Friday, February 24, 2017
The Anatomy of Charisma
For weeks I had been researching what science has to say about the power of charisma. Why do some people so clearly have it and others don’t? Why do we fall so easily under its influence? Charismatics can make us feel charmed and great about ourselves. They can inspire us to excel. But they can also be dangerous. They use charisma for their own purposes, to enhance their power, to manipulate others.
Scientists have plenty to say about charisma. Individuals with charisma tap our unfettered emotions and can shut down our rational minds. They hypnotize us. But studies show charisma is not just something a person alone possesses. It’s created by our own perceptions, particularly when we are feeling vulnerable in politically tense times. I’m going to tell you about these studies and spotlight the opinions of the neuroscientists, psychologists, and sociologists who conducted them.
But first I want to tell you about a magnetic preacher who spent decades wowing audiences in churches across America with the holy words of Jesus. Then he lost his faith and now preaches about how to live happily without God. What scientists study about charisma, Bart Campolo lives.
I first read about the newly non-believing Campolo in The New York Times Magazine last December. “An extreme extrovert, he was brilliant before a crowd and also at ease in private conversations, connecting with everyone from country-club suburbanites to the destitute souls he often fed in his own house,” wrote Mark Oppenheimer. Campolo’s father is Tony Campolo, one of America’s superstar evangelists for the past 50 years, who counseled Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and today continues to mobilize people into a movement for Jesus’ messages of love and redemption.
Who would know more about the power of charisma to both charm and deceive than a preacher’s son gone rogue? Campolo, 53, who today volunteers counseling young people as a “humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California, didn’t disappoint. He was wonderfully frank and engaging, energetic and insightful, just like a, well, evangelical preacher.
The early 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber wrote charisma is a quality that sets an individual “apart from ordinary men,” and causes others to treat him as “endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Such qualities, Weber wrote, “are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”
Campolo had long believed that was true. “I was convinced charisma flowed directly from God,” he told me. “It was a gift.” As he began to lose his faith, he said, “I passed through every stage of apostasy on my way to heresy, I slowly left my ability to believe in all this stuff.” He began to preach that charisma may be something you’re born with, but it wasn’t supernatural; you could employ it at will. “You can use it to get women in bed, you can use it to win people down the aisle for Jesus, or you can use it to sell insurance,” Campolo said. What’s more, it was a quality that could, at least in part, be learned and perfected.
That was precisely what John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior, and the director of the doctoral program in management at the University of Lausanne who has spent years studying charismatic speakers, told me. “Charismatic techniques can be taught,” he said. Antonakis has identified a series of what he calls Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs), which range from the use of metaphors and storytelling to nonverbal methods of communication like open posture and animated, representative gestures at key moments. When taken together, he has shown, they have helped decide eight of the last 10 presidential elections. “The more charismatic leadership tactics used, the more individuals will be seen as leader-like by others,” he said. (Read here how Antonakis breaks down the CLTs of super-popular TV preacher Joel Osteen.)
Tony Campolo had mastered all the tactics. In the 1970s and ’80s, Bart Campolo and his father traversed the country in a beat-up, sky-blue Dodge Coronet, giving sermons wherever they could. Campolo marveled at his father in action. “My dad was one of the most charismatic people in the world,” Campolo said. “I’ve been around black preachers and people like my dad, who can go up and down the spectrum, do the whisper that you can’t help but listen to, tell the joke, then tell the tear-jerking story, and then the fiery fulmination. He can do it all over the map.”
Scientists have plenty to say about charisma. Individuals with charisma tap our unfettered emotions and can shut down our rational minds. They hypnotize us. But studies show charisma is not just something a person alone possesses. It’s created by our own perceptions, particularly when we are feeling vulnerable in politically tense times. I’m going to tell you about these studies and spotlight the opinions of the neuroscientists, psychologists, and sociologists who conducted them.
But first I want to tell you about a magnetic preacher who spent decades wowing audiences in churches across America with the holy words of Jesus. Then he lost his faith and now preaches about how to live happily without God. What scientists study about charisma, Bart Campolo lives.I first read about the newly non-believing Campolo in The New York Times Magazine last December. “An extreme extrovert, he was brilliant before a crowd and also at ease in private conversations, connecting with everyone from country-club suburbanites to the destitute souls he often fed in his own house,” wrote Mark Oppenheimer. Campolo’s father is Tony Campolo, one of America’s superstar evangelists for the past 50 years, who counseled Bill Clinton through the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and today continues to mobilize people into a movement for Jesus’ messages of love and redemption.
Who would know more about the power of charisma to both charm and deceive than a preacher’s son gone rogue? Campolo, 53, who today volunteers counseling young people as a “humanist chaplain” at the University of Southern California, didn’t disappoint. He was wonderfully frank and engaging, energetic and insightful, just like a, well, evangelical preacher.
The early 20th-century German sociologist Max Weber wrote charisma is a quality that sets an individual “apart from ordinary men,” and causes others to treat him as “endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Such qualities, Weber wrote, “are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”
Campolo had long believed that was true. “I was convinced charisma flowed directly from God,” he told me. “It was a gift.” As he began to lose his faith, he said, “I passed through every stage of apostasy on my way to heresy, I slowly left my ability to believe in all this stuff.” He began to preach that charisma may be something you’re born with, but it wasn’t supernatural; you could employ it at will. “You can use it to get women in bed, you can use it to win people down the aisle for Jesus, or you can use it to sell insurance,” Campolo said. What’s more, it was a quality that could, at least in part, be learned and perfected.
That was precisely what John Antonakis, a professor of organizational behavior, and the director of the doctoral program in management at the University of Lausanne who has spent years studying charismatic speakers, told me. “Charismatic techniques can be taught,” he said. Antonakis has identified a series of what he calls Charismatic Leadership Tactics (CLTs), which range from the use of metaphors and storytelling to nonverbal methods of communication like open posture and animated, representative gestures at key moments. When taken together, he has shown, they have helped decide eight of the last 10 presidential elections. “The more charismatic leadership tactics used, the more individuals will be seen as leader-like by others,” he said. (Read here how Antonakis breaks down the CLTs of super-popular TV preacher Joel Osteen.)
Tony Campolo had mastered all the tactics. In the 1970s and ’80s, Bart Campolo and his father traversed the country in a beat-up, sky-blue Dodge Coronet, giving sermons wherever they could. Campolo marveled at his father in action. “My dad was one of the most charismatic people in the world,” Campolo said. “I’ve been around black preachers and people like my dad, who can go up and down the spectrum, do the whisper that you can’t help but listen to, tell the joke, then tell the tear-jerking story, and then the fiery fulmination. He can do it all over the map.”
by Adam Piore, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, February 23, 2017
Politics 101
White House Management 101
Inventing Non-Existent Crises
'They’re Trying to Turn Elizabeth Into a Boogeyman'
Trump Voters Are Not the Enemy
In Venezuela, Short on Food, Short of Hope
The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook
Donald Trump is Dangerous When He's Losing
The Big Idea for America: Think Small
The President of Our Dreams (Russian perspective)
What on Earth Is Going On With the Stock Market?
Inventing Non-Existent Crises
'They’re Trying to Turn Elizabeth Into a Boogeyman'
Trump Voters Are Not the Enemy
In Venezuela, Short on Food, Short of Hope
The Increasingly Unhinged Russia Rhetoric Comes From a Long-Standing U.S. Playbook
Donald Trump is Dangerous When He's Losing
The Big Idea for America: Think Small
The President of Our Dreams (Russian perspective)
What on Earth Is Going On With the Stock Market?
How the Story of “Moana” and Maui Holds Up Against Cultural Truths
I've said it before and I will say it again: the colonization of Pacific Islands is the greatest human adventure story of all time.
People using Stone Age technology built voyaging canoes capable of traveling thousands of miles, then set forth against the winds and currents to find tiny dots of land in the midst of the largest ocean on Earth. And having found them, they traveled back and forth, again and again, to settle them—all this, 500 to 1,000 years ago.
Ever since Captain Cook landed in the Hawaiian Islands and realized that the inhabitants spoke a cognate language to those of the South Pacific islands, scholars and others have researched and theorized about the origins and migrations of the Polynesians.
The Hōkūleʻa voyaging canoe has proved the efficacy of traditional Oceanic navigation since 1976, when it embarked on its historic maiden voyage to recover the lost heritage of this ocean-sailing tradition. The general scholarship on migrations seems well established, and most current researches now seek to understand the timing of the various colonizations.
But one huge mystery, sometimes called “The Long Pause” leaves a gaping hole in the voyaging timeline.
Western Polynesia—the islands closest to Australia and New Guinea—were colonized around 3,500 years ago. But the islands of Central and Eastern Polynesia were not settled until 1,500 to 500 years ago. This means that after arriving in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, Polynesians took a break—for almost 2,000 years—before voyaging forth again.
Then when they did start again, they did so with a vengeance: archaeological evidence suggests that within a century or so after venturing forth, Polynesians discovered and settled nearly every inhabitable island in the central and eastern Pacific.
