The Real Walt Disney, Not the ‘Saving Mr. Banks’ Version

Andrew Romano The Daily Beast

Many of us either think of him as a deity—innocent and imaginative—or a demon—fascist and racist—but what was the man really like? Is the truth anywhere to be found in the new film Saving Mr. Banks?

Who was the real Walt Disney? There is a moment about three-quarters of the way through Saving Mr. Banks, the new Disney movie about Uncle Walt’s attempts to wrest the rights to Mary Poppins from her very protective creator, author P.L. Travers, that strikes me as a winking reenactment, courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures, of our continuing curiosity about the real man behind Mickey.

Hart Preston/Time & Life Pictures via Getty Images

In the scene, Travers (Emma Thompson), who is prim, snappish, repressed, and almost supernaturally English, marches into the Disney executive suite demanding to see the genial, resolute Walt (Tom Hanks). She is upset about those blasted dancing penguins. Disney promised her no animation.

Disney’s secretaries try to deter Travers. You can’t go in there, they squeak, tottering in her wake. Mrs. Travers, please! It seems that something is happening in Walt’s inner sanctum that no living soul is supposed to witness.

Travers doesn’t care. She throws open the door anyway.

And there, at last, is Walt: daydreaming at his desk, a halo of family photographs on the wall behind him—and a cigarette (gasp!) in his hand. “I’m sorry,” Disney sighs as he puts out the butt. “I’d hate to set a bad example for the kids.”

It’s true that Walt Disney wasn’t perfect, the movie seems to be saying. After all, he smoked!

How you react to this “revelation” depends on what you believe about the fellow. Disney was fairly uncontroversial while he was still alive. But ever since he died in 1966 from (what else?) lung cancer, he’s been inspiring some very mixed feelings.

If you’re the sort Disneyphile who thinks Walt could no wrong—and there are lots of you out there on the Internet—you’re likely to see Saving Mr. Banks and say to yourself, Good for Walt Disney Pictures. They were under no obligation to show the old man warts and all—but they did. Bravo.

If, on the other hand, you’re a Disneyphobe—and there are lots of you out there on the Internet, too—you’re likely to have the altogether different reaction. Warts? you might say. What warts? When Travers barrels into that office, we should have gotten a glimpse of what Walt Disney was really like behind closed doors.

At which point you might recite the now-standard litany of “dark” Disney secrets. “Walt was a fascist.” “Walt was an anti-Semite.” “Walt was a racist.” And (if you’re the sort of Disneyphobe who dwells in the deepest, darkest corners of the web) “Walt was an Illuminati pedophile who liked to wear his mother’s dresses and lipstick and was obsessed with the human buttocks.”

Why do some of us need to believe that a figure like Walt Disney was a saint? Why do the rest of us need to believe that he was a dastardly, irredeemable creep? Why isn’t the truth about Disney good enough? It’s certainly much more interesting than either of these reductive caricatures—as the truth usually is.

The guy was hardly perfect. In 1941, Disney’s animators staged a strike that took four months—and the intervention of the federal government—to resolve. Walt was convinced that leftist agents had stirred up trouble on behalf of Screen Cartoonists Guild, and from then on he was a virulent anti-communist, even though he wasn’t particularly political. (He would go on to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness.)

In the 1940s, Disney’s fellow right-wingers convinced him to join an organization dedicated to ridding Hollywood of commies: the Orwellian-sounding Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Many of its members were known anti-Semites—so much so that Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, both anti-communists themselves, refused to join. Disney had no such qualms. He also approved a pair of cartoons, Three Little Pigs and The Opry House, that poked fun at Jewish stereotypes—the former by disguising the Big Bad Wolf as a hook-nosed peddler and the latter by having Mickey dress and dance like a hasid.

Disney’s cartoons could be racially insensitive as well. In Mickey’s Mellerdrammer, the iconic mouse appears in blackface. The original version of Fantasia featured a half-donkey, half-black centaurette servant named Sunflower; in the pop-up book, she eats a watermelon. And the full-length film Song of the South was controversial even in its own time; upon its release the NAACP said it “perpetuate[d] a dangerously glorified picture of slavery.” While casting the movie, Disney himself used the term “pickaninny,” and during a story meeting for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs he “referred to the dwarfs piling on top of each other as a ‘nigger pile,’” according to Neal Gabler’s exhaustively researched 2006 biography Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.

‘Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination’ by Neal Gabler. 912 pp. Vintage. $22. ()

Disney even tangoed with Nazi sympathizers on occasion. Animator Art Babbitt claimed to have seen his boss at a pre-World War II meeting of the German American Bund, an immigrant association with “a definite pro-Nazi slant.” and former Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl once said that when she was looking for work in Hollywood after Kristallnacht, “no studio head would even screen her movies except Walt Disney.” (According to Riefenstahl, Disney “told her he admired her work” but was worried about damaging his reputation “if it became known that he was considering hiring her.”) In The Wayward Canary, from 1932, Minnie Mouse seems to own a lighter with a swastika on it, for some reason.

And yet even though Disney seems to have uttered some racially insensitive remarks, associated with anti-Semites, and met a Nazi or two, he doesn’t seem to have been a racist, bigot, or fascist himself. As Gabler—Disney’s most objective biographer and the first reporter to gain unrestricted access to the Disney archives—has written, “there is no evidence whatsoever in the extensive Disney Archives of any anti-Semitic remarks or actions by Walt,” and while he did use “a variety of crude terms for blacks … there didn’t seem to be any malice in these words, just obtuseness.” Disney hired a Jewish left-wing screenwriter, Maurice Rapf, to draft a screenplay of Song of the South, and he later approached several African-American luminaries—actor Paul Robeson, actress Hattie McDaniel, NAACP secretary Walter White, Howard University scholar Alvin Locke—for input on the film.

