Cancel culture – The "True" North

The non-stop simplistic “good vs evil ” coverage of the war in Ukraine has continued with some people, including Canada’s former foreign affairs minister Peter McKay, calling Vladimir Putin a psychopath and almost all media outlets framing the U.S. and its allies as the all round good guys. The media continues to ignore the role of multinational corporations in the events leading up to the war in Ukraine, some of which I covered in my post The U.S. has treated Ukraine – and Putin – kinda like it treats Black people.

This is a real change from 2003 when the movie The Corporation examined the behaviour of American corporations and found that they were the ones behaving like psychopaths. The film provided a definition from psychology’s Bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness. The DSM-IV (it’s now on the 5th edition) said the symptoms of psychopathy included: callous disregard for the feelings of other people, incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness, incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law. The film explained that, due to an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case, U.S. corporations were legally considered “persons” having the same rights as human beings. The film then examined corporate behaviour and showed that, if the corporations were actually people, they’d meet the definition of psychopaths.

Whether or not some, or many, multinational corporations are acting like full fledged psychos today, what is clear is that many are acting in ways that lead to people being harmed and killed – and that the mainstream media spends very little time covering it.

For example, as I said in one of my previous posts, the war in Ukraine was partly caused by the 2014, U.S.-backed removal of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych following his rejection of U.S. attempts to open Ukraine markets to giant multinational companies and his restarting negotiations with Russia. The negotiations included the International Monetary Fund pushing Ukraine to implement reforms that were friendly to corporations but very unfriendly to the Ukraine people, including cutting wage controls (i.e., lowering wages), reforming and reducing health and education sectors…and cutting natural gas subsidies to Ukrainian citizens that made energy affordable to the general public. (Bryce Green outlined this in his article What You Should Really Know About Ukraine.)

Corporations were also barely, if ever, mentioned by the protesters, governments or media during the wave of anti COVID measures protests that swept across Canada in February 2022. Despite declaring the protests were about “freedom”, the protesters focused their critique – and anger – exclusively on governments, mentioning almost nothing about the role corporations played in exacerbating the effects of the pandemic on many of the most vulnerable workers. They didn’t critique the companies caught red handed giving the pandemic money they got from the government out to their shareholders like long term care home giant Extendicare. They didn’t critique Amazon for imposing on the “freedom” (and right) of its workers to safe working conditions by firing employees who spoke up about unsafe conditions. (The mainstream media did cover one major story that grew out of this: the successful formation of Amazon’s first union at its Staten Island warehouse by former Amazon worker Christian Smalls.)

The convoy protesters also said nothing about the big Canadian banks.

However, unlike the protesters and the mainstream media, the Government of Canada addressed corporations, including the big banks, directly in its recently released 2022 Budget. The government took some of the strongest action in recent years to make corporations – including Big Tech – pay their fair share of taxes by taxing excess pandemic profits, increasing the corporate tax rate (although only on banking and life insurance companies) and closing several corporate tax loop holes. This is probably partly because the deal between the governing Liberals, who have a minority, and the New Democratic Party, included tax measures, but they’re good steps whatever the reason.

The government went after the big Canadian banks in particular because it said the banks’ made huge pandemic profits partly because of measures the government took that benefited the banks. Budget 2022 said, “While many sectors continue to recover, Canada’s major financial institutions made significant profits during the pandemic and have recovered faster than other parts of our economy—in part due to the federal pandemic supports for people and businesses that helped de-risk the balance sheets of some of Canada’s largest financial institutions.” The government also wanted to curb outright tax avoidance by the banks. On that, Budget 2022 “proposes to examine potential changes to the financial transaction approval process to limit the ability of federally regulated financial institutions to use corporate structures in tax havens to engage in aggressive tax avoidance.”

In my post It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture, I pointed out that the ones actually doing the cancelling are the big media corporations that cancel people’s shows or their hosting opportunities – not people calling out celebrities on Twitter. But it’s the corporations’ bad behaviour that needs to be called out and cancelled, and it’s good to see the Canadian government taking strong first steps to cancel corporations’ ability to avoid paying their taxes.

The other bad corporate behaviour is using things like the war in Ukraine and the pandemic to raise prices more than actually needed. Do you notice that all the media stories about prices are framed like prices just go up on their own – and don’t say who’s actually raising them? This line from an April 20, 2022 CTV story is typical, “With Canada’s annual inflation at its highest point in over 30 years, experts say Canadians can anticipate their cost of living to increase significantly, warning that prices will likely not decrease for some time.”

Canadians need to ask companies to justify their price increases. And workers need to follow the lead of Ontario carpenters and strike if their employers aren’t willing to raise wages to meet the high cost of living. On Monday, May 9, CityNews reported that 15,000 workers went on strike at 12:01 a.m after they overwhelmingly rejected the latest offer from their employers in the industrial, commercial and institutional (ICI) sector.

Power to the people.

It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture

If you consume any mainstream or social media you’ve probably heard at least one story about someone being “cancelled”. That’s when someone says or does something, or someone finds out they said or did something years ago, then lots of people criticize them on social media and something of theirs gets taken away.

