Whites Made Up Only 6% of New US Workers Added After BLM Protests

Whites Made Up Only 6% of New US Workers Added After BLM Protests. By Bruce Gil.

In 2021, 94% of new jobs at 88 S&P 100 companies were filled by people of color, according to an analysis from Bloomberg.

Following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, many large corporations made pledges to address racial imbalances among their workforce.

Microsoft promised to double its number of Black managers and senior leaders in the U.S. by 2025. Meta, then known as Facebook, pledged to increase its representation of people of color in leadership positions in the U.S. by 30% by 2025. Amazon set a goal to double its representation of Black directors and vice presidents. …

In 2021, 88 companies in the S&P 100 increased their headcount collectively by 323,094 people, and 94% of those people were from underrepresented groups, the analysis found. …

Seventy-four percent of executive positions were held by white people in 2021.

Protest works. Identity group politics worked, and meritocracy was weakened.

Corporate Australia has a problem: the demise of the anti-communist unions

Corporate Australia has a problem: the demise of the anti-communist unions. By Ken Phillips.

From WWII until recently:

We can start with Australia’s immediate post-second world war political–corporate relationship, which was dominated by one big issue: the fear of communism. To some today this might sound simplistic, but this was the reality for several decades. …

After the war, a major Australian political obsession was the containment of domestic communism. …

The Menzies government attempted to outlaw communism but failed in the referendum of 1951. Brewing largely outside the public eye, however, was a massive power struggle within the Australian union movement and the Australian Labor Party between communist and anti-communist forces. …

What happened as a consequence was the corporate funding of the anti-communist forces. This occurred overtly with corporations directly funding the conservative/liberal political parties and movements.

What occurred covertly was corporate funding of the anti-communist unions. … The corporate funding took place through corporations ‘encouraging’ staff to be members of anti-communist unions. This was particularly the case in the retail sector. Few union members knew or understood the politics at play. But this union membership — which was endorsed and often paid for by the corporates — meant that the anti-communist unions were very well-funded and politically powerful.

This anti-communist effort established a bonded, symbiotic working relationship between corporations and anti-communist unions. These unions delivered workable industrial relations arrangements for the corporates which enabled their businesses to function, and even thrive. …

In effect, there was a subterranean political coalition of anti-communist Liberal, National and Labor parliamentary representatives who, through coordinated action, sought to deny power to the communist forces within the Labor Party and the unions. …

But now, the communist left is overtaking industrial relations in Australia:

Union private-sector membership continued to ‘fall off a cliff’, landing at just 8 per cent today.

This ‘failure’ of the Rudd/Gillard law induced panic in the union movement. For the hard Left in the Labor Party and the unions the Rudd/Gillard laws have ‘proven’ that if unions seek to work with corporations, the corporations will simply screw over the unions.

This has resulted in a massive shift in the balance of power between hard Left and ‘middle Right’ unions. It’s fair to say that the Right within Labor is a shadow of its former self. The old, staunchly anti-communist forces within the ALP have pretty much dissolved. The Left’s unions and ideologues are in a position of dominant power never before seen in Australia. The consequence is a crashing of the union-corporate ‘working relationships’. …

The ‘out-of-the-public-eye’ corporate-union deal-making that had been the primary hidden feature of Australia’s industrial relations system had washed out. But the extent to which this had happened did not become apparent until the Albanese Labor government introduced its first phase of industrial relations laws in late 2022.

Covid aside:

Further, however, Covid interfered. What Covid did was demonstrate that, in Australia, when push comes to shove, the old colonial-style powers of the ruling institutions politically reasserted themselves over the people and the plain wording of the Constitution.

This was demonstrated most starkly in the defeated Palmer application to the High Court where Clive Palmer had sought to prove that it was unconstitutional to close the borders between the states. The High Court was asked to rule that because section 92 of the constitution required that ‘trade, commerce and intercourse’ between the states shall be ‘absolutely free’ that the Covid border closures were unconstitutional. The High Court ruled against the Palmer application, effectively saying that the words ‘absolutely free’ do not mean ‘absolutely free’. …

If there was a message for Australia’s corporates from Covid and the High Court it is this. The law does not really matter. Politics is everything!

