The specter of war in the Asia-Pacific is leading to a gloomy cynicism. But the Australian working class has influenced debates on war before — and won peaceful outcomes.

Paratroopers take part in a joint military drill among Japan, Britain, Australia, and the US at Narashino exercise field in Funabashi of Chiba prefecture on January 8, 2023. (Yuichi Yamazaki / AFP via Getty Images)

Former Australian Labor prime minister Paul Keating’s acrimonious attack on the US policy of containment against China has kick-started a mainstream debate in Australia. This discussion might be low key for now, but as the threat of war in the Asia-Pacific region continues to grow, that is certain to change.

The prime minister and Cabinet are not required to ask for any input should they choose to go to war. An inquiry into whether Parliament should be consulted about such a consequential decision is currently underway. But despite her own party launching the inquiry, foreign minister Penny Wong has made it clear that her government will not alter its existing power to unilaterally declare war.

The very modest proposals raised at the inquiry speak to the nature of the debate. Given the subservience of both the major parties to formerly British and now US strategic hegemony, most wars have historically enjoyed bilateral support from Parliament. “Seeking parliamentary approval” in such a state of affairs would largely amount to a rubber-stamping exercise.

A majority of Australians now believe that the country should stay neutral in the event of a major conflict. An even bigger majority — 77 percent — believe that “Australia’s alliance with the United States makes it more likely Australia will be drawn into a war in Asia that would not be in Australia’s interests.”

But it is not the case that working Australians have always been helpless on major questions of life, death, and regional instability. There are, however, some major differences between today and those historical moments where nonelites have played a key role in world politics.

“Workers, Follow Your Masters!”

Thanks to the revisions of the John Howard era, World War I is popularly remembered in Australia as a time of great camaraderie, adventure, and heroic loss. Obediently sending working-class men to their deaths for the British Empire was successfully — and cynically — rebranded as embodying “larrikinism” and a “scepticism towards authority.”

While early recruitment campaigns did convince many young people to volunteer to fight at the outbreak of World War I, the horrors of the conflict soon dampened public enthusiasm to die for Britain. The International Workers of the World (IWW) and other socialist groups organized mass campaigns against the war. The most famous agitational IWW poster of the era points to the heart of ordinary people’s emerging objection. It read: “TO ARMS!! Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians, Landlords, Newspaper Editors, and Other Stay-at-Home Patriots. Your Country Needs You in the Trenches! Workers, Follow Your Masters!”

By 1916, the hypocrisy of working people dying for the elite’s war was becoming painfully apparent. Many hundreds of thousands stopped work to attend anti-conscription meetings organized by the trade union peak bodies or went on strike to protest measures designed to make them shoulder the economic costs of the war. Due to these mass movements, Australians rejected conscription in two referenda — first in October 1916 and again in December 1917.

The political establishment reacted with ire. Prime Minister Billy Hughes, by then the face of the conscription death drive, ranted that

We place the war first, and everything else after. We believe that it is not only the duty of Australia to stand by the Empire “to the last man and the last shilling” if need be, but that in no other way is it possible for Australia to be saved.

For its part, the wartime Labor government recognized that the war would not be popular among working people. It introduced the War Precautions Act in 1914 and the Unlawful Associations Act in 1916 to stifle dissent, which was used to imprison or deport the entire IWW leadership. It mobilized pastoralists and private school boys to replace, physically attack, and sometimes kill striking workers, even turning the Sydney Cricket Ground and Taronga Zoo into camps for its scab army.

The price of the war was phenomenal. Officially, 62,000 Australians were killed, and 156,000 were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner. There is a strong argument that these numbers are understated. Four out of five surviving soldiers were damaged or disabled after the war, and many thousands more died due to suicide or war-related issues in the following years.

This toll would have been many times higher had Hughes been able to supply the requested quota of youth to Europe. But ordinary people in Australia, drawing inspiration from world-shaking events like the Russian Revolution and the Easter Rising, were able to say no, identifying a divergence between their interests and those of the empire’s elite.

The Black Armada

During World War II, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) came under fierce attack by Japanese imperial forces. In 1942, the Dutch colonial army retreated to Australia, bringing with it hundreds of Indonesian political prisoners — leftists opposed to Dutch rule. Australia agreed to imprison these men, women, and children until the Dutch could reclaim their colony.

