Google/YouTube replied formally to our letter. The clock is paused.
23 August 2019
On the last day before our countdown clock ran out, we
received a formal written reply from Google Germany. In the letter, they
wrote that they have a “a strong interest in the success and
satisfaction of YouTube Creators” — and “for this reason, we appreciate
the recently expressed interest of the trade unions in supporting
YouTube Creators.”
Google Germany has invited us to a meeting in their Berlin
office, to discuss “fundamental questions regarding the future of work.”
We will accept this invitation. And we have paused the countdown clock
on fairtube.info.
Christiane Benner, Vice President of IG Metall (the German
Metalworkers’ Union), said: “The pressure that we have exercised jointly
with the YouTubers Union on Google and YouTube has paid off. Google is
coming to the table. We’re looking forward to meeting — soon. There
we’ll find out what YouTube is ready to change.”
Jörg Sprave, Founder of the YouTubers Union, said: “We would
never have gotten such a high-level invitation without the strong
commitment and engagement of the members of the YouTubers Union. The
YouTubers Union has grown from 15,000 members to over 22,000 members in
the last four weeks alone. That will give us crucial support for the
discussions with Google.”
Last month, Ward accused Carter of removing on-the-record allegations of abuse from sisters Maria and Annie Farmer — who claim Epstein sexually assaulted them when Annie was 15 years old — after the financier pressured the editor in person. “It came down to my sources’ word against Epstein’s,” she wrote in the Daily Beast in 2015, adding that “at the time Graydon believed Epstein.” Carter also stated this week that the reason the allegations of sexual abuse were cut was because Ward did not have three sources to verify the claims, and that the reporting did not meet the magazine’s “legal threshold.” In a statement to NPR, Carter said that Vanity Fair didn’t pull the reporting because of any sense of threat.
But according to “All Things Considered,” shortly after the publication of the Epstein profile in March 2003, Carter called contributing editor John Connolly — who published a book about Epstein with James Patterson in 2017 — and told him that a bullet had been placed outside his front door:
Even in the absence of any evidence Epstein was involved, Connolly says, both Carter and he considered the bullet a clear warning from Epstein. Another former colleague, who spoke on condition of anonymity, recalls receiving an anguished call from Carter linking the bullet to Epstein. (NPR asked Carter repeatedly over the course of a week for his recollections of the bullet incident along with other elements presented here. After this story was broadcast and posted, his spokeswoman wrote to say Carter recalled the bullet appearing in 2004, not 2003.)
In 2006, as federal authorities investigated Epstein for soliciting minors, Connolly went to Florida on a reporting trip to speak with the financier’s female employees. While there, he says Carter called him and told him that in his front yard in Connecticut, there was the severed head of a cat. Other Vanity Fair staffers confirmed that there was contemporaneous office talk around the dead cat. “It was done to intimidate,” Connolly told NPR. “No question about it.” (In a statement to New York, Carter said: “There was no investigation and I have no idea who was responsible, but my wife and I remember attributing them to the work of aggrieved George W. Bush supporters. To suggest that either of these incidents affected my editorial judgment is flatly wrong.”)
NPR’s David Folkenflik describes other attempts to kill the stories of Epstein’s accusers; while these efforts may not share the same intensity and mob-like intimidation, they depict the more traditional, and often successful, routes of the wealthy to suppress bad press. In 2015, ABC reporters Amy Robach and Jim Hill secured an interview with Virginia Giuffre, in which she discussed being sexually trafficked as a minor. The interview never aired.
According to self-identified “pro-life” advocates, the fundamental divide between those who want to outlaw abortion and those who want to keep it legal comes down to one question: when does life begin? Anti-abortion advocacy pushes the view that life begins at conception; the name of their movement carefully centers the conceit that opposition to abortion rights is simply about wanting to save human lives.
A new poll shows that’s a lie. The “pro-life” movement is fundamentally about misogyny.
A Supermajority/PerryUndem survey released this week divides respondents by their position on abortion, and then tracks their answers to 10 questions on gender equality more generally. On every question, anti-abortion voters were significantly more hostile to gender equity than pro-choice voters.
Do men make better political leaders than women? More than half of anti-abortion voters agreed. Do you want there to be equal numbers of men and women in positions of power in America? Fewer than half of abortion opponents said yes – compared with 80% of pro-choicers, who said they want women to share in power equally.
Anti-abortion voters don’t like the #MeToo movement. They don’t think the lack of women in positions of power impacts women’s equality. They don’t think access to birth control impacts women’s equality. They don’t think the way women are treated in society is an important issue in the 2020 election.
In other words, they don’t believe sexism is a problem, and they’re hostile to women’s rights. Pro-lifers are sexists in denial – yes, the women too.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, mostly white pundits wondered if Donald Trump’s white male base was motivated by “economic anxiety”. We heard this over and over: Trump voters aren’t the racist deplorables the liberal media (of which those same pundits were a part) makes them out to be. They’re decent people who have been hurt by free trade agreements, increasing Chinese economic dominance, the decimation of unions, a thinning social safety net, and stagnating wages. (Why those same people would then turn around and vote for a party that kills unions, tears up the safety net and blocks minimum wage raises while cutting taxes for CEOs went unexplained.)
Then came the social scientists – and whaddaya know? Trump voters weren’t motivated by economic anxiety as much as fear of “cultural displacement”. White Christian men (and many of their wives) were so used to their cultural, political and economic dominance that they perceived the ascension of other groups as a threat.
