March, 08 2013, 03:18pm EDT
USDA's Proposed Country of Origin Labeling Rule Will Benefit Consumers
Statement of Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter
WASHINGTON
" Food & Water Watch commends USDA for taking sensible steps to strengthen Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) requirements for meat. There is overwhelming consumer support for country of origin labels and a growing interest by consumers in knowing the source of their food. The USDA's proposed rule will help families know where the meat in their supermarket came from.
"The proposed changes eliminate the vague and misleading 'mixed origin' country of origin label for meat and ensures that each cut of meat clearly displays each stage of production (where the animal was born, raised and slaughtered) on the label. This commonsense approach improves the usefulness of the information consumers receive from the label and allows livestock producers to distinguish their products in the marketplace.
"Improving the integrity of country of origin labels and providing clear, straightforward information also addresses concerns brought in a World Trade Organization challenge to the current rules. We urge the USDA to finalize this proposed rule."
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
Taking on Musk, Sanders Says Corporate Abuse of H-1B Visa Program Must End
"We need an economy that works for all, not just the few. And one important way forward in that direction is to bring about major reforms in the H-1B program."
Jan 02, 2025
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a longtime advocate of reforming H-1B visas, on Thursday reiterated his argument that "widespread corporate abuse" of the guest worker program must end amid a heated battle among Republican President-elect Donald Trump's allies.
"Elon Musk and a number of other billionaire tech company owners have argued that this federal program is vital to our economy because of the scarcity of highly skilled American engineers and other tech workers. I disagree," said Sanders (I-Vt.), a prominent advocate of pro-worker policies including raising the federal minimum wage, in a lengthy statement.
"The main function of the H-1B visa program and other guest worker initiatives is not to hire 'the best and the brightest,' but rather to replace good-paying American jobs with low-wage indentured servants from abroad," he asserted. "The cheaper the labor they hire, the more money the billionaires make."
"If this program is really supposed to be about importing workers with highly advanced degrees in science and technology, why are H-1B guest workers being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers?"
The fight has pitted some far-right, anti-immigrant Trump supporters against Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the billionaires charged with leading the president-elect's proposed Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, who was born in South Africa and is now the world's richest person, has said he once had an H-1B visa and declared last week that "I will go to war on this issue."
Musk is also CEO of the electric vehicle company Tesla and has used H-1B visas as an employer. So has Trump. The incoming president—who in 2016 pledged to eliminate "rampant, widespread" abuse of "H-1B as a cheap labor program"—said Saturday that "I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I've been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It's a great program."
Faced with accusations that those remarks represented a shift from his previous criticism of the program, Trump toldFox News on Tuesday: "I didn't change my mind. I've always felt we have to have the most competent people in our country, and we need competent people... We need smart people coming into our country. We need a lot of people coming in. We're going to have jobs like we've never had before."
As
Common Dreamsreported Sunday, progressives are arguing that both the anti-immigrant and billionaire supporters of Trump are wrong. Krystal Ball, co-host of the online news show "Breaking Points," said that "the truth is if you are struggling it's likely because of billionaire robber barons like Trump, Elon, and Vivek, who rig the rules to screw regular people."
Sanders noted that "in 2022 and 2023, the top 30 corporations using this program laid off at least 85,000 American workers while they hired over 34,000 new H-1B guest workers. There are estimates that as many as 33% of all new information technology jobs in America are being filled by guest workers. Further, according to Census Bureau data, there are millions of Americans with advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math who are not currently employed in those professions."
Taking aim at just one of Musk's companies on Thursday, the senator asked: "If there is really a shortage of skilled tech workers in America, why did Tesla lay off over 7,500 American workers this year—including many software developers and engineers at its factory in Austin, Texas—while being approved to employ thousands of H-1B guest workers?"
"Moreover, if these jobs are only going to 'the best and brightest,' why has Tesla employed H-1B guest workers as associate accountants for as little as $58,000, associate mechanical engineers for as little as $70,000 a year, and associate material planners for as little as $80,000 a year?" he continued. "Those don't sound like highly specialized jobs that are for the top 0.1% as Musk claimed this week."
The senator shared his statement on the Musk-owned social media platform X, formerly called Twitter. Multiple other users shared videos of Sanders criticizing the H-1B program on television and the Senate floor going back to 2007, his first year in the chamber.
"If this program is really supposed to be about importing workers with highly advanced degrees in science and technology, why are H-1B guest workers being employed as dog trainers, massage therapists, cooks, and English teachers?" Sanders asked. "Can we really not find English teachers in America?"
