How a Tiny Team of Journalists Held the World’s Biggest Fishing Fleet to Account

ABOARD THE OCEAN WARRIOR on the South Atlantic – On the high seas roughly a thousand miles north of the Falkland Islands, an 18-year-old deckhand working on a Chinese squid ship nervously ducked into a dark hallway to whisper his plea for help. “Our passports were taken,” he said to me. “They won’t give them back.” 

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Instead of speaking more, he then began typing on his cell phone, for fear of being overheard. “Can you take us to the embassy in Argentina?” Just then, my minder rounded the corner and the deckhand abruptly walked away. Minutes later, I was ushered off the ship.

After I returned to shore, I contacted his family. “My heart really aches,” his older sister, a math teacher in Fujian, China, said, after hearing of her brother’s plea for help. Her family had begged him not to go to sea, but he was drawn to the idea of seeing other countries. She hadn’t known that he was being held captive, and she felt helpless to stop it. “He’s really too young,” she said. “And now there is nothing we can do, because he’s so far away.”

This was one of many stark encounters during a four-year investigation I conducted with an international team of reporters at sea and on land that revealed a broad pattern of severe human rights abuses tied to the global seafood industry. We focused on China because it has by far the largest high-seas fishing fleet and processes much of the world’s catch. 

The investigation documented cases of debt bondage, wage withholding, excessive working hours, beatings of deckhands, passport confiscation, the denial of timely access to medical care, and deaths from violence on hundreds of Chinese fishing ships. Data from just one port—Montevideo, Uruguay—showed that for much of the past decade, one dead body has been disembarked there per month, mostly from Chinese fishing ships. The State Department and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration both named China among countries most likely to engage in illegal labor practices in the seafood sector. The U.S. nonetheless imports much of its seafood from China. Half of the fish sticks served in U.S. public schools, for example, have been processed in China, according to a study by the Genuine Alaska Pollock Producers. The organization explained that state and large school districts have historically used USDA grants to purchase seafood directly from commercial vendors, many of which source from China.

This Chinese fleet is also categorized by The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime as the largest purveyor of illegal fishing in the world. Our reporting revealed Chinese vessels illegally entering the waters of other countries, disabling locational transponders in violation of Chinese law, breaking U.N. sanctions that prohibit foreigners fishing in North Korean waters, transmitting dual identities (or “spoofing”), finning of protected shark species, fishing without a license, and using prohibited gear. More than one hundred Chinese squid ships were found to have engaged in illegal fishing practices, including the dumping of excess catch back into the sea.

Journalists, especially from the West, are rarely, if ever, permitted aboard Chinese ships. To get a glimpse into this world, my team and I visited China’s fishing ships in their largest fishing grounds: near the Galapagos Islands; near the Falkland Islands; off the Coast of Gambia; and in the Sea of Japan, near Korea. Occasionally, Chinese captains permitted me to board their vessels to talk to crew, or to interview officers by radio. In many cases, the ships got spooked, pulling up their gear and fleeing the scene. “Don’t talk to these guys!” a Chinese captain yelled at another officer who was speaking to us over the radio. After this happened, we trailed the ships in a smaller and faster skiff to get close enough to throw aboard plastic bottles weighed down with rice and containing a pen, cigarettes, hard candy, and interview questions. On several occasions, the deckhands quickly wrote their replies, often providing phone numbers for family back home, and then tossed the bottles back into the water. After returning to shore in foreign ports, we contacted families of the workers and interviewed several dozen additional former and current crew. 

Getting onto these ships was essential not just to hear from the crew, including some that said they were being held against their will, but also to experience first hand the gritty and dehumanizing conditions on board. Many deckhands spend over two years at sea without touching land or communicating with their families, and they work long shifts that often last more than twelve hours. Some contract beriberi, a disease caused by deficiencies in vitamin B1, also known as thiamine, and often induced by diets consisting mainly of foods such as white rice or instant noodles, which are low in this vitamin. The disease, fatal if left untreated, has historically appeared in prisons, asylums, and migrant camps, but it has largely been stamped out. Experts say that when it occurs at sea, beriberi often indicates criminal neglect because it is so easily treatable and avoidable. Ships often quickly run out of fresh fruit or vegetables, and conditions on board are filthy. The setting can feel surreal. On squid ships, which make up a large portion of the Chinese distant-water fleet, every surface is covered in oozy ink, and at night the decks are bathed in bright light from bowling ball-sized bulbs that are used to attract squid to the surface of the water.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese fishing ships often used Indonesian deckhands, but with the global lockdowns in response to the pandemic, captains shifted to primarily Chinese crews. Court records offered a rare window into the problem of Chinese-on-Chinese labor abuse, including the trafficking of workers, typically from poorer inland regions of the country. Labor contracts provided by former deckhands from fishing ships and online advertisements posted by recruiters showed how the unwitting and desperate are often targeted in schemes that amount to labor trafficking. 

The investigation also sought to chronicle labor concerns within China’s factories, where large amounts of the world’s seafood gets processed, including catch coming from European and U.S. ships and waters. Over the past decade, China has overseen a crackdown on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, a province in the far west of the country, setting up mass detention centers and forcing detainees to work in cotton plantations, tomato farms, and polysilicate mines. More recently, in an effort to disrupt Uyghur communities and find cheap labor for major industries, China has transferred Uyghurs to work in industries across the country. The U.S. government has described the country’s actions as a form of genocide.

Our investigations revealed for the first time that Uyghurs are also being transferred to work in the seafood industry. As part of its labor-transfer program, the Chinese government has been forcibly relocating thousands of Uyghur workers and sending them to plants on the other side of the country in Shandong province, a major seafood processing hub along the eastern coast. That Shandong is more than two thousand miles away from Xinjiang may have helped it evade scrutiny. But, as it turns out, we found that state-sponsored forced labor from Xinjiang is used extensively in the country’s seafood factories that supply hundreds of restaurants, grocers, and food-service companies in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. Since 2018, ten large seafood companies in China have used at least two thousand Uyghur laborers. During that time, these companies have exported at least forty-seven thousand tons of seafood (among it, some seventeen per cent of all squid) to dozens of American importers. 

