Wednesday, November 14, 2018
Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?
These should be boom times for sex.
The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.
If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.
Polyamory is a household word. Shame-laden terms like perversion have given way to cheerful-sounding ones like kink. Anal sex has gone from final taboo to “fifth base”—Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue) even ran a guide to it. With the exception of perhaps incest and bestiality—and of course nonconsensual sex more generally—our culture has never been more tolerant of sex in just about every permutation.
But despite all this, American teenagers and young adults are having less sex.
To the relief of many parents, educators, and clergy members who care about the health and well-being of young people, teens are launching their sex lives later. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. (And no, they aren’t having oral sex instead—that rate hasn’t changed much.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high. When this decline started, in the 1990s, it was widely and rightly embraced. But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood. (...)
Over the course of many conversations with sex researchers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults, I heard many other theories about what I have come to think of as the sex recession. I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, of surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropping testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator’s golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.
Some experts I spoke with offered more hopeful explanations for the decline in sex. For example, rates of childhood sexual abuse have decreased in recent decades, and abuse can lead to both precocious and promiscuous sexual behavior. And some people today may feel less pressured into sex they don’t want to have, thanks to changing gender mores and growing awareness of diverse sexual orientations, including asexuality. Maybe more people are prioritizing school or work over love and sex, at least for a time, or maybe they’re simply being extra deliberate in choosing a life partner—and if so, good for them.
Many—or all—of these things may be true. In a famous 2007 study, people supplied researchers with 237 distinct reasons for having sex, ranging from mystical (“I wanted to feel closer to God”) to lame (“I wanted to change the topic of conversation”). The number of reasons not to have sex must be at least as high. Still, a handful of suspects came up again and again in my interviews and in the research I reviewed—and each has profound implications for our happiness.
[ed. See also: How the GOP Gave Up on Porn (Politico)]
The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.
If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.
Polyamory is a household word. Shame-laden terms like perversion have given way to cheerful-sounding ones like kink. Anal sex has gone from final taboo to “fifth base”—Teen Vogue (yes, Teen Vogue) even ran a guide to it. With the exception of perhaps incest and bestiality—and of course nonconsensual sex more generally—our culture has never been more tolerant of sex in just about every permutation.But despite all this, American teenagers and young adults are having less sex.
To the relief of many parents, educators, and clergy members who care about the health and well-being of young people, teens are launching their sex lives later. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. (And no, they aren’t having oral sex instead—that rate hasn’t changed much.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high. When this decline started, in the 1990s, it was widely and rightly embraced. But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood. (...)
Over the course of many conversations with sex researchers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults, I heard many other theories about what I have come to think of as the sex recession. I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, of surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropping testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator’s golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.
Some experts I spoke with offered more hopeful explanations for the decline in sex. For example, rates of childhood sexual abuse have decreased in recent decades, and abuse can lead to both precocious and promiscuous sexual behavior. And some people today may feel less pressured into sex they don’t want to have, thanks to changing gender mores and growing awareness of diverse sexual orientations, including asexuality. Maybe more people are prioritizing school or work over love and sex, at least for a time, or maybe they’re simply being extra deliberate in choosing a life partner—and if so, good for them.
Many—or all—of these things may be true. In a famous 2007 study, people supplied researchers with 237 distinct reasons for having sex, ranging from mystical (“I wanted to feel closer to God”) to lame (“I wanted to change the topic of conversation”). The number of reasons not to have sex must be at least as high. Still, a handful of suspects came up again and again in my interviews and in the research I reviewed—and each has profound implications for our happiness.
by Kate Julian, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Justin Metz/Mendelsund/Munday[ed. See also: How the GOP Gave Up on Porn (Politico)]
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
Prince Charles on His Climate-Change Fight, Life with Camilla, and Becoming King
Anyone of my age knows that days pass at a far greater speed than when they were young,” a man nearing his 70th birthday recently told me. “But in my case there are so many things that need to be done.”
“Things that need to be done” takes on a strikingly different quality if you are on the verge of ascending the British throne. Past the age at which many people retire, Charles Philip Arthur George, the Prince of Wales, is still waiting to begin the job he’s been in line for since he was three years old, when his mother, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, began her monarchy in 1952. As she has become the longest-reigning sovereign in British history, he’s become the longest-waiting heir apparent. While the Queen, at 92, still vigorously carries out the major elements of her role as head of state, her reign is inexorably beginning to wind down. At her request, the Prince of Wales has begun to ramp things up.
“Charles figured out a very long time ago that he was going to be Prince of Wales for a very long time,” an English peer intimate with the royal family says. “He planned his life accordingly, and he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish half of what he has if he had become King earlier.”
Dodging the sovereign’s constitutionally mandated straitjacket and muzzle, the Prince of Wales has been able to express strong opinions on many issues—including climate change, alternative medicine, and architectural preservation—for which he has been harshly criticized.
He has also been a prolific worker bee in the Windsor hive, his work constituting charity appearances and other public forays for the greater good. A tally of “jobs” attended by the royal family in 2017 attests to the amount of heavy lifting Charles is doing. With 546 under his belt, Charles was at the top of the list, while the Queen came in fourth (behind Princess Anne and Prince Andrew) at 296. Prince Harry and Prince William, future King himself, notched considerably fewer: 209 and 171, respectively.
As the United Kingdom lurches toward Brexit and relations with the European Union fray, the royal family’s soft power may be Britain’s trump card. They charm, they command respect; they impart a sense of stability and continuity. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth states—home to 2.4 billion citizens, a third of the world’s population—are ever critical. It was not just an act of fashion when Meghan had her 16-foot veil embroidered with flora from each of the 53 member nations. In April, the heads of these countries—which include India, New Zealand, and Nigeria—officially voted that Charles will succeed his mother as leader.
While his relatives and his subjects tiptoe around the mere thought of the Queen’s death, Charles has become a proxy head of state for his mother, while his own children have helped garner massive positive press for the royal family. (Some two billion people around the world tuned in to watch Meghan and Harry’s wedding and their baby news is a global preoccupation.) So, on May 7, when I boarded a plane with the Prince of Wales and his wife of 13 years, the Duchess of Cornwall, bound for an official royal tour through France and Greece, the couple was in high spirits.
“Things that need to be done” takes on a strikingly different quality if you are on the verge of ascending the British throne. Past the age at which many people retire, Charles Philip Arthur George, the Prince of Wales, is still waiting to begin the job he’s been in line for since he was three years old, when his mother, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, began her monarchy in 1952. As she has become the longest-reigning sovereign in British history, he’s become the longest-waiting heir apparent. While the Queen, at 92, still vigorously carries out the major elements of her role as head of state, her reign is inexorably beginning to wind down. At her request, the Prince of Wales has begun to ramp things up.
“Charles figured out a very long time ago that he was going to be Prince of Wales for a very long time,” an English peer intimate with the royal family says. “He planned his life accordingly, and he wouldn’t have been able to accomplish half of what he has if he had become King earlier.”
Dodging the sovereign’s constitutionally mandated straitjacket and muzzle, the Prince of Wales has been able to express strong opinions on many issues—including climate change, alternative medicine, and architectural preservation—for which he has been harshly criticized.He has also been a prolific worker bee in the Windsor hive, his work constituting charity appearances and other public forays for the greater good. A tally of “jobs” attended by the royal family in 2017 attests to the amount of heavy lifting Charles is doing. With 546 under his belt, Charles was at the top of the list, while the Queen came in fourth (behind Princess Anne and Prince Andrew) at 296. Prince Harry and Prince William, future King himself, notched considerably fewer: 209 and 171, respectively.
