Business Ethics Links 7-31-2016 The Convention Bounce Edition

On July 31, 2016 By southwerkIn business ethics

The first post-Democratic convention polls are coming out, and it looks like Hillary Clinton is regaining the advantage over Donald Trump. Trump came up in the polls last week after the Republican convention, but since the focus was on the Democrats all of last week, this week’s new polls will likely reverse that trend.

This election just like “Game of Thrones?”

With the divisiveness plaguing the upcoming presidential election,“Game of Thrones” fans have been quick to point out the remarkable similarities between the fictional show and the race for one of the most important positions in the world. According to Tumblr, the presidential candidates could easily be stand-ins for “GoT” characters, and vice versa.

Trump not invited to billionaire’s club.

As 400 wealthy conservative donors in the Charles and David Koch network gathered at a luxury resort at the base of the Rocky Mountains here, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took to his normal form of communication, Twitter, to blast the activist brothers, saying he “turned down” a meeting request with them.

The Game is Rigged and People are Angry.

The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a system rigged by big corporations, Wall Street, and the super-wealthy.

This is a big reason why Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. It’s also why Bernie Sanders took 22 states in the Democratic primaries, including a majority of Democratic primary voters under age 45.

The new Ghostbusters is telling a different story than the last one.

The Milton Friedman economic fantasy of unfettered markets rewarding talent and effort with success and upward mobility has been laid to waste by the current state of economic inequality and social stagnation.

Jail denies female inmates pants.

Dreadful Murder

But above all, authorities pointed to the stacks of penny dreadfuls found in the boys’ room. These cheap, sensational tales of adventure and (sometimes) violence, often set in the criminal underworld or in exotic locales, were the scandalous comic books and video games of their time, sold to the tune of a million copies per week to working-class boys made newly literate by the educational reform movement of the previous two decades. The yarns published in these pamphlets, often with an intrepid boy as the hero and a fabulous treasure as his reward, would remind modern readers of the adventures of Indiana Jones or Tintin. Nattie told theEast London Advertiser that Robert read these stories passionately and had promised his younger brother that once they were free of their mother, the two of them would head off to India with Fox as their sidekick, in search of “romance and riches.”

Are 2016 Republicans, a throwback to the past?

This fabricated and fear-driven narrative is nothing new; politics in the United States has often fed into national trends of antipathy toward immigration and non-traditional religious practices. American history is fraught with examples of non-white, non-Christian groups being conspicuously excluded from the American promise – simply because enough Americans acquiesced to the politics of fear. Idealists may point out that the social proclivities of the United States have evolved to be more tolerant, compassionate and emotionally intelligent, but the reality is that the nation is bearing witness to a resurgence of these lower-brained mentalities in the 2016 presidential campaign; where an “us vs. them’” binary, oversimplified worldviews and a tendency to negatively stereotype entire religions, nationalities and cultures has proven to be a successful formula for elevating a boorish reality TV star to fully legitimate presidential candidate.

The Doctrine of Fear.

Conservative-authoritarians possess very strong death anxieties. “Terror management theory” explains how they manifest these existential fears through militant nationalism and an obsession with “guns, god, and the flag.” The Republican Party has relied on ginning up white racial resentment and overt racism as its primary way of winning elections. White “Christian” America feels besieged by demographic change. Social scientists have documented an increase in death rates among poor and working-class lower-educated white Americans from drug and alcohol abuse as well as chronic illnesses. “The silent majority” who live in rust-belt America and dying red-state suburbia feel increasingly obsolete because of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Both the right-wing media and the Republican Party profit (economically and politically) from stoking the fears and worries of White America.

It’s time to take the Democratic Party back from the donor class.

The second (and most powerful) reason that I believe this rebellion will persevere is that it’s organic. Not an artificial marketing creation sprouted in some D.C. hothouse by national groups and moneyed interests, this is a wildflower movement that sprang up spontaneously, took root, and seeded thousands of zip codes.
Despite supporters’ natural disappointment that their efforts ended short of the Oval Office, the majority are not petulantly giving up on politics, as most pundits predicted. Why would they? After all, this corps of pro-democracy activists seemingly came from nowhere, won 22 states, virtually tied in five others, and revolutionized the Democrats’ message, policy agenda, and method of campaigning. Having proven their mettle as a talented and inventive grassroots network, they’re eager to push forward. I’ve been out there among them for months — from Great Falls to Cedar Falls, Albany to Albuquerque, Carson City to New York City, and more — and I’ve witnessed their creativity and grit. No way they’ll “Bern out” and fold, for they have audacious, long — term ambitions.

Besides, the gross inequality and corporate rapaciousness they’re fighting will not just go away — and are likely to deepen and spread. Unlike the political and media establishment, which treats elections as periodic games to be “won” with pollsters, funders, and tricksters, this populist team is engaged in REAL politics: the ongoing struggle by everyday people to democratize America’s wealth and power to benefit all and serve the common good.

Indentured Servants?

What if millions of American workers were being denied health insurance, job security and the most basic legal protections, from overtime pay to workers compensation to the right to join a union? What if tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer revenues — money desperately needed to address everything from crumbling roads to education to health care — were never making it to local, state and federal treasuries? What if thousands of companies were violating the law with impunity?

That is exactly what is happening in the United States today, thanks to a rampant practice known as worker misclassification — illegally labeling workers as independent contractors when in fact they are employees under the law. In some cases it’s occurring in plain sight, in others it’s more hidden — but regardless of the circumstances, it is taking an enormous toll on the country.

Our Lady of Birth Control

That war continues to rage, but without the contributions of pioneers like Margaret Sanger, we’d still be stuck in the trenches. Born in 1879 to Irish parents, she was a complicated woman, one who’s best remembered as the tireless birth control advocate who scandalized the country, energized a generation of women and founded the nation’s first birth control clinic, planting the seed for the organization that would eventually become Planned Parenthood. She was also a radical activist, a mother, a wife, a nurse and an extremely savvy media wrangler who excelled at stirring up publicity for her cause (and landed herself in jail a few times as a result). Sanger’s refusal to back down or be silenced is echoed in the steadfast approach of Planned Parenthood itself, even as the problem she labored to correct — American women’s government-sanctioned lack of bodily autonomy — remains ingrained in our supposedly modern society.

