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Business November 10, 2017

German Consumers Fight Automakers For Compensation In Emissions Scandal

German automakers are under fire again, this time from European owners of vehicles linked to the diesel emissions scandal who, unlike American owners, have gotten no compensation.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Two years ago, the EPA ruled that the Volkswagen Group had deliberately manipulated its diesel cars to hide how much pollution they were emitting. In the U.S., between fines and payouts to car owners, the scandal has cost the company nearly $23 billion. But that’s just one part of the story. VW and its subsidiaries like Audi have resisted paying compensation to car owners in Europe. There some 8 million diesel cars have been affected. And in Germany, people are fighting for change. NPR’s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Berlin.

SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON, BYLINE: Retired German Judge Hartmut Baeumer says he’s driven German-made diesel cars for more than a quarter of a century. The 69-year-old says he even let Audi officials talk him out of buying a Toyota Prius in 2008 when he discovered his A6 wasn’t as fuel efficient as advertised.

HARTMUT BAEUMER: And they told me, no, we will change now. It will be – everything will be better. And finally I decided, OK, I’ll try it once more.

NELSON: The Audi A4 he bought a year later turned out to be one of the diesel models embroiled in the emissions test cheating scandal. Baeumer has been in a fight with VW Audi ever since. He claims the $58 software upgrade the German automaker is proposing could harm his car and won’t keep it from exceeding current pollution limits set by the European Union. Baeumer is demanding a similar hardware upgrade offered to hundreds of thousands of U.S. VW Audi owners. He estimates it will cost about $1,700 dollars and says the carmaker refuses to do it.

BAEUMER: Compared with the United States, German consumers are citizens of second class.

NELSON: The German government and EU officials aren’t demanding parity even though the carmakers broke the laws here, too. So earlier this year, Baeumer turned to the German courts for relief. Another 15,000 German diesel car owners did the same this week, joining the consumer advocacy group myRight in a $420 million lawsuit. Lawyer Christopher Rother, who works with the American firm Hausfeld in Berlin, represents Baeumer and the other plaintiffs.

CHRISTOPHER ROTHER: We have two stakeholders here. I mean, one stakeholder is the consumer. The other stakeholder is the environment. And nothing really was done to address consumer and environmental issues in an effective way.

NELSON: VW disagrees. In an email to NPR, a spokesman says it expects German courts to dismiss the latest claims against VW over the diesel scandal. German law doesn’t provide for German consumers the kind of protections U.S. law does for American consumers, including the ability to file a class-action suit. The VW spokesman says customer trust and satisfaction are, quote, “extremely important” to the company, and that repairs are being made in accordance with guidelines provided by the German agency that regulates motor vehicles. That doesn’t satisfy VW’s many German critics, however. Rother criticizes the close ties between carmakers and the German government, which is protective of the 800,000 jobs the automotive industry provides.

ROTHER: The financial and economic threat to the German auto industry is considered to be such an issue that you will hardly find any politician who will want to do something about it.

NELSON: Rother adds his firm expects to file more lawsuits over the coming year not only in Germany, but in several other European countries. Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF ENGLEWOOD AND SIMON ENG’S “HELLO THERE”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Business November 9, 2017

Bruce Springsteen On Broadway Comes With An Economics Lesson

The hottest ticket on Broadway is for a one-of-a-kind, one-man-show. For a limited time, Bruce Springsteen is playing songs and telling stories in a 960-seat theatre. And those lucky fans are now learning a valuable, Nobel Prize Winning economics lesson. Something called: The Endowment Effect.

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

One of the hottest tickets on Broadway is for a one-of-a-kind one-man show. For a limited time only, Bruce Springsteen is playing a 960-seat theater. And the luckiest fans are now learning a valuable, Nobel-Prize-winning economics lesson. Kenny Malone of our Planet Money team explains.

KENNY MALONE, BYLINE: What date – so what date are your tickets for?

DANIEL FLYNN: December…

MALONE: The biggest Bruce Springsteen fan I know, my friend Daniel Flynn, actually snagged two Bruce on Broadway tickets when they went on sale.

Fifteen – and how much did you pay for them?

FLYNN: Four-hundred plus fees.

MALONE: Four-hundred dollars plus fees per ticket – that is the face value. Now, Daniel knows he could resell these for a lot of money.

Have you looked at what they’re going for?

FLYNN: I have not.

MALONE: You still haven’t.

FLYNN: No.

MALONE: Because Daniel worries that if he sees what he could resell the tickets for, it would ruin the show for him.

