Dick & Betsy DeVos fund Broadway play written by a sweatshop profiteer about the founder of an ultra conservative church
Yesterday, MLive posted an article about Dick & Betsy DeVos deciding to provide financial support for the Broadway play Scandalous, written by Kathie Lee Gifford.
The article calls the move by Dick and Betsy their “entry” into Broadway, as if this was a new venture for them.
The play they are funding is about a woman who was an evangelical and the founder of Foursquare Church, which has grown significantly since 1930s, but has maintained its hyper-conservative roots.
The MLive story mentions that this is not the first time that Dick and Betsy DeVos have decided to fund the arts and culture, with increasing amounts of money going to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and their financing of son Rick’s annual event, ArtPrize.
However, the article doesn’t explore why Dick and Betsy have decided to fund arts and culture. Instead, the MLive story refers to other articles in the New York Times and the Huffington Post, neither of which explores their motivations.
Nearly two years ago, we posted an article by artist Richard Kooyman, entitled What is ArtPrize, where Kooyman explores why he thinks the DeVos family has shifted to art & culture. Kooyman believes that the DeVos’ interest in art and culture is connected to the rest of the family philosophy of promoting capitalism and conservative religious values.
There are also aspects of the DeVos/Gifford/Foursquare partnership that are completely ignored by the MLive article.
First, there is no mention of Kathie Lee Gifford’s history of profiting from sweatshops in Central America. In 1996, Charles Kernaghan, with the National Labor Committee (MLC), investigated where Gifford’s brand name clothing was being manufactured and discovered that a factory in Honduras was using teenage girls to sew her clothes for little pay and under horrendous working conditions.
Gifford went on TV, cried and then said she would make sure such practices never happened again. Three years later it was discovered that Gifford continued to profit off of sweatshop labor, when the NLC found her clothing line being made in sweatshops in El Salvador.
This is relevant information as Gifford’s play is about a woman who promoted a certain kind of religious values, yet she herself has a history of exploited women workers abroad. It is also relevant in that the DeVos family has been a proponent of trade policies that have both benefited their company and created exploitative practices, such as the one that Gifford and Amway have profited from.
Second, there is no exploration about what the Foursquare Church has become and its relationship to the politics of DeVos and Gifford. Foursquare Church continues to promote hyper-conservative religious values such as anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage and the dominance of Christian values in public life. Former Foursquare pastor Jack Hayford, now the head of Kings College and Seminary, embraces Dominion theology, a theology that believes that religious doctrines should govern civic life. Essentially, those who embrace Dominion theology in the US would like to replace the US system of laws with the 10 Commandments. Hayford and other Foursquare leaders have also been involved with the patriarchal Christian movement known as the Promise Keepers.
It’s no surprise then that Dick and Betsy DeVos would finance a Broadway play written by a Sweatshop profiteer that promotes the story of the founder of an ultra-conservative Christian Church.
New website exposing Coca Cola’s racist practices
We have reported in the past about the international campaign to boycott Coca Cola because of their role in the murder of union organizers in Colombia and the company’s theft of water from communities in Indian.
Closer to home there is a major lawsuit against Coca Cola because of the blatant racial discrimination against its employees in several bottling plants in the US.
The lawsuit exposing Coke’s racial injustice has produced a new website, http://www.stopcokediscrimination.com/. The site provides details on the legal case against the company and this summary of the racial discrimination that Black and Latino employees face:
1. Coca-Cola may be an enjoyable refreshment for most, but its black and Hispanic workers produce Coca-Cola’s beverages in a cesspool of racial discrimination. There is an endemic culture of racism at Coca-Cola that runs through its management and supervisors at its New York bottling plants in Elmsford and Maspeth. The 16 Plaintiffs herein have suffered from the worst of its ills in terms of biased work assignments and allotment of hours, unfair discipline and retaliation, and the caustic work environment.
