Phil Donahue Changed My Life and Millions of Others

by Jeff Cohen

August 19, 2024
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Town Hall with Ralph Nader and Phil Donahue (1996).

Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.

He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty much banished from TV by MSNBC because he – accurately, correctly and morally – questioned the horrific U.S. invasion of Iraq.

In the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, and consumer rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.

Mainstream media obits will likely focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues – and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.

I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits” – NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because – as the leaked internal memo said – Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”

But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day, 2002, a full hour with Studs Terkel, Congress members Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich, columnist Molly Ivins, experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders, Palestinian advocates including Hanan Ashrawi.

No one on U.S. TV cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned – never having faced such questioning from a U.S. journalist.

But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was anti-war, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had one guest on the left, we needed two on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore – known to oppose the pending Iraq war – she was told she’d need to book three rightwingers for political balance.

Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.

Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indy media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s.)

Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: “Body of War.”

Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.

He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.

Jeff Cohen was director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College and cofounder of the online activism group RootsAction.org.

The Economics Behind the Fall of Autocracy in Bangladesh

by Tarique Niazi

 August 20, 2024
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Photograph Source: Rayhan9d – CC BY-SA 4.0

Naheed Islam was not yet born in 1996, when prime minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh began her first term in office. In 2009, when she was elected to her second term, Islam had just turned 11. On August 5, he brought an abrupt end to Hasina’s 15-year long autocracy.

The 26-year-old Islam, a sociology major at Dhaka University, led the democratic uprising against Hasina’s patronage hires that had solidified her power base. Ostensibly, this patronage was meant to reward the relatives of those who fought for the country’s independence in 1971, when Bangladesh broke away from the mother country Pakistan. Over the years, however, this pretense thinned out as a fig leaf for stacking the government with party loyalists. The Awami League, which Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman founded, and she led, dished out jobs to those who pledged fealty to the party. Patronage hires, in turn, helped suppress dissent and accelerate concentration of power in the ever-grasping hands of Hasina.

During the democratic uprising, Hasina called on her party loyalists government-wide to crush the protesters whom she contemptuously slurred as Razakars (hired assassins). Those beholden to her answered the call with ardor, swarming the streets confronting, bullying, and even slaughtering protesters. Dhaka University, which was the epicenter of the uprising and Naheed Islam’s headquarters, saw countless bloody encounters in which party loyalists unleashed brutality against protesters. Similarly, security services were merciless to protesting students and their allies. Yet, in the face of lethal violence, protesters stood their ground while dying in the hundreds.

What fortified protesters’ determination to push back against state violence was their uncertain economic future. College and university students who swelled the ranks of protesters were dejected at ever-scarce jobs in the private sector, which was dominated by textiles that account for 80 percent of the country’s exports. Despite its staggering contribution to the GDP, the textile industry cannot soak up thousands of freshly minted graduates each year. The textile sector employs around 4 million workers, but it is a highly gendered sector: 80 percent of all textile workers are women. That’s why public-sector employment became ever more attractive. But to land such jobs, college and university graduates had to grease the party machine with party loyalty.

As many as 30 percent of government jobs were reserved for patronage hires that party bosses would distribute to those who swore fidelity to the party, i.e., the Awami League. This led to the political capture of government by one party and one person who brooked no dissent, which she ruled unpatriotic. Dissidents found themselves jailed or exiled. Khaleda Zia, leader of the main opposition party, Bangladesh National Party (BNP) and the political nemesis of Hasina, had to spend the past 15 years in jail or house arrest. She was released the day after Hasina fled into exile.

Zia’s freedom owes itself to mass disaffection over quota jobs, which had been simmering for years. Hasina had been see-sawing with protesters: suppressing them when she could, retreating when she couldn’t. In 2018, she suspended the quota after mass protests by students. But in June this year, she had the Supreme Court restore the same on appeal that ignited a new round of protests in July through early August.

