Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

#Sidney's Picks: The Best of the Week's News

  • Last week, Sasha Chavkin of the New York World broke the news that the public B110 bus line in Brooklyn was sending women to the back of the bus to accomodate the religious sensibilities of the local Hasidic community. On Tuesday, Chavkin reported that the private company that runs the B110 had promised to end sex segregation.
  • Ever wonder what happened to those scoundrels who nearly broke the capitalist system? No, not Occupy Wall Street, the bankers. Braden Goyette of ProPublica has an informative cheat sheet to bring you up to speed. 
  • Speaking of sleazy bankers, the updated edition of Ed Vulliamy’s 2011 book Amexica: War Along the Borderline is going on Sidney’s reading list. Vulliamy tells Democracy Now! how the Wachovia bank allegedly helped launder tens of millions of dollars for the Sinaloa drug cartel.
  • Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren tells Luke Johnson of the Huffington Post that she not only supports the aims of Occupy Wall Street, she laid much of the intellectual foundation for the movement. This is true. As a Harvard professor, Warren did pathbreaking research on consumer debt and middle class bankruptcy. That line is also an interesting piece of political self-presentation. The Occupy Movement is understandably wary of politicians trying to coopt their movement. But if Warren can sell herself as one of the original intellectual architects of the movement, she may create space to court the Occupy activists without seeming to coopt them.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Firedoglake Book Salon with Will Bunch and Lindsay Beyerstein, Thursday at 2:30 Eastern

At 2:30 Eastern, I’ll be hosting Pulitzer Prize-winner reporter and blogger Will Bunch at the Firedoglake Book Salon. We’ll be discussing Bunch’s new book, “The Battle for the Brooklyn Bridge.” Bunch tells the story of the mass arrest of Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, an event which would prove to be a galvanizing moment for the Occupy movement.

Click here to join us from 2:30-4:00 Eastern. Bring questions.

[Photo credit: Adrian Kinloch, Creative Commons.]

 

Letter from Mississippi: Inside the Egg-as-Person Movement

Mississippi is poised to vote on a ballot initiative that would redefine fertilized eggs as human beings. Amazingly, both the Democratic and Republican gubernatorial candidates have endorsed this proposal.

Irin Carmon of Salon travelled to Mississippi to interview the leaders of the local Personhood movement. Officially, the impetus for redefining fertilized eggs as people is to ban all abortion prior to overturning Roe and, ultimately, to lay the groundwork to challenge Roe itself. As Carmon discovered, that’s only part of the agenda:

[T]he Personhood movement hopes to do nothing less than reclassify everyday, routine birth control as abortion. The medical definition of pregnancy is when a fertilized egg successfully implants in the uterine wall. If this initiative passes, and fertilized eggs on their own have full legal rights, anything that could potentially block that implantation – something a woman’s body does naturally all the time – could be considered murder. Scientists say hormonal birth-control pills and the morning-after pill work primarily by preventing fertilization in the first place, but the outside possibility, never documented, that an egg could be fertilized anyway and blocked is enough for some pro-lifers.

Indeed, at least one pro-Personhood doctor in Mississippi, Beverly McMillan, refused to prescribe the pill before retiring last year, writing, “I painfully agree that birth control pills do in fact cause abortions.” Bush does prescribe the pill, but says, “There’s good science on both sides … I think there’s more science to support conception not occurring.” Given that the Personhood Amendment is so vague, I asked her, what would stop the alleged “good science” on one side from prevailing and banning even the pill?

Bush paused. “I could say that is not the intent,” she said. “I don’t have an answer for that particular [case], how it would be settled, but I do know this is simple.” Which part is simple? “The amendment is simple,” she said. “You can play the ‘what if’ game, but if you keep it simple, this is a person who deserves life.” What about the IUD, which she refuses to prescribe for moral reasons, and which McMillan told me the Personhood Amendment would ban? “I’m not the authority on what would and would not be banned.” No – Bush simply plays one on TV. And if her amendment passes, only condoms, diaphragms and natural family planning — the rhythm method – would be guaranteed in Mississippi.

