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 President Obama has launched an effort to rally Congress and the public behind a sustained offensive against the militant group, Islamic State. Obama is set to meet with Congress on Tuesday followed by a national address Wednesday. The United States says it will lead the offensive against the Islamic State with a so-called "core coalition" of 10 countries. The White House says the fight could last beyond the end of President Obama’s term in early 2017. Meanwhile on Sunday, Arab League foreign ministers met in Cairo and announced they would cooperate with efforts to combat militants who have overrun parts of Iraq and Syria. Their resolution did not explicitly support the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State, but suggested it would back the effort.
We are joined by Rami Khouri, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star. "Combining American militarism with Arab dictatorships is probably the stupidest recipe that anybody could possibly come up with to try to fight jihadi movements like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State and others," Khouri says. "It was that combination of Arab autocracy and American militarism that actually nurtured and let these movements expand."
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: President Obama has begun to unveil his strategy for an offensive against the Islamic State that could last as long as three years and beyond the end of his administration. This comes as the United States has carried out more than 140 airstrikes against ISIS fighters in Iraq in the past month. Over the weekend, American warplanes launched fresh strikes against militants near Haditha Dam, less than 150 miles northwest of the capital, Baghdad.
On Tuesday, Obama is set to meet with Congress to discuss the new strategy; on Wednesday, scheduled to give a major address to give more details to the American public. He first outlined the plan Sunday on Meet the Press. Obama says he has ruled out the redeployment of ground troops in Iraq but has left open the possibility of airstrikes in Syria, as well as economic and political measures.
At the NATO summit Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the U.S. will lead the offensive against the Islamic State with a so-called "core coalition" of 10 countries. The group includes Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Italy, Poland, Denmark and Turkey—the only Muslim state. On Sunday, Arab League foreign ministers met in Cairo and announced they would cooperate with efforts to combat militants who have overrun parts of Iraq and Syria. Their resolution did not explicitly support the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State but suggested it would back the effort. This is Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby.
SECRETARY GENERAL NABIL ELARABY: [translated] This matter is neither political nor security-related only, but we will discuss it from all directions to block it and stop its sources. This requires cooperation between different ministers and preemptive meetings and researching the subject from all its angles. However, the combat still stands, and the confrontation. It is not a simple decision, the decision to confront these phenomena, as many states demand. Also, by working on blocking the sources of terrorism through fighting its ideology, seizing its funding, remedying reasons and circumstances that led to the outbreak of this extremist terrorist phenomenon.
AMY GOODMAN: All of this comes as a new report by a private British firm that monitors arms trafficking says military equipment provided by the United States and Saudi Arabia has fallen into the hands of Islamic State fighters. The firm examined rockets and small arms stamped "Property of the U.S. government" that appear to have been supplied to Shiite forces in Iraq during the U.S. occupation.
Well, for more, we’re going to Beirut, Lebanon, to Rami Khouri, the director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He is also editor-at-large of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star. His latest piece, "Avoid a Rerun of the War on Terror." He’s joining us by Democracy Now! video stream in Beirut.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Rami Khouri. What President Obama has said so far this weekend about the strategy in dealing with the Islamic State, as well as the, well, more than a hundred strikes in Iraq, can you respond?
RAMI KHOURI: Well, it’s pretty impressive how he can go from no strategy to 60 miles an hour in like five days, but I think we have to basically understand that the United States feels it must do something. It’s not quite sure what is the best thing to do. And Obama is being cautious, understandably, because the United States has just come out of two rather catastrophic military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a third, I would call it, catastrophic adventure with drone assassinations all over the world, with absolutely no accountability, total impunity. And the cruel and hard irony is that in the last, say, 15 or 20 years of the United States using military action to try to strike al-Qaeda and the derivative groups that have come out of al-Qaeda, the irony is that this has been the single greatest promoter, mobilizer of new recruits for these kinds of militant Islamic terror groups. So, the more the U.S. leads military action, the greater becomes the expanse of recruits and the territory that is controlled by these groups. So it’s a real dilemma for the United States, and it’s something that has to be fundamentally led by people in the region, and that’s not happening very well. So, there’s no easy answer.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain how that recruiting works, Rami Khouri.