When they arrived in Australia, some of the prisoners managed to sneak handwritten notes about their plight to Australian dockworkers. Many maritime workers were active leftists, and soon the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and other organizations became involved. They successfully campaigned to free the Indonesians, who formed the first Indonesian Independence Committees. In 1945 they began the Black Armada campaign.

The Allies had assumed the resistance to the reimposition of European colonial rule after the war would be minimal. But this was not the case. Organized Australian, Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian seamen and dockworkers refused to handle weapons and goods intended for the Dutch recolonization effort. Mass rallies in support of the campaign drew public attention to the violence of Dutch occupation and potential complicity of Australia in the recolonization effort. Over four years, more than five hundred ships were affected by the industrial bans, which gave Indonesian republicans crucial time to consolidate their forces and fight the Dutch to a military and diplomatic impasse.

The international working-class solidarity of the Black Armada was key to securing Indonesian independence in 1949. Amid appalling violence, working people organized and intervened to change the course of history in favor of each other rather than the elite. Their choices flew in the face of not just European powers’ imperial designs but of Australian capitalism’s budding ambitions in the region.

“Amateur Sign Painters”

Aspects of these two historical fights merged when the fiercely anti-China prime minister Robert Menzies managed to introduce conscription via Parliament in order to fight “aggressive communism.” Then, as now, papers like the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian drummed up the mood for increased US military intervention (with Australian support) in Southeast Asia.

Organizations such as Save Our Sons — a mothers’ group opposed to the war in Vietnam — and a dwindling Communist Party were among the initial protesters. As more young men were sent to the war, and students grew disillusioned with electoral politics, an increasingly radical movement exploded on university campuses across the country. As more polls suggested the public had doubts about the war, so the government tried to paint opposition to the draft as an elitist, communist fifth column. Defense minister Allen Fairhall argued in 1966 that

one is bound to say that the confusion in the public mind, both here and in the United States, is a more powerful asset to the Communists than any weapon they have in the field. . . . The Communist newsagency congratulated the Australian people for their attitude. It should be said loudly and clearly that these views emanate, not from the Australian people as such, but from the noisy minority, from the amateur sign painters, from the card burners and from the demonstrators who are led on by intellectuals.

But student and community fervor, the My Lai massacre, and the Tet Offensive contributed to a growing public sense that the war was unwinnable and that the establishment was lying about the threat posed by China.

The explosion of social movements across the world in 1968 — anti-imperialist and antiwar — emboldened a new generation to organize and take to the streets. In 1970 the largest demonstrations so far in Australian history took place. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in the so-called “moratoriums” against the war. Australian troops began a slow withdrawal from Vietnam that same year.

A Cynical New Century

It is undeniable that organization and mass movements have historically shifted public opinion and put pressure on the government to end its involvement in imperialist wars. But there are exceptions. Despite the demonstrations against Australian involvement in the invasion of Iraq being the nation’s largest ever, they had almost no impact on government policy.

The recent media discussion around the anniversary of the invasion this year drives home the fact that, despite the obvious deception behind the war in Iraq, the scale of its violence, and its disastrous consequences, Australian government officials had more or less free rein to prosecute the war as their US superiors saw fit.

Some key factors had changed in the twenty-first century. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the very notion that a different social order could exist — even an imperfect one — vanished from the public imagination. The level of organization in Australia plummeted. The Labor Party — always pro-capitalism but once a base of social democratic organization — well and truly became a party of capital. Union membership dropped to 24.5 percent at the outset of the war in Iraq; today it is a dismal 12.5 percent. While the IWW had two thousand members in 1917 and the CPA had 23,000 members in 1949, socialist political party membership now numbers in the hundreds at most.

Perhaps most fatal, this situation was replicated in almost every advanced economy in the world. The high points of twentieth century antiwar interventions by working people involved them looking abroad for inspiration and momentum. In the twenty-first century, these are in short supply globally.

All of this has further undermined not only workers’ living standards, but also their capacity to win political demands in a wartime situation.

“Workers Have No Interest in War With China”

Though there is little confidence in the public’s capacity to influence a political elite hellbent on war, there have been small glimmers of hope in recent weeks.

Following the latest AUKUS announcements, there have been small protests and joint statements from community groups refusing to host submarine bases. The Kokatha people, whose traditional lands will potentially be used as a dumping site for AUKUS submarine nuclear waste, suggested last week that they would fight against any such plans — just like the Barngarla people are.

The Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) has consistently opposed AUKUS since it was first proposed in 2021. It argues that “workers have no interest in war with China or any other country. Every effort should be made to pursue peaceful relations. The MUA stands in solidarity with workers in all countries opposing war and wasteful, environmentally harmful military spending.”

Despite being much diminished after decades of privatizations, the MUA still holds a strategically crucial position. Pro-war politicians know this; the recently deceased war hawk senator Jim Molan warned on his war-with-China-themed podcast that the unionization of the docks undermined national security.

While the MUA tends to ultimately toe the Labor Party line, a lot can change as the drums of war grow louder. Organized opposition to military escalation from workers and residents could certainly play a role in forcing the union to stick to its guns and intensify its campaign.

Organization must also go into defending Australia’s huge Chinese and Chinese-background population from racist scapegoating. In a recent survey, 90 percent of mainland Chinese people in Australia expressed concern for their wellbeing if war breaks out between China and Australia.

In this respect, there is much to be done and a shrinking window of opportunity. The pro-war provocateurs have a decades-long organizing head start, but their word is not final. If ordinary people want to avoid a war, now is the time to get organized.

The government is tightening its rules after openDemocracy revealed it helped a sanctioned warlord sue a journalist

The accused rioted after 50 Palestinians in Huwara threw stones at Israeli vehicles driving through the town.

By World Israel News Staff

Two Israelis from a Samaria outpost were charged with terror offenses on Thursday for assaulting residents of the Palestinian town of Huwara last month after Palestinians threw stones at passing Jewish drivers, the Shin Bet announced on Thursday.

According to the Shin Bet security agency, Hanoch Rabin, 25, from Givat Ronen – deemed an illegal outpost by Israel – and Raz Giron, 21, from Yitzhar, were arrested by police on March 13 on suspicion of assault, including attacking a car with an axe.

At least five Palestinians were injured in the riots, which coincided with the Jewish festival of Purim, including one who was hit in the head by a stone, the Shin Bet said.

Earlier that day, around 50 Palestinians in Huwara threw stones at Israeli vehicles driving through the town, damaging at least four vehicles.

Rabin and Giron, who were charged with crimes of conspiracy to commit a terrorist act of aggravated damage and willful damage to a vehicle for racist reasons, arrived in Huwara after Palestinians had hurled rocks at Israeli cars.

The Shin Bet accused Rabin and Giron of being part of a “violent group that seeks to harm Palestinians as well as disrupt the activities of the security forces in dealing with thwarting Palestinian terror and maintaining peace in the area.”

Huwara has been a hotbed of Palestinian terror for decades.

Earlier this week, two IDF soldiers were wounded in a shooting attack in the Palestinian town, marking the third terror attack there in the past month.

At the end of February, two Israeli brothers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, were murdered in a drive-by shooting, prompting a riot by Jewish Israelis later that evening.  A poll later found that almost three-quarters of Palestinians supported their murder.

Two weeks later, former U.S. Marine David Stern was shot while driving through the town with his young children family. After being shot at at point blank range, Stern, a martial arts instructor, managed to shoot and neutralize the terrorist.

The post Two Israelis charged with terror for rioting in Huwara appeared first on World Israel News.

The Foundation to Combat Antisemitism will turn the blue square emoji into the symbol for opposing anti-Jewish hatred across social media and TV shows in a $25 million dollar campaign funded by Patriots owner Robert Kraft.

The post WATCH: Why does The Voice have a blue square on screen? Hint: It’s about the Jews appeared first on World Israel News.

For the first time anywhere in the world, researchers at Tel Aviv University recorded and analyzed sounds distinctly emitted by plants.

The click-like sounds, similar to the popping of popcorn, are emitted at a volume similar to human speech, but at high frequencies, beyond the hearing range of the human ear.

The post GLOBAL BREAKTHROUGH: Plants emit sounds, Israeli researchers discover appeared first on World Israel News.

Last month, a federal US court found a former Mexican security chief guilty of colluding with the Sinaloa Cartel. The trial showed how both the US government and its Mexican clients have been guilty of the criminal activity they’re supposedly trying to stop.

