2026-03-21 00:13:17
“It takes money to kill bad guys.”
That’s how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth justified reports that the Pentagon is requesting $200 billion in additional funding to pay for its offensive in Iran, where, as of this writing, more than $18 billion has already been spent to kill thousands, with no end in sight.
Here at Mother Jones, we started to wonder: If the Trump administration weren’t so hellbent on “death and destruction,” at a moment rife with rising inflation and recession concerns, what else could $200 billion deliver? A lot, it turns out. We broke down a few line items below.
2.8 million public school teacher salaries
2,857 luxury 737 jets, bedroom included
378 years of federal public broadcasting funding
500 more White House ballrooms
4 years of a fully-funded National Institutes of Health
2 million Kash Patel trips to Milan by private jet
16.2 years of IRS funding, at pre-Trump levels
40 percent of Greenland, if it were for sale
2,666 Melania sequels
16.9 TSA budgets
2 Warner Bros.
1,779,628 Washington Post salaries
182 million miniature busts of Mount Rushmore with Trump’s face added
2,341 Trump heads on the real Mount Rushmore, space permitting
200 years of free New York City buses
Refund 70 percent of the tariffs the Treasury Department collected illegally
Restore Trump’s cuts to clean energy projects, 6 times over
247 Consumer Financial Protection Bureaus
1.4 billion pairs of Florsheim dress shoes
6.6 years of fully funded school lunches for every public school student in America
3 years of dental coverage, finally included in Medicare Part B
4,347 birthday parades, road repairs included
A lifetime supply of period products more than 100 million Americans
1.4 years worth of annual ACA subsidies, which expired in 2025
90 percent of Americans’ roughly $220 billion in medical debt
10 years of paid family leave funding
Approximately 1 tank of gas, when this is all over.
2026-03-20 21:46:15
If you were to invent a politician ideally suited to appeal to the MAGA base, you might come up with something like this: A classically handsome white guy with a tragically sympathetic life story whose service in US special forces during senseless wars led him to embrace America First isolationism—along with a substantial dose of conspiratorial far-right thinking. That is, they might come up with Joe Kent, a former Green Beret who did 11 combat deployments and lost his wife to an ISIS suicide bomber in 2019 before entering politics as a stalwart defender of Donald Trump.
The fact that Kent’s biography is so compelling to the MAGA faithful is what makes his decision this week to resign as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in protest of the Iran war such a problem for Trump and his administration. Unlike others the president has cast aside, Kent can’t be dismissed as a lightweight or a grifter. Instead, he has been built up for years by Tucker Carlson and others on the right as a model of everything the Trump-era GOP should represent. Now by publicly quitting, Kent is fueling a broader confict that is tearing apart Trump’s coalition over the Iran war and the role that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu played in pressing Trump into it.
“You wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms? Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson.”
As Kent wrote in his Tuesday resignation letter, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” On Wednesday evening, he made similar points in a quickly arranged interview with Carlson that has already been viewed more than 4 million times on YouTube and X. (The conversation later veered off into unsupported speculation about the assasination of Charlie Kirk and Trump’s near assasination in Butler, Pennsylvania.)
In response to Kent’s departure, the administration has turned to a predictable playbook with White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt putting out a statement lambasting the “absurd allegation” that Trump “made this decision based on the influence of others, even foreign countries.” In a nod to Kent’s appeal, Trump called Kent a “nice guy” before adding that he was “very weak on security.” Administration officials may also be the source of recently leaked news that the FBI is investigating Kent for potentially leaking sensitive information.
If the investigation is pursued, it would pit Kash Patel, Trump’s cosplaying FBI director, against a special forces veteran who moved on to doing covert operations for the CIA. (Carlson also recently released a video in which he suggested that the CIA and the Justice Department might be preparing to go after him as well because he was in touch with people in Iran before the war.) The idea of going after Kent and Carlson after they spoke out against the war would also likely draw attention to Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary who suffered no consequences for accidentally sharing war plans with a journalist and then lying about it.
It’s not hard to guess which side much of MAGA would choose—and to a large extent they already have. The faction of major right-wing influencers who are defending Kent or staying silent is notably louder than the one leaning into attacking him.
