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Where employees are a corporation’s key assets, workers’ greater power comes in threatening to walk out the door
On corporate balance sheets, the assets of a corporation are its factories, equipment, patents and brand name.
Workers aren’t considered assets. They appear as costs. In fact, payrolls are typically two-thirds of a corporation’s total costs. Which is why companies often cut payrolls to increase profits.
The reason for this is corporations have traditionally been viewed as production systems. Assets are things that corporations own, which turn inputs – labor, raw materials and components – into marketable products.
Reduce the costs of these inputs, and – presto – each product generates more profit. Or that’s been the traditional view.
Yet today, increasingly, corporations aren’t just production systems. They’re systems for directing the know-how, know-what, know-where and know-why of the people who work within them.
A large and growing part of the value of a corporation now lies in the heads of its workers – heads that know how to innovate, know what needs improvement, know where the company’s strengths and vulnerabilities are found, and know why the corporation succeeds (or doesn’t).
These are becoming the key assets of today’s corporations – human assets that can’t be owned, as are factories, equipment, patents and brands. They must be motivated.
So when Musk fired half of Twitter’s workers, then threatened to fire any remaining dissenters and demanded that the rest pledge to accept “long hours at high intensity” – leading to the resignations last week of an estimated 1,200 additional Twitter employees – he began to destroy what he bought.
Now he’s panicking. Last week he tried to hire back some of the people he fired. On Friday he sent emails to Twitter employees asking that “anyone who actually writes software” report in, and that he wanted to learn about Twitter’s “tech stack” (its software and related systems).
But even if Musk gets this information, he probably won’t be able to save Twitter.
With most of Twitter’s employees gone, most of its know-how to prevent outages and failures during high-traffic events is also gone, as is most of its know-what is necessary to maintain and enhance computing architecture, most of its know-where to guard against cyber-attacks, and most of its know-why hate speech (and other awful stuff advertisers want to avoid) is getting through its filters and what to do about it.
Without this knowledge and talent, Twitter is a shell – an office building, some patents and a brand – without the capacity to improve or even sustain its service.
It’s unlikely to fail all at once, but bugs and glitches will mount, the quality of what’s offered will deteriorate, hateful tweets will burgeon, and customers and advertisers will flee.
As Richard Forno, assistant director of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of Maryland told the New York Times: “It’s like putting a car on the road, hitting the accelerator, and then the driver jumps out. How far is it going to go before it crashes?”
Not even Donald Trump seems particularly eager to take up Musk’s offer to have him back on the platform.
Safe to say, Twitter is no longer worth the nearly $44bn Musk paid for it. It’s probably now worth only a fraction of that – a fact that should be of no small concern to the bankers who lent Musk $13bn to purchase Twitter on condition he pay $1bn a year in interest.
Two lessons here.
First, corporations that regard employees only as costs to be cut rather than as assets to be nourished can make humongous mistakes. Elon Musk is Exhibit 1.
Second, where corporations view employees as costs, the traditional way for employees to flex their muscle is to strike, thereby temporarily closing factories and stopping the machines.
But where employees are a corporation’s key assets, workers’ greater power comes in threatening to – or actually – walking out the door.
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Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) has testified before a grand jury in Georgia that is examining possible interference with the result of the 2020 presidential election in the state. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
A sheriff said that Graham entered Fulton County Courthouse around 8 a.m. to appear before the grand jury, which is hearing testimony in private. Kevin D. Bishop, a spokesman for Graham, later said in a statement the senator testified for “just over two hours and answered all questions.”
“The senator feels he was treated with respect, professionalism and courtesy. Out of respect for the grand jury process, he will not comment on the substance of the questions,” Bishop said.
A spokesman for the Fulton County district attorney’s office, which is leading the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment.
Graham’s testimony followed an extended legal challenge to block his appearance that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which this month declined to overturn lower court rulings requiring him to appear.