Nobody knows the reason for The Long Pause, or why the Polynesians started voyaging again.
Several theories have been proposed—from a favorable wind caused by a sustained period of El Niño, to visible supernovas luring the stargazing islanders to travel, to ciguatera poisoning caused by algae blooms.
Enter Moana, the latest Disney movie, set in what appears to be Samoa, even though most American audiences will see it as Hawaii.
Moana—pronounced “moh-AH-nah,” not “MWAH-nah” means “ocean”—and the character is chosen by the sea itself to return the stolen heart of Te Fiti, who turns out to be an island deity (Tahiti, in its various linguistic forms, including Tafiti, is a pan-Polynesian word for any faraway place).
The heart of Te Fiti is a greenstone (New Zealand Maori) amulet stolen by the demigod Maui. An environmental catastrophe spreading across the island makes the mission urgent. And despite admonitions from her father against anyone going beyond the protective reef, Moana steals a canoe and embarks on her quest.
But as should be expected whenever Disney ventures into cross-cultural milieus, the film is characterized by the good, the bad and the ugly.
Moana’s struggle to learn to sail and get past the reef of her home island sets the stage for her learning of true wayfinding. It also shows traces of Armstrong Sperry’s stirring, classic book Call It Courage, and Tom Hanks's Castaway.
But the film's story also has a different angle with a powerful revelation: Moana’s people had stopped voyaging long ago, and had placed a taboo—another Polynesian world—on going beyond the reef.
With the success of Moana’s mission and her having learned the art of wayfinding, her people start voyaging again.
And so the Long Pause comes to an end, Disney style, with a great fleet of canoes setting forth across the ocean to accomplish the greatest human adventure of all time. I admit to being moved by this scene.
As someone who lectures on traditional oceanic navigation and migration, I can say resoundingly that it is high time the rest of the world learned this amazing story.
But then there is much to criticize.
People using Stone Age technology built voyaging canoes capable of traveling thousands of miles, then set forth against the winds and currents to find tiny dots of land in the midst of the largest ocean on Earth. And having found them, they traveled back and forth, again and again, to settle them—all this, 500 to 1,000 years ago.
Ever since Captain Cook landed in the Hawaiian Islands and realized that the inhabitants spoke a cognate language to those of the South Pacific islands, scholars and others have researched and theorized about the origins and migrations of the Polynesians.
The Hōkūleʻa voyaging canoe has proved the efficacy of traditional Oceanic navigation since 1976, when it embarked on its historic maiden voyage to recover the lost heritage of this ocean-sailing tradition. The general scholarship on migrations seems well established, and most current researches now seek to understand the timing of the various colonizations.But one huge mystery, sometimes called “The Long Pause” leaves a gaping hole in the voyaging timeline.
Western Polynesia—the islands closest to Australia and New Guinea—were colonized around 3,500 years ago. But the islands of Central and Eastern Polynesia were not settled until 1,500 to 500 years ago. This means that after arriving in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga, Polynesians took a break—for almost 2,000 years—before voyaging forth again.
Then when they did start again, they did so with a vengeance: archaeological evidence suggests that within a century or so after venturing forth, Polynesians discovered and settled nearly every inhabitable island in the central and eastern Pacific.
Nobody knows the reason for The Long Pause, or why the Polynesians started voyaging again.
Several theories have been proposed—from a favorable wind caused by a sustained period of El Niño, to visible supernovas luring the stargazing islanders to travel, to ciguatera poisoning caused by algae blooms.
Enter Moana, the latest Disney movie, set in what appears to be Samoa, even though most American audiences will see it as Hawaii.
Moana—pronounced “moh-AH-nah,” not “MWAH-nah” means “ocean”—and the character is chosen by the sea itself to return the stolen heart of Te Fiti, who turns out to be an island deity (Tahiti, in its various linguistic forms, including Tafiti, is a pan-Polynesian word for any faraway place).
The heart of Te Fiti is a greenstone (New Zealand Maori) amulet stolen by the demigod Maui. An environmental catastrophe spreading across the island makes the mission urgent. And despite admonitions from her father against anyone going beyond the protective reef, Moana steals a canoe and embarks on her quest.
But as should be expected whenever Disney ventures into cross-cultural milieus, the film is characterized by the good, the bad and the ugly.
Moana’s struggle to learn to sail and get past the reef of her home island sets the stage for her learning of true wayfinding. It also shows traces of Armstrong Sperry’s stirring, classic book Call It Courage, and Tom Hanks's Castaway.
But the film's story also has a different angle with a powerful revelation: Moana’s people had stopped voyaging long ago, and had placed a taboo—another Polynesian world—on going beyond the reef.
With the success of Moana’s mission and her having learned the art of wayfinding, her people start voyaging again.
And so the Long Pause comes to an end, Disney style, with a great fleet of canoes setting forth across the ocean to accomplish the greatest human adventure of all time. I admit to being moved by this scene.
As someone who lectures on traditional oceanic navigation and migration, I can say resoundingly that it is high time the rest of the world learned this amazing story.
But then there is much to criticize.
by Doug Herman, Smithsonian | Read more:
Image: Phil Uhl/Wikimedia Commons
The GOP's Obamacare Replacement Plan
S. 107
THE SELF-CARE ACT
To replace the Affordable Care Act of 2010 with affordable, quality self-care tips for all Americans.
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
Mr. CRUZ (for himself, Mr. McCONNELL, Mr. RUBIO, and Mr. PAUL) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Finance.
A BILL
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE; INTRODUCTION, TABLE OF DIVISIONS, TITLES, AND SUBTITLES.
a.) SHORT TITLE. — This Act may be cited as the “Self-Care Act of 2017.”
b.) INTRODUCTION. — The Affordable Care Act (Public Law 111–148) will be replaced with the Self-Care Act. Americans surviving under the SCA will be provided with helpful and cost-effective self-care tips that can be performed without the assistance of medical professionals. Tax-paying Americans will no longer be burdened with paying for a broken healthcare system (cough, Obamacare, cough). Those insured under the Self-Care Act cannot be denied health care for pre-existing conditions because they will be their own healthcare providers. Think of this bill as providing assurance instead of insurance.
c.) TABLE OF DIVISIONS, TITLES, AND SUBTITLES. —This Act is divided into divisions, titles, and subtitles as follows:
DIVISION A—AFFORDABLE SELF-CARE TIPS
TITLE I—SELF-CARE FOR MINOR INJURIES AND AILMENTS
Subtitle A—Walk It Off
Subtitle B—Get Some Rest
Subtitle C—Read the Bible
Subtitle D—Shoot a Gun
Subtitle E—Suck It Up, Crybaby
Subtitle F—Mrs. McConnell’s Chicken Soup Recipe
TITLE II—SELF-CARE FOR MENTAL ILLNESS
Subtitle A—Happiness is a Choice
Subtitle B—Just Be Normal
Subtitle C—Pray the Gay Away
Subtitle D—Make Love to a Gun
Subtitle D—Snap Out of It, Snowflake
Subtitle E—Mrs. Cruz’s Bathtub Zoloft Recipe
TITLE III—SELF-CARE FOR PRENATAL AND NEONATALCARE
Subtitle A—Don’t Have an Abortion
Subtitle B—Don’t Have an Abortion
Subtitle C—Don’t Have an Abortion
Subtitle D—You Have a Baby Now!
TITLE IV—SELF-CARE FOR WOMEN’S HEALTH
Subtitle A—Listen to Your Dad
Subtitle B—Listen to Your Brother
Subtitle C—Listen to Your Husband
Subtitle D—Listen to Your Son
Subtitle E—Listen to Jesus
Subtitle F—Listen to Your Male Teacher
Subtitle G—Listen to Your Mailman
Subtitle H—Listen to That Homeless Man
Subtitle I—Take a Bubble Bath, Or Something
TITLE V—SELF-CARE FOR DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENTby Leah Slater, McSweeny's | Read more:
Subtitle A—Sending Thoughts and Prayers!
Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber
[ed. See also: For the Want of a Leather Jacket, Is Uber Lost?]
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.
I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.
After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.
I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense"). (...)
Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done. (...)
When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn't transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.
Things were beginning to get even more comically absurd with each passing day. Every time something ridiculous happened, every time a sexist email was sent, I'd sent a short report to HR just to keep a record going. Things came to a head with one particular email chain from the director of our engineering organization concerning leather jackets that had been ordered for all of the SREs. See, earlier in the year, the organization had promised leather jackets for everyone in organization, and had taken all of our sizes; we all tried them on and found our sizes, and placed our orders. One day, all of the women (there were, I believe, six of us left in the org) received an email saying that no leather jackets were being ordered for the women because there were not enough women in the organization to justify placing an order. I replied and said that I was sure Uber SRE could find room in their budget to buy leather jackets for the, what, six women if it could afford to buy them for over a hundred and twenty men. The director replied back, saying that if we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men's jackets but not on the women's jackets, and it wouldn't be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men's jackets. We were told that if we wanted leather jackets, we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men's jackets.