The #metoo movement resulted in a bunch of people, mostly white men, being cancelled like actor Kevin Spacey, comedian Louis CK and movie producer Harvey Weinstein. Although most of the high profile cancelling (as far as I can see) came from the left, people on the right do it too. In 2018, some of them attacked Asian New York Times journalist Sarah Jeong for her satirical tweets about white people she posted in response to tweets like these that she got from white people:

Right wing critics of cancel culture say it’s political correctness on steroids (like, they literally say that.) Political correctness, or PC, is one of those terms that’s often used but poorly understood. Wikipedia describes it as, “a term used to describe language, policies, or measures that are intended to avoid offense or disadvantage to members of particular groups in society. In public discourse and the media, the term is generally used as a pejorative with an implication that these policies are excessive or unwarranted.”

In May 1991, at a commencement ceremony for a graduating class of the University of Michigan, then U.S. President George H. W. Bush used the term in his speech: “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits.”

The term PC, as we know it today, emerged in the 1970s and folks on the right have used it since then to target everything from policies against hate speech to affirmative action hiring policies for disadvantaged groups. But the term was used earlier than that. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits “only to pure ‘Aryans’ whose opinions are politically correct”. This is particularly relevant since some folks on the right sometimes label those they see as being PC, as Nazis. This includes former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson. As a Republican presidential candidate in 2012, Buzzfeed quoted Carson saying, “political correctness has caused Americans to fall silent, very much like the people in Nazi Germany were silent.”

Calling people Nazis is the clearest expression of something about the term PC that’s rarely discussed: it assumes that those being PC have both the desire – and power – to control others’ thoughts and actions. This idea is also behind the term “thought police” covered in the Dec. 1990 Newsweek article, Taking Offense: Is this the new enlightenment on campus or the new McCarthyism? Thought Police. The irony of the right using the term “police” is they’re equating folks on the left with a state institution that has the actual power to enforce behaviour, up to and including killing people. And, even in the U.S., I can’t think of one example of folks saying the police were run by the left unlike what they often say about the media. It’s not folks on the left yelling Blue Lives Matter.

The right also has more power to influence thought, and thus action, through conservative think tanks which include the most influential ones in the U.S. and are about equal in number with progressive ones in Canada.

The conservative American John M. Foundation funded books like Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus in which D’Souza used “[PC] terminology for a range of policies in academia around victimization, supporting multiculturalism through affirmative action, sanctions against anti-minority hate speech, and revising curricula (sometimes referred to as “canon busting”).” Books like D’Souza’s, combined with social media misinformation and conservative talk radio that both overwhelmingly lean to the right, clearly give the right the upper hand when it comes to thought control.

One of the quotes that has stuck with me from my journalism degree is, “The media doesn’t tell people what to think but it tells them what to think about.” The more media “your side” has the more they shape what people think about.

So what other power does the left have?

The left has activists who put their security – and often lives – on the line every day by organizing to expose injustices that show that people in power aren’t following the principles in the documents upon which their organizations are based. The dream that Martin Luther King articulated in his most famous speech was basically that the United States would one day live up to its own constitution. When I was with the Federal Black Employee Caucus, which I co-founded, we spent our time trying to get the federal public service to follow government policy and treat Black employees equitably. We faced a lot of backlash for what we did…and we all know what happened to MLK…

Folks on the right imply that folks on the left have the power to get people cancelled but it’s not the tweeters who cancel people. In most of the high profile celebrity cases at least, it’s massive media corporations that cancel them. And I would argue that it’s the years of personally risky work of activists organizing and raising the issues that makes the companies decide that not cancelling the people could be a risk to their profits because viewers might move to their competitors. One thing backing up my argument is that Facebook and Google, both of whom essentially have no real competition, don’t cancel anything – ever.

In my rabble.ca article COVID-19 could mean we lose and surveillance capitalists win — again, I talked about how Shoshana Zuboff argues in her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, that Facebook and Google’s business models lead them to aggressively fight against any law or regulation that would require them to remove anything from their platforms. That especially includes misinformation and fake news like conspiracy theories as they generate massive amounts of engagement – and massive profits.

Luckily, most companies have competition and are still very sensitive to anything that might damage their brand, especially ideas spread via social media. But folks taking to Twitter to shame the latest celebrity raises some key questions – if you buy my argument that decades of organizing by activists has been key to causing companies to cancel people. Do those calling for people to be cancelled live their lives each day in ways that actively support activists’ work or do they make that work harder through their own inaction? And if those same people aren’t doing anything in their own lives to address systemic inequities but tweeting, then isn’t demanding apologies from those they shame letting society (of which they’re a part) off the hook for creating the conditions that allowed the people shamed to think that their comments were OK in the first place?

If you really want to show you’re down with the cause, get off the cancellation bandwagon and sign up for monthly donations to a local group working to improve Black and Brown lives.

Note: I took much of the PC info from Wikipedia’s Political Correctness post.