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Tucker Carlson Endorsed a Core Belief of White Supremacy the Other Night
Paul Blest, VICE
Blest writes: "In a rant that could have been ripped out of a speech from Charlottesville four years ago, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Thursday night that immigrants and the children of immigrants who become American citizens 'disenfranchise' him as a voter."
The Fox News host suggested that the Democratic Party is trying to “replace the current electorate” with “voters from the Third World.”
n a rant that could have been ripped out of a speech from Charlottesville four years ago, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Thursday night that immigrants and the children of immigrants who become American citizens “disenfranchise” him as a voter.
Carlson made the remarks on Fox News Primetime during a conversation with Mark Steyn—a man who was born in Canada and educated in the United Kingdom—after Steyn criticized Delta Airlines’ opposition to the new restrictive voting law passed by the Georgia Legislature.
“Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson said.
“But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually,” he added. “Let's just say it: That's true.”
The “white replacement theory,” a close relative of the “white genocide” theory, has been embraced by white supremacists as a rallying cry against immigrants, Jewish people, and people of color, who they believe are displacing white Americans. It was part of a rallying cry from white supremacists who marched with torches at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, and an alleged motivation for the shooter accused of killing more than 20 people in an El Paso Walmart store in 2019.
Carlson’s discussion of “replacement” on Thursday isn’t the first time the white supremacist idea has been echoed on Fox. Last July, Carlson’s alleged dinner buddy Matt Gaetz went on Fox News amid a wave of Confederate monuments being torn down to talk about a supposed “cultural genocide,” and made the claim that “the left us wants us to be ashamed of America so they can replace America."
On Thursday, after a very convoluted analogy comparing immigrants coming to America to parents adopting new kids and giving them bikes, Carlson continued his tirade while simultaneously claiming it had nothing to do with race.
“If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” Carlson said. “I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the white replacement theory? No, no, no. This is a voting right question. I have less political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.”
This is, effectively, the same line of thinking that was used as a pretext for Jim Crow laws disenfranchising Black voters in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Black voters were once also a “brand-new electorate.”
It’s worth reiterating here that Carlson isn’t, as he more often does, slinging mud at undocumented people. But in this case, he’s going after legal immigration and the rights it affords the people who become naturalized citizens.
“Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote, and they are diluting it,” Carlson added. “No, they are not allowed to do it. Why are we putting up with this?”
Union proponents in Bessemer, Ala. (photo: Dustin Chambers/Reuters)
Amazon "Broke the Law": Union Seeks New Election After Alabama Warehouse Organizing Drive Fails
Democracy Now!
Excerpt: "People were not saying that they were satisfied with Amazon's working conditions in any way. They were saying that they were afraid to vote for the union."
he largest union drive in the history of Amazon has ended with the company on top. After a months-long battle, 738 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse voted to unionize, and 1,798 voted no. Ballots from another 505 workers were challenged, mostly by Amazon. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that led the drive says Amazon illegally interfered in the vote, and it plans to file unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. Amazon, which is led by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, spent millions to defeat the closely watched election, and even got a private mailbox installed at the warehouse so it could pressure workers to mail their ballots from work and monitor votes. “It’s important that people don’t misread the results of this election,” says Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. “People were not saying that they were satisfied with Amazon’s working conditions in any way. They were saying that they were afraid to vote for the union.”
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: The largest union drive in the history of Amazon ended Friday with the company, led by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, on top. After a months-long battle, ultimately 738 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse voted to unionize, and 1,798 voted no. Ballots from another 505 workers were challenged, mostly by Amazon.
The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union that led the drive says Amazon illegally interfered in the vote, and it plans to file unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board.
Democracy Now! co-host Juan González tweeted in response to the vote, “How do more than 2,000 workers sign union cards at Amazon’s Alabama plant but only 700 vote yes? And why did only half of workers vote when 3/4 normally vote in such elections? Try examining employer intimidation,” he said.
Indeed, Amazon spent millions to defeat the closely watched election, and even got a private mailbox installed — that’s a U.S. postal mailbox installed — at the warehouse so it could pressure workers to mail their ballots from work, and monitor votes.
Amazon responded to the claim in a statement, saying, quote, “It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true,” they said.
Meanwhile, the David-and-Goliath fight in Bessemer has added pressure on Senate Democrats to follow their peers in the House and pass the PRO Act, which stands for Protecting the Right to Organize and would ban many of the tactics Amazon used to crush the organizing drive.
For more, we go to Birmingham, Alabama, not far from Bessemer, to speak with Stuart Appelbaum. He’s the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, recently wrote a piece for Newsweek headlined “Unionizing Amazon Workers Have Already Won.”
Welcome back to Democracy Now! Stuart Appelbaum, can you talk about what happened? Your reaction to the vote lost for unionizing Amazon, though you see, ultimately, what happened as a victory?
