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Category: Ownership

  • The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 21, 2024 Supreme Court upholds law barring gun ownership for domestic violence abusers.

    Comprehensive coverage of the day’s news with a focus on war and peace; social, environmental and economic justice.

    The post The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays – June 21, 2024 Supreme Court upholds law barring gun ownership for domestic violence abusers. appeared first on KPFA.


    This content originally appeared on KPFA – The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Don’t Dismiss Marx. His Critique of Colonialism Is More Relevant Than Ever.

    During the last couple of decades, we have been witnessing a resurgence of interest in the thought and work of Karl Marx, author of major philosophical, historical, political and economic works — and of course, of The Communist Manifesto, which is perhaps the most popular political manifesto in the history of the world. This resurgence is largely due to the devastating consequences of…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Rob Campbell: Are diversity policies backfiring in business – or am I just being a grumpy old man?

    Corporate diversity and inclusion have become more about profits than about recognising the rights of women and minorities, argues ousted Te Whatu Ora chair Rob Campbell.

    COMMENTARY: By Rob Campbell

    Just as we are making some progress on diversity and inclusion policies in business governance and management my perverse mind is starting to have doubts.

    Initially around gender diversity I was an enthusiastic camp follower. It seemed a relevant part of progressive social change.

    As Te Whatu Ora chair, I was an advocate and supporter of a much stronger role for Māori in health governance and management. I was a strong promoter of inclusion in all my roles such as at Summerset, Tourism Holdings and Sky City.

    I was recognised for this when awarded Chair of the Year a few years back, and the Beacon Award from the Shareholders’ Association at about the same time.

    I think that we have made progress at business board and senior management level — by no means complete but barriers have been reduced and seats filled more appropriately.

    I confess that even while I and many others were advocating and implementing this, my doubts crept in as the narrative morphed from one primarily about rights into one more based on demonstrated benefits, for example, to profitability.

    Then the prize-giving started, the “champions” preened, and one could not help but wonder what interests were really being served. It really was not all that difficult or radical in its impact as after all — the replacements were from the same class and education and non-cis gender characteristics as the old.

    Long overdue
    It is a good thing rather than bad of course, long overdue and still far from complete.

    But the old hierarchies and principles of business control, practice and ownership have not been that much affected. We have more women in influential roles but the roles and expectations of those in the roles have not changed very much. Higher gender representation is a step on the way to gender equity in the workplace but not a final goal.

    My perception is that ethnic diversity is facing an even harder road. There has been some progress but it seems that neither the will nor the availability of “suitable” candidates is as strong as it is on gender.

    Of course this tells us something — our perception about what is “suitable” is limited and excludes all but a few from non-Pākehā communities. It is not that such communities do not have highly capable leaders but that the capability does not readily match the ways business expects its governance and management to be.

    You could be kind and call this a cultural difference. Similar issues may hold back business governance diversity in terms of non-cis gender differences and neuro differences. Maybe what business wants is not real and far reaching diversity but “acceptable or non-disruptive” diversity.

    Welcome to the boardroom and the executive floor on the terms that have always prevailed.

    So this makes me think about “inclusion” too. There is an increasing range of inclusion programmes, training and schemes. My inclination is to welcome and support these and, as with gender, I have seen and celebrated individuals step up within such processes and succeed.

    Cue more prizes, awards and media releases.

    Common theme
    But I see a common theme as we progress. Business is making pathways some for people from other cultures to become acceptable or suitable — on the terms of business. Colonialism has always done this politically and we can see this commercially as well.

    These are adaptable social systems well capable of changing appearance without changing substance.

    Companies co-opting or paying mere lip service to diversity and inclusion? It’s almost universal.

    I admire the people who take these opportunities. They often have to change a lot, to take on more than their peers at work, to model and represent. But business inclusion is inclusion into the world of business not business changing to match another culture, other than quite superficially.

    I wonder if these processes are not more akin to “assimilation” than genuine diversity and inclusion. That is, always on the terms of the boss. Welcome to our club, on our terms. This assumes superiority of culture.

    Just like assimilation sought to obscure and diminish the outside, the minority, the different in order to seem to include. Ultimately assimilation was seen for the destructive force in social policy that it was — a steamroller to flatten diversity not to encourage it.

    Like assimilation, I don’t think, now that my thoughts have run to this point, that our “D&I” policies, appointments and programmes, will really be much of a force for change.

    That does not make them bad, but lets not pretend they are more than they are. The same people still mainly fill the same roles according to the same rules, doing the same things, as they did before.

    I welcome anyone who can convince me otherwise. I don’t like being the grumpy, cynical old man.

    Rob Campbell is chancellor of AUT University and chairs NZ Rural Land Co and renewable energy centre Ara Ake. He is a former chair of health agency Te Whatu Ora, the Environmental Protection Authority, SkyCity Casino, Tourism Holdings, WEL Networks and Summerset. He trained as an economist and originally worked as a unionist before eventually becoming a professional director. This article was first published by Newsroom and is republished with the author’s permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Nature Isn’t a “Vault” Full of Material Value. It Is a Treasure to Be Valued.

