Dollar Tree CEO—Who Made Over $10 Million Last Year—Blames Inflation for Price Hike to $1.25

"Dollar Tree made $1,230,000,000 in profits this year, gave its CEO $10,767,883, and pays workers as little as $8.32 an hour."


A person walks past a Dollar Tree store on November 23, 2021 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)


JAKE JOHNSON

November 24, 2021

Dollar Tree CEO Michael Witynski—who raked in around $11 million in total compensation last year—announced Tuesday that his company is raising prices to $1.25 at stores across the United States, pointing to the current "inflationary environment."

"Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits."

But observers weren't buying Witynski's explanation for the imminent price hike, which was publicized as Dollar Tree reported $216.8 million in net profits for the third quarter of 2021. The 25% price increase is expected to take effect at Dollar Tree stores nationwide in early 2022.

"Dollar Tree made $1,230,000,000 in profits this year, gave its CEO $10,767,883, and pays workers as little as $8.32 an hour. Over 7,400 Dollar Tree employees are forced to rely on food stamps and Medicaid subsidized by U.S. taxpayers," Warren Gunnels, majority staff director for Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), pointed out on Twitter.

"Unfettered greed is corporate America closing U.S. factories where workers made $30/hour, opening sweatshops abroad where workers make 30 cents/hour, hiring U.S. workers to sell the sweatshop goods for $8/hour and blaming inflation for a 25% price increase at Dollar Tree," Gunnels wrote.

Dollar Tree's decision to push higher costs onto consumers follows a growing trend of companies citing inflationary pressures in the economy to justify price hikes—even as they bring in record profits and lavishly reward their executives and shareholders. In 2020, according to a recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, CEOs made 351 times as much as a typical worker, and CEO pay has soared by 1,322% since 1978.

The Institute for Policy Studies noted in a May study that Witynski—who took over as Dollar Tree's CEO in July of 2020—received $11.3 million in total compensation last year.

"That's 715 times as much as the pay for the company's median worker, a part-time U.S. store employee who earned $15,816," IPS observed.

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A report released earlier this month by the watchdog group Accountable.US found that at least a dozen major U.S. corporations have "reported nearly $11 billion in profits the same quarter they announced price increases, along with over $34 billion in stock buybacks and dividends this year."

"As millions of Americans are already struggling against a worsening hunger crisis, eight of these companies, including Proctor & Gamble, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola, have jacked up food prices, or announced their intent to do so, despite recent healthy financial reports," the group said.

While acknowledging that many factors—including major supply chain disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic—are contributing to rising U.S. inflation, progressive economists and lawmakers have argued that consolidated corporate power is a key driver of recent price increases.

"Corporations are using the excuse of inflation to raise prices and make fatter profits. The result is a transfer of wealth from consumers to corporate executives and major investors," former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in a blog post earlier this month. "This has nothing to do with inflation, folks. It has everything to do with the concentration of market power in a relatively few hands."



The Wall Street Journal reported last week that as the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc worldwide, executives of U.S. companies "are seizing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to raise prices to match and in some cases outpace their own higher expenses."

"Nearly two out of three of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies have reported fatter profit margins so far this year than they did over the same stretch of 2019, before the Covid-19 outbreak," the Journal noted. "Nearly 100 of these giants have booked 2021 profit margins—the share of each dollar of sales a company can pocket—that are at least 50% above 2019 levels."

"We're having to pay more because corporate America made a choice to raise prices on us."

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called on the Justice Department to investigate "major poultry companies' anticompetitive practices that have lined the pockets of executives and shareholders while raising prices for families at the grocery store ahead of Thanksgiving."

"Lack of competition in the poultry industry is allowing these massive companies to squeeze both American consumers and farmers to fuel record corporate profits and payouts to shareholders," Warren said in a statement. "When companies have monopoly power as massive suppliers, they can jack up prices of the goods they sell."

"And when those same companies have complete or substantial market power as large employers or buyers of inputs, also known as monopsony power, they can suppress their own costs for those inputs, including workers' wages," she added. "This is the worst of all worlds, where wages are held back while prices are jacked up."

Faiz Shakir, founder of the advocacy journalism organization More Perfect Union, wrote in the New Republic earlier this week that "corporate America has seized on the fears of inflation to jack up prices on you and make a ton more money."

