LARRY ITLIONG BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION IN POPLAR AND DELANO

LARRY ITLIONG BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION IN POPLAR AND DELANO
For a full selection of photographs, click here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/56646659@N05/albums/72157720130510660

POPLAR, CA - 24OCTOBER21 - Farmworker movement activists celebrated the birthday of Larry Itiong at the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar, and walked and caravanned to Delano.  Itliong was a Filipino labor leader, starting in the 1940s, when he helped organize farmworkers and Alaska cannery workers, and was dispatcher of UCAPAWA Local 7 (now the Inlandboatmen's Union of the ILWU).  He organized farmworkers through the 1950s with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, and in 1965 he and other Filipino workers started the 1965 grape strike, which led to the organization of the United Farm Workers.  A day in honor of his birth was declared by the California state legislature.

Among the people celebrating his birthday were California Attorney General Rob Bonta, UFW co-founder Dolores Huerta, Assemblywoman Mia Bonta, Sacramento LCLAA chapter president Desiree Rojas, Filipina academic Robyn Rodriguez, Central Valley Empowerment Alliance organizers Mari Perez and Arturo Rodriguez, longtime Filipino community activists Cyntia Bonta, Lillian Galedo and Edwin Batonbacal, members of the Itliong family, including Johnny Itliong, and many others.

Copyright David Bacon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A CANDIDATE FOR MIXTECOS IN THE REPUBLICAN HEARTLAND

A CANDIDATE FOR MIXTECOS IN THE REPUBLICAN HEARTLAND
By David Bacon
The Nation, 10/7/21
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/california-elsa-mejia-election/

 
MADERA, CA - Alejandro Santiago picks wine grapes and packs them into boxes.  He is a Mixteco indigenous migrant from Coatecas Altas, Oaxaca, and lives in Madera.  He wears a mask because of the coronavirus pandemic.--Copyright David Bacon


Madera County has been a stronghold for decades for the Republican Party in California's San Joaquin Valley.  Billboards this fall lined rural highways, urging the recall of Governor Newsom, pasted over peeling Trump/Pence posters.  If Newsom's fate had rested on Madera County he would no longer be governor - sixty percent of county voters went against him.  Fifty six percent went for Trump in 2020, slightly more than 2016.  In fact, the last Democratic Presidential candidate to win the county (barely) was Jimmy Carter in 1976.

But in the city of Madera, the county seat, changing demographics are producing political challenges to a conservative order.  That seemingly solid majority does not reflect the demographic reality of the county's 156,000 residents.  Almost 60% of county residents list their origin as Hispanic. African Americans, Native Americans and Asian Americans make up another 10%.  

 

 
LOS BANOS, CA - Equipment yard with U.S. flags and rightwing signs put up by the Madera County Republican Party, calling for recalling Governor Gavin Newsom.  Older signs urge votes for Trump and Pence.--Copyright David Bacon

 

 
MADERA, CA - Elsa Mejia is a candidate for Madera City Council District 5.--Copyright David Bacon


That challenge is colorful and young in the city's District 5, which combines a delapidated downtown with a large eastside barrio.  Here California's growing community of indigenous Mexican migrants has put forward its first candidate - Elsa Mejia, who is running for an open seat on the city council.

Mejia was born in nearby Fresno, to parents who'd come to the Valley from the Oaxacan town of Santa Maria Tindu.  A decade ago the Leadership Council of Santa Maria Tindu, an organization of town residents now living in the U.S, carried out its own community census.  They wanted answers because the government does no count indigenous migrants, even in the Census.  The Council found that migrants from just this one Mixtec hometown, living in Madera, already numbered 2,500.  Together with migrants from other Oaxacan communities, Mixtec-speaking people now are an sizeable part of Madera's people.

California communities of indigenous migrants maintain their ties with their Mexican towns of origin.  Growing up, Mejia would return with those family members who could cross the border to visit her grandfather in Tindu.  He would try to teach her Mixteco.  "But we didn't stay long enough, so I just learned a few words," she laughs.  Later she lived in Oaxaca for a year, working for Rufino Dominguez, a revered migrant leader in California who went back to Oaxaca to head its state Institute for Attention to Migrants.  Mejia later worked for a decade as a reporter for the Madera Tribune, and then edited Fresno's progressive monthly, the Community Alliance.  Today she works in the communications staff of Service Employees Local 521, the Valley's union for many public workers.

Mejia's laugh belies the many things her parents, and Mixteco parents like them, did over the years to make sure their children know and enjoy Mixtec culture.  They formed organizations to carry that torch, from dance groups to language classes.  