It helps that Kent is broadly right about why this war started, although he was wrong later in his resignation letter to portray Trump as a hapless victim of Israeli deception. As reporting from the New York Times and other outlets has made clear, Netanyahu played an essential role in pushing the United States toward war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio all but admitted as much when he said earlier this month the United States attacked Iran when it did because Israel had decided to strike. It is nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which Netanyahu opposed a war with Iran and Trump started one anyway.
That reality is impossible to stomach for Carlson and other right-wing figures who have criticized the war, such as former Fox News host Megyn Kelly. MAGA is supposed to be a movement of dominance with Trump as its punisher-in-chief. Now, as they see it, the president is being humiliated by a nation the size of New Jersey on the other side of the world that is undermining the isolationism that was key to Trump’s appeal. “This [war] happened because Israel wanted it to happen,” Carlson stressed at the start of the conflict. “This is Israel’s war. This is not the United States’ war.”
There were more MAGA recriminations on Wednesday when Israel struck Iran’s South Pars gas field, which sent energy prices rocketing even higher. In the wake of the attack, which came well after the United States told Israel to stop hitting Iranian energy infrastructure, a senior Israeli official claimed that it had been coordinated between Netanyahu’s office and the White House. Then, later on Wednesday, Trump posted on social media that Israel had struck the gas field “out of anger” and that the United States “knew nothing about” it in advance.
Neither scenario looks good for Trump. Either Israel explicitly ignored a previous US instruction not to attack Iranian energy sites, or the Trump administration green-lit the strike only to realize within hours that doing so was obviously counter to its own interests. The right-wing podcaster Tim Pool responded by sharing the president’s full Truth Social post with some unusually on-point commentary of his own.
Kelly, the former Fox News host, made the stakes for the Trump administration more clear in a post of her own. “You wanna rip the GOP apart right to its core and prevent a single America First voter from participating in the midterms?” she wrote on Wednesday on X. “Indict Joe Kent and Tucker Carlson. See how that works out.”
2026-03-20 19:00:00
This story was originally published by Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It sounds like a bad joke, but last week a press release dropped into my inbox: “Leading Scientists Challenge Foundation of Climate Change Assessments, Revealing Fatal Flaws in Ocean Heat Content (OHC) Measurements.”
The article this email was promoting claims to upend the generally accepted consensus among climate scientists that greenhouse gas emissions are trapping more heat on the planet, and most of that heat is ending up in the oceans. It’s thanks to the Argo program—a fleet of nearly 4,000 robotic ocean floats that collect data on temperature and other ocean properties, like salinity—that scientists have been able to measure and track long-term ocean warming, but the paper casts doubt on those measurements.
“As promised, the climate science obliteration has arrived TODAY,” lead author Jonathan Cohler wrote on social media (his emphases). “The IPCC’s central claims have now been torn apart. The oceans are not ‘warming’ let alone ‘boiling.’ That claim is false. The claimed Earth Energy Imbalance is false. It’s no different from zero.”
He added “Full demolition:” followed by a link to the study.
As his provocative post suggests, this would be quite the blockbuster article—if it had scientific validity, which it does not.
“It’s so easy to produce bullshit, and it takes so much energy to refute it.”
“What it’s claiming to show is that these Argo floats, which are one of the main ways that we’ve been sampling the temperature and the warming rates of the ocean, are insufficient in their claim to constrain how much total heat has gone into the ocean,” explained Henri Drake, a professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. “They are arguing that we basically don’t have enough measurements of that heat in the ocean and how it’s changing to say that it has changed. Basically, they’re saying that the uncertainties in these measurements are so large that we can’t even tell whether the ocean is warming or not.”
So is there anything to those claims? In short, no. “It gets everything completely backwards,” Drake said. “They’re claiming that they have this new idea that there are not enough Argo floats in the ocean to constrain [assess] the total amount of heat taken up by the ocean. And in fact, this is like the exact opposite of the case.” The scientists who designed the Argo system decided how many Argo floats to put in the ocean, Drake said, precisely because that number was the most cost-effective way of measuring ocean warming within the uncertainty ranges that they wanted.
Kevin Trenberth—an climate scientist who contributed to the 1995, 2001, and 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments, considered the most authoritative scientific analyses of world climate—was even more dismissive. “It is absolute nonsense,” Trenberth wrote in an email. “I do not want to waste my time on it.”