"For months, they have, with one hand, fueled talk of inflation as a way to make obscene profits off the backs of consumers. That’s bad enough," Shakir noted. "But with the other hand, they have been manipulating the talk of inflation to engage in a full-frontal assault on President Biden’s efforts to pass a Build Back Better bill for working families."

"As we head into Thanksgiving and Christmas, and we all look forward to large enjoyable feasts with friends and family, we should rightly harbor anger about inflation," Shakir continued. "Not just that they made us pay more for turkey, cranberries, and pie crusts. We're having to pay more because corporate America made a choice to raise prices on us, and then on top of that, it tried to manipulate your fear about those prices to keep you from getting paid leave, home care, childcare, and climate change action. Corporate America made you pay more while trying to make sure it didn't have to."

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Cuba's Homegrown Covid-19 Vaccines Poised to Protect Millions in Poor Nations

As rich countries hoard doses and Big Pharma refuses to share the knowledge required to ramp up manufacturing, Cuba's public biotech sector could play a key role in defeating vaccine apartheid.


A nurse vaccinates an elderly woman against Covid-19 with Cuban vaccine Abdala in Havana on August 2, 2021.

 (Photo: Yamil Lage/AFP via Getty Images)

KENNY STANCIL

COMMONDREAMS

November 24, 2021

Despite the added challenges created by a six decade-long U.S. blockade, Cuba's public biotech sector has developed two highly effective vaccines and its universal healthcare system has inoculated four-fifths of its population.

Additionally, the island has begun exporting its homegrown doses and is on the verge of sharing its recipes with impoverished nations abandoned by Big Pharma and wealthy countries.

"Cuba knew it would be hard to obtain Covid vaccines, so it made its own... and they could be key to vaccinating the world."

"Cuba is now one of the few lower-income countries to have not only vaccinated a majority of its population," Jacobin's Branko Marcetic wrote Tuesday, "but the only one to have done so with a vaccine it developed on its own."

According to Our World in Data, Cuba has fully vaccinated 80% of its population against Covid-19, putting it in the top 10 globally, and well ahead of several wealthy nations. Nearly 90% of Cubans have received at least one dose, again outpacing most of the world—even as the Biden administration has intensified Washington's embargo on the island, stifling its economy and depriving its residents of food and medical supplies, including syringes.

"Cuba," wrote Marcetic, "has been able to do the unthinkable, developing its own vaccine and outdoing much of the developed world in overcoming the pandemic, despite its size and level of wealth, and despite a policy of concerted economic strangulation from a hostile government off its shores."

He added that "international solidarity efforts have been vital, too. When the U.S. blockade meant a shortage of syringes on the island, jeopardizing its vaccination campaign, solidarity groups from the United States alone sent 6 million syringes to Cuba, with the Mexican government sending 800,000 more, and more than 100,000 on top of that coming from Cubans in China."

Since a late-August peak of nearly 10,000 cases and almost 100 deaths per day, Cuba's successful vaccination effort has coincided with a major decline in coronavirus infections and mortality. While Covid-19 has claimed the lives of 8,295 Cubans since the pandemic began, the country recorded zero deaths from the disease on Tuesday.

Moreover, "the country reopened its borders on November 15 to tourism, roughly a tenth of its economy, and has reopened schools," Marcetic noted. "This makes Cuba an outlier among low-income countries, which have vaccinated only 2.8% of their combined populations."

The glaring gap in vaccination rates between rich and poor countries is the result of vaccine hoarding by wealthy governments—which have gobbled up most of the world's doses, occasionally wasting excess supplies even as they tout their insufficient donations—and pharmaceutical corporations' refusal to share vaccine formulas, even though the underlying technology is publicly funded.

While health justice advocates continue to push for a temporary suspension of deadly intellectual property barriers at the World Trade Organization—a widely supported move that would enable qualified manufacturers to produce generic Covid-19 vaccines, treatments, and tests—Big Pharma has lobbied to maintain its extremely profitable monopoly control over lifesaving knowledge, and the industry continues to be backed by the United Kingdom, Germany, and a few other opponents of the patent waiver.