Bulletproof and Black!

Was the Democratic Convention a little odd?

I was deeply troubled by the discordant tone of the Philly spectacle, by the haphazard leaps it made from a Bernie Sanders-lite progressive social vision to war fever to a Katy Perry concert. I feel absolutely no doubt that the same insanity virus that destroyed the Republican Party from within has infected the Democrats, and the normals are completely unaware of it. (Case in point: the paranoid desire to believe that Trump is in league with Vladimir Putin to destroy America, rather than just an idiotic, blustering troll.) I’m tempted to issue a heartfelt plea about how we can’t afford the usual left-liberal thing of saying, “Whew, we didn’t elect a monster” and then retreating into our info-consumer bubbles for four years. But who would I be kidding? That’s exactly what will happen. That’s the normal person’s way.

Firefighter Revives Cat

Bruce Lee shaped both mind and body.

John Little, who examined Lee’s papers after the actor’s death, says he was stunned when he first entered Lee’s library. He had at least 1,700 heavily annotated books. That’s when he realized that Lee sharpened his mind as much as his body.

“The philosophy of Lee is more powerful than the martial arts of Lee,” says Little, author of “The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee.” “Everything that Bruce Lee did flowed from his mind and his thinking.”

Who was Roger Ailes, really?

Indeed, many believe Ailes’ derogatory language played a role in his departure from NBCUniversal in 1996. Officially, Ailes — then president and CEO of the CNBC and America’s Talking channels — resigned from the network because he was “uncomfortable” with recent restructuring. But a year earlier, according to biographer Gabriel Sherman, Ailes had called NBC executive David Zaslav “a little f—–g Jew prick,” prompting NBC to launch an investigation.

Obama visit highlights invasion of McMansions

Bena argues that the giant homes – often referred to as McMansions – are not only out of proportion with their environment but are wasteful symbols of the over-reaching vanity of their absentee owners. Over the past 20 years, what started as an aberration is now a trend – Mansionisation, or the practice of building the largest possible house on a plot of land.

“For me, this is more gross than mere conspicuous consumption,” says Bena. “It’s another type of gentrification. We need to start taking care of our communities and be more careful with land use and zoning.”

The Police are most likely to die when responding to domestic disputes

Hack Attack

A key question in any criminal investigation is: who benefits? Looking at the above chronology, the answer is clear: Donald Trump. Which then leads to a second question: why would agencies of the Russian government wish to undermine Clinton and benefit her opponent? Here the conspiracy theories move up a gear. Trump has boasted of his admiration for Putin as a “strong” leader with whom he can do business. His admiration has been reciprocated by Putin. Trump has also made clear his disdain for Nato as an organisation that enables European nations to have security without paying their fair share of its costs. So if he were president and Putin made aggressive moves against the Baltic states, would he support a strong Nato response? Who knows? But if you were in Putin’s shoes, you’d regard Trump as clearly preferable to Clinton, who is an old-style American hawk.

Extremists Thrive

I don’t throw the word “fascism” around, but can we at least accept that Trump follows the Führerprinzip? He has no colleagues, only followers. He is a racist. Not a closet racist, or a dog-whistle racist, but a racist so unabashed that the Klan endorses him. Above all, he has the swaggering dictator’s determination to bawl opponents into silence with screams of “loser”, “dummy”, “fraud”, “puppet,” “biased”, “disgusting”, “liar” and “kook”. As with the web trolls Trump so resembles, it is never the point and always the person. Female news presenters have to explain that they are not asking him difficult questions because they have“blood coming out of whatever” or surrender to him, as Megan Kelly of Fox Newsdid to her shame. Latinos have to explain why they are not rapists and murderers or shut up and give up. Muslims have to explain that they are not terrorists or they lose the right to a hearing. At every stage, the argument is shifted on to the troll’s terrain of ethnic and religious loyalty tests. Except here the troll could become the world’s most powerful man.

Justice Department Investigates Shooting

Shipley’s training records show two of his fellow officers had serious concerns that he was too quick to go for his service weapon, that he ignored directives from superiors, and that he was liable to falsify reports and not control his emotions.

A day before Shipley’s training ended, nearly three years ago, a police corporal recommended that the Winslow police department not retain him.

Business Ethics Links 7-30-2016 The 3D Printed Structure Edition

On July 30, 2016 By southwerkIn Business Ethics

3D Printed Structure

fig56-57 — The 3D Printed Structure Edition

3-D Printed Five Story Apartment Building

NASCAR Team and Ransomware

Ransomware attacks have generally been used to hit individuals, but recent months have seen the attacks evolve and lock down files at a much larger scale. Several instances of hospitals and healthcare providers being hit have created considerable scare, while several universities have also been locked out of their extensive databases by the cryptoviruses. In total, the extortion tactics are expected to cost nearly $1 billion in losses to businesses and organizations going forward according to the FBI.

When is a cat not a cat?

Neither of the two candidates is tech savvy.

The tech-aloofness of the two nominees marks a sharp break from President Barack Obama, who fought to keep a mobile phone when he entered the White House, spends downtime surfing his iPad and wrote about his awe at the power of the internet in his 2006 book “The Audacity of Hope.” That raises the prospect that the next occupant of the Oval Office — charged with making decisions on issues like encryption, the fight against a social-media savvy Islamic State, and the growing automation of the American economy — will be less familiar with consumer technologies than the average citizens who use them.

“These are two candidates who don’t have their hands on the technology, and that’s unfortunate, because without that it’s difficult to understand this stuff on a deeper, more visceral level,” said Peter Leyden, a futurist and former managing editor of Wired who was an early Obama backer in Silicon Valley.

Republicans Legislators hold Americans lives hostage hoping they can use the leverage to weaken the clean water act.

President Barack Obama asked for $1.9 billion to fund the Zika response back in February. The Senate eventually passed a bipartisan measure in May that would have provided $1.1 billion. But that measure differed from a version taken up in the House, and Republicans ultimately modified the bill to add provisions targeting Planned Parenthood, preserving the Confederate flag, taking money from Obamacare and weakening the Clean Water Act regarding pesticides.

Democrats objected to the added riders and voted against the bill just before Congress left, saying that Republicans should ditch the ideological additions and just use the original Senate bill that had gotten 89 “yes” votes. Republicans declined.