FLYNN: I mean, it’s self-protection – right? – because I don’t want to know what a stupid decision from an economic standpoint I’m making.

MALONE: (Laughter) I mean, it is pretty stupid.

FLYNN: Yeah.

MALONE: Stupid because he does have another choice. Sell the tickets. Classical economic theory says that if you use a ticket that’s worth, say, a thousand bucks, it is like buying a ticket for a $1,000 because you’re choosing to give up $1,000 to see the show. Daniel would never pay $1,000 to see this show, but classical economic theory does not seem to apply to Bruce Springsteen tickets.

RICHARD THALER: Hello.

MALONE: This is Richard Thaler.

THALER: Professor at the Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.

MALONE: Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics this year for studying the many irrational ways human beings deal with money. And he did this famous study where he and two other colleagues told a classroom of students…

THALER: Bring money to class this day. We’re running an experiment.

MALONE: The kids walked in that day, and Thaler gave brand new coffee mugs to half of the students in the class.

THALER: Forty-four students – so 22 mugs.

MALONE: Then he basically said, sell your mug if you want to. And what they found was that people who had been randomly handed a mug suddenly really valued that mug.

If didn’t have this mug, I didn’t care about this mug. But now that I have it…

THALER: Yeah. I’m not giving that mug up.

MALONE: The discovery was that simply having a thing makes you overvalue the thing.

THALER: I ended up calling this the Endowment Effect.

MALONE: And this Endowment Effect – one of the places you’ll see it a lot is with concert tickets.

Are you and the orchestra?

FLYNN: Yes.

MALONE: You are in the orchestra.

FLYNN: I am in orchestra, and I know the row number.

MALONE: And so the way that I see my friend Daniel Flynn and his refusal to even look at how much his Bruce Springsteen tickets are worth is that he’s sort of accepting that he is a human and he is susceptible to this Endowment Effect. Once he had that ticket in his hand, he knew he was going to go with his dad even though it might be economically irrational.

I do have StubHub pulled up in front of me.

FLYNN: OK, great (laughter).

MALONE: I mean, do you want to know? You don’t have to.

FLYNN: Yes.

MALONE: Really?

FLYNN: Sure.

MALONE: OK.

I also checked with the ticket website SeatGeek about this, and they said there is a range, but tickets like Daniel’s have sold for as much as $4,000 each.

FLYNN: Oh my gosh, wow, yeah, man.

MALONE: Would you be willing to pay $4,000 to go to it?

FLYNN: (Laughter) Of course not. I wouldn’t even pay close to that. But I am honestly surprised it’s that high. But Bruce Springsteen is incredible. And how often do you get to see him in a theater with less than a thousand people?

MALONE: Well, I understand all of that, but now you’re just rationalizing spending $4,000 on it.

FLYNN: Right. It’s Bruce on Broadway, man.

MALONE: Kenny Malone, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SONG, “DANCING IN THE DARK”)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Business November 8, 2017

Some Twitter Users Embrace Longer Tweets; Some Stay Terse

Gokhan Balci/Getty Images

Gokhan Balci/Getty Images

Editing down your thoughts to cram them into a single tweet can be painful. Now, Twitter users might find that process half as painful.

In early September, Twitter announced it was moving on from its “arbitrary” 140-character limit by doubling the amount of characters a tweet can contain to 280.

This is a small change, but a big move for us. 140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence! https://t.co/TuHj51MsTu

— jack (@jack) September 26, 2017

Some users were instantly skeptical — after all, they had signed up for a website whose defining features were, as its founder and CEO Jack Dorsey noted, brevity and speed.

139 characters pic.twitter.com/WkfdXL8oLh

— Caitlin Kelly (@caitlin__kelly) September 26, 2017

Until this week, only a select group of Twitter users were able to tweet past the 140 character count in a trial period. Now, the 280 character feature has been rolled out for the entirety of the platform.

“We — and many of you — were concerned that timelines may fill up with 280 character tweets, and people with the new limit would always use up the whole space,” said Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen in a blog post. “But that didn’t happen.”

Just 5 percent of tweets posted during the trial period were longer than 140 characters — and only 2 percent were longer than 190 characters.

“People in the test got very excited about the extra space in the beginning and many tweets went way beyond 140. We expect to see some of this novelty effect spike again with this week’s launch and expect it to resume to normal behavior soon after,” said Rosen.

Rosen also says that during the 140 character-only era, 9 percent of English language tweets hit the character limit. Since the expanded character count, this happened far less frequently — now, only 1 percent of tweets run up against the limit.

