Chris Hedges's Blog, page 363

The ‘Private Governments’ That Subjugate U.S. Workers

Corporate dictatorships—which strip employees of fundamental constitutional rights, including free speech, and which increasingly rely on temp or contract employees who receive no benefits and have no job security—rule the lives of perhaps 80 percent of working Americans. These corporations, with little or no oversight, surveil and monitor their workforces. They conduct random drug testing, impose punishing quotas and targets, routinely engage in wage theft, injure workers and then refuse to make compensation, and ignore reports of sexual harassment, assault and rape. They use managerial harassment, psychological manipulation—including the pseudo-science of positive psychology—and intimidation to ensure obedience. They fire workers for expressing leftist political opinions on social media or at public events during their off-hours. They terminate those who file complaints or publicly voice criticism about working conditions. They thwart attempts to organize unions, callously dismiss older workers and impose “non-compete” contract clauses, meaning that if workers leave they are unable to use their skills and human capital to work for other employers in the same industry. Nearly half of all technical professions now require workers to sign non-compete clauses, and this practice has spread to low-wage jobs including those in hair salons and restaurants.

The lower the wages the more abusive the conditions. Workers in the food and hotel industries, agriculture, construction, domestic service, call centers, the garment industry, warehouses, retail sales, lawn service, prisons, and health and elder care suffer the most. Walmart, for example, which employs nearly 1 percent of the U.S. labor force (1.4 million workers), prohibits casual conversation, which it describes as “time theft.” The food industry giant Tyson prevents its workers from taking toilet breaks, causing many to urinate on themselves; as a result, some workers must wear diapers. The older, itinerant workers that Amazon often employs are subjected to grueling 12-hour shifts in which the company electronically monitors every action to make sure hourly quotas are met. Some Amazon workers walk for miles on concrete floors each shift and repeatedly get down on their hands and knees to perform their jobs. They frequently suffer crippling injuries. The company makes injured employees, whom it fires, sign releases saying the injuries are not work-related. Two-thirds of workers in low-wage industries are victims of wage theft, losing an amount estimated to be as high as $50 billion a year. From 4 million to 14 million American workers, under threat of wage cuts, plant shutdowns or dismissal, have been pressured by their employers to support pro-corporate political candidates and causes.

The corporations that in effect rule the lives of American workers constitute what University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson refers to as “private governments.” These “workplace governments,” she writes, are “dictatorships, in which bosses govern in ways that are largely unaccountable to those who are governed. They don’t merely govern workers: they dominate them.” These corporations have the legal authority, she writes, “to regulate workers’ off-hour lives as well—their political activities, speech, choice of sexual partner, use of recreational drugs, alcohol, smoking, and exercise. Because most employers exercise this off-hours authority irregularly, and without warning, most workers are unaware of how sweeping it is.”

“If the U.S. government imposed such regulations on us, we would rightly protest that our constitutional rights were being violated,” Anderson writes in her book “Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It).” “But American workers have no such rights against their bosses. Even speaking out against such constraints can get them fired. So most keep silent.”

Once workers sign contracts they essentially cede their rights as citizens to the corporations, except the few rights guaranteed by law, for the duration of the contracts. “Employers’ authority over workers,” Anderson writes, “outside of collective bargaining and a few other contexts, such as university professors’ tenure, is sweeping, arbitrary, and unaccountable—not subject to notice, process, or appeal. The state has established the constitution of the government of the workplace; it is a form of private government.” These corporations, by law, can “impose a far more minute, exacting, and sweeping regulation of employees than democratic states do in any domain outside of prisons and the military.”

These myriad corporate dictatorships, or private governments, ensure American workers are docile and compliant as the superstructure of the corporate state cements into place a species of corporate totalitarianism. The ruling ideology of neoliberalism and libertarianism, used to justify the corporate domination and social inequality that afflict us, sells itself as the protector of freedom and liberty. It does this by subterfuge. It claims workers have the freedom to enter into employment contracts and terminate them, while ignoring the near-total suspension of rights during the period of employment. It pretends that workers and corporations function as independent and autonomous sellers and buyers, with workers selling their labor freely and corporate owners buying this labor.

This neoliberal economic model, however, is defective. The relationship between the corporation and the worker is not the same as the relationship between a self-employed baker, for example, and his customers. The self-employed baker and those who buy the bread appeal to mutual self-interest in the exchange. “The buyer is not an inferior, begging for a favor,” Anderson writes. “Equally importantly, the buyer is not a superior who is entitled to order the butcher, the brewer, or the baker to hand over the fruits of his labor. Buyers must address themselves to the other’s interests. The parties each undertake the exchange with their dignity, their standing, and their personal independence affirmed by the other. This is a model of social relations between free and equal persons.” (Emphasis by the author.)

Once a worker is bonded to a corporation, however, he or she instantly loses this dignity, standing and personal independence, especially if the job is temporary, entry-level or menial. Relations are no longer free and equal.

“When workers sell their labor to an employer, they have to hand themselves over to their boss, who then gets to order them around,” Anderson writes. “The labor contract, instead of leaving the seller free as before, puts the seller under the authority of their boss.” The worker either fulfills the demands of management, which he or she has little ability to question or formulate, or is reprimanded, demoted, sanctioned or fired. The corporate manager wields total authority over the worker. “The performance of the contract embodies a profound asymmetry in whose interests count,” Anderson writes, “henceforth, the worker will be required to toil under conditions that pay no regard to his interests, and every regard for the capitalist’s profits.”