Now mere support for woke won’t save the corporates:

This accumulation of historical events has now brought corporate Australia to the point where the old (secret) industrial relations deal-making that has served them well has collapsed….

It certainly looks as though corporations have, in desperation, jumped on to overtly political bandwagons where those bandwagons seem to be in the ascendancy. They are searching for the new deal-making rules. It’s not just industrial relations that is causing a problem for corporations. The Green Agenda and others have corporates in a spin. But industrial relations is and arguably remains the biggest elephant stomping around the room.

It’s only an observation, but probably a reasonable observation, that the corporate hope was that, in courting political favour on non-industrial relations issues, industrial relations deals as part of broader deal-making could still be secured. This hope, however, has been thoroughly blown apart.

Corporate Australia has surely misread the power shift in the Australian union movement, the Labor Party and the Labor movement. The anti-communist forces are defeated. The Left is strongly in the ascendant. And corporate Australia has been caught flat-footed! The proof is in the new industrial relations legislation.

The Albanese government’s first wave of industrial relations changes in December 2022 shocked corporate Australia. That first wave entirely reflects the ascendancy of the Left inside Labor. It reflects an Australian home-grown Marxist agenda. There’s no deal-making with corporations. It’s now a ‘do as we command’ legislative, structural and political environment.

There’s now a second wave of industrial relations changes mooted by the Albanese government. The Bill presented to parliament on 4 September is a corporation’s nightmare. … The legislation is a Leftist’s dream.

We should remember that old-style Marxism called for the dismantling of the private sector and that the means of production should be owned by the state. Australian, home-grown, ‘modern’ Marxism (or whatever Left ‘ism’ applies) is smarter. It’s not necessary for the institution of the state to own the means of production. What they can do instead is micro-manage the corporate managers. That’s what the Albanese government’s first and now second wave of industrial relations changes seeks to do and will do. It’s the effective neutering of the capacity of managers to manage.

With the collapse of some six decades-plus of comfortable corporate–union deal-making, Australian corporations have turned in desperation to supporting social and related political issues to secure deals. Qantas, of course, is the most visible example of this. That has blown up in spectacular fashion. What do Australian corporations do now? They must be worried!

Australia will now begin sliding down the international rankings, as productivity dives. Eventually all Australians will be poorer.

A Miracle in Argentina?

A Miracle in Argentina? By Phiipp Bagus.

The left-wing zeitgeist is rolling over the freedoms of citizens almost unhindered; most shockingly during the Covid crisis. The left tries to paint anyone who stands in the zeitgeist´s way as an extremist or even a Nazi.

Against this background, what can a successful strategy look like? …

His policies would destroy the upper/bureaucratic class:

Javier Milei is making a splash on all sides, because on August 13, 2023, he won the primaries for the presidency in Argentina. In the German media, he is described as ultra-right and ultra-libertarian. Recently, the Financial Times … insinuated that the libertarian Milei would follow the strategy of right-wing populism designed by Murray Rothbard in 1992 …:

  1. Radical tax cuts
  2. Radical reduction of the welfare state
  3. Abolition of privileges for “protected” minorities
  4. Crushing criminals
  5. Getting rid of bums
  6. Abolition of the Federal Reserve
  7. A program of America First (anti-globalist and isolationist)
  8. Defending traditional family values …

Milei wants to radically reduce taxes. He never tires of calling taxes what they are, theft. He also wants to radically grind down the welfare state and likes to illustrate the reduction in government spending and his proposal of reducing Argentinian ministries from 18 to 8 with a chainsaw. His “Chainsaw Plan” is intended to radically trim the state.

Milei repeatedly speaks of equality before the law as a fundamental liberal principle and wants to abolish privileges for minorities. As a result, he repeatedly clashes with radical feminists who defend legal privileges for women.

The imprisonment of criminals is also on Milei’s agenda. Gun freedom is in his program so that victims can defend themselves against criminals. Those who refuse to work are no longer supported by the state in his Argentina.

