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Kouri Richins, a 33-year-old mother of three from Utah, has been charged with the murder of her husband, Eric Richins. On March 4, 2022, police arrived at the couple’s home in Kamas to find Eric lying at the foot of the bed, having been declared deceased. An autopsy revealed that Eric had died of an oral overdose of fentanyl, five times the lethal dosage.
Eric’s death prompted an investigation that uncovered a troubling history of Kouri’s attempts to poison her husband and more evidence indicating her involvement in his death. Phone records, testimony from an unnamed acquaintance, and her statements to the police were all factors that led to her arrest.
Several years before his death, Eric had expressed to one of his two sisters that he believed his wife had tried to kill him. Eric had also held a joint life insurance policy which his wife had unsuccessfully attempted to add herself as the sole beneficiary in January 2022. Afterward, Eric removed her from his will and replaced her with his sister, believing Kouri would “kill him for the money.”
On Valentine’s Day 2022, Eric “became very ill” and told a friend he believed Kouri was trying to poison him. This illness was followed by Kouri’s alleged attempts to acquire pain medication for an “investor” from an acquaintance, with whom she requested “some of the Michael Jackson stuff,” which specifically turned out to be fentanyl.
The day after Eric’s death, Kouri closed on a $2 million home that she wanted to flip and subsequently threw a large celebratory party during which she allegedly “assaulted” one of Eric’s sisters that had shown up.
Kouri later wrote a picture book, “Are You With Me?” to help kids cope with the death of a loved one – dedicated “to her amazing husband and a wonderful father.”
Elizabeth Holmes speaking at Forbes Under 30 Summit on October 5, 2015 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (Lisa Lake / Getty Images)
Whenever a piece of writing elicits an online backlash, it’s good to keep an open mind and read it for yourself. This is especially true of long-form journalism, which at its best can communicate nuance and inform readers about the complexities of difficult or contentious subjects. It’s all too easy to tweet a passage, paragraph, or headline out of context and use it to bludgeon a writer unfairly or harvest cheap engagement with bad-faith dunks.
All of which is to say that I dove into the New York Times’ recent profile of disgraced Silicon Valley charlatan Elizabeth Holmes, entitled “Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth,” ready to be surprised. Written by author and reporter Amy Chozick, probably best known for her 2018 book Chasing Hillary — a memoir about covering Hillary Clinton in 2016 that is currently being adapted into a drama series for HBO Max — the piece offers a snapshot of Holmes as she awaits incarceration following her conviction last November.
The piece takes roughly five thousand words to serve readers the jejune thesis that Elizabeth Holmes, whatever her crimes and deceptions might be, is ultimately a land of contrasts. Here’s how it opens:
Elizabeth Holmes blends in with the other moms here, in a bucket hat and sunglasses, her newborn strapped to her chest and swathed in a Baby Yoda nursing blanket. We walk past a family of caged orangutans and talk about how Ms. Holmes is preparing to go to prison for one of the most notorious cases of corporate fraud in recent history.
Save the exposition and endless chin-stroking that follows, this opening stanza more or less captures the essence of the piece. Chozick was clearly going for moral nuance, but her implicitly sympathetic fascination with Holmes — manifest in both the profile’s accompanying album-art style photos and its author’s insertion of herself into the proceedings — leaves the effort remarkably short of insight. Fundamentally, she aspires to show us the human being behind the multibillion-dollar fraud: the new mother of two in a loving relationship who takes her young children to the zoo and goes to Burning Man; the erstwhile twentysomething billionaire who doesn’t watch R-rated movies and is possessed of ordinary human foibles.
What Chozick neglects to consider is whether such an exercise is either interesting or even justified. Taking both as axiomatic, she basks in the ostensibly relatable normalness and quiet charm of someone who spent more than decade promoting a supposedly groundbreaking new blood-testing method that did not and could not actually function.
By occasionally nodding to her subject’s criminality and penchant for deception — in one instance recounting how an amused Times editor told her she’d been duped by Holmes in the past — Chozick gets to have her cake and eat it too. The result is a portrait heavy on trivialities and indefensibly lacking in moral gravity.
We briefly hear about a woman who testified at Holmes’s trial that a fraudulent Theranos blood test wrongly told her she was having a miscarriage. Then, a few paragraphs later, we are treated to a day-by-day summary of Chozick’s encounters with Holmes as she was counting down to her prison sentence:
Day 44: the afternoon we ordered in Mexican food at their quaint rental home near the Pacific.
Day 43: the morning we went for breakfast and Ms. Holmes breastfed her baby, Invicta (Latin for “invincible”) and sang along to Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants” on the loudspeakers (“This is the first album I ever owned.”).
Day 42: the time we had croissants and berries and Mr. Evans made coffee and we walked the couple’s 150-pound Great Dane-mastiff mix, Teddy, on the beach.
Lots more chin-stroking ensues, much of it delivered in a tone of implicit affinity:
Ms. Holmes’s defenders, stretching back to childhood, said in letters to the court, and in conversations with me, that the feverish coverage of Ms. Holmes’s downfall felt like a witch trial, less rooted in what actually happened at Theranos, and more of a message to ambitious women everywhere. Don’t girl boss too close to the sun, or this could happen to you…
“There’s an unspoken lesson for female executives: you’re allowed to be successful but not too successful,” Jackie Lamping, a Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sister of Ms. Holmes at Stanford, wrote in a letter to Judge Davila, who oversaw the trial.
This is not Chozick’s own view, but it’s allowed to pass without substantive comment, and its inclusion is difficult to ignore. It elides the basic fact that Holmes hasn’t drawn public ire or legal action for being too successful, but because she oversaw a massive defrauding of investors and consumers. Theranos’s supposed innovation — underwritten by countless media puff pieces and fawning profiles — was scientifically impossible, and the result was more than just a few rich people being embarrassed or losing their money. Its fake testing erroneously led one woman to believe she had HIV. Another woman was led to believe she had an autoimmune condition.
