Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 745
June 18, 2016
Seventy years of exploitation: The enduring plight of California’s farm workers
For the state’s first hundred-plus years, certain unspoken rules governed California politics. In a state where agriculture produced more wealth than any industry, the first rule was that growers held enormous power.
Tax dollars built giant water projects that turned the Central and Imperial Valleys into some of the nation’s most productive farmland. Land ownership was concentrated in huge corporate plantation-like farms. Growers used political power to assure a steady flow of workers from one country after another—Japan, China, the Philippines, Yemen, India, and of course Mexico—to provide the labor that made the land productive.
Agribusiness kept farm labor cheap, at wages far below those of people in the state’s growing urban centers. When workers sought to change their economic condition, grower power in rural areas was near absolute—strikes were broken and unions were kept out.
The second unwritten rule was therefore that progressive movements grew more easily in the cities, where unions and community organizations became political forces to be reckoned with. In the legislature, these rules generally meant that Democrats and pro-labor proposals came from urban districts, while resistance came from Republicans in rural constituencies.
That historic divide in California politics is changing, however.
On June 2 the State Assembly failed to pass AB2757, a bill that would give farm workers the same overtime pay that workers in urban areas have had since the 1930s. In the outcome, echoes can still be heard of those old rules. But the vote also makes clear that past certainties are certain no longer.
Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which established the nation’s first overtime pay requirement—time and a half after forty hours in a week. In the debate, Congress members from the South, heavily dependent on Black workers in cotton and tobacco, opposed making the law apply to farm labor.
Representative J. Mark Wilcox of Florida openly justified this exclusion: “Then there is another matter of great importance in the South, and that is the problem of our Negro labor,” he declared. “There has always been a difference in the wage scale of white and colored labor… You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it. Not only would such a situation result in grave social and racial conflicts but it would also result in throwing the Negro out of employment and in making him a public charge.”
The enslavement of African Americans set a pattern of inequality that lasted long after slavery itself was abolished, and the pattern was then applied to other people of color. While the descendants of slaves worked without overtime pay on the farms of the South, immigrants from Mexico and Asia faced the same exclusion in the West.
The rise of California’s farm worker movement began to change the power equation in the 1960s, however, forcing some growers to agree to union contracts, an unprecedented step. Yet even when the legislature debated the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the nation’s first law guaranteeing union rights for farm workers, the votes in favor came from urban Democrats, while rural Republicans maintained a solid front against it.
Nevertheless, the farm workers movement sparked a sea change in the politics of rural California. Growers did not lose their power, but even in rural communities that power was no longer uncontested.
In 1975, the year the ALRA was passed, Democrats in the legislature also passed the first proposal to give farm workers overtime pay. But it was still a standard below that of other workers — time and a half after ten hours in a day instead of eight, and 60 hours a week instead of 40. Growers have to pay overtime on the seventh day of work, but only if none of the previous workdays are less than six hours. In practice, few California farm workers today get overtime pay.
Through the 1980s and ’90s, when Republicans held the governorship and a majority in the legislature, changing that overtime rule was not in the cards. Even when Democrats regained their legislative majority and passed a bill to restore the 8-hour day to most California workers in 1999, farm workers were still excepted. Finally, in 2010, Democrats passed SB 1121 to remove the exception for farm workers in the 8-hour overtime standard. Then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it.
In his veto message, Schwarzenegger said the 8-hour day and 40-hour week would “not improve the lives of California’s agricultural workers and instead will result in additional burdens on California’s businesses, increased unemployment and lower wages.” He used the argument put forward by grower groups in every overtime battle, predicting that “multiple crews will be hired to work shorter shifts, resulting in lower take-home pay for all workers. Businesses trying to compete under the new wage rules may become unprofitable and go out of business.”
In 2012 Assemblymember Michael Allen introduced a similar bill sponsored by the United Farm Workers. It passed the Senate, but this time it failed in the State Assembly. Fractures in the Assembly Democratic Caucus surprised even the state horse breeders association, part of the grower opposition to the bill. It listed five Democrats “all of whom voted ‘no.’ (Amazing!),” including urban liberals like Joan Buchanan, Fiona Ma and Toni Atkins, as well as others, like Susan Bonilla, who skipped the vote.
“Unfortunately, there are a lot of terrible reasons why farm workers have been excluded for 74 years,” UFW President Arturo Rodriguez commented bitterly at the time. “Often people ask us why? As should now be apparent, Democrats are just as vulnerable to big money as Republicans are.”
In the years since the 1965 grape strike, however, a rising number of Democrats have been elected from rural districts where agricultural interests still wield economic power. Pressure from growers in these districts to vote against farm worker legislation is predictably high. But the 2012 vote revealed that the commitment to farm worker protections had weakened among urban liberal Democrats, where resistance to growers had been historically stronger.
When the vote on AB 2757 was taken on June 2, that trend was even more pronounced. The bill needed 41 votes to pass—a majority of the Assembly—and it received 38. Fourteen Democrats either voted ‘no,’ or were “not present,” which in effect counted as a no vote, since it denied the bill the majority it needed.
‘No’ votes included Ken Cooley (District 8-Rancho Cordova), Jim Cooper (9-Elk Grove), Bill Dodd (4-Woodland), Jim Frazier (11-Fairfield), Adam Gray (21-Merced), Mark Levine (10-San Rafael), Evan Low (28-Cupertino) and Bill Quirk (20-Hayward). ‘Not present’ were Richard Bloom (50 – Santa Monica), Tom Daly (69-Anaheim), Susan Eggman (13-Stockton), Jacqui Irwin (44-Oxnard), Adrin Nazarian (46-Van Nuys) and Jim Wood (2-Ukiah).
Calls placed to urban Democrats, who had little to lose in supporting the bill yet failed to do so (including Levine, Low, Quirk, Bloom, Daly and Nazarian) were not returned. The justification for their votes is unknown.
But the 38 Democratic votes that the bill did receive show that demographic change is working in favor of farm workers in the long term. Giev Kashkooli, legislative director for the United Farm Workers, notes that “Democrats from rural areas all voted ‘yes’ this time. All African-American Assemblymembers but one voted yes, and all Asian Pacific Islander members but one voted ‘yes’ too.”