The South Carolina Republican and Trump confidant was first subpoenaed in July, as Fulton County prosecutors sought to question Graham about phone calls he made to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in the weeks after the 2020 election, and other issues related to the election.
Trump personally urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in the state, where Biden claimed victory by fewer than 12,000 votes. Trump has insisted that the election there was marred by fraud, although multiple legal inquiries have found no evidence of that.
Raffensperger later told The Washington Post he felt pressured by other Republicans, including Graham, who he said echoed Trump’s claims about voting irregularities in the state. He claimed that Graham, on one call, appeared to be asking him to find a way to set aside legally cast ballots.
Graham and his attorneys have strongly rejected that characterization, describing the senator’s interactions with Raffensperger as “investigatory phone calls” that were meant to inform his decision-making on whether to vote to certify the election for Biden and to inform other Senate work.
In court filings, Graham claimed that his actions were legitimate legislative activity protected by the Constitution’s “speech or debate clause” and that he should not be required to answer questions from a grand jury.
In September, U.S. District Judge Leigh Martin May ruled that Fulton County prosecutors could not question Graham about portions of his calls that were legislative fact-finding.
But May cleared the way for prosecutors to question Graham about his coordination with the Trump campaign on post-election efforts in Georgia. The judge also said Graham also could be asked about his public statements about the 2020 election and “any alleged efforts to ‘cajole’ or encourage” Georgia election officials “to throw out ballots or otherwise alter Georgia’s election practices and procedures.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit later upheld that lower court ruling. The Supreme Court rejected a final appeal by Graham this month, paving the way for his appearance this week. Graham’s attorneys have said he has been told he is a witness, not a target, in the Fulton County investigation.
Graham’s testimony came as the grand jury appears to be nearing a conclusion in its work. Jurors have heard testimony from several Trump lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Boris Epshteyn. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who also unsuccessfully sought to quash a subpoena in the case, appeared before the panel last week.
District Attorney Fani T. Willis also has sought testimony from other high-profile Trump advisers including Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows; former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former House speaker Newt Gingrich. All three continue to pursue legal efforts to quash their subpoenas — ongoing appeals that could delay proceedings.
The 23-person grand jury is authorized to meet until May 2023. But Willis said earlier this year that she hoped the panel would wrap up its work by the end of this year. The panel does not have the power to issue indictments, but would make its recommendations in a report to Willis, who would then weigh potential charges.
During a court hearing in Florida last week where Flynn was challenging his subpoena, Assistant Fulton County District Attorney Will Wooten told a judge there are “very few” witnesses remaining.
“The likelihood is that this grand jury is not going to be hearing testimony much longer,” Wooten said, according to CNN.
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Former President Donald Trump, left, and the exterior of Trump Tower, where the Trump Organization is headquartered. (photo: Justin Sullivan/Nicolas Economou/Getty Images)
"I probably would have had a heart attack," Donald Bender, who did the company taxes for 35 years, told a Manhattan jury on Tuesday.
For years, former President Donald Trump personally signed stacks of bonus checks that were then stuffed into the holiday cards of favored company executives, jurors have already heard in the trial.
But the yearly executive bonus handouts were part of a 15-year payroll tax dodge scheme that reached right to the top of the company, prosecutors are trying to prove.
The bonuses should have been reported in their entirety on company W-2s each year, as taxable income. But they were not, prosecutors have charged.
Instead, prosecutors alleged executives received the bulk of their annual bonuses in separate checks from a variety of Trump Organization subsidiaries, as if they had worked the previous year as freelancers or contractors for Wollman Rink, Mar-a-Lago, the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach, Florida, and even Trump Productions, which produced "The Apprentice."
That way, prosecutors alleged, the company saved on withholding and got to write off the checks as subsidiary expenses. Meanwhile, the executives were able to claim the checks as freelance income, which allowed them to stash some of that money in tax-free savings accounts available only to the self-employed.