STUART APPELBAUM: Thank you, and good morning.
I think that it’s important that people don’t misread the results of this election. People were not saying that they were satisfied with Amazon’s working conditions in any way. They were saying that they were afraid to vote for the union.
And I also think that although the results were clearly not what we wanted, we still believe that a lot of powerful things have been accomplished in this vote and that this election is far, far from over. We had a very exciting meeting last night with the committee, the organizing committee, and we’re going to be filing objections this week to the vote, and we’re going to be looking for a new election.
Look, you have to look at what happened. This is the first time ever that there has been an election at an Amazon warehouse any place in the United States, and that’s important. I think it opens the door to further organizing. I think that we put a stoplight on the way Amazon treats its workers, and people around the world were astounded to hear about the conditions there. I think that we have become an important argument for the PRO Act, because we exposed what it is that employers like Amazon do to try to crush union organizing. And I think that this election has received more attention than elections for a union in decades. And part of the result is that a recent poll showed that 77% of Americans supported the Amazon workers seeking a union.
And I look at the alliances that have been created. There was a powerful, powerful, powerful community involvement in this campaign. I know — I believe another one of your guests didn’t understand the community involvement, but she hadn’t spoken to any of the organizers involved in the campaign. We’re proud of the partnership with the Black Lives Matter movement. We saw this as much a civil rights struggle as a union struggle. We think that we breathed new life into the labor movement at the same time. And I think we also showed an inclusive way of organizing. So, we see a lot of positive things that came out of this vote.
If I could just mention two things quickly. More votes were cast for a union in this election than in all union elections in Alabama in the year before. And I think that’s really important.
AMY GOODMAN: Stuart, can you talk about the numbers? I mean, you had 5,800 workers at the Amazon warehouse. Less than half of them voted. Seven hundred-plus voted for the union. Around 1,500 voted against, apparently, according to the certified count. So, in fact, less than half of the voters voted?
STUART APPELBAUM: Actually, I think it was about 55% that voted. I’d also say that at least 400 of the votes that Amazon challenged, for ridiculous reasons — they would say they couldn’t read a signature of a union supporter’s vote. And so, I think that the numbers really don’t reflect how people voted.
Also, you have to understand the extraordinary turnover at Amazon facilities. You have a turnover of over 100% a year, which meant that we had no choice but to move fast in this election. It’s not like organizing at a nursing home or in other places where there is more stability in the workplace. But a lot of people were not even working at Amazon. People who were working there in January, a lot of them were no longer there by the time the vote started on February 9th.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you’re taking — you’re filing complaints with the National Labor Relations Board?
STUART APPELBAUM: Right, right.
AMY GOODMAN: On what grounds?
STUART APPELBAUM: Oh, they broke the law in so many ways. They had union-busting consultants telling employees that if the union were voted in, Amazon may have to shut down the warehouse.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about that for a minute. The Intercept reported Amazon paid a consultant with ties to the Koch brothers $3,200 a day to thwart the unionization drive, also required workers to attend these anti-union captive audience meetings. Can you talk about them?
STUART APPELBAUM: Sure, of course. And also it was many consultants, many. They brought in about 200 people to walk the floors. And a lot of people were paid $3,200 a day. Amazon left no stone unturned in trying to thwart this effort.
And at the captive audience meetings, people would be forced, at an hour at a time, several times a week, to listen to consultants telling them why unions are bad, and they didn’t need to union, and they should vote against it. And if someone questioned them, a photograph would be taken of their employee badge, and they’d be expelled from the meeting.
AMY GOODMAN: Let me go to one Amazon warehouse worker, Joseph Jones, speaking on Democracy Now! about the meetings.
JOSEPH JONES: With one of the meetings, one of their biggest points that they were trying to get us outraged about was: “Look at this balance sheet of this union. They spent $140,000 on vehicles last year! Can you believe it?”
So I raised my hand. And in this setting, no one talks, right? Because they always open it up for questions, but who’s going to speak out to the company, unless you just don’t care? So, my question was: “OK, so let me understand your position. You want me to be outraged at the fact that this union spent $140,000 on qualified business expenses, as it seems, that you’re showing us, but Jeff Bezos makes 150 grand every single minute of every single day. But I’m supposed to be outraged at this?” They were like, “Yeah. Yes. Aren’t you mad?” It’s crazy.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s Joseph Jones. Your response?
STUART APPELBAUM: Well, it’s just — I agree with Joseph. And I’d also point out I don’t even own a car. I don’t have a car from the union. But our union representatives, whose job it is to travel from workplace to workplace, need vehicles.
