What Happened Today: March 18, 2022
Citibank takes on abortion; China sets a Ukraine agenda; Macron goes nuclear
The Big Story
In a regulatory filing Tuesday night, Citibank disclosed that it will now pay its employees travel and lodging expenses when they seek an abortion, a shift in the bank’s healthcare policy that squares off against several states that have recently passed strict abortion laws. This move also has significant implications in the evolving role of corporations, as they are becoming more aggressive in their political and social policy positions that conflict with the cities and states in which they operate. The bank’s initiative comes after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed off on a new bill last year that allows Texans to bring a lawsuit against anyone who aids a woman to get an abortion almost immediately after conception. Though the Supreme Court declined the opportunity to hear a challenge on the Texas law, it has taken up the case of a similarly restrictive Mississippi ban of early-term abortions. After hearing oral arguments on the Mississippi law in December, the court is expected by many to uphold the ban, which could unwind the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that made abortion legal nationwide and effectively delegate the U.S. states as the arbiters of abortion access.
Other companies have taken a similar approach to Citibank’s, with Salesforce, Uber, Lyft, and the dating app company Match Group all making pledges to offer some kind of support to their workers who travel outside of Texas and other states to obtain abortions. But Citibank is the largest corporation so far to do so, and like the policies of many companies trying to appease activist shareholders and employees advocating for corporations to take strong stands on social issues that may have nothing to do with the core function of the business, the Citibank policy fits neatly into the company’s ongoing effort to become what Jane Fraser, CEO of the bank’s parent company Citigroup, has called a “bank with a soul.” Abortion rights advocates are already saying Citibank needs to do more, and cynics point out that covering the cost of an abortion is cheaper than maternity leave and childcare subsidizes. The controversy was inevitable and quickly spilled over into the political arena when George P. Bush, the land commissioner in Texas who’s currently in the race for the state’s attorney general, put Citibank in his crosshairs as a “woke company [that supports] a culture of death,” with a promise to “hold actors who attempt to find loopholes in our laws accountable” if he were elected. Indeed, it’s not exactly clear if Citibank’s policy will stand up against the state’s law, but the continued commingling of social, political, and corporate spheres indicates a growing appetite for company leaders to fortify narrow islands around their employees who share a particular set of views on contentious culture war issues, even when that company might find itself surrounded by an opposition the size of Texas.
Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/16/investing/citi-abortion-travel-expenses/index.html
In the Back Pages: Your Weekend Essay, Before the Siren’s Wail
The Rest
→ In a two-hour video call this morning between President Biden and China’s leader Xi Jinping, the two leaders agreed the “Ukraine crisis is something we don’t want to see,” China’s state media reported soon after the conversation. Walking a tight line between its economic and political alliance with Russia without violating ongoing sanctions against it, and maintaining positive relations with the West, China is offering support for Ukraine that’s part of what those close to government leaders say is the country’s “benevolent neutrality,” a policy full of internal contradictions that “supports” both nations while further elevating China’s position of power to set its own terms on how to shape the outcome of the conflict.
→ Last year, for the first time since 2000, the annual increase in home value exceeded the nation’s median income—which means, essentially, that homeowners made more on their homes going up in value than what a typical person makes each year in salary. The analysis from Zillow found that typical U.S. home prices rose $52,667 between 2020 and 2021, an uptick in homeowner wealth that’s just slightly greater than the pre-tax median income of about $50,000—a significant milestone that reflects just how quickly prices rose during the COVID-19 pandemic, when mortgage interest rates dropped to historic lows and a tight housing supply failed to meet heightened demand. Though mortgage rates popped back up this week to 4% for the first time since May 2019, the housing market is still a shark’s game, with investors of all stripes seeing opportunity. A private equity fund founded by a former Goldman Sachs banker now uses a software that reads new real estate listings several times an hour, with a set of parameters tied to a bucket of money the fund’s team can use to package up all-cash offers sent to sellers within hours after the listing hits the market.
