What was that joke? I’ll believe that a corporation is a person when one goes to jail?
(Okay, that’s not the exact joke, but you get the idea.)
As ever, the reverse (or inverse, or converse—tough to tell), also works: a person with the wealth of a corporation will be treated like one: pay a fine, and walk away.
Of course, one could argue this is only fair: only the very wealthy could have engaged in the kinds of criminal activity of which Bernie Ecclestone was accused.
File under: why would anyone be surprised?
First up: Professor John Ashton, the president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, who writes:
“In both cases [Aids and Ebola], it seems that the involvement of powerless minority groups has contributed to a tardiness of response and a failure to mobilise an adequately resourced international medical response.”
and World Health Organization director general Dr Margaret Chan:
“We must respond to this emergency as if it was in Kensington, Chelsea and Westminster. We must also tackle the scandal of the unwillingness of the pharmaceutical industry to invest in research [on] treatments and vaccines, something they refuse to do because the numbers involved are, in their terms, so small and don’t justify the investment. This is the moral bankruptcy of capitalism acting in the absence of a moral and social framework.”
Second, Allan Sloan, who is surprised enough to be outraged that American companies would park their “incorporation” overseas so as to avoid taxes:
Inverters don’t hesitate to take advantage of the great things that make America America: our deep financial markets, our democracy and rule of law, our military might, our intellectual and physical infrastructure, our national research programs, all the terrific places our country offers for employees and their families to live. But inverters do hesitate — totally — when it’s time to ante up their fair share of financial support of our system.
Profit-seeking companies seeking to maximize their profits?! Who ever heard of such a thing?
Wall Street is delivering a thumbs down to Walgreens’ announcement of a $15.3 billion plan to complete its acquisition of Europe-based Alliance Boots and decision not to pursue potential major tax savings by shifting its headquarters overseas.
Bad capitalists!
Since all is not gloomy, allow for a bit of intellectual-property absurdity:
Wikimedia, the US-based organisation behind Wikipedia, has refused a photographer’s repeated requests to remove one of his images which is used online without his permission, claiming that because a monkey pressed the shutter button it should own the copyright.
Cheeky monkey*!
David Slater/Caters—and monkey!
*Actually, a crested black macaque
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h/t to a coupla’ folks at The Stranger: Charles Mudede, and Ansel Herz (twice!)
How wonderful that French and American cultural institutions are expanding into the United Arab Emirates. How wonderful for the Emiratis to visit the Louvre and the Guggenheim or enroll at NYU without needing a passport.
Ibrahim has the sort of intelligence that crackles around him in sly, sarcastic sparks. He is smart in a way so obvious that he tries to hide it from his bosses by speaking in broken English. He knows five languages, loves poetry, and dreams of getting a master’s degree.
Isn’t it marvelous that a man so obviously intelligent and cultured is laboring to bring such cultural riches to the boss who calls him a donkey?
I mean, how fantastic is it that Ibrahim had someplace to go after being chased out of his own country after the NGO for whom he translated couldn’t be bothered to protect him because he wasn’t a real employee? That he was able to pay someone over $700 in order to work in a place that does, in fact, treat him exactly as a laborer?
And shouldn’t we celebrate when
In 2007, up to 30,000 Arabtec workers went on strike in Dubai. Men building Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest skyscraper, put down their tools. The strike had been coordinated with mobile phones to protest low wages and poor living conditions. Police arrested 4,000 strikers. At the end of ten days, Arabtec promised a pay raise. Managing Director Riad Kamal told Reuters that the impact on the company’s profits would be less than 1 percent.
Arabtec could pay more without any pain to themselves! Win win!
Of course, not everyone was so happy: After 3000 men went on strike for pay raise from $176 to $217 a month,
The police arrested 70 men they claimed were ringleaders. “Their presence in the country is dangerous,” Colonel Mohammed al Murr, director of the Dubai Police’s General Department of Legal and Disciplinary Control, told the National, a state-owned newspaper.
After this, Bangladeshi workers, who were alleged to have helped organize the strikes, were banned for an indefinite period from seeking UAE visas.
I could go on and on and on and on, but you get the point. Conditions are so terrible in these men’s home countries that they pay to work under terrible conditions.
And the neoliberal sings Ain’t capitalism grand! Isn’t it wonderful that these surplus can be put to good use for 200 bucks a month! Isn’t it wonderful that the Louvre and the Gugg and NYU get to extend their brands and the Emiratis—the citizens, not the vast majority of migrant laborers—get to enjoy these brands!
Isn’t it wonderful that a man who speaks five languages and loves poetry arrived to find only that he wanted to leave?
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Okay, there is one truly wonderful thing: the workers are fighting back. They are, damn-near-literally, at the point where they have nothing to lose but their chains.
“Capital is global and derives its velocity from replicating the same model everywhere. Gulf Labor is arguing for a global, humane, and fair standard of labor and migration regulations to accompany, and slow down, global capital,” said Naeem Mohaiemen, a New York–based Bangladeshi artist who is a member of Gulf Labor. “The implications can be staggering. If Saadiyat implemented world-standard labor and migration rights, that could become a precedent for implementing the same standards in the entire region. Then people would ask, what about migrant labor in Malaysia? In Texas? And so on…”
Which is precisely why capital fights so hard against labor.
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Extensive quotes from Molly Crapapple’s Slaves of Happiness Island, in Vice
h/t Jen Graves, The Stranger
Ariella Cohen, on “poor doors”:
Extell, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side asked the city to approve a plan for a 33-story luxury condo with a separate entry for the tenants residing in the publicly subsidized rent-stabilized units, which will be segregated from the rest of the building into a section facing the street while the luxury units will face the Hudson River.
This address isn’t the only one with citizen-subsidized egress segregation, but the overall numbers remain low, if only because, as Cohen notes, it’s hard to retrofit old buildings with separate-because-unequal entrances.
Still, one gets the sense that if it were possible, it would be more popular among the penthouse set. David Von Spreckelsen, a poor-door developer, defends the tender sensibilities of the wealthy living in tax-subsidized mixed-income housing:
I think it’s unfair to expect very high-income homeowners who paid a fortune to live in their building to have to be in the same boat as low-income renters, who are very fortunate to live in a new building in a great neighborhood.
Take it away, Jean-Jacques:
[I]f one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of greatness and fortune while the mob grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them, and because, without changing their position, they would cease to be happy, if the people ceased to be miserable.
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It’s tempting to end on Rousseau, but Cohen makes an important point in her ending: such segregation is not inevitable. It was enabled by policy, and can be undone by policy.
AbsurdBeats 