They just complained about anything they could to make people afraid to vote, you know, like they lied. They lied about dues. We explained to people that we want you to pay dues, we hope you will want to pay dues, but it’s going to be your choice. Alabama is a right-to-work state. We also know, by the time a contract could be negotiated, it would be probably a mostly new workforce, and we’d be doing a dues campaign. But Amazon lied to people about whether or not they’d be compelled to pay money, hundreds of dollars, and that they should spend the money instead on dinners and gifts for friends.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, I wanted to get your response to the Teamsters union, which has 1.4 million members, saying they’re also working on organizing Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers. In These Times labor reporter Hamilton Nolan ran a story last month headlined “The Teamsters Hint at a Combative National Project to Organize Amazon.” The union has said it’s taking a different approach than RWDSU, your union, Stuart. The secretary-treasurer of a Teamsters local in Iowa told The New York Times, “We’re focused on building a new type of labor movement where we don’t rely on the election process to raise standards.” Your final response?
STUART APPELBAUM: I would say that I welcome my sisters and brothers throughout the labor movement to get involved. I think this needs to be a project of the entire labor movement. But I question whether or not you’re going to be able to compel Amazon to deal with a union other than through an election and achieving majority status, because we saw in New York City, when we defeated Amazon in their attempt to build a second headquarters in New York City, that we had incredible leverage at that point, and yet it made no difference. And we’ve seen people talking about maybe instead of having elections, we should sign petitions, or we should have small walkouts. I think, at the end of the day, that’s not going to be sufficient. You’re going to need to get an expression of majority support in the workforce in order to compel Amazon to deal with you. But I welcome — I welcome unions everywhere to be involved in this effort to organize Amazon workers. We have no choice but to challenge Amazon’s way of treating its employees and doing business.
AMY GOODMAN: Stuart Appelbaum, I want to thank you for being with us, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, speaking to us from Alabama.
Joe Biden. (photo: Patrick Semansky/AP)
Biden Faces Pressure From Pelosi, Sanders Over Whether to Double Down on Obamacare or Expand Medicare
Jeff Stein, The Washington Post
Stein writes:
House Democratic leadership and Sen. Bernie Sanders split as Biden administration sculpts next package
he White House is facing diverging pressure from two powerful allies — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — over whether to use an upcoming spending package to strengthen the Affordable Care Act or expand Medicare eligibility.
Pelosi’s office is pushing the White House to make permanent a temporary expansion of Affordable Care Act subsidies that were included in the $1.9 trillion stimulus legislation last month, according to a senior Democratic aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.
Sanders said in an interview that he is arguing for lowering the age of Medicare eligibility to 55 or 60 and expanding the program for seniors so it covers dental, vision and hearing care.
The contrasting visions for the next phase of President Biden’s legislative agenda reflect divisions within the Democratic Party about how Biden should further overhaul health insurance in the United States. Pelosi is looking to double down on the ACA, which has become more popular in recent years as it offers insurance subsidies to people well above the poverty line. Sanders, meanwhile, is looking for an opportunity to make progress on his longtime efforts to make government health insurance universal.
Either approach would offer more health insurance to lower-income Americans. But the choice facing Biden will allow him to decide whether he wants to continue to focus on the ACA, which operates largely through private insurers, or use political capital on a government-run program.
The pressure comes as the White House works to formulate what it is calling the American Families Plan, a sequel to the infrastructure and jobs plan announced last month. The new program, which is likely to be focused on child care, higher education, anti-poverty initiatives and health care, is expected to propose cutting spending on prescription drugs by as much as $450 billion over 10 years.
That money, in turn, could be used for the health insurance expansions. White House officials have not said which direction they will pursue. A White House spokesman declined to comment.
“We cannot continue to deal with millions and millions of seniors — primarily low-income seniors — who cannot afford to go to a dentist, so cannot ingest the food they eat, or the millions of seniors who live in isolation because they can’t hear,” because they cannot afford hearing aids, Sanders said in an interview. He declined to discuss the push from Pelosi, but he said, “It is fair to say there are differences of opinion as to how we prioritize health-care needs.”
The divergent paths charted by Pelosi and Sanders point to one of many underlying tensions within the Democratic Party that the White House is being forced to navigate as it figures out its next major agenda item.
The path to passing either plan remains steep. Congressional lawmakers are just now taking up Biden’s $2 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan, which has faced a barrage of criticism from congressional Republicans and some centrist Democrats. The appetite in Congress for yet another $1 trillion or $2 trillion effort on top of the infrastructure package is unclear, although liberals in the Congressional Progressive Caucus have called for trying to move the two plans in unison.
Still, the early jockeying reflects how Democrats are already looking to the next legislative fight, as well as friction within the party over how best to expand health care.
Democratic leaders have celebrated the durability of the ACA, which has withstood more than a decade of criticism from congressional Republicans and seen its popularity rebound. The White House also has trumpeted figures showing that as many as 500,000 Americans have enrolled in the ACA exchanges during a special enrollment period the Biden administration created.
