Category Archives: Economics

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Get #woke, go broke!

We have previously reported on the self-inflicted brand wound Budweiser and Bud Light suffered. Bud Light Vice President for Marketing Alissa Heinerscheid and her boss Daniel Blake, who oversees marketing for Anheuser-Busch’s mainstream brands, took ‘leaves of absence’ in April, leaves which were reported to not have been voluntary.

Report: Bud Light Makes Decision On Execs Responsible For March Madness Controversy

Story by Chris Rosvoglou • Tuesday, June 27, 2023

According to a report from the Daily Caller, the executives at Anheuser-Busch responsible for the Bud Light controversy that took place during March Madness are out.

Bud Light partnered up with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney during the NCAA Tournament. That didn’t sit well with a large portion of Bud Light’s consumer demographic.

The Daily Caller was told that group vice president for marketing Daniel Blake and Bud Light marketing vice president Alissa Heinerscheid are “gone gone.”

Assuming that this report is accurate, it sends a strong message to other corporate executives: f(ornicate) up like this, and you are toast. Not just toast, but toast which has fallen on the floor, buttered side down.

Just Embarrassing! Bud Light Hits New Weekly Low In Sales After Dylan Mulvaney Disaster, Down Nearly A Whopping 30%

Story by Andrew Powell • Monday, June 26, 2023

It just gets worse and worse for Bud Light.

Also see: William Teach: Bud Light Continues Digging, Brings Back “Old” Mascot

Under the Anheuser-Busch umbrella, Bud Light has been tanking in sales ever since their horrendously bad decision to partner with Dylan Mulvaney. And judging by the latest sales data, it doesn’t look like the bleeding will stop anytime soon. As a matter of fact, the blows to Bud Light have gotten worse.

Compared to the same time period of 2022, sales for the beer company are down a whopping 28.5%, according to data for the week ending June 17 from Bump Williams Consulting and NielsenIQ via the New York Post.

Last week, Bud Light’s decline was at 26.8%, making this week actually worse than prior.

When it comes to the Anheuser-Busch brand altogether, Bud Light isn’t their only beer taking a hit because of their “wokeness.” With their other drinks, Budweiser’s sales are down 12.3%, while Busch Light has dipped 8.1% and Michelob Ultra took a 4% slide, according to Bump Williams Consulting and NielsenIQ data.

Bud Light’s competition, meanwhile, is taking complete advantage of their collapse with skyrocketing numbers. Rival Yuengling Lager has shot up 25.1%, while Coors Light is seeing green at 21.8% and Miller Lite is at 16%.

It’s not just sales either. The stock price of Anheuser-Busch has slipped 15.33% since the Mulvaney campaign. At the end of March around the time of the NCAA college basketball tournament, the beer corporation’s stock was at $66.73. As of Monday afternoon, it’s down to $56.50. In total, Anheuser-Busch’s stock has seen a 15% decline.

There’s more at the original, and while I hate to see anyone get fired, Mr Blake and Mrs Heinerscheid caused a backlash that has cost Bud Light more than a quarter of its total sales. I’m guessing that the lawyers have managed to get some non-disclosure agreement contract buyout for the former execs, but tanking your company’s sales by more than a quarter is an unrecoverable error.

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Crime, like any other cancer, left untreated, metastasizes Philadelphians have no one else to blame; they've done this to themselves

I have previously said that the greatest loss I have suffered in moving away from the Keystone State was the loss of freshly baked, hot Philadelphia pretzels. Coming in as a close second is the loss of Wawa coffee. Yes, you can buy Wawa coffee in K-cups, but even though we use filtered water in our Keurig, it just isn’t the same.

Wawa in Philly’s Headhouse Square to close

Neighborhood groups had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store.

by Mike Newall | Friday, June 16, 2023 | 11:15 AM EDT

The Headhouse Square Wawa will close July 16, a company official told The Inquirer. The move comes after neighborhood associations had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store and outside on the sidewalk.

The site will become the sixth Center City Wawa to shutter since 2020.

“While closing a store is always a difficult decision to make, Wawa constantly conducts careful and extensive evaluations of business performance and operational challenges of all stores on an ongoing basis,” said Wawa spokesperson Lori Bruce in a statement Friday, confirming the pending closure of the Wawa at Second and Lombard. “We continue to invest in our home market of Philadelphia.”

Also see: Ben Mannes on Broad + Liberty: Can cities rebound from lawlessness to cultures of responsibility and compliance?

This isn’t exactly a poor neighborhood! A 585 ft² rear apartment is listed for $305,000, while a 4 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 2,516 ft² upscale row house, with basement parking, is listed for $1,270,000. Yet the area is suffering from street crime and junkies. Who wants to fork out well over a million bucks to be tripping over junkies laying out in the street?