In 2021, Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which declared that all products produced “wholly or in part” by workers from Xinjiang should be presumed to have involved state-imposed forced labor, and are therefore banned from the U.S. market. In the past year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has seized more than a billion dollars of goods connected to Xinjiang, including electronics, clothing, and pharmaceuticals. Seafood has largely remained unquestioned.

Foreign journalists are generally forbidden from reporting in Xinjiang, and censors scrub the Chinese Internet of information about human rights issues. To get around these roadblocks, our team reviewed hundreds of pages of internal company newsletters, local news reports, a database of Uyghur testimonies, trade data, and satellite and cell phone imagery to verify the location of processing plants. We watched thousands of videos uploaded to the Internet, mostly to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which showed Uyghur laborers; we verified that the users had initially registered in Xinjiang; and we had specialists review the languages used in the videos. We also hired investigators in China to discreetly visit several plants using Uyghur workers.

One video uploaded to Douyin provided us with a glimpse of what these transfers look like. In April, for example, a group of roughly a hundred and thirty men and women stood in orderly lines in front of the train station in the city of Kashgar, in Xinjiang. The people were Uyghurs, one of China’s largest ethnic minorities, and they stood watching a farewell ceremony held in their honor by the local government. A banner reads, “Promote mass employment and build societal harmony.” At the end of the video, drone footage pans back to show trains waiting to take the men and women across the country, where they will be put to work.

We also identified North Korean labor used in China’s seafood-processing industry. The Chinese government has largely scrubbed references to these workers from the internet, but by using the search term “North Korean beauties,” we found dozens of videos on Douyin of what appear to be female seafood-plant workers, most posted by male employees. One Chinese commenter said the women “have a strong sense of nationalism and identity and are self-disciplined!” Another pointed out that the workers have no choice but to obey orders, or “their family members will suffer.”

This type of investigative journalism tends to have more impact if you can demonstrate the tie between crimes and consumers. As a result, we tried to connect the supply-chain dots from the abuses at sea or in the Chinese factories to the global brands, buyers, and sellers of this seafood. This goal is distinctly difficult with seafood because in the many handoffs of catch between fishing boats, carrier ships, processing plants and exporters, there are gaping holes in traceability.

We relied heavily on two satellite tools to track ships and to identify illegal or suspicious behavior, including when ships turned off their transponders for longer than seven days, a practice prohibited by Chinese law. These included Skylight, a fisheries monitoring tool built by the Allen Institute for AI, and Global Fishing Watch. In some cases, we hired investigators in China to covertly follow trucks carrying seafood from Shidao port to factories. Trade data then allowed us to track exports from processing plants to stores and restaurants abroad.  

In order to get a view inside the processing facilities, we used cell-phone footage from workers in seafood plants that had been published on Douyin. This footage often featured frozen squid bags showing useful details like vessel names or brand labels, providing the reporters another way to connect ships tied to illegal behavior or factories using forced labor to consumers that consume the seafood. We authenticated the locations where the videos were taken by using Google Earth Pro satellite imagery. Google Lens searches for the unique export codes of Chinese processing plants returned images of packaging with those codes. The reporting team used these codes, along with information from Chinese and American trade databases, to trace the full supply chain.

Our trips at sea to visit the Chinese fleet were facilitated by hitching rides with willing partners. In some cases, national-fishery law-enforcement authorities or private fishing-boat captains agreed to taxi us to target the various fishing grounds around the world. In other instances, ocean-conservation groups, including Sea Shepherd, EarthRace, and Greenpeace, transported the team to high-seas locations of interest. 

To ensure that the reporting would carry global impact, we partnered with two dozen newspapers and magazines in as many countries to publish the findings while also providing reporters from these outlets with country-specific memos tailored for their distinct audiences so these journalists could carry the investigation forward in a way that spoke to their particular audiences. 

Other elements of this journalism project also make it distinct. 

To offer a more intimate and humanizing perspective on why someone, whether Chinese or a foreigner, might choose to take a dangerous, often exploitative job on these ships, we produced a documentary film that follows a fictional character: a young man from China who is deciding whether to follow in his father’s footsteps and work on a Chinese squid jigger. The fictional narrator of the film is an amalgamation drawn from interviews with dozens of deckhands, and he provides a glimpse into a sense of national pride, adventure, and duty that may motivate someone to take this work. The film also makes the point that the U.S. and much of the West may be apt to cast judgment on the brutality of the fleet, but American diners are among the primary consumers of seafood produced on these ships.

We took two steps to heighten the transparency of our reporting process. The first was to publish the sourcing behind most of the facts, figures, and analysis that appear in our dozens of stories. The second was to present a webpage that showed all of our interactions with the more than 300 companies, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations that were associated with the problematic behaviors we uncovered. This page included contact information and the emails we exchanged back and forth with companies, in which they defended themselves or answered our questions, so that advocates, journalists, and policymakers could see in raw fashion the full version of those discussions, and potentially follow up in the future. 

In case we were wondering whether we had tapped into something bigger, there were constant reminders that the problems we were identifying were likely pervasive in the industry. In June 2023, a woman named Silvina González was walking along a beach in Maldonado, Uruguay, picking up trash, when she found a small plastic bottle holding a napkin with black writing in Mandarin. It started with the abbreviation SOS. She quickly sent a photo of the message to her brother-in-law, who spoke Mandarin and sent back a translation: “Hello, I am a crew member of the ship Lu Qing Yuan Yu 765, and I was locked up by the company. When you see this paper, please help me call the police! Help-help.”

