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Was Russia’s decision to cut off natural gas exports a mistake?

Last week Russia announced it would cut off natural gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria after both countries refused to comply with its request to perform export payments in rubles, Russia’s national currency. It is the latest maneuver off the battlefield to hit back against Western efforts to weaken the country even as its armed forces <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/world/2022/04/30/russian-troops-slowed-down-ukrainian-defense-donbas-region/9598036002/">continue to be slowed</a> by Ukrainian troops in the embattled eastern territory of Donbas.
Russia has largely been able to maintain diplomatic relationships in the Asia-Pacific region with China and India, its biggest allies, despite Western sanctions. But Its decision to cut off energy exports has strengthened Europe’s alliance with the US, particularly as Europe continues deliberations over added sanctions against Russia.
The Kremlin <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/04/28/1095113387/what-russia-cutting-off-energy-to-poland-and-bulgaria-means-for-the-world">defended</a> the move as a necessary measure to protect Russia’s financial reserves following heavy sanctions.
“They blocked our accounts, or — to put in Russian — they ‘stole’ a significant portion of our reserves,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told the media during a press call.
Europe imports a third of its oil and gas from Russia but that has not deterred it from using sanctions as a tool to stop the country’s aggression in Ukraine. The European Union has already put out five rounds of economic sanctions against Russia and is expected to introduce more penalties in the upcoming weeks.
Russia’s decision to cut off gas exports to Poland and Bulgaria — the latter of which had remained undecided in its stance regarding Russia up until the recent ban — is a risky move meant to act as a warning to other European countries. But some experts have written off the move as a miscalculation.
According to Yoshiko Herrera, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison specializing in Eurasian politics, it may have the opposite intended effect.
“One of the key arguments for people who are for the additional energy sanctions is to say, Russia is an untrustworthy partner, that they’re using energy as a political tool,” said Herrera. “So by cutting off gas to Poland and Bulgaria, they’re kind of making the case that they are an unreliable partner.”
Although no formal proposals have been put forth, Bloomberg <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-30/eu-to-propose-phasing-out-russian-oil-by-the-end-of-the-year">reports</a> the EU will likely introduce a ban on Russian oil by the end of the year, gradually limiting its imports until then.
“Full European energy sanctions would really hurt [Russia’s] economy and hurt their ability to wage war because they will run out of money. So that, I think, is something Russia has to be worried about,” Herrera said. “Their continued bad behavior in Ukraine, the atrocities are what is I think pushing Europe to quite radically change positions on things, on energy.”
<h3>Russia has maintained allies since its invasion of Ukraine</h3>
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1651440247_4604_920931" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23430957,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/FVo4EUmAaKHDbpnUYGODOD-hRR0=/0x0:6000x4000/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/ihseCJW0zaPJyBRNiFBI7bEDB94=/0x0:6000x4000/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/r06oJq8OlsrDAR0m0Vh_ymVOC9A=/0x0:6000x4000/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XPoduGoSWZrc1j-k7ppneO6o6No=/0x0:6000x4000/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9uZTtmC44u8Yvm4m61_ZLVHqrPg=/0x0:6000x4000/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/H4Jn03cMUBFjBRwtsEgFaufNl0w=/0x0:6000x4000/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/El7i1PKN9BPrzQhIegjefwsq3Y4=/0x0:6000x4000/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/BPVx0MpcNMlAkrJYzO5cOCDJmoQ=/0x0:6000x4000/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9mEK-RJVi7M41h3B5_C9bVToXSo=/0x0:6000x4000/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="Large black screens hovering above crowds show white text with the UN vote to remove Russia from Human Rights Council." data-upload-width="6000" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/G7sWHX1cg2ASXRI7tP8gDQ3a3wg=/0x0:6000x4000/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hzv4PTe4RYc_7cPxstNITKqCWf8=/0x0:6000x4000/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/mhNiGIJ4anjZAqfGRYUgGXQlcQ0=/0x0:6000x4000/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vxbfqbHEgo8H8lgM7dTr122h8WA=/0x0:6000x4000/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6y8rHjimauUyaXAJ_FbmYz0-C60=/0x0:6000x4000/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CO2gPOwZM2x-EQGq7TeCLauk3Qo=/0x0:6000x4000/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XiP0-zfZAYXx8euDINH2TQ90JqI=/0x0:6000x4000/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/cozEdWecbSGM6W-NnZzogkg0VKY=/0x0:6000x4000/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/X5cl8GOPiDNgs-R9X_tnVb-5T3A=/0x0:6000x4000/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/z3SDiIH-iU5zUhBuvlFrMVXOLM0=/0x0:6000x4000/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:6000x4000):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23430957/1239809346.jpg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>Screens show passage of the UN’s resolution to remove Russia from the UN Human Rights Council following a vote by the General Assembly on April 7, 2022.</figcaption>
<cite>Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images</cite></figure>
Despite Western powers’ broad condemnation of and efforts to isolate Russia, the country has managed to maintain allies. In April, the UN General Assembly voted on a resolution to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council over its invasion of Ukraine. The resolution succeeded after it <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/04/1115782">received</a> a two-thirds majority of votes from member states with 93 nations voting in favor of Russia’s suspension from the body. But 24 of the body’s members voted against the action while 58 members abstained from the vote altogether.
Results of the UN vote signify the complexities of real-world diplomacy even in the face of war. Countries in Africa, South America, and Asia have increasingly sought to resist taking sides as the Russia-Ukraine war threatens to shape the world into political factions. But the West’s waning influence in other parts of the globe, combined with economic and political interests at stake, has resulted in many nations <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/world/asia/cold-war-ukraine.html">opting to maintain their independence</a> when it comes to relations with Russia.
In Asia, where growing vigilance over China’s increasing influence is shared across borders, nations in the southeast and the south of the continent have <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-response-asia-us-russia-china-rcna17976">expressed</a> their intentions to remain on good terms with Russia in spite of the situation with Ukraine. Among Russia’s most loyal allies is India, with whom it has maintained a strong alliance since the Soviet Union’s backing of India during the 1971 war with Pakistan.
Another factor behind their continued friendship is India’s <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6c52b083-d38a-40c9-9e23-2747c913065f">reliance</a> on Russia as a military arms supplier — from the 1950s to now the country has received <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/6c52b083-d38a-40c9-9e23-2747c913065f">an estimated 65 percent</a> of firearms exports from the Soviet Union or Russia, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. India’s border disputes in the Himalayas with China, which triggered a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/18/world/asia/china-india-border-conflict.html">bloody clash</a> in 2020, is another motivating factor for India as Russia has functioned as an important mediator in the conflict with China.
The close ties between India and Russia pose challenges for Western powers since India is viewed as a <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/russia-and-the-west-battle-to-get-china-and-india-on-side-in-the-war.html">vital partner</a> in restricting Russian influence in the region.
China, another key Russian ally, has refrained from condemning Russia outright, instead asking for the warring countries to reach a peaceful resolution. In a March virtual meeting with France and Germany, President Xi Jinping <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/9/chinas-xi-beijing-supports-peace-talks-between-russia-ukraine">called</a> for “maximum restraint” on the issue and expressed concerns over the broader impact of sanctions on Russia. But some, like Herrera, doubt how far China will continue to toe the line if the situation worsens.
“China has not said they would not abide by the sanctions and they are so far going along with the sanctions against Russia,” Herrera said. A potential turning point, she said, could be Europe’s next sanctions, particularly any secondary sanctions it puts out, which will be “a big crossroads for China to decide whether to participate with those.”
But its ties with Russia could still end up serving China economically. President Vladimir Putin has <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/60571253">stated</a> Russia will “redirect” its energy exports to “rapidly growing markets” elsewhere to help buttress against sanctions, perhaps an effort to maintain support from its key ally.
<h3>Russian forces continue to face military hurdles in Ukraine</h3>
After two months of conflict, tensions on the war front between Russia and Ukraine have shown no signs of de-escalating. Russian armed forces have shifted focus in recent weeks to <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-kyiv-police-find-bound-men-in-bucha-as-russia-continues-eastern-assault-as-it-happened/a-61643081">take control of eastern Ukraine</a>, referred to as the Donbas territory, where fighting between Ukraine troops and Russia-backed separatists had been ongoing since 2014.
Russia has also continued its advance on Kyiv, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/29/russia-carries-out-airstrike-on-kyiv-during-un-chief-visit-ukraine-antonio-guterres">launching an airstrike</a> on the capital city last week during a diplomatic visit by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The attack drew wide condemnation as an unnecessary act of aggression by Russian forces.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who met with Guterres during his capital visit, accused Russia of deliberately trying to humiliate the UN.
“It says a lot about Russia’s true attitude to global institutions, about the efforts of the Russian leadership to humiliate the UN and everything that the organization represents. It requires a strong response,” Zelenskyy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/29/russia-carries-out-airstrike-on-kyiv-during-un-chief-visit-ukraine-antonio-guterres">stated</a> in a public address following the airstrike.
Former UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch-Brown said the international community “will recognize they cannot have their UN secretary-general treated in this disrespectful, casual and frankly, dangerous way, by Putin.”
As the conflict shows no signs of relenting, last week US President Joe Biden <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/politics/biden-ukraine-congress/index.html">asked</a> Congress to send another $33 billion in military aid to support Ukraine’s military defenses. Biden’s proposal, which includes strategies to potentially use seized funds from Russian oligarchs to fund Ukraine’s military operations, is more than twice as much as the $13.6 billion worth of military and humanitarian aid already approved by Congress last month.
Herrera believes that extra boost could be extremely helpful to Ukraine, both strategically and physically, even this far into the war. Combined with energy sanctions by Europe, she said Russia could be looking at significant roadblocks to achieving its objectives since “that would make a big difference in Russia’s ability to fight the war.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/5/1/23051868/russias-natural-gas-exports-india-china-ukraine">https://www.vox.com/2022/5/1/23051868/russias-natural-gas-exports-india-china-ukraine</a>

