Archive for category: Class Oppression

Authoritarianism is not only a characteristic of the radical right but also of some business organizations and especially their leaders. Moreover, there is ample evidence that some corporate organizations knowingly support radical-right ideas and causes. In some cases, corporations (either directly, or via wealthy owners, or via foundations or other intermediaries) provide vast amounts of funding for radical-right ‘research’, ‘education’, publications, websites, political lobbying, activist support, and general promulgation of radical-right ideology. In the US alone, such ‘dark money’ runs to hundreds of millions of US$ each year.

How well established is the threat and how can corporate support for the radical right be curtailed?

The Corporate/Radical-Right Axis: An Unhealthy Symbiosis

The success and normalization of radical-right ideology is also a measure of the symbiosis between the political and corporate worlds. According to Kean Birch (2007), Peter Bloom & Carl Rhodes (2016; 2018), and Colin Crouch (2014), the two worlds are synergetic. While many senior executives avoid or reject radical or extreme politics, a significant number do not. Although, in principle, it is neither unlawful nor controversial for mutual lobbying on shared interests, nevertheless, there is an obvious risk of corruption, e.g. the Austrian far-right FPŐ corruption scandal involving Heinz-Christian Strache.

There is also the potential for the advancement of unwholesome political agendas that suit both political and corporate interests, e.g. the Cambridge Analytica abuses of millions of Facebook users leading up to the 2016 Presidential election in the US and the UK Brexit referendum. Cambridge Analytica was created by arch radical-right ideologue and promoter Steve Bannon and bankrolled by Robert Mercer, wealthy CEO of Renaissance Technologies.

Far-right funding links tend to keep a low profile but in recent years have received increasing scrutiny, e.g. T.J. Coles (2019; 2020), Josh Halliday et al (2018), and Tom Keatinge et al (2019). Author Jane Mayer (2016; 2017) described the fusion of mutual interests between the radical right and corporations as the application of “dark money”. These mutual interests and synergies demonstrate how the vast wealth of particular individuals and families, their corporations, and their tax-exempt foundations, support the social and political objectives of the radical right.

A survey of 22 such US funds in Waring (2021, pages 70-74) put the combined declared annual revenues of those surveyed at US$532m. The combined fund values of the largest five came to nearly US$4bn. With the estimated total number of US funds for radical-right causes exceeding 100, it suggests a conservative figure for their combined fund values of US$10bn and combined annual revenues of at least US$1.3bn. Prominent among wealthy donors are Robert Shillman (CEO of Cognex), Robert Mercer, and Nina Rosenwald (the Sears, Roebuck & Co heiress). The Publix heiress, Julie Jenkins Fancelli, reportedly made a large donation (along with Alex Jones, the high-profile far-right provocateur) to facilitate the radical-right rally in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, from which many attendees proceeded to attack the Capitol building. Corporate supporters were also allegedly involved in that attack, for example, the arrest of the CEO of Cogensia.

If radical-right politicians become stronger, corporate donors with radical-right sympathies may also become emboldened to act in an authoritarian manner within their own companies, and probably thereby harming employees, external categories, and society as a whole. The authoritarian attitudes and conduct of some corporate bosses are often noticeably similar to those of radical-right political leaders. President Trump was an extreme example of both categories, as a radical-right political leader and a corporation owner. Bloom and Rhodes (2016) were scathing about the genre.

Commercial Opportunists

In addition to ideological and financial support, there are also corporate leaders who, for the sake of their own commercial opportunism, aid and abet the radical and far-right. Prominent among these are the Internet and social media platform providers. Some of the largest have been accused of providing extremists, terrorists, and other criminals with unfettered facilities to promote their beliefs and activities, and to spread hatred against ethno-religious and other minorities (e.g. the Chief Rabbi of Britain, Ephraim Mirvis, in identical complaint letters of July 26, 2020 to Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook), as well as those rejecting radical-right beliefs. They have also been accused of facilitating the dissemination of false facts and fake news, especially relating to wild radical-right conspiracy theories from QAnon and others. Defenses put forward by such platform providers as Twitter and Facebook, that they are merely free-speech information channels and not publishers, have been widely dismissed as sophistry.

The policy of such companies to only react to public pressure and adverse publicity, instead of proactively and quickly banning such material and account holders, remains a target of legislators, e.g. the current Online Harms Bill in the UK. Only following the use of social media by Trump to fire up supporters, which many believe triggered the insurrectionist mob attack on the Capitol building in Washington DC on January 6, 2021, and the use of such media by the mobsters in situ to video and disseminate their actions, did such companies as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter suspend Trump’s accounts.

Perhaps they foresaw a likely global tsunami of tough government regulation of Internet and social media platforms in the aftermath of the attempted coup. However, deferring to all the money-making traffic and profits they gain from such radical-right abuses, these companies remain evasive and resistant to self-regulation.

A boycott of Internet platforms, threatened in 2018 by major corporate advertisers unless they cleaned up their policies, and supervision and control of extremist content and hate messaging, began in 2020. Unilever, which annually spends over US$3billion in digital advertising, and numerous other corporate clients exasperated by continuing perceived obduracy by Facebook, in particular, undertook a 1-month advertising boycott of Facebook (and in some cases, other platforms). Such mass action may provide a pointer to one potential strategy for combatting online racism and hate messaging.

