Saturday, September 12, 2020

RSN: Robert Reich | Elon Musk Called Me a "Moron" Because I Called Out His Exploitative Labor Practices

 

 

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12 September 20


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Robert Reich | Elon Musk Called Me a "Moron" Because I Called Out His Exploitative Labor Practices
Robert Reich. (photo: Getty)
Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Facebook Page
Reich writes: "He can call me every name in the book - it won't change the fact that he's a modern-day robber baron, through and through."

lon Musk thinks I’m a “moron” because I called out his exploitative labor practices. He neglected to mention that he:

  • Illegally threatened to take away stock options if employees unionized (the judge in this case found Musk and Tesla violated labor laws in 11 additional ways)

  • Fired an employee one day before his stock options vested

  • Fired staff after promising them they could take unpaid time off if they didn’t feel comfortable returning to work during COVID

  • Has had 43 workers’ rights violations filed against his company since 2010

  • Has had 145 complaints filed with California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing since 2014

He can call me every name in the book — it won’t change the fact that he’s a modern-day robber baron, through and through.


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A supporter of President Donald Trump wears a Trump mask in Miami, May 10, 2020. (photo: Chandan Khanna/Getty)
A supporter of President Donald Trump wears a Trump mask in Miami, May 10, 2020. (photo: Chandan Khanna/Getty)


3,000 Dead on 9/11 Meant Everything. 200,000 Dead of Covid-19 Means Nothing. Here's Why.
Jon Schwarz, The Intercept
Schwarz writes: "To America's leaders, our lives have value only insofar as they can be used to create a desired panic."

ots of people have ridiculed President Donald Trump for telling journalist Bob Woodward that he “wanted to always play [Covid-19] down … because I don’t want to create a panic.” That’s hilarious, because Trump obviously loves creating panics — about Mexican immigrants, antifa, single-family zoning, and, scariest of all, low-flow toilets.

But Trump was, as he often does, telling us by accident something profound about American politics.

Nineteen years ago today, a group of men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates hijacked four passenger jets. They successfully flew three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. All in all, they murdered 2,977 people in one day.

By March 19, the day Trump explained his reasoning to Woodward, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already predicted that the coronavirus would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and possibly as many as 1.7 million.

In the first situation, George W. Bush, then the president of the United States, actively fomented panic. Americans could not sleep safely in their beds unless we invaded Afghanistan. The FBI should be able to obtain the bank records or internet activity of citizens anytime it wanted without a warrant. Saddam Hussein was hiding anthrax in his mustache.

In the second situation, one that was objectively much more frightening, the president of the United States openly acknowledged that he played the danger down. This goes not just for the danger of Covid-19 itself: His administration has also played down the continuing economic danger to tens of millions of Americans.

What accounts for the glaring disparity in reactions?

History shows the answer is as obvious as it is bizarre: Reality often has nothing to do with gigantic government actions. Instead, politics is mostly about illusions that leaders strive to create inside our heads.

In the case of 9/11, the Bush administration did not attempt to respond rationally to the actual events. Instead, they used it as a justification to do what they had always wanted to do but couldn’t get away with. An influential think tank, the Project for a New American Century, had explained the year before that “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” a goal that “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an aide just hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon that he wanted to “go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not,” including Iraq if possible. Both Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, soon explained that they saw 9/11 as an “opportunity.”

By contrast, Covid-19 really did demand a large-scale government response, but there was little that Trump wanted to do. So Trump has delivered hours of a TV show in which he starred, but not enough PPE for doctors and nurses, or contact tracing, or desperately needed funding for states and cities, and people thrown out of work. Bush wanted a pretext to do a lot of things that were unnecessary, such as invading Iraq, while Trump wanted an excuse to do nothing when, in fact, a lot really needed to be done.

Any look at history shows that this is how the world works. Governments decide what they want to do, and then search for some public rationale.

On December 16, 1989, Panamanian troops shot a U.S. soldier and threatened to rape the wife of a Navy officer. But in the world of political illusion, President George H.W. Bush explained that this meant that we had to invade Panama, which we did, killing hundreds or thousands of people (the precise toll is disputed). An anonymous member of Congress accurately said at the time that “the December 16 incidents were the excuse, and not the reason, for the invasion.” There was no actual connection between the attack on Panama and what had happened to the American troops, which would have been totally ignored if Bush hadn’t wanted a war to oust the country’s military leader, Manuel Noriega, who had once been a CIA asset but had turned into an antagonist to U.S. interests.

