Book claims Fox News chief Rogers Ailes offered employee $100 a week for sex

RAW STORY

A new biography of Fox News chairman Roger Ailes alleges that he often insulted his own on-air talent and offered at least one employee money for sex during a contract negotiation.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that a section of Gabriel Sherman’s book on Ailes will deal with his offer to producer Randi Harrison that he would pay her an extra $100 a week “if you agree to have sex with me whenever I want.”
At the time, Ailes was an executive at NBC. Ailes later served as president of the network’s cable spinoff CNBC before leaving in 1996 to begin the process of launching Fox News.
Sherman’s book also describes a 1995 incident in which Ailes allegedly insulted to another NBC executive, David Zaslav, by using a phrase that included the words “little Jew” and profanity, a claim backed by an independent probe ordered by the network; Ailes’ supervisor at the time, then-NBC CEO Bob Wright, is quoted in the book as saying, “My conclusion was that [Ailes] probably said it.”
However, Zaslav — now the head of Discovery Communications — denied the story to the Times.
“We fought with each other and we fought with a lot of other people,” Zaslav said on Tuesday. “But this allegation is false.”
Fox News issued a similar statement on Tuesday, telling the Times, “These charges are false. While we have not read the book, the only reality here is that Gabe was not provided any direct access to Roger Ailes and the book was never fact-checked with Fox News.”
But Random House, which will publish Sherman’s work on Jan. 21, defended it in a separate statement.
“We fully stand by the book,” spokeswoman Theresa Zoro was quoted as saying. “If anyone has issues with it, we will respond with the facts as Gabe Sherman has reported them.”
For his part, Sherman told the Times via email that he wrote the 560-page book — including 100 pages devoted to a bibliography and source notes — “to shed light on the full scope of [Ailes'] talents and power.” Sherman reportedly interviewed 614 people during his reporting.
The book will also reportedly cover Ailes’ habit of insulting hosts like Bill O’Reilly (“a book salesman with a TV show”) and Brian Kilmeade (“a soccer coach from Long Island”) in private, and his 2012 declaration to network executives that “I want to elect the next president.”

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As Obamacare Sign-Ups Surge, So Does Conservative Rage

TPM

It is amazing to witness the sheer depths of rage, denial and disgust many people experience as they see millions of people gaining access to affordable health care for the first time. Back on the 31st I wrote this overview which outlined how more than 9 million people now have health care coverage because of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). It now seems like the number is more like 10 million (more on that in a moment).
This evening I mentioned this number on Twitter and saw the full force of denial and outrage as many anti-Obamacare diehards made first contact with the actual number of Americans who've gained coverage under the program. More though, it was clear how in the absence of a dead in the water website to cry crocodile tears over, anti-Obamacare hardliners have suddenly gotten a whole lot angrier about Obamacare.
Join me after the jump and we'll review the numbers.

After an expected surge of sign-ups in late December, just over 2.1 million people have purchased ACA-compliant health care policies through the federal and state health care exchanges. A bit more than half came through the now-mainly-functional healthcare.gov website (which covers 36 states) and the rest came from the 14 states which established their own exchanges. That relative disparity is due both to the early problems with the federal website and active efforts to sabotage enrollment in private insurance in Republican run states.
Next there are currently rough 4.3 million people who have been enrolled in Medicaid through Medicaid expansion. A 3.9 million number is still being used in many reports. But that's a number as of 11/30. Charles Gaba is compiling together publicly available reports from different states and currently has the number at 4.3 million - not a surprising number given how much sign-up activity there was in December. The state by state breaks in this spreadsheet are very illuminating.
Notably, we also know the number of Americans who have been prevented from getting coverage because Republican governors and/or state legislatures who refused to participate in Medicaid expansion. That's 5 million people.
So if the Supreme Court had decided differently or if most but not all (Kasich, Snyder, Brewer, et al.) Republican governors had not refused to participate we might be talking about a number in the neighborhood of 15 million newly covered people.
Next there's a number that's been in effect for a couple years now and no one seems to want to discuss: roughly 3.1 million young adults under the age of 26 who now remain covered under their parents policies under a key provision of the ACA. This went into effect in September 2010. And the number of covered young adults in that age bracket grew steadily over the next two years. Here's a good overview from Money magazine from June 2012.
So let's do some simple math. 2.1M + 4.3M + 3.1M = 9.5 million covered.
So how does it get to 10 million? What none of these tabulations take into account are people who bought ACA-compliant policies directly from insurance carriers as opposed to purchasing them from private carriers via the exchanges. A lot of people did this and there was actually an aggressive push to get people to do so while the federal exchange site remained basically dead in the water. There is no tally of this number yet and will require a survey of carriers throughout the country. But I suspect it is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. And thus the round number of 10 million.
Now, as I said up at the top, there are a lot of Obamacare dead-enders out there who just blow a gasket when they make first contact with these numbers. The first claim is that Medicaid expansion somehow doesn't count. Or it doesn't count if a 24 year old is now covered under their parents policy because well that happened a while ago or well, something.
The best dead-ender argument is that well, maybe these people who've signed up for subsidized private insurance policies won't end up paying their premiums. When the arguments get down to this level you know you're dealing with a deep and intense form of denial. I mean, what if all these people change their mind next month and decide they don't want the coverage after all? What if Obamacare is so bad they all die in the Spring? What if Spartacus had an airplane? If you really, really are hoping for bad news you can come up with anything to keep hope, as it were, alive.
And then finally, these numbers are just more administration lies. Because, well, because. Here's where Gaba's spreadsheet is so helpful. It has the breakdown for private insurance and Medicaid expansion in numbers in every state with a link to an independent news source reporting the numbers.
These are the numbers. Lots of people have partisan or ideological or in many cases deeply emotional needs not to believe them. But these are the numbers.

