Shots in the Dark

Last week, Sheryl Sandberg, the author of the womanifesto, Lean In—Women, Work and the Will to Lead, sold $91 million of her Facebook stock. But don’t worry—she still has about $1.75 billion of stock left.

She also advertised for an intern for LeanIn.org, her site advocating for empowering women.

An unpaid intern, that is….

Update: According to the Los Angeles Times,

Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Lean In, said in a statement: “LeanIn.Org, like many nonprofits, has enjoyed the participation of part-time volunteers to help us advance our education and peer support programs.”

I love that—”enjoyed the participation.” Heh. Nice way to put it, especially that word “participation.” (They’re not working for free, they’re participating!)

Let’s rephrase that: Lean-In has “exploited the desperate desire of young women in a lousy job market to do something that they hope will one day allow them to meet Sheryl Sandberg.”

Tow things about Andrea Saul’s statement:

FIrst, is she really arguing that because other organizations don’t pay their interns, it must be okay?

Second, and more important, the point is that hiring unpaid interns (who are likely to be young women) is actually directly contrary to the stated purpose of Lean In. So it really doesn’t matter whether it’s an accepted practice or not. The issue is whether it’s appropriate for Lean In specifically to use unpaid labor.

This is the kind of thing that makes me distrust Sheryl Sandberg, who of course will never step up and take responsibility for this, because that would mean attaching her name to bad publicity.

This is a small matter, not particularly important, and maybe just a mistake in judgment. So step up and say so. Lean in to the responsibility microphone, as it were. Don’t put some flunky out there to issue disingenuous statements to the press.

Or, if I may say so: Man up.

Maine. (Where I am this week; blogging will be sporadic.)

A couple days ago, someone wrote the 25, 000th comment on this blog.

I’m kind of impressed by that benchmark—and kind of grateful.

Thanks to all who read and contribute. It is so much appreciated.

The Times weighs in today with a piece on Larry Summers’ buckraking and the potential conflicts of interest raised by his work for Wall Street banks.

If the White House [nominates Summers as Fed chair], Mr. Summers’s financial disclosure — including his recent consulting jobs, paid speeches and service on company boards — will be one of the hottest documents in Washington. Among the top contenders for the position, Mr. Summers has by far the most Wall Street experience and the most personal wealth.

The Times details many of Summers’ various insider-for-hire gigs—none of which, by the way, are mentioned on his self-promotional personal web page, larrysummers.com, or on his Kennedy School page, or on his CV—although unfortunately it does not mention his work for Minerva University [sic]. Why is that unfortunate? Because given Harvard’s ambitions in the online space, Minerva is clearly a conflict of interest for Summers, and yet that doesn’t seem to bother him. So it should be included in a piece about whether Summers’ lucrative consulting gigs could create problems for him.

I find the litany of activities detailed in the article fairly gross, to be honest. Summers is a very gifted man. I don’t see him involved with a single non-profit, other than academic organizations, where his brainpower, connections and high profile could make a difference. For someone with his good fortune, that omission is odd, and does, I think, go to the question of character. He may be involved with something and not be public about it. But…I doubt it.

Throughout the article, Summers and his defenders take the case that Summers has never lobbied, never been paid to take a position.

In 2009, Mr. Summers said in an interview with The New York Times that he kept boundaries between his private and public work. “I wanted to be involved as an economist, not as a lobbyist,” he said. “I never wanted to be in a position of taking public policy positions based on anything other than my convictions as an economist or a potential policy maker.”

But this is a straw man; Summers is either being disingenuous or stupid. (And the latter is possible. Though the catch-all term “brilliant” is frequently applied to Summers, there are clearly intellectual areas in which he is not brilliant. And then there’s the whole question of emotional intelligence. But I digress.)

The issue is not whether Summers explicitly takes positions on certain issues because he is paid to do so. That’s far too crude a way of framer the matter, and lowers the ethical bar so low that Summers would have no trouble clearing it. Summers, I think, is being too clever by half here, and in his arrogance doesn’t realize that there are plenty of smart people who can see right through this ploy.