For example, in 2015, the Trump Organization paid out $1.1 million in executive bonuses and paid Allen Weisselberg, its chief financial officer, a $300,000 bonus, according to documents.
Of that, $100,000 was paid properly, as compensation claimed on Weisselberg's W-2 wage statement for that year.
But $75,000 of the bonus was paid to him in a check from Wollman Rink, as if the now-75-year-old CFO had moonlighted that year at the famed Central Park skating rink.
The remainder of his bonus was paid in $50,000 checks with three different payors, as if Weisselberg had done work the previous year for the Palm Beach golf club, Mar-a-Lago, and "The Apprentice."
On the stand last week, Weisselberg testified that these payments violated tax reporting requirements.
Careful records were kept internally of how company bonuses were paid, some titled "The Trump Organization Christmas Bonuses."
Trump's initials are on some of these records. He personally approved the total bonus amounts to be received each year by such executives as Weisselberg, company general counsel Jason Greenblatt, controller Jeffrey McConney, and COO Matthew Calamari, according to documents.
But Trump's initials are not on spreadsheets detailing what prosecutors say was the illegal part of the scheme — charts detailing which subsidiaries were paying the bonus checks.
Bender, who works for the Mazars accounting firm, testified Tuesday that he never saw these purported heart-attacks-on-a-chart, not until Manhattan prosecutors showed them to him in 2021.
If he had seen these charts and realized the extent of the scheme, he would have sounded an alarm, he told jurors, under cross-examination by Susan Hoffinger, one of the lead prosecutors.
"I probably would have had a heart attack," he said, before apologizing for the hyperbole and explaining he meant he would have been "very concerned," and likely would have alerted his firm, Mazars.
The accounting firm severed ties with Trump and the Trump Organization earlier this year, citing a history of financial "discrepancies" at the company.
A defense witness, Bender's testimony could help the defense argue that Trump, too, was kept in the dark about the subsidiaries paying executive bonuses as if it was outside compensation.
The trial is off for the rest of the week. Bender's testimony, and the defense case, could be completed Monday, with closing arguments possible as early as Tuesday.
Trump is not personally named as a defendant in the five-week-old criminal trial, but his company could face up to $1.6 million in penalties if convicted of conspiracy, scheme to defraud, and lying on official records.
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Protesters with NYC Fight for $15 in 2017; the movement has grown over the ensuing years, and activists are ready for the next challenge. (photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Federal lawmakers failed to increase the minimum wage, but US workers made other gains, and they are setting their sights on new goals
Congress has failed to increase the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. But across the country, states and companies have raised wages in the wake of Fight for $15’s efforts. While, for many, $15 an hour is still too low, the increases have been especially important in the current era of rising inflation.
Twelve states and Washington DC have adopted a $15 minimum hourly wage, although in many states it’s being phased in. Even deep-red Nebraska has embraced a $15 minimum, while Hawaii has approved an impressive $18 minimum to be phased in between now and 2028.
“The movement’s success is inspirational,” said Yannet Lathrop, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project. “It has helped 26 million workers across the US win $150bn per year in additional pay. Its impact for workers of color is significant. About 12 million workers of color have benefited and their additional earnings are $76bn a year.” For workers whose wages rose, this means an average raise of roughly $6,000 a year.
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) helped create and underwrite the Fight for $15 movement because it believed that the US was paying far too little attention to the plight of low-wage workers. Fight for $15 began in New York and relied on a series of one-day strikes that inspired fast-food workers in other cities. It ultimately expanded to staging strikes in 340 US cities on the movement’s fourth anniversary in 2016.
“The key accomplishment was that the Fight for $15, which was led by black, brown and immigrant workers all across the country, taught all workers that when you join together you can make changes in your jobs and in your lives,” Mary Kay Henry, the SEIU’s president, told the Guardian.
“Twenty-six million workers have seen their wages go up to $15. That is a standard that was scoffed at when it started, but that standard is now getting challenged for demands for an ever-higher minimum, which is a real indicator of success.”