Milei also has the 6th of Rothbard’s points in his agenda: Milei wants to abolish the central bank of Argentina. Using right-wing populist rhetoric he aims to physically blow up the central bank. In doing so, he would wipe out the power of one of the most inflationary central banks, which willingly financed all Peronist and Kirchnerist spending programs. He wants to dollarize the country and open it up to currency competition. …

Milei likes to point out that Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world at the beginning of the 20th century thanks to classical liberal policies and was destroyed by socialism in the 20th century. In 35 years, Milei promises, Argentina can be a superpower again. The prerequisite for this to happen is a return to libertarianism. …

His tactics are bold:

Milei has been very present in the public debate in Argentina for years. He gained fame as a polarizing and fiercely arguing talk show guest. Later, he decided to create his own party to lead the culture war against socialism and statism more effectively and to bring the right ideas to more people.

 

 

His rhetorical strategy in debates is vociferous, belligerent, and is sometimes perceived as offensive (if the truth can be offensive at all). He does not allow himself to be intimidated or belittled by left-wing opinion-makers. In a debate, he simply shouts louder than the leftists, whom he calls “Zurdos”, and interrupts them to tell them to their faces that they are saying an absolute stupidity and have no idea what they are talking about. You should read Hayek, Mises and Rothbard first, Milei recommends to them. He also calls leftists and politicians parasites and thieves, in a debate. For taxes are theft.

In keeping with Rothbard’s strategy of right-wing populism, he clearly names the profiteers of the state apparatus. He rails again and again against the caste of politicians and bureaucrats. He calls them parasites that live at the expense of the hard-working and decent citizens. … So-called social justice is a monstrous injustice because it means unequal treatment of people before the law. It is a fig leaf for envy and resentment.

Milei’s emotional and polemical nature resonates with many, especially among young people. After winning the primaries in mid-August, he has legitimate hopes for the Argentine presidency.

How bad does it have to get before someone like Milei is embraced? 116% inflation and a century of relative under-performance, apparently.

Orwell would loathe today’s left

Orwell would loathe today’s left. By Lisa MacKenzie.

I recently re-read George Orwell’s 1941 essay, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, and I was taken by his description of the bourgeois, left-leaning intelligentsia of his time. They live in the shallowness of ideas, he writes, severed from the common culture and life experiences of the working class. They spend most of their time bickering with their chief enemy, the equally bourgeois ‘Blimps’ — archetypal red-faced imperialists. Though they despise each other, both the bourgeois intelligentsia and the Blimps are united in their mutual disdain for the working class.

 

 

Orwell, perhaps England’s greatest-ever political writer, notes how the bourgeois-left intelligentsia use a lot of words to intellectualise issues without understanding them. He saw that they frequently Blimp-baited without engaging with the real challenges people face. And he saw that they were only prepared to discuss issues raised in a few select publications — mainly the New Statesman and News Chronicle back then — which they also happened to edit, read and write for.

I was struck by how well this description of the bourgeois-left intelligentsia fits today’s middle-class lefties.

 

Corrupt Media Suddenly Care About Russell Brand’s Behavior

Corrupt Media Suddenly Care About Russell Brand’s Behavior. By John Nolte.

The Brett Kavanaugh/Russia Collusion Media say five women have accused Russell Brand of rape and sexual assault between 2006 and 2013. Four of those women have chosen to remain anonymous. One woman claims she was 16 during their relationship, although 16 is the age of consent in England. …

Where do I stand on this?

Hell, I don’t know.

I have no idea.

The only people who know are the alleged victims and Brand. What I do know is that my opinion on this stuff has been and will always be the same: innocent until proven guilty. Our current climate, with its openly fascistic “Believe All Women” mantra, appalls and sickens me. …

Why should we believe the corporate media this time?

Why should we believe these people this time…?

I have no emotional investment in Russell Brand. I don’t know the guy personally. I know that he was a loathsome lout for most of his public life. I also know that in recent years, he’s sought to repent for his past. He appears to have wised up and matured. He says he’s now a dedicated husband and father.