Perhaps the biggest change is that among Democrats, especially rural Democrats, are several legislators who come from families of farm workers themselves. They include Joaquin Arambula (31-Fresno), Rudy Salas (32-Delano), Luis Alejo (30-Watsonville) and Eduardo Garcia (56-Coachella/Imperial Valley). AB 2757 itself was written by Lorena Gonzalez (80-San Diego), whose grandfather was a bracero farm worker, and cosponsored by Rob Bonta (18-Alameda), who grew up at the UFW headquarters in La Paz, where his parents were union staff.
In other words, less dependable liberal white support in urban areas has been offset by a growing demographic shift, not just in color and nationality, but also in terms of family history and experience in farm worker communities themselves.
The Republican Assembly Caucus was united in opposition to AB 2757. The Caucus includes not only conservatives from the upper-middle-class suburbs at the urban fringes of the state’s metropolitan areas, but also, as always, representation of growers themselves. Assemblyman Brian Dahle (1-Redding) told the Assembly, “If I could pick my dirt up and leave, I would. My dream is to leave a flourishing farm to my children. You stand in the way of allowing my children to continue their great-grandfather’s aspirations.”
Devon Mathis (26-Visalia) told the Visalia Times, “They [farm workers] get paid quite well. In our area, they get paid more than minimum wage.”
Gonzalez and Bonta crafted a bill designed to ease the impact on growers.
It would gradually phase in standards by lowering the current 10-hour day to the standard 8-hour day by annual half-hour increments for four years. The 40-hour workweek would be achieved by lowering the 60-hour week in 5-hour steps. Smaller farms would get two extra years to meet the requirement.
Determining the bill’s impact on growers is not easy, since no direct statistics are collected on how many hours of labor farm workers put in over 8 in a day or 40 in a week. Nevertheless, some idea of the stakes is clear. Farm worker payroll in California is more than $6 billion per year, but it makes up just over 10 percent of the $56 billion in growers’ annual receipts.
The median annual income for farm workers is only $14,000.
Pedro Agustin, one of the 450 farm workers who took time off to come to Sacramento to lobby in the two days before the vote, said he earned an average of $12,500 a year. “It isn’t fair that field workers are excluded from receiving this benefit,” he told legislators, “when other workers who work under a roof and some with air conditioners are getting paid overtime after 8 hours per day or after 40 hours per week. We work in very high temperatures and harvest food that everyone eats. What we want is for all of us to be treated the same.”
Growers didn’t argue that they couldn’t pay, but claimed the bill would harm workers. According to AgAlert, the weekly newspaper of the California Farm Bureau Federation, “the higher cost of providing overtime pay—particularly when coupled with scheduled increases in the state minimum wage—would force farmers to reduce employee work hours to control labor costs.” Federation President Paul Wenger predicted that it would cut farm worker income by a third. Growers, he said, would actually hire two shifts of workers, where currently one crew of workers labors throughout the day.
Kashkooli laughed at the idea. “These are the same growers who are telling Congress that they need guest workers, since they face a labor shortage. They don’t have a lot of credibility. Even if their costs would go up, why is it farm workers who always have to take the economic hit? The truth is that we’ve had 78 years of racism, and this distinction was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.”
Bonta says the bill was well designed, taking business needs into account. “But we have to face the fact that racism was a factor when this different standard was established,” he emphasizes. “A status quo inertia based on discrimination and exclusion isn’t an okay reason for carrying it forward today.”
Since the bill only failed by three votes in the Assembly, Bonta, Gonzalez and the UFW plan to bring it back. “AB 2757 is the third attempt in recent years to provide overtime after an 8-hour day, but it won’t be the last,” Gonzalez predicted. ”We’re going to get this done for the 400,000 Californians who deserve the dignity of an 8-hour day.”
June 17, 2016
Orange wasn’t my new black
Taylor Schilling in "Orange Is the New Black" (Credit: Netflix)
I was attending community college and carefully hiding from classmates the fact that I lived in a children’s home for orphans and delinquents. After receiving my GED at age 17, I had finessed my case manager into thinking I had big dreams for my future. I told her I wanted to be a social worker to help at-risk kids like me. The truth? I petitioned to take a class in hopes of bumming cigarettes and slurping down contraband sodas purchased with change I’d scavenged from the group home’s grounds. The first thing I learned from living in state institutions was how to manipulate my custodians.
For two hours twice a week I reveled in a game of make-believe, pretending to be free. I made a ritual of going to the restroom mid-lecture, not because nature called, but because it thrilled me to go without asking. The first month went so well that my case manager gave me a half-hour bonus to do homework in the school’s computer lab.
That’s where I met Ronnie. We bonded over mutual Microsoft impairments and our newness to the sleepy town stretched along the northern Illinois side of the Mississippi. He’d been recruited from Louisiana to play basketball and I’d recently been paroled from a juvenile prison in Chicago.
“Let me give you a lift,” he said in a syrupy Southern drawl. Ronnie had coffee-colored eyes and high, chiseled cheeks and smelled of Cool Water Cologne and gym shoes. I leaned in to soak up some daydream material for later.
“Can’t, friend’s on her way,” was my go-to reply. Said “friend” would actually be a counselor, clocking me in a giant blue shuttle van parked outside the school. Five minutes late was a write-up and could translate into the revocation of my parole.
My descent into the justice system’s labyrinth began a few years prior, after my parents divorced and I went from living in a crowded house with five siblings to a trailer with my mother. She transferred me from the Catholic school I’d loathed to public school. But no longer wearing uniforms was a game changer. Kids at my new school took name brands seriously and my revolving Wal-Mart specials kept me from joining their ranks. My mother’s time was siphoned by long hours at the printing press, boyfriends and booze. I tempered my loneliness with joints, and to avoid becoming a complete loner, acquired friends from a neighboring town. But some of these new companions were black: high treason in a predominantly white community.
Cue ridicule. Crack knuckles. “Gangbanger” was the nicest of my colorful new names.
