Democracy Now! Daily Digest ~ A Daily Independent Global News Hour with Amy Goodman & Juan González ~ Friday, 18 October 2013
STORIES:
New research shows many so-called experts who appeared on television making the case for U.S. strikes on Syria had undisclosed ties to military contractors. A new report by the Public Accountability Initiative identifies 22 commentators with industry ties. While they appeared on television or were quoted as experts 111 times, their links to military firms were disclosed only 13 of those times. The report focuses largely on Stephen Hadley, who served as national security adviser to President George W. Bush. During the debate on Syria, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and Bloomberg TV. None of these stations informed viewers that Hadley currently serves as a director of the weapons manufacturer Raytheon that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles widely touted as the weapon of choice for bombing Syria. He also owns over 11,000 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate. We speak to Kevin Connor of the Public Accountability Initiative, a co-author of the report.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, as we move on now to a very interesting study that has just come out. Juan?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, new research shows many so-called experts who appeared on television making the case for U.S. strikes on Syria had undisclosed ties to military contractors. The report by the Public Accountability Initiative identifies 22 commentators with the industry. While they appeared on television or were quoted as experts 111 times, their links to military firms were disclosed only 13 of those times. Let’s take a look at how some of those pundits were identified during recent television appearances.
JAKE TAPPER: For insight into this high-stakes diplomatic mission, I’m joined by former secretary of state to the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, let’s analyze all this now with our panel of experts. Former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright.
GREGG JARRETT: General Jack Keane joins us, Fox News military analyst, served as four-star general and Army vice chief of staff. General, good to see you, as always.
JAKE TAPPER: I want to bring in two former generals to talk about this. Anthony Zinni is the former commander-in-chief of CENTCOM, and Michael Hayden is the former CIA director. He’s now a principal with the Chertoff Group, a risk management firm.
FOLLY BAH THIBAULT: Well, joining me now, live from Washington, D.C., is former U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen. Secretary Cohen, thank you for being on Al Jazeera.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Joining us is Ambassador John Negroponte. He served as the first U.S. director of national intelligence, as well as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the United Nations, and many more posts, I should add. Nice to see you, sir.
JOHN NEGROPONTE: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: A sampling of recent TV coverage on Syria. All the pundits interviewed currently have ties to military and intelligence contractors, investment firms with a significant defense or intelligence focus, or ties to consulting firms with a focus on defense or intelligence. General Jack Keane, for example, is on the board of General Dynamics. General Anthony Zinni is on the board of BAE Systems. General James Cartwright is on the board of Raytheon.
Joining us now from San Francisco, Kevin Connor, director and co-founder of the Public Accountability Initiative, co-author of the report called "Conflicts of Interest in the Syria Debate."
Lay out what you found, Kevin.
KEVIN CONNOR: Sure. The report really maps out the extent to which the policy conversation on the airwaves around Syria was really dominated by individuals with ties to the defense industry. And these ties, as you laid out there, really were never disclosed—rarely disclosed, only 13 times out of 111 appearances that we identified during the Syria debate.
Now, the importance of that is that readers and viewers at home, who are, you know, seeing these people comment, are introduced to them as having gravitas and credibility—former secretaries of state, diplomats, generals with expertise. You would think these are independent experts who probably retired with a healthy pension, when in fact they’re representing interests that would profit from heightened military activity abroad in Syria. So that has a corrupting effect on the public discourse around an issue like Syria that’s so—so important. And it really goes back to the responsibility of media outlets to disclose these ties and also the individuals here who are implicated in the culture of corruption and the revolving door in Washington.
Anjali mentioned earlier, on the first segment, about the jobs program for the defense industry. And there’s a jobs program in place for the foreign policy establishment as they move out of their public positions onto the boards of these corporations. These aren’t—these are part-time positions, but they’re very high-paying positions. They have financial incentives and fiduciary responsibilities to companies that are profiting from war, profiting from current levels of defense spending. And this is something that viewers at home should be notified of. And it perhaps should preclude their involvement in debates like this, or perhaps they should not get the podium and platform they’re given for their views, given the fact that they have these conflicts of interest that are quite serious in some cases.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Kevin, your report focuses largely on Stephen Hadley, who served as a national security adviser to President George W. Bush. During the debate on Syria, he appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, Bloomberg TV. None of these stations informed viewers that Hadley currently serves as a director of the weapons manufacturer Raytheon that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles. He also owns over 11,000 shares of Raytheon stock, which traded at all-time highs during the Syria debate. Here’s Stephen Hadley being interviewed by Greta Van Susteren on Fox News about the so-called red line on Syria.
GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: Did he, or didn’t he? And does it matter who did, as we sort of fuss about this red line? Joining us is Stephen Hadley, former national security adviser to the Bush administration. Doesn’t—does it—did he set the line? And does it matter?
STEPHEN HADLEY: He did set the line, and it probably doesn’t matter, because the line is set, and the credibility of the country is on—is on the line. And in some sense, the Congress needs to act in such a way so as not to undermine the credibility of President Obama. You know, we only have one president at a time, and he embodies the United States. So if his credibility is undermined, the country’s credibility is undermined. And I think that’s an argument that people are beginning to think about on the—on Capitol Hill.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Stephen Hadley. And, of course, the Tomahawk missile that Raytheon produces was the one that was going to be used in the attack on Syria. Kevin, your response?
