I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.
I know, I know, it's weird when the worst people you know are right, even when they're right for the wrong reasons: like, the "Intelligence Community" is genuinely terrible, pharma companies are murderous crooks, and Big Tech really does have a dangerous grip on public debate. The swivel-eyed loons have a point, is what I'm saying:
When conspiratorialists and reactionaries holler about how the FBI are dirty-tricking creeps who are framing Trump, it's tempting to say, "well, if Trumpists hate the FBI, then I will love the FBI. Who cares about COINTELPRO and what they did to Martin Luther King?"
It's a process called "schizmogenesis": forming new group identity beliefs based on saying the opposite of what your enemies say,
and as tempting as that is, it's extraordinarily foolish and dangerous:
It means that canny reactionaries like Steve Bannon can trick you into taking any position merely by taking the opposite one. Bannon's followers are even more easily led, so it's easy for him to convince them that we have always been at war with Oceania. The right has created an entire mirror world of "I know you are but what am I?" politics.
Anti-vax co-opts "bodily autonomy." Climate denial becomes environmentalism ("wind turbines kill birds"). Transphobia becomes feminism ("keep women-only spaces for real women"). Support for strongmen becomes anti-imperialism ("don't feed the war machine in Ukraine"). These are the doppelgangers Naomi Klein warns us against:
The far right has even managed to co-opt anti-corporate rhetoric. Culture warriors rail against "woke capitalism," insisting that when big businesses take socially progressive positions, it's just empty "virtue signalling." And you know what? They've got a point. Partially.
As with all mirror-world politics, the anti-woke-capitalism shuck is designed to convince low-information right-wing pismires into buying "anti-woke pillows" and demanding the right to pay junk fees to "own the libs":
But woke capitalism is bullshit. Corporations – profit-maximizing immortal transhuman colony organisms that view workers and customers as inconvenient gut-flora – do not care about social justice. They don't care about anything, except for minimizing compensation for workers while maximizing the risk those workers bear; and locking in and gouging customers for products that are as low-quality as can be profitably sold.
Take DEI, a favored target of the right. It's undoubtably true that diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives have made some inroads on correcting bias in hiring decisions, with the result that companies get better employees who would have been excluded without this explicit corrective.
However, corporations don't value DEI because they abhor their history of hiring bias. Instead, DEI is how corporate management demonstrates to workers that their grievances are best addressed by trusting corporate leadership to correct their error of their ways – and not by forming a union.
Before the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, corporations would create fake "Company Unions" whose leadership were beholden to the company executives. These were decoy unions: they looked and sounded like unions, but when they negotiated with management, they were actually working for the bosses, not the workers.
This is more mirror-world tactics. They're the labor equivalent of the "crisis pregnancy centers" that masquerade as abortion clinics in order to fool pregnant people and trap them with endless delays until it's too late to terminate their pregnancies. Company unions get workers to trust in negotiators who are secretly working for the bosses, who emerge from the bargaining table with one-sided, abusive contracts and insist that this is the best deal workers can hope for.
Company unions were outlawed 90 years ago, and for decades, labor had a seat at the table, with wages tracking productivity gains and workers getting protection for discrimination, unsafe labor conditions, and wage-theft. Then came the neoliberal turn, and 40 years of wage stagnation, increased inequality, and corporate rule.