As the United Kingdom lurches toward Brexit and relations with the European Union fray, the royal family’s soft power may be Britain’s trump card. They charm, they command respect; they impart a sense of stability and continuity. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth states—home to 2.4 billion citizens, a third of the world’s population—are ever critical. It was not just an act of fashion when Meghan had her 16-foot veil embroidered with flora from each of the 53 member nations. In April, the heads of these countries—which include India, New Zealand, and Nigeria—officially voted that Charles will succeed his mother as leader.
While his relatives and his subjects tiptoe around the mere thought of the Queen’s death, Charles has become a proxy head of state for his mother, while his own children have helped garner massive positive press for the royal family. (Some two billion people around the world tuned in to watch Meghan and Harry’s wedding and their baby news is a global preoccupation.) So, on May 7, when I boarded a plane with the Prince of Wales and his wife of 13 years, the Duchess of Cornwall, bound for an official royal tour through France and Greece, the couple was in high spirits.
by James Reginato, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: Alexi Lubomirski
Inmates Fighting California's Largest Fires Denied Access to Jobs on Release
As California struggles to contain the largest fire in state history, more than 2,000 inmates have volunteered to fight the flames. Offering just $1 an hour, the state has long encouraged low-level prisoners to risk their lives and serve alongside professional firefighters, who earn nearly $74,000 a year on average. Firefighting, along with less life-threatening trades like plumbing, welding, and cosmetology, is one of several vocational training programs offered to prisoners by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
But in a bitterly ironic twist, once inmates leave prison, they often can’t work as firefighters, despite their frontline experience. In California, nearly all counties require firefighters to become licensed emergency medical technician (EMTs) — a credential that can be denied to almost anyone with a criminal record.
Many are denied jobs for their criminal record
Nor are firefighters the only position off-limits. Under California law, the state’s licensing boards can deny a credential on the basis of an applicant’s criminal record or alleged misconduct. Thanks to the rise in occupational licensing, nearly 1,800 occupations now require a license, certification, or clearance in the Golden State, affecting one-fourth of California’s workforce. As a result, hundreds of different occupations are effectively barred to roughly 8 million Californians.
California’s firefighting felons are a particularly stark illustration of a growing, national problem. According to the American Bar Association, the nation’s occupational and business licensing laws contain over 27,000 restrictions on ex-offenders, including bans on working as barbers or hosting bingo games. Those barriers impose significant costs. Research by the Center for Economic and Policy estimates that in 2014, employment barriers for the incarcerated and those with felony convictions cost the nation’s economy up to $87 billion in annual GDP, equal to “the loss of 1.7 to 1.9 million workers.”
Not only do these policies slam the door on economic opportunity, they may also increase re-offending. A recent study from Arizona State University found that states with more burdensome licensing laws saw their average recidivism rates jump by nine percent. By comparison, states with fewer licensing restrictions and no moralizing provisions had recidivism rates decline by 2.5 percent, on average. In fact, licensing burdens were second only to the overall labor market climate when it came to influencing recidivism rates.
by Nick Sibilla, USA Today | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
But in a bitterly ironic twist, once inmates leave prison, they often can’t work as firefighters, despite their frontline experience. In California, nearly all counties require firefighters to become licensed emergency medical technician (EMTs) — a credential that can be denied to almost anyone with a criminal record.
Many are denied jobs for their criminal record
Nor are firefighters the only position off-limits. Under California law, the state’s licensing boards can deny a credential on the basis of an applicant’s criminal record or alleged misconduct. Thanks to the rise in occupational licensing, nearly 1,800 occupations now require a license, certification, or clearance in the Golden State, affecting one-fourth of California’s workforce. As a result, hundreds of different occupations are effectively barred to roughly 8 million Californians.California’s firefighting felons are a particularly stark illustration of a growing, national problem. According to the American Bar Association, the nation’s occupational and business licensing laws contain over 27,000 restrictions on ex-offenders, including bans on working as barbers or hosting bingo games. Those barriers impose significant costs. Research by the Center for Economic and Policy estimates that in 2014, employment barriers for the incarcerated and those with felony convictions cost the nation’s economy up to $87 billion in annual GDP, equal to “the loss of 1.7 to 1.9 million workers.”
Not only do these policies slam the door on economic opportunity, they may also increase re-offending. A recent study from Arizona State University found that states with more burdensome licensing laws saw their average recidivism rates jump by nine percent. By comparison, states with fewer licensing restrictions and no moralizing provisions had recidivism rates decline by 2.5 percent, on average. In fact, licensing burdens were second only to the overall labor market climate when it came to influencing recidivism rates.
by Nick Sibilla, USA Today | Read more:
Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
[ed. Maybe they could check with Kim and Kanye about becoming "Concierge" firefighters?]
The Optimized Anti-Style of Allbirds Shoes
The San Francisco-based brand Allbirds makes shoes so soft and flexible that you can bend them almost a hundred and eighty degrees in your hands. When worn, the lightweight rubber soles flare out at the ball of the foot, creating a slightly geriatric silhouette. The “S-curve tread array” carved into the bottom of the sole is supposed to distribute your weight evenly as you walk; the insoles caress your arches and make walking feel like gliding. The merino-wool fabric, in a variety of neutral and pastel shades, is reminiscent of an expensive Fair Isle sweater, except somehow not at all itchy. It is thin enough that you can see the outline of your toes as you walk. The eight lace holes of the original Allbirds “Runners,” embellished with contrast stitching, have a dad-ish quality to them. The only visible branding is a small tab on the back and a cursive, lowercase “allbirds” carved into the heel. The shoes are, for all my attempts to describe them, excessively nondescript. This is perhaps their biggest innovation. Allbirds are so meticulously basic that, when clad in them, your feet almost cease to exist.
For quite a while now, “sensible” footwear has been enjoying a curious vogue. Take the slow reinvigoration of Birkenstocks, or the popular #cloglife tag on Instagram, which features women sporting buttery leather clogs inspired by Dutch farm shoes. Or take the bizarre fact that Crocs has surged to No. 13 on the list of footwear brands that teen-agers desire most. Even high fashion is purposefully cribbing an “ugly” aesthetic from the world of Dr. Scholl’s inserts and podiatry foam; the new thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton “Archlight” sneakers look like something an extraterrestrial might wear to a Jazzercise class. But Allbirds, which are billed as “the world’s most comfortable shoe,” cannot really be categorized as ugly footwear, because the idea behind them is not proud unstylishness but technical perfection; the writer Emily Gould has aptly described her Allbirds as “an algorithm on my feet.” (...)
In their initial wave of popularity, Allbirds became an essential part of the daily uniform of Bay Area tech entrepreneurs. “Everyone’s wearing them,” a startup financier told the Times last August. “Sometimes it is awkward, especially if we’re wearing the same color.” But in the past year Allbirds have travelled outside the clean hallways of Silicon Valley headquarters and tipped into the mainstream. Mila Kunis wears Allbirds. So does Jennifer Garner. So do Park Slope dads and modern dancers and trendy teen-agers and kooky aunts and registered nurses and bartenders and pretty much every overworked, weary thirtysomething you see on the New York subway. Leonardo DiCaprio, an early adopter of eco-innovations, liked his pair so much that he became an investor in August, saying in a statement that the shoes are “crucial for creating a more sustainable future.” In October, the company announced a third round of funding, bringing its total valuation reportedly to $1.4 billion—which makes it a particularly precocious breed of unicorn (by comparison, Warby Parker, the digital-first eyeglasses company, took eight years to reach its current valuation of around $1.75 billion). (...)
