'I Didn't Ever Want a Company'
The Sunday Night Reader for 9/18/22
Biblical Levels of Ugliness
A powerful leader went to another state and tricked poor strangers into traveling a long way, hoping that they would be punished and abused by the locals when they arrived. They were instead greeted with food, shelter, and offers of aid.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ stunt sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard is like something out of the Bible, only with airplanes and $500/hour PR consultants. And a lot of folks are out there rooting for Pharaoh. Even “Martha’s Vineyard” sounds biblical. Fittingly, the Gospel’s Martha is best known for busying herself with putting on a good show rather than listening to Jesus’ teachings.
The current MAGA talking point on the topic is: “Ha, ha, the fancy Martha’s Vineyard people moved them too. They’re hypocrites.” So let’s look at the two moves these migrants have experienced in the last few days:
The governor of Florida (and, notably, officials with the Department of Homeland Security) used federal dollars to charter planes in Texas, lie to people, falsify their records, and transport them across state lines. (The part that melts my brain with sadness is that DeSantis -- faced with the fact that there weren't people in his own state to make an example of -- went and hunted them down elsewhere. People who are asylum seekers and are, by definition, here legally. There's no policy he's operating under, no threat to his actual constituents. Just vicious grandstanding.)
Meanwhile, the 20,000 largely working class people that live on Martha's Vineyard in the fall raised $125,000 dollars in one day to support these migrants, immediately provided them with cell phones, food, and a place to sleep. The state of Massachusetts — led by a sane Republican governor — then stepped in to offer these people a 30-mile bus trip to a designated, state-supported emergency shelter and provided emergency counseling, legal aid, and health care.
The moving people isn't the problem. A governor can move them to help them find safety and support, or a governor can move them to terrorize them. The difference is obvious. The decision is a moral one. To equate them is a lie of the ugliest sort. And none of this is some “Let’s go, Brandon” joke. It’s low and mean and inhumane.
‘I Don’t Drive Lexuses’
Be sure to read the New York Time’s story on Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard, who effectively turned the company into a machine to fund environmental causes by creating an irrevocable trust and a new nonprofit.
Here are some choice quotes from Chouinard. (What’s cuter than a former billionaire who thinks that a Lexus is a billionaire’s car?)
“Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people. We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet…
I didn’t know what to do with the company because I didn’t ever want a company. I didn’t want to be a businessman. Now I could die tomorrow and the company is going to continue doing the right thing for the next 50 years, and I don’t have to be around…
I was in Forbes magazine listed as a billionaire, which really, really pissed me off. I don’t have $1 billion in the bank. I don’t drive Lexuses.” Read more.
Helping Those who Help Themselves
Caroline Mimbs Nyce interviews Erik Loomis and provides some helpful context on President Joe Biden’s role in averting a national rail strike. In the talk, Loomis says “There really are not a lot of cases in American history, even in the peak period of union power and New Deal liberalism, in which a president was so openly pro-labor. You saw this going back to President Biden’s speech before the 2021 vote at the Amazon facility in Alabama. Even though that union effort failed, Biden urges workers to vote their conscience, reminding them that they have every right to join a union if they want to.
Presidents really haven’t done that before. Even FDR did not get that directly involved in individual union efforts. And at times, even Roosevelt would act against what unions wanted. While the labor movement did succeed more under FDR, that had much more to do with the conditions of the era and gargantuan Democratic majorities in both the House and the Senate than it did, per se, with FDR himself.
[T]he difference is that Biden is using real political capital in favor of unions in a deeply divided America. He’s spending his relatively limited amount of political capital as a president in a very divided nation and in a divided party, and he’s spending that on the labor movement. There’s no other president that’s done that…
I do think that right now, because you are seeing an uptick in organizing, that the president is trying to re-level the playing field in labor law, and the administration of that law, that has really been tilted toward the companies for the last 40-plus years now.
He’s reading the tea leaves in the sense that he is spending political capital to help labor, because labor is taking the initiative to help themselves to a certain extent. But it should also be said that the president’s power here is somewhat limited.” Read more.
Heavy Rotation
Say It Plain…