    On June 17, 2022, Creamer Media’s Mining Weekly published the article “Nature’s Vault offers investors a ‘green’ gold option” to little fanfare. Like so much of what passes for news from institutionalized sources reporting breathlessly about opportunities for wealth accumulation, it’s a story ostensibly about a “win-win” scenario for capital investment and environmentalists. The piece dangles the tempting prospect of making money from so-called “natural resources” while leaving them unharvested or unextracted, ensuring that the integrity of the ecosystems in which they are found remain unspoiled. But what’s really going on here?

    The article describes Nature’s Vault Ltd. as an “environmental, social and governance finance company” which “aims to keep gold in the ground, thereby avoiding the carbon emissions and environmental impact of mining, while providing investors with stable, tradeable tokens representing what they dubbed ‘nature’s gold’ or environment-friendly gold.” It sounds like a dream come true. What could possibly go wrong?

    Phil Rickard, Nature’s Vault’s CEO, says that the corporation buys up mining assets and “tokenizes” some of them, selling the tokens at private sales. The corporation, he claims, “verifiably commits not to exploit” the monetized assets, assigning quantifiable value based on “international mining and geological standards,” according to Mining Weekly. Moreover, “the company guarantees investors that they will retain their assets in perpetuity, based on the ownership of mining rights for the deposit” [emphasis added].

    The polished rhetoric of Nature’s Vault suggests a commitment to addressing the climate crisis while expanding opportunities for profit through investment in a fully monetized world of untouched riches. One doesn’t need an advanced education in logic to sense something incoherent and irrational in their message.

    The intended implication is that tokenizing gold and other commodities while they’re still in the ground is a “win-win” for environmentalists and investors in natural resources because the investment can still happen, while the continued integrity of nature is respected. But once the investments are made, property interests are created. It cannot be emphasized enough that investors “will retain their assets in perpetuity, based on the ownership of mining rights for the deposit.” The right to mine is a legal right to actually extract, not a virtual right. The law is nothing if not deferential to rights attached to property.

    Wherever there are natural resources “in reserve,” whole ecosystems have been privatized — turned into legal property — and the rights to that property are held exclusively by the investors. And although the hype being amplified by Nature’s Vault is that the resources will remain untouched since they’d only be held in reserve and not extracted; the right to extract may, like the gold itself, be held in reserve, while remaining as palpably real as the assets in the ground. A “don’t touch!” sign on the cookie jar is thin reassurance the chocolate chips won’t disappear.

    Attorney Terry Lodge, my colleague at the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, pointed out some prosaic advantages to be gained by investors in such a plan to hold natural resources in reserve. He wondered if tokenization isn’t a cynical ploy to devalue mineral-bearing land in order to acquire it more cheaply. “If tokenization became somewhat popular, pushing actual mining possibilities into the future, isn’t that going to cause a downward adjustment in gold futures? So, it might just be a market feint,” he told me.

    He also wondered whether, by deferring the opening of a mine, Nature’s Vault is creating what he called a ploy aimed at state and local government tax agencies that could also have federal capital gains implications. “In other words, is the gold industry just manufacturing golden tax opportunities, even as it holds actual gold extraction (which is far and away the dirtiest form of mining) as a future option?” he said.

    More and more of Earth is being transformed into property, with a minority of ultra-wealthy owners having monopolistic control of the world we inhabit. On the slimmest pretense of conservation, environmentalists could be persuaded to buy into this scam. If that happens, the opposite of emancipation of nature will have occurred. Private “management” of nature will be the rule of law, held in the hands of an elite few. Who will stop owners from doing what they will with their property? In this scenario, the majority of humanity will be dispossessed and alienated from the natural world — it having been fully transferred into private hands as property — and the owners will be legally able to begin extracting whenever it is expedient for their agenda.

    We are derelict in exercising our vaunted capacity for reasoned thinking if we don’t ask what value monetization and tokenization of nature actually brings to the planet and to humanity. Even if we could believe that the token-valuated gold, timber, water, copper, lithium, and other resources would remain unharvested, and the ecosystems in which they are situated continue unmolested, why do it?

    What is the point of monetizing those so-called natural assets, based on the ownership of mining rights, if the right to extract (mine) is never exercised? Is it really innocent, this virtual “mining” — and here I mean making Earth’s resources “Mine,” while not mining them? Never mind the ironic homonyms here. Even without extraction, the creation of property in the abstract form of monetized wealth is the whole and only point of minting and selling the “legacy tokens” by which Nature’s Vault will know its market. But let’s be very clear: There is no value to humanity and the Earth in an exponential increase in concentrated wealth based on the ownership of a privatized planet by an aristocracy of investors.

    Even if Nature’s Vault is not a cynical Ponzi scheme for concentrating full ownership of the planet into a small number of bank accounts, or a tax-avoidance ploy for the in-crowd — and even if we can take CEO Rickard’s word that the company really cares about climate catastrophe and environmental decimation — the best we can conclude is that it’s the most naive of solutions, recognizing as we must the infantile instinct of capital investors to “mine” (make mine) the world, even if they don’t grab it in their hands and consume it on the spot.

    It is a scheme that suggests we base human participation in the natural world on possession of rights attached to nature’s status as property, and that the advantages over fellow humans that arrangement gives to the owners of the natural world is in the best interests of nature, including the human species. That’s patently absurd.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.