KEVIN CONNOR: Well, this is just a really egregious, significant conflict of interest that people should have been notified of. When Hadley was making the rounds to the outlets you mentioned, he also published an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing strenuously for war, and at the time, as you mentioned, serves on the board of Raytheon, has nearly $900,000 worth of stock in that company, makes $130,000 a year in cash compensation, actually chairs the public affairs committee for Raytheon, which means that he has oversight of sort of the company’s public profile and image in the media and in policy circles. So this is really a quite clear conflict of interest, and it should have been disclosed to readers and viewers. The fact that—
AMY GOODMAN: The Washington Post has also been criticized for failing to inform its readers about Stephen Hadley’s defense ties. On September 8th, as you said, Kevin, the paper published an op-ed by Hadley that was headlined "To Stop Iran, Obama Must Enforce Red Lines with Assad." The article described Hadley simply as a former national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration. Fred Hiatt, editorial page editor at the Post, defended the paper’s move. Hiatt said, quote, "More disclosure is generally better than less, but I’m confident that Hadley’s opinion piece, which was consistent with the worldview he has espoused for many years, was not influenced by any hypothetical, certainly marginal, impact to Raytheon’s bottom line." That was Hiatt’s statement. Kevin Connor, your response?
KEVIN CONNOR: Well, first, you know, I would like to say kudos to The Washington Post for actually covering the report and really requiring Hiatt to respond. But his response is really absurd. It demonstrates a really fuzzy understanding of conflicts of interest and ethical issues. This is a clear conflict of interest. The conflicts of interest actually raise the possibility of corruption, the corruption of one’s motives. There are relationships that might call into question one’s motives, and this clearly does. And nothing Hiatt said really, you know, defends against that. Hiatt might, you know, have special insight into Hadley’s inner thinking, given that they are perhaps in the same foreign policy circles. Hiatt has written glowing articles about Hadley in the past, so, you know, this is fairly standard for him in terms of his worldview and his sort of milieu.
AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Connor, we want to thank you for being with us, and we’ll certainly link to your report. Kevin is director and co-founder of the Public Accountability Initiative, co-author of the report called "Conflicts of Interest in the Syria Debate," which was released last week.
This is Democracy Now! When we come back, we’re going to look at fast-food workers. How much are you paying for them to be paid so little? Stay with us.
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Al Jazeera’s Anjali Kamat discusses her recent investigation into the state of Bangladeshi sweatshops following the November 2012 fire at the Tazreen factory that killed at least 112 people. Al Jazeera uncovered factories where Old Navy pants are being worked on by children as young as 12.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Our guest is Anjali Kamat, now a correspondent for Al Jazeera Fault Lines, a weekly investigative news program on Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera America, which launched in the United States and is on cable channels across the United States.
Anjali, the first piece that you did, before Egypt, was Bangladesh, Made in Bangladesh. We watched you in this documentary as you sifted through the fire looking for U.S. labels. Can you talk about what happened there in Tazreen?
ANJALI KAMAT: Yeah, so, you know, there have been a series of disasters in garment factories in Bangladesh over the past several years, but there’s been a lot of attention to it in the past year. We went to Bangladesh in June to look at what was happening with Wal-Mart’s supply chain in Bangladesh. And we were interested in a pair of shorts, part of Wal-Mart’s Faded Glory line, that had been found in the ruins of Tazreen, which was a factory that burned down last November, killing at least 112 workers. So we spoke to workers. We spoke to activists. We also spoke to different people along the supply chain.
And one of the things we found, very clearly, was that it is very convenient for large corporations and large retailers like Wal-Mart to not know very much about their supply chain and to remain in the dark about that, because it gives them plausible deniability when there’s an accident. And this is something that an auditor who used to work for Wal-Mart told us. It’s something that advocates in the U.S., like Scott Nova from the Worker Rights Consortium, told us. And it was played out by what we saw in the supply chain in Bangladesh. I mean, at the very bottom of the supply chain, what we found is that there’s very little oversight, and you have factories that are basically in people’s backyards, in their apartments. And large corporations pretend to know nothing about these operations. But this is where—this is the building blocks of the garments that we all buy. And it’s not just Wal-Mart.
What we found is we ended up in a small finishing house, where garments are finished. They’re sort of trimmed, and the buttons are put on, the elastic band is put on. It’s the final step before the garments are shipped out. And we found this small finishing house with, you know, one small window, bars on the windows, no fire extinguisher, just a thatched roof, about 25 young girls and boys working there on Old Navy jeans. And we found children as young as 12 putting in elastic bands into Old Navy jeans. When we took our findings to Gap Inc., they denied—
AMY GOODMAN: Which owns Old Navy.
ANJALI KAMAT: Which owns Old Navy. They denied any connection to this finishing house, said they didn’t know about it, and claimed that the products were either counterfeit or had been improperly acquired. But we collected tags, Old Navy tags, at the finishing house, and we matched the barcodes from these tags to products that were being sold at Old Navy stores in the U.S. So, you know, Gap’s claim that these are counterfeit are really—should be called into question.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about the attempts, or the publicized attempts, especially by European manufacturers, to institute new standards for the factories in Bangladesh? What were you able to see in terms of whether there’s any real progress or change in the way that the manufacturing end of this worldwide garment industry, so much of it centered in countries like Bangladesh—what’s happening there?
ANJALI KAMAT: Right. I mean, so the garment industry is a backbone of the economy in Bangladesh, and, you know, everybody wants a job in the garment industry. And, you know, that’s something that needs to be said.
With respect to the brands, I mean, you’ve got two different safety accords now. The Europeans, European retailers, signed onto one safety accord. Wal-Mart, Gap and other American retailers refused to sign onto that and came up with their own accord saying that this was the best guarantee of worker safety and building safety in Bangladesh and that they’re going to begin all these inspections of factories in Bangladesh.