There are plenty of similar stories in the same vein, to say nothing of the fact that the company’s chief scientist, Ian Gibbons — who was fired, then rehired and demoted, after raising questions about its entirely fictitious technology — was sent into a mental health spiral and ultimately committed suicide (something his widow blames on Holmes). This episode, incidentally, goes entirely unmentioned.
Chozick does temper passages like the one above with acknowledgement of Holmes’s self-delusion, though even this is mostly in the service of representing her deceptions as tragic flaws:
She maintains the idealistic delusion of a 19-year-old, never mind that she’s 39 with a fraud conviction, telling me she is still working on health care–related inventions and would continue to do so behind bars. […]
If your head is exploding at how divorced from reality this sounds, that’s kind of the point. When Ms. Holmes uses the messianic vernacular of tech, I get the sense that she truly believes that she could have — and, in fact, she still could — change the world, and she doesn’t much care if we believe her or not. “Liz is not a natural born leader; she is more of a zealot than a showman,” Mr. Evans wrote to Judge Davila.
Rather than interrogating the structures behind the con or giving much attention to its victims, the author instead revels in how much she herself may have been taken in by Holmes’s aura.
Notwithstanding the various problems that stem from what appears to be the writer’s excessively tender fascination with her subject, the real issue with Chozick’s piece is that it did not need to exist in the first place. As Avi Asher-Schapiro noted in a 2019 essay for the New Republic, coverage of Holmes has tended to emphasize the personal dimensions of her fraud at the expense of wider social and political ones. By this point, any interesting writing left to be done about the Theranos case needs to abandon shallow nuance-mongering or issues of personal psychology and approach its fallen CEO less as a subject of inquiry than an occasion to probe deeper into the entire complex of fawning journalism and credulous investors that gave rise to her.
If the story has a wider valence beyond its central figure’s lies or her painfully affected baritone voice, it’s to be found in what collective investment in the soylent-soaked mythos of Silicon Valley enables. The whole thing ultimately stands not only as an indictment of one individual fraud, but also an entire elite culture at the top of American capitalism and its equally fraudulent myths of bootstrap success. As Asher-Schapiro put it:
[A]lthough Holmes may have displayed some bewitching eccentricities, it was her connections, a brazen willingness to deceive, and an economic climate that rewarded such qualities, that made Theranos a success. She was childhood friends with the daughter of billionaire Silicon Valley investor Tim Draper, who helped her raise a million dollars, and lent credibility to the project from the outset. Through her father, she met Don Lucas, an early investor in Oracle who later became chairman of the board. According to Carreyrou, Holmes and Lucas had brunch every weekend. Lucas, in turn, brought in Larry Ellison, another Silicon Valley brahmin, who sits on the board of Tesla. The circle of investors grew to include a who’s who of American plutocrats: Rupert Murdoch, the Walton Family, and the DeVos family. Naturally, these wealthy patrons were interested in a chunk of the multibillion dollar blood testing market, which was dominated by two clunky firms.
Since such myths generally go uninterrogated, even disgraced erstwhile members of the billionaire class are still assumed to be axiomatically interesting: sophisticated people afflicted by a chaotic messianism but nevertheless worthy of lengthy and empathic psychological profiles in legacy publications. In this instance, and in plenty of others involving would-be tech geniuses, we should probably assume that the inverse is true and that there is actually no mystery behind the curtain.
If Holmes is indeed as normal as Chozick wants us to believe, we might consider the possibility that her zealous drive and Promethean ambition are, in fact, simply byproducts of banal human vices like vanity and greed — and that a system that so regularly produces enterprises like Theranos might just be boringly immoral.
The woman, a former soldier, was dressed in a niqab, holding an airgun and shouting “Allahu Akbar.”
By World Israel News Staff
A young Jewish woman, who apparently wished to commit suicide, was shot dead by IDF troops after she ran at them with an airgun while dressed as an Arab woman on Tuesday evening.
The woman was dressed head to toe in black, including a hijab, when she made out like she was attacking soldiers at the Metzadot Yehuda checkpoint in the south Hebron hills, yelling “Allahu Akbar”, arabic for God is great.
Prior to the incident, the young woman appeared to make her intentions clear to a friend over WhatsApp.
“If someone wants to die, an ordinary Jew, an Israeli, wearing Arab clothes, runs with a fake airsoft gun toward a checkpoint in the territories, shouts Allahu akbar because he wants to be shot because he wants to die, and then they only get shot in the legs and he stays alive, do you [put] them in prison for that? And if so, for how long and for what charge?” she asked the friend, who then reported their conversation to authorities about an hour and a half before the incident.
However, the news did not reach that particular checkpoint in time
“She sent me a picture of her wearing a hijab and a picture of a gun and asked me what would happen if she was only shot in the legs, I didn’t know if she was serious but I said I would report anyway,” the friend told Channel 12 news.
“She told me she was on the bus and going to the checkpoint to carry out an attack and go kill herself,” he said.
“I said I wouldn’t take any chances and called the police, I sent them the photo she sent me an hour and a half before the attack. Maybe her life could have been saved,” he added.
The incident occurred amid heightened tensions after the IDF killed three senior leaders of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.
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“We are in the midst of a campaign. We are prepared for all possibilities. I suggest that our enemies not test us,” said the Israeli premier.
By JNS
Israel is prepared for a multi-front conflict against Iran and its terrorist proxies, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday after the Jewish state launched “Operation Shield and Arrow” against Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.
“It’s clear that 95% of Israel’s security problems come from Iran,” the prime minister said in a Zoom address to a conference organized by the Israel Defense and Security Forum (IDSF).
“We are dealing with an attempt by Iran to start a multi-front campaign against us. I instructed the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] and security forces to be prepared for this fight. … If we need to, we will,” he added.