2. Black and Hispanic production workers at Coca-Cola are typically assigned to the most undesirable and physically dangerous positions, and to tests that are outside of their job descriptions. Meanwhile, the managers contravene the established seniority system by giving better jobs and more overtime hours to white workers with less seniority than minority workers. As several of the Plaintiffs have found, opportunities for advancement and promotion within the company are routinely biased against minority workers. Finally, the truck drivers among the Plaintiffs have had their hours unfairly limited and prevented from working overtime, while white drivers do not have to face these problems.
3. Those among the Plaintiffs who have dared to speak up about the discrimination to managers or human resources have not only found no resolution to their concerns, but instead have faced swift retaliation from the white managers. This retaliation has come in the form of unwanted scrutiny and unfair disciplinary actions, up to the point of suspension and termination for some of the Plaintiffs.
4. The minority workers of Coca-Cola face an atmosphere of casual racism from co-workers, which not only goes unpunished, but is often perpetrated by white supervisors and managers. The Plaintiffs frequently witness overt displays of racism in the plant in the form of offensive remarks and ridicule, while suffering from racially charged harassment from supervisors. This hostile work environment has caused many of the Plaintiffs significant emotional harm, to the point where they must seek therapy to deal with the stress from work.
The website also provides significant documents that related to the lawsuit, a news section, bios on the plaintiffs, protest information and a section that looks at the history of racial discrimination at Coca Cola.
The history section is instructive, with several good articles and a short video done by UK Channel 4, which includes an excerpt from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech in Memphis, where he called for a boycott of Coca Cola.
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
Signal: 02, a Journal of International Political Graphics & Culture, edited by Alec Dunn and Josh MacPhee – In the follow up to Signal 01, this collection of articles, posters and prints is an inspiring and fabulous tribute to visually driven political art. Included in this volume are stories about the political art of famous Mozambican artist Malangatana, political street murals in Portugal in the 1970s, early 20th Century anarchist broadsides that were distributed in northern California, political Gestetner art in the US in the 1960s, Oaxacan street art during the political uprising in 2006 in Mexico, Japanese anarchist sketches and the political printmaking work of the Danish collective Red Mother (1969 – 1978). The visuals that accompany the stories are incredible and truly speaks to the power of visual art for resistance and revolutionary change. A delightful book that should be shared widely.
The 1937 Woolworth’s Sit-Down: Women Strikers Occupy Chain Store, Win Big, by Dana Frank – This 55-page booklet by labor historian Dana Frank is a fabulous read about the courage of 105 women that participated in a seven day strike at a Woolworth’s store in Detroit. Inspired by the Flint UAW strike, the young women who worked long hours for little pay, decided that if it could work for the GM workers, it could work for them. Frank’s recounting of the historic event is lively and insightful. The author notes that the strike not only gained tremendous support from other workers in Detroit, but workers all across the country. Other unions provided supplies and money, but it was the creativity and solidarity of these women at Woolworth’s that won their demands. Frank also notes that the strike inspired workers at other Woolworth’s across the country and service industry workers in general. The 1937 Woolworth’s Sit-Down is a fabulously inspiring read and lesson about the importance of direct action for today.
Social Movements: 1768 – 2008, by Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood – This is an expanded second edition of Tilly’s 2004 book, which brings this analytical history of social movements fully up to date. Tilly and Wood cover such recent topics as immigrants’ rights, new media technologies, anti-Olympic organizing in China, new mobilizations against the Iraq War, and the role of bloggers and Facebook in social movement activities. The co-author’s case studies, reflections and insights into global social movements today provides readers with a useful framework to both understand the power of social movements and the strategic importance of such movements. The book even comes with discussion questions that could be useful for group discussion.
Mic Check: Documentary Shorts from the Occupy Movement (DVD) – Mic Check is a collection of 19 short documentaries that deal with aspects and perspectives on the US Occupy Movement. The shorts deal with topics such as people’s motivations for participating in the Occupy Movement, police abuse, people of color and the Occupy Movement, occupying homes, Occupy Oakland, actions against foreclosures, Occupy the DOE, Food Democracy Now, student organizing and an interview with Naomi Klein. What is most refreshing about this collection of videos is the prominence of voices of color and working class people talking about their involvement, their issues and their aspirations for the future of the world. An inspiring collection of videos that demonstrate that people all across the country are pissed off at the system and want to create something different than what we have all been subjected to our whole lives.