As that struggle continues ahead of the WTO's biannual Ministerial Conference that begins on November 30, Marcetic argued that Cuba's domestic vaccine production "suggests a path forward for the developing world as it continues struggling with the pandemic in the face of ongoing corporate-driven vaccine apartheid, and points more broadly to what's possible when medical science is decoupled from private profit."

Marcetic attributed Cuba's successful inoculation drive to the country's "decision to develop its own vaccines, two of which—Abdala, named for a poem penned by an independence hero, and Soberana 02, Spanish for 'sovereign'—were finally given official regulatory approval in July and August."

He continued:

In the words of Vicente Vérez Bencomo, the internationally acclaimed head of the country's Finlay Vaccine Institute, the country was "betting it safe" by waiting longer to manufacture its own vaccines. This way, it would avoid dependence on bigger allies like Russia and China while adding a new commercial export at a time of ongoing economic hardship.

These efforts are already underway. Vietnam, with only 39% of its population fully vaccinated, inked a deal to buy 5 million vaccine doses, with Cuba recently shipping more than 1 million of them to its communist ally, 150,000 of which were donated. Venezuela (32% fully vaccinated) also agreed to buy $12 million worth of the three-dose vaccine and has already started administering it, while Iran (51%) and Nigeria (1.6%) have agreed to partner with the country to develop their own homegrown vaccines. Syria (4.2%) has recently discussed with Cuban officials the prospect of doing the same.

The two vaccines are part of a suite of five Covid vaccines Cuba is developing. That includes a vaccine delivered nasally that's progressed to Phase II of clinical studies, one of only five vaccines in the entire world that have a nasal application, according to one of its top scientists, that could be particularly useful if proven to be safe and effective, given the virus's entry through the nasal cavity. It also includes a booster shot specially designed to work for those already inoculated with other vaccines, and which was recently trialed on Italian tourists. Since September, Cuba's been in the process of getting World Health Organization approval for its vaccines, which would open the door to its widespread adoption.

Unlike the mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, Cuba opted to develop a more traditional vaccine, as Nature explained Tuesday:

In developing Soberana 02, Vérez Bencomo's group drew on its existing "conjugate" vaccine technology. Finlay's conjugate vaccines take a protein or a sugar from a bacterium or virus and chemically link it to a harmless fragment of a neurotoxin protein from the tetanus bacterium... Conjugate vaccines against meningitis and typhoid are used around the world, and Cuba has been immunizing children with a vaccine of this type for years.

[...]

[The Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology's] Abdala vaccine is also making major strides. As with Soberana 02, the technology behind it is adapted from an existing vaccine—one for hepatitis B—that Cuba developed and has used for many years.

Protein-based vaccines like Soberana 02 and Abdala come with multiple advantages.

For one thing, Marcetic wrote, they "can be kept in a fridge or even at room temperature, as opposed to the subpolar temperatures the Pfizer vaccine has to be stored at or the freezer temperatures Moderna's vaccine requires," making distribution easier, especially in developing countries and remote areas.

"Cuba has decommodified a vital human resource—the exact opposite policy direction that we've seen in these last four decades of neoliberalism."

Alluding to other vaccines' extreme cold storage requirements, Helen Yaffe, senior lecturer in economic and social history at the University of Glasgow, told Marcetic that "in the Global South, where huge amounts of the population have no access to electricity, it's just another technological obstacle."

Moreover, because Cuba has relied on conjugate vaccines for years to protect people, including children, from meningitis and typhoid, Bencomo told Nature he is confident that Soberana 02—which has been used to inoculate nearly two million Cuban children so far—is safe across age groups.

As Marcetic noted, "the mRNA technology, which has never been used on kids before, has meant a lag between adult and child vaccination in the developed world—and means vaccines for kids under five are still being developed."

Cuba, by contrast, "aimed from the outset to create a vaccine that kids could take," he added. "As of this month, it's fully vaccinated more than four-fifths of all kids aged two to eighteen."

Arguably the most important aspect of Cuba's vaccines, proponents say, is that their development demonstrates the existence of an alternative model for scientific research that puts people over profits.

"The Cuban vaccine," Yaffe told Marcetic, "is 100% entirely a product of a public biotech sector."

