Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Five Ways the Biden Labor Team Can Defend Workers Against the Lawless Digital Economy

The Biden administration must break the unprecedented nexus of capital concentration and big data hoarding or it will have no power to protect workers or citizens.


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Inequality.org

Governing the gig economy will require both a committed labor policy team and a committed digital policy team, and they will have to work together. (Photo by studioEAST/Getty Images)

Governing the gig economy will require both a committed labor policy team

 and a committed digital policy team, and they will have to work together.

 (Photo by studioEAST/Getty Images)

The Biden-Harris administration is off to a great start for workers, with a progressive incoming labor team and immediate removal of Trump loyalists at places like the National Labor Relations Board. But are they ready to take on the 21st century’s most prominent challenge—the lawless digital economy?

As the Washington Post pointed out, tackling gig work may be the administration’s most explosive labor issue. President Biden took a stand during his campaign, opposing California’s pernicious Prop 22. Now his team needs a powerful and systemic approach to governing the gig economy.

If gig companies can’t make their business model work in ways favorable to the public interest, they should go out of business and clear the field for genuine innovators who aren’t simply making their profits off scofflaw practices.

Governing the gig economy will require both a committed labor policy team and a committed digital policy team, and they will have to work together. For too long, the platform giants have exploited the space between the experts on labor law and those focused on the digital economy, cloaking themselves in claims that their product was simply technology.

The evidence of bad faith in such arguments is now well-detailed. "Technology" has been used to aggressively promote an unsustainable and exploitative business model that cranked up in the wake of the 2008 economic recession and popularized the idea that app-based gigs could be a cushion for the unemployed while the economy recovered.

The stigma of surviving off odd jobs was mitigated by the status-enhancing fantasy of belonging to the "tech sector." In reality, corporations have used digital platforms to dismantle labor protections so that 21st century California has come to look more like Colombia or Cambodia.

Here’s a five-point plan bridging digital rights and labor rights—not just to address exploitation of platform workers, but to reverse the erosion of decent work in the United States.

1. The Biden administration’s first task is simply to do what should have been done all along: make it possible for people to survive on a single full-time job and give them access to affordable care options. The incoming administration has a made a good start by supporting a $15 minimum wage and committing to invest in the care economy.

If they don’t succeed in this, corporations will continue to win campaigns for gig-friendly regulations, as they did in California, backed by testimonials from workers who say they’ve turned to platform jobs because they can’t afford to live on the wages provided by their regular, full-time jobs or cannot afford care for their children or elderly parents.

2. We need strong Labor Department action on disguised employment and rampant misclassification. It’s time to stop indulging the bad faith argument that companies like Uber and Lyft are not employers. They have, as California courts determined in 2018, simply used technology to mask disguised employment. California should never have needed legislation to get s court ruling on a simple “ABC test” The Trump team gave employers license to misclassify. The incoming team can use its oversight power to quickly correct the record, and in the long term, strengthen federal protections to end the fiction that those controlled by apps or platforms are “independent.”

3. The NLRB needs to protect online and non-traditional organizing. As Miller and Dehlendorf point out in a great longer piece on this subject, “Using social networks and internal communications networks within corporations themselves, people are claiming virtual space to link dynamically with on-the-ground power building.”

Importantly, the NLRB ruled in 2011 that social media organizing is protected activity. Yet under the Trump administration, Google and other firms’ worker actions, such as a push to end contracts with ICE, led to the termination of those involved, with no repercussions for the companies.

On the bright side, such actions likely also stimulated more formal organizing and new unions like the recently launched Alphabet Workers’ Union. These emerging groups will need a credible NLRB at their backs, and NLRB will need to step up with more stringent sanctions against companies that surveil their employees’ online activities.

4. We need to regulate data ownership, and here is where we will need commercial and digital regulators to partner with labor regulators. The digital economy treats worker data as the property of employers. This needs to end immediately.

You can’t compel workers to provide their blood or organs to an employer and so too, the extraction of their private, personal data should be out of bounds for any company. Nor is a simple right of consent like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sufficient. We need to treat data like the resource it is, and develop citizen controls over what entities can access and how they can use digitally acquired data sets.

