Queen’s Dr. Brian May Calls Out ‘Fruitcakes’ Eric Clapton And Other Anti-Vaxxers
Aynslee Darmon 23 hrs ago

Brian May isn't holding back his thoughts on anti-COVID-19 vaxxers.

© Photo: Getty Images Brian May

In a new interview with The Independent, the legendary Queen guitarist, 74, slammed fellow musician Eric Clapton after revealing his stance on vaccines.

RELATED: Queen’s Brian May Says They Are ‘Looking At Ideas’ For ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Sequel

Clapton has recently been very vocal about his opposition to lockdown restrictions and the coronavirus vaccinations. Earlier this month, the musician said he will not perform any gigs where proof of vaccine is required.

Video: Brian May says Eric Clapton and anti-vaxxers are 'fruitcakes' (Bang Showbiz)

“I love Eric Clapton, he’s my hero, but he has very different views from me in many ways,” May said. “He’s a person who thinks it’s OK to shoot animals for fun, so we have our disagreements, but I would never stop respecting the man.”

RELATED: Queen’s Brian May Laments ‘Horror In Our House’ After Flash Flood Causes ‘Sewage Overflow’

He continued: “Anti-vax people, I’m sorry, I think they’re fruitcakes. There’s plenty of evidence to show that vaccination helps. On the whole they’ve been very safe. There’s always going to be some side effect in any drug you take, but to go around saying vaccines are a plot to kill you, I’m sorry, that goes in the fruitcake jar for me.”

The comments from both May and Clapton came after the UK government declared that it will be making proof of vaccination a legal requirement at venues from the end of September.

IMAGINING THE WORKER’S REVOLUTION: THE CASE OF GEORGES SOREL

Posted on March 6, 2017

by Age of Revolutions
By Eric Brandom

By the end of the 19th century, Marx’s legacy was attached to political parties that sought to win power democratically, indeed that to a great degree identified revolution with the electoral victory of socialist parties. Many anarchists militated for a competing purely negative vision of revolution—only the destruction of the state, capitalism, and doubtless much else would bring about a new and better world. Georges Sorel’s syndicalism was different yet again. His was not a conservative revolution, but a revolution that would conserve.

Georges Sorel, 1847-1922

This idea is articulated in Sorel’s 1898 pamphlet, “L’Avenir socialiste des syndicats,” which, if we keep in mind that the fin-de-siècle French “syndicat” is a more open and flexible institution than 20th century trade unions, we can call “The Socialist Future of the Unions.” Sorel retired in 1892 from a successful career as civil engineer, moved to Paris, and soon became one of the most respected Marxist theorists in France. His writings cover a staggering range, from ancient history to William James. He described his own work as “philosophical history” in the tradition of Alexis de Tocqueville; he is often, perhaps dismissively, called a moralist. Sorel is still best remembered for his Reflections on Violence, published in book form in 1908, primarily because this book found a much greater echo on the so-called Right than it did on the Left from which it was written. Without dismissing the importance of this later text as an inspiration for those who wished to be neither Right nor Left, it is worth our time to look more closely at the logic and resources Sorel employed in this earlier intervention. Indeed, when the time came in the fall of 1922 to write obituaries for Sorel, the most thoughtful and balanced of them suggested that “L’Avenir” shaped Sorel’s legacy as much as the Reflections. This was perhaps because “L’Avenir,” while not exactly a work of vulgarization, nonetheless has a clearer argument than most of Sorel’s writing, expressed lucidly in the final line of the text: “the whole future of socialism rests in the autonomous development of the worker syndicats” (60).


This slogan, to be sure, requires some explanation. The place to begin is with Sorel’s interpretation of historical materialism. By this date he had been reading and arguing with Marxist figures like Karl Kautsky, Antonio Labriola, and the young Benedetto Croce, and also confronting Marx with non-Marxist thinkers, most notably Giambattista Vico and Emile Durkheim. Here, though, Sorel draws all of this into the claim that historical materialism, while certainly demanding close attention to economics, means most deeply that “the development of each system provides the material conditions to undertake effective and durable changes in the social relations within which it [the system] was transformed” (3). Or, in less tortured language, that “the working classes will have acquired juridical and political capacity before they are able to triumph” (4). Jacques Julliard has suggested seeing this pair of assertions as an attempt to combine Marx with Proudhon, although the term “capacité” might also point back, for instance, to Guizot’s liberalism. Already, for Sorel, attention must be paid to the internal development of the proletarian institution. We have here not a totality riven by internal contradictions, as later Marxists would perhaps frame it, but institutions that develop according to their own logics.