I forwarded this absurd chain of emails to HR, and they requested to meet with me shortly after. I don't know what I expected after all of my earlier encounters with them, but this one was more ridiculous than I could have ever imagined. The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem. I pointed out that everything I had reported came with extensive documentation and I clearly wasn't the instigator (or even a main character) in the majority of them - she countered by saying that there was absolutely no record in HR of any of the incidents I was claiming I had reported (which, of course, was a lie, and I reminded her I had email and chat records to prove it was a lie). She then asked me if women engineers at Uber were friends and talked a lot, and then asked me how often we communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc. - an absurd and insulting request that I refused to comply with. When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn't be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.
As most of you know, I left Uber in December and joined Stripe in January. I've gotten a lot of questions over the past couple of months about why I left and what my time at Uber was like. It's a strange, fascinating, and slightly horrifying story that deserves to be told while it is still fresh in my mind, so here we go.
I joined Uber as a site reliability engineer (SRE) back in November 2015, and it was a great time to join as an engineer. They were still wrangling microservices out of their monolithic API, and things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done. The SRE team was still pretty new when I joined, and I had the rare opportunity to choose whichever team was working on something that I wanted to be part of.
After the first couple of weeks of training, I chose to join the team that worked on my area of expertise, and this is where things started getting weird. On my first official day rotating on the team, my new manager sent me a string of messages over company chat. He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn't. He was trying to stay out of trouble at work, he said, but he couldn't help getting in trouble, because he was looking for women to have sex with. It was clear that he was trying to get me to have sex with him, and it was so clearly out of line that I immediately took screenshots of these chat messages and reported him to HR.
Uber was a pretty good-sized company at that time, and I had pretty standard expectations of how they would handle situations like this. I expected that I would report him to HR, they would handle the situation appropriately, and then life would go on - unfortunately, things played out quite a bit differently. When I reported the situation, I was told by both HR and upper management that even though this was clearly sexual harassment and he was propositioning me, it was this man's first offense, and that they wouldn't feel comfortable giving him anything other than a warning and a stern talking-to. Upper management told me that he "was a high performer" (i.e. had stellar performance reviews from his superiors) and they wouldn't feel comfortable punishing him for what was probably just an innocent mistake on his part.
I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense"). (...)
Over the next few months, I began to meet more women engineers in the company. As I got to know them, and heard their stories, I was surprised that some of them had stories similar to my own. Some of the women even had stories about reporting the exact same manager I had reported, and had reported inappropriate interactions with him long before I had even joined the company. It became obvious that both HR and management had been lying about this being "his first offense", and it certainly wasn't his last. Within a few months, he was reported once again for inappropriate behavior, and those who reported him were told it was still his "first offense". The situation was escalated as far up the chain as it could be escalated, and still nothing was done. (...)
When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another eng organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn't transfer were quitting or preparing to quit. There were two major reasons for this: there was the organizational chaos, and there was also the sexism within the organization. When I asked our director at an org all-hands about what was being done about the dwindling numbers of women in the org compared to the rest of the company, his reply was, in a nutshell, that the women of Uber just needed to step up and be better engineers.
Things were beginning to get even more comically absurd with each passing day. Every time something ridiculous happened, every time a sexist email was sent, I'd sent a short report to HR just to keep a record going. Things came to a head with one particular email chain from the director of our engineering organization concerning leather jackets that had been ordered for all of the SREs. See, earlier in the year, the organization had promised leather jackets for everyone in organization, and had taken all of our sizes; we all tried them on and found our sizes, and placed our orders. One day, all of the women (there were, I believe, six of us left in the org) received an email saying that no leather jackets were being ordered for the women because there were not enough women in the organization to justify placing an order. I replied and said that I was sure Uber SRE could find room in their budget to buy leather jackets for the, what, six women if it could afford to buy them for over a hundred and twenty men. The director replied back, saying that if we women really wanted equality, then we should realize we were getting equality by not getting the leather jackets. He said that because there were so many men in the org, they had gotten a significant discount on the men's jackets but not on the women's jackets, and it wouldn't be equal or fair, he argued, to give the women leather jackets that cost a little more than the men's jackets. We were told that if we wanted leather jackets, we women needed to find jackets that were the same price as the bulk-order price of the men's jackets.
I forwarded this absurd chain of emails to HR, and they requested to meet with me shortly after. I don't know what I expected after all of my earlier encounters with them, but this one was more ridiculous than I could have ever imagined. The HR rep began the meeting by asking me if I had noticed that *I* was the common theme in all of the reports I had been making, and that if I had ever considered that I might be the problem. I pointed out that everything I had reported came with extensive documentation and I clearly wasn't the instigator (or even a main character) in the majority of them - she countered by saying that there was absolutely no record in HR of any of the incidents I was claiming I had reported (which, of course, was a lie, and I reminded her I had email and chat records to prove it was a lie). She then asked me if women engineers at Uber were friends and talked a lot, and then asked me how often we communicated, what we talked about, what email addresses we used to communicate, which chat rooms we frequented, etc. - an absurd and insulting request that I refused to comply with. When I pointed out how few women were in SRE, she recounted with a story about how sometimes certain people of certain genders and ethnic backgrounds were better suited for some jobs than others, so I shouldn't be surprised by the gender ratios in engineering. Our meeting ended with her berating me about keeping email records of things, and told me it was unprofessional to report things via email to HR.
by Susan J. Fowler | Read more:
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
Smash Putt's Reign of Anarchic Mini-Golf Is Nearly Over
For a miniature-golf entrepreneur, Jeremy Franklin-Ross has a unique aversion to concepts like points and pars.
Since 2009, he and a team of fellow artists, woodworkers, and hackers have organized Smash Putt, an adult-only, self-proclaimed "miniature golf apocalypse" that pops up for a few weeks every year.
Putt-putt courses don't need to have a point; he believes they can be art. Instead of offering a score, holes can show how cruel people can be or how people find meaning in life. "We think about the social-experiment aspects of putt-putt a lot around here," he says.
Smash Putt has been hosted in a former plumbing store, government building, and walnut storage facility, among other locales. It's currently inside a former Mexican restaurant in Post Alley until April 30, when its creators will retire it permanently.
On a bustling Saturday night, Franklin-Ross, a slim fortysomething with a short beard, is sipping bourbon in his makeshift office, speaking with preemptive nostalgia for the putt-putt holes now on their final display. There's the Mission Impossible hole, a dark, foggy little room packed with red lasers that trigger alarms. There's the hole that lets you sabotage your friends, offering a button that closes the hole just as their ball is rolling toward it. There's the final hole, which chews your ball up with a buzz saw.
Smash Putt's 18 holes change every year; some get retired and some get added. Many of the retired holes have been of the "social experiment" variety, lacking specific directions. Many people, he says, will "get vocally angry when they're not provided an experience with a clear goal."
Outside his office door, thundering booms can be overheard from what he calls the event's "must-have hole" and its most defiantly pointless creation.
Called the Driving Range, the hole consists of a long metal cage with an air-powered cannon at one end. Patrons use the cannon to shoot high-velocity golf balls at objects inside the cage, which range from propane tanks to circular blades. That's it—there are no rules or scoring criteria.
The Driving Range, a hole requiring no putter, is quintessential Smash Putt—total anarchy. In the event's early years, the hole confused and upset people so much that they eventually hired someone to stand next to it, assigning random points and goals on the fly.
"For people not ready to create their own games, the person tells them to shoot at this object, shoot at that object," says Franklin-Ross. "You get a million points, you get a hole in one, fuck you."
There's also the primal destructive bliss the hole provides, somewhat diminished this year. For the first time in the event's history, there are no upright pianos to destroy. Due to the new venue's size, the Driving Range must be suspended above patrons, on the restaurant's second floor, to fit.
Objects can't be breakable now, for fear of small materials raining down on people's heads through the cage.
"As much as people are coming here at their own peril, we try to make things as safe as we can, within our means," he says, while admitting he finds it "odd" that the golf-ball cannon isn't pulverizing things. Pianos tended to last four days in the cage before they were reduced to shards and a new one had to be wheeled in.
Franklin-Ross estimates that roughly 100,000 people have attended Smash Putt since its inception. At one point, its creators considered turning it into a full-fledged business and taking their show on the road. They organized a Smash Putt in Denver to test the concept. But, he says, "being a carnie is a heartbreaking life, and we don't want to do it."
Since 2009, he and a team of fellow artists, woodworkers, and hackers have organized Smash Putt, an adult-only, self-proclaimed "miniature golf apocalypse" that pops up for a few weeks every year.
Putt-putt courses don't need to have a point; he believes they can be art. Instead of offering a score, holes can show how cruel people can be or how people find meaning in life. "We think about the social-experiment aspects of putt-putt a lot around here," he says.