I recently watched the fascinating documentary “Generation Wealth,” by the photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who has been chronicling American excess for two decades. Her work portrays the kind of ostentatious materialism—gold chains, stretch limos, marble toilets, super-yachts—that feels like it’s from another era. What’s more prevalent now is a softer, sneakier expression of affluence, the clean, clinical stylings of the technocratic class. Luxury is no longer about wearing so many diamonds that you topple over; it’s about driving the quietest car, living in the most automated home, reducing the amount of friction you have to navigate in the world. Allbirds might be the closest the world of everyday fashion has come to embracing this ideal of optimized efficiency.
by Rachel Syme, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Christie Hemm Klok / NYT / Redux
For quite a while now, “sensible” footwear has been enjoying a curious vogue. Take the slow reinvigoration of Birkenstocks, or the popular #cloglife tag on Instagram, which features women sporting buttery leather clogs inspired by Dutch farm shoes. Or take the bizarre fact that Crocs has surged to No. 13 on the list of footwear brands that teen-agers desire most. Even high fashion is purposefully cribbing an “ugly” aesthetic from the world of Dr. Scholl’s inserts and podiatry foam; the new thousand-dollar Louis Vuitton “Archlight” sneakers look like something an extraterrestrial might wear to a Jazzercise class. But Allbirds, which are billed as “the world’s most comfortable shoe,” cannot really be categorized as ugly footwear, because the idea behind them is not proud unstylishness but technical perfection; the writer Emily Gould has aptly described her Allbirds as “an algorithm on my feet.” (...)In their initial wave of popularity, Allbirds became an essential part of the daily uniform of Bay Area tech entrepreneurs. “Everyone’s wearing them,” a startup financier told the Times last August. “Sometimes it is awkward, especially if we’re wearing the same color.” But in the past year Allbirds have travelled outside the clean hallways of Silicon Valley headquarters and tipped into the mainstream. Mila Kunis wears Allbirds. So does Jennifer Garner. So do Park Slope dads and modern dancers and trendy teen-agers and kooky aunts and registered nurses and bartenders and pretty much every overworked, weary thirtysomething you see on the New York subway. Leonardo DiCaprio, an early adopter of eco-innovations, liked his pair so much that he became an investor in August, saying in a statement that the shoes are “crucial for creating a more sustainable future.” In October, the company announced a third round of funding, bringing its total valuation reportedly to $1.4 billion—which makes it a particularly precocious breed of unicorn (by comparison, Warby Parker, the digital-first eyeglasses company, took eight years to reach its current valuation of around $1.75 billion). (...)
I recently watched the fascinating documentary “Generation Wealth,” by the photographer and filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, who has been chronicling American excess for two decades. Her work portrays the kind of ostentatious materialism—gold chains, stretch limos, marble toilets, super-yachts—that feels like it’s from another era. What’s more prevalent now is a softer, sneakier expression of affluence, the clean, clinical stylings of the technocratic class. Luxury is no longer about wearing so many diamonds that you topple over; it’s about driving the quietest car, living in the most automated home, reducing the amount of friction you have to navigate in the world. Allbirds might be the closest the world of everyday fashion has come to embracing this ideal of optimized efficiency.
by Rachel Syme, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Christie Hemm Klok / NYT / Redux
[ed. I have two pairs and they're wonderful.]
Amazon’s New Neighbor: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project
Amazon’s New Neighbor: The Nation’s Largest Housing Project (NY Times)
Image: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
[ed. Hmm... wonder how that'll work out.]
Monday, November 12, 2018
How Harley-Davidson's Past Crippled Its Future
An hour before midnight on New Year’s Eve in 1985, a bunch of Harley executives sat in a room at a bank with two stacks of papers, one for bankruptcy and another for recapitalization, if their last gasp ask for fresh investment came in. They had given themselves until midnight to get new money or go bankrupt, and time was running out.
Many of the executives had, four years earlier, personally invested $1 million or more—while borrowing tens of millions more on top of that—to buy the company from the conglomerate AMF for $80 million and take it private. AMF itself had acquired the motorcycle manufacturer for $14 million in 1969 (about $100 million today) with a plan to expand production and squeeze out maximum profits. But a decade of labor trouble, declining build quality, and the dominance of Japanese motorcycles—Honda, in particular—had, by 1981, left Harley in dire straits.
It was kind of a miracle that Harley had lasted that long to begin with and, indeed, had almost done so by default. Such was the impact of 1969's Easy Rider that, without it, the company might not have existed much longer after it, since, historically, motorcycle companies in the United States came and went at the ferocious whims of the marketplace. Consider that, after Indian closed its doors in 1958, Harley was the only American motorcycle manufacturer left, having succeeded where hundreds of competitors had tried and failed.
By that time, market forces were already working against them, since by the 1950s in the U.S., no one really needed a motorcycle. Unlike in Europe, Asia and Africa, motorcycles and scooters never really became a viable and large-scale means of transportation—especially in urban areas—here in America. Besides, cars were getting safer and cheaper, and bikes had already become, in the public’s mind, tools of outlaws, thanks in part to 1953's The Wild One and the (often overhyped) emergence of motorcycle gangs.
And while that image has changed, motorcycles have remained hobbies for decades, the province of the weekend rider who has some money to burn.
“We’re in the fashion business,” Willie Davidson, the grandson of Harley co-founder William A. Davidson told People in 1981. “No one needs a motorcycle. It’s your toy or hobby. It has to do something for your ego.”
Harley has found, time and time again, however, that appealing to hobbyists isn’t always a great formula for business success. If the ‘70s almost killed them, the ‘80s were even less kind, though in that room at 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in 1985, the Harley executives finally got a call. New investment had come through. The company would not go bankrupt. The executives in the room were jubilant, and, just seven months later, in July 1986, Harley went public.
The good times were back on for the next 20 years until recently, when sales dropped for the first time in decades, President Donald Trump imposed a damaging trade war, and Harley’s future began to look ever dimmer. It was a child of the 1900s, a warhorse of the 1940s, a Boomer icon of the 1960s, a lucrative source of nostalgia in the 1990s. Today, though, it’s just another shrinking piece of Americana.
Harley sales in the U.S. peaked at over 260,000 motorcycles in 2006, but have dipped to 147,972 last year, a number that is the lowest since 2010 and, before that, the lowest since 1993. (Retail sales fell 13 percent in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2018 compared to 2017, Harley said late last month.)
Harley’s longtime bread and butter has been Baby Boomers, those who grew up enamored with the outlaw image to the point that they were willing to spend $20,000 or more on the bikes and leather to live out that image. But the Boomers are getting older, increasingly physically unable to ride or dying out entirely. And Harley’s response—an electric bike called the LiveWire set to debut next year—isn’t so much of a Hail Mary as it is a capitulation. It also won’t be nearly enough.
“I think they have to completely reinvent the brand, and I don’t know if they can do it,” Erik Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said. “The jokes are true. When I go down the freeway, I always look to see if this cliche about Harley riders is true. And the crazy thing is that it is true. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone under 55.
“My generation viewed Harleys as American fast, loud, muscle. We liked that stuff,” Gordon said. “[My students] view it as the tired old folks who screwed up America.” (...)
With some fanfare, Harley unveiled its electric bike concept a few years ago, taking a prototype on a cross country tour and letting people test-ride it, as a trial balloon. The electric bike they put into production (and will debut next year) looks and operates very much like that prototype. Which is to say very much like Harley’s gasoline-powered motorcycles, with a twist-and-go throttle but no gears to speak of. Harley has spent the time in between the prototype and the launch of its first electric bike—dubbed the LiveWire—prepping its customers to a painful degree.