Joe Dain, cofounder of the Delancey Square Town Watch, which was formed earlier this year, said his group and other neighborhood organizations had met with Wawa officials in April to discuss ongoing concerns at the Headhouse Square Wawa. By that time, the company, he said, had already taken measures to curb panhandlers and other public nuisance issues, including curtailing its hours, hiring private security and working with city police to provide patrols.

“There were certainly efforts being made,” Dain said. “What we were addressing was the fact that more needed to be done.”

Wawa notified the group that it would be instead closing the location, he said. The closure will be only the latest vacancy to hit the historic cobblestone district. A CVS across the street from the Wawa also closed its doors in recent years. The drugstore had been battling many of the same concerns, Dain said. In 2019, Giant Heirloom said it planned to open a supermarket at Abbotts Square at Second and South, around the corner, but that project has since fallen through. The property sits vacant.

Crime affects everybody, not just the immediate victims. Owners see the value of their properties decline, shoppers have fewer options, including the loss of Wawa coffee, and things just generally deteriorate. Trouble is, among the good Democrats of the 5th Ward, which includes Headhouse Square, sort-of progressive but not wild-eyed crazy Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff received 4,777, 47.1%, of the votes in the May primary, while police-hating, hard, hard left progressive Helen Gym Flaherty came in second at 2,908, 28.7%. Primary winner Cherelle Parker Mullin, who campaigned on fighting crime among other things, came in fourth, with 931 votes, 9.2%.

The adjacent 2nd, 8th, and 30th showed similar results.

Simply put, the liberal Democratic voters of the area voted for their own problems!

Wawa has been shrinking its Center City presence.

In October, when Wawa announced it was closing stores at 12th and Market Streets and 19th and Market Streets, the company cited “continued safety and security closures.

Then, even further down, we get to the part where the Inquirer amused me:

Dain, of the Delancey Square Town Watch, said the Headhouse Square store had become more of a problem for residents in recent years.

“We would have groups of kids coming in and ransacking the place at night,” he said. Some of the panhandlers that often congregated outside the store had become aggressive, he said. The store had also become a gathering spot for people in addiction, he said, who would then camp in the historic Shambles structure or by the Headhouse Square Fountain.

“(P)eople in addiction”? That isn’t listed as a direct quote, and I had to chuckle; is that the newspaper’s stylebook phrase for junkies?

This is what you get when you tolerate crime, even the ‘little’ crimes, in what have been mostly minority neighborhoods. Sure, junkies camping out on the streets at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues aren’t bothering anyone in Center City . . . until now, they do. Someone knocking over a bodega in North Philly doesn’t really concern the people in Headhouse Square, and doesn’t even make the news unless a Temple University student gets hurt, so they can safely vote for soft-on-crime, police hating politicians like Mrs Flaherty, or District Attorney Larry Krasner, but crime, like any other cancer left untreated, metastasizes.

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All the News That’s Politically Correct: The Journolism of The Philadelphia Inquirer

No, that’s not a typo in the headline; I spelled journolism exactly as I had intended, reflecting the liberal bias of the newspaper.

The Philadelphia Inquirer is, as I have noted many times, our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, and the winner of twenty Pulitzer Prizes, so one would think that that august journal would cover news that involves the City of Brotherly Love. Well, maybe not, if such news might violate publisher Elizabeth ‘Lisa’ Hughes’ edict that the Inky would be an ‘anti-racist news organization.’ From The New York Times:

White Starbucks Manager Fired Amid Furor Over Racism Wins $25 Million

The company fired a former regional manager because of her race amid the fallout from the arrests of two Black men at a Philadelphia store, a federal jury found.

by Ed Shanahan | Tuesday, June 13, 2023

The episode plunged one of America’s most ubiquitous brands into crisis.

In April 2018, two Black men entered a Starbucks shop in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia for a business meeting with a white man who had not yet arrived. While they waited, and before ordering, one of the two asked to use the bathroom. He was refused. Eventually, they were asked to leave. When they did not, an employee called the police.

Note the date of the Times story: Tuesday, June 13th. A site search of the Inquirer’s website for “Shannon Phillips”, conducted at 9:38 AM EDT on Wednesday, June 14th, turned up a story, dated October 31, 2019, on Miss Phillips’ lawsuit being filed, but absolutely nothing on her winning that lawsuit, and $25.6 million in damages.

