Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

Gentrification

Xtra Nerdcore


Can freak bohemians avoid becoming pawns in the capitalist ethnic cleansing game?

For five years most of my neighbors have been different than myself. I am white and from a middle class family; my neighbors have been latino or black and often working class. I am one small piece of the gentrification puzzle, one of the group of people the real estate analyzers call "risk oblivious", willing to live in an area with little capital invested in it and high crime rates, eventually making the area palatable for other generally white people with higher incomes.

Gentrification happens when a neighborhood becomes attractive to a wealthier class of people than the group of people currently living in the area. Current residents get displaced as landlords jack up rents to milk the wealthier class and developers build with only the newer, wealthier class in mind. The newer, generally white residents, who have more political power, eventually grow intolerant of the old neighborhood culture, often a code word for the poorer, often non-white people who originally lived in the area.

While nobody should have to live in a neighborhood riddled with street drugs and crime, making a neighborhood 'safe' usually involves making it unsafe for certain classes of people, who are forced out to other low-rent neighborhoods, to shelters, or to prison. The version of 'safety' used by city government often involves cultural fascism: criminalizing 'loud music' and certain types of street congregating because they are supposedly associated with street drug trade. The key is figuring out how to protect mixed neighborhoods that are safe, fun, and sustaining for all kinds of people including the original residents.

Because our culture is based on race as well as class privilege, gentrification often goes down along race as well as class lines. It is hard to imagine stopping gentrification and displacement without a working analysis of race privilege. A race-based analysis of gentrification is not a clever way to make the racist assertion that white people make a neighborhood 'better' because they are white, thus implying that white people are better than people of color. That's bullshit. The same privilege grid that lets white shoplifters skip past security guards and tracks white kids into the 'smart' classes follows white people when they move into not-white neighborhoods. The lecherous relationship between the (mostly) white counterculture and the (mostly) white hipster culture means that, when poor white counterculture people move into a neighborhood where rent is low, developers and landlords see hipsters with more money looming in the background and thus see a reason to invest in the neighborhood and raise rents.

For white people, a race based analysis should not be confused with a white guilt complex. White guilt is a luxurious excuse to do nothing because you assume that white people are "the problem" and therefore incapable of engaging in their own positive social action around race issues. Although whites act in the context of a twisted system of race privileged, they can take initiative and responsibility for their own actions and they way they, too, get used as pawns within a racist system. It is irresponsible to sidestep an analysis of race privilege because your politics are centered on an anarchic or democratic ideal free of race and class divisions. Actively dealing with the complex, sick reality of both race and class privilege is hard but essential in revolutionary work.

Like many people in the mainly-white activist community I'm part of, I am not entirely sure how to deal with my implicit role in gentrification. More than mere thorns in the side of people inclined to traditional lives, I do think freak bohemians can have social and political purpose and contribute valuably to the glittering diversity that is an integral part of urban life. White bohemians are placed in a sticky position between our politics and ideals, and the reality of our unwilling but crucial role in promoting gentrification. Because of this role, we may face hostility from a number of fronts, including displaced tenants, the new yuppies, and the old property owners who appreciate the rise in property values that comes with gentrification.

How can gentrification be successfully fought? What is the place of white bohemians and activists in the struggle? Understanding the relation of property to capital is key; in this era of gentrification, city governments are working more closely than ever with development corporations. The battle can be fought both on the bureaucratic front, exposing developer-government connections, and by taking direct action against corporate developers. Tangible improvements to the neighborhood can be made directly by people in the neighborhood, although these improvements usually themselves encourage gentrification. In all these actions, it is important for newly-transplanted activists to respect the work of activists already in the area.

Real estate, the root of evil

When a friend of mine was in prison in the 1970's, his history teacher said that the history of the world revolved around real estate. The root cause of gentrification is real estate, the relationship between property and capital. With the exception of tenant protections like rent control and subsidized "affordable housing", housing costs are arbitrated by the market. Landlords charge what they can based upon the demand for an area. Landlords are most excited when a lot of people with money want to live in an area. When people with money aren't interested in an area, landlords have little incentive to put money into their property, because they won't earn enough of a profit since nobody will pay high enough rent. Buildings deteriorate and are torched so landlords can collect insurance money. Lots lay fallow, buildings deteriorate, and social services slump.