Neoliberalism posits that the choice is between a free market and state control, whereas, as Anderson writes, “most adults live their working lives under a third thing entirely: private government.” Neoliberalism argues that the essence of freedom is free enterprise, while never addressing workers’ surrender of basic freedoms. Neoliberalism holds out the promise, which has not been true since before the Industrial Revolution, that workers can become self-employed if they are hardworking and innovative. We all have the ability to achieve economic independence or become industry leaders if we draw on our inner resources, according to the neoliberal mantra, one popularized by mass culture. The neoliberal ideologues’ solution to the cannibalization of the economy is to call for fostering a nation of entrepreneurs. This is a con. Corporations and their lobbyists write the laws and the legislation, creating a two-tiered legal system in which poverty is criminalized and we are controlled, taxed and punished. The corporate oligarchs, however, live in a world where monopoly, fraud and other financial wrongdoing are legal or rarely punished and taxes are minimal or nonexistent. Among the population, only a tiny percentage—most of whom come from inherited wealth and have been groomed in elitist, plutocratic universities and institutions—dominate the corporate hierarchy. Public discourse, controlled by corporate power, ignores this one-sided power arrangement. It cannot address a problem it refuses to acknowledge. Subjugation is freedom.

Anderson calls this corporate economic system communist—that’s communist with a small “c”—because these private governments “own all the nonlabor means of production in the society it governs. It organizes production by means of central planning. The form of the government is a dictatorship. In some cases, the dictator is appointed by an oligarchy. In other cases, the dictator is self-appointed.” Private governments, their sanctioning powers lacking the state’s ability to imprison or execute (although they often have internal security forces with the power to arrest), ensure compliance by using wholesale surveillance and the threats of demotion and exile, plus the potential rewards of salary raises and promotions. Also, there usually is a steady barrage of company propaganda.

“We have the language of fairness and distributive justice to talk about low wages and inadequate benefits, we know how to talk about the Fight for $15, whatever side of this issue you are on,” Anderson writes. “But we don’t have good ways to talk about the way bosses rule workers’ lives.”

American workers have never achieved the array of rights won by workers in other industrialized countries. At the height of union representation in 1954, only 28.3 percent of American workers were union members. This number has fallen to 11.1 percent, with only 6.6 percent of private-sector workers belonging to unions. Wages have for decades declined or been stagnant. Half of all U.S. workers make less than $29,000 a year, effectively putting their families in poverty.

Workers, lacking unions and the ability to pressure management through collective bargaining, have no say in their working conditions. If they choose to leave abusive employment, where do they go? The inequalities and the workers’ loss of liberty and agency are embedded within the corporate structure. It is impossible, as Anderson warns, to build a free, democratic society dominated by private governments. As these private governments merge into the superstructure of the corporate state we are cementing into place an unassailable corporate tyranny. It is a race against time. Our remaining freedoms are being rapidly extinguished. These omnipotent dictatorships must be destroyed, and they will only be destroyed by sustained popular protest such as we see in the streets of Paris. Otherwise, we will be shackled in 21st-century chains.

Judge Blocks Trump Birth Control Coverage Rules in 13 States

OAKLAND, Calif.—A U.S. judge in California on Sunday blocked Trump administration rules, which would allow more employers to opt out of providing women with no-cost birth control, from taking effect in 13 states and Washington, D.C.

Judge Haywood Gilliam granted a request for a preliminary injunction by California, 12 other states and Washington, D.C. The plaintiffs sought to prevent the rules from taking effect as scheduled on Monday while a lawsuit against them moved forward.

But Gilliam limited the scope of the ruling to the plaintiffs, rejecting their request that he block the rules nationwide.

The changes would allow more employers, including publicly traded companies, to opt out of providing no-cost contraceptive coverage to women by claiming religious objections. Some private employers could also object on moral grounds.

California and the other states argue that women would be forced to turn to state-funded programs for birth control and experience unintended pregnancies.

“The law couldn’t be more clear — employers have no business interfering in women’s health care decisions,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said in a statement Sunday. “Today’s court ruling stops another attempt by the Trump Administration to trample on women’s access to basic reproductive care. It’s 2019, yet the Trump administration is still trying to roll back women’s rights. Our coalition will continue to fight to ensure women have access to the reproductive healthcare they are guaranteed under the law.”

The U.S. Department of Justice said in court documents the rules “protect a narrow class of sincere religious and moral objectors from being forced to facilitate practices that conflict with their beliefs.”

At issue is a requirement under President Barack Obama’s health care law that birth control services be covered at no additional cost. Obama officials included exemptions for religious organizations. The Trump administration expanded those exemptions and added “moral convictions” as a basis to opt out of providing birth control services.

At a hearing on Friday, Gilliam said the changes would result in a “substantial number” of women losing birth control coverage, which would be a “massive policy shift.”

The judge previously blocked an interim version of the rules — a decision that was upheld in December by an appeals court.

Garment Workers in Bangladesh Promised a Raise After Strike

Garment manufacturers in Bangladesh said they would raise wages for a majority of workers after a week of strikes over low pay. Police have used tear gas, rubber bullets and batons during demonstrations in the streets that left one textile worker dead and dozens more injured.

Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi announced Sunday that workers in six out of seven pay grades would receive a raise. In December, the minimum monthly wage in Bangladesh was raised to taka 8,000, or $96, but not all garment workers saw a raise. Union leaders are asking for wages of taka 16,000 taka, or about $191, per month.

Amirul Huq, who represented union workers in negotiations facilitated by the government, said the strike would come to an end. “The discrepancies in the wage structure have been resolved by the prime minister’s intervention,” he said. “We welcome the new wages. As trade unions, we have the right to protest, but that does not mean vandalizing factories or blocking roads. Workers will go back to work.”

