No sooner had Ross died of cancer than the company backed away from its decidedly
progressive tilt. The new-- mostly the same old faces sans Ross-- management first said they
would give equally to both sides of the political aisle. Many employees and artists were revolted
to see TimeWarner money going to the campaigns of Jesse Helms and other right-wing extremists.

   R.E.M. was just one of many patriotic artists in business with TimeWarner who made their
extreme displeasure known. Many senior executives (myself included) reacted with disdain
and bitterness when the corporate higher-ups tried to get us to contribute personally to campaigns
by rightists and incompetents like Bush.
    Around this time Jerry Levin announced that TimeWarner would be making donations to
social organizations rather than political parties in the future.
 
   When AOL bought TimeWarner it became obvious really quickly that the new management
was decidedly right-wing. The first flap was about AOL Chairman Steve Case and his wife giving
large sums of money to a whacky religionist fringe group whose main mission was to "cure" gays
and lesbians. Although Levin thanked me (sincerely) for my suggestions about how Case should
reach out to the gay community, nothing ever came of it besides AOL TimeWarer sowing mistrust
and suspicion among a very important group in almost all the businesses the company is active in.
For the last couple of years, the corporation has seemed to lean more and more right. CNN,
for example, is almost unviewable for anyone wanting real news and intelligent insight instead of
Far Right propaganda and jingoistic gibberish. (I almost passed out the other day when I saw a
partisan shill and kook like Ann Coulter being treated as though she was worth listening to on CNN
while she was spewing her regular Clinton venom and demanding "we" convert everyone in Afghanistan
to Christianity. When another guest of the show asked her what exactly made her any different from
the Taliban she didn't seem to grasp the subtleties of the question and instead said she prayed that
Bush would extend the mandate of the military tribunals to include liberal lawyers.)

Anyway, today Jerry Levin announced he would be stepping down. He's a decent guy and he tried
to keep the company from becoming a partisan bastion of aggressive reactionaries. He certainly never
had a chance to win but I always felt he was able to keep the drooling fascists in check. The new CEO,
Dick Parsons, is a Greed-and-Selfishness-oriented Republican, who, although Afro-American, doesn't
seem to have many problems getting into bed with the Bigots and Haters. He's currently playing an active
role in helping the illegitimate administration currently occupying the Executive Branch to dismantle the
Social Security system (inorder to replace it with a more Enron-like model). And in any case, Parsons
serves at the sufferance of Steve Case, the guy hoping to cure gays and lesbians. Anyone familiar with
the high-handed, dictatorial way they run the AOL service won't have trouble figuring out the future of
this once great company founded by Steve Ross.