Every year the Binational Fronte of Indigenous Organizations (Frente Indigena de Organizationes Binacionales - FIOB) mounts a dazzling festival showcasing the dances of Oaxacan towns, called the Guelaguetza.  Its Fresno festival is just one of several.  California's indigenous Oaxacan population is so large there are more Guelaguetzas organized here than in Oaxaca.  In Madera itself FIOB has organized a yearly basketball tournament, the Copa de Juarez, on the birthday of Benito Juarez, Mexico's first indigenous president.  It organized protests against the celebration of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas, accusing colonizers of trying to destroy indigenous culture and people.

 

MADERA, CA - A home near downtown Madera in a neighborhood of many indigenous immigrant farmworkers.--Copyright David Bacon

 

MADERA, CA - Inside the Del Valle market in downtown Madera people can order and eat food or buy piñatas for their children's birthday parties.--Copyright David Bacon

 

 
MADERA, CA - A paletero, or ice cream seller, sells frozen fruit juice bars from his cart to mechanics in an auto shop near downtown's Yosemite Avenue.--Copyright David Bacon


Culture is a principal basis of organization in Mixteco communities, a key understanding for winning an election in Madera District 5.  Even if she has problems with the language, as many second generation immigrants often do, Mejia understands its importance in mobilizing her community.  "It's very important for people to have access to public services in their own language," she explains.  "We still don't have equal access, even in Spanish.  You can't take a driving test in Mixteco.  Everybody should have access in the languages they speak."    

FIOB fought over many years for language rights in the Valley.  It won interpretation in Mixteco and other indigenous languages in California courts before that right was recognized in Mexico.  But Fidelina Espinoza, FIOB's state coordinator who staffs its Madera office, says she supports Mejia because language is still a huge problem tied to the lack of city services in general.  "When our parents go to school for a conference with teachers, there are no interpreters, and sometimes even no conference," she charges.  "We have no translation to help us access what we need, and the city doesn't support cultural programs or even community gardens for our young people."

Downtown Madera could use a lot of community gardens.  The main street, Yosemite Avenue, is lined with small businesses, mostly with Spanish-language signs, that are clearly having a hard time.  One star attraction is Sabores de Oaxaca (Oaxacan Flavors) where a stream of Mixteco-speaking customers find a small cool restaurant.  Many come inside still in sweat-stained clothes from a day in the fields, in 115-degree heat.  

Nevertheless, other businesses on Yosemite Avenue could clearly use city support.  Across the freeway chain stores and malls get a lot more attention.  Downtown homes are mostly modest rentals, many in need of help as well.  

"The city has abandoned downtown," Mejia charges.  "Those little stores and restaurants were hit hard by COVID, but where was the help?  People in District 5 have the lowest incomes in Madera.  A lot of people have no homes and there's no city program to build housing.  The subsidies in the Federal bills for renters never got here."

 

 
MADERA, CA - Alejandro Santiago picks wine grapes near Madera, where the temperature can reach over 110 in the afternoon.--Copyright David Bacon

 

 
MADERA, CA - Juana Ruiz picks grapes for raisins early in the morning, in a vinyard near Madera.  She stands on a milk crate so that she can reach the grapes on the vines above her.--Copyright David Bacon

 

 
MADERA, CA - Cesilia Perez Lopez, an indigenous farmworker from Oaxaca, comes home from work.  She shows the card punched at work that gives her credit for every bucket of tomatoes she picks.  She is a steward for the United Farm Workers there.--Copyright David Bacon


"Things are going to change if Elsa is elected," promises Antonio Cortes, Central Valley Director for the United Farm Workers.  Cortes also comes from Tindu, and today works in the union's Madera office.  "Oaxacans are very numerous and important here," he says.  "We're always struggling with the city for resources, and we deserve representation.  She comes from a farmworker family, and has that commitment."

Out of an economically active population of 85,000, about 23,000 Madera County residents work in the fields, according to demographer Rick Mines.  His studies show that the median income for a farmworker is between $10,000 and $12,499 while for a family, the median is between $12,500 and $15,000.

In the pandemic, poverty translates into illness and death.  Madera County has had over 22,000 COVID-19 cases (14% of the population) and 266 deaths.   Only half of its residents are vaccinated.  Reporting Area C, which includes downtown and the eastside barrio, has the most cases, almost a third.  By comparison, in Silicon Valley's Santa Clara County, while it has more cases, only 7% of residents got the virus, and over three quarters are vaccinated.  Every day activists in FIOB go out to the fields to sign people up for shots.  UFW organizers visit members in the almond orchards, bringing masks, sanitizer and other protective equipment.

