Chris Hedges's Blog, page 502

Counterprotesters Dwarf White Supremacists at D.C. Rally

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.—A year after a deadly gathering of far-right extremists in Charlottesville, less than two dozen white nationalists marched Sunday across from the White House, their numbers dwarfed by thousands of counterprotesters, while the mother of a woman killed at last summer’s protest said the country continues to face unhealed racial wounds.

The events, largely peaceful though tense at times in Charlottesville and Washington, were part of a day of speeches, vigils and marches marking the anniversary of one of the largest gatherings of white nationalists and other far-right extremists in a decade.

In Washington, dozens of police in bright yellow vests formed a tight cordon around the small group of white nationalists, separating them from shouting counterprotesters within view of the White House.

President Donald Trump wasn’t at home — he has been at his golf club in New Jersey for more than a week on a working vacation.

Jason Kessler, the principal organizer of last year’s “Unite the Right” event, led the Sunday gathering he called a white civil rights rally in Lafayette Square. Kessler said in a permit application that he expected 100 to 400 people to participate, but the actual number was far lower: only around 20.

Counterprotesters, who assembled before the rally’s scheduled start, vastly outnumbered Kessler’s crowd. Thousands showed up to jeer and shout insults at the white nationalists.

Makia Green, who represents the Washington branch of Black Lives Matter, told Sunday’s crowd: “We know from experience that ignoring white nationalism doesn’t work.”

By about 5 p.m., those in Kessler’s group packed into a pair of white vans and left, escorted by police.

Washington Police Chief Peter Newsham said only one person was arrested all day despite several tense moments, with police essentially shielding the white nationalist demonstrators from several thousand enraged counterprotesters.

Newsham called it “a well-executed plan to safeguard people and property while allowing citizens to express their First Amendment rights.”

Earlier this month, Facebook stunned and angered counterprotest organizers when it disabled their Washington event’s page, saying it and others had been created by “bad actors” misusing the social media platform. The company said at the time that the page may be linked to an account created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency — a troll farm that has sown discord in the U.S. — but counterprotesters said it was an authentic event they worked hard to organize.

Earlier in the day in Charlottesville, the mother of Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal who was killed when a car plowed into a crowd of counterprotesters during last year’s rally, said there’s still much healing to be done.

Susan Bro laid flowers at a makeshift memorial at the site of the attack in downtown Charlottesville. With a crowd gathered around her, she thanked them for coming to remember her daughter but also acknowledged the dozens of others injured and the two state troopers killed when a helicopter crashed that day.

“There’s so much healing to do,” Bro said. “We have a huge racial problem in our city and in our country. We have got to fix this, or we’ll be right back here in no time.”

Hundreds of neo-Nazis, skinheads and Ku Klux Klan members and other white nationalists descended on Charlottesville last Aug. 12, in part to protest over the city’s decision to remove a monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from a park.

Violent fighting broke out between attendees and counterprotesters. Authorities eventually forced the crowd to disperse, but chaos erupted again when the car barreled into the crowd.

James Fields Jr., 21, of Maumee, Ohio, is charged in state court with murder in Heyer’s killing and faces separate hate crime charges in federal court. He pleaded not guilty last month to the federal charges.

The day’s death toll rose to three when a state police helicopter crashed, killing Lt. Jay Cullen and Trooper-Pilot Berke Bates.

Among the other anniversary events was a Sunday morning community gathering at a park that drew more than 200 people. The group sang and listened to speakers, among them Courtney Commander, a friend of Heyer’s who was with her when she was killed.

“She is with me today, too,” Commander said.

Law enforcement officials faced blistering criticism after last year’s rally for what was perceived as a passive response to the violence that unfolded. A review by a former U.S. attorney found a lack of coordination between state and city police and an operational plan that elevated officer safety over public safety.

The anniversary weekend was marked by a much heavier police presence, which also drew criticism from some activists.

Demonstrators on Sunday marched through Charlottesville chanting, “Cops and Klan go hand in hand,” and “Will you protect us?”

The city of Charlottesville said four people were arrested in the downtown area. Two arrests stemmed from a confrontation near the Lee statue where a Spotsylvania, Virginia, man stopped to salute, a Charlottesville woman confronted him and a physical altercation took place, officials said.

___

Rankin reported from Richmond. Associated Press writer Ashraf Khalil in Washington contributed to this report.

So, How’s That Major-Party Election Madness Working for Us?

Paul Street’s column will appear in Truthdig each Sunday through Aug. 12. Its regular schedule will resume when Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges returns from vacation.

The United States is full of personally decent and caring, often highly intelligent people mired in political ignorance and delusion.

A smart and liberally inclined family doctor I know recently expressed concern over her high-income husband’s support for the malignant narcissist and pathological liar currently occupying the White House. “I can understand him being a Republican,” the doctor says, “but I just don’t get him backing Donald Trump.”

The problem here—what the doctor doesn’t get—is that Trump’s malicious persona and politics are darkly consistent with the white-supremacist and arch-reactionary heart and dog-whistling racism of the Republican Party going back five decades. It was just a matter of time until something like Trump happened: a Republican candidate who really meant the racism. Along the way, the Republican Party has become what Noam Chomsky credibly calls “the most dangerous organization in human history” because of its total disregard for livable ecology and its dedication to destruction and dismantlement of any institutions in place to address global warming. The Greenhouse Gassing to Death of Life on Earth is a crime that promises to make even the Nazi Party look like a small-time crime syndicate.

A smart and funny retired mental health professional I know is a proud liberal Democrat. She cites reports and stories showing that Trump is a bully, an authoritarian, a cheater, a parasite and a liar, among other terrible things. She gets it that both Trump and the Republican Party are supremely dangerous enemies of the people.

But she, too, is mired in delusions—mistakes and hallucinations common on the other side of America’s tribal and binary major-party partisan divide. For all her savviness and smarts, she can’t or won’t process the simple fact that the dismal, dollar-drenched Democratic Party put Trump in the White House and handed Congress and most of the nation’s state governments over to Trump and the Republican Party by functioning as a corporate-captive Inauthentic Opposition Party that refuses to fight for working people, the poor, minorities and the causes of peace, social justice and environmental sanity.

Tell her that Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were “Wall Street presidents” (an easily and widely documented assertion) and she screws her face up. She doesn’t want to hear it. She wants to believe something that stopped being even remotely true at least four decades ago: that the Democratic Party is the party of the people.