Does a British Shetland Pony need its own AA group?

Accounts of sexual harassment at Fox are sickening.

The Trump Narrative!

Successful politicians don’t choose political narratives at random. They understand that voters’ beliefs about the state of the nation are inevitably shaped by their life experiences and the ideological and cultural lenses through which they interpret them. That was as true in the 1980s as it is today. Consider a blue-collar worker who moved from a devastated Rust Belt town to a bustling Sun Belt suburb in 1984, just as the local economy was starting to boom. To this young woman, the idea that it was “Morning in America” felt exactly right. She had chosen to leave her past behind, and all the union bosses and tax-and-spend liberal politicians that came with it. Reagan’s individualistic ethos resonated with her experience, and it made her feel like the author of her own life.

But what of the blue-collar worker who remained in that same Rust Belt town and who lived through the nightmare of deindustrialization? What if this other woman saw friends lose their jobs and their homes, and what if she herself had to turn to food stamps to keep her family afloat? It’s easy to imagine her scoffing at Reagan’s rhetoric and feeling drawn to darker rhetoric. Democrats in the Reagan era didn’t sound downbeat and nostalgic because they hated America, regardless of what their Republican critics might have claimed. They came across as pessimistic because they wanted to craft messages that resonated with their voters, many of whom felt their world was crumbling around them.

Donald Trump Apocalypse Watch

It has taken this country a long time to come to the realization that prescription drug abuse is a crisis that cuts across class and race. Decades of normalization allowed a Caucasian, middle-upper class, male ex-marine to spend four years feeding an increasingly destabilizing drug habit and suffering virtually no social or economic consequences for it. The fact that his drug use was not directly responsible for the tower shooting does not render its existence irrelevant. Ignoring this side of Whitman’s life only helps perpetuate the myth, just now slowly beginning to die, that drug abuse is primarily a problem for minority communities and the poor.

Picking Tim Kaine was foolish.

Thus, Trump is a Frankensteinian monster, created by Republican elites who thought they could pander to their reactionary base indefinitely while serving Wall Street and corporate America in Washington. Trump is a demagogue, of course, and it’s hard to tell what he truly believes in and what he says to rile up resentful, paranoid and bigoted Americans. But it’s clear what his movement — let’s call it Trumpism — is and what it isn’t.

Trumpism is not a conservative ideology or movement, nor is it rooted in conservative principles. Its adherents do not want to safeguard traditional institutions or preserve the status quo; rather, they strive for its complete destruction. Reporter James Kirchick provided an interesting insight into the mind of a typical Trumpets when he asked prominent Trump supporter and writer Milo Yiannopolous what actual Trump policies he favors, to which the writer replied that Trump supporters don’t care about policies, “They [just] want to burn everything down.” This is nihilism, not conservatism.

Just like Bill and just like Obama, Hilary figures we liberals will finally in the end hold our nose and vote for her. So she selects Tim Kaine to show us who’s the realist, who’s the boss, who’s running this show. It might not work this time. jp

One Facebook Troll Taken Down

“This kind of behaviour is what we call ‘normalisation of violence against women’ and it is really, really scary and damaging,” she wrote. “… Every time you ‘playfully’ tell a woman to get back in the kitchen, every time you smack a girl on the bum because it’s funny, every time you make a joke about rape, YOU are contributing to a society where unfortunately women are not safe.”

Is Trump doing well in the polls because we live in a country where it is better to be in prison than on the streets?

Trump Voters

Most of all, Trump voters want respect. They want respect for their long hours of work that risks their bodies, for the hands caught in vices, backs wrenched by weights, and knees torn. They want respect because they are doing dangerous work, but their pay has been flat for decades.

They want respect because they haven’t just lost economically, but also socially. When they turn on the TV, they see their way of life being mocked and made fun of as nothing but uneducated white trash.

With Trump, they are finding someone who gives them respect. He talks their language, addresses their concerns. Sometimes it is celebrating what defines their neighborhood, what they in Parma have in common: being white. They and Trump are playing in dangerous territory, with the need for respect tipping into misplaced revenge.

Business Ethics Links 7-29-2016 Hilary Can Lose Edition

On July 29, 2016 By southwerkIn business ethics

Hilary Can Lose

She’s certainly the best possible next president, as everyone from Obama to Michael Bloomberg has been lining up to say at the DNC all week. But she’s also certainly a representative of the global capitalist status quo; she is campaigning for a pro-business, pro-markets, essentially anti-working-class system. She won’t talk about this, just as aw-shucks Biden and neither of the glorious Obamas would talk about it; like them, she’ll talk about “America”. Which, for a minority of us, is a pretty privileged place.

But where are her new ideas for making life better for people who feel exploited? What is she saying about taking back this country, not from the immigrants (a ridiculous notion in a country almost entirely composed of immigrants and their descendants) but from an economy of theft and extraction and transfer from the poor to the rich?

What if I’m afraid, not of a terrorist attack – only marginally more likely than a personal lightning strike – but of an impoverished old age or a house foreclosure, or simply of my car breaking down and not having enough money to fix it? For too many Americans, these are real fears, and Hillary represents the class responsible for causing them.

Hilary is the establishment candidate and our establishment is rotten, corrupt and incompetent and people are getting fed up. jp

Turbo-Capitalism and Decay

But most of the social mayhem now rising around us is driven by the seductions and stresses of public decay under a capitalism that’s no longer tempered by Adam Smith’s moral sentiments but that is occasionally still challenged by “liberal education,” which conservatives assail whenever it suggests that “economic violence” does exist and disrupts the village that raises the child.

Totalitarian anti-capitalism was so brutal and duplicitous two generations ago that the “Free World” embraced a taboo against criticizing capitalism at all. But today’s casino-like, predatory, intrusively degrading capitalism has degraded even that taboo by ruining social equality and republican habits of the heart — and doing it mindlessly as much as malevolently.

“Not sure why Trump would openly ask Russia to spy on Americans,” Meyers added. “But I’m sure he has his treasons.”

Sanders Delegate Can’t Forgive Clinton

Harris added: “Particularly Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigning in disgrace, and then Clinton rewarding her with a job 32 minutes later is very insulting to the Sanders campaign. It’s not unifying.”

The Sanders delegate said he took an oath to support the Democratic Party’s nominee, but he confessed that it’s very difficult to get behind Clinton and the party establishment.