Throughout the demonstrations, police hit crowds with tear gas and water cannons. On Tuesday, they fired rubber bullets at textile workers and hit Sumon Mia, killing him, according to The Daily Star newspaper. Colleagues said he was not a protester and was in fact on his way back to work at Anlima Textile factory.

Imdadul Haque, who worked at the same factory as Mia, said police violently raided workers’ houses regardless of whether they were on strike. “Although we did not join the demonstration, police came to our house and asked to see our professional identity cards. Upon seeing our ID cards, police started beating us. At one stage, police fired rubber bullets at my leg and my colleague’s leg,” he said.

The $30 billion textile industry in Bangladesh, which employs about 4 million people, makes clothing for brands including H&M, Uniqlo, Walmart and Nike. Beyond the low pay, the work requires long hours and significant safety risks. In 2013, 1,100 people died, many of whom were garment workers, when the Rana Plaza in Dhaka collapsed. Although progress since has been made to reduce hazards at factories, the job remains fast paced and dangerous.

“Wages are such a small part of the actual price of a product. They could even double or triple the wages,” said Liana Foxvog of the International Labor Rights Forum. “Fast fashion is part of the trend that’s putting pressure toward the race-to-the-bottom working conditions,” she added.

 

Report: Trump Military Adviser Asked Pentagon for Options to Strike Iran

Reminding the world that he is, as one critic put it, “a reckless advocate of military force,” the Wall Street Journal revealed on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton “asked the Pentagon to provide the White House with military options to strike Iran last year, generating concern at the Pentagon and State Department.”

“It definitely rattled people,” a former U.S. official said of the request, which Bolton supposedly made after militants aligned with Iran fired mortars into the diplomatic quarter of Baghdad, Iraq, that contains the U.S. Embassy in early September. “People were shocked. It was mind-boggling how cavalier they were about hitting Iran.”

“The Pentagon complied with the National Security Council’s request to develop options for striking Iran,” the Journal reported, citing unnamed officials. “But it isn’t clear if the proposals were provided to the White House, whether Mr. Trump knew of the request, or whether serious plans for a U.S. strike against Iran took shape at that time.”

The Journal‘s report, which comes just days after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered an “arrogant tirade” of a speech vilifying Iran, sparked immediate alarm among critics of the Trump administration’s biggest warmongers—who, over the past several months, have been accused of fomenting unrest in Iran and laying the groundwork for war.

Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, called the news “a reminder that when it comes to Iran, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are batshit insane.”

In which the @WSJ provides your occasional reminder that when it comes to Iran, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are batshit insane. https://t.co/YVIojDpgl1

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) January 13, 2019

Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), tweeted, “Make no mistake: Bolton is the greatest threat to the security of the United States!” Parsi, an expert on U.S.-Iranian relations and longtime critic of Bolton, called for his immediate ouster over the request detailed in Journal‘s report.

MAKE NO MISTAKE: Bolton is the greatest threat to the security of the United States!

After 2 unclaimed attacks NEAR US facilities in Iraq last year, Bolton asked Pentagon for plan to go to war with Iran.@realDonaldTrump should fire Bolton right away!
https://t.co/s20Fn25dv6

— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) January 13, 2019

“This administration takes an expansive view of war authorities and is leaning into confrontation with Iran at a time when there are numerous tripwires for conflict across the region,” NIAC president Jamal Abdi warned in a statement. “It is imperative that this Congress investigate Bolton’s request for war options and pass legislation placing additional legal and political constraints on the administration’s ability to start a new war of choice with Iran that could haunt America and the region for generations.”

In a series of moves that have elicited concern from members of Congress, political experts, other world leaders, and peace activists, since May the Trump administration has ditched the Iran nuclear deal—formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—and reimposed economic sanctions.

NIAC, in November, urged the new Congress that convened at the beginning of the year to challenge the administration’s hawkish moves and restore U.S. standing on the world stage by passing measures to block the sanctions re-imposed in August and November, and reverse Trump’s decision to breach the deal—which European and Iranian diplomats have been trying to salvage.

Iran continues to comply with the terms of JCPOA, according to the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). However, Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s nuclear chief, told state television on Sunday that “preliminary activities for designing modern 20 percent (enriched uranium) fuel have begun.” While Iran has maintained that it is not pursuing nuclear weapons, the nation would still have to withdraw from the deal if it resumed enrichment at the level.

As Iran signals that it is considering withdrawing from the JCPOA, the Journal report has critics worried that Bolton and Pompeo have the administration on a war path—with Bolton, just last week, insisting without any evidence that Iranian leadership is committed to pursuing nuclear weapons. Some have compared that claim to former Vice President Dick Cheney’s infamous lie in 2002, to bolster support for the U.S. invasion, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Bolton, 2019: “We have little doubt that Iran’s leadership is still strategically committed to achieving deliverable nuclear weapons.”

Cheney, 2002: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” https://t.co/0eomJyGh7I

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) January 12, 2019

“John Bolton and fellow Iran hawks believe they have two years left to collapse the Iran nuclear deal and trigger a disastrous war that the American people want no part of,” Abdi concluded. “We know that Bolton and other administration officials preferred an Iran war to negotiations prior to serving Trump. Now there is confirmation that they are still seeking out opportunities to fulfill their war agenda.”

As the Journal noted, “Alongside the requests in regards to Iran, the National Security Council asked the Pentagon to provide the White House with options to respond with strikes in Iraq and Syria as well.”

The Embarrassing Secret Behind These Tech Giants’ Diversity Figures

This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.

