During my career in corporate America I remember running into the senior executives who ruled by the Welch principles-they all seem disconnected from reality, firing their bottom 10% of their rated employees and outsourcing the most critical work to India or Bulgaria. Here is clip from Gelles at the NYT who just wrote a book on this brute:
Almost immediately after Mr. Welch retired in September 2001 with a $417 million severance package, G.E. went into a tailspin from which it would never recover.
His pupils, though, went on to run dozens of other major companies, including Home Depot, Albertson’s, Chrysler and Boeing. Most of them failed.
And in the decades since Mr. Welch assumed power, the economy at large has come to resemble his skewed priorities. Wages stagnated and jobs moved overseas. C.E.O. pay went stratospheric and buybacks and dividends boomed. Factories closed and companies found ways to pay fewer taxes.
Beyond his enduring influence on the economy, Mr. Welch also redefined what it meant to be a boss, personifying an aggressive, materialistic style of management that endures to this day.
“Jack was the rock star C.E.O. of my era,” said Lynn Forester de Rothschild, one of the rare female media moguls of the 1980s. “We all thought Jack was doing everything right and that success was defined by meeting quarterly earnings to the penny.”
In retirement, Mr. Welch continued to hold sway over the business world as an elder statesman, penning books and columns, and appearing on cable news to praise the executives he had groomed and continue his assault on taxation and regulation.
Mr. Welch also pursued an unexpected retirement pastime: He became an internet troll. His old friend Donald J. Trump seemed to lead the way on many conspiracy theories that Mr. Welch embraced. But by 2012, Mr. Welch was picking fights of his own with his online adversaries, trying to own the libs on Twitter and promulgating conspiracy theories about the Obama administration.
It was a career defined by a ruthless devotion to maximizing short-term profits at any cost, and punctuated by a foray into misinformation. And it opened the door to an era where billionaire C.E.O.s are endowed with vast power and near total impunity.
G.E., too, is still reckoning with Mr. Welch’s legacy. For two decades after he retired, a succession of C.E.O.s tried and failed to return the company to its former glory. Then last year, G.E. management admitted defeat and made an announcement — the company would be broken up for good.
You’ve probably guessed by now that this is not an idle history lesson. I am thinking about “the slave power” because I am thinking about the ways that narrow, destructive factions can capture the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system for their own ends. I am thinking of how they can then use the levers of government to impose their vision of society and civil life against the will of the majority. And I am thinking of this in the context of guns, gun violence and the successful movement, thus far, to make the United States an armed society.
Two weeks ago, a gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in Buffalo. Three days ago, a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Although there has been, in the wake of both atrocities, the requisite call for new gun control laws, no one believes that Congress will actually do much of anything to address gun violence or reduce the odds of gun massacres. The reason is that the Republican Party does not want to. And with the legislative filibuster still in place (preserved, as it has been for the past year, by at least two Democratic senators), Senate Republicans have all the votes they need to stop a bill — any bill — from passing.
The filibuster, however, is only one part of the larger problem of the capture of America’s political institutions by an unrepresentative minority whose outright refusal to compromise is pushing the entire system to a breaking point.
Large majorities of Americans favor universal background checks, bans on “assault-style” weapons, bans on high-capacity magazines and “red flag” laws that would prevent people who might harm themselves or others from purchasing guns.
But the American political system was not designed to directly represent national majorities. To the extent that it does, it’s via the House of Representatives. The Senate, of course, represents the states. And in the Senate (much to the chagrin of many of the framers), population doesn’t matter — each state gets equal say. Fifty-one lawmakers representing a minority of voters can block 49 lawmakers representing a majority of them (and that’s before, again, we get to the filibuster).
Add the polarization of voters by geography — a rural and exurban Republican Party against an urban and suburban Democratic Party — and the picture goes from bad to perverse. Not only can Republicans, who tend to represent the most sparsely populated states, win a majority of the Senate with far less than a majority of votes nationally, but by using the filibuster, a small number of Republican senators representing an even smaller faction of voters can kill legislation supported by most voters and most members of Congress.
The Senate might have been counter-majoritarian by design, but there is a difference between a system that tempers majorities and one that stymies them from any action at all. We have the latter, and like Congress under the failed Articles of Confederation, it makes a mockery of what James Madison called the “republican principle,” which is supposed to enable a majority of the people to defeat the “sinister views” of a minority faction by “regular vote.”
