“it matters not where you live”: Thomas Paine, The Crisis, Dec. 23, 1776, www.ushistory.org/paine/crisis/c-01.htm.
“benefited the economically successful”: Beth Bailey, America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6.
“all citizens have equal rights”: Andrew Bacevich, Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (New York: Picador, 2014), 19.
“Few of the very rich”: Ibid., 43.
“A hugely preponderant”: Quoted in Sandel, Justice, 86.
“We can’t just bomb someone”: Interviewed in National Bird, directed by Sonia Kennebeck (Independent Lens, 2016).
“This is what’s coming”: Quoted in Francisco Cantú, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018), 20.
“Long confused with PTSD”: Quoted ibid., 150. See also David Wood, What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars (New York: Little, Brown, 2016).
Some labeled him a “Nazi”: Simon Romero, “Border Patrol Memoir Ignites Dispute,” New York Times, May 19, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/us/francisco-cantu-border-patrol.html.
“to burden them with guilt”: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 43.
“the room for choices”: Ibid., 50.
“with pity and rigor”: Ibid., 60.
“Some of them grew up”: Cantú, The Line Becomes a River, 24.
“It’s a job in a county”: Brittny Mejia, “Complicated Identities Wrestling with Internal Conflict,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2018, enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=ac6f8add-169e-4509-93dc-77e27b5ef3f7.
“You’re arresting my compadres”: Quoted in Josiah McC. Heyman, “U.S. Immigration Officers of Mexican Ancestry as Mexican Americans, Citizens, and Immigration Police,” Current Anthropology 43, no. 3 (June 2002): 487.
“kid killer”: Quoted in Manny Fernandez et al., “‘People Actively Hate Us’: Inside the Border Patrol’s Morale Crisis,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/15/us/border-patrol-culture.html.
“It remains true”: Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 49.
“For most Americans”: Francisco Cantú, “Cages Are Cruel. The Desert Is, Too,” New York Times, June 30, 2018.
“Whenever I read comments”: Heather Linebaugh, “I Worked on the US Drone Program. The Public Should Know What Really Goes On,” Guardian, Dec. 29, 2013, www.theguardian.com/profile/heather-linebaugh.
“to someone who is listening”: Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 4.
“The public simply did not have”: Jameel Jaffer, The Drone Memos: Targeted Killing, Secrecy, and the Law (New York: New Press, 2016), 29.
“superfluous reporting requirements”: Jennifer Gibson, “Why Trump’s Actions Have Put Civilians at More Risk,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, March 7, 2019, www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-03-07/opinion-why-trumps-actions-have-put-civilians-at-more-risk.
“to present warfare as a form of virtue”: Samuel Moyn, “A War Without Civilian Deaths?,” New Republic, Oct. 23, 2018, newrepublic.com/article/151560/damage-control-book-review-nick-mcdonell-bodies-person.
“sculpt the world around it”: Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Dutton, 2009), 17.
“Blank spots on maps outline”: Ibid.
150–151 “I’m thankful that my doctors”: Quoted in Jonathan S. Landay, “Obama’s Drone War Kills ‘Others,’ Not Just Al Qaida Leaders,” McClatchy News, April 9, 2013, www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article24747826.html.
“pieces of flesh and put[ting] them in a coffin”: Quoted in International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan” (2012), 60.
“The blank spots on the map”: Rebecca Solnit, “The Visibility Wars,” in Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, a book of Trevor Paglen’s photographs and projects on secrecy and surveillance (New York: Aperture, 2010), 6.
6. Shadow People
“One can’t live”: Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 299–300.
“There are people out there”: Interviewed in “Our Town—Part Two,” narrated by Ira Glass and Miki Meek, This American Life, Dec. 8, 2017, www.thisamericanlife.org/633/our-town-part-two.
“Employers feel under no compulsion”: Philip Martin, “The Missing Bridge: How Immigrant Networks Keep Americans out of Dirty Jobs,” Population and Environment 14, no. 6 (1993): 539.
“It made us all think”: Interviewed in “Our Town—Part Two.”
“tortured flesh”: Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 143.
“regularly ripped off the heads”: Ibid., 182.
“The blasé attitude towards unbearable suffering”: “Shocking Investigation at a Turkey Slaughterhouse,” People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals website, www.peta.org/blog/shocking-investigation-turkey-slaughterhouse/.
“In Tokugawa-era Japan”: Wilson J. Warren, Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 135–36.
“they who delight”: Quoted ibid., 135.
“a very river of death”: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; repr. New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 36.
“The novel I plan”: Quoted in Leon Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 78.
“There was not even a place”: Sinclair, The Jungle, 114.
“I aimed at the public’s heart”: Quoted in Harris, Upton Sinclair, 71.
“social and cultural apartheid”: Roger Horowitz, “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 63.
“defeat prejudice”: Ibid., 74.
“My scars are many”: Quoted ibid., 245.
“All the abuses described”: Lance Compa, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in US Meat and Poultry Plants,” Human Rights Watch, 2005, 101.
“causes more than bodily pain”: Angela Stuesse, Scratching Out a Living: Latinos, Race, and Work in the Deep South (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 127.