If the Democrats take back Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020, all will be well in her political world view: democracy and decency restored. You betcha!

She blames Trump’s presence in the White House on … you guessed it, Russia. Like millions of other MSDNC (sorry, I meant MSNBC) and Rachel Maddow devotees, she has let the obsessive CNN-MSNBC Russia-Trump narrative take over her understanding of current events. The “Russiagate” story has trumped her concern with other things that one might think matter a great deal to self-described liberals: racial oppression, sexism, poverty, low wages, plutocracy and—last but not least—livable ecology.

(She isn’t aware that racist Republican voter suppression at the state level was a big part of how Trump won—certainly a far bigger matter than any real or alleged Russian influence on the election. Isn’t that precisely the kind of thing that liberals are supposed to be angry about?)

But I know plenty of Americans well to her left—people who know very well that Obama and the Clintons and Nancy Pelosi are neoliberal corporate and Wall Street politicos and tools—who cling to their own major-party electoral-political delusions. With Sen. Bernie Sanders as their standard-bearer, they are all about boring from within an organization that Kevin P. Phillips once called “history’s second most enthusiastic capitalist party.” Their fallacy is that left progressives can steal the Democratic Party out from under its corporate and imperial masters, turn it to decent and social-democratic purposes and democratically transform America in proper accord with majority-progressive U.S. opinion.

A Newsweek article last fall was titled “Most Americans Desperate for a Third Major Party in the Trump Era.” It cited a Gallup Poll showing that 61 percent, more U.S. citizens than ever, find the Democratic and Republican parties inadequate and think that the U.S. should have a third major political party. Support for a competitive third party had been above 57 percent since at least 2012, but Gallup’s 2017 poll marked a new high. Nobody should be surprised by that finding given the fact that both of the parties have drifted well to the Big Business right of majority public opinion, with the Democrats joining Republicans in the creation of a New Gilded Age so savagely unequal that, as Bernie Sanders, “I”-Vt., said repeatedly (and accurately) in 2016, the top 10th of the upper U.S. 1 percent possesses as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent.

The fake “Independent” Sanders couldn’t care less about the strong majority sentiment on behalf of a third party. He has rejected all calls for him to jump major-party ship and tells progressives to pour their energies into electing candidates within the Democratic Party primary process. “Do what Alexandria did,” Bernie says to young Americans angry about the vicious ecocidal white nationalists in power today. Sanders is referring to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the inspiring young Sanders-style Democratic Socialists of America member who took down longtime establishment Democratic Party incumbent House member Joe Crowley in a New York City district primary last June.

So, to ask the Dr. Phil question, how’s that working out for “the left”?

Not so hot. The preponderant majority of progressive Democrats’ primary victories this year have been won in strongly Republican (“red”) districts, where progressives have not been heavily contested by the Democratic Party establishment. Only a very small number of progressive candidates have won in dependably “blue” (Democratic) districts and are likely to defeat Republicans in the general elections in November.

Crowley is the sole congressional incumbent to have lost a Democratic primary this year. His defeat by Ocasio-Cortez has been over-celebrated on “the left” and over-publicized in the media. She won with incredibly low turnout (13 percent), something that falls quite short of a leftist landslide and reflects local peculiarities in the operation of the New York City Democratic machine.

At the same time, as veteran left urban political strategist, activist and commentator Bruce A. Dixon noted on Black Agenda Report, “Crowley pretty much gave up the seat: After 10 terms in Congress and with lots of corporate friends, Joe Crowley knows he can start at seven figures, at least six to twelve times his congressional salary plus bonuses as a lobbyist. That had to be a powerful motivation not to campaign too damn hard.”

Last but not least, the victory of Ocasio-Cortez, of Puerto Rican heritage, reflected a combined demographic (racial and ethnocultural) and party anomaly: the over-long presence of a white Democratic machine politician atop a recently racially and ethnically redistricted and now majority nonwhite and nearly majority Latinx district where the Democratic Party had failed to cultivate a neoliberal candidate of color—the kind of safe Latinx or black politico the nation’s second corporate and imperial party has developed across most of the nation’s urban minority-majority congressional districts. As Danny Haiphong observed in the American Herald Tribune, “New York District 14 is one of the few [urban minority congressional districts] left where neoliberal Black and Brown politicians do not dominate the political landscape. It will be difficult to replicate Ocasio-Cortez’s victory across the country because neoliberal, Black [and Latino] politicians in other districts are protected by the politics of representation” (emphasis added).

Other districts like Missouri’s predominantly black 1st Congressional District in St. Louis, where the establishment incumbent Congressman Lacy Clay handily crushed the progressive insurgent Cori Bush five days ago.

Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, and the Democratic Socialists of America—the leading progressive organizations attempting to reform the Democratic Party—have endorsed 60 congressional candidates in states that have held their Democratic primaries through last week. Twenty-three of them have won their races. But 18 of these victors have won in red districts where there are entrenched Republican incumbents.

Only five progressive congressional primary winners—Ro Khanna (California 17th), Jamie Raskin (Maryland 8th), Chuy Garcia (Illinois 4th), Ocasio-Cortez, and the rousing Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib (Michigan 13th)—have won in Democratic districts and are likely to win in November. Two of those five (Khanna and Raskin) were already in office and were uncontested by the Democratic establishment. One of the five (Garcia) cut a corrupt deal with the Chicago Democratic machine and so ran unopposed by the establishment. Nebraska’s Kara Eastman is the one and only single-payer supporter to get nominated for a competitive House race in America’s heartland “breadbasket” this year.

Especially depressing for progressives hoping to reform the Democratic Party was the crushing defeat of Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan gubernatorial primary. El-Sayed was hoping to ride the coattails of visits and endorsements from the (in the absurd language of the corporate media) “radical leftists” Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.

“The Democratic Party,” Politico’s centrist commentator Bill Scher writes, “is more liberal than it was 15 years ago, and there’s no question that shift is partly due to an increasingly vocal, confident, confrontational democratic socialist faction. But,” Scher creepily but accurately crowed, “it is still only a faction. Most Democratic nominees in competitive House races—not to mention incumbent Senate Democrats fighting for their political lives in red states—are not embracing single-payer or calling for the abolishment of ICE. They are mostly calling for improvements of the Affordable Care Act and a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.”

