congress, where most members are dependent on the campaign contributions of the wealthy and their Super Pacs. They are not much discussed in the corporate media, in which a handful of conglomerates determine what we see, hear and discuss.
So what’s going on?
We now have more income and wealth inequality than at any time in the last hundred years. In the year 2022, three multibillionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society – 160 million Americans. Today, 45% of all new income goes to the top 1%, and CEOs of large corporations make a record-breaking 350 times what their workers earn.
Meanwhile, as the very rich become much richer, working families continue to struggle. Unbelievably, despite huge increases in worker productivity, wages (accounting for real inflation) are lower today than they were almost 50 years ago. When I was a kid growing up, most families were able to be supported by one breadwinner. Now an overwhelming majority of households need two paychecks to survive.
Today, half of our people live paycheck to paycheck and millions struggle on starvation wages. Despite a lifetime of work, half of older Americans have no savings and no idea how they will ever be able to retire with dignity, while 55% of seniors are trying to survive on an income of less than $25,000 a year.
Since 1975, there has been a massive redistribution of wealth in America that has gone in exactly the wrong direction. Over the past 47 years, according to the Rand Corporation, $50tn in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% of American society to the top 1%, primarily because a growing percentage of corporate profits has been flowing into the stock portfolios of the wealthy and the powerful.
During this terrible pandemic, when thousands of essential workers died doing their jobs, some 700 billionaires in America became nearly $2tn richer. Today, while the working class falls further behind, multibillionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are off taking joyrides on rocket ships to outer space, buying $500m super-yachts and living in mansions with 25 bathrooms.
Disgracefully, we now have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any developed nation on Earth and millions of kids, disproportionately Black and brown, face food insecurity. While psychologists tell us that the first four years are the most important for human development, our childcare system is largely dysfunctional – with an inadequate number of slots, outrageously high costs and pathetically low wages for staff. We remain the only major country without paid family and medical leave.
In terms of higher education, we should remember that 50 years ago tuition was free or virtually free in major public universities throughout the country. Today, higher education is unaffordable for millions of young people. There are now some 45 million Americans struggling with student debt.
Today over 70 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured and millions more are finding it hard to pay for the rising cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, which are more expensive here than anywhere else in the world. The cost of housing is also soaring. Not only are some 600,000 Americans homeless, but nearly 18m households are spending 50% or more of their limited incomes on housing.
It’s not just income and wealth inequality that is plaguing our nation. It is the maldistribution of economic and political power.
Today we have more concentration of ownership than at any time in the modern history of this country. In sector after sector a handful of giant corporations control what is produced and how much we pay for it. Unbelievably, just three Wall Street firms (Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street) control assets of over $20tn and are the major stockholders in 96% of S…P 500 companies. In terms of media, some eight multinational media conglomerates control what we see, hear and read.
In terms of political power, the situation is the same. A small number of billionaires and CEOs, through their Super Pacs, dark money and campaign contributions, play a huge role in determining who gets elected and who gets defeated. There are now an increasing number of campaigns in which Super Pacs actually spend more money on campaigns than the candidates, who become the puppets to their big money puppeteers. In the 2022 Democratic primaries, billionaires spent tens of millions trying to defeat progressive candidates who were standing up for working families.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr was right when he said: “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power” in America. That statement is even more true today.
Let us have the courage to stand together and fight back against corporate greed. Let us fight back against massive income and wealth inequality. Let us fight back against a corrupt political system.
Let us stand together and finally create an economy and a government that works for all, not just the 1%.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy shakes hands with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi. (photo: Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters)
Ahead of the visit, IAEA chief Rafael Grossi said the mission was aware of “increased military activity in the area” but was determined to press ahead with its plan to visit the facility and meet personnel there.
Earlier, the country’s state nuclear power company said the plant’s fifth reactor has been shut down as a result of the shelling.
Meanwhile, Russian forces are concentrating their efforts on restoring supply lines and keeping a hold on captured territories in Ukraine, the country’s armed forces said in an operational update Thursday morning.
The comments come amid a renewed push by Kyiv to reclaim Russian-occupied land, particularly in the south of the country around the city of Kherson. Ukraine’s forces have attacked supply routes into the city, including key bridges across the Dnipro river.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a nightly address that both Ukrainian and international journalists were not allowed to tour the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant with IAEA representatives.
