June 23, 2020

Competitors For The Race Hypocrisy Prize: High End Lawyers

June 23, 2020/ Francis Menton

Just a few days ago I was making fun of the big tech companies (particularly Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple) for lecturing us all about their woke and anti-racist values, even as their own performance in hiring African Americans, especially in the tech field, was abysmal.
In the midst of endless blather about their commitment to “diversity and inclusion” in frequent publicity on the subject, you then need to dig through reams of numbers to find the unhighlighted facts that Facebook has only 1.5% African Americans among its tech workers, Microsoft 3.3%, and Google and Apple have both stopped providing data broken out this way.
Could anybody top these guys for sanctimonious hypocrisy on the subject of race?
I have a candidate for today: high end lawyers. As a group, they are at least as woke and committed to the progressive political project as are the big tech companies. In the major law firms, every single one has a diversity bureaucracy and ongoing diversity initiatives, most have which have been ongoing for decades.
And yet, out of hundreds of firms, not a single one has succeeded in achieving the goal of having a proportion of African Americans equal to the proportion in the general population. . . .

June 20, 2020

It's Time To Cancel The Democratic Party For Its Long History Of Racism

June 20, 2020/ Francis Menton

We are living in the age of cancel culture. All icons from the past associated in any way with mistreatment of minorities are in the process of being eradicated.
Statues of Confederate figures? They’re mostly already gone. But that was just the start. How about statues of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson? In New York, First Lady Chirlane McCray will decide on their fate. How about a statue of Ulysses Grant (who may have done more than anyone other than Lincoln to free the slaves, but also once briefly owned a slave before freeing him)? His statue in San Francisco was toppled yesterday. How about the weathervane atop the Dartmouth College library (featuring a sculpture of a Native American)? It now must go (it “do[es] not reflect Dartmouth’s values” says the president). Aunt Jemima? Uncle Ben? They are now unacceptable racial stereotypes. . . .
But what American institution of all those existing today has the longest and deepest association with violent bigotry and grotesque racism, including slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and the Ku Klux Klan?
The answer is the Democratic Party.

June 18, 2020

June 18, 2020/ Francis Menton

Here in the United States, the environmental movement has been completely taken over by the campaign to ban use of fossil fuels, with the stated goal of slowing or preventing “climate change.”
But at this point, is the “climate” campaign really about the climate in any meaningful way?
The alternative hypothesis is that the principal goal of the anti-fossil-fuel movement in the United States is destruction of the American freedom-based economic system, commonly going by the name of “capitalism.”
So let’s consider whether the anti-fossil-fuel campaign in the U.S. could really be about its avowed goal of saving the planet from climate change caused by greenhouse gases.

June 16, 2020

June 16, 2020/ Francis Menton

Essentially every form of discrimination on the basis of race in economic matters has been banned by law in the United States since at least the 1960s. That’s sufficiently long ago that the number of people old enough to have living memory of the days when racial discrimination was legally tolerated is rapidly diminishing.
Today, nearly every institution of any size in our country — businesses, the government, educational institutions, arts organizations, you name it — not only asserts that it does not practice discrimination, but also loudly proclaims a commitment to diversity and to economic justice for African Americans.
And yet, while everyone claims to practice non-discrimination, blacks continue to lag other racial groups in various measures reported in government statistics, particularly income and wealth.
What is the explanation? The one most often articulated at this moment goes by the name “systemic racism.”

June 13, 2020

June 13, 2020/ Francis Menton

It occurs to me to address the question of exactly what about the “oil-as-nuisance” litigations is stupid, and what is not as stupid.
The matters that I refer to include the cases, discussed in the last post, of the cities of Oakland and San Francisco against five of the largest oil companies, recently reinstated by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and sent to be heard in the California state courts.
The matters in question also include numerous other very similar cases (often with page after page of the complaints copied word-for-word from each other) brought by many other California cities and counties, as well as by various other jurisdictions around the country, not the least of them being my own New York City.
To begin with the “stupid” category, there is the fundamental mangling of the whole concept of a legally actionable nuisance. . . .

June 11, 2020

June 11, 2020/ Francis Menton

For some reason I haven’t seen much about this even on climate-focused websites; but in late May one of the litigations that I have named as being among the stupidest in the country, and which had been dismissed by the trial court, got reversed and reinstated by the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
What next? The defendants — who are five major oil companies — had managed to get the two related cases dismissed at the trial court level on purely procedural grounds, without ever having occasion to address the merits of whether the so-called “settled science” of greenhouse-gas induced catastrophic climate change is complete baloney.
Now they are running out of such procedural defenses. If they are not going to just concede the cases and fork over billions of dollars, it now looks like they will likely need to attack the fake science. I don’t know that they will. But I do know that they soon may not have much choice.
I’ll begin with a relatively thorough history of these cases so far. . . .