Why Corporations Choose Lawlessness To Fight Unions

• by: Sonali Kolhatkar

Sonali Kolhatkar

05-19-2024 ~ Workers at companies like Apple and Starbucks face armies of union-busting lawyers advising employers to repeatedly violate labor laws.

Workers in Towson, Maryland, have earned the distinction of becoming the first Apple retail workers in the nation to vote to strike over failed union negotiations with their employer. The approximately 100 Apple workers were also the first in the nation to successfully form a union. They did so in 2022, as the Coalition of Organized Retail Employees (CORE), joining the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM). Two-thirds of the store’s workers voted to join the union, a resounding success at a company that has long staved off union activity.

Apple could have embraced the Towson store union, respecting the legal right of its workers to bargain collectively for their rights. Instead, the company chose a depressingly familiar path of using its economic power to break labor laws and resist the union at all costs.

Among Apple’s earliest tactics, a bold one even by corporate standards, was to offer all but the Towson store workers new educational and medical perks, saying that the nascent union would have to negotiate for those perks while nonunion workers would be able to enjoy them immediately. The IAM CORE members claimed it was a “calculated” move by Apple, timed just ahead of a second retail union vote at a store in Penn Square, Oklahoma, ostensibly as a warning to those workers, and any others considering union drives, that they could lose out. The National Labor Relations Board, which under President Joe Biden has tended to adhere to its mandate by actually protecting workers more often than not, accused the company of violating the workers’ labor rights. Luckily, the bid failed and a majority of Penn Square’s Apple workers chose to unionize. Read more

Procter & Gamble, Mondelēz, And Nestlé Are Among 10 Of The Leading Consumer Brands Driving Global Deforestation

• by: Laurel Sutherlin

05-19-2024 ~ Despite corporate commitments, deforestation rates remain high, and community land conflicts continue.

Since the turn of the century, there has been a consistent average annual loss of 3 to 4 million hectares (7.4 to 9.9 million acres) of tropical forest globally. This puts us far from reaching the goal of zero deforestation by 2030, a target embraced in 2021 by 145 countries during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Besides damaging the local environment, deforestation threatens our societies and economies by elevating carbon emissions and exacerbating the climate crisis. Land use change—mainly deforestation—contributes as much as a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. So, solving the climate crisis means ending rampant deforestation. And while national commitments are essential, the climate solution can only come from a collaboration between all stakeholders, and that includes, importantly, the private sector.

“Though countries need to take the lead, solving the climate crisis is not up to them alone. Non-state actors—industry, financial institutions, cities, and regions—play a critical role in getting the world to net zero no later than 2050. They will either help scale the ambition and action we need to ensure a sustainable planet, or else they strongly increase the likelihood of failure. The planet cannot afford delays, excuses, or more greenwashing,” said Catherine McKenna, chair of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Expert Group on the Net Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities, in a 2022 report that explored, in part, the role of business in achieving net zero emissions.

However, big multinational brands pose a major problem. Despite commitments to improve their supply chains, deforestation—as well as violence against those people defending land rights—remains increasingly high worldwide.

Deforestation rose 3.2 percent worldwide in 2023, according to a report published in April 2024 by Global Forest Watch, a forest monitoring project of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization. Read more

Ravaged By Floods: Afghanistan’s Desperate Plight

• by: Pranjal Pandey

Map en.wikipedia.org

05-15-2024 ~ Unprecedented flash floods wreak havoc in Afghanistan, leaving devastation in their wake and plunging the nation into crisis.

Nearly 315 people have died, and over 1,600 have suffered injuries in catastrophic flash floods that swept through various provinces in Afghanistan on Friday, May 10. Authorities have declared a state of emergency in response to the situation. Northern Baghlan province bore the brunt of the devastation, with a death toll of over 300 and thousands of houses either destroyed or damaged. Torrential rains have wreaked havoc in several provinces, including Takhar, Badakhshan, Ghor, and Herat.

Flash floods happen when heavy rain overwhelms normal drainage. Climate change, which warms the atmosphere, boosts extreme rainfall, increasing the likelihood of these events. These floods have had a deep impact on the population, as many have lost homes and livelihoods. Rescue teams are working on the ground, but reaching flooded areas has become tough.

Meanwhile, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, expressed his solidarity with the people of Afghanistan and extended his condolences to the families of the victims. He added that the UN was collaborating with local authorities to provide assistance.