We cannot know what form economic crisis will take, or when revolution will erupt, or even what form it will take—but we can gauge preparation. Sorel does “not think that the social revolution will look like a scene from the Apocalypse” (38), because the main foreseeable content of the revolution, in good Marxist terms, is that the proletariat will seize control of the productive capacity of modern industry. This does not mean that the proletariat will step into bourgeois roles, but it does mean that it is possible in principle to judge, in the present, whether or not the working classes have the capacity to run the machines of industry without the bourgeoisie. And here Sorel means literally the machines. Technical knowledge is required, of course, but there is every reason to believe that the working classes already possess it to great degree, or can learn. Sorel rails against the cult of science, scientism, which he regards as essentially a screen for class domination and a ploy of the intellectuals, who understand as a class that they will be rendered largely superfluous by the revolution—they may be offered jobs by the proletariat, but can have no directive role in its activities. The intellectuals—Kautsky’s Intelligenz—are a natural enemy of the proletariat because they will experience the revolution as an enormous lock-out.

So the workers must organize themselves. Echoing Durkheim’s terms, Sorel writes that “to organize is not simply to put machinery up on boxes! Organization is the passage from a mechanical, blind, externally imposed order to organic, intelligent, and full accepted differentiation; in a word, it is moral development.” Such development must be the result of long practical experience: “All institutions shape themselves in the same way; they are not the result of decisions made by great statesmen, nor the calculations of scientists; they make themselves in embracing and condensing all the elements of life. What would allow the proletariat to avoid the necessity of making itself in this way?” (36-37). The contrast Sorel draws here is with socialist parties beginning to experience some measure of success on the electoral level and perhaps too willing to claim that a socialist majority in the chamber of deputies would simply equal the revolution.

Indeed the late 1890s was a moment of debate within socialism about the relationship between “economic” labor organizing and “political” action through electorally-oriented parties. The French delegation to the London Congress of 1896 had split over whether or not political, which is to say electoral, action was a necessary element of socialist activity. In this pamphlet, far from the meeting hall, Sorel presents something like a compromise vision. He does not reject political action—at this point Sorel expresses no hesitation about social legislation improving the lives of the working classes—but he also refuses to make elections the priority. In principle, “to reduce the syndicats to being no more than resistance societies [des sociétés de résistance] is to put a formidable barrier in the way of the development of the proletariat…it is…to refuse it the possibility of becoming a class for itself.” (35-36). The syndicats have a socialist future—they are the future of socialism, because proletarian civilization is simply the full and free development of the new forms of sociability with which the workers surround and manage productive labor. This new civilization would be, Sorel argued, egalitarian, but would not ape the forms of bourgeois democracy. Hierarchy would be task-based, constrained, temporary.

“L’Avenir” is a crucial resource for understanding Sorel’s trajectory across the political field of the pre-WW1 years. But even without that context, we ought to consider carefully the attempt Sorel made to follow the development of proletarian institutions within democracy. The first step is to measure the distance between his moment and what might be ours. Perhaps most immediate is Taylorism. Patrick Gaud has argued that Sorel’s Marxism, and therefore his interpretation of the potentialities of the labor movement, was deeply marked by a French economy that was, in important ways, “behind” the English and Germans. Certainly, Sorel speaks as though he is well aware of the gap between craft labor, for instance, and the mass worker. But it is also true that Taylor’s innovations in labor control would decisively shift the terms of debate—it is not too much to say that it is Taylor, as much as the war, that stands between Sorel and Gramsci or Trotsky.