Unfortunately, plenty of people are wasting time on the article (including this writer, for better or worse). Cohler posted a screenshot showing more than 5,000 posts about the paper on just one social media platform, and one of his posts has nearly half a million impressions.
The question: Is it better to ignore the paper, and hope it dies in obscurity, or to tackle the disinformation head on? That is, if you have the time and energy to do so. This quandary is a perfect example of the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, or Brandolini’s law, Drake says, “which states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
Lead author Jonathan Cohler is identified by his affiliation with MIT, where it turns out he used to teach clarinet.
And AI is supercharging Brandolini’s law, as this paper and others like it show. “It’s just not worth it for scientists to try to debunk all of the bullshit, because there’s so much more bullshit, and it’s so easy to produce bullshit, and it takes so much energy to refute it,” Drake said.
The Science of Climate Change article certainly has all the trappings of a scientific paper: a list of authors and university affiliations, an abstract, keywords, and a bunch of technical language, numbers, and citations that are virtually impenetrable to a layperson.
But who are the “leading scientists” who wrote the article? Lead author Cohler is identified by his affiliation with MIT—a well-known and highly respected research institution. Surely that means he holds a position in, say, MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences department, right? But it appears that Cohler’s connection to the university is limited to being a clarinet instructor. Jonathan Cohler is an acclaimed clarinetist with an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard, but to call him a “leading scientist” would, in my opinion, render those words meaningless. By the time the paper was published, Cohler was no longer employed by MIT, even as a clarinet instructor.
(The Bulletin reached out to MIT to clarify his role at the university. A representative responded, “We can confirm that Jonathan Cohler held the role of “Affiliated Artist-Private Lessons” in Music and Theater Arts for less than a year, from 10/20/2025 to 2/1/2026. He is no longer affiliated with MIT. In general, researchers should only list MIT as their affiliation in scientific journal submissions if their contribution to that specific research was conducted as part of their role at MIT.”)
What about his coauthors? David Legates is a former professor of geography at the University of Delaware with a long history of questioning climate science. In 2005, he was appointed Delaware’s state climatologist, although in 2007 then-governor Ruth Ann Minner asked him to stop using his title on public statements related to climate change, and he was removed from the position in 2011. During the first Trump administration, he was hired as NOAA’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction and led the US Global Change Research Program, but was removed from a position at the White House in disgrace after he published a series of papers questioning the validity of climate change science without approval from the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. The papers included the imprint of the Executive Office of the President and stated that they were copyrighted by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Washington Post reported.
Papers like this are like kindling for anyone “just asking questions” about climate change.
Kesten Green is a senior marketing scientist at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute at Adelaide University, the world’s largest center for research into marketing, who also questions anthropogenic global warming. Ole Humlum is a professor emeritus in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Oslo who has argued that global warming is primarily due to natural causes, as opposed to being caused by human activity, like burning fossil fuels.
Finally, Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and longtime climate change denier who dismisses the anthropogenic causes and impacts of global climate change. In 2015, it was revealed that he received more than $1 million from the fossil fuel industry while working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics and failed to disclose that funding when publishing his research. Franklin Soon, a student at Marblehead High School in Massachusetts, is also listed as an author. (Cohler declined to address questions about his MIT affiliation or criticisms of the paper, and instead directed readers to the full paper. None of the other authors responded to a request for comment.)
In the acknowledgements of the paper, the authors credit AI tools for substantial contributions to the “drafting, editing, conceptual development, research, logical structuring, literature synthesis, and iterative refinement (including critical independent ‘peer review’) of the manuscript.” They write that they think these AI tools—Grok, Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT—deserve credit but many journals prohibit listing nonhuman entities as authors, because they cannot assume legal or ethical responsibility for the work.
“While we regard this exclusion as an unjustified form of prejudice and discrimination against AI contributions in scholarly work, we respect the prevailing standards to ensure the broadest possible dissemination and indexing of this research,” they write. (This didn’t stop Cohler, Legates, and both Soons last year, when they published a paper questioning anthropogenic global warming—with Grok 3 listed as the lead author.)
This paper is just one facet of a bigger problem. Researchers are increasingly using AI chatbots and other large language models to edit or even write scientific articles. Some uses may seem harmless, but AI tools can introduce errors and hallucinations. And it can be hard to distinguish between AI-finessed and fully AI-generated papers when they look and sound the same.