Smash Putt has been hosted in a former plumbing store, government building, and walnut storage facility, among other locales. It's currently inside a former Mexican restaurant in Post Alley until April 30, when its creators will retire it permanently.On a bustling Saturday night, Franklin-Ross, a slim fortysomething with a short beard, is sipping bourbon in his makeshift office, speaking with preemptive nostalgia for the putt-putt holes now on their final display. There's the Mission Impossible hole, a dark, foggy little room packed with red lasers that trigger alarms. There's the hole that lets you sabotage your friends, offering a button that closes the hole just as their ball is rolling toward it. There's the final hole, which chews your ball up with a buzz saw.
Smash Putt's 18 holes change every year; some get retired and some get added. Many of the retired holes have been of the "social experiment" variety, lacking specific directions. Many people, he says, will "get vocally angry when they're not provided an experience with a clear goal."
Outside his office door, thundering booms can be overheard from what he calls the event's "must-have hole" and its most defiantly pointless creation.
Called the Driving Range, the hole consists of a long metal cage with an air-powered cannon at one end. Patrons use the cannon to shoot high-velocity golf balls at objects inside the cage, which range from propane tanks to circular blades. That's it—there are no rules or scoring criteria.
The Driving Range, a hole requiring no putter, is quintessential Smash Putt—total anarchy. In the event's early years, the hole confused and upset people so much that they eventually hired someone to stand next to it, assigning random points and goals on the fly.
"For people not ready to create their own games, the person tells them to shoot at this object, shoot at that object," says Franklin-Ross. "You get a million points, you get a hole in one, fuck you."
There's also the primal destructive bliss the hole provides, somewhat diminished this year. For the first time in the event's history, there are no upright pianos to destroy. Due to the new venue's size, the Driving Range must be suspended above patrons, on the restaurant's second floor, to fit.
Objects can't be breakable now, for fear of small materials raining down on people's heads through the cage.
"As much as people are coming here at their own peril, we try to make things as safe as we can, within our means," he says, while admitting he finds it "odd" that the golf-ball cannon isn't pulverizing things. Pianos tended to last four days in the cage before they were reduced to shards and a new one had to be wheeled in.
Franklin-Ross estimates that roughly 100,000 people have attended Smash Putt since its inception. At one point, its creators considered turning it into a full-fledged business and taking their show on the road. They organized a Smash Putt in Denver to test the concept. But, he says, "being a carnie is a heartbreaking life, and we don't want to do it."
by Drew Atkins, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Uysess Curry
Otto Freundlich, Head (Self Portrait), 1923.
via:
[ed. See also: MF Doom and Gorillaz, November Has Come.]
We All Want Healthcare To Cost Much Less — But We Are Asking The Wrong Question
Imagine this: Healthcare — the whole system — for half as much. Better, more effective. No rationing. Everybody in.
Because we all want that. And because we can. This can be done. Let me tell you how.
I’m an industry insider, covering the industry for 37 years now, publishing millions of words in industry publications, speaking at hundreds of industry conferences, writing books, advising everyone from the U.N.’s World Health Organization, the Defense Department, and the Centers for Disease Control to governments around the world to, probably, your local hospital, your doctor, your health plan.
The economic fundamentals of healthcare in the United States are unique, amazingly complex, multi-layered and opaque. It takes a lot of work and time to understand them, work and time that few of the experts opining about healthcare on television have done. Once you do understand them, it takes serious independence, a big ornery streak, and maybe a bit of a career death wish to speak publicly about how the industry that pays your speaking and consulting fees should, can, and must strive to make half as much money. Well, I turn 67 this year and I’m cranky as hell, so let’s go.
Cost: Healthcare in the U.S., the whole system, costs us something like $3.4 trillion per year. Yes, that’s “trillion” with a “T”. If U.S. healthcare were a country on its own it would be the fifth largest economy in the world.
Waste: About a third of that is wasted on tests and procedures and devices that we really don’t need, that don’t help, that even hurt us. That’s the conservative estimate in a number of expert analyses, and based on the opinions of doctors about their own specialties. Some analyses say more: Some say half. Even that conservative estimate (one third) is a big wow: over $1.2 trillion per year, something like twice the entire U.S. military budget, thrown away on waste.
Prices: The prices are nuts. It’s not just pharmaceuticals. Across the board, from devices to procedures, hospital room charges to implants to diagnostic tests, the prices actually paid in the U.S. are three, five, 10 times what they are in other medically advanced countries like France, Germany, and the U.K.
Value: Unlike any other business, prices in healthcare bear no relation to value. If you pay $50,000 for a car, chances are very good that you’ll get a nicer car than if you pay $15,000. If you pay $2200 or $4500 for an MRI, there is pretty much no chance that you will get a better MRI than if you paid $730 or $420. (Yes, these are real prices, all from the same local market.)
Variation: Unlike any other business, prices in healthcare bear no relation to the producer’s cost. None. How can you tell? I mean, besides the $600 price tag on a 69-cent bottle of sterile water with a teaspoon of salt that’s labeled “saline therapeutics” on the medical bill? (Yes, those are real prices, too.) You can tell because of the insane variation. The price for your pill, procedure or test may well be three, five, even 12 times the price paid in some other city across the country, in some other institution across town, even for the person across the hall. Try that in any other business. Better yet, call me: I have a 10-year-old Ford F-150 to sell you for $75,000.
Inefficiency: We do healthcare in the most inefficient way possible, waiting until people show up in the Emergency Department with their diabetes, heart problem, or emphysema completely out of control, where treatment will cost 10 times as much as it would if we had gotten to them first to help them avoid a serious health crisis. (And no, that’s not part of the 1/3 that is waste. That’s on top of it.)
So who’s the chump here? We’re paying ridiculous prices for things we don’t necessarily need delivered in the most inefficient way possible.
Why?
Why do they do that to us? Because we pay them to.
Wait, this is important. This is the crux of the problem. From doctors to hospitals to labs to device manufacturers to anybody else we want to blame, they don’t overprice things and sell us things we don’t need because they are greedy, evil people. They do it because we tell them to, in the clearest language possible: money. Every inefficiency, every unneeded test, every extra bottle of saline, means more money in the door. And they can decide what’s on the list of what’s needed, as long as it can be argued that it matches the diagnostic code.
That’s called “fee-for-service” medicine: We pay a fee for every service, every drug, every test. There’s a code for everything. There are no standard prices or even price ranges. It’s all negotiated constantly and repeatedly across the system with health plans, employers, even with Medicare and Medicaid.
We pay them to do it and the payment system demands it. Imagine a hospital system that bent every effort to providing health and healthcare in the least expensive, most effective way possible, that charged you $1 for that 69-cent bottle of saline water, that eliminated all unnecessary tests and unhelpful procedures, that put personnel and cash into helping you prevent or manage your diabetes instead of waiting until you show up feet-first in diabetic shock. If it did all this without regard to how it is paid it would soon close its doors, belly up, bankrupt. For-profit or not-for-profit makes little difference to this fact.
If we want them to act differently, we have to pay them differently.
Paying for Healthcare Differently
But wait, isn’t that the only way we can pay? Because, you know, medicine is complicated, every body is different, every disease is unique.
Actually, no. There is no one other ideal way to pay for all of healthcare, but there are lots of other ways to pay. We can pay for outcomes, we can pay for bundles of services, we can pay for subscriptions for all primary care or all diabetes care or special attention for multiple chronic conditions, on and on, the list of alternative ways to pay for healthcare is long and rich.
There are now surgery centers that put their prices up on the wall, just like McDonalds — and they can prove their quality. There are hospital systems that will give you a warranty on your surgery: We will get it right or fixing the problem is free.
Look: You get in an accident and take your crumpled fender to the body shop. Every fender crumples differently, maybe the frame is involved, maybe the chrome strip has to be replaced, all that. So there is no standard “crumpled fender” price. But it is not the first crumpled fender the body shop has ever seen. It’s probably the 10,000th. They are very good at knowing just how to fix it and how much it will cost them to do the work. Do you pay for each can of Bondo, each disk of sandpaper, each minute in the paint booth? No. They write you up an estimate for the whole thing, from diagnosis to rehab. Come back next Thursday and it will be good as new. That’s a bundled outcome. It’s the body shop’s way of doing business, its business model.
There are new business models arising now in healthcare (such as reference prices, medical tourism, centers of excellence, “Blue Choice” and other health plan options) that force hospitals and surgical centers to compete on price and quality for specific bundles, like a new hip or a re-plumbed heart.
Healthcare is a vast market with lots of different kinds of customers in different financial situations, different life stages, different genders, different needs, different resources, yet we have somehow decided that in pretty nearly all of that vast market there should be only one business model: diagnostic-code-driven fee for service. Change that, and the whole equation changes. It’s called business model innovation. If we find ways to pay for what we want and need, not for whatever they pile onto the bill, they will find ways to bring us what we want and need at prices that make sense. That’s called changing the incentives.
Because we all want that. And because we can. This can be done. Let me tell you how.
I’m an industry insider, covering the industry for 37 years now, publishing millions of words in industry publications, speaking at hundreds of industry conferences, writing books, advising everyone from the U.N.’s World Health Organization, the Defense Department, and the Centers for Disease Control to governments around the world to, probably, your local hospital, your doctor, your health plan.