The revolution that Sorel had in mind was neither the “grand soir” of the anarchists nor the Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat. Today, when hardheaded thinking about the conditions of possibility for autonomy takes place, subsistence agriculture is at least for some an imaginative horizon. For one influential group, in fact, “the factory system is not the kernel of a future society, but a machine producing no-future.” Like Marx, Sorel had enormous appreciation for certain achievements of industrial capitalism. The workers, Sorel believed, could have the industry without the capitalism, but only if they could, in fact, run the factories better than the capitalists themselves. This was not implausible, since he believed that the real creativity rested with the workers and that management tended to be parasitical. For Sorel, the factories, the technology of production, was a window into a future of substantive autonomy and practical egalitarianism, at once the fulfillment and the overcoming of liberalism. It was an idea of revolution that would not survive the early 20th century primarily because it rested on the foundation of a liberal state that was, even as Sorel wrote, already in the process of becoming something quite different. The transformations of state structures sometimes called neoliberalism open the way, it seems to me, to a reconsideration of this once obsolete moment.

Eric Brandom is a James Carey Fellow in the History Department at Kansas State University and is at work on a book, Autonomy and Violence, Georges Sorel and the Problem of Liberalism. He is a contributing editor at JHIblog, and tweets at @ebrandom.

Suggested Readings

The resurgence of French interest in Sorel in the 1980s is best represented, but certainly not exhausted, by the collections of essays edited by Michel Charzat and by Jacques Julliard and Shlomo Sand. In English, the works of Jeremy Jennings and John Stanley are standard. For the state of scholarship on Sorel in French, see the 2014 Mil-neuf-cent, formerly the Cahiers Georges Sorel. Despite its age, Isaiah Berlin’s 1970 essay on Sorel, republished in Against the Current, remains an excellent starting place.

Georges Sorel, Autonomy and Violence in the Third Republic

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How did Georges Sorel's philosophy of violence emerge from the moderate, reformist, and liberal philosophy of the French Third Republic? This dissertation answers the question through a contextual intellectual history of Sorel's writings from the 1880s until 1908. Drawing on a variety of archives and printed sources, this dissertation situates Sorel in terms of the intellectual field of the early Third Republic. I locate the roots of Sorel's problematic at once in a broadly European late 19th century philosophy of science and in the liberal values and the political culture of the French 1870s. Sorel's engagement with Karl Marx, but also Émile Durkheim, Giambattista Vico, and other social theorists, is traced in order to explain why, despite his Marxism, Sorel confronted the twin fin-de-siècle crises of the Dreyfus Affair and Revisionism as a political liberal. I show how his syndicalism became radical, scissionistic, and anti-Statist in the post-Dreyfus context of anticlericalism leading up to the separation of Church and State in 1905. Sorel drew on figures such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Benedetto Croce to elaborate his Reflections on Violence in 1906-1908, finally transforming his political theory of institutions into an ethics of myth and individual engagement.

Sorel has been best known as an icon of radicalism as such--in shorthand, an inspiration for both Lenin and Mussolini. This political polarization has occluded Sorel's profound engagement with the foundational thinkers of the Third Republic. Against the backdrop of a systematic misunderstanding of the philosophical issues at stake, Sorel's political ideas and interventions have also been misunderstood. Not only his insights about the limits and potentials of the intellectual framework of the French Third Republic, but also their most significant contemporary resonances, have been lost. I show how and why this has been so by studying the reception of Sorel's work in the Anglophone world from the immediate postwar years until the early 1970s. Finally, I investigate resonances between Sorel's work as I have reconstructed it, and some currents in contemporary post-Marxist political thought.

Sorel is a revelatory figure in the entangled history of late 19th century liberalism and republicanism. He was profoundly engaged in the intellectual life of the French Third Republic and this, as much as his Marxism although less overtly, has shaped the meaning of his work. To return him to this context gives us a new understanding of the stakes of the philosophy of the period and the limits of its liberalism.

 The Origins And Development Of Fascism [1939]

by Morgan Lorne T.

Publication date 1939

Topics fascism, Italy

Language English

 https://archive.org/details/morgan-lorne-t.-the-origins-and-development-of-fascism-1939/page/n27/mode/2up

 

The burden of the COVID-19 pandemic may contribute to outbreaks of violent protest and antigovernment sentiment

Peer-Reviewed Publication

ASSOCIATION FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE

The COVID-19 pandemic is the most severe global health crisis of the 21st century. While media reports and policy directives tend to focus on the health and economic aspects of the pandemic, new research suggests that the pandemic is also destabilizing the fundamental relationship between citizens and the state.