Rather than suppress the “mischiefs of faction,” our system empowers them. Few Americans want the most permissive gun laws on offer. But those who do have captured the Republican Party and used its institutional advantages to both stop gun control and elevate an expansive and idiosyncratic view of gun rights to the level of constitutional law.
The result is a country so saturated in guns that there’s no real hope of going back to the status quo ante. If anything, American gun laws are poised to get even more permissive. If the Supreme Court rules as expected in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it will strike down a law that requires a license for carrying a concealed firearm.
There have only been three justices in American history who were appointed by a president who lost the popular vote, and who were confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half the country. All three of them sit on the Supreme Court right now, and all three were appointed by Donald Trump.
Indeed, if not for anti-democratic institutions such as the Senate and the Electoral College, it’s likely that Democrats would control a majority of the seats on the Supreme Court, and a decision overruling Roe would not be on the table.
So it is ironic — for that reason, and others — that Alito’s draft opinion overruling Roe leans heavily on appeals to democracy. Quoting from an opinion by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Alito writes that “the permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.”
If Alito truly wants to put the question of whether pregnant individuals have a right to terminate that pregnancy up to a free and fair democratic process, polling indicates that liberals could probably win that fight on a national level.
…this three-part, multimedia deep dive from Jonathan Mahler and Jim Rutenberg, also in the Times back in 2019: here, here, and here (with a cheat sheet here). That one illustrated the global machinations of the Murdoch family. It demonstrated the manner in which its members have poisoned political discourse in countless countries simultaneously, increasing racism, promoting violence, destroying any hopes for saving the planet, and worsening life for the most vulnerable people everywhere, purely because it makes the Murdochs more and more money, when they already have more money than any group of people their size could spend in a dozen lifetimes. These pieces are in some ways more remarkable than the Tucker Carlson series because of the (mostly realized) ambition of their reach. These articles should most definitely be treated as prerequisites for the Carlson pieces, the way English 101 is a prerequisite for English 10
Private equity billionaires are looting the country, leaving everyday Americans to clean up the mess—and fight for the scraps….
For a long time, corporations worked in the plain way that you’d imagine they should work: They created a product or provided a service, and if they did a good job of it, they turned a profit. Houdaille, for example, grew to be a valuable company by making first-rate car parts. Simple enough.
But a confluence of factors in the 1970s flipped that model on its head. Suddenly, the value of a business was measured less by how well it served its customers, and far more by the profits it reaped for its investors. University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman helped propel this change with a 1970 manifesto in the New York Times. Corporations, he wrote, need not worry about “providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else.” They were accountable to the wallets of their shareholders: nothing more, nothing less. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profit,” Friedman added….
Soon, businesses came to be viewed less as productive enterprises and more as bundles of assets to be bought, sold, and endlessly manipulated for financial gain. Rather than doing the hard work of investing in new value—innovative products or fresh approaches to societal problems—financiers began focusing on extracting existing value, again, and again, and again.
LensCulture: It seems that a lot of your work concerns the “internal” world (both yours and your viewer’s). How much do you let the external world—politics, the cultural climate—impact your photography?
Todd Hido: The internal/personal is often quite political, and external forces have always influenced my work. However, I learned from my mentor, Larry Sultan, that it is through the personal connection that one could relate to another in a truly impactful way.
For one of my last books, Excerpts from Silver Meadows, I was deeply influenced by a television that is constantly running in my kitchen, playing CNN. As I worked on my edit of photographs, there were a lot of really crazy things going on politically. These things absolutely filtered into my work.
Dorothea Lange said, “It is a photographer’s task to portray what exists and prevails.” I came to that message through the work of Robert Adams, who has clearly been doing this beautifully and accurately for almost all of his career.
One thing that is important to know about my work is that not all of it is about me or things that I have encountered. Many of the narratives, particularly in Excerpts, come from things I have seen in others.
My latest body of work, entitled Bright Black World, is very much a reaction to the current times that we live in. I was already working on a body of work that touched upon climate change in my own way, which is an issue growing far quicker than we could have imagined. That being said, I think my work became even darker in this truly horrific and inescapable political atmosphere in America today. There is no way you can turn a blind eye or be willfully ignorant to the tide of current events.
LC: Your photographs strongly remind me of Edward Hopper’s paintings; smooth vistas, and yet charged. Can you talk about some of the visual material you find inspiring? How do you see that material influencing and impacting your work?