According to Gabler, “most of what we hear about Disney as a racist or anti-Semite was circulated by animators who had struck in 1941.” When one of them, David Swift, left Disney Studios for Columbia Pictures that year, he complained that Walt’s last words to him had been “it’s where you belong, with those Jews.” But Swift returned in 1945 and later said he “owed everything” to Disney. When Swift left again in the 1950s, Disney reportedly told him “there is still a candle burning in the window if you ever want to come back.” (Swift went on to write and directPollyanna and The Parent Trap for Disney). And Walt “never, either publicly or privately, made disparaging remarks about blacks or asserted white superiority,” again according to Gabler’s research.

In short, Disney was a fairly typical product of his era: a man who probably absorbed some racial and ethnic biases as a child in the early years of the 20th century, then worked to overcome those biases as an adult in the 1950s and 1960s—sometimes with mixed results. (He eventually distanced himself from the Motion Picture Alliance and was named “1955 Man of the Year” by the B’nai B’rith chapter in Beverly Hills.) As Gabler puts it, “the truth about Walt Disney seems much more complicated and nuanced than either his enemies or supporters would have you believe.”

So why do we still have such a bipolar relationship with Walt? I suppose both impulses—to build him up and to knock him down—make a certain kind of sense. Instinctively, many of us want to trust the man who, perhaps more than any other, shaped us as children, and who will go on to shape our children and our children’s children. Because we welcomed him into our lives when we were innocent, we’d prefer to think that Walt Disney was as innocent as we were—that his motives were always pure, his intentions were always good, and that he always had our best interests at heart.

The flip side is that, by promoting himself as an exemplar of wholesomeness and decency and childlike wonder, Disney invited our scrutiny as well. Like a pedophile priest or closeted ant-gay politician—anyone, in short, who conveys one image in public and betrays it in private—Disney is a prime target for cynics who believe that any claim of righteousness inevitably masks some sort of secret depravity. He’s good hypocrite material.

But insisting that Disney was a hero, or a villain, makes him a little less human—and a lot less fascinating. (The same is true of any celebrity, really.) Saving Mr. Banks is a perfect example. In the film, P.L. Travers is eventually persuaded to relinquish the rights to her beloved Mary Poppins when Disney shows up at her house in London, dials up the sincerity, and demonstrates that he really understands Mary—and, by extension, Travers herself. A few minutes later, Travers is sitting in a darkened theater at the star-studded premiere, smiling and weeping and singing along to “Let’s Go Fly a Kite.”

It’s happy ending. It’s just not true. Travers did, in fact, cry throughout the premiere of Mary Poppins in 1964. But those weren’t tears of joy; they were tears of frustration. Unlike in Saving Mr. Banks, Travers was never won over by Disney, his minions, or the movie they made together. Even at the premiere she was still pleading with Walt to axe the animated penguins. Disney’s response was brief and barbed. “Pamela, the ship has sailed,” he said. Then he walked away. Travers “spent the rest of her life maligning what she saw as the maudlin mess her Mary Poppins had become on the big screen”, and when she agreed to a stage an adaptation in the 1990s, she insisted, right there in her last will and testament, that no Americans, and certainly no one who had been involved in that dreadful Disney film, would be allowed to participate.

The Walt Disney who could have that effect on P.L. Travers and still make a great children’s movie—that’s the real Walt Disney. And he’s an inspiring Walt Disney because he’s a human Walt Disney—neither deity nor demon.

Sadly, he’s nowhere to be found in Saving Mr. Banks. At the end of the day, the man behind Mickey was hardly some sort of bitter-tasting medicine. But he wasn’t a spoonful of sugar, either.

It Is Not About Gays Any More

Kundalini Majumder Tehelka.com

Photo: Shubhashish Dey

I was horrified as the lawyer of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) gave a sound bite on 11 December regarding being the original petitioner in the case that saw the Supreme Court of India declare sexual minorities as criminals once again. I still remember the day when the Delhi High Court had struck down Section 377 and decriminalised homosexuality. I was studying as an exchange student in Paris. In the country that gave the slogan ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’, I was proud to be an Indian. I was proud to be part of a country which gave equal rights to all minorities – religious, regional, caste, gender and then sexual. I was proud to be the inheritor of a Constitution that guaranteed all these rights. Being a constitutionalist by ideology, I proudly declared to my non-Indian friend – “We have the longest constitution in the world which protects everyone. It should be a bible for the free world.” How wrong I was.

Nearly five years later, I was shocked by my own Supreme Court. The guardian of the Indian Constitution, the father of so many landmark judgments that gave rights to so many minorities in this country – Muslims, Christians, Dalits, women – simply left it to the Parliament to legislate on this matter. Today I know how it feels to be a minority in your own country. Today I know how Dalits feel when upper caste men burn down their houses and declare them untouchable. Today I know how Muslims feel when Hindu fanatics declare them as non-Indians. Today I know how Ahmadis feel when a majority of their own community think that they do not have the right to live. Today I know how Christians in Odisha and Karnataka feel when their churches are vandalised. Today I know how it feels when young men and women are forced to follow diktats from khap panchayats. Today I know how it feels when Kashmiris are declared terrorists. Today I realise what it feels like when the same Kashmiris refuse to accept the pain of their fellow Kashmiri Pandits. Today I know how it feels when Manipuris are called foreigners on the streets of Delhi. Today I know what feels to be a lone woman walking on a deserted street. Today I am a minority, a criminal in my own country.

What hurts more is that the same people whose rights you have been advocating for years refuse to accept that you have rights too. Stuck in their medieval mental setup, they believe that the only minorities in the country are from their own religions, the only equality that should exist should be for their own communities, the only intolerance that exists in the country is from others. It amazes me that the same AIMPLB which talks about minority rights would be instrumental in denying sexual minorities their rights. Sections of other religious groups, including Hindu ones, have contributed to creating this human rights disaster. I find each and every argument put forward by these homophobic groups highly disturbing as there is a danger that in the future (There have been instances in past as well) the same arguments would be used against religious minorities. For instance, the argument of personal choice becomes laughable as religion might be a choice, but sexuality or gender isn’t.

The Supreme Court’s judgment regarding section 377 is not about the gaycommunity anymore. It has to be taken to the very beginning when our forefathers sat down to frame the constitution and decided the kind of India we should inherit. Like it or not, it is about the idea of India. Today, more than 65 years after independence, we are still stuck at the beginning. What kind of India do we want? The fight is still between two currents of thought – one that supports equality for all across caste, religion, sex and sexuality; and another that still believes in a country where certain sections of the society are more equal than others and some not equal enough.