Overlaps of Corporate and Radical-Right Authoritarianism

Corporate authoritarianism typically encompasses a range of overbearing, if not dictatorial, stances and bad conduct by some corporate leaders towards customers, employees, contractors, and society in general. While some motivations evidently emerge from pathological or anti-social personalities, other motivations may be simply laziness and avoidance of managerial inconvenience or minimizing adverse impact on revenue (an aspect of greed and/or misplaced competitiveness), or an indignant free-market determination not to recognize rules and limits set by ‘big government’. Some corporate leaders may possess all these motivations.

The psychological study reported in 2016 of problem personalities in work organizations in Australia, and the follow-on study of 261 senior executives reported in 2020, suggests that approximately 20% of CEOs are classifiable as exhibiting clinically elevated psychopathic personality traits. The power attractiveness of boardroom jobs may explain why toxic personalities appear to have a disproportionate presence among corporate leaders.

The prevalence of radical-right world-views in the general population may not be as high as their ‘noisy’ public presence might suggest. Emily Turner-Graham (2019, page 143) estimated on the basis of known memberships and supporter data that in 2018 the total number of UK supporters of the radical right, ranging from the ‘softer’ populist end of the spectrum to the hard extremist end, to be some 1.82 million or 3.8% of the UK electorate of 47.93 million. However, as with anti-social and/or psychopathic traits, those with radical-right proclivities may also be attracted disproportionately to gain powerful positions.

Recognition in both academic and corporate circles that authoritarian corporate organizations and their leaders had become not just an embarrassing anachronism, but also a dysfunctional stumbling block to the survival and continuity of corporations in the 21st century, has arisen relatively recently. By 2010, failures by corporate leaders to recognize, understand, and respond appropriately to such fundamental issues as organizational culture/climate, and power relations and potential abuses of them within their organization, as well as leadership failures, had emerged as a recognized major impediment to corporate success and sustainability. See e.g. Jeffrey Pfeffer (2010; 2018).

Corporate Moral Purpose: Lost and Rediscovered?

Many corporations appear to have ‘lost their way’ in terms of properly understanding their purpose and then enacting it. A radical new paradigm, the “framework for the future of the corporation”, has been proposed by the British Academy (2018) to replace the present dysfunctional one:

“Corporations were originally established with clear public purposes. It is only over the last half century that corporate purpose has become equated solely with profit. This has been damaging for corporations’ role in society, trust in business and the impact that business has had on the environment, inequality and social cohesion. In addition, globalisation and technological advances are exacerbating problems of regulatory lag.” (page 8).

In a similar vein, 181 CEOs of major US corporations at the US Business Roundtable also issued a joint statement in 2019 redefining the purpose of a corporation with a focus on benefitting all stakeholders and not just stockholders. Business press articles e.g. Milken Review have also favored the theme. Since maintaining and increasing inequalities based on indefensible criteria lies at the heart of radical-right ideology, the new model is anathema to the radical right.

Authoritarianism among radical-right politicians and in corporations is essentially the same underlying phenomenon, which projects their shared interests and promotes symbiosis. As noted above, corporate world-views still focus on profit, personal greed, personal gratification, predatory unilateral competition, callous disregard for the classes of people they harm, and a belief that the only stakeholders to be serviced and protected are themselves and corporate shareholders. The ‘new corporation paradigm’ inherently and explicitly rejects all such characteristics of corporate authoritarianism. Increasingly, shareholders will be expecting boards to adopt this model and this implicitly requires boards to curb, if not terminate, any director or CEO whose attitude and conduct smacks of radical-right excess.

Typically, those corporate leaders and executives who support radical-right ideology and objectives will probably not care that their conduct and character are subject to criticism and opprobrium, in whatever context or medium. As proud supporters and true believers, some may even revel in the notoriety and reinforcement of the radical-right cause which their contribution seeks to advance. However, even corporate authoritarians who do not consciously espouse radical-right ideology may find themselves nonetheless increasingly likened to, and categorized as fellow travelers of, the radical-right by virtue of exhibiting similar rhetoric, ideas, and conduct. Either way, they will all become increasingly vulnerable to sanctions and dismissal.

Clearly, the new model for corporations based on broad-based stakeholder fairness and equity (not necessarily equity in shares or asset rights) is totally at odds with authoritarianism. Authoritarian attitudes, amoral calculation, cavalier conduct (especially any with a radical-right character), and corporate donations to radical- or far-right causes, will have no place or acceptance in the new model corporation.

Recent ‘New Model’ Corporate Actions

When authoritarianism infects a corporation, it has potentially damaging effects on a broad range of stakeholders: mistreatment of employees, contractors, customers, the public, environment, public health, etc. as well as democracy overall. In countering such potential, especially in publicly listed corporations, corporate governance rules, anti-discrimination policies, and CSR (corporate social responsibility) have had some effect but much less so in privately owned corporations where Listing Rules have no impact.

In October 2020, the bold public threat by Legal & General, one of the UK’s largest institutional investors, namely to all FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies to implement the Parker Report recommendations on appointing ethnic minority directors or face retribution, was unprecedented. So too was the walk-out by Glaxo Smith Kline and Credit Suisse directors from a social event when a racist cabaret act opened. The ‘new model corporation‘ epitomizes this sea-change that heralds a potential check on corporate/radical-right symbiosis.

In keeping with the new anti-authoritarian mood signaled by the US Business Roundtable joint statement in 2019, in April 2021 some 700 major US corporations issued statements condemning the voter suppression bill signed off in Georgia state by Governor Brian Kemp. These included CitiGroup, Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, Merck, and Microsoft. Voter suppression by radical-right interests is now regarded as an unacceptable assault on the mutual and joint interests of corporations and the communities they serve.

