Simon & Schuster employees triggered by Mike Pence deal, demand firm stop making deals with Trump officials



Employees of Simon & Schuster have delivered a petition demanding the publisher stop all deals with Trump administration officials, wherein they accuse the outlet of "perpetuating white supremacy" by going forward with a book by former Vice President Mike Pence.

What are the details?

According to an exclusive report from The Wall Street Journal, Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp was aware that a petition was circulating when he announced internally last week that a memoir by Pence would move forward despite pushback from some employees.

All told, 216 Simon & Schuster employees signed the petition, which equates to roughly 14% of the company's workforce. They also solicited the signatures of another 3,500 outsiders, some of whom were "well-known Black writers," the newspaper wrote.

The Daily Mail later published the contents of the petition in it entirety.

The letter begins by stating:

"The events of the past week have affirmed that Simon & Schuster has chosen complicity in perpetuating white supremacy by publishing Mike Pence and continuing to distribute books for Post Hill Press, including predator Matt Gaetz's FIREBRAND.
By choosing to publish Mike Pence, Simon & Schuster is generating wealth for a central figure of a presidency that unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence. This is not a difference of opinions; this is legitimizing bigotry.

The letter goes on to demand that Simon & Schuster "cancel the two-book deal with Mike Pence and do not sign any more book deals with former members of the Trump administration," and "commit to ongoing reevaluations of all clients, authors, distribution deals, and all other financial commitments that promote white supremacist content and/or harm the aforementioned marginalized communities."

The Journal noted the "Simon & Schuster is one of the leading publishers of political books," and just last year published Fox News host Sean Hannity's "Live Free or Die" and former national security adviser John Bolton's anti-Trump book, "The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir."

Cuomo scrambles to recoup millions in taxpayer dollars from bad COVID-19 deals that didn't deliver



In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) used his emergency powers to spend more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds to acquire critical medical equipment such as ventilators and PPE in the fight against the virus.

But many of the vendors never fulfilled their end of the bargain, and for several months, his administration has been scrambling to recoup the funds.

What are the details?

The New York Post reported Tuesday that Cuomo's Department of Health was "duped" into buying millions of dollars worth of medical supplies from Chinese firms "and has been forced to hire a law firm in Hong Kong in a bid to recoup the taxpayer money it lost."

The newspaper, which first reported that Cuomo's administration intentionally underreported nursing home deaths during the pandemic, has now reported that the DOH hired the Hong Kong firm Gall Solicitors for $125,000 in an effort to get money back from overseas suppliers.

A Cuomo spokesperson confirmed the contract, saying they hired the firm in late December "to help us pursue recovery of state funds there, related to procurement."

Gall is reportedly trying to get back a $12.5 million deposit Cuomo's administration delivered to a company called Please Me LLC, which had promised 1,000 ventilators to the state despite never selling the devices. The supplier never delivered a single ventilator.

The Post pointed to a New York Times article from December that showed Please Me LLC is a company "whose products include not just small medical devices but also sex toys, children's books and a mask for dry eyes."

The owner of the company, Eddie Sitt, defended his firm to The Times, claiming that medical products were actually his main business. New York officials claim the company asked to substitute the ventilators requested for a different model after the deposit was already made but the state refused. Sitt claims the ventilators were, in fact, shipped to New York but remain in storage amid the dispute.

Cuomo's people are also trying to get $10 million back from a man named Yaron Oren-Pines, whom they paid $69 million for 1,450 ventilators after he tweeted to former President Donald Trump, "We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and non-invasive. Have someone call me URGENT." He never delivered, but has thus far returned $59 million of what he was handed by the state.

The Times also reported that at the time of its December report, New York had already recouped $233 million in wasted funds from companies that failed to hold up their end of bargains.

Meanwhile, Cuomo is facing calls to resign from New York Republicans and Democrats alike over the reports of his mishandling of nursing home policies regarding the coronavirus and subsequent allegations of burying the true data. President Joe Biden and the White House has refused to speak of the scandal, after previously saying that Cuomo's response was the "gold standard" among U.S. governors.