“The pandemic has disrupted our normal way of living, generating frustrations, unprecedented social exclusion, and a range of other concerns,” said Henrikas Bartusevičius, a researcher with the Peace Research Institute Oslo and coauthor on a paper published in the journal Psychological Science. “Our investigations show that the psychological toll of living through a pandemic also stoked antigovernment and antisystemic attitudes that led to political violence in a number of countries.”

Bartusevičius and his colleagues asked 6,000 adults from the United States, Denmark, Italy, and Hungary if and how the COVID-19 pandemic had negatively affected their health, finances, relationships, and rights. The interviewees were asked to report if they felt dissatisfaction with their societies and governments and whether they were motivated to engage in or had already engaged in protests or political violence.

The results from this survey uncovered striking associations between the psychological burden of COVID-19 and highly disruptive sentiments and behaviors, including the use of violence for a political cause. In contrast, the research revealed no consistent correlations between the COVID-19 burden and the motivation to engage in peaceful forms of activism.

“We were also surprised to find that COVID-19 burden does not need additional triggers to motivate political violence,” said Bartusevičius. “It is seemingly enough on its own.”

COVID-19 burden is the overall psychological toll of living through a pandemic. It’s the sum total of individual stresses a person experiences during a pandemic and the responses that governments take against it, such as lockdown measures, mask mandates, and physical-distancing directives.

The researchers found that in the United States specifically, those experiencing a higher COVID-19 burden were also more likely to report engagement in violence during the Black Lives Matter protests and counterprotests. The pandemic and associated lockdowns may have contributed to the frustrations that were unleashed in these events, the researchers said.

“This is the first time in the modern era that highly individualized Western democracies have faced a major pandemic,” said coauthor Michael Bang Peterson, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark. Before the pandemic, there was little knowledge about how societies would respond to or cope with such a crisis. “Our research presents one of the first pieces of evidence on the disruptive potential of pandemics and associated lockdowns,” he said.

The researchers did find differences across nations, with Danish respondents reporting the lowest COVID-19 burden and Hungarian respondents reporting the highest. However, there were no notable differences in the effects of COVID-19 burden across the four countries. For example, although the average Dane felt less burdened by the pandemic than respondents in other countries, Danes who felt more burdened showed anti-systemic attitudes and motivations for political violence similar to those reported elsewhere.

The researchers proposed several potential explanations for why pandemics can lead to civil unrest. The pandemic and lockdowns have unequally afflicted particular social groups, likely producing perceptions of injustice and anger that, in turn, can be directed against governments. Also, the burden of COVID-19 may contribute to social exclusion and marginalization as normal social life disappears, which could fuel antisystemic attitudes and motivations for political violence.

The researchers concluded that in the aftermath of pandemics, recovery programs should do more than address public health concerns and the economy; they should also endeavor to repair the relationship between citizens and the political system.

# # # 

Reference: Bartusevičius, H., Bor, A., Jorgensen, F., & Petersen, M. B. (2021). The psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with anti-systemic attitudes and political violence. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211031847

---

JOURNAL

Psychological Science

DOI

10.1177/09567976211031847

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

The psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with anti-systemic attitudes and political violence

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Aug-2021

Violence in Translation:

Georges Sorel, Liberalism, and Totalitarianism from Weimar to Woodstock

Eric Brandom1,2

This paper traces readings of Georges Sorel (1847-1922) from Carl Schmitt to Saul Bellow.

The image of Sorel that came out of Weimar-era sociological debate around Schmitt and

Karl Mannheim was simplified and hardened by émigré scholars in the war years, put to

good use in the anti-totalitarian combat of the 1950s, and finally shattered when applied to

the unfamiliar situation of the 1960s in the United States. Scholars taken with the problem of

the political intellectual and the closely related problem of the relationship between

instrumental and critical reason play the central role in this reception history. Sorel’s

commingling of left and right justified attempts to replace this organization of political space

with one around totalitarian and free societies.

https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:11178/datastreams/CONTENT/content

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M 101

Amazon, Walmart's Flipkart must face India antitrust probe, top court says

By Aditya Kalra and Abhirup Roy 3 

© Reuters/DADO RUVIC Small toy shopping cart is seen in front of displayed Amazon and Flipkart logos in this illustration

NEW DELHI (Reuters) -Amazon.com Inc and Walmart's Flipkart must face antitrust investigations ordered against them in India, the country's Supreme Court ruled on Monday, in a blow to the leading e-commerce giants which had urged judges to quash the inquiries.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) ordered the investigation against the companies last year https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-antitrust-ecommerce/india-orders-antitrust-probe-of-amazon-walmarts-flipkart-idUSKBN1ZC1BO for allegedly promoting select sellers on their e-commerce platforms and using business practices that stifle competition.