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Finally, finally, we have reached a turning point in labor, with public approval for unions at levels not seen since the Carter administration and thousands of strikes and protests breaking out across the country:
https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/
It's not just the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, either. For the first time in history, the UAW is striking against all the major automakers, and they are winning:
The automakers are getting desperate. Stellantis – Chrysler's latest alias, reflecting the company's absorbtion into corporate-human-centipede of global carmakers – has mobilized its DEI programs, trying to get marginalized people to believe that scabbing is a liberatory activity:
Stellantis calls each of its DEI silos a "Business Resource Group" (BRG): there's a "Working Parents Network," an "African Ancestry Network," "Asians Connected Together," a "DiverseAbilities Network," a "Gay & Lesbian Alliance" and more:
The corporate managers who lead these BRGs have established a scab rotation for each subgroup, calling on members to cross a UAW picket-line at a Michigan Parts Distribution Center run by Stellantis subsidiary Mopar:
Each BRG will pick a specific day of the week/weekend to volunteer as a team. Help continue to be the RESOURCE the BUSINESS can count on! Stellantis needs your help in running the Parts Distribution Centers (PDC) to ensure a steady supply of parts to our customers while negotiations continue. Working Parents Network has identified Friday, October 13 as WPN’s BRG Day at the PDCs!"
Now, these BRGs weren't invented by marginalized workers facing discrimination in the workplace. They come from literal union-busting playbooks produced by giant "union avoidance" firms that charge bosses millions for advice on skirting – or breaking – the law to keep workplace democracy at bay. All the biggest anti-union consultancies love BRGs, from Littler Mendelson to Jackson Lewis. IRI Strategies touts BRGs as a way to "union-proof" a business by absorbing workers' grievances in a decoy committee that will let them feel listened to.
BRGs, in other words, are the Crisis Pregnancy Centers of workplace discrimination. They're a Big Store Con, a company union dressed up as corporate social responsibility.
Now, let's not pretend that unions have a sterling record on race and gender issues. Giant labor organizations like the AFL had to be dragged into racial integration, and trade unions have sometimes been on the wrong side of anti-immigration panics:
But unions have also been the most reliable way for people of color and women to win better workplace treatment. The struggle for racial and gender justice was fought through labor organizing. Remember that MLK's "I've Been To the Mountaintop" speech was given in support of striking sanitation workers in Memphis:
Black organizers have always been militant labor organizers. Labor Day commemorates the victory of the long, hard-fought Pullman strike, where Black workers brought one of the most powerful companies in America to its knees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike
And women have always fought for gender justice through the labor movement: the New York shirtwaist strike is the Ur-example, when women-led unions fought thugs and scabs on icy New York streets:
It's no surprise that labor activism, anti-racism and feminism go together. Since the earliest days, the labor justice struggle was also a social justice struggle. To learn more check out Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor:
The vanguard of today's labor surge is Black, brown, female and queer. Without a union, workers who face discrimination are on their own, hoping that their bosses will voluntarily do something about it. Black workers in Tesla's rabidly anti-union shops face vicious racism, from slurs to threats to violence. Without a union, they have to rely on the shifting whims of an Apartheid emerald mine space-Karen for relief, or hope for help from the NLRB or a class-action lawyer:
The far right isn't wrong when they holler that woke capitalism is bullshit. As with so many of their mirror-world causes, they've got a point, but only a limited one. The problem with woke capitalism is that it's no substitute for a union. The problem with relying on Business Resource Groups to fight racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia is that these struggles are all class struggles, and a BRG is never going to fight against the company that created it.
To understand how bankrupt woke capitalism is, conside this: Stellantis is calling on its "Working Parents Network" to scab this Friday. Stellantis is also being sanctioned by the Department Of Labor for discriminating against nursing mothers – the same "working parents" that the BRG is meant to protect:
Woke capitalism is just another kind of "predatory inclusion," like Intuit's campaign defending its "Free File" tax-prep scam, where they're claiming that ending this ripoff is racist because it denies Black families the right to be tricked into paying for something they are entitled to get for free:
When I learned about Intuit's wokewashing, I thought I'd found woke capitalism's rock bottom, but I was wrong. Stellantis's call for woke scabbing is a new low.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!
BMW openly admitting they don't do it to actually make a difference, they brand themselves to conform to the law of the land. Including the unwritten cultural rainbow law of June in the USA.