Mars rover finds chemical ingredients for life to have thrived

Amina Khan Los Angeles Times

Billions of years ago, when early life was just taking hold on Earth, Mars was home to an ancient lake filled with the right chemical ingredients for life to thrive, scientists said Monday.

Drilling into dry rock, NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered signs that Gale Crater was once watery, perhaps ringed with ice and snow, and could potentially have hosted an entire Martian biosphere based on a type of microbe found in caves on Earth. Such primitive organisms, called chemolithoautotrophs, feed on chemicals found in rocks and make their own energy.

"Ancient Mars was more habitable than we imagined," said Caltech geologist John Grotzinger, lead scientist for the Curiosity mission. This wet, potentially Earth-like environment could have lasted for tens of millions of years, giving life a wide-open window to emerge.

The findings, described Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco and detailed among half a dozen papers published in the journal Science, impressed scientists who were not involved with the mission.

"They're really quite amazing," said Malcolm Walters, an astrobiologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia who helped find some of the earliest microfossils on Earth. "Now we have enormous detail on the chemistry of sediments [on Mars]. It's a great leap forward."

Still missing is evidence of the type of organic matter that forms the basis for most life on Earth. Curiosity's search will now focus on that — and thanks to some clever manipulation of the rover's inner laboratory, scientists now know exactly where to look for it.

"I think it's a critical turning point in the mission, to accept a much more significant challenge," Grotzinger said.

Mars' geologic history is inscribed in its layers of sedimentary rock, and Curiosity set out to read it after landing in Gale Crater in August 2012. The rover's primary goal was to search for life-friendly environments at Mt. Sharp, the 3-mile-high mound whose clay-rich layers could reveal details about Gale's environment over the eons.

But rather than head straight to Mt. Sharp, the rover took a months-long detour to an intriguing spot called Yellowknife Bay. There, Curiosity drilled into two mudstone rocks, named John Klein and Cumberland.

It was a risk to turn away from the planned mission, and it paid off, Grotzinger said.

The rocks, dated to roughly 3.6 billion years ago, have turned up a smorgasbord of elements needed for life, including carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus. They also show signs of sulfates, sulfides and other compounds that would have been fuel for chemolithoautotrophs.

What's more, the water that transformed these rocks had a neutral pH and would have been drinkable, unlike the highly acidic water detected by NASA's rover Opportunity at Meridiani Planum, on the other side of the planet.

Most likely, the lake would have been "suitable for quite a wide range of microorganisms as opposed to just extremophiles" that can survive salty, acidic environments, said David Catling, a planetary scientist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the new studies.

Curiosity has not yet found any organic carbon, the type that's combined with hydrogen and is a mainstay of life on Earth. That may be partly because its inner lab cooks soil samples to analyze the gases they form, and the test ends up destroying some crucial information in the process.

Life could certainly evolve and thrive without organic carbon. In a past watery environment, chemolithoautotrophs would have done just fine with the ingredients already found on Mars. That said, scientists do want to find organic carbon because it would indicate that the planet once had a wider range of life-friendly habitats.

But scientists feared that the surface had been exposed to cosmic radiation for so long — perhaps hundreds of millions of years — that any traces within reach of Curiosity's drill were long gone.

It was "a pretty serious concern," said Kenneth Farley, a Caltech geochemist and lead author of one of the Science papers.

So Farley directed Curiosity to analyze several soil samples and found telltale gases — such as helium-3, neon-21 and argon-36 — that helped pin down the age of the Martian surface. It was about 78 million years old, much younger than scientists had expected. That meant the amount of cosmic radiation exposure was also lower than they expected.

This was a relief, but how was it possible? The team noticed a small cliff, called a scarp, located some distance away. The geologists soon realized that the edge of the scarp had once extended to the top of the rocks they were sampling; over timeit eroded, leaving the rocks newly exposed to radiation.

And while they couldn't dig underneath the scarp, they could drill right by the base of it, where cosmic radiation exposure was still minimal.

If any organic carbon exists in Gale Crater, the foot of one of these scarps would be the best place to search for it, the scientists concluded.

The scientists plan to take this information and run with it — at least as fast as good judgment (and Curiosity's theoretical top speed of 1.57 inches per second on flat ground) will allow.

In about two months, Curiosity will take a detour to an outcrop called KMS-9, Grotzinger said Monday. Scientists are not sure whether it held a lake, but they hope to ride right up to a protected spot and deploy Curiosity's drill.

"You just never know what you'll encounter," said NASA scientist Douglas Ming, who led the organic carbon study. "One thing I've come to expect doing Mars research is to expect the unexpected."

amina.khan@latimes.com

Hustler or victim?

Gavin Arvizo’s New Beginning: Jackson Abuse Accuser Gets Married at 24

Dianne Diamond The Daily Beast

His abuse allegations brought the King of Pop to court. This week, he wed in front of the prosecutor, his mom—now named Janet Jackson—and a DJ who unknowingly spun an MJ tune.

Gavin Arvizo, who as a boy was at the center of the sensational 2005 Michael Jackson sex abuse trial, has just married his longtime sweetheart. The wedding took place at the bride’s suburban Atlanta Baptist Church on Saturday November 30.

Courtesy of Diane Dimond

The bride, the former Shelby Drake, is a teacher and the daughter of a minister. She spent her early years living in England where her parents were missionaries. Her father, Bill Drake, is an ordained minister and a well-known Christian musician and singer. Drake, along with Catholic priest, Kevin Hargaden, performed the wedding ceremony. Going forward, the Catholic Arvizo intends to worship in both churches.

One of the most touching moments of the ceremony occurred when the groom dipped to one knee and ceremoniously washed the feet of his bride. Minister Drake explained Gavin had been inspired by the bible story of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and wanted it included in the ceremony.