TH: I am a fan of Edward Hopper, and I was delighted to have my work hung next to his at a show at the Whitney Museum. Other visual inspiration for me often comes from my library of over 6,000 photography books that I am constantly adding to and referencing.
I am also inspired by things that are in my daily visual path. I love to leave books open on my dining room table and walk past them 100 times. You would be surprised how much that sinks in and becomes reflected in your work.
LC: Your series Homes at Night is one of my favorites. We never see human silhouettes or the homes’ inhabitants. Why is it important to you that the houses appear on their own?
TH: Because of the very simple fact that if it is an empty shell, the viewer can place their own memories within it or create a narrative that would otherwise be blocked by the reality of what is actually inside.
LC: When viewers “place their own memories within,” do they ever react in a way that surprises you?
TH: While I know that my work does elicit a response in people, it is often something that is personal and not really shared with me. This, of course, is totally fine.
In the United States, the politics of debt has mostly focused on personal debt and, in particular, student debt. Recent figures show that Americans owe just over $800 billion in credit card debt, and when you add in mortgages, car loans, and student debt, the total rises to over $15 trillion. Beginning in the years after Occupy Wall Street, activist groups like Andrew Ross and Astra Taylor’s Debt Collective have lobbied for aggressive student debt forgiveness—a policy that was originally part of the 2020 Democratic Party agenda but now seems to be flagging as a serious consideration for the Biden administration as it struggles to maintain the party’s majorities in Congress in the run-up to the 2022 midterm elections.
Yet debt has become a central engine of the US economy, not only for consumers but for cities and states. In the US, local municipalities take on onerous amounts of debt to keep functioning. Meanwhile, throughout the world, debt is employed as leverage that allows wealthier countries to extract concessions from poorer ones. This practice was evident in the United States’ “dollar diplomacy” interventions throughout the Americas in the early 20th century, justified under the Monroe Doctrine, and has been repeated in the 21st century through the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Union in order to sustain a capitalist hegemony over most parts of the globe.
In Colonial Debts, Zambrana situates Puerto Rico’s current turmoil within the politics of debt. The island had accumulated $74 billion in bond debt and $123 billion in debt overall, with pensions included, which spurred Congress to create PROMESA, a law designed to restructure and reduce the level of debt so that Puerto Rico can eventually reenter the sphere of capital markets and resume borrowing in a supposedly more responsible fashion. On March 15, a debt restructuring plan approved by the PROMESA-mandated Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB) officially kicked in, ostensibly bringing Puerto Rico “out of bankruptcy,” but the plan’s austerity measures are still provoking protests and discontent. “Debt is an exchange that has not been brought to completion,” Zambrana writes. “During the time that the debt remains unpaid, the logic of hierarchy ‘takes hold.’” In Puerto Rico’s case, this hierarchy is embodied by the FOMB, which has had the effect of eroding democracy on the island.
For Zambrana, the story of PROMESA is really the story of colonialism reinventing itself. The debt crisis in Puerto Rico is not a simple case of an incompetent government borrowing beyond its means; it is the result of the many years in which the island served as a profit machine for US corporate interests, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a tax shelter for businesses and, increasingly, individuals. Puerto Rico’s debt grew, Zambrana shows, because most of the profits generated there were siphoned off into US and offshore banks, not reinvested in the island, and because a series of laws allowed US interests to treat it as an American state when it was convenient and as a foreign country when it wasn’t. Unable to make autonomous trade arrangements with its neighbors, and subject to laws like the 1920 Jones Act, which made it overly dependent on US maritime commerce, Puerto Rico could never grow enough economically to create an adequate tax base and keep its government out of the red, even after it developed a manufacturing industry in the postwar years.
As an appendage of the US economy, Puerto Rico, which had enjoyed a period of prosperity in the 1950s and ’60s, ran into trouble with the economic convulsions of the 1970s, and it began to borrow in the form of bond issues in the millions of dollars just to pay for essential government services. The market for Puerto Rican bonds has grown rapidly since then as banking was deregulated and bond investment became more volatile in the 1980s, while in 1984, Puerto Rico’s status under Chapter 9 bankruptcy law was changed to that of a state, which had the effect of making it ineligible to declare bankruptcy.