vox Was Russia’s decision to cut off natural gas exports a mistake?

Last week Russia announced it would cut off natural gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria after both countries refused to comply with its request to perform export payments in rubles, Russia’s national currency. It is the latest maneuver off the batt…

What happens when The Real World turns you into an “Angry Black Woman”

“I just want you to know that I don’t like you. We’re not friends, because I find you to be very dishonest,” <a href="https://www.instagram.com/melissabeckrwno/">Melissa Beck</a> (née Howard) said to Julie Stoffer the last time the two were on TV together on MTV’s Battle of the Sexes in 2003. “You got your smug little smile and think it’s all cute — you’re a backstabber and you’re a liar.”
Then, in a separate confessional, Melissa uttered a phrase that’s become a part of MTV canon: “You go messing with my money, you go messing with my emotions.”
Melissa and Julie had left their season of The Real World: New Orleans as best friends. Two years later, they were onscreen enemies, and Melissa was pigeonholed as “The Angry Black Woman.”
The Real World will go down as one of the more progressive shows in television history for documenting the lives of gay people, people of color, and other underrepresented groups. But in its 33-season run, it could also lean on stereotypes — like the Angry Black Woman — to tell those stories. Real World: Homecoming, a new weekly Paramount+ series starring Melissa and the rest of her New Orleans housemates, is trying to right those wrongs and allow the cast to reassess their experiences.
“Listen, there were abs and there was comedy — it’s iconic,” <a href="https://melissabeck.merchdirect.com/categories/accessories">Melissa</a>, now a 44-year-old mom of three living on Long Island, told Vox in a recent interview. Reflecting on her fight with Julie, she said, “My arm is so thin. My stomach is so flat. I had a great tan. And I was cussing somebody out. I have no apologies about that.”
Being able to laugh at yourself is a gift, but getting to this point wasn’t easy for Melissa. Looking back, it’s clear how The Real World failed Melissa and other Black women: Kameelah Phillips, who was on the show’s Boston edition, Arissa Hill on Las Vegas, Coral Smith on Back to New York. All were portrayed as versions of <a href="https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/antiblack/sapphire.htm">the Angry Black Woman,</a> a stereotype rooted in the false and racist idea that anger is ingrained within a Black woman’s nature rather than a normal human response to a frustrating situation.
It’s not that The Real World and other reality programs can’t show Black women and women of color having angry moments. The problem is how that anger is so often presented.
Going back on the show is an opportunity for Melissa to tell her story and make sure viewers know she was more than the Black woman who cussed out the white girl.
“I also figured,” she said, “what’s the worst that could happen?”
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
In Melissa’s original season, she and her housemates took a swamp boat tour during which the white guide called one of the bird species by a name that included the n-word. Melissa was disturbed by the guide’s casual use of the word and upset with her castmate Jamie’s reaction. He made excuses for the guide, saying that he wasn’t purposely using the word in a hurtful way. Melissa tried in vain to explain that there is no way for white people to use that word and not have it be malicious.
She knew she had the right to be angry, but the editing questioned that and in turn emboldened fans. After the show aired, she was hounded by viewers. Social media didn’t exist at the time, but people sent their attacks by email.
“For months, I was called racist, that I’m race-obsessed, that I’m race-baiting,” she said. “Every racist thing that could be hurled toward me was, and I don’t think that as a cast — because we hadn’t kept in touch with each other over the years — they understood that perspective or the impact that had on my life.”
After the season aired, Melissa and some <a href="https://pagesix.com/2022/04/20/real-world-star-danny-roberts-on-julies-alleged-homophobic-letter/">former</a> Real World <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/MtvChallenge/comments/7rl8ef/reality_bytes_coral_smith_podcast_havent_seen/">castmates</a> alleged that Julie stole their opportunities on the lucrative (at the time) college speaker circuit. They claimed Julie would offer to speak at the schools for a smaller fee than her castmates, and the colleges — looking to save money — would book Julie instead. Because Battle of the Sexes producers didn’t offer viewers this context, the Melissa/Julie fight appeared to come out of left field.
“It’s the first time viewers had seen Melissa and Julie from The Real World, who left the show frolicking through a bed of roses. They came back, and now Melissa is screaming her head off,” Melissa said. “Instead of it being like, ‘Melissa was genuinely hurt by a friend who went behind her back and fucked with her money,’ it was, ‘Wow, Melissa’s really petty, I can’t believe she voted her off — Melissa’s a terrible person.’”
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<figcaption>Melissa Beck and Danny Roberts on The Real World Homecoming: New Orleans</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount+</cite></figure>
Because she was seen as inherently rage-filled — an Angry Black Woman — anything she criticized became easy to dismiss, whether it was a situation that’s plainly racist like the one on the boat or her business dispute with Julie.
Critics and <a href="https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/antiblack/sapphire.htm">scholars</a> note that while the Angry Black Woman caricature has roots in minstrel shows of the early 1900s, the radio show Amos ’n’ Andy — which debuted in 1928 — is what led to its <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299859537_Sapphire_Exploring_The_Power_Of_A_Popular_Stereotype">popularization</a>. Amos ’n’ Andy, a show about Black characters that was created and voiced by two white men, features <a href="https://vawnet.org/events/unpacking-sapphire-stereotype-protect-black-girls">Sapphire</a>, an aggressive scold; “the Sapphire,” in fact, became shorthand for the Angry Black Woman caricature. The stereotype began to appear as an <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/popular-and-pervasive-stereotypes-african-americans">onscreen trope</a> as the film industry took hold in the <a href="https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/antiblack/sapphire.htm">1930s</a> and carried over into the television age (Amos ’n’ Andy itself became a TV show in 1951).
Sustained, harmful pop culture portrayals like these generate <a href="https://scholars.org/contribution/how-racial-stereotypes-popular-media-affect-people-and-what-hollywood-can-do-become">real-world bias</a> with real-world effects. Studies have shown that the Angry Black Woman stereotype has led to Black women receiving <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33793257/">negative performance evaluations at work</a>, <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24188294/">less effective mental health treatment</a>, and <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31112918/">discrimination during maternity care</a>.
The Real World premiered in 1992, more than 60 years after the premiere of Amos ’n’ Andy. It was an era when tabloid talk shows like The Jerry Springer Show, The Maury Povich Show, and The Jenny Jones Show were wildly popular — and heavily reliant on the Angry Black Woman and <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2018/08/the-racial-dynamics-in-maury-make-my-stomach-churn.html">other</a> <a href="https://www.complex.com/music/2019/11/chuck-d-accuses-maury-povich-jerry-springer-exploiting-black-people">racist tropes</a>.
The Real World purported to be more thoughtful. It promised to show real-life young people dealing with real-life issues like sexuality, religion, and gender — and for some of its audience, the show was the first time they would get to “know” people that they might not encounter in their own lives.
It’s that last part that bothers some of the show’s Black female alums who spoke to Vox: In many ways, The Real World was progressive, educational, and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/29/21240341/the-real-world-cultural-influence-chappelles-show-parodies">highly influential</a>, but it still relied on tropes and dynamics that privileged white people’s point of view at the expense of others.
First-season cast member Julie Gentry’s storyline was that she was a sheltered, small-town white girl from Alabama. In the final stretch of the season, Julie accused her Black roommate Kevin Powell of threatening her after she interrupted one of his personal phone calls. He refuted her telling of the story and explained to her and the other castmates that accusing a Black person of violence is a serious matter, citing the Rodney King trial (which coincided with the taping of the show). Julie called Kevin <a href="https://www.mtv.com/video-clips/erba2g/the-real-world-kevin-and-julie-argue-over-cultural-differences">racist, psychotic, and capable of violence</a> and said she didn’t want to be alone in the house with him. The roommates largely took her side. Julie and Kevin reconciled on their season of <a href="https://www.avclub.com/the-real-worlds-kevin-julie-and-andre-on-racism-and-t-1846411168">Homecoming</a>, and Julie has talked in <a href="https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-03-08/julie-oliver-gentry-the-real-world-new-york-reunion">interviews</a> about how her views on race have changed since her experience on the show.
