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15 June 20
Toni Gilpin, Jacobin
Excerpt: "How much do black lives matter to America's leading corporations? Not enough to put any real money on the table for their workers."
ever underestimate the American business community’s capacity for hypocrisy.
That’s one of the lessons to be drawn from the explosive reaction to George Floyd’s murder. As demonstrators began flooding streets, corporate PR departments flew into rapid response mode, issuing a flurry of agonized, apologetic pledges to do more to combat racism and inequality.
Such statements may, on a personal level, be sincere: the depth of righteous pain and anger expressed by African Americans has induced widespread soul-searching, even in executive suites. Yet this high-profile hand-wringing is used to uncouple the outpouring of outrage from capitalist practices that are now, and always have been, at the intertwined roots of racial and economic injustice.
As they nimbly co-opted the language of the protests, moreover, corporate leaders offered up “solutions” to structural racism that won’t diminish managerial control or redistribute power in the workplace, meaning their proposals won’t promote actual structural change of any sort. With a few well-publicized contributions and some new rounds of diversity training, business elites hope to emerge from the present crisis with their privilege, and their profits, intact.
“Tragic, painful and unacceptable,” so Walmart CEO Doug McMillon described George Floyd’s death. “The inequitable and brutal treatment of black people in our country must stop,” an Amazon tweet proclaimed. “We do not tolerate inequity, injustice or racism,” McDonald’s announced, with CEO Joe Erlinger insisting, “when any member of our McFamily hurts, we all hurt.”
To address this “hurt,” McDonald’s announced it will donate $1 million to the NAACP and the National Urban League and promised “tangible goals related to diversity.” Many corporations made similar commitments. Amazon said it will give $10 million to “organizations supporting justice and equity,” and Walmart pledged $100 million over five years to create “a new center on racial equity” aimed at promoting “economic opportunity and healthier living.”
But such contributions, publicized with much fanfare, in fact are chump change to these immensely powerful corporations. For Walmart, $100 million over the next five years represents less than 1/250 of one percent of the nearly $3 trillion in income it expects to rake in during that period. Put another way, its gift would translate to a mere $13 extra a year, for the next five years, to each Walmart employee in the United States.
And American CEOs are wealthy almost beyond imagination: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest person, is worth $150 billion, a figure so much larger than the average median household income of $63,000 that it requires special graphics just to illustrate it.
A Real Fix
If these companies really want to address inequality and improve opportunities for African Americans, there’s a fix readily at hand: they could simply give more money to their own employees, a substantial percentage of whom are black and largely concentrated in low-wage occupations. African Americans, in general, earn less than white workers in this country do, and the jobs they hold are more unstable and less likely to offer benefits, all crucial factors that contribute to our persistent racial wealth gap.
Walmart, with a U.S. workforce of one and a half million, is both the nation’s largest employer overall and the largest employer of African Americans; nearly half of Walmart workers are people of color. Yet Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s don’t pay livable wages. Benefits, when offered at all, are paltry (the lack of paid sick leave has become especially visible in COVID times). Schedules are unpredictable and job security tenuous. Working conditions are onerous.
How much do black lives matter to America’s leading corporations? Not enough to put any real money on the table.
Also not to be taken seriously: the desire for “dialogue” expressed by these big business titans and all that “listening” they say they’ll do. There is one meaningful and time-honored way to ensure that workers will truly be heard: through a union. Unions democratize workplaces, giving employees the collective voice necessary to put them on a more equal footing with management, to ensure their concerns are heeded.
For people of color, unions are especially valuable, literally. While unions are financially advantageous for all workers, “the gains from union membership in terms of pay, benefits, and stability are more pronounced among nonwhite families than among white families,” one recent study notes. African Americans who are unionized make more money and are more likely to have benefits like health care and employer-supported retirement plans, translating to greater savings and home ownership levels. Union membership, in other words, is critical to narrowing the racial wealth gap.