Mejia's chances of winning come from her connection to these campaigns and organizations, working on concrete community problems.  She's running for an open seat, and her opponent is another Latina, Matilda Villafan.  But in challenging the economic priorities of the San Joaquin Valley, Mejia doesn't have an easy path to election.  For instance, she believes that "farmworkers who work during the pandemic should be paid better since they're risking their lives.  And not just them, but their families as well.  This should be part of treating them with dignity as workers."  The growers who put up those Trump signs can't be happy about that.  

 

 
FRESNO, CA - Rolando Hernandez, a community activist with FIOB and the Centro Binacional, talks with Angelica Corona as she picks peaches about the importance of getting vaccinated against COVID-19.  Hernandez speaks Mixteco, and can talk with the many workers who only speak that language.--Copyright David Bacon

 

 
MADERA, CA - Vianney Torres, an organizer for the United Farm Workers, hands out personal protective equipment to workers in a pistachio grove at lunchtime to members of the United Farm Workers at the Wonderful Co., a large grower.--Copyright David Bacon

 

 
MADERA, CA - Carlos Cruz Victoriano lives in a rundown home in Madera with other Mixteco farmworkers.  In the summer of 2020 everyone in the house had serious cases of COVID-19 and were hospitalized.--Copyright David Bacon


She thinks there are about 2000 eligible voters in her district, but there's no precise number for those who come from indigenous families.  It is a complicated question for several reasons.  In the huge migration of people out of Oaxaca, the first wave of migrants to reach California arrived in the mid-1980s, and the arrival of people has continued ever since.  Because the last immigration amnesty in 1986 had a cutoff date of January 1, 1982, most of these migrants have been undocumented.  For them, citizenship, the ability to register to vote, and the political rights that come with that, are out of reach.

If all the immigrant farmworkers in San Joaquin Valley agriculture could vote, Kevin McCarthy would probably not be the Congressman from Bakersfield, and head of the Republican Congressional caucus.  Using citizenship to restrict the franchise has successfully prevented the formation of a voting base for more worker-friendly politicians, and more progressive legislation.  

Elsa Mejia represents the new generation of the children of these families, born here, and therefore citizens.  Her campaign is part of their entrance onto the political stage in communities where immigrant workers contribute the bulk of the labor, but cannot vote.  Over time, that could affect California politics as profoundly as the immigrant upsurge did in Los Angeles in the 1990s.  

But it does make it difficult to determine who the Oaxacan or Oaxacan-descended voters are in District 5, and how to mobilize them.  In an era of scientific election campaigns, like those already unfolding for 2020's Congressional election, lack of such concrete information is a cardinal sin.  

But sometimes what scientific campaigns lack is an organic connection to local communities and their struggles.  Mejia is not running against Trump, at least not directly.  She's running on her ability to speak to the concrete needs of her district, which in the end conflict with those of the ranchers, with all their flags and recall signs.  On November 2 this year, Elsa Mejia will have the chance to show that kind of strength.

 

 
FRESNO, CA - The Danza de los Diablos, performed by the community of Mixtec immigrants from San Miguel Cuevas, Oaxaca, at the annual festival of Oaxacan indigenous culture, the Guelaguetza.

GOV. NEWSOM VETOES UNION VOTE-BY-MAIL BILL FOR FARMWORKERS

GOV. NEWSOM VETOES UNION VOTE-BY-MAIL BILL FOR FARMWORKERS
By David Bacon
Capital & Main, 10/4/21
https://capitalandmain.com/gov-newsom-vetoes-union-vote-by-mail-bill-for-farmworkers

United Farm Workers members and supporters begin the "March for the Governor's Signature" in Farmersville, CA on Sept. 22 in support of Assembly Bill 616. Newsom vetoed the bill the same day. All photos by David Bacon


Almost before athe farmworker voting rights march set out for Sacramento last week, their 217-mile pilgrimage was cut short by the Governor's veto of the bill they supported.

The march sought to press Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would have brought farmworker union elections into line with the voting process used in California general elections.   Instead, the governor refused to allow changes in a 50-year old election process that workers say favors growers - changes that he has 's advocated for in general elections, like the recall vote he just overcame.

"Why was the absentee ballot process good for the Governor when he depended on it to defeat the recall, but not good for farmworkers?" asked Teresa Romero, president of the United Farm Workers.

AB 616 would have made it easier for farmworkers to vote to unionize by allowing them to fill out and mail ballots as absentees, just as voters do in a general election. Under AB 616 a union could distribute ballots to workers at home, which they could mail back to California's Agricultural Labor Relations Board in envelopes that keep the vote confidential, just like voters can do in any political election.

