CEO fat cats get the cream

  

In 1980, big company CEOs averaged 42 times more compensation than their typical workers. These gaps rapidly expanded in the 1990s, as wages stagnated for most workers and stock-based executive pay exploded. During the 21st century, the annual gap between CEO pay and typical worker pay has averaged about 350 to 1.

 Only 1 percent of CEOs at our country's 500 largest corporations are Black, 2.4 percent are East or South Asians, 3.4 percent are Latino, and 6 percent are women.

 In the three years leading up to the 2008-09 meltdown, the top five executives at the 20 biggest bailed out banks had averaged $32 million each in personal compensation.

Coca-Cola: None of the soft drink maker's top executives met their bonus targets last year, but the board gave them all bonuses anyway. CEO James Quincey wound up with a total compensation package worth more than $18 million, over 1,600 times as much as the company's typical worker pay.

Carnival: The pandemic has been devastating for the cruise industry. At Carnival, CEO Arnold Donald not surprisingly failed to meet his pre-Covid bonus targets. He also accepted a cut in his base salary from $1.5 million in 2019 to $857,413 in 2020. But thanks to a special "retention and incentive" award, Donald's total 2020 compensation grew to $13.3 million — nearly $2.2 million more than in 2019. He received the bulk of his special stock awards on August 28, 2020. 

After the industry shut down in mid-March amid Covid-19 outbreaks on several ships, Carnival and other cruise lines focused on getting paying customers home while leaving employees stranded on board for months without pay. The company reportedly even charged the abandoned workers for basic necessities like soap.

Tyson Foods: The meat processing company's top executives didn't meet their cash bonus targets either. So what did the board do? The Tyson directors gave them stock awards to make up the difference. Frontline employees, meanwhile, were facing high risks on the job. More than 12,000 of the company's workers have contracted Covid-19, and at least 38 have lost their lives to the virus—more than at any other meatpacking company. One of the executives who benefited from the Tyson board's special Covid stock awards is company chair John Tyson, who was hardly in dire need of support. The heir and grandson of the company founder, Tyson has watched his personal wealth increase 62 percent during the pandemic—to $2.4 billion.

According to research by the Institute for Policy Studies colleagues and Americans for Tax Fairness, the nation's 657 billionaires have enjoyed a stock-fueled boost in their net wealth of 44 percent since the rough start of the pandemic crisis. 

As of March 10, 2021, their combined fortunes stood at $4.2 trillion—up $1.3 trillion since March 18, 2020. Many of these billionaires owe their fortunes to their years as CEOs.

More than 500 publicly held U.S. companies announced cuts to their CEO's base salary in 2020. These moves garnered considerable positive press coverage, but they had a negligible impact on pay levels since straight salary makes up on average only 10 percent of executive compensation packages. A.O. Smith CEO Kevin J. Wheeler, for example, took a 25 percent salary cut while enjoying a 36 percent increase in his overall compensation. At Whirlpool, CEO Mark Bitzer accepted a 25 percent trim on his base salary during April and May 2020 while his total compensation for the year rose 22 percent to more than $17 million.

A 2017 Bloomberg survey found that U.S. CEOs were making more than twice as much, on average, as German CEOs, more than six times as much as Japanese CEOs, and nearly eight times as much as their Chinese counterparts.

A report for the Institute for Policy Studies found that 80 percent of S&P 500 firms paid their CEO over 100 times more than their median worker in 2018.

Opinion | The Single Most Dramatic Driver of Our Country's Economic Divide: The Growing Gap Between CEO and Worker Pay (commondreams.org)

Settler violence in the West Bank

About 500,000 Jewish settlers live in more than 250 illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. Settlers in the occupied West Bank, who long depended on Israeli soldiers for protection, have now established their own security force in every settlement, which works hand-in-hand with the Israeli military.

 According to Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 94 violent attacks took place against Palestinian civilians between December 21, 2020, to March 13, 2021. Settlers have also forced the closure of main roads in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Jenin.

Munir Kadus, a researcher with the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din, described the recent attacks as an “unprecedented escalation of violence against Palestinians across all of the West Bank”.

 A group known as the “Hilltop Youths” is accused of attacking Palestinians and their property.

Idan Zendi, an Israeli from the Ma’ale Adumim settlement, said the area is “Israeli land, not Palestinian”. He declared, “Palestinians have many lands to live in – Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt – they have many lands. We have only one land,” Zendi said 

The Israeli military told Al Jazeera that its authority is limited to separating the two sides when clashes occur, saying it has no power to arrest, detain or investigate settlers occupying the West Bank, which is the responsibility of Israeli police.