“When you personalize that decision about, am I going to reward this person with my support, it’s a very difficult decision that we have to wrestle with as black men,” Harris concluded.

Bill O’Reilly decides that slaves were well fed.

The antebellum American South was not a “Gone with the Wind” fantasy of “magnolias mint juleps.” It was a military state organized around oppressing and controlling black bodies for the purposes of profit and wealth creation for white people. The slave plantation was a charnel house and place of mass rape, where white men and women could sexually abuse black boys, girls, men, and women at their whim. As historian Edward Baptist explains in his excellent book “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” the “plantation” is more accurately described as a slave labor camp.

Feminist Writer Jessica Valenti Leaves Social Media After Rape Threats Against Her Five Year Old Daughter

Clinton Can Lose II

But Democrats are nervous that even while Trump has failed to build a modern political organization, squandered most the past two months, been accused of racism by his own party, neither aired TV ads nor reserved time for the fall, has praised foreign strongmen including Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin, the race is essentially tied.

Trump has taken the lead in some surveys after the GOP convention, despite the disunity and disorganization on display in Cleveland. He has inflamed controversy almost daily, the latest this week with his public call for Russia to “find the 30,000 emails that are missing” of Clinton’s from her private server, essentially inviting a foreign nation to hack correspondence from her time as as the country’s top diplomat.

Colorado Professors Condemn Trump

“Mr. Trump has repeatedly stated that crime in the United States is rising and that we live in a society that is growing more dangerous,” the letter stated. “A preponderance of evidence at the nationwide level contradicts that claim; but more importantly, Trump then uses such specious reasoning to fuel fear of certain minority groups.

“Second, Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated statements have been used to impugn entire groups of people, including Muslims, Mexicans, women, and disabled people,” the letter continued. “We contend that his divisive language prevents the kind of civil discourse that is the life blood of a democratic society. Mr. Trump’s claim that the majority of immigrants from Mexico are criminals, including murderers and rapists, is contradicted by documented evidence. Similarly, Mr. Trump’s call for the use of torture would contravene the United Nations Convention against Torture.”

Business Ethics Links 7-25-2016 The Clinton Coronation Edition

On July 25, 2016 By southwerkIn business ethics

Clinton Coronation Begins.

Like her career, Clinton’s neoliberal ideology peaked at a moment when its foundations have all but rotted away. There is no great principle at work here that moves and inspires the crowd. To prevail, today’s very old “New Democrats” must incessantly appeal to the bourgeois pleasure of staving off panic without banishing it completely. To make her case for uniting the scepters of the neoliberal West and the U.S. presidency, Clinton must hit a psychological sweet spot: one part sheer terror at the prospect of a fascistic or socialistic takeover, and one part smug satisfaction at not only being humanity’s only hope, but having earned it.

…

For the Clinton campaign, and the ideology she incarnates, the secret motto is simple: The fix is in, and you will like it. Because it really doesn’t get better, except insofar as Clintonism rules longer. Clinton is the Pollyanna of power politics, for whom there’s nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what’s right with her and her squad. Clinton has twisted her husband’s homey maxim about America’s inner goodness into a tribute to her own — an unseemly funhouse reflection of Trump’s own preposterous claim that “I alone can fix it.”

New York Times Pushes Nuclear Energy.

Utterly lost on the Times is the irony that nuclear power was originally touted as a key part of a future where electricity was “too cheap to meter.” Now it’s just another inflexible but powerful dinosaur industry being crushed in the marketplace by a superior product — kind of like mainframe computers or the horse and buggy or … print newspapers.

Man tries to defraud Michigan by returning 10,000 bottles from Kentucky.

Richard Dreyfuss at 68.

I love the ideals of my country. But I hate that we’ve been so denied any real knowledge of the world and don’t have the education to think clearly, so we vote against our economic interest and believe in our most shallow first thoughts of fear and hatred.

African Methodist Episcopal church addresses climate change.

African American religious leaders have added their weight to calls for action on climate change, with one of the largest and oldest black churches in the US warning that black people are disproportionally harmed by global warming and fossil fuel pollution.

The African Methodist Episcopal church has passed its first resolution in its 200-year history devoted to climate change, calling for a swift transition to renewable energy.

“We can move away from the dirty fuels that make us sick and shift toward safe, clean energy like wind and solar that help make every breath our neighbors and families take a healthy one,” states the resolution, which also points to research showing that black children are four times as likely as white children to die from asthma.

Tim Kaine is the wrong choice.

Beyond the racial resentment, xenophobia and Islamaphobia that is very plainly coursing through the veins of Trump’s candidacy and his supporters’ fervor, this election is also marked by a genuine craving for radical change, new ideas and new leadership — a craving that cuts across partisan divides.

To see this movie, you have to survive the election – hang tough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIHH5-HVS9o

Scotland preps for leaving Britain

Offshore companies are used for evil – You might call it a business ethics problem.

“When he wasn’t aboard his yacht, Farid Bedjaoui held court in the Bulgari Hotel in Milan, a renovated 18th-century palace nestled between the botanical gardens and the La Scala theater. Over five years, Bedjaoui’s hotel tab there exceeded $100,000.

In the plush rooms and the granite-lined lobby, Bedjaoui met with Algerian government officials and executives from Saipem, the Italian energy giant. Their agenda, according to witnesses later interviewed by Italian prosecutors: arranging some $275 million in bribes to help the energy company win more than $10 billion in contracts to build oil and gas pipelines from the North African desert to the shores of the Mediterranean.

To shift the bribe money between countries, Bedjaoui used a cluster of offshore companies that helped him shield the transactions from scrutiny, Italian prosecutors claim. Twelve of the 17 shell companies linked to Bedjaoui were created by Mossack Fonseca, the Panama-based law firm that is at the center of the Panama Papers scandal, a review of the law firm’s internal records by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media partners has found.”

What were you wearing when you were assaulted?

And I wasn’t there to help!!!

Hilary Hate!!!!

Gardner, who raised two children as a single mother, says she felt vaguely positive about Bill Clinton when he was elected in 1992. In 2008, she supported John McCain, and in this election she’s become a passionate Sanders backer. She sees Hillary Clinton as integral to the economic system that has left her struggling. “I’ve been working since I was 12. It seems like when I was working as a kid, my money went further than it does now as an adult, just trying to feed the kids. I could work 40 hours a week and go live in the Y because that’s all you can afford,” she says.