Politically, while he’s no Donald Trump, he does see the Matrix. Using his wildly popular YouTube channel, he questions narratives cherished by the corporate media. He lashes out at the establishment’s obscene lies and desire to divide us and subjugate normal people as racist Nazis.

I also know that the moment any former member of the left takes even one step off the Leftist Plantation, the corporate media targets them for destruction.

So, yeah, I have questions…

The first question is, why now…? These allegations of wrongdoing are said to have occurred between 2006 and 2013. Why now? …

And let’s not forget this…

We all saw just how far the corporate media were willing to go to destroy Brett Kavananaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Christine Blasey Ford, an obvious liar who couldn’t even remember where and when her alleged assault happened, was treated like Rosa Parks. The media then pummeled us with one phony Kavanaugh claim after another, including rape gangs!

I simply cannot trust that this same media would not do whatever it takes to destroy an apostate like Russell Brand, a guy with 6.5 million YouTube subscribers. …

I don’t know if Brand is guilty or not…

What I do know is that over and over and over again, the corporate media have been caught red-handed manufacturing evidence to further the left-wing political agenda.

What I do know is that over and over and over again, women have been caught red-handed manufacturing allegations that proved to be lies. Still, if their lies are aimed at a media-approved target, that woman becomes Rosa Parks. Ahh, but if the media do not approve of the target, they are Tara Reade and Juanita Broaddrick.

They locked up Julian Assange on dubious sex charges too.

John Hinderaker on how Brand’s cancellation is really all about politics:

The British press has stirred up a wave of hate against him, and YouTube, where he had a vast number of followers, has demonetized him. So Brand has moved to Rumble. The London Times takes this as more evidence of Brand’s guilt: not of being a rapist, which may be secondary at this point, but of not being fully on board with woke ideology …:

A major shareholder in one of the world’s biggest “alt-right” video sites has embraced Russell Brand after the BBC, Channel 4 and YouTube distanced themselves from him.”

So Rumble is “alt-right.” No one knows what that recently-invented word means, but it is surely bad. The “major shareholder” is Dan Bongino.

Dan Bongino, a former Fox News presenter, is among the largest financial backers of Rumble, a Florida-based video-sharing platform that has styled itself as being “immune from cancel culture”.

A former Fox News presenter! A Florida-based platform! “Immune from cancel culture!” These are all cues to the Times’s liberal audience. …

The London Times obviously disapproves of the content of Brand’s videos, now that he has become a sort-of conservative:

After he passed one million subscribers in March, Brand hinted at its value and the way in which Rumble provided him with a platform to share his conspiracy theory-laced rants about Covid lockdowns, vaccines, central bank’s digital currencies and the West’s role in the Ukraine war.

Conspiracy theory-laced “rants” about Covid lockdowns and vaccines! Note, first, that liberals never “rant,” and second, that “conspiracy theories” about covid responses and vaccines have often proved to be true. (I have no idea what Brand’s specific take might be.) Nor do I know what Brand has to say about central banks’ digital currencies or the Ukraine war, but apparently these are verboten topics. …

I am not impressed by stories told by anonymous women about something that supposedly happened ten or fifteen years ago. Brand may or may not have anything useful to say, but in any event, he has the right to say it.

The media and political establishment had no problem with Brand’s well-known bad behavior when he was a left winger. But now he must be silenced from speaking his mind on politics.

Is Australia trying to follow the US on race?

Is Australia trying to follow the US on race? Steve Sailer describes the arc of race relations in the US for the last 60 years. The parallels with Australia (and the Voice) are obvious.

I think a lot of 1970s Americans who backed racial quotas had similar hopes: Sure, blacks are behind today, but many grew up with their parents picking cotton in the Jim Crow South. If we show them that the bourgeois world welcomes them, they’ll become more bourgeois.

And to some extent that indeed happened. There are more bourgeois blacks in Georgia today than in 1970.

But, my impression is, the trend toward competence convergence appear to have petered out in the later 20th Century, and today, nobody really expects convergence anymore.