Marcetic explained:

While in the United States and other developed countries, lifesaving medicines are developed thanks largely to public funding before their profits and distribution are ruthlessly privatized for corporate enrichment, Cuba's biotech sector is wholly publicly owned and funded. That means Cuba has decommodified a vital human resource—the exact opposite policy direction that we've seen in these last four decades of neoliberalism.

Cuba has poured billions of dollars into creating a domestic biotech industry since the 1980s, when a combination of an outbreak of dengue fever and new economic sanctions from then-president Ronald Reagan forced its hand. Despite a crushing blockade by the United States, responsible for a third of the world's pharmaceutical production, Cuba's biotech sector has thrived: it makes nearly 70% of the roughly eight hundred medicines that Cubans consume and eight of the eleven vaccines in the country's national immunization program, and it exports hundreds of millions of vaccines a year. The revenues are then reinvested into the sector.

Journalist Paris Marx marveled at Cuba's recent accomplishment. "Under U.S. embargo for 60 years," they tweeted, "Cuba knew it would be hard to obtain Covid vaccines, so it made its own... and they could be key to vaccinating the world."

"The Cuban vaccine is 100% entirely a product of a public biotech sector."

"Being in Canada, it's such a stark contrast," Marx added. "Canada hasn't even manufactured Covid vaccines, let alone developed them, after privatizing the public pharma company. Meanwhile, Cuba is not only measuring up to the top global pharma giants, it's producing vaccines for export."

Marcetic wrote that "while Cuba's rebound from the pandemic suggests [Bencomo's] and the Cuban government's confidence in the vaccines isn't misplaced, it may take some more time for them to get the international scientific community's official imprimatur."

"Should it come," he continued, "it would prove a powerful refutation of the corporate-driven vaccine model that has so far dominated, which holds that, in line with the talking points of Big Pharma, only profit-driven competition can produce the kind of lifesaving innovation the world is desperate for."

Ongoing opposition to the WTO patent waiver threatens to prolong vaccine apartheid and with it, the Covid-19 pandemic—potentially endangering everyone should a vaccine-resistant variant emerge, as epidemiologists have repeatedly warned is a growing possibility.

In light of that, Marcetic added, "we should all hope that Cuba's vaccines are proven as successful as its scientists are sure they are."

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PAID FOR BY KENNEY & UCP

KXL Pipeline Company Exploits NAFTA Provision to File $15 Billion Claim Against US

"NAFTA's legacy of granting multinational corporations special rights to sue governments taking action to protect the environment lives on."


Climate activists hold signs against the Keystone XL project at a September 20, 2013 protest. 

(Photo: Joe Brusky/CC BY-NC 2.0)

ANDREA GERMANOS

COMMONDREAMS

November 24, 2021

The Canadian company behind the canceled Keystone XL pipeline filed a formal request for arbitration this week under the North American Free Trade Agreement to seek over $15 billion in economic damages over the Biden administration's revocation of the cross-border oil project's permit.

In its Monday filing, TC Energy criticizes the permit's cancellation as "unfair and inequitable" and argues the U.S. government should pay damages for the "regulatory roller coaster" the company endured while seeking to build the pipeline.

"Action on the climate crisis will require trade reforms, including killing these investor provisions."

Erin LeBlanc, a lecturer at the Smith School of Business in Kingston, Ont. told CBC News that amount represents "the largest claim for a Canadian organization against the U.S. government."

The company said in a statement announcing its filing that it "has a responsibility to our shareholders to seek recovery of the losses incurred due to the permit revocation, which resulted in the termination of the project."

The pipeline project, which would have transported tar sands from Alberta, Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast, was first proposed in 2008. Following sustained grassroots pressure, the Obama administration ultimately rejected the pipeline—prompting a since-dropped NAFTA claim. That permit rejection was reversed by the fossil fuel-promoting Trump administration.

President Joe Biden then canceled the permit in his first hours in office—a move attributed to relentless Indigenous-led activism and heralded by climate groups as "a huge win for the health and safety of Americans and our planet."

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In July, a month after it declared the project dead, TC Energy filed its intent to use the NAFTA Chapter 11 investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions to recoup perceived economic losses.

As such, the new filing is not surprising, author and water rights expert Maude Barlow noted in a Tuesday tweet. "This awful practice," she added, referring to the ISDS mechanism, "was grandfathered in the old NAFTA."