This Day in Resistance History: Nat Turner’s Slave Revolt
On this day in 1831, a slave in Virginia named Nat Turner, led an armed rebellion against slave owners and their families.
Turner, who had been a slave nearly all his life, claimed to have had religious visions. In one of those visions, Turner was told to, “slay my enemies with their own weapons.”
Whatever one thinks about the religious visions that Turner claimed to have, the reality is that he was a slave and his lived experience of slavery certainly taught him that living under a repressive system often leads people to acts of resistance and liberation.
People who object to religion justifying his acts of violence against slave owners and their families should come to terms with the fact that most slave owners justified owning and brutalizing slaves based on religion, particularly Christianity.
Beginning on the night of August 21, 1831, Turner, along with other slaves, used axes to kill his slave owner and family. Turner and his followers then went to other slave plantations to free other slaves and attack slave owners who tries to stop them. By the next day there were some 70 slaves and free Blacks that were part of the insurrection.
Virginia authorities responded quickly by calling up the local militia and members of the US military to help put down the rebellion. On August 22nd, Turner and the rest of the rebellion were confronted by a militia. Some were killed immediately, while others escaped. Turner himself went into hiding until he was captured on October 30. The slave rebellion leader was then put on trial and sentenced to be executed on November 11, where he was hung.
It would be easy to quickly dismiss Turner’s actions as an utter failure. However, it is important that we look at these kinds of acts of resistance as part of larger movement, which led to the abolition of slavery.
Nat Turner’s rebellion was not the first by slaves in the US, nor was it the last. Some historians will note that the Haitian slave rebellion at the end of the 18th century gave birth to slave rebellions in the US. Herbert Aptheker in American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) chronicles 250 slave actions between 1526 and 1860.
The fact that slave revolts were so numerous should tell us something about the level of resistance that slaves were willing to engage in to obtain their freedom. Slaves also used other tactics to rebel against the legal system of chattel slavery, such as stealing slave owner property, sabotage, work slow downs, burning down buildings and running away. An excellent book that documents the diversity of tactics used by slaves can be found in Eugene Genovese’s book Roll, Jordan, Roll.
It is important to also note that the slave owners in Virginia and the south did not let Nat Turner’s rebellion pass without making some changes. Clearly, this action put fear into the hearts and minds of slave owners everywhere. Some states passed laws which forbid anyone to teach slaves to read and write, demonstrating the system’s fear in knowing that knowledge is power. Slave owners also began to figure out ways to tighten their control over their slaves, but the increased repression only led to more opposition.
Turner’s rebellion forced anti-slave sectors to question their own tactics and complacency and more people became more vocal and willing to take bigger risks. Just as the Haitian uprising gave birth to Nat Turner’s rebellion, Turner’s rebellion gave birth to an increase in slave revolts and the armed insurrection led by John Brown in 1859. None of these actions alone ended slavery in the US, but the collective resistance against slavery over decades is what eventually led to the abolition of slavery.
Such a view of history is not how it is often presented to us in grade school where a specific date or some great man is what brought about change in this country. It is the acts of the unknown thousands that bring about change, the men and women who joined Turner to rebel against slavery in 1831 or the thousands who were arrested during the Civil Rights era that brought about change. We might not ever know their names, but we must honor their courage by taking the same kinds of risks today and revolting against systems of oppression.
Editor’s note: For those interested in exploring the history of the abolition movement and other social justice movements in the US, GRIID is offer a class entitled, A History of US Social Movements, which begins on September 17.
Nuclear Cover-Up Threatens Great Lakes Region
This article by Michael Leonardi is re-posted from CounterPunch.
According to recent reports from the nuclear watchdog Beyond Nuclear and several Great Lakes environmental organizations, the NRC is up to its usual practices as an industry captured agency. Collusion and flagrant cover-ups at the Davis Besse nuclear power plant on the shores of Lake Erie and at the Palisades nuclear plant on the shores of Lake Michigan have drawn the ire of Congressmen Dennis Kucinich of Ohio and Ed Markey of Massachusetts who have called on the NRC’s investigator general to investigate NRC region 3 practices and motivations of the NRC in allowing these plants to operate with grave safety concerns.