Could it be because Miss Hughes wasn’t publisher of the newspaper in 2019? The newspaper quoted her as having said:

Nothing matters more in our democracy than local journalism, to speak truth to power, to hold elected officials accountable, to celebrate our sports teams’ wins and losses, and to report on justice reform and the education system and gun violence, all of which has been part of The Inquirer’s beat for 190 years.

Apparently, “local journalism” and “speak(ing) truth to power” go into the trash bin when that “local journalism” and “truth” do not fit the newspaper’s “anti-racist” direction!

Back to the Times:

The subsequent arrests, captured in videos viewed millions of times online, prompted accusations of racism, protests and boycott threats. The company’s chief executive apologized publicly, describing the way the men had been treated as “reprehensible.” Starbucks took the extraordinary step of temporarily closing 8,000 stores to teach workers about racial bias.

On Monday, in a surprising twist, a federal jury in New Jersey ordered Starbucks to pay $25.6 million to a former regional manager after determining that the company had fired her amid the fallout from the Rittenhouse Square episode because she was white.

The jury found that Starbucks had violated the federal civil rights of the former manager, Shannon Phillips, as well as a New Jersey law that prohibits discrimination based on race, awarding her $600,000 in compensatory damages and $25 million in punitive damages.

Note that while the Times’ story was dated Tuesday, the verdict was reached on Monday; the Inky had plenty of time to get this story onto its website.

There’s more at the Times’ original, which is interesting, but this article is not about the verdict, but the Inquirer’s biased journolism. An important story about an incident in Philadelphia does not get covered because it doesn’t fit the newspaper’s meme.

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Get #woke, go broke: this is what can happen when companies start getting involved in political controversies All too often, it's not just the #woke who go broke

Everybody has heard the expression, ‘Get #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading, go broke.’

Some on the left thought that the backlash against Bud Light over the Dylan Mulvaney stunt would fade relatively quickly. In news which might call into question other corporations and their ‘celebration’ of homosexual ‘Pride Month,’ it looks like that hasn’t happened yet. From The Wall Street Journal:

Bud Light Loses Title as Top-Selling U.S. Beer

Modelo Especial in May took over the top sales spot, reflecting the enduring damage from a Bud Light boycott

By Jennifer Maloney | Tuesday, June 13, 2023 | 8:58 PM EDT

Bud Light no longer rules the American beer market.

Modelo Especial overtook the brand as the top-selling U.S. beer in May, punctuating a monthslong boycott of Bud Light that has reshuffled the beer industry.

Modelo represented 8.4% of U.S. retail-store beer sales in the four weeks ended June 3, compared with 7.3% for Bud Light, according to an analysis of Nielsen data by consulting firm Bump Williams.

Bud Light’s sales have tanked since April, when transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney posted an image on Instagram of a personalized Bud Light can that the brand had sent her as a gift. The Instagram post sparked an uproar, and brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev’s BUD: (%) response to the boycott angered even more people.

Bud Light’s sales were down about 24% in the week ended June 3 compared with the same week last year, according to Bump Williams. Other Anheuser-Busch brands also have taken a hit, including Budweiser and Michelob Ultra.

At least as of June 1th, it was “unclear” whether Bud Light’s vice president for marketing Alissa Heinerscheid remains on her ‘leave of absence’ or has returned to work. That was the latest information I could find in a Google search for Alissa Heinerscheid.

One would have thought that other corporate leaders, seeing what happened to Mrs Heinerscheid and her boss, Group Vice President for Marketing at Anheuser-Busch Daniel Blake, who also took a ‘leave of absence,’, reportedly involuntarily, would have tempered the response of other corporate executives to going all-in on ‘Pride Month,’ but some took the leap anyway.

The continued decline through May is an ominous sign for Bud Light distributors during what they say is a make-or-break stretch between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Most Anheuser-Busch distributors are independently owned, many of them by families who have sold Budweiser for generations. Some Anheuser-Busch distributors said they are now contemplating layoffs. Others who also carry Constellation brands said their losses have been partially offset by Modelo’s surge.

“Our year is screwed,” said an Anheuser-Busch distributor who doesn’t carry Modelo.

In other words, it isn’t just Mr Blake and Mrs Heinerscheid who have suffered[2]I have not seen any public information as to whether Mr Blake or Mrs Heinerscheid are being paid during their involuntary leaves of absence.; many small business owners have lost a lot of business, and some of their employees may lose their jobs.

Since the boycott, Anheuser-Busch has accelerated production of new Bud Light ads, leaning into the themes of football and country music. The brewer also told its distributors that it would buy back unsold cases of beer that have gone past their expiration date.

In other words, ‘leaning into the themes’ that are not controversial or political, which is pretty much what sensible advertisers have been doing since advertising began. Try to get a few new customers, and don’t piss off the ones you already have. One would have thought that the Harvard-educated Mrs Heinerscheid would have already known that, but apparently if one did think that, one would have been wrong.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.