In situations where workers willingly provide certain data to companies, such as Uber drivers providing location information, they still need the right to contest the programming logic behind automated decision making. Workers have a right not just to the raw data they provide, but to know how companies are using it. This means companies must be obliged to share code with workers, where that code is directly relevant to their work.

5. Innovative businesses that respect workers need space to flourish, and that can only happen if we take on capital concentration in the platform sector. Amazon alone has acquired enormous monopoly power over markets—and data—worldwide. The unprecedented nexus of capital concentration and big data hoarding are leading us to overall concentrations of power that leave citizens worldwide at risk.

The way forward with respect to some platforms may be to turn them into public utilities.

These companies will become too big to regulate. The Biden administration must break this nexus, or it will have no power to protect workers or citizens. The way forward with respect to some platforms may be to turn them into public utilities. In other cases, governments must break data monopolies on the principle that data is part of the public “commons.” If gig companies can’t make their business model work in ways favorable to the public interest, they should go out of business and clear the field for genuine innovators who aren’t simply making their profits off scofflaw practices.

President Biden’s inaugural address was clear-eyed about the unprecedented challenges his administration will face. The digital economy today is part of the problem and not the solution. It’s not too late to change that.

Bama Athreya

Bama Athreya is an Economic Inequality Fellow with the Open Society Foundations.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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'100 Seconds to Midnight': Doomsday Clock Reveals Humanity Closer Than Ever to the Apocalypse

Citizens must "demand... that their governments reorder their priorities and cooperate... to reduce the risk of nuclear war, climate change, and other global disasters, including pandemic disease."

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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' "Doomsday Clock"—an estimate of how close humanity is to the apocalypse—remains at 100 seconds to zero for 2021. (Photo: Eva Hambach/AFP via Getty Images)

One hundred seconds to midnight. That's how close humanity is to the apocalypse, and it's as close as the world has ever been, according to Wednesday's annual announcement from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a group that has been running its "Doomsday Clock" since the early years of the nuclear age in 1947. 

"In 2020, online lying literally killed." 
—Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 

Although the scientists cite the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed 1.7 million people around the world and has "revealed just how unprepared and unwilling countries and the international system are to handle global emergencies properly," they acknowledge that the coronavirus does not pose an existential threat to Homo sapiens. 

However, nuclear weapons and, increasingly, catastrophic global heating caused and exacerbated by human activity—the climate crisis—do. 

"Accelerating nuclear programs in multiple countries moved the world into less stable and manageable territory last year," the scientists say. "Development of hypersonic glide vehicles, ballistic missile defenses, and weapons-delivery systems that can flexibly use conventional or nuclear warheads may raise the probability of miscalculation in times of tension."

"Events like the deadly assault earlier this month on the U.S. Capitol renewed legitimate concerns about national leaders who have sole control of the use of nuclear weapons," they say. "Nuclear nations, however, have ignored or undermined practical and available diplomatic and security tools for managing nuclear risks."

"By our estimation, the potential for the world to stumble into nuclear war—an ever-present danger over the last 75 years—increased in 2020," they conclude. 

Thirty years ago, by contrast, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock to 17 minutes to midnight as the Soviet Union collapsed and the threat of thermonuclear annihilation ebbed to its lowest level since before the United States invented the atomic bomb and waged the only nuclear war in history against Japan in 1945. That was the year that Albert Einstein—who helped develop the first nuclear weapons—and other researchers formed the Bulletin.

Once again this year, the scientists stress that governments have also "failed to sufficiently address climate change," and although "a pandemic-related economic slowdown temporarily reduced the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming," much more needs to be done to rein in planetary warming. 

"Over the coming decade fossil fuel use needs to decline precipitously if the worst effects of climate change are to be avoided," they state. "Instead, fossil fuel development and production are projected to increase. Atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations hit a record high in 2020, one of the two warmest years on record."

"The massive wildfires and catastrophic cyclones of 2020 are illustrations of the major devastation that will only increase if governments do not significantly and quickly amplify their efforts to bring greenhouse gas emissions essentially to zero," they warn. 