I gravitated toward kids who were similarly combatting idleness and absentee parents. I was expelled for fighting, became a runaway and eventually was arrested for stealing a car at age 15. I was sentenced into court custody until age 21 and was shipped five hours north of my rural town. At first, I welcomed this initiation into street culture. It was a solid escape from the chaos at home.
But kiddy prison was not as airy as the minimum security facility depicted in “Orange Is the New Black.” Thanks in part to the super-predator rhetoric of the Clinton administration, facilities were overcrowded, forcing murderers and nonviolent criminals to be bunked together in closet-sized cells. It was, however, the first time I experienced solidarity amongst peers. Despite actual disparities, we were all leveled by our familiarity with counting cinderblocks to pass the time. But not having a lease on one’s own will is exhausting, and after two years, I was itching to decamp.
In Ronnie’s company, I forgot about being state property. His flattery allowed me to imagine that I was desirable. After mistaking my refusals for playing hard to get, he stepped up his game.
“Big party this weekend, you down?” When that didn’t work, he said, “Could use a cheerleader at tonight’s game.” Then came this: “‘Star Wars’ premieres on Friday. Let me take you on a date.”
The last one broke me. I ached to be normal and desperately wanted to do what others my age seem to be doing—even if it meant turning back into a pumpkin at midnight. But before I could accept Ronnie’s proposal, I had to proposition my guardians.
“I promise not to start any more riots during group therapy,” I said.
“Okay,” my case manager conceded. “But only if he meets your treatment team and they approve unanimously.” Team was code for case manager, two counselors, a therapist, a caseworker and a social worker. I was not a catch; more like a catch-22.
I assessed my options: blow the lid off operation hide-my-group-home-status or spend another Friday night plugging my ears, trying to shut out kids fighting over missing Uno cards.
I made the call.
“By group home you mean dorms?” Ronnie asked.
“No,” I laughed, twisting the curly phone cord around my arm. “Just come to this address. No biggie. Politics, that’s all.”
When a counselor tapped on my door for roll call the following morning, I wasn’t sure if I’d slept between practicing kissable facial expressions and naming children. I tried to act casual, standing at the double-glass doors of my unit, speculating on each car that pulled in.
When Ronnie screeched into the parking lot behind the wheel of a rusted white Cadillac, I rushed to greet him. His stare was bug-eyed and not fixed on me, but at my unit where a cluster of fifth and sixth graders were waving frenziedly.
Usually talkative, he went mute as we entered an adjacent administration building. There, the team was lounging around a conference table with an additional guest—the staff nurse.
My case manager directed Ronnie to take a seat at the head of the table and instructed me to sit in a chair in the corner. The scene was similar to my sentencing, where I was an observer and not a participant in the discussion of my future.
Questions darted at Ronnie from all directions. “Where’d you grow up? Work? Grades? Drugs?” His face flushed while his knuckles turned white around his keys. He stayed perched on the chair’s edge, on his mark to bolt out of the ambush.
After 20 savage minutes, the team conferred, then delivered its verdict. “You pick her up, we bring her home.” My case manager stood up and outstretched her palm. “Just need to Xerox your ID.” Ronnie remained frozen until she returned—all smiles—then dashed to his car without a word.
Come Friday, the girls in my unit were excited to help me primp. “Tell us how he asked again.” They spritzed curls in my blond ponytail, checked for precise creases in my jeans and ensured that I chose the least offensive of the pit-stained T-shirts from the donation bin. I was the one who was going to neck at the theater, but this was their moment, too.
The movie started at 7:00, so I expected Ronnie no later than 6:30. At six, the girls took their post at the doors, calling out each car that pulled in. “Red–not him.”
6:39. No screeches in the parking lot.
6:44. “Blue—nope.”
6:53…
At 6:55, a counselor coaxed the girls away from the door, reducing the normal bustle to whispers.
The mercy call came hours later. “Coach set a curfew,” was the best he had. I was mortified. I had set myself up for failure and disappointed the only girls who had ever looked up to me.
After that, Ronnie changed his library schedule. When I reached the lab, traces of him lingered, causing stomach cramps where butterflies once flew.
I eventually was promoted to Independent Living, where I leased an apartment and practiced new freedoms, like going to parties. It was a small town, so I was not surprised to run into Ronnie. He saw me, glanced around nervously and asked, “Did you run away?” I explained my situation. He confessed to lying about curfew and apologized, “That was just too crazy.” We truced on a friendship that never materialized. For him, solving the mystery had spoiled my allure.
Ronnie’s rejection, combined with a familial void, burned into me a belief that I belonged to the nation of no one. I did not have respect for myself and, believing I was damaged goods, was not choosy who I bedded so long as they’d come back for more. When the time neared for me to be released from parole, I considered my freedom, which true to Plato’s Allegory form, had not been this beautiful thing I fantasized in my cell. It was disastrous and even lonelier than I remembered.
I decided to intentionally revoke my parole; the warm blanket of the institution appealed more than being released with nary a counselor or human being to check on me. But this was borrowed time. New laws were enacted to decrease the prison population, which scrolled back my discharge date to age 19. After four years away, I was released back to my mother with a trash bag containing everything I owned. I tried to blend back into the family, but was detached. I was a foreigner among familiar faces I no longer knew how to communicate with.
I scrounged enough savings from working multiple fast-food joints to relocate to another college town and became the first in my family to graduate from a university. There, I studied anthropology and developed a hunger to see the world I’d only experienced on the page. Perhaps the greatest gift from my seedy past was how well I dealt with isolation and how easily I could sleep in some of the most defunct places on the planet. I transformed myself into a backpacker: couch-surfing with strangers, sleeping in $3 hostels, in bus stations or on the beach. I eventually settled in New York, which is brimming with lone wolves like me. I no longer have inhibitions about where I came from. But I am eyes-wide-open about where I’ll go.
“You have those pipe dreams that Spielberg is going to see it”: The ultimate film geeks finally finish their “Raiders” masterpiece
“Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” is the ultimate film geek project: a shot-for-shot remake of the classic blockbuster “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” It was made in 1989 by then 11-year-olds Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos. The boys and their friends filmed it every summer for seven years. And they completed all but one scene—the plane scene.