How many guests in the church knew about Gavin’s tempestuous background is unknown. How many realized the triumph that was unfolding before them? Gavin, 24, has lived almost a decade under a crushing cloud of hounding paparazzi and has endured torment from a worldwide legion of die-hard Jackson fanatics who have vowed to kill him, maim him, and stalk him for the rest of his life. These fans cannot forgive Gavin Arvizo for being the one person who had the courage to swear in open court that their idol had molested him. One of the more vicious fans recently discovered Gavin was about to get married to a preacher’s daughter and urged other fans to inundate the church with menacing phone calls questioning Gavin’s integrity.

Those who did know about Gavin’s past surely made note of several guests sitting on the groom’s side of the church. There was the former Santa Barbara Senior Assistant District Attorney, Ron Zonen, who prosecuted the Jackson case. Producer/comedienne Louise Palanker, who was a mentor and benefactor to the Arvizo family, was also there. She had been called as state’s witness during the trial. (Interestingly, Zonen and Palanker first met during the Jackson trial and married two years ago.)

There was Gavin’s mother, Janet, who many blamed for being such an erratic and emotional witness that she alone caused the prosecution to lose the case.  (She is now married to a man named Jackson—Army Lt. Colonel Jay Jackson—and her name is, ironically, Janet Jackson)

Gavin’s older sister Davellin was also at the wedding with her four-month-old daughter. She, along with her brother Star, also testified against Michael Jackson.

And, then there was me—the only journalist in the church. I had broken the first stories about the child molestation allegations against Jackson in 1993 and have stayed on the case ever since.  I covered Jackson’s arrest and criminal trial for Court TV.  Staying in touch with a newsmaker can sometimes lead to a wedding invitation.

Arvizo’s bombshell claims against the King of Pop surfaced in 2003 when he was 13 and still recovering from a rare and deadly cancer. In fact, it seems life was stacked against this kid from the very beginning.

As a youngster Gavin lived in a barely habitable one-room apartment in East Los Angeles with his two siblings and his parents. Poverty and domestic abuse was a way of life.

At the age of eight Gavin and Star were instructed by their father to walk out of a J.C. Penney store with clothing that wasn’t paid for. Out in the parking lot the boys watched in horror as their father was surrounded by security guards and wrestled to the pavement.  His mother, emerging from another store, soon joined in the melee and both parents were handcuffed and taken to the police station.

This episode would be mentioned time and time again during the Jackson trial. It was proof, according to Jackson’s defense attorney, that the Arvizos were not to be believed.

At just ten years old Gavin was diagnosed with a cancer that aggressively attacked his kidney and quickly spread to other organs. As he lay helpless in an L.A. hospital bed feigning sleep he heard caregivers advise his parents to start planning his funeral.   Following months of grueling treatments this plucky youngster pulled through.

While in the hospital the child’s plight came to Michael Jackson’s attention. The superstar sent a basket full of toys and good wishes.  When he was well enough to travel, the young Hispanic boy was invited to visit the singer’s Neverland Ranch. Knowing of their poverty, Jackson even sent a limousine to drive the entire family. What a wonderful respite for a recuperating cancer patient and his exhausted parents!

But once back home things got worse. More violence. Restraining orders. Divorce. Yet the limousines kept arriving and the sleepovers in Jackson’s master bedroom at Neverland continued.

The rest is history. Authorities in Santa Barbara, California, charged Jackson with child sexual abuse, giving intoxicating substances to a minor to facilitate child sexual abuse, conspiracy to cover up the crimes, and more.

During the trial Gavin, then 15, was vilified as an accomplished liar. Jackson’s lawyer, Tom Mesereau, called the teen and his family “grifters” and “thieves” and he repeatedly warned the jury that the Arvizos were only “in it for the money.”

The jury also heard about two other boys who said they too had been molested by Jackson. One was a maid’s son, the other the son of an L.A. dentist.  Both boys received generous payouts from Jackson in return for keeping quiet. The dentist’s family got nearly $20 million.

The defense called a group of young men to the witness stand, leading off with dancer/choreographer Wade Robson. Each testified they had often slept in Jackson’s bed when they were youngsters and nothing sexual had ever happened. Jackson was acquitted of all charges in June 2005.

In a stunning turnaround, Robson recently admitted he had perjured himself at trial. He is attempting to file suit against the Jackson estate claiming he suffered two nervous breakdowns because of the sexual abuse secret he harbored for so long. During a Today show interview Robson said of Jackson, “He sexually abused me from seven years old until 14. He performed sexual acts on me, and forced me to perform sexual acts on him.” Robson bluntly added, “Jackson was an amazing talent, but he was a pedophile.”

As the number of young men claiming they were victimized by Jackson continues to mount defense attorney Mesereau continues to publicly vilify Gavin as a “thief” and a dishonest character. Mesereau maintains Arvizo’s allegations were money-driven. 

Gavin steadfastly refuses to speak up for himself, believing a man’s actions speak for themselves. The only time he talks about his past, I’ve learned, is when he is applying for a job—he knows potential employers will Google his name. So, as the interview comes to a close Gavin says, “There is something I’d like to tell you,” and he reveals pertinent information about the time his life collided with Michael Jackson’s.

Here are some facts about this young man.

Gavin worked two and three jobs at a time (in restaurants and landscaping) to put himself though community college. His perseverance helped him win partial scholarships to attend Emory University. He double-majored in history and philosophy, made the honor roll, participated in moot court, was president of the student union and he still found time to volunteer at his church.

Gavin doesn’t drink, use tobacco, drugs or foul language. He is currently working as a paralegal in a law firm, preparing to take the L-SAT test and is applying to more than a dozen law schools.  His dream is to go to Harvard.

Most telling about the character of Gavin Arvizo?  He has never accepted any of the outstanding six-figure offers to sell his story.  Newspapers and television shows continually dangle tempting deals that would more than pay off his mounting tuition costs, but Gavin is adamant that the passage of time will best tell his story.  He says he knows the truth and believes it will be revealed to the doubters of the world when the time is right.

As I sat in church and watched this resilient young man joyfully take a wife, I thought back to all his trials and tribulations.  Poverty, violence, near fatal cancer, his punishing and unsatisfying ride through the justice system. Amazing.