For privately-owned companies, in some cases, laissez-faire leadership, inferior managerial quality, and authoritarian, prejudicial, and discriminatory values may prevail, and radical-right infiltration may already have occurred. However, as with listed corporations and their leaders who fail to behave ethically and responsibly, increasingly these ‘rogues’ too may find themselves being quarantined to an out-group of ‘untouchables’ whose business no one wants. The mood change in corporate boardrooms is that authoritarianism, whether personal or ideological, and whether seeking to encourage ‒ or worse ‒ fund radical-right causes, will no longer be tolerated.

Organizational, Professional and Peer Group Strategies

At an organizational level, a number of strategies are available to counter radical-right insurgency, interference, or manipulation. For corporations, these include formal anti-extremist (including anti-radical right) policies as part of corporate governance and risk management. These policies would include such routine protections as:

(a) Separation of CEO and Chairman/President functions as two separate individuals, so as to prevent a joint Chairman-CEO becoming too powerful, self-serving and beyond effective control if indulging in decisions and conduct damaging to the corporation;

(b) Appointment of fully independent non-executive directors (NEDs) to help steer executive directors away from potentially egregious or damaging decisions and conduct;

(c) Establishing an effective Board Risk Committee (separate from a Board Audit Committee) tasked with ensuring that the Board addresses ‘all significant risks’ to the business, which would include any potential threats arising from ideological sources of whatever kind;

(d) Requiring effective due-diligence background checks (negative or positive vetting, as appropriate) on all staff appointments, staff promotions, contractor appointments, agent appointments, partnering and joint venture contracts, licensing agreements, and proposed mergers or acquisitions;

(e) As an integral part of due-diligence, requiring psychological evaluation for all individuals subject to positive vetting.

The essential requirements of corporate governance and risk management within an organization are well established. Whereas the formal framework for corporate governance and risk management should work to prevent harmful radical ideologies and authoritarianism operating in corporations, and does appear to in general, there are numerous instances of failure. The reasons for such failures lie in a combination in the particular organization of defective formal frameworks and weak and/or toxic leadership. As Clive Smallman has laid out (pages 191-224), the characteristics of positive leadership versus toxic leadership are clear and well known. Ensuring that only positive leaders are appointed is another crucial aspect of due-diligence, and emphasizes the necessity for psychometric and psychological evaluation as well as searching for tell-tale signs of offensive attitudes and conduct.

How fast the ‘new model corporation’ gains traction is likely to hinge on a combination of factors, including enlightened self-interest of corporate leaders. This is especially so in the context of the fragile global economy of the Covid-19 and post-Covid era, the policy positions and codes of ethics of professional and sector/trade bodies, and how rapidly the overall management education and training syllabuses of business schools, universities, and other centers are able to be re-orientated to reflect the new model.

Dr Alan Waring is a Policy and Practitioner Fellow at CARR and Adjunct Professor at Centre for Risk and Decision Sciences (CERIDES), European University Cyprus. See full profile here.

© Alan Waring. Views expressed on this website are individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect that of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR). We are pleased to share previously unpublished materials with the community under creative commons license 4.0 (Attribution-NoDerivatives).

This article was originally published at CARR’s media partner, Rantt Media. See the original article he r e.

Lisa Graves

“I was once a Koch lobbyist,” writes Lisa Graves. “I just didn’t know it.” A look at just how deep and wide the libertarian billionaires’ grasp have long been.

The big Wall Street banks have all talked a good line about supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. But that was never going to be enough for racial justice advocates.

“Stating commitments without accountability and transparency does not dismantle systemic racism,” said Marc Bayard, director of the Black Worker Initiative at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Bayard is part of a coalition pushing Wall Street banks to submit to independent examinations of the impact of their policies and practices on racial inequality.

The financial industry has a long history of racism, and even though protections against redlining and other discriminatory practices have been on the books for decades, the problems persist.

In fact, big Wall Street banks have largely abandoned poor people of color, forcing them to rely on payday lenders and other small predatory financial firms. According to an FDIC survey, 13.8 percent of Black households and 12.2 percent of Latino households did not have bank accounts in 2019, compared to just 2.5 percent of white households.

Another study found that for every $1 loaned out to finance residential properties in white neighborhoods in Chicago from 2012-2018, a mere 12 cents was invested in Black neighborhoods.

This spring, two labor union-related institutional investors gave executives at seven big Wall Street banks a big opportunity to show they’re serious about changing course on racial inequality.

CtW Investment Group, which advises unions affiliated with the Change to Win federation, and the SEIU pension fund filed shareholder proposals asking the banks to engage civil rights organizations, employees, shareholders, and customers in a racial equity audit process. The goal: identifying and remedying the adverse impacts of bank policies and practices on non-white stakeholders and communities of color.

But instead of embracing the audit idea, all but one of the banks urged shareholders to reject the proposals.

How have shareholders responded? Thus far, four of the seven banks (Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Goldman Sachs) have held their annual meetings. And while none of the audit proposals received majority votes, sizeable minorities backed the idea, putting pressure on management to take notice.

A 38 percent “yes” vote at Citi was particularly encouraging, given the fact that institutional investors typically follow the corporate board’s recommendation. Shareholders at JPMorgan Chase and State Street hold their meetings this week. CtW dropped the Morgan Stanley proposal after the bank agreed to conduct a racial equity audit.

Why did nearly all of the banks urge “no” votes on the audit proposals? In SEC filings, the banks argued that such analysis was unnecessary given the enormous strides they’re already making on racial equity.