“An authentic Harley-Davidson expression of individuality, iconic style and performance that just happens to be electric,” text read on Harley’s website in the build-up. It’s electric, Harley’s saying, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The LiveWire will debut in a market—high-powered electric motorcycles—that essentially doesn’t exist yet, with fewer than 1,000 such motorcycles sold in 2017 in the U.S. and Europe, according to Cycle World. Part of the problem is inherent in the design.
Many of the executives had, four years earlier, personally invested $1 million or more—while borrowing tens of millions more on top of that—to buy the company from the conglomerate AMF for $80 million and take it private. AMF itself had acquired the motorcycle manufacturer for $14 million in 1969 (about $100 million today) with a plan to expand production and squeeze out maximum profits. But a decade of labor trouble, declining build quality, and the dominance of Japanese motorcycles—Honda, in particular—had, by 1981, left Harley in dire straits.It was kind of a miracle that Harley had lasted that long to begin with and, indeed, had almost done so by default. Such was the impact of 1969's Easy Rider that, without it, the company might not have existed much longer after it, since, historically, motorcycle companies in the United States came and went at the ferocious whims of the marketplace. Consider that, after Indian closed its doors in 1958, Harley was the only American motorcycle manufacturer left, having succeeded where hundreds of competitors had tried and failed.
By that time, market forces were already working against them, since by the 1950s in the U.S., no one really needed a motorcycle. Unlike in Europe, Asia and Africa, motorcycles and scooters never really became a viable and large-scale means of transportation—especially in urban areas—here in America. Besides, cars were getting safer and cheaper, and bikes had already become, in the public’s mind, tools of outlaws, thanks in part to 1953's The Wild One and the (often overhyped) emergence of motorcycle gangs.
And while that image has changed, motorcycles have remained hobbies for decades, the province of the weekend rider who has some money to burn.
“We’re in the fashion business,” Willie Davidson, the grandson of Harley co-founder William A. Davidson told People in 1981. “No one needs a motorcycle. It’s your toy or hobby. It has to do something for your ego.”
Harley has found, time and time again, however, that appealing to hobbyists isn’t always a great formula for business success. If the ‘70s almost killed them, the ‘80s were even less kind, though in that room at 11 p.m. on New Year’s Eve in 1985, the Harley executives finally got a call. New investment had come through. The company would not go bankrupt. The executives in the room were jubilant, and, just seven months later, in July 1986, Harley went public.
The good times were back on for the next 20 years until recently, when sales dropped for the first time in decades, President Donald Trump imposed a damaging trade war, and Harley’s future began to look ever dimmer. It was a child of the 1900s, a warhorse of the 1940s, a Boomer icon of the 1960s, a lucrative source of nostalgia in the 1990s. Today, though, it’s just another shrinking piece of Americana.
Harley sales in the U.S. peaked at over 260,000 motorcycles in 2006, but have dipped to 147,972 last year, a number that is the lowest since 2010 and, before that, the lowest since 1993. (Retail sales fell 13 percent in the U.S. in the third quarter of 2018 compared to 2017, Harley said late last month.)
Harley’s longtime bread and butter has been Baby Boomers, those who grew up enamored with the outlaw image to the point that they were willing to spend $20,000 or more on the bikes and leather to live out that image. But the Boomers are getting older, increasingly physically unable to ride or dying out entirely. And Harley’s response—an electric bike called the LiveWire set to debut next year—isn’t so much of a Hail Mary as it is a capitulation. It also won’t be nearly enough.
“I think they have to completely reinvent the brand, and I don’t know if they can do it,” Erik Gordon, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said. “The jokes are true. When I go down the freeway, I always look to see if this cliche about Harley riders is true. And the crazy thing is that it is true. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone under 55.
“My generation viewed Harleys as American fast, loud, muscle. We liked that stuff,” Gordon said. “[My students] view it as the tired old folks who screwed up America.” (...)
With some fanfare, Harley unveiled its electric bike concept a few years ago, taking a prototype on a cross country tour and letting people test-ride it, as a trial balloon. The electric bike they put into production (and will debut next year) looks and operates very much like that prototype. Which is to say very much like Harley’s gasoline-powered motorcycles, with a twist-and-go throttle but no gears to speak of. Harley has spent the time in between the prototype and the launch of its first electric bike—dubbed the LiveWire—prepping its customers to a painful degree.
“An authentic Harley-Davidson expression of individuality, iconic style and performance that just happens to be electric,” text read on Harley’s website in the build-up. It’s electric, Harley’s saying, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
The LiveWire will debut in a market—high-powered electric motorcycles—that essentially doesn’t exist yet, with fewer than 1,000 such motorcycles sold in 2017 in the U.S. and Europe, according to Cycle World. Part of the problem is inherent in the design.
by Erik Shilling, Jalopnik | Read more:
Image: Sam Woolley
Wells Fargo's 'Puffery' Defense
"Yeah, well, you know, that's just like your opinion, man." (The Big Lebowski)
If you’ve ever wondered how businesses can get away with making transparently false or deceptive claims about themselves or their products — “The Best Tasting Juice in America,” Wrigley’s gum is “for whiter teeth, no matter what,” etc., etc. — the answer is an all-purpose legal dodge known as the “puffery” defense.
Simply put, judges and regulators have ruled that when a business makes a claim that is either vague or so obviously inflated that people simply won’t believe it, that’s “puffery,” and not actionable in court.
Wells Fargo, which is struggling to rebuild its reputation for integrity after a string of scandals involving consumer rip-offs, is testing the limits of the “puffery” defense. In a legal filing last week aimed at getting a shareholder lawsuit dismissed, the company asserted that statements that the bank was working to “restore trust” among its customers and “trying to be more transparent” about its scandals — statements made by its chief executive, Tim Sloan — were, well, just puffery.
The filing says these were generic statements “on which no reasonable investor could rely.” Therefore, even though the bank’s stock price fell sharply when evidence emerged that they were false, investors don’t have grounds to sue for their losses.
“This is just another example of corporate actors making statements to the market, and then trying to avoid liability for the representations they made,” says Darren Robbins, the San Diego lawyer bringing the shareholder suit.
If it sounds like a strange thing for a bank to say when it’s trying to present itself as a paragon of rectitude — in essence, “We can’t be sued because no one believed us anyway” — just wait. It gets stranger.
Wells Fargo says that even though the statements by its management fall within the legal definition of puffery, that doesn’t mean they’re untrue. “Wells Fargo stands behind the statements it made regarding its commitment to transparency and rebuilding trust with its customers,” the bank told me by email. “These statements were true then and remain so today.”
The lawsuit at issue concerns a scandal that erupted in public in July 2017, when it became known that for years Wells Fargo had been charging auto loan borrowers for unnecessary insurance on their vehicles. The lawsuit seeks class certification for all investors who bought the company’s stock from Nov. 3, 2016 — when Sloan announced at an investors conference that he was “not aware” of any undisclosed scandals in sales practices — through Aug. 3, 2018, the day before the bank formally disclosed the auto-loan issues in an earnings report.
The scam at the heart of this case was massively abusive, according to internal reports and assertions in a consumer lawsuit filed last week. Wells Fargo saddled roughly 600,000 auto loan borrowers — disproportionately lower-income customers — with insurance to cover the vehicles that collateralized the loans.
Many borrowers, however, already had insurance, so they didn’t need the additional coverage. Some didn’t even know they were being charged because Wells Fargo didn’t itemize the insurance fees on their loan statements.