Another warning came in the form of the scientists' condemnation of what they call the "threat multiplier" of "false and misleading information," both online and in more traditional media. 

"This wanton disregard for science and the large-scale embrace of conspiratorial nonsense—often driven by political figures and partisan media—undermined the ability of responsible national and global leaders to protect the security of their citizens," the scientists posit. "False conspiracy theories about a 'stolen' presidential election led to rioting that resulted in the death of five people and the first hostile occupation of the U.S. Capitol since 1814."

"In 2020, online lying literally killed," they write. 

However, this year's report is not all gloom and doom. 

"The election of a U.S. president who acknowledges climate change as a profound threat and supports international cooperation and science-based policy puts the world on a better footing to address global problems," the scientists assert. "For example, the United States has already announced it is rejoining the Paris Agreement on climate change and the Biden administration has offered to extend the New START arms control agreement with Russia for five years."

"In the context of a post-pandemic return to relative stability, more such demonstrations of renewed interest in and respect for science and multilateral cooperation could create the basis for a safer and saner world," they write. 

"If humanity is to avoid an existential catastrophe—one that would dwarf anything it has yet seen—national leaders must do a far better job of countering disinformation, heeding science, and cooperating to diminish global risks."
—Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 

"We continue to believe that human beings can manage the dangers posed by modern technology, even in times of crisis," the researchers conclude. "But if humanity is to avoid an existential catastrophe—one that would dwarf anything it has yet seen—national leaders must do a far better job of countering disinformation, heeding science, and cooperating to diminish global risks."

Ultimately, the scientists say, it's up to "citizens around the world" to "organize and demand—through public protests, at ballot boxes, and in other creative ways—that their governments reorder their priorities and cooperate domestically and internationally to reduce the risk of nuclear war, climate change, and other global disasters, including pandemic disease."  

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Walter Bernstein Survived the Hollywood Blacklist – And Lived to Be 101

The screenwriter was my friend and my hero, a brave opponent of right-wing repression during a dark period of our history.

by Michael Winship
Published on Monday, January 25, 2021
by Common Dreams


Screenwriter Walter Bernstein (1919-2021) attends The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences Presents "Spotlight On Screenwriting: Hollywood's Darkest Moment: An Evening With Blacklisted Screenwriter Walter Bernstein And A Special 40th Anniversary Screening Of The Front" on June 7, 2016 in New York City. (Photo: Robin Marchant/Getty Images for Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences)

When the brilliant songwriter George Gershwin passed away, the writer John O'Hara famously declared that Gershwin had died on July 11, 1937, "but I don't have to believe it if I don't want to."

My friend and colleague Walter Bernstein died over the weekend and I don't have to believe it either.

You should know about Walter. He was 101 years old and lived a remarkable, courageous life of bounteous creativity and fierce political commitment right up to the end. For many years, we served together on the governing council of the Writers Guild of America East, and during the decade when I was its president especially, I thought of him as my consigliere, the person I could call on for sage counsel and reassurance when the union was in a scrape and needed help. Many, many others felt the same.

He would hear the arguments pro and con, and then from his vast well of experience come up with a simple, fair solution. Often, he'd sum up with a succinct line from an old vaudeville sketch he liked: "Pay the two dollars." In other words, sometimes you have to concede a minor point because otherwise, you'll wind up with a much bigger problem. Compromise isn't always the enemy of progress.

"The government wanted him to name names and Walter would not, and so he lived in the shadows for all those years, until a few brave souls in the industry broke the fever of the blacklist and began putting those falsely accused of disloyalty to country back on the payroll."

A noted writer for movies and TV, and a fervent political advocate, Walter's credits include Fail Safe (about a nuclear confrontation between the US and Russia), Semi-Tough (pro football and EST!), The Molly Maguires (a hell of a film about coal mines, labor and social justice) and The Front, perhaps the film closest to his heart and most resonant with his own life.

That's because Walter was one of the last living survivors of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s into the early '60s, it was an ugly, unholy registry of writers, producers, performers and directors who were unofficially banned from working in the TV and movie industry because of their left-wing political views and affiliations.

