British tycoon Green named over alleged sexual harassment
Reuters, Oct 25 2018
LONDON – Retail billionaire Philip Green, one of Britain’s most prominent businessmen, was named in parliament on Thursday as having taken legal action to try to prevent publication of allegations of sexual harassment against him. The Telegraph newspaper said on Wednesday that a leading businessmen had been granted an injunction by a British judge preventing it from identifying him and publishing details of alleged sexual harassment and racial abuse of staff. In a statement, Green denied having broken the law and said his businesses fully investigated employee grievances. He said in a statement issued by a media representative:
To the extent that it is suggested that I have been guilty of unlawful sexual or racist behavior, I categorically and wholly deny these allegations.
The case has been cast in the British media as an example of powerful men using money and lawyers to cover up allegations of sexual harassment. Labour politician Peter Hain used a speech in the House of Lords to name Green. Hain said:
I feel it’s my duty under parliamentary privilege to name Philip Green as the individual in question. The media have been subject to an injunction preventing publication of full details of a story which is clearly in the public interest.
In his statement, Green said his Arcadia group, which owns TopShop, sometimes reached confidential legal settlements in response to employees’ formal complaints, in common with other large businesses. “These are settled with the agreement of all parties and their legal advisers. These settlements are confidential so I cannot comment further on them,” he said. The Telegraph had described the case as “the British #MeToo scandal which cannot be revealed.” Green, 66, became one of the Britain’s best known retailers when he bought department store group BHS in 2000 and TopShop owner Arcadia in 2002. The entrepreneur, once known as ‘king of the high street’ was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. But his reputation was damaged by the collapse of BHS after he sold the chain for £1 in 2015 to a businessman who had formerly been declared bankrupt. MPs blamed Green for the chain’s demise and said it raised questions about gaps in company law and pension regulation. In a report to parliament in Jul 2016, they called the collapse “the unacceptable face of capitalism.” Green called the report “the predetermined and inaccurate output of a biased and unfair process” and said the sale had been made in good faith.
NYT celebrates downfall of 201 “powerful men:” The ugly face of the #MeToo campaign
David Walsh, WSWS, Oct 25 2018
The NYT published a crude and revealing article on Oct 23, entitled “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women.” The piece, credited to seven authors, inadvertently points toward an important truth: the #MeToo campaign is fundamentally an effort by a layer of upper middle class women to advance their economic interests at the expense of their male rivals. The selfish and mercenary motives help explain why the sexual harassment crusade resorts to the foul methods of the smear campaign and the political witch-hunt. The NYT credits the allegations of sexual harassment and assault against film producer Harvey Weinstein, published last October in its own pages and in the New Yorker magazine, with having opened the floodgates. The article gloats that according to its own research:
At least 200 prominent men have lost their jobs after public allegations of sexual harassment. … And nearly half of the men who have been replaced were succeeded by women.
The NYT does not bother to evaluate the truth or non-truth of the accusations. The authors begin from the assumption that allegations are to be accepted at face value or, more cynically, that they are useful as part of a gender purge. The deplorable piece begins breathlessly:
They had often gotten away with it for years, and for those they harassed, it seemed as if the perpetrators would never pay any consequences.
It later argues that the controversy over the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh shows the following:
Pindos disagree on how people accused of sexual misconduct should be held accountable and what the standard of evidence should be.
Our seven authors, without a trace of democratic sensibility among them, fail to recognize that an individual merely accused is not to be held accountable for anything. The core of the article is the immense dual pleasure the NYT takes in the downfall of the various men, guilty or otherwise, accused of serious abuse or not, and their replacement in a good many cases by women clearly on the ascendancy. The article claims:
The #MeToo movement shook, and is still shaking, power structures in society’s most visible sectors. The NYT gathered cases of prominent people who lost their main jobs, significant leadership positions or major contracts, and whose ousters were publicly covered in news reports. “Forty-three percent of their replacements were women. Of those, one-third are in news media, one-quarter in government, and one-fifth in entertainment and the arts. For example, Robin Wright replaced Kevin Spacey as lead actor on ‘House of Cards,’ Emily Nemens replaced Lorin Stein as editor of ‘The Paris Review,’ and Tina Smith replaced Al Franken as a senator from Minnesota. Women are starting to gain power in organizations that have been jolted by harassment, with potentially far-reaching effects.