The companies deny any wrongdoing and mounted legal challenges in lower courts https://www.reuters.com/technology/india-court-quashes-amazon-flipkart-plea-against-antitrust-probe-2021-07-23 and at the Supreme Court against the investigation, saying the CCI did not have enough evidence to pursue the matter.


A three-judge Supreme Court bench, led by Chief Justice N.V. Ramana, said companies like Amazon and Flipkart should volunteer for such investigations.

"We expect organisations like Amazon and Flipkart, big organisations, they have to volunteer for inquiry and transparency. We expect that and you don’t even want (an) inquiry," Justice Ramana told the court.

"You have to submit and an inquiry has to be conducted."

Amazon in a statement said it complies with all laws and "will extend full cooperation to the CCI investigation". Flipkart too said it complies with Indian laws and will cooperate with investigators.

Amazon and Flipkart are leading players in an e-retail market India forecasts will be worth $200 billion by 2026. The decision is a major setback for both companies as the Supreme Court appeal was seen as the last legal recourse to block the CCI pressing on with its investigation.

In the current antitrust case, filed by trader group Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh, the two companies face allegations of exclusive launches of mobile phones, promotion of select sellers on their websites and deep discounting practices that drive out competition.

Amazon and Flipkart had also asked the Supreme Court to put on hold the CCI's recent request for information in which they were asked 32 questions - including details of top 100 sellers and top-selling products. The companies argue such queries relate to "sensitive" business information.

Justice Ramana said on Monday the companies will have four more weeks to answer those queries.

In February, a Reuters investigation https://reut.rs/3xyz8er based on Amazon documents showed it had given preferential treatment for years to a small group of sellers. The CCI has said the Reuters story corroborated evidence https://reut.rs/3eTV2CX it had received against the company. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.

The companies are also grappling with the prospect of tougher e-commerce regulations and investigations by the country's financial-crime agency for alleged violation of foreign investment laws.

In another legal challenge, the Supreme Court last week handed Amazon a victory https://reut.rs/37u8FnK by blocking its partner Future Group from selling $3.4 billion in retail assets to rival Reliance Industries. The CCI though has accused Amazon of concealing facts when it sought approval for a 2019 deal with the Future unit that has sparked the legal dispute, Reuters has reported https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-india-watchdog-accuses-amazon-concealing-facts-deal-future-group-unit-2021-07-22.

 Amazon has said it is confident of addressing those concerns.

(Reporting by Aditya Kalra in New Delhi and Abhirup Roy in Mumbai; Editing by Kirsten Donovan, Sanjeev Miglani and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

New research reinforces impact men can have as gender equality allies in the workplace

Peer-Reviewed Publication

SOCIETY FOR PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Men can have a major influence on the extent to which women feel that their identity is safe within a workplace. New research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science reports that the presence of a gender equality supportive ally reduces anticipated feelings of isolation while increasing anticipated support and respect.

While many existing allyship studies focuses on responses to events like misogynistic comments or hiring decisions, this research shows that people do not need to wait for something overtly sexist to happen in order to be an effective ally.

“Simply communicating that you care about gender equality and intend to act as an ally for women can make a difference for women’s feelings of inclusion in male-dominated spaces,” says lead author Charlotte Moser, a graduate student at the University of Kansas.

Researchers conducted three studies in which women were asked to imagine that they had received a job offer and were randomly assigned to view a slideshow of their future coworkers, displaying either all-male coworkers or a gender-balanced staff. Certain slideshows included a man expressing support for gender equality, whereas no coworker mentioned gender equality in the no-ally group. Participants then completed a questionnaire to indicate the degree to which they would feel isolated or supported by coworkers at the company.

“We found that stating allyship intentions significantly reduced women’s anticipation of workplace harassment and hostility,” Moser says. “Our work also demonstrates that these male allies set norms of equality for an organization.”

