To make sense of the tumult in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Washington establishment has made for the safe harbour of analogies. Obama applauded the transformation in the region in his May 19 speech at the State Department and then announced a $2 billion aid package to revive the region’s stalled economies. The parallel Obama drew was instructive: the new Enterprise Funds will be “modelled on funds that supported the transitions in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall”. … what the historian Marshall Goldman called the “piratisation” of Eastern Europe, with the economist Jeffrey Sachs in the lead in Poland. […] …the IMF pledged to lend $3 billion to Egypt, and the G8 promised $20 billion from the various international agencies… If you add in the U.S. promise, the total government assistance amounts to $25 billion. Such figures are a tease, but sufficient as a down payment to ensure that the U.S. and the G8 have a place at Egypt’s decision-making table.
Vijay Prashad in Counterpunch, June 17-19, 2011
2011.7.02.Sat.1200 | Tags: Thanks to Jeffrey Sachs economics
Helen L. Walters says her boss called her a ‘hooker,’ a ‘bitch’ and a ‘streetwalker.’ Sometimes he brandished a riding crop in front of her and once he left condoms on her desk.
Ms. Walters, then a trading-room secretary at a California brokerage firm, filed a complaint against him alleging sexual harassment. In a formal hearing, he readily admitted to the whip and the condoms, and to using all of those epithets. Her case, legal scholars agree, seems a textbook example of illegal harassment as defined by the Supreme Court: a situation in which a ‘reasonable person’ would find the work environment ‘hostile or abusive.’
So why did Ms. Walters lose?
Ms. Walters slammed into a little-known, but extraordinarily daunting, roadblock facing many women in the securities industry: Bias complaints, like any other employee dispute, must go through the industry’s mandatory-arbitration system. That means victims’ complaints can’t be heard in court by judge or jury, no matter how strong their merit.
Men’s Club: Riding Crop and Slurs: How Wall Street Dealt with a Sex-Bias Case, Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1994, by Margaret Jacobs, as quoted in Judicial Apartheid, by Pam Martens.
[W]omen felt they might be taken seriously. But instead of the claims being ushered into the vaunted U.S. court system, where sunshine and continued public debate might have led to real change… claims were heard in secret in hotel rooms, the typical venue for the mushrooming use of private arbitration in the U.S. today.
Will France Tidy Up After Housekeeper Charges? Counterpunch, June 7, 2011, by Pam Martens.
2011.6.26.Sun.1200 | Tags: law enforcement economics
4si4:
destroyyourhedonism:
Short form: I don’t know what “pornography” is. And you don’t, either.
“Pornography” and the use of value-laden words
What is “pornography?” I think I’ve seen a thousand threads on DeviantArt and ModelMayhem purporting to resolve the “art VS porn” discussion and, after reading many of them,…
Interesting post. The most interesting thing about it is that it presents itself as an argument about pornography when it’s really about something related but different: the concept of obscenity. The meaning of the word ‘pornography’ is not seriously addressed.
The author, Marcus J. Ranum, argues carefully and persuasively that definitions of ‘obscenity’ are “meaningless” and then ends his post by saying: “By now, hopefully, you’ve had a chance to think about it and realize that, in the absence of a workable notion for what is (and therefore isn’t) ‘obscene’ or ‘pornographic’ the words are meaningless.” But ‘obscenity’ and ‘pornography’ are two different, though related, concepts and words. They have different etymologies for example. The word ‘obscene’ is thought to come from the Latin ‘ob’ (“onto”) and ‘caenum’ (“filth”) and its entry in an online etymological dictionary quotes from the same famous court case quoted in Ranum’s post.
What is missing, both in Ranum’s argument and more generally in Western culture despite endless rhetoric and drama, is a careful examination of the word ‘pornography’ and how this word can help us understand our culture. Possible reasons for avoiding the topic are revealed as soon as one looks at the etymology of the word. The word ‘pornography’ is from the Greek ‘porne’ (“prostitute”) and ‘graphein’ (“to write”). ‘Depiction of prostitutes’ is an approximation of what the term originally meant. What is or is not pornography by that original definition may not be totally clear but it’s certainly more clear than what is or is not obscene. For example prosecutions for the crime of prostitution proceed without difficulty across the nation while prosecutions for obscenity are famously difficult and controversial.
Given the relative simplicity and clarity of the original meaning of ‘pornography’ compared to the original meaning of ‘obscenity,’ it’s not surprising that contemporary definitions and discussions of ‘pornography’ have evaded clarity by diverting into the fog of ‘obscenity’ definitions. This is unfortunate because there’s a lot of potential for clarity and concreteness in the word ‘pornography’ and clarity, especially clarity in regard to ubiquitous and intensely controversial public and personal phenomena, can help people to move forward.
