Sleeping Giants is a mysterious group that has no address, no organizational structure and no officers. At least none that are publicly known. All of its leaders are anonymous
.. It aims to drive advertisers away from Breitbart. “We’re trying to defund bigotry,” the spokesman says.
.. Sleeping Giants’ basic approach is to make Breitbart’s advertisers aware that they are, in fact, Breitbart advertisers. Many apparently don’t know this, given that Web ads are often bought through third-party brokers, such as Google and Facebook.
.. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure
.. “What they’re doing is a very dangerous thing,” says Alexander Marlow, Breitbart’s editor in chief. “They are trying to impose corporate censorship and corporate segregation on us, and they’re doing it anonymously.”
.. “It really happened as a reaction to Steve Bannon’s rise,” the spokesman says. “We weren’t familiar with Breitbart at the time and were obviously pretty shocked at the articles. . . . To be honest, we weren’t familiar with [other conservative] sites,” so those weren’t even considered, he says.
.. Facebook and Google — two of the biggest Web-ad distributors — have never responded to Sleeping Giants, which wants the two companies to impose a blanket ban on serving ads to Breitbart.
.. Even if Sleeping Giants persuaded every advertiser to avoid Breitbart, it seems unlikely to threaten the site’s existence or even impose severe financial hardship. Breitbart is directly funded, and partially owned, by Robert Mercer,
.. “No one [in the media business] has said anything to defend Breitbart,” he says. “No one is standing up and saying, ‘This is about Breitbart now. But it could be about us tomorrow.’ ”
Richard Rohr Meditation: The Inevitable Spiral of Violence
. If “the world” is hidden structural violence, then “the devil” is sanctified, romanticized, and legitimated violence—violence that is deemed culturally necessary to control the angry flesh and the world run amuck. Any institution thought of as “too big to fail” or somehow above criticism has a strong possibility of diabolical misuse. Think of the military industrial complex, the penal system, banks, multinational corporations subject to no law, tax codes benefiting the wealthy, or even organized religion itself. We need and admire these institutions all too much. As a result, they can “get away with murder.” Paul called this level of violence “powers, principalities, thrones, and dominions” (Colossians 1:16).
.. If we do not recognize the roots of violence at the first and disguised structural level (“the world”), we will waste time focusing exclusively on the second and individual level (“the flesh”), and we will seldom see our real devils who are always disguised as angels of light (“the devil”).
I criticized Google. It got me fired. That’s how corporate power works.
Antimonopoly law, I learned, dates to the founding of our nation. It is, in essence, an extension of the concept of checks and balances into the political economy. One goal of antimonopoly law is to ensure that every American has liberty, to change jobs when they want, to create a small business or small farm if they want, to get access to the information they want. Another goal of antimonopoly is to ensure that our democratic institutions are not overwhelmed by wealth and power concentrated in the hands of the few.
.. since the early days of the Reagan Administration, power over almost all forms of economic activity in America has been steadily concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
.. As hospitals continue to merge into giant chains, for example, they are able to pass along ever higher prices without having to worry about losing business to competitors. And anyone who flies these days can attest to what happens when just four airlines control 80 percent of the market.
..It means that fewer and fewer companies are competing for our labor, allowing employers to gain more and more power not only over how we do business, but also how over we speak, think and act.
.. his last June 27, my group published a statement praising the European Union for fining Google for violating antitrust law. Later that day I was told that Google — which provides substantial support to other programs at New America — said they wanted to sever all ties with the organization. Two days later I was told that the entire team of my Open Markets Program had to leave New America by September 1.
.. No think tank wants to appear beholden to the demands of its corporate donors. But in this instance, that’s exactly the case. I — and my entire team of journalists and researchers at Open Markets — were let go because the leaders of my think tank chose not to stand up to Google’s threats.
.. But today we are failing. Not only are we not preventing concentration of power over our economy and our media. We are not protecting the groups that are working to prevent and reverse that concentration of power.
Who’s Reading Employees’ Online Reviews? Their CEOs
More chief executives are perusing anonymous online reviews of their performance on websites like Glassdoor
Career websites like Glassdoor have become regular reading for job seekers. Now chief executives are increasingly perusing their online reviews to find out what employees think of them—to evaluate policies and even to talk back.
A growing number of sites such as Indeed.com, Vault.com, Kununu and Fairygodboss let people post anonymous appraisals of their employers. A poster can comment on everything from pay and benefits to workplace likes and dislikes. Glassdoor is one of the most extensive sources of online employee feedback, displaying reviews of more than 700,000 companies and whether reviewers approve or disapprove of their CEOs.
The public-yet-personal critiques are prompting more company bosses to track and respond to reviews. In the process, they have come to treat them as a necessary evil or a useful management tool, and a performance measure akin to using stock prices to gauge investor confidence.
..“We have walked away from dozens of acquisitions that looked good on paper and made strategic sense” because of poor reviews, says Mr. Rascoff. “It really lets you look under the hood,” he says... “I need that negative feedback,” Mr. Chait says of some reviews. “As a CEO, my life is full of people saying nice things to me.”