“Today, the IAEA mission arrived at Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. It is good that it happened, the fact itself, despite all the provocations of the Russian military and the cynical shelling of Enerhodar and the territory of the station,” said in an update on the Telegram messaging app, according to an NBC News translation.
Zelenskyy added that the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, promised him that independent journalists would accompany the inspectors.
“Unfortunately, IAEA representatives did not protect representatives of independent media,” Zelenskyy added.
Red states are rushing to pass new abortion bans and move restrictions out of legal limbo. (photo: Getty)
And that number is about to be even higher as states rush to pass new bans and move restrictions out of legal limbo.
Seventeen states have banned, severely restricted or stopped offering access to abortion care since the court took away federal abortion protections in June’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
That means that of the 75 million American women of reproductive age, nearly 30 million have limited or no access to abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization. Around 17 million of those women live in states where lawmakers have either completely banned abortion care or providers have stopped offering it due to uncertainty around abortion laws. These numbers only increase when including transgender, nonbinary and genderqueer people who are able to get pregnant.
“These bans mean that every one of these millions of people, should they need an abortion, will have to overcome extreme logistical and financial barriers to access care,” Elizabeth Nash, a principal policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, said in a recent statement. “Abortion is an essential component of reproductive health care that was already difficult to achieve pre-Dobbs, but is now even more challenging or outright impossible for many.”
Eleven states are currently enforcing near-total abortion bans: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Idaho, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Missouri. Some of these near-total bans were implemented through trigger laws, while others went into effect through pre-Roe restrictions that immediately took effect after the Dobbs decision came down in June.
All of the near-total bans have extremely limited exceptions. Some, like Tennessee’s and South Dakota’s, have no exceptions for rape or incest, and those that do require victims to report to law enforcement before they can access abortion care. All of the abortion bans have exceptions to save the life of a pregnant person, but many of those exceptions, like those in Missouri and Texas, are intentionally vague and create a powerful incentive for physicians not to provide lifesaving care until the pregnant person is at death’s door, for fear of consequences like losing their license or facing lawsuits and criminal penalties.
Other states are enforcing abortion restrictions in the wake of Roe’s demise. These include Georgia and Ohio, which each have a six-week ban; Florida, which has a 15-week ban; Utah, which has an 18-week ban; and North Carolina, which has a 20-week ban. And in Wisconsin, physicians have stopped providing abortions because it’s unclear if a pre-Roe abortion ban is in effect. Georgia is the only state that has an exception for rape or incest, but requires victims to report the assault to law enforcement before accessing an abortion.
Florida’s and North Carolina’s restrictions are less severe than those in many other states, but they have broader implications for the region. Florida and North Carolina both border states with near-total bans, making them critical access points for people who need to travel out of state for abortion care. Utah’s 18-week abortion restriction is limiting as well, but the state is close to Colorado and New Mexico, where abortion is far more accessible.
The fall of Roe has had far-reaching and devastating consequences. In addition to those who have been forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, many patients who have been able to receive care have had to travel far distances and overcome obstacles like getting time off of work and finding child care. Often, those barriers to care push people further into their pregnancies, which can lead to an even more costly medication or procedural abortion.
Some patients, like one woman in Texas, have had to delay their medically necessary abortions until they are hours or even moments from death. Others, like a 10-year-old girl from Ohio, have been forced to travel out of state to receive abortion care after becoming pregnant from rape or incest. In many cases, the physicians who provided lifesaving care were attacked or threatened legally for doing their jobs.
And across the country, surveillance of pregnant people has grown. In Nebraska, for example, Facebook provided law enforcement with social media messages between a teenager and her mother after the two were accused of self-managing an abortion for the teen.
The surveillance and fear of prosecution go way beyond just those with the capacity for pregnancy.
Pharmacists across the country have been reticent to prescribe medications that include or are similar to those used in medication abortion. Heartburn medication was pulled in some Texas pharmacies because of its makeup; some doctors reportedly stopped prescribing methotrexate, a common medication for people with auto-immune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn’s disease. Other patients have been wrongly denied their birth control prescriptions or access to emergency contraceptives like Plan B, which are still legal in every state despite the overturn of Roe. Some women have reported pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for certain forms of mifepristone (one of the medications included in abortion pills) even though it was prescribed prior to an IUD insertion.
“Two months after the Supreme Court eliminated the federal constitutional right to abortion, nearly a third of this country is without meaningful access to care,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement.