Newsom, in a veto statement, said he "has worked tirelessly to protect and support workers across California." However, he added, "this bill contains various inconsistencies and procedural issues related to the collection and review of ballot cards." No specifics were given in the message, or beforehand to the union and the bill's sponsors.

Presently, workers are forced to vote in polling places on the growers' or company's property. Voting by absentee would make it possible for farmworkers to cast their ballot away from foremen and anti-union consultants.

Currently, when workers want to organize a union, they have to sign cards that authorize the union to represent them. The union then presents them to the Agricultural Labor Relations Board. If the Board decides a majority of the grower's workers have signed, and other requirements have been met, it sets up a polling place on the company property. Workers have to cast their votes there, in favor or against the union.  

 
Xico Garza and Paulina Rodriguez lead UFW members and supporters in a prayer to the four directions at the start of the march.


It is a very high-stress process. Before the vote growers often hire union busters to dissuade workers all day from joining up. Foremen can legally pull workers aside during work hours, giving each a one-on-one talk to pressure her or him to vote as the grower wants. Since the Supreme Court ruled in June (Cedar Point Nursey v. Hassid) union organizers can no longer go on a grower's property during non-work time to counter false statements or threats.

Organizing a union in the face of these obstacles is hard and risky for workers.  Over the years the Agricultural Labor Relations Board, which administers California's farmworker unionization law, has held hundreds of hearings.  An endless parade of workers has testified to threats, firings and other illegal actions by growers and crew bosses.- all intended to increase fear.

Just as voting by absentee ballot is easier and less stressful in a general election, voting at home would make it possible for farmworkers to cast their ballot away from the pressure. Under AB 616 a union could distribute ballots to workers at home, which they could then fill out and mail back to the Board in envelopes that keep the vote confidential, just as anyone in California can do in a general election.

The Governor's objections makes little sense to the workers and their advocates. The existing process outlined in the Agricultural Labor Relations Act allows a union to request a list of employees by giving the Board authorizations signed by 10% of the workforce. Then the union can either request an election on the grower's property, as it can now, or it can distribute ballot cards to workers, allowing them to cast their vote at home. This is the same procedure that gave Biden his victory over Trump in many states, one that rightwing Republicans are now trying to outlaw in Texas and elsewhere.

The Agricultural Labor Relations Board must monitor the validity of the signatures on the ballot cards it receives, and must hold a hearing if there are accusations of chicanery. Voter coercion or falsifying signatures is already illegal.

As farmworker advocates see it, Newsom's veto is a self-serving bow to California's $50 billion agricultural industry as he faces relection next year and beyond that, he may run for the Oval Office - both of which need big-money donors. Among his anti-recall donors, along with unions, are tech moguls Eric Schmidt, Reed Hastings, Priscilla Chan and Jerry Yang, to whom unions are anathema.

As San Francisco mayor,  Gavin Newsom did play an important role in helping hotel workers win their lockout and strike in 2004, but his labor record is more mixed than his veto message claims. Workers have no union in Newsom's Plumpjack restaurant and Napa Valley winery. Business lobbyists were well represented at the lobbyist's birthday party Newsom attended, maskless and indoors, at the swanky French Laundry  restaurant at the height of the pandemic last November.  

 
UFW President Teresa Romero and farmworker activist Lourdes Cardenas march in support of AB 616.


His misstep angered millions of locked-down Californians and helped put the recall petition on the ballot. Farmworkers were not invited, a fact the United Farm Workers dramatized last week in a protest of his veto outside the French Laundry.  

In the weeks before Newsom fended off a recall on Sept. 15, UFW's Romero had asked to meet with him to talk about the bill. He refused. "We didn't want it to become an issue in the recall campaign, which farmworkers were committed to winning," she said, "so we didn't say anything publicly, even though we thought he should have been willing to hear our reasons for it."

This summer and fall AB 616 easily passed the state Assembly and Senate, despite fierce opposition from growers. The California Chamber of Commerce called it a "job killer."  Presumably if workers organize more easily, a larger and stronger union might push wages up - not a prospect agricultural businesses favor.

Agribusiness has fought laws giving farmworkers a legal process for organizing unions since agricultural and domestic labor  was excluded from the National Labor Relations Act in 1935.  Currently only California and Hawaii have state laws with a unionization process for farmworkers.  One result is that less than one percent of farmworkers belong to unions today.  In strengthening California's law, therefore, AB 616 could help increase that percentage and inspire the spread of similar laws to other states.

