Acting Badly, Looking Good

Victory? Oh, sure.

The Washington Redskins of the National Football League will be changing its name now that, as reported by The Washington Post

After years of resistance, the team said it was launching a thorough review of the name. It did not share any details of the process, but two people familiar with discussions between Snyder, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and league officials that led to Friday’s announcement said the review is expected to result in a new team nickname and mascot.

“You know where this leads,” one of the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They’re working on that process [of changing the name]. It will end with a new name. Dan has been listening to different people over the last number of weeks.”

The different people he has been listening to are not the multitudes of protesters of racial bias, native tribal members, nor the activists who for decades have been promoting a name change. Instead, on July 2

FedEx, a longtime sponsor and naming-rights holder of the team’s home stadium, issued a one sentence statement calling for a change. Fred Smith, the FedEx chief executive, is a minority owner of the Redskins.

That would be the same FedEx which is non-union and in which

workers who charge that their benefits are less than at rival UPS said the company has bombarded them with anti-union messages and forced them to attend anti-union meetings.

The Guardian obtained recordings of meetings that were mandatory and required workers to sign in, according to a FedEx employee, held at FedEx facilities in 2015 and 2016, where managers and union avoidance consultants lectured workers on unions as the Teamsters was attempting to organize FedEx drivers at several locations around the United States.

“It’s time to campaign. If you don’t want this third party coming in putting a wall between us, it’s time. Because when you campaign and tell them you don’t want them here, eventually it becomes loud and clear to them. You can do that,” said a FedEx human resources manager in a July 2016 captive audience meeting.

There is pressure coming from other socially conscious companies. And so

Larry Di Rita, Bank of America’s president for the Washington market, said: “As a partner and sponsor, we have encouraged the team to change the name and we welcome this announcement.”

Nonetheless, one owner of a small software company has explained that Bank of America

is now being sued by small businesses for shutting my and other small enterprises out of the Payroll Protection Program (PPP) loan. The allegation is that BofA served large businesses first, on whom they could earn the most in fees per transaction.

After joining with others to bring the world economy nearly to a standstill earlier this century, Bank of America received a $45 billion bailout from the federal government and still

brought tens of thousands of Americans to foreclosure court using bogus, “robo-signed” evidence – a type of mass perjury that it helped pioneer. It hawked worthless mortgages to dozens of unions and state pension funds, draining them of hundreds of millions in value. And when it wasn’t ripping off workers and pensioners, it was helping to push insurance giants like AMBAC into bankruptcy by fraudulently inducing them to spend hundreds of millions insuring those same worthless mortgages.

The Post adds

As major corporate backers of the team, FedEx and PepsiCo tied their brands to that of the Redskins for years. In their respective statements acknowledging that they support a name-change, neither company used the word “Redskins."

How sensitive; or progressive; or "woke" the two of them are. PepsiCo, as we know, is a major player in the soft drink market, in which the easily absorbable sugar which is intrinsic to its product is arguably the most important contributor in the universe to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and liver disease, let alone obesity.

At the time the WaPo article was written, Nike had not yet issued a statement but had removed the Washington Redskins merchandise from its website.  In recent years, Nike has moved some of its production from  mainland China to other nations, especially Vietnam. However, it still owns facilities in China, whose dictatorial, murderous regime has been propped up by Nike and other American corporations which, when pressed, will demonstrate their sensitivity and compassion by demanding that ethnically insensitive nicknames change. 

Meanwhile, the exploitation of Chinese workers by a government engaged in destroying the culture of Uighurs, and with the most extensive deployment of internment camps since the Holocaust, will remain. The death of Americans still will be an integral part of the PepsiCo business model. BOA will continue to lead the way in cheating customers and small businesses. FedEx will continue to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on union avoidance consultants because the working conditions and benefits of its employees pale in importance to opportunistic public relations. 

And why not? It's 2020 and workers, consumers, small business, health care, and genocide cannot compare to being on the right side in the identity wars.

                                          HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY



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