“The Israeli security forces must take decisive and effective steps to prevent any friction between settlers and Palestinians, because it is in the interest of Israeli security to maintain a state of calm and stability, not to create security chaos through settler violence against Palestinians,” David Chacham, a former Arab affairs adviser for the Israeli defence ministry, explained.

Israeli settler attacks surge against Palestinians | Occupied West Bank News | Al Jazeera

Austerity Returns

 Britain could be headed for a new era of austerity, the leading tax and spending thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said after its analysis of Rishi Sunak’s budget revealed deep cuts in spending plans for Whitehall departments and local government.

Ben Zaranko, research economist at the Institute, said: “Plans can change but, as things stand, for many public services, the first half of the 2020s could feel like the austerity of the 2010s.” He explained, : “For departments not fortunate enough to be protected by a pre-existing agreement with the Treasury, the chancellor’s spending plans are even tighter than they first appeared. This poses clear and obvious challenges, not least because of the new pressures created by the pandemic.”

The IFS said, public service spending was now set to be roughly £14bn lower than planned pre-Covid. Of that, about £5bn came from lower spending on overseas aid. Some areas of spending – such as the NHS and schools – are ringfenced from cuts, but cash spending for unprotected departments would be £9bn lower than under pre-pandemic plans. After taking inflation into account, this would mean a real cut of 7.5% in 2022-23.

The IFS said Sunak’s plans implied cuts for “perennially squeezed” areas such as the Crown Prosecution Service and the courts system. “It would also mean further cuts for local government – something that would be difficult to reconcile with a coherent ‘levelling-up’ agenda.”

Britain 'heading for new era of austerity', thinktank warns | Tax and spending | The Guardian

Libya - UK and France refused to negotiate

 Libya has been embroiled in perpetual conflict for 10 years. Foreign powers have intervened and foreign mercenaries deployed by rival Libyan governments. The country also eventually becoming the second largest base for the so-called Islamic State jihadists. And Libya because of its chaotic condition became the the centre of the migrant route to Europe. Libya became an example of another failed state;

On March 17th 2011, the United Nations voted to intervene to stop Gaddafi killing his own people, with NATO aircraft flying more than 7,000 strike sorties against Gaddafi’s forces over the following seven months. Two senior Norwegian officials were in talks  in the Presidential Palace in Tripoli with Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam,  when the UN resolution was passed in New York. They had to be hurriedly driven across the border into Tunisia for their own safety, with the first NATO airstrikes imminent.

In February 2011 Libya followed other Arab countries into uprising, with tens of thousands taking to the streets demanding an end to Gaddafi’s rule. His security forces cracked down brutally.

 In regard to negotiations, the then-Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Store, who was brokering a deal, accused France and Britain of opposing a negotiated solution. The two sides agreed to a draft text stating that Muammar Gaddafi - who had ruled Libya for 42 years - would step down and leave politics, but keep the institutions of state in place. In the end the talks fell apart and rebels, with NATO’s support, ultimately captured and killed Gaddafi.

Store explains, "Had there been in the international community a willingness to pursue this track with some authority and dedication, I believe there could have been an opening to achieve a less dramatic outcome and avoid the collapse of the Libyan state."

Norwegian diplomats went back and forth, eventually hammering out a ‘comprehensive plan’ to end the crisis. The first line stated: "Colonel Gaddafi has decided to leave power and step aside and to end the first phase of the revolution." Store even spoke to Saif al-Islam on the phone to confirm this plan had backing at the highest levels in Libya. 

"People very close to Gaddafi, people in the legal apparatus, in his family, supported what was on the table," said Staale Wiig, a Norwegian biographer of Store who first uncovered the existence of the negotiations years after the war. 

They took the deal agreed in Oslo to the United States, France and Britain. Store himself accepts that the major Western nations weren’t interested in a negotiated settlement. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was reportedly keen but the other two nations weren’t interested, Store said.

"Had there been a will to do it... one could have imagined some kind of ceasefire in the military campaign to allow diplomats to move in," Store said. "But the military operation had already lasted for eight weeks, the dynamic on the ground was changing, and frankly speaking the will to rally behind such a process was not there."