“Conducting a racial equity audit at this point in time would not provide us with useful additional information,” states the JPMorgan proxy statement. “We believe our shareholders would be better served by the Firm’s vigilant focus on building on current momentum to maintain a culture of respect and inclusion and advance racial equity.”

That same proxy statement revealed that JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon earned $32 million in compensation last year. Like the chief executives of all seven of the banks in 2020, Dimon is a white man. (Jane Fraser, a white woman, took the helm of Citi in February 2021.)

Across the financial sector, the upper echelons are overwhelmingly white. At the five largest U.S. investment banks, the share of senior executives and top managers who are white ranges from 71 to 83 percent. (JPMorgan Chase: 81%, Goldman Sachs: 77%, Bank of America: 81%, Morgan Stanley: 83%, and Citigroup: 71%)

Nationwide, employees in the lucrative securities industry are 80.5 percent white, 5.8 percent Black, 11.5 percent Asian, and 8.1 percent Latino. Average pay in that industry (including bonus) was nearly $600,000 in 2019. By contrast, whites make up an estimated 55.4 percent of people in jobs that pay less than $15 per hour.

In a letter to JPMorgan CEO Dimon, the groups Transform Finance, Activest, Worth Rises, the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), the Institute for Policy Studies, and Public Accountability Initiative joined other racial justice organizations in supporting the racial equity audit proposal before JPMorgan, demanding “a commitment to long-term tangible change.”

“Without a comprehensive investigation of how institutionalized racism impacts policies and business practices at these banks,” says Bayard of IPS, “all their public commitments to equity will amount to empty promises.”

The post While Professing BLM Support, Wall Street Banks Reject Racial Equity Audits appeared first on Institute for Policy Studies.

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On August 18, 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a petition by researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF) seeking federal approval to release their genetically engineered (GE) Darling 58 (D58) American chestnut tree into U.S. forests. Researchers claim the transgenic D58 tree will resist the fungal blight that, coupled with rampant overlogging, decimated the American chestnut population in the early 20th century. In fact, the GE American chestnut is a Trojan horse meant to open the doors to commercial GE trees designed for industrial plantations.

The D58 would be the first GE forest tree approved in the U.S. and the first GMO intended to spread in the wild. (GE canola plants were discovered in the wild in 2010 but that was unplanned.) “This is a project to rapidly domesticate a wild species through genetic engineering and accelerated breeding, and then to put it back into ecosystems to form self-perpetuating populations—an intentional evolutionary intervention that has never been attempted before with any species,” explain scientists at the Center for Food Safety (CFS) and International Center for Technology Assessment (ICTA), which are nonprofits based in Washington, D.C.

“The Southern U.S. is global ground zero for the forest products industry and we see genetically engineered chestnut trees as this industry’s sneaky way of opening the floodgates for ‘frankentrees’ that will harm forests, biodiversity and local communities across the region,” explains Scot Quaranda of Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit based in North Carolina that works to protect Southern U.S. forests. “Our natural forests that support wildlife and the economic sovereignty of rural communities will rapidly be replaced with tree plantations for wood pellets, paper and more, leaving environmental and climate injustice in their wake.”

The GE American chestnut faces an uphill battle due to decades of opposition to GE trees by Indigenous peoples, scientists, students, activists, foresters and others, including a GE tree ban by the Forest Stewardship Council and a United Nations decision that warns countries of the dangers of GE trees and urges use of the precautionary principle while addressing the issue.

By October 19, 2020, the close of the public comment period on the petition, 109 organizations, representing millions of members, plus an additional 123,426 individuals had registered their opposition to the D58. The next step is the creation of a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) by the USDA recommending action on the petition. The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) estimates this could take up to a year to complete. Following this, another public comment period will be undertaken to review the draft EIS, after which the agency will develop a final EIS with a decision on the petition.

D58 Safety Studies ‘Invalid,’ Warn Scientists

While American chestnut trees are known to live hundreds of years, D58 trees have only been growing since 2017, calling into question the ESF petition assertion that “Darling 58 has been studied in detail and no plant pest or environmental risks have been observed.”

In a report on the GE American chestnut she co-wrote, Dr. Rachel Smolker from Biofuelwatch explains, “Given the long lifespan of trees and varying environmental conditions they face, we cannot extrapolate from tests done on very young trees under controlled lab and field conditions. How GE trees might behave in the diverse and changing context of natural forests over long periods of time is unknown and likely to remain unknown even after they are released.”

Scientists at CFS and ICTA warn of problems with the D58 safety studies, writing, “Given the young age of Darling 58 trees and corresponding dearth of tissue samples, conclusions from most of the animal experiments described in the Petition are too preliminary to depend upon.”

In studying ESF’s assessment of the impacts of inserting the blight-resistant oxalate oxidase (OxO) transgene into the chestnut genome, both CFS and ICTA further point out that some D58 studies did not, in fact, use material from transgenic D58 trees, rendering them invalid. “Petitioners did experiments to study how bumblebees might be affected by Darling 58, but did not have enough Darling 58 pollen for the experiments so used non-transgenic pollen instead, to which they added purified OxO from barley seeds. … Other important initial studies on animals reported in the Petition are of limited use because they involved feeding leaves from the Darling 4 instead of Darling 58… even though Darling 4 has much lower levels of OxO in leaves… again invalidating the conclusions for risk assessments.” The Darling 4 was an earlier version of the American chestnut genetically engineered with the OxO transgene.

While researchers have argued that a strict regulatory process will ensure the safety of the D58 GE tree, a 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine titled, “Forest Health and Biotechnology: Possibilities and Considerations,” raises flags: “Forest health is not accounted for in the regulations for the use of biotechnology or for other approaches to mitigating forest tree insect pests or pathogens. … There are no specific regulations or policies that those agencies apply to biotech trees.”