The first study involved 241 women and examined the impact of male allyship in reducing effects of underrepresentation among women, such as feelings of isolation and perceived lack of support. The second study included 393 participants, an equal mix of Black and White women, and focused on how the races of the participant and ally affected the ally’s impact.

In both studies, the presence of an ally increased feelings of identity-safety such as a sense of belonging in the group and trust that the group would treat the participant fairly. Researchers found no differences in Black or White women’s response to allyship from either a Black or White man.

A group of 398 women with male-dominated, STEM backgrounds participated in the final study to address the impact of the gender of an ally among women in male-dominated fields. Researchers found that allyship in a male-dominated workplace is effective for women, especially when the ally is male. While the female ally was perceived as championing gender equality, this did not reduce expectations of workplace hostility or isolation.

Moser explains that while allyship from men could be interpreted as paternalistic, her research found that women perceived an ally to be an empowering figure. Future research, she notes, would do well to explore men’s perceptions of male allies in such workplaces.

In the meantime, this research can serve as a resource for men who want to learn how to be better allies. Their behavior can have a lasting impact, particularly in male-dominated fields like STEM.

“This is important,” Moser says, “because it means that men can harness their privileged status to make these contexts more welcoming for women.”

---

JOURNAL

Social Psychological and Personality Science

DOI

10.1177/19485506211033748

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Male Allies at Work: Gender-Equality Supportive Men Reduce Negative Underrepresentation Effects Among Women

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

9-Aug-2021

After this CEO raised his company's minimum wage to $70,000, he said the number of babies born to staff each year grew 10-fold and revenue soared

ztayeb@businessinsider.com (Zahra Tayeb) 1 day ago

 Dan Price Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments. Dan Price

Gravity Payment's CEO Dan Price introduced a minimum wage of $70,000 in 2015.

$36.45 an hour

In the years afterwards, revenue rose, and staff had more babies and bought more homes, he said.

Amid the pandemic, revenues dropped 50% but Price said the company was able to recover.

Six years ago, Dan Price, the founder and CEO of credit-card processing company Gravity Payments made waves when he announced that he was raising the firm's minimum salary to $70,000 for his 120 employees.

To accommodate the change, Price slashed his own $1 million salary.

In the following years, revenue soared, and staff had many more babies and bought more homes, Price told Insider. To show their appreciation of the minimum-salary change, staff bought him a Tesla.

 Dan Price Dan Price said his employees bought him a Tesla as a thank-you gesture. Dan Price

"That was a really beautiful gesture and any day I drive to work or a client meeting, I can just feel the amazing relationship that we're able to have," he said.

The Seattle-based company's starting wages used to be roughly $35,000 a year, Price said. But for the company to thrive, he felt he needed to make sure that all employees were making enough to look after themselves.

This led him to double their salaries. The move inevitably drew skepticism. "The media in general predicted and said we would fail. Or even in some cases, rooted for us to fail," Price said.

But he believes he's proved them wrong: "It's been over six years now and we've had really fantastic results. We've had a 10 times increase in the number of first-time homeowners every year and 70% of our employees were able to pay down debt," Price said. About a third of his staff reported they were debt-free.

"Our employees had a 10x boom in terms of the number of babies they were having. We went from having between 0-2 babies born per year among the entire team, to over 65 born or announced over the last six years," he added.

The company has more than tripled its payment-processing volume for small businesses, according to Price. Revenue grew every year, up until the pandemic hit.

When the COVID crisis really began to bite, things looked less rosy. "2020 was the first year our revenue didn't grow in our 17-year history as a company, Price said. In fact, the company lost 50% of its revenue.

Still, "we were able to recover from that," Price said, adding that staff volunteered to take pay cuts to prevent mass layoffs and were reimbursed once the firm bounced back.

Price believes that this year the company will be able to report revenue growth again. Unlike other companies though, he is not struggling with a more recent crisis: the labor shortage.

His employee-centric business model, which includes unlimited parental leave and unlimited paid time off, has led to more than 300 applications per vacancy this year. "It gives a little perspective that paying a living wage is a huge factor in keeping and finding employees," Price said.

This echoes the findings of &pizza's CEO, Michael Lastoria, who, in a previous interview told Insider he received more than 100 applications for each vacancy, which he attributes to paying people a "proper wage." He added: "If you aren't paying your employees enough to cover basic survival costs, what possible incentive could a person have to take that job?"