Netanyahu convened an expanded situational assessment session in the early evening whose participants included Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, National Security Adviser Tzachi Hanegbi, Mossad Director David Barnea, Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) chief Ronen Bar and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi.
Shortly thereafter, the Security Cabinet held a meeting at the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
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Thousands of union members gather around with their union banners as they attend the May Day rally in Yoyogi Park on May 1, 2017, Tokyo, Japan. (Richard Atrero de Guzman / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The Spring Offensive, an annual campaign in which trade unions across Japan come together to raise joint demands, has been a fixture of the country’s organized labor movement for decades. But its influence has been waning recently, as the voices of increasingly numerous “nonregular” workers — those on part-time and temporary contracts — have historically been excluded.
But this year, the Spring Offensive focused on nonregular workers, who now account for nearly 40 percent of the Japanese workforce but have largely been ignored by Japan’s established trade unions. This year’s Spring Offensive gathered sixteen different unions across the nation to call for a collective wage increase for nonregular workers.
A daylong series of rallies on March 10 saw organizers marching to different workplaces to show solidarity with each other’s bargaining campaigns, from foreign language schools to a local restaurant chain. This mobilization marks the first organized nationwide coordination of nonregular workers in Japan. At least one of these companies, ABC Mart, a popular shoe-store chain, responded with a 6 percent wage increase for more than 4,600 nonregular workers it employs.
Jacobin contributor Promise Li talked to a range of participants from Tokyo to Kyoto in this year’s Spring Offensive to learn more about the campaign: Kotaro Aoki, a trade unionist in Tokyo and key organizer of this year’s Spring Offensive; Nana Iwamoto, a student labor activist in Tokyo volunteering at labor NGO POSSE; and Taro Yamada, a rank-and-file worker who recently went on strike at a dispatch company contracted to Amazon in Kyoto.
Promise Li
Can you all describe your role in labor organizing and how each of you first came into the work?
Kotaro Aoki
I’m the general secretary of the General Support Union in Japan. I was born in 1989 and raised in times when the real wage for Japanese workers has never increased — in the last thirty or so years. Actually, it has been decreasing for the last thirty years.
I became active in the labor movement around 2008 after witnessing how the financial crisis hit the Japanese labor economy hard, and many nonregular and dispatch workers were laid off. Since many of them were living in company housing, their housing contracts were also terminated. Many employers evicted their dispatch workers. In December 2008, a group of unions and other labor organizations organized a large rally to support these laid-off dispatch workers. These workers held an occupation at a park in front of the Ministry of Labor, and it was heavily featured in the media. That’s when I decided that I want to be a part of the labor movement.
In 2011, I was in one of the cities that was hit by the earthquake and tsunami, and I moved there for four to five years assisting residents who were affected by the natural disasters and ended up living in temporary housing. When I was there, I realized that many were living in temporary housing not just for a few days or weeks, but for many years after the tsunami. Many of these precarious residents also faced issues in their workplaces as well. So a group of friends and I formed the General Support Union to begin organizing these workers.
Nana Iwamoto
I am a student volunteer for an organization working on labor issues named POSSE. I’m currently pursuing my master’s degree, and one of the issues I am organizing around and studying is the working conditions of student workers. And I will be leaving with student loan debt — which is another growing major issue among students in Japan.
Many migrant workers in Japan work for around $2 an hour, and live in, basically, detention centers, with minimal access to adequate medical care.
I’ve been involved in activism for the last three years, and being born and raised in Tokyo, it’s not uncommon to encounter migrant workers everywhere, from convenience stores to supermarkets. I am of Korean descent and know of other students and workers who have roots in other Asian countries who work in terrible conditions. Many work for around $2 an hour, and live in, basically, detention centers, with minimal access to adequate medical care, and there are many reports of high rates of suicide among these workers.
Being exposed to these conditions made me understand that I should be helping to fight against labor and racial discrimination, and led me to be involved in the organization I am in now. Unfortunately, support for migrants is not that ubiquitous in Japan right now. I realized that supporting migrants from the standpoint of the labor movement is crucial in the larger fight against racism and discrimination toward migrants when I first witnessed POSSE helping a Filipina migrant worker who had her passport taken away by her employer.
The pandemic made it even more difficult for migrant workers in Japan to return to their native countries, while exacerbating labor issues that already existed. I’ve heard of some who were fired on the spot without being paid
Taro Yamada
I was born in 1999 and finished college just last year. I am now working as a dispatch worker at a warehouse contracted to Amazon.
There wasn’t really a specific moment when I decided to do labor organizing, but there are three important things that helped inspire me. The first is that for my generation in Japan, there are fewer and fewer prospects for jobs. Even if we work hard, we know we might not be doing enough to make a sustainable living.
The second reason was being exposed to and learning about the history of the labor movement in Japan, both before World War I and in the postwar years. Recently, I’ve been reading about a number of strikes organized by railroad workers in the 1960s and ’70s. That’s what helped me believe that workers standing up and raising their voices is what is needed to sustain and improve working conditions.
Lastly, I was moved to action after learning more about the conditions of migrant workers around me. I remember seeing reports of Vietnamese migrant workers in manufacturing factories, like those making snacks and food to be sold at convenience stores, demanding better working conditions. Being in a production line, I definitely see firsthand how the experiences of migrant workers are not great.
Promise Li
What is the Spring Offensive, and why is it significant that nonregular workers in Japan are participating in it this year? What are some of its core demands?
Kotaro Aoki
The Spring Offensive is an annual campaign every March that has been organized by trade unions for many decades, since around the end of World War II. Japanese labor unions are mostly organized at the company level, so there is minimal sectoral- or industrial-level bargaining being conducted. The Spring Offensive is one of the few opportunities for different unions to come together in the spring to raise joint demands while many workers are in the bargaining process.