“If we look at the storytelling of the original The Real World,” Melissa said, “the viewpoint that has always been the most important perspective was the doe-eyed white girl that walks into the house.”
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
Three seasons prior to New Orleans, on The Real World: Boston, Kameelah Phillips experienced something similar to Melissa. <a href="https://www.instagram.com/drkameelahsays/?hl=en">Kameelah</a>, 44, <a href="https://www.callawomenshealth.com/">is now an obstetrician</a> based in New York City.
On the show, Kameelah was 19, taking a break from Stanford. She clashed with Sean Duffy, then 25, who went on to serve as a Republican Congress member from 2011 through 2019. In one of their final fights on the show, Kameelah told him that she was exhausted from having to teach him about Blackness and Black culture. In response, Sean compared her to Hitler.
“I definitely think I got a bit of the Angry Black Woman stereotype,” Kameelah said.
She theorized that because she butted heads with a white man whose storyline was about how he was sheltered and conservative, she came off as mad and aggressive. She says she was also portrayed at times as the <a href="https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/mcnairsymposium/2020/presentations/12/">“lonely” and “bitter” Black woman</a>, as the show implied that she was hostile to her fellow Black castmate Syrus Yarbrough because he dated white women.
“That was a storyline I felt was created to run that narrative of Black women being alone and or being just so grumpy that they can’t get along, when that wasn’t the case at all,” Kameelah said. Like Melissa, she received a stream of racist abuse when the show aired.
“I remember checking DOS or some basic email and I had hate mail there. I was like, ‘Why? What is going on?’ I definitely experienced a negative backlash from strangers,” she said. “People called me horrible names, so I got to a point where I had very negative emotions about this show.”
Arissa Hill, who was on The Real World: Las Vegas, hasn’t watched her run on the show, which aired in 2002. Still, she’s heard plenty about how fans believe her season ruined the franchise. While <a href="https://ew.com/recap/reunited-real-world-vegas-grown-pains/">Las Vegas was a ratings monster</a>, producers were criticized by <a href="https://stopbeingpolite.com/2018/12/18/game-changers-the-real-world-las-vegas/">viewers</a> and <a href="https://www.theringer.com/tv/2020/4/29/21240376/the-real-world-mtv-best-25-seasons">critics</a> for turning the show into something overly argumentative and overtly sexual rather than the more introspective seasons of prior Real Worlds.
What strikes Arissa most about how her season was edited is that she and her roommates spent a lot of time having fun together and lovingly teasing each other. Most of that good-natured ribbing was left on the cutting room floor. “I believe we were fucking hilarious,” she said.
That the cast’s lighter moments didn’t make the cut didn’t necessarily surprise her, since she quickly understood the narrative producers were attempting to create. The season that made it to air featured love triangles, a pregnancy scare, and plenty of shouting and scolding. Arissa was often at the center of the confrontations, frequently fighting with her white castmate Frank Roessler, whom MTV described as “wide-eyed” and someone who “makes friends easily.”
Their dynamic wasn’t unlike that of Kameelah and Sean, or Melissa and Julie. The Angry Black Woman and Wide-Eyed Young White Person are stereotypes that simultaneously shortchange both of the people they supposedly portray, but it’s inherently more damaging to be portrayed as angry — which is seen as a permanent character flaw — than being sheltered, which one will presumably grow out of.
“Do we have the Angry Black Woman or somebody who is just trying to assert themselves or assert a boundary that has been crossed?” Arissa asked.
Arissa is working on a docuseries that’s inspired by her experience after The Real World stopped filming. Like Melissa, Arissa didn’t know how to navigate her image post-show. Every single time her season re-aired during a marathon or in syndication, there was a new round of people who knew Arissa only as that person — the villain, the scold, the fight-starter — on Las Vegas.
“I want the opportunity to reclaim my likeness and rebrand myself, and tell stories the way that I’d like to tell them,” she said. “I am not the only person that feels this way. There’s a space for a story like this, and it’s been a long time coming.”
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
After deciding to reenter The Real World fold, Melissa stressed to producers that she was concerned that the emotional labor of explaining and teaching people about race was going to fall on her shoulders yet again. She was also worried that the show wouldn’t explore the other aspects of her life. “I wanted to be able to be a whole and full person outside of who I am as my race,” she said.
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<figcaption>Melissa Beck from The Real World: New Orleans.</figcaption>
<cite>MTV Entertainment</cite></figure>
Homecoming executive producer and showrunner James Knox said he fully understood Melissa’s worries. Knox didn’t work on the original season, and he has no qualms discussing how the 2000 series and Battle of the Sexes fell short. Knox, a queer Black man, noted that Julie was the main character, with Melissa and Danny (Danny came out on the show as gay) used as accessories to her story.
“That season was all through Julie’s perspective,” he said of Real World: New Orleans. “I needed to allow for Melissa and Danny to lead their own stories independent of Julie being naive.”
The centering of the white experience and the use of the Angry Black Woman trope was, and continues to be, a problem in reality television. Following The Real World, it was perpetuated in series from Survivor to The Apprentice to the various Real Housewives franchises. What’s changed over the last decade or so is that we’re less inclined to buy into them. Audiences, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/interactive/2021/black-women-reality-tv/">reality show participants themselves</a>, and even the people who make reality television now, are all more aware and ready to call out these lazy portrayals.
“Back then, we didn’t have the language to describe what was going on. We didn’t have ‘diversity and inclusion.’ We didn’t use the word ‘equity.,” Kameelah said. “We’ve, in the past 20 years, developed the tools to call things out when we see injustices — not just on TV.”
Knox told Melissa that Homecoming wasn’t about any kind of redemption narrative for her; this also wouldn’t be a sympathy edit to make up for what happened in 2000. What he and his team wanted to do is tell the story of seven strangers picked to live in a house — and how their lives had changed once the cameras moved on.
Part of what convinced Melissa to sign on was the fact that, in addition to Knox, there were many people of color involved in making Homecoming. With a more diverse crew and an audience that’s fluent in topics of identity like race and class, Knox said, there’s now a way to tell fuller stories that — while not perfect — do not have the same blind spots as the show did before.
The first episode of Homecoming revisits the Melissa and Julie fight. This time around, Melissa was given space to talk about the situation and the hurt it caused. The episode also included a moment in which Melissa’s castmates discussed the damage that can be done when a white person calls a person of color a liar.
“Melissa has had to have this conversation a lot, and that’s tiring — that’s a burden and it shouldn’t be her burden,” Melissa’s castmate Kelley Wolf told Vox. Kelley said that living with Melissa again, and reliving those moments, made Kelley more empathetic to Melissa and brought the two closer than when the show first aired.
Melissa said that, in her first run on MTV, she didn’t have the language to easily express what she knew to be true about race, identity, and the way her castmates were treating her back in 2000.
“I was a messy, vulnerable 22-year-old girl from the South, who was awkward, biracial, with bad teeth, who had a lot of feelings, and who was coming into her own in terms of identity,” Melissa said. She has unapologetic affection for that version of herself, someone who approached the experiment earnestly, if naively. Melissa kept all that in mind as she filmed this reunion.
“Did it hinder the process of me being able to be real? I don’t think so.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/23047340/real-world-new-orleans-homecoming-melissa-beck">https://www.vox.com/23047340/real-world-new-orleans-homecoming-melissa-beck</a>