Asked by a reporter on Thursday about making the ACA expansion permanent, Pelosi cited the Biden administration’s pending families plan and the $500 billion that could be saved for “further expanding access to health care.” She also kept the door open to other forms of health-care expansion, saying the savings “could be used for other purposes,” too.
For Sanders, however, Biden has a unique opportunity to expand on the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan by offering tangible economic benefits to millions of older voters. Sanders helped popularize the single-payer proposal that would enroll every American in Medicare, and lowering the eligibility threshold represents a step in the direction of universal government-provided insurance.
“Some Democrats are all in on solidifying the Affordable Care Act, while progressives want to use their majority to push the health agenda further in the direction of Medicare-for-all,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization.
As a presidential candidate, Biden campaigned on introducing a public option through which Americans could enroll in a government health system, as well as making the ACA subsidies more generous.
But the “unity task force” between Sanders and Biden aides after the 2020 primary produced policy recommendations that included dropping the Medicare enrollment age from 65 to 60. The task force report also said that gaps in dental, vision and hearing services “can lead to severe health consequences for Medicare patients” and stressed that “Democrats are committed to finding financially sustainable policies” to close those gaps.
The expected White House support for the prescription drug effort has helped create an opening for debating how Democrats want to expand health care. As The Washington Post previously reported, the administration is planning to include a measure to force pharmaceutical companies to reduce their prices or pay a steep penalty. Those plans are likely to be similar to the prescription drug bill House Democrats introduced in 2019, although its exact scope remains unclear.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the House Democrats’ bill would save the government about $450 billion over the next decade. It does so by lowering the cost of prescription drugs, which allows the government to spend significantly less on Medicare and other public health programs.
Under House Democrats’ proposal, these savings are redirected to expand Medicare to cover costs for dental, vision and hearing care through Medicare, while also limiting yearly out-of-pocket spending on prescriptions to $2,000, said Alex Lawson, executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works, which supports the prescription drug reform.
Congressional aides say the savings may be smaller if Democrats, as expected, are forced to pass the measure through the parliamentary procedure known as budget reconciliation.
Conservatives said the United States should use any easily recouped savings to help pay down the existing federal debt. Even passing the measure may be difficult, given warnings from powerful pharmaceutical groups that it would stifle innovation around lifesaving drugs.
“Any low-hanging-fruit budget savings should go to addressing the baseline deficit of $15 trillion,” said Brian Riedl, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “If there’s $500 billion in heath-care savings, shouldn’t we be using that to pay for the programs we already have?”
Others played down the extent of the divisions. The disagreement about the policy direction has not been described by aides as acrimonious, and there may be room for a compromise that incorporates elements of both plans.
“Either one would be a blessing. There’s good arguments for both,” said Harold Pollack, a public health researcher at the University of Chicago, of the bids by Sanders and Pelosi. “I hope Democrats coalesce around whichever is most politically feasible and get it done.”
Still, tensions persist.
Biden’s rescue plan included expanded subsidies for very poor Americans and also extended them to those whose income is above 400 percent of the federal poverty level. That cost about $45 billion for two years, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group.
“There’s been a robust conversation in the health-care [space] about the best uses of the savings,” said Leslie Dach, an Obama administration health official who is now chair of Protect Our Care, which advocates ACA expansion.
Dach said focusing on expanding the ACA delivers “the most health care for the buck,” noting that having insurance throughout one’s life improves long-term health outcomes. “Getting those folks covered really delivers a lot of health care, particularly to communities of color. … There’s a sense the ACA and Medicaid, which get people in the program early, have a lot of benefits.” Dach said there is also agreement on limiting out-of-pocket drug costs for Medicare enrollees.
Still, some advocacy groups are adamant that Biden increase the scope of public health programs, rather than putting more funding into plans that run through private health insurers.
Lawson said it was a “no-brainer” for Biden to demonstrate to seniors, a crucial voting demographic, that he was working on their behalf.
About half of Americans ages 65 to 80 lack dental insurance, according to University of Michigan researchers. As many as 23 million Americans would newly qualify for health insurance if the Medicare enrollment age is lowered to 60, Sanders’s office said in a statement, adding that half of Medicare recipients have not seen a dentist over the past year.
“Before the next election, we need the American people — and particularly seniors, who have suffered so much during this pandemic — to see that this government is working for them,” Lawson said. “People would get hearing aids, get their teeth checked, before the next election. That will show them Biden is on their side. Democrats have to deliver for seniors if they are going to win.”
Virginia gov. Ralph Northam (D). (photo: Zach Gibson/Getty Images)
Virginia Officer Who Pepper-Sprayed Army Officer Fired
Mychael Schnell, The Hill
Schnell writes:
Windsor, Va., police officer who pepper-sprayed an Army officer during a traffic stop last year has been fired, the Windsor Police Department announced on Sunday.