“The people living in these states have fewer rights than those who live where abortion remains legal,” she added. “They have been robbed of their fundamental right to decide what is best for their own bodies, lives, and futures. … There is no way to sugarcoat how dark this time is, and the devastation that is unfolding.”
Abortion access still hangs in the balance in several other states, with some poised to enact restrictions over the next month.
Trigger laws in North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming have been temporarily blocked while litigation moves forward. A near-total abortion ban is making its way through the West Virginia and South Carolina state legislatures, while a near-total abortion ban in Indiana — the first anti-choice legislation to pass since Roe’s demise — will take effect on Sept. 15. And an anti-abortion measure in Arizona is set to go into effect on Sept. 24, but the state attorney general requested the courts consider an even stricter ban.
To commemorate Labor Day, Starbucks workers are planning actions at stores around the country. (photo: Getty)
To commemorate Labor Day, Starbucks workers are planning actions at stores around the country—part of the growing campaign to organize the coffee chain.
Sip-ins are loosely modeled after sit-ins, and mark designated times when supporters of a store are asked to come in, order low-priced drinks or water, and leave big tips. The events provide an opportunity for baristas and their supporters to engage in conversation about labor conditions and build community.
“I’m a little nervous, but we’re excited,” said Samantha Shields, a 21-year-old barista at a Starbucks store in Washington, D.C. Her store filed to unionize in late August and is the first to organize in the city. She’s worried about retaliation as a result, she told In These Times.
Meanwhile, several stores will also be on strike. Additionally, in several large cities, other major events are also scheduled, pointing to a more expansive vision of what the nascent union can do for Labor Day.
In Boston, a labor rally, a rank-and-file breakfast, and a reproductive justice rally will precede sip-ins on Labor Day. Starbucks workers are also rallying at the state capitals of Oklahoma and Texas. And Colorado baristas will converge on a Labor Day parade in Louisville in remembrance of the early 20th century Coal Wars, says fired Denver barista Ryan Dinaro, 23.
“The goal of this [day of] action is to empower workers on Labor Day, it’s to send a message to Starbucks that they couldn’t run their business without us, and they need to be held accountable,” says Collin Pollitt, a barista in Oklahoma City.
On Monday evening, Starbucks Workers United (SBWU), the union behind the organizing effort, is planning to host a web-based event for attendees of Labor Day events to have an opportunity to tune in so they can watch and discuss together.
“We’re not only building a movement for Starbucks workers, we’re building a cohesive labor movement,” says Tyler DaGuerre, a 27-year-old Boston barista.
The array of different types of events, dominated by the sip-ins, reflects both the desire for coordinated action and the roles that different actors are playing in the SBWU-backed movement.
Conversation about SBWU’s Labor Day plans began in the early summer. Individual leaders in the Southwest, Rocky Mountains, and New England regions of SBWU including Pollitt, Dinaro, and DaGuerre, respectively, are among those who helped create the iteration that now exists. They eventually did so as part of SBWU’s National Contract Action Team, the body charged with planning escalating direct actions to pressure Starbucks to negotiate a first contract. Workers United, the parent union for SBWU, first introduced the idea of a broad wave of sip-ins, which then received broad support from workers.
Workers in some cities have also hinted at more militant events to follow in the days and weeks to come after Labor Day, noting that the next few months are Starbucks’ high season, though details were not yet available.
In the Boston area, the day’s events are themed around intersectionality, with a focus on reproductive rights, among other issues. “So long as we’re upholding one system of oppression, we’re therefore justifying our own,” says DaGuerre. “So it really needs to be a collective movement of intersectional solidarity.”
In Oklahoma, Pollitt was mindful of the need to make Labor Day relevant to today’s workers and also emphasized intersectionality. He wants to “spark a national discussion about labor” after what he describes as decades of stagnation. In Pollitt’s state, workers are gathering at the state capitol.
Boosting community support is a key aim of the sip-ins. SBWU has a goal of gathering 30,000 signatures to its “No Contract, No Coffee” solidarity campaign over the course of the weekend.
Such support often, but not exclusively, comes from Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members and chapters. For example, Worcester DSA member and barista Cory Bisbee, 25, told In These Times that his chapter has made supporting the SBWU campaign a priority. That city will see a LGBTQ+-themed sip-in, with Labor Day coinciding with Pride week in Worcester, Mass.