Oftentimes, different unions will come together demanding a wage increase at the same time. This does not bypass the limitations of our labor system, such that most unions are more or less isolated, with bargaining powers mainly within each company, but it helps compensate for this weakness in that we are building cross-union public pressure to demand a collective pay increase for workers in different workplaces.
But there are some core weaknesses of the mainstream trade unions and the traditional Spring Offensives. One is that there are huge gaps between workers in major companies and workers in companies with few employees. Also, the pay increases demanded in the Spring Offensive are usually in terms of percentages, to unify different campaigns. This means that the imbalance between different kinds of workers is not addressed, as a percentage demand would not be as powerful for, say, a restaurant worker who wants to be paid a certain minimum amount.
An even larger issue is that most established unions in Japan are largely focused on representing the interests only of permanent workers. Historically in Japan, permanent workers have been limited to male college graduates. Temporary workers, including migrant and nonregular ones, have never really been the organizing target of major established unions, and the gap between permanent and temporary workers is only further widening. So our goal in the Spring Offensive this year was to center the demands and participation of nonregular workers.
Our goal in the Spring Offensive this year was to center the demands and participation of nonregular workers.
This time, we are specifically demanding a 10 percent wage increase for nonregular workers. By not closing the gap between permanent and nonregular workers, companies are protecting the conditions of permanent workers at the expense of nonregular workers, essentially discriminating against the latter by putting them in harsh and exploitative labor conditions. This is what we are trying to change.
Promise Li
A majority of women in the Japanese workforce are nonregular workers. Can you talk about the changing role of women in Japanese labor and in the labor movement?
Kotaro Aoki
In the early ’90s, around half of women in Japan were in the labor market, but now 75 percent of women are in the labor market. And their roles in the workforce have been changing, from working in supplementary tasks to more diverse roles.
However, the wages of women workers are still basically at minimum wage, which is only about 1073 yen [around $8] per hour in Tokyo and about 800 yen [around $6] in some other prefectures. In the past, women were seen as depending on their husbands and parents to make a living, but now, many women are earning income on their own and depending on their own wages to make a living. Many of them are being systematically discriminated against in the labor market, many not earning a livable wage — and also being discriminated against in the larger union movement, as many of the established trade unions have not focused on organizing nonregular women workers.
The pandemic made these conditions worse, as many could not earn enough, and so there are many women workers affected by the pandemic who are involved and who we are trying to organize in the Spring Offensive.
Promise Li
What are the greatest challenges for workers’ organizing in Japan right now, and what has helped motivate workers to get involved in the movement? What are some challenges to building solidarity between different groups of nonregular workers, and between non regular and regular workers?
Kotaro Aoki
Since the ’70s and ’80s, there has not been a strong class consciousness among workers in Japan. Many workers identify mainly as employees of a corporation, and since union activities are so narrowly centered on connecting workers simply within their own workplace, it has been hard for workers to see common interests as a common working class selling their labor power across sectors and industries.
Things have not gone very well for the Japanese labor movement since its heyday in the ’70s. The number of strikes has been on the decline since 1975, and even in the ’70s, it was mainly public sector workers who were on strike. A big reason for this is that labor unions are isolated and predominantly organized within their own enterprises, and not across industries. When a company decides to not improve the workers’ conditions, then there are not a lot of means to fight back, especially in a time when economic growth is limited.
Even though labor unions are primarily organized within each enterprise or company, there were a number of scattered workers’ groups and unions not tied to specific companies that formed independently in the 1980s, which was also when the population of nonregular workers began to rise. These nonregular workers have basically not been organized en masse and are forced to work in a labor market where there is no protection provided by any major labor unions, and with minimal welfare protection from the government. These unions have by and large not reckoned with the fact that the labor movement should be moving in a different direction.
Since the’80s, the increasing pool of nonregular workers was not only primarily women, but also student and migrant workers, as well as those who had previously retired but are forced to go back into the labor market. And they have been mostly ignored by the labor movement in the past few decades. There are some NGOs specifically assisting women and migrant workers, but few of them frame the problem as a collective issue for the whole working class.
Our Spring Offensive tried to combine the problems of these different groups — single mothers, disabled people, migrants, and other workers facing various kinds of discrimination — as a general issue of the working class. Women workers are working in call centers and restaurants to earn their living, while many have to take care of children and families at home. The wages they receive are not livable at all, so they are demanding a 10 percent pay increase, just like the Vietnamese migrant workers, student workers, and foreign language school workers (many from the West teaching English to students in schools in Japan) who are also part of the offensive.
Since tuition in Japan is increasing every year, more and more students are having to work just to attend college. Many work in restaurants and supermarkets, and one of our organizers has been bargaining in his job at a sushi restaurant chain. We also have workers who are disabled and are routinely discriminated against in their companies. What we believe in is not treating these groups’ issues as separate, but as a part of a larger workers’ struggle.
Nana Iwamoto
What’s difficult, but also what’s moving nonregular workers to action, is that workers themselves are seeing that there are not a lot of ways out for them. It’s feeling impossible to improve their conditions, and they don’t see a lot of organizations or people standing up for them and what they have to face in the workplace and labor market. The Spring Offensive this year enabled a diversity of nonregular workers to voice their concerns — which some are eager to do. Their public presence and organizing have in turn allowed some other unorganized workers to know that there is a larger movement of which they can be a part, and that they can also echo the call for a 10 percent wage increase in their own workplaces.
We’re seeing workers from different walks of life come together. The worker that Kotaro mentioned from the sushi chain restaurant who joined us is just nineteen. A worker in their seventies wanted to join the offensive as well, demanding a wage increase in their own workplace. The consciousness of young workers is changing. Many are realizing that the economic conditions are worsening, and that tuition, rent, and student debt are all rising. Many more of their parents are nonregular workers now too, so these youth are receiving less and less support from their parents. And many student workers are starting to notice these imbalances, seeing Vietnamese single mothers making less than a minimum wage in the restaurants or supermarkets where they work, or other colleagues still working in their seventies because their pensions are not enough.