After 2011 Libya slid into a new civil war, which lasted much of the last decade. Barack Obama later described the lack of post-conflict planning as the “worst mistake” of his presidency, with the country becoming a battleground for rival regional powers.

Store said the failure to take the 2011 negotiations seriously was made more tragic by the lost decade that followed it, in which the country became "a theatre for remote battles - other countries fighting it out to the last Libyan."

The secret talks that nearly saved Gaddafi | The Independent

Socialist Sonnet No. 25

 Reclaiming…

 

In a blinking moment a life is lost,

Blow struck in anger or calculation

Delivers a blow of devastation

And all must bear some measure of the cost.

The cry goes up, ‘Reclaim the streets!’ But then,

Reclaim the homes where too many blows fall,

Or those police cells when officers fail

To be colour blind. It is also men

And boys and girls of all ethnicities,

When the blow is by bomb, bullet or shell

Dispatching them not to heaven, but hell:

Reclaim villages and towns and cities.

 

Reclaim a world where all such blows will stall,

Where welfare of one is the welfare of all.

 

D.A.

Quote of the Day

 “The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just.” - Frederick Douglass 

It is time for workers who oppose capitalism to step up and  speak up.

Science denialism

 The oil industry knew at least 50 years ago that air pollution from burning fossil fuels posed serious risks to human health, only to spend decades aggressively lobbying against clean air regulations,

The effects of burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas from factories, cars and other sources has long been evident. From the 1960s a mass of historical documents from corporate archives at libraries in the US and Canada, scientific journals and paperwork released in legal cases shows the oil industry had begun to grasp the damage to health caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

“The response from fossil-fuel interests has been from the same playbook – first they know, then they scheme, then they deny and then they delay,” said Geoffrey Supran, a researcher at Harvard University who has studied the history of fossil-fuel companies and climate change.

In an internal technical report in 1968, Shell went further, warning that air pollution “may, in extreme situations, be deleterious to health” and acknowledging the oil industry “reluctantly” must accept that cars “are by far the greatest sources of air pollution”. 

In 1971, Esso, a forerunner to Exxon, sampled particles in New York City and found, for the first time, the air was rife with tiny fragments of aluminum, magnesium and other metals. Esso scientists noted that gases from industrial smokestacks were “hot, dirty and contain high concentrations of pollutants” and suggested further testing was needed for symptoms including “eye irritation, excess coughing, or bronchial effects”.

By 1980, Imperial Oil had outlined plans to investigate incidences of cancers and “birth defects among industry worker offspring.” Esso experts, meanwhile, raised the “possibility for improved particulate control” in new vehicle designs to reduce the emission of harmful pollution.

Following a further major report in 1993, known as the Harvard “six cities” study, which found air pollution was spurring deaths from heart disease and lung cancer, pressure began to mount on the US Environmental Protection Agency to set pollution limits for the smallest particles, known as PM2.5 as they measure less than 2.5 micrometers across, or about a 30th of the diameter of a human hair. 

Arden Pope, an air pollution expert at Brigham Young University who said he got a “lot of pushback” from industry over his work, which includes the six cities study. “But the evidence has grown dramatically and, boy, it’s just hard to deny now,” he said. It’s overwhelming.”

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a US oil and gas industry group, promptly told a congressional hearing in 1997 the link between air pollution and mortality was “weak”, before Exxon pushed out its own study claiming “there is no substantive basis” for believing PM2.5 was causing more deaths.

This undermining of air-pollution science is likened by some researchers to efforts by tobacco companies to muddy the connection between cigarette smoking and cancer.

“The fossil-fuel industry was sowing uncertainty to maintain business as usual, and in all likelihood they were collaborating with other groups, such as the tobacco industry,” said Carroll Muffett, chief executive of the Center for International Environmental Law. “When you look at these historical documents in context it becomes clear that the oil and gas industry has a playbook they’ve used again and again for an array of pollutants. They used it around climate change but absolutely we are seeing it around PM2.5 as well. It’s the same pattern.”

Undeterred, oil and gas interests have sought to stymie tighter standards on air pollution while mobilizing an effort to cast doubt over this science. A gathering called by the Heartland Institute, a conservative thinktank, in 2006 on clean-air rules helped set the tone – two speakers were from Exxon and the title of one session was “Uncertainty of NAAQS (National Ambient Air Quality Standards) Health Science”.