RAMI KHOURI: Well, if you go back to the beginning of this phase of the Salafist, Qaeda, jihadi-type movements—there’s many different names for them, [inaudible], but let’s call them, you know, militant Islamists, like al-Qaeda—they started basically to fight the Russians in Afghanistan in the late '70s, early ’80s, and the U.S. helped them with money and training and things like that. And then, in the mid-'80s and then into the '90s, the group under bin Laden's leadership in Sudan and other places shifted to try to hit the United States. They thought the far enemy—the U.S., they called the "far enemy"—was the one that had to be hit, because it was the U.S. that was supporting all these dictators in the Arab world, and therefore better to hit the far enemy. And then, after the U.S. came into the Middle East in the Iraq War to liberate Kuwait, and then the U.S. stayed, troops in Saudi Arabia, then the United States became the main enemy because, again, like the Russians in Afghanistan, it was a foreign army in Arab or Islamic lands, and therefore it had to be driven out.
So, military action by foreign powers, whether they’re Americans or Russian, it doesn’t matter. Military action in Arab Islamic lands by foreign powers has been the most consistent and most effective recruiting tool to attract new recruits to these kinds of movements, like al-Qaeda, like Jabhat al-Nusra, like the Islamic State and others, others like them, because these guys project themselves and see themselves as fighting what they call the defensive jihad. They’re trying to protect and cleanse Islamic societies from the two great problems they feel it faces. One is corrupt, amoral, un-Islamic regimes, and the other is foreign military threats and attacks. So, again, the U.S. using military action is going to increase the problem in the long run.
And you can see the track record going back to the mid-'80s, when Clinton was attacking bin Laden's bases in Africa and other places, Sudan. And over the last 15 or 20 years, the more that the U.S. has used military power to attack and degrade al-Qaeda, the bigger that al-Qaeda has become. And if you look at these movements that have been spawned by it or imitate it, they now have anchorage, small anchorage, but they have anchorage in Somalia, in Yemen, in Syria, in Iraq, in Nigeria, in Mali, in Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, probably some other places, too.
Now, these groups, I should say, don’t have support in these societies. They don’t willingly attract millions and millions of supporters. They have been rejected by the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims. And they can only operate where there’s chaos. And American militarism brings chaos in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in other places. So this is why I’m so concerned about a rerun of George W. Bush’s really unsuccessful and, I would say, quite criminal war on terror.
AMY GOODMAN: This is President Obama speaking Sunday on Meet the Press.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We’re not looking at sending in 100,000 American troops. We are going to be, as part of an international coalition, carrying out airstrikes in support of work on the ground by Iraqi troops, Kurdish troops. We are going to be helping to put together a plan for them so that they can start retaking territory that ISIL had taken over. What I want people to understand, though, is that over the course of months we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL, we are going to systematically degrade their capabilities, we’re going shrink the territory that they control, and ultimately we’re going to defeat them.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Obama on Sunday. Can you talk about the other states that are joining in, Rami Khouri, and particularly Arab countries, where they fit into this picture?
RAMI KHOURI: Well, the problem with the Arab countries is that most of them are responsible for the inadvertent but clear birth and expansion of these kind of Salafi, jihadi, extremist, militant Islamist groups. If you go back to the ’70s and ’80s, where these groups really started to take shape, the incubator for al-Qaeda and other groups like it were Saudi jails, Egyptian jails, Jordanian jails, Iraqi jails, Syrian jails, Tunisian jails. The jails of Arab regimes is where these movements were born. Young men became radicalized, then they got out of jail, and then they became jihadis. They went to Afghanistan. Bin Laden organized them. The CIA helped them. And then, off they go. It was the American military presence in the region that created the conditions, in fact, that allowed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian, to come in and start an al-Qaeda offshoot there, and then that expanded.
So the problem is that all these Arab countries are in the same dilemma that the U.S. is in, which is their autocracy, their mistreatment of their citizens, created this problem over the years, and American militarism, from the American perspective, is also part of the impetus that expands this problem. So, combining American militarism with Arab dictatorships is probably the stupidest recipe that anybody could possibly come up with to try to fight jihadi movements like al-Qaeda and Islamic State and others, because it was that combination of Arab autocracy and American militarism that actually nurtured and let these movements expand. There has to be a more intelligent, more realistic process that allows the people in the Middle East to roll back these threats. And these people need to be fought; I’m not saying you sit around and do nothing. You have to fight these people and eradicate them, because they’re really awful. And then, the people in the region are the ones who suffer more than anybody else.
AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri—
RAMI KHOURI: But the way—
AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, one of the ways that has focused U.S. attention, of course, is the two—is the killing of the U.S. journalists, the beheading of the U.S. journalists. The Independent had a very interesting piece, "Who Beheads More People: ISIS or the Government of Saudi Arabia?" And they said that in the 21 months between James Foley’s capture in 2012 and his subsequent beheading by ISIS militants in August 2014, Saudi Arabia beheaded 113 people. It says this did "not include any estimates for executions at the end of 2012. Most of these beheadings are carried out as public executions at the notorious 'Chop-Chop Square' in Riyadh for crimes such as blasphemy, drug smuggling, sedition and sorcery’, although for certain crimes such as adultery, the authorities may order death by stoning." Rami Khouri?
RAMI KHOURI: Well, this is a very old, you know, 18th century Wahhabi brand of hardline Islamic justice, really severe, that the overwhelming majority of Muslims all over the world think is something that should have been left behind in the 18th century. There’s very few people, almost nobody around the world, except the Saudis and these Islamic State guys and Jakarta—the people in Jakarta have stopped doing it—that do this. So I wouldn’t focus particularly on that. I mean, there’s been many more people that have been killed by American drones who are innocent than people who have been killed by Saudis. And the Saudis have this justice system. It’s just that we may not like it. They probably don’t like people being put in the electric chair in Texas every couple of months. So, there’s a qualitative difference between what we’re talking about. We can certainly—I would certainly disagree with the way the Saudis chop people’s heads off as a form of justice and deterrence, because it doesn’t work, any more than electric chairs work in the United States or [inaudible]—
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, there’s the journalists wearing the orange jumpsuits, reminiscent of Guantánamo.
RAMI KHOURI: There’s what? Oh, yes, of course. So, what the Islamic State guys are doing are kind of poking Obama in the ribs and saying, "Look, you kill us, we kill you. You make us dress in orange jumpsuits, we’re going to do the same thing to your people." Of course, the innocent journalists should not be captured or killed, and they certainly shouldn’t be put in jails, as they are in Egypt, which is the great friend of the United States. So there’s many, many parallels between these things, but each one of them is different. It’s hard to really—we shouldn’t compare the United States with Saudi Arabia, with Islamic State stuff. They’re all very different. But there is a common thread that runs through them, which is that the use of military power and extreme acts of torture or assassinations almost always backfire. You cannot try to have an orderly, just, decent society while relying heavily on militarism and death as a form of deterrence.
So, but the problem before us all is: What do we do about this Islamic State? These guys are taking more territory. They’re enforcing their rule by force, by terrorizing people. And very few people are happily accepting them. They don’t—you know, ordinary people don’t have a choice. If the Islamic State comes in with their guns and chops people’s heads off or crucifies a couple of people, everybody else stays [inaudible]. And this should be a telltale sign that these groups only can operate in zones of chaos. And the United States and others, the British, have helped create these zones of chaos in the last 20 years in Afghanistan and in Iraq, most recently. So, there’s really a lot of shared responsibility for this terrible situation we’re in, but the bottom line is we need to figure out how to fight the two real problems, which Obama keeps repeating as his strategy, the two real problems of autocratic, nondemocratic, abusive, corrupt, pretty inefficient and mediocre Arab government systems, Arab regimes, across the board. And the other one is the repeated use of American, British, Israeli, other military power in the region to try to enforce an order that the West and the Israelis and others feel is suitable for them. Those two problems are two of the root causes of all of these issues that we’re seeing, and the Islamic State is simply a symptom of years and years of this, of these kinds of problems of bad governance.
AMY GOODMAN: Rami Khouri, we want to thank you for being with us, director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, also editor-at-large of the Beirut-based newspaper, The Daily Star. We’ll link to your latest piece, "Avoid a Rerun of the War on Terror." This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
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Think Tanks as Lobbyists: Exposé Shows U.S. Groups Receive Millions to
Push Foreign Nations' Agendas
 A New York Times exposé reveals more than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials. Some scholars funded by the think tanks say they faced pressure to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing their work. The groups named in the report include the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Atlantic Council, and most of the money comes from countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, including the oil-producing nations of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Norway. Few of them have registered with the Justice Department as "foreign agents" that aim to shape policy, as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act. We are joined by Brooke Williams, a contributing reporter at The New York Times who co-wrote the new article, "Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks."
Image Credit: flickr.com/dora_bakoyannis
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to a New York Times exposé which finds some of the most influential think tanks in the United States are awash in funds from foreign governments. According to the investigation published over the weekend, quote, "More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities."