The Clintons, says Gardner, “removed a lot of sanctions against companies and changed a lot of laws so companies could pay their workers less, fight unions, fight health care.” Employment used to come with security and benefits, she says. “That was just common knowledge, all those things you got when you worked your butt off for a company.” Clinton, she believes, had a hand in taking all that away. “Bill and Hillary’s friends were all rich, they were the ones who owned all these companies, why not use your power to let everyone in your circle get as rich as humanly possible?”

What’s it like for a woman working at Fox?

According to a new New York Times investigation, the other leaders of Fox News may have been emboldened by Ailes’ alleged sexism. More than 10 women told the Times they’d endured sexual harassment as employees of Fox News or Fox Business Network, and several others said they saw fellow employees become victims of harassment. Just two of these cases involved Ailes; the rest of the acts were perpetrated by other supervisors at the networks. They are uniformly horrifying.

What’s in the DNC’s leaked e-mails?

Business Ethics Links 7-24-2016 The Revenge Porn Edition

On July 24, 2016 By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Revenge Porn is Wrong.

Now, after over two years of delicate negotiations, Congress is finally introducing such a law — the federal revenge porn bill — which, if passed, could help revenge porn victims like Vora prosecute their aggressors.

The Intimate Privacy Protection Act (IPPA) was introduced by Rep. Speieralongside co-sponsors Ryan Costello (R-Pa.), Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), Thomas Rooney (R-Fla.), and Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.).

Revenge porn is the layman’s term for nonconsensual pornography, a crime that typically involves sharing or publishing nude or sexualized images of someone without their consent. Emerging alongside increased access to smartphones and social media, revenge porn often looks like what happened to Vora, but it can take various forms. In one of the highest-profile revenge porn cases, rapper 50 Cent published a privately acquired sex tape starring the ex-girlfriend of one of his rivals in order to shame him. The woman, Lastonia Leviston, sued and was awarded a $7 million settlement.

Do you want to join the fight to end revenge porn? – go here!

Password Rage!!! By Stephanie Faris – The best thing written on the Internet in days – READ and ENJOY!

(A passage from the opening:)

Like so many of us, I have my browser set to remember all of my login credentials, so when I get the occasional request to re-enter information, I draw a blank. Far too many times, I enter the information I think is correct, only to get that annoying red text: “Your username and password is incorrect. Please try again.”

Rage.

Passwords used to make sense. They were first used in the 1960s to protect critical computer systems from unauthorized access. A limited number of people used these systems, and each person likely only had one password to remember.

Taxpayer Funded Stadiums are a RIP-OFF.

The failings of this crony capitalist dynamic have been noticed within the NFL as well. Asked last month what he would do were he the league’s president, Seattle Seahawks defensive star Richard Sherman was quick to point the finger at subsidies. “I’d stop spending billions of taxpayer dollars on stadiums and probably get us out of debt and maybe make the billionaires who actually benefit from the stadiums pay for them,” he said. “That kind of seems like a system that would work for me.”

When billionaires con the public into paying for their expenses, the public loses. In many cases, long after the stadium is demolished taxpayers are still paying on the bonds that paid for the construction. This isn’t rocket science. Giving multi-billionaires huge sums of tax money is a form of theft. That it happens so regularly is a savage indictment of the insularity, stupidity and lack of a public service mission in our morally bankrupt ruling class. jp

Michael Moore Predicts Trump Victory – he might be right.

Sexual harassment at the Fox network?

More sexual harassment at the Fox network?

Is Trump a racist?

Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.

No matter what you’ve been told, it is not illegal to be black!

My Black Opinion!

The New Working Class

The decades-long destruction of American manufacturing profoundly changed the working class — neighborhoods, jobs and families. What had once been nearly universal, guaranteed well-paying jobs for young men fresh from high school graduation were yanked overseas with little regard for the devastation left behind.

To add insult to injury, the loss of manufacturing jobs was often heralded as a sign of progress. As the economic contribution of these former working-class heroes to our nation dwindled and the technology revolution sizzled, in many people’s minds, millions of men became zeroes. They seemed to be a dusty anachronism in a sparkling new economy.

That these people, their lives and their jobs meant and mean so little to our ruling class is a giant exclamation point on the need for system wide change. When millions of peoples’ lives become irrelevant, it is time to boot out the current band of besotted fools who told us that all these trade deals and all the job destruction were good things. jp

Will Women Stop Trump? This maybe the election where women voters have their biggest effect ever.

But nothing seemed to stop Trump. And now, joined by Gov. Mark Pence, the most extreme anti-woman vice presidential candidate in a generation, a man who spouts nothing but reckless, vicious and hateful rhetoric is just one step away from the nation’s highest office.

But there is one group that can and will stop him: women. Women, who have been so frequently criticized, derided, humiliated and underestimated by Trump, will be the ones to bring him down.

It’s a numbers game, plain and simple. Women, who make up a majority of the general population and 53 percent of voters, unsurprisingly have an overwhelmingly negative opinion of the man fond of calling them “bimbos,” “dogs” and “fat pigs.”

In fact, more than 70 percent of registered women voters view Donald Trump negatively. And it’s not just Democratic women who dislike him; polls show that nearly half of Republican women primary voters — 47 percent — said that they “could not imagine” themselves supporting Trump, despite the fact that he’s their party’s nominee.

Jon Steward, American Hero.

Business Ethics Links 7-23-2016 The Establishment Verdict on Trump Edition

On July 23, 2016 By southwerkIn business ethics

Washington Post Gives Establishment Verdict on Trump

Mr. Trump campaigns by insult and denigration, insinuation and wild accusation: Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; Hillary Clinton may be guilty of murder; Mr. Obama is a traitor who wants Muslims to attack. The Republican Party has moved the lunatic fringe onto center stage, with discourse that renders impossible the kind of substantive debate upon which any civil democracy depends.

Florida Investigates First Mosquito Transmitted Case of Zika

A small failure of business ethics.