Profit Motive Trumping Morality?

Proponents argue that there can be no downside to releasing a tree engineered to resist an introduced blight. But like fire suppression, which has led to devastating wildfires due to an unnatural buildup of flammable materials in the forest, the future impacts of even a well-meaning action can become catastrophic, especially in combination with the unpredictable effects of climate change and extreme weather. Yet, researchers are engineering trees with the conviction that because they can, they should.

In her book Can Science Make Sense of Life?, Dr. Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School, explains the implications of this arrogance. “For life scientists and their enthusiastic promoters, the arc of the technologically possible, often coincident with the promise of financial gain, increasingly… defines the boundaries of the morally permissible.”

Researcher William Powell, whose GE American chestnut research has received both financial and technical support from companies with a vested interest in the approval of the GE American chestnut—including Monsanto, ArborGen and Duke Energy—defends his approach. In an article in the Conversation, Powell says, “One of the key advantages of genetic engineering is that it’s far less disruptive to the original chestnut genome—and thus to its ecologically important characteristics. The trees remain more true to form with less chance of unforeseen and unwanted side effects. Once these genes are inserted, they become a normal part of the tree’s genome and are inherited just like any other gene.”

However, in a briefing paper published by the Federation of German Scientists, Dr. Ricarda Steinbrecher, a molecular geneticist, and Antje Lorch, a biologist, counter that the genetic engineering process is inherently risky. The paper states, “It is well documented that the processes of plant transformation give rise to many mutations throughout the plant genome as well as at the insertion site of the transgene. … Any robust risk assessment study needs to take several generations into account, for example to assess the stability and heritability of the transgene, unintended side effects and changes due to transformation impact.”

Why the American Chestnut?

The D58 American chestnut is the culmination of decades of effort to open the doors to GE trees in the U.S. by biotechnology and timber companies. In 1999, Monsanto joined with timber companies from the U.S. and New Zealand to form a “forestry biotechnology joint venture,” which later became ArborGen, one of the world’s leaders in GE tree research and development. GE tree research was originally focused on trees and traits valued by the forest products industry; trees like poplar, pine and eucalyptus, and traits like insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, faster growth or altered wood composition.

Other early associations—including the Tree Genetic Engineering Research Cooperative at Oregon State University, launched in 1994—brought together university researchers with timber and biotechnology giants as well as the U.S. Forest Service to develop genetically engineered trees for industrial timber plantations.

These efforts were met with widespread opposition and sabotage, leading the industry to conclude that they needed a charismatic “test tree” to try to win over the public opinion relating to GE trees.

A 2007 published paper explains, “There is opposition to commercial application of trees, engineered specifically for fast growth and increased yields, by those whose stance is that the value accrues only to ‘big companies.’ It will remain for traits that have broad societal benefits, such as conservation… for acceptance to be gained.”

The D58 is seen as a positive example for the beleaguered biotechnology industry of the benefits of ‘biotechnology for conservation.’ Duke Energy also sees the American chestnut for its value as a greenwashing tool. Duke Energy invested millions into the GE American chestnut through the Forest Health Initiative. Its hope was to use the American chestnut to help “green” its devastated mountaintop removal mining lands.

Naturalist and author Bernd Heinrich has one such grove growing on his land in Maine. In a New York Times op-ed in 2013, he wrote, “I have been enjoying American chestnuts for several years now, harvested from some trees that are now part of my forest of 600 acres in western Maine. I planted four seedlings in the spring of 1982. Beyond all my expectations, the trees thrived, and some are now 35 feet tall. … In my small corner of western Maine, the American chestnut is now promising to again become a significant component of the ecosystem.”

Once dominant in Eastern U.S. forests, the American chestnut was highly valued for its beautiful and rot-resistant wood, and abundant nuts. While few actually remember the tree, which largely disappeared from the landscape by the 1920s, a public relations effort was launched in the early 2010s with articles appearing in numerous major publications heralding the return of this “mighty giant” through the wonders of genetic engineering. Millions of American chestnut stumps, meanwhile, continue to send up shoots that occasionally grow into trees large enough to produce nuts, and in some locations, wild American chestnuts are spreading on their own, showing at least some evolving blight tolerance.

Another decades-long program by the American Chestnut Cooperators’ Foundation is successfully breeding pure wild American chestnuts that are naturally blight-resistant.

In spite of examples like this, GE chestnut proponents have declared the American chestnut functionally extinct, and insist that its survival hinges on the release of unproven and risky genetic engineered American chestnut trees into forests. But Lois Breault-Melican, a former board member of the American Chestnut Foundation who publicly resigned from the TACF over the organization’s support for the GE American chestnut, points out that this argument ignores the risks posed to organic and other chestnut growers: “These growers are concerned about the potential GMO contamination of their orchards caused by the unregulated and unmonitored planting of genetically engineered American chestnut trees. If the USDA approves these GE American chestnuts, the integrity of chestnut orchards would be forever compromised.”

Indigenous Sovereignty Concerns

Indigenous peoples in the regions of proposed D58 releases have expressed concern that unregulated distribution of a GE tree would violate their sovereign right to keep their territories free from GMOs. They insist that Indigenous peoples be consulted in the process of reviewing the D58 American chestnut.