Now, just earlier this month, there was another fire at a unit that had clothes linked to Wal-Mart, and 10 people—at least 10 people were killed in this factory fire. And Wal-Mart claimed that this particular unit—I think it was a dying unit—wouldn’t fall under their inspections. So there’s a lot of gaps that are still, you know, not being—not going to be included in these new safety accords. And they don’t really say very much about paying workers more, about treating workers with more respect.
You know, I think it’s important to remember that it’s been almost a year since the Tazreen factory fire. At least 112 workers were killed. Wal-Mart shorts were found in the rubble of the factory. There’s been no compensation paid by Wal-Mart to any of the survivors, to any of the victims’ families. And they’re still living in the shadow of this factory.
AMY GOODMAN: Anjali Kamat, we want to thank you very much for being with us, as you continue to do your investigations. And you can check out Fault Lines at Al Jazeera America on your local cable company, as it broadcasts now all over the country on the former channel of Current, which Al Jazeera bought.
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The United States recently announced plans to scale back aid to Egypt’s military government three months after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. Last week, the State Department said the United States will withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance until "credible progress" is made toward "an inclusive, democratically elected civilian government." But a new investigation from Al Jazeera’s "Fault Lines" program shows that the recent aid cuts might be more symbolic than anything else. Al Jazeera recently revealed that from July 3 to September 24, eight ships left New York, Baltimore and Norfolk, Virginia, bound for the Egyptian cities of Damietta and Alexandria, where they unloaded defense equipment covered by laws that require State Department approval. We speak to Anjali Kamat, correspondent and producer for Al Jazeera’s "Fault Lines."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now we want to turn to the—human rights groups are criticizing the Obama administration for lifting rules to make it easier for U.S. arms manufacturers to export weapons and related technology with little oversight. Until this week, military firms had to register with the State Department and obtain a license for each export deal. That allowed U.S. officials to screen for issues including possible human rights violations. But now tens of thousands of items are shifting to the Commerce Department, where they fall under looser controls. The changes were heavily lobbied for by military firms, including Lockheed Martin, Textron and Honeywell.
AMY GOODMAN: In related news, the United States recently announced plans to scale back aid to Egypt’s military government three months after the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi. Last week, the State Department said the United States will withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance until "credible progress" is made toward a, quote, "inclusive, democratically elected civilian government."
But a new investigation from Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines program shows the recent aid cuts might be more symbolic than anything else. Al Jazeera’s Anjali Kamat joins us here in New York, former Democracy Now! producer.
Great to have you back, Anjali.
ANJALI KAMAT: Thanks, Amy. Thanks, Juan.
AMY GOODMAN: Amazing report that you did.
ANJALI KAMAT: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you explain what you found as you traveled from the United States, Washington, to Egypt?
ANJALI KAMAT: Right. I mean, so, I think the important thing to understand is that this has been portrayed as a pretty substantial cut to U.S. military aid to Egypt and a big change. And in some ways it is—it amounts to several hundreds of millions of dollars. But what’s important is that this is temporary and—this is something that Obama administration officials made very clear—that it can be reversible.
And the other thing is that, at the end of the day, it’s very symbolic. You know, from the research that we did and the reporting that we did in this film, which aired last week on Al Jazeera America and is airing now on Al Jazeera English — it’s called Egypt and the USA — we found that what actually matters is the transfer of spare parts and maintenance contracts. And that is continuing. That has not stopped. Egypt already has a surplus of these large military systems. What was announced last week by the administration was a temporary delay in the delivery of large weapons systems, which include F-16s, M1A1 tanks, Apache helicopters, Harpoon missile systems. Egypt’s military already has a surplus of this. It has the fourth-largest amount of F-16s in the world. And when we spoke to Egyptian generals, retired Egyptian generals in Egypt, as well as defense analysts here in the U.S., what became clear is that they don’t need these—you know, these kind of large weapons systems for what—for anything they’re confronting right now. It’s also interesting that the U.S. military has been trying to push for Egypt to kind of switch from these large military systems to lighter systems designed for counterterrorism, for border surveillance, for use in the Sinai. And all of that support will continue as before.
What will also continue is the funds for military training. You know, every year, Egyptian officers and generals come to the U.S. to be trained in American war colleges. One of those generals was today Egypt’s strongman; General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 2006. This exchange program will continue. And from what, you know, major generals in the American military and the Egyptian military told us, this is a key part of the relationship. It creates lasting friendships between the two militaries.
AMY GOODMAN: This is IMET?
ANJALI KAMAT: This is IMET, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: International Military Education and Training.
ANJALI KAMAT: Yeah, mm-hmm, that’s right.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And also, you found that even as the Obama administration was announcing these cuts, huge shipments were on their way to Egypt.
ANJALI KAMAT: Right. I mean, what we found is that—so there was a military coup in Egypt on July 3rd. Under U.S. law, the U.S. is required to suspend military aid to a country if there’s a determination that there’s been a military coup there. The U.S. has declined to make this determination so far. What we found—and this is on the Department of Defense website—is that after July 3rd, in the three months after the coup before this latest announcement, the Pentagon continued to award defense contracts to large defense corporations for equipment headed to Egypt. So this was to Raytheon, BAE Systems and to General Electric. And this continued through July, August and September.
When we asked the Pentagon to comment on this, they directed us to the State Department. When we asked the State Department to comment on this, they had no idea about this. So we commissioned further research on arms shipments to Egypt from the United States, from a group that tracks arms shipments in Chicago called Transarms.