The new documentary, “Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made,” directed by Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen, chronicles the history of the cult masterpiece “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” as the guys reunite to finally—hopefully(!)—finish their film.
As “Raiders!” shows, Eric and Chris are intrepid filmmakers. They use birthday money to buy costumes and use Eric’s home as a set for many of the sequences. They have trouble with fire, causing their parents to shut down the production at one point. There are dangers with Belloq’s plaster mask, which requires some medical attention. And there are some rivalries that develop between Eric and Chris as well as with their friend Jayson Lamb that cause the guys to stop talking to one another.
But there is also the prospect of realizing their childhood dream, a dream that goes Technicolor after their film becomes an underground cult hit fawned over by Harry Jay Knowles and Eli Roth, which generates the very real possibility of getting their homemade movie seen by Steven Spielberg.
Salon talked with Chris Strompolos about “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” and the new documentary, “Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made.”
Why “Raiders of the Lost Ark?” What was it about this film that seemed viable that you said, “Yeah, we can do that!”?
I think as a young boy, growing up in the late ’70s/early ’80s, we were coming out of the “Star Wars” generation. I took a liking to Han Solo and Harrison Ford. “Raiders” was so well promoted when I went to see it as a 10-year-old. Indiana Jones was much more real and accessible to me. He was an academic, he got hurt and was vulnerable, he had girl troubles, and he was fighting the bad guys who really existed. He was a larger-than-life hero with a noble cause, a leather jacket, a hat, a gun and a whip, and he used his smarts.
“Raiders” means a lot to a lot of people. It’s a special film and has so many beautiful elements in it that were regenerated from the serials. Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Lawrence Kasdan caught lightning in a bottle. People who know and love “Raiders” have kindred stories. It’s a wonderful thing.
Yes! I’ve always had a very strong, personal connection to the film because my father was an archeologist. Did you feel you were making a film or remaking one?
Alan Stenum, who played Sallah [in “The Adaptation”], was there every summer. He said it so nicely. In reference to Eric and I, he said we weren’t remaking a film, but that we were making “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” There was a level of conviction and determination. It was our goal, and we took ourselves very seriously, even with the crappy-looking Betamax. It was a passion project. “Raiders” is visually superior, and we were remaking it, but our consciousness was that this was our world that we have control over, so let’s make it the best film we can for ourselves.
Why didn’t you get the airplane scene back in the day? What made this scene the most difficult?
It’s one of the most complex sequences. To pull it off, we had to blow up an airplane, and we had to make it look convincing, not fake, or use miniatures. We tried to command the elements, choosing an airfield and getting a Cessna, but we stepped back because it was too complicated and too dangerous. Our justification [for leaving it out originally] was that the narrative worked fine going from the well scene to the truck scene. We never got a chance to do it. Our drive was to do it.
You experienced various setbacks as kids, and many setbacks as adults. How, and why did you persevere and work around the struggles?
I attribute a lot of that to choosing my friends wisely. I knew my own personality couldn’t helm all this on my own. I had to rally in bringing Eric and Jayson in. The three of us have different personalities but powerful chemistry. When Eric and I work together there is no stopping us. We wanted to quit, but it was a quagmire: We have to finish the [plane] scene. Year after year, when we tell people we’re going to finish it this summer and you keep repeating that, you charge yourself with that responsibility. I’m glad we did it. The creative process of doing something isn’t always fun. Sometimes it’s after that [struggle] that you are able to enjoy the bliss. It took us 35 years. That’s not entirely true, but it was a good way to end that question!
You literally grew up on film, and in the process you created a makeshift family as well as created a playground for yourselves. Can you describe how filmmaking taught you life lessons?
I think it was a place for us to escape to, and the documentary [“Raiders!”] captures that. We have these strange dysfunctional worlds to escape and movie-making is a beautiful escape. Even the modern-day film business is a refuge for lost people who feel safe, protected, understood, and have a purpose. Everything is there—the emotions, the excitement—and it’s temporary and then you move to the next thing. That’s what growing up inside this world taught us. It’s a strange, highly charged arena that you submerge yourself into. It’s all the things that go into that process. “No” is not the final answer when someone says “no.” You keep asking for it, and find resources, and make things happen. And that’s what Eric and I are really good at when we work together. You fall back on what you learned. You become resourceful and don’t give up and push and push.
“Raiders!” shows there were rivalries and personality clashes. How were you able to work together for seven years, have a falling out for more than a decade, and then come back together to try and finish the film?
I think Eric and I know each other very well. In your 20s you lose yourself and redefine yourself and your priorities as you settle into place in your 30s. You find your path. I was committing myself to an artistic path and Eric was putting his life together in a different way. Those components drove us apart. We didn’t have to re-learn anything. We know who we are when we work together. We’re in sync. Eric said, “It’s iron sharpening iron.” We make each other better.
It must be gratifying to have had “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” become an underground cult favorite, championed by Harry Jay Knowles and Eli Roth. Did you ever expect it to reach the huge cult status it has?
Never. Absolutely never. You have those pipe dreams that Spielberg is going to see it. You have that dream while spray-painting hieroglyphics on your mom’s basement wall. They seem far away. When we were invited by the Drafthouse family for the World Premiere in 2003, Eric summed it up best by saying, “This was never supposed to happen. It was just for ourselves.” Everything else has been people rallying for the movie, and wanting to see it. Every day I’m thankful. I’ve been asked, “Aren’t you tired of ‘Raiders’?” And I struggle with that as I continue to define myself, but I’ve come to terms with it. It’s not a bad thing. Indiana Jones is a classic, timeless hero.
What advice would you have wanted as budding filmmakers embarking on a similar project?