Gay men and women put themselves and everything on the line to fight for what is right. A giant, multi-national corporation won't put anything on the line for what is right. Instead, they'll silently sit back and watch while gay people living under oppressive Islamic regimes fight for their lives. If and only when they win the day, the corporation will swoop in, exploit their blood for a marketing opportunity and congratulate themselves for being "allies."
Greenwashing is everywhere—from buying clothes to taking vacations to offsetting carbon footprints by planting trees. But it very much exists for once-climate denying industries, especially fossil fuels.
For example, Chevron may have set some goals for minimizing emissions, but the vast majority of its footprint comes from scope 3 emissions (all of the emissions associated with making and delivering a product) which isn’t addressed anywhere in its climate goals. Instead of accounting for emissions associated with oil and gas, according to environmental law group Client Earth, the company “will develop a renewable energy business, invest in ‘low-carbon technologies’ and sell offsets ‘to our customers around the world to help them achieve their own lower-carbon goals.‘ ” Still, Chevron’s shiny advertisements and rampant use of the terms net-zero and sustainable fuels don’t give the slightest clue that it hasn’t revealed how, or even if it plans to, move away from fossil fuels.
A similarly concerning trend is “wokewashing,” where corporations pose as champions for people of color and women through advertisements. Exxon’s ad, which centers around the story of an immigrant from India who now works for the fossil fuel giant, is one example.
“Big oil companies now spend a lot of money to convince us that they are dealing with the problem, although their claims are highly misleading,” says Maibach. “They have large advertising and PR budgets which they use to convince us that they are responsible actors who are working to solve climate change.”
Academic researchers say the fossil fuel industry engages in 'discourses of delay' to divert attention away from the crisis.
Excerpt from this story from The Guardian/EcoWatch:
ExxonMobil has been touting its commitment to "reducing carbon emissions with innovative energy solutions". Chevron would like to remind you it is keeping the lights on during this dark time. BP is going #NetZero, but is also very proud of the "digital innovations" on its new, enormous oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile Shell insists it really supports women in traditionally male-dominated jobs.
A casual social media user might get the impression the fossil fuel industry views itself as a social justice warrior, fighting on behalf of the poor, the marginalized, and women – at least based on its marketing material in recent years.
These campaigns fall into what a handful of sociologists and economists call "discourses of delay". While oil and gas companies have a long track record of denying climate change, even after their own scientists repeatedly warned of the harm caused by burning fossil fuels, now the industry's messaging is far more subtle and in many ways more effective than outright climate science denial.
By downplaying the urgency of the climate crisis, the industry has new tools to delay efforts to curb fossil fuel emissions. And worse yet: even industry critics haven't fully caught up to this new approach.
"If you just focus on climate denial, then all of this other stuff is missed," explains Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist and visiting professor at Brown University.
Brulle, who published a peer-reviewed study in 2019 that analyzed major oil corporations' advertising spending over a 30-year period, says the "lion's share" of ad dollars were directed not toward denial, or even toward the industry's products, but toward pro-fossil fuel propaganda – campaigns that remind people over and over again about all the great things oil companies do, how dependent we are on fossil fuels, and how integral the industry is to society.
"They're spending probably five or 10 times more on all this corporate promotion advertising," he says. "And yet the climate movement seems to only focus on the science denial part."
Greenwashing is everywhere—from buying clothes to taking vacations to offsetting carbon footprints by planting trees. But it very much exists for once-climate denying industries, especially fossil fuels.
For example, Chevron may have set some goals for minimizing emissions, but the vast majority of its footprint comes from scope 3 emissions (all of the emissions associated with making and delivering a product) which isn’t addressed anywhere in its climate goals. Instead of accounting for emissions associated with oil and gas, according to environmental law group Client Earth, the company “will develop a renewable energy business, invest in ‘low-carbon technologies’ and sell offsets ‘to our customers around the world to help them achieve their own lower-carbon goals.‘ ” Still, Chevron’s shiny advertisements and rampant use of the terms net-zero and sustainable fuels don’t give the slightest clue that it hasn’t revealed how, or even if it plans to, move away from fossil fuels.