The Front tells the story of a night cashier/part-time bookie, played by Woody Allen, who agrees to pose as the author of television scripts actually written by a group of writers who have to keep their identities hidden for fear of McCarthyism's fierce retribution. At first apolitical and cynical, over the course of the movie Allen's character slowly grows a spine and ends up in prison when he tells the House Un-American Activities Committee to do something I continue to believe is anatomically impossible.

In any case, see the movie. Walter tells the story much better than I do.

The Front was based on personal experience. During the blacklist, he wrote scripts under a variety of pseudonyms for such TV shows as Danger and You Are There, a series hosted by Walter Cronkite in which historical incidents, from the death of Socrates to the trial of Susan B. Anthony, were covered as news events.

Walter was a member of the American Communist Party until 1956 but quit after the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Premier Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's atrocities. "I had left the Party," he wrote, "but not the idea of socialism, the possibility that there could be a system not based in inequality and exploitation."

There was nothing illegal about his party membership and he felt no need to disavow or apologize for his beliefs. But for eight years in films and eleven years in television, his political views were used against him to deny his livelihood. He was listed in a notorious Cold War publication called "Red Channels"—a list of "151 actors, writers, directors, producers, painters and musicians, together with their alleged Communist or Communist-front affiliations," Walter wrote in his fascinating memoir, Inside Out. "'Red Channels' became the bible of the blacklist movement. There were eight listings for me, all of them true…


I would have felt insulted if I had not been included. On the other hand, inclusion in 'Red Channels,' however honorable, meant an automatic blacklisting. No one ever questioned this; it was simply accepted by the networks and movie studios. There was no government edict behind it, no proof of illegality, moral turpitude or, even worse, lack of talent.


As Associated Press national writer Hillel Italie wrote in Walter's obituary, the result of this rabid anti-Communist paranoia, "ruined the lives of many of his peers and led some to suicide. Job offers to Bernstein were rescinded and onetime friends stopped speaking to him. FBI agents looked through his trash, showed up at his door and followed him outside."

The government wanted him to name names and Walter would not, and so he lived in the shadows for all those years, until a few brave souls in the industry broke the fever of the blacklist and began putting those falsely accused of disloyalty to country back on the payroll.

A native Brooklynite descended from Jewish immigrants, he attended Erasmus Hall High School and was a movie nut from the start. Walter even was film critic for the Dartmouth College student newspaper, until he was fired for panning the movie Lost Horizon.

Six months of an intensive language course in pre-war Europe made him an eyewitness to the rise of fascism and helped stir his interest in communism as an alternative. Drafted in 1941, he served in the army during World War II and became a correspondent for the GI newspaper, Yank.

He scooped the world when he snuck behind enemy lines and interviewed Josip Broz Tito, the leader of partisan fighters against the Nazis and Yugoslavia's president for life. Framed in a bathroom in Walter's apartment is a page from a comic book that told the story of that adventure. Unfortunately, that journey was one of the things the political witch hunters used against him, citing it as evidence of treachery. Tito was, after all, a Communist.

The bathroom wall also displays a short letter from Harold Ross, the legendary founding editor of The New Yorker, written to the playwright and director Moss Hart, who had sent Ross a short piece of Walter's for publication. Walter wound up writing for the magazine both during and after the war.

His first trip to Hollywood came in 1947 when he went to work for the writer-director Robert Rossen. Rossen was in the middle of writing the screenplay for All the King's Men, novelist Robert Penn Warren's masterpiece about a Southern demagogue he modeled after Louisiana's Huey Long. The Hollywood Ten—a group of left-leaning writers, producers and directors—had just been called before the House Un-American Activities Committee but Walter knew he had done nothing seditious and thought he was low enough on the ladder to be safe. He was wrong.

My memories of Walter will include not only the many union meetings we shared but also the too few lunches and dinners, often with his wife the literary agent Gloria Loomis, including one for my 65th birthday. Each was stimulating, entertaining and infused with his characteristic wit and enthusiasm. He was a mentor and friend not only to me, my colleagues and many other screenwriters but also to the students he taught for years at NYU and the fledgling independent filmmakers at Robert Redford's Sundance Lab.