You have to choose your friends and team members wisely and surround yourself with people who know more than you do. Eric is a better director and I’m a better producer and Jayson is a great cameraman. Refine that thing in yourself to identity strengths and pull the energy together. It’s about the project, not your ego. And while it’s trite to say “Don’t give up,” the creative process is uncomfortable, and you have to push yourself and get through the agonizing times and forge ahead. I’d tell kids in any creative field—music, painting, programming, “Don’t let anyone convince you that you can’t do something.” If someone gets in your mind and sterilizes your passion, or says that you’re not capable of it, that’s a terrible thing.
OK, I almost hate to ask this, but I feel obligated, and I really want to know: Would you guys ever want to re/make “Temple of Doom?”
[Laughs]. As long as you help! If you’re on board, we’re on board!
Normalizing the binge: We’ve decided gorging on TV is harmless—with Netflix’s help
(Credit: LoloStock via Shutterstock)
The most recent study conducted by Netflix on the viewing habits of its subscribers has yielded, understandably, an only minor ripple in the electronic fabric of our news cycle. This is partly due to how the press release frames the study, which is basically as more or less feel-good propaganda for increased binge-watching. The truly inspired touch is the company’s attempt to tap into one of our most deeply rooted and widely bandied American values: freedom of choice. With this study, Netflix claims that subscribers today autonomously “choose to binge” and that they do so at different rates, rates that correspond to how discerningly their subscribers adapt their viewing patterns based on the genre of program they’ve chosen to ingest. Some genres, such as dramas like “House of Cards,” with what Netflix calls “complex narratives,” and “sophisticated comedies” like “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” subscribers choose to “savor,” because the content is oh-so-rich, the jokes too rapid-fire to absorb all at once. Thrillers like “Breaking Bad,” on the other hand, we simply “devour,” propelled by the breakneck speed of the action, the unflinching drive of the plot. (The press release was nothing if not an advertisement for Netflix’s programming, of course.)
Keep in mind that all of the viewing Netflix describes, whether that viewing is savoring, devouring, or one of the categories that fell in between those and remained unnamed (noshing? gorging?), registers clearly on the company’s fantastic “Binge Scale,” a colorful wheel of binge levels populated with characters from our favorite shows that provides a handy way to self-diagnose the level of one’s consumption by genre and hours of captive streaming. Only those subscribers who were “focused on finishing” a season of a given series and succeeded in doing so were counted in the study of viewers across 190 countries, and we’re left to assume that many millions succeeded by this metric, but the precise number of Netflix’s 81 million worldwide subscribers who provided data was not revealed, in the same way Netflix refuses to divulge its ratings, much to the consternation of its competitors.
In addition to celebrating our freedom to binge, Netflix accomplishes a sleight of hand by avoiding questions about what bingeing is and what its effects may be, instead presenting bingeing as a kind of normally regulated activity that one might discuss as one does a gym routine or a gardening hobby. It no longer behooves Netflix to try and understand what bingeing is and how it affects us as they once did in a previous study that dates from the dark ages of 2013; rather, today, their efforts to diversify our conception of bingeing by promoting different ways one might binge and aligning those behaviors with specific genres and programs are all generally aimed at normalizing the practice through the development of various bingeing normalcies with which one might identify. If you’re not one kind of binger, you’re likely another.
Is Netflix and its binge-promoting model evil? Major television networks might say yes, but they have their own motives. Netflix’s success at promoting its model of viewing over the now traditional, weekly viewing of network television episodes both frustrates and inspires network executives, but effectively most entertainment disseminators are on their way to a hybridized production model if not a complete conversion to the release-the-whole-season-at-once-and-let-them-feast approach for which we now hunger. And that alone can make one wonder: Do all entertainment companies seek to enslave us all to an extended series of binges with only brief interruptions for emergency trips to the bathroom and sugar fixes, eradicating our will to do anything other than keep watching until we expire, our subscriptions living on after us in a dystopian future a la the North America of the famous millennial entertainment in “Infinite Jest” portrayed in David Foster Wallace’s novel of the same name? Unfortunately, probably not.
Though the dystopian-future-sugar-fix-binge would be an exciting plot to uncover, the sinister part of what the Netflix study portends is both simpler and more disturbing. The contours of this troubling moment come into relief when we gather historical perspective—and realize that Netflix’s and other streaming services are not yet a full decade old. The truly alarming thing about where the conversation about bingeing is right now is that at the same time Netflix and their companies are working hard to normalize binge-watching and the production models that facilitate it, the behavior itself remains something we have only begun to study and understand. In this sense, though the forces of an apocalypse may not be aligning in the same way they do in Wallace’s novel, we may all be a little more like the author’s Hal Incandenza than we realize: “Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves.”
What we know about bingeing today is the result of a few researchers, Yoon Hi Sung, Eun Yeon Kang, and Wei-Na Lee, from the University of Texas at Austin among them. In a much-circulated study, they suggest that binge-watching is merely one of many behaviors related to bingeing in general. Like bingeing on food, alcohol, or any other vice, bingeing on entertainment is partially the result of one’s inability to regulate one’s own behavior at large. This inability and the resulting behaviors can lead to anxiety, depression and obesity, or it can exacerbate these conditions in the cases where they already exist. In fact, research suggests a direct correlation between loneliness and depression and binge-watching, that the former can lead to the latter, and because the latter compounds the former, the cycle becomes difficult to break. Studies on the negative health effects associated with binge-watching also suggest that the average American watches enough television each day to rank at the highest level of the handy Netflix Binge Scale. Not only that, but the viewers know this fact, often self-identifying as bingers. This additional layer of the new binge-watching normal is how we end up where we are today: We hear the alarm, we smell the smoke, and revel in our arson instead of putting out the fire.
So, are we all depressed, we nation of binge-watching zombies, skulking from couch to cabinet, fixing our gaze on screens with ever-higher resolutions and definitions, totally aware that those screens are draining our will to live at the same time they’re burning our retinas? If we are, an increasingly younger portion of our population doesn’t see it that way, a Deloitte study seems to suggest. The results, released in March, provide some insight into how the condition of our new bingeing normal escapes our concern. Surveying more than 2,000 people last year, Deloitte concludes that not only do close to half of Americans now pay for subscriptions to streaming services like Netflix, but millennials who pay for such services usually have an average of three different subscriptions, and they tend to value their streaming subscriptions more than other media subscriptions (like that of traditional cable television, for example).