This overall weak performance by left-leaning Sanders-style Democrats reflects elite business and professional-class manipulation within the party to which so many progressives remain attached. As the pro-third-party Movement for a People’s Party (headed by former Sanders staffers) noted two weeks ago:

The DNC [Democratic National Committee] and the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] have systematically cheated and blocked progressive candidates by flooding races with corporate cash, knocking progressives off the ballot, feeding opposition research to the media, forcing candidates to spend three quarters of their fundraising on consultants and ads, changing the rules required to get party support, denying access to crucial voter data, endorsing establishment Democrats, setting party affiliation deadlines months before the primaries, blocking independents from voting, and even giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates. For more than a year after the 2016 election, the Democratic Party denied rigging primary elections against progressives. The party has now abandoned that pretense as it openly rigs midterm primaries across the country and normalizes election rigging. …While the media focuses on a handful of exceptions, the Democratic Party establishment is getting its way in the 2018 midterm primaries.

As the primaries have taken place this year, the left historian and journalist Terry Thomas writes me, “the establishment Dems are stridently going after the progressives. Just watch MSNBC’s coverage of elections. They’re advancing the ‘out of the mainstream’ line, implying that the few progressive-types who won are ruining the party and setting the stage for the Republicans to retain the House in the fall.”

It is true that the progressive Democrat Sanders came tantalizingly close to defeating the ultimate corporate Democrat, Hillary Clinton, in the 2016 presidential primaries—an amazing accomplishment for a small-donor candidate who received no funding from the corporate and financial establishment.

But imagine if Sanders had sneaked past Clinton in the primary race. Could he have defeated the billionaire and right-wing billionaire-backed Trump in the general election? There’s no way to know. Sanders consistently outperformed Clinton in one-on-one matchup polls vis-à-vis Trump during the primary season, but much of the big money (and corporate media) that backed Clinton would probably have gone over to Trump had the supposedly “radical” Sanders been the Democratic nominee.

Even if Sanders had been elected president, moreover, Noam Chomsky is certainly correct in his judgment that a President Sanders “couldn’t have done a thing” because he would have had “nobody [on his side] in Congress, no governors, no legislatures, none of the big economic powers, which have an enormous effect on policy. All opposed to him. In order for him to do anything,” Chomsky adds, “he would have [needed] a substantial, functioning party apparatus, which would have to grow from the grass roots. It would have to be locally organized, it would have to operate at local levels, state levels, Congress, the bureaucracy—you have to build the whole system from the bottom.” None of those things would be remotely forthcoming from the Inauthentic Opposition Party.

It might well have been worse than not being able to “do anything,” actually. Even as he loaded his administration with corporate and imperial centrists—as he certainly would have been compelled to do to mollify the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire—a President Sanders would have been faced with a capital strike: with severe “market instability” and “declining business confidence” raising the specter of a financial meltdown.

“With little prospect of the economic tumult subsiding during his 11-week transition period,” the political scientists William Grover and Joseph Peschek wrote in the summer of 2015, a Sanders presidency:

… would face enormous pressure to calm the fears of the market by announcing the appointment of moderates to hold Cabinet positions—non-confrontational, non-ideological people who would be “acceptable” to political and economic power holders. No radicals for the Treasury Department, no thoughts of Ben and Jerry as Co-Secretaries of Commerce, no union firebrand to head the Labor Department, no Bill McKibben leading the Interior Department. Only nice, “safe” choices would suffice—personnel decisions that would undermine the progressive vision of his campaign. In short, the economics of “capital strike” would threaten to trump the verdict of democracy.

A President Sanders would also have been compelled to engage in an aggressively imperial foreign policy. He would have faced what Bruce Dixon calls “immense pressure to demonstrate his unwavering hostility toward the Russians and his fealty to empire”—pressure to which “Bernie the Bomber” would certainly have caved. (Dixon adds that “he’s notoriously squishy on empire as it is … as are pretty much all the Berniecrats.”)

Meanwhile, many of the Dems’ corporate and professional class “elites” would have attributed Sanders’ victory to “Russian interference” while joining hands with ruling-class Republican brothers in undermining Sanders’ supposedly “far left” (mildly progressive) agenda—and his political viability in 2020. The nation’s paranoid, white Christian and proto-fascistic right would have gone ballistic, its underlying anti-Semitism on appalling display with an ethnoculturally Jewish “democratic socialist” (and purported atheist) from Brooklyn in the White House.

Sanders’ oligarchy-imposed “failures” would have been great fodder for the right-wing and neoliberal disparagement and smearing of progressive, left-leaning and majority-backed policy change. “See,” the reigning plutocratic media and politics culture would have said, “we tried all that and it was a disaster!” It might well have been a real train wreck for everything and anything progressive.

None of which is to mean that third-party politics hold the keys to progressive change. Its status as corporate media notwithstanding, Newsweek isn’t lying when it notes that “the structure of America’s electoral system—especially campaign finance regulations”—makes it “extremely hard for third party candidates to run and win.”

It’s not just about campaign finance. It’s also about winner-take-all, “first-past-the-post” elections and the absence of proportional-representation rules that would allot representation in accord with vote shares for parties that can’t yet field candidates capable of winning pluralities in contests with the long-established major parties’ contenders.

It goes way back. Theodore Roosevelt is the only third-party candidate who ever came remotely close to winning a presidential election. In 1912, he came in second with 27 percent of the vote atop the Progressive Party.

The biggest political delusion of all is in the U.S. electoral politics itself—the “Election Madness” that tells us that (in the sardonic words of the late radical historian Howard Zinn) “the most important act a citizen can engage in is to go to the polls and choose one of the [small number of ] mediocrities who have already been chosen for us.” Real progressive change requires popular organization and great social movements beneath and beyond the empty promises of the nation’s ruthlessly time-staggered major-party, major-media, big-money-candidate-centered ballot box extravaganzas (please see Chomsky’s classic 2004 essay on “The Disconnect in U.S. Democracy”). The people’s movements we desperately need to form—perhaps it is my delusion that rank-and-file citizens can and will ever do so—should include in their list of demands the creation of a party and elections system that deserves passionate citizen engagement. The oligarchic system (beyond mere plutocracy) now in place in the U.S. is worthy of no such thing.

The ‘Gig Economy’ Is the New Term for Serfdom

This is a repost of a March 25, 2018, column by Chris Hedges, who is on vacation. Truthdig’s publication of new articles from Hedges will resume next Sunday.

