Tuesday, December 03, 2013

The Sweat Shop Amy Goodman Runs

Monday morning, Amy Goodman was doing what she's so good at, trafficking in rank hypocrisy.

The morning found the 'journalist,' declaring, "At least 111 people were arrested on Black Friday in a series of protests and acts of civil disobedience targeting Wal-Mart and other big-box retailers. In St. Paul, Minnesota, 26 protesters were arrested when they blocked traffic while demanding better wages for janitors and retail employees."

By nightfall her own efforts at sweat shop labor were exposed.

For the 'wonder' of serving her, Democracy Now! interns could starve.

That is what demanding people give you 20 free hours a week of work does.

After you donated those 20 hours?

If you then, in that same week, worked five or more hours on one day?  You get paid $3 an hour.

But to get that $3 an hour?  You don't just need to have donated 20 free hours already that week and then, on one day, worked five or more hours, you also need to have been donating free hours for two months.

That's not even half minimum wage.  (Federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.  In April, the state of New York raised minimum wage to $9 an hour.)

But you learn such important skills!

Like taking coats and serving at parties -- where you're not even allowed to consume the food but will get some crappy cold pizza after?

Does it get worse than that?

Yeah, it really does.

Earlier, Ava filling in for Trina wrote "The Whore Named Amy Goodman"  about the details in Charles Davis' "The Exploited Laborers of the Liberal Media" (Vice).

In June, Piper Hoffman (Truth-Out) wrote about Wal-Mart:

 You are paying Wal-Mart employees’ wages. Yep, you.
The notoriously stingy company cuts every corner to keep prices low, and one of those corners is the payroll. It pays employees peanuts (and then cheats them of their overtime peanuts, but that is another story). By “peanuts” I mean an average of $8.81 per hour.

 Many of these workers need welfare to survive. Thus you, the taxpayer, are paying part of Wal-Mart employees’ incomes, to the tune of between $900,000 and $1.75 million per store, and about $5,815 per employee. The welfare programs Wal-Mart workers rely on include Medicaid, subsidized housing and SNAP (aka food stamps — contrary to popular belief, over 40 percent of SNAP recipients live in a household with a wage-earner).


And June 21, 2011, journalist Liza Featherstone appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss Wal-Mart.  In the discussion, she also noted food stamps.


 LIZA FEATHERSTONE: Mm-hmm. Yeah, many workers are on food stamps or other forms of public assistance. In fact, Wal-Mart managers know that and often refer their workers to public assistance or give them the forms to fill out. That’s been well documented in many states. I think in many states Wal-Mart has been, of any private employer, the one with the largest percentage of employees on welfare. 

 As Davis reports, in orientation on the first day, Democracy Now! tells the interns that they should apply for food stamps.

So Goodman's been part of the move decrying the lousy wages Wal-Mart pays (and it does pay lousy wages) and noting how the American people have to support Wal-Mart workers via food stamps and other programs, but Goodman's exploiting workers herself and she's telling them to go on food stamps.


For those who don't know, Goodman used smears to take over Democracy Now!

She likes to pretend it sprang from her uterus full grown.

That's not reality.  She was part of a team that developed the program and, bit by bit, on airs and producers were run off by her.


Using Pacifica's own internal wars to her benefit and using the corruption rank at WBAI, Goodman was able to take over the program and to even steal it from Pacifica Radio.

This woman now owns it.  She has multi-million dollar deal with Pacifica and Pacifica no longer even owns the show.

While she's gotten rich off the program -- and helped drive WBAI near bankruptcy -- she's refused to pay staff.

The positions -- even now -- that she has posted for 'interns' aren't intern positions.

One's a full-time archivist and another's public relations.

She has a lot of nerve exploiting people to begin with.

But to be on her high horse about Wal-Mart?

Goodman's not the only exploiter on the left.  Read Davis' article.

But grasp that Goodman's really the whore of Panhandle Media.

No one begs for your dollars more than Goodman.

"Only with you!" she screams during pledge drives (she also screams at the interns -- one of the many reasons her voice often gives out) and apparently listeners and viewers don't hear her sotto voiced whisper "can I screw over interns."

Democracy Now! has now cheerleaded war and so much more it's supposed to stand against.  It's flipped its beliefs in its efforts to whore for Barack.  It's a weak talk show.  Pacifica needs to end their agreement with a show they don't own.  There is no reason to continue to fund that show -- let alone give it millions -- when they don't own the archives of it.

Maybe its exposure as the sweat shop of public radio will help Pacifica decide to walk away from the show?

If so, Amy knows the project's in jeopardy.  It's not a news cast -- that's why some NPR stations long ago moved to pull Goody's propaganda off the air.  And without Pacifica as a 'credit' she can float, Goody's left with the fact that her show's largely just a public access program.


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