The company also cited language differences in its decision to expand. In character-based languages such as Chinese and Japanese, “you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French,” wrote Rosen.

Twitter says its research shows us that the 140 character limit was a major cause of frustration for people tweeting in English, but not in Japanese. Only 0.4 percent of Japanese tweets compared to the 9 percent of English tweets hit the 140 character limit.

For these reasons, says Rosen, the character count for tweeting in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese won’t be doubled.

Some Twitter users were lukewarm about the platform-wide update. Many chose to dedicate their first 140+ character post to jokes.

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— Cookie Monster (@MeCookieMonster) November 8, 2017

‘Extravagant’:
baroque, devilish, exorbitant, excessive, extreme, fancy, immoderate, inordinate, insane, intolerable, lavish, overdue, overextravagant, overmuch, overweening, plethoric, profligate, steep, stiff, spendthrift, thriftless, towering, unconscionable, undue, unmerciful

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) November 7, 2017

BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD BIRD

— birdsrightsactivist (@ProBirdRights) November 7, 2017

Twitter’s destroyed its USP. The whole point, for me, was how inventive people could be within that concise framework. #Twitter280characters

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 8, 2017

By the way, it took 2579 characters—or 10 280 character tweets—to file this story.

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Business November 7, 2017

Report: Weinstein Hired Agents To Investigate And Suppress Accusations Against Him

A report in The New Yorker says Harvey Weinstein hired an Israeli intelligence firm to collect information on the allegations against him.

Chris Pizzello/Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

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Chris Pizzello/Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP

When women started telling their stories of sexual harassment and assault by Harvey Weinstein, many talked about the fear they had of him. Likewise, some journalists spoke of the pressure the powerful film executive had applied on them or their bosses to quash reports of his misconduct.

Now a new report by Ronan Farrow, published Monday evening in The New Yorker, shows that Weinstein hired “an army of spies” to investigate the women who were considering speaking out and the journalists who were digging into the allegations.

Though Farrow lays out the details plainly, it still reads like an espionage thriller. It involves multiple “international high-level corporate intelligence firms, using very aggressive tactics,” Farrow told NPR.

One firm’s tactics included “targeting women, targeting journalists,” Farrow said. “Showing up in their lives using fake identities. Using fake companies as a front. This was detailed, this was aggressive, and according to the women I spoke to — this was terrifying.”

According to Farrow’s reporting, this is the plot:

Last fall, Weinstein began hiring private security firms to collect information on the women who might speak out against him. One firm was Kroll, a major corporate intelligence firm. Another was Black Cube, a much newer company founded by two former Israeli intelligence officers, Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus, and which touts its staff of “veterans of elite units” from Israeli intelligence.

Black Cube was hired by Weinstein’s lawyer, David Boies. Boies is well-known attorney: he represented Al Gore in the disputed 2000 presidential election, and he fought California’s ban on same-sex marriage. He has also provided legal counsel to The New York Timesin three matters over the last decade.

That last part is problematic because his law firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, hired Black Cube to accomplish two objectives. One was to learn the contents of a book – a forthcoming memoir by actress Rose McGowan – that “includes harmful negative information” about Weinstein. The other was to provide intelligence that would help Weinstein stop the Times from publishing a negative article about him.

That would be this article, published in the Times on October 5. Weinstein was fired from his company three days later.

Farrow obtained the contract between the law firm and Black Cube, which lays out some details of the deal. A key part of the mission was an agent known as “Anna,” who managed to meet and befriend McGowan, who says Weinstein assaulted her. Anna told McGowan her name was Diana Filip, an advocate for women’s empowerment at a London-based wealth management firm.

But Anna and Diana Filip are both aliases for a former Israeli Defense Force officer, Farrow reports. The operative also met with Ben Wallace, a reporter at New York magazine who was working on a possible Weinstein story. The agent and others were apparently gathering intelligence on who was likely to come forward, and which reporters were working on Weinstein stories.

Another intelligence firm, PSOPS, sent Weinstein research on Farrow, Wallace, Times reporter Jodi Kantor, and New York editor Adam Moss. Weinstein had hired Kroll to collect information on the late journalist David Carr back in the early 2000s, Farrow reports, and Carr’s widow says he “believed that he was being surveilled, though he didn’t know by whom.”

In the contract, Black Cube promised that “due to the urgency of the project,” it would use its “blitz methodology” to bring its resources to the Weinstein job.