“The Fight for $15”, Henry added, “has changed the way the country thinks about wages, the way elected officials think about wages, and the way economists think about wages.”
Frances Holmes, a fast-food worker in St Louis, Missouri, is glad that her pay has jumped from $7.75 an hour a decade ago to $15 today. “I was able to move from an apartment to a house,” she said. “I was able to afford to buy bacon again, but it’s still a struggle living on $15. They don’t give you enough hours to work each week. Our biggest hope is to have a union. That would help us get more money and more hours.”
Not all of the campaign’s initial aims have panned out. Its original goal was “$15 and a union”, and while it has racked up major successes in raising wages, it has failed to unionize any fast-food workers. One reason is that its pressure campaign against McDonald’s has not gotten the fast-food giant to agree not to oppose unionization efforts.
“The Fight for $15 has lifted up the whole issue of the pathetic state of the minimum wage,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. “In terms of pushing the envelope to make the utopian real, it was extremely successful, at least in blue cities and states.”
“As for its stated goal of ‘$15 and a union’,” Milkman added, “the second half of that has not taken place.” She said the movement’s assumption that it could get the federal government to declare that heavily franchised companies like McDonald’s were joint employers “turned out to be wrong”. If the government considered McDonald’s to be a joint employer with its franchisees, it would make it far easier for employees of the fast-food giant to unionize and win contracts that would cover many of its locations, rather than having to negotiate many individual contracts with individual franchisees.
“It’s pretty tough to unionize in the fast-food sector without the joint employer thing,” Milkman said.
With their successes on the wage front and lack of success on the unionization front, workers and strategists behind Fight for $15 are trying to figure out their next steps. One ambitious new initiative has been to set up a new group, the Union of Southern Service Workers, to help workers across the southern region of the US, where the Fight for $15 movement has had the least success in getting employers and states to raise pay.
Last weekend, more than 100 fast-food, retail, healthcare, warehouse and other workers from the south’s service economy met in Columbia, South Carolina, to launch this new, non-traditional union. The organizers said the effort would seek to unite “workers across workplaces plagued by low pay, high turnover and a legacy of racism”.
Terrence Wise, a Taco Bell worker and Fight for $15 leader who attended the South Carolina meeting that founded the new union, said: “We’re going to do whatever it takes: go on strike, do civil disobedience, do union elections, target the employer in any way possible. That’s what’s unique about this. It’s across different industries.
“We know that wages are lowest in the south, and we know the history of the south: slavery, plantations, union-busting,” Wise continued. “Racial inequality is baked into the country and especially the southern states. We know we can win in California and New York. Don’t you want to take the fight where it’s hardest to win, where it’s most challenging? That means the south.”
This new union may push for union elections at nursing homes in Mississippi or stage protests at Amazon warehouses in Georgia over safety problems there.
Wise said another goal of the South Carolina meeting was to help develop new leaders, people like Lizett Aguilar, a McDonald’s worker in Los Angeles. Aguilar said the biggest effect of Fight for $15 for her hasn’t been that her pay rose to $16 an hour from $8.50 a decade ago, but that “the Fight for $15 has helped me lose my fear about speaking out against injustice”. Aguilar has helped lead marches and knocked on legislators’ doors to win passage of California’s Assembly Bill 257 (AB 257), which has set up a type of sectoral bargaining for more than 550,000 California fast-food workers to help them get raises and reduce wage theft and sexual harassment.
Fight for $15 leaders say their movement helped inspire the union drives at Starbucks and Amazon. Indeed, some activists say the Fight for $15 movement should seek to help the unionization wave grow faster and further by copying the Starbucks campaign and pushing to unionize hundreds of McDonald’s restaurants, despite the lack of joint employer status.
But some Fight for $15 leaders don’t see that as a formula for success. SEIU president Henry said: “Bargaining store by store in a franchised industry is not going to give workers the power they need. That’s why we will fight to pass legislation like AB 257 in other states.”
