. . . or just its site?
It wasn't long after I posted my piece on the Boston Book Festival's track record of community-busting corporate sponsors that an unannounced change appeared on the BBF's website. Gone are the most obnoxious of the sugar daddies -- Bank of America, Verizon, and Target -- that the festival's organizers had so egregiously flattered and fellated on Twitter and elsewhere a year before. A coincidence, I'm sure, but a very gratifying one nonetheless.
Still, it's worth keeping an eye on the BBF's site, Twitter feed, and press releases, to see who might drop into the begging-bowl in the months leading up to this year's festival. In the meantime we can be confident that the BBF will remain a thoroughly corporate event, blandly unthreatening to the plutocracy and its servants and enforcers (i.e., what the organizers still really mean when they say "community"); the presence of 3 of the publishing mega-conglomerates (Hachette, Penguin/Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) can reassure us of that.
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8 comments:
Maybe the community-busters dropped BBF . . . I can't imagine BBF dropping them! In any case, this is a strange development.
Don't stop there, Edmond!
According to recent Form 8-K filings by Akamai both a Board member and a Sr. VP resigned last week. Wonder what that's all about? They're also transitioning their CEO and President out. Their most recent 10-Q looks pretty dicey as well http://biz.yahoo.com/e/120510/akam10-q.html All in all a pretty shaky partner for the BBF.
Gary Syman, board member of the Pearson Foundation (retired Goldman Sachs pahtnuh) talking about privatized education, sounds like, on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GFlpPvmAH0 Which makes sense because The Pearson Foundation itself (reading between the lines, naturally) looks like it's running offense for the privatizing education movement. Syman's wife is a big fundraiser for Obama; they were at the recent White House dinner with Babs Streisand. "People, people who need people are the LUCKIEST people in the world." It's all so seamless.
George Bennett, CEO of Good Measures was part of the Reagan Revolution http://www.goodmeasures.com/about/bios/george-bennett Now, remember I was working as a legislative aide in the U.S. Congress (Ed & Labor Committee) at exactly that moment. The very FIRST program under the Committee on Education and Labor's purview that Reagan via his hatchetman David Stockman tried to cut was the WIC program, a very low-budget item for impoverished nursing moms and their babies. The reason they came for this one was purely psychological: IF THEY COULD CUT IT, THEY COULD CUT ANYTHING. And they did. Now I'm thinking that was one of Mr. Bennett's "best practices."
Maybe ketchup as a vegetable was another one, just for good measure.
Frances, this is priceless. It's true what they say: It takes a village to raze a book festival. Indeed, a Cooperative Village!
I'm going to make your comment into a post of its own, if that's OK w/ you...
From Akamai's wikipedia entry:
"Arabic news network Al-Jazeera was a customer from March 28, 2003 until April 2, 2003, when Akamai decided to end the relationship. The network's English-language managing editor claimed this was due to political pressure."
Flip over a rock and be amazed at what crawls out!
More to come...
Sure thing, but what are you going to call the post? "The [Something] Mafia"? Not Lobster, that's been done, but something shellfishy and oh so very unKosher would be cute. The Crabby Mafia? The Shrimpy Mafia? The Scalloped Mafia? Maybe an umbrella term like: The Treif Mafia.
Now I'm curious how the editors at The Missouri Review (of all places) came to give Ms. Solomon her 2011 reward, I mean, award.
And how marvelous that the Contest Editor there--one Claire McQuerry--has a new book of poems: Lacemakers (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)! And she's off on a wonderful book tour, all over the map: Spokane, Illinois, Arizona. How lucky!
Hhhmmm..... I was thinking of the Quahog Mafia, maybe? AKA the "hard clam," or, by their scientific name, "Mercenaria mercenaria" (seriously).
Kveller calls The Quahog Mafia a shonda only your mother could love! The Quahog Mafia tells the story of a 16-year-old Minna, a nice longnecked Jewish girl who makes the journey from Odessa to America as a mail-order bride in the 1880s on a steamer. We won’t give too much away, but when Minna winds up on the seafood farm of an Orthodox man in South Dakota who has two teenage sons–one older than her who tries to pop her cherrystone–she realizes her fantasy of making the perfect bouillibaise is not quite a reality and that life is just a bowl of chowder.
You've turned a piece of grit into a pearl of great price!
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