While the ISDS provision of NAFTA was "gutted" under the replacement U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), the company is making a "legacy" NAFTA claim. According to advocacy group Public Citizen, ISDS is "totally rigged" in favor of corporations.

As the group explains on its website:

Under ISDS, [a tribunal of three corporate lawyers] can order U.S. taxpayers to pay corporations unlimited sums of money, including for the loss of "expected future profits" that the corporation would have earned in the absence of the public policy it is attacking.

The multinational corporations only need to convince the lawyers that a law protecting public health or the environment violates their special “trade” agreement rights. The corporate lawyers' decisions are not subject to appeal. And if a country does not pay, the corporation can seize a government's assets—bank accounts, ships, airplanes—to extract the compensation ordered.

Addressing the TC Energy-U.S. government dispute, Bloomberg reported that "the tribunal cannot compel a country to change its laws over the matter nor force approval of the pipeline, but it could award damages for lost profits and costs incurred by the company."

In a Tuesday tweet, Ben Lilliston, director of rural strategies and climate change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, put TC Energy's filing in the context of the planetary climate emergency.

"NAFTA's legacy of granting multinational corporations special rights to sue governments taking action to protect the environment lives on," he wrote. "Action on the climate crisis will require trade reforms, including killing these investor provisions."

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FASCISM

South Dakota Supreme Court Kills Recreational Marijuana Law Approved by Voters

The ruling is a win for Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, who directed the state to pay for the legal fight against the voter-backed amendment.


A worker looks through a bag of marijuana that will be used to make marijuana infused chocolate edibles at Kiva Confections on January 16, 2018 in Oakland, California. (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

ANDREA GERMANOS

COMMONDREAMS

November 24, 2021

The South Dakota Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a lower court's ruling in striking down a voter-approved measure that would have legalized recreational marijuana.

"Legalization opponents... are now petitioning the courts to overturn the will of the people."

In a statement explaining its 4-1 ruling, the court argued that Constitutional Amendment A—which passed by an eight-point margin last year in a state-wide referendum vote last year—was invalid because it dealt with more than one subject and thus ran afoul of the state constitution.

In addition to addressing recreational pot, the measure also had provisions regarding hemp and medical marijuana.

"As a result of the constitutional violation, the court has declared the amendment invalid," the judges said.

Matthew Schweich, campaign director for South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws, which led the campaign in support of Amendment A, called the ruling "extremely flawed."

The ruling, according to Schweich, "states that Amendment A comprised three subjects—recreational marijuana, medical marijuana, and hemp legalization—and that South Dakotans could not tell what they were voting on when voting for Amendment A." But Schweich rejected that finding as "a legal stretch and one that relies on the disrespectful assumption that South Dakota voters were intellectually incapable of understanding the initiative."

Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, had backed the lawsuit against legalization and welcomed the supreme court's ruling.

The plaintiffs in the case are South Dakota Highway Patrol Superintendent Rick Miller and Pennington County Sheriff Kevin Thom. "Legal fees for Miller's role in challenging the amendment," the Sioux Falls Argus Leader previously reported, "are being paid for by the state of South Dakota at the order of Gov. Kristi Noem, who campaigned against the ballot measure leading up to the election."

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“Legalization opponents cannot succeed in the court of public opinion or at the ballot box," Paul Armentano, deputy director of advocacy group NORML, said in a statement. "Thus, they are now petitioning the courts to overturn the will of the people. Whether or not one supports marijuana legalization, Americans should be deeply concerned by this trend and by the outcome of this case."

Fifty-four percent of South Dakota voters approved the amendment last November. Among other things, it would have allowed recreational use for those over 21, as well as the possession and distribution for up to an ounce of marijuana.

"We had full confidence that a majority of South Dakotans, if given the opportunity to vote on (marijuana), would realize the economic, health, and social justice benefits of marijuana reform. And they did," Drey Samuelson, political director for South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws, said at the time.

Legal challenges in the conservative state, however, quickly ensued.

Wednesday's decision upholds the February decision from Circuit Court Judge Christina Klinger.

