Capitalism 2.0. Is the lion really lying down with the lamb?

What's going on here? Corporate America, Hollywood, and NFL owners all rebranding and advertising Black Lives Matter themes, doling out billions in philanthropic grants to left and progressive organizations, and even heaping faint praise on socialists. 

From watching the TV ads, one would think that the Fortune 500 corporations had all joined BLM, that the NFL had made things right with Colin Kaepernick, and that the Golden Globes weren't being awarded by a white-only board. 

In this vein, two recent articles in Crain's Chicago Business caught my attention this week. The first, "City Council's socialists see themselves as an antidote to the status quo", by reporter A.D. Quig, is surprisingly praiseful of a "socialist bloc" of aldermen, elected to the Council in the 2019 anti-machine wave that included the landslide election of Mayor Lori Lightfoot. 

Quig writes: 

Their legislative scoreboard isn't terribly impressive, and they've rankled some of their colleagues and the mayor along the way. But they've undoubtedly moved the needle: They changed city policy to fight gentrification in Woodlawn, along the 606 trail and in Pilsen. They've pushed officials to at least examine wresting control of Chicago's electrical grid from ComEd. And in the most recent city budget, they helped boost funding for non-police anti-violence programs and to have mental health workers respond to certain emergency calls instead of cops.

Corporate capitalists lauding socialist aldermen? Is the lion really lying down with the lamb or just preparing lamb stew? I would say, a little of both -- a divide and conquer game.

In the second, "Capitalism 2.0, it's not just about profits", Judith Crown claims there's a "new capitalism" that is all about socially conscious investors seeking "to improve sustainability and benefit the social good while still making money."

Putting lipstick on a pig? Of course. 

Corporate greed has never been more rapacious. The gap between the one-percent and the rest of us has never been wider, and it's been made more apparent by a pandemic and global recession that has reproduced and magnified social inequality and put thousands of working-class and poor families on long food lines while Wall St. booms. 

According to Oxfam, the world’s 10 richest billionaires — which include Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and LVMH luxury group’s CEO Bernard Arnault — have collectively seen their wealth grow by $540 billion over this period. 

Big philanthropy using a portion of its enormous concentration of wealth to improve its image while avoiding taxation is nothing new. It goes back to the days of Carnegie and Rockefeller. But there's more to it than that. 

(Dissent Magazine)

Warren Buffett's son Peter calls it "Philanthropic Colonialism", and he oughta know:

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

So why is this sop to City Council socialists, now coming from the voice of big business in Chicago?

Well, for one thing, it's definitely not a "sea change," but the same old, same old in response to popular revolts and grassroots reform. It's what we used to call "riot insurance" back in the '60s. It's new in that it includes and is shaped by new technologies and includes innovative and created corporate branding strategies combined with the use of, what I call power philanthropy. That is, huge foundations created by the like of Bill Gates as alternatives to government, public space, and decision-making.

That's not to say there aren't real divisions among the plutocrats, populists, and fascists or well-intentioned philanthropists who truly support social justice and environmental movements on the ground. 

But the system's short-term response to popular revolts is still tactical, a mixture of political repression along with some concessions and hard-won reforms for racial justice and expanding the social safety net. Then there's the long-term, strategic response -- an ideological barrage fomenting division, confusion, and false consciousness, the normalization of inequality the manufacturing of consent. 

******

It was largely these insights about how power is constituted in the realm of ideas and knowledge, along side of repressive force, that pushed many of us progressive educators to develop the popular education practices, to contest accepted norms of legitimacy and foment critical thinking skills and habits of the mind in our classrooms and communities. All this in the face of a top-down corporate reform, heavily-funded by these same power philanthropists which was often successful in buying off leaders and fomenting divisions and splits at the base. 

Our strategy included the adult literacy and consciousness-raising methods of Paulo Freire in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, methods of participatory action research (PAR), and many other approaches to social transformation, popular media, communication, and cultural action.

I'll leave it to the current generation of activists, organizers, and educators to develop their own counter-strategies, and they are doing just that. 

There's no better example I can think of than the current organizing drive among Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, which ties labor issues to Black Lives Matter and issues of racial equality. That's the recipe, it seems to me. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"Casting call for a Lipitor commercial"?

SNL's Leslie Jones 

 Jones later drew attention to the fact that every Alabama senator who voted for the law was a white man, quipping that an image of them looked like a "casting call for a Lipitor commercial." --The Hill

Missouri Rep. Barry Hovis on 'consensual rape'.

“Let’s just say someone goes out and they’re raped or they’re sexually assaulted one night after a college party — because most of my rapes were not the gentleman jumping out of the bushes that nobody had ever met. That was one or two times out of a hundred. Most of them were date rapes or consensual rapes, which were all terrible.” -- Washington Post

Sherry Boston, DeKalb County’s district attorney

"As District Attorney with charging discretion, I will not prosecute individuals pursuant to HB 481 given its ambiguity and constitutional concerns. As a woman and mother, I am concerned about the passage and attempted passage of laws such as this one in Georgia, Alabama, and other states. I believe it is a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her own body and medical care, including, but not limited to, seeking an abortion, as upheld by the United States Supreme Court." -- 11 Alive

Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.)

...became the first Republican congressman to say the president “engaged in impeachable conduct”. -- Washington Post

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Victory in Denver Teachers Strike.

