WGA Post From Dan - psyche! From Luvh!

This is an article I wrote about the outcome of the strike for a website that I think is called voicesfor2morrow. It could also have been for voices4tomorrow. Or a Pickle-esque voices-42mor.row. You see, I didn't submit it directly; I gave it to a friend, who needed something written by a twentysomething to accompany a video she made about the strike in order to have it included on the site. Which is a little silly. So please excuse some of the cheesiness, but I had to make it... youthful.

They wanted it to be on the subject of idealism with regard to the writers' strike:

This is what victory looks like

The Writers Guild went out on strike on November 5, but even shortly beforehand, there was a tremendous amount of doubt – among everyone involved, even us – as to whether we’d actually go out. It was only when the corporations responded to our reasonable demands with an offer actually worse than the status quo that we realized what we were up against. We realized we would have to strike.

The decision was undertaken with great sense of purpose. We knew that the economic destruction of a strike would affect not just corporations and writers but the entertainment community (and for that matter, the local economy) as well. But the things we wanted were worth fighting for, and we had a responsibility to each other, to our sister unions in Hollywood, and most importantly to the next generation of writers to not only wage a strike but win it.

What followed was truly inspiring. The air became thick with impassioned speeches and eloquent emails – as befits a writers’ strike. And though it may have occasionally strayed into overdramatic territory, at the end of the day, we sustained a campaign of social protest for a hundred days. It was hard, because it’s hard to form and then keep the belief that individuals can resist a powerful, entrenched, nondemocratic institution like a corporation. But we bore in mind the reasonableness of our demands, the rightness of our cause, and the necessity of the fight, and I believe that idealism carried us through till the end.

So this was my frame of mind when I first saw the proposed deal a week ago. And when I saw it, my heart sank. The negotiated terms seemed only a shadow of our demands, those things we thought were worth fighting for. And to make things worse, the deal was essentially done. The membership would weigh in, but it was already a fait accompli. There would be no more fight and there would be no more changes to the deal. How could I accept that? Hadn’t I dedicated a huge amount of effort to the idea that our demands were perfectly fair, that anything less would be wrong?

And yet, I did accept the deal. Was that settling? No, I would say it was learning. I’ve come to understand idealism as a motivating force, as the fuel of the movement. But eventually, if that movement is tied to a process, you need a little, uh, dealism. At the final meeting, a WGA leader reminded us of a Voltaire quote – that we mustn’t let “the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

I should add, though - this isn’t a “loss of innocence” story. My idealism is intact and has never been stronger. Making a deal doesn’t eviscerate idealism; in fact it employs and requires it. In turn, the deal enables our guild and our idealism to survive. We will need that fuel to negotiate the next deal, when this deal is up in three years. And in fact, this is the design of the deal – it carves out pathways for us to better achieve some of those fightworthy demands, but the onus is on us to take those paths. That will require an approach that starts with idealism and only arrives, briefly and ultimately, at dealism. And I trust that this is the approach we’ll take. Skipping to the end isn’t something writers like to do anyway.

PS, Pickle Reader - If you don't think I freaked myself out with how H-Rod the second to last paragraph was and immediately tacked on the last one... well, you are not taking into consideration many feelings I've made clear.

MoveOn

Good friend and crusader for justice Anna Galland stopped in on me this weekend. (This will be a good test of whether Anna’s contrition about not reading The Pickle was genuine or not.) Anna works for MoveOn. I met her when we both worked on the 21st Century Democrats’ Young Voter Project in 2004. She worked for the American Friends Service Committee before that, and she’s on their board now. She’s a really good person.

I was probing about MoveOn, and at one point I asked where they were headquartered. “Oh, nowhere,” she said, with a knowing smile.

