Labor-Management Conflict At Time Warner/Time Inc. Historically

On June 2, 1976, 600 dissatisfied Time Inc. magazine staff and book publishing employees, led by the Newspaper Guild, went on strike. Time Inc. management had sought to reduce pay rates by reducing the minimum pay rates and the number of staff members who received mandatory percentage raises, while increasing the number of staff members whose pay rates could be increased only if individual Time Inc. managers decided they “deserved merit raises.” Newspaper Guild members, however, voted to end the strike after 18 days and accept an unfavorable new contract—after their strike failed to stop the publication of any Time Inc. publications.

(Downtown 10/24/90)

Next: Time Warner/Time Inc’s Historic Political Role

Time Warner/Time Inc.'s Historical Discrimination Record

According to David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be book, in the early 1940s Time magazine:

“did not hire Jews. Jews were very much a they, they were not yet in the mainstream of American letters, let alone Luceian letters; indeed, for another fifteen years it would be difficult for Jews to join the foreign staff of Time. They could be hired and they could work as stringers, but whether they could go on the masthead if their names were too Semitic was another thing. For the Luce publications, like Luce in those early days, were Waspy and old-school; until the very end of his life Luce was still capable of turning to a Jewish editor and asking, `And what do our Jewish friends think of that?’”

Luce’s Time Inc. employment police in relation to African-American and women journalists also left much to be desired in the 1950s and 1960s. As late as seven years after the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawed legal segregation, for instance, only about 2 percent of all employees at Time Inc. were African-American and not one of the 50 African-American employees at Time Inc. held a major editorial job. The Black Media Committee criticized a special 1970 Time magazine issue on “Black America” by describing it as “a ghettoized supplement.” As late as the early 1970s, African-Americans held only 1 percent of the jobs at Fortune magazine, only 2.5 percent of the jobs at Life magazine and Sports Illustrated and only 4 percent of the jobs at Time magazine.

In 1970 Time magazine’s research chief, Marylois Vega, had also confessed: “Any fair observer of Time over the past 25 years would admit that there has been a prejudice against women in the editorial department of this magazine…” Time Inc.’s practice since the 1920s had been to track the women it hired into the lower-paying clerical, secretarial and researcher jobs and to reserve the higher-paying writer or editor slots for the men it hired. Time magazine’s editor-in-chief in 1979, Henry Grunwald, had said in 1969: “I must add in candor that I have not met many women who seem to have the physical and mental energy required for Time senior editing.”

One-hundred-and-forty-seven women members of Time Inc.’s editorial staff subsequently signed a formal complaint of sex discrimination by Time Inc. management which was presented to the New York State Division of Human Rights. On May 4, 1970, New York State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz filed the complaint which specifically charged Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Time-Life Books with sex discrimination. The New York Civil Rights Bureau Chief also charged Time Inc. management with gender discrimination.

(Downtown 10/24/90)

Next: Labor-Management Conflict At Time Warner/Time Inc. Historically

`Non-Profit' IDA Paid IDA President $323,000 Annual Salary In 2002

Being the president of the Pentagon’s tax-exempt, “non-profit” weapons research think-tank, the Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA], is an even more lucrative job than being the president of the tax-exempt, “non-profit” Teachers College of Columbia University. Between Sept. 2004 and Sept. 2005, for instance, the then-Columbia University Teachers College President, Arthur Levine, was paid a $315,600 annual salary. Yet as early as 2002, the President of IDA, Retired U.S. Air Force General Larry Welch, was being paid an annual salary of $323,979, according to IDA’s Form 990 for the year beginning Sept. 29, 2001 and ending Sept. 27, 2002.

At least ten other IDA executives were also paid annual salaries of over $140,000 in 2002. For instance, the IDA Vice-President for Administration and Finance, Ruth Greenstein, was paid an annual salary of $261,212, while the IDA Vice-President for Planning and Evaluation was paid $212,554. Annual salaries of between $196,889 and $231,076 were also paid to the directors of IDA’s five weapons research divisions in 2002.

In addition, the chairman of the IDA board of trustees, former University of South Carolina President John Palms, was paid an additional $27,100 in 2002 by IDA for his work as IDA board chairman. MIT Professor Sheila Widnall, a former Clinton Administration Secretary of the Air Force, also was paid an additional $10,800 in 2002 by IDA for apparently representing MIT on IDA’s board of trustees in 2002.