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"Science & Society", Mr A. H. Nimtz & Bakunin

René Berthier

2016, "Science & Society", Mr A. H. Nimtz & Bakunin

89 Pages

1 File ▾

An academic from the United States of America, August H. Nimtz, published in the journal "Science & Society" (July 2016) a short article entitled "Another 'side' to the Story" to which this text does not constitute an answer but rather a critical digression, which explains its length. Indeed, Mr. Nimtz's article condenses into three pages almost all of Marx's absurdities about Bakunin, and my text attempts to set the record straight, not from preconceived ideas but from documents of the time. My text also attempts to show that Mr. Nimtz's deeply rooted anti-Bakuninian prejudices, characteristic of Marxist historiography devoid of any critical examination of facts and documents, are a radical handicap that prevents analysis of the many points of convergence between the two men. The question is not whether social-democratic strategy or revolutionary syndicalist-type strategy (which was in fact the one advocated by Bakunin), was more effective in achieving immediate and temporary improvements in the living conditions of the working population; the question is: what would be the most effective way for this working population to collectively takeover all the machinery of society and to make it work so that it meets the needs of the entire population? The basis of the debate between Marx and Bakunin, between Marxism and Anarchism is there. Unfortunately, Marx’s stubborn refusal to discuss these issues, his obsession with accusing Bakunin of all kinds of evils, his systematic avoidance of debate, prevented the establishment of a real debate that could have led to a constructive synthesis

https://www.academia.edu/39262714/_Science_and_Society_Mr_A_H_Nimtz_and_Bakunin?auto=download&email_work_card=download-paper

FASCISM IN ALBERTA

UCP BILL 81 BANS LABOUR FROM THIRD PARTY ADVOCACY *Bill 81 says no group which has criticized the government can register as a so-called Third-Party Advertiser (TPA). The UCP recently introduced an anti-democratic gag law, the omnibus Bill 81, designed to silence their critics, especially the Alberta Federation of Labour, and add a backdoor method to raise unlimited donations from secret donors. Read on to learn more about how outrageous and authoritarian it is... and join us for a webinar this Thursday as we discuss it.   News Alberta Federation of Labour plans to stand up to UCP's Bill 81 AFL president Gil McGowan said the bill targets the federation, which is listed as an affiliated organization in the Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) constitution, and campaigns for workers’ interests in and outside Alberta election periods. “We’re just doing what our organization was created to do, which is to run advocacy campaigns on behalf of workers,” McGowan said. Read Edmonton Journal Story.  Read AFL Executive Council Statement. Watch: “Premier Kenney, your authoritarianism is showing.” Union leader condemns UCP’s Bill 81 as a “blatant effort to silence workers while magnifying the power of the rich.” The following is a statement from Gil McGowan, president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, which is Alberta’s largest and oldest worker advocacy organization. Read statement. Watch AFL statement. Action Join us for the webinar: The UCP anti-democracy gag law, Bill 81 explained Join us this Thursday, Nov. 25, at 6:30pm MT, as AFL president Gil McGowan moderates a panel discussing the UCP gag law Bill 81 with Health Sciences Association of Alberta (HSAA) President Mike Parker and political scientist University of Calgary professor Lisa Young.  Register now! Do you want to make Jason Kenney really angry? Let’s spoil his plans to silence his critics. Please share our Stand up to Kenney campaign to stop Kenney from silencing working Albertans with your friends and family. Together we can protect the voices of working Albertans and send a loud and clear message to Kenney that we won’t be silenced. Make sure our voices are heard!

HUBRIS

JPMorgan: Boss 'regrets' saying bank will outlast Chinese Communist Party

IMAGE SOURCE,GETTY IMAGES

JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon has apologised after saying his Wall Street bank would outlast China's Communist Party.

The comments, made at a US event, sparked anger in China, with experts warning they could jeopardise the bank's ambitions in the country.

Mr Dimon said: "I regret and should not have made that comment," in a statement issued on Wednesday.

He added he was only to trying to "emphasise the strength" of the bank.

Academics suggested the quick apology was aimed at containing the fallout.

In August, JP Morgan won approval to become the first full foreign owner of a securities brokerage in China.

'I bet we last longer'

Mr Dimon made his original remarks at Boston College on Tuesday, where he was taking part in a series of interviews with chief executives.

"I made a joke the other day that the Communist Party is celebrating its 100th year - so is JPMorgan," he said.

"I'd make a bet that we last longer," he told the event. "I can't say that in China. They are probably listening anyway," he added.