I also remember a train ride from New York to Washington with Walter and Victor Navasky, the wry and wonderful publisher emeritus of The Nation magazine. I was moderating and they were appearing on a panel at the National Press Club marking the 60th anniversary of the blacklist (Victor's book Naming Names is an essential history of the era). Walter was 88, Victor was 73 and I a boyish 56, but the laughter of our conversation—we tried to keep it down—almost got us kicked off the train's quiet car.

A decade ago, at the request of the Writers Guild Foundation, Walter and I sat down for a wide-ranging conversation about his life and career. You can view the whole thing here (or watch below):



And now he's gone. Walter lived just long enough to see Donald Trump come and blessedly go—for now, at least. Because if you don't think it can happen here, think again. It happened to Walter Bernstein.



Michael Winship is the Schumann Senior Writing Fellow for Common Dreams. Previously, he was the Emmy Award-winning senior writer for Moyers & Company and BillMoyers.com, a past senior writing fellow at the policy and advocacy group Demos, and former president of the Writers Guild of America East. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelWinship
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DOW CHEMICAL PRODUCED AND STORED IT IN YEG

French Court Hears Case Against

Chemical Corporations Over Agent Orange Use in Vietnam

"I'm not fighting for myself, but for my children and the millions of victims," explained plaintiff Tran To Nga.


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A child patient suffering from Agent Orange-related ailments lives at the Peace Village ward at Tu Du Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Children are still being born with severe birth defects 50 to 60 years after their grandparents were exposed to the chemical defoliant sprayed by U.S. warplanes during the Vietnam War. (Photo: Hiroko Tanaka/NurPhoto/via Getty Images) 

A court in France on Monday heard a case brought by a French-Vietnamese woman against over a dozen multinational corporations she accuses of causing grievous harm by selling the defoliant Agent Orange to the United States government, whose use of the deadly chemical during the Vietnam War has killed, maimed, or seriously sickened hundreds of thousands of people to this day. 

"I asked myself, what have I done to transmit this incurable disease to my children? Now I know that I am not at fault."
—Tran To Nga,
Agent Orange victim 

Agence France-Presse reports the suit was brought by Tran To Nga, 78, an activist and journalist who was working in Vietnam when she was exposed to Agent Orange. Tran suffers from diabetes and a blood disorder she transmitted to her second daughter; her first daughter died of a heart defect when she was 17 months old. Tran also contracted tuberculosis twice, had cancer, and suffers from an extremely rare insulin allergy. 

Initially, Tran blamed herself for the afflictions that have plagued her and her children. 

"I asked myself, what have I done to transmit this incurable disease to my children?" she said in a 2015 France 24 interview. 

"Now I know that I am not at fault," she said. "We can identify the culprit of my children's illnesses… It's these dioxins." 

In 2014, Tran sued 14 companies that made or sold Agent Orange, including Monsanto—now owned by the German firm Bayer—and Dow Chemical for their roles in selling the chemical to the U.S. government. 

Agent Orange contains TCDD dioxin, a known carcinogen and one of the most toxic chemicals ever invented. In addition to numerous cancers, research has shown that Agent Orange exposure causes severe birth defects, diabetes, spina bifida, cardiovascular, digestive, neurological, respiratory, skin, and other ailments. 

The U.S. government knew about the dangers of Agent Orange when the John F. Kennedy administration approved Operation Ranch Hand (pdf) in 1961 as part of a growing counterinsurgency operation in Vietnam. 

"When we initiated the herbicide program in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide," Dr. James R. Clary, a former senior scientist at the Chemical Weapons Branch of the U.S. Air Force Armaments Development Laboratory, later admitted.

"We were even aware that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the civilian version due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture," added Clary. "However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned."

The communist Viet Cong insurgency against the oppressive U.S.-backed Ngo Dinh Diem dictatorship was proving more difficult to defeat than anticipated by U.S. planners, who sought novel ways to combat the resistance. In a bid to deny fighters the cover provided by the dense jungle foliage, the U.S. sprayed an estimated 76 million liters (20 million gallons) of Agent Orange over Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian rainforests. 