How serious of a problem is this one paper? After all, it seems likely Cohler is merely tweeting into an echo-chamber of likeminded people, who repost and reply with bot-like synergy. By drawing broader attention to it, I may do more harm than good.
But papers like this are like kindling for anyone just asking questions about climate change, or doing their own research, stoking the flames of climate denial. Climate misinformation isn’t new, but AI tools make it that much easier to produce—and it seems worthwhile to point that out.
2026-03-20 04:21:21
On the anniversary of Fred Rogers birthday, we take a trip to Mr. Rogers’ real life neighborhood in this special episode that celebrates the life and work of public media’s most famous defender.
Reveal’s Michael Schiller visits WQED in Pittsburgh for a look back at how Fred Rogers, the host of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, championed public television throughout its decades-long struggle to survive Washington politics.
Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.Find Reveal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.
2026-03-20 03:08:43
This story was produced in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network.
On Monday at 5:30 a.m., more than three thousand employees at the JBS beef packing plant in Greeley, Colorado, officially walked off the line. Members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7, the union that represents the plant, had begun the first major meatpacking strike in more than four decades, effectively shutting down one of the largest meat processing sites in the country. About 7 percent of America’s beef comes out of this single plant on a normal day. But now, thousands of workers—mostly foreign-born laborers from Haiti, Somalia, Burma, and Mexico—formed a picket line across the street, singing in Haitian Creole, chanting through a megaphone in Spanish, and wearing placards that read PLEASE DO NOT PATRONIZE JBS.
They were walking out to protest stalled wage negotiations and poor working conditions. A recent class action lawsuit brought by Haitian workers at the plant claims that they have been segregated onto a night shift and forced to work at “dangerously fast speeds.” Last month’s strike vote was nearly unanimous—evidence, the union says, of worker frustration.
“I don’t think the American public has a sense that the food on our table is being produced by immigrant workers under conditions that would make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave.”
By mid-morning outside the plant, just three semis carrying cattle for slaughter sat idling on the side of the highway—a far cry from the usual long line of trucks, known among workers as “Death Row.” The cattle pens north of the plant were virtually empty. Production was at a standstill. But the company seemed to want to downplay the significance of the stoppage. “This morning,” a JBS spokeswoman told me via email, “many JBS Greeley team members chose to report to work rather than participate in the strike called by UFCW Local 7, and we expect that number to continue increasing in the days ahead.”
But the scene outside the plant didn’t seem to support that optimism. JBS had erected fencing around the employee parking lot, and security personnel in company windbreakers stood at entry checkpoints, scanning IDs and waving through any workers who chose to cross the picket. There weren’t many of them. Union members had voted almost unanimously to strike a couple of weeks earlier. Workers on the picket parted to let the cars enter but speculated that these were probably managers at the plant.
“Don’t be late for work,” one picketer jeered.
Another shouted, “Have fun on the kill.”
All morning, the picket line continued to grow as union officials checked in more workers, handed out more picket signs, and called out simple reminders—stay on the sidewalks, keep moving, don’t block anyone trying to cross the picket line. Kim Cordova, president of Local 7, stood by the folding tables where strike placards were being distributed. She wore a winter hat and down jacket with a yellow reflective vest over top. “My toes are frozen,” she joked, “but everything is going well, very organized.”
She was projecting confidence, but the fact is that this strike is a huge gamble. The price of beef has soared over the past year. The work stoppage—choking off slaughtering, butchering, and packaging of some 30,000 head of cattle per week—promised to further constrict supply and likely send prices even higher.
“I think it’s unavoidable,” said Jennifer Martin, an associate professor of Animal Sciences and Meat Extension Specialist at Colorado State University. The only question, she said, is when. “That depends on how much of the kill they can relocate to other plants,” she said. “That’s going to be the thing that really determines the speed at which consumers see price impacts.”
In short, if the strike lasts more than a few days, then what has been a local battle over workplace conditions, healthcare, and wages could turn into a proxy for bigger picture conflicts—inflation and affordability, the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigrants, and corrupt corporate influence.
If the strike continues, it stands to become a national issue, one that might force a reckoning over how our meat is made. “I don’t think the American public has a sense that the food on our table is being produced by immigrant workers under conditions that would make Upton Sinclair turn over in his grave,” said Peter Rachleff, a professor emeritus of history at Macalester College and author of Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. “I don’t think the public has a clue that that’s what’s going on.”