Gentrification happens because of this relationship between property and capital, because the land owner can make a profit off the fact that somebody is living on their land. It is this profit-motive that keeps poor people moving at the whim of the wealthier folks. Displacement of poor and working class people is built into the very structure of capitalism.

Continues at: http://slingshot.tao.ca/displaybi.php?74002

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

AMONG THE RIGHTEOUS DOPEFIENDS

DECEMBER 10, 2009




As the sun went down one evening over San Francisco’s shipyards, the anthropologist Philippe Bourgois came across a man in a drug-induced seizure under the intersection of two freeways. Bourgois was only a few months into a 12-year research project on homeless heroin addicts, a journey that would make him a habitué of vacant factories, dead-end alleyways, storage lots, and broken-down cars. At the time, in 1994, he already knew a few things about drug addiction; he’d spent three and a half years studying Puerto Rican crack dealers in East Harlem. Bourgois wanted to know more about the addicts in San Francisco, so he set out with photographer Jeff Schonberg to document their lives. “We really didn’t know what to expect at first,” Bourgois said. “I wasn’t an expert in homelessness.”

The powerful results of their collaboration are now on view in Righteous Dopefiend: Homelessness, Addiction, and Poverty in Urban America, an exhibition at the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia through December 31. Based on a book of the same title published in May, the exhibition contains photographs, photo projections, and audio recordings of their homeless subjects, arranged around a centerpiece inspired by the urban environment: a chain-link fence on which more than 200 photographs are taped.



As they chronicled shooting galleries and makeshift encampments, Bourgois and Schonberg found that housing costs, gentrification, and even weather were factors in the addicts’ homelessness. Most surprisingly, they found out that San Francisco heroin addicts had a stable social network. In spite of regular arrests, overdosing, and forced migrations, the addicts shared resources, money, and food in relative peace. However, their lives still lacked basic amenities. Bourgois and Schonberg felt the need to intervene. “We tried to get them access to services,” Bourgois said, “and in the process we learned how dysfunctional the services were in regards to what they needed.”

Excerpted from: http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/5549



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[American Dream]

Young Women’s Eggs: Elite and Ordinary

by Elizabeth Reis, Biopolitical Times guest contributor
September 15th, 2011




My college-age daughter can earn $50,000-$100,000 just for being smart, beautiful, tall, and a Harvard student. Yes, going to Harvard could actually pay off, even sooner than we might have imagined. $100,000 would go a long way toward paying her tuition and fees, a fact that she has pointed out to me many times. And all she would have to do is “donate” her eggs to an infertile couple willing to pay.

“Donate” is quite a misnomer. Young women are getting paid handsomely, though there is outrageous discrepancy between what are considered “elite” and more ordinary eggs. At the University of Oregon, where I teach, advertisements frequently appear in the student newspaper offering only $5000 for my students’ eggs. Still, many are tempted. I worry that young women are being unfairly lured by these exorbitant sums (even $5000 is a lot to a college student at a public university) to sign on to something that we can’t really be sure is safe in the long run.

One danger is ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS), a potentially harmful condition caused by the daily hormone injections taken to produce high numbers of eggs. In some cases OHSS can lead to blood clots, kidney failure, and electrolyte imbalance. And my UO students may run an even higher medical risk than my daughter. Because their eggs aren’t worth as much in a world that overvalues so-called “elite” eggs, these women may decide to undergo the egg stimulation and retrieval process multiple times to pay for rent, school, or their living expenses. The more times they go through the procedure, the greater the infusion of hormones and the greater their risk of ovarian hyperstimulation.

Continues at: http://www.geneticsandsociety.org/article.php?id=5852

[American Dream]

This one has many important insights:


“Recognizing Invisible Violence: A Thirty-Year Ethnographic Retrospective”

by Philippe Bourgois

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[American Dream]

Affective labor


Affective Labor is a term identifying work carried out that is intended to produce or modify emotional experiences in people. Coming out of Autonomist Feminist critiques of marginalized and so-called "invisible" labor, it has been the focus of critical discussions by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, as well as Juan Martin Prada and Michael Betancourt.