An outcome of the planning in the New England region, says DaGuerre, is that stores seeking support have been matched up with community supporters looking to “adopt” a store to help it organize, taking advantage of resources that were already there but uncoordinated.
Not every store is able to take part in the day of action. Because much of the national plan depends on community support, many workers in more isolated locations likely won’t be able to participate. Others, like the Anderson store in South Carolina where workers are suspended and barred from entering any Starbucks, have to take into account the impact of previous union-busting tactics by the company.
But for those who are able to participate, some see it as an opportunity to step up their impact in the innovative campaign to unionize Starbucks.
“A bunch of Gen Z kids have banded together and decided to stop accepting that Starbucks will refuse to pay us a living wage,” says Dinaro. “It’s truly inspiring and it’s a stepping stone to greater change.”
Members of Patriot Front, a far-right group, hide behind shields after marching in Washington, D.C., in 2021. (photo: Shutterstock)
The rightwing group’s workings resemble a media production company more than a classic neo-Nazi group, researchers say
The mass arrest not only revealed the names of members of an extremist group that had long worked to keep those hidden, it provided extremist experts with new insight into how the group is meticulously planning, financing, organizing and publicizing armed demonstrations at public events that celebrate diversity.
Patriot Front’s fundraising and mobilizing efforts, those experts say, reveal a corporate-style organization that more resembles a media production company with satellite offices than a classic neo-Nazi group.
“No other white supremacist group operating in the US today is able to match Patriot Front’s ability to produce media, ability to mobilize across the country, and ability to finance,” says Morgan Moon, investigative researcher with the ADL Center on Extremism. “That’s what makes them a particular concern.”
When white nationalism meets media production
Patriot Front was founded after the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville by Thomas Rousseau, a former member of the small, neo-Nazi group Vanguard America.
Disaffected members of Vanguard America left to join Rousseau’s organization, and for two years, primarily stickered college campuses and dropped banners with slogans like “Reclaim America” over highway overpasses.
In the 18 months after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, many anti-government extremist groups, like the Proud Boys, Oathkeepers and Three Percenters, have lain low. But Patriot Front has geared up. The group has made unpermitted demonstrations its “bread and butter”, says Moon, making sure each event is heavily publicized on social media.
Since last December, the group has organized five such flash demonstrations. Two of them – the event in Idaho and a contentious march along Boston’s Freedom Trail on the Fourth of July holiday – resulted in national media attention.
At the rallies, Rousseau typically addresses the crowd, urging onlookers to rise up physically and “reclaim your country”.
To capture different angles of a rally, several camera operators circulate and shoot video while members wear body-worn cameras, according to Jeff Tischauser, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Then, the media team edits the footage and circulates a video package on alt-tech platforms like Gab, Odyssey and Telegram.
Afterward, Patriot Front’s social media team monitors the group’s mentions, shares news coverage on private servers, and tells members which social media accounts to harass, Tischauser says.
The video packages are specifically designed toward attracting a younger audience, says Stephen Piggott, program analyst with Western States Center, a Portland-based non-profit that promotes inclusive democracy. And while other far-right and white nationalist groups are engaging in meme culture and recruiting people online, the group has been effective at attracting young radicals and getting them off their laptops and into the streets, he adds.
Throughout its propaganda, the group is careful to craft an image that will appeal to younger users, promoting the “idea of a young warrior” and becoming the “warrior elite”, says Moon, the ADL researcher. The group emphasizes fitness, diet and training and often holds paramilitary drills before demonstrations.
Also attractive to young recruits is the premium the group puts on anonymity. Banner drops and mural defacing typically happen after dark, and members keep their faces covered. Internal chats show members using code names. At protests, Rousseau is typically the only person whose face is shown.
‘A white nationalist pyramid scheme’
Undergirding Patriot Front’s activities is a rigid, top-down hierarchy, researchers say.
Rousseau is at the head. Lieutenants run departments of the group, including media production, recruitment and online security. Fifteen regional network directors organize local and national activities, and supervise members.
Once recruits become members, they are required to attend monthly roundups, hit a weekly activism quota, and show up to demonstrations, according to Moon. If they don’t, Rousseau expels them from Patriot Front.
Internal chats obtained by extremist experts show members complaining about the ongoing expenses they incur paying for stickers, stencils and other mandatory propaganda materials, which Rousseau charges them for.