A 65-year-old New York City cab driver from Queens, Nicanor Ochisor, hanged himself in his garage March 16, saying in a note he left behind that the ride-hailing companies Uber and Lyft had made it impossible for him to make a living. It was the fourth suicide by a cab driver in New York in the last four months, including one Feb. 5 in which livery driver Douglas Schifter, 61, killed himself with a shotgun outside City Hall.

“Due to the huge numbers of cars available with desperate drivers trying to feed their families,” wrote Schifter, “they squeeze rates to below operating costs and force professionals like me out of business. They count their money and we are driven down into the streets we drive becoming homeless and hungry. I will not be a slave working for chump change. I would rather be dead.” He said he had been working 100 to 120 hours a week for the past 14 years.

Schifter and Ochisor were two of the millions of victims of the new economy. Corporate capitalism is establishing a neofeudal serfdom in numerous occupations, a condition in which there are no labor laws, no minimum wage, no benefits, no job security and no regulations. Desperate and impoverished workers, forced to endure 16-hour days, are viciously pitted against each other. Uber drivers make about $13.25 an hour. In cities like Detroit this falls to $8.77. Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber and one of the founders, has a net worth of $4.8 billion. Logan Green, the CEO of Lyft, has a net worth of $300 million.

The corporate elites, which have seized control of ruling institutions including the government and destroyed labor unions, are re-establishing the inhumane labor conditions that characterized the 19th and early 20th centuries. When workers at General Motors carried out a 44-day sit-down strike in 1936, many were living in shacks that lacked heating and indoor plumbing; they could be laid off for weeks without compensation, had no medical or retirement benefits and often were fired without explanation. When they turned 40 their employment could be terminated. The average wage was about $900 a year at a time when the government determined that a family of four needed a minimum of $1,600 to live above the poverty line.

The managers at General Motors relentlessly persecuted union organizers. The company spent $839,000 on detective work in 1934 to spy on union organizers and infiltrate union meetings. GM employed the white terrorist group the Black Legion—the police chief of Detroit was suspected of being a member—to threaten and physically assault labor activists and assassinate union leaders including George Marchuk and John Bielak, both shot to death.

The reign of the all-powerful capitalist class has returned with a vengeance. The job conditions of working men and women, thrust backward, will not improve until they regain the militancy and rebuild the popular organizations that seized power from the capitalists. There are some 13,000 licensed cabs in New York City and 40,000 livery or town cars. The drivers should, as farmers did in 2015 with tractors in Paris, shut down the center of the city. And drivers in other cities should do the same. This is the only language our corporate masters understand.

The ruling capitalists will be as vicious as they were in the past. Nothing enrages the rich more than having to part with a fraction of their obscene wealth. Consumed by greed, rendered numb to human suffering by a life of hedonism and extravagance, devoid of empathy, incapable of self-criticism or self-sacrifice, surrounded by sycophants and leeches who cater to their wishes, appetites and demands, able to use their wealth to ignore the law and destroy critics and opponents, they are among the most repugnant of the human species. Don’t be fooled by the elites’ skillful public relations campaigns—we are watching Mark Zuckerberg, whose net worth is $64.1 billion, mount a massive propaganda effort against charges that he and Facebook are focused on exploiting and selling our personal information—or by the fawning news celebrities on corporate media who act as courtiers and apologists for the oligarchs. These people are the enemy.

Ochisor, a Romanian immigrant, owned a New York City taxi medallion. (Medallions were once coveted by cab drivers because having them allowed the drivers to own their own cabs or lease the cabs to other drivers.) Ochisor drove the night shift, lasting 10 to 12 hours. His wife drove the day shift. But after Uber and Lyft flooded the city with cars and underpaid drivers about three years ago, the couple could barely meet expenses. Ochisor’s home was about to go into foreclosure. His medallion, once worth $1.1 million, had plummeted in value to $180,000. The dramatic drop in the value of the medallion, which he had hoped to lease for $3,000 a month or sell to finance his retirement, wiped out his economic security. He faced financial ruin and poverty. And he was not alone.

The corporate architects of the new economy have no intention of halting the assault. They intend to turn everyone into temp workers trapped in demeaning, low-paying, part-time, service-sector jobs without job security or benefits, a reality they plaster over by inventing hip terms like “the gig economy.”

John McDonagh began driving a New York City cab 40 years ago. He, like most drivers, worked out of garages owned and operated by businesses. He was paid a percentage of what he earned each night.

“You could make a living [then],” he told me. “But everyone shared the burden. The garage shared it. The driver shared it. If you had a good night, the garage made money. If you had a bad night, you split it. That’s not the case anymore. Right now we’re leasing [cabs at the garages].”

Leasing requires a driver to pay $120 a day for the car and $30 for the gas. The drivers begin a shift $150 in debt. Because of Uber, Lyft and other smartphone ride apps, drivers’ incomes have been cut by half in many cases. Cab drivers can finish their 12-hour shifts owing the garages money. Drivers are facing bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions. Some are homeless.

“The TLC [New York City Transportation and Limousine Commission] wanted to limit yellow cab drivers to 12 hours a day,” he said, referring to the distinctive yellow cabs that have medallions and can pick up passengers anywhere in the five boroughs. “There was a protest. Yellow cab drivers were protesting that they have to work a 16-hour day in order to make a living. It’s cut everything. Everybody’s fighting for that extra fare. You would be at a light with two or three other yellow cabs. You saw someone up the street with luggage you would run the lights to get to them. Because that might be an airport job. You’re risking your own life, risking getting tickets, you’re doing things you would never have done before.”

“We don’t have any health care,” he said. “Sitting for those 12 to 16 hours a day, you are getting diabetes. There’s no blood circulation. You’re putting on weight. And then there’s that added stress you’re not making any money.”

Uber and Lyft in 2016 had 370 active lobbyists in 44 states, “dwarfing some of the largest business and technology companies,” according to the National Employment Law Project. “Together, Uber and Lyft lobbyists outnumbered Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.” The two companies, like many lobbying firms, also hire former government regulators. The former head of the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, for example, is now on the board of Uber. The companies have used their money and their lobbyists, most of whom are members of the Democratic Party, to free themselves from the regulations and oversight imposed on the taxi industry. The companies using ride-hail apps have flooded New York City with about 100,000 unregulated cars in the past two years.