After the recall election was over, however, Newsom continued to sit on AB 616. Finally the union and its supporters decided to start walking to Sacramento to demonstrate their commitment and ask him to sign it. The march was due to take 19 days, following in the footsteps of the original farmworker march to Sacramento in 1967, during the famous Delano grape strike that marked the beginnings of the UFW.

Senator Alex Padilla, appointed by Newsom to fill Vice-President Kamala Harris's seat, supported the bill. "As Secretary of State," he said in a written statement, "I was proud to support and implement changes in state law to make it easier for people to exercise their right to vote. Farm workers should have similar opportunities as they exercise their longstanding right to vote in a union representation [election]."

Voting rights for farmworkers can't be taken for granted. They came with the passage of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, after decades of conflict in California fields.  Last week's farmworker march sought to remind the governor of that history by starting in Farmersville, site of one of the key conflicts that led to the creation of the United Farm Workers union.

 
Xico Garza walks at the head of the march burning sage. UFW President Teresa Romero and activist Lourdes Cardenas walk behind him.


Pointing proudly to a silent man in a soft-brimmed hat walking beside her, Mari Perez said, "My father was part of that history.  He stood up for us."  Marchers like Jose Perez started their perigrinacion, or pilgrimage, less than a mile from one of the most famous battles, the rent strike at the Linnell labor camp.  "Voting rights and unions for farmworkers only came after a long struggle against poverty and powerlessness," explained another marcher, Roberto DeLa Rosa, board chair of California Rural Legal Assistance.

In 1965 anger over racism and exploitation grew hot in Tulare County, and boiled over when farmworkers living at the Linnell labor camp in Farmersville decided to stop paying rent. Residents lived in shacks built for dust bowl migrants.  They were so hot during the summer that families would salvage rugs from the dump, douse them with water, and spread them on the roof to cool off the rooms below. There were no separate showers for women. Gilbert Padilla, one of the strike organizers, called it "a very disgusting site."  

Camp residents won their strike. and Padilla (now a revered veteran organizer) went on to help lead the Delano grape strike later that year. Voting rights came a decade after that-- - in 1965 farmworkers had no right to vote for a union in the fields.  Even in general elections voting procedures were restricted, and most farmworkers didn't or couldn't vote. The idea that you could register easily at the DMV, or that every voter would be mailed a ballot to send back at their convenience, would have seemed utopian.

Today those changes in general election procedures are the norm in California, intended to make voting as easy as possible, and to encourage the maximum turnout. Governor Gavin Newsom owes his victory in the recent recall election at least in part to the increased turnout those changes made possible. Indeed, on Sept. 27, Newsom signed a bill to make mail-in ballots - a pandemic-era safety measure - permanent.

On Wednesday, September 22, 25 workers and their supporters who'd agreed to walk the whole way gathered in a Farmersville church parking lot. After a prayer to the four directions, led by dancers Xico Garza and Paulina Rodriguez, and accompanied by dozens of supporters, the marchers set off. A few hours later the word came down - Newsom had vetoed the bill.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the San Diego Assemblymember who authored AB 5 to end misclassification of gig workers, tweeted her disappointment at the veto of AB 616, which she cosponsored. "I'm truly devastated that @GavinNewsom vetoed the most important union organizing bill of the year. Denying Farmworkers the right to organize and join a union in the same manner we allow all public sector workers in CA to do so is abhorrent."

"To me, the reasons he gave for the veto have no value," Romero said.told Capital & Main. "He benefitted from the voting choice Californians have to beat the recall. But he thinks farmworkers are not equal to him."


More photos from the march:

 

 

 

THE FIERCE ENDURING LEGACY OF ANTI-AFGHANISTAN WAR PROTESTS

THE FIERCE ENDURING LEGACY OF ANTI-AFGHANISTAN WAR PROTESTS
Photoessay by David Bacon, Rick Reinhard, Jim West, Meg Handler and Najib Joe Hakim
The Nation, 9/9/21
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/photos-afghanistan-war-protests/

 
These photos from 20 years ago remind us that resistance to the war began even before the war itself.


The U.S. is finally bringing its troops home, after 20 years of imperial intervention. But they leave Afghanistan a deeply war-wounded country, its cities in ruins and hundreds of thousands of its people in graves.  

Almost no one calls for the troops to stay, but media coverage often overlooks that the war was always unpopular.  From the beginning thousands of people in U.S. cities went into the streets to call for it to stop.  

Nevertheless, despite grassroots opposition, Congress was eager to go to war in 2001.  East Bay Representative Barbara Lee was the only vote against authorizing it - Joint Resolution 64 - passed three days after the planes flew into the World Trade Center.  Congress provided the justification and administrations, both Republican and Democratic, used it for two decades of invasions from Somalia to Syria and Iraq.  