The senator expressed support for using the program as a temporary fix for labor shortages in highly specialized areas while also arguing that "in the long term, if the United States is going to be able to compete in a global economy, we must make sure that we have the best-educated workforce in the world. And one way to help make that happen is to substantially increase the guest worker fees large corporations pay to fund scholarships, apprenticeships, and job training opportunities for American workers."
"Further, we must also significantly raise the minimum wage for guest workers, allow them to easily switch jobs, and make sure that corporations are required to aggressively recruit American workers first before they can hire workers from overseas," he added. "It should never be cheaper for a corporation to hire a guest worker from overseas than an American worker."
While Musk, Ramaswamy, and others "are right" that "we need a highly skilled and well-educated workforce," Sanders said, "the answer is to hire qualified American workers first and to make certain that we have an education system that produces the kind of workforce that our country needs for the jobs of the future. And that's not just engineering. We are in desperate need of more doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, electricians, plumbers, and a host of other professions."
In addition to blasting the ultrarich beneficiaries of the H-1B program like Musk and Trump, Sanders called out decades-old lies about the impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and permanent normal trade relations with China.
"Thirty years ago, the economic elite and political establishment in both major parties told us not to worry about the loss of blue-collar manufacturing jobs that would come as a result of disastrous unfettered free trade agreements," he said. "They promised that those lost jobs would be more than offset by the many good-paying, white-collar information technology jobs that would be created in the United States."
Sanders stressed that "not only have corporations exported millions of blue-collar manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico, and other low-wage countries, they are now importing hundreds of thousands of low-paid guest workers from abroad to fill the white-collar technology jobs that are available."
"At a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when the richest three people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our country, and when the CEOs of major corporations make almost 300 times more than their average workers, we need fundamental changes in our economic policies," he concluded. "We need an economy that works for all, not just the few. And one important way forward in that direction is to bring about major reforms in the H-1B program."
Other progressives echoed the senator—including Nina Turner, who co-chaired his 2020 presidential campaign and said on Thursday that "Sen. Sanders is right. We must stand against worker exploitation in all forms, be it American workers, workers overseas, or immigrant workers here in America. The ruling class wants cheap labor and will game any system to secure it."
Like Turner, Howard University professor Ron Hira, who co-authored the book Outsourcing America, also weighed in on X.
"Sen. Sanders has been leading the fight for H-1B reform for 20 years," Hira said Thursday. "He's made floor speeches and was the only 2016 Dem presidential candidate to publicly criticize Disney for replacing its U.S. workers with H-1Bs. His framing is exactly right. CEOs are trying to pull a fast one."
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Rights Group Finds Israel Uses Gaza 'Safe Zones' to 'Hide a Genocide'
The analysis was published a day before Israeli forces bombed yet another "safe zone," killing at least 12 Palestinians, including children.
Jan 02, 2025
A report published on Wednesday details how Israel forcibly expels Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in order to facilitate—and hide—genocidal attacks in evacuated areas, while forcing refugees into alleged humanitarian "safe zones" that are "intentionally designed to ensure the destruction of all life sheltering there."
The Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq published the report, titled How to Hide a Genocide, which examines "the role of evacuation orders and safe zones in Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza."
According to the report:
Since the very first week of its genocide, Israel has methodically cleared vast stretches of the Gaza Strip of its inhabitants through its unlawful issuance of evacuation orders. Israel presents these evacuation orders to the public as proof of its efforts to minimize civilian casualties and to support its alleged compliance with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law. However, they achieve the direct opposite. Over 90% of Gaza's population... has been forcibly displaced from their homes and temporary shelters, the majority of them multiple times, to alleged safe zones.
Contrary to their label, these zones are anything but safe. With insufficient space, shelter, sanitation facilities, food, or water sources, and medical care, these safe zones are intentionally designed to ensure the destruction of all life sheltering there. What's more, the safe zones—despite their unilateral establishment by Israel—are routinely targeted by Israeli occupying forces (IOF) by air, land, and sea. Crowded together with nowhere to flee, Palestinians in Gaza are either killed by Israeli strikes, severely physically and mentally injured by the IOF's physical and psychological warfare, or subject to a slow death as a result of starvation, dehydration, a complete lack of crucial medical care, or the rampant spread of infectious diseases in the densely populated, unsanitary zones.
Al-Haq said: "As shown throughout the report, by applying humanitarian terms to its practice of forcibly transferring Palestinians, without any legal basis and in a manner that breaches international law, and labeling areas as safe zones despite being constantly attacked and lacking in all essentials for survival, Israel argues that it is acting in accordance with its legal obligations when in fact it is providing further evidence of its genocidal intent as it uses these measures to commit and contribute to the genocidal acts of killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, and creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza."