vox What happens when The Real World turns you into an “Angry Black Woman”

“I just want you to know that I don’t like you. We’re not friends, because I find you to be very dishonest,” Melissa Beck (née Howard) said to Julie Stoffer the last time the two were on TV together on MTV’s Battle of the Sexes in 2003. “You got your…

Can Sri Lanka dig itself out of a $50 billion debt?

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/5k72yudGUgPRF6-BYHZqEVfZ9po=/0x408:5699x3392/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23429121/1240346996.jpg" /></div>
After a month of intense civilian-led protests over Sri Lanka’s deteriorating economy, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to appoint a new council on Friday to lead the formation of an interim government. The resolution would create a coalition made up of all parties in Parliament and would remove the grip of the Rajapaksa family dynasty currently ruling the country. At issue is the country’s economic future which is in shambles after defaulting on payments on its mountain of foreign loans — estimated to be worth $50 billion — <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-international-monetary-fund-sri-lanka-foreign-debt-f48b3cfb388c3a11af5d2d8a3d1a4391">for the first time</a> since the country gained independence from the British in 1948.
Signs of Sri Lanka’s impending economic crisis became increasingly apparent over the last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/world/asia/sri-lanka-economic-crisis.html">food prices soared and power blackouts</a> increased in frequency. Sri Lanka currently has about $7 billion in total debt due this year.
Many attribute Sri Lanka’s economic crisis to the mishandling of its finances by successive governments through mounting foreign debt and continued infrastructure investments. The Rajapaksa administration also implemented <a href="https://apnews.com/article/b6b96849ebe74c8dbeac461ff8418c28">sweeping tax cuts in 2019</a>, slashing the value added tax (VAT) rate — the tax applied to imports and domestic supplies — from 15 percent to eight percent which contributed to a decrease in the country’s revenue.
The president’s older brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is expected to be removed as prime minister as part of an agreement brokered by former President Maithripala Sirisena, who defected with dozens of other members of the incumbent president’s governing party in April in protest of the Rajapaksas’ poor governing.
But the country’s power struggle may have sown discord between the two brothers which could exacerbate its political impasse. On Friday, the Associated Press <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-biden-cabinet-sri-lanka-maithripala-sirisena-bc8ed130537eb090b9bc648b1b470d76">reported</a> a spokesperson for the prime minister did not immediately confirm the elder Rajapaksa’s removal, saying that any such decisions would be announced by the prime minister in due time.
<h3>The country continued to mount foreign debt without sufficient revenue</h3>
A big part of Sri Lanka’s economic woes is its ballooning foreign debt, namely to fund its aggressive turn to infrastructure development under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the elder Rajapaksa sibling and two-time prime minister. With its finances already bleeding, Sri Lanka took out major investment loans from state-owned Chinese banks to fund its infrastructure projects including a controversial port development in the Hambantota district.
The Sri Lankan government justified the Hambantota project as a way to grow its economy as a bustling trade hub comparable to Singapore. However, the project was riddled with corruption and stalled, and Sri Lanka eventually <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html">handed over the port’s control</a> to China as collateral after it was unable to pay back its loans.
Over the last decade, Sri Lanka amassed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html">a debt of $5 billion to China</a> alone, making up a large portion of its overall foreign debt, according to the BBC. Sri Lanka’s bloated debt to China and the Hambantota project failure are often held up as an example of the “debtbook diplomacy” that China has pursued in the last couple of decades.
Some believe China has expanded that monetary diplomacy approach through its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure project involving Chinese investment in infrastructure developments in parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe that is later repaid, as part of China’s bid to increase global influence as a growing economic power. About 139 out of 146 of the world’s countries, including Sri Lanka, have signed on to China’s BRI project. While an infrastructure project on such a global scale may provide some economic benefits to the participating countries, the BRI has inevitably become a strategic way for China to gain political leverage with economically vulnerable countries across the Asia-Pacific region. At least 16 countries involved in the BRI project have been saddled with billions of dollars of debt which China then has leveraged, according to an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/15/warning-sounded-over-chinas-debtbook-diplomacy">independent analysis</a> by Harvard’s Kennedy School for the US State Department.
About <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/india-tries-to-pry-sri-lanka-loose-from-chinas-embrace.html">22 percent of Sri Lanka’s debt</a> is owed to bilateral creditors — institutional investors from foreign governments — according to CNBC. Neighboring India has sought to grow its bilateral cooperation with Sri Lanka partly as an attempt to secure its influence in South Asia over China. India recently gave Sri Lanka a $1.5 billion credit line to tide over the country’s fuel crisis in addition to another $2.4 billion through a currency swap and loan deferment since January.
As the country amassed foreign debt, its tourism sector — previously <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/sri-lanka-tourism-plummets-after-bombings/4904347.html">a $44 billion industry</a> and a primary revenue source for the island — took successive hits. In 2019, tourism suffered after <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/world/sri-lanka-attacks/">a series of church bombings</a> that killed nearly 300 people, including some foreign nationals.
The next year, the Covid-19 pandemic halted tourism and other major sectors, spurring a global economic downturn. Although Sri Lanka saw some increase in its number of foreign visitors last year, the ongoing pandemic combined with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — both nations <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/6/crisis-hit-sri-lanka-is-hosting-thousands-of-stranded-ukrainians">leading sources of tourism</a> for Sri Lanka before the conflict — continued to slow the industry’s recovery.
<h3>A worsening crisis triggered mass protests</h3>
The country’s issues escalated in March when the Sri Lankan government <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220330-10-hour-power-cuts-in-sri-lanka-as-crisis-worsens">announced</a> a 13-hour daily power cut as a way to save energy amid the ongoing crisis. Without sufficient power, many were unable to do their jobs as the economic crisis continued, prompting mass unrest. Thousands of Sri Lankans took to the streets in the weeks following the power cut to protest the country’s growing crisis.
On April 1, President Rajapaksa declared an emergency as growing unrest saw protesters clash with police. The entire Sri Lankan government Cabinet <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/04/04/1090753152/sri-lanka-offers-resignations-as-public-anger-grows-over-economic-crisis">resigned in protest</a> not long after the emergency law was implemented, causing Rajapaksa to revoke the law. Among those who resigned was Sports Minister Namal Rajapaksa, another member of the Rajapaksa family and the president’s nephew.
With growing political unrest and no resolution in sight, Rajapaksa’s rivals began calls for a no-confidence vote against his administration.
“We are confident we have the numbers and we will bring the motion at the appropriate time,” opposition lawmaker Harsha de Silva <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/18/sri-lankan-opposition-to-table-no-confidence-vote-against-government-.html">told</a> CNBC. Hoping to placate critics, President Rajapaksa sought to form a new unity coalition under his leadership but failed to gain support. In April, the government also announced it would temporarily suspend foreign debt payments, marking the first time Sri Lanka had defaulted on foreign loans since its independence.
Experts had been warning of a potential dire situation around the country’s finances for some time. When the country defaulted, the government had been <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61145854">negotiating a bailout plan</a> with the International Monetary Fund, which had assessed its accumulated debt as unsustainable.
“The government intends to pursue its discussions with the IMF as expeditiously as possible with a view to formulating and presenting to the country’s creditors a comprehensive plan for restoring Sri Lanka’s external public debt to a fully sustainable position,” the Finance Ministry said in a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-international-monetary-fund-sri-lanka-foreign-debt-f48b3cfb388c3a11af5d2d8a3d1a4391">statement</a>.
In a meeting with Cabinet officials a week later, President Rajapaksa <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-biden-cabinet-sri-lanka-mahinda-rajapaksa-c85718a88d4ff03d2a72f969eb595afa">acknowledged</a> his government’s role in the country’s declining economy. Specifically, the president said the government should have approached the IMF earlier for support in tackling its unruly foreign debt and that they should have avoided the ban on imported chemical fertilizers which was meant to preserve Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange holdings but instead hurt its agricultural production.
“During the last two and a half years we have had vast challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the debt burden, and some mistakes on our part,” Rajapaksa said.
Now, Sri Lanka’s future rests on whether the president’s proposed government changes will placate his growing opposition long enough for a solution to come through from the IMF. The Sri Lankan head of finance, Nandalal Weerasinghe, has stated that such a hoped-for deal could <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220429-crisis-hit-sri-lanka-says-imf-bailout-three-months-away">still be months away</a>, however.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/4/30/23050242/sri-lanka-50-billion-debt-protests-loan-default-china-india-imf">https://www.vox.com/2022/4/30/23050242/sri-lanka-50-billion-debt-protests-loan-default-china-india-imf</a>