The proponents of ovum personhood in Mississippi come off as profoundly disingenuous and/or hopelessly off-message. A cynical reader might conclude that even they aren’t serious about this egg-as-person rhetoric. Are they really prepared to call for the death penalty for women who use IUDs? Because by their logic, those women are serial killers. It seems like this “egg as person” talk is just a pretext to restrict the rights of women.

[Photo credit: Sir Chalky, Creative Commons.]

Extra! Extra! Newspaper Execs Reap Huge Bonuses for Lackluster Performance

Why not occupy the newsrooms?” asks media columnist David Carr of the New York Times. Carr notes that, like Wall Street financiers, newspaper executives are reaping massive bonuses for lackluster performance:

[…] Craig A. Dubow resigned as Gannett’s chief executive. His short six-year tenure was, by most accounts, a disaster. Gannett’s stock price declined to about $10 a share from a high of $75 the day after he took over; the number of employees at Gannett plummeted to 32,000 from about 52,000, resulting in a remarkable diminution in journalistic boots on the ground at the 82 newspapers the company owns.

Never a standout in journalism performance, the company strip-mined its newspapers in search of earnings, leaving many communities with far less original, serious reporting.

Given that legacy, it was about time Mr. Dubow was shown the door, right? Not in the current world we live in. Not only did Mr. Dubow retire under his own power because of health reasons, he got a mash note from Marjorie Magner, a member of Gannett’s board, who said without irony that “Craig championed our consumers and their ever-changing needs for news and information.”

But the board gave him far more than undeserved plaudits. Mr. Dubow walked out the door with just under $37.1 million in retirement, health and disability benefits. That comes on top of a combined $16 million in salary and bonuses in the last two years. [NYT]

Lest you think this is an isolated aberration, Carr points out that the Tribune Company is paying out up to $115 million in bonuses as part of a deal to exit bankruptcy. “The Tribune story includes overleveraged purchases, feckless management and a culture of personal enrichment, all hallmarks of the Wall Street way that have left protesters enraged,” Carr writes.

Gannett and Tribune executives tried to make newspapers profitable by slashing news budgets and payrolls. They sacrificed journalistic quality without restoring profitability. They have reaped bonuses for doing so.

Carr argues that the optics of these deals is bad management piled on injustice:

Newspapers are asking their employees for shared sacrifice and their digital readers to begin paying. So, lucrative packages won’t cut it. As newspapers all over the country struggle to divine the meaning of the Occupy protests, some of the companies that own them might want to listen closely to see if there is a message there meant for them.

Clearly, reporters are part of the 99%.

[Photo credit: wili_hybrid, Creative Commons.]

WaPo Ombudsman: The Truth Unfair to the Koch Brothers

The Ombudsman of the Washington Post, Patrick B. Pexton says that his paper should not have republished the Bloomberg Markets magazine expose of Koch Industries:

The story was about illegal or questionable business practices by Koch subsidiaries dating back to the 1990s and earlier. The Post story, shortened from the original, describes Koch company activities that include bribing foreign officials in Africa, the Middle East and India to get contracts; selling petrochemical equipment to Iran (legal at the time); being found liable for a pipeline explosion that killed two teenagers in Texas; falsifying records about the amount of oil pumped from federal and Indian lands; and misreporting the amount of benzene emissions at a refinery.

It all looks pretty bad, and it is, on many levels. Koch companies paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and settlements to resolve these cases, no small change.

But I think The Post erred in republishing this story, or at least in the way it did. And when the Kochs complained to The Post after publication, The Post’s response wasn’t handled well.

Pexton concedes that Koch Industries bribed officials, traded with Iran; neglected a pipeline so badly that it exploded and killed two teens; falsified records to steal oil from the U.S. Treasury and Indian tribes, and pumped vast qualities of untreated benzene into the air and lied about it.

