Heroines of the Week (Year)
Girls kick ass: Instead of naming yet another stupid white man as "Person of the Year," Time magazine named three smart women as "Persons of the Year." (They kind of look like a thinking person's "Charlie's Angels," don't they?)
Time magazine pulled a fast one and instead of naming yet another stupid white man as "Person of the Year," named three women -- all whistleblowers against stupid white men -- as "Persons of the Year."
Time honored Coleen Rowley, Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins. The issue is available now and the cover story (at least an abbreviated version of it) is available online here.
According to the Associated Press, Rowley "was the FBI agent based in Minneapolis whose scathing memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller last May said agency headquarters ignored her pleas in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks to aggressively investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, now charged as an accomplice. In later Senate testimony, Rowley charged that the FBI was plagued by 'careerism' and bureaucracy."
Cooper "was an internal auditor at WorldCom who alerted the telecommunications firm's board of directors to $3.8 billion in accounting irregularities. A month later, WorldCom declared the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. Investigators have since uncovered more than $9 billion in accounting fraud at WorldCom," the AP reported.
Watkins "was a vice president of Enron, who warned company chairman Kenneth Lay in 2001 that the firm could collapse as a result of extensive false accounting. Enron also filed for bankruptcy, and Watkins resigned last month," according to the AP.
"Time's 2002 picks are unusual in that most people cited by the magazine in the past have been well-known public figures," the AP reported, noting that "Last year's selection was New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for his conduct in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks."
Other stupid (mostly white) men that Time named "Person of the Year" in the past include Adolf Hitler in 1938, Joseph Stalin in 1939 and 1942, Richard Nixon in 1971 and 1972, Henry Kissinger in 1972 (with Nixon), Ayatullah Khomeini in 1979, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1983, George Bush the First in 1990, Pope John Paul II in 1994, Newt Gingrich in 1995, Kenneth Starr (with Bill Clinton) in 1998 and George Bush the Second in 2000.
(To be balanced, Time also named as "Person of the Year" the luminaries Gandhi [1930]; FDR [1932, 1934 and 1941]; Winston Churchill [1940 and 1949]; JFK [1961]; MLK [1963]; Jimmy Carter, the last honest U.S. president [1976]; and Nelson Mandela [1993]. The title of "Person of the Year" goes to the individual or group of individuals whom Time believes was most influential, whether for good or for ill.)
Only a handful of women have been named as Time's "Person of the Year." Before this year's "Persons of the Year," the last woman to be named "Person of the Year" was Corazon Aquino in 1986. Before that, in 1975, Time named "American women" as a whole as "Person of the Year."
Hopefully, Time's choice this year will encourage more women to claim their power and will encourage more men and women to blow the whistle on the stupid white men who are running this nation and this planet into the ground.
3:28:51 PM 
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