Palantir Technologies said it must hide the number of women and people of color it employs so competitors won’t “steal” them.

That’s the argument the data-mining company made to the federal government, blocking release of its diversity statistics for more than a year.

Well, we finally got Palantir’s 2015 diversity numbers through a public records battle with the government. It turns out that Palantir didn’t have such great diversity after all. The company had no female executives and only one woman, who was white, among its managers.

Palantir told the U.S. Department of Labor, in a letter it also tried to keep secret, that “competitors could identify where Palantir has made significant progress in hiring women and minorities and target recruitment strategies at specific job categories to steal this talent from Palantir.”

But Palantir doesn’t compare well, even in an industry infamous for its lack of diversity. Of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley, only 10 other companies had no female executives in 2015. That’s out of 167 of the largest tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, according to an analysis by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the Center for Employment Equity. The company was in the bottom four for its percentage of female managers and the only one that had no women of color in management.

Co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir has won hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts, drawing controversy for helping law enforcement track citizens, predict crime and target immigrants. Firms with government contracts are overseen by the Labor Department’s anti-discrimination arm, making their diversity reports subject to public records requests.

Reveal filed Freedom of Information Act requests for many tech firms’ EEO-1 reports, which show a company’s workforce broken down by race, gender and broad job category. The Labor Department initially let the companies block the release of the numbers – as is its longtime policy – but reversed course and coughed up the data after we sued.

It’s all part of our project providing the most detailed look at the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley. We showed how companies that are designing and defining the future have by and large left out women and people of color, especially in leadership. But while some companies have particularly dramatic disparities, others have shown that greater diversity is possible.

Interested in crunching the numbers for a project of your own? All of our Silicon Valley diversity data, including the newly released data, can be found here.

Tech companies are transforming the San Francisco Bay Area but are far from reflecting its diversity. Pandora Media, for example, is headquartered in Oakland, where about 26 percent of the population was black in 2015, but only 3.5 percent of the company’s workforce was black.

Because we sued, we also got the letters tech companies used to argue that their diversity numbers are trade secrets that must be protected. Keep in mind that the government actually went along with these arguments – until we pushed back.

Here’s a rundown of some of the excuses:

“A very real threat”

Oracle argued that “there is a very real threat to its competitive position” if its workforce diversity were to be exposed. Any such advantage to a competitor, Oracle argued, “may have a very significant and detrimental impact on Oracle’s business.”

So watch out, investors – the competitive positions of Oracle, Palantir and Pandora are about to take a big hit. That’s if you believe the companies’ arguments that releasing their diversity numbers will cause “substantial competitive harm.”

Thanks to our lawsuit, we now know that just under 13 percent of Oracle’s executives in 2015 were women, including co-CEO Safra Catz. Two-thirds of major Silicon Valley companies had a better representation of female executives that year. And like Palantir, Oracle’s workforce was 90 percent white and Asian.

“Public relations harm”

Most companies wouldn’t admit that what they’re really afraid of is bad press. But Synnex, an information technology services company, wasn’t above that argument, citing potential “public relations harm” if its diversity reports were released.

An official government report, the company wisely noted, is tougher to deny.

“Any unwarranted assertions made against the Company would be harder to refute if they are somehow tied to an official document such as the EEO-1 Report,” Synnex’s letter states. “For example, a newspaper doing an exposé or plaintiffs seeking a basis for class certification in litigation could seek to negatively characterize the work environment as unfriendly toward minorities or females based on selective interpretation of data (and without further evidence).”

Perhaps after realizing that its numbers aren’t as bad as many other tech companies’ numbers, Synnex more recently dropped its objections.

“Raiding of minority or female employees”

Oracle and Pandora both warned that revealing their diversity numbers would lead to “raiding of minority or female employees.”

“Losing highly talented diverse staff would be a costly and huge competitive disadvantage to Oracle,” its letter states. “This result is very likely given the level of talent of Oracle’s employees and the competitive nature of the high technology industry.”

The competition probably wouldn’t find many women of color who are executives at Oracle to target. The software giant had only one – an Asian woman – among 103 executives in 2015.

Pandora also warned that its competitors would “identify key minority or female Pandora employees and poach them.”

Nearly half of Pandora’s workforce was female in 2015, which was way more than most large technology companies. However, that drops to just under 24 percent at the executive level. And it had just three women of color among 76 executives.

Pandora overall was whiter than half of its 167 peers, at 68 percent, and its executives were 89 percent white.

In any case, the arguments for secrecy are “just terrible excuses,” said Leslie Miley, an engineering leader and diversity advocate who has held engineering management positions at Slack, Twitter, Google and Apple.

“If you’re so worried about retention, do something to keep the people – don’t hide them,” Miley said. “There’s no good look here.”

Pandora recently gave up its stated fear of diversity-raiding. After learning that the government was going to give up its information anyway, the music-streaming company committed to Reveal to release its 2017 EEO-1 report later in 2018. Then, it said it would share the report in early 2019. Tick tock, Pandora!

“Single digits”

The EEO-1 forms include only statistics about diversity – without employee names. But Oracle and Pandora saw peril in the numbers, especially in positions with very few people of color.

“Where numbers in the categories are in the single digits, individuals may be discernible,” Oracle’s letter states. “Where there is only one person in a given category, especially if the individual is an Executive/Senior Level Official or Manager, it is very easy to deduce the person’s identity.”

Oracle said it worried this could violate employees’ right to privacy.

Oracle helpfully cited the example that it had only two black men among its 103 executives in 2015. Pandora, for its part, points out that it had only one Latino man and two Latina women among 76 executives.