Among Genaro García Luna’s “strategic partners” were ex-members of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the FBI, and the CIA. (Kena Betancur / AFP via Getty Images)

On Tuesday, February 21, a federal jury in Brooklyn, New York, found Mexico’s former secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna, guilty of conspiring with the Sinaloa Cartel. Known as the “supercop” due to the outsize power he wielded during the administration of conservative president Felipe Calderón, García Luna was convicted on all counts: conspiracy to distribute cocaine internationally, conspiracy to distribute and possess cocaine, and conspiracy to import cocaine, together with participating in a continuing criminal enterprise and making false statements on his application to become a naturalized US citizen.

In a statement, US attorney Breon Peace declared that García Luna had betrayed his duty by “accepting millions of dollars in bribe money that was stained by the blood of Cartel wars and drug-related battles” in exchange for “protecting those murderers and traffickers he was solemnly sworn to investigate.” The jury’s verdict, he concluded, was “a shining light for the rule of law, right over wrong, and justice over injustice.”

Calderón’s Criminal Symbiosis

But behind the picture-perfect façade of a dogged American prosecutorial team bringing a corrupted former Mexican official to justice lies a web of complicity and collusion that shines a harsh light on the entire narrative of the “war on drugs.”

To start, the verdict represents a brutal humiliation for two former presidents: Vicente Fox (2000–6), who named García Luna to be the director of the Federal Intelligence Agency (AFI), Mexico’s now-defunct version of the FBI, and Calderón (2006–2012), who elevated him to cabinet status as his secretary for public security, investing him with plenipotentiary powers over the nation’s policing.

In stark contrast to the former presidents’ attempts to depict their time in office as a heroic crusade against organized crime, witness accounts painted a portrait of a security apparatus in lockstep with it. According to Jesús “El Rey” Zambada, brother of the Sinaloa Cartel’s former leader Ismael, members of the Sinaloa Cartel would wear AFI uniforms “to make arrests and engage in fighting” while García Luna, as the head of the agency, was on the take for $1.5 million a month.

Over at the Mexico City airport — also controlled for nearly a decade by Zambada — federal police would be conscripted to unload cocaine shipments. Indeed, García Luna would even allow the cartel to “choose personnel” for federal police assignments. At an exclusive restaurant in Mexico City, Zambada would pay García Luna his own bribes directly. According to testimony from the former attorney general of the state of Nayarit, the order to protect the Sinaloa Cartel came from Calderón himself.

“In [Calderon’s] administration you didn’t know who to fear more, organized crime or the disorganized security corps,” writes analyst Jorge Rodríguez. “Rather than an infiltration, it should be referred to as a symbiosis, which to a large extent is the cause of the violence we continue to experience.”

This symbiosis extended to relations with the press. While Calderón was threatening journalists, filmmakers,  and even a sitting member of the supreme court (in a recent interview, Justice Arturo Zaldívar revealed that he and his family were threatened at gunpoint by federal police and that the then president not only was aware of it, but that “he knew in real time”), García Luna was using his burgeoning wealth to sweeten the pot. At his turn on the stand, the former finance minister of the state of Coahuila testified that García Luna paid the newspaper El Universal some Mex$25 million (USD$131,725 at today’s exchange rates) per month in exchange for favorable media coverage; at least one of the payments was funneled through state coffers using a phony invoice.

The sum total of these revelations was enough to send Mexico’s talking heads into a spiral of defensiveness and lashing out. Raymundo Riva-Palacio, the former editorial director at El Universal, insisted that García Luna couldn’t possibly have received a million-dollar bribe because a million dollars in bills would weigh a ton . . . literally.

María Amparo Casar, executive president of the US Agency for International Development–funded NGO Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity insisted that, because the only charge García Luna was proven guilty of was falsifying his naturalization document, he could wind up “walking free” from the court. When that didn’t happen, Carlos Marín of the newspaper Milenio fumed that the jury verdict could only be understood in the context of working-class people with deficient education being allowed on US juries. Equally bereft, former Televisa anchor Joaquín López-Dóriga devoted an entire Twitter thread to quotes from García Luna’s lawyer, César de Castro, decrying the verdict.