“The yellow cab has to be a certain vehicle,” said McDonagh. “It’s a Nissan. [Nissan won the bid to supply the city’s cabs.] Every yellow cab has to charge a certain price. When that drop goes down, that’s regulated by the city. They added on all these extra taxes, for the MTA and for the wheelchair [half of all yellow cabs are required to be wheelchair-accessible by 2020], a rush-hour tax. Uber comes in. No regulations at all. They could pick whatever type of car they want. Whatever color of car. They could change prices when it’s slow. They can lower the prices. When it’s busy they can do price surging. It can be two or three times. Whereas the yellow cab is just plowing along at the same rate at the same time. Going to Kennedy Airport from Manhattan is $52. No matter what the traffic is like, no matter how many hours it takes you to get there. Uber will jack up its prices two or three times. You might have to pay $100 to get to Kennedy Airport. While the yellow cab industry is almost regulated to death, Uber is coming in with new technology, figuring out different ways how [it is] going to make money. … It’s finished, with the yellow cabs.”

Life for Uber and Lyft drivers is as difficult. Uber and Lyft use bonuses to lure drivers into the business. Once the bonuses are gone, these drivers sink to the same economic desperation as those driving yellow cabs.

“Uber is leasing cars,” McDonagh said. “They have car dealerships that will sell. They advertise as, ‘Listen, you can have bad credit. Come down to Uber. We’ll get you the money or loan to buy this car.’ And what they do is they’ll take the money directly out of what you’re making that day to pay for the loan. They can’t lose. And if you go under, they’ll sell the car back to the dealership and then redo it for the next immigrant driver. There’s a whole scam going on.”

“As a yellow cab driver, you don’t see the world vision,” he said. “But there’s that famous term ‘the race to the bottom.’ You’re working more and more hours for less and less wages. This is the new gig economy. Someone will use an Uber to go to an Airbnb and get on his phone to order something from Amazon to eat in his house. All those shops are now gone. From cashiers to cab drivers. I feel like I’m a blacksmith or a typesetter at a newspaper business trying to explain to you what the yellow cab industry used to be. We’re becoming obsolete.”

“Guys are sleeping in the cab,” McDonagh said. “They’ll go out to Kennedy at 2 or 3 in the morning. They pull into the lot and go to sleep to catch [passengers off] the first flight that’s coming in from California a couple of hours later. You have guys who won’t go home for a couple of days. They’ll just stay out on the street. They roam the street to try to make money. It’s dangerous for the passenger. The amount of accidents will be going up because drivers are drowsy.”

McDonagh said Uber and Lyft cars must be regulated. All cars should have meters to guarantee an adequate income for drivers. And drivers should have health care and benefits. None of this will happen, he warned, as long as we live under a system of government where our political elites are dependent on campaign contributions from corporations and those who should be regulating the industry look to these corporations for future employment.

“We have to limit the amount of cabs, particularly here in New York City,” McDonagh said. “If we did it in the yellow cab industry for 50 years, why can’t we do it with Uber? They’re adding 100 cars a week through the streets of New York. This is insane. When you call an Uber, the biggest complaint people have now is, ‘The car is here too quick.’ They’re there within two or three minutes. I can’t even get dressed. … They’re rolling empty throughout the city, waiting for that hit.”

“Horses in Central Park are regulated,” he pointed out. “There’s 150 of them. They make a great living there, the guys on the horse and buggies. Say Uber comes in and says, ‘We want to bring in Uber horses. And we want to add 100,000.’ And let’s see how the market will handle it. We know what’s going to happen. No one will make money. They’re all around Central Park. And now no one can go anywhere because there are now 100,000 horses in Central Park. It would be considered madness to do that. They wouldn’t do it. Yet when it comes to the yellow cab industry, for 50 years all we could have was 13,000 cabs, and then within a year or two we’re going to add 100,000. Let’s see how the market works on that! We know how the market works.”

“They [the horses] work less hours [than cab drivers],” he said. “They don’t work in hot and cold temperatures. If you believe in reincarnation, you should come back as a horse in Central Park. And they all live on the West Side of Manhattan. We live in basements in Brooklyn and Queens. We haven’t upped our status in life, that’s for sure.”

Rep. Keith Ellison Accused of Assault by Ex-Girlfriend, Issues Denial

MINNEAPOLIS—Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison on Sunday denied an allegation from an ex-girlfriend that he had once dragged her off a bed while screaming obscenities at her — an allegation that came just days before a Tuesday primary in which the congressman is among several Democrats running for state attorney general.

The allegation first surfaced Saturday night from Karen Monahan after her son alleged in a Facebook post that he had seen hundreds of angry text messages from Ellison, some threatening his mother. He also wrote he had viewed a video in which Ellison dragged Monahan off the bed by her feet. Monahan, a Minneapolis political organizer, said via Twitter that what her son posted was “true.”

Ellison denied the allegation of physical abuse. A spokesman for his campaign also denied the congressman had sent threatening text messages.

“Karen and I were in a long-term relationship which ended in 2016, and I still care deeply for her well-being,” Ellison said in a statement. “This video does not exist because I have never behaved in this way, and any characterization otherwise is false.”

Monahan had sent Twitter messages for several months referencing an unidentified, powerful man who had abused her. She had declined to share her story when contacted in recent weeks by The Associated Press, and she did not respond to a message late Saturday requesting copies of the texts and video.

Minnesota Public Radio News reported Sunday that it reviewed more than 100 text and Twitter messages between Ellison and Monahan that showed the two communicating over months after their breakup, including coordinating her getting her things from his house. MPR said the tenor was sometimes friendly, sometimes combative. MPR said in one message, Monahan told Ellison she planned to write about their “journey” and Ellison warned her not to, calling it a “horrible attack on my privacy, unreal.”

MPR said there was no evidence in the messages it reviewed of alleged physical abuse.

Ellison, who is divorced, is a six-term congressman and a leader within the Democratic Party. He became deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee last year after falling just short of the top job. He announced this summer he would leave Congress after six terms representing the Minneapolis area and run for the state’s open attorney general’s office.

With a huge fundraising advantage and star power over his opponents — including a visit from Vermont Sen. and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders — Ellison was considered the heavy favorite heading into Tuesday’s primary.

Ellison’s Democratic opponents pounced on the allegations. State Rep. Debra Hilstrom circulated the initial Facebook post Saturday night, calling the allegations “troubling.” Tom Foley, a former county attorney, called on any video or messages to be turned over to law enforcement for an “immediate investigation.”