But there’s a much easier way to identify employees of color than using EEO-1 reports, said Y-Vonne Hutchinson, CEO of ReadySet, a diversity solutions firm in Oakland.

“You could literally just log in to LinkedIn and find out,” she said. “It’s far more likely that what they’re actually concerned about is that their numbers are disappointing.”

“An inclusive work environment”

Tech companies argued in their letters that they already had prioritized diversity.

Palantir and Gilead Sciences both stated that workforce diversity is more to them “than just a legal concept; it is a business imperative.” The companies used the same lawyer to make the arguments, so a lot of the language is identical.

But while Gilead’s letter states that “we believe in an inclusive work environment,” sandwiched between identical passages, Palantir didn’t include that part.

Gilead and Palantir have very different workforces. At Gilead, more than half of its professional staff were women, compared with 23 percent at Palantir. Indeed, we’ve found that some companies with the most diverse numbers in Silicon Valley also have been hiding.

“A competitive advantage”

Many of these companies’ competitors already release their EEO-1 diversity numbers publicly.

Pandora, for example, names seven other tech companies in its objection letter, citing fierce competition for talent. Six of them – Apple, Facebook, Uber, Google, Amazon and Salesforce – post their EEO-1 forms online.

Oracle lists 11 major competitors in government filings. Eight of them – Amazon, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco Systems, Adobe, Google, and Salesforce – publish their EEO-1 reports.

Oracle and Pandora claim their rivals could use the numbers to glean valuable insights into their “workforce strategy.”

“Allowing Oracle’s competitors to grow and restructure with the help of the Requested Information would give them a competitive advantage,” the company’s letter states.

So did hiding their diversity numbers for so long give Pandora and Oracle an unfair advantage against more transparent rivals? We asked, but neither Pandora nor Oracle responded to that question.

“Employees may be reluctant”

Palantir and Gilead warned the government that releasing these numbers would threaten the very integrity of the data. Their employees, they claimed, may worry that their personal information would somehow be disclosed and “may be reluctant” or refuse to self-report their gender and race – thereby skewing the data.

It doesn’t matter that that’s an unrealistic concern, according to the companies: “And while the likelihood of anyone’s personal identity becoming discernable from EEO-1 data may be remote, the perception of the employee is what matters in this context.”

Yet it’s often women and employees of color who are at the forefront of transparency initiatives, pushing their employers to disclose more information – from salary disparities to retention data – not less.

“Business sensitive”

Grant Bassett, Splunk’s vice president of global talent acquisition, diversity and inclusion, declared under penalty of perjury that the company’s EEO-1 reports “contain information that is business sensitive, and, if released, would likely result in substantial competitive injury to Splunk.”

But Splunk has faced a different public disclosure that actually hit the software company’s bottom line: a $2.7 million settlement in 2017 to resolve the Labor Department’s allegations that it discriminated against qualified black and Asian job applicants.

Splunk had no black executives or black women in management, and under 2 percent of its workforce was black. But in Silicon Valley, that’s not uncommon. Dozens of tech companies had similar numbers.

What other big tech companies has the government accused of hiring discrimination? Palantir, which settled for $1.7 million, and Oracle, which still is fighting the case.

Beyond EEO-1s to pay disparities

The gender and racial breakdowns that EEO-1s provide aren’t the only way to measure diversity and equality. What about pay?

The Trump administration killed an Obama-era rule that would have required companies to report pay disparities to the government. And Oracle, accused by the Labor Department of paying white men more than their counterparts, shot down a shareholder proposal to do a gender pay gap audit.

But in the United Kingdom, companies now are required to put out a public report on their gender pay gaps. That includes international tech companies such as Oracle.

And not all company officials think that’s a bad thing. Take it from Andy Campbell, Oracle’s director of human capital management strategy:

“A major roadblock to improvement has been a lack of accountability for employers,” he wrote on Oracle’s U.K. website. “Forcing companies to be more transparent about how they treat male and female workers puts more power in the hands of employees, who increasingly want to work somewhere that shares their value system and will be drawn to an equal opportunity organization.”

One battle in a longer war

The Labor Department so far has turned over only 2015 data for these companies – the most recent that was available when we filed our original FOIA requests in 2017. (That’s how long it took to pry this information loose.) So far, the same tech firms – and the Labor Department – have a blocked our year-old request for 2016 diversity data – except Synnex, which saw the light.

The federal government now agrees with us that these are public records but still is holding them back. We’ll keep fighting to liberate more recent data.

Editor’s note: Journalism organizations have their own problems with diversity. We don’t file an EEO-1 report because we have fewer than 100 employees, but we provided our diversity numbers for an industry survey. (Type in “Center for Investigative Reporting/California Watch” in the search box to see our numbers and how we compare with others in the industry.) They were compiled as part of a survey by the American Society of News Editors on race and gender in the newsroom.

 

U.S. Shows Flagrant Disregard for Science Once Again

The signals are blaring: Dramatic changes to our climate are well upon us. These changes — we know thanks to a steady drumbeat of alarming official reports over the past 12 months — could cripple the U.S. economy, threaten to make vast stretches of our coastlines uninhabitable, make basic food supplies scarce and push millions of the planet’s poorest people into cities and across borders as they flee environmental perils.

All is not yet lost, we are told, but the demands of the moment are great. The resounding consensus of scientists, economists and analysts tells us that the solution lies in an unprecedented global effort to immediately and drastically drop carbon emissions levels. That drop is possible, but it will need to happen so fast that it will demand extraordinary commitment, resolve, innovation and, yes, sacrifice. The time we’ve got to work with, according to the United Nations, is a tad more than 10 years.