The issue is really whether Summers’ mindset, his weltanschauung, has been shaped by his close association with Wall Street, and whether he can’t help but feel a sense of obligation to institutions and people who a) helped keep his career alive after the Harvard debacle and b) have paid him millions of dollars—a sense of obligation that might tip the balance of his own intellectual judgments towards reflexively favoring Wall Street.

I think that’s a very serious question. As anyone in Washington will tell you, it doesn’t take a big gift to create in policymakers a sense of obligation. Write a $2000 check to a congressional candidate, and you may get a sentence in a piece of legislation that creates a $10 million tax break for your firm.

So imagine, then, what it must do if one is not getting $2000 for one’s campaign, but millions of dollars for one’s bank account.

There is absolutely no way that that doesn’t influence you.

Where I think Summers’ defenders could make a stronger case is to show actions, decisions, policies Summers has taken or advocated which would hurt the interests of Wall Street.

I’m just not sure there are any.

Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine, the owners of Politics and Prose, a terrific independent bookstore in Washington, provide one of the most useful commentaries’ on Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post I’ve seen.

Yes, Amazon has transformed bookselling in ways that have afforded consumers greater convenience, lower costs and digital alternatives. But in doing so, the company also has engaged in questionable practices such as selling below cost to gain market share and evading the collection of sales taxes. It also has sought to bully smaller companies that have resisted its terms, and it has been criticized for poor workplace conditions in the United States and abroad.

I’m inclined to agree, even though I admire Amazon in many ways and shop from it all the time. (Which, yes, makes me hypocritical. Guilty as charged. Though I do buy books from indie bookshops, buying diapers from Amazon is a no-brainer.)

And having watched the Justice Department’s anti-trust case against Apple, all I could think was that the government was taking the wrong bookseller to court. All that its case against Apple has done is made Amazon, which has an increasing stranglehold on bookselling, even stronger.

Graham and Muscatine point out that President Obama just granted an exclusive interview to …Kindle, which may have resulted from Amazon’s significant political contributions to his campaign. (Kindle not being widely considered a respectable news outlet, or even a news outlet, period.)

And Obama recently traveled to an Amazon printing facility in Tennessee to highlight a speech on job creation…

I have a great deal of fondness for the Washington Post, although it has, admittedly, degenerated into a second-tier paper in recent years. When I was starting my journalism career in Washington, D.C., it was a beacon of journalistic excellence; a job covering politics for the Post was about as good as you could imagine it got. And its Style section was producing some of the finest magazine and book writers in my business. I did a short stint writing for the Post, and it was incredibly exciting to finish a story at midnight, go to bed, and see it on my doorstep in the morning.

That’s all gone now, due, in my opinion, not so much to the Internet as to the business shortcomings of the Graham family. Like [Bradley] Graham and Muscatine, I want to believe in Jeff Bezos. But I’m not there yet.

In an interview with Times Higher Education, former Harvard divinity professor Susan Coakley accuses Larry Summers, who was then president of Harvard, of banning the Dalai Lama from campus.

She recalls that Lawrence Summers, who was president of the university from 2001 to 2006, was “totally opposed to any religious practice on his campus”.

“When he arrived, he banned the Dalai Lama from a conference – he didn’t want anyone in a robe in Harvard! That was a sort of declaration of war. He wanted a religion department that was secular: he didn’t want a divinity school that was training ministers. He had to back off because of antagonising alumni, but what he did instead was to try to secularise the place as much as possible.

Coakley’s comments about Summers and the Divinity School are not really news—I reported on Summers’ hostility to HSD in Harvard Rules—but I have never before heard the story about the Dalai Lama. The president of Harvard prohibiting the Dalai Lama from attending a conference? That seems like a big deal to me.