A similarly concerning trend is “wokewashing,” where corporations pose as champions for people of color and women through advertisements. Exxon’s ad, which centers around the story of an immigrant from India who now works for the fossil fuel giant, is one example.
“Big oil companies now spend a lot of money to convince us that they are dealing with the problem, although their claims are highly misleading,” says Maibach. “They have large advertising and PR budgets which they use to convince us that they are responsible actors who are working to solve climate change.”
During Blackwashing discussions, it was often mentioned that this person is black / isn´t black.
Exemple: "Ariel couldn´t be black, but making Jesus white is okay."
On the other hand, princesses like Esmeralda, Moana and Pocahontas are not considered black.
Jesus was born in Palestine, on the border with Israel.
In the discussion about the new Assassin Creed game, the Japanese are the white ones.
But the definition of POC says something different: People of Color refers to all ethnicized people who are of varying degrees of African, Asian, Latin American, Arab, Jewish, Indigenous, or Pacific descent or origin.
Is it about color or ethnicity? Anyone who wants to, can be a Jew. So they can also be white. But back to topic.
I assume that by African or black people, people like him are meant:
And with Asian people, people like her:
At least that's what I get, when I enter "an African person" / "an black person" and "an Asian person" into the Canva-Al.
However, this is all part of Africa.
And this is all part of Asia.
Don't be angry with me if I chalked up a country too much or too little. I don't know exactly. The source was Google Maps.
Africa is a continent where there are far more people living than "blacks". It's not just Japanese who live in Asia. Do Russians look like the lady in the Al picture? - No. Are Russians colored? - Yes or no? Did Jesus look like the man in the Al-picture? - No. We can assume that Japanese people are colored. Or do we sort them to the ethnics? Are they white?
You notice that the definitions are all pretty vague.
And depending on how you interpret them, ethnic groups seem to have more or fewer rights. - Or why aren't Japanese people allowed to say that they would have preferred a Japanese samurai instead of a "black" samurai? And what does that have to do with the fact that they have “white” skin color?
So in order to have a decent discussion, you would have to sort people into white, black, colored and ethnic and wich right they have to speak their minds.
It's sad that we have to argue about the interpretation of whether Jesus was black, white or colored. The people who accuse critics of racism, when it comes to blackwashing, are actually the ones who shows how different we are.
Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington were once asked: "Why is racism such a big problem in our world?" Both said: "Because we always talk about it..."
In medieval times, it was common practice for the wealthy to buy indulgences from the church to atone for their sins. These payments, the church assured, meant the person paying would not remain in purgatory for too long and would later ascend into heaven.
A wealthy person could even buy indulgences for their family members or ancestors who were long dead. Today we think of ourselves as far more enlightened than our medieval forebears. We secular folk would never pay a class of clerics large sums of money to atone for our sins. Or would we?
In recent years, billions of dollars have flowed into investment funds that market themselves as providing “environmental, social and governance” impacts. In Australia, industry super funds lead this trend, with money pouring into funds that then invest in companies that promote green, social justice, equity, diversity and inclusion causes.
The basic idea behind ESG, which has been promoted by organisations such as the World Economic Forum, is that one can make a profit and “do good” at the same time. Investors argue they can contribute to a net-zero future while making solid returns, or contribute to social justice alongside their fiduciary duty.
Rating agencies and research firms issue ESG “scores” to companies that are then used by bodies who advise institutional and retail investors which organisations they should invest in. Because ESG has no standardised metrics or even standardised definitions, such scores can be massaged by those companies that have enough money to play the game.
An entire industry of consulting agencies and non-profits exists today to implement cosmetic changes within companies to boost their ESG scores. Such cosmetic changes may include sponsoring a float at the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras or offering paid leave for staff who wish to change their gender.
