Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Last Call For Harvey The Wonder Hamster

Harvey Weinstein isn't just somebody who needs to be fired (and he was over the weekend) but this latest report on the other closet full of shoes dropping from the New Yorker's Ronan Farrow means this asshole needs to serve prison time, period.  He's a sex criminal, full stop.



Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The English Patient,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Crying Game,” “Shakespeare in Love,” and “The King’s Speech.” Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God. 
For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few women were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now––Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would “crush” her. “I know he has crushed a lot of people before,” Argento said. “That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old, some of them are older—has never come out.” 
Last week, the New York Times, in a powerful report by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, revealed multiple allegations of sexual harassment against Weinstein, a story that led to the resignation of four members of his company’s all-male board, and to Weinstein’s firing from the company. 
The story, however, is more complex, and there is more to know and to understand. In the course of a ten-month investigation, I was told by thirteen women that, between the nineteen-nineties and 2015, Weinstein sexually harassed or assaulted them, allegations that corroborate and overlap with the Times’s revelations, and also include far more serious claims. 
Three women––among them Argento and a former aspiring actress named Lucia Evans—told me that Weinstein raped them, allegations that include Weinstein forcibly performing or receiving oral sex and forcing vaginal sex. Four women said that they experienced unwanted touching that could be classified as an assault. In an audio recording captured during a New York Police Department sting operation in 2015 and made public here for the first time, Weinstein admits to groping a Filipina-Italian model named Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, describing it as behavior he is “used to.” Four of the women I interviewed cited encounters in which Weinstein exposed himself or masturbated in front of them. 
Sixteen former and current executives and assistants at Weinstein’s companies told me that they witnessed or had knowledge of unwanted sexual advances and touching at events associated with Weinstein’s films and in the workplace. They and others describe a pattern of professional meetings that were little more than thin pretexts for sexual advances on young actresses and models. All sixteen said that the behavior was widely known within both Miramax and the Weinstein Company. Messages sent by Irwin Reiter, a senior company executive, to Emily Nestor, one of the women who alleged that she was harassed at the company, described the “mistreatment of women” as a serial problem that the Weinstein Company was struggling with in recent years. Other employees described what was, in essence, a culture of complicity at Weinstein’s places of business, with numerous people throughout the companies fully aware of his behavior but either abetting it or looking the other way. Some employees said that they were enlisted in subterfuge to make the victims feel safe. A female executive with the company described how Weinstein assistants and others served as a “honeypot”—they would initially join a meeting, but then Weinstein would dismiss them, leaving him alone with the woman. 
Virtually all of the people I spoke with told me that they were frightened of retaliation. “If Harvey were to discover my identity, I’m worried that he could ruin my life,” one former employee told me. Many said that they had seen Weinstein’s associates confront and intimidate those who crossed him, and feared that they would be similarly targeted. Four actresses, including Mira Sorvino and Rosanna Arquette, told me they suspected that, after they rejected Weinstein’s advances or complained about them to company representatives, Weinstein had them removed from projects or dissuaded people from hiring them. Multiple sources said that Weinstein frequently bragged about planting items in media outlets about those who spoke against him; these sources feared that they might be similarly targeted. Several pointed to Gutierrez’s case, in 2015: after she went to the police, negative items discussing her sexual history and impugning her credibility began rapidly appearing in New York gossip pages. (In the taped conversation with Gutierrez, Weinstein asks her to join him for “five minutes,” and warns, “Don’t ruin your friendship with me for five minutes.”) 
Several former employees told me that they were speaking about Weinstein’s alleged behavior now because they hoped to protect women in the future. “This wasn’t a one-off. This wasn’t a period of time,” an executive who worked for Weinstein for many years told me. “This was ongoing predatory behavior towards women—whether they consented or not.”

And this is why I'm sharing this article in this post.  Yes, this is going to make people feel uncomfortable.  I hope it makes people uncomfortable enough to speak out about how wrong this is, especially men.  Harvey is not a hero, guys.  He's not somebody to emulate or even pity, he's somebody who abused his power in order to hurt women.  He's a criminal, period.

Prison awaits him, I should hope.

The Suds Sucker Proxy

So the biggest corporate proxy battle in history just took place this morning here in Cincinnati (home of Proctor and Gamble, or P&G as it's know now), and it was, if you'll excuse the pun, a complete wash for billionaire hedge fund master Nelson Peltz.

Nelson Peltz has been thwarted in the largest proxy battle in history, failing to claim a board seat from $236 billion giant Procter & Gamble
Peltz, the founder of $14 billion hedge fund Trian Partners, lost the proxy fight by a slim margin against P&G, the maker of consumer products like Tide, Crest, and Bounty and the largest-ever company to face such a challenge.

Trian quickly announced it disagrees with P&G's vote count and is calling for a recount.

The billionaire investor has been trying to shake up Procter & Gamble since announcing a $3.5 billion stake in February. He was nominated to the board in July.

The two companies have spent some $100 million on the campaign to win over shareholders, 40% of which are comprised of individual retail investors, according to Reuters.

This one isn't over, not by a long shot.  P&G is still one of the biggest employers in the Cincy area and people are afraid Peltz is going to take over and shed thousands of jobs just to add another few billion or so to his pile of billions.

There are also a lot of retirees around with pretty decent retirement and pension benefits (including P&G stock) and those would certainly be first on the block if Peltz had his way.  The first skirmish may have seen Peltz from raiding the company, but the war is far from done.

Trump Gives Us The Coaled Shoulder

EPA chief Scott Pruitt came to Kentucky yesterday to make an announcement with Mitch the Turtle that the "war on coal" has been won, and that all of America will lose as a result.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt told coal miners in Kentucky Monday he will move to repeal a rule limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, assuring them, “The war against coal is over.” 
Speaking at an event in Hazard, Ky. with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Pruitt said his agency will publish the new proposed rule on Tuesday.

“[Tuesday], in Washington D.C., I’ll be a signing a proposed rule to withdraw the so-called Clean Power Plan of the past administration, and thus begin the effort to withdraw that rule,” Pruitt said. 
The proposal, which was obtained by The Washington Post and other news outlets last week, argues that the agency overstepped its legal authority in seeking to force utilities to reduce carbon emissions outside their actual facilities to meet federal emissions targets.

There are of course no plans to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan with, well, anything at this point, and Scott Pruitt's job is to make sure that will never happen.

Of course here in coal country those jobs aren't ever coming back and in fact since Trump took office the state has lost another 300 mining and logging jobs and is below 10,000 of them total, but hey, who's counting?

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of additional respiratory deaths will occur over the next ten years as a result if the plan is scrapped and that will result in billions in health care expenses but that doesn't exactly seem to be an issue with the Trump Regime.  Dead people don't vote, after all.

StupidiNews!