With respect to Davis Besse it seems like a flashback to the 2002 hole in the reactor head incident documented here, as part of the history of this Nuclear Nightmare between Toledo and Cleveland on the western Lake Erie basin. In 2003 the NRC’s commissioner resigned after the General Accounting Office found the agency guilty of collusion with plant operator First Energy in their attempts to cover-up the seriousness of corrosion issues that brought Davis Besse within 3/16ths of an inch of a core containment breach and catastrophic release of radioactivity. Then congressman Dennis Kucinich led the call of the Inspector General’s office as he is once again after First Energy and the NRC have colluded to downplay the seriousness of widespread cracking that has been discovered over the past year throughout the concrete shield building that houses the Davis Besse reactor.
According to some alarming revelations found in NRC documents revealed through a Freedom of Information Act filing by Kevin Kamps at Beyond Nuclear found here, NRC investigators have serious reservations as to whether the Davis Besse shield building could withstand even minor seismic activity and admit that even before the widespread cracking was discovered that the shield building was never designed “for containment accident pressure and temperature.”
This means that, even when brand new and un-cracked, Davis Besse’s shield building was not capable of preventing catastrophic radioactivity releases during a reactor core meltdown. An inner steel containment vessel, a mere 1.5 inches thick when brand new, would thus be the last line of defense. However, the environmental intervenors have un-earthed NRC and First Energy documents showing that the steel containment vessel has suffered significant corrosion over the past several decades due to infiltrating and standing chemically “aggressive” groundwater in the “sand bed” region surrounding the bottom of the containment vessel (which has also degraded the shield building’s underground “moisture barrier”), as well as due to an acidic borated water leak from the refueling channel near the top of the containment vessel.
The coalition of environmental and citizens groups fighting the relicensing of Davis Besse has pointed to a 1982 study, “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” (CRAC-2), commissioned by NRC, to show how bad the casualties and property damage would be downwind and downstream of a catastrophic radioactivity release which escapes Davis Besse’s corroded inner steel containment vessel and cracked outer shield building. CRAC-2 lists the following consequences at Davis-Besse: 1,400 Peak Early Fatalities; 73,000 Peak Early Injuries; 10,000 Peak Cancer Deaths; $84 billion in property damage. However, CRAC-2 was based on 1970 U.S. Census data. As reported by Jeff Donn at the Associated Press in summer 2011, populations around U.S. nuclear power plants have “soared” in the past 42 years, meaning those casualty figures near Davis Besse would likely now be much worse. And, when adjusted for inflation from 1982-dollar figures, property damage would today surmount $187 billion in 2010-dollar figures.
According to the environmental coalition’s attorney Terry Lodge, “What we have established from NRC’s own documents is that there are two Nuclear Regulatory Commissions: some hard-working, intelligent people who set out to find out the truth of these very dangerous technical problems and their causes, and a political class in the agency that is dedicated to pulling the plug on any investigation that threatens utility profits, above all else. The search for truth about the shield building had to be cut off because it went too close to the cash cow.”
Michael Keegan of Don’t Waste Michigan in Monroe stated: “These multiple crackings, complete with concrete degradation of the shield containment building, are but a metaphor for the entire dilapidated Davis Besse atomic reactor. This reactor is running on borrowed time, propped up on stilts by a captured regulator that is now under investigation for doing so.”
Kevin Kamps, of national watchdog Beyond Nuclear in Takoma Park, Maryland stated: “NRC staff and management, both at its national headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, as well as its Region 3 office outside Chicago, worked long hours, during evenings, on weekends, and even through the Thanksgiving holiday, in order to rubber stamp reactor restart approval at Davis Besse in a great big hurry, despite countless unanswered questions and unresolved concerns about the shield building cracking.”