Industry-funded consultants published studies disputing the link between emissions and deteriorating health or simply disparaged the work of other researchers. “Their goal is to undermine the scientific method, science itself,” said  George Thurston, an environmental health expert at New York University who co-authored a landmark 1987 study that found the smaller particles were far more deadly than larger fragments that could be coughed out.

“We’ve seen the oil and gas industry’s disinformation campaign come full circle with the renewed attacks on research that tells us what we’ve known for decades – air pollution kills,” said Kert Davies, director of Climate Investigations Center

Exxon has told the EPA that estimating a risk of death from particulate matter is “unreliable and misleading” while, in 2017, API demanded the agency relax standards around nitrogen dioxide – a pollutant linked to asthma in children and higher mortality in adults from heart disease and cancer – claiming there was no proven association with harm and existing rules were “more stringent than necessary.”

The industry’s approach bore fruit during Donald Trump’s administration, where senior executives from Exxon, Chevron, Occidental Petroleum and API met the then-US president in the White House. A cavalcade of clean air regulations were scaled back, such as rules to limit pollution from cars and trucks, while a so-called “transparency” rule for science risked invalidating studies based on confidential medical data, which is vital for bedrock air pollution research. Last year, in the midst of an historic pandemic of respiratory disease, Trump’s EPA decided to not strengthen standards around fine soot particles. Under Trump, Tony Cox, a researcher who received funding from API and allowed the lobby group to copy edit his findings, was named as chairman of a key EPA clean air advisory board. Cox, whose previous work has questioned the harm caused by particulates, accused EPA experts of bad science and subjectivity when they found that particles can be deadly even in low concentrations.

Right now, the residents of St James Parish, located in the heart of what is known as "cancer alley" in Louisiana are desperately resisting the operations of a petrochemical complex. In 2019 it was found that the air around the site has more cancer-causing chemicals than 99.6 percent of the country’s industrialized areas. 

Formosa Plastics Group's director of community and government relations, Janile Parks pleads, "The entire petrochemical industry is under attack by national environmental activist groups opposed to all industrial development.” 

Resident of St James Parish accuse the state’s leading Democrats, specifically Gov. John Bel Edwards and former Rep. Cedric Richmond, of ignoring those in Cancer Alley and refusing to protect them from deadly pollution. Despite the Environmental Protection Agency recognizing there are elevated cancer risks in the area, Louisiana authorities have done little to enforce environmental regulations and elected officials who represent St. James have been largely silent about the deaths and those dying in Cancer Alley.

Oil firms knew decades ago fossil fuels posed grave health risks, files reveal | Environment | The Guardian

Here come the robot job-killers

  

RPA -  "robotic process automation " - are not merely robots doing repetitive mechanical tasks but sophisticated automatons armed with artificial intelligence which can substitute for financial analysts, lawyers, engineers, managers and doctors.

 The New York Times reports that a survey of executives last year found that nearly 80% of them have already put some forms of RPA in place, with an additional 16% planning to do so within three years. 

Yes, that's 96% of corporate employers. 

Sales of the new-age automation software are booming, turning little-known providers like UiPath and Automation Anywhere into multibillion-dollar businesses intent on radically shrinking the job market here and elsewhere. 

 CEOs are speeding up the adoption of highly advanced RPAs to replace employees once assumed to be immune from displacement. As one analyst told a New York Times reporter, "With R.P.A., you can build a bot that costs $10,000 a year and take out two to four humans."

The nationwide pandemic shutdown of offices and furloughing of employees has caused misery for millions, yet one purveyor of RPA systems approvingly notes that it has "'massively raised awareness' among executives about the variety of work that no longer requires human involvement." His firm advises corporate bosses that half to two-thirds of all the tasks being done at their companies can be done by machines.

McKinsey, the world's biggest corporate strategy consultancy, calculated in 2019 that the emerging revolution of thinking robotics would displace 37 million U.S. workers by 2030.

Now, seeing the current corporate stampede to impose RPAs on U.S. workplaces, McKinsey analysts have upped their projection to 45 million job losses by 2030.

Opinion | Robots Are Coming for Millions of Blue-Collar Jobs (commondreams.org)

Pandemic and Procreation

 Joshua Wilde and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany predicted in October they predicted that by February there would be a 15.2% decline in births. Now they see that slump extending until August. It would be the largest fall in births in more than a century, lasting longer than the effect of the 2008 recession or even the Great Depression in 1929.

In June last year economists at the Brookings Institute in the United States estimated that US births would fall by 300,000 to half a million babies.