↑2 I have not seen any public information as to whether Mr Blake or Mrs Heinerscheid are being paid during their involuntary leaves of absence.
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The #ClimateChange activists want more people to move to large cities They are pushing 'walkable' neighborhoods and public transportation

A view from our farm; the river is just beyond the trees.

The activists wanting to fight global warming climate change have long said that increased urbanization is part of the solutions they seek:

Huge gains, in terms of reducing harmful gases, can be made by changing how we plan, build, manage and power our cities and towns. Well designed, compact, walkable cities with good public transport greatly reduce our per capita carbon footprint and are key to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals of which climate action is a key part.

Good public transportation, huh? We have already noted how a well-funded public transportation system, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Agency, SEPTA, has admitted that they have lost control of the train cars as the heavily Democratic city has lost any semblance of control over crime, drug abuse, and homelessness, and SEPTA’s ridership is still below that before the panicdemic. Having the homeless and the junkies using SEPTA trains and train and subway stations for shelter and shooting galleries will cause decent people to avoid the system.

But there’s another problem with promoting increased urbanization:

The Philly area doesn’t have enough homes available for low- and middle-income buyers

In the Philadelphia metro area, households making $50,000 faced the largest shortage of available, affordable homes for sale, according to the National Association of Realtors and Realtors.com.

by Michaelle Bond | Friday, June 9, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

More than one million homes nationwide were available for sale in late April. But high prices mean that what’s out there doesn’t match what people at various income levels can afford, according to a new report from the nation’s Realtors.

Basically, home listings affordable for middle- and lower-income households are missing. The country needs more homes that households at all income levels can buy to chip away at the problems of low affordability and low housing supply, according to a report that the National Association of Realtors and Realtor.com released Thursday.

“Ongoing high housing costs and the scarcity of available homes continues to present budget challenges for many prospective buyers, and it’s likely keeping some buyers in the rental market or on the sidelines and delaying their purchase until conditions improve,” Danielle Hale, Realtor.com’s chief economist, said in a statement.

The report breaks down the number of homes missing for each income level by comparing the number of listings available in April to the number that would need to be available to accommodate buyers. Realtors said they hope local and federal governments can use their analysis to ease the twin problems of affordability and housing supply.

According to the story, households with a $50,000 income level can afford homes that cost up to $163,440, but if the Philadelphia market is short 3,440 homes listed for sale at that or lower prices, there’s also the obvious question: what can someone buy at those prices? We previously noted the home at 4931 Hoopes Street, listed for $125,000 in April, but down to $75,000 now.

Kitchen at 1829 North Bucknell Street, via zillow.com

For just $69,750, you can buy this 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom 870 ft² fixer-upper at 1829 North Bucknell Street. That’s North Philadelphia, not exactly a great neighborhood!

Now, why did I pick that listing? In December of 2021, we bought a small, detached house, 2 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1,344 ft², with a detached one-car garage, in a small town in Kentucky for $70,000. My nephew and I had to remodel the bathroom and redo the plumbing, but, doing the work ourselves, spent less than $2,000. The house is perfectly neat and clean and livable — and is rented out to my sister-in-law — yet was virtually the same price. What we spent in a small town for a decent, if not modern, house, will buy you an absolute dump in North Philly.

716 West Allegheny Avenue, photo via zillow,com.

$70,000 will buy you this boarded-up, barred-in porch, 1,260 ft² rowhome at 716 West Allegheny Avenue, in the Fairhill neighborhood in the Philadelphia Badlands. Sorry, no interior pictures in the listing. The realtor probably figures that interior photos will scare off more prospective buyers.

114 South Cecil Street, photo via zillow.com.

The story stated that a household with a $50,000 income could afford a home of up to $146,440. For $145,000, you can buy this home at 114 South Cecil Street, in West Philly.

And with all of that, the Philadelphia metropolitan area was one of only four major metropolitan areas — the others being Detroit, Houston, and Cleveland — in which buying a home was less expensive than renting.

The global warming climate change activists want more and more people to move into densely-populated urban areas, and to use public transportation, to reduce CO2 emissions, but one thing is very clear: doing so will make people, especially people at the lower end of the economic spectrum, poorer than ever. Housing prices for even modest homes are hugely inflated, and mortgage interest rates have increased significantly.