See also:
1,
2(Source: mjranum.deviantart.com)
Reblogged from 4si4 2011.4.05.Tue.1200 | Tags: words economics
The word pornography, derived from the ancient Greek pornē and graphos, means “writing about whores.” Pornē means “whore,” … Graphos means “writing, etching, or drawing.”
The word pornography does not mean “writing about sex” or “depictions of the erotic” or “depictions of sexual acts” or “depictions of nude bodies” or “sexual representations” or any other such euphemism. …
Contemporary pornography strictly and literally conforms to the word’s root meaning…. The word has not changed its meaning and the genre is not misnamed. The only change in the meaning of the word is with respect to its second part, graphos: now there are cameras ….
Andrea Dworkin, in Amelia Jones’ The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. London: Routledge, 2003.
See also:
link
2011.3.26.Sat.1200 | Tags: economics Andrea Dworkin words
silvibee:
She was young, young, young, couldn’t have been more than 19 or 20. And she was sweet, or she acted it. … This young woman was gorgeous. She had long straight hair. Her makeup was perfectly applied. She was thin and looked like she worked out a lot. Her skin was incredibly soft. She smelled amazing. She made jokes and was complimentary to me. … Here was this incredibly beautiful woman, who did everything, everything that a woman was supposed to do to make herself appealing to men. She was thin, she was compliant, she was beautiful, she spent probably hours every day shaving and lotioning and applying makeup and picking out clothes and pouring what was surely substantial cashflow into maintaining her appearance. She was, in a word, perfect. … I was able to buy access to this woman’s body and (very convincing) pretend affections for less than I would spend picking up a couple of last-minute things at the grocery store. It was worth almost nothing. Less than an oil change. Less than someone cutting my hair. Less than getting a decent tailor to hem a pair of pants. Less than a bouquet of roses.
And that’s the day that I realized we were all the victims of a sick joke…
(Source: tigerbeatdown.com)
Reblogged from silvibee 2011.3.22.Tue.1200 | Tags: economics
"The scale on which stripping, pornography, and prostitution now take place is unparalleled in human history. Free-market ideology, the proclaimed ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s, and developments in technology all aligned to make the 1990s the decade during which sex became managed, manufactured, marketed, and consumed. Yet the gender-neutral term ‘sex industry’ betrays the very specific nature of the transaction involved: in the sex industry, it is overwhelmingly men who are the consumers, and women who are the product."
— The Equality Illusion, Kat Banyard (via petitefeministe)
Reblogged from octagon-surgeon 2011.2.14.Mon.1200 | Tags: economics
…[H]owever one counts, it is clear that commerce in sex is not diminishing and that more people are involved in various aspects of the industry every day. The sex industry - a loose term for a variety of commerce in sex - is an enormous economic force in the United States and worldwide. According to one report, the American pornography industry grosses more per year than the American music and mainstream movie industries combined.1 According to another report, Americans spend more money per year on strip clubs than on theater, opera, ballet, jazz, and classical music concerts combined.2 General Motors (through its subsidiaries) supposedly sells more pornographic videos than Larry Flynt.3 […]
1. Frank Rich, “Naked Capitalists: There’s No Business Like Porn Business,” New York Times, May 20, 2001.
2. Martin Amis, “Sex in America,” Talk, February 2001; and “A Rough Trade” Guardian Unlimited, March 17, 2001.
3. Timothy Egan, “Erotica Inc.: A Special Report; Technology Sent Wall Street into Market for Pornography,” New York times, October 23, 2000.
An excerpt from “Sex, Money, and Philosophy,” Jessica Spector’s introduction to
Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006.
(Although the numbers are a decade old they are at least accompanied by clear citations unlike
some more recent and widely circulated numbers. See:
1,
2.)
2011.1.21.Fri.1100 | Tags: numbers economics
That Victorian politicians could so easily pass laws legalizing prostitution, an activity regularly deplored as immoral as well as uncivilized in the press, in parliament, in churches and on the streets, is in itself significant. Soldiers, as we have seen, were regarded as the ultimate defenders of the Empire, the force that, if and when resistance erupted, was always called upon first: they were the face and the frame of imperial masculinity, the final enforcers of rule through brute force. Women – in this case, colonial women – were expected to service them, to provide the necessary sexual outlet that masculinity was understood to require.
Philippa Levine. The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset. Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2007.
2011.1.17.Mon.1338 | Tags: a man in a uniform economics PL