At the reception the unknowing DJ played “The Way You Make Me Feel,” by Michael Jackson. I caught Gavin’s eye as he sat up on the dais with his new bride. He just smiled, grandly shrugged his shoulders and went back to living his life as anonymously as possible.

$15 Wage in Fast Food Stirs Debate on Effects

By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

As fast-food workers plan yet another round of one-day strikes on Thursday in cities around the country, labor leaders, economists and industry officials continue to debate the potential effects of raising wages at companies that often assert that such increases would raise consumer prices and shrink the work force.

Organizers of the fast-food workers’ nascent movement are clamoring for a $15 an hour wage, which would mean a 67 percent pay increase in an industry where wages average around $9 an hour.

Restaurant industry officials have balked at so high a wage, saying it would sharply raise fast-food prices and reduce employment, in part by fueling automation of some jobs. They call the demand of $15 an hour a nonstarter as far as initiating negotiations.

“When you start by insisting on $15 an hour, that’s not conducive to substantive dialogue,” said Scott DeFife, an executive vice president with the National Restaurant Association.

But Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union, which has spent several million dollars to underwrite the fast-food strikes around the country that began a year ago, said it was only a matter of time before the worker protests became so great that McDonald’s, Burger King and other companies agreed to negotiate.

“I think there’s growing recognition that a nerve has been touched,” Ms. Henry said. “The industry had better start to take this seriously, because this isn’t going to blow over.”

But even experts who support some increase worry that a raise to $15 an hour would have profound effects on the industry. Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, said an increase in pay to $15 would push up fast-food prices by nearly 20 percent. With the industry estimating that one-third of its costs go to labor, he said a $15 wage would mean wage increases averaging around 60 percent, raising the cost of a $3 hamburger to $3.50 or $3.60.

Ken Jacobs, chairman of the University of California, Berkeley, Center for Labor Research and Education, differed slightly on the effects, saying a $15 wage would cause a somewhat lesser price increase, perhaps 10 percent, and adding that higher pay would save restaurants some money by leading to less turnover and higher productivity per worker. In addition, he said, franchisees might swallow some of the increases instead of totally offsetting them with higher prices.

Stephen J. Caldeira, president of the International Franchise Association, estimated that the demand for $15 wages would lead to a 25 percent to 50 percent increase in fast-food prices. “It would definitely hurt the consumer,” he said. “Increasing the cost of labor would lead to higher prices for the consumer, lower foot traffic and sales for franchise owners and ultimately lost entry-level jobs.”

Within academia, there has been a fierce debate about how much increases in the minimum wage affect employment.

Professor Dube has been a leading voice in arguing that a modestly higher minimum wage does not harm employment levels. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that an increase as steep as the rise to $15 could hurt employment.

“Would I be concerned about possible job losses if there were a $15 minimum wage in the restaurant industry, yes, I’d be concerned,” he said. “There are concerns that it might lead to the substitution of automation for workers.”

Several fast-food chains have already cut labor costs by allowing self-service for soft drinks. And some restaurants have begun replacing counter workers with computer screens that greet customers and ask them to tap in their orders, which are relayed to the cooks.

David Neumark, an economics professor at University of California, Irvine, who has studied minimum wage increases in depth, estimated that raising fast-food pay to $15 would result in a 5 percent or 6 percent reduction in employment. He and Professor Dube said they were reluctant to speculate about the effects of a $15 wage because while many studies have been done about the effects of a 50 cent or $1 increase in the minimum wage, hardly any have been done about the effects of a sharp jump to the $15 area.

Still, Professor Neumark said, “Anyone who thinks sensibly about this should be concerned that $15 would have a big effect on employment.”

He said one advantage of a $15 wage was that it would save the government money by reducing workers’ reliance on food stamps and other programs. A study by the University of California, Berkeley, found that fast-food workers receive nearly $7 billion a year in public assistance. 

Thursday’s one-day strikes are planned for 100 cities, and will include Boston, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. The organizers say that there will be protest activities in an additional 100 cities and that thousands of fast-food workers will walk out. Industry officials insist that few workers will go on strike and that most of the protesters will be union or community activists.

Some fast-food workers who participated in a one-day strike in August say that they dream of getting a raise to $15, but would be happy to receive $12 or $13.

For the movement’s strategists, the big question is how to achieve their $15 goal. One option being debated is to push for referendums or city council measures that require restaurants and retailers to pay at least $15 an hour — similar to the recently approved referendum in SeaTac, Wash., requiring that workers at the international airport there be paid at least $15 an hour.

Ms. Henry, the service employees’ president, said the movement hoped to persuade McDonald’s and other companies to require franchisees to pay $15 an hour. To help the franchisees afford that, she said, the chains might agree to have their franchises pay them lower fees.

But Mr. Caldeira bridled at requiring a $15 wage. “It would put folks out of business,” he said.

Ms. Henry responded: “In our 90-year history as a union, I’ve never seen a time when workers got a wage increase that put people out of business. It’s in our interest to make sure we secure our employment, not to reduce employment.”

In some ways, the fast-food strikes parallel the Black Friday protests urging Walmart to pay its workers more. Some economists maintain that giving raises to low-paid fast-food and retail workers would stimulate the underperforming economy by increasing their ability to spend. But other economists counter that the stimulus would be negated when the raises forced restaurants and retailers to raise prices, subtracting from other consumers’ spending power.

“The real problem with the economy is there aren’t enough people working,” said David French, a senior vice president at the National Retail Federation. “There’s been a lot of growth of jobs in the retail and service sector. It’s been one of the bright spots. Why then should the policy response be to create fewer jobs? That’s a bizarre remedy to a crushing problem.”

 

 

New Strides in Spaying and Neutering

By DOUGLAS QUENQUA NY TIMES

Todd Bruce, a herd manager on a farm in Oregon City, Ore., had long resisted neutering his 5-year-old Australian cattle dog, Cody, for fear of losing the extra set (or two) of legs in the field.

“I just wanted him to maintain his working abilities,” said Mr. Bruce, 28. “I’ve had other dogs neutered that have had a lot of weight gain, and their bodies go through huge changes, and I didn’t want that to happen with my dog this time.”