vox Can Sri Lanka dig itself out of a $50 billion debt?

After a month of intense civilian-led protests over Sri Lanka’s deteriorating economy, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to appoint a new council on Friday to lead the formation of an interim government. The resolution would create a coalition mad…

The Great Resignation is becoming a “great midlife crisis”

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/k2zr8f4_s3A9Kv9rneFkZ8eFSNY=/0x242:2119x1351/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23425385/GettyImages_1350030499.jpg" /></div>
With prices soaring and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/economy/inflation-recession-economy-deutsche-bank/index.html">analysts predicting</a> a recession on the horizon, it might not seem like the best time to quit your job. But that’s not keeping American workers, especially older, more tenured ones, from doing so.
Higher-paid workers are increasingly quitting their jobs, as the Great Resignation — also known as the Great Reshuffle — enters its second year. Earlier in the pandemic, the trend was led by younger, less-tenured workers in low-paying industries like retail, food service, and health care. Now, the main growth in quit rates is coming from older, more tenured workers in higher-paid industries like finance, tech, and other knowledge worker fields, according to data from two separate human resources and analytics companies. These workers say they are searching for less tangible benefits like meaning and flexibility.
That changing composition of who is quitting paints an increasingly complicated picture of the state of work in America and suggests that while quit rates have decreased slightly from their highs last year, the phenomenon is not going away just yet.
“The Great Resignation is almost like a train, where it’s built all this momentum and it’s hard to slow down, but certain workers are getting off the train and new workers are coming on,” said Luke Pardue, an economist at <a href="https://gusto.com/">Gusto</a>, which provides payroll, benefits, and human resource management software to small- and medium-sized businesses.
Rates of quits are always highest among younger workers — those who tend to be less invested in their jobs and whose lives are less stable. This was true during the early stages of the pandemic when these workers quit their jobs amid heightened demand to eke out better wages and conditions elsewhere (though those gains are <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22977654/future-of-work-restaurants-retail-hospitality">unlikely to be permanent</a>). But those quit rates have been declining. Data from Gusto, which typically works with companies that have around 25 employees, shows that the average tenure of people who quit has grown in every age group and in nearly every industry. In other words, older people who’ve worked at a job longer are also quitting.
A similar change is happening at bigger companies, according to data from people analytics provider <a href="https://www.visier.com/">Visier</a>.
Between the first quarter of 2021 and 2022, the greatest growth in resignations was among people aged 40 to 60 and those with a tenure of more than 10 years, a Visier dataset from companies with over 1,000 employees shows. Older and more tenured people are especially likely to be quitting in knowledge worker industries like finance and tech.
Their reasons are myriad.
“Don’t look for one thing that’s driving the Great Resignation,” Ian Cook, Visier’s vice president of people analytics, told Recode. “It’s actually made up from a combination of different patterns and will continue to change as the labor market changes and as the economic recovery changes.”
Among the more financially stable set, quits are being driven by everything from a desire to continue working remotely to a greater search for meaning to simply having the means to do so.
Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky calls this iteration of the Great Resignation the “great midlife crisis.”
“At the midpoint of life, we become aware of our own mortality, and it allows us to reflect on what really matters to us,” said Galinsky. The pandemic has amplified that effect. “A global pandemic obviously makes people reflect on their own mortality in terms of being afraid of dying themselves or having a loved one or family and colleagues pass away.”
Importantly, the people who quit to hold out for the jobs they want or forgo work entirely are usually the ones with the financial means to do so.
Galinsky, who is currently on sabbatical in Hawaii, says he’s seen it among his peers and among other high-earning knowledge workers now working from his island getaway. He mentioned a Bloomberg employee who quit after the finance publication called workers back to the office and who now works on a pasta truck.
Such workers, either due to savings or a spouse’s income, have the freedom to look for other work, including <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22651953/americans-gig-independent-workers-benefits-vacation-health-care-inequality">gig work</a> or <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22884040/more-americans-starting-own-business-entrepreneur">starting their own business</a>. A Gusto survey of new businesses shows that they’ve shifted from e-commerce startups earlier in the pandemic to more professional services, like, say, an accountant starting her own firm rather than working for someone else.
Many of these workers, especially those who are older and more stable in their careers, now have the perspective to consider what they really want out of their lives and work.
After more than two years of successfully working from home, many knowledge workers are loath to come back to the office, and some are jumping ship if they feel they have to do so. That makes sense. Data from Slack’s <a href="https://futureforum.com/">ongoing survey</a> of 10,000 knowledge workers <a href="https://futureforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Future-Forum-Pulse-Report-April-2022.pdf">just found</a> that with a third of them now back in the office five days a week, their work-related stress and anxiety has reached its highest level since the survey began in 2020.
Growth in knowledge worker quits also might just simply be a case of people copying one another.
“Workers who have this experience, that switched a job, that became more flexible, talk about it and how they had a great experience, and that leads their neighbor or their friend to do the same,” Pardue said.
They’re also quitting because there are a lot of jobs out there for them. The number of business and professional services job openings is at a record high, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. According to job site Indeed, the number of high-paid job postings has not cooled as much as postings for low-paid jobs (postings for both remain above pre-pandemic levels).
So while the future might look grim, the present looks just fine for these workers, who are confident in the current tight job market. As Galinsky put it, “People believe less in global warming on days it snows.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/23042785/the-great-resignation-older-tenured-higher-paid">https://www.vox.com/recode/23042785/the-great-resignation-older-tenured-higher-paid</a>