JBS was well aware of the shockwaves such a strike could send through the system. Last week, in preparation for the work stoppage, the company halted slaughtering, canceled cattle shipments, and began redirecting deliveries from feedlots to its plants in Grand Island, Nebraska, and Cactus, Texas—exactly the strategy described by Martin. “By utilizing available capacity at other JBS facilities,” the company spokeswoman said via email, “we can maintain supply, protect the long term stability of the beef chain, and minimize disruption for consumers and retailers.” Still, the price meatpackers pay feedlots for livestock fell 4 percent in anticipation of the strike. (The price of livestock goes down whenever slaughtering slows, since there is more supply and ranchers feel pressure to sell at a lower cost.) “We are operating the facility to the best of our ability,” the JBS spokeswoman wrote. “We will continue scaling operations this week as more team members return.”
Cordova says the company is trying to force employees back to work through implicit threats of firing. On March 9, she says, JBS called workers into a meeting, and managers passed out a form letter addressed to the union, resigning membership. All employees had to do was sign and then show up for work as usual—with no more union representation. I independently obtained a copy of the letter from a worker. On a recording of the meeting made by another employee, a manager can be heard telling workers who declined to sign that they should take all of their personal possessions with them. (The JBS spokeswoman wrote: “This is a legally compliant document that was shared in response to employees asking for direction on how to withdraw their union membership in order to prevent being fined by the union for making the choice to work.”)
Today, the US meatpacking industry is more centralized and monopolized than it was when Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906.
On a new website posted to respond to questions about the strike, JBS again hinted that workers could be fired if they don’t return soon—vowing to continue operations “either with workers who choose not to strike, or with replacement workers.” Such language has fed fear among the workforce and fueled speculation that JBS might bus in workers from the recently shuttered Tyson beef plant in Lexington, Nebraska, or from Amarillo, Texas, where, in January, Tyson reduced operations from two shifts to one.
This strategy of trying to turn the workforce against itself, some labor historians observed, is a familiar tactic—one that helped create the industry landscape of today. Rachleff, whose book Hard-Pressed in the Heartland is an insider account of the last major labor stoppage among meatpacking workers, the 1985 to ’86 union strike at the Hormel pork plant in Austin, Minnesota, sees parallels between that stoppage and the dispute unfolding in Greeley. During the Hormel strike, the company reopened the plant with more than five hundred “permanent replacements,” escorted through the picket lines by National Guard troops called up by the governor of Minnesota. Under such pressure, the union unraveled. Nearly five hundred members crossed their own picket lines. A thousand unyielding workers were fired. And, eventually, union leadership in DC stepped in and declared an end to the strike—with almost none of the union’s demands met.
The failure of that strike had far-reaching implications. The nearly all-white, US-born workforce was steadily replaced with immigrant workers. Wage increases were slowed or halted. Skilled work was broken down and automated. Most importantly, meatpacking giants were able to grow and consolidate, until just a few companies gained near-total control over markets for beef, pork, and poultry. Today, the US meatpacking industry is more centralized and monopolized than it was when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle in 1906, leading President Theodore Roosevelt to break up the so-called Meat Trust.
JBS’s size allows the company to achieve powerful economies of scale. It’s so large, in fact, that JBS and just three other companies (Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef), known as the Big Four, control as much as 93 percent of the market. Other members of the beef supply chain—cattle ranchers, grocery chains, and the fast food behemoth McDonald’s, among others—have argued in multiple lawsuits that the Big Four are working in coordination to depress the market price of cattle, suppress worker wages, and drive up the price of processed beef for their clients, who pass the pain along to consumers. Local 7 is gambling that workers can use the industry’s unprecedented consolidation against JBS: If they can hamstring the plant’s production, maybe prices will rise enough that the government will have to take action against the company.
Beef prices have climbed steadily since the pandemic—but in the last year, they’ve soared.
We’ve already been paying more for beef. Prices have climbed steadily since the pandemic—but in the last year, they’ve soared. Since Trump returned to the White House, the average price of steaks has climbed from $10.87 a pound to $12.51 a pound—a leap of 15 percent. The price of ground beef is 20 percent higher—nearly seven times the increase in overall consumer prices. Then, late last year, Tyson announced its plans to reduce production, cutting the national beef processing capacity by 10 percent and further driving price increases. This led some industry observers to allege that the company was intentionally constricting supply in order to increase profitability. (In a statement, Tyson said it was working to “right size its beef business and position it for long-term success.”)
