In the news this week, an awful reminder of the alliance between American law enforcement and the property-owning class — and its value of profit over human life. This article from the Guardian describes how police officers killed 26-year-old Sudanese refugee Chiewelthap Mariar as he finished working a shift at an Oklahoma meatpacking plant after being fired. The officers have tried to justify the murder by claiming that Mariar was armed. But a coworker who filmed the officers’ fatal attack on Mariar (and was later fired for doing so) said that he was working with a band cutter from the plant.
After witnessing the murder of their coworker, Seaboard Foods workers were forced to get back to their shifts. This is the latest and most grievous in a series of attacks on workers’ health and safety at Seaboard, which was investigated by OSHA last year and forced to improve working conditions after OSHA found that the company did not document workers’ illnesses and injuries on the job — and then retaliated against those workers for taking time off. But it’s horribly clear that working conditions at Seaboard are as unacceptable as ever, and that the company is willing to unite with police to threaten its workers’ lives, all in the name of keeping the production line going.
This week we’ll be speaking with Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch, who was initially refused a Harvard Kennedy School fellowship for speaking out against Israel’s human rights violations. We’ll talk to him about the conditions in Israel that led Human Rights Watch and others to condemn their treatment of Palestinians as apartheid. Especially in light of a new right wing government that is pushing the boundaries of political extremism. And we’ll of course tackle our own government’s willing blindness and complicity in this human rights atrocity.
This episode will be available as a video to paying subscribers on Friday night. Everyone can tune in this Saturday via Pandora, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and more. Thanks for tuning in.
late on getting this one out
“the alliance between American law enforcement and the property-owning class “. Laying it on a little thick? No?