It sparked a swift reaction, with Hu Xijin, editor of the state-backed Global Times newspaper, saying on Twitter: "Think long-term! And I bet the CPC [Chinese Communist Party] will outlast the USA."

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a news conference on Wednesday: "Why the publicity stunt with some grandstanding remarks?"

'I regret my comment'

Mr Dimon apologised on Wednesday, saying: "I regret my recent comment because it's never right to joke about or denigrate any group of people, whether it's a country, its leadership, or any part of a society and culture.

"Speaking in that way can take away from constructive and thoughtful dialogue in society, which is needed now more than ever."

• Can Western brands recover in China after backlash?
• UBS economist reinstated after China 'pig' comments

Global executives typically choose their words carefully when discussing China, where foreign companies have occasionally been subject to a backlash for perceived offences.

Swiss bank UBS ran into trouble in 2019, after a remark by one of its senior economists about food inflation and swine fever was interpreted as a racist slur.

He was suspended for three months and UBS lost a lucrative financial contract with a state-backed client.

Earlier this year, Swedish fashion giant H&M and US-based Nike faced pushback from Chinese state media and ecommerce platforms after expressing concern about allegations of forced labour in Xinjiang.

Eswar Prasad, a professor at Cornell University, said Mr Dimon's swift apology was designed to mitigate any damage.

"Dimon's apology shows the degree of deference foreign businesses have to show to the Chinese government in order to remain in its good graces and maintain access to the country's markets," he said.

In State Legislatures Nationwide, Republicans Are Consolidating Power

Barricades are seen in front of the State Capitol in Madison, Wisconsin, on January 17, 2021, during a nationwide protest called by anti-government and far-right groups supporting US President Donald Trump 

By Matt Shuham
December 26, 2021 

Congress gets most of the national attention in the redistricting wars, but state legislatures are key battlegrounds that deserve some scrutiny.

For one thing, there are thousands of state legislative districts — all the more opportunity for a sneaky gerrymander to slip by unnoticed.

Also, state legislatures, as we’ve seen over the past year, hold immense power in the democratic process — including setting election rules and responding (or not) to the 

Here are five of the most dramatic examples of state-level gerrymandering we’ve seen this year.

Texas

Texas Republicans’ redistricting maps, which were signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) in October, have attracted their share of lawsuits, including the Justice Department’s only redistricting lawsuit so far this year.

The DOJ sued over the congressional and state House maps, alleging that the legislature had “eliminated Latino electoral opportunities in the State House plan through manipulation or outright elimination of districts where Latino communities previously had elected their preferred candidates.”

The suit highlights House District 118, which had a solid Latino majority leading into the redistricting process. The Texas House adopted an amendment to alter the district over the objections of the majority of the Bexar County delegation, the suit noted, and the change allegedly resulted in a 10 percent decrease to the Latino citizen voting-age population in the district.

The maps protect GOP incumbents in the state and their legislative majorities. And despite people of color making up 95% of Texas’ population growth over the past decade, there are no new Latino-majority districts in the new state House and Senate maps, nor new Black-majority districts. The House map actually decreases the number of districts with Black or Latino majorities.
North Carolina

Amid the multiple lawsuits over North Carolina Republicans’ state legislative and congressional maps, the state’s Supreme Court postponed primary elections, citing “the great public interest in the subject matter.”

It’s not hard to see why people are interested: The maps passed by the state legislature would give Republicans 24 safe Senate seats, as opposed to 17 safe seats for Democrats, the News Observer reported. In the House, the balance of safe seats is 55-41 in Republicans’ favor.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Project, a nonpartisan group that scores redistricting proposals, gave the state House and Senate maps “F” grades overall, as well as Fs for partisan fairness.

Ohio

Donald Trump won Ohio’s presidential electors with 53% of the state’s vote to Joe Biden’s 45% in 2020, up a few points from his 51-43% win over Hillary Clinton in 2016. Before that, Barack Obama won the state in back to back presidential contests.

And yet, the maps approved by Ohio’s redistricting commission, on a party line vote, would effectively give Ohio Republicans 64.4% of the legislature, the Columbus Dispatch reported — a 62-37 House margin and a 23-10 Senate margin. This despite Ohio voters passing two initiatives over the past decade to rein in partisan gerrymandering.