“They say every Englishman”: Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (1899; repr. Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2016), 2:148.
“with a high percentage”: Kira Burkhart et al., “Water Pollution from Slaughterhouses,” Environmental Integrity Project, 2018, 3.
“They have been chickenized”: Christopher Leonard, The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America’s Food Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 145.
“We believe if we are”: “Sanderson Farms Continues Its Mission in Transparency,” press release, 2018, sandersonfarms.com/press-releases/sanderson-farms-continues-mission-transparency/.
“Without the Mexican”: David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 183.
“the Mexican was inferior”: Ibid., 228.
“had to be taught”: Ibid., 231.
“matter out of place”: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002), 44.
“Where there is dirt”: Ibid., 44.
“polluting person”: Ibid., 140.
“this people [Jews] should”: Quoted in Jerry Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, vol. 2, Belonging, 1492–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 10.
“potentates of England’s Jews”: Simon Schama, The Story of the Jews (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 317.
“sucked dry, injured”: R. Po-chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., In and out of the Ghetto: Jewi
sh-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 164.
“the breaking of interest slavery”: Muller, Capitalism and the Jews, 31.
“When a Jewish lender died”: Schama, The Story of the Jews, 2: 315–16.
“The way they came”: Quoted in Richard Fausset, “After ICE Raids, a Reckoning in Mississippi’s Chicken County,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/12/28/us/mississippi-ice-raids-poultry-plants.html.
7. “Essential Workers”
“No other country raises”: Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 333.
“not only whole fish”: Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1939; repr. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 118.
“too graphic for the viewing public”: Gail A. Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse: The Shocking Story of Greed, Neglect, and Inhumane Treatment Inside the Meat Industry (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1997), 214.
“zone of confinement”: Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013), 97.
“The cattle jump and kick”: Ibid., 151.
“The worst thing”: Quoted in Eisnitz, Slaughterhouse, 87–88.
“Nobody wants to do that”: Quoted in Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds, 151.
“She maintained, passionately and with conviction”: Ibid., 160.
“Killing and cutting up the animals”: Lance Compa, “Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Workers’ Rights in US Meat and Poultry Plants,” Human Rights Watch, 2005, 11.
“Every week throughout the South”: Scott Bronstein, “Special Report—Chicken: How Safe?,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 26, 1991.
“They don’t talk about it publicly”: Kimberly Kindy, “At Chicken Plants, Chemicals Blamed for Health Ailments Are Poised to Proliferate,” Washington Post, April 25, 2013.
“JBS was in touch”: Quoted in Robert Klemko and Kimberly Kindy, “He Fled Congo to Work in a U.S. Meat Plant. Then He—and Hundreds of His Co-workers—Got the Coronavirus,” Washington Post, Aug. 6, 2020.
“The food supply chain”: “A Delicate Balance: Feeding the Nation and Keeping Our Employees Healthy,” Tyson ad, April 27, 2020. The ad can be found at www.washingtonpost.com/context/tyson-ad/86b9290d-115b-4628-ad80-0e679dcd2669.
“It is important”: Donald J. Trump, “Executive Order on Delegating Authority Under the DPA with Respect to Food Supply Chain Resources During the National Emergency Caused by the Outbreak of COVID-19,” April 28, 2020, www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-delegating-authority-dpa-respect-food-supply-chain-resources-national-emergency-caused-outbreak-covid-19/.
“In all, a record amount”: Michael Corkery and David Yaffe-Bellany, “As Meat Plants Stayed Open to Feed Americans, Exports to China Surged,” New York Times, June 16, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/business/meat-industry-china-pork.html.
“a consistent relationship”: Bruce P. Bernard, ed., “Musculoskeletal Disorders and Workplace Factors,” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, July 1997, iii.
“I haven’t seen conditions”: Quoted in Nancy Cleeland, “Union Decries Conditions at Pilgrim’s Pride Chicken Plant,” Los Angeles Times, Feb. 27, 2002.
“commercial shackles are unjust”: Quoted in John Samples, “James Madison’s Vision of Liberty,” Cato Policy Report 23, no. 2 (March/April 2001): 11, www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/policy-report/2001/3/madison.pdf.
“These are great, great people”: “Trump Makes Appearance at the RNC with Frontline Workers,” CNN, Aug. 25, 2020, www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/rnc-2020-day-1/h_4bb5f99b5b708420912a9e00b58ddc99.
“an entire region hostage”: Holly Ellyatt, “German District Sees Lockdown Return as Country Tries to Suppress Regional Outbreaks,” CNBC, June 23, 2020, www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/germany-is-struggling-with-more-coronavirus-outbreaks.html.
“organized irresponsibility”: Phillip Grull, “German Labour Minister Announces Stricter Standards in the Meat Industry,” EURACTIV Germany, July 29, 2020, www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/german-labour-minister-announces-stricter-standards-in-the-meat-industry/.
“Nothing can bring these workers”: Quoted in “Death of Four Workers Prompts Deeper Look at DuPont Safety Practices,” OSHA News Release— Region 6, Department of Labor, July 9, 2015, www.osha.gov/news/newsreleases/region6/07092015.