Agent Orange was also sprayed over farmland, as U.S. planners sought to eradicate the crops that were feeding Viet Cong and North Vietnamese fighters, their families, and supporters. 

The effects on the people of Vietnam have been devastating. As many as 4.8 million Vietnamese were exposed, with the country's government claiming 400,000 deaths and millions of cancer cases caused by the decadelong spraying. More than 50,000 babies over three generations have suffered severe birth defects, which will continue to affect future generations. 

Soil and water contamination due to Agent Orange continue to sicken and kill to this day. Around 800,000 Vietnamese currently require medical and other assistance due to the lingering effects of exposure. 

Tens of thousands of U.S., South Vietnamese, South Korean, and Australian troops were also exposed to Agent Orange, which has caused serious health problems for many of them, and some of their children. 

While U.S. victims of Agent Orange were awarded $180 million in a class-action lawsuit in 1984, nearly all attempts by the people of Vietnam to gain desperately needed direct compensation have been rejected by the U.S. government and American courts.

This, despite a U.S. promise as part of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement to pay $3.25 billion over a five-year period, plus an additional $1.5 billion, in reparations to Vietnam. Not a penny was paid.

"We were aware of the potential for damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide... However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us were overly concerned."
—Dr. James R. Clary,
former senior U.S. military scientist  

Vietnamese also watched with great interest as Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million in damages to an American man who said that its Roundup weed killer caused his cancer. 

Since 2007, the U.S. Congress has appropriated (pdf) nearly $60 million for dioxin cleanup and related healthcare services in Vietnam as relations between Washington and Hanoi have improved, but victims' advocates say this is nowhere near enough, as some 6,000 children are diagnosed with congenital deformities each year due to Agent Orange. 

Tran says her lawsuit is meant for these and other victims who have been denied relief over the decades.

"I'm not fighting for myself, but for my children and the millions of victims," she told AFP.

Vietnam is not the only place the U.S. has used toxic weapons in recent decades. The firing of depleted uranium rounds in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, the 1999 NATO air war against Yugoslavia, and during 2003-2011 Iraq War have been blamed for a rise in birth defects and other often deadly ailments. 

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Trump Gone, But the Right-Wing Leadership Institute Promises to Keep Trumpism Alive and Well


Largely flying under the radar has been the training operation for right-wingers to be taught how to work the media, infiltrate government and otherwise promote a right-wing agenda in the United States.

by Karl Grossman

Morton C. Blackwell, President of the Leadership Institute. 
(Photo: Twitter/ Leadership Institute)

We’re familiar with Fox, the TV propaganda arm of the Trump administration remaining a far right-wing outlet under Rupert Murdoch and his mission of using media to push an arch-conservative agenda.

And we’re becoming aware of other radical right efforts to use media to indoctrinate people. There’s the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group seeking to buy up more local TV stations to deceive and lie from, and One America News and Newsmax TV.

As the headline of a recent article in The New York Times declared: “Pro-Trump Media Keeps the Disinformation Flowing.”

Much has to be done about this radical right drive to destroy the ideal of media being an independent monitor, a watchdog taking on power—not a partisan handmaiden.

Use of anti-trust regulations and implementation of Federal Communication Commission broadcast rules are on the top of the list.

One proud graduate of The Leadership Institute is Mitch McConnell.

But largely flying under the radar has been the training operation for right-wingers to be taught how to work the media, infiltrate government and otherwise promote a right-wing agenda in the United States and in recent years extending itself through the world especially to Europe.

It’s called The Leadership Institute and since it was set up in 1979 “has trained,” according to its website, “more than 200,000 conservative activists, leaders and students.”

One proud graduate of The Leadership Institute is Mitch McConnell, minority leader of the U.S. Senate, who on its website, below his photo, declares: “Thanks to you (Morton) and everyone who has served on your staff. There are countless conservatives making a difference in public policy across the country. As one of your earliest students, I know firsthand what a wonderful foundation the Leadership Institute's education provides for someone involved in public service."