Joe Gutierrez was one of the two Windsor police officers caught on camera pointing their guns at Caron Nazario, a second lieutenant in the Army, at a traffic stop at a gas station in December.
In body camera video shared online by The Associated Press, Gutierrez is also seen pepper-spraying Nazario multiple times after one of the officers attempts to open his car door.
In a statement released on Sunday, the Windsor Police Department said it conducted an investigation into Gutierrez’s use of force and determined that department policy “was not followed.”
“At the conclusion of this investigation, it was determined that Windsor Police Department policy was not followed,” the department wrote in a statement.
“This resulted in disciplinary action, and department-wide requirements for additional training were implemented beginning in January and continue up to the present. Since that time, Officer Gutierrez was also terminated from his employment,” the department added.
Earlier this month, Nazario filed a lawsuit arguing that the officers violated his constitutional rights during a traffic stop in Windsor, located about 46 miles west of Virginia Beach.
In the statement, the Windsor Police Department said it has “openly provided documents and related video to attorneys for Lt. Nazario.”
Additionally, the city officials said they requested an investigation of the event by Virginia State Police.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) announced earlier Sunday that he is directing Virginia State Police to conduct an independent investigation into the traffic stop and use of force.
Video from the AP shows Nazario, who is Black and Latino, sitting in his parked car at a gas station, dressed in uniform, with his hands up as the two officers point their guns at him.
The officers were captured on video ordering Nazario to exit his vehicle, to which he responds, “I’m honestly afraid to get out.”
“Yeah, you should be, get out!” one of the officers can be heard responding.
The other officer, Daniel Crocker had radioed the station earlier saying he was trying to pull over a vehicle with tinted windows that appeared to not have a rear license plate, according to the AP. He called the situation a “high-risk traffic stop” and said the driver was “eluding police.”
Nazario, however, said he was not trying to escape the officer on his drive home from his duty station but instead wanted to stop in a well-lit area “for officer safety and out of respect for the officers.”
In the lawsuit, Nazario said that once the officers arrived at the gas station his rear license plate was clearly visible, but the officers still immediately drew their guns and pointed them at Nazario.
African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop Reginald Jackson announces a boycott of Coca-Cola products outside the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta on March 25 because he said Coca-Cola and other large Georgia companies hadn't done enough to oppose restrictive voting bills. (photo: Jeff Amy/AP)
MLB's Move Out of Georgia Is the Latest in a Line of Political Boycotts
Domenico Montanaro, NPR
Montanaro writes:
hen Major League Baseball decided to move its All-Star Game out of Georgia because of the state's new restrictive voting law, it became the latest in a line of political boycotts.
Lots of corporations through the years have been boycotted, but until somewhat recently it had been fairly rare for corporations to be the ones to speak out.
After the Georgia law's passage, though, that's exactly what's happening.
Atlanta-based Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, for example, condemned the law as "unacceptable." Home Depot, Georgia's largest company, has tried to steer clear of the controversy. Its co-founder, Ken Langone, was an early — and major — financial backer of Donald Trump, though after the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, he said he felt "betrayed" by the former president.
And while companies based in Georgia spoke up after the measure became law, some corporations based in Texas are getting ahead of proposed voting bills there.
On Friday, another business leader, Levi Strauss CEO Chip Bergh, called laws like Georgia's "racist" and a "step backward."
"We're going to do everything we can to work with the legislatures" in places like Texas and Florida, where Levi's has large operations, "to make sure that these restrictive laws don't go into place," Bergh said on CNN.
Trump, meanwhile, has called for a boycott of what he derisively has called "woke" companies, and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell warned of potentially "serious consequences" for companies that weigh in on voting rules. It's quite the twist from what had been, for years, a lockstep relationship between corporate America and the Republican Party. But that has been upended by the party's emphasis on cultural issues in the Trump era.
These boycotts aren't coming out of nowhere, and one doesn't have to look far for similar ones. Here's a look at some prominent examples in history — recent and not so recent — how boycotts got started, and where the word comes from:
Some Notable Examples
North Carolina "bathroom bill": In 2016, the NCAA boycotted the state of North Carolina, and some state and local governments prevented their officials from traveling to North Carolina for business, because of a law limiting LGBTQ rights that included restrictions on which bathrooms people could use.
The boycott led to the repeal of the law in 2017.
Social media and hate speech: Last year, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Hershey, Honda, Ford and others boycotted Facebook and other social media platforms by pausing advertising because they felt the social media companies weren't doing enough to remove hate speech. Facebook did act eventually, and many months later, it — and Twitter and others — banned Trump from their sites following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and because of his lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Conservatives in recent years have complained of rampant bias and censorship from social media companies, and they've accused the corporations now speaking up as succumbing to "cancel culture." But looking at the history of boycotts, "cancel culture" goes back a lot further than one might think. (Keep on reading.)