Then Mr. Bruce’s sister, a veterinary student, told him about Zeuterin, a drug that sterilizes male dogs without the removal of the testicles, thus preserving some testosterone production. In June, Mr. Bruce volunteered Cody for the procedure, performed by veterinarians as part of a training program at a clinic in Portland. The next day, Cody was back at work, enthusiastically rounding up livestock.

“It was quick, painless and super uninvasive,” Mr. Bruce said. “He’s mellowed out a bit, but I haven’t had the problems I had before.”

The 40-year movement to convince Americans that they should spay or neuter their pets has been nothing short of a triumph: 83 percent of owned dogs and 91 percent of owned cats are now spayed or neutered in the United States, compared with only about 10 percent in the 1970s. But surgically removing the reproductive organs of every pet is still time-consuming for veterinarians, unpopular among a subset of pet owners and ethically troubling to animal welfare advocates.

It is also an impractical solution to sterilizing stray animals, which constitute the bulk of America’s nuisance animal problem. “Surgery is definitely a bottleneck for humane animal control,” said Dr. Julie K. Levy, a veterinarian at the University of Florida who has researched the problem.

Now, a handful of nonsurgical sterilization treatments are emerging — led by Zeuterin, which could be commercially available in the United States by the end of this year — that could reduce or even eliminate the need for traditional neutering.

“The truth is, we may have maximized what we can do with surgical spay-neuter,” said Joyce Briggs, the president of the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs, a group advocating alternative approaches. “Nonsurgical sterilants could be a game-changer for animal welfare across the world.”

The problem, she added, is persuading enough veterinarians, pet owners and pharmaceutical companies to embrace the new technology.

The remedy nearest to market is Zeuterin, a mix of zinc gluconate and arginine that is injected directly into a dog’s testicles, killing the sperm and then shutting down the passageway through which it would normally travel. The results are permanent, and the process takes only a few hours, poses little risk compared with surgery and works in 99.6 percent of dogs, according to research trials.

“I think it’s an outstanding product,” said Dr. Levy, who used the drug nearly a decade ago to sterilize wild dogs in the Galápagos. She is eager for Americans to see what Zeuterin can accomplish.

“There’s just a communication issue,” she added.

The drug now called Zeuterin has been on the market before and failed. Introduced as Neutersol in 2003, the drug, which needs to be injected very precisely and delicately, was sold to veterinarians without much training or support. As a result, too many dogs had adverse reactions (inflamed testicles, mostly), and the drug earned a bad reputation. By 2005, both it and the company behind it had disappeared.

“This product isn’t a product,” said Joe Tosini, the founder and chief executive of Ark Sciences, which bought the rights to the drug and renamed it. “It’s really a procedure that has to be taught.” The company is waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to approve its manufacturing facilities so it can sell the drug in the United States. Approval may come as early as this month.

Mr. Tosini, a former minister who was an original investor in Neutersol, said Ark Sciences had learned from the mistakes of its predecessor. To provide Zeuterin, veterinarians will have to complete a five-hour course that includes injecting the drug into several dogs.

The idea that surgical castration causes weight gain or even behavioral changes in dogs is still a matter of debate among veterinarians. Nonetheless, the procedure remains unpopular among some pet owners who rely on their dogs for hunting, sports or protection, who fear that castration could affect their pets’ performance.

Some owners simply cannot afford the procedure, which can cost upward of $400 depending on the region (Ark Sciences plans to make Zeuterin available at clinics for as little as $15). Other owners, particularly those with male dogs, make a conscious choice not to sterilize.

“In certain cultures, and Latin cultures are among them, castration is really viewed as very emasculating, and I think people identify with their dogs,” Dr. Levy said.

Few other companies have shown much enthusiasm for walking the long, expensive regulatory path required to get approval for nonsurgical sterilization drugs — a process that takes five to seven years and can cost more than $10 million.

The perception, some researchers say, is that surgical spaying and neutering are now just too deeply ingrained in veterinary practices.

“What I often hear from the big animal health company executives is, ‘Well, vets just like to spay and neuter dogs and cats, so there’s no market for this,’ ” said Dr. Linda Rhodes, the chief scientific officer of Aratana Therapeutics, a company that licenses the rights to use drugs developed for humans in animals.

Although most veterinarians lose money on spaying and neutering, they prefer to stick with the technique they know rather than try something they consider experimental, said Dr. Mark Russak, the immediate past president of the American Animal Hospital Association. “We wonder, ‘What’s going to happen in 10 years? Are these dogs going to get cancer?’ We’d rather let the guy up the street try it first.”

Elsewhere, nonsurgical sterilizers are starting to catch on. In recent years, castration-resistant owners in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe have been turning to Suprelorin, an implant that sterilizes male dogs for six or 12 months by neutralizing the production of reproductive hormones.

Though an implant that must regularly be replaced like Suprelorin is not practical for strays, a vaccine known as GonaCon and developed by the Department of Agriculture to sterilize deer and wild horses may be a viable alternative, Dr. Levy said. Studies have shown that a single injection of GonaCon will sterilize most cats and dogs for up to four years — about the life span of a stray animal. And because it blocks reproductive hormones, GonaCon eliminates many of the nuisance behaviors, like fighting and spraying, associated with strays.

But GonaCon would need to be approved by the F.D.A. for use in dogs and cats, and there is hardly enough money to be made in treating stray animals to justify that cost for a for-profit company.

“We’re kind of looking at a charity population,” Dr. Levy said. “It’s like developing drugs to treat disease that only occur in impoverished countries.” One charitable organization, The Found Animals Foundation, is offering a $25 million award to the inventor of the first single-shot, nonsurgical sterilant that works in both dogs and cats. But no one has been able to claim the prize.

With a successful Zeuterin debut, other companies might choose to invest in similar treatments. But for now Ark Sciences, aware of the resistance to change, is focusing its marketing efforts on early adopters, veterinarians like Dr. Levy who already know the virtues of nonsurgical sterilants.

For many of them, the switch to a new neutering strategy will be like “giving an airplane to people who are used to traveling by covered wagon,” Mr. Tosini said.