The economic fundamentals of healthcare in the United States are unique, amazingly complex, multi-layered and opaque. It takes a lot of work and time to understand them, work and time that few of the experts opining about healthcare on television have done. Once you do understand them, it takes serious independence, a big ornery streak, and maybe a bit of a career death wish to speak publicly about how the industry that pays your speaking and consulting fees should, can, and must strive to make half as much money. Well, I turn 67 this year and I’m cranky as hell, so let’s go.
The Wrong Question
We are back again in the cage fight over healthcare in Congress. But in all these fights we are only arguing over one question: Who pays? The government, your employer, you? A different answer to that question will distribute the pain differently, but it won’t cut the pain in half.
There are other questions to ask whose answers could get us there, such as:
A few facts, the old-fashioned non-alternative kind:
We are back again in the cage fight over healthcare in Congress. But in all these fights we are only arguing over one question: Who pays? The government, your employer, you? A different answer to that question will distribute the pain differently, but it won’t cut the pain in half.
There are other questions to ask whose answers could get us there, such as:
- Who do we pay?
- How do we pay them?
- For what, exactly, are we paying?
A few facts, the old-fashioned non-alternative kind:
Cost: Healthcare in the U.S., the whole system, costs us something like $3.4 trillion per year. Yes, that’s “trillion” with a “T”. If U.S. healthcare were a country on its own it would be the fifth largest economy in the world.
Waste: About a third of that is wasted on tests and procedures and devices that we really don’t need, that don’t help, that even hurt us. That’s the conservative estimate in a number of expert analyses, and based on the opinions of doctors about their own specialties. Some analyses say more: Some say half. Even that conservative estimate (one third) is a big wow: over $1.2 trillion per year, something like twice the entire U.S. military budget, thrown away on waste.
Prices: The prices are nuts. It’s not just pharmaceuticals. Across the board, from devices to procedures, hospital room charges to implants to diagnostic tests, the prices actually paid in the U.S. are three, five, 10 times what they are in other medically advanced countries like France, Germany, and the U.K.
Value: Unlike any other business, prices in healthcare bear no relation to value. If you pay $50,000 for a car, chances are very good that you’ll get a nicer car than if you pay $15,000. If you pay $2200 or $4500 for an MRI, there is pretty much no chance that you will get a better MRI than if you paid $730 or $420. (Yes, these are real prices, all from the same local market.)
Variation: Unlike any other business, prices in healthcare bear no relation to the producer’s cost. None. How can you tell? I mean, besides the $600 price tag on a 69-cent bottle of sterile water with a teaspoon of salt that’s labeled “saline therapeutics” on the medical bill? (Yes, those are real prices, too.) You can tell because of the insane variation. The price for your pill, procedure or test may well be three, five, even 12 times the price paid in some other city across the country, in some other institution across town, even for the person across the hall. Try that in any other business. Better yet, call me: I have a 10-year-old Ford F-150 to sell you for $75,000.
Inefficiency: We do healthcare in the most inefficient way possible, waiting until people show up in the Emergency Department with their diabetes, heart problem, or emphysema completely out of control, where treatment will cost 10 times as much as it would if we had gotten to them first to help them avoid a serious health crisis. (And no, that’s not part of the 1/3 that is waste. That’s on top of it.)
So who’s the chump here? We’re paying ridiculous prices for things we don’t necessarily need delivered in the most inefficient way possible.
Why?
Why do they do that to us? Because we pay them to.
Wait, this is important. This is the crux of the problem. From doctors to hospitals to labs to device manufacturers to anybody else we want to blame, they don’t overprice things and sell us things we don’t need because they are greedy, evil people. They do it because we tell them to, in the clearest language possible: money. Every inefficiency, every unneeded test, every extra bottle of saline, means more money in the door. And they can decide what’s on the list of what’s needed, as long as it can be argued that it matches the diagnostic code.
That’s called “fee-for-service” medicine: We pay a fee for every service, every drug, every test. There’s a code for everything. There are no standard prices or even price ranges. It’s all negotiated constantly and repeatedly across the system with health plans, employers, even with Medicare and Medicaid.
We pay them to do it and the payment system demands it. Imagine a hospital system that bent every effort to providing health and healthcare in the least expensive, most effective way possible, that charged you $1 for that 69-cent bottle of saline water, that eliminated all unnecessary tests and unhelpful procedures, that put personnel and cash into helping you prevent or manage your diabetes instead of waiting until you show up feet-first in diabetic shock. If it did all this without regard to how it is paid it would soon close its doors, belly up, bankrupt. For-profit or not-for-profit makes little difference to this fact.
If we want them to act differently, we have to pay them differently.
Paying for Healthcare Differently
But wait, isn’t that the only way we can pay? Because, you know, medicine is complicated, every body is different, every disease is unique.
Actually, no. There is no one other ideal way to pay for all of healthcare, but there are lots of other ways to pay. We can pay for outcomes, we can pay for bundles of services, we can pay for subscriptions for all primary care or all diabetes care or special attention for multiple chronic conditions, on and on, the list of alternative ways to pay for healthcare is long and rich.
There are now surgery centers that put their prices up on the wall, just like McDonalds — and they can prove their quality. There are hospital systems that will give you a warranty on your surgery: We will get it right or fixing the problem is free.
Look: You get in an accident and take your crumpled fender to the body shop. Every fender crumples differently, maybe the frame is involved, maybe the chrome strip has to be replaced, all that. So there is no standard “crumpled fender” price. But it is not the first crumpled fender the body shop has ever seen. It’s probably the 10,000th. They are very good at knowing just how to fix it and how much it will cost them to do the work. Do you pay for each can of Bondo, each disk of sandpaper, each minute in the paint booth? No. They write you up an estimate for the whole thing, from diagnosis to rehab. Come back next Thursday and it will be good as new. That’s a bundled outcome. It’s the body shop’s way of doing business, its business model.
There are new business models arising now in healthcare (such as reference prices, medical tourism, centers of excellence, “Blue Choice” and other health plan options) that force hospitals and surgical centers to compete on price and quality for specific bundles, like a new hip or a re-plumbed heart.
Healthcare is a vast market with lots of different kinds of customers in different financial situations, different life stages, different genders, different needs, different resources, yet we have somehow decided that in pretty nearly all of that vast market there should be only one business model: diagnostic-code-driven fee for service. Change that, and the whole equation changes. It’s called business model innovation. If we find ways to pay for what we want and need, not for whatever they pile onto the bill, they will find ways to bring us what we want and need at prices that make sense. That’s called changing the incentives.
by Joe Flower, Healthcare in America | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Fatal Flaw in Subscription Models
[ed. At one time I thought micro-payments might be the answer but I'm not so sure anymore. It seems any subscription service has to provide some additional 'value added' benefit, beyond the quality of its reporting. Think Amazon Prime, which besides free shipping also provides music, streaming tv and original programming. Not sure what the answer is, but if recent trends are an example I expect aggregation or consolidation among numerous news sources to be the most likely option. What that means for a blog like Duck Soup is probably eventual extinction (or a more restricted focus on topics that don't require subscription services.]
Many column inches both here at TheMediaBriefing and elsewhere have been dedicated to revenue models, and how individual publishers can monetise their audiences.Subscriptions are nothing new. Most of the media industry seems to have it all worked out, with millions paying out for Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Prime, Apple Music and more.
But one industry segment hasn’t quite grasped it yet. In a period of rapid change and disruption, news publishers grapple with putting paywalls up, taking them down, growing subscribers and trying to convince people that their content should be paid for.
Subscription’s fatal flaw
Various studies have been done on how people consume news, particularly in the US, but there is very little information on how many different outlets a user will read from. Increasingly, it is the article rather than the source itself which garners attention, with the most widely-known publishers being those who have mastered social distribution.
We put out a snap poll to followers of @mediabrief asking how many different sources they read a day, and the results were telling: (...)
If every publisher put up a hard paywall overnight, and these people then took out subscriptions to each of these sources, the cost could be anything from £80-£120 a month, if not more.
Paywalls rely on publishers assuming that an individual will only have one or two subscriptions, and therefore that theirs is the only content worth paying for. Yes, on a publisher-by-publisher basis, it is critical that the content they produce is valued and paid for. But on an industry level, it isn’t sustainable.
Paying subscribers to these outlets are skewed in terms of age, and the younger generation have never grown accustomed to handing over money for content, according to Business Insider’s Publisher Paywall Report. I would suggest this is because we now read news and content from a huge variety of sources (both reputable and otherwise). The age of loyalty to a single newsbrand is long gone; digital signalled the death of brand monogamy.
Industry parallels
Many people draw comparisons between publishing subscription models and the success media companies like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify have found.
There is, however, a key difference. Imagine 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros each charged users a monthly fee to access their films. Very quickly, the model would fall over, and smaller film studios would be unable to compete.
Instead, these studios all come together in an aggregator, like Netflix. Paying a monthly fee becomes a lot more valuable for film fanatics, as they can watch as much as they like from different sources.