The consciousness of young workers is changing. Many are realizing that the economic conditions are worsening, and that tuition, rent, and student debt are all rising.
Many young people are also motivated by the desire for a better, just world beyond the workplace. I’ve been personally learning from social movements beyond Japan, like the Fridays for Future and other climate justice movements, higher education workers’ strikes, and the Fight for Fifteen campaign in the United States. Learning about the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 was a big reason why I first got interested and involved in antidiscrimination organizing among migrant workers through POSSE. The rise of social movements around the globe has had an effect on why many student workers are getting involved in the labor movement.
Promise Li
Taro, you just participated in a strike at a dispatch warehouse in Kyoto that’s contracted to Amazon. Can you talk about your organizing work there? What were some of the issues there, and how did you become involved in the strike?
Taro Yamada
The labor issues my coworkers and I face in the warehouse are probably similar to what’s happening in other workplaces contracted to Amazon around the globe. We can barely get any breaks when we are working and are strictly monitored by the company’s computer system. Our warehouse is the second warehouse in Kansai where Amazon Robotics equipment has been introduced.
We are in charge of packing products into containers on the shelf. Though the items to be stored range widely from small things like lipsticks to large objects like computer monitors, we only have eight seconds between scanning and shelving each item. Many workers complain about back-pain issues. Of course, the company says that workers’ safety is its priority, but this doesn’t seem to be true. Other colleagues, like those who have to help stack folding carts, tend to have more back issues. We are occasionally allowed to gather for some back exercises together for two minutes, but there are not many safety guidelines or much education beyond that.
You get the results of the morning after the lunch break, and if you do not reach your quota, then a manager will monitor you more closely all afternoon. But it is unclear in our contracts what the standards and thresholds are, or what would warrant our termination. According to other workers, the base quota has been increasing more and more.
So with all these issues, I agree with other organizers participating in the Spring Offensive that we need a 10 percent wage increase. I’m currently making 1150 yen per hour, which is less than $10. I want to be able to make a decent living and have some say about the wages that I’m earning — even as a nonregular worker.
We can barely get any breaks when we are working and are strictly monitored by the company’s computer system.
In Japan, one or more workers can organize a union or strike. I first came in contact with the General Support Union after seeing its press conference about some nonregular workers on strike at a popular shoe chain in Japan called ABC Mart. It was one of my first times hearing about nonregular workers organizing and realizing that nonregular workers can have power too, not just permanent workers whose jobs are stable and who are represented by established unions.
I learned that the union has a workers’ hotline and contacted it. We went through the basics of union and strike organizing. Amazon doesn’t directly pay me, since I work for a dispatch company that is subcontracted to Amazon. We asked Amazon to come to the bargaining table, and it obviously refused, so we are now bargaining with the dispatch company directly. But the company refused to agree to the wage increase, so I went on strike for a couple of days in March. The following month, some workers received a 4 percent wage increase, which is not a lot, but it is still important to see that even Amazon subcontractors can be forced to compromise for nonregular workers.
Promise Li
Many activists and researchers in the West are familiar with the militant Japanese labor movement of the 1970s and ’80s. What is the state of the labor movement today, and does it have any allies within the political parties?
Kotaro Aoki
As I mentioned, most mainstream labor unions are organized only within individual companies and seldom have an interest in organizing nationally. There are three major national union federations in Japan, and many allow workers to join on an individual basis. We do have some workers from these established unions joining us for the Spring Offensive with whom we try to organize individually. Generally speaking, most mainstream unions do not put enough effort into organizing nonregular workers and tend to focus on their long-standing bases of permanent workers.
As far as political parties go, we basically have no real left-wing parties in Japan. Of course, there are some individual legislators who show sympathy for the trade-union movement, but no single party represents the interests of both regular and non regular workers. Either way, I’m not sure if tying the nonregular workers’ movement to a particular political party is the way to go in Japan right now. Of course, we do not expect, but do hope, that more established labor unions and political parties recognize what’s happening to nonregular workers in Japan and do something about it.
Promise Li
How can labor movement allies beyond Japan best support your struggles?
Kotaro Aoki
Many of the conditions nonregular workers face are similar around the world, especially in Amazon’s warehouses. This is not just a fight within Japan, but a larger fight against employers around the globe. It is a struggle carried out often by migrant workers, and to keep supporting these workers in particular, we need international support, especially from labor unions from these migrant workers’ native countries. Migrant workers in Japan come from all across Asia, many from countries like Vietnam, China, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. Japan is also not the only country they work in, and many travel to places like Taiwan and South Korea before they return home. So coordination between unions across Asia is especially important.
Here is one concrete example of how international solidarity is important to our organizing. Our union encountered a group of Cambodian workers who came to Japan to work in a food manufacturing company, and they were laid off and deported by the company only six months into their contract. These workers found a labor union back home in Cambodia to support them, and we collaborated with that Cambodian union to collectively bargain with the Japanese company that fired them over Zoom, and we were able to win compensation for unfairly terminating the labor contract early. Building these types of international connections can be crucial in defending workers’ rights here.
Nana Iwamoto
As far as international cooperation goes, I just heard that warehouse workers in Britain won an £11 wage increase. These types of victories, especially against a company as big as Amazon, can definitely be empowering for Amazon workers in Japan. This news makes tangible the point that their struggles are connected to other ones globally, and that it is possible to win against one of the biggest employers in the world. So hearing about and connecting to workers organizing in the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, and other regions helps us better organize workers in Japan.