Rousseau charges members a premium for Patriot Front propaganda material, Tischauser said, adding that network directors are expected to push members to purchase flyers to go on several flyering runs a month. “In this sense, Patriot Front is close to a white nationalist pyramid scheme,” Tischauser notes.
The tightly organized structure enables Patriot Front to be responsible for up to 14 hate incidents a day, according to the ADL. Under the direction of network directors, Patriot Front members defaced 29 murals honoring Black history, LGBTQ+ pride, migrant history and police shooting victims, said Tischauser.
Patriot Front did not respond to a request for comment.
‘It lifted the veil a bit’
Recent events have somewhat disrupted the group’s carefully constructed image. Earlier this year, the leftwing non-profit Unicorn Riot leaked the group’s internal audio and chats, which helped investigators discover the identity of the national team, regional directors and many other members. And following the arrest in Coeur d’Alene, all 31 names of arrested members were broadcasted and published in local media outlets, along with their mugshots.
“They got kind of the opposite of what they wanted: they weren’t able to disrupt the LGBTQ Pride events, and they got a whole lot of mainstream media attention,” Piggott said.
The Idaho arrests also exposed that their members flew into the state from different parts of the country, Piggott added. “It lifted the veil a bit. They may not have the numbers they say they have.”
Still, civil rights groups are increasingly concerned about violence breaking out at flash demonstrations. During Patriot Front’s unpermitted rally in Boston this July, for example, members of the group allegedly assaulted a Black artist and activist, Charles Murrell.
Murrell did not respond to an interview request.
The ADL, the Western States Center and other civil rights groups have urged the Department of Justice to launch a comprehensive investigation into the group, arguing that some of its activities could violate federal legislation.
“More must be done to hold the group accountable and ensure they do not continue to intimidate historically marginalized communities,” the organizations wrote in a letter to the US attorney general, Merrick Garland.
“This is particularly true at a time when Patriot Front is becoming increasingly emboldened and coordinating its activity at a national level, targeting specific locations across the country,” they added. “The Department of Justice may indeed be the only entity able to address these concerns effectively.”
People with Chilean flags take part in a rally in support of amending the constitution established under the military rule of General Augusto Pinochet, October 22, 2020, in Santiago, Chile. (photo: Martin Bernetti/Getty)
Chile’s president Gabriel Boric’s government rose to power on the back of a decade of industrial militancy and popular protest. To achieve its aims, it will need to use these forces as a battering ram against the elite.
Community groups and environmental organizations, both key supporters of Boric’s campaign, hailed the decision to close the plant, which in 2018 Greenpeace described as a “Chilean Chernobyl.” Since the plant opened in 1964, local farmers and residents had complained of the damage it was inflicting on their health and the environment, and scientists had observed high levels of arsenic in the surrounding area.
Despite this, the backers of the president’s Apruebo Dignidad coalition were not united in support for the closure of the smelter. The Federación de Trabajadores del Cobre, the union representing employees of Chile’s state copper industry, also a crucial constituency of the new government, immediately responded to the announcement with a national strike. Endorsed by the general workers’ confederation, Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT), miners mobilized to defend their livelihoods as well as public industrial infrastructure that Boric’s coalition had just placed on the chopping block.
Superficially, the episode, which pit social justice movements against organized workers in strategic sectors of the resource-based economy, appeared to embody a core tension within the millennial new left. But the conflict, which jolted the government’s agenda earlier than expected, was not simply a sign of an antagonism between civil society groups against extractive industries and the workers they employ. Rather, these conflicts indicate the new political terrain on which Chile’s left will have to struggle if it is to be successful.
Expanding Popular Power
Chile’s October 2019 popular rebellion upended the country’s governing system, pummeling the neoliberal regimes’ ruling alliances and thrusting new forces to prominence. While the mass explosion buried the old party system and spurred the rise of insurgent forces, Chile’s postauthoritarian neoliberal order had been faltering for roughly a decade.
Twenty years after the country’s democratic transition, Chile’s establishment parties began to struggle to maintain their electoral supremacy. The center-left Concertación and the center-right Alianza had dominated politics since the transition to democracy in 1990; following four consecutive victories, the center left began alternating turns in office with its center-right ruling partners, all the while steadily reducing voter turnout.