Although its history is as old as that of labor itself, affective labor has been of increasing importance to modern economies since the emergence of mass culture in the nineteenth century. The most visible institutionalized form of affective labor is perhaps advertising, which typically attempts to make audiences relate to products through particular effects. Yet there are many other areas in which affective labor figures prominently, including service and care industries whose purpose is to make people feel in particular ways. Domestic work, frequently ignored by other analysts of labor, has also been a critical focus of theories of Affective Labor.[1]

History

The phrase Affective Labor, seen broadly, has its roots in the Autonomist critiques of the 1970s, in particular those that theorize a dynamic form of capitalism that is able to move away from purely industrial labor. In particular, the Fragment on Machines, from Marx's Grundrisse, and conceptions of [Immaterial Labor] decentered the focus of labor theory and sparked debate over what constituted real labor:

No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing (Naturgegenstand) as middle link between the object (Objekt) and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth.[2]

Meanwhile, movements such as Selma James and Marirosa Dalla Costa's Wages for Housework campaign attempted to activate the most exploited and invisible sectors of the economy and challenge the typical, male and industrial focus of labor studies.

Hardt and Negri on affective labor

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have begun to develop this concept in their books Empire[3] and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire[4].

In their recent work, Hardt and Negri focus on the role affective labor plays in the current mode of production (which can be referred to as "imperial," "late capitalist," or "postmodern"). In this passage from Multitude they briefly define their key terms:

"Unlike emotions, which are mental phenomena, affects refer equally to body and mind. In fact, affects, such as joy and sadness, reveal the present state of life in the entire organism, expressing a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking. Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects.... One can recognize affective labor, for example, in the work of legal assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile). One indication of the rising importance of affective labor, at least in the dominant countries, is the tendency for employers to highlight education, attitude, character, and "prosocial" behavior as the primary skills employees need. A worker with a good attitude and social skills is another way of saying a worker is adept at affective labor”" [5]

The most important point in their scholarship with respect to this issue is that immaterial labor, of which affective labor is a specific form, has achieved dominance in the current mode of production. This does not mean that there are more immaterial laborers than material laborers, or that immaterial labor produces more capital than material labor. Instead, this dominance is signaled by the fact that, in developed countries, labor is more often figured as immaterial than material. To illustrate the significance of this claim, they draw a comparison between the early twenty-first-century and that of the mid-nineteenth-century, famously engaged by Karl Marx, in which factory labor was dominant even if it was not the form of labor practiced by the most people. One popular, albeit slightly less than perfect example, of this might be that, whereas Fred Flintstone, as an average American, drove a crane in a quarry, Homer Simpson sits at a desk and provides safety.

Role in the Political Economy

Michael Betancourt has suggested that affective labor may have a role in the development and maintenance of what he has termed "agnotologic capitalism." His point is that affective labor is a symptom of the disassociation between the reality of capitalist economy and the alienation it produces:

The affective labor created to address this alienation is part of the mechanisms where the agnotological order maintains its grip on the social: managing the emotional states of the consumers, who also serve as the labor reserve, is a necessary precondition for the effective management of the quality and range of information.[6]

His construction of affective labor is concerned with its role as an enabler for a larger capitalist superstructure. Where the reduction alienation of alienation is a precondition for the elimination of dissent. Affective labor is part of a larger activity where the population is distracted by affective pursuits and fantasies of economic advancement.


References

^ Federici, Silvia (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia.
^ Marx, Karl. The Grundrisse. Accessed Online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... rundrisse/
^ Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
^ Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin.
^ Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, p. 108.
^ ""Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism", CTheory, Theory Beyond the Codes: tbc002, Date Published: 6/10/2010, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, Editors".

[American Dream]

[American Dream]

http://www.blackagendareport.com/conten ... n-declines

Not a Word About Gentrification as Black Urban Population Declines

03/30/2011




A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

In the media euphoria at news that Blacks were leaving the cities en mass for the suburbs and the South, corporate media seemed to make a collective decision to eliminate gentrification from the equation. A huge reverse migration and suburban exodus was depicted as wholly voluntary, having nothing to do with a crescendo of Black push-out from the whitening inner cities. “It is no wonder that 17 percent of Blacks that relocated to the South in the past decade were New Yorkers, far more than from any other state.”