At the same time a survey of fertility plans in Europe showed that 50% of people in Germany and France who had planned to have a child in 2020 were going to postpone it. In Italy 37% said they had abandoned the idea altogether.

A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report indicates an 8% drop in births in the month of December.

Early data from Italy suggests a 21.6% decline at the beginning of the year and Spain is reporting its lowest birth rate since records began - a decline of 20%.

Nine months on from the start of the pandemic France, Korea, Taiwan, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have all reported monthly birth figures for December or January that were their lowest in more than 20 years.

However, elsewhere it is different. The UN's sexual and reproductive health agency says the pandemic has caused nearly 12 million women in 115 countries to lose access to family planning services and could result in 1.4 million unintended pregnancies.

In Indonesia alone, the government predicts half a million more babies will be born because of the pandemic. The country's national family planning agency says up to 10 million people stopped using contraception because they couldn't access clinics or pharmacies in that time.

In the future if there are less people of working age, there will be less tax revenue generated to pay for pensions and healthcare for old people who in turn are living longer. There are solutions to this problem - increasing the retirement age for example or encouraging immigration - but those have political implications. Many countries have tried to increase the numbers of babies born with little success. Once birth rates decline it's extremely difficult to convince women to have more babies.

Covid: From boom to bust - why lockdown hasn't led to more babies - BBC News

Warning from the Red Cross

 "In just the last six months, there have been 12.6 million people internally displaced around the world and over 80% of these forced displacements have been caused by disasters, most of which are triggered by climate and weather extremes," said Helen Brunt of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

"Asia suffers much more than any other region from climate disaster-related displacements," noted Brunt, IFRC's Asia Pacific Migration and Displacement coordinator. "These upheavals are taking a terrible toll on some of the poorest communities already reeling from the economic and social impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic."

The new report, entitled Responding to Disasters and Displacement in a Changing Climate (pdf), draws data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. According to the IDMC, about 2.3 million displacements over the past six months are related to conflict compared with 10.3 million due to disasters.

The IFRC has responded to various humanitarian needs across Asia, with case studies about assisting communities affected by drought in Afghanistan; seasonal cyclones and monsoon rains, which lead to flooding and landslides, in Bangladesh; and a dzud, a term for extreme winter conditions that cause mass livestock loss, in Mongolia.

"We are seeing an alarming trend of people displaced by more extreme weather events such as Typhoon Goni, the world's most ferocious storm last year, that smashed into the Philippines," said Brunt. "Three storms hit the Philippines in as many weeks, leaving over three million people destitute."

"Things are getting worse as climate change aggravates existing factors like poverty, conflict, and political instability," Brunt told Reuters. "The compounded impact makes recovery longer and more difficult: people barely have time to recover and they're slammed with another disaster."

An analysis released last year by the Sydney-based Institute for Economics & Peace found that as the global population climbs toward 10 billion by 2050, ecological disasters and armed conflict could forcibly displace about 10% of humanity.

Climate Crisis Displaced Over 10 Million People in Past Six Months: Red Cross | Common Dreams News

The Paris Commune - Fly the Red Flag

 

The Paris Commune was a radical  and revolutionary movement that took charge of Paris from 18 March to 28 May 1871 when the Franco-Prussian War led to the collapse of the Second French Empire. The Commune refused to accept the authority of the new Third Republic government. The Communards controlled Paris for two months, until it was eventually suppressed in "The Bloody Week” beginning on 21 May 1871.

 Marx celebrated the Paris Commune of 1871 on the grounds that it was ‘a Revolution against the State itself’. 

Some so-called Marxists insist that Marx and Engels opinion about capturing the State changed with the Paris Commune and will frequently quote from ‘The Civil War in France’:

“[The Paris Commune]... had shown that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” 

But Engels specifically points out specifically that this quote “is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first refashion the old bureaucratic, administrative centralised state power before it can use it for its own purposes.”

This, for instance, is what Marx write about the Paris Commune of 1871:
"The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms  . . . Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible at all times revocable agent of the Commune. So were the official of all other branches of the Administration…Like the rest of public servants, magistrates and judges were to be elective, responsive and revocable"

The Commune was an instance of majority control based upon democratic elections. There was no suppression of the newspapers or the propaganda of the minority, and no denial of their right to vote. The Communards, having once obtained control of the State, set about democratising the machinery of legislation and administration. For example, they filled all positions of administration, justice, etc., through election by universal suffrage, the elected being at all times subject to recall by. their constituents. They also paid for all services at the workmen’s rate of pay. This was an example of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

 Marx and Engels never possessed any contempt for democracy. They did not wish to destroy it, but on the contrary sought to enlarge and perfect it.