Ford under the microscope: Ironically, 100 years before Ford's boycott of social media giants, the car giant itself was being boycotted.
In 1918, Henry Ford bought a local newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. Under Ford's ownership, it published anti-Semitic articles. A boycott of Ford gained steam, and the company's auto sales declined.
Henry Ford eventually apologized and sold the paper in 1927.
Religious conservatives also boycotted Ford in the 2000s because of a pro-LGBTQ corporate stance. But that had less success, given the rising acceptance at that time of LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage.
Farmworkers and Taco Bell: After a decade-long fight waged by Florida farmworkers, who highlighted low pay and poor working conditions on tomato farms to no avail, the workers shifted their sights from suppliers to the companies that bought the tomatoes. One of those was Taco Bell.
In 2005, after a three-year boycott — and in a deal that former President Jimmy Carter helped broker — the fast-food chain announced it would buy tomatoes only from growers who agreed to the deal, which would pay higher wages and provide better working conditions.
"We recognize that Florida tomato workers do not enjoy the same rights and conditions as employees in other industries and there is a need for reform," then-Taco Bell President Emil Brolick said in a statement. "We have indicated that any solution must be industry-wide, as our company simply does not have the clout alone to solve the issues raised."
Where does the word "boycott" come from?
Ireland, and a man named Charles Boycott.
Yes, there was literally a man named Boycott who, by the way, wasn't doing any of the boycotting but was, instead, himself being boycotted.
Boycott, a retired British army captain, was an estate manager for English landowners who owned land in Ireland. Irish farmers had a particularly bad harvest in 1880 and wanted a rent reduction. The landowners, with Boycott as their proxy, would not give as much of a reduction as was sought. When the tenants refused to pay, Boycott attempted to have them evicted — some forcibly.
The leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party advised the tenants to cease communication with Boycott, and he was isolated. People in town would not sell goods or provide services to him — or people associated with him. Boycott complained about the situation to the British press, and it was amplified around the world.
The episode backfired on Boycott and increased the power of Irish peasants and the Irish Parliamentary Party, and the following year, the Land Act of 1881 put in place fair-rent tribunals.
In 1888, the word "boycott" was entered into the dictionary for the first time.
A security vehicle passes in front of the Natanz nuclear facility, south of the capital Tehran. (photo: Reuters)
Iran's Zarif Blames Israel for Natanz Nuclear Incident, Vows Revenge
Maziar Motamedi, Al Jazeera
Motamedi writes: "Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif vowed revenge against Israel for an attack on Iran's main nuclear facilities at Natanz but said it will not stop high-level talks to restore the country's nuclear deal with world powers."
Contrary to last year’s attack on Natanz, Iran has chosen not to shy away from directly blaming Israel and singling out its efforts to derail nuclear talks in Vienna.
In a private meeting with lawmakers on Monday, Zarif pointed out that top Israeli officials explicitly said they would try to prevent multilateral efforts to restore the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which would lead to lifting United States sanctions on Iran.
“Now they think they will achieve their goal. But the Zionists will get their answer in more nuclear advancements,” the diplomat was quoted as saying by state-run IRNA.
He vowed “revenge” against Israel and said Iran would not fall into its trap by refusing to engage in talks that could see unilateral US sanctions lifted.
Zarif also promised Natanz will be built stronger than before, using more advanced centrifuges.
“If they think our hand in the negotiations has been weakened, actually this cowardly act will strengthen our position in the talks,” he said.
“Other parties to the talks must know that if they faced enrichment facilities that used first-generation machines, now Natanz can be filled with advanced centrifuges that have several times the enrichment capacity.”
Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the atomic energy organisation, said an emergency power system was established at the Natanz facilities on Monday.
“Enrichment at Natanz has not been stopped and is going strong, although some of the machines that have been decommissioned need to be reevaluated,” he said.
The enrichment and centrifuge assembly lines in Isfahan’s Natanz, the country’s main facilities, were targeted by a large-scale blackout on Sunday that Iran called an act of “nuclear terrorism”.
Israel has not officially accepted responsibility for the attack but has imposed no censorship restrictions on its wide coverage by local media, some of which has explicitly said Israel’s spy agency Mossad was responsible.
Nournews, an outlet with ties to Iran’s security apparatus, cited an unnamed source at the intelligence ministry as saying the person who caused the power outage by disrupting the electrical system has been identified. Steps are being taken to arrest the unidentified individual, it said.
The foreign ministry spokesman also said Iran has already “started to communicate with international authorities and the United Nations” to legally pursue the attack at Natanz.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that he would “never allow” Tehran to obtain nuclear weapons, but made no comment on Iran’s accusation that Israel had targeted Natanz.