Sixteen months before the message in a bottle washed up on Uruguayan shores, my team and I were in the South Atlantic chasing down ships from the Lu Qing Yuan Yu fleet. One of them was the ship named in the message.

This story was produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization in Washington, D.C. Reporting and writing was contributed by Ian Urbina, Daniel Murphy, Joe Galvin, Maya Martin, Susan Ryan, Austin Brush, and Jake Conley.

source https://time.com/6328528/investigation-chinese-fishing-fleet-ian-urbina-essay/

The U.S. Energy Department Is Spending $36 Million On Ocean Carbon-Capture Research

In recent years, startups have begun trying to scale up methods to use the world’s oceans to remove carbon dioxide from an overheating atmosphere. As of today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is getting in on the idea too. As TIME can exclusively report, the department is distributing $36 million to 11 scientific projects across the U.S. that aim to help quantify exactly how much carbon potential ocean projects would be locking away.

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The basic idea behind ocean-based carbon removal has been around for decades: With a bit of human manipulation, the oceans could—theoretically—suck up billions of tons of carbon dioxide and take care of some of the world’s climate woes. Humans could dump alkaline materials like lime into the water to suck up greenhouse gasses (ocean water gets more acidic as it absorbs more CO2), or potentially use iron filings to create algal blooms, which would absorb carbon as they grow. We could even start sinking plant biomass into the deep ocean (thus preventing it from decomposing and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere).

In recent years, climate investors drawn by the promise of lucrative carbon offset contracts and predictions from scientists that humanity will need to find a way to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the decades ahead have started pouring money into startups pledging to prove out such approaches. It’s a subset of the nascent, venture capital fueled carbon removal industry, which also includes better known approaches like ClimeWorks’s carbon-sucking fans in Iceland.

Read more: The Ocean is the Next Frontier for the Carbon Removal Industry

Right now, such approaches are only able to remove a negligible amount of carbon from the atmosphere—and they would need to be scaled up hundreds of thousands or even millions of times more to make a difference in the decades ahead. There is no way to tell whether such an expansion can or will happen. And if they work, such engineering-heavy carbon removal methods—or simpler efforts like planting millions of trees—would need to come in alongside rapid worldwide emissions cuts in order for humanity to meet its climate goals.

Ocean-based methods of carbon removal could have particular promise compared to other methods. Many proposed approaches would essentially speed up natural processes that already cause ocean water to draw CO2 out of the atmosphere. There are also problems, though: for instance, legal issues around working in international waters, and unknown effects on ocean ecosystems. Then there’s the potential public relations problem: climate change is very bad, and we’re running out of time to implement solutions, but we have yet to see if, for the public, engineering the oceans will be a bridge too far (efforts to study how humans might engineer the atmosphere, for their part, have stirred up considerable controversy). And then there’s the issue of actually measuring how much carbon the oceans are absorbing, which would be essential for separating good projects from bad, and preventing a proliferation of bogus offsetting claims like those that have plagued more traditional efforts like planting trees. 

That last problem has caught the eye of ARPA-E, an office within the Energy Department specializing in developing new technologies. Earlier this year it launched a program to help develop sensors and computer models that could one day help determine exactly how much carbon dioxide ocean-based carbon removal concepts are pulling out of the atmosphere. Today, it announced that it was funding a series of research proposals to that end submitted by scientists and engineers around the country.

“Reaching President Biden’s ambitious decarbonization goals and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change will require a wide range of innovative climate solutions, from common-sense approaches like improving energy efficiency to novel applications like utilizing the ocean’s natural carbon removal abilities to reduce greenhouse gas pollution from the atmosphere,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm in a press release. “With critical funding from DOE, project teams from across the country will develop groundbreaking new technologies to cut emissions that will help combat the climate crisis while reinforcing America’s global leadership in the clean energy industries of the future.”

One proposal from General Electric’s research division, which received about $4 million in government funding, proposed to develop a miles-long fiber optic cable that boats could tow through the water to measure ocean carbon. A project from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin that would aim to develop acoustic sensors to measure how much carbon is being stored in seagrass beds received $2 million. Another project from a small company in Cambridge, Mass. that would try to design new software that could model ocean dynamics 100 times faster than current methods can, received a grant of $2.5 million.

The ARPA-E funding follows a slew of other announcements signaling the Biden Administration’s strong interest in ocean carbon removal. An “Ocean Climate Action Plan” released by a White House committee in March stated that “a substantial ramp up in marine [carbon removal] research and development investments, and enhanced interagency coordination is needed to evaluate efficacy and ensure safe and effective implementation and regulation of these techniques to mitigate climate change.” In September, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that it would distribute about $24 million in funding to study ocean carbon removal. Earlier this month, the White House formed a “Fast-Track Action Committee” of government experts, who will evaluate different ocean carbon removal approaches.

Matt Long, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and director of [C]Worthy, a nonprofit aiming to help build tools to measure and verify ocean carbon removal, is working on a project that received about $3.9 million in ARPA-E’s announcement today. He says that the grants won’t be enough to do all of the scientific work that is necessary in the field, but that it does provide an important signal to private investors and philanthropists that the government is interested in ocean-based carbon removal innovation, and in making sure that there is hard science to back up its proponents’ claims. 

“The hope is that, in combination with venture capital and philanthropic support, we can really establish a foundation for the industry to grow,” Long says. 

source https://time.com/6328555/energy-department-funding-ocean-carbon-capture-research/

City of Orlando Buys Pulse Nightclub Property to Build Memorial to Massacre Victims

ORLANDO, Fla. — The city of Orlando is moving forward with plans to create a memorial on the property of the Pulse nightclub, where 49 people were massacred seven years ago.

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City leaders agreed Monday night to purchase the property for $2 million. Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said they plan a collaborative approach, working with families of the victims to create the memorial.