Although IDA claims to be a “non-profit” and a “public charity”, from its Pentagon weapons research contracts in 2002 it earned total revenues of $145 million that were $4 million more than the $141 million it had to spend on its weapons research think-tank activity. According to IDA’s 2006 Annual Report, between 1996 and 2006, “Operation Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom was examined” by IDA researchers “for lessons for future joint military operations and for operational test and evaluation programs.”

Next: Time Warner/Time Inc.’s Historical Discrimination Record

Hollywood Racism and Classism

Hollywood has never been eager to hire many African-American screenwriters and directors to help produce its movies. As The Urban Plantation: Racism & Colonialism in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Robert Staples noted as late as 1987, “of some 5,700 writers in the Writers Guild of America-West, only 70 are black” and “only 252 of the 6,672 members of the Directors Guild of America are members of minority groups.”

The same book also made the following observations about African-American-oriented radio stations in the United States:

“Most of the 400 black radio stations are owned by whites, some of whom have become millionaires through their control of the black communications media…A black owner seems to be no guarantee the black community’s needs will be met or even the job stability of black personnel at these stations. The son of Adam Clayton Powell purchased a black soul station in Oakland, California, converted it to an all-news format and replaced most of the black employees with whites…”

(Downtown 4/27/94)

Foreign transnational-owned Hollywood studios still make a lot of money distributing their films to audiences of U.S. working-class people. Yet Hollywood has long been accused of portraying both U.S. working-class people and their labor unions in a classist way.

In his 1953 book Film In The Battle Of Ideas, one of the blacklisted “Hollywood Ten” screenwriters, John Howard Lawson, for instance, argued that “workers and their families see films which urge them to…emulate the corrupt values of their enemies” and “the consistent presentation on the nation’s screens of the views that…workers who seek to protect their class interests are stupid, malicious or even treasonable” is what Hollywood engages in. Through Jaundiced Eyes: How The Media View Organized Labor by William Puette also observed during the 1980s:

“The real problem with Hollywood’s portrayal of unions is its blatant inaccuracy. Most unions, particularly the well-established ones, are shown as being connected in some way to organized crime. In fact, a 1982 presidential commission on organized crime found that fewer than 400 of the country’s 70,000 locals, less than one percent had been suspected of such influence. There is likely a parallel if not considerably higher incidence of crooked bankers, lawyers, doctors, and politicians as well. Yet no media portrayals of these professions would ever suggest endemic corruption.

“…The portrayal of unions in the media, particularly in movies, plays a major role in shaping the attitudes of Americans towards labor unions. With few exceptions, that portrayal has been both unrepresentative and virulently negative.”

(Downtown 2/2/94)

Next: “Non-Profit” IDA Paid IDA President $323,000 Annual Salary In 2002

Turkey's Human Rights Record In 1990s

Even the Associated Press (7/7/95) reported in 1995 that “thousands of Iraqi Kurds fled their villages…after Turkish forces dropped bombs in Northern Iraq, and about 3,000 soldiers pressed their cross-border offensive against Kurdish rebels” while “an estimated 3,000 Iraqi Kurds from 18 villages…fled their homes for safer areas.” The Turkish government that invades Iraq to deny the Kurdish people their democratic right to self-determination is a NATO ally of the U.S. government.

(Downtown 7/19/95)

The 1996 deaths of political prisoners in Turkey also indicated that during the 1990s the Clintons’ first administration remained aligned with a Turkish government that violated the human rights of its political opponents. In its 1994 Annual Report, Amnesty International summarized the human rights situation in Turkey during the Clintons’ first term in the White House:

“Hundreds of people were detained as prisoners of conscience…Torture of political and criminal detainees in police stations was widespread and systematic, and there were at least 24 reported deaths in custody as a result of torture. At least 26 people reportedly `disappeared’ in security force custody and scores of people were killed in the mainly Kurdish southeastern provinces and also in western Turkey, in circumstances which suggested that they had been extra-judicially executed by members of the security forces…”

The New York Times (9/7/96) also reported that on Sept. 6, 1996 “Turkish planes continued their bombing attacks…on camps inside Iraq that are used by the Kurdish faction, the Kurdistan Workers Party.”