Black Cube said its team would include a project manager, a legal advisor, “avatar operators” fluent in media analysis, linguists, an investigative journalist, a full-time agent (“Anna”), and operations experts with “extensive experience in social engineering.” It also promised the support of its board and advisors: “businessmen in key positions in Israel and abroad” and former heads of Israeli intelligence forces.

That’s a lot of firepower to unleash on actresses and journalists.

But this kind of intelligence work on behalf of private clients “is huge in Israel,” according to Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.

The Weinstein scheme sounds like “the same sort of mindset and originality and experience that someone who served many, many years in Israeli intelligence” would have deployed on behalf of the state of Israel, Bergman told NPR. Only now, those former officers are doing that work on behalf of a private company.

Farrow reported that Boies’ firm paid Black Cube $100,000 on Oct. 28, 2016, toward an eventual $600,000 invoice. Black Cube was promised a “success fee” of $300,000 if it managed to block the Times from publishing its report on Weinstein. It would get an additional $50,000 if it managed to acquire the second half of McGowan’s book.

The mission failed, of course. The Timespublished its story and The New Yorkerpublished its own (reported by Farrow). Now police in New York are building a case that Weinstein raped an actress there seven years ago.

It’s not known how much money Weinstein paid out to to all the firms he hired. Bergman, the Israeli journalist, says articles like the one you’re reading are good business development for such firms – suggesting they’ll do whatever possible for their clients, and they’ll bring significant capabilities to the task.

For Boies Shiller Flexner, the outlook is less rosy. As Farrow notes, law firms are often used as the middlemen between clients and intelligence firms, “to place investigative materials under the aegis of attorney-client privilege, which can prevent the disclosure of communications, even in court.”

Boies defended his actions, telling Farrow that he didn’t think it was a conflict of interest to hire Black Cube to work on stopping the Times story, while he was also representing the paper in a libel suit. He said he never pressured any news outlets, and that Weinstein was at that point denying the allegations.

“Given what was known at the time, I thought it was entirely appropriate to investigate precisely what he was accused of doing, and to investigate whether there were facts that would rebut those accusations,” he said.

The Times feels differently.

“We learned today that the law firm of Boies Schiller and Flexner secretly worked to stop our reporting on Harvey Weinstein at the same time as the firm’s lawyers were representing us in other matters,” the newspaper said in a statement Monday. “We consider this intolerable conduct, a grave betrayal of trust, and a breach of the basic professional standards that all lawyers are required to observe. It is inexcusable and we will be pursuing appropriate remedies.”

And it seems that Weinstein’s intense efforts to keep a lid on the allegations against him weren’t enough in the end.

It’s proof, Bergman says, that sometimes even the most highly trained staff and whole lot of money “cannot stop a truthful and profound and deep investigative journalism.”

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Business November 6, 2017

Understanding How Trump Does Business And Who He Does It With

One of President Trump’s signature projects during his days as a businessman was Trump SoHo in Manhattan. Now the Mueller investigation is reportedly looking into the finances of that project, developed by a firm called Bayrock. NPR’s Embedded podcast looked at the checkered history of the Bayrock Group and one of its key figures, Felix Sater.

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team is reportedly looking beyond whether President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia in last year’s election. It’s also looking at Trump’s finances on projects like his Manhattan building Trump SoHo. One of the developers of Trump SoHo is a company called Bayrock, and one of the people at Bayrock was a man named Felix Sater. To know about him is to understand how Trump does business and who he does business with. For my podcast Embedded, NPR’s Alina Selyukh, Jim Zarroli and I start with Felix Sater’s background.

JIM ZARROLI, BYLINE: Sater was from the former Soviet Union, came here as a child living in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, which is home to a lot of Russian immigrants.

MCEVERS: Felix Sater’s father had a criminal history. He once pled guilty to extortion charges.

DAVID BARRY: He wanted Felix to be an above-board businessman.

ZARROLI: That’s David Barry. He’s a former AP reporter, and he’s spent a lot of time covering organized crime. He actually ended up writing a memoir with a guy named Sal Lauria, who is very good friends with Sater.

ALINA SELYUKH, BYLINE: And I should add here that we did try to talk to Felix Sater. He, through his lawyer, declined to talk to us. And so Felix Sater and this guy Sal Lauria grew up to be these high-flying brokers on Wall Street. And Felix Sater’s trouble with the law starts at this party one night in 1991. Sal had just passed a broker’s exam. It’s very hard to pass. They’re out celebrating.