A month of democratic uprising brought Hasina to heel. She was, however, hopeful of surviving the mass revolt, as she did in the past. Hours before her motorcade of over a dozen vehicles headed for a nearby military airbase to fly her out of Dhaka, Hasina was still huddling with her defense and security chiefs. She was instructing military leaders to follow the example of her police and paramilitary forces that had sternly dealt with protesters. By then, they had already slain over 400 of them. The chief of army staff, who is Hasina’s relation by marriage, pleaded with her that violence was not the answer to a mass movement that had swept the country and whose advancing throngs were within striking distance of her residence. Hasina was adamant that the protest movement could be tamed by the strategic deployment of violence. As this back and forth continued, Hasina’s sister, who was visiting her, intervened and called her sibling out of the huddle to have a word in private.

Minutes after, Hasina returned to the meeting unpersuaded. By then, the chief of army staff had Hasina’s son, who lives in the United States, on the phone to speak with her. The son politely told his mother that it was over. By the time Hasina came around to the chief of army staff’s pleading, she didn’t even have time to write her resignation. She hurriedly gathered what came to hand and left her residence. Her motorcade had to make several detours to evade the frightening surge of protesters. Hours after her departure, protesters were swarming her palace, helping themselves to food, flowerpots, fans, and wall clocks ripped off the mansion’s walls. A young woman was seen getting a workout on a treadmill. The chaotic scenes evoked the images in 2022 of protesters breaching the mansion of the Sri Lankan president, who also had to flee the country in the face of public protests.

Hasina, however, presided over a booming economy that quadrupled on her watch from $102 billion in 2009 to $437 billion in 2023, making Bangladesh the second largest economy in south Asia, next only to India. The country’s per capita GDP of $2,529 in 2023 was highest in the entire south Asia. More importantly, she saw the poverty rate slashed from 44 percent in 1991 to 18.7 percent in 2022. The unemployment rate, at 5.1 percent in 2023, was the lowest on the subcontinent.

What, then, caused the mass eruption against her and her government?

It began with the pandemic in 2020 that put immense pressure on the household economies. Bangladesh, having been a textile-dominated economy, endured a dramatic dip in garment orders. About a million workers, one-fourth of the entire textile sector’s workforce, were rendered jobless. On top of that, the Russian invasion of Ukraine caused a steep spike in fuel prices that Bangladesh massively subsidized. To make matters worse, multilateral institutions forced the government to cut fuel subsidies in half. This cut raised the price of everything that needs fuel to operate: electricity, food, transportation, groceries, and all manner of everyday staples. Remittances that finance the current account (trade balance) and keep the foreign exchange reserves replenished dropped as well. This sent food and fuel prices soaring. Faced with a gathering financial drought, the government went to the IMF in 2022 to seek $4.5 billions in loans to pay the bills.

It is tempting to paint former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina as the villain of the piece. But in the grand scheme of things it is the neoliberal economic order that felled her. Similar trends are sweeping across south Asia. In 2022, Sri Lanka, once a prosperous economy, suffered the collapse of government after going into default. The same year, the Pakistani government fell, again over fears of default. This year, India’s ruling Bhartiya Janta Party was humbled at the ballot box, losing its absolute majority in parliament because it courted crony capitalism.

And now Hasina’s government. She suspects that the United States played a role in her ouster since she refused to give it St. Martin Island, whose strategic location could help surveille the Bay of Bengal and the entire Indian Ocean. The State Department laughed off the suggestion. It seems that every fallen leader finds it seductive to claim cheap martyrdom by blaming their fall on the United States. True to this pattern, Imran Khan, a former prime minister of Pakistan, accused the United States of toppling his government in 2022 because he denied it military bases, a canard that even Noam Chomsky debunked as nonsense. That said, Hasina is as much victim of the neoliberal reality as she is a villain to her detractors.

The bottom line is that the bottom line led to Hasina’s ouster.

This first appeared on FPIF.

Tarique Niazi teaches environmental sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and can be reached via email: niazit@uwec.edu.

Speculative Algorithms are the New Invisible Cage for Workers

by Hatim Rahman

 August 20, 2024
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It was barely a decade ago that many of us became enamored by the “gig” economy. Booking a room, ride, or restaurant took seconds and could be done at virtually any time or place.