Japanese labor law enables even a single worker in a company to start a union in the workplace and demand bargaining rights that the company cannot refuse. I think one way we can use this to our advantage is to build solidarity with other workers employed by the same company or brand in other parts of the world, and address demands and grievances in each other’s workplaces across the supply chain. For example, if Uniqlo workers in Bangladesh are facing certain issues, we can organize unionized Uniqlo workers in Japan to put pressure on the company too. That is just one way in which we can take advantage of the differences between labor laws in different countries to support each other’s struggles.
Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) coleader Mithat Sancar gives a speech under the slogan “The unity of the Kurds is the freedom of the Kurds.” Diyarbakir, Turkey, April 3, 2023.
(Mehmet Masum Suer / SOPA Images / LightRocket via Getty Images)
The pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) established itself as a key player in Turkish politics after it secured 13 percent of the popular vote and eighty seats in Turkey’s Grand National Assembly in June 2015. This was possible because it managed to build a coalition with Turkey’s leftist and progressive political forces while incorporating influential local Kurdish political actors.
However, since this initial breakthrough, escalating levels of repression from the government of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have decimated the HDP’s institutional base and political influence. The Turkish authorities have jailed the leading figures of the party and removed its elected mayors from office. A vicious campaign by pro-government and state media has depicted the HDP as a focal point of violence and terrorism.
As a legal case designed to permanently shut down the HDP and ban many of its leading figures from participating in politics nears a conclusion, the party once again finds itself at the center of Turkish politics. On May 14, Turkey will hold parliamentary and presidential elections. Depending on the outcome, either Erdoğan’s conservative nationalist government will consolidate its grip on power, or else the country may start returning to parliamentary democracy under the leadership of the opposition’s mild-mannered presidential candidate, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.
Having been at the receiving end of much of Erdoğan’s repression over the past eight years, the pro-Kurdish bloc now has the opportunity to tip the balance in the opposition’s favor and bring an end to Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule.
The HDP was founded in 2012 to unite Turkey’s fragmented left and the pro-Kurdish democratic movement and create a radical democratic alternative to the country’s right-wing and centrist political parties. It faced significant challenges from the start as the heir to the pro-Kurdish movement that has faced repeated cycles of repression since its foundation in 1990. The Turkish political and legal order has interpreted advocacy for the rights of Kurds and other minority groups as a threat to Turkey’s unity and territorial integrity.
HDP general election results, 2015–18
Votes
Percentage
Seats (out of 550)
June 2015
6,058,489
13.12
80
November 2015
5,148,085
10.76
59
June 2018
5,867,302
11.70
67
The emergence of this new force in Turkish politics in June 2015 came just as Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since it rose to power in 2002. However, President Erdoğan was not in the mood for power-sharing, and talks to form a coalition government with the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) went nowhere.
Turkey held another election in November 2015 amid growing instability in the country caused by the escalation of armed conflict with the Kurdish guerrilla movement, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). There were several Islamic State (IS) terror attacks targeting mainly the Kurds and Turkey’s peace movement. This backdrop proved an ideal context for the AKP to secure a parliamentary majority.
President Erdoğan then used the failed coup attempt by his opponents in July 2016 to further centralize power in his hands. Soon after, Erdoğan formed an alliance with the ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which has grown stronger ever since. This enabled him to introduce a personalized presidential system and consolidate his authoritarian rule.
The HDP has been the main target of Erdoğan’s authoritarianism. The government has focused on eliminating the institutional base that the pro-Kurdish movement has managed to build over the past two decades. Most of the leading figures in the party have been jailed, including its coleaders Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, and thousands of rank-and-file members have been harassed, detained, and arrested.
Most of the leading figures in the HDP have been jailed, and thousands of rank-and-file members have been harassed, detained, and arrested.
In spite of this repression, the HDP was able to maintain its support base and obtain 11.7 percent of the vote in the general election of June 2018, winning sixty-seven seats in parliament. At the 2019 local elections, it won eight municipal councils in the Kurdish-majority east and southeast regions of Turkey. By the end of 2020, however, government-appointed trustees had taken over almost all the HDP-run councils.
In 2019, the HDP chose not to field candidates in most of western Turkey and encouraged its supporters to back the opposition candidates as part of its strategy to weaken the AKP’s power base. This support proved crucial, enabling the opposition to win the control of the politically influential metropolitan councils of Istanbul, Ankara, Adana, Antalya, and Mersin.
The Erdoğan government has upped the level of repression over the past two years. In December 2020, the MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli called for the HDP to be shut down. Weeks later, the Ankara criminal court accepted the indictment in the “Kobani” case, which relates to the violent protests that took place on October 6 through 8, 2014 across Turkey. The protests were triggered by the government’s refusal to facilitate aid to the Kurdish fighters who were then surrounded by the Islamic State in the north Syrian town of Kobani.
The indictment is mainly based on the statement of a secret witness. The trial has been in progress since April 2021. The case is widely interpreted as a step toward dissolving the HDP, with 108 HDP officials, including the former coleaders, on trial. The prosecutors would use a conviction in the Kobani case to argue that the legal conditions for dissolving the party have been met and that the HDP has become the focal point of terrorist activities.
The case is widely interpreted as a step toward dissolving the HDP, with 108 HDP officials, including the former coleaders, on trial.
Following Bahçeli’s call, the public prosecutor for the Court of Cassation announced in March 2021 that it was starting an investigation into the HDP and accused the party of having ties with the PKK. Having previously returned the indictment on grounds of legal shortcomings, the Constitutional Court accepted it in the HDP’s closure case in June 2021.
The indictment claimed that the HDP “has become the focus of actions against the indivisible unity of the state with its territory and nation” and demanded that 687 former and current members of the party be banned from involvement in politics for five years. The indictment also included requests for the HDP to be wholly deprived of the financial aid that Turkey’s treasury pays to political parties. It urged the court to block the HDP’s bank accounts and reclaim the financial aid that the treasury has paid in the past.