vox The Great Resignation is becoming a “great midlife crisis”

With prices soaring and analysts predicting a recession on the horizon, it might not seem like the best time to quit your job. But that’s not keeping American workers, especially older, more tenured ones, from doing so. Higher-paid workers are incre…

The Offer is a TV show about how great movies are

Midway through the pilot episode of The Offer, future Godfather producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller) is sitting in a movie theater with his girlfriend, gaping at the audience around him, who are gasping at the famously shocking concluding moments of Planet of the Apes. It’s 1968, and Ruddy is fresh off Hogan’s Heroes, the TV show he co-created. But TV bores him. He wants more. He wants the big screen.
“It’s not just about the ending, it’s about the experience of it,” he tells his girlfriend. Waxing enthusiastic about the collective emotion of movie theaters, he concludes that you “can’t get that experience in television. You’re just sitting in your living room, looking at a fucking box.”
Now, of course, to actually watch this scene, you have to look at that same effing box, or maybe your laptop or your phone, all visible at that moment through a thick scrim of irony. But The Offer, a show that’s less about how one of the greatest big-screen films in history was made than how it almost wasn’t made, seems comfortable with the contradiction. Throughout its 10-episode runtime — available, with even more irony, only on the Paramount+ streaming service — various characters trot onscreen to extol daring cinema and denigrate television and brainless movies. Legendary Paramount head of production Robert Evans (played in an absolutely virtuosic turn by Matthew Goode) gives a couple of lengthy speeches about the magic of cinema. Ruddy tells a group of FBI agents that “TV’s too limiting. You can’t do real stories on TV.”
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<figcaption>Matthew Goode as Paramount head of production Robert Evans in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Which means it’s almost as interesting as an artifact of our time, when movies and TV are in flux, as it is as a story about 1970s Hollywood. I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t fascinated by Hollywood minutiae really watching The Offer, which isn’t to say they shouldn’t try. It’s uneven, but a handful of solid performances anchor it — Juno Temple (as Ruddy’s plucky assistant Bettye McCartt), and Dan Fogler (who makes a surprisingly good Francis Ford Coppola), and the go-for-broke Goode — with a fine showing by Teller, as Ruddy is the ostensible center of the show.
In fact, the title credits declare that the show is based on Ruddy’s memories of making The Godfather, which is an uncommon credit to see. Most writing on the movie’s legendary production, from newspaper profiles to books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, has focused on Coppola’s role in driving the project forward. But while Coppola gets plenty of screen time here, it’s Ruddy who’s our main character. The pilot (perhaps the weakest of the episodes) cruises through several years inside of an hour, apparently in an attempt to explain why Ruddy got involved in the Paramount circus to begin with.
The net effect can at times tip over into listening to an old Hollywood hand tell mildly unbelievable war stories for 10 hours, though much of what appears in The Offer sticks, in broad outlines, to the tales others have told. Ruddy got pulled into making The Godfather as a low-budget specialist at Paramount, even though his most recent picture, the 1970 Robert Redford biker flick Little Fauss and Big Halsy, was a bit of a flop. Paramount had acquired rights before publication to Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, but didn’t really want to make it, fearing that it would fail like so many other recent mobster films; once the book became a runaway bestseller, Evans realized they’d better do it.
But the experience for everyone seems to have been somewhere between herding cats and cosplaying Sisyphus. Everything was a debacle. Casting Marlon Brando (considered both a legend and a has-been) and Al Pacino (considered an absolute nobody) seemed impossible. Wrangling locations — not to mention Coppola himself — was a headache. Tangling with executives at Paramount parent company Gulf and Western, irate crew members fed up with their no-name director, and the literal mafia were enough to test the patience of a saint, let alone a movie producer.
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<figcaption>Miles Teller and Juno Temple in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Furthermore, The Offer paints production of The Godfather as a trying time that ultimately created a band of brothers — not without interpersonal friction, but in that everybody came to respect one another and be proud of the work they did. The reality is a bit messier. For instance, Evans and Coppola were so profoundly angry at one another by the end of the post-production process that Coppola initially tried to get them to hire Martin Scorsese to direct The Godfather: Part II. Years later, he was still brooding, sending a letter to Evans in the early ’80s about how angry he was that Evans had taken credit for the film’s final form. (Evans framed the letter and hung it in his bathroom.)
Other examples like this abound, if you dig into Godfather history, and even a quick look at Ruddy’s own public work history shows how much personal myth-making is involved. (The show portrays him as just a computer programmer for a defense contractor who kind of stumbled into show business, but he in fact worked for Warner Bros. before he became a programmer; he left when Marlon Brando’s father hired him to produce Wild Seed, not when he landed Hogan’s Heroes, as the show suggests.)
But, artistic license is hard to fault, especially when it’s the nitpicking details of the producer’s career. The overarching sense you get from The Offer is that it is remarkable that any movie is ever successful or good or, indeed, even gets made. If you see a movie that’s good, you’re watching a miracle.
Which might be why The Offer’s greatest service is to remind us that The Godfather is, really, that good. (And so is at least one of its sequels; judge for yourself, as all three are also streaming on Paramount+.) It pushed boundaries artistically, narratively, and technically, and viewers responded, making it the biggest movie in history upon its release. Something about its story, which shifted from Puzo’s juicy potboiler to something far more insightful and allegorical about America, resonates deeply. Get lucky enough to catch it on a big screen, and it feels as exciting as it must have at the film’s premiere.
The show knows, and doesn’t get in the way. It does that, in part, by not trying to be nearly as good as its predecessor, with its daring lighting and cinematography, its uniformly outstanding performances, and its sense of epic scale. When it does pay self-conscious homage to Coppola’s film, it’s in winking references (you’ll get a line about a cannoli in the first couple of minutes). There are several different sequences that cut violence scenes together with more domestic ones, in tribute to the famous assassination-and-baptism scene in the film. But you don’t feel the episodes’ directors stretching beyond the somewhat goofy limits of the show, and that’s probably to its credit.