And what we found is that in the three months after the coup there were nearly 2,000 tons of military equipment that continued to flow to Egypt. This is despite the administration’s pronouncements that business would not be continuing as usual and that there was a review underway. That might have led some people to assume that maybe there’d be a hold on some of this equipment. And we found that, you know, 2,000 tons continued to flow on eight ships that left from Baltimore, New York, Norfolk, Virginia, and they arrived in Alexandria and Damietta as late as late September. And this continued despite the pronouncements of concern and despite, you know, on August 14th—it’s been described by Human Rights Watch as one of the worst incidents of mass killings in Egypt. Hundreds of protesters were killed. The day after that, President Obama spoke and said that, you know, business cannot continue as usual. But these ships and shipments of arms continue to flow.
AMY GOODMAN: In his speech to the United Nations in late September, President Obama said the United States had avoided choosing sides in Egypt after the military’s July 3rd overthrow of Morsi.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: America has been attacked by all sides of this internal conflict, simultaneously accused of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and engineering their removal of power. In fact, the United States has purposely avoided choosing sides. Our overriding interest throughout these past few years has been to encourage a government that legitimately reflects the will of the Egyptian people and recognizes true democracy as requiring a respect for minority rights and the rule of law, freedom of speech and assembly and a strong civil society.
AMY GOODMAN: That was President Obama. He was speaking at the United Nations. Anjali Kamat, not taking sides?
ANJALI KAMAT: Well, you know, there’s been—it’s interesting. In Egypt, the U.S. has certainly been viewed as a villain from both sides. There has been a great deal of populist anti-Americanism, nationalism that’s been fueled by state and private media within Egypt, because they perceive the United States as having supported the Brotherhood and as not being as supportive of the military-led government after July 3rd as they hoped the U.S. would be. On the other side, you know, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, those who haven’t been arrested, do feel a sense of betrayal, that they, you know, didn’t get the support that they thought they would from the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: You spoke to one of them.
ANJALI KAMAT: Yeah, when I was in Cairo, you know, hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters and all of the top—practically all of the top leadership has been arrested. There’s about 1,800 people who were arrested, just many of them supporters. But there are few of the top leadership that remain free, and one of them is Amr Darrag, who used to be the minister—minister for international cooperation under the Morsi presidency. And, you know, he felt—you know, one of the things he said is that he said, "I thought the era of supporting military dictatorships and military coups was over. But I should have known better."
But within Egypt, there’s a very deep polarization right now, in a way that’s probably never really happened before, between large segments of the population that support the military-led government, military-backed government, and segments of the population that are opposed to the coup and support—for a while, they were calling for the return of the ousted President Morsi, but that support the Muslim Brotherhood. There are still protests continuing—for a while, they were fairly sporadic; in recent weeks, they’ve stepped up—of Morsi supporters on the streets of Egypt. Some of these protests have been targeted. This continues to be violence from security forces against protesters.
You know, a lot of people in Egypt are also—you know, might make up some sort of a silent majority, which—it’s hard to tell, but the climate when I was in Cairo was very much one of fear. There was still a curfew in place. The curfew has been largely lifted by now. And people were very scared to speak out. There was a sense, even from human rights activists, that the police, the—Egypt’s notorious Ministry of Interior, which their abuses under Mubarak formed the basis of the January 25th, 2011, uprising, now they are stronger than ever before and seem to have a wide public backing. So it’s a very scary type of situation, and people are unable to really speak out between these two dominant narratives, one from the military and a smaller one from the Brotherhood.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Anjali, I wanted to get back to—a second, to the military aid. One of the things that you point out is that a lot of the military aid from the United States to Egypt—
ANJALI KAMAT: Yeah.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —never actually leaves the United States.
ANJALI KAMAT: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, this is something that I think a lot of people don’t realize, is that, you know, since Egypt signed the peace accords with Israel, Camp David, 1979, there’s been a steady flow of U.S. military aid to Egypt. Since 1987, that’s averaged to about $1.3 billion a year in military aid. All of this aid stays in the United States. It never actually makes it to Egypt. What happens is that Egypt can draw on this money, or has been able to traditionally draw on this money, to purchase American-made equipment.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: It’s deposited in a bank in New York?
ANJALI KAMAT: It’s deposited in a bank in New York, that’s right. So, at this point, what we know is that half of that aid has already been disbursed. So there’s about $584 million left. I spoke to the State Department last week after their announcement to ask what was going to happen to the rest of this money. And they said they still hadn’t made a determination. They made it clear that Egypt wouldn’t have access to it immediately, but it might—it would still be used primarily to pay up the defense contractors. So, even though there’s been a delay in the delivery of these large weapons systems—I mean, some of them are weapons systems that were ordered back in 2009, so these are orders that were made years before, and some of them have been paid off already. But the ones that haven’t been paid off—
AMY GOODMAN: And they have boxes of unopened massive weapons, like tanks.
ANJALI KAMAT: Yes, yeah, that’s what we heard in Egypt, is that there are still unopened boxes of tanks. They have so many tanks that there’s no real use for them right now.
AMY GOODMAN: So it’s great corporate welfare for U.S. weapons manufacturers.
ANJALI KAMAT: Absolutely, absolutely. That’s precisely what a lot of analysts told us, is that this is really a jobs program for the defense industry here in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: How did you travel there? It’s very dangerous right now for reporters, and especially for Al Jazeera reporters. Many of your colleagues at Al Jazeera Arabic are in prison there.
ANJALI KAMAT: There’s at least a couple of Al Jazeera Arabic reporters, staff members, who are still imprisoned. They’ve been in prison since August, one of them possibly since July, and their detention just got increased by another 45 days in late September. It’s—Al Jazeera is not well loved in Egypt. The coverage on the Arabic channel is seen to be biased towards the Brotherhood. That also affects employees working for the English channel and the new Al Jazeera America channel. So, it has been very difficult for Al Jazeera staff and reporters to work inside Egypt freely.