The Al-Haq report was published shortly after Sila Mahmoud Al-Faseeh, a 3-week-old baby girl,
died from hypothermia in the al-Mawasi safe zone in southern Gaza. She is one of at least eight people—seven of them infants or children—who have reportedly frozen to death in Gaza in recent weeks.
The report was also published a day before Israeli forces bombed a tent encampment in al-Mawasi, killing at least 12 Palestinians including three children and wounding at least 15 others.
It was one of numerous Israeli strikes on the al-Mawasi safe zone, which have killed or wounded at least hundreds of Palestinians. In the deadliest of these, at least 90 Palestinians including many women and children were killed—some of them burned alive in their tents—and hundreds of others were injured when eight 2,000-pound bombs, at least one of which was supplied by the United States, were dropped on the humanitarian zone on July 13, 2024 in order to assassinate Hamas leader Mohammed Deif. Israeli forces then attacked and killed rescue workers arriving at the site of the strike.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the death toll from the strike "unacceptably high." However, just weeks later, the Biden administration approved approximately $20 billion worth of new U.S. weapons for Israel.
The International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands is currently weighing whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
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Outrage Over Global 'Silence' as Israel Continues Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza
"History will reveal those who spoke out against this genocide, and those who did not," said one rights group.
Jan 02, 2025
A pediatrician working in Gaza was among those on Thursday who condemned "how deaf the world has become to repeated cries" from people in the enclave as Israel continues its assault and humanitarian aid blockade, which has plunged parts of Gaza into famine conditions, according to experts.
"I'm watching children die in every possible way whether it's violence, cold, hunger, disease—all directly as a consequence of a carefully orchestrated Israeli military campaign that has been enabled by the United States and other countries that are turning a deaf ear and blind eye," Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan toldAl Jazeera.
At least seven infants have died of hypothermia in the enclave in recent days, their families among 1.9 million people who have been forcibly displaced by Israel's bombardment of Gaza. With 92% of housing units destroyed or damaged, people across Gaza have resorted to living in makeshift tents that don't protect them from wind, heavy rain, and cold nighttime temperatures.
"I struggle for words to describe how horrific the situation has become and how deaf the world has become to repeated cries from humanitarian workers, and mostly from Gazans themselves," said Haj-Hassan. "They have documented on a daily basis their own genocide and have been killed for doing so."
Paula Gil, president of the Spanish chapter of Doctors Without Borders or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said Israel's U.S.-backed assault has reduced Gaza to "a death trap."
"This does not happen in a vacuum. The hypocrisy and complicity of Israel's allies is allowing the social fabric of Gaza to be destroyed with impunity."
"Families are surviving in makeshift shelters made of wood, plastic, and mattresses," she told Al Jazeera. "Now the cold and the storms have arrived. How will they face the winter in these conditions?"
Haj-Hassan's and Gil's comments came as Israel bombed the coastal area of al-Mawasi, a so-called "humanitarian zone" that has nevertheless been attacked by the Israel Defense Forces numerous times. At least 63 Palestinians were killed in attacks across Gaza on Thursday, including 12 in al-Mawasi.
A report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) on Wednesday showed that around 100,000 Gaza residents have left the enclave since Israel began its assault in October 2023 and more than 45,000 people have been killed, while 10,000 are missing and presumed dead.
Those statistics mean that the population of Gaza is down 6% since Israel's current escalation started.
Israel, said the PCBS, has "raged a brutal aggression against Gaza targeting all kinds of life there; humans, buildings, and vital infrastructure... Entire families were erased from the civil register. There are catastrophic human and material losses."
Human rights groups have said Israel's relentless bombardment of Gaza and its recent ground offensive in northern Gaza—where Israeli military leaders seek to execute the so-called Generals' Plan to forcibly displace everyone in the area and kill anyone who remains through starvation or other means—amounts to ethnic cleansing.
"As the world watches in silence, the far-right government of indicted war criminal [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu is carrying out its intentional campaign of slaughter, mass destruction, forced starvation, and ethnic cleansing in Gaza," said the Council on American Islamic Relations. "History will reveal those who spoke out against this genocide, and those who did not."
The U.S. government—the largest international funder of the Israel Defense Forces, has continued to give political and material support to Israel as it has bombarded and blockaded Gaza, making more than 100 weapons transfers to the Israeli government.
"This does not happen in a vacuum," said Gil. "The hypocrisy and complicity of Israel's allies is allowing the social fabric of Gaza to be destroyed with impunity... There is no future. There is no hope. In Gaza, humanity is being destroyed and we cannot look away."
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