Next: Hollywood Racism and Classism

Two-Term President Bill Clinton's Puppet: Hillary Clinton?

In order to apparently evade the spirit of the 22nd amendment of the U.S. Constitution (which attempted to prevent any U.S. politician from occupying the White House for more than two terms), former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s wife, Hillary Clinton, is running as a 2008 Democratic Party presidential candidate. The former member of the Wellesley College board of trustees and Wal-Mart board of directors is also attempting to portray herself as being something other than Bill Clinton’s surrogate and political puppet. Yet as former New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth and current New York Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr. observed in their 2007 book, Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton:

“Hillaryland’s chief advisor, of course, is Bill, who often test markets Hillary’s position or sound bites before she uses them herself to see how they play…

“She supported Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan…On October 25 [2001], she voted for the Patriot Act…She remained decidedly hawkish, far closer to President Bush than most of her fellow Democrats were…

“…Her husband, Bill Clinton, had signed a law in 1998 that contained…provisions calling for regime change, and he also predicted the same year that Saddam Hussein would use weapons of mass destruction…

“Bill served as her main counsel on the Iraq war vote…Hillary voted against an amendment to the war resolution that would have required the diplomatic emphasis…Instead of voting for Bush to pursue more diplomacy, she voted to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq…”

In utilizing his wife as a stand-in candidate to apparently evade a term-limit constitutional amendment, former Democratic Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton seems to be doing something similar to what another former Southern Democratic Governor, George Wallace, did in Alabama in 1965 to violate the spirit of a section of the Alabama state constitution which prohibited Alabama governors from serving two consecutive terms in office. As the 1994 book George Wallace by Stephen Lesher recalled:

“…In September 1965, Wallace called the legislature into special session with instructions to draw up a constitutional amendment to allow a sitting governor to run for a second consecutive term…

“…Immediately after being notified that the succession resolution had been voted down, Wallace rose from his desk; jabbed a cigar in his mouth; and, as he started out the door for an out-of-town engagement, turned to his staff and said simply, `My wife may run.’…

“…Only with Lurleen [Wallace] as governor could Wallace claim…to be…the co-sovereign…

“Rep. Edith Green of Oregon feared that Lurleen’s evident role as her husband’s pawn might set back the movement toward women’s equality…

“After Lurleen’s overwhelming victory in the primary and general elections, George…offered a number of `recommendations’ for the new administration, which everyone understood to be Lurleen’s proposed legislative program…

“After Lurleen’s inauguration, she moved into the governor’s office suite (number 100), while George moved in across the hall (number 101) but retained the key to the private entrance to Lurleen’s office. Lurleen kept George’s cabinet intact…"

The Politics of Rage by Dan Carter also observed that “the sweeping victory of Lurleen Wallace, stand-in candidate for governor, had made George Wallace the king of a captive state.”

Next: Turkey’s Human Rights Record In 1990s

`Living On Stolen Goods'

Oh, many, many ages ago
Red people lived alone
At peace with the buffalo
Oh, they’re living on stolen goods.

To make money they came
The Anglos and their slaves
For housework they had their dames
Oh, they’re living on stolen goods.

And they brought with them their guns
And whipped and shot Black ones
They brainwashed their children
Oh, they’re living on stolen goods.

And westward ho! they marched
And shot down the reds who tried to resist
And this whole land they robbed
Oh, they’re living on stolen goods.

And they cramped the red people in camps
And they ghettoized the Blacks
And now they’re into Asia
Oh, they’re living on stolen goods.

Amerika, your riches
Are based on your robbery
You rich fascists are doomed
‘Cause you’re living on stolen goods.

Yes, many, many ages ago
Red people lived alone
At peace with the buffalo
Oh, they’re living on stolen goods.


To listen to "Livin' On Stolen Goods" folk song, you can click on following music site link:

http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Protest+Folk+Songs/Livin%27+on+Stolen+Goods

The Living On Stolen Goods protest folk song was written in the Spring of 1971. The words for the song came to me while riding on a bus through Harlem, into the Bronx and Westchester and up to Boston for a day trip.

Next: Two-Term President Bill Clinton’s Puppet: Hillary Clinton?