Tag: nike
Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee Tweets Weirdly Racist Attack On ‘Chinese’ —And Gets Hosed Down

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos

Former Arkansas Governor and Baptist minister Mike Huckabee chose Easter weekend to sink to an unimaginable low, practically spitting in the face of Asian American communities, apparently because Republicans lost a presidential election. Democrats argue that the 2020 defeat, coupled with twin losses in Senate runoff elections in Georgia. triggered more restrictive voting laws throughout the country and especially in the Peach State, where a recently passed law makes it illegal to give water and food to voters standing in line to cast ballots. Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian and Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey spoke out against the law and Major League Baseball vowed to move its 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta because of the law.

Applying the usual nonsensical GOP logic, Huckabee decided those moves were somehow connected to an outpouring of support for Asian Americans following a spike in racist and violent acts against the community. "I've decided to 'identify' as Chinese," he tweeted sarcastically on Saturday. "Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my 'values' and I'll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to @MLB games. Ain't America great?"

The tweet earned Huckabee well-earned criticism on social media. Rep. Ted Lieu tweeted on Saturday: "Hey Mike Huckabee, I asked around and Coke likes me, Delta agrees with my values, I wear Nikes and my hometown Dodgers won the World Series. But it's not because of my ethnicity. It's because I'm not a sh*thead like you who is adding fuel to anti-Asian hate. #StopAAPIHate" Comedian John Fugelsang tweeted: "Yes except for the part where racist Mike Huckabee fans accuse you of spreading a virus."

Democrat Jake Lobin tweeted: "I can't believe Mike Huckabee's job has been to actually govern people. Holy shit." Author and unitarian pastor John Pavlovitz tweeted: "Mike Huckabee motivated me to do this work. The day of the Sandy Hook shooting he inexplicably used the murder of children to spread a cancerous religion. It made me realize as a pastor that I needed to explicitly oppose monsters like him who bastardize my faith tradition."

"He and his party are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and adversarial to diverse humanity," Pavlovitz added in another tweet. "Good people can simply not allow them to steer this nation into the abyss—and we won't."

Black corporate leaders have advocated for other corporations to take a stand against the restrictive new Georgia law, The New York Times reported. "There is no middle ground here," former American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault said. "You either are for more people voting, or you want to suppress the vote." His remarks followed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's decision to sign into law a bill state Republicans rushed through the legislature in the final hour, slithering just outside of the public eye after earlier criticism for similarly restrictive voting bills.

With only eight days left in the state legislative session, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Greg Bluestein tweeted that the Georgia House adopted the measure on a party-line vote working to "restrict drop boxes, require voter ID for mail-in ballots and gives the Republican-controlled Legislature more authority over local elections officials." The state Senate followed suit.

Merck pharmaceutical company CEO Kenneth Frazier told The New York Times he and other executives began emailing and texting each other following the passage of Georgia's law. Their goal is to stop other restrictive voting bills from passing across the country. "As African-American business executives, we don't have the luxury of being bystanders to injustice," Frazier said. "We don't have the luxury of sitting on the sidelines when these kinds of injustices are happening all around us."

Nike warehouse

After Worker Died, Nike Barred Public Health Officials From Its Warehouse

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica.

MEMPHIS, TN — The security guard said no. It didn't matter that the visitor was from the Shelby County Health Department.

It didn't matter that she was there to investigate health conditions at a Nike distribution center where, five days earlier, company officials learned a temporary worker had died after testing positive for the novel coronavirus.

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Who Really Pays For Subsidies To Big Business?

Who Really Pays For Subsidies To Big Business?

The hustlers claim that job incentives are a sound investment of our tax dollars, because those new jobs create new taxpayers, meaning investments soon pay for themselves. Hmmm … not quite. In fact, not even close.

Last year, a watchdog outfit called Good Jobs First tracked the 386 incentive deals since 1976 that gave at least $50 million to a corporation, and then it tallied the number of jobs created. The average cost per job was $658,427. Each! That’s likely far more than cities and states can recover through sales, property, income and all other taxes those jobholders would pay in their lifetimes. Worse, the rise of megadeals in the past 10 years has made the job-incentive argument mega-ridiculous:

—New York gave a $258-million subsidy to Yahoo and got 125 jobs — costing taxpayers $2 million per job.

—Oregon awarded $2 billion to Nike and got 500 jobs — $4 million per job.

—North Carolina shelled out $321 million to Apple and got 50 jobs — $6.4 million per job.

—Louisiana handed $234 million to Valero Energy and got 15 jobs — $15.6 million per job.

The rosy jobs-creation claims by incentive boosters also tend to be bogus, for they don’t subtract the number of jobs lost as a result of these deals. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, for example, has leaned on officials in every major metro area to subsidize its creation of a nationwide network of warehouses, data centers, and other facilities. This web forms Amazon’s all-encompassing business structure, giving it the reach to achieve near monopoly power in industry after industry.

In its 2016 report Amazon’s Stranglehold, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that more than half of Amazon’s facilities had been built with government subsidies. The “Amazon Tracker,” a continuously updated web page produced by Good Jobs First, reports that since 2005, the retailer has been showered with $1.1 billion in local and state subsidies to build their private business.

Each of those taxpayer handouts (given to the world’s third-largest retailer) was made in the name of local workers. And, yes, the Amazon warehouses do employ thousands, but their subsidized network enables the giant to undercut local competitors, causing devastating job losses that greatly outnumber jobs gained. The ILSR report notes that at the end of 2015 Bezos did indeed employ 146,000 people in his U.S. operations, but — oops — they calculated that his taxpayer-supported behemoth had meanwhile eliminated some 295,000 U.S. retail jobs.

Plus, there’s an ugly blotch on Amazon’s ballyhooed job-creation numbers: Working conditions in those sprawling, windowless warehouses are grim, and 40 percent of the employees are low-wage, temporary hires with no benefits and no job security. While warehouse wages everywhere are low, an ILSR survey documented that Amazon’s average 15 percent lower than what other corporations pay.

Almost every city/state giveaway program ignores smaller and locally owned businesses (which really do create jobs), and instead tries to land brand name corporations with blockbuster deals. This emphasis — subsidizing big outfits to come from afar to compete unfairly against local, unsubsidized firms — is spreading an epidemic of vacant storefronts across America. It’s also altering the very essence of our communities. Rather than each having its own diverse, unique commercial character, our towns are being transformed into corporatized, homogenized versions of Everywhere, USA.

Beyond local business, our larger society also pays a substantial cost for these subsidies. Most of the deals woo the giants by granting 10-year, 20-year, or even longer exemptions from paying property taxes — the chief source of funding for local schools, roads, fire departments, water systems, parks and other essential public services. To cover the loss of revenue, school districts, cities and counties respond both by cutting services and by hiking the property taxes of homeowners, renters, and hometown businesses. As a result, the community gets more inequality, gentrification, homelessness, and divisiveness. The corporate favor-seekers, however, fail to see (or care about) the connection between this result and their grab for the public’s money.

Institute for Local Self Reliance is an excellent resource on how to support all things local.

Populist author, public speaker, and radio commentator Jim Hightower writes The Hightower Lowdown, a monthly newsletter chronicling the ongoing fights by America’s ordinary people against rule by plutocratic elites. Sign up at HightowerLowdown.org.