Report Details Israel’s Use of Armed Drone That Killed Gazan Children

A secret report by the Israeli military police—obtained by The Intercept‘s Robert Mackey—reveals that a week into Israel’s Operation Protective Edge in 2014, “air force, naval, and intelligence officers” mistook four 10- and 11-year-old boys who were playing on a beach in Gaza for Hamas militants and killed them by firing missiles from an armed drone.

While “hacked Israeli surveillance images provided to The Intercept by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden showed an Israeli drone armed with missiles in 2010,” Mackey notes, “the Israeli government maintains an official stance of secrecy around its use of drones to carry out airstrikes”—meaning this report provides perhaps “the most direct evidence to date that Israel has used armed drones to launch attacks in Gaza.”

The 2014 attack on the four boys, which occurred in the middle of the afternoon, provoked outrage the world over after it was documented by several international journalists staying in the area, who captured photographs of the dead children on the beach. It was initially suspected that Israel had launched the missiles from naval boats.

Report breaks down how this tragic even happened- How Israeli military w/high tech equip cld mistake these boys 4 Hamas is beyond me. #gaza Picture i took below- after 1st strike on the shack- shows boys running before the 2nd hit on them further up beachhttps://t.co/U7YR2ZY6BB https://t.co/53sqcd43pz

— Stefanie Dekker (@StefanieDekker) August 12, 2018

The four boys—Ismail Bakr, 10; Ahed Bakr, 10; Zakaria Bakr, 10; and Mohammed Bakr, 11—were cousins, the sons of Gazan fisherman. Their families, with support from the Israel-based Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights, or Adalah, are still fighting in court to hold accountable the members of the military directly involved with the airstrikes that killed the children.

Armed drones “alter the process of human decision-making,” and “[expand] the circle of people responsible for the actual killing of the Bakr children,” Suhad Bishara, one of the attorneys representing the families, told The Intercept. Israel’s use of the technology to kill Palestinians, Bishara added, raises “many questions concerning human judgment, ethics, and compliance with international humanitarian law.”

As Mackey outlines:

After images of the attack prompted widespread outrage, Israel’s army conducted a review of the mission and recommended that a military police investigation into possible criminal negligence be conducted. The testimonies collected by the military police from the strike team were included in a report presented to Israel’s military advocate general, Maj. Gen. Danny Efroni, 11 months after the boys were killed.

Efroni did not release the testimonies, but did make a summary of the report’s findings public on June 11, 2015, when he closed the investigationwithout filing any charges. Israel’s chief military prosecutor decided that no further criminal or disciplinary measures would be taken, since the investigators had concluded that “it would not have been possible for the operational entities involved to have identified these figures, via aerial surveillance, as children.”

Efroni did not explain why that was impossible. Two days before the strike in question, Israel’s military PR unit had released another video clip in which drone operators could be heard deciding to halt strikes because they had identified figures in their live feeds as children.

Hagai El-Ad, director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, told The Interceptthat the Israeli government’s use of armed drones is an “open secret,” and emphasized the responsibility of the military figures who order such attacks. In 2016, his group released a report titled “Whitewash Protocol: The So-Called Investigation of Operation Protective Edge,” which criticizes the Israel for inadequately reviewing the killings of Gazan civilians.

“The various specific delays, gaps, failures in the so-called investigation are all part of that broad systematic way to eventually close the files, while producing all this paper trail which may look from the outside as a sincere effort,” El-Ad told The Intercept. “It’s all totally routine.”

The Intercept‘s reporting, published Saturday, came after Israel conducted a bombing campaign in Gaza on Thursday, killing a pregnant woman and her 18-month-old daughter. As Common Dreams reported, Israel’s attack “was characterized as the largest escalation since 2014.”

Against All Odds: Democrats Pour Money Into Longshot Races

HOUSTON — Thara Narasimhan, who hosts a Hindu radio program in Houston, has already given $1,200 to a Democrat running against Republican U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, who once drove around his solidly conservative Texas district with a “NEVER HILLARY” bumper sticker on his pickup. Her plans to donate even more bewilder friends.

“It’s not the question of why I have to support a failing candidate,” said Narasimhan, mingling at a fundraiser for Democrat Sri Kulkarni on a sweltering Texas summer night. “Unless you put some faith in it, you’re not going to make it work.”

The November midterms are on pace to shatter records for political spending. While more than $1 billion raised so far nationally is helping finance battlegrounds that are poised to decide control of Congress, restless donors aren’t stopping there — they’re also putting cash into races and places they never have before to help underdog Democrats.

Examples include: a district home to the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium and held by the GOP since 1983; the South Carolina district of outgoing U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford; and a reliably Republican Southern California district that President Donald Trump won by 15 points.

All are places where Democrats are outraising their Republicans opponents — a feat that while perhaps not changing the conventional wisdom about their chances, is succeeding in giving their campaigns unusual viability. In Texas, 15 Democratic challengers running in Republican-held districts have so far raised at least $100,000. In 2014, only one cracked six figures.

The average cost of winning a House seat is more than $1 million. And in Texas, some candidates still lag substantially behind despite their early hauls in places where Republicans have been invincible.

But driving donors’ eagerness to open their wallets to longshot candidates, supporters say, is a mix of anti-Trump enthusiasm and optimism following upsets like Democrat Doug Jones’ last year in a Senate race in Alabama. Campaigns, meanwhile, say donors are simply responding to finally having better candidates in historically lopsided districts that previously attracted only fringe contenders who made little effort to professionally fundraise or run hard.

At a crowded house party in suburban Austin for Democrat MJ Hegar, Jana Reeves found a seat on a kitchen bench that was a long way from her own Hill Country home that isn’t even in Hegar’s congressional district. Hegar has raised more $1.7 million in large part due to a polished six-minute campaign ad called “Doors” that got attention online and enticed donors like Reeves to give her a hand.

“Even though it’s hopeless? You know why?” Reeves said of the giving to Hegar and other Democratic challengers. “Even though maybe my paltry money can’t do much, I still want to support these people in the deep red districts, because the Democrats (at party headquarters) aren’t going to do it.”

In few places is the surge of money more evident than in Texas. At the top of the ticket, Rep. Beto O’Rourke is outraising Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in a state where Democrats have not won a statewide race since 1994. Seven Democrats also outraised their GOP opponents between April and June in districts held by Republicans, bolstered by primary runoffs that forced campaigns to double down on fundraising.

