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Arabica Robusta

A subtle kind of racism | News24 - 0 views

  • The real, and much deeper, problem is how a multiplicity of institutional practices, which are not motivated by malice or prejudice, are felt by black people at UCT. A host of everyday practices on campus are experienced by many black students and staff as discriminatory and seen to perpetuate racial stereotypes of superiority and inferiority.
  • American activist Kwame Toure – perhaps more widely remembered as Stokely Carmichael – described institutional racism as more subtle than individual racism and much more obvious to those on the receiving end than it is to those responsible for perpetuating it.
  • Beyond any doubt, the photographers involved – Peter Magubane, David Goldblatt, Paul Weinberg, Omar Badsha – intended them as ammunition in the struggle against apartheid. But if you are a black student born well after 1994 what you see is a parade of black people stripped of their dignity and whites exuding wealth and success. Even if you know the historic context of the photos, a powerful contemporary context may overwhelm this, leading you to conclude that the photos are just one more indication of how this university views black and white people.
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  • A young black student from the North West has related how she grew up not knowing anyone who spoke English as a first language and had never shared a meal or a classroom with a white person. She came top of her class at school, and entered university a confident student.Early in her first semester at UCT she put up her hand and asked a question. The lecturer misunderstood the question and people chuckled. The lecturer asked her to repeat the question but could not get what she was asking and requested that she see him after class. She never asked a question again. The lecturer was not racist but the student felt deeply humiliated. She knew she wasn’t stupid, so it must be the institution that was making her – and other black students – look inarticulate and second rate.
  • When UCT removed the statute of Rhodes this was not a one-off concession to the pressure of student anger. The university made a significant declaration that we wanted to make a decisive break with the colonialist past and we are well aware that this demands that we tackle the elusive but extremely powerful creature of institutional racism.
Arabica Robusta

Is It Time to Redesign or Terminate Investor-State Arbitration? | Centre for Internatio... - 0 views

  • How should those concerned with the ISDS threat to democracy and sovereignty approach these two paths? The choice should be guided by four criteria: independence, fairness, balance and respect for domestic courts. If a proposed ISDS makeover does not meet each criterion, then the notion of special rights for foreign investors, enforceable through international adjudication, should be rejected in favour of ISDS termination.
  • The arbitrators have the power to order the country to compensate the foreign investor, without a cap on the amount that can be awarded. Orders by ISDS tribunals are enforceable against the country’s assets in other countries, making ISDS more enforceable than domestic court judgments or other international adjudicative decisions.
  • ISDS favours foreign investors by giving them special rights that go well beyond private rights in domestic law and other areas of international law. Except for the national government responding to a foreign investor’s claim, ISDS denies even the basic right of standing for others affected by the adjudication of the claim. With treaties that allow for ISDS, arbitrators have tended to interpret ambiguous language in ways that expand foreign investors’ rights to compensation and the arbitrators’ power to award it.
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  • Loosely put, ISDS gives foreign investors an enclave legal status based on their power to invoke rights, and access to public money through a process that is open only to them. Foreign investor rights are Exhibit A, as The Economist put it, in demonstrating that “international trade agreements are a way to let multinational companies get rich at the expense of ordinary people” (The Economist 2014).
  • The simplest approach to fixing these foreign investor rights is to leave them out of trade and investment agreements. That option was not taken in proposed agreements such as the Canada-EU CETA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. For the first time since NAFTA, these agreements would apply ISDS to relations among developed countries that have court systems superior to ISDS, thus entrenching ISDS as a global institution. Such is the priority given by major governments to entrenching special rights for foreign investors and shifting judicial sovereignty to ISDS arbitrators.
  • In ISDS at present, foreign investors have elaborate rights, with corresponding responsibilities for countries. Yet ISDS lacks actionable responsibilities for foreign investors.
  • emarkably, in ISDS, foreign investors are not required to seek a resolution in a country’s courts before bringing an international claim. They are not even asked to supply evidence that domestic courts cannot ensure effective protection before resorting to ISDS. In effect, it is assumed in ISDS that courts fail systematically to offer justice in all countries subject to ISDS, and that ISDS is independent and fair in the manner of a court which, as noted above, it is not.
  • At a multilateral investment court, this lack of respect for domestic courts must be remedied by incorporating the duty to exhaust reasonably available local remedies into the court’s constituting document.
Arabica Robusta