“Today, there remain large areas of traditional and treaty lands on which much is forested and managed as sovereign territory of many different Native American Peoples,” explains BJ McManama of the Indigenous Environmental Network. “These forests are not only a source of economic self-determination but hold great cultural significance to include sacred sites where trees are an element of sustenance, knowledge and familial identity. Every living being within the forests [is] related in some form and nothing within these lands lives in isolation; therefore, changing or altering the original instructions of any one or any part of these elements threatens the natural order established over millennia.”

The Eastern Band of Cherokee, members of the Lumbee Tribe of central North Carolina and Seminole Peoples from unceded Florida territory joined the Campaign to STOP GE Trees for an October 2014 gathering in the mountains of North Carolina to protest GE trees as a form of colonization. Their concerns were focused on the GE American chestnut trees.

Lisa Montelongo, a member of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, explained, “I’m very concerned that GE trees would impact our future generations and their traditional uses of trees. Our basket makers, people that use wood for the natural colors of our clay work—there would be no natural life, no cycle of life in GE tree plantations.”

Following the camp, the Band’s Tribal Council passed a unanimous resolution prohibiting GE trees from their lands: Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) Tribal Council Resolution No. 31 (2015): “We commit to rejecting biomass, genetically engineering the natural world, carbon trading, carbon offsets and carbon sequestration schemes as they are false solutions to the climate change.” Concerns were focused on the inability of the tribe to keep the GE American chestnut tree off of their lands if it were released into surrounding forests, which they describe as a violation of the Free, Prior and Informed Consent mandate under the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Global Impact of the Genetically Engineered D58 American Chestnut Tree

In the end, the potential deregulation of the D58 is not about restoring a “mighty giant” to Eastern U.S. forests. Its approval is about paving the way for the deregulation of all GE trees, toward the creation of an oxymoronic future “bioeconomy” where biodiverse forests are replaced with specially engineered trees for the manufacture of fuels, chemicals, textiles, plastics and other goods in a “green” version of “business as usual.” Implicit in this scheme is a massive increase in the consumption of wood. This in turn will drive accelerated conversion of carbon-rich native forests, critical for climate regulation, and other ecosystems for conversion to fast-growing plantations that include GE trees with traits to expedite their use as feedstocks. Existing non-native plantations of eucalyptus, the most common plantation tree, are already notorious for their devastating social, ecological and climate change impacts. But new research out of Oregon State University is attempting to “green” these plantations with claims that eucalyptus trees can be genetically engineered to be infertile, through a process to “knock out LEAFY,” the gene believed to control flower formation. The research claims this would prevent eucalyptus trees from invading native ecosystems, though it does nothing to address the ability of eucalyptus to spread asexually through vegetative propagation.

This new technology also does nothing to address the serious problems caused by industrial plantations of eucalyptus. These impacts, outlined in detail by the World Rainforest Movement, include depletion of fresh water; forced displacement of Indigenous groups, rural communities and subsistence farmers; and catastrophic wildfires. In fact, the addition of GE trees to these plantations could exacerbate known impacts and/or lead to new, unknown and potentially irreversible problems.

Another attempt to “green” GE trees for the bioeconomy involves the development of trees specially engineered to store extra carbon as a supposed climate change mitigation tool. But a new article in Yale Environment 360 challenges schemes like this that focus on tree planting for climate mitigation. Echoing the findings of the World Rainforest Movement and others, the article reports “a growing number of scientists and environmentalists are challenging this narrative on tree-planting. They say that planting programs, especially those based on large numerical targets, can wreck natural ecosystems, dry up water supplies, damage agriculture, push people off their land—and even make global warming worse.” In addition, they say, “Tree planting can distract from the greater priorities of protecting existing forests and reducing fossil fuel use.”

The attempts to greenwash genetically engineered trees with their unpredictable and irreversible impacts are being opposed globally by a broad coalition of scientists, Indigenous peoples, agronomists, peasant farmers, foresters, teachers and others, as well as organizations focused on protecting forests, human rights and climate justice. GE trees have no place in an ecologically and socially just future.

Author’s note: Following the initial publication of this article, Reuters reported that a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed on April 21 between the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians (EBCI) and the American Chestnut Foundation. The MOU, described by EBCI members as highly controversial, would allow the planting of GE American chestnuts on Cherokee land.

The post USDA May Allow Genetically Modified Trees to be Released Into the Wild appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

Brett Wilkins, staff writer

A new Greenpeace USA report reveals corporations that have spoken in defense of voting rights and democracy are still supporting lawmakers behind anti-voter and anti-protest bills.

The rich have found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity

M. K. Chin, Indiana University

There’s a growing rift between corporate America and the GOP – two groups that have long been bedfellows.

The latest incident involves a restrictive voting law passed in Georgia – with dozens of other states working on their own measures meant to limit voting. Over 300 companies, CEOs and other executives signed a statement printed in The New York Times to “defend the right to vote and oppose any discriminatory legislation,” while Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver.

Kenny Stancil, staff writer

“The time is now to get big money out of politics, and move to the public funding of elections,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders in response.

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Jake Alimahomed-Wilson is a professor of sociology at the California State University, Long Beach, and a member of the California Faculty Association. His research has focused on the movement of goods around the world and the logistics workers who make the entire system of global capitalism function. Together with Ellen Reese, he edited the book The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, published by Pluto Press in 2020. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

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I‘ve spent most of my career studying how capitalism functions via logistics and how workers across the global supply chain are impacted by neoliberalism and capitalist exploitation, racism, and violence. I started when I completed this project called Choke Points a couple of years ago with Immanuel Ness. I was giving talks to folks all around the world, from New York to London and Paris. Many of the questions we got from organizers, activists, and folks in the labor movement were about Amazon. I had just begun my own research on Amazon. I was really interested in studying the company from a labor and logistics perspective.