On their own, those results likely aren’t surprising, but as viewing values have shifted, so have other values. Perhaps some of the most remarkable data from the Deloitte study indicates that two-thirds of millennials actually value their mediated interactions (i.e., time spent with friends on social media) as much as the time they spend with those people in person. It doesn’t take Holmesian powers of deduction to connect FaceTime to Netflix-and-chill time—or, in other words, screen time to screen time. But what if mediated experiences are the experiences that not only millennials but most Americans are choosing? And what if we are choosing at an ever-increasing rate, fueled not only by our autonomy, as the Netflix study would like us to believe, but also by an entertainment industry that finally has the technology and critical mass of screens to launch a full-scale assault on our attention?
To think about any of these things—binge-watching, screen time, mediated friendships—as right or wrong is to oversimplify the issues that surround their proliferation. At the same time, flying the freedom-of-choice flag, the new-normal flag, over something you’re selling when a growing body of knowledge suggests that the thing you’re selling can seriously and negatively impact a consumer is, at least to some extent, irresponsible. But we can’t expect a profit-driven industry to regulate the products from which it derives profits, right? We can’t (nor do I think want to) ask a government or agency to regulate that industry for us, lest we end up with warning labels flashing before whatever they deem binge-likely programming: Unsafe for those with addictive behaviors. Would we take those warnings seriously anyway, or would they only entice us, the same way a smiley face on otherwise unmarked packages concealing the lethal entertainment did in “Infinite Jest?”
Though the prospect of labeling seems unpalatable (and potentially unsafe), what we can do, at least as long as we have the capacity to do so, is reflect on what this time of transition between one normal and the next normal signals. That we now refer to our viewing as bingeing—remember, one hour and 45 minutes in front of your screen puts your behavior squarely on the Binge Scale—certainly signals a semantic shift in how we regard the most common way most of us (Americans) unwind. Can that shift, the new language we use to talk about television viewing, start to awaken us to the cycle of addictive behaviors and emotional fallout of which binge-watching is only one part, or will bingeing remain a self-aware, ironic term to describe what we did with a Tuesday night? With an entire weekend? Perhaps if we use the term bingeing enough, the full connotative weight of the word, the fact that what we do when we watch that much television is succumb to the pleasure of deregulated, addictive consumption, will begin to register.
New life for the Dump Trump movement — this time from the delegates
Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Nati Harnik)
The movement to stop Donald Trump from getting the Republican nomination has entered another phase. Now though, instead of pundits, it’s delegates, a.k.a the only people who have an actual say in what happens at the convention.
Interestingly, they don’t have a candidate to take his place yet. Instead, they want to stop Trump now and pick a candidate later, reports say. In this way, it’s kind of similar to the “plan” we saw at the end of the primary with John Kasich and Ted Cruz splitting the remaining states. The leader of this new movement, Kendal Unruh of Colorado, said in an interview with the Washington Post, “This literally is an ‘Anybody but Trump’ movement.”
Basically, the plan involves changing the rules of the convention so that delegates can vote for whomever they want. However, since these rules aren’t already on the books, they have to be proposed a couple of days before the convention, and then the convention has to ratify it.
This will take a lot of coordination, made more difficult by the fact that the Republican National Committee may not release the full list of delegates, so Unruh and his co-conspirators (currently about 30 delegates) won’t even know who to try to recruit.
Read the whole report on The Washington Post
Suspected killer of British lawmaker is neo-Nazi — but media blamed mental illness, like Charleston 1 year ago
A memorial for Jo Cox outside the House of Parliament in London, June 17, 2016. (Credit: AP/Matt Dunham)
The man suspected of brutally killing a left-wing British lawmaker on Thursday was a longtime supporter of a neo-Nazi group, a hate group watchdog says, although media reports have misleadingly portrayed the white shooter as a “crazed loner.”
This attack comes one year after fellow neo-Nazi Dylann Roof massacred nine black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, in another attack media outlets deceptively blamed on mental illness.
Labour Party MP Jo Cox was attacked outside of a library in Birstall, West Yorkshire on Thursday. She was shot three times and stabbed several times.
Multiple witnesses say the alleged killer repeatedly shouted “Britain first!” as he attacked her.
This phrase could be a reference to Britain First, a far-right, anti-immigrant party. The party, however, strongly denies any involvement and says the shooter could have been shouting “It’s time to put Britain first!”
The vicious attack came mere days before the U.K. votes on whether or not to leave the European Union.
Cox was known for her outspoken support for refugees. She also strongly opposed Brexit, a British exit from the E.U.
Far-right parties like Britain First and the U.K. Independence Party want to leave the E.U., which they hope will allow them to cut down on immigration.
Authorities arrested 52-year-old Thomas Mair as the suspected shooter. British media outlets described Mair simply as a “loner” with a “history of mental illness,” implying that his alleged attack was not politically motivated.
The leading monitor of hate groups, on the other hand, says Mair was not a mere loner. Rather, he had “a long history with white nationalism” and “was a dedicated supporter” of a neo-Nazi group, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported.
The watchdog group obtained records that show that, for decades, Mair supported the National Alliance, “the once premier neo-Nazi organization in the United States.”
Mair sent more than $620 to the neo-Nazi group, buying periodicals and manuals with instructions on how to build guns and make explosives. Among the items on Mair’s receipts was “Ich Kämpfe,” an illustrated handbook issued in 1942 to members of the Nazi Party.
The National Alliance’s founder, William Pierce, was most well-known for writing white supremacist novels, including “The Turner Diaries,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center noted may have been an inspiration for Timothy McVeigh, the right-wing extremist who bombed an Oklahoma City federal government building in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring at least 600 more.
Police also found “Nazi regalia and far-right literature” at the home of the suspected shooter Thomas Mair, The Guardian reported.
“Sources say that the suspected killer was lucid when first questioned,” The Guardian added, further suggesting earlier claims that the attack was a product of mental illness are misleading.