When customers made monthly payments on their loans, according to the consumer lawsuit, Wells Fargo applied them in a way that pushed as many as 275,000 customers into delinquency, resulting in some 25,000 improper repossessions. The bank didn’t always fully or promptly refund the fees and late charges it owed the victimized customers, and didn’t always clean up credit reports that had been sullied by its illicit behavior. (...)
The shareholder lawsuit focuses on the efforts by Sloan and his fellow executives to conceal the auto-loan scandal from the public. While they were trying to clean up the splatter from the bank’s most prominent scandal, in which sales representatives secretly opened millions of accounts for consumers in order to meet punishing work quotas, the executives consistently stated that they were investigating high and low to make sure the bank was otherwise clean and would fully disclose anything they discovered.
“We want to leave no stone unturned,” Sloan told investment analysts during a conference call in January 2017. “If we find something that’s important, we’ll communicate that…. I think given our desire to be very transparent, we’ll probably err on the side of overcommunicating as opposed to undercommunicating.”
Yet by then, Sloan had received a report from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman that laid out the auto-loan scandal in great detail.
by Michael Hiltzik, LA Times | Read more:
Simply put, judges and regulators have ruled that when a business makes a claim that is either vague or so obviously inflated that people simply won’t believe it, that’s “puffery,” and not actionable in court.
Wells Fargo, which is struggling to rebuild its reputation for integrity after a string of scandals involving consumer rip-offs, is testing the limits of the “puffery” defense. In a legal filing last week aimed at getting a shareholder lawsuit dismissed, the company asserted that statements that the bank was working to “restore trust” among its customers and “trying to be more transparent” about its scandals — statements made by its chief executive, Tim Sloan — were, well, just puffery.
The filing says these were generic statements “on which no reasonable investor could rely.” Therefore, even though the bank’s stock price fell sharply when evidence emerged that they were false, investors don’t have grounds to sue for their losses.
“This is just another example of corporate actors making statements to the market, and then trying to avoid liability for the representations they made,” says Darren Robbins, the San Diego lawyer bringing the shareholder suit.
If it sounds like a strange thing for a bank to say when it’s trying to present itself as a paragon of rectitude — in essence, “We can’t be sued because no one believed us anyway” — just wait. It gets stranger.
Wells Fargo says that even though the statements by its management fall within the legal definition of puffery, that doesn’t mean they’re untrue. “Wells Fargo stands behind the statements it made regarding its commitment to transparency and rebuilding trust with its customers,” the bank told me by email. “These statements were true then and remain so today.”
The lawsuit at issue concerns a scandal that erupted in public in July 2017, when it became known that for years Wells Fargo had been charging auto loan borrowers for unnecessary insurance on their vehicles. The lawsuit seeks class certification for all investors who bought the company’s stock from Nov. 3, 2016 — when Sloan announced at an investors conference that he was “not aware” of any undisclosed scandals in sales practices — through Aug. 3, 2018, the day before the bank formally disclosed the auto-loan issues in an earnings report.
The scam at the heart of this case was massively abusive, according to internal reports and assertions in a consumer lawsuit filed last week. Wells Fargo saddled roughly 600,000 auto loan borrowers — disproportionately lower-income customers — with insurance to cover the vehicles that collateralized the loans.
Many borrowers, however, already had insurance, so they didn’t need the additional coverage. Some didn’t even know they were being charged because Wells Fargo didn’t itemize the insurance fees on their loan statements.
When customers made monthly payments on their loans, according to the consumer lawsuit, Wells Fargo applied them in a way that pushed as many as 275,000 customers into delinquency, resulting in some 25,000 improper repossessions. The bank didn’t always fully or promptly refund the fees and late charges it owed the victimized customers, and didn’t always clean up credit reports that had been sullied by its illicit behavior. (...)
The shareholder lawsuit focuses on the efforts by Sloan and his fellow executives to conceal the auto-loan scandal from the public. While they were trying to clean up the splatter from the bank’s most prominent scandal, in which sales representatives secretly opened millions of accounts for consumers in order to meet punishing work quotas, the executives consistently stated that they were investigating high and low to make sure the bank was otherwise clean and would fully disclose anything they discovered.
“We want to leave no stone unturned,” Sloan told investment analysts during a conference call in January 2017. “If we find something that’s important, we’ll communicate that…. I think given our desire to be very transparent, we’ll probably err on the side of overcommunicating as opposed to undercommunicating.”
Yet by then, Sloan had received a report from the consulting firm Oliver Wyman that laid out the auto-loan scandal in great detail.
by Michael Hiltzik, LA Times | Read more:
Image: The Big Lebowski
[ed. See also: Jury delivers $25.5 million 'statement' to Aetna to change its ways (CNN)]
[ed. See also: Jury delivers $25.5 million 'statement' to Aetna to change its ways (CNN)]
Scum vs. Scum
There is perhaps no better illustration of the deep decay of the American political system than the Senate race in New Jersey. Sen. Bob Menendez, running for re-election [ed. he was elected], was censured by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting bribes from the Florida businessman Salomon Melgen, who was convicted in 2017 of defrauding Medicare of $73 million. The senator had flown to the Dominican Republic with Melgen on the physician’s private jet and stayed in his private villa, where the men cavorted with young Dominican women who allegedly were prostitutes. Menendez performed numerous political favors for Melgen, including helping some of the Dominican women acquire visas to the United States. Menendez was indicted in a federal corruption trial but escaped sentencing because of a hung jury. (...)
His Republican rival in the Senate race that will be decided Tuesday is Bob Hugin, whose reported net worth is at least $84 million. With Hugin as its CEO, the pharmaceutical firm Celgene made $200 million by conspiring to keep generic cancer drugs off the market, according to its critics. Celgene, a model of everything that is wrong with our for-profit health care system, paid $280 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a whistleblower who accused the firm of improperly marketing two drugs to treat several forms of cancer without getting Federal Drug Administration approval, thereby defrauding Medicare. Celgene, over seven years, also doubled the price of the cancer drug Revlimid to some $20,000 for a supply of 28 pills.
The Senate campaign in New Jersey has seen no discussion of substantive issues. It is dominated by both candidates’ nonstop personal attacks and negative ads, part of the typical burlesque of American politics.
Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that 100 million Americans don’t bother to vote? When all you are offered is Bob One or Bob Two, why bother? One-fourth of Democratic challengers in competitive House districts in this week’s elections have backgrounds in the CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the State Department. Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are corporate-sponsored, with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as Democrats. The securities and finance industry has backed Democratic congressional candidates 63 percent to 37 percent over Republicans, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. Democratic candidates and political action committees have received $56.8 million, compared with Republicans’ $33.4 million, the center reported. The broader sector of finance, insurance and real estate, it found, has given $174 million to Democratic candidates, against $157 million to Republicans. And Michael Bloomberg, weighing his own presidential run, has pledged $100 million to elect a Democratic Congress.
“In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors and those who raise money from them, Democrats described an extraordinary level of investment and excitement from the finance sector … ,” The New York Times reported about current campaign contributions to the Democrats from the corporate oligarchs.
Our system of legalized bribery is an equal-opportunity employer.
Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man’s party of the president retain control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are in for it.
Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn’t vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.
The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics, Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing another run for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast elites who want to instill corporate fascism with a friendly face.
Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in “Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power” warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner’s sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises protection against enemies real and invented. But denounce its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from fascism’s iron grip, and you are mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States’ form of fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true intentions behind its “friendly” face we would be stripped of power, shorn of our most cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.
“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America,” Gross wrote. “Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion.”
No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We are, at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including sporting events, reality television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of this form of entertainment. Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are stripped from us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game. (...)