Now, say what you will about MoveOn. (In particular, say what you will about the “General Betrayus” episode, but certainly don’t say it was a shrewd political move that makes it more likely that the 3 million some-odd members of MoveOn will get more things they want.) But when Anna told me that they don’t have a central HQ, and then when she answered all my subsequent wide-eyed, rapid-fire questions, I got the idea that MoveOn might be realizing the implications of the internet for democracy in a more advanced way than other organizations. The (small) core staff uses sophisticated research and marketing techniques to understand who MoveOn’s membership is – who MoveOn is, really – and, yes, sometimes to get them to do things, but almost always to get them to do things that will help them get the things they say they want. That’s as good a definition of grassroots organizing as I can think of.

I asked Anna how they define a “member.” It’s someone who signs up to get the emails. I’m a MoveOn member now. They sometimes drive me crazy, never more than when I’ve been working on a campaign and trying to coordinate with them, but purely based on the organizational philosophy that I didn’t really understand until Anna described it to me, this is an organization of which I feel I should be a part.

(PS: This is a dated citation, but here is Chris Hayes' really insightful take on the dust-up over Patraeus.)

Wisconsin is the new Alamo

My good friend Luke Hayes, who was in Nevada for Obama starting in the summer, was shipped to South Carolina right after caucus day, then up to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Luke spent two months in Austin with me on the Mayor’s campaign in 2006, so when I asked him, after Super Tuesday, if he was on his way down to Texas, I was shocked (and admittedly a little dismayed) when he told me they were sending him to Waukesha, Wisconsin. Didn’t they realize how important Texas was going to be, and didn’t they want to take advantage of Luke’s experience and network in Austin? “Well,” reasoned Luke, “they seem to think Wisconsin is critical.”

Now, ten days later, it looks like they may have been right. Hillary’s people seem to have initially shared my position, but a few days ago they started competing more fiercely for the cheese-heads, realizing they couldn’t just punt and hope to make a stand in Texas and Ohio. Fourteen days after Wisconsin might be too little too late. Let’s take a look at why:

The states that have voted so far contribute 2171 of the 3249 pledged delegates to be awarded, or 66.8%. That’s a lot – more than 2/3, already weighed in. Estimates continue to vary (though less and less so), and some news outlets prefer to wait to award the caucus delegates, but I think we are pretty close if we say that Obama has 1134, Clinton has 995, 26 went to Edwards, and 16 of those 2171 are yet to be awarded. What sequence of events could lead to Hillary having more pledged delegates than Barack when the polls close in Puerto Rico on June 7th?

(For the purposes of this post, we’re going to assume two things. First, those Michigan and Florida delegates may get a seat at the convention, but only if there’s a clear nominee. To count them for Hillary would probably be illegal. Second – and this is much more open to debate – it is looking less and less likely that the loser of the pledged delegate race will be able to convince enough superdelegates that the founding fathers, the gods of democracy, and their constituents would be cool with them swinging the election his or her way. This is a development of my post on this subject last week – “Delegate Math.” From the start, this question has been framed in the news as “will the party elite reverse the will of the people.” I just don’t think so right now, but again, that could change. So for the purposes of this post, the important question is who will get the most pledged delegates.)

Let’s say that Barack wins Wisconsin 52-48 and cleans up in his native state of Hawaii, and then rides this uninterrupted wave of momentum to lose by only 5 or 6 points in both Texas and Ohio. Let’s also say that he loses Rhode Island 45-55 and wins Vermont by the same margin. Under that scenario, his lead would be cut to about 120-125 from its current 139, with Wyoming and Mississippi set to vote on March 8th and 10th, and then nothing until PA on April 22nd. (I’m also giving him Democrats Abroad, who have voted but not yet returned results.) Assuming he continues to be strong in the interior mountain west and southern states with large black populations, and thus wins MS and WY by significant margins, she would have to beat him by 20 points in all the remaining states except for SD and MT, where she could draw him, and Puerto Rico, which she would have to win by 30. Keep in mind, her largest margin of victory in any state other than the one she represents in the Senate (17 points), the one of which she was First Lady (43 points), or Oklahoma (24 points – I have no idea), has been 15 points. So it would be some kind of trick for her to wipe him out that badly – ie, to hold him under 40% - in PA, NC, IN, WV, OR, and KY, all while being outspent. Impossible, basically, without something game-changing happening.