Terrence Wise feels considerable pride when he hears that Bank of America announced a $15 minimum wage in 2017 and a $22 minimum wage recently. “Whenever I hear about wages being increased – just the other week in Nebraska, or when we hear about Starbucks workers forming a union or Amazon workers challenging Jeff Bezos – that kind of change is real, and we know it was inspired by the Fight for $15 and those workers in New York City walking out 10 years ago,” Wise said.
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Photos of victims of the shootings at a memorial near Club Q in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Nov. 21. (photo: Cecilia Sanchez/AFP/Getty Images)
Tucker Carlson was among the conservative media figures who continued attacking LGBTQ people in the wake of the Club Q shooting.
The rhetoric mirrors what LGBTQ advocates have warned about for months, most notably false claims that children are being sexualized or “groomed” by LGBTQ people and events. The Colorado shooter’s motive is unknown, but the primary suspect Anderson Lee Aldrich is facing five counts of first-degree murder and five counts of bias-motivated crime-causing bodily injury, more commonly known as hate crimes. Aldrich's first court appearance is scheduled for Wednesday.
On Monday evening, Fox News host Tucker Carlson condemned the shooting, focusing on the suspect’s reported history of making a bomb threat in 2021. Three minutes into his nearly 15-minute monologue, however, Carlson’s show displayed a graphic reading “STOP SEXUALIZING KIDS.” On Tuesday evening, Carlson hosted a guest who said shootings would continue to happen "until we end this evil agenda that is attacking children."
Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, said that the repetitive messaging from Carlson and others has opened the door for violence against LGBTQ people.
“The way they soften up the support for this kind of violence is essentially by making it seem morally justified in the minds of people who believe this,” Caraballo said. “The way they do this is by constantly painting LGBT people as pedophiles and groomers, and so people feel morally justified in carrying out this violence.”
Some well-followed accounts on social media that have routinely and misleadingly associated LGBTQ people with sexualizing children continued to do so in recent days.
Tim Pool, a conservative internet personality with 1.4 million followers on Twitter, targeted the venue, Club Q, where the shooting happened.
“We shouldn’t tolerate pedophiles grooming kids,” Pool tweeted. “Club Q had a grooming event. How do prevent the violence and stop the grooming?” Pool appeared to be referring to all-ages drag Sunday brunches that were being hosted at the venue.
Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director at Media Matters, a progressive watchdog organization, called Pool’s tweet a false and “insanely dangerous and irresponsible thing to say.” Drennen, who tracks media narratives around LGBTQ people, said not even in her “worst nightmare scenario” did she predict the responses to the Colorado mass shooting.
“So many of these people seem to have crossed over into territory where they’re very comfortable advocating for people to take matters into their own hands,” Drennen said.
Libs of TikTok, a prominent conservative social media brand created by Chaya Raichik that has 1.5 million followers on Twitter and focuses on the LGBTQ community, proceeded with its usual practices on the platform Sunday and Monday, republishing videos and posts from LGBTQ creators with smaller followings and opening them up to harassment and criticism. In one post Sunday, the account focused on Colorado specifically, highlighting a nonprofit that hosts events for kids interested in drag.
Matt Walsh, a prominent conservative YouTuber known for his criticism of LGBTQ people, published a video on Tuesday titled, “Why The Left Is So Desperate To Expose Children To Drag Queens.” Walsh, who has 1.9 million YouTube subscribers, called the shooting “tragic” but doubled down on his attacks on drag queens. “Is it that hard to not crossdress in front of kids? Is the compulsion that overwhelming?” he asked in the video. “If it’s causing this much chaos and violence, why do you insist on continuing to do it?”
Carlson, Raichik, Walsh and Pool did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of the LGBTQ advocacy GLAAD, said the ongoing demonization of LGBTQ people by conservative media figures has taken its toll.
“No one is holding them accountable for all of the misinformation they’re spreading, but then we need to prove we’re not what they say we are,” Ellis said.