“A picture is now emerging of a deliberately targeted attack in which Mair lay in wait for the MP as she emerged from her constituency meeting on Thursday,” the prominent British newspaper wrote.
Media reports also revealed that Mair was a longtime subscriber to S. A. Patriot, a pro-apartheid South African magazine. The racist publication, which says it opposes “multi-cultural societies” and “expansionist Islam,”described Mair in 2006 as “one of the earliest subscribers and supporters of S. A. Patriot.”
Media outlets have long been criticized for blaming attacks carried out by non-Muslim white people on mental illness. In reality, scientific research shows that mentally ill people are more likely to be the victims of violence than they are the perpetrators.
This same misleading media response, in fact, was exemplified one year before the killing of MP Cox.
On June 17, 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof massacred nine black Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Media outlets immediately blamed the attack on mental illness. They insisted that Roof was a “white loner” who “has a history of severe mental health issues that have either gone untreated or undiagnosed.”
News outlets also reported that Roof was a “really sweet,” “quiet,” “normal” kid with only “a few friends” — including even some black ones. Yet he “was raised in a home destroyed by domestic violence” and was a product of “internet evil,” they claimed.
When anti-fascist activists dug deeper, they discovered Roof’s website, which contained his white supremacist manifesto, along with 60 photos of the Charleston killer posing with neo-Nazi and white supremacist symbols.
In his manifesto, Roof made it clear that his attack was politically motivated; by slaughtering black civilians, he hoped to instigate a race war.
Mainstream journalists actively depoliticized the killing. The editorial board of the Wall Street Journal went so far as to claim that racism is dead and that Roof’s shooting was “a problem that defies explanation beyond the reality that evil still stalks humanity.”
Meanwhile, avowed communists did real reporting. “As a communist, it is my duty and obligation to spend at least $49 to help ruin this guy’s insanity plea,” said one of the sleuths after unearthing Roof’s neo-Nazi website.
One year later, media outlets continue to depoliticize these murderous attacks by right-wing extremists, which are on the rise throughout the West. It appears few lessons have been learned.
Fox News host Bret Baier “grills” the Dalai Lama: “Have you ever seen the movie ‘Caddyshack’?”
Fox News host Bret Baier had the rare opportunity to squander an interview with the Dalai Lama on Wednesday after the latter’s meeting with President Obama.
Baier asked the Dalai Lama if he’d ever seen “Caddyshack,” to which his holiness replied, “What?” and then “I don’t know.”
He then described in detail the following scene from the film:
Baier then asked asked if he ever plays golf.
“No,” said the Dalai Lama. “I play badminton.”
Watch the full interview below:
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
Send in the abortion drones: We could use this Irish pro-choice tech protest here in the U.S., too
(Credit: Maxiphoto via iStock)
It’s an act of defiance to raise awareness, a gesture of “solidarity.” It won’t terminate the pregnancy of a single desperate woman in a place where abortion is illegal. It’s still a good idea. But it’d be better if it went all in — and not just across the Atlantic.
Pro-choice advocates have scheduled a drone drop for next week to send abortion pills to a border area between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland to protest restrictive reproductive health laws in both places. Rita Harrold, one of the effort’s organizers, told the Guardian this week that “The action is an act of solidarity from women in the south, where abortion is criminalized, with women in the north, where abortion is also criminalized and unfortunately there have recently been a number of prosecutions. We will be sending the drone over the border and bringing the pills into Northern Ireland to show women that they are still available and they are still safe.”
There, a group of women who are not pregnant have pledged to take the pills — mifepristone and misoprostol — to demonstrate their safety and to make a plea for reproductive rights.
In a statement, one of the groups organizing the event, Women On Waves, said the act will “highlight the violation of human rights caused by the existing laws that criminalize abortion in both the north and south of Ireland except in very limited circumstances.”
One can understand why the groups are cautiously not vowing to give the pills to currently pregnant women — as the Guardian reports, “The maximum penalty for the crime of administering a drug to induce miscarriage under the relevant law in Northern Ireland, the Offenses Against The Person Act 1861, is life imprisonment. In the Irish Republic, the offense of procuring an abortion carries a potential 14-year jail term.”
And opponents of abortion rights are keeping a sharp eye on the event — a representative from an anti choice group called Precious Life told the Guardian, “I am currently seeking legal advice and may very well be in contact with the Police Service of Northern Ireland to ensure that these pills will be confiscated and to ensure that they are not used to destroy the lives of unborn children. These people are hell-bent on destroying lives, but we will be doing everything in our power, legally, to protect lives.” Because nothing says you care about protecting lives like punishing women with potential lifelong jail sentences for exercising control over their own bodies.
Similar protests have sprung up over the past few years in abortion restricted areas throughout Europe. Last year, European advocacy groups, including the Dutch nonprofit Women on Waves, successfully sent a drone carrying abortion pills to Poland. Similar initiatives, like the “abortion ship” featured in the 2014 documentary “Vessel,” have been launched. In 2015, International abortion rights group Women on Web reported it receives more than 10,000 emails a month from needy women who don’t have access to safe abortions. Amnesty International estimates an astonishing 4,000 women travel from Ireland to England every year for the express purpose of terminating pregnancy. And it gets pretty depressing when you realize that those women may still have an easier experience than women right here in a nation with a constitutionally protected right to abortion.
Earlier this year, the New York Times reported on the dwindling number of abortion providers in Texas, where nearly half of its previous 41 clinics have closed — and how onerously time-consuming and expensive obtaining a procedure is for many women. The story spoke of women driving 300 miles or further to get an abortion in their own state. To put it in context, that’s double the distance a woman traveling between Dublin, where abortion is illegal, to Liverpool, where it is not, would have to go. According to the Guttmacher Institute, one third of American women seeking abortions must travel distances of 25 miles or greater — sometimes significantly greater. For something they have a legal right to do. And while the push to improve reproductive rights for women in other countries intensifies, we could use a fleet of drones right here in the U.S. to help a growing population of women in need right now.