Pure social distribution isn’t the answer for publishing. The catch in the current situation is that Facebook doesn’t pay publishers to distribute articles on their platform. If Netflix refused to pay its content creators, or even charged them to reach their audience, studios would quickly take their films elsewhere.
Yet the point still stands. The average consumer cannot afford to ‘subscribe’ to individual film studios, no matter how good their films are. Similarly, people listened to a much narrower range of music when it cost £10.99 for an album – a luxury purchase. The music industry was disrupted, and Spotify emerged as a way to listen to artists, and more importantly, discover new music from small labels and independent artists. It’s taken almost a decade for the industry to right itself, but it’s getting there.
It’s not all plain sailing for consumers. Many are happy to sacrifice the tangibility of paying a one-off fee for a physical product (DVDs or CDs) to access unlimited content from different sources (films and music) for a monthly fee. There is no sense of ownership – should Spotify close, all the music and years of accumulated monthly payments disappear. But that is the price many have chosen to pay.
Music and films (for the most part) are also valuable in their exclusivity. No one else is legally reproducing Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ for free. To watch it, and keep up with the water-cooler talk, you must have a subscription to Netflix.
This is another area publishing struggles with. Unless the content is niche or special interest, many stories, particularly in news, are easily replicable and available elsewhere for free.
Subscriptions won’t provide a long-term, sustainable solution. Consumers no longer pay for a physical product, and many read across a variety of sources. Publishers with paywalls have implemented them because they value their content and don’t believe it should be given away for free, and they are right in their belief, but not in the isolationist solution.
by Esther Kezia Harding, Media Briefing | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
The Next Financial Crisis Might Be in Your Driveway
[ed. Bubbles everywhere... Wall Street, housing, student debt, health care.)
Lured by low interest rates, low gas prices, and a crop of seductive vehicles that are faster, smarter, and more efficient than ever before, American drivers are increasingly riding in style. Don’t be fooled by the curb appeal, though—those swanky machines are heavily leveraged.
The country’s auto debt hit a record in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, when a rush of year-end car shopping pushed vehicle loans to a dubious peak of $1.16 trillion. The combination of new car smell and new credit woes stretches from Subarus in Maine to Teslas in San Francisco.
It’s an alarming number, big enough to incite talk of a bubble. In fact, the pile of debt would cover the cost of 43.4 million Ford F-150 pickups, one for every eight or so people in the country.
Another way to look at: Every licensed driver in the U.S., on average, owes about $6,100 in car payments.
Lured by low interest rates, low gas prices, and a crop of seductive vehicles that are faster, smarter, and more efficient than ever before, American drivers are increasingly riding in style. Don’t be fooled by the curb appeal, though—those swanky machines are heavily leveraged.
The country’s auto debt hit a record in the fourth quarter of 2016, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, when a rush of year-end car shopping pushed vehicle loans to a dubious peak of $1.16 trillion. The combination of new car smell and new credit woes stretches from Subarus in Maine to Teslas in San Francisco. It’s an alarming number, big enough to incite talk of a bubble. In fact, the pile of debt would cover the cost of 43.4 million Ford F-150 pickups, one for every eight or so people in the country.
Another way to look at: Every licensed driver in the U.S., on average, owes about $6,100 in car payments.
by Kyle Stock, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: uncredited
What We'll Tolerate, And What We Won't
It wasn’t that he told a woman there was something wrong with her for wearing a hijab in America. It wasn’t that he encouraged people to “Purge the Illegals” and gave out ICE’s hotline number at a presentation. It wasn’t that he mocked a transgender college student in front of a crowd, saying he’d still almost bang her because she looked like a man. Instead, it was his discussion of the complexities of his sexual experiences with adults as a gay teenager that caused Milo Yiannopoulos to lose his $250,000 book deal with Simon and Schuster.
The swift recent reversal of Yiannopoulos’s fortunes is in many ways illuminating. The Breitbart editor had spent the last year building a public profile by going around American college campuses giving “lectures” with titles like “Why Do Lesbians Fake So Many Hate Crimes?” and “Why Ugly People Hate Me.” At these events, he would tell people why “feminism is cancer,” refer to various people as “cunts” and “retards,” and make jokes about how Muslims were probably terrorists. When appalled students tried to have the talks canceled, he would insist that the PC left was simply afraid to deal with arguments, facts, and statistics. (The more obvious explanation is that the PC left doesn’t think a person whose idea of elevated political discourse is “100% of fat people are fucking gross”—and who gigglingly posts pictures of the overweight people at his gym—is sincere about wanting to improve political dialogue on campus.)
As Yiannopoulos would continue to bait students with outrageous and cruel remarks, and students would continue to take the bait by giving Yiannopoulos publicity and fueling his persecution narrative, he managed to bring himself mainstream attention. For God only knows what reason, a major publishing house decided to reward him with a six-figure advance. (Actually, we know full well the reason: $) Bill Maher invited Yiannopoulous on Real Time, where the two enjoyed a pleasant back-and-forth about how the left were the real intolerant ones, before agreeing that transgender people were a bunch of sex criminals who couldn’t be trusted in women’s bathrooms. (The only relief during Yiannopoulos’s otherwise unendurable Real Time appearance was provided by Larry Wilmore, who enthusiastically told Yiannopoulos to go fuck himself after Yiannopoulos speculated that his black co-panelists must have low IQs.) Finally, the Conservative Political Action Conference placed a gleaming maraschino atop Yiannopoulos’s recent success by offering him a speaking slot.
Until a few days ago, then, Milo Yiannopoulos was doing quite well for himself. Then the pedophilia tapes surfaced. It turned out that Yiannopoulos had once made a few remarks that were difficult to interpret as anything other than a defense of sex between older men and young boys:
“We get hung up on this sort of child abuse stuff, to the point where we are heavily policing consensual adults. In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents.”
When the interviewer pointed out that this sounded like “Catholic priest molestation,” Yiannopoulos replied: “You know what? I’m grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him…” In another interview, Yiannopoulos confirmed that age 14 he had had sexual interactions with a priest, but said that this “wasn’t molestation,” nor was it pedophilia, because “pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.”
Conservatives were scandalized. Bill Kristol called the remarks “despicable” and CPAC rapidly rescinded Yiannopoulos’s invitation to speak. Soon after, Simon & Schuster canceled his book deal, and there were reports that Breitbart editors were threatening to resign if he wasn’t fired. During Friday’s Real Time, Bill Maher had said that Yiannopoulos was “only at the beginning of [his] career.” By Monday, it seemed like he was at the end of it.
The rapid undoing of Yiannopoulos was interesting for several reasons. It served as an instructive illustration of what conservatives were and were not willing to tolerate. All the hateful filth about women, Muslims, and transgender people actually made a conservative publishing imprint want to publish his book. These things evidently do not cross a moral line. (To his credit, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg deplored this lack of principle, commenting that “apparently the racism and anti-Semitism wasn’t a deal breaker.”)
As far as CPAC goes, Yiannopoulos’s invitation and dis-invitation shows where the standards lie. For Simon and Schuster, on the other hand, dropping Yiannopoulos may have been strictly business. As Roxane Gay, who withdrew her book from the publishing house in protest of their decision to offer Yiannopoulos a contract, explained: “Simon and Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them. They did not finally ‘do the right thing.’ They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies.” Indeed, like most publishers, S&S is far more concerned with what they can sell than with whether it’s moral or immoral.
But just as interesting as what didn’t make Yiannopoulos toxic is what did. Ironically, the remarks that finally got him expelled from the mainstream were among his less indefensible. He has been condemned by almost everybody for “defending pedophilia.” But this is not quite fair. In fact, while his comments are shocking, the arguments he is making are not unfamiliar in LGBT discourse. As Current Affairs editor Yasmin Nair explained in a thoughtful and provocative essay in 2005, the intensity of feelings around child abuse often prevent people from appreciating nuanced arguments. Nair was writing about a publisher’s decision to exclude an article on pederasty from a book on the history of same-sex relationships, after right-wing complaints that it would condone “rampant child molestation.” As she writes, there is a long tradition of the right using fears about pedophilia “to condemn all queers, particularly gay men, as predators of children.” It is often impossible to have a discussion about the reality of queer people’s lives, because anyone who speaks of their neutral or positive experiences with older people as a youth is perceived as endorsing pedophilia.
Yiannopoulos says that gay men’s experiences as teens with older men are often complicated, not always easily captured by the available terminology. He says that his own teenage sexual encounters with men did not fit the labels “molestation” and “pedophilia,” especially since pedophilia refers to attraction to the pre-pubescent. He offered a further clarification on Facebook:
I do not support pedophilia. Period. It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst…If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that’s my prerogative. It’s no different to gallows humor from AIDS sufferers…I did say that there are relationships between younger men and older men that can help a young gay man escape from a lack of support or understanding at home. That’s perfectly true and every gay man knows it. But I was not talking about anything illegal and I was not referring to pre-pubescent boys.