And so it stings particularly badly to learn from a new report released this week by the Rhodium Group, a private research company, that U.S. emissions — which amount to one-sixth of the planet’s — didn’t drop in 2018 but instead skyrocketed. The 3.4 percent jump in CO2 for 2018, projected by the Rhodium Group, would be second-largest surge in greenhouse gas emissions from the United States since 1996, when Bill Clinton was president.

The report notes that Americans consumed significantly more electricity in 2018 than in years past, and that demand for trucking (think shipping) and jet fuel (lots more people flew) also grew substantially. More alarming are the large jumps in U.S. emissions from industry and from buildings — which the report’s authors note are largely “ignored in clean energy and climate policymaking.” Heating and cooking-related emissions from old, often-inefficient buildings jumped 10 percent, in part due to a growing population and despite a warmer-than-average winter. As manufacturing was buoyed by the strong economy, the emissions the sector produced jumped by nearly 6 percent. The Rhodium Group forecasts those emissions will continue to grow.

Until now, it had seemed we were making modest, if insufficient, progress, largely, many experts declared, as coal-fired power plants were phased out and replaced with natural gas, which burns cleaner out of the smokestack. For two decades, U.S. emissions had been steadily dropping, chipping off more than 1 percent annually in most years since peaking in 2007. But the pace of the decline had been slowing and now threatens to put emissions reduction goals set by the Paris accord — to cut emissions to at least 26 percent less than 2005 levels by 2025 — out of reach.

There are plenty of reasons the Rhodium Group report’s conclusions aren’t particularly surprising. The rate of growth it describes dovetails with what the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted late last year: a roughly 3 percent rise in CO2 from U.S. sources. As far back as 2015, a flurry of academic research raised questions about whether the drop in U.S. emissions was indeed due to successful efforts to curb them or instead reflected the 2008-09 recession. At least one prominent study concluded that U.S. efforts to reduce emissions resulted mostly from economic decline, not other efforts. Even the increasing emissions from U.S. industries — the metric most cited from this week’s Rhodium Group research — may prove to be a red herring: Economists and climate scientists have long argued that global trade merely outsourced U.S. emissions.

In the meantime, some climate deniers — including some in the Trump administration — have seized on earlier reports of dropping emissions to argue that aggressive U.S. emissions controls aren’t necessary. “The economy is booming, energy production is surging, and we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources,” acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler wrote last October. “Federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions.” That thinking was offered as partial justification for everything from the reversal of the Clean Power Plan to phase out coal-generated electricity to the relaxation of fuel economy standards for cars.

This week’s emissions forecast is a reminder that, as John McArthur, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution recently wrote, “Every new unit of economic gain is still cranking out a corresponding unit of environmental pain.” That may be unlikely to change soon, and the “urgent” challenge for 2019, he writes, is to find palatable approaches to drastic emissions reductions that still allow for the kind of sustained economic growth the nation has been enjoying. Until or unless the economy can be decoupled from the emissions associated with driving it, the fastest way to curb CO2 is to produce — and buy and consume — less.

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Spring’s Early Arrival Poses Deadly Threat to Migrant Birds

Biologists have identified another tale of conflict and bloodshed as African migrant birds compete with European natives for resources in a fast-warming world.

Death rates among male pied flycatchers – African carnivores that migrate each spring to the Netherlands to breed – have risen in the 10 years between 2007 and 2016, as winters have warmed and springs have arrived earlier.

And in some years, almost one in 10 of the male migrant flycatchers has been found pecked to death by great tits that have already taken up residence in nest boxes that both species favour.

Jelmer Samplonius, then of the University of Groningen and now at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and a colleague report in the journal Current Biology that they became interested in the competition between the migrant Ficedula hypoleuca and the European garden bird Parus major because both compete for the same resources.

These are the spring explosion of the caterpillar population, and the nest boxes established by householders who like to encourage wildlife. Both species try to time their breeding calendar to coincide with the arrival of plentiful, nourishing food for their chicks, and both species have become accustomed to colonising available nest boxes.

“When a flycatcher enters a box with a great tit inside, it doesn’t stand a chance”

But, the scientists say, climate change driven by global warming, in turn fired by profligate combustion of fossil fuels that increase the ratios of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, has brought new challenges.

Climate change poses a hazard for many species that are precisely adapted to their immediate environment.

They become more vulnerable as their breeding timetable goes out of synchrony with the food supply, or they become more at risk from predation in once relatively secure nesting sites in the rapidly warming Arctic.

The northern hemisphere spring now arrives much earlier. Some migrant species have been able to adapt, and the great tit in particular has shown itself to be resourceful and ready to cope with new challenges.

It now gets to the nesting sites to breed on average 16.6 days earlier than the pied flycatcher, which winters in West Africa, and therefore has no way of knowing the right moment to head for a breeding site so far to the north in Europe.

Growing violence

And the late arrival of the African competitor has meant a marked increase in conflict. When the researchers checked the nest boxes, they counted 86 male flycatchers dead from injuries delivered by great tits, and two killed by the smaller species, the blue tit.

“The dead flycatchers were all found in active tit nests and had severe head wounds, and often their brains had been eaten by the tits,” they write.

“This could exhibit a significant mortality cause on male pied flycatchers in some years, with up to 8.9% of all males … known to defend a nest box being killed in a single year.”

Some years there were almost no little feathered corpses: other years were marked by conspicuous slaughter, and the researchers put the variation in the kill count down to what they define as a problem of synchrony. Tits killed more flycatchers when the competitors turned up at the peak of the tits’ breeding season.