On August 2, 1964 the U.S.S. Maddox exchanged fire with North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. No U.S. sailors were killed; the Maddox suffered a single bullet hole. Then on August 4, nothing at all happened, although the U.S. dreamed up an imaginary second attack on the Maddox. In the world of political illusion, the U.S. used these events as justification to escalate a war that ended up killing millions of people in Indochina.

This isn’t just an American thing.

In April 1980, members of Islamic Dawa, an Iraqi Shia organization opposed to Saddam and backed by Iran, threw a grenade at Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minster of Iraq. According to Saddam, this meant that Iraq had to go to war with Iran, which it did, leading to the deaths of a million people on both sides.

In June 1982, Palestinian terrorists attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to the U.K. in London. According to Israel, this meant that it had to invade Lebanon, leading to the deaths of thousands and the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

In September 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, who was Jewish, shot a German diplomat in Paris. According to the Nazi Party’s SA paramilitaries, this required them to carry out Kristallnacht.

Today more than any other, we should understand how much Trump’s berserk honesty tells us about life on earth. Our lives have value insofar as the powerful can use them to create whatever “panic” they desire. If not, we Americans will die quietly in a void, as a thousand of us are currently doing every day from Covid-19.

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The Trump administration wants to collect DNA of U.S. citizens sponsoring immigrants. (photo: Getty)
The Trump administration wants to collect DNA of U.S. citizens sponsoring immigrants. (photo: Getty)


Trump Officials Propose Collecting DNA From Citizens Sponsoring Immigrants
Celine Castronuovo, The Hill
Castronuovo writes: "The Trump administration on Friday issued a proposal to expand its DNA and other biometric data collection of immigrants to include citizens sponsoring them."
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A charred vehicle in the parking lot of the Oak Park Motel, near Gates, Oregon. (photo: Kathryn Elsesser/Getty)
A charred vehicle in the parking lot of the Oak Park Motel, near Gates, Oregon. (photo: Kathryn Elsesser/Getty)


When They Came to an Oregon Town to Take Pictures of the Fires, Armed Militias Accused Them of Being Antifa Arsonists
Christopher Miller and Jane Lytvynenko, BuzzFeed
Excerpt: "Authorities in Oregon have struggled for days to fight apocalyptic wildfires that have burned over 800 square miles, forced thousands to evacuate their homes, and killed at least three people. Now they are also fighting a wave of rumors spreading on social media that the blazes were set by left-wing activists linked to the Portland protests."

abriel Trumbly, a Portland videographer who has spent roughly 90 of the past 100 days capturing the protests, wanted to take footage of the forest fires raging in Oregon. So on Wednesday night, the 29-year-old Army veteran set out with his partner, Jennifer Paulsen, 24, to see what was happening near her childhood home of Molalla, a town of 9,000 people known for its annual rodeo, the Buckeroo. Fires surrounding the town were so intense they had prompted a level 3 “GO NOW” warning to evacuate.

Little did they know when they arrived that Trumbly and Paulsen's presence would spark national rumors that far-left activists were starting fires across the West Coast.

After parking their car on the side of a road, the couple pulled on gas masks and shot video of towering flames. As they worked, they encountered people who had rigged a garden hose to a water tank in the bed of a truck and were trying to put out a fire in the driveway. Trumbly and Paulsen briefly spoke with them, as well as a driver who asked them if they needed any water.

Trumbly and Paulsen, both of whom spoke to BuzzFeed News by phone from Portland on Thursday, said the interactions seemed “normal.” They said the fire was moving quickly, so they didn’t stay long in Molalla. “We thought it was getting a bit dangerous, so we left,” Trumbly said.

But shortly after they left, Paulsen began checking Twitter and Facebook to see news about the fires. She noticed that residents were sharing information about their car, including detailed descriptions of its appearance and license plate. The posts claimed they were members of antifa, an amorphous collection of left-wing groups that the president has called “a terrorist organization,” who had come to Molalla from Portland to commit arson.