If the story’s true, Summers was probably afraid of jeopardizing Chinese money, or maybe his own future relationships with Chinese money. But most people would see the free exercise of speech, and the protection of that exercise, as part of the job of a university president.

“She just tends to see things through Main Street and he sees things through Wall Street.”

—Former FDIC chair Sheila Bair, referring to Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and potential Fed chair Larry Summers.

The quote comes in a Boston Globe story by Matt Viser, who reports that Warren has no love for Summers because he torpedoed her chances to be the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was Warren’s brainchild.

Here is the crucial section:

[In the summer of 2010, Summers] and Warren were scheduled for a meeting in the White House. In her quest to lead the consumer board, she had already gained some high-profile backers within the administration, among them senior adviser David Axelrod and Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers.

The next day, in the Oval Office, Obama told Warren he was not going to nominate her to lead the agency, instead naming her a “special assistant to the president’’ to help get the bureau running.

This isn’t exactly conclusive, and it followed some public criticisms of Summers by Warren which probably didn’t help things. But it does sound like Summers’ MO: If you’re going to stick it to someone, make sure they never see the shiv.

And if so…how sweet it must be for Warren, to be now a senator, a position from which she can make Larry Summers’ own professional advancement considerably more complicated.

The Washington Post reports on the astonishing aural memory of dolphins: They can remember the specific whistles of other dolphins at least 20 years after the last time they heard them.

“The main implications of such findings is that humans are not the only mammals that retain memories of others for long periods,” said SUNY-Buffalo psychologist Eduardo Mercado III, who was not involved in the research.

Very cool.

In the Globe, Scot Lehigh makes the case against the appointment of Caroline Kennedy as U.S. ambassador to Japan.

….ambassadorial postings to crucial countries should have seasoned diplomats in charge. Japan, a key trading partner and host to almost 50,000 US troops, is nothing if not a vitally important ally, and Kennedy is anything but a seasoned diplomat.

Lehigh mentions these specific issues:

1) North Korea
2) our complicated relationship with China
3) “tinderbox territorial disputes, long-standing historical antagonisms, and economic tensions”

I’m not generally a big fan of Caroline Kennedy, but I’m going to take hopeful exception to Lehigh’s argument. I think that, in her role as Kennedy family ambassador to the world, Kennedy has more diplomatic experience than most professional diplomats. Yes, she’s not an expert on the regional issues; many ambassadors aren’t at the time of their appointment. She has staff for that, and I’ve no doubt she’s a fast learner. And her lack of Asian expertise may well be offset by Japan’s impression that the U.S. is appointing a person of great prestige as its ambassador—the daughter of an iconic president and leading representative of an iconic American family.

I did not think Caroline Kennedy should be a senator. But I bet she’s going to make a fine ambassador.

In the Washington Post, the PIMCO CEO argues that the fight over who will be the next Fed chair is damaging the next Fed chair—whoever it is.

...the effectiveness of central banks is linked in an important fashion to credibility, including the capacity of leaders to combine constructive internal collaboration with a solid external standing. A successful central banker must do more than just convey the current policy stance. She or he must also command the necessary respect among politicians, financial markets and foreign central bankers that anchors the baseline policy path, underpins a well-disseminated methodology and facilitates the inevitable midcourse corrections.

Which is why the current debate is cause for worry, El-Erian argues—because it has degenerated into mudslinging that risks making either choice less effective.

The solution, El-Erian writes, is for Obama to make his choice…now.

This all seems quite logical to me, but I would add a corollary, which El-Erian, who probably knows both Summers and Yellen, is probably too restricted to say, if he even agreed with it: This is what happens, inevitably, when you throw Larry Summers into the mix. Things get ugly.

Fairly or not—fairly, I think—Summers is a polarizing and divisive figure. I doubt there’s anyone who’s paid much attention to Summers’ career who doesn’t have a strong opinion about the man, con and pro. That in itself should be a factor in Obama’s choice. Because if Summers is polarizing before he becomes Fed chair, imagine what might happen after….