“It is also assumed, against all relevant evidence, that this mass movement of Black people is totally voluntary.”

The corporate news media greeted new census data detailing the drastic and general decline of Black populations in center cities as if the phenomenon were, somehow, a vindication of the American dream – a cause for celebration. The dramatic increase in the movement of African Americans back to the South, which actually began decades ago, is held up as proof positive that America’s racial conflicts will soon be a thing of the past. Newsrooms seemed filled with jubilation, that the nation’s cities will soon be liberated from two generations of concentrated Black presence. Underlying the upbeat news coverage is the assumption that a diffusion of Blacks is, by definition, a good thing for the nation as a whole, and for Black people, themselves.

It is also assumed, against all relevant evidence, that this mass movement of Black people from New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Oakland, and so many other cities is totally voluntary – that economic push-out has played no major role in emptying the cities of Blacks, and sending hundreds of thousands down to Dixie. It is an absurd assumption, by journalists whose elation at the Black exodus compels them to ignore gentrification as one of the main factors.

People who are priced out of the cities by gentrification cannot be considered voluntary migrants. Gentrification has become an overarching fact of Black urban existence, making life less tenable every day. – especially in New York. It is no wonder that 17 percent of Blacks that relocated to the South in the past decade were New Yorkers, far more than from any other state. When gentrification places the monthly rent hopelessly out of reach, there is no choice but to leave – and why not South, where it’s cheaper, and there are so many people who look like you, some of whom are related.

“It is not only the poor who are pushed out, but also better off families and singles for whom city life is no longer viable.”

Those who would characterize the Black southward movement as overwhelmingly voluntary and non-economic, speculate that folks are going South to be near family. But “family” has always been there. Why the big rush to join them now? There is literally no statistical basis in the U.S. Census data to conclude that the urge to strengthen family ties is an important factor in reverse Black migration. But white corporate media – and the types of Black folks that work for it – have no problem substituting their own favorite scenarios for real data and facts.

Black movement from inner cities to the suburbs is also intertwined with gentrification. It is not only the poor who are pushed out, but also better off families and singles for whom city life is no longer viable. But all suburbs are not alike. Study after study shows that Blacks more often wind up just outside the borders of the central city in older suburbs, many of which have the characteristics of inner city ghettos, without the conveniences and urban amenities. Such suburbs hug the edges of Washington, Chicago, and Detroit. Other suburbs may appear to be racially “integrated” today – but that is only a snapshot in time. These places will be much Blacker or browner tomorrow because of white flight – the root source of segregation in America.

Whites are also in flight from the truth: that the deeply racial dynamic of gentrification is forcing Black folks to cheaper suburbs and the lower-cost South – including many Blacks that claim the move is strictly voluntary.

For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, to to http://www.BlackAgendaReport.com.

[American Dream]

Excerpted from: Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection
by Peter Dale Scott

A Continuous Succession of Drug-Related Deep Events

Mafias and empires have certain elements in common. Both can be seen as the systematic violent imposition of governance in areas of undergovernance. Both use atrocities to achieve their ends; but both tend to be tolerated to the extent that the result of their controlled violence is a diminution of uncontrolled violence. (I would tentatively suggest an important difference between mafias and empires: that, with the passage of time, mafias tend to become more and more part of the civil society whose rules they once broke, while empires tend to become more and more irreconcilably at odds with the societies they once controlled.)

In this book we have seen an overlap between the infrastructures of the American mafia and the indirect American empire. And in this chapter I have attempted to describe the epicenter of this overlap in a milieu, expanding at its outer limits into a global nexus that I have called the global drug connections, with intimate links to both the U.S underworld and U.S. overworld. The nexus links U.S. intelligence to the intelligence services of many other countries, including Taiwan, Israel, Italy, and Chile. It also oversees financial contributions to the leading politicians of many countries, including both parties of the United States.

All of the major deep events in recent American history, and all of the major expansions of the U.S. indirect empire since World War II, can be linked to this global drug connection:

-- The first U.S. postwar presence in East Asia was established in conjunction with the drug-financed KMT in Taiwan.

-- The U.S. presence in Southeast Asia began with Sea Supply’s support for KMT drug traffickers in East Burma, then expanded in the mid-fifties with the drug-financed PARU force into Laos, while the CIA secured Saigon by controlling drug distribution there.