An Economy of Means

None of this is to say that all criticisms of the trial are unfounded. Indeed, both in the formulation of charges and the evidence presented, the prosecution case led by US attorney Peace appeared perfectly calibrated to achieve a conviction while divulging the least possible information to the public. Initial reports painted a picture of a prosecution bulging with over a million documents, thousands of recordings, and a witness list of some seventy or so; with all of this, the trial, which began with opening arguments on January 23, was expected to stretch into March. Instead, it was over by mid-February, with a fraction of the documents, less than a third of the witnesses, and none of the recordings having come out.

Part of this can be chalked up to the standard procedure of mobilizing only the witnesses and evidence deemed helpful to an unfolding case. But another crucial part has to do with the limited set of accusations made by the government, allowing Judge Brian Cogan to rule out any evidence of the highly incriminating business dealings García Luna set up in Miami after leaving his governmental role in 2012 — dealings that are the subject of a $700-million civil lawsuit filed by AMLO’s Justice Department against him.

Other omissions were still more glaring. No mention was made, for example, of the Obama era’s botched gun-tracing program “Fast and Furious,” which delivered US arms into the hands of Mexican cartels. (In January, the Mexican Attorney General’s Office issued an arrest warrant of its own for García Luna for his alleged participation in the operation.)

When the defense tried asking about Garcia Luna’s meetings with top-level officials in Washington, the prosecution moved to head them off. And while prosecutors took great pains to link García Luna to Iván Reyes Arzate, the former head of the Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU) of the Federal Police, they conveniently left out that the unit was directly linked to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), where all of its members — including Reyes Arzate — had received special training.

One of the things that did slip out at the trial was the testimony of DEA agent Miguel Madrigal, who stated that the agency had been informed about García Luna’s connections with the Sinaloa Cartel by Sergio Villarreal Barragán, “El Grande,” in 2010, two years before he left office.

This is consistent with statements by the DEA’s former chief of intelligence operations, Anthony Placido, who a year before Barragán’s tip was already voicing public suspicions, and by former assistant secretary of state and later ambassador Roberta Jacobson, who in a 2020 interview revealed that the State Department knew about García Luna’s ties as far back as the Fox administration. According to Jacobson, the information came from members of the Mexican government, which knew “as much as we did, or more, and never took action.” As for the reasons why the United States did not act either, Jacobson, with an almost audible shrug, rationalized that “we had to work with him.”

From Houseguests to Business Partners

It’s not just a question of what US officials heard; it’s also a matter of what they saw. In an investigative report by ProPublica, a former US embassy official reports being invited to a party at García Luna’s house, only for the host to show off his collection of restored vintage automobiles to his American guests. “It was right in front of us,” said the official, who estimated the value of the collection to range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Astonishment quickly gave way, however, to the Jacobson excuse: “But we didn’t really have a choice about working with him.”

The fact that the intelligence community had a pretty good idea of who García Luna was did not stop its rank and file from “working with him” or even, as it turned out, going into business with him. According to Reporte Indigo, which reviewed the websites of GL & Associates Consulting and its sister organization ICIT Security before they were taken down, among García Luna’s “strategic partners” were ex-members of the DEA, the FBI, and the CIA. From the DEA, Larry Holifield had been regional director for Mexico and Central America at the time García Luna headed the AFI. The FBI’s Carlos Villar had been the bureau’s legal attaché in the US Embassy in Mexico around the same time. But the name that truly raises eyebrows is Jose Rodriguez, who ran the CIA’s torture program under George W. Bush and destroyed some ninety-two videos with evidence of torture before becoming the public face — and best-selling author — defending the program.

All of this — including a string of recent scandals at the DEA, such as the ousting of Mexico chief Nicholas Palmieri in 2022 for “socializing and vacationing with Miami drug lawyers” — should be enough to warrant an investigation into the intelligence community’s contacts with García Luna in particular and organized crime in general. But because of the Democratic Party’s near-total absorption into the national security borg, the task of asking these questions has fallen, by default, to Republicans. On February 22, the day after the verdict, Senator Charles Grassley wrote to the DEA and FBI requesting all recordings of García Luna, together with reports, notes, and documents related to him, vetting procedures used, and an explanation of “what each of your agencies knew about García Luna’s corruption and criminal activity, when your agencies learned the information, and how your agencies learned the information.”

Denial and Deflection

From his self-imposed exile in Spain, Felipe Calderón released a statement following the verdict denying everything and playing the victim. This was to be expected. Even more cynical has been the behavior of the US press in recent weeks: instead of coming to grips with the lessons of the trial and demanding answers from the officials who played ball with García Luna for years, including red-carpet treatment, photo ops, and breathless profiles in the New York Times, major media has joined hands with a claque of swaggering politicians in a convenient attempt to argue that the narco-state is now, not then.