It’s not, on the face of it, an unreasonable explanation. Yiannopoulos may not have made his point very well. But there’s something nuanced and defensible here. First, he’s saying that the relationships between gay men and teenage boys (according to their own accounts) have historically been messier than simple categories allow for. And second, it’s absurd to say that he can’t make dark or crass jokes about his priest if it’s his way of dealing with what happened to him.
Unfortunately for Yiannopoulos, there is no possibility of complexity where it comes to discussions around age, sex, and consent. Fears of pedophilia have made it so that even the slightest hint that one is condoning it brings instant total ostracism. (These same sentiments have also made it so that no punishment is considered too severe when it comes to those convicted of sex crimes against minors. Nobody wants to speak out on behalf of society’s most loathed group of criminals, thus they get shunted under bridges and denied housing rather than given treatment.)
Yiannopoulos has quickly found out which ideas will actually get you booted from the public square, and they’re left-wing ones rather than right-wing ones. It turned out the real people you can’t offend are the conservatives whose latent homophobia make them instantly pounce on a gay man as a defender of pedophilia when he tries to explain his world to them. How fitting that Yiannopoulos should end up subjected to the very kind of vicious misrepresentation of LGBT people that he has spent his time encouraging. How appropriate for him to discover that his friends on the right only supported him so long as he nurtured their prejudices; they loved their campy gay mascot until the moment he challenged them. Then he was a pervert.
The swift recent reversal of Yiannopoulos’s fortunes is in many ways illuminating. The Breitbart editor had spent the last year building a public profile by going around American college campuses giving “lectures” with titles like “Why Do Lesbians Fake So Many Hate Crimes?” and “Why Ugly People Hate Me.” At these events, he would tell people why “feminism is cancer,” refer to various people as “cunts” and “retards,” and make jokes about how Muslims were probably terrorists. When appalled students tried to have the talks canceled, he would insist that the PC left was simply afraid to deal with arguments, facts, and statistics. (The more obvious explanation is that the PC left doesn’t think a person whose idea of elevated political discourse is “100% of fat people are fucking gross”—and who gigglingly posts pictures of the overweight people at his gym—is sincere about wanting to improve political dialogue on campus.)
As Yiannopoulos would continue to bait students with outrageous and cruel remarks, and students would continue to take the bait by giving Yiannopoulos publicity and fueling his persecution narrative, he managed to bring himself mainstream attention. For God only knows what reason, a major publishing house decided to reward him with a six-figure advance. (Actually, we know full well the reason: $) Bill Maher invited Yiannopoulous on Real Time, where the two enjoyed a pleasant back-and-forth about how the left were the real intolerant ones, before agreeing that transgender people were a bunch of sex criminals who couldn’t be trusted in women’s bathrooms. (The only relief during Yiannopoulos’s otherwise unendurable Real Time appearance was provided by Larry Wilmore, who enthusiastically told Yiannopoulos to go fuck himself after Yiannopoulos speculated that his black co-panelists must have low IQs.) Finally, the Conservative Political Action Conference placed a gleaming maraschino atop Yiannopoulos’s recent success by offering him a speaking slot.Until a few days ago, then, Milo Yiannopoulos was doing quite well for himself. Then the pedophilia tapes surfaced. It turned out that Yiannopoulos had once made a few remarks that were difficult to interpret as anything other than a defense of sex between older men and young boys:
“We get hung up on this sort of child abuse stuff, to the point where we are heavily policing consensual adults. In the homosexual world, particularly, some of those relationships between younger boys and older men — the sort of ‘coming of age’ relationship — those relationships in which those older men help those young boys discover who they are and give them security and safety and provide them with love and a reliable, sort of rock, where they can’t speak to their parents.”
When the interviewer pointed out that this sounded like “Catholic priest molestation,” Yiannopoulos replied: “You know what? I’m grateful for Father Michael. I wouldn’t give nearly such good head if it wasn’t for him…” In another interview, Yiannopoulos confirmed that age 14 he had had sexual interactions with a priest, but said that this “wasn’t molestation,” nor was it pedophilia, because “pedophilia is not a sexual attraction to somebody 13 years old who is sexually mature. Pedophilia is attraction to children who have not reached puberty.”
Conservatives were scandalized. Bill Kristol called the remarks “despicable” and CPAC rapidly rescinded Yiannopoulos’s invitation to speak. Soon after, Simon & Schuster canceled his book deal, and there were reports that Breitbart editors were threatening to resign if he wasn’t fired. During Friday’s Real Time, Bill Maher had said that Yiannopoulos was “only at the beginning of [his] career.” By Monday, it seemed like he was at the end of it.
The rapid undoing of Yiannopoulos was interesting for several reasons. It served as an instructive illustration of what conservatives were and were not willing to tolerate. All the hateful filth about women, Muslims, and transgender people actually made a conservative publishing imprint want to publish his book. These things evidently do not cross a moral line. (To his credit, National Review editor Jonah Goldberg deplored this lack of principle, commenting that “apparently the racism and anti-Semitism wasn’t a deal breaker.”)
As far as CPAC goes, Yiannopoulos’s invitation and dis-invitation shows where the standards lie. For Simon and Schuster, on the other hand, dropping Yiannopoulos may have been strictly business. As Roxane Gay, who withdrew her book from the publishing house in protest of their decision to offer Yiannopoulos a contract, explained: “Simon and Schuster realized it would cost them more money to do business with Milo than he could earn for them. They did not finally ‘do the right thing.’ They were fine with his racist and xenophobic and sexist ideologies.” Indeed, like most publishers, S&S is far more concerned with what they can sell than with whether it’s moral or immoral.
But just as interesting as what didn’t make Yiannopoulos toxic is what did. Ironically, the remarks that finally got him expelled from the mainstream were among his less indefensible. He has been condemned by almost everybody for “defending pedophilia.” But this is not quite fair. In fact, while his comments are shocking, the arguments he is making are not unfamiliar in LGBT discourse. As Current Affairs editor Yasmin Nair explained in a thoughtful and provocative essay in 2005, the intensity of feelings around child abuse often prevent people from appreciating nuanced arguments. Nair was writing about a publisher’s decision to exclude an article on pederasty from a book on the history of same-sex relationships, after right-wing complaints that it would condone “rampant child molestation.” As she writes, there is a long tradition of the right using fears about pedophilia “to condemn all queers, particularly gay men, as predators of children.” It is often impossible to have a discussion about the reality of queer people’s lives, because anyone who speaks of their neutral or positive experiences with older people as a youth is perceived as endorsing pedophilia.
Yiannopoulos says that gay men’s experiences as teens with older men are often complicated, not always easily captured by the available terminology. He says that his own teenage sexual encounters with men did not fit the labels “molestation” and “pedophilia,” especially since pedophilia refers to attraction to the pre-pubescent. He offered a further clarification on Facebook:
I do not support pedophilia. Period. It is a vile and disgusting crime, perhaps the very worst…If I choose to deal in an edgy way on an internet livestream with a crime I was the victim of that’s my prerogative. It’s no different to gallows humor from AIDS sufferers…I did say that there are relationships between younger men and older men that can help a young gay man escape from a lack of support or understanding at home. That’s perfectly true and every gay man knows it. But I was not talking about anything illegal and I was not referring to pre-pubescent boys.
It’s not, on the face of it, an unreasonable explanation. Yiannopoulos may not have made his point very well. But there’s something nuanced and defensible here. First, he’s saying that the relationships between gay men and teenage boys (according to their own accounts) have historically been messier than simple categories allow for. And second, it’s absurd to say that he can’t make dark or crass jokes about his priest if it’s his way of dealing with what happened to him.
Unfortunately for Yiannopoulos, there is no possibility of complexity where it comes to discussions around age, sex, and consent. Fears of pedophilia have made it so that even the slightest hint that one is condoning it brings instant total ostracism. (These same sentiments have also made it so that no punishment is considered too severe when it comes to those convicted of sex crimes against minors. Nobody wants to speak out on behalf of society’s most loathed group of criminals, thus they get shunted under bridges and denied housing rather than given treatment.)