The “Morton” he is referring to is Morton C. Blackwell, who founded The Leadership Institute, and remains its president and runs it.

Another graduate is now former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

As The Leadership Institute says on a page about its “Mission” on its website: “The Leadership Institute’s mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process.”

“Institute programs prepare thousands of conservatives each year,” it says. And from it, “Conservatives learn how to…Succeed in the competitive field of broadcast media, Run successfully for elected office…Communicate a conservative message using the media…Formulate policy as elected officials or key staff members. The Leadership Institute is the center of conservative activist training. No other organization provides more training to conservative activists each year.”

Describing under “Headquarters” The Leadership Institute’s “facility” in Arlington, Virginia, the website says it includes “a training center, professional multimedia studies, dormitories.”

Blackwell’s trajectory through the years has been allied with the most conservative streams in U.S. politics as detailed on The Leadership Institute’s website.


“Mr. Blackwell was Barry Goldwater’s youngest elected delegate to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco,” it says. “He was a national convention Alternate Delegate for Ronald Reagan in 1968 and 1976, and a Ronald Reagan Delegate at the 1980 national convention. In 1980, he organized and oversaw the national youth effort for Ronald Reagan. He served as Special Assistant to the President on President Reagan’s White House Staff 1981-1984. Mr. Blackwell is something of a specialist in matters relating to the rules of the Republican Party….He serves now on the RNC’s Standing Committee on Rules and has attended every meeting of the Republican National Conventions’ Rules Committees since 1972.”

The biography also notes that The Leadership Institute’s total revenue since 1974 is $274 million. It currently has revenue of over $16.9 million a year and a full-time staff of 70.”

Despite its political purpose, The Leadership Institute has received 501(c)(3) non-profit status from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service.

In recent years, The Leadership Institute has extended its reach worldwide, especially to Europe.

The British-based organization openDemocracy (yes, the “o” is not capitalized and the words are combined) which seeks “to educate citizens to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world,” conducted an investigation that resulted in a report it published in October of last year.

It was headlined: “Undercover with the US conservatives who trained Mike Pence. This is how the architects of America’s culture wars are trying to export their tactics to Europe.”

Its authors, Adam Ramsay and Joni Hess, write: “Our host via Zoom, the Leadership Institute, exists to ‘place conservatives in the government, politics and media’– and it says its graduates include Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence. Like a multi-level marketing scheme, the workshop taught us to recruit students to right-wing activism, who would in turn recruit others. Blair stressed a growing marginalisation of conservative ideology on college campuses, and a ‘moral obligation to save the US….Over several hours, we were taught to polarise discussions, to war game public debates, to reframe ‘anti-worker’ policies as ‘right to work’, to characterise pro-choice activists as ‘hating babies’.”

Under a subtitle, “The US culture wars go global,” they continue: “This bare-knuckled politics is no longer confined to the US. The Leadership Institute has spent around $350,000 bringing its agenda to Europe since 2016, according to a new investigation by openDemocracy. There has been a marked increase in its European activities in recent years—and it spends more money in Europe than anywhere else in the world, outside the US. openDemocracy’s research also reveals that the organisation has worked with controversial ultra-conservatives in Europe including a Lega politician in Italy, the Spanish far-right group CitizenGo, Croatia’s anti-LGBT ‘In the Name of the Family’ coalition and the neo-feudalist Tradition, Family and Property movement’s branches in Austria and France, as well as across Latin America.”

“The Leadership Institute has also worked with a number of conservative groups and politicians in the UK—including Tim Evans, a former lobbyist for privatised healthcare; a former chair of the conservative Bow Group think-tank; and Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the Vote Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum campaign.”

It continues: “Speaking to openDemocracy, the prominent UK LGBT rights activist Peter Tatchell accused the Leadership Institute of ‘a form of cultural imperialism’. ‘It is exporting culture wars to subvert our democracies and influence our politics. We [didn’t] even know it is happening, until now,’ he said.”