The Talk of the Town; from The New Yorker

Thinking about the minimum wage 

COMMENT

Higher Calling

In 2005, Alaska Airlines fired nearly five hundred union baggage handlers in Seattle and replaced them with contractors. The old workers earned about thirteen dollars an hour; the new ones made around nine. The restructuring was a common episode in America’s recent experience of inequality. In the decade after 2000, Seattle’s median household income rose by a third, lifted by the stock-vested, Tumi-toting travellers of its tech economy. But at the bottom of the wage scale earnings flattened.

Sea-Tac, the airport serving the Seattle-Tacoma area, lies within SeaTac, a city flecked by poverty. Its population of twenty-seven thousand includes Latino, Somali, and South Asian immigrants. Earlier this year, residents, aided by outside labor organizers, put forward a ballot initiative, Proposition 1, to raise the local minimum wage for some airport and hotel workers, including baggage handlers. The reformers did not aim incrementally: they proposed fifteen dollars an hour, which would be the highest minimum wage in the country, by almost fifty per cent. A ballot initiative so audacious would normally have little chance of becoming law, but Proposition 1 polled well, and by the summer it had turned SeaTac into a carnival of electoral competition. Business groups and labor activists spent almost two million dollars on television ads, mailings, and door knocking—about three hundred dollars per eventual voter. (Alaska Airlines wrote the biggest check for the no side.) On November 5th, SeaTac-ians spoke: yes, by a margin of just seventy-seven votes, out of six thousand cast. A reversal after a recount is still possible.

In any event, SeaTac has proved that the sources of surprise in American politics since the Great Recession are not limited to Tea Party rabble-rousing. The grassroots left, which seemed scattered and demoralized after the Occupy movement fizzled, has revived itself this year—with help from union money and professional canvassers—by rallying voters around the argument that anyone who works full time ought not to be at risk of poverty. Earlier this year, fast-food workers nationwide went on strike for higher pay. This holiday season, activists have been excoriating WalMart because one of its stores organized a charitable food drive for its own low-paid employees. McDonald’s was taken to task for suggesting, on a company Web site, that strapped employees could raise cash for presents by selling belongings on eBay.

The movement has momentum because most Americans believe that the federal minimum wage—seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour, the same as it was in 2009—is too low. A family of four dependent on a single earner at that level—making fifteen thousand dollars a year—is living far below the federal poverty line. In January, President Obama called for raising the federal minimum to nine dollars an hour, and, more recently, he endorsed a target of ten dollars. Yet Congress has failed to act: a bill is finally heading for the Senate this month, but intractable Republican opposition in the House has made passage of any legislation in the short term highly unlikely. The gridlock has prompted local wage campaigns such as the one in SeaTac.

Twenty-one states and more than a hundred counties and cities have enacted laws that set minimums above the federal one. Before SeaTac’s vote, an Indian reservation in California had the highest local minimum in the country, of ten dollars and sixty cents. San Francisco’s is just a nickel less. But political support for higher wages extends well beyond Left Coast enclaves. According to a Gallup poll taken earlier this year, a majority of Republicans favor a minimum wage of nine dollars. That reflects a truth beyond ideology: life on fifteen thousand a year is barely plausible anymore, even in the low-cost rural areas of the Deep South and the Midwest. National Republican leaders are out of touch with the electorate on this as on much else, and they are too wary of Tea Party dissent to challenge their party’s current orthodoxies of fiscal austerity and free-market purity. In New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie, a presumed 2016 Presidential contender, publicly denounced a ballot measure to raise his state’s minimum to eight dollars and twenty-five cents and to guarantee annual increases linked to inflation. The proposal passed last month anyway, backed by a sixty-one-per-cent majority.

For decades, business owners have resisted higher minimum wages by arguing that they destroy jobs, particularly for young people. At some theoretical level, high minimum wages will distort job creation, but the best empirical evidence from the past decade is aligned with common sense: a minimum wage drawn somewhat above the poverty line helps those who work full time to live decently, without having a significant impact on other job seekers or on total employment. (For example, a study of pairs of neighboring counties with differing minimum pay found that higher wages had no adverse effect on restaurant jobs.) Even so, a federal minimum wage of ten dollars or more will not solve inequality. It will not stop runaway executive pay or alter the winner-take-all forces at work in the global economy. Yet it will bring millions of Americans closer to the levels of economic security and disposable income that they knew before the housing bubble burst.

Now ’tis the season to be hired for temporary low-wage jobs: about half a million people will get work packing Amazon boxes, tending department-store perfume counters, and restocking toy-store shelves to earn and spend their way through the holidays. For those who are paid minimum wage, the outlook remains desultory. Bloomberg News, noting that spendable incomes at the bottom of the pay scale have hardly risen for the fourth consecutive year, reported that “low-income Americans will again have a less-merry season than affluent consumers, who are more flush thanks in part to surging stock markets.”

In SeaTac, at least, there is cheer. The higher-wage campaign showed some of the Occupy movement’s exuberant spirit, but it added a poll-tested goal and the savvy of political professionals. It was politics of a familiar type, yet the bold demands discomfited some of the Northwestern establishment. The Seattle Times urged SeaTac-ians to vote no; the editorial board worried that Proposition 1 was “a labor contract written by social activists,” as if that were a departure from history. The case for a strong minimum wage has always been, in part, civic and moral. Minimum wages do not create new “entitlement” programs or otherwise enjoin the country’s sterile debates about the value of government. They are designed to insure that the dignity of work includes true economic independence for all who embrace it.

—Steve Coll

As Oil Floods Plains Towns, Crime Pours In

Jack Healey NYTimes

SIDNEY, Mont. — One cold morning last year, a math teacher jogging through her hometown in eastern Montana was abducted, strangled and buried in a shallow grave. Charged in her death were two drifters from Colorado, drawn to the region by the allure of easy money in the oil fields.

One hundred fifty miles away, in a bustling oil town in North Dakota, a 30-year-old man disappeared one afternoon from the street where he had been putting in water and sewer pipes, leaving behind a lunchbox with his paycheck inside and a family grasping for answers. After months of searching, his mother said she now believes her son is gone, buried somewhere on the high plain.