 Engels in his introduction to the 1891 edition of Marx’s Civil War in France: it was a ‘new and truly democratic’ form of government. It showed how the ‘transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states’, could be avoided. And the means, it is interesting to note, were:

(i) ‘election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time, by the same electors’ of all administrative, judicial and educational officials;

(ii) ‘an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism’ by reducing the wages of the high officials to the level of those of the workers.

The new plantation structure

  Rutgers basketball player Geo Baker wrote on Instagram in response to a post by US college sports’ governing body, the NCAA: 

“I have to sign a paper that says my name and likeness belongs to the school. Modern day slavery."

Baker highlights one of the ugliest dimensions of the college sport industrial complex: the disproportionately racialized nature of its exploitative dynamics.

Former University of Wisconsin men’s basketball star Nigel Hayes explains, “It’s always been an interesting situation and dynamic. Black athletes, but white school, white coaches, white fans… minimal Black people.” Hayes adds: “Most are aware these university teams, primarily men’s basketball and football, are filled with Black players. Making money for usually white people and not being able to have their share of a billion dollar plus industry. So the visual you get is white institutions recruit Black talent to make millions. While dealing with all the other hurdles of being Black.”

 Paul, a former SEC men’s basketball player: “Every time I signed that piece of paper that said my name and likeness belonged to university, I felt like I was giving up a piece of myself. Why should my school own my name? My image? How is that fair? I am a grown man. A Black man. And I have to sign my life away to who? To a bunch of rich white guys.”

Former NBA player David West puts it this way: “Athletes are expected to be content as an unpaid labor force for a system that allows economic opportunities for everyone but them. The racial undertones are always there.”

 In the 2018-2019 academic year, the 65 Power Five universities generated $8.3bn through athletics. Yet, aside from scholarships, players don’t see any of that money directly.

 If players did receive a share, economist David Berri has calculated that men’s basketball players at an elite Power Five school like Duke would receive between $145,000 and $4.13m per year. And, here’s the thing: an extremely high proportion of the players being systematically denied the revenue they are responsible for generating are Black.

Based on the NCAA’s own figures, at the predominantly white institutions (PWIs) that comprise the Power Five, as of the 2019-2020 season, Black students comprise only 5.7% of the population. 

Yet, in the Power Five, Black athletes make up 55.9% of men’s basketball players, 55.7% of men’s football, and 48.1% of women’s basketball. At some schools, the numbers are particularly startling. Texas A&M, the second-highest athletic revenue earning institution in US college sports, has only 3.1% Black students in the general student body. Yet, its college football team is 75% Black, and its women’s basketball team 92.9%. 

It is hard to deny from these numbers that Black athletes are admitted into institutions that usually ignore them specifically to have their labor exploited for the universities’ gain.

Creighton University Blujays men’s basketball head coach Greg McDermott admitted that he demanded players “stay on the plantation” during a postgame talk. Tennessee GOP state law-makers called on universities across the state to prohibit athletes from engaging in anti-racist protests during the national anthem. 

Although non-Hispanic/Latino white people make 60.1% of the US population, 84.4% of Power Five chancellors and presidents are white. In athletic departments across the Power Five, 75% of athletic directors. At the coaching level, 80.6% of head men’s basketball coaches, 81.54% of head women’s basketball coaches, and 80% of head football coaches in the Power Five are white.

The college sport industrial complex also subsidizes major media corporations and the journalists who staff them. According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, 85% of sports editors and 82.1% of sports reporters are white. Pre-pandemic, CBS/Turner pulled in at least $655.1m from the men’s basketball NCAA Tournament alone, while ESPN networks earned $792.5m in ad revenue from college football. This revenue is entirely predicated on the racialized labor of unpaid campus athletic workers largely at Power Five schools.

Racial capitalism is the concept made famous by Cedric Robinson, which is to say global histories of colonialism and capitalism build to systematically extract wealth from people of color. Because of the violent and systematic exploitation of unfree labor that built the United States, there exists what we might call a racialized political economy of life chances – one that distributes opportunity and access in massively unequal ways, particularly between white and Black Americans. This is how racial capitalism functions as a form of coercion, a structure that views Black bodies as expendable and their labor essentially exploitable.