So unions clearly empower African Americans—yet Walmart, Amazon, and McDonald’s are unabashed union-busters. In order to crush organizing efforts (very often led by people of color), these companies invest far more in lawyers, consulting firms, and employee surveillance than they’ll ever dish out to promote “diversity.”
For Bezos, Erlinger, and McMillon, and the other CEOs who follow their lead, genuine “justice and equity” for their workers would come at too high a cost: allowing unions in would require them to relinquish the total control that they now exert over their enterprises.
This particular form of hypocrisy may not be much scrutinized by mainstream media, which are, after all, also corporate enterprises. Much recent coverage of business initiatives to address inequity has omitted issues like fairer compensation or union representation. A lengthy New York Times article—“Corporate America Has Failed Black America”—doesn’t mention unions at all and allots only a few sentences to low-wage workers; the main focus is the dearth of African Americans in top management.
And in a stunning act of appropriation, the New York Stock Exchange observed a moment of silence to honor George Floyd. This took place just as the stock market roared back into full recovery, thus alleviating the real anxieties of the 1%, an irony that drew little notice.
Will corporate executives get away with this sleight-of-hand, purporting to be troubled by the structural racism and economic inequality that they, in fact, perpetuate and benefit from? It’s through this sort of misdirection, and by narrowing the “legitimate” terms of debate, that capitalists, as the early labor historian Selig Perlman once noted, exert their “effective will to power” and “convince other classes that they alone, the capitalists, know how to operate the complex economic apparatus of modern society.”
After George Floyd’s death, Black Lives Matter activists and their allies refused to allow business as usual, and through massive protests and direct action achieved the extraordinary: exposing to the world the brutality and racism that define American policing. For the moment, though, it seems that CEOs are maintaining their authority over the “complex economic apparatus of modern society.”
Union supporters must stand up and assert their own “effective will to power,” to ensure that the practitioners of economic oppression are called to account—and forced to make concessions—as well.
Daniel Goldman of Arlington, Va., holds the transgender flag at a demonstration outside the Supreme Court on Oct. 8. (photo: Michael S. Williamson/WP)
Supreme Court Says Gay, Transgender Workers Are Protected by Federal Law Forbidding Discrimination on the Basis of Sex
Robert Barnes, The Washington Post
Barnes writes: "The Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal anti-discrimination laws protect gay and transgender employees, a major gay rights ruling written by one of the court's most conservative justices."
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Robert Barnes, The Washington Post
Barnes writes: "The Supreme Court ruled Monday that federal anti-discrimination laws protect gay and transgender employees, a major gay rights ruling written by one of the court's most conservative justices."
READ MORE
Police and protesters clash on 30 May in Philadelphia, during a demonstration over the death of George Floyd. (photo: Matt Rourke/AP)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker
Excerpt: "The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police."
More than seventeen thousand National Guard troops have been deployed—more soldiers than are currently occupying Iraq and Afghanistan—to put down the rebellion. More than ten thousand people have been arrested; more than twelve people, mostly African-American men, have been killed. Curfews were imposed in at least thirty cities, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Omaha, and Sioux City. Solidarity demonstrations have been organized from Accra to Dublin—in Berlin, Paris, London, and beyond. And, most surprisingly, two weeks after Floyd’s death, the protests have not ended. Last Saturday saw the largest protests so far, as tens of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall and marched down the streets of Brooklyn and Philadelphia.
The relentless fury and pace of rebellion has forced states to shrug off their stumbling efforts to subdue the novel coronavirus that continues to sicken thousands in the United States. State leaders have been much more adept in calling up the National Guard and coördinating police actions to confront marchers than they were in any of their efforts to curtail the virus. In a show of both cowardice and authoritarianism, Donald Trump threatened to call up the U.S. military to occupy American cities. “Crisis” does not begin to describe the political maelstrom that has been unleashed.