The rebellion or estallido that took hold of Chile in 2019 and its aftershocks, exacerbated by the pandemic, sent the once-mighty coalitions into outright collapse. In last year’s presidential elections, they failed to even make the runoffs. Together, the two parties mustered less than a quarter of all votes.
The decay of the center-left and center-right former hegemons offered an opening for the new left coalition. The success of Boric’s Apruebo Dignidad, which joins the historic Communist Party and the president’s still cohering Frente Amplio (FA) alliance, was thanks to an increasingly mobilized working class. When Apruebo first competed in Chile’s 2020 constituent assembly elections, much of its support came from the well-established student movement, environmental and community groups’ campaigns, retirees’ mass mobilizations, and a surging wave of feminist protest.
After decades of quiescence by Chile’s poor and working classes, unexpected rounds of student protest exploded first in 2006 and again five years later, starting a cycle of insurgency that culminated in the great rebellion. The 2011 movement, in which university students organized 125 major protests, proved to be a pivotal moment. As mobilization grew, Chile’s youth adopted more disorderly tactics, like choking the main streets of Santiago and other major cities. In hundreds of actions, students adopted combative tactics including the direct confrontation of state authorities.
Others followed suit. Shaken by the country’s extreme deregulation and commodification yet heartened by the university and high school rebellions, protests spread across the country. Some were organized by mortgage debtors, others by neighborhoods and towns like Puchuncaví-Quintero that had been irreparably polluted by local industry, and still others by remote towns and cities, areas and provinces neglected by the central state.
Young women and the elderly in particular built and sustained disruptive nationwide movements. By the end of the 2010s, they had mobilized millions of members and sympathizers in days of action that paralyzed the country. Large-scale feminist protest, for instance, grew tenfold in the five years preceding the mass explosion. Together with student associations and pensioners, women’s collectives provided the basic infrastructural building blocks of the rebellion.
When the estallido erupted, confrontations with authorities and forceful occupations and destruction of property spread at lightning speed. After student networks shut down Santiago’s subway system on October 18, daily violent disturbances rose to an average of over forty per month, peaking around sixty early in the rebellion. At that time, protesters mobilized a historic 1.2 million marchers in the capital alone. The ability of mass organizations to sustain disruptive protests for a month forced the government to concede the November 15 Pact for Social Peace and a New Constitution, the historic agreement brokered by Boric and other FA figures that paved a way to the plebiscite and constituent assembly elections, and eventually to the victory of Apruebo Dignidad.
By this point, rising popular mobilizations were cohering organizationally and programmatically as nationwide coordinating bodies began shaping unified demands and leading full-blown general strikes.
Decisive Insurgent Capacity
Popular sector organization and mobilization expanded in tandem with growing workers’ power. The resurgence of Chile’s labor movement helped lay the foundations for expanding associational capacity across sectors. Crucially, worker militance grew not only in scale but in terms of its power over strategic sections of the economy. Revived labor insurgency was particularly effective in industries held to be important by Chilean elites. As strikes spread across sectors, increasing proportions of unpredictable wildcat campaigns amplified workers’ leverage.
Stoppages increased sharply from the mid-2000s to the late 2010s. During that span, yearly strikes more than doubled to over 450 in 2016. Over the key years of industrial escalation, the total number of workers shutting production down multiplied more than sixfold. Though the largest share of striking workers were public sector employees who walked out in 2014 and 2015, the number of striking private sector workers increased from 25,000 to roughly 150,000. As total strikes and their duration multiplied, so too did the costs they imposed on business and the state. In 2005, strikes cost Chile’s economy just under 100,000 worker-days. By 2010, employers endured 335,000 lost worker-days, and by 2016, industry suffered another 606,000.
During these years, union density partially recovered from the free fall that took hold after the return of democracy. Still, the decade-plus strike wave was not simply the product of formal organization. Wildcat activity was not only central but served to grow the ranks of unionized workers. Most industrial action during the multiyear cycle of militancy consisted of extralegal stoppages.
Crucially, workers located within the strategic industries on which the state depends for its revenue struck. Industrial action launched by subcontracted and informalized miners and service employees in copper fueled the first phase of labor insurgency. The second phase, rebounding after 2010, involved a more diverse array of sectors, including entire branches of public administration. Yet once again, copper miners, many now organized in dissident unions, played a decisive role along with longshoremen and transportation who also joined the strike wave.