At least one Republican politician also targeted LGBTQ people on social media in the wake of the shooting. On Monday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., published a video on her recently re
“The left wants you to believe that you can make your gender whatever you want,” she said. “They want kids in school to learn that they can change their gender to whatever they want!”
A representative for Greene responded to a request for comment from NBC News by asking, “Are you suggesting that chromosomes can be changed?”
The LGBTQ community has faced a wave of threats and violence.
In recently published research from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University San Bernardino, researchers found that reports of hate crimes against LGBTQ people in major cities increased by 51% in 2021.
Ellis said leaders in the LGBTQ community have “seen a dramatic uptick” in anti-LGBTQ rhetoric. She said over 344 anti-LGBTQ bills have been proposed this legislative season “to solve problems that never existed.”
“They use all of this language, ‘grooming,’ ‘pedophiles,’ it’s mostly around kids and children,” Ellis said. “Meanwhile, so many in our community are parents and have kids and are trying to protect our kids.”
Broader anti-LGBTQ sentiment has been growing on social media, according to researchers.
Jeremy Blackburn, an assistant professor of computer science at Binghamton University in New York who studies online extremism, found that use of the term “grooming” on social media increased by 100% beginning in March compared to the start of 2022.
On Twitter, the use of the anti-gay slur “fa----” had a notable increase in the past seven days, according to data reviewed by a team of researchers at the Center for Strategic Communication at Montclair State University, which studies and monitors social media. Use of the word “groomer” on Twitter saw even greater growth, with data showing almost as many mentions of the word in the past two days as in the past two weeks combined, the researchers found.
Caraballo noted that rising anti-LGBTQ speech on social media has been met with the rolling back of suspensions on Twitter, where she said major anti-LGBTQ accounts that were suspended in the past five years have been reinstated and “let off the leash.”
“This is an ‘In emergency break glass’ moment for social media,” Caraballo said. “This is priming some very violent people to do shocking acts of violence, and this is all being pushed on social media and on Fox News, on Tucker Carlson.”
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A member of the Youth Army movement practices assembling and disassembling a Kalashnikov assault rifle. (photo: Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)
Russia is turbocharging its indoctrination of young people, using games and influencers to draw them into a militarised Youth Army
But the regime is also turbocharging indoctrination efforts aimed at its youngest subjects. This includes well-worn tactics such as closing off social media and online dissent, and rolling out propaganda lessons in schools. But its most effective tool may be a myriad of new youth groups that introduce children to the Russian state’s world of constant war with a dazzling barrage of social media infotainment.
The biggest such organisation is the Youth Army, established in 2016 under the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, with the explicit intention of preparing children for careers in the state or military apparatus. It is fronted not by a greying politician, or career soldier, but by the popular 25-year-old Olympic and World Championship gymnast Nikita Nagornyy. Charismatic and handsome, as well as hugely popular on social media, Nagornyy uses influencer-style videos and posts to spread the state’s gospel.
One day he might appear in a workout video or meet Vladimir Putin, the next he poses with a military veteran. “Let’s talk about something important,” he commented alongside a selfie in uniform on the eve of this year’s Victory Day celebration in May, before launching into a sermon on the importance of remembering Russia’s military martyrs.
Equal parts Instagram influencer, teen heart-throb, and chief scout, Nagornyy is the embodiment of the state’s vision for its youth. He is the perfect role model for a 21st-century paramilitary movement. PR photos show him visiting “veterans” of the war in Ukraine, which Nagornyy has repeatedly praised. In turn, his young followers swamp anyone who steps out of line in comment threads: “Go to Ukraine! We don’t need fascists here! Bon voyage!” All over Russia, groups of “young soldiers” clad in distinctive red berets and khaki uniforms practise military manoeuvres and firing guns, attend lessons on patriotic history and gather aid for the “ethnic Russians” the state purports to be rescuing in Ukraine.