President Trump took to Truth Social. “I have asked the DOJ to immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies who are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation,” he wrote. “Action must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People.” The Department of Justice immediately announced an investigation into JBS and other members of the Big Four. Last week, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer introduced legislation that mandated a breakup of the large meatpacking corporations and specifically called for an investigation of JBS for “corruption” and business practices that “distorted competitive conditions” across the industry.
The union is betting that if it can take another 7 percent of the nation’s slaughter capacity offline, it may drive up food prices enough that Trump and Congress would be forced to follow through on their promises to investigate JBS—and even break up the company.
But it could also backfire. Cordova worries that JBS will be protected by the Trump administration—in part because the company was the single largest donor to his second inauguration. And also because the plant’s workforce is estimated to be 90 percent non-white immigrants, including more than 1,200 Haitian workers, whose visa statuses are on shaky ground. The administration is currently arguing before the Supreme Court that it should have the power to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants who entered the country legally under the Biden administration. If that happens, Cordova believes there’s a chance that the Trump administration could use the strike as justification for a raid of the plant by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Cordova was a union representative in 2006 when the plant, then owned by Swift & Company, became a central target of the first major ICE action ever undertaken. “Those raids,” she told me in an earlier interview, “were a push by [President George W.] Bush, I believe, to make some sort of political statement—to come in and really go after the industry and these plants for what he believed were undocumented workers.” The situation today is different: All of the plant’s employees, who herald from dozens of countries and speak some fifty different languages, have documentation. At least, for now.
On Monday afternoon, as night shift strikers took to the picket, the threat of an immediate ICE raid dissipated. The Supreme Court had declined to allow the administration to revoke TPS protections for Haitians and begin deportations immediately. But no one could breathe a total sigh of relief: The justices had agreed to hear oral arguments for the case in late April.
Despite their precarious status, the Local 7 membership voted last month nearly 99 percent in favor of the strike—driven, many say, by years of mistreatment. “The chain speed is the main thing,” Robenson Franc told me, speaking in Haitian Creole through an interpreter. Franc is one of more than a thousand Haitian workers who arrived at JBS in 2023 as part of what Local 7 describes as a human trafficking scheme, aimed at undercutting the union and forcing new employees to work on the night shift at unfair speeds. The suit claims that the line on the daytime shift usually averages 300 head of cattle processed per hour. But the night shift, when many of these newly recruited Haitian workers are on the line, runs at 370—and has reached as high as 440 head per hour. “They put up the speed as fast as they need,” Franc told me. And regardless of the speed, he said, workers are expected to keep pace.
Last month, Trump’s Department of Agriculture removed all restrictions on the speeds of poultry and pork production lines—a move that will increase output and help stabilize JBS’s profits through its pork operations and Pilgrim’s Pride, which is majority-owned by JBS and one of the largest poultry producers in the world. Cordova says JBS is now pushing to lift restrictions on beef production lines. The prospect of government oversight being removed has made documentation and negotiations over staffing to safely match line speeds a central issue at the Greeley plant, where workers say that lines currently run so fast that there’s no time to sharpen their knives, leading to debilitating repetitive stress injuries.
On the new website posted by JBS, the company says it is “false” that “UFCW Local 7 is striking over worker conditions.” The website claims that JBS “and the union resolved all non-economic items in bargaining” and says that the company has implemented “a process to provide newly sharpened knives frequently throughout the day”—with new, state-of-the-art knives to be installed soon. JBS says that the only remaining disagreement is over hourly wages and other “economic considerations.”
“They’re just trying to push that this is an economic strike,” Cordova said, which she believes is an effort to paint workers as only concerned about money. “That’s not true,” she said: Unresolved issues include disagreements over who should have to pay for worker personal protective equipment; the amount of sick time and paid leave benefits workers receive; and accurate accounting of line speeds, in order to make sure there’s enough staff to keep up with the pace of sped-up lines. While those issues may be strictly economic considerations for JBS, she said, for workers “it’s a staffing issue, it’s a safety issue, it’s a transparency issue.”