The last time anybody seemed to take seriously the idea that with just one more generation of affirmative action, blacks should be able to catch up was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor putting a 25 year time limit on race quotas in her 2003 Grutter decision. …

But nobody believes blacks will have caught up to whites by 2028 anymore. (And the ongoing Asian tidal wave has put blacks even further behind in competing on merit for the good colleges and jobs than in 2003.) Or any other date they’d specify (absent genetic engineering).

Crushed hopes of equality led to calls for reparations forever:

Instead, we see the rise of Ibram X. Kendi’s demands for discrimination against whites to subsidize blacks for, roughly, ever.

E.g., the SF reparations commission called for 250 years of massive income subsidies for blacks in San Francisco.

Thus, contemporary mainstream discourse on race has become ever more antiquarian to cover up the last 54 years of affirmative action. Instead of thinking about the last 54 years, which is pretty much a blur in the NYT, we are told to obsess over FDR’s redlining, Tulsa, Emmett Till, slavery, etc. Follow The Science: Redlining in 1938 is why blacks don’t score high on the SAT in 2023!

So, respectable opinion on race is focused more and more on subsidizing backs forever: when reparations fail to Close the Gap, that will be seen as proof that Systemic Racism is so insidious we need more reparations. Reparations Now, Reparations Tomorrow, Reparations Forever!

But, whites participating in respectable discourse aren’t supposed to notice this huge shift in the premises behind affirmative action since 1970. Whites’ model of the world is supposed to still be the one that seemed fairly plausible in 1970: we will have race quotas to help blacks catch up for some limited time.

You don’t think some of these differences are the product of 70,000 years of separate evolution, do you? That’s racist!

We are supposed to testify we believe that the reason blacks remain behind whites in 2023 (and don’t mention the Asians) is purely environmental … Thus, those who are skeptical of the conventional wisdom’s 100% environmental explanation for why blacks are behind must be driven out of respectable discourse because their data and logic subvert the case for expanded and eternal quotas/DEI/reparations.

After all, we are talking about Real Money here.

Australian Aboriginals who have assimilated seem to be doing pretty well. Keeping a small minority living unassimilated in remote and poor conditions seems to suit the goals of activists and service providers, but otherwise isn’t doing anyone any favors.

What if we realized that race is a distraction from class? Look at this video from the US, where the elite’s worst nightmare is Black Lives Matter activists and Trump Supporters finding common ground.

What does “far-right” even mean anymore?

What does “far-right” even mean anymore? By Mark Jeftovic.

Anybody taking the legacy, corporate media at face value these days is likely under the impression that the entire world is being overrun with “far-right” extremists.

After all, anything orthogonal to the current WEF-inspired world order seems to be, by definition, far right. …

The term has now been so misplaced and over-used that it becomes impossible to differentiate between fast rising maverick politicians from skinheads with swastika tattoos. Make no mistake, this is deliberate. …

The standard playbook is to cast anything gaining momentum as “populist” — which is always implicated as being wrong-headed and retrograde, even though a literal definition of the word simply connotes that large swaths of the population are feeling strongly about something (usually some manner of getting screwed by the elites). …

Negative branding:

I refer the reader to Brandon Smith’s characterization of “negative branding”:

One of the most favored propaganda tactics of [the establishment] is to relabel or redefine an opponent before they can solidly define themselves. In other words, [they] will seek to “brand” you (just as corporations use branding) in the minds of the masses so that they can take away your ability to define yourself as anything else…. Through the art of negative branding, your enemy has stolen your most precious asset — the ability to present yourself to the public as you really are.

Negative branding is a form of psychological inoculation. It is designed to close people’s minds to particular ideas before they actually hear those ideas presented by a true proponent of the ideas.