A network of such influencers mirrors Nagornyy’s feeds. The 21-year-old champion skier Veronika Stepanova, for instance, posts about her life as an athlete today, as a teen Youth Army member in the past, and about politics and the war in Ukraine. When a Youth Army “veteran” such as Stepanova praises Putin while receiving a state award, she links her enviable lifestyle, the Youth Army and the regime.
The state has thrown massive political and financial support behind the Youth Army project, and it appears to be paying off. Last year a 185m federal subsidy was announced, and the group is growing rapidly. A million children are already members, and enrolment is projected to hit 20% of the school-age population by 2030.
Membership is painted as an enjoyable way to make friends and attain an influencer-like lifestyle. The Youth Army’s official website is packed with uniformed cartoon characters, warlike video game clips and soft-focus images of smiling “soldiers”. Using the group’s social media feeds and official app, children can play games and photograph themselves completing “patriotic” activities – such as visiting war memorials – to win prizes. Many of the young recruits imitate the methods of Nagornyy and the Youth Army by incorporating their Youth Army participation into their carefully curated social media lives – in particular on TikTok, which, despite an official ban, remains widely popular among Russian teens.
The state promises power, self-actualisation and, above all, social belonging. The apathetic and apolitical are left to gaze at this fantasy world from the outside. A series of Youth Army members and leaders I interviewed this summer were unequivocal: joining up wasn’t a totalitarian imposition; it was a proactive choice to belong to a patriotic community. One regional leader told me that his group could barely cope with the number of applications received since 24 February.
But the Youth Army isn’t an ordinary army cadet group, and patriotic social media chatter is not idle talk. Its members are being taught “to die for the motherland”. They learn serious military skills in classrooms and summer training camps. The Russian media whip up expectations about their military capabilities: “The only reason the Youth Army is on the EU’s sanctions list is the west’s fear of Russian children!”
As the state pivots its propaganda away from the measured inculcation of apathy and toward proactive indoctrination, children as young as six learn to speak the language of war: “I want to defend my country and my loved ones,” one new elementary-aged recruit confidently declared to a local TV journalist. And older children must live its reality. Some of the programme’s graduates are already at the front. Online tributes to the former “youth soldiers” who have “died a hero’s death” in Ukraine reify these young men’s deaths, linking their lives to the unattainable ideal of Nagornyy, to the curated Instagram feeds of “young soldiers,” and finally to the paths that Russia’s children are being taught to follow more widely: join up, train in the military arts, discover a sense of community and your perfect self, prepare to defend the motherland.
The Youth Army is one part of the state’s broader project to politicise the young. Money pours into slickly marketed groups, glitzy youth conferences attended by internet celebrities and teacher-training programmes that buttress national efforts. The government is even launching plans to create a movement along the lines of the Soviet “Pioneers” – a more palatable alternative for cosmopolitan city-dwellers than the militarised Youth Army. The politicians backing the group are already discussing enrolment that would reach into the millions and exceed that of the Youth Army.
Next time the state’s military recruiters come calling, young Russians may be more likely to sign up than to flee abroad.
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Qatar. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
A new report says stadium construction is largely to blame
Qatar has been on a decade-long World Cup construction boom, building seven new stadiums, 30 practice facilities, thousands of hotel rooms, and an expansion to the Doha International Airport.
Back when Qatar was awarded hosting privileges for the tournament, the event’s organizers pledged to offset all unavoidable emissions, largely through carbon credits. But achieving this “carbon-neutral” goal depends on a comprehensive accounting of all emissions associated with the World Cup, something researchers at the group Carbon Market Watch say FIFA and Qatar have failed to do.
“The main issue we found was with the construction of the stadiums,” said Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer for Carbon Market Watch and the author of the report, which was updated last month. He raised concerns about the placement of the stadiums and how they might be used in the future – two factors he says organizers did not sufficiently take into account in their carbon footprint calculations for this year’s tournament.