It’s really quite simple: the activists live in urban areas, and that is the life they see as their baseline good. Those of us who live out in the sticks are just a bunch of unedumacated rubes. But the activists also have money, and have been able to afford living in the cities, and living reasonably well. They have to be economically secure, simply to have the time to be activist. What they seem unable to grasp is that there are a lot of people living paycheck-to-paycheck, people who can’t afford the inflated urban housing costs.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer whines that not enough blacks are getting into the legal marijuana business.

The Garden State legalized pot, so now The Philadelphia Inquirer is lamenting that not enough of New Jersey’s drug dealers are black!

New Jersey has few Black-owned marijuana dispensaries. A banker-turned-budtender is about to open one.

Tahir Johnson is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in his hometown of Ewing Township.

by Nick Vadala | Saturday, June 10, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

As a college student at Howard University in 2005, Tahir Johnson decided to go to the beach. He put on his pink polo shirt, packed up his decked-out red Lexus, grabbed his youngest brother and little cousin, and set off for Ocean City, Md.

But rather than a day in the sand, Johnson got pulled over due to a broken taillight — one traffic stop of what he estimates to be about 100 in his life. The officer told Johnson, who is Black, that he looked like a drug dealer. Johnson told the officer he had weed in his trunk. The police found it, and arrested him. He was convicted on a possession charge, and would later be arrested two more times for marijuana.

Looks like the officer — assuming that Mr Johnson told his tale accurately, and that it’s not just a whiny ‘driving while black’ meme — got it right.

His marijuana-related arrests and conviction have since been expunged. But Johnson’s legal issues never scared him away from cannabis.

Now, Johnson, 39, is preparing to open Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing Township, N.J., his hometown. The shop will make Johnson one of the first Black recreational dispensary owners in New Jersey, and one of the state’s first operating owners with a cannabis-related conviction. Simply Pure Trenton is tentatively set to open in July.

Tahir Johnson, CEO of the soon-to-open recreational marijuana shop Simply Pure Trenton in Ewing, N.J., Friday, May 12, 2023. Johnson programs his robot receptionist named Pepper to greet guests.

So, not only did the Inquirer tell us about Mr Johnson’s new business, but even provided the hyperlink to it, helpfully aiding readers to get to his store to get high.

In Mercer County, which includes Trenton and Ewing, police arrested Black people for marijuana at a rate 4.1 times higher than white people between 2010 and 2018, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. And New Jersey’s prison population has the highest racial disparity in the country, with Black people being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites, a 2021 report from the Sentencing Project found.

As we have previously documented, at least when it comes to homicide, black Americans both commit and are victims of that crime at a hugely elevated rate compared to white Americans. Unlike most offenses, murder is a crime of evidence, not a crime of reporting, as it’s very difficult to simply dispose of a body without it being noticed; dead bodies get found, and that leads to mostly reliable statistics. Yet the left somehow, some way, cannot seem to grasp the concept that perhaps, just perhaps, black Americans might commit other crimes at ‘disproportionate’ rates. Perhaps, just perhaps, if black New Jersey residents are “being incarcerated at a rate 12.5 times higher than whites,” this is indicative not of racism, but black New Jerseyans committing crimes at a far greater rate than whites. Why is that not a possibility being considered?

Discrimination, especially in enforcing marijuana laws, was “egregious” in Trenton, Johnson said. “If you’re unlucky enough to have even a seed or a roach, your whole life is ruined.”

So, the way to not have your life ruined is to not have “even a seed or a roach”, right?

A common criticism of the legal marijuana industry is that while Black people have been disproportionately targeted for cannabis offenses, white business owners are benefiting from legalization. New Jersey’s marijuana legalization laws have attempted to address that impact: The state’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission gives priority to applicants with cannabis-related convictions, as well as those who come from communities inordinately harmed by the war on drugs, such as Trenton and Ewing.

So, the Garden State is actually giving preferential treatment to convicted criminals rather than citizens with clean records. Wouldn’t the normal suspicion be that someone who has previously broken the law would be less likely to obey the law in the future? Isn’t that why we have the perfectly reasonable conditions that criminals released from prison have probation officers to whom they must report, and are legally barred from owning firearms?

There’s more at the original, a lot of it being laments about “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups having difficulty raising money to get into that stinking business. I have to wonder: would the Inquirer have written it this way if the subject was liquor stores?

Let’s tell the truth here: marijuana use hurts black Americans at a ‘disproportionate’ rate, because it keeps more of them out of good jobs. If you are applying for a job which requires a commercial driver’s license, you will be subjected to pre-employment drug testing, and the company will be, under federal laws, required to maintain some form of random drug testing of covered personnel. Test hot for pot, and it’s off to the unemployment line you go! Many jobs which require personnel to handle money, along with other things, require pre-employment drug screens. And in the Inquirer’s hometown, where pot isn’t legal, rampant drug use of things other than marijuana has led to tremendous drug abuse problems; why wouldn’t the editors of the newspaper be taking a hard line against drug usage if they are so concerned about economic conditions for black Philadelphians?