Hegar is among the most successful. The military veteran is running against Republican Rep. John Carter, who was re-elected to an eighth term in 2016 by 20 points over a Democrat who only raised $16,000 total. Now she has the attention of Trump’s campaign team, which last month announced it would financially help Carter along with roughly 100 other Republican House and Senate candidates.

For her part, Hegar doesn’t inveigh against Trump while passing the hat: She didn’t even mention his name while speaking to a living room of about 50 supporters at the Austin fundraiser. She said afterward that she understands Trump was motivating some of the donors but she preferred to talk to them about other issues.

“They want to fight against racism. They want to fight against bullying and intimidation and things like that. And they’re labeling those things with a person’s name,” Hegar said. “I think it’s more effective to fight against those themes.”

Near Fort Worth, Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez has raked in more than $358,000 and has campaigned through summer with more money than her heavily favored Republican opponent, Ronald Wright. They’re both running to replace GOP Rep. Joe Barton, who represented the district for more than 30 years but abandoned plans for re-election after a nude photo of him circulated online.

Sanchez bemoaned the “fish fries and pancake breakfasts” that candidates used in the past to raise money and spends six hours a day on the phone, competing with a half-dozen campaigns that she said are “sucking up most of the money” from big donors. On her list of ways to spend that money: hiring a campaign manager who has previously flipped a Republican district.

“People who say, ‘Money doesn’t vote,’ have never run a campaign,” Sanchez said.

Omarosa Claims She Secretly Taped Her Firing, Plays Audio

BRIDGEWATER, N.J.—Former presidential adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman said Sunday she secretly recorded conversations she had in the White House, including her firing by Chief of Staff John Kelly in the high-security Situation Room. It was a highly unusual admission, which immediately drew fire from allies of the president.

Parts of her conversation with Kelly were played on the air during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to promote her new book, “Unhinged,” which will be released next week.

In it, she paints a damning picture of President Donald Trump, including claiming without evidence that tapes exist of him using the N-word as he filmed his “The Apprentice” reality series, on which she co-starred.

Manigault Newman said in the book that she had not personally heard the recording. But she told Chuck Todd on Sunday that, after the book had closed, she was able to hear a recording of Trump during a trip to Los Angeles.

“I heard his voice as clear as you and I are sitting here,” she said on the show.

But the other recording she discussed Sunday could prove equally explosive.

“Who in their right mind thinks it’s appropriate to secretly record the White House chief of staff in the Situation Room?” tweeted Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee.

The Situation Room is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, and staff are not permitted to bring in cell phones or other recording devices.

In the recording played on air, and which Manigault Newman quotes in the book, Kelly can be heard saying she can look at her time at the White House as a year of “service to the nation” and referring to potential “difficulty in the future relative to your reputation.”

Manigault Newman said she viewed the comment as a “threat” and defended her decision to covertly record it and other White House conversations, describing it as a form of protection.

“If I didn’t have these recordings, no one in America would believe me,” she said.

The White House did not immediately respond to the recording but has tried to discredit the book. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called it “riddled with lies and false accusations” and Trump on Saturday labeled Manigault Newman a “lowlife.”

White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also questioned Manigault Newman’s credibility in an interview Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“The first time I ever heard Omarosa suggest those awful things about this president are in this book,” she said, noting Manigault Newman “is somebody who gave a glowing appraisal of Donald Trump the businessman, the star of the ‘The Apprentice,’ the candidate and, indeed, the president of the United States.”

Conway said that, in her more than two years working with Trump, she has never heard him use a racial slur about anyone.

Manigault Newman had indeed been a staunch defender of the president for years, including pushing back, as the highest-profile African-American in the White House, on accusations that he was racist.

But Manigault Newman now says she was “used” by Trump for years, calling him a “con” who “has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities” and is “truly a racist.”

“I was complicit with this White House deceiving this nation,” she said. “I had a blind spot where it came to Donald Trump.”

On the anniversary of the deadly gathering of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, Manigault Newman told Todd that Trump uses race to “stir up his base” and doesn’t have the ability to bring the country together “because he puts himself over country every day.”

How Media Launders Gaza Massacres by Labeling Them as ‘Clashes’

As FAIR has noted before (e.g., Extra!, 1/17; FAIR.org, 4/2/18), the term “clash” is almost always used to launder power asymmetry and give the reader the impression of two equal warring sides. It obscures power dynamics and the nature of the conflict itself, e.g., who instigated it and what weapons if any were used. “Clash” is a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, “to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

It’s predictable, then, that in coverage of Israel’s recent mass shootings in Gaza—which have killed over 30 Palestinians and injured more than 1,100—the word “clashes” is used to euphemize snipers in fortified positions firing on unarmed protesters 100 meters away:

Journalist Among 9 Dead in Latest Gaza Clashes, Palestinian Health Officials Say (CNN, 4/7/18)
Burning Tires, Tear Gas and Live Fire: Gaza Clashes Turn Deadly (Washington Post, 4/6/18)
Demonstrators Wounded as Gaza Clashes Resume (Reuters, 4/7/18)
After Gaza Clash, Israel and Palestinians Fight With Videos and Words (New York Times, 4/1/18)

When one side is dying by the dozens and the other is sitting behind a heavily secured wall, firing at will on unarmed people from hundreds of feet away (some of whom are wearing vests marked “PRESS”), this is not a “clash.” It’s more accurately described as a “massacre,” or at the very least, “firing on protesters.” (No Israelis have been injured, which would be a surprising thing if two sides were actually “clashing.”)

New York Times, 3/25/11

The fig leaf of “clashes” is not needed in reporting on US enemies. In 2011, Western headlines routinely described Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as having “fired on protesters” (Guardian, 2/20/11; New York Times, 3/25/11). Simple plain English works when reporting on those in bad standing with the US national security establishment, but for allies of the United States, the push for false parity requires increasingly absurd euphemisms to mask what’s really going on—in this case, the long-distance slaughter of unarmed human beings.

Israel has a state-of-the-art military: F35s, Sa’ar corvettes, Merkava tanks and Hellfire missiles, not to mention the most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world; total control over the air, sea and land. In the Great March of Return protests, the Palestinians have employed rocks, tires and, according to the IDF, the occasional Molotov cocktail, though no independent evidence has emerged of the latter being used. The power asymmetry is one of the largest of any conflict in the world, yet Western media still cling on an institutional level to a “cycle of violence” frame, with “both sides” depicted as equal parties. The term “clashes” permits them to do this in perpetuity, no matter how one-sided the violence becomes.