If she can win WI, on the other hand, and turn the tide in her favor, and then beat him up a lot on March 4th, she might be able to capture enough momentum to power through to big wins in April and May. It would still take big wins, though; 15 to 18 point wins, consistently, and there is a long time between March 10th and April 22nd. In that scenario, her hope might still only be that the superdelegates might be able to go against the pledged delegate count if it’s close and if the momentum is clearly with her. In other words, the numbers say that she really can’t win the pledged delegate count without a very strong showing on March 4th, and it sure seems like she can’t have big wins – really big wins – in TX and OH without something that breaks his momentum before then. That has to be Wisconsin.

My last post about predictions and how foolish they are notwithstanding, if she doesn’t outright win WI and then rough him up on March 4th, there are going to start to be a lot of Democratic Party insiders – ie, superdelegates – telling her that her arithmetic window has closed, that their support is firmly with Obama, and that no one wants to wait until April 22nd to have a nominee, let alone August 25th.

Labor War and Labor Peace, Chapter 2

So. The strike is officially over, and I am back to unwilling unemployment as the show I was writing for was cancelled while I was out on the picket line. I have a brand new excuse not to post, though: I’m moving. And I’m going to India next week. So.

Picking up where I left off – jurisdiction. Mindful of our reality and animation troubles, the WGA knew that negotiating jurisdiction in “New Media” was a must. Initially, this is not something that the corporations wanted to give us. Even granting – hypothetically –their theory that reality and animation are in some way ancillary to scripted television and movies, writing for new media clearly wouldn’t fall in that category. In the end, we did get pretty decent jurisdiction.

Of course there are caveats. In order to fall under WGA jurisdiction, a new media project must satisfy a few conditions, and it is these conditions that may be of interest to Pickle readers, not from a legal perspective but rather a “where is TV headed?” perspective. A made for new media project (i.e., we’re not talking about re-showing/streaming an episode of “House” on fox.com, but rather a brand new program) falls under WGA jurisdiction if it meets any of the following criteria:

1) It’s written by a “professional” writer – defined as someone with any kind of writing credit, for any size screen or even the page, whatever that is
2) It’s a derivative of a property already under WGA jurisdiction (i.e. an online-only spinoff of Heroes, or Air Bud)
3) It meets a budget threshold of either $15k/minute, $300k/episode, or $500k/series order

Not too bad. At least we know that WGA members, all “professionals,” get covered. But what these conditions point to is where the corporations think much of their new media is going to come from: cheap, original content made by first timers. The traditional development process (pitch to script to pilot to series) is speculative and full of expensive WGA minimum payments. “Developing” a hit YouTube video into a TV show bypasses both those problems. Does this mean that these companies’ programming will become a wild west of user generated content? Probably not – for one, media companies are premised on the idea that they know how to program, that they have an expertise (Obviously, I have doubts on the existence of this expertise – for anyone, not just easy-to-pick-on TV execs). For two, they probably don’t want to directly compete with the YouTubes of the world. Media corporations’ models are based on reproducibility whereas YouTube is more about venue than content.

This new method of generating ideas for content may crowd out more traditional pilots (although there will always be $12 million pilots like Lost, spectacles that can’t be made cheaply and by first timers), and it would seem that there is a lot of water coming through this hole. The WGA has tried to mitigate that in a couple ways. First, there’s a “guild shop” provision in the deal. This means once you write your first new media project for a media corporation, you then join the Guild. Second, there is a provision for “separated rights” which spells out the control a writer would have over a new media project that then becomes a TV show or feature film.

CNN Perspective

"The Superdelegates are NOT going to reverse the decision of the pledged delegates." Bill Schneider, moments ago.

That's the way this picture is emerging.

Must Win?