It remains to be seen whether this strike is short-lived or stretches on for weeks or months in the way of historic strikes of the past. Jennifer Martin emphasized that the length of the strike will determine the future for consumers. “If the strike continues, would we expect to see higher prices? Yes. And would we expect that to be compounded by higher input costs, fuel prices, all of those sorts of things? Yes.”
“Is this the final straw where all of these pressures have been building, and this is the thing that sends it over the edge?”
What she couldn’t predict is who would feel the impact of those changes the most. Would it be the workers, who are forced to risk their livelihoods or accept what they consider unsafe conditions; the ranchers, who will have to sell their cattle at a lower price; the company, which says its razor-thin margins are “pressuring profitability”; or the American people, who are struggling to put food on the table?
“Is this the final straw,” she continued, “where all of these pressures have been building, and this is the thing that sends it over the edge, where prices move far enough that consumer behavior changes in a meaningful way?”
“That’s an unknown. It will really depend on how long this strike continues.”
2026-03-20 00:49:03
My mother and her family left Cuba when she was 15 years old, four years after Fidel Castro’s revolution claimed their island home. They arrived in Union City, New Jersey, in 1963, a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis between the US and the Soviet Union nearly spiraled into nuclear war. Like many Cubans during the early days of the Castro regime, her father, my grandfather Angel Roberto Mas, was convinced that the move would only be temporary. Within a few short years, he hoped his family—my grandmother, mother, and uncle—could return to their two-bedroom home in Fomento, a small town tucked in the rolling hills of central Cuba.
My grandfather never saw his homeland again. He died of a heart attack three years later—when he was 48 years old. I never met him, but I thought about him sixty years later when Fidel Castro died in 2016 at the age of 90. I was in Miami visiting home for Thanksgiving when news of his death broke, and Cubans flooded the city’s streets banging pots and pans to celebrate. As a reporter for the Tampa Bay Times at the time, I visited a cemetery on Calle Ocho, the heart of Miami’s Cuban community, and spoke to those who were visiting the graves of family members who had died before this historic moment.
For my whole life, I have witnessed how my family here has tried to help our relatives in Cuba. It’s the same ordeal for millions of others who left the island knowing it would fracture their families forever. In the 1960s, when my mother came to the US, they kept in touch via telegrams and letters. She went more than a decade without hearing her grandmother’s voice until international phone calls became more widely available. On my mother’s three trips to Cuba, she traveled with suitcases and duffel bags full of gifts and food for her cousins and aunts. And in the last few years, she’s relied on privately run shipping agencies, which advertise their services with the well-known phrase, Envíos A Cuba—or “shipping to Cuba”—to send care packages to them.
Fast forward to 2026, and the packages that Cuban exiled families and humanitarian aid groups send to the island have become more crucial than ever. The Caribbean nation is experiencing what Cuba scholars describe as the worst economic crisis ever to grip the island. Food is scarce for many of the approximately 10 million residents—and even when it is available, it’s extremely expensive. Blackouts have plagued the island for years. Its once-prized medical infrastructure is deteriorating. Inflation is astronomical—the exchange rate in the informal market is currently above 500 Cuban pesos per US dollar, up from 40 pesos in 2021. The government no longer picks up the trash, so residents have resorted to burning garbage, leaving fumes of smoke cloaking the streets. Since the US invasion of Venezuela in January, Cuba is rapidly running out of oil now that Venezuela no longer sends shipments, and Trump has threatened other nations with tariffs if they intervene. “No modern economy can function without fuel,” Sebastian Arcos, interim director at Florida International University’s Cuban Research Institute, told me last week. “The current crisis that we have is going to get worse.”
“No modern economy can function without fuel. The current crisis that we have is going to get worse.”
It already has. On Monday, Cuba’s entire electrical grid collapsed for more than 29 hours, and Cubans in the US with family on the island fret about what will happen to their loved ones. My mother, now a retired hair stylist and grandmother, has kept in touch with several cousins there through Facebook and WhatsApp. In one message, a cousin in Havana described how she waited 11 hours in line just to obtain a canister of fuel for cooking. In a voice note, another cousin described cancelled bus routes to nearby towns and power that only comes on in spurts, concluding that “everything is bad.”