Yet, in this article, the Inky is practically advocating more marijuana use by black citizens.

Using drugs, including alcohol, alters people’s sobriety, and being less than sober hurts people’s abilities to take good decisions and get and hold decent jobs. In America’s poorest large city, one would think that a sensible editorial position for our nation’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper would be to want more residents, of all racial and ethnic groups, to be at their best and strongest economic and competitive conditions, to improve their lives individually and as part of the larger community, but that’s not what the Inky seems to do.

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What could possibly go wrong?

Who could ever have predicted this?

Pronouns Ruin Prospects: Research Proves Hiring Managers’ Bias Against Non-Binary and Gender Queer Pronoun Users

by Ananyaa Bhowmik | May 30, 2023

Pronouns may be nothing new, but the idea that people may claim their own is still somewhat astonishing to some. Many people still succumb to the siren call of referring to people using binary pronouns.

While struggling to get used to something relatively new is understandable, what is not fair is using it as an excuse to promote bias, especially when it can keep people from earning their livelihoods. Yet hiring managers all over the world seem to be doing just that.

Simply put, research into recent hiring trends shows that resumes with genderqueer and non-binary pronouns elicit less than enthusiastic responses from prospective employers. Some applications are skipped over entirely, while others never receive a callback. A worrying trend, to say the least.

Why wouldn’t a responsible human resources manager discard résumés in which the applicant is telling him that he’s a walking, talking hostile workplace lawsuit?

It isn’t difficult to see where the issue is. If someone goes to the extent of specifying “genderqueer and non-binary pronouns,” he is telling his prospective employer that he finds the issue serious, and wants to be referred to in ways that most normal English-speaking people would not normally use. Whether deliberately or otherwise, such a person may be referred to with references of which he disapproves, and too many such incidences could generate a lawsuit against the employer. The human resources manager’s job is to do more than find the best employees; it is also to protect the company from lawsuits. And one of the easiest ways to do that is not to hire people who could be seen as increasing the probability of a hostile workplace lawsuit.

Legislative guidance introduced by NYCHRL clearly states that the “use the name, pronouns, and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs./Mx.) 15 with which a person self-identifies, regardless of the person’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the person’s identification.” Despite that, recent research conducted by Business.com concluded that “More than 80 percent of nonbinary people believed that identifying as nonbinary would hurt their job search.”

I spent my career in an almost all-male industry, and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how a significant number of the men with whom I worked would react to a “genderqueer or non-binary” employee. Such an employee would receive little respect and be the target of disparaging remarks. Why would I want to risk having to discipline, and perhaps even lose several trained and experience concrete mixer drivers because there was one employee who specified references which were out-of-the-norm?

I’m retired now, and hadn’t handled any hiring duties the last eleven years during my career, so I, fortunately, never had to face any such silliness in my decisions. But I do know one thing: the job of any employee in taking hiring decisions is to do the best job for the company, and not the applicants.

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This is the kind of thing that ‘progressives’ just don’t understand

Many people have made fun of Helen Gym Flaherty’s huge promises, including this poor site, with even the Editorial Board of the very liberal Philadelphia Inquirer calling her out:

Gym should be honest about her big spending agenda before voters go to the polls on May 16. Philadelphia does not have unlimited funds. Under Mayor Jim Kenney, the city’s budget increased 50% to $6 billion with little to show for the spending spree.

The city tried to tax and spend its way to prosperity in the 1970s and ‘80s and nearly went bankrupt. Despite 25 years of fiscal sanity before Kenney was elected, Philadelphia remains one of the most heavily taxed cities in the country. The city’s tax burden continues to contribute to its slow job growth, which, in turn, is linked to its high poverty rate.

Sometimes it’s the little stories which illustrate the problem:

Philadelphia pool closures leave neighborhoods without a vital community resource: ‘Why our pool?’

Across the area pools have been closing down due to lifeguard shortages and ongoing renovations. No one is certain when, or if, some pools will open again.

by Allison Beck | Monday, May 15, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

On a March afternoon, Lakia Toney recalled the sounds of kids laughing and splashing in the clear blue water during a summer afternoon. Neighbors of all ages joined in on the fun at 12th and Cambria Recreation Center.

She smiled at the memory of her North Philadelphia community enjoying the safety of the city-run pool, and one another’s company.

“(T)he safety of the city-run pool”? Perhaps the author, Allison Beck, forgot about, or never heard of, the city having to close the pool at the McVeigh Recreation Center last year due to “unruly behavior,”, violence, and vandalism.