The men are accused of making $3m profit by fraudulently trading currencies in advance of a client buying $3.4bn of pounds sterling in 2011, according to the complaint. They are accused of buying sterling in advance of the client’s transaction in a manner “designed to spike the price” to the benefit of HSBC “and at the expense of their client”. They also billed their client for $5m in fees for their work.

Money for Malaysian Economic Development Does Some Serious Traveling (and it’s not coming home, not ever)

The 1MDB affair has stretched from Malaysia to Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Switzerland, the Caribbean, Hong Kong and the US. The suspected fraud occurred in three phases in which money was laundered through bank accounts in Singapore, Switzerland, Luxembourg and the US, the government said in the court filing.

In 2009, after 1MDB was set up to pursue development projects, officials of 1MDB and others, under the pretense of investing in a joint venture between 1MDB and a Saudi oil company, transferred more than $1bn to a Swiss bank account.
In 2012, 1MDB officials and others diverted proceeds raised through two separate bond offerings arranged by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, according to the justice department.

More than 40% of the proceeds, or $1.4bn, were transferred to a Swiss bank account belonging to a British Virgin Islands entity. More than $1bn was diverted from another bond offering arranged by Goldman Sachs in 2013.

Isn’t it strange that Goldman Sachs shows up so often in these things? jp

Do women make better politicians than men?

It’s a shame more women don’t run for office, because they truly could improve America. Despite Christie’s accusation that Clinton is a “self-proclaimed champion of women” who helped Boko Haram abduct “hundreds of innocent young girls”, studies show female politicians are good for the world. For example, they tend to focus on providing childcare, healthcare and education, policies that help lift the disproportionate number of low-income women out of poverty. Women are also more collaborative colleagues. Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said they “inject less libido and less testosterone into the equation”, which can often lead to better results. Women in office obtain almost 10% more federal funding than male politicians and introduce about double the number of bills.

Ban the Box Fails??

White power is so pervasive in the US, even attempts to correct it are ruined. Take the recent push to “ban the box”, in which some local governments have made it so that employers can’t ask upfront if an applicant has been convicted of a crime. The idea was to address how the over incarceration of black people discriminates against us in the job market. But a recent study has found that when the box was banned, “the racial gap in callbacks by employers actually increased”, according to economist Amanda Agan.

Why? As NPR’s Shankar Vendantam explained: “When companies were not allowed to check on the criminal histories of applicants, what they did was they fell back on their stereotypes and said, black men are more likely to be associated with crime. So let me just reject black applicants more often or call back white applicants more often.”

Milo, the banned.

Milo shows no remorse for the avalanche of misconduct he helped direct towards Leslie Jones, who is just the latest victim of the recreational ritual abuse he likes to launch at women and minorities for the fame and fun of it. According to the law of the wild web, the spoils go to those with fewest fucks to give. I have come to believe, in the course of our bizarro unfriendship, that Milo believes in almost nothing concrete—not even in free speech. The same is reportedly true of Trump, of people like Ann Coulter, of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage: They are pure antagonists unencumbered by any conviction apart from their personal entitlement to raw power and stacks of cash.

Business Ethics Links 7-22-2016 The Verbal Judo Edition

On July 22, 2016July 22, 2016 By southwerkIn business ethics

The Verbal Judo Edition

Verbal Judo – something we should all learn?

“There’s so many times when people are screaming and yelling and you just go to them: ‘Hey, buddy, how you doing? My names’s Sergeant Francis, I’m with NYPD, I noticed that you’re really upset, now what’s going on with you, is there any way I can help?’” he said. “What’s the expression on your face, what’s the tone of your voice? A lot of it has to do with keeping yourself calm. We have to have some sort of a professional language to use, and that’s what verbal judo really supplies.”

The Russians Cheat! – Only in an officially sanctioned and thoroughly organized manner.

I do not pity the 68 Russian athletes who put the appeal in. I pity the athletes who were cheated out of the success they deserved, the athletes who lost their moment on the podium as well as the financial rewards, and have suffered from the continual self-doubt that they just weren’t good enough.

Yeah, this is sports where we send our children to build character and with a little luck permanently harm their bodies through injury or in some cases officially sanctioned drugs. I’m still waiting for the evidence of character building I’ve been hearing about for my entire life. (I have no problem with the no money sports where both adults and children compete for the love of simple athletics and the joy of movement.)

!!@@#dddddd4444035m — The Verbal Judo Edition

The madman in his castle?

Twice in its history the United States has been forced to re-create itself, both times in the face of existential crises. The abolition of slavery was the first such re-creation, born out of the crisis of the civil war. The New Deal was the second, the formation of the modern welfare state in response to the crisis of the Great Depression; had Roosevelt acted any less radically, the profound unrest that in certain places had already flared into outright insurrection – an episode of US history that’s largely forgotten, or ignored – might well have morphed into re-creation by other means. Now we find ourselves in dire need of a third re-creation, a revolution in the psyche as well as the structure of the country that takes account of realities that are already upon us. A broadening beyond the psychic island, the insane castle, the encircling wall of the Wasp that Norman Mailer wrote about nearly a half-century ago. It has to happen; the country’s changing demographics, and the sheer weight of human experience they represent, demand it. The only way it won’t happen is by the outright subversion of democracy, which by definition would constitute a very different sort of re-creation.

Olympics desecrates graves.

Adilson Batista Almeida, the leader of Camorim Quilombo, accuses developers of riding roughshod over the history of slavery in the area by destroying archaeological remains at the site of an old sugar mill, and depriving the community of a public space for cultural activities that celebrate its Afro-Brazilian heritage.

“One Sunday morning a chainsaw came and devastated everything including century-old trees,” Almeida said. “I regard the ground as sacred because it is where my ancestors were buried.”

The media village is a condominium – Grand Club Verdant – that will be sold to private buyers after the Games. The land was acquired in 2013 by the real estate developer Cyrela which felled hundreds of trees, destroyed a community football pitch and demolished the remains of the old slave owner’s house and the slavery-era sugar mill in order to clear the area for construction.

New York ends tampon tax.

On Thursday, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed legislation banning the “tampon tax” – a tax on menstruation products. The measure was approved by the state senate and assembly earlier this year.

“Women statewide will no longer be burdened by a lingering tax that was levied at a time when women were not part of government and the decision-making process,” said Linda B Rosenthal, the bill’s sponsor in the state assembly.

