What Happened Today: January 13, 2022
Biden's Omicron struggles; U.K. population dwindles; How Unilever lost the plot
The Big Story
Americans are running out of places to look for a confident response to the coronavirus pandemic after President Biden’s chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, told Congress on Tuesday that vaccines are no match against the Omicron variant. “With its extraordinary, unprecedented degree of efficiency of transmissibility, [Omicron] will ultimately find just about everybody,” he said, though the vaccinated who get infected will at least “do reasonably well in the sense of not having hospitalization and death.” Though the blunt truth from America’s Doctor was refreshing to hear, it didn’t make the medicine go down any easier for so many who’ve made sacrifices under the decree of Fauci and other public health officials to now be told it might have been for naught. President Biden tried to assuage a nation at its wit’s end this morning with his new campaign to temper Omicron: a promise to provide masks and a billion COVID-19 tests to Americans, doubling the previous allotment of tests announced in December.
During the White House event, President Biden was light on the details about the mask distribution timeline or when those tests would be available, how people would get them, and what use masks and a billion tests would be at this point if everyone is going to get the virus anyway. Though he did mention a website. “We’re on track to roll out a website next week where you can order free tests shipped to your home,” Biden said. Vice President Harris was also attempting to project an air of confidence in front of the camera this morning, though it didn’t go well during her interview on the Today show. Asked by host Craig Melvin if the administration should reconsider its pandemic response strategy, Harris brushed off the suggestion: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day. Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/us/politics/covid-tests-biden.html
Today's Back Pages: How Unilever Lost the Plot
The Rest
→ Prime Minister Boris Johnson is facing intense political pressure to resign as he struggles to squash the scandal that’s arisen from reports of his attendance at a Downing Street party last year while the rest of his country was under tight lockdown. In an apology yesterday, Johnson made his first public acknowledgement of attending the holiday drinking event and the public’s growing animus toward him. “I know the rage they feel with me and with the government I lead when they think in Downing Street itself the rules are not being properly followed by the people who make the rules,” he said, though the sincerity of his remarks was quickly called into question when The Times reported that after his speech, he allegedly told colleagues, “Sometimes we take the credit for things we don’t deserve, and this time we’re taking hits for something we don’t deserve.” According to the BBC, the unrest has become the pretense for dozens of parliament members calling upon Johnson to step down, a sentiment echoed by 60% of those asked in a YouGov poll taken before Johnson’s apology.
Read more: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/contrite-boris-johnson-doesnt-believe-he-did-anything-wrong-say-tories-zxxgf6pt3
→ Apropos of nothing, really:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
→ While Omicron has Fauci throwing his hands in the air, the United States’ remote workers are putting their foot down on going back into the office. According to a new Morning Consult survey, some 55% of remote workers said they’d quit their position if their employers asked them to return to the office before they believed the office was a safe place to work. Not that offices are exactly teeming with staff on-site at the moment. A recent report from Kastle Systems found that after 40% of the workers in the United State’s 10 largest business districts were in offices at the beginning of December 2021, that tally has plummeted by more than half, with less than 18% now in the office. An enduring trend throughout the pandemic, the large percentage of workers going and staying remote is in part coming from corporate leadership as tech and banking workplaces like Facebook and Wells Fargo continue to push back timelines that require staff to return to the office.
→ Banks are cutting their overdraft fees, even if those fees are a steady source of revenue. After Bank of America racked up a cool $1.1 billion in 2020 on overdraft charges, it announced Tuesday that it would reduce the $35 fee to $10, just as other financial institutions like JP Morgan and Wells Fargo continue the trend to lower or do away with their fees altogether. Long considered a predatory tactic by critics, overdraft fees are twice as likely to affect Black households as white households, according to an analysis by the Financial Health Network.
→ A 58-year-old intelligence officer in the Bashar al-Assad Syrian regime was found guilty on 27 of 58 counts of rape, murder, torture, and sexual assault and sentenced to life in prison by a German court today. Pleading not guilty to all his charges of crimes against humanity, Anwar Raslan was brought to court under German’s universal jurisdiction laws for the landmark verdict, which was the first conviction for government torture during the Syrian civil war. Next week sees the start of a similar trial, in which a Syrian doctor will face charges of crimes against humanity for the torture and murder of victims at a military hospital during the conflict.
