Part 2: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-lawyers-who-ate-california-part-1a8?s=r

thank

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44526937)

tyia

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44526958)

https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1525625936007372802

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44526990)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44528178)

lying rats in the media, why I never

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44528203)

Part One: The Feds. A small group of regulators out West tests out a new theory of corporate enforcement, with disastrous consequences.

Matt Taibbi

May 14

541

361

A while ago I got a tip, suggesting a look into a high-profile lawsuit. You likely know the case: video game titan Activision, makers of Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, sued by the state of California for discrimination and harassment. The firm was acquired by Microsoft earlier this year for a staggering $68 billion, and with regulators in countries around the world awaiting resolution of California’s action before approving or denying that mega-deal, Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) vs. Activision Blizzard Inc. now becomes perhaps the most portentous lawsuit in the world.

The company filed a lengthy motion in its defense last Friday, detailing its side of a sordid-sounding case it believes should be wrapped up in its favor. However, the self-defense pleas of a leading current corporate Nosferatu received little bounce in popular press, which in the moral mania era isn’t much for “maybe they didn’t” stories.

At first, this sounded like a straightforward story in which the only question was whether Activision is run by misogynist dinosaurs who deserve their brutal public fragging, or whether they’re merely a bunch of rich gamers blindsided by unproven allegations in the latest example of social justice politics run amok. Not the kind of dispute where a disinterested party would have an obvious rooting interest. Someone would find the storyline fascinating, but that person, I guessed, was unlikely to be me.

Sometimes in journalism, however, a story you think is about one thing, turns out really to be about something very different. The tale is barely about Activision. The real protagonists are the regulators.

In the spirit of California, long the cradle of American innovation, a small group of government litigators spent nearly a decade dreaming up an aggressive new vision of corporate regulation, one that’s seen agencies like California’s DFEH act like high-end plaintiffs’ firms. They laugh off mediation, jump quick as you can to litigation they may be mandated to avoid, then couple blunt public accusations with eye-catching damage demands that open at ten or fifteen times the size of previous record awards. Also in the California spirit there are ruthless box-outs of other regulatory agencies, private attorneys, and even the agency’s own in-house lawyers for the sole rights to be claimants in each of the target firms’ stories, told by media pals who act more like production partners than journalists.

Few noticed, because this is California, where every fourth-rate character actor breaking wind makes the front pages but the inner workings of the state governing the world’s 5th most powerful economy are left to a handful of overworked reporters at the Sacramento Bee. “With all due respect to your profession,” one source unconnected to Activision quipped, “it’s kind of amazing none of you have looked under the hood here.”

Sexual harassment and pay discrimination of the type not just condoned but mandated in the highest corporate boardrooms have no place in modern America. Whether the offender is a senior executive who spent years overdue for a personal appearance on the dock (à la Harvey Weinstein), or a leftover from a bygone era who never got the memo about “compliments,” “banter,” “unwanted physical touching,” and inappropriate “jokes,” few dispute the issue needs dealing with, whether at Activision or anywhere else.

What follows is not about whether or not harassment and discrimination should be punished. This is a complex legal story of a debate within the regulatory community about, first, how such offenses should be proved, and second, how they should be remedied. An Obama-era initiative designed to make issues like pay inequity easier to address ironically ended a string of humiliating defeats for government investigators and would-be discrimination claimants. Meanwhile, disputes between federal employment regulators and their opposite numbers in states like California over whether to sanction individuals for alleged abuse, or to aim higher up the company directory for harder-to-define cultural offenses like the “failure to prevent” it, led to some of the bitterest bureaucratic turf wars this country has seen.

The story also turns out to be in part about why California, which had a growth streak dating back to the gold rush, saw it broken in 2020, when the population shrank by 182,000 and caused a first-ever loss of a congressional seat. More tellingly, over 265 companies moved their headquarters out between 2018 and 2021, with the rate of flight doubling just during those years.

Bear with me, for I fell way down the rabbit hole on this one. Based on interviews with current and former executives, congressional and legislative sources from both parties, past and present employment regulators, a handful of public and private litigators with knowledge of the relevant cases, and review of thousands of excruciating pages of court records, here’s the background to sensational cases like Riot Games, Activision, and Tesla that no one told you about — the story of the Lawyers Who Ate California:

Part One: The Feds

Toward the end of Barack Obama’s administration, the West regional office of an investigatory arm of the Department of Labor called the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, got word to conduct a routine compliance review of Oracle, employer to over 130,000 and the second-largest software company in the world.

The OFCCP’s mandate among other things is to promote diversity and bar federal contractors from discrimination, and Obama had a vision for the agency which involved using it aggressively to correct the pay gap. “You are in a unique position to fix this problem,” Obama reportedly told DOL officials early in his term. “Why are you not fixing this problem?”

In 2013, the agency rolled out a new approach that more than ever before would stress using statistical analyses to identify actionable pay gap issues. This led to some controversial results, including a settlement with Tyson foods that ended in a confusing settlement for $1.6 million for underpaid workers that among other things “revealed discrimination against black and white applicants when compared to Hispanic applicants.” Cases in the years that followed would accuse various companies of discriminating both for and against Asians, for and against Hispanics, even for and against white women.

In a case involving Palantir, the tech firm run by the Trump-supporting executive Peter Thiel, the firm was accused of discrimination against Asians because although 85% of the firm’s applicants were Asian, the company in one hiring round only brought on 11 Asians versus 14 non-Asians. The agency said this development had just a 1 in 3.4 million chance of occurring naturally. Palantir soon after settled for $1.7 million but also announced it was leaving Palo Alto for Denver, part of what would become a conspicuous pattern.

Companies ranging from hospitals to utilities to dairy farms to tool companies soon began entering into agreements with the agency, which in many cases didn’t allege discrimination, but rather failure to keep records that would allow the company to judge whether or not it had a discrimination problem. The OFCCP to conservatives especially was fast becoming a “widely disliked and widely despised agency… kind of like the IRS,” as John Fox, a former agency official now in private practice, told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer at the time.

When the OFCCP went after Oracle, the agency’s West Regional Director was a new hire named Janette Wipper. A former managing partner at a California “powerhouse plaintiff’s firm” called Sanford Heisler, she’d worked on a series of storied class action suits, against firms like Valero Energy Corporation, AT&T, and especially Novartis, where she helped the firm to a record $250 million award. That led to her being named a “Rising Star” in 2013 by Law360, and her appointment soon after to the powerful DOL post. Then-director Patricia Shiu’s letter welcoming Wipper to the OFCCP gives a sense of what was then considered large-scale action at the OFCCP (emphasis mine):

Janette will oversee more than 100 staff working 12 offices and responsible for enforcement across 11 states and territories. The Pacific is one of the largest and most diverse regions in our agency, and, over the past year, staff in the region were responsible for negotiating more than $2.2 million in back wages and 933 job offers on behalf of 3,685 workers affected by discrimination – the largest remedies in the nation.

The days of government boasting about collecting a few million bucks were about to end. The lead in the investigation of Oracle, regional solicitor Janet Herold, was a former general counsel for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Under Wipper’s leadership, and armed with the new statistics-based approach, they were about to enter a new era of thinking bigger. They took on not just Oracle but another huge California-based firm, Google, both of which were blasted in headlines at the outset of the actions and, in Oracle’s case anyway, told they would have to pay historically enormous bills to make amends. (Repeat requests for comment to the attorney for both Herold and Wipper went unanswered).

The action involving Oracle was incredibly poisonous even by the usual vituperative standards of corporate litigation. In early 2017, two days before Barack Obama was set to turn over the federal government to Donald Trump, the OFCCP filed an administrative complaint against Oracle. (The company’s co-CEO Safra Catz, like Thiel, was a Trump supporter who’d served on the Orange One’s Transition team). Oracle was accused of “systemic compensation discrimination,” the government reportedly having found a “pattern and practice of hiring discrimination” involving “gross disparities in pay,” not just paying men more but this time “favoring Asians.”

This resulted in sweeping headlines about Oracle’s bad behavior, often in conjunction with a record new financial demand and hints at proof to come. “Oracle allegedly underpaid women and minorities by $400 million. Now the details are set to come out in court,” read the Washington Post. “Oracle’s Pay Practices Cost Women, Minorities $400 Million, Feds Say,” read the San Francisco Chronicle. “Oracle Underpaid women and minority workers by $401 million, the Labor Department says,” read The Business Insider. Among major news outlets, only the Wall Street Journal pointed out that the OFCCP’s all-time record settlement was $14 million and its all-time biggest litigated award at the time was $7 million. In that year of 2019 the agency recovered a total of $40 million, then also a record. (The Journal’s lonely take on this would soon look ironic given its future coverage). In other words, the Western office of the OFCCP was seeking ten times the agency’s entire record yearly haul just from Oracle.

Moreover, the $400 million was just a starting point. The OFCCP complaint against Oracle also sought “an order canceling all of Oracle’s federal contracts or subcontracts” as well as “debarment of Oracle from holding federal contracts or subcontracts until OFCCP is satisfied that it has come into compliance.” According to media reports that could have meant an additional $100 million loss per year, or more.

A detail few reporters bothered to explain was that the OFCCP “lawsuits” were filed before Administrative Law Judges, who are not members of an independent judiciary but technically Department of Labor employees. While regulators still have to prove their cases, these “administrative complaints” are filed under the mother of home court advantages, i.e. they were Department of Labor litigators arguing before Department of Labor “judges.” These judges don’t issue final rulings on their cases, but rather make recommendations that can then be appealed before another body within the Department of Labor called an Administrative Review Board.

In the rare instances in which companies choose to fight to the death against DOL actions, they typically wait until the case actually gets out of the executive branch. Return blows usually come after the ruling of the Administrative Law Judge, and after a loss before the Administrative Review Board, at which point companies might try their luck by pleading cases in federal court.

I mention this only because it underscores the sweeping nature of the rebuke these litigators soon after received in these huge cases. The OFCCP ultimately lost the Oracle case outright at the first stage of the process, castigated at length by their own Administrative Law Judge — grade point average zero point zero for that lawyering — while Google in 2021 ended up settling for $2.59 million, or 1/12239th of the company’s profits that year, for the aforementioned “quite extreme” discrimination.

In both of these cases, as well as a third case involving a Massachusetts firm called Analogics, Administrative Law Judges went to great lengths to deconstruct and criticize the OFCCP cases. All three judges reached the bench before Trump and each sounded variations of themes that would come up in later cases like Activision: OFCCP litigators deployed high-handed tactics in seeming rushes to litigate, made inflammatory pre-judgments to media, and relied perhaps too much on dubious statistical analyses.

By this time the Pacific office especially was developing a reputation among lawyers used to dealing with the DOL. “The Pacific region,” says Denver-based lawyer Michael Silberman, “is almost a federal agency unto itself in its aggressiveness in approach.”

A former OFCCP official named Lawrence Lorber was critical of the decision-making that led to the OFCCP’s moves. “They’re making policy,” he told Bloomberg Law, “and calling it law.”

Google filed a motion to stop further federal requests for documentation from the company on the grounds that public statements by Herold about “extreme” discrimination showed the agency had already made up its mind and “completed” its investigation. Judge Steven Berlin didn’t grant Google’s request to shut the whole thing down, but he did have a lot to say about litigators who make early conclusive statements to media:

I question any extrajudicial statement that a Department attorney makes to the press while the matter is pending, if the statement goes beyond the public record in the pleadings and evidence adduced… Conciliation is a cornerstone of the regulatory scheme… Public statements such as those here could create obstacles to conciliation…

Google was initially asked to provide a “snapshot” of its current employment picture, so regulators could look at who was being paid what. Wipper soon after asked for records for all employees dating back to 1998 because “research shows that women don’t negotiate as well as men, and if starting salaries are negotiated, female employees remain behind the better negotiators for their entire career,” a phenomenon she described as “anchoring.”

A judge’s footnote later claimed that “OFCCP offered no academic literature or other research to support Wipper’s contention about… women’s negotiating skills.” Only “in its closing brief” did OFCCP cite “an article at slate.com and a Washington Post article.” Berlin noted there that had the information been offered upfront, it “would have allowed Google to submit opposing material and to object to OFCCP’s offers.” In other words, a titanic battle over hundreds of thousands of documents that took up thousands of lawyer-hours might have been averted.

Episodes like this led Berlin to conclude that Wipper was only “generally — though not uniformly — credible,” and that there were times when she was “evasive, as though she was advocating.” The judge ended up comparing the credibility of Wipper and deputy regional director Jane Suhr with the credibility of Google’s Vice President of Compensation, Frank Wagner, saying, “To the extent there is any inconsistency between the testimony of Wagner on one hand and the testimony of either Wipper or Suhr on the other, I give greater weight to Wagner’s testimony.” Again, for someone who was not a Trump-appointee but a long-serving Labor Department official to go to the trouble of saying publicly he trusted a Google executive more than two senior Labor investigators was beyond damning.

The ruling in the Oracle case, by the San Francisco-based Administrative Law judge Richard M. Clark, is even more remarkable. At a heated 278 pages, it reads like the diary of a man reduced to his last nerve cell of patience, kept going only out of determination to record every detail of his journey toward madness before perhaps jumping out an office window or going limp in front of a BART train. More than one source I spoke to laughed about the ruling, with one attorney cracking, “Drink at least two highballs before you read the whole thing. It’s painful. Dude suffered.”

The lawyer Silberman emphasized the unusual nature of such a definitive ruling in favor of a company by an Administrative Law Judge. “For the ALJ to annihilate OFCCP’s case,” he said, “is pretty extraordinary.”

In Clark’s telling the Oracle case comes off as a historically noteworthy waste of human energy. Both sides spent years battling over every conceivable issue in what the judge ripped as “continual, voluminous discovery disputes,” concluding, “My role is to decide cases, which does not require adjudicating every quibble and quarrel.”

More importantly, however, he led the reader on a tour through the OFCCP’s case, the hostile nature of which clearly bothered him, given the OFCCP’s extensive history of settling with relative efficiency under both blue and red presidents. “The process at [the outset] between OFCCP and the contractor is meant to be collaborative, not adversarial,” he wrote. “The aim is to not litigate.”

It should be noted that not every judge feels pushing settlement — either to alleviate court clog or to avoid ugly public throwdowns — is in the public interest. Storied federal Justice Jed Rakoff, for instance, tries to avoid pushing regulators toward settlement, which he believes “tends to cut the baby in half,” especially when “the merits really favor one side or the other.” As Rakoff puts it, “My view is the judge should not put pressure on the parties to settle.”

However, in some cases there are laws or procedures that mandate attempts at settlement, and judges on both sides of the debate tend to look with disfavor on litigants that act like they want conciliation when they’re really holding it out to try to push defendants into missteps that might trigger early litigation. Clark’s ruling hints at this, citing a long list of instances where the OFCCP claimed to want to talk things out while issuing convoluted discovery requests with short-to-impossible deadlines, all the while apparently refusing to explain what they were looking for.

“On November 19, 2014, OFCCP sought a broad array of additional information, giving Oracle only until November 26, 2014, to comply,” Clark wrote. Next: “OFCCP requested Oracle policies on February 17, 2015, with only two days to comply.” Then: “At the end of May 2015, OFCCP demanded the personal contact information of all Oracle employees, giving Oracle one week to gather the information.” The OFCCP continually offered conciliation in return for more and more outlandish conditions, a pattern that would soon appear in other litigations.

In the end, the record-smashing $400 million discrimination claim came down, essentially, to two pieces of evidence: statistical analysis by one paid expert with a history of testifying for the OFCCP, and a single line of testimony.

In their initial complaint, OFCCP promised to show evidence of a senior Oracle HR executive “admitting to a strategy of hiring women ‘because they can pay them less.’” This turned out to be a recollection from one female executive of another female executive describing a vaguely remembered “chitchat” from roughly 15 years earlier, in which she’d observed to a colleague that “if you hire a woman, she’ll work harder for less money.” This, Clark wrote, “is the most direct anecdotal evidence presented.” While it’s true the executive in question went on to be director of HR at Oracle, she denied making the remark at all, and moreover at the time it was supposedly made, she did “not make pay decisions for the thousands of employees at issue” in the suit, per the judge.

That was it. The whole case, in which enough paper was filed that a stack would surely have escaped the earth’s atmosphere, came down to a memory of one distant remark made by a person without the ability to affect the discrimination alleged. The judge, who seemed irritated by everything about the case, recommended dismissal, chiding the OFCCP for “reaching its results by making powerful, but unwarranted assumptions” instead of finding “good reason” to conclude discrimination.

A few months after the feds lost the Oracle case, the Department of Labor issued new rules. These came in the wake of yet another loss in a discrimination case, struck down this time by Administrative Law Judge Colleen Geraghty, who in a 43-page ruling bluntly ruled in favor of a Massachusetts firm called Analogics. The new rule would require OFCCP “to provide qualitative evidence supporting a finding of discriminatory intent for all cases proceeding under a disparate treatment theory.” According to multiple sources, this new rule was meant to prevent the filing of massive discrimination cases based mostly or entirely on statistical analyses.

The litigators in the Oracle disaster didn’t go down without a fight. Reports came out that the lead attorney clashed with Trump’s Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia over the matter, with places like the New York Times writing that the much-loathed Supreme Court offspring had tried to settle Oracle’s case for “less than $40 million.” News reports alleged that Scalia might have “abused his authority” by stepping in to try to secure a lower settlement.

This coverage obscured a pair of unlikely statistics. First, the OFCCP’s other settlements in the four-year period between Fiscal Year 2017 and Fiscal Year 2020 totaled $117 million, which reportedly exceeded the total recoveries during the nine years covered by the Obama administration. Second, the OFCCP brought in $40 million in settlements total during 2019, which was $16 million more than the previous record set in 2017. If Scalia had stepped in and managed, say, a $40 million settlement with Oracle, it would have meant more for Oracle employees than the zero dollars the agency’s own judge recommended be paid out.

“Instead of getting some number of millions of dollars to distribute to individuals who may have gotten discriminated against,” Silberman says, “they got nothing to show for it.”

Scalia appeared angry enough about the faceplant in the Oracle case that he reassigned Herold out of California to a job overseeing OSHA complaints in Chicago. One source I spoke with compared this to comedian John Larroquette’s feckless Captain Stillman character being dispatched to a polar outpost at the end of the Bill Murray movie Stripes:

Amid all this, a fascinating nugget emerged. Herold reportedly sent a letter at one point to the Solicitor General, explaining and defending the OFCCP’s legal strategy with Oracle. Oracle’s “real vulnerability,” it turned out, would be if the trial was made public. This, Herold wrote, would “damage Oracle’s reputation in the industry and hinder their ability to retain top talent.”

She went on to write, “I remain convinced that predicting how [judge] Clark will rule is beside the point in this particular enforcement action. The most critical part of this enforcement action is the public airing and discussion of common industry pay practices which depress the wages of women and people of color.” This was only made public when an outgoing Trump labor official, Joe Wheeler, sent a letter to House Labor Committee chair Rose DeLauro arguing against further investigation of her “whistleblower” complaint.

Ultimately, Biden turned right around after entering the White House and reinstalled Herold as the Western region’s chief legal officer for the Department of Labor at the outset of 2021. Moreover, he soon after undid the rule requiring “qualitative” evidence in discrimination cases, seemingly bringing the whole affair full circle. Except: Herold just months later left the DOL for the second time in less than a year, stepping down from the prestigious post to take a job at Justice Catalyst Law, an outside firm that “focuses on social justice issues.” She would soon have high-profile company in private practice.

Several attorneys familiar with the case described Oracle as a “colossal loss” that rattled the entire cabinet-level department and ought to have inspired a major strategic re-think. This makes it all the more surprising that one of the Biden administration’s first moves was to undo much of the post-Oracle damage control at DOL, as if Google, Oracle, and Analogics had been anomalies. More to the point, the state of California was about to adopt an even more aggressive version of the Oracle strategy at home, launching a series of campaigns that would soon have even its own governor on the defensive.

Next: Bloodbath at Activision

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44542219)

The Activision Case, and the beginning of Tesla. Taking a strategy imported from the Department of Labor, the DFEH launches a series of media-centric cases

Matt Taibbi

May 14

517

236

The failure of the federal case against Oracle had wide-ranging repercussions. For one thing, the firm moved its headquarters out of Redwood City to Austin, Texas within months of the judge’s decision. Oracle announced a move in the same week as Tesla, which was destined to be targeted by some of the same lawyers who’d worked the Oracle case. CEO Elon Musk told the Wall Street Journal that California regulators had begun behaving like a “monopoly that cannot go bankrupt,” preaching a religion that “regulations are immortal,” while adding the following acid commentary:

If a team has been winning for too long, they do tend to get a little complacent, a little entitled and then they don’t win the championship anymore. California has been winning for too long.

State officials responded to the departures of Oracle, Tesla, and other companies like Hewlett-Packard by claiming that a combination of irrational resistance to the state’s strict COVID-19 laws and a reluctance by coddled white male executives to diversify was causing the exodus.

Eric Mellon, a spokesman for Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, told The Washington Post that California’s success was “not despite our progressive policies, but because of them… These are California’s fundamental values, and we’ll continue creating more jobs than any other state.”

Newsom then nervously insisted there was nothing to worry about. He pointed to a new law offering restaurants and other small businesses more flexibility in expanding outdoor dining — “eat your heart out, Paris,” he quipped — and reassured citizens the Silicon Valley departures were no big deal. “Our best days are in front of us,” the governor said.

“The ironic thing is, he was about six months from becoming a target of all this himself,” laughs one lawyer, referring to a state case that would soon far eclipse Oracle for sheer bile and bitterness.

“There’s ugly,” he added, “and then there’s Activision ugly.”

Way back on February 18th, 2018, Fortune magazine released its annual list of “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Game giant Activision Blizzard made the list for the fourth straight year, with a Fortune survey claiming 95 percent of its employees said it was a “fun place to work.” The firm’s PR department giddily noted it also made the “Most Admired” and “Most Innovative” lists the year before. Coupled with $7 billion in revenues, the news sent their share price skyrocketing to an all-time high of $78.25, as executives appeared to have reached gamer nirvana.

That same month, the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission (EEOC) got an anonymous complaint from an employee of Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, alleging “a hostile work environment based on sex.” The letter triggered a chain of events that within three years completely transformed Activision’s reputation. The firm went from “most admired” to shunned as the Freddy Krueger of workplaces, the living symbol of “toxic culture.”

The coup de grace was a lawsuit filed by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, or DFEH, on July 21, 2021. It described the firm as a hellscape of “frat boy” antics in which male employees regularly came in hungover and blew workdays playing video games and joking about rape while women did all the work. Not merely uncomfortable, the Activision work environment was both deadly and perverse, as laid out in a crucial passage high in the complaint (emphasis mine):

In a particularly tragic example, a female employee committed suicide during a business trip with a male supervisor who had brought butt plugs and lubricant with him on the trip…the deceased female employee may have been suffering from other sexual harassment… male co-workers were alleged to be passing around a picture of the deceased’s vagina…

This filing was followed by a “bombshell” report in the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Activision CEO Bobby Kotick Knew for Years About Sexual-Misconduct Allegations at Videogame Giant.” Expansively citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Journal piggy-backed on details used by the DFEH, which really did sound shocking. It said the company’s soft-spoken, khaki-clad CEO, Bobby Kotick, had presided over a vast empire of testosterone-driven predation, having failed to inform his board about “alleged rapes,” and “intervened to keep” a male employee accused of harassment. The paper described one executive’s particularly demeaning experience:

She described a party for an Activision development studio she attended with Mr. Kotick around 2007 in which scantily clad women danced on stripper poles.

That the alleged rape from the lede of the Journal piece was reviewed by outside counsel understandably didn’t impress reporters, but the fact that police declined to file charges should have been in any story about what the company did or didn’t “know.” The Journal put “police” up top — “The woman… reported one of the incidents to the police” — but tucked the crucial detail, “No charges were brought,” at the bottom. Most subsequent reports that mentioned Activision in connection with rape left that element out, for instance here, here, here, and elsewhere.

As for the party the Journal wrote about involving “scantily clad women” who “danced on stripper poles”? A performance of Cirque Du Soleil, according to one source who attended the event. When I asked the Journal about that and other issues, they said, “We stand by our fair and accurate reporting on Activision.”

While the Journal was careful to say only that Kotick “knew” about “allegations,” other outlets quickly followed with less equivocal headlines, like GameInformer’s “Report: Bobby Kotick Knew Of Activision Blizzard’s History Of Sexual Misconduct.” In a literal sense, coverage only went from bad to worse. A site for users of role-playing games, RPGFan, even announced it was ceasing all reviews of Activision products, saying of the suit’s claims, “Every bit of this could very well be as bad as it sounds, or quite possibly worse.” The Communications Workers of America — a union that for years had been unsuccessfully attempting to unionize Activision offices — would refer to these press accounts of definite “rampant sexual misconduct” in letters to politicians demanding broader federal inquiries into potential criminal violations.

The initial DFEH complaint appeared to have been written specifically for reporters. If you read carefully, it didn’t even allege a connection between a “butt plug” and an employee’s tragic suicide, but the mere mention of this inflammatory and bizarre detail helped fuel the media panic.

As the press reported on the journey of the DFEH allegations through the courts, they over time acquired the character of facts, in a game of media telephone that helped inspire still more legal actions. In September, 2021, the SEC launched a probe into whether or not the firm “properly disclosed allegations.” Next came a shareholder lawsuit that quoted the Journal article, alleging Kotick “didn’t inform the Board of Directors about everything he knew,” again about — allegations. The firm’s share price plunged after each of the filings of the DFEH suit, the publication of the Journal article, and the launch of the SEC probe, and the once-ascendant firm appeared in freefall.

Maybe they deserved it! The video game industry after all is an infamous scourge of justice activists, driven as it historically has been by self-isolating, on-spectrum men raised in fantasy worlds of musclebound swordfighters and buxom warrior princesses. There’s no shortage of documented stories of abuse, leering, and all-out grossness at gamer studios where male employees might outnumber women by a factor of five or even ten to one, to say nothing of the industry’s reputation for Burger King wages and the uncompensated overtime phenomenon called “crunching.” Activision furiously denied the pay equity accusations, insisting women earned $1.01 for every dollar men in the same positions made, but companies have lied before.

Meaning, the worst of the Activision horror tales could have been all or partly true. It’s just that, because of the unique way the DFEH operates — mimicking the strategy of the OFCCP in the Oracle and Google cases — they didn’t have to be. Corporate regulation often begins with an investigation and ends with a devastating headline, but California flipped the script, leading with the endgame in a new approach that appeared designed to “overwhelm companies at the point of allegation,” as one lawyer put it.

“Listen, if you go into any company, particularly in this field, you’re going to find some shit,” one former civil rights regulator explains. “They all want to get off cheap, but most companies are willing to take their medicine. You carrot-and-stick them to get the number up. The carrot is the press release at the end that says they cooperated and moved their policies into the correct century. Most firms will pay a lot for that.”

Stressing he had no personal knowledge of the Activision case, the ex-regulator added: “The difference with the DFEH is, there’s no carrot. Even at settlement, it’s all stick.”

Like the OFCCP before it, the DFEH just five years ago was an agency with traditionally more modest aims, a bane of slumlords and strip club owners that took thousands of calls a year and litigated only in the rarest of cases. In 2017 it received 24,779 complaints and investigated 6,160, out of which it litigated a grand total of 35 cases, for a total return of $12.9 million. The agency then was proud to announce five-figure settlements for a 64-year-old Latina cook told she was too old, a Kit Kat Bar waitress fired for getting pregnant, a woman at a flower farm whose male co-workers were “staring, leering, winking and licking their lips,” and so on.

Then in 2018 the DFEH hired Wipper, who left federal office before the conclusion of the Oracle and Google cases. The “compelling evidence of very significant discrimination against women” cited in the OFCCP’s Google case ended up being worth just $527 in back pay per female employee. The DFEH would soon launch another investigation of Google just as the federal case was settling, this time for alleged mistreatment of black female employees. But the signature DFEH case was destined to be Activision.

A DFEH harassment suit against Activision was never supposed to happen. State and federal civil rights agencies typically divide work, to avoid duplicate investigations. By tradition, the agency with the “earliest charge” — in this case the EEOC, which received the initial complaint — leads the probe. As such, the Director of the EEOC’s Los Angeles District office, Rosa Viramontes, entered into a workshare agreement with DFEH Director Kevin Kish on October 2, 2018, under which the EEOC would investigate harassment claims, and the DFEH would investigate discrimination and pay equity issues.

Over the course of years this simple deal — us harassment, you pay equity — was repeatedly memorialized. The EEOC and the DFEH agreed to “coordinate during the investigation,” with the EEOC investigating “the harassment allegations” and the DFEH “taking the lead” on pay and promotion. As late as June 4, 2020, Wipper sent an email to Viramontes. “Rosa,” she wrote. “To confirm our discussion, DFEH is not conducting the investigation of the harassment allegations in this matter… Janette.”

Something soon went awry between California and the feds, however. On August 27, 2020, Wipper wrote to Viramontes asking her “not to inform defendants of the Interagency agreement.” California apparently didn’t want the EEOC to answer company questions about which agency was investigating what.

The EEOC, proceeding under the belief that it was doing the harassment case, wrapped up its investigation nearly a year later, on June 15, 2021. Though generally panned in the press as a massively insufficient wrist-slap, their investigation didn’t acquit Activision Blizzard, either, concluding it “engaged in unlawful practices” by subjecting “certain employees” to “sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, or related retaliation” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The gory details weren’t made public and they agreed to settle with Activision for $18 million, obviously not a huge sum for such a firm. A consent decree was later signed by a Republican-appointed judge named Judge Dale Fischer, who called it “fair, reasonable, and adequate.”

California clearly didn’t agree. The instant the EEOC informed the DFEH it was settling, it became obvious the DFEH had already decided to toss out the workshare agreement and pursue its own case. Wipper now wrote to Viramontes that same day of June 15, 2021, announcing that, sorry, we’re going to investigate harassment after all. Her reasoning, never brought up before, was that California law “provides Californians with much broader legal protections,” including “coverage of interns and contractors,” and “uncapped damages,” among other things.

Actually, the more stringent California harassment laws had come up at least one other time, according to the public record. On June 2, 2020, Wipper wrote to Viramontes saying her agency might look into a “separate claim” under California’s Fair Equity and Housing Act (FEHA), under which “an employer is required to take all reasonable steps to prevent discrimination.”

Wipper was writing in response to an email the day before from a confused-sounding Viramontes, who must have heard the DFEH was investigating something involving harassment and asked in despair, “What is failure to prevent discrimination?” She added: “We need clearer answers before moving forward.” Wipper wrote in a reassuring tone that the state was merely investigating something not covered by federal law, but not to fret, it wasn’t planning on monetizing the claim. “The DFEH may independently seek non-monetary preventive remedies” under that statute, she said.

A year later, all such niceties were off the table, and soon California was not only telling the EEOC it was going after bigger “remedies,” but also that it planned on trying to block the apparently insufficient federal settlement. “We expect that you agree that California workers should not be deprived of these greater rights,” Wipper wrote, in the summer of 2021.

The state soon after formalized this decision via a series of motions to intervene to block the federal deal, essentially hoping to replace it with its own bigger, badder settlement.

Activision’s latest motion makes clear what the company thinks happened. The firm says it cooperated with the parallel DFEH pay equity and EEOC harassment investigations for two years, in what they believed was a “routine” process that was only upended when the EEOC surprised California by announcing it was ready to settle. “Apparently recognizing that the pay and promotion claims it had agreed to investigate under the Interagency Agreement were unlikely to generate significant media interest or claims value,” the motion reads, “DFEH suddenly changed course and abandoned [California’s Fair Equity and Housing Act’s] mandated procedure in a rush to file suit.”

This furious scramble to block the EEOC followed a pattern of aggressive efforts by the DFEH to elbow out other claimants in other cases. With Riot Games in 2019, it stepped in to block a $10 million class action settlement, then a record, saying the women involved were entitled to more like $400 million in back pay (they were right up to a point, and ultimately settled for $100 million). They also demanded the company hand over the contact information of roughly 100 women who had settled confidentially with Riot over the years, which according to one lawyer would have been interpreted by management as an effort to re-litigate settled claims. In the Activision case, soon after the DFEH sent its “back off” letter to the EEOC, the agency sent a letter to Activision employees, warning them not to get their own lawyers because “it is unnecessary” and “a private attorney would have to file suit in your name.” The agency even told employees to “please let us know if an attorney attempts to solicit your business.”

The wildest example of the DFEH’s zeal for claims came in a still-pending racial discrimination case involving Tesla. In that case, the state agency offered to negotiate with the firm, on an unusual condition. “The DFEH,” they wrote, “is willing to mediate… on the condition that Tesla confirms that no other settlement related to the allegations in DFEH Director’s Complaint… will be reached.” According to Tesla’s lawyers, the DFEH went further:

In subsequent communication, DFEH then mandated a gag order that Tesla not “discuss” or even “contemplate” settlement with the EEOC, or DFEH mediation would proceed the very next day.

It takes gumption for an agency to demand a gag order preventing a corporation from talking to federal investigators, but the DFEH in recent years has not lacked in the stones department. The timeline leading to the filing of the DFEH’s harassment suit shows this. On June 23rd, 2021, the EEOC’s Viramontes confronted Wipper in an email about the workshare dispute, telling Wipper that “the EEOC suspected that DFEH had begun to investigate sexual harassment” in defiance of their agreement.

Viramontes was a little off. According to the just-filed Activision motion, the DFEH hadn’t just begun investigating the company for harassment by the time Viramontes aired her suspicions, it was already finished doing so, or at least claimed as much. Despite having set a date for later that year, in December of 2021, to mediate with Activision, it announced on June 24th, 2021 that it, too, had “completed its investigation” and now had “reason to file a civil complaint…against Activision Blizzard.” It didn’t file a full suit at this time, but submitted a “cause letter” essentially announcing its readiness to go forward without specifying over what. Activision’s new motion describes the tactic, which again, sounds strikingly like the Oracle case:

DFEH’s June 24, 2021 Cause Letter provided no cause, at all. It contained no description of what claims might be at issue (pay, promotion, or otherwise), what alleged unlawful practices had occurred as to what employee or group of employees… The Cause Letter offered “mandatory dispute resolution” with an internal DFEH mediator on either Thursday or Friday, July 1 or 2—seven and eight days, respectively, after the letter was sent… To allow for good-faith mediation, Activision Blizzard sought information from DFEH regarding the claims the agency wished to mediate. DFEH did not provide any such information.

In any case, the end result in the Activision affair was that the firm found itself sued and answering questions in media about butt plugs and suicide before it even knew what it was being accused of. This was pretty far from any mandate to “resolve the dispute without litigation.”

Tesla, the clean energy carmaker run by would-be Twitter conqueror Elon Musk, is also caught up in a shockingly bloody war with the Golden State.

The company at the end of April claimed DFEH pulled the same stunt Activision complained of, saying the agency investigated, learned another set of lawyers appeared to have a juicier-sounding case than they did, and bigfooted their way into that other claim, going public with explosive allegations seemingly at the last minute without regard for their impact. Echoing other complaints about the use of outside counsel, Tesla said DFEH initially announced that it was investigating racial harassment and other claims, then “‘abruptly abandoned its ‘investigation,’ rushing to file on the back of — and based entirely on — private litigation brought by plaintiffs’ counsel,” who were then brought into the suit.

The Tesla case makes the “butt plug” complaint seem like child’s play. It described the firm’s Fremont plant as “racially segregated” and a “slave ship,” claimed one black employee was told, “You’re eating watermelon, that’s why you’re lazy,” and that employees were subjected to “supervisors directly calling them the n-word throughout the day.” Powerful stuff, and bold, given that, as Tesla has repeatedly pointed out (and the DFEH hasn’t denied), the DFEH filed this complaint “without ever stepping foot in the Fremont facility.”

I reached out to both parties to confirm that the DFEH was alleging white-on-black harassment and to ask why, if that were true, more hadn’t been done. If there were indeed managers directly calling workers the n-word on a “constant” basis at Fremont, it seems like Tesla shouldn’t be waiting to act and the DFEH should be working with the firm to identify those figures immediately.

The DFEH again didn’t respond. The company in response only said the following:

The Fremont factory has a majority-minority workforce and provides the best paying jobs in the automotive industry to over 30,000 Californians.

Over the past five years, the DFEH has been asked on almost 50 occasions by individuals who believe they were discriminated against or harassed to investigate Tesla. On every single occasion, when the DFEH closed an investigation, it did not find misconduct against Tesla.

The DFEH does dispute the idea that they found insufficient reason to investigate on 50 previous occasions. “It is unclear which administrative complaints Tesla refers to, but many resulted in an immediate request for a right to sue,” they wrote, in one court document. I was unable however to find record of previous DFEH actions for this kind of harassment at the Fremont plant.

Overall, with the DFEH’s stress on anecdotal charges upfront, it is “trickier for companies to be super combative with the agency because you have these concrete personal stories that are driving the enforcement action,” said University of California law Professor Jodi Short.

Meanwhile, on March 29th of this year, just as Herold was stepping down from the DOL, Wipper was fired from the DFEH without explanation, in “the midst of her success,” as her lawyer put it. On the same day, a judge rejected the DFEH’s attempt to block the EEOC’s settlement with Activision, a decision that enraged social justice activists, who felt the company was getting off cheap. One proverbial “person familiar with the matter,” however, relayed a comment on Wipper’s departure: “When was the last time you heard of a state official being fired?” Another official, Anna Park of the EEOC, told the Washington Post, “You don’t get to double dip,” she said. “That’s the reality of these settlements.”

A Democrat-on-Democrat melee ensued over Wipper’s firing, with the state’s milquetoast JV governor Newsom taking the place of the companies and even villainous names like Scalia as a prime media target. Wipper’s lawyer announced that, like Herold, she was considering a whistleblower claim, essentially accusing the governor of succumbing to pressure from the powerful. “For there to be justice, those with political influence must be forced to play by the same set of laws and rules,” read the statement.

Even worse, a deputy to Wipper resigned — in some cases the resignation was reported as coming on the official’s “last day” — and on the way out, this deputy released an email strongly suggesting that Newsom and Activision were in cahoots. Newsom, the outgoing deputy wrote, had “repeatedly demanded advance notice of litigation strategy and next steps in the litigation,” in behavior that “mimicked the interests of Activision’s counsel.” The complaint was strikingly similar to the one made against Scalia at the end of the Oracle case, except the evil corrupt scumlord was now boring old Gavin Newsom, not Antonin Scalia’s son. A spokesperson for Newsom responded by saying, “Claims of interference by our office are categorically false.”

So much for “Eat your heart out, Paris.” The state was devouring itself.

Next: “Go anywhere but West, young man.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44542221)

Regulatory controversies help explain corporate flight in part, but why else is California struggling?

Matt Taibbi

11 hr ago

274

216

Tesla workers in Fremont, California

Washington [D.C.] is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting, and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

— New-York Daily Tribune, July 13, 1865

Horace Greeley’s famous injunction held up for a long time. Across parts of three centuries, people flocked to California by wagon, boat, train, car, even on foot, buzzing with dreams of living in a paradise of plenty, free of the “disgusting” dust and “high” rents of the industrial east.

Through the heydays of Hollywood, the Bay Area shipyards, and Silicon Valley, California symbolized freedom, innovation, and the second chance. Here the gangster on the run, the actress with a past, and the crackpot preacher, refugee family, and oft-fired inventor were all able to remake themselves, in this unique place where fame and respectability were somehow the same thing. If you could make it here, you could call yourself whatever you wanted. The Great Gatsby could never have been set in California, a state that agreed with Fitzgerald’s doomed hero, whose belief that “of course you can” repeat the past made him a tragic figure back East.

Thanks to its status at the forefront of everything in our culture, California began decades ago to develop problems other states hadn’t yet. Its entrepreneurial tradition began to cross-pollinate with its hyper-progressive politics, and along with building highways and skyscrapers it began to specialize in growing simple well-meaning laws into vast, ungovernable bureaucracies. As of last year the state boasted an astonishing 396,000 regulations, 100,000 more than its closest competitor, New York.

That number is one bigger thanks to Josiah Zayner, the controversial CEO of a small biotech firm called The Odin. Zayner was amazed to watch the state legislature take the time three years ago to pass a law prohibiting the sale of do-it-yourself genetic engineering kits, a rule that could only possibly apply to his firm.

“They specifically targeted my company,” says Zayner, who joined Oracle, Apple, and Tesla in moving to Austin, Texas. “I was also investigated by the California Medical Board, the California Department of Consumer Affairs, and audited by the California Employment Division. We’re glad to be out of there.”

Multiple other business figures cited CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act, which accomplished good things at its inception in 1970 but has since seen exponential-to-cancerous growth, making home construction massively more expensive and pushing companies to relocate workforces to locales with more available housing.

Intended to modernize residential building, CEQA to some has instead become a backdoor subsidy to owners of the state’s stagnant pool of mid-century homes, mandating so many lengthy reviews and conditions that petitioners can NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) neighborhood projects to death and kill even environmentally friendly projects like bike paths and public transport. Even progressives have begun to feel empowered to openly hate on this statute. Democratic State Senator Scott Weiner called it the “the law that swallowed California.”

A common complaint is things in the state take forever. California announced a high-speed train in 1996 and the current plan is for service on the L.A-San Francisco line to begin in 2033. One executive I spoke with described the state’s development as “frozen in aspic.”

Stripe CEO Patrick Collison gave an interview to Noah Smith on Substack that compared the push-pull tension between the state’s penchant for innovation and its cumbersome if well-meaning morass of regulations as mimicking the dizzying dynamic of the Christopher Nolan movie Tenet:

California shifted mid century from being the US's fastest-growing state — 50% population growth between 1950 and 1960 — to a state that is somehow, improbably, shrinking… mostly because of the regulations the state’s inhabitants put in place that block the housing that's required to support California’s economic success. As a result, California has lost the “technology” of being able to affordably house its inhabitants. In these ways and many others, technology is both advancing rapidly and yet often receding in the state. (Tenet is a movie about time moving backwards and forwards simultaneously… as a result of its policies, California is the Tenet of states.)

The recent litigations involving companies like Riot Games, Activision, and Tesla similarly became so weighed down by accusations and counter-accusations, disputes and cross-disputes, involving so many different parties, that over time it’s become difficult to follow who’s fighting whom, and why, and in which direction cases are moving. It’s a wonder there isn’t a higher suicide rate among the state’s civil judges. Parts of the public record read like Wrestlemania for lawyers.

In one example, the Department of Fair Housing and Employment (DFEH) decided to bring in outside counsel in the cases involving both Riot Games and Activision, which didn’t go over well with its own lawyers. Tension over those decisions reached a point where the union for California’s public attorneys filed a complaint in April against the DFEH, arguing against the agency’s decision to bring the San Francisco-based Olivier Schreiber & Chao into the Riot Games case, and lawyers from the San Francisco office of Outten & Golden to pursue Activision.

Tesla, in its own motion filed in late May, made a note of the DFEH’s intramural battle:

Even the union representing DFEH’s staff attorneys has voiced objection to DFEH’s recent conduct — initiating proceedings for siphoning work away from DFEH attorneys (members of a union) and sending the work to private plaintiff law firms.

So many different entities are already part of the argument: Activision, Riot Games, Tesla, the DFEH, the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), California’s Office of the Attorney General (OAG), and the state lawyers’ union, also known as California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges, and Hearing Officers in State Employment, or CASE.

The ostensible reasons for the DFEH’s use of outside counsel in the Activision case are head-scratching. During its pursuit of the video game firm, the DFEH hired two attorneys who had worked on the EEOC’s own Activision case. Reportedly, the DFEH then assigned these lawyers to work on California’s Activision case, an arrangement the EEOC then claimed violated the Ethics in Government Act.

According to filings by CASE, the DFEH took all of one day to respond to the EEOC complaints with a decision to hire new lawyers:

On October 5, 2021, the day following the meeting with the EEOC, DFEH notified the OAG of the need to retain outside counsel. The notice stated, in part, “The DFEH needs to augment its in-house team with outside counsel with specialized knowledge and expertise in class action litigation, opposing reverse action settlement tactics, and state and federal procedure and anti-discrimination law.”

While not admitting it had birthed any conflict of interest by hiring EEOC attorneys who’d investigated Activision, the DFEH immediately decided that it needed to retain outside counsel in the Activision case as insurance, in case should it happen that somebody in the future would ultimately rule that such a conflict existed.

As CASE noted (emphasis mine): “DFEH contends the challenged legal services contracts are permissible and necessary to guard against adverse consequences in the underlying litigated matters due to potential conflicts of interest.” This argument, the CASE motion insists, makes no sense, since hiring the outside firm “does not cure the purported conflict of interest issue,” because the new firm, too, “admittedly works closely with DFEH’s assigned attorneys who are the subject of the EEOC’s ethical complaint.”

In other words, whether the DFEH used its own lawyers or outside counsel to pursue Activision, so long as the former EEOC lawyers are still in the picture, the same problem remains, at least in the eyes of the California public attorneys’ union. This issue continues to be a sticking point in the case and is one of countless issues that may have to be resolved before the Activision matter can reach a conclusion in any direction.

Why the state needed so badly to hire away and keep two former federal lawyers — who worked on a federal case it claims was a failure — that it’s now willing to hire a whole new crew of outside lawyers for the duration just in case the decision turns out to be judged unethical is a bizarre use of public resources, no matter how you slice it.

All this may not interest anyone who’s read and been angered by the allegations of misconduct at Activision, or is inclined to see it gouged for as much as possible. However, it’s already been shown that the DFEH, like the OFCCP before it, is radically rewriting the manual for corporate enforcement, in a way that will likely have ramifications extending far beyond these cases.

Having covered dozens of corporate settlements, I’ve seen how frequently it becomes a problem when regulators are too willing to jump into conciliation with firms accused of serious wrongdoing. Judge Jed Rakoff is right: regulators searching for appropriate penalties for companies that launder millions for drug cartels or sell worthless mortgage securities to pensioners should never be in a hurry to settle. However, the opposite scenario — in which the state avoids mediation at all costs and turns every dispute into Appomattox — doesn’t work, either.

After Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced his move out of state, the DFEH seethed in its complaint that his decision was nothing more than “another move to avoid accountability.” Even if you share the ordinary person’s distaste for corporations and rich executives, the angle from Sacramento in episodes like this is pretty hard to figure. One company leaving is one thing, but when it gets to be hundreds of companies packing up, with each taking thousands or tens of thousands of jobs, can they all be leaving to “avoid accountability”?

I first got interested in Activision last year, after a reader sent a fascinating article by a Swedish Marxist named Malcom Kyeyune, a.k.a. “Tinkzorg.” Kyeyune’s theory was that the high-profile harassment and discrimination case at Activision-Blizzard symbolized America’s decline into a “negative-sum” economy. To use a California literary reference, that meant no more living off the “fat of the land,” for with the well of plenty drying, even elites are now forced to feed off each other. In such a society, he wrote, “belligerence is not a choice,” and “you need to dispossess others” to get ahead, because “not doing so means losing your own way of life.”

Blizzard, he wrote, is superficially a story about harassment, but on another level a tale about this desperate fight over resources. “Though harassment is claimed to be a problem, the solution is not for men to stop harassing women, it is for Blizzard to do a whole other slew of things,” he wrote. “Firing the offending employees… is not a solution. In fact, the only ‘real’ way forward is for them to simply hire more people… most of which will have skillsets completely orthogonal to the development of video games.”

In an age when movie studios are less and less about making movies, and academic faculties stagnate while university rolls fatten with non-academic deans and sub-deans, does this sound familiar? Institutions everywhere are filling up with employees bearing skills “orthogonal” to the bureaucratic mission, part of what’s been packaged as progress but feels more like a vast jobs program for otherwise unemployable pseudo-intellectuals. “Hire us, pay us, give us and our clients sinecures at your expense,” Kyeyune writes, “or we will make life difficult for you.”

It’s conspicuous in the Activision-Blizzard complaint that at the very top, the DFEH says “the gaming industry continues to cater to men, even in California,” as if it were given that this is an issue that can or should be solved through regulatory attention. Then, after the oft-repeated headline claim that the firm maintains a “frat boy” culture, the DFEH says it has evidence that at Activision, “women who were not ‘huge gamers’ or ‘core gamers’… were excluded and treated as outsiders.’”

Is it the state’s job to make sure companies embrace and promote employees who aren’t interested in their core products? Applied enough times in enough directions, won’t that idea get weird really fast? The potential Tenet factor in that vision of regulation seems enormous, and not restricted to the hot-button gender-controversial world of gaming.

Hollywood became the center of a global cultural movement by producing films with box-office appeal but deeply questionable messaging. Detectives in noir movies smoked like they were impatient for cancer, proudly slapped gold-digging “dames” who were forever tempting virtuous men to murder, and made full-length movies that were Playboy centerfolds for the military hardware that by an extraordinary coincidence were also among the state’s most profitable exports.

The state even ended up being governed by an ex-actor who once starred in a movie, Predator, where all you needed to do to get a young Spanish-speaking girl in a jungle village to start blabbing intelligence in fluent English was to shout “No more games!” and shake her, super-hard. “It changes colors, like the chameleon,” came the sudden revelation of Arnold-shaken “Anna,” who added, “It uses the jungle...”

Predator made $100 million worldwide, big numbers for a 1987 movie, but was filled with scenes that could never be shot today. This is the paradox at the center of a lot of issues in today’s California. The state got filthy rich thanks to its pitch-perfect read of what markets all over the world wanted, but from the 1970s on, as even writers like Ezra Klein have hinted at, the state began to worry about how to balance the proceeds of its mastery of lowbrow markets with the desire of its most influential inhabitants to maintain reputations for the latest in progressive attitudes. Weiner for instance described to Klein residents who had a “‘Black Lives Matter’ sign in their window, but they’re opposing an affordable housing project… down the street.”

California is what happens when new money becomes old money. With no more endless frontier, the clean slate goes from a promised given to a thing offered to new settlers as a service, subject to regular review, by local boyars who’ve appointed themselves to set the price of indulgences. Greeley would have called those rents, and would never have found fame writing about this version of the American West. “Turn around, young man” just doesn’t have the same ring.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44542222)

Thanks

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5111049&forum_id=2#44542347)