The legislation will exempt tampons, sanitary napkins and panty liners from state and local taxes. It will go into effect in the next sales tax quarter, reported the Associated Press.

When these kinds of products are designated what they are – necessities, and no longer designated as luxuries, we will have taken a step in recognizing the facts of women’s lives rather than the systematic foolishness of old men. jp

“Beware of Darkness” the new Trump anthem?

Famous Network Leader Leaves Job and all Personal Accountability Behind.

“While we are glad to see Roger Ailes step down from his position at Fox News, sending him off with zero accountability and a big check is a slap in the face to the … women he harassed during his tenure as CEO and does nothing to fundamentally change the culture of Fox News that he created,” Nita Chaudhary, co-founder of UltraViolet, a national women’s advocacy organization, said in a statement.

North Carolina suffers setback.

The Atlantic and Washington Post sell out for climate deniers.

Evidence of human-made climate change is so conclusive that it’s wrong for journalists to treat its denial like a reasonable point of view. But it is a new low for major media groups to sell their brand to lobbyists and let climate truthers go unchallenged.

And The Atlantic was hardly alone. At the Republican National Convention, the American Petroleum Institute also paid the Washington Post and Politico to host panel conversations where API literature was distributed, API representatives gave opening remarks, and not one speaker was an environmentalist, climate expert, scientists, or Democrat.

Business Ethics Blog Posts 7-21-2016 The Concrete Sarcophagus Edition

On July 21, 2016 By southwerkIn business ethics

Fukushima to be entombed in a concrete sarcophagus?

The idea of leaving the plant as is and creating a sarcophagus around the three melted down reactors is extremely problematic. The groundwater issue is just one problem that would be a permanent problem. Even the ice wall if it eventually works as planned can only operate for a few years. Erosion and groundwater flows would create a permanent problem for the ocean and the region around the plant. This would also leave the fuel and crumbling buildings in place. Building failures, radioactive dust and fuel debris would all still be in place. This would need to be managed not just due to aging but further natural disasters such as typhoons and tsunami. Current problems include fuel fragments that have been found in unit 1′s torus room basement water. These have been a concern as groundwater flows through these basements that if improperly managed, more of these fuel fragments could leave the basement into the groundwater.

Koizumi asks for help for U.S. veterans who came to Japan’s aid during meltdown.

Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is calling for donations to the relief fund he founded for U.S. veterans who claim their health problems resulted from radioactive fallout after the 2011 nuclear disaster.

Speaking at a news conference on July 5 alongside another former prime minister, Morihiro Hosokawa, Koizumi said of the U.S. veterans: “They went so far to do their utmost to help Japan. It is not the kind of issue we can dismiss with just sympathy.”

Can Economists Reason?

Neoclassical economics has since long given up on the real world and contents itself with proving things about thought up worlds. Empirical evidence only plays a minor role in economic theory, where models largely function as a substitute for empirical evidence. The one-sided, almost religious, insistence on axiomatic-deductivist modeling as the only scientific activity worthy of pursuing in economics, is a scientific cul-de-sac. To have valid evidence is not enough. What economics needs is sound evidence.

Paul Kiser’s Blog Today!

Liberals are blamed for almost everything, but we are not responsible for the fiasco at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in Cleveland this week. We did not make a secret deal with Donald Trump to destroy everything Republican. We didn’t pay Rudy Giuliani to do an impression of Hitler speaking to a Nazi rally. We didn’t make Melania Trump look like a Stepford wife and upload her with a speech that was plagiarized from Michelle Obama’s convention speech from eight years ago.

Drug Prices are too high and unfair.

(This is a particularly good article. You should make a special effort to go to teh original site and read it in full. jp)

First, about 38% of the basic research science is actually funded by taxpayer money—so the public is paying twice: once in taxes and once again for the drugs resulting from the research. This, of course, leaves a significant legitimate area of expenses for companies, but hardly enough to warrant absurdly high prices.

Second, most large drug companies spend almost twice as much on promotion and marketing as they do on R&D. While these are legitimate business expenses, this fact does undercut using R&D expenses to justify excessive drug prices. Obviously, telling the public that pills are pricy because of the cost of marketing pills so people will buy them would not be an effective strategy. There is also the issue of the ethics of advertising drugs, which is another matter entirely.

Third, many “new” drugs are actually slightly tweaked old drugs. Common examples including combining two older drugs to create a “new” drug, changing the delivery method (from an injectable to a pill, for example) or altering the release time. In many cases, the government will grant a new patent for these minor tweaks and this will grant the company up to a 20-year monopoly on the product, preventing competition. This practice, though obviously legal, is certainly sketchy. To use an analogy, imagine a company held the patent on a wheel and an axle. Then, when those patents expired, they patented wheel + axle as a “new” invention. That would obviously be absurd.

Online Charter Schools Seek to Evade Regulation

Ohio’s Steve Dyer reports in his personal blog that defenders of Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, the notorious ECOT online charter school, have even been lobbying delegates to the Republican National Convention here in Cleveland against Ohio’s crack-down on e-schools which seem to have been collecting millions of dollars every year from the state for phantom students. Dyer writes: “And now, the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education—the state’s ironically named and most egregious defender of poor-performing charter schools… slipped a letter under the doors of delegates to the Republican National Convention….” The letter “blames sneaky Democratic bureaucrats at ODE (Ohio Department of Education) for ECOT’s problems….” In fact, as Dyer explains, passage of a bill modestly to increase regulation of Ohio’s charter sector was passed with bipartisan support. But now, as Ohio’s largest and most profitable charter stands to lose millions of dollars because it has been inflating the per-pupil attendance on which state funding is based, powerful backers are appealing to anyone they can to try to keep their school operating and keep the tax dollars flowing into their profits.

New York Times fails to properly weigh Mike Pence’s education record

Revenge Against the Elites

On the morning after British voters chose to leave the European Union, Obama was in California addressing an audience at Stanford University, a school often celebrated these days as the pre-eminent educational institution of Silicon Valley. The occasion of the president’s remarks was the annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit, and the substance of his speech was the purest globaloney, flavored with a whiff of vintage dotcom ebullience. Obama marveled at the smart young creative people who start tech businesses. He deplored bigotry as an impediment that sometimes keeps these smart creative people from succeeding. He demanded that more power be given to the smart young creatives who are transforming the world. Keywords included “innovation”, “interconnection”, and of course “Zuckerberg”, the Facebook CEO, who has appeared with Obama on so many occasions and whose company is often used as shorthand by Democrats to signify everything that is wonderful about our era.