In each case, wildcats remained the norm. In 2014, miners struck fifteen times, with strikes averaging over 1,500 lost worker-days. The following year, militancy in the copper industry erupted again but on an even greater scale. Twenty strikes alone deprived employers of an average of 36,250 lost worker-days. That same year, dock, transportation, and warehouse workers struck forty-seven times for total of 183,200 lost worker-days. By impairing business’s ability to extract and transport minerals to international markets, miners, truckers, and dockworkers imposed severe costs on economic elites and ruling authorities.
As insurgency by unions in strategic industries mounted, workers increasingly coordinated nationwide campaigns. After having attempted just one general strike in the first twenty years of democratic neoliberalism, the protracted strike wave gave the CUT the confidence to flex its muscles. After its reserved endorsements of national strikes called by students in 2011 and 2013, the worker’s federation launched its own general stoppage in 2016, followed by two in 2018, and then five more in 2019. By the start of the great rebellion, CUT, battle tested, was in a prominent position to help direct massive protests involving all large sections of the working and popular classes.
The Promise of a New Political Coalition
Back in power after fifty years in the wilderness and on the back of a decade of organized resistance, Chile’s left has a daunting mandate. Boric’s platform blends protections against various forms of oppression and discrimination with core material reforms. To deliver on the gender, indigenous, environmental, and other social rights central to his campaign, along with the universal welfare and labor grievances that roused the 2019 rebellion, Apruebo Dignidad must transform Chile’s entire commodity-based neoliberal growth regime.
Fortunately, the diverse sectors that mobilized to crush the former governing parties and then swung behind the new left in the constituent and general elections constitute the basis for a powerful coalition that could be up to the task. If the mass movements that have defined the last decade manage to forge coherent links among each other as well as effective relationships to the new government, Apruebo Dignidad could enjoy the social power needed to restructure elites’ accumulation strategies.
The formations of Boric’s new left party coalition was itself a historic milestone. Once Frente Amplio’s young radicals set their sights on state power and the traditional Communists found in them new allies outside the progressive neoliberal class, ordinary Chileans witnessed the reemergence of a viable reform project not dominated by elite interests.
But these reformers lack a parliamentary majority and the outcome of the constituent assembly’s proposals for the draft constitution is unclear. Even in a less hostile environment, Chile’s new radicals could not defy recalcitrant business elites without the backing of strategically aligned movements.
Fortunately, two key characteristics set Chile apart from recent reform efforts in the region. First, a decade of mobilization has created a constructive balance between assorted civil society movements and the power of industrial labor. This configuration of associational and structural capacities gives mass constituencies the wherewithal to keep the heat on the government and elites and press for a broad range of social demands.
While the associational capacity of social justice activists has multiplied over the years, it remains too weak to overwhelm new left policymakers with sectional demands. To avoid a pattern whereby fragmented campaigns pressure Apruebo Dignidad into making narrow, ad hoc concessions, Chile’s mass movements require the type of social weight that will compel Boric’s government to take on business interests, embedding the diversity of civil society demands within encompassing campaigns for systemic change.
The magnitude and nature of Chile’s new labor militance could serve as the coordinating and disciplinary axis for exactly this type of classwide struggle. By deploying their formidable structural leverage in industries on which Chile’s entire model depends, fights against employers and public managers could reverberate into campaigns for universal public goods and protections.
Demands for industrywide contracts in copper mines and ports, for instance, will inevitably raise questions regarding progressive taxation, minimum wages, public pensions, and environmental standards. From this perspective, tensions between miners and community associations in environmental “sacrifice zones” are not necessarily about competing interests but rather about how a strong left should seek to wield the capacities of a diverse movement most effectively in pursuit of universal reforms.
Second, expanding movements are positioned to build strategic relations not only among one another but also with the watershed Apruebo Dignidad coalition and politicians. Given the trajectories of popular sector and labor insurgencies on the one hand and of the emergence of the partisan new left on the other, a favorable opening exists in Chile today for a calibrated, nonclientelist affiliation of mass movements within the alliance.
While the parties in government remain largely composed of middle layers without a direct mass base, mobilized poor and working masses lack parties of their own. Accordingly, as the governing coalition confronts business resistance to its reform program, it has a special opportunity to channel movement insurgency into and through its policymaking and political project.