Patrons of 17 Philadelphia pools are dealing with a similar story. Between lifeguard shortages and renovations, no one is certain when, or if, the pools will open again. The area pools that open often do so later in the season, with their gates closing after as little as six weeks.

Just 50 of 72 city pools could open in 2023, and many of them for only a portion of the summer.

Parks and Recreation has been recruiting lifeguards through high schools, community groups, and employment organizations. They are hiring Philadelphians who do not yet know how to swim and offering free training and certification ahead of the summer. Pay was recently raised to $16 per hour, with a $1,000 end-of-season bonus if guards submitted their applications by April 15.

Just how desperate do they have to be to find lifeguards if the city has to first train people who don’t even know how to swim?

Toney said the background checks and drug testing needed for lifeguards are a big barrier for some neighborhood youths. All candidates are required to submit to background checks and must pass a drug screening if they are over 18, according to Andrew Alter, a spokesperson for Parks and Recreation.

“When there are opportunities like this where they could be making a great income or helping out the community, helping out themselves, they’re not able to,” Toney said. “They can’t be a part of that because they’re involved in things that they’re not supposed to be doing and it’s hindering them from actually helping themselves and others.”

Heaven forfend! You mean that city employees who would be responsible for rescuing swimmers in distress, and be able to perform CPR, would be expected to be clean and sober, expected to not use drugs?

The ‘progressives’ seem to think that our social problems are caused by government not doing enough, and Mrs Flaherty has been frequently mocked for saying that part of the solution is to have more public libraries open, for longer hours, I guess so the gang-bangers and wannabes could sit in there are read Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books.

If, of course, they could read at all. Mrs Flaherty has bragged how she saved the Edward T Steel Elementary School from ‘going charter,’ but the school is ranked 1,205th out of 1,607 Pennsylvania elementary schools, 1% of students scored at or above the proficient level for their grade in math, and 8% scored at or above that level in reading.

But, like lifeguards, there is a shortage of librarians, and a shortage of money to pay for more of them and keep libraries open longer. Mayor Jim Kenney, if not as hard-left ‘progressive’ as Mrs Flaherty, would have loved to keep the libraries open longer, and the City Council would have appropriated money for it, if the city had the money!

Note that even the Editorial Board of the Inky stated that Philadelphians were very highly taxed, and that has contributed to slower job growth and economic opportunities.

I will admit it: while I’d like to see the City of Brotherly Love saved from the looming disaster of progressivism, there’s a little part of me which wouldn’t be all that upset if Mrs Flaherty won, because then Philadelphians, Pennsylvanians, and the whole nation would be able to see what an utter failure progressive policies would be. Coupled up with the police-hating defense lawyer who is the city’s District Attorney, and adding to that a police department crippled by inept leadership and a huge shortage of officers, Philly would become the disaster area of the eastern seaboard, and perhaps, just perhaps, teach the well-to-do liberals who have been voting for Democrats for so long that being soft-on-crime and supporting the bad behavior that makes and keeps people poor harms our society and our country.

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Hold them accountable! The good old boys’ network strikes again

I have frequently called out The Philadelphia Inquirer for poor reporting, so it is only fair when I note when they do good journalism.

The quiet handling of rape allegations at two Philly health institutions

How Jefferson and Rothman dealt with an alleged sexual assault involving an orthopedic surgeon and a medical resident.

by Wendy Ruderman | Monday, May 8, 2023

It was almost midnight and Jessica Phillips, a doctor training in orthopedic surgery, was one of the few guests remaining at a pool party that surgeon John Abraham hosted each summer for Thomas Jefferson University medical residents at his nine-bedroom Main Line home.

Phillips sat in an Adirondack-style chair by a stone fire pit with Abraham, a (Thomas) Jefferson (University) professor and division chief at the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute, a private practice whose physicians work at the university’s hospitals.

The band had packed up, and caterers had cleared the wine glasses and plates smeared with cocktail sauce. Abraham handed her a lit Cuban cigar. She later remembered being so drunk she dropped it on her pants.

The medical resident remembered little else afterward. In flashes, while in and out of consciousness, she recalled Abraham on top of her on the ornate rug in his library. She awoke in his bedroom naked and bruised, she later told multiple investigators.

In Abraham’s recollection, Phillips pulled him on top of her on the library floor, court records show, while his judgment was impaired by alcohol. Nonetheless, in a text message sent to his boss after the party, Abraham acknowledged it was “unethical” to have sex with a medical resident.