On June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen opened fire in the gay nightclub, killing 49 and wounding another 53 people. At the time, it was the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. But that number was surpassed the following year when 58 people were killed and more than 850 were injured among a crowd of 22,000 at a country music festival in Las Vegas.

A SWAT team killed Mateen, who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, following a standoff.

Plans to build the memorial had been in the works for years, but the nonprofit onePulse Foundation announced earlier this year that it was scaling back plans for a $100 million memorial following fundraising challenges.

The building still stands, surrounded by a temporary display that honors the victims.

“We look forward to being a part of the discussion with the City of Orlando as this moves forward,” a statement from the onePulse Foundation said.

source https://time.com/6328422/city-of-orlando-buys-pulse-nightclub-property-to-build-memorial-to-massacre-victims/

Mike Johnson Would Be the Least Experienced Speaker Since 1883

After three weeks of infighting over who should lead the lower chamber, House Republicans are on the cusp of installing a new Speaker in Rep. Mike Johnson, a social conservative from Louisiana who, if elected, would be the least experienced House Speaker in decades.

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The choice has triggered a mix of reactions within the party, with some hailing it as a unifying moment and others expressing concerns about his qualifications and controversial stances, including his role in seeking to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. The House is expected to vote Wednesday on whether to give him the gavel, following 22 days of deliberation, 14 candidates, four nominees, and three floor votes.

While it remains to be seen if he has enough votes to be elected, the enthusiasm among some House GOP members and the absence of vocal opposition from others marked a significant shift after a period of turmoil. “Democracy is messy sometimes, but it is our system. This conference that you see, this House Republican majority, is united,” Johnson said Tuesday night, flanked by an exuberant conference cheering his name.

Johnson, 51, was first elected to the House in 2016. He gained recognition for his involvement in conservative policy circles and became the chair of the Republican Study Committee in 2019. But if elected, Johnson would be the least experienced Speaker in 140 years, with just four terms in the House and no senior leadership roles or full committee chairmanships under his belt. The lack of experience may pose some challenges, especially given the complexities of the role. Julian Zelizer, a political historian and professor at Princeton University, says that most House Speakers tend to be drawn from senior lawmakers or those in the party leadership who have been in office for some time, rather than rank-and-file members. “The elevation of the least experienced is not usually the strategy for the party,” he says. “It has a big impact. The GOP would elect someone with weak personal ties in the House, lack of institutional knowledge, and without the personal memory of how different things seem to unfold. You also end up with someone who has the least commitment to government as an institution.”

As Speaker, Johnson would need to oversee a large staff and manage a substantial national fundraising apparatus—and he is far from a prolific fundraiser, which is a key responsibility for party leaders. His campaign raised about $1.3 million in the 2022 election cycle, a fraction of the $28 million raised by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign.

But while Johnson’s lack of experience might pose some challenges, it could also be what helps him get elected, says Matthew Green, a politics professor at Catholic University who authored a book on the historical role of House Speakers. “It’s almost like picking a Supreme Court Justice who has never written any prior decisions,” Green says. “We just don’t know what he’s going to be like. I think it’s one of the big reasons that he got the nod and will likely be elected, because every member and every faction can sort of look at him and see something they like.”

(To wit: asked about working with Johnson on spending issues, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told CNN that she doesn’t know him and was going to Google him.)

Despite being relatively unknown on the national stage or even among other lawmakers, one significant point of contention surrounds Johnson’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. He led the organization of an amicus brief, signed by 125 House Republicans, supporting a Texas-led lawsuit seeking to intervene in the vote counting in key swing states won by Biden. Asked by a reporter about his role in attempting to overturn the election on Tuesday night, Johnson responded “next question” as Republicans beside him booed.

His stance on various hot-button issues, including abortion, civil rights, and free speech, along with his positions on foreign policy and federal spending, have also concerned some moderates. He has expressed opposition to continued funding for the war in Ukraine, which could become a divisive issue for him to navigate. 

Despite these concerns, Johnson’s nomination appears to have quelled the chaos within the House GOP, and his ascension could bring some stability to the divided conference that has hindered legislative progress for three weeks. If his colleagues elect him, the position may come with a steep learning curve for Johnson himself. “The speakership is unique in the amount of skill that’s required to do well, and some of that comes from experience,” Green says. “It’s through experience that you learn the ins-and-outs of House procedure, you learn more about your colleagues, and you also get to know the dynamics of working with the Senate and with the White House and with the press. Those are things that Speakers have to deal with to a much greater degree than a rank-and-file member.”

source https://time.com/6328412/mike-johnson-speaker-republicans-experience/

The Winner of a $1 Million Philosophy Prize Sees a Silver Lining to Ideas Getting Attacked

For centuries, when nations prepared those destined for leadership, philosophy – the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence – ranked among the subjects in which instruction was not optional. But, in this, the age of information, the standing of philosophy has fallen so far that between 2021 and 2022, 10 different colleges and universities contemplated everything from shrinking to outright eliminating their philosophy programs prompting written pleas from the American Philosophy Association to reverse course. It’s against that backdrop that each year since 2016, the Berggruen Institute has awarded its annual Berggruen Philosophy Prize as well as the $1 million purse that comes with it to a thinker shaping political, economic, and social institutions. 

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This year, the organization has awarded the prize to American sociologist and social theorist Patricia Hill Collins. Collins began working in preschool classrooms at the age of 15 and spent years teaching first very young children, then students working to become educators at Harvard University. She led the Black studies department at the University of Cincinnati for more than two decades before joining the sociology faculty at the University of Maryland. Her writing has identified often overlooked arenas of political action and explored injustice and resistance to it. Beginning with her first book, Black Feminist Thought, in 1990, Collins also helped to establish the concept of intersectionality, what the Berggruen jury described as “a powerful analytical lens through which we can envision the different and intersecting ways in which our material, social, and cultural worlds produce injustice.” While philosophy is often expressed in rarely accessed tomes, Collins has developed a way of thinking, writing, and talking about power that makes philosophical inquiry feel accessible and even urgent. So it’s not surprising that Black Feminist Thought remains in print along with most of Collins’ nine other titles. Her latest, Lethal to Intersections: Race, Gender and Violence, will be published this week.