Now my mother and millions of other Cuban immigrants—the community in Florida alone is more than 1 million, and it’s estimated another 2 million are scattered throughout the US—all await updates on the negotiations between the administration of President Donald Trump and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel on the island’s future. On Monday, Díaz-Canel announced that Cubans abroad can invest in and open businesses.
My mother recently sent our family nearly $200 worth of medicines and hygiene products, including multi-vitamins, antibiotic ointment, body lotion, anti-bacterial soap, perfumes, toothpaste, and antacid tablets. “I wish I could send more,” she told me. Economic ties between the US and Cuba are restricted under the decades-old embargo, which began in 1962 under President John F. Kennedy following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. The embargo severely limits commerce with the island. It does, however, allow for some exceptions for humanitarian aid and gift parcels. This carveout has resulted in the creation of privately run Cuban shipping agencies, where my mother goes to send care packages to her family.
I stopped by one in Tampa, called Miramar Services, last Friday to see if the business has changed, given all the increasing pressure facing residents of the island.
Located in a strip mall off busy Hillsborough Avenue, I walked into the office, soft piano music playing in the background, and greeted owner Lorein Castellanos Gomez. She sat behind a desk, a list of the packages she would be picking up at her clients’ homes in a few days in front of her. On one wall, shelves are stacked with powdered milk, espresso coffee, Vienna sausages, toothpaste, packets of drink mixes, guava paste, mayonnaise, crackers, and chips. Some clients, she explained, might add a last-minute item to their packages. On another wall, a shelf contains boxes of rice cookers, solar LED lights, and battery-powered fans—a popular, even essential purchase given the constant outages.
Castellanos has a rare window into the connection between Cuban immigrants and those they left behind. She and her husband opened Miramar Services—named after their neighborhood in Havana—three years ago. “People sit here and tell me their life stories,” she told me. She gets updates about clients’ loved ones: the cousin recovering from surgery, the baby that’s now a toddler, the mother back home who recently died. Packages can travel by airmail, on a plane that leaves once a week, or on a cargo ship. Recently, however, fuel shortages in Cuba have resulted in some delivery delays. Havana deliveries have remained relatively constant, but those going out to farther, more rural regions can take longer to arrive.
She remembered one recent customer who came in with a box of food. He had lived in the US for 10 years and never sent anything back home. It’s a common sentiment for many in the Cuban exile community; if you send aid, you’re indirectly supporting the regime. The man wasn’t sure he wanted to send the box. “Either way,” Castellanos recalled telling him, “we send, send, and send, and people are still struggling.” He handed her the package.
As I stood talking to Castellanos, Yuly Reyes and Mayra Gonzalez arrived carrying large garbage bags crammed with goods. Together, the three women started arranging the items into U-Haul boxes that Castellanos retrieved from the back of the store. “Let me tell you, this takes a lot of skill,” she told me, only half joking as she placed oatmeal packets into small crevices around boxes of Special K and pancake mixes. “They don’t have any breakfast over there,” Reyes explained. “They can make themselves some oatmeal, and at least that’s something.” Castellanos told them she recently sent a friend packets of instant mashed potatoes and tuna so she could cobble together lunches during blackouts.
They stuffed over-the-counter medicines, clothing, and a few pairs of sandals into the boxes as well. Reyes also packed plastic shopping bags from Ross and Burlington Coat Factory—her family can use those too. Each box was weighed, and Castellanos recorded its weight with a permanent marker. The total amount was 121 pounds worth of breakfasts, medicines, clothes, and other items bound for the island.
Outside the store, Gonzalez told me she has been in the United States for 10 years. I asked her if she’s ever returned to visit. “I have never gone back,” she said, her eyes immediately watering. “We do what we can,” Reyes chimed in. “We suffer because we can’t send packages all the time. Things are hard here, too.”
Clients also often send nonessential items, Castellanos said, such as furniture, clothing, and party decorations. When I was at the shop, someone dropped off a kitchen sink and turquoise-colored patio furniture cushions. Some clients have told her that they can’t fathom their loved ones lacking some of the products that they take for granted in the US. After years in the shipping business, Castellanos believes that simple creature comforts can distract from the crisis most Cubans endure every day. I thought of my mother’s cousin. Among her requests for medicine, she also asked for a new eyebrow pencil—hers had run out long ago. Any black or brown one, she wrote, would do.