The story is headlined "Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks." It reveals most of the money comes from countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, including the oil-producing nations of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Norway. Some scholars funded by the think tanks say they faced pressure to reach conclusions friendly to the government financing the research. Among the organizations named in the report are the Brookings Institution, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Atlantic Council.
For more, we’re joined by one of the article’s authors, Brooke Williams, contributing reporter at The New York Times who co-wrote the piece. She’s also an investigative journalism fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
Brooke Williams, welcome to Democracy Now! Talk about what you found.
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Thank you for having me. Well, we found tens of millions of dollars, as much as $92 million—and that’s a bare minimum—from foreign governments and foreign-controlled entities to think tanks, mostly in Washington, D.C. We also found a window into—to examine how the think tanks are interacting with the governments. And this is something that we’ve done for the first time. Think tanks have always—some of them have always published lists of donors. However, we could never tell what the foreign governments were paying for exactly, and usually not how much money they provided. We used public records from one of the governments and provided a window into how the think tanks were interacting. And what we found were some agreements in which the foreign government, Norway, in particular, was explicitly asking a think tank to approach—
AMY GOODMAN: The think tank being?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: The Center for Global Development—and to approach U.S. policymakers with a specific objective that was in the government’s interest. And we found that donors—
AMY GOODMAN: What were they asking for?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: They were asking for—to double spending in a foreign aid program. And a portion—a progress report that they sent to the Norwegian government said, "Target [group]: U.S. policy makers," and then listed the policymakers that they would be targeting.
AMY GOODMAN: And the foreign aid money would go to where?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: The foreign aid money, it was doubling U.S. spending money to—it’s a deforestation effort, so it’s a climate change agenda.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about other examples that you found.
BROOKE WILLIAMS: We found letters, for instance, from think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, and they’re on the document viewer that’s on—readers can see on the website, in which—
AMY GOODMAN: You built the database?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: I built the database. And so, yes. And this is the first of its kind, in which we can really track how much money. I mean, it’s coming from all over the world, but, as you mentioned, certain areas are more heavily involved. But we found letters, for instance, from the Atlantic Council to a Norwegian energy minister, inviting them to attend an event and saying to the state-owned oil company, "If you attend, you know, this will really benefit your interests." We found in one case a Brookings scholar saying that he would help to bring along a State Department official to a meeting, and Norway is a major donor to Brookings.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me get—bring in Brookings’ response, who we called. This is a message published by Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution, in response to the New York Times article on foreign powers buying influence at think tanks. Talbott writes, quote, "By disregarding important facts and taking information out of context, the reporters drew inaccurate conclusions that misrepresent the work of Brookings and ignore the institutional safeguards we have in place to ensure complete independence for our scholars’ research and policy recommendations." Your response to that, Brooke Williams?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Brookings does have institutional safeguards, and we examined them, and we included them in the article. I think it’s important to remember, however, that even with explicit rules, there can be implicit understandings. And as you can see in the article, we spoke with scholars who said donations from foreign governments led to implicit agreements, and that they would refrain from criticizing the donor governments. So even with explicit agreements, there can be implicit agreements and pressure to self-censor.
AMY GOODMAN: You talked about the Atlantic Council, and you feature a photograph, in addition to in the text, of Michele Dunne, who resigned as head of the Atlantic Council’s center for the Middle East after calling for a suspension a military aid to Egypt in 2013. Explain what happened and what this has to do with your central point in this article.
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Well, it comes back to the idea that scholars rely on funding from donors. And, you know, Brookings, for instance, said their senior scholars, they have an understanding and agreement that senior scholars, even if a donor pulls funding, will not lose their jobs because of that. Right? And so, this goes back to safeguards in place at institutions. And in that case, the Atlantic Council declined to comment much on what happened there, but I think it comes back to the idea of feeling pressure to self-censor and what might happen if a scholar were to criticize a donor government.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the laws in the United States, not just the rules of these different organizations, around the issue of registering as a lobbyist.