BARRY: And it was a nice night of celebration at a nice restaurant that specialized in margaritas.

MCEVERS: David Barry says there’s this other broker who’s there at the time. Somehow a fight breaks out over a woman.

BARRY: And Felix exploded and smashed this heavy margarita glass. You know, it was a goblet, not like a martini glass. And he just in half a second or more cut this guy’s face open.

MCEVERS: The New York Times reported the man suffered nerve damage and later needed 110 stitches in his face.

SELYUKH: Felix Sater ends up going to prison.

ZARROLI: And yet that really wasn’t the end of Felix Sater’s criminal career.

MCEVERS: Court documents show Felix Sater and Sal Lauria then started what’s known as a pump-and-dump scheme. They would buy up shares of stock through offshore accounts, which inflates the price, then sell these shares or dump them onto unknowing investors. The FBI said they were part of an operation that made $40 million this way. And court documents show they had help from the Italian Mafia.

BARRY: To run something like that on a large scale, you need muscle.

ZARROLI: David Barry says you can’t just politely ask other brokers not to sell stock you’re trying to pump or inflate.

BARRY: But if you have two guys who are soldiers for the Gambino family and they show up at the brokerage, the brokers listen. They’re not listening to Hutton at that point. They’re listening to Dominic and Sonny.

MCEVERS: In 1998, Felix Sater pleads guilty to one count of racketeering. And here’s where things get even more interesting. Instead of being sentenced for his crime…

ZARROLI: The charges against him were sealed and the case against him was basically frozen for years. And the reason was that he turned state’s evidence. He started to become a cooperating witness for the government. And he became a really valuable witness over the next 10 years or so.

MCEVERS: One thing Sater helped the U.S. government do was to try to get Stinger missiles – these are these shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles that had been used in Afghanistan – off the black market in Russia and out of the hands of terrorists. This is in that book by David Barry and Sal Lauria. And in return, the government promised to keep Sater from going to prison.

ZARROLI: And then, as I said, Felix Sater’s pump-and-dump case is sealed for years. And Felix Sater reinvents himself.

SELYUKH: And the next thing that he moves on to is a new real estate investment company called the Bayrock Group.

MCEVERS: One of the developers that would go on to build Trump SoHo.

SELYUKH: So Bayrock was founded in 2001. They later get an office at Trump Tower.

TIM O’BRIEN: Two floors beneath where the Trump family conducted their own business at the Trump Organization.

ZARROLI: That’s Tim O’Brien. He’s with Bloomberg, and he’s been reporting on Donald Trump for decades. So Bayrock and other developers come to Trump with this idea of Trump SoHo.

SELYUKH: Here’s the pitch – let’s build this 46-story condo hotel and you put your name on it, but you don’t have to invest any of your own money. We will raise the money and you’ll get equity in the building. Plus you’ll be paid some management fees.

MCEVERS: It’s called a licensing deal, and Trump has done a lot of these over the years around the world.

ZARROLI: By this point Trump’s businesses have been through several bankruptcies, and O’Brien says Trump can’t get loans from major banks.

O’BRIEN: From Trump’s perspective, anybody who walked into Trump Tower and put a bag of money on his desk could do business with him.

MCEVERS: That’s according to O’Brien’s sources. So Trump announces this new project on “The Apprentice.”

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, “THE APPRENTICE”)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Located in the center of Manhattan’s chic artist enclave, the Trump International Hotel…

MCEVERS: But there are now questions. Did Trump know about Felix Sater’s felony conviction? Because if he did, it shows he’s willing to do business with someone who’s committed financial crimes. If he didn’t, it means he doesn’t fully vet who he does business with. Felix Sater’s lawyer says he’d reformed by the time of Trump SoHo. Bayrock and Sater have since been sued in a case that alleges financial improprieties, allegations their lawyers deny.

ZARROLI: Lawyers we talked to say that before 2007, Trump probably could have found out about Felix Sater’s conviction. But after 2007, a lot of people knew about it. That’s when The New York Times published an article about the margarita glass, the pump-and-dump scheme, and about Felix Sater’s work for the government.

MCEVERS: A lawyer named Richard Lerner picks up the story from there. He has internal Bayrock emails from that time. They were filed as part of a lawsuit.

RICHARD LERNER: The New York Times article was published on December 17, 2007. Two days later, he was deposed.

ZARROLI: Trump was deposed as part of a separate lawsuit.

MCEVERS: In it, Trump says nobody knew anything about Felix Sater. And then he says he’ll look into it. Again, here’s Lerner.