Powerful claws

“When a flycatcher enters a box with a great tit inside, it doesn’t stand a chance”, Dr Samplonius said. “The great tit is heavier, as the flycatchers are built for a long migration from Europe to Western Africa and back. Also, great tits have very strong claws.”

The finding doesn’t seem to mean that the flycatcher is in immediate danger of local extinction: the scientists say that most of the slaughter occurred among surplus males; those who turned up late were less likely to find a breeding partner, and more likely to die from competition with great tits.

A surplus of males acts as a “buffer” to protect the overall population. But in the long run, the flycatcher could lose the race for survival.

“If buffers are diminished,” the scientists write, “population consequences of interspecific competition may become apparent, especially after warm winters that are benign to resident species.”

This EPA Rule Change Could Kill Thousands

While Americans were quietly preparing to ring in the New Year, the EPA gave families a deadly present to start the year off wrong.

On December 28, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal that would effectively weaken the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which protect American families from mercury and other harmful air pollutants emitted by power plants.

The EPA “proposes to determine that it is not ‘appropriate and necessary’ to regulate” these emissions, the EPA wrote in a statement. This means that the regulations will lose the necessary legal mechanism that actually enables them to actually be enforced.

These regulations save a lot of lives — 11,000 every year, according to the EPA’s own data — and they prevent 130,000 asthma attacks annually. Stripping this regulatory power virtually guarantees more asthma attacks and more preventable deaths.

For families, those aren’t just numbers.

At any age, exposure to even small amounts of mercury can lead to serious health problems. The worst health impacts include irreparable brain development defects in babies and young children, and cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and premature death among people of all ages.

Infants, young children, and pregnant mothers are particularly vulnerable to mercury — as well as to arsenic, lead, dioxin, and acid gases, which are also regulated by MATS.

Before MATS, coal-fired power plants were the largest source of these pollutants. American families paid the price for lack of federal regulations.

I’m a fairly young person — I grew up with dire warnings about exposure to these chemicals. Yet despite overwhelming evidence of their health effects — and the longstanding availability of proven control technologies — it took over 20 years after the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments to establish federal regulations on power plant emissions of these harmful substances.

Through the MATS program, Congress identified approximately 180 hazardous air pollutants, including mercury, and directed the EPA to draft regulations governing their emissions from power plants.

The impact has been enormous. A significant majority of top power companies have already complied with MATS, for a fraction of the originally estimated cost. It’s estimated that over 5,000 emergency and hospital visits and 4,700 heart attacks have been prevented each year as a direct result of these vital regulations.

In fact, one of the EPA’s own resources on the program highlights its widespread benefits: “The benefits of MATS are widely distributed and are especially important to minority and low income populations who are disproportionately impacted by asthma and other debilitating health conditions,” it notes.

Undoing critical health and safety standards and putting more Americans in danger goes against the very purpose of the EPA. Even utility companies, who invested in complying with the standards, are calling for the EPA to keep MATS fully intact.

Younger generations deserve to grow up protected from these harmful and deadly substances. The EPA wants to make mercury and air toxics deadlier again. We can’t let that happen.

How Trump’s 2019 Foreign Policy Will Change the World

Let me just say a few things about the interview I gave at Arirang a couple of weeks ago, embedded below. I argue that President Donald Trump is becoming increasingly impatient with being held back by the Washington establishment and that he has gradually shed everyone who could curb his impetuous decision-making. His national security adviser, H. R. McMaster is gone, and replaced by the irascible John Bolton, with whom Trump has nothing in common. (Bolton was pressed on Trump by Newt Gingrich, who is not exactly an administration insider, and perhaps by big-money campaign donors like Sheldon Adelson who want someone on the inside to make the case for going after Iran.) McMaster had been a general, and Trump couldn’t overrule him as easily as he does Bolton, who I think may not be in that position very many more Scaramuccis.

Trump has now divested himself of Jim Mattis, the steady hand at the Pentagon, and John Kelly, who tried to keep random staffers with cult-like agendas from just wandering into the Oval Office to light fires under Trump over crackpot issues.

Trump increasingly is able to dominate his acting cabinet secretaries and his firing of Sessions and his pushing out Mattis have probably made the remaining members of the cabinet more reluctant to stand up to him, given that most of them seem to be grifters who are making or have the prospect of making big bucks from their current jobs, so why would they risk them for nothing? (It is not as if they really would be able to change Trump’s mind about much).

So I expect moves like the Syria withdrawal to become more frequent. Trump’s new doctrine with 2020 nearing is “Let Trump be Trump.” He may well get out of Afghanistan this year, which would be, as I say in the interview, a geopolitical earthquake. It would create a power vacuum. Would Kabul fall shortly thereafter to the Taliban? Will India, Pakistan, Russia and Iran vie to succeed the US in making Afghanistan their sphere of interest?

Will Trump try to reverse sanctions on Russia over Moscow’s annexation of Crimea and its dirty war in eastern Ukraine? It is already coming out that he has hidden or destroyed minutes of some of his meetings with Russian president Vladimir Putin, keeping them from his own cabinet. With the adults in the room departed, will his obsequiousness to Putin grow even more blatant?

He promised his base less spending on foreign boondoggles and better relations with Russia and he has not delivered on either pledge. He may feel he has to start fulfilling some of his longstanding promises if he is to remain viable.

His government shutdown is part of this acceleration of Trump’s impetuousness and assertiveness. No Republican leader would sincerely advise him to stage a shutdown, but Trump thinks he can be seen twisting the arms of the congressional Democrats to get funding for his wall. Never mind that most Americans don’t want it. He thinks his followers do, and you can’t run for president if you can’t even bring your own main constituency to the table.