As I commented in these pages last year, “gender affirmation leave” is offered by our two biggest supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, and contributes to these companies earning “gold- and platinum-tier” status by the Australian Workplace Equality Index – despite the fact both companies are simultaneously implicated in wage theft scandals.
Sometimes called “wokewashing”, the practice of buying virtue through ESG allows corporate entities to deflect attention away from their PR embarrassments, like Henry VIII’s Indulgences allowed him to go on indulging.
Such practices are called wokewashing because these changes usually do not go deep enough to really cause change within a large organisation. By sheer virtue of their size, our largest corporations often make mistakes that only a complete overhaul of management practices could possibly address.
Take BHP, for example. The biggest company in Australia, and largest mining company in the world, is now embroiled in one of the biggest wage theft scandals in history. Accused of underpaying 28,500 workers $430m in wages for deducting public holidays from leave entitlements, BHP is now supporting the Yes vote in the voice referendum and has pledged a $2m donation to the campaign. This pledge is likely to boost its ESG score, but whether it satisfies the workers who have been underpaid is yet to be seen.
It is not just the mining industry that seeks ESG redemption. The banking industry wants to buy its way into heaven as well. Following on the heels of the disastrous royal commission into the sector, the Big Four are all doubling down on ESG. NAB faced criminal charges in 2021 for failing to pay casual employees long-service leave entitlements, but this is offset by its sponsorship of Midsumma – Melbourne’s queer arts and cultural festival. Last year ANZ was fined $25m for misleading consumer practices, but it also announced it was offering its staff paid leave for a sex change.
Commonwealth Bank has been in hot water in recent years for breaching money-laundering laws and Westpac was required to pay a $1.3bn fine after 250 customers made transfers that were linked to child exploitation. Both organisations are atoning for these sins by campaigning for the Yes vote.
Almost every large corporation that has signed on to the Yes campaign for the voice referendum is embroiled in some kind of scandal that involves their core business. Whether Coles is underpaying its staff, or Rio Tinto is dealing with dozens of accusations of sexual harassment, each company has significant work to do internally.
And this is why ESG is so popular among our corporate class. Symbolic gestures that can be outsourced to consultants and NGOs are an easy box-ticking exercise. Systemic changes to management habits, or making sure business practices are fair, is much more costly and time-consuming than simply waving a rainbow flag.
In the medieval period, wealthy elites would pay indulgences in order to curry favour with the church because the institution was incredibly powerful.
It is not surprising then that our biggest corporations are pledging their support for ESG goals that are also supported by the government, unions, the majority of our media, academia and non-profit sectors.
While commitment to ESG is not necessarily a sign of true moral fibre, if it can assist in washing away the stain of sin, then every dollar pledged will be money well spent.
==
Whenever a large corporation pledges its commitment to some movement or ideology, especially those that are unrelated to their actual business, you should assume that it's hiding something.
The more controversial the movement or ideology, the bigger the scandal they're trying to distract attention from.
For reference, the "Voice to Parliament" is a referendum to embed in the Australian constitution a vaguely defined independent body with unknown powers, unclear authority and unidentified influence to be a whisper in the ear of the Australian political system, supposedly representing all indigenous (Aboriginal) Australians. In essence, it functions as a form of "reparations."
When it's rejected, as current polling indicates it massively will be, as with Affirmative Action, citizens will be scolded by the supporters for their "racism," and the country will be told it's irredeemably racist. Rather than recognizing the diverse objections to the initiative: the lack of transparency of what the body is or does; progressives who insist it doesn't go far enough (e.g. a desire to literally "hand back" the land); Aboriginal Australians themselves who are concerned about establishing a "separate but equal" system; importing Critical Race Theory ideas from the US to racially divide the nation; the rather racist notion itself that any single "voice" could represent all indigenous people, ignoring that their viewpoints are as diverse as everyone else's; and the very simple answer of "I don't like this particular solution."
But while all of that is going on, the companies will be looking for their next diversion.