When I caught up with Collins, 75, last week, she was in her office at the University of Cambridge, preparing to spend the next five weeks teaching at its Centre for Gender Studies. What follows is a transcript of my conversation with Collins edited only for clarity and length.

Let’s start with a big but simple question. How did you get here, to a career in philosophy, the so-called “life of the mind”?

I think you have to invent yourself. That’s what I had to do from an early age because the life of the mind was not in the community around me or in the family around me. But seeds were planted there in terms of how to have confidence about what you love and what you think is right. And in my case, it had to do with reading. 

I had a mother who could not go to college and was a dreamer. She was an artist, and she helped me understand the power of ideas in books by teaching me to read and by taking me to the Philadelphia public library. She turned it into this magical journey. She was one of these parents who can actually get your imagination going, and I thought we were going up the steps of the Capitol building. That’s how big it felt to me when I was 5. I learned to write my name. And Patricia had lots of letters in it, but you could not get a library card unless you could sign your own signature. So what she was telling and teaching me was all about literacy and ideas and the freedom to read and think what you want regardless of what people think. A lot of the time you have to fit in. But a life of the mind and its ability to set you free, I would say started with that moment of reading, becoming a believer in libraries, books, free speech, the power of ideas in public space. 

When you think about your own work, what do you think of as the major themes? 

First would be the power of critical thinking and critical literacy. The ability to read – not just reading the book, but reading the situation, reading the discussion, reading the film. The second idea tied to that is creativity, people having the belief in the power of their own creativity and ability to analyze situations as a source of power, particularly for groups that are on the bottom of the social hierarchy. 

I think Black women are quite foundational for my own work in terms of race and gender. But if you look at the corpus of my work, it has been traveling through various systems of power, race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and ability, more recently, disability issues, and age, as I become increasingly interested in youth as a really important period of life and saying that ideas matter, particularly for groups that are struggling with issues of social inequality, disenchantment, disempowerment.

Read More: Attacks on Libraries Are Attacks on Democracy

Very often what happens is groups on the bottom are told, “Well, you’re too stupid” or “You can’t read,” or “You don’t have time,” or “You have no creativity, why would we listen to you?” When it’s actually the reverse. When people claim their own narratives, their own discussions, their own music, their own dance, their own philosophy, then that is a rock that cannot be taken away. So my work on Black women lays the foundation for everything I’ve done since. And in that foundation is the idea of intersectionality – that systems of power intersect in the lives of Black women and in everyone’s lives. Not just the life of the individual, but the collective life, the social structures that we are in. 

Now on the front end I had no clue this is what I intended. I make decisions that seem to make sense in the here and now and that hopefully will open more doors, not close them. It’s standing in one location and looking in multiple directions and saying, wait a minute, there’s a race door, there’s a class door, there’s a gender door, there’s a nationality or nationalism door. There are all these various things that are affecting this one location where I am standing now. So what is it that I want to do? Or what is it that we want to do? A lot of my work has really been around collective politics and political activists.  

I am not going to say that it is easy to do. It’s really labor-intensive to do intellectual work. But you have to be focused about why you’re doing it. 

So even if not intentional from the outset, why have these things become your focus?

I’m the first person in my family to graduate from college. I’ve always believed that you might be the first but you don’t need to be the last. And in my own family I have landed first but I have not been the last. In a lot of ways that is how I looked at my work. The work is giving gifts to people and clearing space for people who come after me. That’s what teachers do. They bring something to you that you didn’t know or help you develop a skill that you didn’t have, particularly that critical-thinking skill. Then they say you have to go out into your world with these tools and these skills and this knowledge and what will you do? 

What’s really nice for me right now is I’ve been writing for quite some time and people are finding work for the first time now that I wrote 30 years ago. They weren’t even born when some of these ideas were first published. I was writing to them without my knowing.

You mentioned the essential nature of the skill for critical thinking. That made me think about the proliferation of misinformation and disinformation. Have we reached a nadir of critical thought? 

I recognize that the world is in very difficult straits right now. But it always has been, particularly for people on the bottom. The issue is what is the collective wisdom and history that we take with us? 

This is all very much tied to the book I just finished. I didn’t just look at it as in the life of the mind, I looked at how people manipulated and used ideas in public.

[The Nazis], they were using film. They recognized the power of spectacle. And what they did was they took long-standing ideas that were tropes of racism, sexism, and homophobia, and they recast them with conspiracy theories to explain the problems, in a country that was really fearful about where it was going, to German people who lost World War I. And that they succeeded through democratic means–to me, that is the scary part of it. That party was elected, and once they were elected, they changed the rules to keep them in power.

Read More: Book Bans Aren’t the Only Threat to Literature in American Classrooms

Raw power is just guns and you shoot and you do this, that, and the other. But they had a really carefully orchestrated campaign to snuff out dissent. They had a major book burning in front of a major university in Berlin. So when you burn things, you’re looking at the pile of ashes and you say those ideas are no good and you get people to celebrate that around the bonfire, especially children and young people. You create the space for your own interpretation of the world. 

And we know how that turned out. The situation with all the misinformation and all the fake news going on now, with the conspiracy theories that have risen, they recycle, they don’t go away. A lot of this is tied to political opportunism. And we are very much into that period of time again.

But I think the period of time that we’re in is also one where lots of people have access to information where they didn’t have it before. The question now is do you know how to read the stuff that you have? Do you have the critical literacy around social media? Do you have the critical literacy about understanding political messages? So it is today a major public-education function, recognizing that people don’t follow nefarious conspiracy theories if they aren’t already afraid, if there aren’t issues not being addressed. 