Climate Strategy Needs Tailoring to the World’s Poorest

An effective climate strategy to protect everyone on Earth, and the natural world as well, is what the planet needs. But Austrian-based scientists have now confirmed something all climate scientists have suspected for more than a decade: there can be no simple, one-size-fits-all solution to the twin challenges of climate change and human poverty.

That catastrophic climate change driven by “business as usual” fossil fuel energy reliance will by 2100 impose devastating costs worldwide, and drive millions from their homes and even homelands,  has been repeatedly established.

So has the need to shift from fossil fuels to renewable resources, almost certainly by imposing some kind of “carbon tax” worldwide.

But a new study from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis warns that if agriculture is included in stringent climate mitigation schemes, there will be higher costs in the short term.

If humans don’t act, then climate change driven by global warming will create conditions that will put an extra 24 million people, or perhaps 50 million extra, at risk of hunger and malnutrition.

Crop yields could fall by 17%, and market prices could rise by 20% by 2050. And if they do act with a global carbon tax or its equivalent, then by 2050 an extra 78 million – or perhaps 170 million, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa and India – could be priced out of the food market. So for many of the poorest people on the planet, the cure could be worse than the disease.

“The findings are important to help realize that agriculture should receive a very specific treatment when it comes to climate change policies,” said Tomoko Hasegawa, a systems engineer and researcher at IIASA, and of Japan’s National Institute for Environment Studies. He added:

Carbon pricing schemes will not bring any viable options for developing countries where there are highly vulnerable populations. Mitigation in agriculture should instead be integrated with development policies.

Thinking Ahead

Studies such as these should not be taken as excuses for doing nothing: they are precautionary exercises in foresight. All human acts impose some kind of environmental and social costs. Rich nations can absorb the price of climate mitigation. The poorest communities, ironically the ones most at risk from climate change, cannot.

Dr Hasegawa and her co-authors report in the journal Nature Climate Change that they looked at eight global agricultural models to analyze a range of outcomes for 2050.

Their scenarios contemplated socio-economic development options. These included the one in which the world actually pursued the sustainable programme implicitly agreed in 2015 in Paris, when 195 nations vowed to contain warming to “well below” 2°C by 2100.

They also included one in which the world followed current development trends, along with various levels of global warming, and various mitigation policies.

Possible Solutions

And the researchers concluded that, instead of simply focusing on reducing emissions, policymakers would have to look at the big picture.

Carbon taxes will in various forms raise the prices of food, in some models by 110%. But the same study offers potential solutions. Right now, grazing animals in the developing world produce three-fourths of the world’s ruminant greenhouse gases, but only half its milk and beef. So techniques used in the developed world could if introduced at the same time reduce greenhouse gas emissions, promote economic growth, reduce poverty and improve health in the poorest nations.

There are other options: money raised from carbon taxes could be used for food aid programmes to help those areas hardest hit. The point the researchers make is that when it comes to mitigation policies, governments and international organizations need to think carefully.

“Although climate change is a global phenomenon, its specific impacts and efforts to mitigate its impacts will be realized at national and local levels,” the scientists conclude. “As such, future research will be required to assess the unique local and national challenges to adapting to and mitigating climate change while also reducing food insecurity.”

Aid Group: Ships Not Willing to Save Mediterranean Migrants

ROME — Migrants in distress at sea have told their rescuers that several ships passed them by without offering assistance, a European aid group said Sunday while seeking safe harbor for a rescue vessel with 141 migrants aboard.

SOS Mediterranee in a statement said that due to the recent refusal of Italy and Malta to let rescue vessels carrying migrants dock, ships might be now unwilling to get involved fearing they will be stranded with migrants aboard and denied a port to disembark them.

On Friday the group’s chartered ship Aquarius, which it operates in partnership with Doctors Without Borders, rescued 141 people in waters off Libya. Of these, 25 were found adrift on a small wooden boat that had no motor and was believed to have been at sea for about 35 hours, the group said. The other 116 people, including 67 unaccompanied minors, were rescued later that day, it said.

Nearly three-quarters of those rescued originate from Somalia and Eritrea. Many migrants recounted how they were “held in inhumane conditions in Libya,” where human traffickers are based, the aid group aid.

It added that Libya’s rescue coordination authorities wouldn’t provide the Aquarius with “a place of safety” and asked it to request safe harbor from another country’s authorities.

The Aquarius was sailing north in the Mediterranean on Sunday in hopes of receiving docking permission from another country.

SOS Mediterranee said that “in a disturbing development, rescued people on board told our teams they encountered five different ships which did not offer them assistance before they were rescued by Aquarius.”

Aboard Aquarius is Doctors Without Borders project coordinator, Aloys Vimard, who elaborated.

“It seems the very principle of rendering assistance to persons in distress at sea is now at stake. Ships might be unwilling to respond to those in distress due to the high risk of being stranded and denied a place of safety,” the statement quoted Vimard as saying.

SOS Mediterranee said many of those aboard were extremely week and malnourished. Those rescued in recent years have said they receive scanty rations while kept in Libya to await the opportunity to leave on human smugglers’ unseaworthy boats.

“What is of utmost importance is that the survivors are brought to a place of safety without delay, where their basic needs can be met and where they can be protected from abuse,” the group quoted Nick Romaniuk, its search and rescue coordinator as saying.

In June, Aquarius was forced to sail north for days with more than 600 migrants to Spain after Italy and Malta refused it docking permission. Since then, other private rescue vessels have had to wait for days until some country agreed to let migrants disembark.

Italy’s new populist government has vowed that no more private aid ships will bring migrants to Italian shores.

Although arrivals in Italy of rescued migrants smuggled from Libya have sharply dropped off this year compared to previous years, some 600,000 reached Italian ports in the last few years. Italy demands fellow European Union countries take the asylum-seekers from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The tiny EU island nation of Malta says it can’t handle large numbers of migrants.

Cargo and other commercial vessels often have plucked migrants to safety from deflating rubber dinghies and rickety wooden boats. But with Italy’s crackdown, commercial ships risk being blocked for days at sea, unable to carry out their business. Recently a support ship for an offshore oil platform was left in limbo for days after rescuing migrants.

SOS Mediterranee said the Libya rescue coordination center didn’t inform it about migrant boats in distress despite knowing the Aquarius was nearby.

“It was extremely fortunate that we spotted these boats in distress ourselves” on Friday, the group said.