The article makes a half-hearted effort to convince NYT readers that this “gain” in “power” will somehow make the world a better place, writing:
Research has repeatedly shown that women tend to lead differently. In general, they create more respectful work environments, where harassment is less likely to flourish and where women feel more comfortable reporting it. Female leaders tend to hire and promote more women; pay them more equally; and make companies more profitable. Women bring their life experiences and perspectives to decision-making, and that can help in business because women make the vast majority of purchasing decisions. In government, women have been shown to be more collaborative and bipartisan, and promote more policies supporting women, children and social welfare.
This is rubbish hardly worth replying to. It is not even necessary to accept Rosa Luxemburg’s contention in 1912 that bourgeois women, equipped with full political rights, “would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class” to recognize that the female of the capitalist species is at least as vicious and exploitive as the male. Workers at PepsiCo, General Motors, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, IBM and HP Enterprise, all firms currently blessed with female CEOs, would be able to testify to that reality. Referring only to recent Pindo history, figures such as Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Nikki Haley, Victoria Nuland, Gina Haspel and others have surely proven themselves thoroughly and enthusiastically murderous. And one of the most conscious and ruthless enemies of “policies supporting women, children and social welfare” in the latter part of the 20th century was none other than British PM Margaret Thatcher. The stress in the Oct 23 NYT article is not truly on the social progress the Weinstein allegations have ushered in. That is largely public relations, meant to assuage the conscience of those readers susceptible to such things. The excited emphasis here rather is on the economic gains accruing to a small portion of the female population. That small portion is already doing extraordinarily well. For example, an analysis by executive data firm Equilar for AP found that while women last year made up only 5% of CEOs at S&P 500 companies:
Median compensation for a female CEO was valued at $13.5m for FY 2017, versus $11.5m for their male counterparts. Median pay for female CEOs rose 15.4% from the prior year, while for men it increased 8.2%.
In their recent article, the NYT authors crassly offer a good many “success” stories.
- Robert Scoble, co-founder of the Transformation Group, an augmented reality company, resigned after being accused of sexual assault or inappropriate behavior with three women, and was replaced by Irena Cronin.
- John Besh, chief executive, Besh Restaurant Group, stepped down from day-to-day operations after accusations of sexual harassment from multiple employees. Shannon White took his place.
- NBC News political journalist Mark Halperin, accused of sexual harassment, had his job taken by Alex Wagner.
- Hamilton Fish, publisher and president of the New Republic, resigned after accusations of inappropriate conduct. Rachel Rosenfelt took over from him.
- Leonard Lopate was fired as host on New York Public Radio after complaints of sexual harassment. Lopate, who said he had “never done anything inappropriate on any level,” was replaced by Alison Stewart.
- Etc, etc.
In the various “swapping” of positions the NYT documents, how many tens of millions of dollars in income have gone from one gender column to the other? The newspaper remains discreetly silent. Among the many statistics the NYT is pleased to report, another also goes missing: that 75 or so of the men denied the accusations altogether. Others agreed their behavior had been inappropriate and apologized. Also missing from the article are the words “convicted” or “found guilty.” No matter, careers have been made and advancement in a good many cases assured. The NYT leaves it to the political charlatans in the International Socialist Organization, at Jacobin magazine and the rest of the pseudo-left to carry on the pretense that there is anything “progressive” or “left-wing” about the current sexual misconduct campaign. The article on the downfall of the 201 “powerful men” proceeds along the same general lines as a number of other NYT pieces inspired by the #MeToo campaign. In March, Susan Chira, a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues at the newspaper, in her article “Money Is Power And Women Need More of Both,” lamented the small number of female billionaires. She regretted thye fact that:
Many women, those who grew up wealthy and those who did not, have long been steered away from the unapologetic drive for wealth.
A NYT opinion piece in April by novelist Jessica Knoll carried the unapologetic headline “I Want to Be Rich and I’m Not Sorry.” Knoll elaborated:
Success, for me, is synonymous with making money. I want to write books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my husband gasp, and fat royalty checks twice a year.
These are the reactionary, grasping elements gathering around the #MeToo and Time’s Up banners. However, they feel their newly won positions are not entirely secure, dangers still lurk. The disgraced males might not simply disappear as they are supposed to do. The NYT piece notes:
More than 10% of the ousted men have tried to make a comeback, or voiced a desire to, and many never lost financial power. The comedian Louis C K recently took the stage at the Comedy Cellar in New York, raising questions of how long is long enough for people to be banished from their field, and who gets to decide. Garrison Keillor, the radio host, has restarted The Writer’s Almanac as a podcast and reportedly received $275k for a deal in which Minnesota Public Radio reposted archived episodes of his programs.
Again, this latest outburst from the NYT staff, which cannot help itself, shows the sexual witch-hunt’s true class interests.
Niqnaq 