Referring to the labor shortage's impact, Price said: "What we've had is a brutal and systematic redistribution of wealth from the vast majority of American workers to the people at the very top."

Because of that, "and coupled with the cost of housing, healthcare, and education, which has gotten completely out of control at the same time, we've created a scenario where it's just not workable," he added.

Price is keen to raise his employees' salaries again in future. "Things do get more expensive every year so if our minimum wage is not going up, that means it's really going down," he said.

Chicken producer Sanderson Farms nears $4.5 billion sale to Continental Grain, Cargill - WSJ

(Reuters) - Chicken producer Sanderson Farms Inc is in advanced talks with Cargill Inc and agricultural investment firm Continental Grain Co to sell itself in a $4.5 billion deal, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.

© Reuters/Jason Lange A truck laden with chicken leg quarters leaves Sanderson Farms poultry processing plant enroute to Mexico, in Palestine

The potential deal could value Sanderson Farms at $203 a share, the newspaper reported https://on.wsj.com/3jEpIsE. The deal could be finalized as soon as Monday, it added.

According to a Reuters report from June, Sanderson Farms had drawn interest from buyers including Continental Grain, which owns a smaller chicken processor, Wayne Farms.

"While we don’t comment on market rumors, Cargill is a growth company and we are always looking for new opportunities," a Cargill spokesperson told Reuters.

Sanderson Farms and Continental Grain were not immediately available to respond to requests for comment outside office hours.

Talk about a potential deal comes at a time when demand for the company's products is on the rise as restaurants reopen for business.

Prices of chicken products, especially those of wings and breasts, have risen as easing restrictions bring consumers back to restaurants and more fast-food chains create fried-chicken sandwiches.

(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Radhika Anilkumar; editing by Richard Pullin)

Marx’s view was that capital accumulation, economies of scale, the growth of credit markets, and the dominance of the corporation in business organization would lead to the concentration and centralization of capital into fewer and fewer hands. Competition would end by destroying itself, and the large corpo­ration would assume monopoly power.

KARL MARX THE CONCENTRATION AND CENTRALIZATION OF CAPITAL ...

empiricalanecdotes.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/karl-marx-the-concentration-and-ce…

Contractors who powered US war in Afghanistan stuck in Dubai

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Some of the foreign contractors who powered the logistics of America’s “forever war” in Afghanistan now find themselves stranded on an unending layover in Dubai without a way to get home.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

After nearly two decades, the rapid U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has upended the lives of thousands of private security contractors from some of the world’s poorest countries — not the hired guns but the hired hands who serviced the American war effort. For years, they toiled in the shadows as cleaners, cooks, construction workers, servers and technicians on sprawling American bases.

In the rushed evacuation, scores of these foreign workers trying to get home to the Philippines and other countries that restricted international travel because of the pandemic have become stuck in limbo at hotels across Dubai.

As the U.S. brings home its remaining troops and abandons its bases, experts say the chaotic departure of the Pentagon’s logistics army lays bare an uncomfortable truth about a privatized system long susceptible to mismanagement — one largely funded by American taxpayers but outside the purview of American law.

“It's the same situation that affects foreign contractors all over the world, people who have little understanding of where they're going and very uncertain relationships once they arrive determining their legal status and movements,” said Anthony Cordesman, a national security analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“The terms of contracts in war can really absolve the employer of major responsibility ... even the right of return can be uncertain.”

While it’s unclear just how many remain stuck abroad after the evacuation, an Associated Press journalist saw at least a dozen Filipino contractors for engineering and construction company Fluor stranded at the Movenpick hotel in Bur Dubai, an older neighborhood of the city-state along the Dubai Creek.

The hotel management declined to comment, saying it "has no authority to disclose presence and information of any hotel guests nor hotel corporate partners details due to privacy reasons.”

The U.S. military's Central Command declined to comment on private security contractors, referring all questions to their companies. The U.S. military’s contracting office and the Philippines Consulate in Dubai did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the stranded Filipino contractors.