LERNER: Then on January 21, 2008, there are internal emails at Bayrock saying there’s going to be a meeting. And Donald Jr., Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Sr. are coming. Sater will be there.

SELYUKH: We don’t exactly know what that meeting was about, but remember; some weeks earlier, The New York Times had published that article about Felix Sater.

LERNER: And in that email chain of January 21, 2008, I believe the very final email of the day is…

MCEVERS: Donald is happy with me, Felix Sater writes. I’ll explain when I see you.

SELYUKH: As recently as 2010, Felix Sater had a business card, and it said senior adviser to Donald Trump. Then in 2013, Trump does this interview with the BBC’s John Sweeney.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JOHN SWEENEY: Why didn’t you go to Felix Sater and say, you’re connected with the Mafia, you’re fired?

TRUMP: Well, first of all, we were not the developer there. That was a licensing deal.

SWEENEY: But your name was on it.

TRUMP: A very simple licensing deal.

SWEENEY: But your name’s on it, Mr. Trump.

TRUMP: Excuse me. But I don’t know – you’re telling me things that I don’t even know about. I mean, you’re telling me about Felix Sater. I know who he is.

ZARROLI: After a few more exchanges, Trump ends the interview.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

TRUMP: And by the way, John, I hate to do this, but I do have that big group of people waiting. So I have to…

SWEENEY: OK, now, hold on…

MCEVERS: Later, Trump said he wouldn’t know Felix Sater if they were sitting in the same room. And even later in 2015, as first reported by The New York Times, Felix Sater emails Trump’s personal lawyer and says, quote, “our boy can become president of the USA and we can engineer it. I will get all of Putin’s team to buy in on this.” The White House says that email is a non-story. No one from the Trump Organization would talk to us for this story.

SELYUKH: As recently as last year, Felix Sater said he and Trump worked closely together over the Trump SoHo years.

ZARROLI: Trump told the AP in 2015 that he wasn’t that familiar with Sater.

MCEVERS: And Bayrock does not currently do real estate deals.

ZARROLI: I’m Jim Zarroli.

SELYUKH: I’m Alina Selyukh.

MCEVERS: I’m Kelly McEvers.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Business November 5, 2017

Of Power, Predators And Innocent Mistakes: The Complex Problems Of Sexual Harassment

Harvey Weinstein faces very serious accusations of sexual assault. But one writer thinks many men are being unfairly caught up in less serious accusations.

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Rich Polk/Getty Images for The Weinstein C

Women around the country have been speaking out in what seems like a deluge of sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations against men in positions of power.

The floodgates opened with a New York Times story about sexual harassment accusations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, who has since been accused of raping multiple women and is now being investigated by multiple police agencies.

A national conversation has begun about sexual harassment. But there are times when some people disagree on what that phrase means.

In a recent example, NPR’s former news boss Mike Oreskes was forced to resign this past week due to multiple accusations of sexual harassment.

NPR’s David Folkenflik detailed the numerous allegations of Oreskes’ inappropriate behavior. When “taken together, the allegations involving Oreskes paint an ominous picture of an executive willing to abuse his authority,” Folkenflik writes.

But “[s]ome of the incidents, in isolation, might not appear consequential.”

A former NPR editor who was pressured to meet Oreskes for dinner “found the experience bewildering as she tried to sort out whether what she had experienced was truly sexual harassment.”

Last month, after former President George H.W. Bush was accused of groping multiple women, his spokesman responded that Bush “has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner. Some have seen it as innocent; others clearly view it as inappropriate.” (He “sexually assaulted me,” one actress wrote.)

One person says she has been sexually assaulted while another calls the same incident “innocent.”

NPR’s newsroom uses Webster’s New World College Dictionary, which defines “sexual harassment” as: “inappropriate, unwelcome, and, typically, persistent behavior, as by an employer or co-worker, that is sexual in nature, specif. when actionable under federal or state statutes.”

NPR’s Weekend Edition asked men around the country what behavior they thought crosses the line from something less serious to harassment.

“Any line where the other person is uncomfortable or feeling like they’re being harassed or assaulted — that’s the line for me,” says 25-year-old Wade Hankin of Seattle.

He says he was raised by a feminist mom, surrounded by strong women he loved and respected and has thought deeply about issues of consent. But a friend told him he crossed a line himself.

Four years ago he was “blacked-out drunk” at a Halloween party, Hankin tells NPR’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Weekend Edition. “I was slapping and grabbing my two friends’ behinds. And neither of them liked it.”