In a bizarre Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for military intervention in Mexico, former attorney general William Barr argued that “Mexican cartels have flourished because Mexican administrations haven’t been willing to take them on. The exception was Felipe Calderón.” It was as if the García Luna trial hadn’t just happened. Or rather, perhaps it was precisely because the García Luna trial had just happened.

This attempt to turn history on its head has two main functions: it avoids uncomfortable questioning about US complicity in the war on drugs, while deflecting attention on the Mexican side from Calderón (who was a US client) onto AMLO (who is not). But that strategy could run into a brick wall if García Luna decides to become a cooperating witness against his former bosses in exchange for a reduced sentence, which his lawyer has said he is considering.

Meanwhile, all the jingoistic saber-rattling may be running up against the law of unintended consequences. On Saturday, March 18, an estimated five hundred thousand people turned out at a rally in Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the expropriation of the oil industry and also to oppose US interventionism. “This is no longer the time of Calderón or García Luna,” declared the president from the podium. “This is no longer the time of shady ties between the Mexican government and US agencies.”

Bernie Sanders’s grilling of Starbucks’s union-busting billionaire Howard Schultz put a CEO in the hot seat on a national stage. It also forced Senate Democrats who would rather stay on Schultz’s good side to denounce his flagrantly illegal behavior.

Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chairman Bernie Sanders (I-VT) arrives to a hearing with former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 29, 2023, in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)

Yesterday morning, Sen. Bernie Sanders and his Democratic colleagues grilled Howard Schultz, former CEO of Starbucks, and heard testimony from workers about the company’s extensive, illegal union–busting. It was a glorious spectacle, displaying the power of working-class organizing with allies in elected office to push back against and divide the ruling class on a national stage.

Workers at Starbucks have been unionizing, voting yes to form unions at nearly three hundred stores and filing for elections at even more. Sanders, after two formidable presidential campaigns, is one of the most popular politicians in America and is still viewed nervously by the Washington establishment. With Sanders at the head of the hearing and Starbucks workers in the audience, Senate Democrats rightly treated Schultz, a longtime Democratic donor who ran for president in the 2020 primary, like the criminal that he is.

Sanders has been convening hearings about capitalist wrongdoing, presiding with his trademark vibe of focused and righteous exasperation, looking as pissed off as he’s given all of us permission to be. (His new book is titled It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.) Schultz at first refused to appear, but threatened with a subpoena, he had no choice. The main subject of the hearing was Starbucks’s extensive illegal efforts to prevent its employees from joining a union. Workers have filed more than two hundred unfair labor practices complaints against the company. Starbucks management has punished workers for union organizing, including by firing those workers and depriving them of benefits.

Schultz and the Republicans kept insisting these were just “allegations” and under “investigation.” Schultz repeatedly insisted that Starbucks “did not break the law.” These were lies.

National Labor Relations Board judges have in numerous cases found Starbucks guilty of violating workers’ right to organize and have even ordered the company to admit this to employees and reinstate fired workers. One administrative judge reprimanded the company for “egregious and widespread misconduct demonstrating a general disregard for the employees.”

Schultz’s denials of illegal union busting, Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, told the former CEO, were “akin to someone who has been ticketed for speeding a hundred times saying, ‘I’ve never violated the law, because every single time — every single time — the cop got it wrong.’ That would not be a believable contention.”

It was important that the excoriations of Starbucks came from Murphy and indeed, all the Democrats present, not only from Sanders. All Democrats present expressed support for the workers and harsh condemnation for Starbucks. None of them went easy on Schultz — not even Senator Patty Murray, who represents Washington State, where the company is headquartered and who has received campaign contributions from Schultz. She questioned Schultz about complaints from workers, saying that she was “troubled” and “disappointed” to hear about the company’s widespread union-busting efforts.

Schultz seemed personally offended that Democrats whose goodwill he thought he’d purchased were throwing him under the bus.

Schultz seemed personally offended that Democrats whose goodwill he thought he’d purchased were throwing him under the bus, especially Murray. He reminded Senator Murray, in a wounded tone, that they’d known each other for years and that she used to speak of Starbucks as a model company.