There have been planned demonstrations, and there have also been violent and explosive outbursts that can only be described as a revolt or an uprising. Riots are not only the voice of the unheard, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., famously said; they are the rowdy entry of the oppressed into the political realm. They become a stage of political theatre where joy, revulsion, sadness, anger, and excitement clash wildly in a cathartic dance. They are a festival of the oppressed.
King continued, “The black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. It is exposing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”
By now, it should be clear what the demands of young black people are: an end to racism, police abuse, and violence; and the right to be free of the economic coercion of poverty and inequality.
We have the resources to remake the United States, but it will have to come at the expense of the plutocrats and the plunderers, and therein lies the three-hundred-year-old conundrum: America’s professed values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, continually undone by the reality of debt, despair, and the human degradation of racism and inequality.
The unfolding revolt in the U.S. today holds the real promise to change this country. While it reflects the history and failures of past endeavors to confront racism and police brutality, these protests cannot be reduced to them. Unlike the uprising in Los Angeles, where Korean businesses were targeted and some white bystanders were beaten, or the rebellions of the nineteen-sixties, which were confined to black neighborhoods, today’s protests are stunning in their racial solidarity. The whitest states in the country, including Maine and Idaho, have had protests involving thousands of people. And it’s not just students or activists; the demands for an end to this racist violence have mobilized a broad range of ordinary people who are fed up.
The protests are building on the incredible groundwork of a previous iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, young white people are compelled to protest not only because of their anxieties about the instability of this country and their compromised futures in it but also because of a revulsion against white supremacy and the rot of racism. Their outlooks have been shaped during the past several years by the anti-racist politics of the B.L.M. movement, which move beyond seeing racism as interpersonal or attitudinal, to understanding that it is deeply rooted in the country’s institutions and organizations.
This may account, in part, for the firm political foundation that this round of struggle has begun upon. It explains why activists and organizers have so quickly been able to gather support for demands to defund police, and in some cases introduce ideas about ending policing altogether. They have been able to quickly link bloated police budgets to the attacks on other aspects of the public sector, and to the limits on cities’ abilities to attend to the social crises that have been exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. They have built upon the vivid memories of previous failures, and refuse to submit to empty or rhetoric-driven calls for change. This is evidence again of how struggles build upon one another and are not just recycled events from the past.
Rayshard Brooks was shot and killed during an encounter with Atlanta police on Friday. (photo: Stewart Trial Attorneys Handout/EPA)
Justin Glawe and Guardian UK
Excerpt: "The death of Rayshard Brooks, a black man killed by a white police officer in Atlanta on Friday, was a homicide caused by gunshot wounds to the back, the Fulton county medical examiner's office has said, as the US headed into a fourth week of unrest over police violence."
Atlanta’s police chief, Erika Shields, resigned over the shooting. Garrett Rolfe, the officer who shot Brooks, was fired, and the other officer involved in the incident, also white, was put on administrative leave.
As demonstrators in Atlanta took to the streets and called for the officers in Brooks’s case to be criminally charged, the Wendy’s restaurant was set on fire.
On Sunday police offered a $10,000 reward and published photos of what appeared to be a masked white woman being sought in connection with the fire.
Police said they were seeking those responsible for the blaze, including a woman who was “attempting to hide her identity”. The department posted photos on social media of what looked to be a young white woman wearing a black baseball cap and face mask, and a video clip filmed by a protester that appeared to show a woman encouraging the flames.
“Look at the white girl trying to burn down the Wendy’s,” the man recording the video can be heard saying. “This wasn’t us.”
Lawyers for Brooks’s family said he was the father of a young daughter who was celebrating her birthday on Saturday. They said the officers had no right to use deadly force even if he had fired the Taser, a non-lethal weapon, in their direction.
Prosecutors would decide by midweek whether to bring charges, said the Fulton county district attorney, Paul Howard. “[The victim] did not seem to present any kind of threat to anyone, and so the fact that it would escalate to his death just seems unreasonable,” Howard told CNN.
Donald Trump. (photo: Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty Images)
Trump Aides Know His Polls Are Terrible - and Tell Him Otherwise
Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The re-election campaign is increasingly divided between the realist and the wishful thinkers."