Though I've worked in campaign politics for 7 years and followed them for at least a bit longer, I still get surprised at how quickly things change, and how fast that which appears inevitible becomes unlikely. I felt pretty good by the end of the night on February 5th, but the news was that it was a better night for her. If she was the frontrunner going into Super Duper Tuesday, and she had a better night than he did, how did we get to where we are tonight? It's only exactly one week later. Three days ago, I advised you to focus on whether or not Barack would edge out Hillary in the pledged delegate count, and if so by how much, and would it be enough to overcome her lead among pledged delegates. Three days ago!

Well, three days later he is over 100 pledged delegates ahead of her, and the superdelegates are starting to move. The question before was will the people make their voices heard loud enough to force the superdelegates to follow them. Now the question is will the superdelegates take the first opportunity to let the regular delegates take them off the hook. Hillary is counting on Texas and Ohio to arrest her fall on March 4th, but will she even make it that far (ie, is this the Rudy Strategy?).

First New Hampshire, now the week after Super Tuesday - make predictions at your peril. It's a good night - a good week - for Barack, but the only prediction I'm willing to make right now is that more things are going to happen before we're done.

Labor War and Labor Peace, Chapter 1

The WGA strike appears to be headed for a close, and it takes with it my number one excuse for not writing very much, here on The Pickle or elsewhere.

Over the next few days, I’ll try to outline the main disputes as well as how they’re addressed in the deal memo. Rather than going into hard numbers, though, which are uninteresting to you and unknown to me, my intention is to reflect back upon the strike in general ways that may be of interest to lefties and/or Screen Actors Guild organizers. If you are a writer, you may find it basic, and if you are a giant diversified vertically integrated multinational corporation that gets a small part of its revenue from scripted entertainment, you may find it biased.

Most everyone knows that the primary area of contention was “the internet,” but this perhaps bears a little explaining. While our demands are technically about getting paid for internet reuse of our material in the short term, what everyone really has their eyes on is the eventuality of TV becoming indistinguishable from the internet. Eventually, we will just have various sized screens and interfaces in our houses, and there’ll be one big fat cable that provides you with all your 1’s and 0’s needs, be they video, telephony or laundry detergent for your digital clothing. Those screens will have scripted entertainment programming. There may be no channels, or no schedule, but writers will still be writing things.

Of course, this is a ways off, and in the mean time, there aren’t very many people streaming TV shows. But once a rate is negotiated for the first time, it becomes an immovable object, especially if it’s costly to writers. The VHS rate negotiated in the 1980’s represented an 80% cut in the normal residual rate (because magnetic tape and plastic wheels are expensive). It has remained unchanged since then. It’s the rate we’re currently paid on DVDs. And – it’s still in the contract that I plan to vote “yes” on. Based on that experience, we knew we had to have a good foundation for an internet deal. (Incidentally, the home video rate cut has cost writers something in the neighborhood of $1.5 billion. Anger over this is probably the main factor that the leadership could call a strike. This didn’t stop the corporations from telling us we should “embrace the home video rate with open arms,” even if, to paraphrase Guild President Patric Verrone, embracing and open arms are mutually exclusive.)

There are two areas of concern here for the Writers Guild – payment, which you may have heard about, and jurisdiction, which you probably didn’t.

When the WGA has jurisdiction over a certain area, it means that when signatory companies make deals within that area, those deals must conform to standards pre-negotiated with the WGA. Sitcoms and live action movies, jurisdiction. Reality television (which is written, often meticulously) and animation, no jurisdiction. WGA jurisdiction provides a number of things. At the most basic level, it requires fair labor practices. Reality shows routinely violate these, arousing the concern of the state of California. Jurisdiction also means equitable compensation, or at least something that resembles it. To date, The Lion King – just the movie, no toys – has made $783 million worldwide. Its writers probably made about $100k. (I’m working on getting an accurate number from the Guild). And finally, jurisdiction means added leverage for the Guild. If we covered reality, then it wouldn't be cheap replacement programming during a strike, and in fact they wouldn't be able to put shows like Clash of the Choirs on at all.

This post has gotten way too long; I’ll pick up how the tentative deal addresses jurisdiction in the next one. Also, please let me know if you have questions about this or any other aspect of the strike.

Back to Politics...