“Iran has never given up its quest for nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them,” Netanyahu said. “I will never allow Iran to obtain the nuclear capability to carry out its genocidal goal of eliminating Israel.”
The US said it was “not involved in any manner” in the incident at Natanz.
Iran says its nuclear programme is only for peaceful purposes.
‘Infiltration phenomenon’
The nuclear talks in Vienna on Friday concluded a “constructive” opening week with delegates from Iran, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United Kingdom slated to return on Wednesday.
US representatives are not officially part of the talks as Iran says it will not engage directly with them until all sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump are lifted. However, European representatives relay messages to them.
On Monday, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said the centrifuges that were taken out as a result of the attack were first-generation IR1 machines, which will now be replaced by more advanced versions.
The attack came one day after Iran began feeding gas to a variety of more advanced locally made machines, including dozens of IR6, IR6s and IR4 centrifuges, and also commenced mechanical tests on IR9 machines.
The blackout further led to another incident as Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesman of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, broke both his legs and fractured his skull while inspecting the damage at the Natanz site.
Reports say bits of aluminium sheets had covered a hatch that he stepped on, leading to a fall of more than 7 metres (23 feet). IRNA spoke with Kamalvandi by his hospital bed, where he said he has no doubt Iran’s nuclear programme will continue to advance.
The incident has also once more brought to the fore Iran’s shortcomings in protecting its nuclear assets.
In a tweet on Sunday, the secretary of Iran’s Expediency Council suggested a fire also broke out as part of the attack.
“Could the reoccurrence of a fire at the Natanz nuclear facilities, in less than one year following the previous explosion, be a sign of the seriousness of the infiltration phenomenon?” asked Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
In June 2020, Natanz was hit by an explosion that caused a large fire, which was also suspected to have been orchestrated by Israel.
Iran had said “sabotage is certain” in that explosion, but did not publish more information because of security concerns.
Iran and Israel have been locked for more than a decade in a shadow war across the region that has recently increasingly spilled out in the open.
The latest examples have come in the form of a series of attacks on Iranian and Israeli ships, and the brazen assassination of Iran’s top nuclear and military scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
A surgical mask floats in the ocean. (photo: Eloi_Omella/Getty Images)
How Did the Pandemic Affect Ocean Conservation?
David Shiffman, The Revelator
Shiffman writes:
s we enter what's hopefully the home stretch of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's time to take stock of how it affected every aspect of our world, to consider what happened, what could be done different to avoid those problems in the future, and what's next.
That might mean confronting some of our earlier conclusions. For example, at the start of the pandemic we were bombarded with often false stories about suddenly quiet cities and waterways experiencing animals reclaiming what was once their habitat. "Nature is healing" stories like this seem to have created an overly rosy picture of the pandemic's impact on the natural world.
The reality is much more complicated, and I'm not just talking about things like the well-publicized millions of inappropriately discarded plastic bags and protective masks ending up in the ocean. Many other changes to the world's waters, including some potentially harmful ones, are taking place beneath the surface.
"Protected and conserved areas and the people who depend on them are facing mounting challenges due to the pandemic," says Rachel Golden Kroner, an environmental governance fellow at Conservation International. Indeed, for the past two decades a sizable chunk of global biodiversity conservation has been funded by ecotourism, a funding source that dries up when international travel slows down, as it did this past year.
While any global complex event has many impacts including some that we almost certainly can't predict at this point, many of the medium and long-term effects are likely to be bad.
And You Thought Your Virtual Meetings Were Bad
It's not just your workplace that's been meeting online this past year. It's every meeting, including international wildlife conservation and management meetings.
Some of these important events have been postponed, stalling critical political momentum that scientists and activists have been building for years. Others have met virtually, with notably less effectiveness.
The highest profile example of this was the December 2020 failure of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission. The IATTC is an international gathering that governs a multi-billion-dollar series of global tuna fisheries, and meetings include representatives from all over the world who hammer out fishing quotas and other rules. The 2020 meeting closed without reaching an agreement on 2021 quotas. If allowed to stand, this would have meant that starting on January 1 of this year, a multi-billion-dollar global industry would have had absolutely no rules governing it. Imagine if your city council failed to agree on a policing budget, and this meant that "The Purge" was suddenly real — that's what nearly happened in the world of tuna management this past winter.
The pandemic didn't create the problem of tuna management politics, but experts believe that the virtual meeting, which precluded "schmoozing" in the hallway during coffee breaks and added an element of multiple time zone chaos, contributed to this year's unprecedented breakdown in negotiations.