As the island became increasingly shackled to its debt, Puerto Rican bonds became more and more attractive for speculators. Since 1917, with the passage of the Jones-Shafroth Act, the bonds have been triple tax-exempt, and as speculators jockeyed for position in the 1980s, they became a hot investment, especially for Wall Street underwriters and hedge and vulture funds, the latter always on the hunt for “distressed” economies from which to extract profits.
Zambrana tells this story of colonial manipulation and financial speculation, but she also does something else interesting: Fusing the theorist Aníbal Quijano’s idea of the “coloniality of power” with Saidiya Hartman’s notion of “afterlife,” she argues that Puerto Rico’s “decolonization,” ostensibly accomplished in 1950 with the creation of its “commonwealth” status, allowed its original colonization to have an afterlife in the form of this debt. It was more than just a way for Wall Street speculators to get rich, Zambrana notes; Puerto Rico’s debt was a means to reassert US dominance over the island “within and through the strictures of financialized neoliberal capitalism.”
Zambrana wants to demonstrate how the idea of coloniality very much resembles Hartman’s concept of the “afterlife” of slavery. “It specifies the persistence of slavery in the present in the fact that black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago,” she writes. Zambrana insists that it is “not a legacy…rather an operating rationality and sensibility organizing the very reproduction of life through the attrition of life in the present.” This sort of literary framing very much uses the same logic as legal scholar Michelle Alexander did in The New Jim Crow, and alludes to Critical Race Theory’s central concept of systemic racism.
Animals die in large numbers in every war. Think of draft horses drowning in mud in the battlefields of France, or water buffalo machine-gunned from the air in Vietnamese rice paddies, or the tormented farm animals in Picasso’s Guernica. Their deaths are never counted in official casualty figures; almost all of them go unrecorded and unremembered. Animals are also targets in war, usually as a means to deprive an enemy of food and income. But in this war, animals have become Russian targets for no purpose other than sheer cruelty. Ukraine’s government has accused the Russian military of intentionally striking dog shelters and horse stables. Russian soldiers in retreat from the Kyiv region left behind the bullet-riddled corpses of not just cattle, horses, and goats, but even pet dogs. By killing animals, the invaders seem to be responding to all the pictures of Ukrainians with pets in bomb shelters and evacuation convoys. The Russians have identified yet another way to inflict pain on the Ukrainian people—not by starving them but by breaking their heart.
Something is uniquely unfair about the suffering that war inflicts on animals. They are the ultimate noncombatants. War has nothing to do with the world they inhabit. In their consciousness it has no meaning, not even the meaning of evil. A deer scorched by artillery fire has no understanding of the cause of its pain, and yet it gazes at the camera with immense stoicism. In Ukraine, this unfairness seems all the greater because, more than in most wars, animals in this war are not anonymous. Because of the intense bonds they share with human beings, and because their fate is seen widely on social media, they’ve become individuals to the outside world—unwitting protagonists in the drama.
Perhaps Ukrainians are no more animal-loving than other people. I imagine Russians back home take good care of their huskies and borzois. But the stories of animals in this war tell you something about the two sides. An invasion launched for the purpose of erasing an entire nation has dehumanized Russian soldiers so quickly and thoroughly that killing has become an end in itself; so, in retreat, they shoot kenneled dogs. And the country they came to destroy, in fighting for its life, has become one that extends solidarity and love beyond its human citizens.
Yesterday I read the news on the internet, on a Ted Goia email, that Jessica Williams, the extremely talented jazz pianist, had passed away. The news has been slow coming but I'll link to several sites that have examples of her work or interviews with her. We are fortunate in that she is very well represented via her broad discography. Years ago when I attempted to learn about her talents I read that she actually grew up in Baltimore and attended Peabody Prep which stunned me as I had never heard her name mentioned here in Baltimore. Part of that reason is that she left for Philadelphia nd then San Francisco in the mid-70's. That still meant I could have run into her when I was an undergraduate at Hopkins and going to the Ballroom. From the an announcement at KNKX:
Two-time Grammy nominee Jessica Williams was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and classically trained at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. In her teens, Williams moved to Philadelphia and began playing with drummer Philly Joe Jones.
Relocating to San Francisco in 1977, Williams became the house pianist at the famous Keystone Korner jazz club. She also worked with Eddie Harris, Dexter Gordon, Tony Williams, Stan Getz, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Charlie Rouse, John Abercrombie, Charlie Haden, Leroy Vinnegar, and others.