-- The interlocking finance company Deak & Company, founded by OSS veteran Nicholas Deak, "was reportedly used by the CIA to finance covert operations, including the 1953 overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq."

-- The 1954 overthrow of democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was partly achieved with the support of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, a major figure in Lansky’s arms pipeline to Israel in the 1940s, and whose Guardia Nacional was deeply involved in Caribbean drug trafficking thereafter.

--- The introduction of CIA covert forces in Laos in 1960, which eventually grew into a drug-financed irregular army of tens of thousands, was achieved with a force that grew out of the Sea Supply operation in Thailand. The CIA’s private war in Laos, which President Kennedy sought vainly to contain, was the true starting point of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

-- Angleton’s "alternative CIA," CI/SIG, manipulated and falsified its "intelligence" about Lee Harvey Oswald in such a way as to prepare him to be the designated suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

-- The overthrow of democratically elected Indonesian President Sukarno in 1965 was achieved in part by covert assistance through Lockheed Corporation payoffs, and in part by the intervention of Sasakawa Ryoichi, a CIA agent of influence, along with his friend Kodama Yoshio, with the yakuza in Japan. Sasakawa and Kodama were also recipients of Lockheed payoffs facilitated partly by Deak & Company, and partly on the scene by Shig Katayama, whose ID Corp. in the Cayman Islands conducted mysterious business transactions with Helliwell’s Castle Bank.

-- BCCI provided the initial infrastructure for the CIA intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, and the ensuing alliance with the major drug trafficker Gulbeddin Hekmatyar. Pakistan’s President Zia arranged for Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, to work with Lt.-Gen. Fazle Haq; while a BCCI informant told U.S. authorities that Fazle Haq was "heavily engaged in narcotics trafficking and moving the heroin money through the [BCCI] bank." Hekmatyar in the next decade received more CIA aid than any other CIA asset before or since.

-- In 1970, a CIA officer with the pseudonym Henry J. Sloman, who was also "a high-risk smuggler directly linked to the Mafia," was dispatched to Chile, where he became involved with the right-wing plotting to assassinate General René Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army.

-- Orlando Letelier was murdered in Washington in September 1976 by a team including Cuban exile drug-traffickers, working for the dug-financed Chilean intelligence agency DINA. Though the US Government was already aware of DINA’s Operation CONDOR for such foreign-based murders, CIA Director Bush chose publicly to deflect suspicion away from DINA.

-- According to Robert Parry, Alexandre de Marenches of the Safari Club arranged for William Casey (a fellow Knight of Malta) to meet with Iranian and Israeli representatives in Paris in July and October 1980, where Casey promised delivery to Iran of needed U.S. armaments in exchange for a delay in the return of the U.S. hostages in Iran. (This was the so-called Republican "October Counter-surprise.") Parry suspects a role of BCCI in both the funding of payoffs for the secret deal, and also the subsequent flow of Israeli armaments to Iran.

-- In 1981 Mehmet Ali Agça, a member of the Turkish drug-trafficking Grey Wolves, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Le Monde diplomatique later reported that the assassination attempt was organized, at the request of Turkish mafia chief Bekir Celenk, by Abdullah Çatli, a drug-trafficking Grey Wolf leader of death squads for Turkish intelligence. Le Monde diplomatique added that one year later Çatli visited Miami with the notorious Operation CONDOR killer, Stefano delle Chiaie.

-- Shackley, Khashoggi, and BCCI were instrumental in inaugurating the illegal Iran-Contra Connection of 1985-86, which diverted funds from arms sales to Iran to support of the Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica.

-- The looting of Russia during the Yeltsin era in the 1990s saw funds channeled through Rappaport’s Inter Maritime Bank into the Bank of New York, where Rappaport also had an important if not controlling interest.

-- In 1991, Shackley’s colleague Richard Secord created an airline in Azerbaijan which arranged to fly in hundreds of mujahideen from Afghanistan recruited by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

-- U.S. support for the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1998, a group backed by al-Qaeda and financed in part by drugs, led to revelations that for years at least one of the KLA leaders had a longtime relationship with the U.S. private military company MPRI. (As late as 1997 the KLA had been recognized by the United States as a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.)