→ Stat of the day: With crime rates rising and police morale at what seems like an all-time low in some cities, gun buyers are snatching up licenses at unprecedented rates. In Philadelphia last year, 70,789 people sought a license from the city to carry a gun. For the three years prior, that number topped out at 11,814 applicants, meaning a more than sixfold increase in gun applicants in just one year.
→ With millions of Americans quitting their jobs and millions more relocating several hours away so they can work remotely while living in desirable locales, the nation’s biggest retail employers are ramping up their efforts to draw employees to work in their stores and distribution centers while they continue to see strong sales with buyers who haven’t slowed their spending on consumer products for their homes since the start of the pandemic. With 1.6 million employees already, Walmart said this week that it will try to hire 50,000 workers before the end of next month, a goal it hopes to hit by offering a starting hourly wage of up to $30 for some positions and an average of $16.40 for all new employees. Walmart is also sweetening its incentives package with free teleheath coverage and offers to cover tuition and certain expenses for employees at select colleges, which will make it more competitive against other retailers like Costco and Target as they increase their starting salaries. Hiring from a similar job applicant pool, Amazon too has been forced to up its offers, with sign-up bonuses as high as $3,000 and a starting hourly pay averaging $18.
→ In the Chernobyl nuclear site seized by Russian soldiers, some 210 workers who maintain the site have been kept hostage while they eat canned food and sleep on piles of clothes as “the psychological situation is deteriorating,” one staff member there told The Wall Street Journal this week. Pushed to exhaustion and unable to leave the complex, workers have been forced to give their phones to the Russian soldiers, who trail them as they carry out their daily tasks. In a remarkable report of the conditions inside, workers said they are granted one-minute phone calls with family, just enough time to describe their “extreme fatigue, dizziness, nausea, and terrible headaches.” Quibbling with their captors over the purpose of the invasion, the workers are rebelling in small ways, playing “Ukraine Has Not Perished” each morning through the telecom system.
→ Speaking of small gestures of rebellion, the iconic outdoor Red Rocks Amphitheatre has struck back against the entertainment company AXS, denying its effort to install Amazon palm-scan technology for ticket entry into the venue. Amazon has made a big push to sell its bio-security software as a convenient way to verify identifies and make everything from buying groceries in Whole Foods to dancing incoherently at a Phish show as easy as possible. But the activist group Fight for the Future, which led the Amazon Doesn’t Rock campaign, wasn’t having it. “Other venues should similarly listen to the hundreds of artists, organizations, and fans who don’t see this technology as ‘convenient’ but recognize it as a tool of corporate surveillance and supercharged state violence,” it said in the wake of the Red Rock decision.
→ Now available for download, ISSUE NUMBER NINE of The Tab, Tablet’s curated weekly digest of recently published articles, newly relevant archival hits, recipes, and a little bit of The Scroll, laid out in an attractive PDF for reading online or easy printing for that paper-in-hand thrill. In this week’s edition: Ukraine: Russian emigres, crypto crowdfunding, and China as the big winner. Plus: Nowruz in Los Angeles, and Joan Nathan’s onion-poppy seed flatbread recipe.
Download it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-tab-printable-weekly
→ French President Emmanuel Macron wasn’t kidding when he made economic growth the cornerstone of his recently announced bid for a second term as president. This week, Macron laid out his agenda with plans to nationalize the electric utility in France (the French government already owns an 84% stake in the primary provider). Along with taking over the nation’s energy supplier, Macron said he’d build a series of new atomic plants that, along with the construction of new renewable energy infrastructure, would allow France to be carbon neutral by 2050. With a recession on the horizon and grave energy vulnerabilities tied to Russia’s political woes, Macron’s push for big economic projects and energy independence will resonate with many voters. “We will have to be able to produce up to 60% more electricity than we do today,” Macron said this week. “We will continue to develop industrial employment and investments so that these strong choices for offshore wind power are accompanied by job creation everywhere.” The first round of voting for the French election will take place in three weeks.