Stories like these, once rare, have become as common as drilling rigs in rural towns at the heart of one of the nation’s richest oil booms. Crime has soared as thousands of workers and rivers of cash have flowed into towns, straining police departments and shattering residents’ sense of safety.

“It just feels like the modern-day Wild West,” said Sgt. Kylan Klauzer, an investigator in Dickinson, in western North Dakota. The Dickinson police handled 41 violent crimes last year, up from seven only five years ago.

To the police and residents, the violence shows how a modern-day gold rush is transforming the rolling plains and farm towns where people once fretted about a population drain. Today, four-story chain hotels are rising, and small apartments rent for $2,000 a month. Two-lane roads are jammed with tractor-trailers. Fast-food restaurants offer $300 signing bonuses for new employees, and jobs as gas station attendants can pay $50,000 a year. Workers flush with cash are snapping up A.T.V.s, and hotel menus offer crab and artichoke dip and bacon-wrapped dates.

Amid all of that new money, reports of assault and theft have doubled or even tripled, and the police say they are rushing from call to call, grappling with everything from bar brawls and shoplifting to kidnappings and attempted murders. Traffic stops for drunken or reckless driving have skyrocketed; local jails are spilling over with drug suspects.

Last year, a study by officials in Montana and North Dakota found that crime had risen by 32 percent since 2005 in communities at the center of the boom. In Watford City, N.D., where mile-long chains of tractor-trailers stack up at the town’s main traffic light, arrests increased 565 percent during that time. In Roosevelt County in Montana, arrests were up 855 percent, and the sheriff, Freedom Crawford, said his jail was so full that he was ticketing and releasing offenders for minor crimes like disorderly conduct.

“I don’t have nowhere to put them,” Sheriff Crawford said.

Officials say that most of the new arrivals are hard workers who are simply looking for better lives, and that much of the increase in crime has resulted from population growth: Waves of new residents inevitably mean more traffic crashes and calls to 911.

Police and sheriff’s departments are responding by hiring more officers, in part with new tax revenue but often not fast enough to keep pace with their booming populations. In Dickinson, for example, the population has surged to an estimated 25,000 from 16,000 in 2000, with new hotels, condominiums and extended-stay inns being built every week. The city’s police department has 38 officers, but Sergeant Klauzer said it would need to add 12 more to keep up with the growth. Each detective’s caseload has doubled.

Once a month, Sergeant Klauzer receives a phone call from a mother looking for news about her son, Eric Haider, the 30-year-old pipe layer who vanished in May 2012, one of several disappearances in the region. Mr. Haider hated the tiring three-hour commute to his job in Dickinson, but the town’s breakneck growth meant steady work and money to support his daughter, said his mother, Maryellen Suchan.

The family has made buttons and printed fliers with Mr. Haider’s brown-bearded face, and has silk-screened T-shirts with the words “Have You Seen My Son?” The police dug up the streets and searched with dogs. As hopes dimmed, Mr. Haider’s family began asking hunters and oil workers to look out for shallow graves. Not a trace has been found.

“It’s a living nightmare,” Ms. Suchan said. “There isn’t a single day that we don’t think of him, talk of him. I don’t have an end.”

Page 2 of 2

Federal prosecutors say the boom’s riches have attracted opportunists and criminals. Mexican cartels and regional methamphetamine and heroin traffickers have proliferated, hoping to tap the same sources of wealth that have turned farmers into millionaires and shaved unemployment rates to as low as 0.7 percent.

“It’s following the money,” said Michael W. Cotter, the United States attorney for Montana. “I hate to call the cartels entrepreneurs, but they’re in the business to make money. There’s a lot of money flying around that part of Montana and North Dakota.”

Over the last year, the police and prosecutors in North Dakota, Montana and Canada have tried to crack down on drug traffickers and the most violent offenders systematically with an effort they call Project Safe Bakken, named for the rich oil formation under the plains. The F.B.I. is adding a handful of agents to the region. Federal officials have charged more than two dozen people they say were trafficking drugs into the area.

As more families arrive, domestic-violence shelters are also filling up, often with similar stories of troubled migrations. Families arrived hoping for $20-an-hour jobs, but discovered that modest homes rent for $2,000 and that things like gasoline and dinner cost more. The stresses of life piled up. Alcohol and drugs added to the problem. Old patterns of domestic abuse crossed state lines.

In Dickinson, mothers in the shelter sleep on couches with their children. In Williston, the small Family Crisis Shelter has added four sets of bunk beds and turned its living room into a bedroom to accommodate more people. The executive director, Lana Bonnet, said that 83 percent of her clients were from out of town, and that many had sought refuge after being choked, threatened with a gun or beaten until bones broke or teeth fell out.

While the raw numbers of murders and rapes remain low, every few months seem to bring an act of violence that flares like a gas flame on the dark prairie, shaking a community and underscoring how much life here is changing.

In Dickinson, it was the rape of an 83-year-old woman, who the police say was attacked inside her home by a 24-year-old man who had come to town looking for work. In Culbertson, Mont., it was a man who was beaten with brass knuckles by a group of drug dealers and left for dead along the side of a road. In Sidney, it was the murder in January 2012 of Sherry Arnold, the 43-year-old schoolteacher abducted during her Sunday morning jog.

Hundreds of people searched for Ms. Arnold in frozen fields, neighborhoods and ditches until her body was found in North Dakota, near a line of trees planted as a windbreak by farmers. After receiving a tip, the police arrested two men, Lester Van Waters Jr. and Michael Spell. Mr. Van Waters has pleaded guilty, and Mr. Spell is expected to go on trial in January. His lawyer has said Mr. Spell is mentally disabled.

After Ms. Arnold’s killing, there was a run on pepper spray and stun guns in Sidney, and the town offered martial arts classes to women. Mayor Bret Smelser, who attended the same Lutheran church that Ms. Arnold did, said his wife had bought a small handgun to help her feel safer when he was away.

“Nobody knew anybody anymore,” he said. “We were a community that never locked our doors. That’s all changed.”