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Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "The re-election campaign is increasingly divided between the realist and the wishful thinkers."
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Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico at a news conference on the coronavirus on May 27. (photo: Eddie Moore/The Albuquerque Journal/AP)
Hospital's Secret COVID-19 Policy Separated Native American Mothers From Their Newborns
Bryant Furlow, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham cited 'significant, awful allegations' in a ProPublica and New Mexico In Depth story on a hospital where clinicians said pregnant Native women were singled out for COVID-19 testing and separated from newborns after delivery."
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Bryant Furlow, ProPublica
Excerpt: "Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham cited 'significant, awful allegations' in a ProPublica and New Mexico In Depth story on a hospital where clinicians said pregnant Native women were singled out for COVID-19 testing and separated from newborns after delivery."
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The deep-sea frogfish floats near the ocean floor. (photo: Mikael Kvist/Getty Images)
Ocean Warming Is Causing Deep-Sea Creatures to Rapidly Migrate Toward Poles
Tim Radford, Climate News Network
Radford writes: "Scientists have taken the temperature of the deep seas and found alarming signs of change: ocean warming is prompting many creatures to migrate fast."
Tim Radford, Climate News Network
Radford writes: "Scientists have taken the temperature of the deep seas and found alarming signs of change: ocean warming is prompting many creatures to migrate fast."
he species that live in the deep and the dark are moving towards the poles at twice to almost four times the speed of surface creatures.
The implication is that – even though conditions in the abyssal plain are far more stable than surface currents – the creatures of the abyss are feeling the heat.
The oceans of the world cover almost three-fourths of the globe and, from surface to seafloor, provide at least 90% of the planet's living space.
And although there has been repeated attention to the health of the waters that define the Blue Planet, it remains immensely difficult to arrive at a consistent, global figure for rates of change in temperature of the planet's largest habitat.
Oceanographers are fond of complaining that humankind knows more about the surface of Mars and Venus than it does about the bedrock and marine sediments at depth.
This may still be true, but repeated studies have confirmed that the ocean floor ecosystem is surprisingly rich, varied and potentially at risk.
Now researchers from Australia, Europe, Japan, South Africa and the Philippines report in the journal Nature Climate Change that although they could not deliver thermometer readings, they had found an indirect measure: the rate at which marine creatures move on because they don't care for their local temperature shifts.
They call this "climate velocity." They had data for 20,000 marine species. And they found that overall, at depths greater than 1000 meters, marine creatures have been on the move much faster than their fellow citizens near the surface, over the second half of the 20th century.
Computer simulations tell an even more alarming story: by the end of this century, creatures in the mesopelagic layer – from 200 meters down to 1000 meters – will be moving away between four and 11 times faster than those at the surface do now.
Faster Migrants
The finding is indirectly supported by a second and unrelated study on the same day in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. French scientists looked at studies of more than 12,000 kinds of the migrations of bacteria, plant, fungus and animal to find that sea creatures are already floating, swimming or crawling towards the poles six times faster than those on land, as a response to global heating driven by profligate human use of fossil fuels.
So shifts in range can be interpreted as an indicator of the stress on the ocean habitats. This creates complications for conservationists arguing for internationally protected zones – protected from fishing trawl nets, and from submarine mining operations – because, if for no other reason, not only are ocean creatures moving at different speeds at different depths; some of the shifts are in different directions.
"Significantly reducing carbon emissions is vital to control warming and help take control of climate velocities in the surface layers of the ocean by 2100," said Anthony Richardson of the University of Queensland in Australia, one of the authors.
"But because of the immense size and depth of the ocean, warming already observed at the ocean surface will mix into deeper waters. This means that marine life in the deep ocean will face escalating threats from ocean warming until the end of the century, no matter what we do now.
"This leaves only one option – act urgently to alleviate other human-generated threats to deep sea life, including seabed mining and deep-sea bottom-fishing."