I also want to point out the narratives that are starting to come out from the campaigns about the role of the superdelegates. These quotes have appeared in a couple of places:

Obama: "My strong belief is that if we end up with the most states and the most pledged delegates from the most voters in the country, that it would be problematic for the political insiders to overturn the judgment of the voters. I think it is also important for superdelegates to think about who will be in the strongest position to defeat John McCain in November and who will be in the strongest position to ensure that we are broadening the base, bringing people who historically have not gotten involved in politics into the fold."

Clinton: "Superdelegates are, by design, supposed to exercise independent judgment. But, of course, if Senator Obama and his campaign continue to push this position, which is really contrary to what the definition of a superdelegate has historically been, I will look forward to receiving the support of Senator Kennedy and Senator Kerry."

Hilariously, each of them is making two arguments that, in both cases, have incompatible premises, but we're just dipping a pinky toe into this swamp for now. I'm sure they'll each develop a strong, consistent message that emphasizes the first point each makes before they wade in much above the knees. Which really shouldn't be too much longer, since Hillary might be able to pick up Wisconsin and nothing else before Texas and Ohio, and it is starting to feel like she's going to have a tough time ending up with more pledged delegates than him.

For those who haven't seen it before, check out the Iowa Electronic Market. These are real securities that trade on, among other things, the nominations. See the Dems here. Studies show that these kinds of things reflect actual probablities at a given time, so that's pretty interesting...

See, you try to do something nice for people...

So there I was, at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Boston, positively laughing my ass off, when it dawned on me - this is going to be on YouTube! I will share this with Pickle Nation. We can share something other than Barack Obama.

But it's not. I won't. No we can't.

But I'm still going to tell you what was so damn funny, and maybe you can find it yourselves online (in which case I hope you will have the decency to post a comment), or, for those of you in the Boston area, you can make your way to the end of the earth yourself and check it out.

1) Cezary Bodzianowski. Dude has a rollerblade on one hand and another one on one foot, and he's inside a slowly rotating concrete cylinder. It's funny, then you're over it, then it's funnier than it was before. And so on and so forth.

2) Christian Jankowski. "The Hunt." Man vows only to eat what he can hunt with a bow and arrow, then goes to the supermarket and hilarity ensues.

3) Rachel Perry Welty. Karaoke Wrong Number. It's Karaoke, but with wrong numbers.

4) Andrea Fraser. Frank and his Little Carp. Um, it's porn. Frank is Frank Gehry. His little carp is the Guggenheim Bilbao or his little carp, depending who you ask.

Honestly, I'm sorry I can't link to them - Internet Seriously Letting Me Down Alert. I mean, not one of them! As far as I can tell, Andrea Fraser's art is all about knocking pretensiousness. Hey Andrea, YouTube is exposing you! You're like John McCain (sorry) - it's so much worse because you promised us you were different. But anyway, they are all brilliant, and if you can check out the ICA, you will be rewarded.

Delegate Math

This post is a little wonky, but stick with it. I’ve done a few back of the large envelope calculations. Here they are:

Right now – and the estimates vary, so it’s hard to get a lock on these numbers, which is really unnerving in and of itself – Obama seems to have something close to 878 pledged delegates, and Clinton has 865. She appears to be leading in most delegate counts because about 300 out of the 800 superdelegates have declared their intentions, and she’s got 2/3 of them.

I took a look at those numbers state-by-state to try to get a sense of where the pledged delegate count might be headed in the second half of the voting. Bottom line: Unless one of them does something to destabilize this race and seriously tip the scales one way or the other, the proportional system for allocating delegates is going to make it very, very hard for a winner to emerge without input from the superdelegates.

Looking at the results in terms of pledged delegates won, Hillary has been winning big states by small margins, and Barack has been winning small states by big margins. If we take each of their top 6 margins of victory, throw out the very highest one, and average the other five, we get a number for Hillary of 59.3%, and 69.1% for Barack. In other words, in states that Clinton wins decisively, she seems to get about 59% of the pledged delegates, and in states that Obama wins decisively, he seems to get about 69% of the same.