Authorities in Oregon have struggled for days to fight apocalyptic wildfires that have burned over 800 square miles, forced thousands to evacuate their homes, and killed at least three people. Now they are also fighting a wave of rumors spreading on social media that the blazes were set by left-wing activists linked to the Portland protests.

The panic in Oregon appeared to stem from a woman in a Facebook group called Molalla NOW, meant for locals to share information about community events.

The post, which Trumbly shared a screenshot of on Twitter, claimed he and Paulsen had started a fire and misidentified them as “two guys wearing gas masks and ‘press’ vests.” It quickly garnered hundreds of reactions and replies.

“It blew up with comments!” Paulsen said. “People were saying, ‘Send people out with guns!’ It said we were antifa.”

Paulsen, who graduated from Molalla High School, even knew some of the people in the group. Now she and Trumbly were being hunted by a group of armed men on the town’s streets.

BuzzFeed News was unable to identify the armed men, but a spokesperson for the Molalla Police Department confirmed their presence by phone and two Portland-based freelance reporters who visited the town on Thursday posted photographs of what they said were three armed men who threatened them.

A vague Facebook message by the Molalla Police Department posted Wednesday evening fed suspicion among the rumor- and fire-stricken residents.

“To those of you still in and around town, please report any suspicious activity (strange people walking around/looking into cars and houses/vehicles driving through neighborhoods that don't belong there) to 911 immediately,” the MPD post read.

“Make them dig a grave then shoot them,” read one of the posts calling for them to be shot.

Concerned about dozens of similar posts, Trumbly called the Molalla Police Department around 1 a.m. “to clear things up,” he said.

He said an officer told him several calls had come in since he and Paulsen left Molalla about antifa members being seen in the town and a group of armed men patrolling the streets.

But it wasn’t until early Thursday morning that the police department updated its post.

“EDIT/CLARIFICATION: This is about possible looters, not antifa or setting of fires,” the updated post read. “There has been NO antifa in town as of this posting at 02:00 am. Please, folks, stay calm and use common sense. Stay inside or leave the area.”

While police in Washington did make an arson arrest yesterday, it was long after the fires began spreading, and in a different state.

Besides the Molalla Police Department, the Medford Police Department, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office, and the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office have published appeals on their Facebook pages in the past 24 hours for the public to stop spreading false information connecting antifa to the Oregon fires.

“Rumors spread just like wildfire and now our 9-1-1 dispatchers and professional staff are being overrun with requests for information and inquiries on an UNTRUE rumor that 6 Antifa members have been arrested for setting fires in DOUGLAS COUNTY, OREGON,” wrote the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office.

Acknowledging the incident, a Molalla Police Department hotline operator told BuzzFeed News Thursday that the department has “gotten calls about antifa arsonists and more [...] We‘ve gotten calls about everything and anything.” The operator also confirmed reports on social media of armed locals patrolling the town’s streets.

Lt. Mike Budreau of the Medford Police told BuzzFeed News that his department had been inundated with unsubstantiated reports about members of antifa and the Proud Boys, a right-wing group. “It’s been problematic and it takes time away from us when we're dealing with not only these fires, we have missing people, missing pets,” he said. “It’s certainly hindering our ability to do our job more effectively.”

The narrative was quickly seized upon by provocateurs. Right-wing website the Biggs Report claimed that antifa members were starting fires throughout the Pacific Northwest. “Possible ANTIFA Member Arrested For Starting Fires In Washington State,” said the post. A Washington state volunteer firefighter service linked to that story on Facebook, receiving 56 shares before the platform removed it.

At the same time, the Biggs Report, founded by a former InfoWars contributor, attempted to knock down rumors of their own, posting a second story that purported to debunk claims that members of far-right group the Proud Boys had started fires of their own. “The Boys Did Nothing Wrong!” said the story.

The group, which the FBI has labeled “extremist” and having “ties to white nationalism,” shared both stories on its Telegram channel.