Yiannopoulos has quickly found out which ideas will actually get you booted from the public square, and they’re left-wing ones rather than right-wing ones. It turned out the real people you can’t offend are the conservatives whose latent homophobia make them instantly pounce on a gay man as a defender of pedophilia when he tries to explain his world to them. How fitting that Yiannopoulos should end up subjected to the very kind of vicious misrepresentation of LGBT people that he has spent his time encouraging. How appropriate for him to discover that his friends on the right only supported him so long as he nurtured their prejudices; they loved their campy gay mascot until the moment he challenged them. Then he was a pervert.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Monday, February 20, 2017
A Biker's Sunday
I’m not going anywhere, in the sense that the point of this journey is the journey. It’s Sunday morning, the roads are dry, the sky isn’t threatening anything and the worst of the road salt has gone. This is going out for a ride just for the sake of the ride. There is a destination; I’m headed for British Camp on the shoulders of the Malvern Hills. There’s a café up there and I know, just know that heading towards it like migrating birds or butterflies drawn in by a particular flower on a particular day, will be dozens of others of my kind; bikers keen to get out and remember what it is about their expensive, sometimes ridiculous and often dangerous passion that drives them to do it.I’m lucky and have a choice of bikes at home. I’ve chosen a Kawasaki Z900 from 1976. I needed a Japanese multi-cylinder engine today, something that connects me directly with the big capacity machines I lusted after as a kid. It’s not perfect, my Z900, but then neither am I and we are working together to overcome our respective shortcomings. The bike’s suspension is crude and baggy compared with modern stuff, but then I am far from being a steely-eyed pilot of a this-minute superbike, so we’ll get along fine. Adjusting the bike’s trajectory by moving a shoulder or shifting a hip, I am reconnecting with the business of working as a team, machine and rider, sharing the goal of playing with the road’s curves and straights and dips and stringing them together to form a perfect whole. I’ve ridden bikes through this winter, yes, but only as transport, only as a cheat, a quicker means of getting to where I need to be. This though, is different, this isn’t anything as mundane as transport, this is biking.
by Richard Hammond, Drivetribe | Read more:
Image: Richard Hammond
A Corporate Defender At Heart, Former SEC Chair Returns to Her Happy Place
Mary Jo White, whose tenure as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission under President Obama bitterly disappointed those who hoped she would aggressively enforce banking laws, is rejoining the corporate defense team at Debevoise & Plimpton, marking her sixth trip through the revolving door between various government jobs and the white-collar defense law firm she calls home.
Debevoise represents numerous major financial institutions under federal investigation, and White will now help those corporate clients manage their legal exposure.
White got the call to return to Debevoise on Inauguration Day, her last day at the SEC. As Debevoise presiding partner Michael Blair told the Wall Street Journal, “We had been waiting to make that phone call for several years.”
This latest trip through the revolving door is particularly disturbing because White declared in ethics disclosure forms before becoming SEC chair that she was retiring from her partnership at Debevoise, receiving a lump sum retirement payment of over $2 million. Instead of staying retired, she immediately went back to Debevoise after her government service ended, pocketing the money.
It is not, however, surprising.
White auditioned for the job promising to police Wall Street aggressively, and be “bold and unrelenting.” But once installed, she spent her time at the SEC operating like she still worked for Debevoise. Her tenure was marked by persistent delays on finalizing rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, including those on corporate political spending and disclosure of the CEO pay ratio. One anti-corruption rule requiring oil and gas companies to disclose payments to foreign governments got finalized so late that Republicans had the opportunity to scrap it earlier this month with a special review procedure.
Critics have charged that White continued the SEC’s tradition of light enforcement. James Kidney, a former SEC trial lawyer, attacked the agency in a scathing retirement speech in 2014, saying that it “polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors.”
Kidney added, “I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses … who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket. They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances.”
Under White, the SEC failed to monitor stock buybacks to prevent market manipulation. It failed to stop the epidemic of granting waivers to companies automatically banned from securities activities after settling cases of civil and criminal wrongdoing. White stood with Republican commissioners even as Democratic colleagues tried to stop those waivers from being granted. In a troubling continuance of regulatory capture at the agency, White hired a senior Goldman Sachs attorney as the SEC chief of staff.
Though White made a big show of fighting to force companies to admit guilt in any settlement, a break from past practice, in reality this tool was rarely used. According to a letter from Sen, Elizabeth Warren, of 520 settlements from June 2013 to September 2014, only 19 required admissions of guilt. And in the majority of those cases, the SEC only asked for a broad admission of the facts of the case, rather than admissions of specific securities violations. In one example, the SEC got JPMorgan Chase to admit to breaking a law in 2013, but it wouldn’t say which one.
Perhaps the most notable trend of White’s SEC tenure was how she repeatedly recused herself from cases, not only because of her past association with Debevoise (which forced recusal from cases involving Bank of America), but because her husband John White worked as a corporate lawyer at another white-shoe firm, Cravath Swaine & Moore. It’s been rumored that firms would try to sign up with Cravath just to knock White out of enforcement cases.
In the first two years, White recused herself from over four dozen investigations, according to the New York Times. In several cases, this resulted in a 2-2 split on enforcement decisions among the five-member panel, delaying or sometimes ending the offending banks’ cases.
White got ethics waivers to insert herself into some cases involving former clients, like Credit Suisse, despite the conflict of interest. Enforcement against the Swiss bank has been called cozy and soft; a recent $90 million fine for misleading investors was “almost a win-win for the SEC and Credit Suisse,” according to former SEC enforcement attorney David Chase.
Warren asked President Obama to fire White last October, saying “The only way to return the SEC to its intended purpose is to change its leadership.”
Unlike Obama, President Trump does not even pay lip service to that intended purpose, which is to protect investors. Trump’s choice for White’s replacement, Jay Clayton, is also a former corporate lawyer. Clayton worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented Goldman Sachs, among other financial firms. Clayton’s wife Gretchen is a vice president at Goldman Sachs, leading to yet more conflicts of interest. And even before Clayton’s confirmation, the SEC’s acting chairman, Michael Piwowar, has quietly worked to roll back the power of senior attorneys to open investigations into Wall Street misconduct.
Debevoise represents numerous major financial institutions under federal investigation, and White will now help those corporate clients manage their legal exposure.
White got the call to return to Debevoise on Inauguration Day, her last day at the SEC. As Debevoise presiding partner Michael Blair told the Wall Street Journal, “We had been waiting to make that phone call for several years.”This latest trip through the revolving door is particularly disturbing because White declared in ethics disclosure forms before becoming SEC chair that she was retiring from her partnership at Debevoise, receiving a lump sum retirement payment of over $2 million. Instead of staying retired, she immediately went back to Debevoise after her government service ended, pocketing the money.
It is not, however, surprising.
White auditioned for the job promising to police Wall Street aggressively, and be “bold and unrelenting.” But once installed, she spent her time at the SEC operating like she still worked for Debevoise. Her tenure was marked by persistent delays on finalizing rules mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, including those on corporate political spending and disclosure of the CEO pay ratio. One anti-corruption rule requiring oil and gas companies to disclose payments to foreign governments got finalized so late that Republicans had the opportunity to scrap it earlier this month with a special review procedure.
Critics have charged that White continued the SEC’s tradition of light enforcement. James Kidney, a former SEC trial lawyer, attacked the agency in a scathing retirement speech in 2014, saying that it “polices the broken windows on the street level and rarely goes to the penthouse floors.”
Kidney added, “I have had bosses, and bosses of my bosses … who made little secret that they were here to punch their ticket. They mouthed serious regard for the mission of the commission, but their actions were tentative and fearful in many instances.”
Under White, the SEC failed to monitor stock buybacks to prevent market manipulation. It failed to stop the epidemic of granting waivers to companies automatically banned from securities activities after settling cases of civil and criminal wrongdoing. White stood with Republican commissioners even as Democratic colleagues tried to stop those waivers from being granted. In a troubling continuance of regulatory capture at the agency, White hired a senior Goldman Sachs attorney as the SEC chief of staff.
Though White made a big show of fighting to force companies to admit guilt in any settlement, a break from past practice, in reality this tool was rarely used. According to a letter from Sen, Elizabeth Warren, of 520 settlements from June 2013 to September 2014, only 19 required admissions of guilt. And in the majority of those cases, the SEC only asked for a broad admission of the facts of the case, rather than admissions of specific securities violations. In one example, the SEC got JPMorgan Chase to admit to breaking a law in 2013, but it wouldn’t say which one.
Perhaps the most notable trend of White’s SEC tenure was how she repeatedly recused herself from cases, not only because of her past association with Debevoise (which forced recusal from cases involving Bank of America), but because her husband John White worked as a corporate lawyer at another white-shoe firm, Cravath Swaine & Moore. It’s been rumored that firms would try to sign up with Cravath just to knock White out of enforcement cases.
In the first two years, White recused herself from over four dozen investigations, according to the New York Times. In several cases, this resulted in a 2-2 split on enforcement decisions among the five-member panel, delaying or sometimes ending the offending banks’ cases.
White got ethics waivers to insert herself into some cases involving former clients, like Credit Suisse, despite the conflict of interest. Enforcement against the Swiss bank has been called cozy and soft; a recent $90 million fine for misleading investors was “almost a win-win for the SEC and Credit Suisse,” according to former SEC enforcement attorney David Chase.
Warren asked President Obama to fire White last October, saying “The only way to return the SEC to its intended purpose is to change its leadership.”
Unlike Obama, President Trump does not even pay lip service to that intended purpose, which is to protect investors. Trump’s choice for White’s replacement, Jay Clayton, is also a former corporate lawyer. Clayton worked for Sullivan & Cromwell, which represented Goldman Sachs, among other financial firms. Clayton’s wife Gretchen is a vice president at Goldman Sachs, leading to yet more conflicts of interest. And even before Clayton’s confirmation, the SEC’s acting chairman, Michael Piwowar, has quietly worked to roll back the power of senior attorneys to open investigations into Wall Street misconduct.
by David Dayen, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Pete Marovich/Bloomberg News via Getty Images
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