Eventually, I got in touch with Ellen Reese, who’s a professor at UC Riverside, located in the Inland Empire region of Southern California, which is known as the world’s warehousing capital. We worked together on an idea for a book on Amazon that would include workers’ and activists’ perspectives.

Throughout the book, you use the phrase “Amazonification of the economy.” How would you describe this phenomenon, and how is it different from the role that other mega-companies like Walmart play in the global economy?

My previous work focused a lot on the rise of big-box retailers like Walmart and how they’ve dominated the global economy by their mastery of logistics and the way they move goods and how that has impacted workers. I realized that Amazon does a lot of things differently and that e-commerce in general has made a lot of changes to the movement of goods, resulting in the “Amazonification” of the economy.

For example, I looked at a case study of Amazon’s subcontracted last-mile delivery drivers who work for third-party delivery service partners. These workers drive Amazon vans and wear Amazon uniforms, but they don’t work for Amazon. Their employers are small, third-party trucking companies. In this way, Amazon uses the legal system to avoid paying its fair share and to withhold protections and benefits from workers.

We argue in the book that e-commerce — and this is largely driven by Amazon, which is the world’s largest e-commerce firm — is leading to what we call a “worker speedup.” Workers now have to work faster and under more pressure. Related to this are what I call “technologies of worker surveillance and control” that corporations use to spy on their workers. Workers’ movements are codified into the most minute metric.

All this has led to increased racialization of the workforce, in which people of color, particularly women of color, are overrepresented in the most backbreaking, hyper-surveilled jobs in the e-commerce industry. And Amazon is driving this, which is leading to an immense amount of profit for a very small group of mostly white male executives.

The surveillance of workers and worker speedup have always been tactics used by the bosses to eke out more profit from their workers. So how is the Amazonification of the economy in this period different? How do you think about this process in the broader context of neoliberalism and the history of capitalism?

Amazon is the outcome of several historical processes related to capitalist development, neoliberalism, and finance capitalism. But because of Amazon’s scale and growing power in the global economy, it is propelling or accelerating some of these novel processes of combining big tech and squeezing of blue-collar workers and changing the nature of working-class jobs.

These massive corporations are on a scale and size almost never seen in human history. They have so much concentrated power to, for example, rewrite laws, as they did in California, with the gig economy law that Uber got passed to avoid taxes by classifying workers not as employees but as contractors and members of private, fake businesses.

Unlike many sectors of the economy, Amazon has increased its profits as a result of the pandemic and shutdowns. How has Amazon’s role in the economy shifted in the last year? What might this tell us about trends in the global economy going forward?

Ellen Reese and I began this project before the pandemic. Amazon was already growing at breakneck speed. We were already seeing major industry shifts in logistics and retailing, including the emergence of Amazon web services, which accounts for a large portion of Amazon’s profits. And then a few months before our book was scheduled to publish, the pandemic began and everything accelerated. What we’ve seen over the last year is obviously a concentration of corporate power in the emergence of Amazon, which will soon become the world’s largest private employer.

Amazon is already the second-largest private employer in the U.S., but of course it’s bigger than the official numbers show because there are hundreds of thousands of workers who should be employees of Amazon but who are not considered such. Amazon is not responsible for these workers. And these are the workers who deliver over 50 percent of all Amazon Prime packages. They are contract workers, or they are kind of like gig workers. They’re flex drivers as well. They drive their own vehicles to deliver the products. And we’re seeing this all over the world.

Further, over the last 12 months, there’s been this unprecedented demand for e-commerce delivery. This has led Amazon to go on a hiring spree, and they’ve nearly doubled their workforce. Currently, the global workforce is about 1.3 million people, and this number doesn’t account for the half a million other workers who deliver Amazon’s goods to your doorstep.

I think we’re going to see Amazon continue to build market power and take on a greater role in increasing corporate dominance, in the United States, Europe, and increasingly in the Global South. In the U.S., we are likely to see changes in the economy and in consumption. One of the things I’ve argued is that Amazon is not solely responsible for this, but it is really driving a change in consumption, at least among middle-class consumers. This is a lot different from only a few years ago, when the supply chain used to end at a Walmart store, a brick-and-mortar store, that you physically got into your vehicle to drive to and buy a product.

Now the supply chain ends at our place of residence, our apartments, our homes, right where we live — or increasingly, Amazon lockers. My university, California State University Long Beach was the first public CSU. This is the largest public education system in the United States. And now we have an Amazon campus store on our campus. It’s a brick-and-mortar store, and it’s right outside my office. I remember writing the introduction to the book, looking at this damn store. And we will see more of this. Amazon is increasingly expanding into grocery work and establishing workerless stores. They’re opening several stores in the UK without workers. Automation is going to play a big role in the coming years. Shopping malls are not going to come back after the pandemic.

Meanwhile, we are seeing Amazon invest heavily in the Global South. They’re trying to deal with, already, the competition of other firms in both Latin America and Asia. In the Middle East, they’re buying up small e-commerce firms. Amazon is also trying to increase its market share in Mexico in particular. They’re really doing some different things there in terms of how they are hiring warehouse workers. The conditions in those facilities are exploitative at a level not even seen in the U.S., in terms of how workers are being pitted against each other. There is almost a kind of gamification of work there. Workers struggle against each other to get color badges in order to get steady employment.