Federal judge asks: Why haven’t any top executives been prosecuted for financial crisis?

RAW STORY

As the five-year statute of limitations nears for crimes that led to the Great Recession, a federal judge wants to know why no high-level executives have been prosecuted.
U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff said he could not be sure whether intentional fraud was committed in any particular case, but he pointed out that government agencies had found significant evidence to suggest wrongdoing in their own investigations.
“The stated opinion of those government entities asked to examine the financial crisis overall is not that no fraud was committed. Quite the contrary,” Rakoff writes in the New York Review of Books. “For example, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in its final report, uses variants of the word ‘fraud’ no fewer than 157 times in describing what led to the crisis, concluding that there was a ‘systemic breakdown,’ not just in accountability, but also in ethical behavior.”
He dismissed claims by Department of Justice officials that proving intent would be too difficult, pointing out that federal prosecutors routinely did so by establishing that defendants acted in willful or conscious disregard of the law.
“A top-level banker, one might argue, confronted with growing evidence from his own and other banks that mortgage fraud was increasing, might have inquired why his bank’s mortgage-based securities continued to receive AAA ratings,” Rakoff writes. “And if, despite these and other reports of suspicious activity, the executive failed to make such inquiries, might it be because he did not want to know what such inquiries would reveal?”
Rakoff expressed outrage that Justice Department officials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, had shown a reluctance to prosecute top-ranking financial executives out of concern for the economy.
“To a federal judge, who takes an oath to apply the law equally to rich and to poor, this excuse — sometimes labeled the ‘too big to jail’ excuse — is disturbing, frankly, in what it says about the department’s apparent disregard for equality under the law,” he writes.
Rakoff concedes that there aren’t enough prosecutors to pursue lengthy and complicated investigations into alleged fraud by high-level financial executives, but he also pointed out the government encouraged risky investment through deregulation and other policies.
“The government was deeply involved, from beginning to end, in helping create the conditions that could lead to such fraud, and that this would give a prudent prosecutor pause in deciding whether to indict a CEO who might, with some justice, claim that he was only doing what he fairly believed the government wanted him to do,” he writes.
The judge expressed irritation at the shift in recent decades from prosecuting individuals, who often go to trial, to corporations, which usually settle out of court.
“Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do,” Rakoff writes. “And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent. Moreover, under the law of most U.S. jurisdictions, a company cannot be criminally liable unless at least one managerial agent has committed the crime in question; so why not prosecute the agent who actually committed the crime?”
He said investigations of top-level executives work the same as a mobster or gang kingpin – from the bottom up – but investigations of corporations are usually conducted by former U.S. attorneys hired by the targeted companies themselves, and the results are then handed over to prosecutors to help broker a settlement.
“I suggest that this is not the best way to proceed,” Rakoff writes. “Although it is supposedly justified because it prevents future crimes, I suggest that the future deterrent value of successfully prosecuting individuals far outweighs the prophylactic benefits of imposing internal compliance measures that are often little more than window-dressing.”
Besides, he said, prosecuting corporations is both technically and morally suspect.
“Under the law, you should not indict or threaten to indict a company unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that some managerial agent of the company committed the alleged crime; and if you can prove that, why not indict the manager?” Rakoff asks.

China Says 8 Million Acres Of Farmland Now Too Polluted For Food

THINK PROGRESS

An official from the Chinese government announced Monday that approximately 3.33 million hectares, or 8 million acres, of China’s farmland is now too polluted to grow crops, according to a Reuters report from Beijing.
China’s Vice Minister of Land and Resources Wang Shiyuan reportedly told a news conference that current farming on the now-too-contaminated land — roughly the size of Belgium — will be halted and rehabilitated in order to ensure food safety. It was unclear late Monday whether food that had already been grown on that land would be sought out or recalled.
“These areas cannot continue farming,” Wang said, noting that the Ministry of Environmental Protection had deemed all of the 8 million acres as having “moderate to severe pollution.”
The Chinese government has said that the country needs at least 120 million hectares of arable land to ensure it is able to meet the vastly populated country’s food needs. Though China started 2013 with a strong 135 million hectares of arable land, contamination — paired with recent efforts to convert farmland to forests, grasslands and wetlands — has caused the amount of stable cultivated land to drop to 120 million hectares, Wang said. Wang also said the country is committed to spending “tens of billions of yuan” a year for projects aimed at rehabilitating polluted land.
High levels of contamination caused by pollution are nothing new for the people of China, who have been caught in somewhat of a pollution storm in the last year. A major source of the country’s pollution is its 2,300 (and growing) dirty coal plants, which helped Beijing in January experience its worst air pollution on record — levels of particulate matter topped out at 723 micrograms per cubic meter. The World Health Organization (WHO) considers 25 or less micrograms per cubic meter ideal for human health. Above 300 is considered hazardous.
In October, air pollution nearly shut down the entire city of Harbin, and in December, extreme air pollution forced children and the elderly in Shanghai behind closed doors and windows for at least seven days. Later that month, a clinic dedicated to treating victims of China’s notorious smog opened its doors in Sichuan Provence, southwest China.