When our team—we had a very small team, just two people—when we traveled to Cairo in early September, that was a time when four Al Jazeera English staff members had actually been arrested. And they had been detained for four days, so they were still in detention when we got to Egypt. The week we were there, they were released and sent back home. But the office was raided. So there was definitely a climate of fear, and we tried very hard to just stay away from the office and, you know, not make very public the fact that we were with Al Jazeera.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to another investigation you did. I was there on opening day, Al Jazeera America, in its headquarters here in New York City, when one of the first shows they played was Fault Lines, and it was your exposé of what’s happening in the Bangladeshi garment factories. This is Democracy Now! Anjali Kamat is our guest, now a correspondent for Al Jazeera Fault Lines, which airs on Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera America throughout the United States. Stay with us.
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New research shows more than half of low-wage workers at fast-food restaurants rely on public assistance to survive – a rate double that of the overall workforce. According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, low wages in the fast-food industry cost American taxpayers nearly $7 billion every year – that’s more than the entire annual budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A companion report by the National Employment Law Project found McDonald’s alone costs Americans $1.2 billion annually by paying its workers insufficient wages. Last year the top 10 largest fast-food companies alone made more than $7.4 billion in profits.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A Big Mac costs only a couple dollars, but it comes with a $7 billion side of welfare. New research shows more than half of low-wage workers at fast-food restaurants rely on public assistance to survive—a rate double that of the overall workforce. According to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, low wages in the fast-food industry cost American taxpayers nearly $7 billion every year. That’s more than the entire annual budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A companion report by the National Employment Law Project found McDonald’s alone costs American taxpayers $1.2 billion annually by paying its workers insufficient wages. Last year, the top 10 largest fast-food companies alone made more than $7.4 billion in profits.
AMY GOODMAN: While CEOs are raking in record profits, in August fast-food workers went on strike in 60 U.S. cities in the largest protest of an almost year-long campaign to raise service-sector wages at restaurants, including McDonald’s and Burger King. The striking workers say they want to unionize without retaliation in order to collectively bargain for a $15-an-hour "living wage," more than twice the federal minimum of $7.25. Longtime fast-food worker Shantel Walker went on strike in New York City.
SHANTEL WALKER: The truth, I’ve been in fast food since 1999, on and off, and it’s 2013. I had a couple other jobs in between. But for the most part, no matter what job I get, it always starts back at $7.25. That’s—like they say, that’s state minimum wage. So, it doesn’t matter where you work. That’s the whole irony of this whole situation. It’s not just fast food. It’s people in factories. It’s people in warehouses. It’s people all over. They’re not making money. Some people can’t even pay their rent. Some people have—some people live in shelters. I know some people that don’t even have homes to live in. They live in shelters, and they work every day. That’s what you call the working poor.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Jack Temple, policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, author of this new report, "Super-Sizing Public Costs: How Low Wages at Top Fast-Food Chains Leave Taxpayers Footing the Bill."
Jack Temple, welcome to Democracy Now! Lay out your major findings.
JACK TEMPLE: Thanks so much.
You know, I think this report is an important contribution to what we’ve seen over the last year. You know, we know that the fast-food industry pays low wages. But what this report clarifies is that whether or not you work in the fast-food industry, whether or not you eat fast food, the low-wage business model in the fast-food industry is costing you money. The low-wage business model, which forces workers in the industry to rely on public assistance in order to afford food or healthcare or housing or other basic necessities, is draining the economy of resources. And so, this is an industry that’s really a race to the bottom. And it’s not just spelling economic hardship for workers in the industry; it’s spelling, yeah, weak economic growth and really dragging down the economy across the board.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jack, I wanted to ask you about some of the arguments that are used in terms of defending this practice. One is that many of these restaurants, especially McDonald’s and Burger Kings, are franchises, where basically every restaurant is a small business, in effect, and that these jobs are entry-level jobs that naturally would pay low wages, because the people would move on to other jobs.
JACK TEMPLE: Mm-hmm. Well, the facts refute both of those arguments, actually, so let’s just take them both in turn.
For all the talk about small businesses in this industry, as you mentioned in the opening, you know, McDonald’s made $5.5 billion last year. This is an industry that’s making hundreds of billions of dollars every year. And the corporate level really does exercise a lot of control over franchisees. You know, the food tastes the same in any McDonald’s you walk into. The napkins look the same. Whenever there’s a new menu item, all the franchisees have to comply. They have to buy new equipment, when it’s needed. It’s not really fair for the company to say that they can dictate the terms of basically every facet of the arrangement between the corporation and the franchisee, but all of the sudden they have no control over wages. They determine the costs. They determine the requirements that franchisees have to comply by. And, in effect, they absolutely control the wages. And so, the corporations are really on the hook for wages in this industry. And, you know, the only thing more outrageous than that is the fact that they have substantial profits at the same time.
And regarding the question about entry-level workers, the data really show that this is an industry that is significantly older and more experienced than maybe what popular impression might suggest. So, 70 percent of all fast-food workers are adults over the age of 20. And 30 percent, nearly a third, of those workers are actually supporting children at home. And so, these low wages are being used to support adults that are trying to make ends meet, support families that are trying to make ends meet. And that’s why you see the public cost of this industry so high. These wages just aren’t cutting it for workers, and they’re requiring public assistance in order to make ends meet.
AMY GOODMAN: How much do these franchises make annually? How much do the CEOs make? How much do the workers make? And talk about justifying the disparity.