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Right, yeah. So the law pertaining to foreign government interests is much more strict than the Lobbying Disclosure Act, which, you know, we know, companies register to lobby. So, it requires foreign government interests who are attempting to influence public opinion or policy to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And those filings are extremely detailed. They contain the dates and contacts of reporters, think tank officials, you name it. They listed the dates of contact, the purpose, whether it was by phone or in-person meeting. And it goes back to World War II, in an effort for the U.S. government to distinguish between Nazi Germany propaganda and research. And so, this—
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think these think tanks should have to register as foreign agents?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Well, what I can say is that we spoke with attorneys who specialize in this area and examined, several times, the documents that we obtained, the agreements between the think tanks and the foreign governments. And the language in the documents, in these agreements, those attorneys felt, was strong enough—they leaned back in their chairs and said, "Wow! You know, this is explicit." Some of the documents explicitly showed how the government was asking the think tank to influence public policy and, in some cases, opinion.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a piece under the sub-headline "Parallels With Lobbying." "The line between scholarly research and lobbying can sometimes be hard to discern.
“Last year, Japan began an effort to persuade American officials to accelerate negotiations over a free-trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of Japan’s top priorities. The country already had lobbyists on retainer, from the Washington firm of Akin Gump, but decided to embark on a broader campaign.
"Akin Gump lobbyists approached several influential members of Congress and their staffs ... [I]n October 2013, the lawmakers established just such a group, the Friends of the Trans-Pacific Partnership," in October of 2013. Talk about what happened from there.
BROOKE WILLIAMS: So, they established this group, and there’s an organization called the Japan External Trade Organization. And we found, in filings with the Department of Justice, that they had been paying the Center for Strategic and International Studies, as well as other think tanks, for research and consulting. And then we also documented that the product of these seminars and groups that they held was to promote the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now, a member, a scholar there, ended up testifying before Congress, promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And what this comes down to is: Do lawmakers know? When someone from a research organization approaches them with a policy recommendation, do they know that a foreign government has funded that organization or, in some cases, even the policy paper itself?
AMY GOODMAN: And explain the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ relationship with this.
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Well, the Center for Strategic and International Studies has a seminar. It’s called the JETRO-CSIS seminar. And annually, they bring together lawmakers, specifically lawmakers who are in charge of U.S. trade policy, and Japan officials who are in charge of Japan’s trade policy, together, funded by the Japanese government and this Japan trade organization, to discuss U.S. policies in trade. And those policies are very important to Japan. So, attorneys who looked at these documents, you know, that area was more grey than perhaps the Center for Global Development and Brookings, but it still produced questions. You know, was this lobbying? Bringing together—it was providing access, at the very least.
AMY GOODMAN: Did you find violations of U.S. law?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: The attorneys we spoke with thought that the documents they reviewed, that I requested and obtained from Norway, the attorneys we interviewed believed that they—that two of the think tanks have.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you name those two think tanks?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Brookings and the Center for Global Development.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, where would that lead?
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Well, it’s hard to say. The Department of Justice is in charge of the Foreign Agent Registration Act and in charge of enforcing it. And we’ll have to see what happens from here.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll leave it at that. I want to thank you very much for being with us.
BROOKE WILLIAMS: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Brooke Williams is one of the journalists who wrote the New York Times piece, "Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks." She is also an investigative journalism fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University and built the database that you can see. We’ll link to the New York Times piece that links to that database.
This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Thirteen years old and working in the tobacco plantations in North Carolina and other states, stay with us.
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 Even as tobacco companies are legally barred from selling cigarettes to children, they are reportedly profiting from child labor. Investigations by The New York Times and Human Rights Watch reveal hundreds, if not thousands, of children are working on tobacco farms in the United States. Many suffer from "green tobacco sickness," or nicotine poisoning, which can cause vomiting, dizziness and irregular heart rates, among other symptoms. Children are especially vulnerable to toxic pesticides since their bodies are still developing. Workers can absorb as much nicotine as if they were actually smoking simply by handling wet tobacco leaves. We speak with Steven Greenhouse, longtime labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, who went to North Carolina to meet the young laborers. "I was shocked that a lot of these kids said, 'I work in the fields from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.,'" Greenhouse says of the 60-hour weekly schedules the young workers commonly endure, often in grueling heat. Under U.S. law, tobacco farms can hire workers as young as 12 years old for unlimited hours, as long as it doesn’t conflict with their school attendance.
Image Credit: HRW.org
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Tobacco companies cannot legally sell cigarettes to children, but they’re reportedly profiting from child labor. That’s the conclusion of a recent investigation by The New York Times that uncovers the dangers faced by thousands of children working on tobacco farms in the United States. Headlined "Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields," the piece reveals child laborers frequently catch what is known as "green tobacco sickness," or nicotine poisoning, which can cause vomiting, dizziness, irregular heart rates, among other symptoms. Children are especially vulnerable to toxic pesticides since their bodies are still developing. The risks include nervous system damage, reproductive impacts and cancer. Many of the kids are immigrants, or children of immigrants, and routinely work 60-hour work weeks, without overtime pay. Tobacco workers can absorb as much nicotine as if they were actually smoking simply by handling wet tobacco leaves.
Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch spoke to several child tobacco workers who described what it’s like to work on tobacco farms.
CHILD TOBACCO WORKER 1: Your neck starts hurting, your shoulders are hurting, and it’s just like your body wants to give up.
CHILD TOBACCO WORKER 2: It feels like you can’t feel your legs, and you’ve got to take breaks.
HECTOR: I use the bathroom before I leave, and I just wait ’til I get back here. We start working at 6:00, and we get out at 6:00. And I just wait ’til I get home.
CHILD TOBACCO WORKER 3: It feels horrible, because you feel like there’s no air. And then you look down, you look beside, and then you’re only halfway done. And you feel like it’s time for us to get out, because you feel like you’re going to die in there.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from a video by Human Rights Watch, which accompanied its recent report, "US: Child Workers in Danger on Tobacco Farms." Under U.S. law, tobacco farms can hire workers at much younger ages, for longer hours and under more hazardous conditions than in almost any other sector. Federal law allows children as young as 12 years old to work on farms for unlimited hours, as long as it doesn’t conflict with their school attendance. Tobacco growers say the practice of using young teenagers is rare, but The New York Times found the practice is still prevalent.
Well, for more, we’re joined by Steven Greenhouse, the longtime labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times, author of the exposé, "Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields."
Steven Greenhouse, welcome back to Democracy Now!
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: Nice to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain more what you found.
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: So, I went to North Carolina, and I went to the eastern part of the state and visited many tobacco farms and met many young kids who were working in tobacco—you know, 13-year-old Saray Cambray Alvarez, 16-year-old Ana Flores, 15-year-old Edinson [Bueso]. And, you know, it is fairly prevalent. And I was shocked that a lot of these kids said, "I work in the fields from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m." Ana Flores told me she wakes up at 5:00 in the morning, leaves for the fields at 6:00, gets to the fields at 7:00, works until 7:00 p.m., sometimes 8:00 p.m., sometimes 8:30. And a lot of these kids told me they get really sick some of the time. The nicotine—when there’s a lot of dew, when it rains, the nicotine in the plants will kind of dissolve into the water, and when it gets on people’s skin, that’s when they get this nicotine poisoning, green tobacco sickness. And they throw up. They get nauseous. They get dizzy. This one 15-year-old girl, Esmeralda Juarez, told me that at one point she was feeling so sick she asked her supervisor, "I really need just to sit for five or 10 minutes. I’m feeling nauseous." And she told me that unless she kept on working, he was going to fire her. So it’s a very difficult, shall I say, road to hoe. You know, it’s very difficult for these kids. It’s very difficult for many workers. Now, a lot of—
AMY GOODMAN: Even getting access to water.
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: So, a lot of the workers say the days are too long. It’s very, very hot. You know, in North Carolina in the summer, it can be 90, 95, even 100. And some of the workers I interviewed said that they’ll work ’til—they’ll work across the field. They’ll be dying of thirst, so it might take another hour for them to, you know, weed or pluck unwanted flowers off the plants, and take them an hour to get back to the trucks where the water was. And they say they felt extremely thirsty, extremely uncomfortable.
AMY GOODMAN: Human Rights Watch found many child tobacco workers are expected to operate dangerous machinery, lift heavy loads, climb to perilous heights to hang tobacco for drying. One boy, who preferred not to be named, described the dangers he faces on the job.
CHILD TOBACCO WORKER 4: [translated] Almost all of us climb up onto the wooden beams, that are 10-, 15-, 20-, 30-meters high. Sometimes you can step in the wrong place and fall all the way down. If you suffer an accident, you can even lose your life. It’s very dangerous.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Steven Greenhouse, this is dangerous for adults, let alone children. You write, "Opponents of child labor note [that] Brazil, India and some other tobacco-producing nations already prohibit anyone under 18 from working on tobacco farms." What happened here?