As regards to the chronically leaking Palisade’s nuclear reactor located on the shores of Lake Michigan in southwest Michigan, the NRC’s investigator general is conducting an investigation into why recently resigned NRC chairman Gregory Jaczko was kept in the dark, along with the public, about a leak of Safety Injection Refueling Water from a storage tank into buckets in the control room when he was on a visit to the facility before meeting with nuclear watchdogs and environmentalists back in May of this year. This investigation was called for by congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts after it was revealed that ongoing safety issues were covered-up by the Entergy owned Palisades even while a tour of the plant was in act. Palisades has a terrible record of leaks, mishaps and accidents, some of which were outlined in this 2010 report “Headaches at Palisades: Broken Seals & Failed Heals,” by the Union of Concerned Scientist’s David Lochbaum. Most recently on the 12th of August Palisades was shut down for a leak of radioactive and acidic primary coolant, escaping from safety-critical control rod drive mechanisms attached to its degraded lid, atop what is considered by the NRC itself to be most embrittled reactor pressure vessel in the U.S..
Palisades’ operator Entergy is also in the habit of periodically releasing radioactive steam into the area due to reoccurring electrical accidents most recently in September of 2011. This steam may be a contributing factor to the fact that the area around South Haven is considered a cancer cluster by medical researchers from the state of Michigan Health department.
Jaczko was the subject of what Senator Reid of Nevada called a witch hunt by politically motivated commissioners angered at the fact that Jaczko had helped to mothball the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository and resigned in June. A December 2011 article by Andrew Cockburn, provides an overview of the politically motivated actions at an NRC that has clearly distinguished itself to be nothing more than a regulatory agency under complete control by an industry always willing to put profit margins above any considerations of health, public safety of property values. As Kevin Kamps was quoted as saying in this article in regards to Jaczko “He’s not ‘our guy’ by any means, he has voted to re-license plants that should probably be shut down, but he does care about safety, in ways that the others do not.” It was also well put by CounterPunch contributor Karl Grossman, when he said “Jaczko was insufficiently pro nuclear.”
One of the NRC commissioners responsible forcing out Jaczko was Commissioner William Ostendorff. Ostendorff reportedly threw a temper tantrum at the NRC calling on the NRC’s Investigator General to halt her investigation into the cover-up at Palisades calling it a waste of taxpayer dollars. Now Ostebdorff finds himself under investigation for impeding an investigation. Ostendorff is an explicit representation of how the NRC operates as a captured agency through orchestrated industry deception.
The story of the NRC and nuclear regulation in the United States is one of corruption and collusion at the whim of industry dictates. Congressmen Dennis Kucinich, along with congressman Markey of Massachusetts, Senators Barbara Boxer, Bernie Sanders and Ron Wyden are some of the few voices of credibility in the wilderness of congressional complacency and acquiescence to the profit driven desires of an industry driven by the vast mythology of the “peaceful atom” that has been perpetrated by decades of propaganda from the likes of the industry front group the Nuclear Energy Institute. The corporations like Exelon, GE, First Energy, Entergy and their political escorts that prop them up from the white house and throughout the halls of congress continue to allow the operation of 104 reactors across the United States.
Obama has surrounded himself with nuclear industry advisors and cabinet members as part of his nuclear powered white house. Meanwhile congress people like republican representative Fred Upton, who’s district includes Palisades and democratic representative Marcy Kaptur who resides over the district that includes Davis Besse give carte blanche to the NRC, Entergy and First Energy putting what they define as “good jobs” and “economic partnership” over any concerns of health and safety for their constituents or for the entire Great Lakes ecosystem.
In regards to the cases of Palisade’s and Davis Besse, Dennis Kucinich stated “I can’t say the cases are related, but the similarities between these two investigations are troubling. In Michigan, an effort to determine why a radioactive leak was kept from the Chairman of NRC may have been undermined. In Ohio, we witnessed agency officials give public statements that varied dramatically from what engineers had told my staff. I cannot determine what caused this change in the answers of these Region III engineers, but I am concerned that it was in response to political pressure. I hope that the Inspector General is able to restore confidence in the NRC’s ability to provide effective oversight of our nation’s nuclear power plants.” This is a confidence that for many citizens that have been following culture of collusion and corruption at the NRC since its inception has never existed.