The litigation process in the case has continued, and the HDP has submitted its written defense. In January of this year, the court put a temporary block on the financial aid the HDP receives from the treasury and ordered the HDP to present its oral defense on March 14. The HDP requested a three-month extension to the date of the oral defense, arguing that it would not be able to present it because of the earthquake that hit southeastern Turkey in February and the forthcoming elections.
While the court rejected the HDP’s request, it set April 14 as the new date for the oral defense and removed the temporary block on its bank accounts. The HDP has refused to present an oral defense during the election campaign. A two-thirds majority, or ten votes, is required for the Constitutional Court to dissolve the party.
On March 20, the opposition standard-bearer Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu paid a visit to the HDP’s coleaders and presented the democratic reforms that he would carry out if elected. He also talked about the need to find a solution to the Kurdish question via parliament. Two days later, the HDP decided to take part in the elections under the Green Left Party (YSP) banner. It also chose not to field its own presidential candidate. On April 28, the HDP openly declared its support for Kılıçdaroğlu and urged its supporters to vote for him.
In August 2022, the HDP and other socialist parties took part in founding the Labor and Freedom Alliance as the third bloc for the forthcoming elections. This is the continuation of a strategy that the HDP pursued — one that paid dividends for both the HDP and Turkish socialists.
This was possible because the alliance parties managed to agree on a joint list in the previous elections. For the forthcoming election, however, it has not been possible to cover over the cracks that have opened up between the alliance partners. The Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP) insisted that while it would remain part of the alliance, its candidates would contest the election under their own banner rather than as part of the YSP list.
The conditions are not the same as they were in June 2015, when the HDP made real headway by appealing to a wide range of voters.
The TİP has been emboldened by some opinion polls that put its support at around 3 percent. Being part of the HDP-led bloc means that the 7 percent national threshold for winning seats in parliament will not apply to it. The TİP leader Erkan Baş has argued that being a part of an alliance does not change the fact that his party is an independent force with its own program, organization, political goals, and decision-making body.
For the pro-Kurdish bloc, the conditions are not the same as they were in June 2015, when the HDP made real headway by appealing to a wide range of voters. Nor does the situation resemble that of the 2018 elections, when the country was emerging from two years of emergency rule and coming to terms with extensive damage to its political institutions.
The Labor and Freedom Alliance is targeting one hundred seats in the parliament. Analysis by reputable pollsters shows that a figure close to that target might have been achievable had there been a single list. However, it is now unlikely that the alliance will reach this level, because in many electoral districts TİP and YSP candidates will be competing against each other, dividing the bloc’s voter base.
There is optimism in the opposition camp that it has a real chance to end Erdoğan’s rule. Widespread poverty due to spiraling inflation has left millions of Turks barely meeting their essential needs, and this has eroded the government’s support base. In recent weeks, Erdoğan has broadened his People’s Alliance with the addition of the Free Cause Party (Hüda Par), a small Islamist Kurdish political party, as well as some minor right-wing and Islamist groups.
There is optimism in the opposition camp that it has a real chance to end Erdoğan’s rule.
The opposition Nation Alliance comprises of the main opposition force, the center-left Republican People’s Party (CHP), the nationalist Good Party (İP), two breakaway groups from the AKP, and a minor center-right party. Its election platform offers an alternative to Erdoğan’s Islamic-conservative and Turkish-nationalist identity politics. The alliance promises a return to normalcy with respect for the rule of law, the strengthening of state institutions, and the reconstruction of parliamentary democracy.
This is by no means a progressive, left-wing platform. The HDP’s support for the opposition candidate has a different motivation. As well as the desire to oust Erdoğan, the party has also listened to Kılıçdaroğlu’s talk about solving the Kurdish question through legislation to improve Kurdish rights, and the formation of a national consensus on the accommodation of different cultural groups.
The Erdoğan government has responded to the country’s economic woes by announcing new policy measures to win back its lost voters, including a program to build affordable housing for the poor and an increase to the minimum wage. It has also scrapped a minimum-age requirement for workers to access their pensions. Erdoğan has tried to turn the crisis caused by the earthquake into an opportunity, promising to build houses for everyone whose home was destroyed within a year.
In addition, Erdoğan and senior figures in his alliance have promoted the claim that the Nation Alliance is connected to terrorist groups and serves the interests of the West. His government has intensified its efforts to disrupt the HDP’s election campaign by targeting its members and activists in several waves of arrests in recent weeks.
However, these economic measures may not be enough to win back the AKP’s lost supporters. The opposition parties have criticized the government for its slow response to the earthquake and are framing their election campaign around Turkey’s cost-of-living crisis and poor economic conditions.
The presence of some 3.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey is also likely to be a crucial election issue. The opposition parties have long argued for scrapping Turkey’s disastrous Syria policy and promised to prioritize the return of these refugees back to Syria. They propose to reestablish links with the Syrian government and convince it to accept the return of the refugees. Tensions around the presence of Syrians in Turkey have been high in recent years, and this policy is likely to resonate with a large section of Turkish voters.
Credible opinion polls suggest there will be a high turnout on election day, with Erdoğan’s People’s Alliance likely to lose its parliamentary majority. The main parties gathered under its banner will contest the election under their own lists, which means that they will not be able to pool together the vote of all the alliance parties. While the opinion polls place Kılıçdaroğlu marginally ahead of Erdoğan, there will probably be a second-round runoff as neither candidate will receive over 50 percent of the vote in the first round.
The opposition is unlikely to secure a majority in parliament because, much like the Labor and Freedom Alliance, it will contest the election under two separate lists. A Kılıçdaroğlu victory combined with a hung parliament would empower the pro-Kurdish bloc as the Nation Alliance would need the votes of YSP lawmakers to pass its ambitious legislative program.