“I felt it was necessary to say something about it and say how sorry I am,” he says. He wrote about the experience on social media. He agreed to let NPR use his full name; his recounting of something he’s not proud of will come up on Google searches of his name.

“We only ever hear women’s allegations. Women saying what has happened to them. If there is any word from a man, it’s deny. It’s suing. It’s, ‘I never did this,’ ” Hankin says is the reason why he responded in such a public way.

“It’s never: ‘This is what I have done. I am so sorry.’ It’s never taking responsibility for actions.”

The court of public opinion

Writer Cathy Young, a contributing editor for the libertarian Reason magazine, thinks some of the outcry — she calls it “Weinsteining” — has gone too far.

“Obviously I think we can all get behind people like Harvey Weinstein, or you know, Mark Halperin, being exposed for apparent very, very serious misconduct toward subordinates and co-workers,” she tells NPR.

But she thinks the punishment doesn’t fit the crime for someone like Roy Price, who was forced out of his executive job at Amazon Studios. Young calls the offending incident “what was essentially one sort of instance of a drunken overture to somebody while they were at Comic-Con … where everyone was intoxicated.” (A producer says Price “repeatedly and insistently propositioned” her with explicit language.)

“It may not be admirable conduct, but at the same time, I really don’t think that that sort of thing — where there was no hint of retaliation, no hint of him exploiting his status to coerce a sexual contact — should be treated the same as these people who are engaging in clearly criminal conduct,” Young says.

“I don’t think that we need to be concerned about taking it too far,” responds Kaitlin Prest, host of The Heart podcast.

“Even something as seemingly minor as going into a meeting and having somebody who is in a position of power over you glance down at your breasts every few moments,” she says. “Or asking if you want to go out to your boss’s beach house and have a glass of wine. …

“There’s an entire spectrum of inappropriate behavior that happens. And especially when you take that into the workplace, those seemingly innocuous behaviors are — those are microaggressions. Those are the small things that chip away at someone’s feeling of professional value in the workplace,” Prest says. A woman could feel “the only reason why she’s here is boss man likes to look at her breasts.”

Power and consent on the job

Prest would rather have a “better safe than sorry” office environment. “I think we’re so far away from understanding what consent means,” she says.

It has to do with understanding power dynamics at work, where most of us have bosses.

“You want your boss to like you, so you feel like you have to say yes to everything,” she says. “They ask you to go out for drinks after work — you say yes automatically because you want to have this person’s favor.”

Young concedes that “there are very real power differentials in the workplace.” But she’s “concerned about this mindset that we have to constantly police for microaggressions — which, a lot of that is defined very subjectively.”

She thinks there’s a danger of glances being misinterpreted, and of “seeing offenses where none exist.”

“I don’t think most people really have that much trouble understanding consent,” Young says. “I think genuine miscommunications and genuine mixed signals really do happen.”

Prest strongly disagrees with that assessment. “I don’t think that we’re overreacting,” she says.

“This is the first time where you’re hearing people who have perpetrated that type of harassment actually investigating their behavior.” Prest says “the pendulum needs to swing a little bit farther into this extreme before we can get back to the middle.”

But Prest says she and Young can agree on asking the same question.

“I do think the question of what accountability looks like is a huge question that we need to be asking right now, and a really, really important question that I don’t think we have the answer to — at all.”

NPR’s Ravenna Koenig and Kroc Fellow Adelina Lancianese contributed to this report.

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Business November 4, 2017

Potential T-Mobile And Sprint Merger Falls Apart

Had T-Mobile and Sprint completed a merger, Reuters says the new company would have claimed more than 130 million subscribers.

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After years of talks and speculation, Sprint and T-Mobile announced Saturday that they have ended discussions about a merger.

In a jointstatement, the third- (T-Mobile) and fourth-largest (Sprint) wireless carriers in the U.S. explained that they were unable to agree on the terms of a deal.

“The prospect of combining with Sprint has been compelling for a variety of reasons,” said T-Mobile President and CEO John Legere in a statement. But, he continued, “we have been clear all along that a deal with anyone will have to result in superior long-term value for T-Mobile’s shareholders compared to our outstanding stand-alone performance and track record.”

T-Mobile has seen growth in customer numbers in recent years, which many view as a reward for pioneering more customer-friendly options such as dropping two-year contracts, The Associated Press reports.

Although it has cut its costs, Sprint is saddled with considerable debt and has endured numerous annual losses.