In India, which we discuss in the book, Amazon is basically going head-to-head against Walmart to try to get a slice of India’s massive emerging middle class. Among the approximately 1.3 billion people living in India, there are high rates of poverty, but there is also an emerging consumer class that Amazon is spending immense efforts trying to appeal to in order to get a leg up on Walmart. Walmart bought Flipkart, which is the largest e-commerce company in India, so Amazon is trying to counter that.

At the same time, there have been waves of resistance and rebellion in India, specifically in New Delhi, where workers and independent small business owners and merchants are very much threatened. And there’s a large informal sector in India that could stand to lose out when these big tech companies come in and continue to squeeze people.

Is it fair to say that Amazon’s exploitative practices, like its innovations in worker surveillance tactics, have sparked a new wave of resistance among Amazon workers? The workers fighting to form a union in Bessemer, Alabama, right now have explicitly cited Amazon’s horrific working conditions as a reason they need a union. Can you speak about what workers around the world have been doing to fight back against Amazon?

There have been different forms of worker activism. One of the forms that we highlighted in the book was the organizing work of Amazonians United, among workers in Chicago in particular. One of the things that’s really important about Amazonians United’s work is that they’re really interested in developing and building worker power from the bottom up. They focus a lot on worker organizing and building connections between workers to come together and to talk about the workplace in order to change the workplace themselves.

There’s also the “Make Amazon Pay” movement that launched last year, in which Amazon workers and their allies staged protests on Cyber Monday and Black Friday in 2020 during the pandemic. So here you have this massive global corporation that is known to not pay taxes and to avoid investing in communities, and is instead taking from workers — not only taking their labor and the rewards of that labor, but also making communities pay for its practices. There is also Amazon’s environmental impact: in the Inland Empire region of Southern California, which has a population of over 4 million people, Amazon is now the largest private employer in this region. Inland Empire has basically become a sink of racial capitalism and environmental racism. Communities of color, disproportionately Latinx and Black communities, are absorbing the toxins of these thousands and thousands of truck trips a day to move the goods that make free shipping possible. These goods are then brought to Los Angeles and delivered by highly exploited delivery drivers.

What we’ve seen is that across the world, Amazon employs predominantly workers of color in some of the hardest, most hyper-surveilled jobs; especially in the United States, Black and Latinx workers are over-represented as warehouse workers, the lowest-paid workers of Amazon’s entire corporation.

They’re underrepresented in management positions, and overrepresented in the hard, burnout types of jobs that lead to high injury rates. But also, immigrant and migrant workers are overrepresented in these jobs all around the world. And so in terms of resistance, it’s paramount that the same workers who are overrepresented in the most exploitative conditions should be the workers who lead the movement to oppose and to organize and increase worker power.

That’s why what is going on in Bessemer is so important. This is a majority Black fulfillment center. There’s a high percentage of Black women who are employed there. The movement for economic justice for the workers in that Bessemer facility is inseparable from racial justice organizing.

That is one of the strengths of the organizing that’s emerging here in the United States: there is a connection between immigrant rights, Black lives, and worker justice. And Amazon again provides a useful thread that can bring these groups together. Amazon owns Ring doorbell systems, which is the largest surveillance for the masses. You have a large number of middle-class, many white folks, buying these Ring doorbell systems to police people of color in their neighborhoods. And this data is turned over to the police. Hundreds of police departments have access to a Ring doorbell system. So again, this extends beyond just kind of buying a product on e-commerce. There are other forms of the state-corporate nexus. Amazon Web Service, the largest cloud infrastructure in the world, contracts with ICE, the CIA, a lot of state agencies.

Amazon is fueling the emergence of this kind of corporate-state nexus. Now, is Amazon the only corporation that does this? No. But Amazon has such a scale, and such a size, and such an influence that we have to pay attention to it, because its power and revenue eclipses that of many countries around the world.

As Amazon gets bigger and employs more workers — many of them gig workers who are unprotected, unorganized, and hyper-exploited — the jobs it creates will replace unionized jobs. Consequently, the unionization attempt in Bessemer is important. It could set the stage for more Amazon unions or even more unionization attempts at other big corporations across the country, creating union jobs for workforces that are predominantly made up of people of color. With this in mind, how do you see the role of unions and Amazon in the national economy?

The unionization effort in Bessemer is historic. But there are multiple ways that workers can resist and better their working conditions. The workers in Bessemer are fighting to form a union as part of the RWDSU to represent the workers in collective bargaining. And this is huge. But it’s also huge what Amazonians United is doing. They’re doing a different way of worker organizing, that’s worker led, right? So there’s different models in which workers can fight back. And so all those are really important in the broader struggle.

Another important aspect of this is that Amazon is an international company. Capital is global, so worker actions and worker power and movements that connect and intersect with worker’s rights must also be global, and they should be intersectional. In recent history, mainstream unions haven’t attended to other pressing social justice issues. That’s why so many folks are amped about what’s going on in Bessemer and what other global movements of workers are doing. Amazon Workers United is a global coalition of Amazon workers from all over the world who are also meeting, strategizing, and coordinating actions. This is all part of what I think is really important work. The attacks on unions are also attacks on communities of color. Unionizing a huge corporation in the warehouses of Amazon would be a huge leveling factor.

And of course, in concert with that, we have to mobilize to also curtail the obscene wealth that Amazon offers to a small group of executives, this ultra-rich class who are not paying their fair share. There are schools dwindling. Water is poisoned, poverty is rising, and they continue to keep more and more resources for themselves. It has to be a multifaceted kind of movement that’s global.

“Over 900 Global Shapers joined World Economic Forum Founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab for talks on the Great Reset initiative… a Great Reset that places all citizens, especially young people, at the heart of social and economic systems.”

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