We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and progressives, as they do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for the Democrats, although the Democratic Party in Europe would be classified as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build progressive movements the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its abject service to corporations. It knows the left and liberals become supplicants in every election cycle. And this is why the Democratic Party drifts further and further to the right and we become more and more irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for it. But there is no fight in us.
The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it.
His Republican rival in the Senate race that will be decided Tuesday is Bob Hugin, whose reported net worth is at least $84 million. With Hugin as its CEO, the pharmaceutical firm Celgene made $200 million by conspiring to keep generic cancer drugs off the market, according to its critics. Celgene, a model of everything that is wrong with our for-profit health care system, paid $280 million to settle a lawsuit filed by a whistleblower who accused the firm of improperly marketing two drugs to treat several forms of cancer without getting Federal Drug Administration approval, thereby defrauding Medicare. Celgene, over seven years, also doubled the price of the cancer drug Revlimid to some $20,000 for a supply of 28 pills.The Senate campaign in New Jersey has seen no discussion of substantive issues. It is dominated by both candidates’ nonstop personal attacks and negative ads, part of the typical burlesque of American politics.
Scum versus scum. That sums up this election season. Is it any wonder that 100 million Americans don’t bother to vote? When all you are offered is Bob One or Bob Two, why bother? One-fourth of Democratic challengers in competitive House districts in this week’s elections have backgrounds in the CIA, the military, the National Security Council or the State Department. Nearly all candidates on the ballots in House races are corporate-sponsored, with a few lonely exceptions such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, members of the Democratic Socialists of America who are running as Democrats. The securities and finance industry has backed Democratic congressional candidates 63 percent to 37 percent over Republicans, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. Democratic candidates and political action committees have received $56.8 million, compared with Republicans’ $33.4 million, the center reported. The broader sector of finance, insurance and real estate, it found, has given $174 million to Democratic candidates, against $157 million to Republicans. And Michael Bloomberg, weighing his own presidential run, has pledged $100 million to elect a Democratic Congress.
“In interviews with two dozen Wall Street executives, fund-raisers, donors and those who raise money from them, Democrats described an extraordinary level of investment and excitement from the finance sector … ,” The New York Times reported about current campaign contributions to the Democrats from the corporate oligarchs.
Our system of legalized bribery is an equal-opportunity employer.
Of course, we are all supposed to vote Democratic to halt the tide of Trump fascism. But should the Democrats take control of the House of Representatives, hate speech and violence as a tool for intimidation and control will increase, with much of it directed, as we saw with the pipe bombs intended to decapitate the Democratic Party leadership, toward prominent Democratic politicians and critics of Donald Trump. Should the white man’s party of the president retain control of the House and the Senate, violence will still be the favored instrument of political control as the last of democratic protections are stripped from us. Either way we are in for it.
Trump is a clownish and embarrassing tool of the kleptocrats. His faux populism is a sham. Only the rich like his tax cuts, his refusal to raise the minimum wage and his effort to destroy Obamacare. All he has left is hate. And he will use it. Which is not to say that, if only to throw up some obstacle to Trump, you shouldn’t vote for the Democratic scum, tools of the war industry and the pharmaceutical and insurance industry, Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry, as opposed to the Republican scum. But Democratic control of the House will do very little to halt our descent into corporate tyranny, especially with another economic crisis brewing on Wall Street. The rot inside the American political system is deep and terminal.
The Democrats, who refuse to address the social inequality they helped orchestrate and that has given rise to Trump, are the party of racial and ethnic inclusivity, identity politics, Wall Street and the military. Their core battle cry is: We are not Trump! This is ultimately a losing formula. It was adopted by Hillary Clinton, who is apparently weighing another run for the presidency after we thought we had thrust a stake through her political heart. It is the agenda of the well-heeled East Coast and West Coast elites who want to instill corporate fascism with a friendly face.
Bertram Gross (1912-1997) in “Friendly Fascism: The New Face of American Power” warned us that fascism always has two looks. One is paternal, benevolent, entertaining and kind. The other is embodied in the executioner’s sadistic leer. Janus-like, fascism seeks to present itself to a captive public as a force for good and moral renewal. It promises protection against enemies real and invented. But denounce its ideology, challenge its power, demand freedom from fascism’s iron grip, and you are mercilessly crushed. Gross knew that if the United States’ form of fascism, expressed through corporate tyranny, was able to effectively mask its true intentions behind its “friendly” face we would be stripped of power, shorn of our most cherished rights and impoverished. He has been proved correct.
“Looking at the present, I see a more probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America,” Gross wrote. “Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion.”
No totalitarian state has mastered propaganda better than the corporate state. Our press has replaced journalism with trivia, feel-good stories, jingoism and celebrity gossip. The banal and the absurd, delivered by cheery corporate courtiers, saturate the airwaves. Our emotions are skillfully manipulated around manufactured personalities and manufactured events. We are, at the same time, offered elaborate diversionary spectacles including sporting events, reality television and absurdist political campaigns. Trump is a master of this form of entertainment. Our emotional and intellectual energy is swallowed up by the modern equivalent of the Roman arena. Choreographed political vaudeville, which costs corporations billions of dollars, is called free elections. Cliché-ridden slogans, which assure us that the freedoms we cherish remain sacrosanct, dominate our national discourse as these freedoms are stripped from us by judicial and legislative fiat. It is a vast con game. (...)
We no longer live in a functioning democracy. Self-styled liberals and progressives, as they do in every election cycle, are urging us to vote for the Democrats, although the Democratic Party in Europe would be classified as a right-wing party, and tell us to begin to build progressive movements the day after the election. Only no one ever builds these movements. The Democratic Party knows there is no price to pay for selling us out and its abject service to corporations. It knows the left and liberals become supplicants in every election cycle. And this is why the Democratic Party drifts further and further to the right and we become more and more irrelevant. If you stand for something, you have to be willing to fight for it. But there is no fight in us.
The elites, Republican and Democrat, belong to the same club. We are not in it.
by Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Read more:
Good Luck Everyone
Sunday, November 11, 2018
Winners Take All
Modern philanthropy means that giving some away is more important than how you got it
Anand Giridharadas was a former McKinsey consultant turned "thought leader," invited to the stages of the best "ideas festivals" and to TED (twice), the author of some very good and successful books, and as a kind of capstone to this career, he was named a fellow to the Aspen Institute, an elite corps of entrepreneurs who are given institutional support and advice as they formulate "win-win" solutions to the world's greatest problems, harnessing the power of markets to lift people out of poverty and oppression.
But the deeper Giridharadas got into this new role, the more uncomfortable he became with it. On the night he was to give a valedictory address to an audience of business leaders, finance leaders, and other members of the ruling class, he abandoned the "Aspen consensus" and instead give a scorching and excoriating talk about the structural failure of "win-win" as a way of thinking about the world's problems.
Giridharadas's point was that the business elites who were gathered to "give back" and "solve the big problems" were some of the most egregious contributors to those problems. They had looted the world's treasuries, shut down businesses and shipped jobs to low-wage, low-regulation free trade zones, gutted public services and replaced them with low-bidder private sector contractors, and had done so while formulating and promulgating the philosophy that business leaders' individual judgment about the provision of public services were always to be preferred to those policies set by democratically elected politicians.
Anand Giridharadas was a former McKinsey consultant turned "thought leader," invited to the stages of the best "ideas festivals" and to TED (twice), the author of some very good and successful books, and as a kind of capstone to this career, he was named a fellow to the Aspen Institute, an elite corps of entrepreneurs who are given institutional support and advice as they formulate "win-win" solutions to the world's greatest problems, harnessing the power of markets to lift people out of poverty and oppression.