A major factor enabling the gig economy to grow was organizations using algorithms to create these services. Organizations, such as Airbnb, Uber, Upwork, and TaskRabbit, used algorithms to create digital platforms and used them to search, match, monitor, rate, and rank products, people, and places on a global scale.

For many organizations and users, algorithms provide breathtaking speed, scale, and efficiency. Algorithms, however, have always been an imperfect solution for undergirding the growth of the gig economy.

Algorithms have been used for centuries in primarily mathematical and engineering domains to establish fixed, reproducible relationships between different variables. Think about the algorithm to calculate the area of a square or volume of a sphere.

On the other hand, in the gig economy, organizations are using what I call “speculative algorithms” because they are using algorithms to establish fixed relationships of phenomenon that are inherently subjective and changing. Think about a worker’s reputation or the quality of a restaurant. These are inherently subjective—people have different opinions based on many different factors.

Yet, in the gig economy, platforms and people often treat the output of speculative algorithms as definitive. A three “star” rating for a product on Amazon will show up lower in search results and few will stop to interrogate if the rating is accurate or how the product is different from a product with a higher/lower rating.

Second, over time, organizations have made speculative algorithms increasingly opaque to prevent people from gaming them. Almost every algorithmic system—from YouTube and TripAdvisor to eBay and Alibaba—has experienced users unduly manipulating their algorithms. In response, many organizations have introduced more opacity into their algorithms. The algorithm’s inputs, processing, and outputs are increasingly obscured to its users. While opaque algorithms may prevent them from being gamed, they also create new problems.

Inside the Invisible Cage

In my book Inside the Invisible Cage, I argue that organizations’ use of speculative, opaque algorithms on digital platforms, particularly online labor markets for high-skilled workers, is creating an invisible cage: an environment in which organizations embed the rules and guidelines for how workers should behave in opaque algorithms that shift without providing notice, explanation, or recourse for workers.

It is ‘invisible’ because organizations can use AI and algorithms to change the rules and criteria for success at an unprecedented speed and scale without notice or explanation. It is a ‘cage’ because these algorithms increasingly control our opportunities without our say.

For workers, the invisible cage is like playing a game where the rules keep shifting without warning. Except it is not a game. The platform’s algorithms predominantly control their ability to get jobs and how they appear in search results. As a result, many workers find themselves stuck, navigating a system that controls their professional fate in ways they can’t fully understand or predict.

The Invisible Cage Beyond the Gig Economy

I am increasingly observing the dynamics I discovered in my book in areas beyond the gig economy. OpenAI, Google and the like use speculative, opaque algorithms in ways that do not provide explanation, recourse, or compensation to those whose data organizations use to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems. The systems also largely do not provide attribution or convey the speculative nature of the outputs. Reports are already emerging about how easily people can use these systems to produce misinformation.

It is not just generative AI. Organizations are increasingly using opaque AI systems for hiring, evaluating, and choosing which workers to fire.

In 2018, reporters revealed that Amazon’s AI hiring system unfairly discriminated against women. Who knows how many women’s careers were and continue to be altered by such algorithms?

To be clear, it is an organizational choice to use these opaque systems. Organizations are not compelled to use algorithms and AI systems, nor are they required to make them opaque. Ultimately, the way algorithms are designed and implemented reveal what organizations choose to (de)value and (de)prioritize.

So where do we go from here? While there are many research-based insights into this question, there are also new initiatives attempting to redress the power and information asymmetries favoring platform companies and organizations. As one example, Fair.Work is providing a research-based rating system evaluating different platform organizations on their policies and practices related to fair pay, fair conditions, fair contracts, fair management, and fair representation.

Suffice to say we need all hands-on deck and multiple, simultaneous approaches to make sustainable changes to the way organizations are designing, developing, and implementing algorithms in the gig economy and beyond. Policy-makers, academics, workers, and consumers all have a role in ensuring more equitable outcomes to ensure the invisible cage can be dismantled.

This originally appeared on the UCPress blog and is reprinted here with permission.