There are people who will always bristle at the work of ideas, at generating philosophy because it is to them esoteric and only concerned with theory and inspiring additional thought. Why were you drawn to it?

I chose theoretical work, because at the heart of Western knowledge is philosophy, philosophy and theology, and these are the idea systems that shaped the rest. So, years later, here I am, saying, I’m so glad I made that decision. Because of that, I could sit down and write this latest book about intersectionality as critical social theory, where I could talk about various philosophical schools. I’ve juxtaposed and put in the same chapter Simone de Beauvoir, who was the sometimes darling of feminist circles, and the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray.

I’m making the case that both of them are in fact making really compelling arguments about freedom. Now to do that, I had to really do some homework and read quite a bit, but I’m willing to do that kind of work to clear space for other people. And that’s what the theory does. Right? That’s what philosophy does. It describes and affects culture. 

The main ideas that I work with have come from philosophy, from pragmatist philosophers, who during a period similar to our culture now, were just thinking big thoughts. So it was very nice for me to take an idea from John Dewey. His idea of community offers a whole discussion of community and democracy. And that allowed me to put in that same chapter Black women’s community work and how it speaks to questions of democracy. But we can actually put those in dialogue, see what comes out. That’s richer.

What do you make of the fact that book bans, and now a threatened book burning, appear to be proliferating? There have been recent reports that Scholastic, a children’s book publisher, has created a sort of easy opt-out for schools that want to remove books about people of color and LGBTQ characters from their book fairs.

I empathize with those who have become frontline actors in this struggle, I don’t necessarily think that people of Scholastic are getting any more or less progressive or whatever. They are afraid and are protecting themselves from the ugliness that can come down the road. But as I go back to the moment that we’re in now, I actually get a little bit of a boost because when an idea becomes effective, that’s what it gets attacked.

Read More: Shuttering Access to History Will Impoverish Us All

When our everything was print media, and it was restricted, and maybe you didn’t know unless you went to your book fair in your teeny tiny town, that’s not the case anymore. These kids are on the internet. The more we digitize stuff, they can get to the general public much more easily. And because the ideas are speaking to bona fide issues that young people have, that is not going to go away no matter how much you try and censor the author. We are not in the era of the book burning in front of the university. 

Some people are actually quite courageous in getting out in front with their ideas. I don’t have that kind of courage. Some authors are taking principled positions in public and just speaking out and just showing up. They are not just going to be quiet in a closet or just go away just because you yelled louder or tried to scare us.

And people will fight for their children. So you have a child who is queer. People will leave their churches. They will move out of the state of Florida if they can’t get health care. They will speak out. This is really a source of deep political commitment on the part of many, many people that often goes unrecognized because it’s often done by women.

So I’m saying we just need to diagnose this moment. And we need to think strategically, get all the emotions out of it, because after a while shock value no longer has the same resonance. Maybe five years from now, people will say, “What was that word again? Intersection, intersectionality?” The same is true for critical race theory. How many of these people up in arms now are really going to hang in there when most of them can’t even define it now? 

You write the stuff that needs to be written, what is going to stand the test of time. I don’t care if it’s popular. I’m not interested in a thumbs-up, share, like thing. That doesn’t mean that you get every idea right, but you are giving a gift to people that they need for their lives. 

You mentioned there is a type of political action that gets undervalued because it’s often performed by women. What are you referring to? 

It is a kind of personal sacrifice. It’s the politics you do on a community level. We start with what needs to be done to survive. The era we’re in is far more narcissistic, transactional. But individual sacrifice, doing something for the greater good, is fundamentally the heart of democracy. 

The book I just finished is about this. I’m looking at violence that really occurs at an intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., people who are vulnerable to death or dying because they live in those intersections. But the issue is, what do they do when they are encountering that kind of violence? An example exists in a place that’s grim: mothers of murdered children. But this is really common, right? People who are the survivors who are left behind and how they respond to that immediately.

It’s a deep wound and it’s a wound to a community to have that happen over and over again. A lot of people have strategies that are not really helpful – addiction, they become violent themselves. But what a lot of mothers of murdered children tend to do is they organize. They organize in Brazil. They organize in this country, again and again, and they organize in Mexico where their children have disappeared. You can take a big movement like that or a tiny movement on your block. We know this exists. They organized in New Zealand, where there was an incident of domestic violence of a young child, to make this amazing film. Or, in some cases, it’s an intergenerational memory, the refusal to forget. It’s often women at the center of efforts to reclaim the histories and whereabouts of Native children, indigenous children who’ve been taken from their families, in this country, Canada, New Zealand, everywhere, right? Memory is an important thing in terms of resisting violence. 

What I am saying is building resistance to violence is political. The dominant narrative is nothing was happening until Black Lives Matter. No. No. No. There is no possibility of Black Lives Matter without all these other things. So talking about various spheres of politics and political action is important. One is community, community organizers; another is social protests. The other is all the people who find ways to enter into organizations and corporations and they say we’re going to work the system from the inside. 

You’ve spoken about giving people the opportunity for teachable moments and told me they “might be something that hits the soul.” Have you seen this happen? 

Oh, yes. Years ago, I was teaching a class on urban Black community development, primarily Black students in the class. And I was teaching about the police. And this one young white woman said very little – she was definitely in there but wasn’t like the progressive young white women who want to say a whole lot in your class. 

But the day I said, “To those of you who are young Black men, how many of you have had an encounter with the police?” Literally every hand went up. One talked about being spread-eagled over the hood of a police car, being forced to lie face down on the pavement, of fearing that this was the moment they would die. And because of that you can make sense of the cumulative, collective damage, the pain of that experience. And this young woman bravely started talking about the police. 