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: So, three years ago, then-Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis proposed some broad new restrictions against child labor. You know, she proposed that no children under 16 work in tobacco fields. And as part of that package, she said no children under 16 should work with power-driven equipment, like tractors. She also proposed that no children under 18 work in grain silos. You know, there were some horrendous stories about kids being crushed to death in grain silos. Then, as often happens in the United States, there was a huge backlash by industry, by farmers saying, "This is terrible. We need these workers. It’s important to have young workers learning agriculture. And if you ban them, it’s going to really hurt the next generation of people in farming." And the Obama administration—this was now in 2012 during his re-election campaign, and basically, the Obama administration caved and withdrew Secretary Solis’s proposal. So now what’s happening, Amy, is some advocates are trying to kind of refloat this idea just with regard to tobacco, thinking that in President Obama’s last two years of office, with all these elections and politics behind him, he might have the courage to go forward with this ban on tobacco workers under age 16.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me read the Obama administration comment, a statement, the press release that it issued. The Obama administration issued a press statement that read: "The Obama administration is firmly committed to promoting family farmers and respecting the rural way of life, especially the role that parents and other family members play in passing those traditions down through the generations." Your response, Steven Greenhouse?
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: So, I should have explained, Amy. So, after Secretary Solis proposed this, all these farmers said, you know, "We run family farms. We need our 10-year-olds and 12-year-olds and 14-year-olds able to work on the farms." And the Obama administration has explicitly exempted family farms and kids on those—you know, and children on those farms from these rules. Nonetheless, there was such a firestorm against these proposals, you know, not just by agricultural interests, but by many Republican lawmakers, and then some Democratic lawmakers in the farm states also got very worried that it might hurt their re-election, and President Obama thought it might cause him to lose certain states. So he basically—you know, I use the word "caved." And he said, "We’re not going to really consider these proposals for the remainder of my administration," which is pretty strong language. But Human Rights Watch and other groups are really pushing now and saying, you know, "Tobacco work is so unhealthy for kids. Let’s make this one exception and bar this in your last two years of office."
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn to Graham Boyd, the executive vice president for the Tobacco Growers Association of North Carolina. He told you most tobacco farmers go beyond what is required in terms of labor compliance, saying, "There is absolutely zero benefit in mistreating farm workers." He went on to acknowledge the danger of nicotine poisoning and other tough conditions in the fields, saying, quote, "No one is going to say it’s a day at the beach." Steven Greenhouse?
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: Yes. So, I was surprised when I interviewed some of the folks from the Tobacco Growers Associations. You know, I wasn’t surprised that they said, "We hardly hire anyone under 16, anyone under 18." But when I asked them, you know, "What would you think about proposals to ban kids under 16?" they said they were open to it, even kids under 18. They’re facing a lot of pressure from one cigarette company, which has really taken the lead on this. Philip Morris International has adopted a proposal far, far stricter than the U.S. government regulations. You know, Philip Morris International bars any of its growers from using people, workers under age 18, and it has banned, barred 20 growers in the United States over the past year for using workers under age 18. R.J. Reynolds and Altria, you know, the two other giant cigarette companies, have not adopted proposals nearly as strong. They’re saying, "We hate illegal child labor." Everyone hates illegal child labor. And they say, "We think kids under 18 should not be doing hazardous work." But they—you know, Reynolds and Altria don’t see regular tobacco work in the fields, where people are getting green tobacco sickness, as hazardous.
AMY GOODMAN: What was Hilda Solis’s response herself, the secretary of labor, who pushed so hard for this?
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: I tried to interview Secretary Solis on this, but I didn’t hear back. I think she—you know, I think she was pretty courageous in pushing for this, but I think she doesn’t want to be seen as criticizing the Obama administration right now.
AMY GOODMAN: And how many children do you think are working in the fields in the States?
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: I think certainly several hundred. Some people say thousands. I think that might be a high number, but certainly several hundred. And there are a lot of kids, 13, 14, 15, working. I interviewed a lot of 17-, 18-, 19-year-olds who said, "I began at the age of 12." I interviewed this 13-year-old, Saray, whose picture is on the front page. I interviewed her 22-year-old sister. The 22-year-old sister said, "I’ve been doing this since the age of 12." So it really is quite prevalent.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to, before we go, get to another piece you recently wrote about wage theft. Talk about what that is and where it’s happening.