"These meetings are often difficult to get through, but usually they keep working until they get it done, until there's at least a decent solution," says Grantly Galland, a global tuna conservation expert with Pew Environment. That's hard enough in person, but this year "the meeting started at 6 p.m. for me in D.C., which was midnight in Europe, and early morning in Japan. People were often frustrated. As discussions dragged into the night the incentive to keep going disappeared, and the meeting ended without rules."
Fortunately, after receiving intense pushback from environmental groups and the concerned public, the commission met for an emergency meeting a few weeks later and fixed this problem by just carrying over the 2020 rules to 2021 — hardly an ideal solution given existing problems with the 2020 rules, but a lot better than open ocean anarchy.
Still, this near-disaster shows how dependent our system of environmental management is on face-to-face meetings.
Industry Relief
Whenever there's any economic crisis, industry will ask for a temporary (or even permanent) rollback of environmental protection regulations that they find economically burdensome. Marine and coastal protected areas, long a priority for science-based conservation and long opposed by elements of the fishing industry, have been no exception.
For example, a fisheries management council asked then-President Trump to allow fishing in currently protected areas, and the Trump administration did roll back fishing protections in the Atlantic around that time.
Marine protected areas also face other threats stemming from the pandemic. Rachel Golden Kroner, who also authored a recent paper on the impacts of the pandemic on protected areas, says: "Key challenges for marine protected areas include budget cuts, declines in tourism revenue, disruption of seafood supply chains and challenges in implementing management activities."
Golden Kroner shared examples of the near-collapse of the tourism-associated hospitality industry in Kenya, the Galapagos, Indonesia and Australia, noting that some of these industries employed former members of the fishing industry who had been persuaded to work in tourism instead.
While some coastal communities and protected areas face these serious issues, the good news is that this problem is far from universal.
"While the shutdowns, restrictions, and closures of coastal areas disrupted access and temporarily interrupted stewardship and harvest activities across Hawai'i, the connections between humans and nature forged over generations ensured that marine management actions never lost momentum," says Ulu Ching, the program manager for community-based conservation for Conservation International's Hawaii office. "Well-established community networks in collaboration with government resource management agencies continued to advance the work of mālama i ke kai (caring for the ocean) through the development and establishment of community-driven marine managed areas across the islands during the pandemic."
Additionally, Golden Kroner points out that while some momentum for creating protected areas has stalled and some industry groups have called for rollbacks, there is good news in the form of expanded protected areas in a handful of places around the world. But it's clear that despite some positive signs, momentum in creating new marine protected areas has stalled in many places, tourism that funded their operations has slowed to a crawl, and some industries have been successful in rolling back protections.
Threats Continue, But Monitoring Has Stalled
One of the primary tools in the conservationist's toolbox for making sure that the commercial fishing industry follows the rules is observer coverage: independent people on board fishing vessels who monitor and record the catch. Due to COVID-19 safety regulations, observer coverage in much of the world has been reduced or eliminated — but fishing continues.
"For countries with fewer management resources, I can imagine that less observer coverage could lead to more rules being bent," says Simon Gulak, a fisheries consultant with Sea Leucas LLC who used to coordinate fisheries observers for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"Fisheries observers provide fisheries management with accurate information on all discards/bycatch at sea, not just the cuddly protected species," he says. "They're a bit like a fisher's auditor and are liked about as much."
The problem with a lack of observers means that we generally have no way of knowing if bad things are happening on the water, but there are certainly cases of fishing vessels who only follow the rules because they'll get fined if they don't.
Gulak notes that in fisheries subject to electronic monitoring — including GPS trackers and cameras that document all catch and bycatch — observers may be less important because all relevant data is recorded automatically and it's harder to get away with breaking the rules.
Galland, the tuna conservation expert, also stressed the importance of ramping up electronic fisheries monitoring efforts. If the pandemic leads to an increase in e-monitoring, that may be a long-term good. In the meantime, we just don't know what's going on in many fisheries that were previously monitored by human observers.
It's not just fisheries observing that's stalled due to workplace safety concerns, but also fish market surveys, an important scientific tool for monitoring catch from boats too numerous and small to have observers or electronic monitoring equipment. In large parts of the world, fish market surveys are the only data we have on local catch composition. Without them, we wouldn't know how many endangered species are caught, or if formerly common species started to disappear.
Monitoring of things like sea turtle nests has similarly slowed down. These nest surveys are a critical way for scientists and managers to keep track of population trends of iconic endangered species, and to protect the nests themselves by marking them so beach drivers of off-road vehicles know to not crush the hidden nests.
So what does the pandemic mean for ocean conservation? Experts caution that it's probably too early to tell. However, it's not all stories of dolphins frolicking in suddenly quiet rivers. Environmental planning meetings, funding schemes for protected areas, and monitoring of fisheries and endangered species populations were all disrupted, giving us good reasons to fear that the story is far more complicated, and far less happy, than many of us have been led to believe.
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