But the deeper Giridharadas got into this new role, the more uncomfortable he became with it. On the night he was to give a valedictory address to an audience of business leaders, finance leaders, and other members of the ruling class, he abandoned the "Aspen consensus" and instead give a scorching and excoriating talk about the structural failure of "win-win" as a way of thinking about the world's problems.Giridharadas's point was that the business elites who were gathered to "give back" and "solve the big problems" were some of the most egregious contributors to those problems. They had looted the world's treasuries, shut down businesses and shipped jobs to low-wage, low-regulation free trade zones, gutted public services and replaced them with low-bidder private sector contractors, and had done so while formulating and promulgating the philosophy that business leaders' individual judgment about the provision of public services were always to be preferred to those policies set by democratically elected politicians.
The speech was -- obviously -- divisive. Giridharadas had expected to be pilloried for his views, and he was, to an extent. A hedge-fund millionaire sought him out later to call him an asshole, people glared at him from across the Institute's bar. But there were also people who applauded vigorously, billionaires who thanked him for finally articulating the doubt that had lurked in their hearts.
It was the start of a project that culminated in the publication of last summer's Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, a beautifully written "argument with Giridharadas's friends" about the problems with their worldview. As Giridharadas says, being inside the system gives you special insight when it comes to criticizing it, and Giridharadas is deep inside the system.
Winners Take All moves all the way up and down the stack of today's plutocratic philanthropy industry, talking to NGO managers, billionaire donors, critics, cheerleaders, superstars (Bill Clinton granted Giridharadas a wide-ranging interview about his extraordinary transition for a man who led the most powerful nation on Earth to someone committed to bypassing nations in favor of private philanthropy enacted by multinational corporations and hereditary billionaires), and, of course, critics.
The result is a comprehensive and devastating critique of elite giving, and a sharp articulation of its core philosophy: that it doesn't matter how you made your money, provided that you do some good with it once it's in your anonymous, offshore, tax-free bank-account. Giridharadas's shows how this belief gives the rich cover to continue actions that are worsening the problems that they are nominally concerned with solving, and to still think of themselves (and be publicly recognized) as do-gooders rather than the source of our problems.
The private philanthropy model has both ideological and methodological blinkers. Practicioners of "marketworld" philanthropy approach every problem like a McKinsey consultant, bringing the management consultant's toolkit and specialized, jargony vocabulary with them. When "the protocol" of the management consultants are the only tool at your disposal, parts of problems that the protocol can't solve are downranked to oblivion, as are the methods that might tackle them.
I live on the periphery of the world Giridharadas describes: I, too, get invited to "ideas" festivals, and while I generally use my time there to decry corruption and to make explicit connections between bad policy and plutocratic wealth, I've also seen enough of the people Giridharadas is talking about to agree with him when he says that many of these people are kind, kind-hearted, and also secretly worried that the "market-world" approach to solving problems will never solve a problem that challenges market-world, or its beneficiaries (like them).
Giridharadas doesn't speculate about whether market-world's givers have their hearts in the right place because he wants to know whether they can be forgiven for their participation in the system -- but rather, whether they can be convinced to do something about it.
All through Giridharadas's book, he meets people high and low, rich and powerful or poor and scrappy, who understand that we're at a breaking point. Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that elite do-goodism was just cover for perpetuation of the system (nevermind that he also planned on perpetuating the system), and he resonated with people. Ever since late nineties, when Reagan-era deregulation had pervaded deeply into the system and wages started to stagnate, organized labor started to crumble, and policies like the WTO were consummated to the benefit of capital and the cost of the world, its climate and its people, there's been a mounting sense that we are on a collision course with disaster.
As inequality mounts, our weakened governments are unable to enact policies that upset plutocrats' apple carts. American health care, education, infrastructure, and (of course) its climate are unravelling so fast we can actually see it happen. People are turning to far-right movements and falling prey to charlatans as they seek a way out, or at least an explanation.
It was the start of a project that culminated in the publication of last summer's Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, a beautifully written "argument with Giridharadas's friends" about the problems with their worldview. As Giridharadas says, being inside the system gives you special insight when it comes to criticizing it, and Giridharadas is deep inside the system.
Winners Take All moves all the way up and down the stack of today's plutocratic philanthropy industry, talking to NGO managers, billionaire donors, critics, cheerleaders, superstars (Bill Clinton granted Giridharadas a wide-ranging interview about his extraordinary transition for a man who led the most powerful nation on Earth to someone committed to bypassing nations in favor of private philanthropy enacted by multinational corporations and hereditary billionaires), and, of course, critics.
The result is a comprehensive and devastating critique of elite giving, and a sharp articulation of its core philosophy: that it doesn't matter how you made your money, provided that you do some good with it once it's in your anonymous, offshore, tax-free bank-account. Giridharadas's shows how this belief gives the rich cover to continue actions that are worsening the problems that they are nominally concerned with solving, and to still think of themselves (and be publicly recognized) as do-gooders rather than the source of our problems.
The private philanthropy model has both ideological and methodological blinkers. Practicioners of "marketworld" philanthropy approach every problem like a McKinsey consultant, bringing the management consultant's toolkit and specialized, jargony vocabulary with them. When "the protocol" of the management consultants are the only tool at your disposal, parts of problems that the protocol can't solve are downranked to oblivion, as are the methods that might tackle them.
I live on the periphery of the world Giridharadas describes: I, too, get invited to "ideas" festivals, and while I generally use my time there to decry corruption and to make explicit connections between bad policy and plutocratic wealth, I've also seen enough of the people Giridharadas is talking about to agree with him when he says that many of these people are kind, kind-hearted, and also secretly worried that the "market-world" approach to solving problems will never solve a problem that challenges market-world, or its beneficiaries (like them).
Giridharadas doesn't speculate about whether market-world's givers have their hearts in the right place because he wants to know whether they can be forgiven for their participation in the system -- but rather, whether they can be convinced to do something about it.
All through Giridharadas's book, he meets people high and low, rich and powerful or poor and scrappy, who understand that we're at a breaking point. Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that elite do-goodism was just cover for perpetuation of the system (nevermind that he also planned on perpetuating the system), and he resonated with people. Ever since late nineties, when Reagan-era deregulation had pervaded deeply into the system and wages started to stagnate, organized labor started to crumble, and policies like the WTO were consummated to the benefit of capital and the cost of the world, its climate and its people, there's been a mounting sense that we are on a collision course with disaster.
As inequality mounts, our weakened governments are unable to enact policies that upset plutocrats' apple carts. American health care, education, infrastructure, and (of course) its climate are unravelling so fast we can actually see it happen. People are turning to far-right movements and falling prey to charlatans as they seek a way out, or at least an explanation.
by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing | Read more:
Image: Winners Take All
Bassist Darryl Jones on Touring Life with the Rolling Stones and Playing with Miles Davis
It is 10:30 on a Tuesday morning, a morning which can best be described as a “proper” English morning. You must go to England to really experience a proper English morning, the sun shines brightly, but there is no oppressive heat. There’s a crisp breeze blowing, which is all the better because all the streets nearby are decked out in bunting, Union Jacks, and English flags. As far as the eye can see, there are decorations strung between building creating a sea of red, white and blue. Why all the flags? I’m here just a few days after the royal wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle. I’m not here for the wedding, however. I’m here for that other omnipresent British export, The Rolling Stones, and I’ve been granted an interview with their bassist, Darryl Jones.