VersoBooks.com - 0 views

  • Hall insisted that the “crisis of the Left” in the late twentieth century was due neither to internal divisions in the activist or academic Left nor to the clever rhetoric or funding schemes of the Right. Rather, he charged, this ascendency was consequent to the Left's own failure to apprehend the character of the age, and to develop a political critique and a moral-political vision appropriate to this character.
  • For Hall, the rise of the Right was a symptom rather than a cause of this failure, just as the Left's dismissive or suspicious attitude toward cultural politics is for Hall not a sign of its unwavering principles but of its anachronistic habits of thought, and its fears and anxieties about revising those habits. In short, the Left's disintegration and disarray must be pinned not on external events or developments in the late twentieth century, but on the way the Left positions itself in relation to those events and developments.
  • But “Left melancholia” is Benjamin's unambivalent epithet for the revolutionary hack who is, finally, not serious about political change, who is more attached to a particular political analysis or ideal — even to the failure of that ideal — than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present. In the context of Benjamin's enigmatic insistence on the political value of a dialectical historical grasp of the time of the Now, Left melancholia represents not only a refusal to come to terms with the particular character of the present, that is, a failure to understand history in terms other than “empty time” or “progress.”
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  • Benjamin never offers a precise formulation of Left melancholy. Rather, he deploys it as a term of opprobrium for those beholden more to certain long-held sentiments and objects than to the possibilities of political transformation in the present. Benjamin is particularly attuned to the melancholic's investment in “things.” In The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he argues that “melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge,” here suggesting that the loyalty of the melancholic converts its truth (“every loyal vow or memory”) about its beloved into a thing, indeed, imbues knowledge itself with a thinglike quality.
  • Left melancholy, in short, is Benjamin's name for a mournful, conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or relationship that has been rendered thing-like and frozen in the heart of the putative Leftist. If Freud is helpful here, then this condition presumably issues from some unaccountable loss, some unavowably crushed ideal, contemporarily signified by the terms “Left,” “socialism,” “Marx,” or “movement.”
  • The literal disintegration of socialist regimes and of the legitimacy of Marxism may well be the least of it. We are awash in the loss of a unified analysis and unified movement, in the loss of labour and class as inviolable predicates of political analysis and mobilization, in the loss of an inexorable and scientific forward movement of history, and in the loss of a viable alternative to the political economy of capitalism.
  • But in the hollow core of all these losses, perhaps in the place of our political unconscious, is there also an unavowed loss — the promise that Left analysis and Left commitment would supply its adherents with a clear and certain path towards the good, the right, and the true? Is it not this promise that formed the basis for much of our pleasure in being on the Left, indeed, for our self-love as Leftists and for our fellow feeling towards other Leftists?
  • But if read through the prism of Left melancholy, the element of displacement in both sets of charges may appear more starkly since we would be forced to ask: what aspects of Left analysis or orthodoxy have wilted on the vine for its adherents, but are safeguarded from this recognition through the scornful attention heaped on identity politics and poststructuralism?
  • this failure results as well from a particular intellectual straitjacket — an insistence on a materialism that refuses the importance of the subject and the subjective, the question of style, the problematic of language. And it is the combination of these two causes of failure that is deadly: “Our sectarianism,” he argues in the conclusion of The Hard Road to Renewal, “consists not only of a defensiveness towards the agendas fixed by now-anachronistic political-economic formations (those of the 1930s and 1945), but is also due to a certain notion of politics, inhabited not so much as a theory, more as a habit of mind.”
  • Certainly the course of capital shapes the conditions of possibility in politics, but politics itself “is either conducted ideologically or not at all.”11 Or, in another of Hall's pithy formulas, “politics does not reflect majorities, it constructs them.”12
  • It is important to be clear here. Hall never claims that ideology determines the course of globalization, but that it harnesses it for one political purpose or another, and when it is successful, the political and economic strategies represented by a particular ideology will also themselves bring into being certain political-economic formations within global capitalist developments.
  • Walter Benjamin sketches this phenomenon in his attack on Erich Kästner, the popular Left-wing poet in the Weimar Republic who is the subject of his "Left melancholy” essay: “This poet is dissatisfied, indeed heavy-hearted. But this heaviness of heart derives from routine. For to be in a routine means to have sacrificed one's idiosyncracies, to have forfeited the gift of distaste. And that makes one heavy-hearted.”14
  • What is entailed in throwing off the melancholic and conservative habits of the Left to invigorate it with a radical (from the Latin radix, meaning “root”), critical and visionary spirit again? This would be a spirit that embraces the notion of a deep and indeed unsettling transformation of society rather than recoiling at this prospect, even as we must be wisened to the fact that neither total revolution nor the automatic progress of history would carry us towards whatever reformulated vision we might develop. What political hope can we nurture that does not falsely ground itself in the notion that “history is on our side” or that there is some inevitability of popular attachment to whatever values we might develop as those of a new Left vision?
Arabica Robusta