JACK TEMPLE: Yeah, so, that’s a perfect contrast for you. So, at the seven largest publicly traded fast-food companies in the U.S., the CEOs at those companies made a combined total of $53 million in annual compensation last year. At McDonald’s, just for example, the CEO, Don Thompson, made $13.7 million alone last year. Meanwhile, the median hourly wage for a fast-food worker is $8.69 an hour. It’s one of the lowest wages in the economy today for the occupation. So you see the stunning disparity between what the workers are making in this industry and what the CEOs are making.
AMY GOODMAN: The demographic of the workers?
JACK TEMPLE: Yeah, I mean, you know, these are workers, as I mentioned, that are significantly older than we expect. The median age of the fast-food worker is nearly 29 years old. Many are supporting children. So, you know, this is a workforce that actually isn’t all that different than what we’re seeing across the economy now. Low-wage jobs have made up the majority of job growth throughout the post-recession recovery. And we’ve seen over the last several decades a real shift in the economy away from the manufacturing jobs, the industrial jobs, that once supported the middle class throughout the beginning and the middle of the 20th century, to a service economy in retail and restaurants. These are the industries that are beginning to define the core of the American economy today. And that’s a problem because these are the industries that are driving low wages for a lot of Americans.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Not only are they defining the core of the economy, the bulk of the jobs created since the Great Recession of 2008 have been in these kinds of low-wage jobs. Can you talk about what that means for the future of our economy?
JACK TEMPLE: Yeah, I think it means two things. The first point, it means, at the very least, more Americans are going to be finding themselves stuck in low-wage jobs. The more low-wage jobs dominate the economy, the more Americans are going to find themselves relying on low-wage jobs to make ends meet. And the data bear that out. So, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does projections for job growth over the next decade and finds that six of the 10 largest growth occupations over the next decade are going to be low-wage occupations. And so, this is an economic trend that’s been going on for the last three decades and is projected to continue. We know that if we don’t take active steps to raise wages, the economy is not going to be doing it on its own.
I think the other—obviously, the real cost of this is, even if you’re not someone that ends up relying on low-wage jobs, you know, as we show in this report, the low-wage economy, low-wage industry, is costing all of us, though. The more workers have to rely on public assistance in order to make ends meet, that’s more money drained out of the economy and going to support massively profitable industries and companies.
AMY GOODMAN: In August, New York City Councilmember Letitia James expressed support for striking fast-food workers and talked about the feminization of poverty.
COUNCILMEMBER LETITIA JAMES: Most of the individuals who work in fast-food restaurants, which is one of the growing—fastest-growing industries in the City of New York, it’s a race to the bottom. A significant number of them in retail and in the fast-food restaurants are women of color who look like me. And so, there is a feminization of poverty. It’s a term which describes most women who live below the poverty level who are struggling to make ends meet.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s New York City Councilmember Letitia James, who’s running for public advocate here in New York. If—Jack Temple, the issue of this particularly affecting women, that welfare is a women’s issue, and what you think the public should do about this?
JACK TEMPLE: Well, you know, I mean, I think we hear that argument a lot, you know, when we’re talking about public assistance, generally, or talking about the American safety net. I think, you know, what the trends show, at least, is that what we might have been able to argue affects only a small amount of the population is beginning to affect workers across the board, across the economy. You know, it’s going to be the case where we’re not able to talk about specific demographics or specific qualities. This low-wage job growth is going to begin to affect all of us, the more the current trends continue.
And so, I think, you know, as you mentioned in the beginning of the segment, a lot of opponents or a lot of the company spokespersons will argue that these low-wage jobs are exclusively teens or exclusively, you know, workers that are starting out or entry-level workers, and that provides a springboard for more opportunity. But the fact of the matter is, these low-wage jobs are beginning to affect all Americans across the board. If they’re not relying on low-wage jobs already, then their tax dollars are supporting low-wage companies. And so, it’s beginning to be a core—an aspect of the core of the American economy.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, five seconds: the argument the companies make, "Then we’ll have to pick up the costs of the food, and that will particularly hurt poorer people."
JACK TEMPLE: Well, companies have a ton of resources. We’re talking, again, about a multibillion-dollar—
AMY GOODMAN: Five seconds.
JACK TEMPLE: —multibillion-dollar industry here. There’s just no reason to suspect that companies can’t afford higher wages.
AMY GOODMAN: Jack Temple, we want to thank you for being with us, with the National Employment Law Project. We’ll link to your report, "Super-Sizing Public Costs."
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The trial has begun in the largest corruption case in New York City history. Private consultants are accused of siphoning tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from the scandal-ridden $700 million CityTime payroll project. Last year, the project’s main contractor, SAIC, was forced to repay the city $500 million as part of a deferred prosecution agreement. Juan González, who broke the story, discusses the latest developments.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, you have a piece today in the New York Daily News about the largest corruption case in city history, that you actually exposed. It’s going to trial this week.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, the CityTime scandal. Three people are—started trial in U.S. District Court in Manhattan this week. They’re the last of 11 people that were indicted by federal prosecutors in 2010 and 2011 over this massive information technology contract called CityTime. It was a payroll system that the New York City government, the Bloomberg administration, was instituting. And the amazing thing is, of the 11 people originally charged, one died, two fled to India with millions of dollars that they stole from New York City taxpayers, and the rest of them have already pled guilty. So there’s only three left, two of whom are accused of being the masterminds of the—of the plot.