“absent extraordinary circumstances”: Noam Scheiber, “Labor Department Curbs Announcements of Company Violations,” New York Times, Oct. 23, 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/business/economy/labor-department-memo.html.
“home and social” aspects: Liz Crampton, “Azar Blames ‘Home and Social Conditions’ for the Meatpacking Crisis,” Politico, May 8, 2020, www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-agriculture/2020/05/08/azar-blames-home-and-social-conditions-for-the-meatpacking-crisis-787452.
“a nicety that makes sense”: Quoted in Michael Grabell, Claire Perlman, and Bernice Yeung, “Emails Reveal Chaos as Meatpacking Companies Fought Health Agencies over COVID-19 Outbreaks in Their Plants,” ProPublica, June 12, 2020, www.propublica.org/article/emails-reveal-chaos-as-meatpacking-companies-fought-health-agencies-over-covid-19-outbreaks-in-their-plants.
“What do we see”: Interviewed in Christina Stella, “Immigrant Meatpackers Say They’re Being Blamed for Spread of COVID-19,” NPR, Aug. 10, 2020, www.npr.org/2020/08/10/900766712/immigrant-meatpackers-say-theyre-being-blamed-for-spread-of-covid-19.
“We live in the shadows”: Quoted in Margaret Gray, “The Dark Side of Local,” Jacobin, Aug. 21, 2016, www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/farmworkers-local-locavore-agriculture-exploitation/.
8. Dirty Energy
“heat, noise, confusion”: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier 1937; repr. (New York: Berkley Publishing, 1961), 21.
“The most definitely distinctive thing”: Ibid., 36.
“fossil fuels still supplied”: “World Energy Outlook 2019,” IEA report, www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2019/oil.
“serious deficiencies”: National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling,” Deepwater: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling, Jan. 2011, 221, www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-OILCOMMISSION/pdf/GPO-OILCOMMISSION.pdf.
“a series of identifiable mistakes”: Ibid., vii.
“indignant rage”: Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 21.
“A path to a life”: David Barstow, David Rohde, and Stephanie Saul, “Deepwater Horizon’s Final Hours,” New York Times, Dec. 25, 2010.
“to get away from that”: Quoted in William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling, Oil in Troubled Waters: Perceptions, Politics, and the Battle over Offshore Drilling (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 51.
“The more oil, the more jobs”: Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (New York: New Press, 2016), 73.
“least resistant personalities”: Ibid., 80–81.
“It was like we had been invaded”: Quoted in Jason Theriot, American Energy, Imperiled Coast: Oil and Gas Development in Louisiana’s Wetlands (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014), 43.
“Those leaders carefully walked”: Ibid., 201.
“more than four times higher”: National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, “Deepwater,” 225.
“more as a partner”: Ibid., 71–72.
“Help is on the way”: Quoted in Eric Lipton, “Trump Rollback Targets Offshore Rules ‘Written with Human Blood,’” New York Times, March 10,
2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/business/offshore-drilling-trump-administration.html.
“It makes me feel guilty”: Interviewed in, The Great Invisible, directed by Margaret Brown (Radius-TWC, 2014).
“If you look at SUV sales”: Quoted in David Sheppard, “Pandemic Crisis Offers Glimpse into Oil Industry’s Future,” Financial Times, May 3, 2020, www.ft.com/content/99fc40be-83aa-11ea-b872-8db45d5f6714.
9. Dirty Tech
“Google is not”: Sergey Brin and Larry Page, “‘An Owner’s Manual’ for Google’s Shareholders,” 2004 Founders’ IPO Letter, abc.xyz/investor /founders-letters/2004-ipo-letter/.
“smart creative”: Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works, with Alan Eagle (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014), 17.
“When a person carries out”: Ryan Gallagher, “Google Plans to Launch Censored Research Engine in China, Leaked Documents Reveal,” Intercept, Aug. 1, 2018, theintercept.com/2018/08/01/google-china-search-engine-censorship/.
“At some point you have to stand back”: Quoted in “It Was a Real Step Backward,” Spiegel International, March 3, 2010, www.spiegel.de/international/business/google-co-founder-on-pulling-out-of-china-it-was-a-real-step-backward-a-686269.html.
“directly contributing to”: “Open Letter: Google Must Not Capitulate on Human Rights to Gain Access to China,” Aug. 28, 2010, www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/08/open-letter-to-google-on-reported-plans-to-launch-a-censored-search-engine-in-china/.
“In the public consciousness”: Quoted in David Naguib Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, The Silicon Valley of Dreams: Environmental Injustice, Immigrant Workers, and the High-Tech Global Economy (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1.
“textbook example of ethnic”: Stephanie Nebehay, “U.N. Sees ‘Textbook Example of Ethnic Cleansing’ in Myanmar,” Reuters, Sept. 11, 2017, www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rohingya-un/u-n-sees-textbook-example-of-ethnic-cleansing-in-myanmar-idUSKCN1BM0SL.
“Under this new regime”: Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 53.