→ Scroll readers will recall that CD sales were up last year for the first time in two decades, and it looks as if that same enthusiasm has carried over to more physical media. According to BookScan, a publishing industry sales tracker, 2021 saw book purchases up almost 9% from the year prior, though it wasn’t new titles and debut authors driving that uptick. Some 68% of print titles sold came from books that were released at least before last year, with readers flocking to the classics and to writers with established followings. Audiences are sticking with what they know in podcasts as well: Each of the 10 most popular podcasts as of last month have been broadcasting for an average of seven years. Part of the difficulty for new podcasts is to set themselves apart when so many podcasts continue to flood the market. After hosting just a few hundred thousand titles in 2019, Spotify now offers some 3 million podcasts on its platform.
→ Estimates for population growth in the United Kingdom have been scaled down after the Office for National Statistics recently found that low birth rates and declining life expectancy reversed the long-standing projection that the United Kingdom would maintain “natural” population growth, or more people being born than dying, through at least 2040. With women waiting until they’re older to have children, and families staying small on average, researchers now believe that millions fewer people will be living in the United Kingdom over the next several decades, with the great increase in population coming from immigration.
→ With President Macron’s ability to win reelection in doubt in the upcoming election in France, and the rapid rise of far-right candidate Eric Zemmour, questions abound about the nation’s future. Zemmour has been a controversial and vocal critic of the country’s growing Islamic population, the establishment political order, and the journalists he sees as the French elite’s handmaidens—“priests who have lost their monopoly over the interpretation … of the world,” he said recently. Though Zemmour is still lagging far behind Macron in the polls, with some 13% of the vote, his explosion on the political scene has touched a nerve in France. In an interview this week, prominent French philosopher Marcel Gauchet attributed Zemmour’s newfound political popularity to his willingness to force the country to confront what it wants to become. “He has caused a truth about the French situation to suddenly emerge, a truth which the other candidates have set aside,” Gauchet said. “He has brought to light the uncertainty about French identity.”
Read more: https://www.europe1.fr/politique/presidentielle-eric-zemmour-est-un-phenomene-majeur-analyse-marcel-gauchet-4087372
And here:
How Unilever Lost the Plot
Last year, Alan Jope, the chief executive of Unilever, which makes Dove soap, Hellmann’s mayonnaise, and dozens of other products as one of the biggest consumer goods companies in the world, staked out a definitive agenda “to prove incontrovertibly that sustainable business does drive superior financial performance.” The problem, though, is that sustainability is a term of art, and it can be deployed to obfuscate a company’s poor performance. Compared to its peers over the past year, Unilever has had a tough go, with its stock dropping 9% while corporations like Nestle and Procter & Gamble have enjoyed terrific growth.
This week, one of Unilever’s biggest shareholders, Terry Smith, penned a scathing critique of Jope in his annual letter to the investors of his $39 billion Fundsmith Equity Fund. In reference to Jope’s argument that Unilever’s widely known mayo brand has a clear-cut, eco-friendly proposition for consumers—“Fighting against food waste—that is the purpose of Hellmann’s,” Jope said last year—Smith told his investors Jope was wildly incorrect:
A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot. The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913, so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose (spoiler alert: salads and sandwiches).
Jope’s model of sustainable stewardship is part of a new movement across the corporate sphere. The rise of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) priorities in the C-suite has been one response to increased calls for company leaders to go above and beyond rapacious profit-making and fiduciary responsibility to shareholders in the name of being good fellow citizens to the workers and the physical environments in which their products and services are rendered. That’s all well and good, and any effort to reduce waste and improve quality of life for employees and those living near factories and production sites should be truly championed.
Yet the ESG movement has had its fair share of critics like Terry Smith, who point out that executives can say whatever they want about their company’s new purpose, or how the mayo will help solve climate change, without it leading to either improved environmental conditions or, in Unilever’s case, corporate performance.
In his letter, Smith noted the entanglement by Unilever’s management in their subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s embarrassing, illogical, and counterproductive boycott of distributing ice cream in the West Bank, but that was just a piece within the overall bungling of the company’s affairs. Indeed, the consumer goods giant “seems to be labouring under the weight of a management which is obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business.”
That Smith’s letter has found something of an audience this week outside of financial circles speaks to a growing agitation with leaders of all stripes—political, corporate, and cultural—who advocate their sterling intentions but whose actual performance continually fails expectations. From Jope’s shareholders to the elected officials drinking at parties during lockdown or making promises of masks two years into the pandemic, there’s no shortage of justification for resentment.
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