The most fascinating thing in the first days of testimony is that a key city official, who has never been indicted, the former head of Mayor Bloomberg’s payroll agency, was repeatedly raised in testimony as the person who allowed this massive fraud, kickbacks of millions and millions of dollars to the—to the contractors. The main company, a defense giant, SAIC, has already reached a deferred prosecution agreement with the government and repaid the City of New York the astounding figure of $500 million, because this payroll project started at $60 million, and it ended up costing over $700 million. And so, the company paid back $500 million, and one of its—one of its executives has now been a chief witness in the case. And he testified that the city payroll director basically allowed these fellow workers of his to develop the fraud, to continue to hire people and charge outrageous rates to the city, even when the company itself knew that he shouldn’t be doing it, but they weren’t able to prevent him from doing it.
So that the—we’ll see how the testimony unfolds over the next month, because the trial is expected to take a month. But it really is sort of a way to look at what I’ve considered for years to be the prime form of corruption in modern governments in the United States today, which is information technology contracts. It’s the new form of patronage and corruption in local, state and federal governments.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, it makes me wonder a little bit about the exchange websites.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely. It’s the same kind of problems. These companies come in—
AMY GOODMAN: Get hundreds of millions of dollars.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: They get hundreds of millions of dollars, promising you this new computerized system. And inevitably they charge an enormous amount of money, and they don’t deliver what they promise, and then the taxpayers end up with the problems.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll certainly continue to follow this trial that’s just begun this week.
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HEADLINES:
Obama Taps Pentagon Lawyer Who Played Key Role in Drone Wars to Head Homeland Security
President Obama is set to announce his nomination of former Pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson to become the next secretary of Homeland Security, replacing Janet Napolitano. Johnson played a key role in crafting policies used to guide the U.S. drone wars and the detention of terror suspects. During a speech at Oxford University last year, Johnson rejected the terms "indefinite detention" and "extrajudicial killings," which are frequently used to describe how the administration detains and assassinates people without charge or trial. He said such terms might be appropriate in a law enforcement setting, but not in the context of what he called a war with al-Qaeda and its "associated forces."
Jeh Johnson: "Viewed within the context of conventional armed conflict, as they should be, capture, detention and lethal force are traditional practices as old as armies. Capture and detention by the military are part and parcel of armed conflict. We employ weapons of war against al-Qaeda, but in a manner consistent with the law of war. We employ lethal force, but in a manner consistent with the law of war principles of proportionality, necessity and distinction."
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Budget Committee Begins Talks on Long-Term Spending
National parks and memorials have reopened, and hundreds of thousands of federal workers headed back to work Thursday following the end of a 16-day partial government shutdown. Lawmakers are now facing the next potential standoff over long-term budget negotiations, with a deadline of December 13 for the Budget Committee to report back to their House and Senate colleagues on a potential deal. Committee leaders include Republican Congressmember Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, who has pushed for gutting Medicare and Medicaid. Another budget landmark comes in mid-January when the next round of across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration are due to kick in.
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Obama Calls on Congress to Pass Immigration Reform, Farm Bill
President Obama blasted Republicans over the government shutdown Thursday, saying it had damaged the credibility of the United States and "encouraged our enemies." He urged Republicans to negotiate with Democrats on a number of stalled legislative efforts.
President Obama: "Passing a budget, immigration reform, farm bill — those are three specific things that would make a huge difference in our economy right now. And we could get them done by the end of the year, if our focus is on what’s good for the American people."
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Iraq: 66 Killed in Attacks
Violence in Iraq killed at least 66 people on Thursday amid the worst period of bloodshed since 2008. Most of the victims reportedly died as a result of 11 car bombs that exploded in eight different areas in and around the capital Baghdad.
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4 Former Blackwater Operatives Face New Charges for Nisoor Square Massacre
The Obama administration is pursuing new charges against four former operatives of the private military firm Blackwater for the 2007 Nisoor Square massacre that killed 17 Iraqi civilians, including women and children. An appeals court reinstated the case two years ago after a lower court dismissed it in 2009. Now a federal grand jury has issued a new indictment charging the men with voluntary manslaughter and other crimes. In a statement, the chief government prosecutor said, "these defendants abused their power through a relentless attack on unarmed civilians that recklessly exceeded any possible justification." A hearing is set for next week.
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Marine Panel: Officer Should Be Forcibly Discharged for Role in Troops Urinating on Dead Afghans
A panel of U.S. Marine colonels has recommended a forcible discharge for an officer who oversaw a group of snipers shown on video urinating on the corpses of Afghans. Captain James Clement is the only officer to face criminal charges for the 2011 incident. Three marines accepted plea deals last year. A pair of lieutenant generals will now review the panel’s recommendation on Clement’s fate.
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Syrian Official Says Peace Talks Possible Next Month; Rebels Kill Top General
A Syrian government official says international talks to resolve the conflict in Syria could open in Geneva in late November. Qadri Jamil, a deputy prime minister in Syria, is the first official to mention a possible date for the talks. Meanwhile, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has appointed Sigrid Kaag, a Dutch expert on the Middle East, to lead the team charged with destroying Syria’s chemical arsenal under a deal to avert U.S. military strikes. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last week, says its inspectors have made progress in visiting sites and destroying key equipment. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told NPR the weapons should be relocated.
John Kerry: "The fact is that these weapons can be removed, whether Assad is there or not there, because we know the locations. Locations have been declared. Locations are being secured. And my hope is that much of this material will be moved as rapidly possible into one location, and hopefully on a ship, and removed from the region."
Syrian rebels meanwhile have reportedly shot dead a top general in an eastern province. General Jamea Jamea was the military intelligence chief in the province of Deir ez-Zor.