The piece goes on: “Leadership Institute was founded by its current president Morton Blackwell in 1979. Since then, it says it has trained thousands of US conservatives, from high-school students to senior politicians, in skills from email marketing to how to get jobs on Capitol Hill. In our workshop, we were told that Blackwell thought 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was ideologically correct, but saw that that didn’t help him win. So he and other Goldwater supporters launched some key institutions of US conservatism: the anti-abortion and gun-rights movements, the Heritage Foundation think tank and the Leadership Institute, which works behind the scenes, recruiting, training, connecting—pushing allies onto the front lines of US politics. In the future, they swore, they’d win. And they have: their alumni, in addition to Pence, include George W. Bush’s strategist Karl Rove and Republican senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.”

Blackwell received the “Titan of Conservation Award” from the Heritage Foundation this past December. A Heritage Foundation press release said the entity’s president, Kay C. James, “who calls Blackwell a personal mentor,” asserted: “Morton Blackwell is a living legend of the conservative movement.”

Trump is most thankfully gone. Trumpism, most unfortunately, is still with us—as is The Leadership Institute with its right-wing operation now extending globally. 



Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, is the author of Weapons In Space and wrote and narrated the TV documentary Nukes In Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens.
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UN Labor Agency: Pandemic Job Losses Four Times Higher Than After 2009 Financial Collapse

"This has been the most severe crisis for the world of work since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Its impact is far greater than that of the global financial crisis of 2009."


by

People line up to receive food packages distributed in Budapest, Hungary

 on December 30, 2020. (Photo: Gergely Besenyei/AFP via Getty Images)

Surveying the widespread and devastating wreckage the coronavirus pandemic has inflicted on the world economy over the past nine months, the United Nations' labor agency estimated Monday that the Covid-19 crisis caused a loss of 8.8% of global working hours in 2020—the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs.

That figure, according to the International Labor Organization's latest report (pdf), is approximately four times greater than the number of jobs lost during the 2009 global financial crisis, with the pain felt disproportionately by workers in the service industry and other typically low-wage sectors of the economy.

"This has been the most severe crisis for the world of work since the Great Depression of the 1930s," ILO Director General Guy Ryder told the Associated Press. "Its impact is far greater than that of the global financial crisis of 2009."

While expressing cautious optimism about the possibility of a strong recovery in the latter half of 2021 as vaccination efforts ramp up, the ILO report warns that "the global economy is still facing high levels of uncertainty and there is a risk that the recovery will be uneven" if governments don't provide sufficient support for those harmed by ongoing mass layoffs and the international community fails to assist developing nations.

"Inequality is likely to further increase as a result of the type of job losses generated by the crisis," the report states. "In the United States and the United Kingdom, for instance, significant job losses occurred at the lower end of the labor income distribution, while high-paid jobs were left largely intact."

"The crisis has had particularly devastating effects on many vulnerable population groups and sectors around the globe," the analysis continues. "Young people, women, the low‑paid, and low‑skilled workers have less potential to achieve recovery quickly, and the risk of long-term scarring and detachment from the labor market is all too real."

In order to facilitate a sustainable and equitable recovery from the pandemic—which has killed more than two million people across the globe—the report recommends:

  • Macroeconomic policies to remain accommodative in 2021 and beyond, including fiscal stimulus where possible, and measures to support incomes and promote investment;
  • Targeted measures to reach women, young people, low-skilled and low-paid workers, and other hard-hit groups;
  • International support for low and middle-income countries—which have fewer financial resources to roll out vaccines and promote economic and employment recovery;
  • Focusing support on the hardest-hit sectors while creating jobs in fast growing ones; and
  • Social dialogue to implement the recovery strategies necessary to create more inclusive, fair, sustainable economies.

"The signs of recovery we see are encouraging, but they are fragile and highly uncertain, and we must remember that no country or group can recover alone," Ryder said in a statement. "We are at a fork in the road. One path leads to an uneven, unsustainable, recovery with growing inequality and instability, and the prospect of more crises. The other focuses on a human-centered recovery for building back better, prioritizing employment, income and social protection, workers' rights, and social dialogue."

"If we want a lasting, sustainable, and inclusive recovery," Ryder said, "this is the path policymakers must commit to.”

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