Pexton admits it all looks “pretty bad.” He goes on to say that, as far as he can tell, it’s all true:

Now, I couldn’t find any outright falsehoods in the story that would warrant corrections. Bloomberg, too, has published no corrections. But I think the story lacked context, was tendentious and was unfair in not reporting some of the exculpatory and contextual information Koch provided to Bloomberg.

His main objection is that the reporters didn’t remind readers that Koch Industries isn’t the only flagrant law-breaking corporation out there, not by a long shot:

As Indiviglio and Rubin wrote, lots of companies have foreign subsidiaries that until recently did business with Iran, including GE, Hewlett-Packard and Caterpillar. Many multinational companies have been investigated and prosecuted for violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and been fined and prosecuted for violating clean water and clean air laws.

Are the Kochs worse, better or in the middle? We can’t tell from this story.

For Pexton, adequate context requires a precise accounting of where Koch Industries stands in the grand scale of corporate wrongdoing. That’s an ambitious project. We can’t know for sure how bad Koch Industries is until we’ve looked at all the other companies.

As the original story notes, the Kochs have been champions for the rights of all corporations to bribe, steal, pollute, and endanger innocent people. For all we know, some firms have imitated, or even surpassed the masters.

The ombudsman of the Washington Post is calling for a forensic audit of the capitalist system. Talk about burying the lede.

The Post should immediately allocate all necessary resources to conduct a complete audit of corporate malfeasance, in the interest of providing full context. The Ombudsman has spoken: The Koch Brothers deserve it! 

[Photo credit: AMagill, Creative Commons.]

#Sidney's Picks: The Best of the Week's News

  • On Tuesday, Sasha Chavkin of the New York World (a publication of the Columbia Journalism School) reported that women in Brooklyn were being forced to sit at the back of the B110 bus, a public bus route operated by a private company between Williamsburg and Borough Park. The New York Times picked up the story and, disappointingly, framed it as a clash of religious and women’s rights because the bus bends the rules to accomodate the religious sensibilities of local Hasidic Jews. In fact, there are no religious rights at stake here. As Mayor Bloomberg said in a news conference, sex discrimination is “obviously not permitted” on public transit. BeckySharper of the Persuit of Harpyness puts the conflict in context with an informative post on the status of women in Hasidic Brooklyn.
  • UK Labor MP Tom Watson will travel to a NewsCorp shareholders meeting in Los Angeles to reveal previously unreported allegations about the company’s illegal surveillance program, Ed Pilkington and Dan Sabbagh report in the Guardian. Watson is a member of the House of Commons committee that investigated NewsCorp. He has the right to address the meeting because he is serving as a proxy for the AFL-CIO. [HT: Boing Boing]
  • U.S. Tom Watson, our friend and digital consultant, has some thoughts on Occupy Wall Street as a start-up. So far, the Zuccotti Park protesters have done incredibly well at drawing a crowd and spreading their message and their model across the country and the world. Now, everyone wants to tell them what to do: Issue demands, work for Democratic candidates, join organized labor. Tom, who knows a thing or two about tech ventures from his days as a journalist on the start-up beat, disagrees with the conventional wisdom: “But all this [advice] sounds exactly like the early days of Twitter to me. Do this, be that, fit into our idea of what you should be. And this is where Fred Wilson’s longstanding advice to Internet entrepreneurs is instructive: time and again, he’s urged startups to focus on building usership and serving customers. The revenue model will be there, if you do those things right.”
  • Risa L. Goluboff and Dahlia Lithwick explain why the GOP is fighting a bogus crusade on non-existent voter fraud. The short answer? Twenty-five percent of African Americans lack government-issued photo ID, vs. 12% of Americans at large. Voter ID laws surgically disenfranchise a core Democratic constituency.