Williams received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Rockefeller Grant for composing, the Alice B. Toklas Grant for Women Composers, and the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was an honored guest on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. She also wrote musical scores for PBS and HBO programs.
Williams recorded more than 40 albums over her career, eight of them on the Seattle-based Origin Records label.
Celebrated for her absolute control of the keyboard, her wit, and her solid sense of swing, the influence of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane was evident in many of Williams' performances and recordings.
Williams settled in Portland, Oregon in 1993, and then later in Yakima, Washington. She created a her own record label and music publishing company in an effort to retain control of her creative output.
Severe spinal problems sent Williams through major surgery in 2012. The medical procedures and recovery were lengthy, complicated and expensive; she ended up having to sell her beloved Yamaha piano.
A cancer diagnosis came in 2017. Williams tried to stay positive and active, posting on her website, "I have decided that the best thing I can do for myself is to do what I do, and be who I am. I love my music, and I will soon release new music and begin performing again. There are many things to do, and I will start slow, but speed alone is not music — soul and passion are. I am not done."
Jessica Williams' music will be featured on Jim Wilke's Jazz Northwest program on KNKX this Sunday, March 20, at 2 p.m.
She had recently moved to the Bay Area, and was all but unknown even among jazz insiders—but not for long. She would occasionally play piano at the Keystone Korner during the break between the headline acts, and her powerful command of the keyboard was immediately apparent to listeners. This wasn’t tinkly intermission piano, but something quite extraordinary.
You could hear the magic in her playing. Her tone control and ease of execution were the first things that hit you. But Williams also had a remarkable ability to enter into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the ‘flow state’—a openness to the possibilities of the immediate moment that is the ideal mindset for jazz improvisation.
I’d always believed that music was an ecstatic vocation, and here was someone demonstrating it right before my eyes. It might just be an intermission between sets, but Jessica had blocked out all the noise and conversation, and was flying off into some higher sphere of music-driven nirvana.
I became an ardent fan, and bought copies of the few indie albums featuring Williams that were now showing up in record stores. I had heard of her quirks and eccentricities—and even just seeing her in live performance I could tell that Jessica Williams would not be a typical teacher. But that didn’t deter me. Her approach to the keyboard—with that singing tone, harmonic richness, and melodic freedom—was very closely aligned with what I was pursuing in my own music.
I tracked her down at gigs, and we eventually had several conversations. Her first reaction was that she had no idea how to teach what she did. Her music just happened. She didn’t have a method to share.
My glib response was: “No worries. We will do stop-and-cop.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“I’ll watch you play the piano. And at certain junctures, I will ask you to stop. And I’ll cop what you just did. That’s the stop-and-cop method—and it always works.”
Jessica eventually agreed to be my teacher—but now things really got strange. She set certain conditions: (1) I had to provide the piano and a place for the lesson, (2) I had to drive her to and from the lesson, and (3) the lesson had to be in the middle of the night. 3 AM was the best time for her.
Yes, jazz education was a little different back then. The students at Berklee have no idea.
I’m married to a great guy named Atherton and I finally quit playing jazz and married him after knowing him for 34 years. I did not take my site down- it was stolen from me 5 years ago during the cyber war between Trump and Truth began.I lost $200,000 and I had a nervous breakdown.But I’m fine now.I’m a good cook and my husband is a health care provider.He watches over me. He’s my fourth and final marriage!As for jazz, I made some really beautiful music with the best musicians in the world and I got to live in Italy and France and Denmark. I’ve been to Tokyo and I played in South Korea. I quit smoking and drinking 27 years ago.I’m not a jazz musician anymore but I love good music.Now is my time to enjoy myself!All light and love to you !Jessica Jennifer Williams pianist and composer.
But I really use Jessica Jennifer Williams as a work and medical name but everyone else calls me Angie or Angela Emily Atherton because that’s my chosen aka and my husband is named Atherton and so after all these years my life is safe and good. I went through a lot of operations and then I was attacked viciously by jazz musicians and critics. The audience was cool but a lot of people hated on me with their prejudices. A white trans girl playing with Hutch or Getz or Dexter Gordon or Philly Joe Jones or Pharoah. And many more. It’s hell for trans people and for women. Enjoy the music and know that you are still just one person among billions who loved me and it’s still me. I’m changing every day and its been my entire life and I love it.