It’s not just dark horse, anti-establishment challengers who get the “far right” treatment, in this era of increasingly collectivist sympathies, it can be anything that reduces dependency on the state or faith in the system. …

There is nothing political, let alone “far right” around embracing fitness or valuing freedom. However anything that confers greater autonomy on the individual, or instills the idea that one can improve their own lives without state intervention, is anathema. …

It’s no problem if the target has no tenable relationship to right-wing politics: personal responsibility, physical fitness, or non-state, decentralized digital hard currency . Just call it a “dog whistle”. …

If it’s an unambiguous rejection of an establishment core premise, call it “denialism”. I once saw a guy stomp off of a live podcast because, as he huffed at the host before he disconnected, “I can see that you’re a Russian Collusion Denialist!”, and then he was gone. …

When people or voices push back on WEF-inspired theology, they get branded as “right-wing” and even the term “conservative” carries baggage. It’s practically a slur.

Only works one way, because of the media:

Lefty?

People put that it in their Twitter bios and walk around with Che Guevara shirts. I’m surprised there isn’t a hammer-and-sickle emoji yet. …

The left employs dog whistles too, only they aren’t recognized as such under the prevailing zeitgeist.

The burgeoning “#degrowth” movement is a dog whistle for communism. “Equity” is one for wealth redistribution, while “inclusivity” forays into racism more often than many care to admit.

If an entrenched elite goes so far off the rails that the citizenry rebels and chooses the unthinkable (Brexit, Trump, Bitcoin, “conservatism”), it is never because the establishment let down or even betrayed the public — it’s because, for some unfathomable and inscrutable reason, the peasants went “far-right”.

Left vs right is now meaningless:

The defining tension of our age is centralization, collectivism, statism, censorship, authoritarianism vs decentralization, individuality, autonomy, free speech, personal responsibility and self-reliance.

There are basically those who believe they have the ecclesiastical authority to tell everybody else what to do, how to live, and what is permissible to think and say. Then there is everybody who wants to be left alone to live their own lives in peace.

The narrative people use “far-right” to mean people who oppose the narrative. Being called on the “right” merely means you are in the official opposition but in the uniparty — they approve, sort of. But if you oppose the narrative effectively — like really damage it — then you graduate to “extreme right” or “white supremacist.”.

Lefties behaving badly on the Voice

Lefties behaving badly on the Voice. By Rosie Lewis.

Leading No campaigner Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has accused “tolerant Yes people” of “abusing and denigrating” attendees of Fair Australia’s South Australian No campaign launch on Monday night.

“The tolerant Yes people were busy abusing and denigrating attendees of our event in Adelaide last night,” Senator Price said on Facebook after protesters yelled “racist dog” and “racist pig”.

“Clearly if you don’t toe their ideological line you’re a racist dog amongst other things. Didn’t appear to be a single Aboriginal person amongst them — oh the irony.”

 

 

John Ray comments:

Leftist feel all warm and righteous at advocating a special voice in Federal parliament for Aborigines. Aborigines as a group are in a hell of a mess in many ways so “doing something” for them has great appeal. It shows how much heart you have for their problems and may lead to better treatment of them by future governments.

But conservatives know their history and are quite appalled by the prospect of racial privileges for one particular group. If the 20th century taught us anything, it taught us the evils of racial favoritism. There can be no doubt that racial preferences are simply evil and provoke disharmony.

So conservatives are against the Voice on that and other grounds. And that makes them the enemies of the Leftist feelgood policy. So what do the Left do when threatened with the loss of their feelgood policy? Do they simply concede the point and desist from advocating something that could be very harmful? No way. They like their feelgood policy too much to abandon it.

So what do they do? In good Leftist style they resort to abuse and lies. They go “ad hominem”. They cannot answer the conservative arguments so they impugn the motives of conservatives who oppose the policy. In the oldest bit of Leftist abuse in the book, they accuse conservatives of racism. They say that it is racism that lies behind opposition to the “voice”. That they are are the one who are advocating something racist seems quite lost on them.

So they pretend that it is white supremacists who are their opposition while they are the good and noble guys. It’s a sad commentary on the ego needs that drive such irrationality but it is a classic bit of Leftist argumentation. …

One of the many things that the Left are sedulously ignoring is that it is not only white conservatives in opposition but many Aborigines too. Around half of Aborigines seem to be opposed to the Voice and say so. How come they oppose something that is supposed to help them?

Color me shocked. Just shocked.