Afghanistan ranks among the 10 most vulnerable countries to climate change and has been experiencing a rise in extreme weather conditions, particularly floods, droughts, and sand and dust storms. These phenomena have led to the loss of lives and livelihoods, as well as significant damage to infrastructure. Yet, despite being one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change, Afghanistan was not represented at COP27, the crucial 2022 UN Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. Nations acknowledged the need for finance to tackle climate-related loss and damage, agreeing to establish a fund and funding arrangements. Read more

Seven Features Of Ancient Enterprise

• by: Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson

05-15-2024 ~ The changing context for enterprise through the centuries reminds us that business activities are not universal but fluid and alter according to society’s practical priorities and ethics.

There are multiple differences between antiquity’s economic practices and those of the modern world, and these should be borne in mind when considering the changing context for enterprise through the centuries. Whereas modern business largely operates on credit, in archaic and classical times handicraft workshops were located on basically self-sufficient landed estates, including those of the large public institutions. Such industry was self-financed rather than operating on credit, which was extended mainly for long-distance and bulk trade.

Furthermore, entrepreneurs in antiquity either headed wealthy families or sought fortunes by managing other people’s money, which typically was provided subject to a stipulated return. Regardless of the source of their capital, they coordinated a complex set of relationships whose institutional structure evolved throughout the second and first millennia BC.

The Importance of Land
From Babylonian times down through late Republican Rome, commercial income tended to be invested in land. But there was no price speculation on credit until the late first century BC in Rome. Land was the major savings vehicle and sign of status. The largest estate owners shifted subsistence land to growing cash crops, headed by olive oil and wine in the Mediterranean, and dates in the Near East, harvested increasingly by slaves. Read more

Parallels Between Archaic Entrepots And Modern Offshore Banking Centers

• by: Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson

05-12-2024 ~ Offshore banking and tax-avoidance centers are nothing new; they’ve been with us for millennia.

A discussion of the origins of urbanization may provide some insight into the character of modern social problems by highlighting the long historical dynamic at work. It may not be out of place here to point out that anti‑states are well known in the modern world, above all in what the U.S. Federal Reserve Board classifies as eleven offshore banking centers. Five such enclaves are in the Caribbean: Panama, the Netherlands Antilles (Curaçao), Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the British West Indies (Cayman Islands). Three enclaves—Hong Kong, Macao, and Singapore—were founded to conduct the China trade. The remaining three are Liberia, Lebanon, and Bahrain at the mouth of the Persian Gulf—the island which Bronze Age Sumerians called Dilmun when they used it to trade with the Indus valley and the Iranian shore.

Nothing would seem more modern than these offshore banking and tax-avoidance centers. They are the brainchildren of lawyers and accountants in the 1960s seeking to weave loopholes into the social fabric—to provide curtains of secrecy (“privacy”) to avoid or evade taxes, and to serve as havens for ill‑gotten earnings as well as to facilitate legitimate commerce.

Whereas modern nation‑states enact laws and impose taxes, these enclaves help individuals evade such regulations. And whereas nation‑states have armies, these centers are the furthest thing from being military powers. They are antibodies to nationhood, yet more may be learned about Ice Age, Neolithic, and even Bronze Age gathering and meeting sites by looking at these modern enclaves than by examining classical city‑states such as Athens and Rome. Read more

Trump Loyalists Preview Strategies To Upend 2024 Election

• by: Steven Rosenfeld

05-10-2024 ~ Not just challenging voters’ credentials in battleground states. But attacking every step in running elections.

As the 2020 presidential election entered its final stretch, Christina Bobb was not just covering it as a TV newswoman for the pro-Donald Trump One America News Network (OANN). The tall, dark-haired, clear-speaking ex-marine and lawyer was working to overturn it.

Bobb believed that Democrats and election officials colluded to fabricate thousands of voter registrations, illegal voters, forged ballots, and finessed the vote count until Joe Biden was the victor in 2020’s battleground states.

Yet it was Bobb and Trump loyalists who were feverishly plotting and pushing to alter the presidential election’s outcome, as she detailed in her 2023 book, Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What it Means for 2024.

Publicly, Bobb kept reporting for OANN. Under the radar, she “joined” Rudy Giuliani and others in Trump’s orbit who pursued ways to nullify the results. She wrote that she was on the call with Trump when he urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes.” Bobb said that she coordinated “the litigation efforts in Arizona, Michigan, and New Mexico,” including, apparently, a slate of fake Electoral College members who forged and sent paperwork to Congress certifying that Trump had won Arizona.

In April, Bobb and 17 others were indicted on multiple felonies in that electoral hijacking scheme by Arizona Attorney General Kristin Mayes, a Democrat. Only weeks before, on the same day Trump secured the 2024 Republican nomination, Bobb was named the Republican National Committee’s senior counsel for election integrity. Beyond the surreal twist that a politico indicted for attempting to overturn a swing state’s presidential vote will now lead a national party’s efforts to police elections, Bobb’s book previews the lawfare and conspiratorial mindset that is already shadowing 2024’s presidential election. Read more