Mining, Environments and the role of Anthropologists - RESOURCE WORLDS - 0 views

  • to consider mining only from a purely technical or engineering point of view does not give insight into the complexity of the relationships established around the mines, nor help us in fully evaluating the social, political and economic impacts of this activity. Extractive processes are neither ecologically nor politically neutral.
  • More than ever, anthropologists now have the opportunity to extend the boundaries of their discipline and undertake fieldwork that explores possible forms of integration with other disciplines (Godoy, 1985) as well as cooperating with social actors that are not necessarily linked to the academy (Ballard, Banks 2003). Overall, they can continue to experiment with new forms of civic engagement and advocacy in support of the communities being studied (e.g. Coumans 2011).
  • By re-orientating the purposes and methods of the discipline, anthropologists have the opportunity to offer critical and analytical tools capable of subverting the “politics of resignation” (Benson, Kirsch 2010) that large scale mining companies promote in order to attempt to make acceptable and taken for granted the suffering, risks and environmental damages they themselves produce.
Arabica Robusta

Conflict Minerals and Firms' Ignorance Over Their Supply Chains | Business Ethics - 0 views

  • Your smartphone or desktop computer is not built from scratch by Apple or Dell. It includes parts made by subcontractors. But one sole subcontractor does not make every chip inside; that task is handled by yet another subcontractor, who may buy the needed tantalum from still another supplier who may have purchased the tantalum ore from a militia leader who forces children to work in dangerous mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
  • The authors found foreign-based companies “about 22 percent less likely to admit they were unable to verify the origins of their products.” (A company can be non-U.S. based and be listed in the U.S. and thus subject to SEC rules.)
  • “Businesses are not dissembling about their inability to determine the source of their minerals. They simply cannot obtain a reasonable degree of certainty about processes from which they are three or more steps removed.”
Arabica Robusta

Brands, Organizations Criticize 'Fashion Transparency Index' - WWD - 0 views

  • the index was based on methodology that immediately stirred criticism. WWD contacted a series of industry organizations that work on sustainability initiatives but they declined to comment. A spokesperson from one of the organizations said “it is really hard to comment on research that is so poorly executed and tells us nothing.”
  • In a statement, a Chanel spokesman questioned the report, stating that it only highlights how well companies communicate their sustainability initiatives. “This index in no way measures actions regarding social, societal and environmental responsibility, but only evaluates the communication policies of brands relative to these topics. Like three-quarters of the companies questioned, if Chanel chose not to answer the questionnaire, it is because the reality of our actions seems more important to us than any related media coverage.
  • The group said it took more than a year to put together the research. According to the organization, the survey revealed an absence in long-term thinking in brands’ sustainability strategies, with only 40 percent of the companies surveyed having a system in place to monitor labor standards.
Arabica Robusta

The price of fashion's murky supply chains - SciDev.Net - 0 views

  • There has been some backlash to this methodology from luxury brands such as Chanel and Fendi, which fared particularly badly on the index. Chanel replied that the “reality of our actions seems more important to us than any related media coverage”.
  • But, as Moore tells me, this goes against the idea of transparency. Companies should be making clear how — and how far — they monitor supply chains, she explains. Transparency is essential, Moore says, to tackle the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ culture in the fashion industry.
  • And beyond it, things get considerably worse. “When we started asking to drill down below sewing factories, companies didn’t seem to know,” Moore says. Only two of the surveyed companies published details of second-tier suppliers, which include fabric and yarn mills. And more than half published no details of monitoring processes for raw materials such as cotton.
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  • Cotton production can involve large-scale pesticide and water use, and human rights abuses such as the use of child labour. Production of the textile fibre rayon can cause deforestation.
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