Republicans seemed amused to find themselves defending a known Democrat like Schultz but made clear that their commitment to capital and their class solidarity with bosses eclipsed any other values they might espouse. Mitt Romney joked about the oddity of finding himself, as a Republican and a Mormon who eschews coffee for religious reasons, on Schultz’s side, but quickly pivoted into a full-throated defense of the ownership class.

“It’s somewhat rich that you’re being grilled by people who have never had the opportunity to create a single job,” Romney said to Schultz. “And yet they believe that they know better how to do so.”

Like most anti-union ideologists, the Senate Republicans effused over the importance of supporting unions in other far-flung situations, unions in the past (back in the dark days when workers were exploited) or those supporting the Keystone Pipeline (of course), but repeatedly insisted that Starbucks didn’t need a union.

It was nearly impossible for Starbucks’s defenders to make the case that the company had followed the law and respected the workers’ rights, so they did their best to change the subject to the greatness of capitalism, the dangers of socialism, Sanders’s hypocrisy in denouncing the rich despite his success as a best-selling author, and of course, the abuse this country heaps upon the poor capitalist. Rand Paul opined:

Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark points out the ingratitude that man has for the entrepreneur, the creator. Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire — he was probably burnt at the stake he taught the others to light. . . . Many would argue we have too much food. It’s extraordinary how wealthy we are!

Sanders kept his cool. “This isn’t about my book, or Venezuela,” he deadpanned at one point.

We often hear laments about “partisan division” in this country, but too often, Republicans and Democrats are united in the fight that matters most: supporting capitalists against workers. Schultz’s bad day at the Capitol showed that worker power can change that, forcing parts of the governing class to turn against the bosses and make concessions to the workers. We’re seeing a similar dynamic in Albany, New York, this week, as legislators support some socialist and working-class demands, including protections for tenants, indexing the minimum wage to inflation, and taxing the rich.

Democrats gave Schultz, who remains on the board of Starbucks even though he recently retired from being CEO, an assignment: bargain in good faith and sign a first contract with at least one of the unionized stores within two weeks. It will doubtless take more organizing to resist Schultz’s backdoor efforts to wheedle the Senate Democrats back into the fold, but yesterday was a good start.

Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders says arrest “looks like a retaliation measure of Russia against the United States.”

By The Associated Press

Russia’s security service arrested an American reporter for The Wall Street Journal on espionage charges, the first time a U.S. correspondent has been detained on spying accusations since the Cold War. The newspaper denied the allegations.

Evan Gershkovich was detained in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg while allegedly trying to obtain classified information, the Federal Security Service, known by the acronym FSB, said Thursday.

The service, which is the top domestic security agency and main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, alleged that Gershkovich “was acting on the U.S. orders to collect information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex that constitutes a state secret.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Wednesday: “It is not about a suspicion, is it about the fact that he was caught red-handed.”

“The Wall Street Journal vehemently denies the allegations from the FSB and seeks the immediate release of our trusted and dedicated reporter, Evan Gershkovich,” the newspaper said. “We stand in solidarity with Evan and his family.”

Russia cracks down on free speech

The arrest comes at a moment of bitter tensions between the West and Moscow over its war in Ukraine and as the Kremlin intensifies a crackdown on opposition activists, independent journalists and civil society groups. The sweeping campaign of repression is unprecedented since the Soviet era.

Earlier this week, a Russian court convicted a father over social media posts critical of the war and sentenced him to two years in prison while his 13-year-old daughter was sent to an orphanage.

Gershkovich is the first American reporter to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since September 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, a Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, was arrested by the KGB. Daniloff was released without charge 20 days later in a swap for an employee of the Soviet Union’s United Nations mission who was arrested by the FBI, also on spying charges.

At a hearing Thursday, a Moscow court quickly ruled to keep Gershkovich behind bars pending the investigation, according to the official Telegram channel of the capital’s courts.

While previous American detainees have been freed in prisoner swaps, a top Russian official said it was way too early to talk about any such deal.

There was no immediate public comment from Washington, although a U.S. official indicated the U.S. government was aware of the situation and awaiting more information from Russia.

Gershkovich, who covers Russia, Ukraine and other ex-Soviet nations as a correspondent in The Wall Street Journal’s Moscow bureau, could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of espionage. Prominent lawyers noted that past investigations into espionage cases in the past took a year to 18 months during which time he may be held with little contact with the outside world.