Here’s the interview:

Arirang (South Korea): The Point: World Affairs: U.S. foreign policy in 2019 |

Juan Cole comments on President Trump’s “America First” policies, which drove the global economy into chaos last year and caused a stir in the international community. This is why the world is paying close attention to the direction of the Trump administration’s foreign policy this year. The U.S. created some tension with its allies by announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria and by saying he will increase the cost of defense shared by its allies. What’s more, the sudden resignation of Mattis is expected to change the direction of U.S. foreign policy in 2019. Against this backdrop, President Trump is continuously pursuing denuclearization talks with North Korea with patience. On this week’s [The Point: World Affairs], we discuss the significance of the Trump administration’s foreign policy toward North Korea in 2019 and the progressing relationship between the two countries.

(Cole segment begins at 7:42).

Pence’s Dilemma: How to Bargain When No One Speaks for Trump

WASHINGTON — Progress made, said one.

Not so, said the other.

We’ll meet again, said one.

Waste of time, said the other.

Such has been the life lately of Mike Pence, the loyal soldier dispatched by President Donald Trump to lead negotiations over the partial government shutdown.

The vice president has been one of the administration’s most visible emissaries during the shutdown fight, meeting with lawmakers, sitting for interviews and leading staff-level talks. But he’s been repeatedly—and very publicly—undermined and contradicted by his boss, who’s demanding billions from Congress to build a wall along the southern border.

Lawmakers and aides in both parties say it’s become increasingly clear that, in this White House, no one speaks for the president but himself, leaving Pence in an all-but-impossible position as he tries to negotiate on Trump’s behalf.

“He doesn’t really have the authority to make a deal,” said Republican Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, who worked alongside Pence back when Pence was a member of Congress. He said legislators respect the vice president even if he is just “the messenger.” But he adds: “Trump is the one who’s going to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.'”

Even before the shutdown began, Pence was in an awkward spot in the wall debate — quite literally. When Trump hosted then-incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer at a heated Oval Office meeting in December that ended with the president saying he’d be “proud” to own a government shutdown, a stone-faced Pence sat by, speechless in his chair, drawing quips on social media comparing him to a statue or the “Elf on the Shelf.”

Trump later sent Pence to lead a weekend of budget talks with staff for Republican and Democratic congressional leaders, an effort that Democrats dismissed as little more than a public-relations effort by the White House to give the impression it was working to end the impasse. Some also saw Pence’s meetings with legislative staffers as unbefitting of his title.

When the first negotiation session ended that Saturday, Pence tweeted: “Productive discussion.”

An hour later, Trump countered: “Not much headway made.”

The next morning, as Pence was set to return to the negotiating table, Trump again threw cold water on the effort.

“I don’t expect to have anything happen at that meeting … nor does the vice president,” Trump told reporters. “Ultimately, it’s going to be solved by the principals.”

Allies of the vice president minimized the significance of the comments and the White House denied any friction.

“The vice president has been very effective in communicating on behalf of the administration,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “He has been in lock step with the president throughout the entire process.”

Pence, too, rejected the idea that he’d been undermined by the president or had difficulty building trust on Capitol Hill because of Trump’s tendency to change his mind.

He described to reporters an offer he brought to Schumer from the president on the Saturday before Christmas to try to cut a deal.

“I didn’t have any impression that whole week that they doubted that it was a legitimate offer,” said Pence. He would not confirm the details, but it was understood to have lowered the president’s demand for $5.7 billion to build the wall to $2.5 billion.

Democrats panned the offer.

Days later, Trump rejected it, too.

“No, not 2.5,” Trump told reporters. “We’re asking for 5.6. And, you know, somebody said 2.5. No.”

With negotiations now at a standstill, Pence has been a frequent visitor to the Capitol, focused on trying to keep jittery Republicans from breaking with Trump.

The vice president is well known in Congress, having climbed the ladder as the leader of a conservative faction to serve as chairman of the House GOP conference before running for governor of Indiana. That background was among the reasons Trump, who arrived in Washington with no government experience, chose Pence as his running mate.

Marc Lotter, a former Pence spokesman who remains an outside adviser, said Pence “often gets called in if we’re getting close to the finish line to see if we can bring in a couple of last votes” or hold onto those who may be wavering. He recalled Pence, during a health care fight, “working back and forth, taking ideas and trying to find areas where there could be agreement, looking for areas where there could be compromise.”

While Pence lacks the personal relationships with Schumer and Pelosi that some of his predecessors had with opposition leaders— notably Vice President Joe Biden’s relationship with Senate Republicans — Lotter said Pence meets regularly with members of both parties and both chambers, hosting lawmakers at his residence for regular dinners.

Marc Short, the former White House director of legislative affairs who previously served as Pence’s chief of staff, said the vice president’s measured manner has been a “complement” to Trump’s very different style.

He pointed to efforts during the “Obamacare” repeal effort to sway Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, known for taking her time to weigh decisions. Pence worked patiently to answer her questions.

Indeed, “listener” was a word that came up often when lawmakers were asked to describe Pence.

“He’s a good listener,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio. “Which is a rare quality around here.”

“He tells us exactly what he thinks,” said Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “He’s a good listener. He takes our messages back to the president.”

But Simpson questioned whether that’s what is needed.

Pence, said the Idaho Republican, is “a relayer. We need to have a negotiator … someone who has the authority to go in and negotiate. And then someone who has the ability to go to Trump and say this is the best we can do.”