She said, “I think you should know that I’m a third-generation member of a police family. My grandfather was a police officer. My father was a police officer. My brother was in the military.” And she said to the class, “I really had never thought about it this way before.” She thanked them for sharing. She wasn’t defensive. She was open to that moment. But these are the kinds of things that can happen. And this is the way I want to write: critical, informed but where there is space for you to enter.

source https://time.com/6328162/patricia-hills-collins-interview-berggruen-philosophy-prize/

Off-Duty Pilot Accused of Trying to Shut Down Engines of a Horizon Air Jet Midflight

PORTLAND, Ore. — An off-duty pilot riding in the extra seat in the cockpit of a Horizon Air passenger jet tried to shut down the engines in midflight and had to be subdued by the crew, a pilot flying the plane told air traffic controllers.

Authorities in Oregon identified the man as Joseph David Emerson, 44. He was being held Monday on 83 counts each of attempted murder and reckless endangerment and one count of endangering an aircraft, according to the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office.

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The San Francisco-bound flight on Sunday diverted to Portland, Oregon, where Emerson was taken into custody by officers from the Port of Portland. He is to be arraigned Tuesday.

Seattle-based Alaska Airlines, which owns Horizon, a regional carrier, did not name Emerson, but said Monday that the threat was posed by one of its pilots who was off duty but authorized to occupy the cockpit jump seat.

The airline said in a statement that the captain and co-pilot “quickly responded, engine power was not lost and the crew secured the aircraft without incident.” Alaska said no weapons were involved.

One of the pilots told air traffic controllers that the man who posed the threat had been removed from the cockpit and was in handcuffs in the back of the plane.

“We’ve got the guy that tried to shut the engines down out of the cockpit. And he — doesn’t sound like he’s causing any issue in the back right now, and I think he’s subdued,” one of the pilots said on audio captured by LiveATC.net. “Other than that, we want law enforcement as soon as we get on the ground and parked.”

Bailey Beck, who was on the flight, described to SFGate the confusion and stress experienced by passengers.

“It was really bizarre because there was no overheard commotion to alert the passengers. The man walked from the cockpit to the back of the plane by himself, where he was then handcuffed to a railing and didn’t make any disturbance from the rear,” Beck told the news outlet.

Sunday’s incident occurred on a Horizon Air Embraer 175 carrying 80 passengers, including children 2 or younger, and four crewmembers. The plane left Everett, Washington, at 5:23 p.m. local time and landed in Portland an hour later. Alaska said passengers continued on to San Francisco on a later flight.

The FBI office in Portland said it was investigating.

The Federal Aviation Administration, in an alert to airlines, said a jump seat passenger tried to disable the engines by deploying the engine fire-suppression system. The agency said it was helping law enforcement investigations, but declined further comment.

FAA records indicate Emerson has a valid license to fly airline planes. Property records show he owns a house in Pleasant Hill, California, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) east of San Francisco. The Associated Press tried but couldn’t reach family members.

The Multnomah County sheriff’s office, district attorney’s office and public defender’s office didn’t immediately respond to inquiries about whether Emerson had an attorney to comment on his behalf.

John Cox, a retired airline pilot who is now a safety consultant, said it isn’t hard to activate the fire handles on a jet. “You want them to be accessible in case of an engine fire,” he said.

He said it’s possible to restart the engines once the fire handles are returned to their normal position.

“This is an extremely rare event. In 53 years, I have never heard of a jump seat rider attempting to shut down engines,” Cox said. He said the third pilot can be invaluable in cases where a crew must deal with a complex situation.

Jeffrey Price, an aviation-security expert at Metropolitan University of Denver, said airlines must approve people who sit in the jump seat, but the pilots working the flight can deny access.

The vetting of crew members is based on trust, he said, and the last line of defense is what happened on the Horizon plane — “crew members physically preventing someone from taking over the flight controls. The system worked, fortunately.”

Airlines use the third seat to accommodate pilots who need to get in position to fly a later flight, avoiding the need to bump a passenger off the plane. Many U.S. carriers will let pilots from other airlines occupy the third seat, at least on domestic flights.

“For the amount of times this type of incident happens — almost never — it’s probably not a procedure we need to get rid of,” Price said. He added, however, that Sunday’s quashed threat will lead to an analysis of whether procedures were followed and whether additional safeguards are needed.

Price could recall only one other similar episode — in 1994, when a FedEx pilot who was facing possible termination tried to kill the crew and crash the plane. The crew subdued the hijacker, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

In 2018, a pilot in the jump seat of a Boeing 737 Max operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air emerged as a hero after helping the crew stop the plane’s nose from repeatedly pointing down. Disaster was averted — or delayed until the next flight of the plane, which crashed, killing all 189 people on board.

There have been crashes that investigators believe were deliberately caused by pilots. Authorities said the co-pilot of a Germanwings jet that crashed in the French Alps in 2015 had practiced putting the plane into a dive.

In 2018, a Horizon Air ground agent stole an empty plane at Seattle’s Sea-Tac International Airport and crashed into a small island in Puget Sound after being chased by military jets that scrambled to intercept the aircraft. The man told an air traffic controller that he “wasn’t really planning on landing” and described himself as “a broken guy.”

source https://time.com/6327909/off-duty-pilot-horizon-air-jet-midflight/

History Suggests Amazon Will Need the Public on Its Side as It Faces the FTC’s Antitrust Suit

On Sept. 26, 2023, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Lina Khan launched an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. The company is an exploitative monopoly, Khan’s case argues, and must be restructured to “restore the lost promise of free and fair competition.” Yet Amazon has said the case is “wrong on the facts and the law.” Her crusade has echoes of her commission’s investigation of monopolies in the electricity industry in the late 1920s.