Presidential margins are a rough metric, but what Republicans on the Ohio redistricting commission used is perhaps more bizarre: Republican candidates won 13 out of the 16 last statewide elections, or 81%, they said, and the vote proportion in those elections went for Republicans 55-45.

“Thus, the statewide proportion of voters favoring statewide Republican candidates is between 55% and 81%,” the commission said in a statement. In the words of the Columbus Dispatch’s editorial board: “Huh?” By this logic, New York, which always elects Democrats to state-wide office, would be justified in drawing a map with 100% Democratic districts, noted an analysis on Democracy Docket, the website from Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), a member of the redistricting commission, voted for the maps even though he later acknowledged, “What I am sure in my heart is that this committee could have come up with a bill that was much more clearly constitutional. I’m sorry that we did not do that.”

Wisconsin

Wisconsin is a perfect example of how redistricting wins in years past can build on themselves: In 2011, Republicans controlled the state’s legislature and governorship, and they passed a redistricting map heavily slanted in their own favor. This year, with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in office, things weren’t going to be so simple.

Typically, the partisan split would result in courts drawing the districts, Wisconsin Public Radio noted. But this time, the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty sued, calling for the court to pursue a “least changes” map — that is, incorporating the fewest number of changes to the previous, Republican dominated map. The state’s Supreme Court not only agreed with them, it said the new map wouldn’t necessarily have to change on account of being disproportionately Republican.

The state doesn’t have its final map yet: Watch this space. But things are not looking good. Evers has submitted his own proposed “least changes” map to the court, but it’s improving on a heavily gerrymandered state, and as such, can only go so far.

Georgia

Republicans control both the legislature and governor’s mansion in Georgia, and the party will reap the rewards.

The effect will be especially clear in certain districts: Joe Biden won 59% of State Sen. Michelle Au’s district in 2020, for example, but the map set to be signed by Gov. Brain Kemp would make the area a 52% Trump win.

There are also issues of racial representation that open the state up to lawsuits — which are expected en masse. House Speaker David Ralston (R) acknowledged earlier this month that “abusive use of the political process” was just part of redistricting, and pointed to Democratic perpetrators like Illinois and New York to make the case that both sides do it.

“You never hear those talked about — the blatant abusive use of the political process — but it’s a part of the process, and I don’t know how you take it out,” Ralson said. “I think the maps, notwithstanding the rhetoric, are fair. They very carefully followed the law. They follow the Voting Rights Act. Now we’ll see what happens.”

Matt Shuham (@mattshuham) is a reporter in TPM’s New York office. Prior to joining TPM, he was associate editor of The National Memo and an editorial intern at Rolling Stone.

Sao Paulo stock exchange removes bull statue


A man makes a selfie with a replica of the "Charging Bull" (known as the Wall Street Bull) statue outside Sao Paulo's Stock Exchange headquarters in NOvember: the bull has now been removed following protests (AFP/NELSON ALMEIDA)

Wed, November 24, 2021

The Sao Paulo stock exchange has taken down a statue of a bull reminiscent of the one on Wall Street after being hit by protests and a fine for installing it without authorization.

The one-ton "golden bull," as it was dubbed, was installed last week in the heart of Brazil's economic capital.

But it immediately became a target of graffiti, with messages such as "Tax the rich" painted on it, as well as protests over inequality, including one in which anti-poverty activists held a barbeque beside it for the homeless.

That was followed by a ruling Tuesday that the stock exchange failed to obtain the necessary permit from the city's Urban Landscape Protection Commission.

The bull "was primarily advertising or promotional in nature," and should not be installed on a public sidewalk, the commission ruled.

On Tuesday night, a crane removed the three-meter (nearly 10-foot) tall bull, which was wrapped in plastic.

Installed on November 16, the statue drew immediate comparisons with "Charging Bull," the famed bronze sculpture by Italian artist Arturo Di Modica installed in New York's financial district in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash.

However, the Sao Paulo stock exchange said the New York statue was not the inspiration for the Brazilian work, which was created by artist and architect Rafael Brancatelli.

Brazil is one of the world's most unequal countries, a problem that has deepened with the coronavirus pandemic, whose economic fallout has hit hardest among the poor.

The Sao Paulo stock exchange is the largest in Latin America.

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