Harry Roman, Denver Teachers Union President

During the daylight hours, Roman said he found it surreal to look outside the window of the Denver Central Library’s fifth-floor conference room and see masses of red-clad teachers marching and chanting about the wages he and his team were trying to improve. “It felt like, ‘Wow, we’re creating a movement here,’ ” Roman said. “It was very, very touching.” -- Denver Post

Lindsay Graham

Kentucky kids would be better off if school funds were diverted to the border wall. “I would say it’s better for the middle school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border...We’ll get them the school they need, but right now we’ve got a national emergency on our hands." -- TPM

Senior German official 

"We fool ourselves if we think Trump is just an aberration,” said a senior German official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. “Trump is a symptom more than a cause.” -- Washington Post

Dr. Angela Davis comes home to Birmingham

It was here [at Carrie A. Tuggle Elementary School] I watched black teachers stand up and “take exception" to white representatives of the board of education calling them by their first names. Where “I acquired, the consciousness of what it means to stand for black freedom...Here is where I acquired the sense of possibilities to resist...This school helped shape my sense of relationship with my community.” -- AL.com

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Harold died 30 years ago. 

To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men. -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox ("Protest" 1914 poem)

 Forrest Claypool (Doing his best Jeff Sessions)

“However differently I recalled my past conversation, the documents you shared with me this week make it clear I did do that." -- Sun-Times

Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

...noted the city’s history as the industrial centre of the south and the related rise of trade unionism. “What made Alabama different from other deep south states is that it did have this pesky progressive tradition."

For the state to have gone through so much agony and now be in this position is “deeply heartbreaking”, McWhorter added, describing Alabama as something of a bellwether for the nation. “Looking back at George Wallace, we thought he was a fading and terrible relic, but he’s now in the White House, effectively. After Trump, we’re all Alabamans now.” -- The Guardian

Rev. Dr. William Barber

This is not Christianity. Rather, it is an extreme Republican religionism that stands by party and regressive policy no matter what. It's not the gospel of Christ, but a gospel of greed. It is the religion of racism and lies, not the religion of redemption and love. -- NBC News 

Fritz Kaegi

Fritz Kaegi

Within Chicago, we have a lot of cynicism ("Oh, this is just the way the system is and that's the way it's always been") but people in the rest of the country who see what we see, they see an anomaly. They see a problem. They can't quite believe it's like this. And it's become a national story. -- Hitting Left

Joshua Tepfer, attorney for victims of Chicago police corruption

“This group of police officers led by Sgt. Watts had been doing this for 10 years; corruption on this scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s truly astounding. This represents great hope for the future of our county.” -- Sneed

 David Figlio, economist at Northwestern University

"I think the best evidence from the best recent research ... if anything, it looks like that maybe kids going to private school on voucher programs might do worse in reading and math than they do in public [schools]," -- Edweek

Taking the deduction away from school teachers who pay out of pocket for supplies for their students, but including this. Vile. https://t.co/DZbSGIlmh1

— Adam Scott (@mradamscott) November 17, 2017

They're whistling Dixie again

Have they really put Jim Crow behind them?

Now the segregationists and Dixie T-Party types believe they have enough backing in the Supreme Court to roll back all or many of the gains made during the Civil Right Movement. They're probably right.

Even as a new statue of Rosa Parks is unveiled in the Capitol rotunda in D.C., the foul aroma of Alabama's Jim Crow laws is wafting through the same building. There's a new move afoot to overturn important provisions in the 1965 Voting Rights Bill that forced states like Alabama to end their denial of equal voting rights to African-Americans.

Shelby County, Alabama, is contending that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Bill  is unfair to its residents and other jurisdictions that it requires to obtain federal pre-clearance before changing their voting laws.

Sorry Alabama. But you're the state that just recently drove out thousands of immigrant farm workers. And now you're claiming that race is no longer an issue? That we've moved into the post-racial era because we have a black president?  Really?

Most likely Justice Scalia and his faction on the Supreme Court, who see voting rights as a "racial  entitlement" will agree and overturn Section 5.

But why? Has Alabama and other affected states moved beyond their Dixiecrat past? No way.

Remember this story?

Birmingham, Ala. -- Latino students have started vanishing from Alabama public schools in the wake of a court ruling that upheld the state's tough new law cracking down on illegal immigration. Education officials say scores of immigrant families have withdrawn their children from classes or kept them home this week, fearful that sending the kids to school would draw attention from authorities. -- AP Wire

They're even deputizing school bus drivers to identify undocumented immigrant students based on the new state law. But federal law, The McKinney-Vento Act, mandates schools to teach all students, regardless of legal status.

Last November, Alabama voters had an opportunity to remove racist language still embedded in the State Constitution by passing Amendment 4. 61% voted against this amendment which would have removed language calling for racial segregation in schools and the imposition of poll taxes. In the same election, Alabama officially became a right-to-work state.

Is this the "post-racial" era?

Obama at Rosa Parks statue unveiling

No it's not!

 While things have certainly changed since 1965 due to the hard-fought battles of the Civil Rights Movement, and Alabamans like Mrs. Parks, plus the many who sacrificed their lives in the face of KKK terror, make no mistake. Without the Voting Rights Act, with all its provisions, that change might never have happened.

Also, the color of real economic, social and political power hasn't changed much. It's is still white. And it's not just in Dixie.

Take Chicago, which recently had its own deseg agreement thrown out. Its school system is still among the most racially segregated in the country.  And check out the make up of the corporate elite in the city. According to an article in Wednesday Sun-Times: "African-Americans make up just a tiny fraction of Chicago corporate boards"

African Americans make up only 6.6 percent of the 1,527 board members at 160 public companies in the Chicago area, according to a KPMG survey commissioned and released by the Chicago Urban League.

If anything, Section 5 should not just be kept in place in Dixie, but should be expanded to states like Florida, Ohio and Michigan, and wherever the hours-long voting lines and other Republican tricks were sprung last November.

 You can read overviews and  more analysis of the Shelby case on Bill Moyers,  SCOTUSBlog (Made Simple | Symposium),The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times: Room for Debate Blog and the Washington Post.