As of early June, 2,491 foreign contract workers remained on American bases across Afghanistan, down from 6,399 in April, according to the latest figures from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

With the U.S. set to formally end its military mission at the month's end, most of these workers have since made it home on flights arranged by their employers — the private military behemoths that over years of war won Pentagon logistics contracts in Afghanistan worth billions of dollars.

But other employees, brought first to Dubai on their way home after an abrupt departure on June 15, weren't so lucky. The Philippines, along with Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka, halted flights to the United Arab Emirates in mid-May over fears of the fast-spreading delta variant of the coronavirus and repeatedly renewed the travel ban.

Thus began a seemingly interminable layover that some Filipino workers described to the AP as one of anxiety and unrelenting boredom. The contractors spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the precariousness of their situation.

Drawn to Afghanistan by the promise of steady employment and wages far higher than in the Philippines, several of the stranded Fluor contractors spent years working in construction, equipment transport, visa processing and other military logistics. Some worked at Bagram Air Base, the largest military compound in the country, and at Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan. They had nothing to do with combat operations but described nonetheless facing rocket attacks and other risks of war on base.

Those who spoke to the AP said they knew of scores more contractors from the Philippines and other countries including Nepal stuck in Dubai, but couldn’t provide more specific information.

With their cash dwindling over the two-month layover, most said they couldn’t afford to do anything but wait. They while away their time watching TV and video-calling with family in the Philippines from the hotel, where Fluor provides daily meals.

Construction giant Fluor, the Irving, Texas-based firm that was the biggest defense contractor in Afghanistan, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the AP. The Defense Department has spent $3.8 billion for Fluor's work in Afghanistan since 2015, federal records show, most of it for logistics services.

With little publicly known about the evacuation process for the war's contractors, it has become increasingly apparent that the Pentagon's long-invisible foreign fleet may remain so.

“Everyone has been so focused on the U.S. troops, and also the Afghans, interpreters and others” who could face revenge killings by a resurgent Taliban, said John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “About the stranded foreign workers, the Biden administration can say, well, their companies and their governments should have moved heaven and earth to get them home.”

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Follow Isabel DeBre on Twitter at www.twitter.com/isabeldebre.

Isabel Debre, The Associated Press

Indigenous peoples 'abused' under Nepal's conservation policies: rights groups

AFP

 

Nepal's indigenous peoples have been subjected to human rights violations including torture and unlawful killings under the country's conservation policies, Amnesty International and a local activist group said Monday.

© PRAKASH MATHEMA While Nepal been praised internationally for its conservation efforts, rights groups say its policies have led to the human rights violations of indigenous peoples

Nearly a quarter of the Himalayan nation's land has been declared protected, while the government's conservation efforts -- particularly for tigers and rhinos -- are hailed as a success internationally.

But the policies have seen indigenous peoples "forcibly evicted" from their ancestral lands, said the report, released by Amnesty and the Community Self-Reliance Centre on the International Day of Indigenous Peoples.

"That success has come at a high price for the country's indigenous peoples, who had lived in and depended on these protected areas for generations," Amnesty's Deputy South Asia Director Dinushika Dissanayake said in a statement.

Dissanayake said that since the 1970s, Nepal's governments have used an approach to conservation that "severely limited (indigenous peoples') ability to access traditional foods, medicinal plants and other resources".

"Heavy-handed enforcement of these policies has subsequently resulted in numerous cases of torture or other ill-treatment and unlawful killings."

A spokesman for Nepal's Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation said the agency had yet to read the report, but added that the government sought to "minimise" conflict between the laws and indigenous rights.

The report -- which includes interviews with community members, activists and officials -- cited the case of Raj Kumar Chepang, who died after allegedly being beaten by army officers in Chitwan National Park in July last year.

The 26-year-old, a member of the indigenous Chepang group who lived in Chitwan's forests for generations, was collecting snails with six others when they were allegedly confronted and beaten, the report said.

"While returning home, Raj Kumar was not able to walk properly," one of the six people, Santosh Chepang, told the report's authors.

"His condition grew worse, and that led to his death."

The rights groups said laws should be amended to restrict detentions and the use of force by the army in protected areas.

"Nepal's authorities must recognise indigenous peoples' rights to their ancestral lands and allow them to return," added CSRC executive director Jagat Basnet.

Indigenous communities should be included in conservation initiatives, with alternative housing and land provided to those who lose their homes due to the establishment of national parks, the report added.

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