Suggest a story for next week’s #Sidney’s Picks by tweeting #Sidney to @hillmanfoundation.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

Ken Auletta on Jill Abramson in "The New Yorker"

The best part of Ken Auletta’s long New Yorker profile of Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times, comes in the final paragraph:

To celebrate her return to the city, in 2003, Abramson got a small tattoo on her right shoulder that replicates an old subway token. It was intended, she says, as a tribute to the subway system, which she rides and which she associates with her home town, and as a declaration that she had “come back to New York, likely for good.” The slogan on the coin, she said, was also meant as a reflection of her philosophy that life is not a dress rehearsal for anything: “Good for one fare.”

Unfortunately, the rest of the profile is an extended rumination on whether Abramson is a bitch. Auletta is obsessed with this question. The piece is a littany of people Jill Abramson did or didn’t fight with over the course of her distinguished career. Steven Brill: only that one time; Howell Raines: oh, yes; Bill Keller: no; Dean Baquet: no.

In the very first paragraph we’re told that Abramson was “nervous” on her first day as executive editor because “many in the newsroom feared her.” Auletta takes it for granted that this is a bad thing.

In fairness, Abramson seems determined to cast herself as a repentant overbearing boss determined to mend her ways. The piece hints that this might be a strategic decision. We’re given the strong impression that Howell Raines’ imperious personality shortened his tenure as executive editor and that Abramson knows it.

Oddly, for a piece that’s explicitly about gender and power, Auletta gives scant consideration to the possibility that Abramson is being judged unfairly because she’s an assertive woman. He sets the stage by rattling off some anecdotes and statistics about the Times’ male-dominated history, but that’s about it.

The piece weighs two theories of Abramson’s psychology: incorrigible bitch and unintentional bitch capable of reform. An anonymous senior editor is quoted as saying, “Unlike Howell, she is not mean. Jill is a nice, caring person. … She doesn’t enjoy torturing people. So much of her negativity is unintended.” Abramson remarks that her children often perceived her as yelling at them, even when she wasn’t.

Auletta remarks on Abramson’s “schoolteacherlike” manner of speech and her “cackle of a laugh.” He gets a lot of people to say that Abramson was mean at meetings, but he doesn’t get around to describing what she actually said. “Abramson interrupted, without allowing them to finish the presentation, and began belittling many of their ideas,” he writes in one representative passage, adding that “even her supporters were mildly critical of her behavior” that day.

Auletta portrays Abramson’s decision to write a dog training memoir, “The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout,” as an unfathomable feminine quirk, one that Abramson herself is somewhat self-conscious about. “Say what you will about the grayer days of the Times in mid-century, but it was always hard to imagine James Reston writing a book about a beloved household pet,” he writes. It doesn’t seem to occur to him writing a book about nurturing a puppy might be a strategy to soften her image.

The piece is so focused on Abramson’s interpersonal style that it glosses over much more interesting and substantial themes, themes that Auletta identifies as important and then abandons to go back to talking about Abramson’s voice. Auletta reports that Arthur Sulzberger hired Abramson for the top job in large part because he wanted an editor who understood “the move from search to social and what that means for us.” According to Sulzberger, “Increasingly, people are learning where they want to go, what they want to consume, how they want to engage with news or games or a variety of different things from each other.” Yet, Auletta barely touches on Abramson’s new media strategy.

We’re told that Abramson’s background as an investigative reporter has informed her approach to editing the paper. She wants the paper to “get to the bottom of things” whereas Bill Keller, a former foreign correspondent, was more interested in “explaining things” (meaning, roughly, describing events as they unfolded). That’s pretty much all we learn about a purportedly profound philosophical shift at the national newspaper of record.

Imagine you’re pitching a magazine profile. Your angle is that the executive editor of the New York Times can be brusque, abrupt, and intimidating. That’s a dog bites man story, unless of course the executive editor is a woman.

[Photo credit: “Abramson to Replace Keller as The Times’s Executive Editor,” John Niedermeyer, Creative Commons.]