→ Patrol units at the U.S. border are preparing for what U.S. intelligence officials anticipate could be a “mass migration event” once a Trump administration policy that continued under President Biden expires, with perhaps as many as 170,000 migrants about to come over the southern border, according to a new Axios report. The temporary policy has allowed border officials to quickly deport migrants without hearing asylum claims, which under the Biden administration has been used extensively, with an all-time high of 1.7 million migrants arrested last year by border agents. In an email this week, the Department of Homeland Security Deputy Secretary John Tien requested employees to “consider stepping forward” to join the DHS Volunteer Force that handles data entry and supports the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. With the spring weather warming and the policy about to expire, the DHS estimates that Mexican shelters close to the border now hold as many as 25,000 migrants waiting to approach the border—which, along with the tens of thousands of other migrants anticipated to join them, has led the DHS to form the Southwest Border Mass Irregular Migration Contingency Plan, a multi-agency effort that could tap the Department of Defense, U.S. marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons to shelter and provide medical, housing, and legal assistance to the potentially unprecedented flood of migrants at the border.
Before the Siren’s Wail: Vignettes from Central Ukraine
This article is written by my father, Efim Marmer, a distinguished Ukrainian journalist, who lives and writes in Kropyvnytskyi, a town in central Ukraine, where I grew up. Before the war, when I’d come for a visit, it would take me five hours to get to Kropyvnytskyi from Kyiv airport, and I’d curse my fate every time. Today, I am grateful for the town’s remoteness, tactical irrelevance, and therefore its relative quiet, save for a few recent attacks on the military airport in the city’s outskirts. And yet the sirens wail nearly every night, alerting people of passing warplanes, forcing all into shelters; thousands of refugees pour in, some passing through, others staying; roads are blocked, and the stores are gradually emptying out. This piece is a wartime reflection, a diaristic glimpse into the lives of those Ukrainians, who, like my parents, are out of the immediate line of fire yet are immersed in the war. — Jake Marmer
Not too long ago, we would get irritated by the nightly ruckus of garbage trucks—even complained to the city mayor about it!—and now, their noise brings us nothing but joy. The sounds of the siren, however, turn one’s soul inside out. Especially when they go off at night, for prolonged stretches of time.
This week, an alert like that lasted for more than five hours. Some stopped thinking about the dangers, even. The only question they had was, Why is it going off for so long? Is it true that it’s broken? No, it’s not broken. It took a break for a bit, and now it’s back to its business.
While the siren wails, you can’t even watch TV—all you see is war, anyway. Day after day. And horrifying footage of Kharkiv and Mariupol, Bucha and Borodyanka. Can’t focus on the phone for five hours straight, either. All you see there is promises: Biden, Macron, Bennett. And the string of motivational clips and addresses from President Zelensky. And, of course, the backbiting of our own folk—can’t do without it. Most of the time, it’s the bots barking at each other—ours, Russian? Instead of names, idiotic nicknames; instead of photographs, cheery images. Also, on the phone, is the PPL triumvirate: Putin, Peskov and Lavrov. Where, where do such assholes come from?
The brain can’t handle the endless repetitions, and you turn everything off, but sleep doesn’t come. You start turning your head from side to side, and there is no choice but to let your mind roam and contemplate.
What is that man thinking in his cold, nearly empty shelter as he clutches to himself two dogs swaddled in blankets? Is he thinking about his family, who are now very far away but in safety? Or about when all this is going to end? And what about a woman, tired from walking up and down the stairs from her seventh-floor apartment and into basement shelter? She spread the mattress in her hallway, between the two walls that seem most sturdy, hoping to keep herself safe. Don’t want to disappoint her, but even she herself knows …
Every day, buses leave Kropyvnytskyi and head westward. Mostly women and children. People say their goodbyes, promising each other a reunion on their own land, under their own roof, but the eyes are filled with sadness. Is this forever? Of course, not! You will certainly come back to our town. We’ll meet again. But no, not everyone will come back—it is all, as they say, God’s will.
Read the rest of this Weekend Read by Efim Marmer (translated by his son, Jake Marmer), here:
Excellent writing, insightful and useful.