By October government attacks on U.S. Muslims had already begun, with illegal roundups and imprisonment in hastily organized "detention centers."  Around the country demonstrations condemned the racist raids, while government repression legitimized a broad wave of anti-Muslim attacks.  

The first marches followed Congress' vote by just two weeks, at the end of September.  More followed after the U.S. started bombing Kabul at the beginning of its Afghan invasion.

People protesting the war in Afghanistan quickly linked it to U.S. mideast policy in general.  Marchers opposed both the Afghan war and Israel's military offensive in the occupied territories during the second intifada, "Operation Shield Wall."

Protestors linked the Afghan war to social cost of the enormous military budget, while banners announced that "another world is possible" - an enduring theme during the following years of protests.

These photographs are evidence that opposing the Afghan war started as soon as the war did.  Those protests may not have been as widespread as those opposing the war in Vietnam, but they played their part.  

Yet wars and militarization are still with us.  Some of the children brought to those first marches in their strollers are now young activists in their 20s.  A whole generation grew up protesting this war.

To see the full selection at The Nation website, click here

AT THE END OF THIS HATED WAR, WE NEED TRUTH

AT THE END OF THIS HATED WAR, WE NEED TRUTH
By David Bacon
Foreign Policy in Focus | August 30, 2021
https://fpif.org/at-the-end-of-this-hated-war-we-need-truth/

 
Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) was the main speaker at the rally of over 200,000 people who marched up Market Street in San Francisco to protest the Bush administration's war on terror and threatened invasion of Iraq. (David Bacon)


Many in the U.S. media continue to credit the good intentions of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while belaboring its failure over 20 years to achieve any of them.  But to say that the United States wanted a progressive, liberal democratic, and secular government in Afghanistan can only be believed by those who refuse to remember what Washington did when Kabul actually had one.

In the days following the attacks on September 11, the United States was called on to declare war against an enemy those in Congress who voted for it couldn't even name.  Policymakers asked American citizens to sacrifice civil liberties for security and give the military money that was so desperately needed to solve the country's social problems.

Congress did those things with only one dissenting vote: Barbara Lee's. Now it's time to look at historical truth, to understand how the United States got this 20-year war, with its ignominious end at the Kabul airport, and how the overarching framework of U.S. policy was responsible for creating it.

Other countries facing similar traumatic changes wrenching them from the past have pioneered a way to examine their own history. El Salvador, Guatemala, South Africa, and elsewhere established truth commissions to probe into and acknowledge each country's real history.  Such public acknowledgement is a necessary step towards change.

The United States is no stranger to this process. After the end of the Vietnam War (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it), Senator Frank Church held watershed hearings that brought some of the Cold War's ghosts to public attention. But the process was cut short, the policies responsible for Cold War atrocities never fully questioned, and as a result, the ghosts were never laid to rest. Those ghosts still haunt the United States, and in Afghanistan hundreds of thousands died for them.

The massive social upheaval at home following the Vietnam War- and the deaths of over a million Vietnamese and 40,000 US soldiers-forced Senator Church's examination. Before the people of this and other countries pay a similar price in yet another war, the United States need to reexamine that history.

The roots of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington lie in the Cold War.  Without truly ending it and untangling its consequences, there will be no security for us.

The groups accused of responsibility for the attacks of September, which set off the most recent Afghan war, have roots in the forces assembled in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union. That much, at least, has become openly discussed. But why did Washington seek to bring these forces together, including Osama bin Laden, then an upper-class Saudi youth?

In the 1970s, a moderately reformist government came to power in Afghanistan, a leftwing populist movement seeking to democratize Afghan society. It mounted literacy campaigns and built schools and clinics in rural areas. It sought to end restrictions on women in education and employment, and discouraged the use of the purdah, a practice that separated men from women and veiled the latter. It talked, although often little more than that, about land reform.

That was enough to earn it the enmity of traditional elements of Afghan society, which began organizing armed attacks on government officials, literacy workers, and people associated with the values the government promoted. Perhaps in another era, Afghans themselves might have resolved those internal conflicts. The forces of right-wing religious extremism might not have come out the better for it.

But Afghanistan's common border and friendly relationship with the Soviet Union made it an attractive target for Cold War destabilization. British and U.S. intelligence agencies funneled money through the Pakistani intelligence service to groups opposing the government. When real civil conflict broke out, the Afghan government appealed for Soviet military help, and the war was on.

From that point forward, the United States spent more money building training camps for the fundamentalist forces and supplying them guns and missiles than it spent in the contra war in Nicaragua and the counterinsurgency in El Salvador combined. U.S. intelligence services dreamed of extending that war into Soviet Central Asia itself. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the conflict did in fact spread north.