 

Small Liberal Think Tank, 1; Right Wing Huckster James O'Keefe, 0

Right wing media huckster James O’Keefe tried and failed to entrap the Economic Policy Institute, a small but distinguished liberal think tank, Sam Stein reports in the Huffington Post:

Last week, both [EPI’s President Lawrence] Mishel and Amy Hanauer, the founding executive director of the group Policy Matters Ohio, received cryptic phone calls from a person identifying himself as Luke Fowler. Fowler explained that he worked as a researcher for a hedge fund manager named Peter Harman who was interested in funding a study showing that cuts to education and collective bargaining rights would hurt students. Harman, Fowler added, was associated with the Ohio Education Association, a union that represents some 130,000 teachers and faculty members.

The implication was clear. If Mishel could produce the data, he would get the money. “He wanted me to do something to show that spending cuts were going to hurt children in schools,” Mishel said. “I told him, you know, you can’t buy results.”

The last time O’Keefe was in the news, it was for falsely claiming to have entrapped National Public Radio officials in a money-for-coverage sting. In fact, O’Keefe released heavily edited video that made it appear that NPR execs were agreeing to slant coverage for donations when the unedited footage showed that they were refusing to do so.

Hat tips to Laura Clawson of DKos and Dave Dayen of Firedoglake.

[Photo credit: Center for American Progress, Creative Commons.]

National Labor Relations Board May Lose Quorum in 2012

The National Labor Relations Board could once again be paralyzed by lack of quorum, Nick Jones reports in Labor Notes:

NLRB Chair Wilma Liebman stepped down August 28 after 14 years on the board, leaving only three of five seats filled, all by Obama appointees. The board must have at least three members to issue decisions, following a Supreme Court decision last year.

So conservative activists are calling for Obama’s one Republican appointee, Brian Hayes, to resign in order to cripple the board.

It’s a bit of a stretch to call these activists “conservative” when they are openly calling on an NLRB member to step down in order to cripple the very organization he swore to serve. South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said last month she would support Hayes’ resignation or “anything that would disband the NLRB.”

Jones explains that the quorum conundrum won’t go away, even if Hayes stays on: 

It is unclear whether Hayes will do so, but in any case the term of Craig Becker, a former attorney for the AFL-CIO and SEIU, expires at the end of this year. The Senate is unlikely to approve any new nomination from Obama, and maneuvering by House Republicans could prevent him from making a recess appointment. (Since President Reagan, appointments made while the Senate is in recess have become a common way that presidents have installed their picks at the NLRB.)

Even without quorum the boad could still oversee unionization elections and investigate allegations of unfair labor practices, but it would not be allowed to rule on cases. So, employers would have no incentive to settle disputes rather than face the board.

[Photo credit: justmakeit, Creative Commons.]

How Hershey Milked a Venerable Cultural Exchange Program for Cheap Labor

Remember those cultural exchange students who paid up to $6000 for a summer job and an educational experience in the United States and found themselves heaving 60-pound boxes of chocolate on the night shift at a Hershey factory in Pennsylvania?

Julia Preston has a front-page story in the New York Times explaining how Hershey and the private contractor overseeing the exchange abused a successful 50-year-old State Department program.

The students found themselves overworked, isolated, and unable to live on their meager wages. Like many guest workers they found their paychecks docked for a myriad of “expenses” without explanation. The students tried to complain to the private contractor who oversaw the program for the State Department, the Council for Educational Travel, USA, but they were told that they would be sent home if they complained. The students finally got the State Department’s attention by going on strike.

The students were J-1 visa holders. The J-1 visa is supposed to be an opportunity for university students to experience life in the U.S. at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer. The applicants work for up to four months and travel for a month. The program has grown rapidly, 130,000 students participated in 2008, up from just 30,000 in 1998. Because this is a cultural exchange program, the students’ working conditions are not subject to the usual level of oversight.

[Photo credit: wuperruper, Creative Commons.]

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