Sprint President and CEO Marcelo Claure said: “While we couldn’t reach an agreement to combine our companies, we certainly recognize the benefits of scale through a potential combination. However, we have agreed that it is best to move forward on our own.”

Rumors surrounding the merger reached a fever pitch in October, when many speculated an agreement was near. But earlier this week, reports had begun to surface that talks were deteriorating.

Both carriers are still substantially smaller than the Top 2 in the industry, Verizon and AT&T. Had T-Mobile and Sprint completed a merger, Reuters says the new company would have claimed more than 130 million subscribers.

Reuters also speculated that the atypical nature of Saturday’s joint statement may signify that the two companies are trying to preserve a relationship and sustain the possibility of an eventual return to talks.

Previous attempts have been made to court T-Mobile, but they appear to have run into trouble with federal overseers. In 2014, Sprint came close to buying the company but was reportedly scared off by the threat of regulatory action. AT&T had flirted with the idea of purchasing T-Mobile in 2011 but backed off after both the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission expressed their displeasure with the potential deal.

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Business November 2, 2017

Yellen Will Leave Top Fed Post With Solid Record

Janet Yellen has served as chair of the Federal Reserve Board since 2014.

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Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, the first woman to hold that position, won’t have the opportunity to serve four more years as leader of the nation’s central bank. But she leaves the Fed’s top post having largely achieved its mandate to engineer full employment while keeping inflation at a level that fosters growth.

On Thursday, President Trump said he would nominate Jerome Powell, a Fed governor, to be Fed chairman, the first time in decades that a president hasn’t reappointed a Fed chief for a second term.

When Yellen took over as Fed chair from Ben Bernanke in 2014, the economy had largely stabilized after the turmoil of the Great Recession. But interest rates remained near zero.

While there were calls from some to raise rates quickly to avoid sparking higher inflation, Yellen engineered a consensus at the Fed for increasing rates gradually. The policy led to steady job growth and a downward march of the unemployment rate to its current level of 4.2 percent.

Most economists view that as very near to full employment. Meanwhile, inflation has remained in check. In fact, it has hovered below the 2 percent level that Fed policymakers think is best for economic growth.

While Yellen has her critics, she is widely viewed as a successful Fed chair. Even President Trump said Thursday that Yellen is “a wonderful woman who has done a terrific job.” It would not have been unusual for Trump to reappoint her even though she was a Barack Obama appointee. Three presidents in recent history — Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Obama — have reappointed Fed chairs initially nominated by presidents of the opposing party. However, Trump made clear he wanted to put his own stamp on the Fed.

Yellen was vice chair of the Fed’s board of governors for four years before taking over as chair in February 2014. She was the head of the San Francisco regional Federal Reserve bank from 2004 to 2010. In the 1990s, she served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton.

Beyond overseeing the Fed’s traditional role of setting interest rates, the Yellen Fed also has begun the task of unwinding the extraordinary intervention the Fed engineered to stabilize the economy after the financial crisis.

That involved injecting trillions of dollars into the economy through Fed purchases of mortgage-backed securities and government bonds. It left the Fed with a balance sheet of more than $4.5 trillion. Yellen has overseen a process to begin slowly shrinking the balance sheet without destabilizing financial markets.

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Business November 1, 2017

Episode 803: Nudge, Nudge, Nobel

NPR's Weekend in Washington session at the Willard InterContinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 31, 2015.

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Economists used to assume that people were, overall, rational. They may make mistakes now and then, but, if reasonably informed, they do the right thing. Then came Richard Thaler, who, in October, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.

While Thaler was teaching at the University of Rochester, he had a side gig. Not a lot of people knew about it or took it seriously. He would catalog ways people behaved irrationally. And Thaler though, there must be a way to make sense of this behavior, to understand it and to predict it. This list lead him to psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Inspired by Kahneman and Tversky, Richard Thaler started running experiments on his classrooms. Once, he gave half of his class coffee mugs, and allowed those with mugs to sell to those without. People with mugs (mugs they got for free, that had no sentimental value) would value them at twice the rate of those without mugs. Thaler found a name for this phenomenon: the endowment effect. This trio, Kahneman, Tversky and Thaler, did more and more of these studies. Thaler’s field of study finally gets a name: behavioral economics.

Today on the show, how Thaler’s work went from a side hustle to winning a Nobel Prize.

Music: “Roof Top Pre-Game,” “Flinging About” and “After Surf Chill.” Find us: Twitter/ Facebook.

Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, PocketCasts and NPR One.

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