The antifa narrative was also encouraged by a failed Republican Senate candidate in Oregon. His tweet was retweeted over 8,000 times and a screenshot of it spread on pro-Trump Instagram channels. It was also pushed by a Trump supporter affiliated with conservative nonprofit students organization Turning Point USA in Seattle. Her tweet went viral. “These fires are allegedly linked to Antifa and the Riots,” she wrote.

The rumor has been posted to virtually every social media network, including TikTok and the anonymous messaging board 4chan.

Despite the rampant misinformation, some people were attempting to clarify the situation.

“Ok we gotta clear this up now,” said one person on Facebook alongside a Bureau of Land Management announcement of area closures. “Blm does NOT stand for Black lives matter in this in reference to the fires.”

“They are ones who manages the lands and watch for fires ect,” the person continued. “I think the acronym is causing confusion making people assume its ‘antifa’ before factchecking. local radio refer to them as blm too but means the government program not the protests.... thats where our hysteria is coming from.”

Paulsen said the ordeal has spooked and shocked her. “I know these people or I know their families, and they’re treating me like I’m an outsider, even though that’s where I went to high school. That’s where my parents live,” Paulsen said. “They were writing [on Facebook], “Shoot now, ask questions later. You don’t want your house catching on fire.’”

For the record, Trumbly and Paulsen said they are not members of antifa, although they are against fascism.

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Still from Immigration Nation. (photo: Netflix)
Still from Immigration Nation. (photo: Netflix)


The US Immigration System Is an Exercise in Mass Cruelty
Jacob Hamburger, Jacobin
Excerpt: "A new Netflix series puts the evils of Donald Trump's ICE on full display. The solution to such blatant cruelty isn't to return to Barack Obama's deportation-happy approach, but to finally construct a humane immigration system that isn't tied to the carceral state."


t was supposed to be the documentary ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) didn’t want you to see. A few weeks before Immigration Nation was set to appear on Netflix, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration was seeking to prevent its release. The filmmakers, Shaul Schwarz and Christina Clusiau, suddenly began receiving aggressive phone calls demanding that they remove certain scenes the agency found unflattering.

In the end, after repeated threats to subpoena footage and bring the “full weight” of the federal government down on the production team, the dispute was resolved, and the six-part series started streaming in early August. Reports that the Trump administration was trying to censor the film ultimately created more buzz for the film.

Yet ICE’s last-minute attacks on Immigration Nation obscured the fact that the agency was perfectly happy to give the filmmakers access to its agents and facilities over several years of filming. ICE’s public affairs director Bryan Cox sat for extensive interviews with Schwarz and Clusiau, while also providing several behind-the-scenes glimpses into how ICE’s local field directors manage their mass arrest operations. While we can’t know for sure what motivated higher-ups in the Trump administration to bully the creators of Immigration Nation, the film clearly portrays ICE like many in the agency want it to be seen.

Despite its somewhat generic title, Immigration Nation does provide a shocking look inside ICE. At the same time, it also contains humanizing profiles of undocumented immigrants, including rare interviews with those currently in detention facilities, and the filmmakers showcase the brave work of activists — often undocumented themselves — fighting against wage theft or ICE collaboration with local police.

As the camera crew follows Stefania Arteaga of the Charlotte-based activist network Comunidad Colectiva, she documents ICE enforcement operations in 2018, and we see the tactics long used against immigrants, but only recently spreading to Americans of all backgrounds, including federal agents refusing to identify themselves, snatching detainees into unmarked vans.

But unsurprisingly for a documentary that relies heavily on access to law enforcement, Immigration Nation suffers one critical flaw: it cannot fully separate its own point of view from the mixed messages coming out of ICE. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the series’s handling of the connection between criminal and immigration enforcement.

The documentary focuses heavily on Trump’s 2017 executive order that effectively undid the Obama administration’s priorities for ICE enforcement. While Obama instructed the agency to prioritize those with serious criminal histories, Trump gave ICE the green light to arrest and remove anyone in the country without legal status. Many of the rank-and-file agents who speak to the filmmakers are enthusiastic about this policy — as one officer puts it, “we’re finally able to do our job…. I honestly still can’t believe that he’s our president.” For another officer, “it’s like Christmas for us.”