STEVEN GREENHOUSE: So, when I was in North Carolina, it’s funny, I was interviewing some folks, and some of the workers were saying, "I suffered wage theft." I said, "What is wage theft?" So, you know, many, many employers violate minimum-wage laws or don’t pay time and a half when workers work more than 40 hours a week. Or when workers work, say, 45, 50 hours a week and should be getting overtime, some hours will magically disappear from their electronic timecards and will just say they worked 39 or 40 hours, so they don’t get overtime. Sometimes employers will illegally steal tips that waiters, waitresses, bartenders deserve, and it’s illegal for managers to take tips. And all those different schemes to deprive workers of their rightful wages, that’s been called wage theft. And there’s a growing push by advocates to get not just the U.S. Labor Department, but state labor departments, to get much more aggressive about it.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but I thank you very much, Steven Greenhouse, author of "Just 13, and Working Risky 12-Hour Shifts in the Tobacco Fields," his latest piece, also author of the book, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker." He’s the longtime labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times. We’ll link to the articles on wage theft and children working in the tobacco fields of the United States at democracynow.org.
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President Obama has confirmed he will not fulfill his pledge to take executive action on immigration reform by summer’s end. Obama had promised a broad overhaul in the face of Republican obstruction, including a potential new reprieve to slow his record-breaking deportations. But over the weekend, the White House cited what it called House Republicans’ "extreme politicization of this issue" for forcing Obama to wait until after the midterm elections. Obama had faced calls from a number of Democrats to delay action so as not to hurt their election chances this November. In an interview with Chuck Todd of NBC, Obama denied Democratic midterm success as his motivation. Instead, Obama said he needs more time to convince the U.S. public on the merits of his approach.
President Obama: "I’m being honest now, about the politics of it. This problem with unaccompanied children that we saw a couple if weeks ago, where you had from Central America a surge of kids who are showing up at the border, got a lot of attention. And a lot of Americans started thinking, ’We’ve got this immigration crisis on our hands.’ Now, the fact of the matter is, is that the number of people apprehended crossing our borders has plummeted over the course of the decade. It’s far lower than it was 10 years ago. And in terms of these unaccompanied children, we’ve actually systematically worked through the problem so that the surge in June dropped in July, dropped further in August. It’s now below what it was last year. But that’s not the impression on people’s minds. And what I want to do is, when I take executive action, I want to make sure that it’s sustainable."
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President Obama has launched an effort to rally Congress and the public behind a sustained offensive against the militant group Islamic State. Obama is set to meet with Congress on Tuesday followed by a national address the following day. He discussed the plan Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press.
President Obama: "We’re not looking at sending in 100,000 American troops. We are going to be, as part of an international coalition, carrying out airstrikes in support of work on the ground by Iraqi troops, Kurdish troops. We are going to be helping to put together a plan for them so that they can start retaking territory that ISIL had taken over. What I want people to understand, though, is that over the course of months we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL, we are going to systematically degrade their capabilities, we’re going shrink the territory that they control, and ultimately we’re going to defeat them."
The United States says it will lead the offensive against the Islamic State with a so-called "core coalition" of 10 countries. The White House says the fight could last beyond the end of Obama’s term in early 2017. The news follows a month of U.S. bombing attacks against ISIL fighters in Iraq. Over the weekend, American warplanes expanded the offensive with strikes against militants near the Haditha Dam.
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A ceasefire between the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian rebels appears to be holding despite a weekend of scattered attacks. A deal brokered on Friday was followed by clashes around 24 hours later in Donetsk and Mariupol. The truce lays out the "decentralization of power" as a key component of any long-term agreement, but both Ukraine and its rival Russia have pushed diverging proposals for what that would mean. It also calls for a mass prisoner exchange. The ceasefire was reached as NATO approved a 4,000-strong force capable of rapid deployment in eastern Europe to confront Russia.
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The United Nations says more than 3,000 people have died in eastern Ukraine since violence broke out in April, including the 298 passengers killed when a Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down.
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Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny: "We will have results of safety by November 2014, and after that, these vaccines will start to be rolled out in the affected countries, starting with healthcare workers and other front-line staff in the affected countries. So this is real. This is going into the field. This is not staying it in laboratories."
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The United Nations has now set a goal of containing the epidemic within six to nine months. Speaking to NBC’s "Meet the Press," President Obama said the U.S. military will play a role in the international response.
President Obama: "We’re going to have to get U.S. military assets just to set up, for example, isolation units and equipment there to provide security for public health workers surging from around the world. If we do that, then it’s still going to be months before this problem is controllable in Africa, but it shouldn’t reach our shores. … If we don’t make that effort now and this spreads, not just through Africa, but other parts of the world, there is the prospect then that the virus mutates, it becomes more easily transmittable, and then it could be a serious danger to the United States."
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