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<figcaption>On the set of The Godfather ... in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Yet it does seem oddly self-aware that it’s a TV show bent on promoting cinema (and, in particular, this instance of cinema). All that aforementioned ragging on TV and effusing about the magic of the movies seems purposeful, and reaches levels we usually only hear on stage at the Oscars.
Of course, the 1970s were a different time for both film and TV. Hollywood was riding a strange fault line, existing in a brief and often-valorized pocket of time in which visionaries like Coppola and Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich and Robert Altman and Warren Beatty and Paul Schrader and a host of others were running the show, making the most exciting movies. There was a lot wrong with that time — only certain sorts of white guys got to talk executives into making their films — but there was something right, too, with exciting and daring movies showing eager audiences what movies could do. “We can’t chase after what the audience wants to see,” Evans says in one triumphant scene late in the show. “We need to show it what it needs to see.”
Meanwhile, TV was still largely working within formulas; storytelling innovations that we now take for granted were far off. That’s not to say it wasn’t great in its own way, or that incredible artists weren’t working in the medium. But the barrier between film and TV talents was much higher and more rigid.
Yet we’re in a totally different media landscape now, and Paramount itself is, like every major entertainment company, trying to figure out what it is going to be. Just two months ago, the movie studio’s parent company, created in 2019 when Viacom merged with CBS, rebranded itself as Paramount Global, after its most prestigious property. Paramount+ itself was first launched in 2014 as CBS All Access and renamed in March 2021. And like every company, they’re trying to figure out the right balance between traditional TV, streaming shows, and big-screen movies that eventually migrate back over to the streaming service. Nobody knows how this will all shake out, but the jitters in Hollywood right now are at a high that rivals the jitters back in Robert Evans’s day.
<figure class="e-image"><picture class="c-picture" data-cid="site/picture_element-1651266366_9121_94262" data-cdata='{"asset_id":23423623,"ratio":"*"}'><source srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/1i6JQ8oHmrm3x4su6hvaDVTMv2A=/0x0:3000x1876/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/MIT4CQOuFsqOhWMxTGm0hpc8fEI=/0x0:3000x1876/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/DGUj26K7FOpTCkQr0_FrS7aygMI=/0x0:3000x1876/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/TIiWCZ7wH3j2UN7F25ZE5vRcWqw=/0x0:3000x1876/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Hs82w9HdjA0Coo1kqZff_srRkUc=/0x0:3000x1876/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LnLHnq72OJFh9UoKIyuqWll0cAA=/0x0:3000x1876/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eC2Q2z2bhYBPoHkvQBlqF-AYgh0=/0x0:3000x1876/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/yLJ4vkzQ7W0ZYLn2eqyF2DQfh_A=/0x0:3000x1876/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/J82TlIN2Ch4XbNWX1JvW0E5Syjo=/0x0:3000x1876/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1920w" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" type="image/webp" /> <img alt="" data-upload-width="3000" sizes="(min-width: 1221px) 846px, (min-width: 880px) calc(100vw - 334px), 100vw" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/R7wrjbBQNAdQms8kc6_2pS1I6AQ=/0x0:3000x1876/1200x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg" srcset="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/wzHV1PCLxkKEdEe7YyUMdvmioWY=/0x0:3000x1876/320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/PFRUQgqn8wWCMLiO7x404FtMPu4=/0x0:3000x1876/520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/q8-ODndG3f_wn-1Vya0xeiWGKK0=/0x0:3000x1876/720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/xbkVSiKLf_3dG7no6qsOFWqREzI=/0x0:3000x1876/920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 920w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/IRCzv3HoAuDTF0iGHNzIbI8S01g=/0x0:3000x1876/1120x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1120w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/6Iv9q3qXzFwoU8l28kZnMTnYVhY=/0x0:3000x1876/1320x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1320w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jCUw80QrplI7cvrwaKl7fSD-CSA=/0x0:3000x1876/1520x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1520w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/EOhkH_UzLPzIeefXNhCoc81dM1I=/0x0:3000x1876/1720x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1720w, https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/gxjJ3O4thQkoiHKsXgB2D6f2u3U=/0x0:3000x1876/1920x0/filters:focal(0x0:3000x1876):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423623/theoffer_103_nw_2012_rt2_1643833833.jpg 1920w" /></picture>
<figcaption>Matthew Goode and Miles Teller as Robert Evans and Al Ruddy in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Which is why diving back into its history to reinforce the brand probably makes sense. As the movie rewrites and refines bits of Godfather history, it spins and smooths out its film’s legend, declaring by the end that the film is widely considered “the best” movie in history. That’s debatable (if you’re speaking of Hollywood, at least, then Citizen Kane would like a word), though there’s no doubt it’s one of them. But as Charlie Bluhdorn (Burn Gorman), president of Gulf and Western and gadfly presence on the set, confides to Evans late in the show, he loves historical movies because they allow you to rewrite history. “Maybe that’s how we can deal with the horror,” he suggests, and while it’s not exactly horror The Offer rewrites, you can kind of see the point. The legend you put on screen is, eventually, more important to the average person than whatever the history books say — both a useful observation and, depending on your perspective, a terrifying one.
And that could be why The Offer’s villains aren’t really the various mobsters and entertainers (cough cough Frank Sinatra) who tried to block The Godfather’s production a half-century ago. They’re the executives who are more interested in chasing what they already know the audience wants than taking a chance on a movie like, well, The Godfather.
The Offer serves up a legend, too. It’s the story of a time in America when movies were king, when the big screen was something to yearn for, when risk might bring reward, when the collective experience was worth breaking your budget and your heart over. That Paramount has chosen to retell that story with a little bit of finessing and artistic license in a time when big-screen movies are hurting badly, when studios are chasing what they think the audience wants to see whether they need to see it or not, feels like a poke in someone’s eye. By the end, I kind of wondered whether it was their own.
The first three episodes of The Offer began streaming on Paramount+ on April 28. The remaining episodes will release on successive Thursdays through June 16.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/23047143/offer-godfather-paramount-review">https://www.vox.com/23047143/offer-godfather-paramount-review</a>