Schwarz and Clusiau do not appear to approve of Trump’s Christmas gift to his most loyal federal agents; the impression one gets is that they would prefer a return to the Obama-era policy of deporting “felons, not families.” But despite the Trump administration’s apparent policy shift, ICE representatives continue to justify their harsh approach as necessary to uphold public safety.

Filmed during a public meeting defending collaboration between ICE and local police, Bryan Cox reassures North Carolina residents that “unless they themselves have committed a criminal offense, they themselves have nothing to worry about…. Our focus is on persons who are in the country unlawfully who also commit criminal offenses.”

The filmmakers may not expect the viewer to believe ICE’s spokesperson that only criminals are the agency’s targets. But they almost certainly do intend for us to sympathize with the New York–area agent who confesses that he prefers not to take “collaterals” — arrests of undocumented people who are not on ICE’s radar but who are unlucky enough to find themselves near the main target — because he’d rather be out looking for dangerous felons. Never mind that in the same scene, the agent’s supervisor calls with an instruction to “start taking collaterals,” knowing full well the film crew is in the car.

There is some value in putting the worst evils of ICE — and the series has no shortage of evil, in both the straightforward sadistic and banal Arendtian varieties — into the public view. At the same time, presenting the fundamental problem as trigger-happy ICE agents emboldened by the Trump agenda ends up obscuring the realities of our “immigration nation.”

To take an easy example: at one point, a Trump-supporting deportation officer cheerfully speculates that removals are now “probably double” what they were before. The officer’s enthusiasm for ripping apart families and sending many people to their likely deaths is jarring (particularly after the officer tells the audience that two members of his own family have been deported).

The filmmakers neglect to point out, however, that the officer’s claim isn’t true. Trump’s enforcement agenda has brought about a new reign of terror in immigrant communities, and his administration has inched closer to shutting down the asylum system altogether. But since the immigrants targeted under the last administration often had fewer defenses at their disposal — whether because they included fewer asylum seekers or had more extensive criminal histories — Obama remains the “deporter in chief.”

Most importantly, Immigration Nation perpetuates the myth that prioritizing removals of people with criminal records would create a more humane immigration system. The filmmakers rightly side with activists seeking to end “Section 287(g) agreements,” which deputize local police to conduct federal immigration enforcement. But deporting “felons, not families” also relied on local police and jails to find the “felons” in the first place.

Obama-era ICE agents were less likely to terrorize you at your home or workplace — your local sheriff’s reign of terror was enough. For ICE’s assistant field director in Charlotte, a sadistic thick-necked, goateed man identified in the film as “Bob,” the current system might be more exciting, but the difference is minimal: “Even under the Obama administration when we had the priorities, that really didn’t limit anything…. There was this little fine print at the bottom that said ‘you can arrest anybody you want to….’ And we did!”

Only an immigration regime that is fully decoupled from the police and carceral state, and that no longer mimics the latter’s infrastructure of armed enforcement and mass incarceration, can hope to eradicate the evils depicted in Immigration Nation. It is therefore a shame that the documentary did not include a humanizing portrait of an undocumented person who also happened to have a serious criminal record. (The one slight exception is a man named César who was deported after a conviction for marijuana possession, but who is treated as an exceptionally egregious case because he had served in the Marines.)

To win a more humane immigration system, we will have to challenge the lie that an immigrant who has violated the law must be banished from our society in order to maintain public safety.

Simply displaying the evils of ICE under Trump does little to bring us closer to that goal. In a new age of public impunity, where Trump-loyalist federal agents are snatching protesters off the street, the nativist far right no longer cares about hiding its blatant abuses of federal law enforcement power.

ICE’s public relations team may try to muddy the waters with mixed messages, and its legal team may try to harass critical journalists. But if you put a camera in front of people like the ICE agents who appear in Immigration Nation, they will show you who they are — knowing full well that without a real alternative to the system that put them in power, they have nothing to fear.