Activists protest outside the 9th Summit of the Americas at the LA Convention Center to deliver a letter rejecting President Joe Biden’s policy of sanctions, exclusions, and blockades against Latin America and the Caribbean, in Los Angeles, California, on June 10, 2022. (Ringo Chiu / AFP via Getty Images)
The US government is sanctioning so many countries right now, it’s hard to keep track of them all.
There are the countries you probably know about, like Russia, Syria, Iran, and Venezuela. There are the ones you hear less about, like Nicaragua, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Myanmar. And then there are the official enemies that Washington has sanctioned for decades, like Cuba and North Korea.
These sanctions are presented to the public as a nondestructive, even humane alternative to military action. But a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) lays out the brutal and damaging reality of sanctions regimes and their human costs. Synthesizing the findings of dozens of studies and examining the sanctions’ impact on three targeted countries in particular, the CEPR study makes clear what critics of the policy have long stressed: that sanctions are a form of collective punishment, whose costs are overwhelmingly borne by the innocent people ruled by the often undemocratic governments US officials seek to punish, and which is in practice not so much an alternative to war as an alternative form of it.
The report, titled “The Human Consequences of Economic Sanctions” and drawing on thirty-two studies of sanctions and their effects, concludes that “economic sanctions generate significant levels of distress in target economies,” and that “the populations most often harmed, and in some cases killed, by sanctions are also voiceless in decisions about their adoption.”
The author of those words, Francisco R. Rodríguez, is far from a bomb-throwing iconoclast: an economist who has done stints at the United Nations and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Rodríguez also served as the chief economist for the National Assembly of Venezuela, one of the countries examined in the report, and in 2018, advised an opposition presidential candidate who challenged current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro.
Sanctions are a form of collective punishment, whose costs are overwhelmingly borne by the innocent people ruled by the often undemocratic governments US officials seek to punish.
Surveying the research on sanctions, the report finds that thirty of the thirty-two papers examined conclude there are “significant negative long-run effects on indicators of human and economic development.” This body of research has found that sanctions lead to significant rises in everything from poverty, mortality, income inequality, and childhood HIV infection rates, to instances of international terrorism and the likelihood of government repression and human rights violations — even a decline in democracy.
When sanctions regimes target both a country’s trade and financial transactions, the studies show, GDP drops anywhere between 0.9 and 4.2 percent, while per capita GDP — the total economic output of each individual person in a country, on average — is slashed by as much as 26 percent. To put that in perspective, during the 2008 recession, the United States suffered a 4.3 percent drop in GDP.
Only one study disputes these findings: a 2021 study by Caracas-based think tank Anova, which claimed that US sanctions on Venezuela saw the importation of essential goods improve and living standards rise. But that study was based on a coding error and dubious modeling choices, the CEPR paper argues, including the decision to leave out categories of imports like cereals, oils, and sugars, which together made up four-fifths of Venezuela’s food imports in the year it was slapped with sanctions.
The reality of US sanctions on Venezuela — the “maximum pressure” campaign started by the Donald Trump administration in 2017 as a way to foment regime change in the country — is far bleaker.
The country suffered “the largest economic collapse outside of wartime since 1950,” Rodríguez writes, with US sanctions preceding a collapse in oil revenues, in a country where oil made up 95 percent of all exports in the last year before sanctions, and which is heavily reliant on imports for food and medicine. (CEPR had previously found that US sanctions led to forty thousand more Venezuelan deaths from 2017 to 2018).
While a number of neighboring countries suffered similarly from a global fall in oil prices in 2016, unencumbered by sanctions, they eventually recovered. Venezuela, meanwhile, continued to suffer a drastic collapse in oil production that had only one other comparison, according to the paper: Yemen, which at the time was having its oil fields bombed into oblivion by the US-backed Saudi war on the country.
“The collapse in Venezuela’s oil production is of a dimension that we only see when armies blow up oil fields,” the study concludes.
It’s a similar state of affairs in Iran. Over the decades, the paper shows, the ups and downs of its per capita GDP and exports map closely onto the placement of Western sanctions following the 1979 Iranian revolution and in 2011 and 2018, as well as a brief recovery after the Iran deal was signed in 2015 and sanctions were lifted. Studies reaffirm what critics of the sanctions have said for years: far from targeting the elite, sanctions have pushed ordinary Iranians into poverty and led to chronic medicinal shortages.
While a lack of data and multiple disruptive events, including the decade-long Soviet war in the country, makes doing this same evaluation trickier when it comes to Afghanistan, the paper observes a similar phenomenon in the ups and downs of the country’s own child mortality rate. The 76 percent fall in real per capita income Afghanistan experienced between 1986 and 2001 is “in line with some of the largest economic collapses observed in modern world history,” Rodríguez writes. While the Taliban haven’t published official statistics since taking power in the country in 2021, US seizure of its federal reserves has helped trigger a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe in the country that rivals the two-decades-long US occupation for the horror it’s inflicting on ordinary Afghans.
All of this is important to keep in mind at a time when the use of sanctions has exploded. As the paper points out, while less than 4 percent of the world’s countries were sanctioned in the early 1960s, 14 percent of them are now targets of sanctions regimes, representing more than a quarter of world GDP. The Biden administration has made expansive use of this weapon according to the paper, imposing more sanctions per year than even Trump, who had himself far outdone the Barack Obama administration in his zest for using the weapon.
“It is hard to think of other policy interventions that continue to be pursued amid so much evidence of their adverse and often deadly effects on vulnerable populations,” the paper concludes. Even as sanctions have decimated the people of these countries, those sanctions have objectively been a miserable failure when it comes to their nominal goals of collapsing governments or inducing policy changes from them.
It’s high time we talk about the overuse of this weapon and the misery and resentment it fosters around the world, a weapon that US officials continue to cavalierly wield because its human costs and impotence has effectively been hidden from the US public. Here’s hoping the CEPR report helps spark that conversation.