vox The Offer is a TV show about how great movies are

Midway through the pilot episode of The Offer, future Godfather producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller) is sitting in a movie theater with his girlfriend, gaping at the audience around him, who are gasping at the famously shocking concluding moments …

The long-shot campaign to get big banks out of fossil fuels

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Vci6vt8hGm9pNDvaxwzaEDSjjl4=/0x0:3000x1571/fit-in/1200x630/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23423705/GettyImages_79159068.jpg" /></div>
This week, shareholders at Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs voted on resolutions recommending the companies stop any additional financing for fossil fuel projects.
All the resolutions failed, pretty spectacularly, garnering just over 10 percent of the vote. Despite that failure, the votes were notable examples of a strategy climate activists are implementing with increasing boldness: pressuring institutions from the inside to make meaningful reforms on climate change.
It’s one that showed some signs of success at the <a href="https://www.vox.com/22455347/exxon-board-shell-oil-news-chevron-engine-no-one">shareholder meetings of energy companies</a> last year, and is also one advocates like Kate Monahan — director of shareholder advocacy at <a href="https://www.trilliuminvest.com/">Trillium Asset Management</a>, a fund that sponsored the climate resolution at Bank of America on Tuesday — believe will eventually bear fruit more broadly.
“I’m optimistic that we can build the vote over time,” she said. “This is a totally new type of proposal. So 11 percent, I think, is a really good base on which to build for next year.”
The incremental approach this strategy entails can seem frustrating, considering the scientific consensus that <a href="https://www.vox.com/23009894/un-ipcc-climate-mitigation-report-ar6-summary">the world needs to stop financing</a> new fossil fuel development today. But there is reason to believe it could ultimately have an impact.
The current shareholder push has its roots in the divestment movement, which saw climate activists building a case to a conservative audience of financial institutions, universities, and state pension funds that they should divest their investments from fossil fuel companies. After a decade and a litany of failures, powerful players relented — including <a href="https://www.vox.com/22256192/norway-oil-gas-investments-fossil-fuel">Norway’s sovereign wealth fund</a>, <a href="https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/9/10/divest-declares-victory/">Harvard University</a>, and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/nyregion/new-york-pension-fossil-fuels.html">New York state’s pension fund</a>.
Now, the global fossil fuel divestment movement has come to represent about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opinion/climate-change-divestment-fossil-fuels.html">$40 trillion</a> in assets. Other firms, like the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock, have made <a href="https://www.marketwatch.com/story/blackrock-promises-big-jump-in-climate-commitments-within-its-holdings-whats-different-this-time-11649947380">public commitments</a> to align their funds with climate targets.
It’s that success that has <a href="https://www.iccr.org/sites/default/files/page_attachments/co-filers_on_bank_proposals12.17.21.pdf">led the groups</a> behind <a href="https://www.iccr.org/2022-climate-finance-resolutions-going-vote">this week’s resolutions</a>, like the Sierra Club Foundation and asset mangers Harrington Investments and Trillium, to apply daring pressure campaigns at annual shareholder meetings.
The largest institutional shareholders at big banks are still clearly skeptical of this latest ask to stop new fossil fuel finance immediately. In part, that’s because the campaign hasn’t reached the same heights as the divestment movement — just yet.
<h3>The long road to changing the conversation around banks’ role in financing a climate crisis</h3>
All the banks with meetings this week (and <a href="https://www.iccr.org/sites/default/files/page_attachments/jp_morgan_chase_2022_sierra_club_foundation_.pdf">JPMorgan Chase</a> and <a href="https://www.iccr.org/sites/default/files/page_attachments/morgan_stanley_2022_sierra_club_foundation.pdf">Morgan Stanley</a>, which have shareholder votes next month), <a href="https://www.unepfi.org/net-zero-banking/">joined a coalition</a> at last fall’s climate conference in Glasgow aligning their financing with reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Despite that pledge, the same banks all still fund fossil fuel development that ensures they are not aligned with these longer-term targets.
“Now we need to see the policies that will actually make that happen,” Loren Blackford, the investor committee chair of the Sierra Club Foundation’s board of directors, said.
To that end, SCF’s proposal (similar to the others from this week) <a href="https://www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/financials/proxy-statements/2022/2022-proxy-statement-pdf.pdf">requested Goldman Sachs</a> commit to “proactive measures to ensure that the firm’s lending and underwritten activities do not contribute to new fossil fuel development.”
It argued there were two problems: that Goldman Sachs’s “prominence in asserting climate leadership flies in the face of its actions, creating reputation risk from accusations of greenwashing” and that the bank is putting its long-term stability and gains at risk by pouring money into a dying industry — “knowingly loading potentially stranded assets onto its clients’ balance sheets, creating litigation risk.”
Big banks are indeed continuing to fund fossil fuel expansion: Last year alone, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America spent a combined $137 billion on fossil fuel projects, according to a report from a coalition of environmental advocacy groups, <a href="https://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org//wp-content/themes/bocc-2021/inc/bcc-data-2022/BOCC_2022_vSPREAD.pdf">Banking on Climate Chaos</a>. (JPMorgan Chase by itself spent over $61 billion in 2021 on fossil fuels.)
There are a few reasons for this.
One is that banks are deeply intertwined with fossil fuel companies even though their rhetoric suggests the opposite. The Banking on Climate Chaos <a href="https://www.bankingonclimatechaos.org//wp-content/themes/bocc-2021/inc/bcc-data-2022/BOCC_2022_vSPREAD.pdf">report</a> found that the 60 biggest banks spent about $4.6 trillion on fossil fuel investments since the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and about $742 billion last year alone. The pandemic illustrated just how exposed banks are to volatility in the oil market. When global demand for oil plummeted in 2020, big banks like <a href="https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2021/04/jpmorgan-secretly-emailed-the-trump-administration-about-bailing-out-the-oil-industry/">JPMorgan</a> advocated on behalf of oil companies for federal stimulus.
Climate advocates argue the only way to avoid similar fallout again is by limiting further investment in the sector. Bank boards disagree, so much so that they went to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to block this week’s votes. When the SEC didn’t intervene, the boards campaigned against the proposals. Goldman’s board finally said that it’s committed to the climate goals set out six years ago in Paris; however, they said, “We do not believe that placing limits on financing to producers will result in either reduction in emissions or demand for fossil fuels.”
Another factor is current turmoil in the oil market, caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine. That made any climate proposal a harder sell to major asset managers who are worried about their bottom line.
The importance of swaying the wealthiest companies owning stock at any given meeting — particularly firms like BlackRock and Vanguard — can’t be understated either. These two asset managers backed the climate proposals at energy companies last year, ensuring their victory. And although BlackRock and Vanguard have not yet disclosed their votes from this week, it’s expected, given the final results, they didn’t support the 2022 initiatives. Getting BlackRock on board, along with pension funds and other major asset managers, will be crucial to raise the stakes for financial institutions.
<h3>Changing banks’ approach to fossil fuels is difficult, not necessarily impossible</h3>
There are a few reasons for hope though.
One is that the play to get a giant corporation’s attention at the general shareholder meetings is not particularly new, and success doesn’t always entirely depend on getting to a majority. In 2019, for instance, environmental campaigners attempted to get Goldman Sachs to stop financing Arctic oil exploration. The company <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/dec/16/goldman-sachs-to-stop-financing-new-drilling-for-oil-in-the-arctic">responded</a> by making an initial pledge commitment not to fund drilling in the Arctic.
Another is climate activists’ successes in <a href="https://www.vox.com/22455347/exxon-board-shell-oil-news-chevron-engine-no-one">last year’s oil company meetings</a>. Shareholders at Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Phillips 66 voted for more disclosure on climate preparation. And ExxonMobil lost three board seats to climate activist-backed candidates. In these cases, shareholders actually overrode the board’s recommendations against taking climate action.
Finally, there has been growing momentum for more climate disclosure and commitment from companies. Corporate governance analysts at the research group The Conference Board <a href="https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/02/11/2021-proxy-season-preview-and-shareholder-voting-trends-2017-2020/">tracked</a> how the average vote for climate-related proposals grew from 24 percent in 2019 up to 32 percent in 2020 (the investor-focused nonprofit Ceres counted another 10-point jump to <a href="https://www.climateaction100.org/news/as-climate-risks-skyrocket-largest-asset-managers-vote-for-more-climate-related-shareholder-proposals-tipping-support-to-record-levels-in-2021/">41 percent</a> in 2021).
Every year that passes is another year that the world comes up short on its climate commitments. The <a href="https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050">International Energy Agency</a> and the United Nations’ <a href="https://www.vox.com/23009894/un-ipcc-climate-mitigation-report-ar6-summary">Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change</a> have all asserted that averting the worst of climate change requires the world to stop investing in new fossil fuels, immediately. So rather than play it safe, activists are going bigger and bolder with their resolutions.
Some end in failure. But they’re also banking that someday soon, they might not.
“It may not be a quick process,” Monahan said. “But we believe it’s important for us to try.”
Correction, 11 am: A previous version of this article erroneously referred to the Sierra Club rather than the Sierra Club Foundation, the independent fiscal sponsor of the Sierra Club. It also misstated Loren Blackford’s title; she is the investor committee chair of the Sierra Club Foundation’s board of directors.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/23046282/banks-climate-shareholder-votes-fossil-fuels">https://www.vox.com/23046282/banks-climate-shareholder-votes-fossil-fuels</a>

vox The long-shot campaign to get big banks out of fossil fuels

This week, shareholders at Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs voted on resolutions recommending the companies stop any additional financing for fossil fuel projects. All the resolutions failed, pretty spectacularly, garnering…