The socialist faculty have corrupted our youth

So, I guess we should gird ourselves. If the Republicans lose in November, watch out for some pretty mean-spirited scapegoating directed at the professoriate. For clearly in the eyes of those like Luntz the younger generation has been “lost’ to “socialism” all because of us and that cries out for a “solution.” Never mind, of course, that most academics, even on the left, neither call themselves or actually are socialists of any stripe. Never mind that the number of classes in which openly “socialist” readings predominate is minimal and at many institutions totally non-existent. I challenge anyone to identify a single “socialist” Economics department. Never mind also that the most sacred principles of our profession enjoin us from indoctrination. And, most of all, never mind that a generation brought up during the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression, at a time when income and wealth inequality, not to mention simple abject poverty and homelessness, have grown to hitherto unseen levels might well be likely to question the morality and workability of unrestrained capitalism. Surely instead it’s the professors’ who are to blame for such allegedly extreme views among the youth, not their life experiences.

Overheating.

‘What do the fateful Brexit referendum, the epidemic spread of Nintendo’s ‘Pokémon Go’ game, the escalating death of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and the fivefold growth in tourism since 1980 have in common? The short answer is that they all express symptoms or outcomes of global accelerated change, or ‘overheating’, as I call it in my new book.

Business Ethics Links 7-20-2016 The Orange Leader Edition

On July 20, 2016 By southwerkIn Business Ethics

RNC votes Trump as nominee.

This is a radical time in American politics: a time the pundits and elected politicians thought would never come. After two decades of populist anger, the elderly rebels of Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork army finally stormed the barricades of the establishment and hoisted an orange leader atop the smoking rubble.

Don’t hand out union flyers in the South?

Check your freezer! Massive frozen food recall affects all of U.S.

Light weights just as good as heavy weights??

“Fatigue is the great equalizer here,” study researcher Stuart Phillips, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, said in a statement. “Lift to the point of exhaustion, and it doesn’t matter whether the weights are heavy or light.”

European truck companies conspire to fix prices.

“It is not acceptable that MAN, Volvo/Renault, Daimler, Iveco and DAF, which together account for around 9 out of every 10 medium and heavy trucks produced in Europe, were part of a cartel instead of competing with each other,” European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

The hottest tourist destination?

World Wrestling Entertainment Inc. sued.

The complaint was filed on behalf of more than 50 plaintiffs who have performed with WWE or its predecessors since the 1970s, including Joseph “Road Warrior Animal” Laurinaitis and Paul “Mr. Wonderful” Orndorff.

It accused Stamford, Connecticut-based WWE and Chairman Vince McMahon of intentionally classifying wrestlers as “independent contractors” rather than employees, as a means to avoid liability under applicable worker protection laws.

“WWE placed corporate gain over its wrestlers’ health, safety, and financial security, choosing to leave the plaintiffs severely injured and with no recourse to treat their damaged minds and bodies,” the complaint said.

It is sad that a corporate behemoth like WWE can make suck enormous profits and simply evade any responsibility for the broken bodies it leaves behind. jp

U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Fights for Equal Pay!

These women make the advertising money by winning and winning a lot. They make American soccer a success and get paid less than their male counterparts who are not as competitive. What’s going on here?

Is there a justification here of any significance beyond simple mulish male stubborn pride?

I don’t think so.

Simple business ethics says equal pay for equal work but in this case the women are doing better work and still not getting the same. jp

Raging Hormones responsible for sexual assault!!!

That’s right! Sexual assault is not an affirmative act committed with intent, it’s a result of raging hormones. Who would’ve thought? In my apparently irrelevant law school, they taught us that rape was an intentional act and punishable by imprisonment and fines. But lo and behold, the new Big Twelve Commisioner has this to say –

“But let it suffice to say as it pertains to all of our institutions, we are very committed as a group of 10 schools to eradicating sexual assault on our campuses. It almost goes without saying that when you combine alcohol and drugs and raging hormones and the experiences of 18 to 22 years old, it’s probably unrealistic to think that these kinds of things are never going to happen.”

It’s just nature. So, you see – we just have to accept that sexual predators are among us. It’s just natural.

And that means that rigorous enforcement of the laws, the jailing and punishment of the perpetrators whenever found – we are not going to talk about that. After all, nature!

White people are really, really special!

Women for Trump event poorly attended. Who would have thought?

Milo Yiannopoulos permanently banned from Twitter

Milo Yiannopoulos, the technology editor for Breitbart.com, tweeted as @Nero. Before he was banned, he had more than 338,000 followers and called himself “the most fabulous supervillain on the internet” for his provocations online.

A known contrarian who likened rape culture to Harry Potter (“both fantasy”) and affectionately referred to Donald Trump as “daddy”, he emerged as a spokesman for the “alt-right” in the wake of the Gamergate movement.

Some conservative groups urge Republicans to accept climate change as fact.

Climate change, and other environmental concerns, are unlikely to receive much, if any, attention during the Republican convention in Cleveland this week. This is despite a slew of temperature records being broken – June was the 14th consecutive month of record heat around the world – and extreme examples ofArctic ice decline and drought and wildfires in the US west.

But the Republican gathering has been targeted by conservative voices calling for climate science to be accepted and for national parks to be preserved, rather than opened up for drilling and other development.

First woman to run for president arrested.

Hillary Clinton will make history next week in Philadelphia when she formally becomes the first woman to be the presidential nominee of a major party. But she is not the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate: that distinction is held by Victoria Claflin Woodhull. In 1872, she became a third-party candidate, running against the incumbent Republican president, General Ulysses S Grant, and his Democratic challenger, New York publisher Horace Greeley. She would not have been able to vote for herself – that right would not be granted to American woman for another 50 years – but that did not deter this pioneering feminist from making a historic bid for change.

Her life story would not be out of place in a 19th-century novel. It is peopled by a colourful array of charlatans, churchmen, philanthropists and philanderers. It is also a classic American tale: a triumph over adversity – poverty, abusive parents, and a bad marriage – and a rise to prominence in the most vital social movements of the day.