 Former NBA player Etan Thomas explains the impossibility of authentic consent in a neocolonial context this way: “You know when a company goes into an underdeveloped country and sets up shop there, and hires the locals there for pennies while the company makes billions of dollars. Then pretends that they are doing the locals a favor by providing a job opportunity for them that they otherwise wouldn’t have, and [provides] other benefits – maybe food and clothes and some form of healthcare – so they can stay healthy enough to continue working. That’s basically the system the NCAA has.”

If a scholarship and chance to play college sport is one of the best possibilities available for material uplift, it is something of a no-brainer to take that opportunity. But, when a choice is between bad and worse, then it isn’t really freely made – and that is exactly what we are talking about in the context of college sports. 

Joe, a college  football player, immediately picked up on the fictitious notion that participation equates to consent: 

“It is a dynamic we are kind of forced not to think about in my opinion. For me football was always used as a ticket or a way out of the way I was living. Therefore I feel as though I was never able to address the fact that people don’t care about me but only my athletic ability. It is especially hard doing it for no compensation that is worth what we have to endure both mentally and physically. It is kind of like slave owner Mandingo fighter, in that my coach is measured on how good his slaves perform."

Marla, a current WNBA player, shed light on the unique challenges faced by Black women in this context: 

“As a Black woman, the dynamics I experienced while I was at school were different. Yeah, of course we felt that we had no choice but to do what they told us and that our time wasn’t ours until basketball was done, not even when it came to school. But there was also this constant need for us to justify our existence compared to the guys. Everything for us was much harder to get credit for, even if we won more games.” Marla went on to say: “you know, I remember reading The New Plantation in a class and it makes a lot of sense to me. I often ask myself where I would be without basketball. Would I have had those opportunities? … Would I be accepted as a Black woman in the same way? Would I have been able to go to college? Would people on campus treat me the same? To be totally honest I think the answer is no way.”

Jordan M Fields, a former track athlete and now a policy advisor at Pittsburgh, explained  that “the extreme power imbalance that exists between Black college athletes, and white athletic administrators and coaches was obvious to me.”

 She ultimately viewed college sport through the prism of the plantation:

 “College athletic programs rely on Black athletes’ labor and increase their profit the more they exploit them physically and restrict their academic and social freedom. My comparisons of sports at the college level, to the plantation system, focus on the ‘plantation’ not necessarily as a place, but as the extremely self-degrading and manipulated mindset of countless Black athletes caused by their exploitation and the undermining of their personal and professional growth as young Black men and women. I never had the opportunity to speak freely amongst other athletes at my alma mater about this, and I don’t believe the conversation would’ve been welcomed amongst athletic department leadership.”

A  current ACC football player pointed out: “Recently, especially this last 2020 season, you could see the slave mentality some have regarding athletes. If you’re producing there is no problem, but however you show or express any concern outside of football or your respective sport, you’re a ‘liability.’”

Andrew, another football player, highlighted how the NCAA’s prohibition on earnings have consequences for Black players, who are often denied the social capital that accrues to white athletes from college sport.

“While the education is great, being a minority and an athlete disadvantages you from being able to take full advantage of the opportunity. I was told by coaches to drop classes that would take up too much time. I was told that my GPA was fine as long as my eligibility wasn’t at risk. To have a lack of support from the athletic side, and to not be able to fulfill my academic potential is tough. The system isn’t fair, and many seem to think it’s broken. The truth is that it’s working as intended. The majority of scholarship athletes who are Black struggle to find good paying jobs out of college if they can’t make it [to the NFL], while white players, walk on or not, often land jobs at least earning $60,000 a year. This isn’t a coincidence, I’ve witnessed first hand the difference in experience white players have compared to their Black counterparts. Boosters and alumni are typically white, and they’re more than happy to hire people that look like them, especially if they came from the team they love. Players who are persons of color aren’t afforded these opportunities because we aren’t members of the same ‘club’ that our white counterparts are beckoned into. Being a student athlete is valued on campus and off, but few experience the prestige it offers, especially when the color of their skin is seen first.”

Players also pointed to the problem with the compensation they did receive in exchange for their labor: the cost of attendance scholarship and the degree that ultimately results – in other words, their education. In fact, the story itself is already told by graduation rates. While the graduation rate by 2019-2020 of the 2013-2014 cohort across Power Five schools was 78% for all undergraduates, that number fell to 68.6% for Black women’s basketball players, 60.6% for Black men’s football players, and all the way down to 46.7% for Black men’s basketball players. 