It’s a very long story, and there’s a lot of he said/she said in it. Both physicians were intoxicated, both married, though Dr Abraham, then 43-years-old, was going through a divorce, and neither was really capable of consent. As her supervisor, Dr Abraham was contractually barred from a sexual relationship with a subordinate. An investigation resulted in no criminal charges. This is being made public because both Dr Abraham and Dr Phillips are suing.

The events of the June 2018 party spurred three separate investigations and three lawsuits – all now rolling back the confidentiality that usually cloaks how major institutions handle sexual misconduct claims. The cases chronicle sex, power and money in the male-dominated world of orthopedic surgery.

Both Phillips and Abraham say they were victims. They blame Jefferson and Rothman for protecting their institutional interests despite federal regulations that are supposed to ensure sexual assault cases are dealt with fairly.

Ahhh, yes, “protecting their institutional interests”. That’s what “institutions” do!

Jefferson used the threat of federal reporting requirements to force Abraham out of its hospitals while evading formal reports that would let other institutions know what happened.

Then Jefferson’s and Rothman’s leadership brokered a deal that avoided a sexual misconduct hearing and ultimately closed an investigation opened under the federal Title IX law prohibiting sex-based discrimination.

Rothman’s all-male board of directors decided not to fire Abraham. Instead, they restricted him from working in Jefferson’s hospitals or interacting with Jefferson residents. Eventually, they moved him to a hospital network not affiliated with Jefferson in New Jersey.

I remember when then-District Attorney Seth Williams went hard after Monsignor William Lynn, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s supervisor of priest assignments, who was convicted on one of two counts of child endangerment for “knowingly placing minors in danger when he reassigned troubled priests to parishes where they would have access to children.” Msgr Lynn wound up serving almost three years of his three-to-six year sentence, when his conviction was overturned, twice actually, for Mr Williams and Judge Teresa Sarmina misapplying the law.

So, with all of this, why isn’t current Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner going after Thomas Jefferson University and the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute for doing what is a very similar thing? According to the Inquirer, Rothman basically moved Dr Abraham to someplace where his conduct wasn’t widely known, and to a hospital network outside of their control . . . and their liability.

Amid investigations by the university and Rothman, Abraham said, a Jefferson top doctor offered him a deal in a private conversation: Take a voluntary leave, and we won’t report the alleged sexual misconduct.

Congress generally expects health institutions employing doctors accused of wrongdoing to file a report into the National Practitioner Data Bank (NPDB), a federal tracking system.

Hospitals must query the data bank before credentialing a newly hired doctor to ensure that the person hasn’t gotten into trouble elsewhere. Data bank reports also go to state licensing boards.

In court depositions, Abraham recalled getting a phone call from Edmund Pribitkin, chief physician and executive vice president of Jefferson Health, telling him that he had to take an immediate leave of absence from Jefferson.

If he didn’t do as told, Pribitkin said, the sexual assault allegations would go before the hospital’s medical executive committee and they’d likely have to report him to the NPDB, according to Abraham.

So, Rothman essentially blackmailed Dr Abraham into taking an immediate leave, by saying that the Institute would commit a crime by not reporting the sexual assault allegations. Perhaps it’s not just the District Attorney who needs to look into this, but the United States Attorney as well, given that this is an allegation of violation of federal law.

There’s a lot more information at the Inky’s original, and it’s not limited to subscribers, though if you access more than a few articles a month, the paywall does come down.

As a Mass-every-Sunday Catholic, I was very disappointed with the allegations against Msgr Lynn. At most, I saw what he was alleged to have done as a crime by Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, but when this became a criminal case, the Cardinal, by then retired, 88-years-old, and suffering from cancer and dementia, couldn’t be tried. Early in the trial, Judge Sarmina ruled that Cardinal Bevilacqua was able and competent to give testimony as a witness in the case, but just two days after her ruling, the Cardinal died in his sleep. But while Mr Williams and Judge Sarmina misapplied the law as it stood, which resulted in an unfair, and eventually reversed, conviction, the point that the Archdiocese of Philadelphia shuffled around offending priests to keep them from being defrocked or, worse, charged, tried, and convicted in sexual abuse cases was a valid one. Supervisory officials such as then Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier, Athletic Director Tim Curley, and Senior Vice President for Finance and Business Gary Schultz, who was responsible for oversight of the campus police department, were all held accountable for covering up former Assistant Football Coach Jerry Sandusky’s rape of a young boy, though they were incarcerated for just a couple of months each.

The Inquirer’s story is the first step, and now law enforcement needs to look into this case. Yeah, there are some wealthy and powerful interests involved here, people able to pay for major league legal help, but the potential prosecution has plenty of money as well. Hold them accountable, and maybe some other good old boys network will think twice before covering up things.