Sanders vows to continue political revolution, says defeating Trump is not enough — we must “transform America”
Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Julie Jacobson)
Insurgent left-wing presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered a triumphant speech Thursday night in which insisted “the political revolution must continue into the future.”
“Election days come and go,” he declared. “But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end. They continue every day, every week and every month in the fight to create a nation of social and economic justice.”
Drawing on the trade union movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT rights movement and the environmental movement, Sanders stressed that the struggle must go on.
“This campaign has never been about any single candidate. It is always about transforming America,” he emphasized in the address (video below), which was live-streamed to viewers around the U.S. and the world.
Supporters of Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton have called on Sanders to step down, bitterly attacking the Vermont senator for not conceding to the presumed nominee and for pledging to take his democratic socialist message all the way to the Democratic National Convention in late July.
Sen. Sanders renewed this pledge in his speech on Thursday night, maintaining that he must take his grassroots campaign’s energy to Philadelphia for the DNC.
“Real change never takes place from the top down, or in the living rooms of wealthy campaign contributors,” Sanders stressed. “It always occurs from the bottom on up – when tens of millions of people say ‘enough is enough’ and become engaged in the fight for justice. That’s what the political revolution we helped start is all about. That’s why the political revolution must continue.”
In just over a year, Sanders pointed out, his campaign went from having no political organization, money or name recognition and facing constant backlash from a staunchly antagonist corporate media to earning more than 12 million votes, winning 22 state primaries and caucuses and nearly winning five more states within 2 percentage points or less.
The enormous enthusiasm around his campaign’s democratic socialist platform is confirmation that it is what working-class Americans yearn for, Sanders aruged. “In other words, our vision for the future of this country is not some kind of fringe idea. It is not a radical idea. It is mainstream. It is what millions of Americans believe in and want to see happen.”
Throughout his campaign, Sanders has faced countless obstacles, and the Democratic National Committee has done its fair share to prevent him from clinching the nomination.
What appear to be hacked DNC documents show that the party, which is supposed to be neutral in primary contests, always assumed Clinton was going to be the presidential candidate.
Sanders reflect on these obstacles in his address, stressing, “In every single state that we contested we took on virtually the entire political establishment – U.S. senators, members of Congress, governors, mayors, state legislators and local party leaders.”
“To those relatively few elected officials who had the courage to stand with us, I say thank you,” he added. “We must continue working together into the future.”
Given the Brobdingnagian odds he faced, Sanders said there is “something else extraordinarily important happened in this campaign that makes me very optimistic about the future of our country — something that, frankly, I had not anticipated.”
That is the incredible support he saw among young Americans. “In virtually every state that we contested we won the overwhelming majority of the votes of people 45 years of age or younger, sometimes, may I say, by huge numbers,” Sanders said. “These are the people who are determined to shape the future of this country. These are the people who ARE the future of this country.”
At least 1.5 million people came to Bernie Sanders rallies and town meetings in almost every state in the country, he said. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers made 75 million phone calls on behalf of the Sanders campaign. Canvassers knocked on more than 5 million doors, and the campaign hosted 74,000 meetings in every U.S. state and territory.
More than 8 million individual contributions were made to Sanders’ campaign by 2.7 million people — “more contributions at this point than any campaign in American history,” Sanders added — at an average of $27 a piece.
“In an unprecedented way, we showed the world that we could run a strong national campaign without being dependent on the big-money interests whose greed has done so much to damage our country,” he said.
Sanders pledged to help defeat Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, condemning him for exploiting racism against Latinos, Muslims, women and black Americans; for promising hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks for the very rich; and for, despite the mountains of scientific evidence, claiming that climate change is a hoax.
“But defeating Donald Trump cannot be our only goal,” Sanders added. “We must continue our grassroots efforts to create the America that we know we can become.”
Sanders reiterated his calls for a $15 per hour minimum wage, reconstruction of the U.S.’s crumbling infrastructure, pay equity for women, abortion rights, LGBT equality, gun control, rejection of the neoliberal Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, an expansion of Social Security, regulation of Wall street, aggressive action against climate change, a ban on fracking, a carbon tax, free public education, universal health care, an end to mass incarceration, comprehensive immigration reform, cuts in government waste and military spending and a halting of “perpetual warfare in the Middle East.”
“The political revolution means much more than fighting for our ideals at the Democratic National Convention and defeating Donald Trump,” Sanders continued. “It means that, at every level, we continue the fight to make our society a nation of economic, social, racial and environmental justice.”
He called for progressive candidates to run for office in local elections, for “engaging at the local and state level in an unprecedented way,” at the level of school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures and governorships.
“Let me conclude by once again thanking everyone who has helped in this campaign in one way or another. We have begun the long and arduous process of transforming America, a fight that will continue tomorrow, next week, next year and into the future,” Sanders said.
“My hope is that when future historians look back and describe how our country moved forward into reversing the drift toward oligarchy, and created a government which represents all the people and not just the few, they will note that, to a significant degree, that effort began with the political revolution of 2016.”
Sanders’ speech can be watched below:
The Putin-Trump love fest continues: The Russian president reaffirms his praise for the GOP front-runner
Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump (Credit: AP/Andrew Harnik/Nati Harnik/Photo montage by Salon)
Russian president Vladimir Putin has continued to sing Donald Trump’s praises.
When asked about his previous compliments of Trump as a “bright” man last December, Putin said his praise stands, the Associated Press reported Friday.
After Putin’s first admitted his admiration for Trump in December, the billionaire returned the favor, calling Putin a “strong leader” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and complimenting his poll numbers.
“I’ve always felt fine about Putin. I think that he’s a strong leader,” he said. “I think he’s up in the 80s, which is you see where Obama’s in the 30s and the low 40s and he’s up in the 80s, and I don’t know who does the polls, maybe he does the polls, but I think they’re done by American companies, actually.” By the way, Obama’s approval rating over his term has been in the high 40s, and has only gone down into the high 30s a handful of times.
At the time, Trump’s foes in the Republican primary called him out, to which Trump retorted that they were just jealous that Putin had praised him and not them.
This week’s affirmation comes just a day after one of Putin’s close allies expressed his approval for Trump.