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Like Amazon in 2023, the electricity companies had built an enormous distribution network that proved popular with customers even while they ruffled regulatory feathers. The FTC’s investigation in the 1920s turned up juicy details of nefarious business practices and underhanded dealings. Newspapers splashed the revelations on the front pages, while a few members of Congress thundered about the “fangs” of monopoly fastened on to the necks of consumers. But for the most part, Americans just shrugged.

Why? 

It wasn’t just because the electricity monopolies offered good electricity service at a reasonable price, although they did. It was because executives had spent two decades courting public opinion. By the time the FTC issued subpoenas, presented evidence, and heard witnesses in 1928, the electricity industry had already won over Americans. And in the mind of electricity executives, that was all that mattered. They were right. This lesson provides clues as to what might determine the outcome of the FTC’s battle with Amazon today.

In the first decade of the 20th century, electricity executives encountered a public relations nightmare. They had treated customers with scorn and gotten caught bribing city councils, which precipitated demands from reformers for strict government regulation of electricity companies or outright government ownership of their networks.

In responding to this crisis, electricity company executives learned from a fatal mistake made by 19th century railroad monopolies. The railroad companies had expressed a “public be damned” attitude, which fueled animosity from Americans and aggressive government interference in their industry.

To avoid any similar limitations on their control of the electricity industry, executives undertook the largest non-governmental public relations campaign the U.S. had ever seen. Their logic was simple—though at the time it was revolutionary. Public opinion now ruled the political economy of the nation, these executives believed. No monopoly operating permit, rate hike, or regulatory structure could survive if it failed in the court of public opinion. “Public sentiment controls the ultimate destiny of every utility company,” declared an electricity executive in 1922.

Read More: Amazon’s Dangerous Ambition to Dominate Healthcare

Accordingly, in 1908, the industry announced a new slogan: “the public be pleased.” This motto encapsulated the insight that customers wanted to at least feel like they were in charge of corporations. To generate that feeling, executives intensively engaged in PR activities.

They compelled their clerks, telephone operators, even linemen to exude “courtesy,” “friendliness,”and “sympathy” toward customers. Managers required “a smile and a pleasant word,” a “friendly feeling,” and “the human quality” from workers. Clerks had to display “a smiling courteous demeanor,” exhibit “a world of patience,” and emit a “ray of sunshine during the entire day.” The idea: if customers received courteous treatment, they would warm up to the idea of corporate monopolies controlling a crucial utility service.

But executives didn’t just tell their employees to mind their manners with customers. Instead, they developed intensive training programs that amounted to huge finishing schools for the working class. This instruction perpetuated and expanded Victorian culture, even as a new consumer culture emerged. To ensure that their staff followed the lessons of these programs, managers sent out mystery shoppers to secretly grade clerks on their customer service. 

The cost to low-level employees was high. Their plastered smiles and scripted pleasantries represented a great loss of emotional freedom and a new level of managerial control.

In addition to courtesy, executives remodeled their customer service offices where customers went to sign up for service, pay their bills, and complain about charges. At thousands of branch offices around the country, workers tore down the iron bars and glass partitions that utilities had inherited from bank designs, and replaced these barricaded offices with new open and inviting layouts. The interiors of these offices now looked like a middle-class living room, while their exteriors resembled the single-family homes in the surrounding residential neighborhoods. 

If monopoly corporations lived here, perhaps corporations really were people.

Electricity monopolies also advertised, of course. But this advertising was mostly intended as a bribe to get editors to publish articles written by electricity managers. These articles—not the ads—would do the real work of convincing Americans that corporate monopolies operated in the customer’s best interest, executives calculated. In many states, between 70 and 95 percent of newspapers participated in this ads-for-articles scheme. 

Executives had once bribed city councils, but muckraking journalists had exposed that practice. So instead, executives simply bribed the journalists. 

The campaign to convince the public of the value of monopolies also included employee speeches at civic clubs, political tracts about the horrors of “communist” municipal ownership of utilities stuffed into billing envelopes, and company-authored textbooks that praised corporate electricity companies. In several states, over 70% of children received instruction from civics books authored by electricity monopolies. 

Finally, electricity companies engaged in diverse community activities aimed at painting themselves in a positive light. These included donating to the local orphanage and YMCA, inviting school groups on field trips to corporate facilities, and producing innovative radio cooking shows.

This massive public relations campaign proved exceptionally effective. Even critics of electricity monopolies admitted by the late 1920s that public opinion toward these companies had dramatically improved. Not even the Great Depression and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s could dislodge corporate electricity monopolies from their privileged position within the American economy.

The success of the electricity monopolies at winning over the public points to what may determine the success of the FTC’s campaign against Amazon: what the public thinks of the shopping giant. 

Crucially, people have complained that Amazon has driven mom and pop shops out of business and mistreated warehouse workers. But despite such criticisms, the company has not seemed to focus much energy on combating that idea.

Read More: FTC and 17 States Sue Amazon, Alleging Price Inflation and Overcharging of Sellers

That may be starting to change. Earlier this year, Amazon sent out a glossy mailer to residents of Arlington, Va., the home of Amazon’s second headquarters, filled with pictures of community organizations that received Amazon donations. Next, Amazon began sponsoring the area’s Little League.

Even so, these local efforts are only a trickle compared to the flood of PR activities that electricity executives employed long before their own dust up with the FTC in 1928.

While Amazon is not facing a jury trail, the jury of public opinion is still out. Whether Amazon can get public opinion behind it remains to be seen. If the company’s executives don’t start seeing the link between public relations at the lowest levels of their corporation and political regulation at the highest levels of government, as electricity executives did, America’s long wait for another good old-fashioned antimonopoly movement may come to an end. Perhaps it already has.

Daniel Robert is the author of Courteous Capitalism: Public Relations and the Monopoly Problem, 1900-1930; he holds a PhD in American history from Berkeley. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here.

source https://time.com/6321896/amazon-ftc-history/