It’s the night after the first of six Stones shows in the U.K, and specifically it’s the night after the first show in London, which can only be described as somewhat of a “homecoming” for the Stones. It’s been some years since they toured the U.K. and in some cases, it’s been decades since they’ve played some of the cities on this 2018 tour, known as the No Filter tour. There’s a buzz in the air, and the local denizens are eagerly anticipating their hometown boys. It’s not just the fans who view this as a homecoming, as Darryl tells me, “It felt a little bit like the hometown boys done good, you know what I mean?” He continues, “Last night there was definitely something in the air. At one point I turned to Keith and said ‘Welcome home’. I said that to the whole band, actually.”
The venue they played at last night isn’t a venue that they’ve ever played at. It’s the former 2012 Olympic stadium known now as “Queen Elizabeth Stadium”, a shiny and massive structure holding over 80,000 friends and family. When you’re a Stones fan, you’re either one or the other, sometimes both. It’s not atypical for super-fans to travel more than ten thousand miles for these gigs, and I’m no different.
After leaving my accommodations in the center of London, I hail one of the ubiquitous black London taxis as to make the journey — and the experience — as British as possible. The cab glides effortlessly between all the Ubers, bicyclists, and pedestrians as only a London cabbie can do, as we make our way to the venerable Savoy Hotel on the river Thames. This isn’t my first trip to The Savoy, however, as I was there the night before to pick up my tickets, which were held by the “ticket lady,” a position that has changed very few times over the decades, but is present whenever The Stones show up to play. I navigated the ermine and velvet hallways to find the VIP ticket office, which is in an unmarked room, past the various eateries and sitting areas.
The taxi pulls up to the gilded port-cochere of the hotel, where I am met by a lovely chap outfitted in top hat and tails, in grey of course. Posh is how you would best describe it. A short walk from the drop-off to the front desk, where I inform the concierge I’m there to meet with Darryl Jones. I’m asked to have a seat and after a few minutes, I’m approached and told “Mr. Jones will see you now, Sir. Take the lift up to the eighth floor.” And with that I am on my way.
If you haven’t been up front at a Stones show, you don’t fully grasp just how incredibly loud the group is, nor do you necessarily pick up on all the interplay between the band members. “We’re an incredibly loud band,” says Darryl. “Dave is our front of the house guy and at times I’ll tell my tech man to get on the walkie talkie and tell Dave to turn the bass down, he really does push the bass in the mix, he tells me all the time that if you can’t feel the drums and bass, it ain’t rock and roll.”
If you’ve been lucky enough to be front of house for a more intimate gig, as I was at the tiny Fonda Theater in Los Angeles in 2015, you fully know what I’m talking about. Darryl knew exactly what I was talking about as he stated, “Being in the front for that Fonda show must have really blown your hair back, we’re really loud in small places like that!” The loudness of the band must be felt to be truly appreciated. When I was present in 2015 at the band’s rehearsal space, it felt like I was standing inside the room with them cranked to 11. As Darryl explains, “I guess it just depends on the room too, because I don’t remember that being particularly loud. It’s just one of those things you know? Rock and Roll.”
One of the things that has always endeared the band to its fans is the occasional mistake or misstep. “Last night we were having issues with the wireless mics and guitars,” Darryl explains. “It’s gonna happen with any modern technology if you want to walk around the stage without a cable. They always check all this stuff before we go on, but sometimes there’s radio interference and things cut out, for some reason, something was interfering a little bit last night. I’ve been working with these guys for a while and I don’t remember the last time that happened, I don’t think I ever remember that happening with Keith’s guitar. The fans don’t seem to mind, and the band is acutely aware of that.”
He continues, “It’s really interesting, I get the feeling that the real fans want to see that, they want to see something real and they love the mistakes. If there’s a faux-pas, they seem to really dig it. There’s definitely an element of chaos to what the band does, I always thought that when I first started playing with them,” says Darryl. “I’d be at a wedding for a musician, and the band playing is really a great band, but when they start playing a Rolling Stones song, I would think to myself, “Something’s not right,” and then I’d realize that there’s a little bit of irreverence to what the Stones do. We don’t mind if our “slip” is showing a bit, and the fans seem to really appreciate it. We’re going to let that be a part of our music, I think I learned that from Miles Davis.
It’s the night after the first of six Stones shows in the U.K, and specifically it’s the night after the first show in London, which can only be described as somewhat of a “homecoming” for the Stones. It’s been some years since they toured the U.K. and in some cases, it’s been decades since they’ve played some of the cities on this 2018 tour, known as the No Filter tour. There’s a buzz in the air, and the local denizens are eagerly anticipating their hometown boys. It’s not just the fans who view this as a homecoming, as Darryl tells me, “It felt a little bit like the hometown boys done good, you know what I mean?” He continues, “Last night there was definitely something in the air. At one point I turned to Keith and said ‘Welcome home’. I said that to the whole band, actually.”The venue they played at last night isn’t a venue that they’ve ever played at. It’s the former 2012 Olympic stadium known now as “Queen Elizabeth Stadium”, a shiny and massive structure holding over 80,000 friends and family. When you’re a Stones fan, you’re either one or the other, sometimes both. It’s not atypical for super-fans to travel more than ten thousand miles for these gigs, and I’m no different.
After leaving my accommodations in the center of London, I hail one of the ubiquitous black London taxis as to make the journey — and the experience — as British as possible. The cab glides effortlessly between all the Ubers, bicyclists, and pedestrians as only a London cabbie can do, as we make our way to the venerable Savoy Hotel on the river Thames. This isn’t my first trip to The Savoy, however, as I was there the night before to pick up my tickets, which were held by the “ticket lady,” a position that has changed very few times over the decades, but is present whenever The Stones show up to play. I navigated the ermine and velvet hallways to find the VIP ticket office, which is in an unmarked room, past the various eateries and sitting areas.
The taxi pulls up to the gilded port-cochere of the hotel, where I am met by a lovely chap outfitted in top hat and tails, in grey of course. Posh is how you would best describe it. A short walk from the drop-off to the front desk, where I inform the concierge I’m there to meet with Darryl Jones. I’m asked to have a seat and after a few minutes, I’m approached and told “Mr. Jones will see you now, Sir. Take the lift up to the eighth floor.” And with that I am on my way.
If you haven’t been up front at a Stones show, you don’t fully grasp just how incredibly loud the group is, nor do you necessarily pick up on all the interplay between the band members. “We’re an incredibly loud band,” says Darryl. “Dave is our front of the house guy and at times I’ll tell my tech man to get on the walkie talkie and tell Dave to turn the bass down, he really does push the bass in the mix, he tells me all the time that if you can’t feel the drums and bass, it ain’t rock and roll.”
One of the things that has always endeared the band to its fans is the occasional mistake or misstep. “Last night we were having issues with the wireless mics and guitars,” Darryl explains. “It’s gonna happen with any modern technology if you want to walk around the stage without a cable. They always check all this stuff before we go on, but sometimes there’s radio interference and things cut out, for some reason, something was interfering a little bit last night. I’ve been working with these guys for a while and I don’t remember the last time that happened, I don’t think I ever remember that happening with Keith’s guitar. The fans don’t seem to mind, and the band is acutely aware of that.”
He continues, “It’s really interesting, I get the feeling that the real fans want to see that, they want to see something real and they love the mistakes. If there’s a faux-pas, they seem to really dig it. There’s definitely an element of chaos to what the band does, I always thought that when I first started playing with them,” says Darryl. “I’d be at a wedding for a musician, and the band playing is really a great band, but when they start playing a Rolling Stones song, I would think to myself, “Something’s not right,” and then I’d realize that there’s a little bit of irreverence to what the Stones do. We don’t mind if our “slip” is showing a bit, and the fans seem to really appreciate it. We’re going to let that be a part of our music, I think I learned that from Miles Davis.
by Ivor Levine, Rock Cellar | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Saturday, November 10, 2018
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