Jaczko has now been hunted out and replaced by Allison Macfarlane who has so far decided to keep her head in the sand when it comes to the political motivations of the NRC and its cosiness with the nuclear industry that it purports to regulate. The commissioners responsible for Jaczko’s demise remain. When asked about the perception of the NRC being a captured agency at a recent press conference Macfarlane feigned ignorance, or maybe it is that she is truly ignorant that this perception exists. If she wants to “restore confidence” as Kucinich puts it or “build public confidence in the agency by improving communication and increasing transparency” as she put it, she better get on top of the ongoing investigations of her own Inspector General very quickly. The reality that the NRC is now regulating based on deception and lies does not bode well for her attempts to build public confidence.
Senator Harry Reid recently referred to NRC commissioner Bill Magwood as a “treacherous, miserable liar,” referring to questions regarding Magwood’s support for a nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain. This repository was considered to be geologically inadequate by former chairman Jaczko and the new chair Allison Macfarlane until she jumped into the political playing field and said she would keep an open mind about the Yucca Mountain repository during her senate confirmation hearing.
Macfarlane is a geologist and expert on radioactive waste chosen at a time when the unsolvable problem of high level radioactive waste has come to the forefront once again and threatens to block any future relicensing of nuclear plants. As another in the long line of myth perpetrators Macfarlane wants to assure the American people that a safe geological storage site to keep high level radioactive waste safe and sound for over 100,000 years is surely possible if congress has the
Executive Excess 2012: The CEO Hands in Uncle Sam’s Pocket
This article is re-posted from the Institute for Policy Studies. Editor’s note: The following information is shared here so as to provide readers with yet another example of how the system screws us over. We are not advocating for a reform in the system or simply more equity in pay between workers and CEOs. Our readers have to make up their own minds on what to do with this information.
Nationwide, budget cuts have axed 627,000 public service jobs just since June 2009. Schools, health clinics, fire stations, parks, and recreation facilities—virtually no public service has gone unsqueezed. Tax dollars haven’t seemed this scarce in generations.
Yet tens of billions of these scarce tax dollars are getting diverted. These tax dollars are flowing from average Americans who depend on public services to the kingpins of America’s private sector. They’re subsidizing, directly and indirectly, the mega-million paychecks that go to the top executives at our nation’s biggest banks and corporations.
Exorbitant CEO pay packages have, of course, been outraging Americans for quite some time now. Every new annual CEO pay report seems to bring a rash of predictably angry editorials and calls for reform. But little overall has changed. Wages for average Americans continue to stagnate. Pay for top executives continues to soar.
One key reason why: Our nation’s tax code has become a powerful enabler of bloated CEO pay. Some tax rules on the books today essentially encourage corporations to compensate their executives at unconscionably higher multiples of what their average workers are paid.
Other rules let executives who run major corporations routinely reduce their corporate tax bills. The fewer dollars these corporations pay in taxes, the more robust their eventual earnings and the higher the “performance-based” pay for the CEOs who produce them.
In effect, we’re rewarding corporate executives for gaming the tax system. Our tax code is helping the CEOs of our nation’s most prosperous corporations pick Uncle Sam’s pocket.
In this latest Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess annual report, our 19th consecutive, we take a close look at the most lucrative tax incentives and subsidies behind bloated CEO pay and highlight those executives who have reaped the highest rewards from tax code provisions that actively encourage outrageously disproportionate executive pay.
We also identify the top executives who have benefited the most from what have become known as “the Bush tax cuts”—the reductions in federal income tax rates on top-bracket, capital gains, and dividend income enacted in 2001 and 2003.
Among our findings:
- Of last year’s 100 highest-paid U.S. corporate chief executives, 26 took home more in CEO pay than their companies paid in federal income taxes, up from the 25 we noted in last year’s analysis. Seven firms made the list in both 2011 and 2010.
- The CEOs of these 26 firms received $20.4 million in average total compensation last year. That’s a 23 percent increase over the average for last year’s list of 2010’s tax dodging executives.