Apruebo’s Pink Tide predecessors too often ended up rewarding the allegiance of its movement backers with targeted supports and resources. If Boric is able to integrate social movements into the Apruebo coalition in a more methodical fashion, he would be able to avoid the transactional logic that characterized mass incorporation into recent left populisms in the region.
Chile’s new radicals must design and combine organizational tactics that preserve and amplify independent mass militancy while fomenting it from within their cohering parties in pursuit of systemic reforms. In this scenario, social movements have a chance to design and follow a delicate strategy that uses their leverage to shape the government’s reform agenda without politically weakening it as it consolidates in the state.
Though the stakes are high, and the social forces and organizations tasked with enacting radical reform in Chile are still in their infancy, it may be possible for the country’s left to chart a new path to power. This will only be possible if the parliamentary left is able to hold together within its coalition the social movements and organized labor.
It's the first time in 60 years that Zimbabwe has embarked on such a mass internal movement of wildlife. (photo: AFP)
It’s the first time in 60 years that Zimbabwe has embarked on such a mass internal movement of wildlife.
Zimbabwe has begun moving more than 2,500 wild animals from a southern reserve to one in the country’s north to rescue them from drought, as the ravages of climate change replace poaching as the biggest threat to wildlife.
About 400 elephants, 2,000 impalas, 70 giraffes, 50 buffaloes, 50 wildebeest, 50 zebras, 50 elands, 10 lions and a pack of 10 wild dogs are among the animals being moved from Zimbabwe’s Save Valley Conservancy to three conservancies in the north — Sapi, Matusadonha and Chizarira — in one of southern Africa’s biggest live animal capture and translocation exercises.
“Project Rewild Zambezi,” as the operation is called, is moving the animals to an area in the Zambezi River valley to rebuild the wildlife populations there.
It’s the first time in 60 years that Zimbabwe has embarked on such a mass internal movement of wildlife. Between 1958 and 1964, when the country was white-minority-ruled Rhodesia, more than 5,000 animals were moved in what was called “Operation Noah.” That operation rescued wildlife from the rising water caused by the construction of a massive hydro-electric dam on the Zambezi River that created one of the world’s largest man-made lakes, Lake Kariba.
This time it’s the lack of water that has made it necessary to move wildlife as their habitat has become parched by prolonged drought, said Tinashe Farawo, spokesman for the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority.
The parks agency issued permits to allow the animals to be moved to avert “a disaster from happening,” said Farawo.
“We are doing this to relieve pressure. For years we have fought poaching and just as we are winning that war, climate change has emerged as the biggest threat to our wildlife,” Farawo told The Associated Press.
“Many of our parks are becoming overpopulated and there is little water or food. The animals end up destroying their own habitat, they become a danger unto themselves and they encroach neighboring human settlements for food resulting in incessant conflict,” he said.
One option would be culling to reduce the numbers of wildlife, but conservation groups protest that such killings are cruel. Zimbabwe last did culling in 1987, said Farawo.
The effects of climate change on wildlife is not isolated to Zimbabwe. Across Africa, national parks that are home to myriad wildlife species such as lions, elephants and buffaloes are increasingly threatened by below-average rainfall and new infrastructure projects. Authorities and experts say drought has seriously threatened species like rhinos, giraffes and antelope as it reduces the amount of food available.
For example, a recent study conducted in South Africa’s Kruger National Park linked extreme weather events to the loss of plants and animals, unable to cope with the drastic conditions and lack of water due to longer dry spells and hotter temperatures.
The mass movement is supported by the Great Plains Foundation, a non-profit organization that works “to conserve and expand natural habitats in Africa through innovative conservation initiatives,” according to its website. The organization is working with the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, local experts, the University of Washington-Seattle’s Center for Environmental Forensic Science and Oxford University’s Department of Zoology, according to the website.
One of the new homes for the animals moved in Zimbabwe is Sapi Reserve. the privately-run 280,000-acre private concession is east of Mana Pools National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site known for its splendid setting along the Zambezi River that forms the border between Zimbabwe with Zambia.
Sapi “is the perfect solution for many reasons,” Great Plains chief executive officer Dereck Joubert said on the foundation’s website.
“This reserve forms the middle-Zambezi biosphere, totaling 1.6 million acres,” wrote Joubert. “From the 1950s until we took it over in 2017, decades of hunting had decimated wildlife populations in Sapi Reserve. We are rewilding and restoring the wild back to what it once was.”
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