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Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia
National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden says he has ensured there is a "zero percent chance" either China or Russia could obtain access to the secret NSA documents he has given to journalists. Writing over encrypted chat, Snowden told The New York Times’ James Risen he did not keep any copies of the files after handing them to Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong. He says he was able to prevent China from accessing the files because he was familiar with their systems after targeting them as an NSA contractor. Snowden told Risen: "So long as there’s broad support amongst a people, it can be argued there’s a level of legitimacy even to the most invasive and morally wrong program, as it was an informed and willing decision. However, programs that are implemented in secret, out of public oversight, lack that legitimacy, and that’s a problem." Snowden also disputed an earlier New York Times report about a warning regarding his behavior placed in his personnel file in 2009 by a supervisor at the CIA. Snowden said the supervisor was retaliating against him after he warned about a software vulnerability. The CIA has also disputed The New York Times’ account.
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Snowden’s Father Says Son is a Whistleblower, Not a Fugitive
Edward Snowden’s father, Lon Snowden, has returned from visiting his son in Russia. He told reporters back in the United States that Edward Snowden is doing well.
Lon Snowden: "Given where we were in June, I can’t imagine a better scenario today, because what this allows is time to continue to push these issues forward, to make sure that the story is — the true story is told, is not spun within the media, about Edward Snowden, who is a whistleblower. He is not a fugitive. He’s a legal asylee of the Russian federation."
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NSA Director and Deputy to Leave Agency
The White House has confirmed that the director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, will step down early next year. Alexander has led the NSA since 2005. His deputy, John Inglis, is also expected to leave soon. An NSA spokesperson denied General Alexander’s departure was tied to recent revelations about the NSA’s sweeping spy programs.
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Canada: Dozens Arrested as Police Descend on Anti-Fracking Blockade in New Brunswick
In New Brunswick, Canada, dozens of people were arrested and several police cars were set ablaze as protesters resisted efforts by police to clear an anti-fracking blockade. For more than two weeks, members of the Mi’kmaq First Nation and other area residents have blocked a road near the village of Rexton, cutting off access to an equipment compound used by the Texas-based firm Southwestern Energy. The company is seeking to explore the area for natural gas. Residents say they don’t want their water supplies poisoned by gas fracking, which involves blasting a chemical cocktail deep into shale rock. Scores of Royal Canadian Mounted Police descended on the encampment early Thursday morning to enforce an injunction won by the company. Protesters Mona Lisa Clair and Mark Corbiere described what happened.
Mona Lisa Clair: "We were all in our tents sleeping, and then my sister hollers out, ’They’re coming in!’ And all I could do was rush to get my clothes on. And I come out onto the road, and I could see them starting to come in through the fence."
Mark Corbiere: "They came in through the far exit, the far entrance, near the highway, with probably about 75 to 100 cops on that end. They are armed with semi-automatic long rifle weapons. There were shots fired at one point. I believe one of the people in camo was firing in the air."
Police fired pepper spray at protesters, some of whom reportedly hurled Molotov cocktails, setting five police cars on fire. At least 40 people were arrested by the police count. The crackdown has sparked widespread solidarity protests across Canada and in the United States.
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Romania: Chevron Halts Search for Natural Gas After Mass Protests
Chevron says it has suspended its search for natural gas in northeast Romania following massive civil disobedience against fracking. This week hundreds of people occupied a field in the village of Pungesti to block Chevron from drilling. Protests also erupted in the capital Bucharest.
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Romanians Protest Gold Mine Project Planned by Canadian Firm
Romanians have also taken to the streets by the thousands to protest plans by a Canadian firm to construct what would become Europe’s largest gold mine. The protesters say cyanide used in the mining process could poison animals and water supplies.
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Report: Federal Health Exchange Created Using Decade-Old Technology
In the United States, the new government health insurance marketplace continues to be plagued with glitches. Now there are reports the new federal healthcare exchange was made using decade-old technology that may require a complete overhaul. USA Today reports: "Recent changes have made the exchanges easier to use, but they still require clearing the computer’s cache several times, stopping a pop-up blocker, talking to people via Web chat who suggest waiting until the server is not busy, opening links in new windows and clicking on every available possibility on a page in the hopes of not receiving an error message." The Wall Street Journal says the federal healthcare marketplace website is feeding insurers flawed data, including "duplicate enrollments, spouses reported as children, [and] missing data fields." One analytics firm said just over a fourth of more than 200,000 people who started the registration process on Monday and Tuesday actually finished. That’s up from 10 percent of people in the first week.
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Transit Workers Go on Strike in California
In California, public transit workers have gone on strike after talks broke down between Bay Area Rapid Transit and union negotiators. It’s the second time in four months the transit workers have gone on strike. They say they are approaching a deal to resolve issues related to healthcare and pensions but remain at odds on work rules. SEIU Local 1021 President Roxanne Sanchez said, "We made concessions, but you can only bend so far before you break."
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U.N. Agency: Outdoor Air Pollution is Leading Cause of Cancer
The World Health Organization has classified outdoor air pollution as a leading cause of cancer deaths among humans worldwide. The move places the air we breathe in the same top category as cigarette smoke, plutonium and ultraviolet radiation. Air pollution from sources including cars, factories and power plants caused more than 220,000 deaths from lung cancer worldwide in 2010, more than half of them in East Asia.
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Report: Nearly 30 Million People Enslaved Worldwide; 60,000 in U.S.
A new report by the Walk Free Foundation has found there are nearly 30 million people living in slavery around the world. Today people are enslaved as forced laborers and sex workers, as child soldiers and child brides in forced marriages. Mauritania and Haiti have the highest proportion of slaves compared to population size, while India and China have the highest overall numbers. Ten countries in Asia and Africa account for 76 percent of the enslaved population, but there were enslaved people found in every single one of the 162 countries investigated. An estimated 60,000 enslaved people are living in the United States today.
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