Already one of the hottest countries on Earth, Qatar faces worsening heat waves and water shortages as climate change intensifies. FIFA predicts activities related to this year’s World Cup will amount to 3.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of nearly 460,000 homes’ energy use for a year. According to FIFA’s latest emissions report, the largest sources of tournament-related emissions come down to air travel and accommodations, as more than 1.2 million fans are expected to attend the event from all over the world.
Stadium construction, meanwhile, accounts for roughly 18 percent of the group’s carbon estimations. In its report, tournament organizers calculated stadium emissions by splitting them between two different categories: temporary and permanent seats. Of the seven new stadiums built for the Qatar tournament, World Cup organizers plan to dismantle one entirely and reduce the capacity of the others by nearly half.
For temporary seats, organizers hold themselves accountable for just 70 days’ worth of emissions — the length of the upcoming tournament combined with two lead-up FIFA World Cup Club events. But Carbon Market Watch noted that methodology didn’t track with previous FIFA reports, which stated the lifetime of a stadium can be up to 60 years. The climate watchdog group used FIFA’s previous reports to estimate a new emissions total for 2022 World Cup stadiums.
Under these new guidelines, researchers found the total footprint for the six permanent stadiums will amount to at least eight times organizers’ original carbon accounting.
Then there’s the issue of location: Each of the eight stadiums used for the World Cup are within roughly 30 miles of Doha’s city center. While the high concentration of stadiums will reduce emissions associated with fans traveling between venues, the facilities could create long-term problems for the city’s 2.4 million residents.
Figuring out what to do with leftover stadiums is a well-known problem for cities that have hosted huge athletic events, such as the World Cup or the Olympics. Known as “white elephants,” these expensive, world-class venues can fall into disrepair, taking up valuable space while draining local resources.
World Cup organizers in Qatar have tried to get ahead of this issue by making plans to turn what remains of these stadiums into community hubs, hotels and education centers. But in its report, Carbon Market Watch casts doubt on the practicality of this plan.
For example, the new, 40,000-seat Al Janoub stadium is slated to become home to a local soccer team. After the World Cup, the stadium’s capacity will go down to 20,000, but that’s still a big bump up for the club, which currently plays in a stadium with 60 percent that capacity.
“It is unclear whether the local team will attract a sufficient crowd to fill, and maintain, the new stadium, and what will happen to the 12,000 seat stadium they previously used,” Carbon Market Watch reported. “Overall, it is very difficult to assess the credibility of the legacy plans. These depend strongly on demand from the local population, as well as interest from companies to invest in maintaining the infrastructure.”
As for Qatar’s temporary Stadium 974, named after the country’s international dialing code, FIFA has not yet announced any concrete plans for how or if the materials might be reused. The stadium was built from shipping containers so that it could theoretically be dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere. Carbon Market Watch noted that FIFA has not announced plans on where the stadium might find a new home, nor plans for the upper-tier seats that will be removed from the permanent stadiums. The emissions accrued during the transportation and reconstruction of these materials are not accounted for in FIFA and Qatar’s carbon calculations.
“It’s an interesting concept,” said Dufrasne on the idea of repurposing a stadium. But there’s a catch: “If you have the temporary stadium, and you transport it quite far away, and you reuse it only once,” he said, “then actually it’s potentially worse than having two permanent stadiums in those two different locations.”
According to its sustainability report, FIFA and Qatar plan to offset unavoidable emissions with carbon credits and through other measures such as planting trees. But Carbon Market Watch argues the groups should not market this year’s World Cup as carbon-neutral until organizers do a more comprehensive accounting of the event’s long-term footprint. Carbon Market Watch called on FIFA to take on a new carbon calculation that includes direct and indirect emissions.
“It’s highly misleading to make carbon neutrality claims today,” Dufrasne said, “ and there are very, very few, if any, companies that do it correctly.”
FIFA did not comment on the findings of the Carbon Market Watch report, but it is expected to release an updated emissions report following the conclusion of the tournament.
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