So let’s take a look at the remaining states. If we categorize each state as either Clinton, Obama, or Split, based on the demographic trends so far, and then give each of the candidates 50% of the pledged delegates in Split states, and their average margin of victory for clear wins as calculated above in states that we can reasonably expect each of them to win, we see more of the same – things come out very close, with a slight edge for Barack.

What does this mean? Well, it’s a very crude calculation, but it means that, again, barring a destabilization of the balance of power in the race, the margin for one candidate of the other among pledged delegates is going to be very close. Even if we assume that one of the two candidates wins all the remaining states by something a little smaller than their average clear win margin so far – say 55% for Clinton and 60% for Obama – the difference between the two candidates on pledged delegates alone does not end up being even half of the 800 superdelegates.

If Clinton wins the most pledged delegates, the outcome seems clear. She is likely to have the most superdelegates, and if both those things are true, she has more delegates than he does, the party elite are in concert with the rank and file, and everyone goes home if not happy, at least feeling like they were treated fairly. If, however, Obama has something like 50 to 100 pledged delegates more than she does – a scenario that I would argue at this point seems like the most likely one – but she continues to get more of the party establishment, what then? Are the superdelegates going to deny the people their nominee? At some threshold level of Obama victory, I argue that they are not.

I am making the case, then, that this nominating constest is now a race to 50% plus about 20-50 pledged delegates for Obama. If he can clear that hurdle, the superdelegates will have to fall into line. If wins by a really tiny margin, the Clinton superdelegates can declare it a tie and break it in her favor. Unless Obama can turn the superdelegate tide in his favor (unlikely), his nomination depends on getting half plus a chunk of the pledged delegates. That is the race now. That is the number to watch.

Kenya

I have more thoughts on the delegate math that I am winding up to share tonight or tomorrow, so check back for that, but in the meantime, I want to call your attention to Kenya.

I taught math for a semester in a rural school in Kenya after graduating from high school. I lived with a family in Western Province, not far from the Ugandan border, a few hours and 50 or so miles from Kisumu, which is the third largest city in Kenya, and the population center of the Luo tribe. My village was Luhya. I think of my friends and students every time I read about the recent violence that is mostly between members of the Luo and Kikuyu tribes, and I hope that the much smaller and more northerly Luhyas are staying out of it.

The Kikuyus have dominated Kenyan national politics since independence – Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent Kenyan President, is a Kikuyu. Raila Odinga, the challenger, is Luo. Kenya has been spared – has spared itself – much of the ethnic conflict that has burdened many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which is part of why it has been relatively stable and economically successful, by the neighborhood’s standards. But a hotly contested and legally questionable election in December has brought undercurrents of tribal tension to the surface, and the violence is real, ethnic, as brutal as it can be, and, despite a lull after the first surge in January, persistant.

In our society it’s easy to forget that mobility has not been the norm for most people throughout most of human history. When I took my family to lunch in the central city of Western Province, Kakamega, near the end of my time there – 25 miles and an hour or so from our village – it was the first time that my Kenyan grandmother had been there in 40 years! When I left my adoptive family at the end of the three months I spent there, they admonished me to come back, saying “we will always be here.” They meant it. As my brother David explained, there is a strong cultural bond between a family and the land on which they have long lived. That bond is not often broken.

Today’s NYT shows a picture of Luos in the back of a truck in Nakuru, about to be shipped off to their “ancestral homeland.” Nakuru is about 100 miles east of Kisumu. There is a really beautiful lake there. In the past, it was Kikuyu land. But those Luos live there now. Refugees have the worst public health in the world. This afternoon there is news of progress in talks between Kibaki and Odinga. Let’s hope so.

Mission Creep

This isn't quite slang, but it's still coinage.
While on strike (maybe not for long? more on this soon), I've gotten a day job tutoring high school kids, and today my chemistry student came up with what might be the best name ever for a white rapper:
Whitrogen.

Recommended DJ pairing: Cut Chemist, no duh!