Women not the ones who need fixing

October 28, 2019

Women are not the problem. There has always been something grotesque about the idea that they are. But to embrace that idea in the #MeToo era is not just grotesque, but clueless. It suggests that you slept through a reckoning that has shifted the Zeitgeist. So someone tell Ernst & Young to wake up and smell the 2019. The multinational business services firm has been struggling to contain the fallout of a story posted by HuffPost last week about a June 2018 training seminar at its office in Hoboken, N.J.,. “Power-Presence-Purpose,” conducted, according to the firm, by a ...

California set to create own public banks

October 28, 2019

When you pay state and local taxes, parking fees and other payments to your regional government, chances are those funds will almost immediately end up in a corporate bank. Until recently most of these payments to the city of Los Angeles were held by Wells Fargo, a bank that has routinely paid out millions in fines and settlements due to predatory lending, foreclosure abuses and defrauding investors. Although the Los Angeles City Council voted in December 2017 to divest from Wells Fargo, the city must still use the banking services of JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. That’s in ...

Check your treats to avoid any tricks this Halloween

October 25, 2019

I’ll always remember the Halloween I went as a 7 Up can, based on a commercial that was popular at the time. My father fashioned a costume for me by rolling a giant piece of cardboard into a cylinder shape. With his mechanical drawing background, he meticulously sketched out and painted the bright green background and red and white logo. I’m not sure if it had eyes cut out for me to see or if a parental unit led me around as we trick-or-treated. My super cute go-go boots also probably were not ideal for walking, but I made it work. Then there were many Halloweens my sister and I ...

Washing our heads of plastic

October 25, 2019

Earlier this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a ban on those small plastic bottles for hotel guests that contain shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, moisturizer and other personal care items. They’re convenient, particularly for airline passengers who, since 2006, haven’t been allowed to carry on containers of liquids any larger than 3.4 ounces and so often leave their own products at home. And they’re fun to collect. But they’re also a waste. They’re too difficult to clean to make them easily recyclable, so they end up in landfills in enormous quantities ...

Why Zuckerberg wants to recruit outside liberal bubble

October 24, 2019

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that Facebook strives for diversity in its workforce — and not just on the basis of race or gender. The CEO says he works hard to recruit people who attended a state school, are rooted to their local communities and come from traditional backgrounds. “We certainly do,” Zuckerberg said of his 40,000 mostly U.S.-based employees in an interview with the New York Post. “There’s a woman who runs our commerce product and is deeply religious,” he said. “The person who runs policies of the company is quite a prominent Republican. So we have ...

Identity politics are still a dead end in 2020

October 23, 2019

In her post-mortem on Hillary Clinton’s failed candidacy, Donna Brazile noted that her students at Georgetown University truly disliked identity politics. “They thought that Hillary spent too much time trying to appeal to people based on their race, or their gender, or their sexual orientation,” the Democratic strategist wrote in “Hacks,” “and not enough time appealing to people based on what really worried them — issues like income inequality and climate change.” On the opposite end of the political compass, right-wing agitator Steve Bannon said this about identity ...