These numbers offer a fuller measure of the exploitation of Black athletes on campus. In addition to being denied a fair portion of the revenue they produce through their labor, they also don’t receive the full compensation they are promised: an education resulting in a degree.

The problem is not calling the conditions of college sport, racist, white supremacy, or a new plantation; the problem is that no matter what label we put on it, that is what it actually is, and it is exactly what a lot of very wealthy and powerful white people want it to be.

'I signed my life to rich white guys': athletes on the racial dynamics of college sports | College sports | The Guardian

The Pandemic's Consequence

 The full effect of the pandemic - and ensuing lockdowns - is just starting to become clear as countries take stock

New research focused on Afghanistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka where there has been more than 186,000 deaths so far, now adds to that tragic mortality toll, 228,000 additional deaths of children under five in these six countries due to crucial services, ranging from nutrition benefits to immunisation, being halted.

It says the number of children being treated for severe malnutrition fell by more than 80% in Bangladesh and Nepal, and immunisation among children dropped by 35% and 65% in India and Pakistan respectively.

The report also says that child mortality rose the highest in India in 2020 - up by 15.4% - followed by Bangladesh at 13%. Sri Lanka saw the sharpest increase in maternal deaths - 21.5% followed by Pakistan's 21.3%.

It also estimates that there have been some 3.5 million additional unwanted pregnancies, including 400,000 among teenagers, due to poor or no access to contraception.

Covid-19 disruptions killed 228,000 children in South Asia, says UN report - BBC News

Italy's Falling Population

 Prior to the pandemic, birth rates in Italy were already among Europe’s lowest. Now, Italians are having even fewer children.

 Preliminary birth rate figures for Italy show that in December 2020, 15 Italian cities recorded a 21.6% drop in fertility rates compared to 12 months earlier.

Italy's birth rate is the lowest out of all European states. The number of new marriages has halved, too.

Italian women had around 2.5 children in the 1960s. Today, that rate has fallen to a mere 1.27. 

Italian birth rate sinks further amid pandemic | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW | 15.03.2021

South Korea's Falling Numbers

 "So many little towns are at risk of disappearing," said demographics researcher Choi One-lack at the Korea Economic Research Institute (KERI). "The pace of ageing and birth declines is the worst here among the OECD."

The population of South Korea, Asia's fourth-largest economy, has become the world's fastest-ageing society with the lowest birth rate anywhere in 2020, according to the World Bank.

The Bank of Korea expects the nation will overtake Japan as the oldest society in the world sooner than 2045 - its earlier projection - as its "fertility rate is declining at a much faster pace than expected"

The nation's fertility rate slid to just 0.84 in 2020 from 4.5 in 1970, Statistics Korea data showed. 

Experts predict serious labour shortage problems.

"Losing workforce will be a bigger hit for countries like South Korea, than say Australia or other resource-rich nations, because the very backbone of the growth engine here has been manpower and technologies," said KERI's Choi.

To replenish the workforce, the government plans to encourage more women and senior citizens to work, and create new visas to attract foreign professionals.

The last children on South Korea's ageing island | The Wider Image | Reuters

India's Orphan Illnesses

 In India up to 96 million people who may be living with more than 7,000 illnesses defined as rare diseases are not so lucky. India has no budget for rare diseases and health insurance companies do not cover them. Charitable programmes provide for only a very few. 

Half of rare diseases appear in children, of whom a third will die before they turn five. Only 5% of such diseases have a cure. But with medicines for management, patients can have a better and longer life. 

 “A majority of medication for rare diseases is exorbitantly priced and none is manufactured in India,” says Prasanna Shirol, co-founder of Organisation of Rare Diseases India (ORDI), a non-profit umbrella group.

 Newborn screening could diagnose many disorders at birth, since 80% of rare diseases are genetic. But barring a few Indian states, it is unavailable in government-run hospitals, where, in 2018, almost 55% of women gave birth.

Next-generation sequencing – a blood test that can diagnose a human’s entire genetic makeup – is now offered in some private laboratories, shortening the journey to diagnosis. But given the prohibitive costs, it may not be enough.

What price a child's life? India's quest to make rare disease drugs affordable | Global development | The Guardian