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A demonstration in Bogotá, Colombia, on Wednesday. (photo: Ivan Valencia/AP)
A demonstration in Bogotá, Colombia, on Wednesday. (photo: Ivan Valencia/AP)


Colombia: Death Toll Rises to 13 in Protests Over Police Abuse
teleSUR
Excerpt: "At least 13 people have been killed by the police during the demonstrations against police brutality that have been shaking Colombia since Wednesday."
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Protesters rallied outside the Rio Tinto office in June in Perth, Australia, after the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites the month before. (photo: EPA)
Protesters rallied outside the Rio Tinto office in June in Perth, Australia, after the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites the month before. (photo: EPA)


Mining Company CEO Forced to Resign After Blasting of 46,000-Year-Old Aboriginal Site in Australia
Jordan Davidson, EcoWatch
Davidson writes: "The chief executive officer and two senior executives are being forced out of the mining giant Rio Tinto several months after investors started to revolt over the company's destruction of an ancient aboriginal rock shelter."


he chief executive officer and two senior executives are being forced out of the mining giant Rio Tinto several months after investors started to revolt over the company's destruction of an ancient aboriginal rock shelter, according to CNN.

CEO Jean-Sebastian Jacques will leave in March 2021, while two senior executives, Chris Salisbury, iron ore chief executive, and Simone Nieven, head of corporate relations who had the responsibility of handling relations with Indigenous communities, will leave at the end of 2020, according to Forbes.

The 48-year-old chief executive is being forced out after investors listened to a continuing outcry from the Indigenous people of Australia who were horrified that Rio Tinto would trounce upon their sacred ground and blast away the ancient Juukan Gorge rock shelters, two culturally significant rock shelters in Western Australia's Pilbara region. Despite knowing the importance of the grounds to the the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people, Rio Tinto blasted the site in order to mine a better quality of iron ore, according to The Guardian.

The company's board responded to the move by cutting executive pay and stripping the three executives of $7 million in bonuses, but investors lined up to denounce that penalty as inadequate.

"There were certainly some shareholders who felt strongly that the accountability was inappropriate and that this was an issue that needed to be addressed to rebuild trust," said Rio Tinto Chairman Simon Thompson to The Sydney Morning Herald.

"While there is general recognition of the transparency of the board review and support for the changes recommended, significant stakeholders have expressed concerns about executive accountability for the failings identified," the company said in a statement, as The Guardian reported.

The wanton destruction of the site has shed light on the remarkable power the mining industry has over sacred, traditional lands. It has shown the need for greater legal guarantees to make sure heritage sites are protected.

A spokesperson for the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people told The Sydney Morning Herald, "Our focus continues to rest heavily on preserving Aboriginal heritage and advocating for wide-ranging changes to ensure a tragedy like this never happens again. We cannot and will not allow this type of devastation to occur ever again."

Among the prominent shareholders to express their misgivings were several large Australian investment funds and a group of 81 British pension funds. Also, the National Native Title Council in Australia said the board was divorced from reality in thinking that the pay cuts were somehow just punishment for destroying a 46,000-year-old site, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

"There is more work to be done," said Jamie Lowe, chief executive for the National Native Title Council, as The Guardian reported. "The law needs to be strengthened. We can't rely on the goodwill of mining companies, we need the law strengthened. We can't rely on their word that things will get better."

"What happened at Juukan was wrong," Thompson said Friday to The Sydney Morning Herald. "We are determined to ensure the destruction of a heritage site of such exceptional archaeological and cultural significance never occurs again at a Rio Tinto operation."

Ian Silk, the chief executive of Australia's biggest superannuation fund, AustralianSuper, said that he was "satisfied that appropriate responsibility has now been taken by executives at Rio Tinto," according to The Guardian,

"Rio can now work with traditional owners to guarantee that its processes are appropriate for the protection of culturally important sites and that it has the right internal accountabilities," he added, as The Guardian reported.

Additionally, the Australian Center for Corporate Responsibility applauded Friday's announcement as an end to the "dishonest malaise of Rio Tinto's board and senior management," according to The Guardian.

While the news of the executives departing is welcome, the institutional investors who have the clout to spur action within the company said the company would have to take steps to repair its relationship with Australia's Indigenous people.

"Rio Tinto now has the opportunity to address the necessary remediation, cultural heritage and risk processes with fresh eyes," said Louise Davidson, chief executive of the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, which advises 38 large super funds on governance issues, to The Guardian.

"Rio Tinto must prioritise working with traditional owners the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people to rebuild their relationship. It is critical that this is not delayed," she added.

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