- The four most direct tax subsidies for excessive executive pay cost taxpayers an estimated $14.4 billion per year—$46 for every American man, woman, and child. That amount could also cover the annual cost of hiring 211,732 elementary-school teachers or creating 241,593 clean-energy jobs.
- CEOs have benefited enormously from the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers. Last year, 57 CEOs saved more than $1 million on their personal income tax bills, thanks to these Bush-era cuts.
What can be done to end today’s incredibly gross pay divide between top executives and average workers? In this year’s Executive Excess, we once again survey a wide range of reform notions with a “scorecard” that notes those reforms that have already been enacted, those still pending before Congress, and those proposals not yet before Congress that we believe hold the most CEO pay-deflating promise.
Read the full report: Executive Excess 2012: The CEO Hands in Uncle Sam’s Pocket (PDF)
Go to the campaign page: Executive Excess 2012 Campaign
Challenging Channel One’s commercial influence in our schools
This action alert is re-posted from Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.
For nearly 25 years, Channel One News has been the nation’s most pernicious in-school advertiser, wasting taxpayer-funded class time by showing student-targeted commercials to a captive audience of schoolchildren. But there are signs that Channel One’s days may be numbered. Many schools have dumped the network and its student audience has shrunk from 8.1 million in 2000 to 5.5 million today. But that’s 5.5 million too many.
And now, in a desperate attempt to make up for lost revenue, Channel One is escalating its daily commercial assault by advertising inappropriate and disreputable websites to students and turning entire broadcasts into ads. That’s why CCFC is calling on state departments of education to conduct a thorough review of the costs and benefits of showing Channel One News in school and to encourage local districts to suspend its use until such a review is complete.
Will you join us in urging your state’s department of education to investigate Channel One?
This week, CCFC sent a letter to state school superintendents detailing the reasons why Channel One should not be shown in schools, including:
It’s waste of students’ time and taxpayers’ money. In exchange for the loan of outdated video equipment, schools agree to show a 12-minute newscast – including 2 minutes of commercials – every day. Schools with Channel One lose more than a week of instructional time each year, including a full day just to the commercials!
Channel One violates its contract with schools by exceeding the agreed-upon limit on commercial content. In addition to regular commercials, Channel One integrates advertising into its actual newscast. For instance, on May 23, 2012, Channel One’s entire 12-minute broadcast was devoted to promoting four television shows on the ABC Family network.
Channel One promotes websites that are inappropriate for children and teens, including the highly sexualized gURL.com; Live Psychic Readings, which charges $7.49/minute; and the controversial website Spokeo.com, which was fined $800,000 by the Federal Trade Commission in June for the misuse and sale of personal data.
If state education departments investigate and publicize what Channel One is doing in classrooms and on its student-targeted website, it’s likely that educators will pull the plug. But they will only act if there is significant pressure to do so. Will you urge your state to investigate Channel One and help us put an end to the worst-of-the-worst in in-school advertising? Click here.
OKT offers Tomato canning workshop this Saturday
The Grand Rapids-based group Our Kitchen Table (OKT), is offer the 3rd in a series of canning and food preservation workshops this Saturday, August 25.
The workshop will include a how to on canning tomatoes and oven roasting tomatoes with herbs for freezing.
This workshop is for anyone, no matter what your skill level is. OKT will provide tomatoes and canning supplies, so just bring your desire to learn or share your knowledge.
The workshop is free and open to anyone. For more information contact OKT at 616-570-0218 or OKTable1@gmail.com. They also have a facebook event page for the workshop.
Tomato Canning Workshop
Saturday, August 25
2 – 4 PM
Sherman Street Church
1000 Sherman St. SE, Grand Rapids
GQ’s take on ArtPrize and the DeVos Family
Within the past 24 hours, I have had friends message me to see if I had seen the recent GQ article on ArtPrize and Rick DeVos.
Comments have been exchanged and conversation have ensued which led me to believe that a response was relevant considering Grand Rapids is about to embark on year four of ArtPrize.