Those who wanted a secular Afghanistan, social progress, and justice for its citizens were murdered or driven into exile or silence. Meanwhile, military leaders bent on using Soviet troops to pursue their side of the civil war replaced reformers.

U.S. aid fueled a philosophical movement that combined conservative religious doctrine with nationalism. Having defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan, this movement eventually turned against the United States, as people that U.S. intelligence agencies previously considered "assets" began using weapons originally supplied by the U.S. government. This effort was fueled by the huge U.S. military presence in the Mideast and the oil interests it protects, its support for Israel, and the sanctions and subsequent war against Iraq.

What questions, then, would a truth commission ask, arising from the current tragedy of Afghanistan?

Was a policy bent on destabilizing the Soviet Union sufficient justification for the U.S. decision to support a war against a government that shared more professed U.S. values than the mujahideen that Washington financed? Will the national security advisors who made that decision now answer for its consequences?

In a supposedly post-Cold War world, the military interventions that characterized Cold War policy are far from over. This policy was basically unchanged in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Vietnam, Korea, Colombia and elsewhere.

And behind the soldiers and the guns, whose interests are being defended?  Are we supporting those in other countries seeking social equality and social justice, or those fighting against them?

For the countries which have served as battlegrounds, like El Salvador, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Afghanistan itself, what must be done to repair the damage of those decades and help create stable societies that function for the benefit of the vast majority of their citizens?

The United States could help to rebuild Afghanistan, after having bombed the country back to the Stone Age (to use the old Cold War idiom). Instead, it is now washing its hands of Afghanistan and leaving.

Similarly, Washington could end support for free-market policies that impose poverty on millions of people.  Our country's soldiers and bombs are the enforcers in that system of poverty and exploitation, as Marine General Smedley Butler admitted almost a century ago.

But Washington shows no signs of shifting course. Unless we, as people, face the truth and demand change, both Democratic and Republican governments are set to continue the Cold War's history of military intervention, with all the destruction and economic inequality that they entail.

HEAT, BAD HOUSING AND LABOR ABUSE

HEAT, BAD HOUSING AND LABOR ABUSE
The Reality for Many H-2A Farmworkers
Photoessay by David Bacon
The Nation, 8/13/2

https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/california-farmworkers-extreme-heat/

In November of 2020 Roberto arrived in California's San Joaquin Valley to pick oranges, tangerines and lemons for Porterville Citrus, a large grower.  He'd been hired in Veracruz, Mexico, by a recruiter for Fresh Harvest, a labor contractor who brings workers to the U.S. every year under the H-2A temporary visa program.

"We were being paid by the hour, but they put production quotas on us and continually demanded more," he said in an interview in May.  "They said we'd be fired and put on a blacklist if we didn't meet the quota.  In the oranges, we had to fill a bin every hour.  If there was a lot of fruit in the trees, we had to fill it every 45 minutes, or even every half hour."

Roberto's experience is not unique.  Last year, in the middle of the pandemic, the U.S. Department of Labor gave certifications to California growers, allowing them to bring in about 25,000 H-2A workers.  This year many of those workers are laboring in the extreme heat wave in the San Joaquin Valley, where temperatures rise to over 110 degrees by early afternoon.

People keep working in the heat motivated by fear and economic necessity.  "We all come from marginalized communities in Mexico where there's no work," Roberto explained.  "It's easy for the company to take advantage of our need."  In his crew of 45 pickers, eight were fired in six months for not meeting the quota.  "It was completely exhausting," he said.  "The food the company gave us wasn't enough and we were tired all the time."  

Like most of the H-2A workers I've interviewed, Roberto asked me not to use his real name.  "All the people I work with are afraid of reprisals if we speak up.  We can be fired at any time.  The company tells us we can't come back the next year if we don't do what they want."

Roberto was housed, along with several hundred other H-2A workers, at the Palm Tree Inn, a rundown motel by the freeway in Porterville.  "Some of us were living 3-4 people in one room," he said "and there are rooms with as many as 8 or 10.  In the van or bus going to and from work we're crowded like sardines.  During the pandemic we've been very worried about it."

On May 28 he and over two dozen other workers stood in the motel's parking lot, demanding to meet with the contractor who'd hired them.  Their work contracts and visas had expired, and they feared returning to Mexico without their final paychecks.  "It wasn't the first time they didn't pay us on time," Roberto charged.  After local activists, and even a Porterville city councilman and the mayor of nearby Delano, joined them, the company handed out their paychecks and most headed home.

The photographs in this series are an effort to show visually the reality Roberto described.  Some show the work process of two other crews of H-2A workers, hired by a different contractor.  Others show the Palm Tree Inn and other motels where they live.  Since the number of workers brought to California by growers increases by thousands every year, we need a better understanding of their true situation.  Roberto's story and the photographs are a part of that picture.

 

 

Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program harvest melons early in the morning in a field near Huron, in the San Joaquin Valley.  They cut the melons from the vines, and toss them onto a conveyor belt that leads to a platform where other workers pack the melons into boxes.  This system replaces the earlier system, in which workers tossed, caught and packed melons with their hands, which was easier on the fruit than a more mechanized process.

 
These H-2A workers have been brought to California by Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, which contracts crews of H-2A workers to growers throughout California.  This field belongs to the Fisher family, which contracts with Rancho Nuevo to harvest it.  Fisher uses a mechanized harvester, called a "Melonator" for ten percent of his melon crop.  The rest is picked by local workers or those employed by H-2A contactors.

Fisher says he has developed melon varieties that stand up to the machine harvesting process.  But according to Hank Giclas, senior vice president for science and technology at the Western Growers Association, "These workers are skilled workers and the product is a delicate product."

 

The temperature at the time, about 9 in the morning, was over 95 degrees, and would reach over 110 in the afternoon.  Workers said they would put in eight hours, which would have had them stop at 1:30.

 
The workers in the two crews in the Fisher field are Cora indigenous people, recruited from the Mexican state of Nayarit.  These photographs were taken on their second day of work in the U.S. and they were not yet accustomed to the heat.  The Cora live in a mountainous region where the climate is cool, and often even cold.  According to a man cutting melons next to the machine, one worker began to bleed from his nose the day before, on his first day working in the heat.

Workers on the machine pack melons into boxes with the "KingFisher" label.  The label marks produce from the ranches of the Fisher family, one of California's largest melon growers.

Bart Fisher has claimed that a shortage of farmworkers is driving up labor costs.  His costs are also increasing, he says, because California legislation, fought for by the United Farm Workers, now requires that growers pay overtime after 40 hours. "We're marching toward an 8-hour workday and $15 an hour.  It's just going to make us noncompetitive," he told the Desert Sun.

The conveyor belt and the loader assembly are parts of a mechanized system, the Melonator, intended to supplant much of hand labor in melon harvesting. Grower Bart Fisher says that when an additional assembly is added to replace the pickers themselves, the machine only needs seven people to do a job that now requires the 30 people in the H-2A crew.

 

As the machine moves through the field, at the end of the conveyor belt the melons are loaded into a large hopper on a trailer dragged by a tractor.

 
Farmworkers brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program are housed by the labor contractor Jim Hernandez at the Travelodge Motel in Los Banos, in the San Joaquin Valley.  Jose Diaz Solano is a welder, originally from Jalisco, who is welding bunk bed frames so that the contractor can increase the number of workers sleeping in each motel room from 3 to 4.

 
The H-2A workers at the Travelodge Motel get their meals at the taco truck in the motel parking lot.

 
"We were kept in the Palm Tree Inn," said Roberto, "which is in very bad condition."  
The H-2A farmworkers working for Porterville Citrus were housed by the labor contractor Fresh Harvest at that motel in Porterville.  

 
Some rooms in the Palm Tree Inn have notices on the windows saying they've been decontaminated and/or disinfected.  The Material Safety Data Sheet says the chemical used is Aqua Systems' Quat Sanitizer II, "a quaternary ammonium product proven to be effective for sanitizing work areas and equipment against a multitude of virus and bacteria, to specifically include COVID-19."

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The Palm Tree Inn is an old motel.  It received terrible reviews on websites like Yelp until Fresh Harvest took over its rooms to house its H-2A crews.  After the controversy over unpaid wages, and the expiration of the contracts for the last workers, the motel appeared vacant.  There are many other rundown motels like it across the San Joaquin Valley, however, and they are quickly being taken over as housing by H-2A contractors.

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According to Mari Perez and Art Rodriguez, organizers for the Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, when they went to the Palm Tree Inn to talk with workers, Fresh Harvest guards threw them off the property.  Other farmworker advocacy organizations also charge that labor contractors refuse public access to motel residences for H-2A workers.

 
The farmworkers in the Fisher melon field, brought to the U.S. in the H-2A visa program by the labor contractor Rancho Nuevo Harvesting, are housed at the Encino Motel in Huron.  

 
Some H-2A farmworkers are housed by growers on their own property.  Peri and Sons, a large grower, has built barracks on its remote ranch near Firebaugh, in the San Joaquin Valley.