The FSB noted that Gershkovich had accreditation from the Russian Foreign Ministry to work as a journalist, but ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Gershkovich was using his journalistic credentials as a cover for “activities that have nothing to do with journalism.”

Gershkovich speaks fluent Russian and had previously worked for the French agency Agence France-Presse and The New York Times. His last report from Moscow, published earlier this week, focused on the Russian economy’s slowdown amid Western sanctions imposed when Russian troops invaded Ukraine last year.

What will happen to the detained American journalist?

Ivan Pavlov, a prominent Russian defense attorney who has worked on many espionage and treason cases, said Gershkovich is the first criminal case on espionage charges against a foreign journalist in post-Soviet Russia.

“That unwritten rule not to touch accredited foreign journalists, has stopped working,” said Pavlov, a member of the First Department legal aid group.

Pavlov said the case against Gershkovich was built in order for Russia to have “trump cards” for a future prisoner exchange and will likely be resolved “not by the means of the law, but by political, diplomatic means.”

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov ruled out any quick swap.

“I wouldn’t even consider this issue now because people who were previously swapped had already served their sentences,” Ryabkov said, according to Russian news agencies.

Ryabkov added that the U.S. citizens swapped in the past were behind bars on “quite serious charges” while the Russians in the American custody had found themselves in “the millstones of the American system of persecution.”

Gershkovich’s arrest follows a swap in December, in which WNBA star Brittney Griner was freed after 10 months behind bars in exchange for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Another American, Paul Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive, has been imprisoned in Russia since December 2018 on espionage charges that his family and the U.S. government have said are baseless.

Jeanne Cavelier, of press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, said Gershkovich’s arrest “looks like a retaliation measure of Russia against the United States.”

“We are very alarmed because it is probably a way to intimidate all Western journalists that are trying to investigate aspects of the war on the ground in Russia,” said Cavelier, head of Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk at the Paris-based group. “The Western powers should immediately ask for clarifications on the charges, because as far as we know he was just doing his job as a journalist.”

Russian journalist Dmitry Kolezev said on the messaging app Telegram that he spoke to Gershkovich before his trip to Yekaterinburg.

“He was preparing for the usual, albeit rather dangerous in current conditions, journalist work,” Kolezev wrote. He said Gershkovich asked him for the contacts of local journalists and officials in the area as he prepared to arrange interviews.

Another prominent lawyer with the First Department group, Yevgeny Smirnov, said that those arrested on espionage and treason charges are usually held at the FSB’s Lefortovo prison in Moscow, known for its stringent conditions. It was Moscow’s Lefortovo District Court that ruled behind closed doors to keep Gershkovich in custody.

Smirnov said espionage suspects are usually held in a total isolation, without phone calls, visitors or even access to newspapers. At most, they can receive letters, often delayed by weeks.
Smirnov called these conditions “tools of suppression.”

Smirnov and Pavlov both said that the investigation could last for 12 to 18 months, and the trial would be held behind closed doors.

According to Pavlov, there have been no acquittals in treason and espionage cases in Russia since 1999.

Most recently, Smirnov and Pavlov defended Ivan Safronov, a former Russian journalist turned an official with the federal space corporation Roscosmos who was convicted of treason.

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The United States Army’s 101st Airborne Division was met with tragedy late Wednesday evening when two of the iconic unit’s Blackhawk helicopters collided in the skies above Kentucky during training exercises.

The crash claimed nine lives, leaving Fort Campbell officials and Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear to confirm the tragedy.

Eyewitness accounts reported the two helicopters traveling low over residents’ homes when the crash occurred. It was a clear night, with light wind and no precipitation reported. The Fort Campbell statement noted a heavy focus on supporting affected servicemembers and their families, with an investigation launched for the cause of the accident quickly.

The national emblem of the Screaming Eagles Division has been in service since its activation in 1942, becoming the only air assault division in the Army. The crash was a heavy blow to the courageous members and their families. The outpouring of support from around the nation has shown in prayers for those lost and well wishes for those mourning the tragedy. The Army is providing resources and doing its best to aid those affected by the trauma of the crash.

Even with clear skies, the cause of the accident is unknown. Investigations are constantly in the works, with reports noting that the Army is hoping for answers soon.