My first reaction to the Matthew Power piece in GQ, which was written based on his visit last year, was that it was nice to see such a mainstream publication willing to talk about the political dynamics of ArtPrize.
Early on in the article, Power lets his readers know that he wants to know the motives behind ArtPrize, a question many of us have been asking since it was first announced.
It was also refreshing to see the article include information on the politics of the DeVos family. The GQ article does not give enough details on their political and economic influence, but that the writer even dared to go down that path is important since none of the commercial media in Grand Rapids has been willing to utter a sound about the influence of the DeVos family and ArtPrize. In fact, the local media as we have noted on numerous occasions has been nothing short of a PR engine for the event. We have also noted that local news outlets have demonstrated that reporting on ArtPrize is more important than reporting on electoral politics.
It was equally refreshing to see Matthew Power include critical comments from two local artists, Paul Amenta and Michael Pfleghaar. Amenta and Pfleghaar both do not mince words when talking about what they find objectionable about ArtPrize, which is important considering that the event itself has not been very interested in providing a forum for critical discourse. Last year this writer attended a panel discussion on AtPrize at GVSU where not one of the panel members was willing to provide any critical comments about the annual event; and, when one audience member did, the panelists danced around his question.
Pfleghaar should also be saluted for saying that the “DeVoses were oligarchs who treated Grand Rapids like a playtown, and he also suspected ArtPrize was somehow part of their shadowy conservative cultural agenda.” Pfelghaar also stated, “Rick’s money is their money to me. He was born into this fortune.”
This last comment cuts to the core of the issue in many ways, despite Rick DeVos’ attempts to distance himself from his family’s political legacy. According to the 990s we have looked at for ArtPrize, Dick and Betsy DeVos gave their son $1.7 million in 2009 to help him make his dream become a reality. His parents have continued this trend, along with other DeVos family members and the Prince family, providing hundreds of thousands each year to underwrite some of the larger venues.
Rick DeVos’ desire to distance himself from the family politics was reflected in this comment in the GQ story where he says, “I don’t even want to weigh in on any of the political stuff. I just prefer to stay away from that.” Sorry Rick, but you do not get to stay away from that since the political stuff is woven into the very fabric of ArtPrize as we have noted in a previous posting entitled The Political Economy of ArtPrize.
Does Rick really believe that he can separate his activities, such as ArtPrize or Start Garden, when they can only happen because of the family money? He can no more distance himself from his family’s politics than any other child of a billionaire family unless they reject the wealth, which ultimately means rejecting how that wealth was acquired and what kind of influence and power that wealth buys. Rick cannot distance himself from the anti-LGBT, anti-Union, anti-public education and pro-privatization policies that the DeVos family has financed and lent their name to for decades.
This influence was reflected in the GQ story when the writer pointed out that some people he spoke with said that many artists are hesitant to submit critical pieces or voice criticism of ArtPrize. Powers states that this form of “self-censorship” was due to “all the funding the DeVoses provide for cultural institutions.” Indeed, it is extremely difficult for the cash-strapped nonprofit world to slap one of the biggest hands that feeds them.
Lastly, the GQ article was instructive in its observations about Rick DeVos and his family, with references to a bodyguard-protected family car waiting for them in the alley to the bodyguard hovering near Rick during the ArtPrize awards ceremony last year at the convention center. If Rick is afraid of being assaulted or kidnapped for ransom, he might consider that animosity towards his family is not just because of their politics, but because there are millions of people living in utter poverty while his family owns their own island and Grandpa is consistently one of the top 100 wealthiest people on the planet.
Applauding Whistleblowers targeted by the Obama Administration
This interview is re-posted from ZNet.
Dr. Marsha Coleman-Adebayo, author of No FEAR: A Whistleblower’s Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) interviews Professor Noam Chomsky. Dr. Coleman-Adebayo was a student of Noam Chomsky at MIT.
While at the EPA, Dr. Coleman-Adebayo reported that a US multinational corporation was endangering the lives of South African vanadium mine workers and was ordered to “shut-up” by supervisors. She was called racial and sexual names and received death and rape threats while at the Agency.
Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy 