November 9, 2023

Thursday, November 9, 2023. Annette’s News Roundup.

I think the Roundup makes people feel not so alone.

To read an article excerpted in this Roundup, click on its blue title. Each “blue” article is hyperlinked so you can read the whole article.

Please feel free to share.

Invite at least one other person to subscribe today! https://buttondown.email/AnnettesNewsRoundup

—————————————————————-

Election Day aftermath.

Virginia.

Democrats won back control of the Virginia House of Delegates. Once all the votes are counted, Democrats will hold 53 seats while Republicans will hold 47 seats with a 2 seat margin of error.

Yes, Democrats won the Virginia State House too.

Touch 👇 to meet the youngest elected Democrat in the State Legislature in Virginia, Nadarius Clark.

Touch 👇 to watch the Vice President talk about the Elections of 2023 and 2024.

Pennsylvania.

The Democrat who ran for Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court won his race, beating an extreme Republican candidate and giving Democrats a 5-2 supermajority on the Supreme Court. Abortion Rights were his top issue.

Democrat Dan McCaffery won an open seat on Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, preserving its 5-2 Democratic majority.

Rhode Island.

New Jersey.

Democrats retained control of the New Jersey Legislature.

Democrats are expected to add five seats to their majority in the Assembly. Democrats hold a ten-seat lead in the Senate. The Governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, is also a Democrat.

Rue Landau earns at-large seat, becomes Philadelphia’s first-ever openly LGBTQ City Council member.

Democrat City Council at-large candidate Rue Landau got her start hitting the streets with ACT UP and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union before serving as the director of both the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations and the Fair Housing Commission.

—————————————————————-

Senator John Fetterman, Democrat from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is clear about his support.

Touch 👇 to tour the Senator’s office.

—————————————————————-

Macron recognizes a winning issue.

Macron moves to add abortion to France’s constitution, reacting to U.S. - The Washington Post.

President Emmanuel Macron on Friday submitted language for an amendment that would make France the first country to enshrine a right to abortion in its constitution.
Macron has declared on social media that by next year “the right of women to choose abortion will become irreversible.”


The push comes in direct response to the restriction of abortion rights in the United States.



Abortion in France has not been similarly under threat. The French public overwhelmingly supports abortion rights. Abortion is legal for any reason through the 14th week of pregnancy and fully covered by the country’s health insurance system.
But after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade last year and allowed states to outlaw abortion, French women clamored to further protect their right.
[In many countries, abortion is protected by law, not court decision]


“The Dobbs case was very shocking in France,” said Mathilde Philip-Gay, a law professor at Jean Moulin Lyon 3 University. “A movement was born just after the case, and women asked Parliament to act and especially to change the constitution.”

She noted that polls in the summer of 2022 showed that about 80 percent of the population supported abortion rights and a similar percentage was in favor of adding a right to abortion to the constitution.


“We don’t have the same problem as the U.S. It’s not for now. It’s for the future,” Philip-Gay said. “If you listen to Donald Trump campaign in 2018, you can tell that there was a strategy to reverse federal abortion rights. In the U.S., there was a long-term strategy; in France, we need a long-term strategy, too.”

Macron’s office confirmed Friday that he had submitted a draft reflecting the “freedom” language favored by the more conservative Senate.

The proposed text, to be added to Article 34 of the constitution, says: “The law determines the conditions under which a woman’s freedom is exercised, which is guaranteed to her, to have recourse to an abortion.”

That text could still be amended by lawmakers before they vote on it.


Feminist groups have argued that a “right” would be more robust than a “freedom” and would more clearly confer an obligation on the government to provide access. Some advocates are also concerned that the proposed wording gives too much power to the legislators of the day and might not prevent any rollback of protections.


The fine-tuning of language may seem like a luxury to abortion rights activists in the United States, who have been fighting bans and other steps to limit access in various states.
[States where abortion is legal, banned or under threat]


“Certainly we’re very far away from a constitutional amendment enshrining a woman’s right to choose abortion. In fact, America is moving in the other direction,” said Adam Winkler, a UCLA professor specializing in U.S. constitutional law.


And while it’s hard to change the constitution in France, it’s even harder in the United States, where three-fourths of the states need to agree on any amendment. The last constitutional amendment — preventing Congress from giving itself a pay raise before an election — was ratified in 1992, more than 200 years after it was passed by both houses of Congress.


“There are enough states that are profoundly antiabortion that they would be able to stop a constitutional amendment, currently,” Winkler said.
But it’s possible things could change — over time.
[How abortion laws in the U.S. compare with those in other countries]


“Dobbs dropped a bomb into U.S. politics and led to more mobilization from pro-choice voters,” Winkler said. “That could, ultimately, lead to a sufficient backlash that there is a push for a constitutional amendment. In the long run, abortion rights advocates are not going to want to rely on a Supreme Court decision to protect rights to an abortion, because, obviously, that can be overturned.”

—————————————————————-

The other Party played its political games in front of a national audience last night.

Can you see who said what?

—————————————————————-

Women’s Professionals Soccer is taking off.

Her family bought half of the New York Giants 30 years ago. Now she’s leading their investment in New York women’s soccer team Gotham FC.

– Game on. When Carolyn Tisch Blodgett was 6 years old, her grandfather, Loews Corporation cofounder Bob Tisch, bought a 50% stake in the New York Giants. The 1991 purchase turned out to be a formative one for Tisch Blodgett and her entire family; they began spending Sundays together watching football. Tisch Blodgett even wrote her college admissions essay about bonding through the sport with three generations of women in her family.

As Tisch Blodgett progressed in her own career, she stayed close to sports and fitness; she was Peloton’s head of global marketing between 2016 and 2020. After leaving the fitness company, last year she began working within the Giants representing her family’s ownership interest as a strategic advisor. (The team is co-owned by the Tisch and Mara families.) Spending more time in the sports world helped her identify opportunities outside the NFL, and she now also serves as founder and CEO for Next 3, an investment arm for the Tisch family backing innovation in sports.

Today, Next 3 is leading a minority stake investment in NJ/NY Gotham FC, the New York metropolitan area’s women’s soccer franchise. The size of the investment wasn’t disclosed. As Tisch Blodgett considered possible Next 3 investments, “all roads kept leading us back to women’s soccer,” she says.

New soccer teams have popped up across the country in recent years—from the celebrity-backed Los Angeles team Angel City to a forthcoming Bay Area franchise—but Tisch Blodgett followed her grandfather’s lead and stuck with the New York market. “He had the opportunity to invest in many other teams where he would be the controlling owner, but he said, ‘How could I invest 100% in another team when I have an opportunity to invest 50% in the New York Giants?'” she remembers. “That was really how we felt about Gotham.”

Gotham’s other co-owners and investors include New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and Tammy Murphy as well as Sue Bird and Carli Lloyd.

Carolyn Tisch Blodgett is leading her family’s investment in New York women’s soccer team Gotham FC.

As a co-owner, Tisch Blodgett wants to help Gotham reach new audiences. “Gotham can absolutely be one of the best women’s soccer teams in the country and in the world,” she says. “It can also be one of the best brands in the world.”

Tisch Blodgett’s Peloton experience informs her approach, too. She’d like to help more Gotham players grow into household names, just as Peloton instructors Cody Rigsby and Robin Arzón became stars in their own right. (The team’s roster includes Ali Krieger, who has announced her retirement, and forward Katie Stengel.) And she wants to build a community around the team similar to the following of devotees Peloton developed online.

The New York Liberty’s recent run in the WNBA finals showed Tisch Blodgett what could be possible. “All of a sudden people are walking down the street wearing Liberty shirts and they’re talking about the Liberty in a way that five years ago wouldn’t have happened,” she says.

At the Giants, much of Tisch Blodgett’s work is about modernizing the team. Gotham gives Tisch Blodgett opportunities to test new strategies on a smaller scale before trying them in the NFL. (Gotham plays at New Jersey’s Red Bull Arena, which holds 25,000 people to MetLife’s 82,500.) She and Next 3 are interested in changing patterns in sports media consumption, evolving behavior in the stadium—younger generations are less willing to miss key moments to get up and buy popcorn, for instance—and keeping fans connected with players 24/7, not just during games.

Tisch Blodgett wants Gotham to define her family’s legacy just as the Giants have. “When my family got involved in the Giants, that fundamentally changed our family,” she says. “When I look back, 30 years from now, I hope that for our family and so many other families Gotham will be a life-changing moment, because women’s soccer is part of their lives in a way it hadn’t been before.”
(Emma Hinchliffe, The Broadsheet, Fortune).

—————————————————————-

STRIKE OVER: Actors Make a Deal With Studios After 118 Days.

The work stoppage will end 12:01 a.m. on Thursday.

After a grueling 118 days on strike, SAG-AFTRA has officially reached a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract with studios, a move that is heralding the end of the 2023 actors strike.

The SAG-AFTRA TV/Theatrical Committee approved the agreement in a unanimous vote on Wednesday, SAG-AFTRA announced. The strike will end at 12:01 a.m. Thursday. On Friday, the deal will go to the union’s national board for approval.

The performers union announced the provisional agreement Wednesday, after about two weeks of renewed negotiations. The development came not long before a deadline of 5 p.m. that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers had set for the union to give their answer on whether they had a deal.

The union is so far being mum on the details of the agreement, which will likely emerge in the next few days prior to the union’s ratification vote. If the deal is ratified, the contract could soon go into effect, and if not, members would essentially send their labor negotiators back to the bargaining table with the AMPTP.

When negotiations restarted on Oct. 2 for the first time since SAG-AFTRA called its work stoppage in July, hopes were high in the industry that Hollywood’s largest union could come to terms with major companies quickly. Just like they had in the final days of the writers’ negotiations, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, Disney CEO Bob Iger, and NBCUniversal Studio Group chairman and chief content officer Donna Langley attended the talks at the union’s national headquarters in Los Angeles. But the studio ended up walking out on Oct. 11 over SAG-AFTRA’s proposal to charge a fee per every streaming subscriber on major platforms in a move that the union’s chief negotiator called “mystifying” (Sarandos called the ask “a bridge too far“).

The sides reconvened Oct. 24 after a nearly two-week break. This time, the studios came in with a more generous offer to increase actors’ wage floors and a slightly modified version of a success-based streaming bonus they had previously offered the WGA. The two sides exchanged proposals for much of the week in a tense situation that had the industry on edge.

Even as a deal came into sight, progress was slow, especially when it came to putting the contract’s inaugural guardrails on artificial intelligence: The union considers the rapidly advancing technology an absolutely existential issue for members and sought to close any potential loopholes that could lead to future issues. On Saturday the studios presented what the union characterized as the companies’ “last, best and final,” overarching offer (still, the two sides kept swapping offers after).

When the union’s previous contract expired in mid-July and SAG-AFTRA went out on strike, many outstanding issues were left on the table. Setting terms for the use of AI was a major sticking point between union and studio negotiators, as was a proposal to provide casts with additional streaming compensation. Union negotiators sought to institute an unusually large minimum rate increase in the first year of the contract, a host of ground rules for self-taped virtual auditions and major increases to health and pension contributions “caps” that have not been changed since the 1980s. Meanwhile, as the entertainment business continues to experience a period of contraction, major companies looked to preserve some measure of flexibility and cost control.

SAG-AFTRA’s strike, coming as it did amid an ongoing writers strike in July, gave the union an unusual amount of leverage early on in its talks with the AMPTP. Almost immediately, most remaining unionized U.S. productions that were operating without writers shut down, including Deadpool 3 and Venom 3. An as the months of the work stoppage stretched on, a strategist at the Milken Institute has estimated that the strikes have cost the California economy alone at least $6 billion.

But pressure started to build as the strike neared and surpassed its 100-day mark. A-list actors began talking to both their union and the studios in an attempt to improve progress in the negotiations. A number of actors also started drafting a letter expressing concerns about the union’s leadership but held back from publishing it, fearful of the missive’s potential impact on negotiations. Then, on Oct. 26, a separate letter was released signed by apparently thousands of actors, exhorting negotiators, “We have not come all this way to cave now.”

The amount of time that the union spent on strike in 2023 will certainly raise expectations for the deal they reached with studios. In the union’s upcoming ratification vote, the date of which has not yet been announced, members will decide whether the pact is acceptable to them. (The Hollywood Reporter).

Fran Drescher, Head of SAG-AFTRA, made the announcement.

—————————————————————-