(The list could be indefinitely expanded. For example, the conversion of Australia into a dependable U.S. ally can be dated to the fall of democratically elected Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, in which Penny Lernoux and others have seen the hidden hand of the Nugan Hand Bank.)

This deep continuity underlying U.S. expansion since World War II helps make credible the startling phenomenon described in our last chapter – namely, that deep events such as the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 are not unrelated, or the product of forces attacking America from outside. Rather, at least in part, they surface into public awareness out of the deep connection described in this chapter, a connection whose presence is ongoing but almost completely unacknowledged.

[emphasis added]

[American Dream]

People movin' out
People movin' in
Why, because of the color of their skin
Run, run, run, but you sho' can't hide...

[American Dream]

Precarious work

Precarious work is a term used to describe non-standard employment which is poorly paid, insecure, unprotected, and cannot support a household.[1] In recent decades there has been a dramatic increase in precarious work due to such factors as: globalization, the shift from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, and the spread of information technology.[2] These changes have created a new economy which demands flexibility in the workplace and, as a result, caused the decline of the standard employment relationship and a dramatic increase in precarious work.[3] An important aspect of precarious work is its gendered nature, as women are continuously over-represented in this type of work.[4]

Precarious work is frequently associated with the following types of employment: “part-time employment, self-employment, fixed-term work, temporary work, on-call work, homeworkers, and telecommuting.”[5] All of these forms of employment are related in that they depart from the standard employment relationship (full-time, continuous work with one employer).[4] Each form of precarious work may offer its own challenges but they all share the same disadvantages: low wages, few benefits, lack of collective representation, and little to no job security.[6]

There are four dimensions when determining if employment is precarious in nature:

1. the degree of certainty of continuing employment;
2. control over the labor process, which is linked to the presence or absence of trade unions and professional associations and relates to control over working conditions, wages, and the pace of work;
3. the degree of regulatory protection; and
4. income level.[7]


Deviation from the Standard Employment Relationship

The standard employment relationship can be defined as full-time, continuous employment where the employee works on his employer’s premises or under the employer's supervision.[8] The central aspects of this relationship include an employment contract of indefinite duration, standardized working hours/weeks and sufficient social benefits.[9] Benefits like pensions, unemployment, and extensive medical coverage protected the standard employee from unacceptable practices and working conditions.[10] The standard employment relationship emerged after World War II with the men who worked in the manufacturing industries and this soon became the norm.[11] On completing their education, most men would go on to work full-time for one employer their entire lives until their retirement at the age of 65.[12] During this time, women would only work temporarily until they got married and had children, at which time they would withdraw from the workforce.[13]

The Gendered Nature of Precarious Work



"We Can Do It" US wartime poster
(often mistaken for Rosie the Riveter)

When the standard employment relationship dominated, women would take on precarious work merely to supplement her husband’s income.[4] In the last two decades, the standard employment relationship has declined, and more men are taking jobs that were previously associated with women.[14] Despite this fact, women continue to make up the majority of precarious workers, and this has led to the growth of precarious employment being referred to as the "feminization of work."[15]

“Feminization” refers to not only the increase of women in the workforce but also the increase of forms of employment that were previously assigned solely to women (low wages, part-time or temporary, and without benefits).[16] As more women entered the workplace in developing countries in the 1990s, there became deteriorating employment opportunities for men, while women workers were challenged by unequal treatment.[17] Despite women “joining” men in the workforce, there is widespread segregation of the genders in different occupations.[18] Additionally, women have higher rates of part-time employment, earn less than men do for the same work, and face a glass ceiling that prevents upward mobility in their organization.[19] For example, in Australia, one in three women are non-permanent employees and they are paid 21 percent less than permanent employees and are without benefits like holiday and sick leave.[20] In Canada, 40 percent of employed women hold precarious jobs, while in Korea this rate is even higher where 69 percent of women are engaged in precarious work.[21]

The differences in work performed by men and women in the paid labor force have been historically explained by women’s care responsibilities in the home.[22] Neoclassical economists reject the feminist theory that the relationship of the public and private spheres is not separate, rather interdependent.[23] The separation view taken by advanced industrialized economies, of production from reproduction, creates an extreme tension in the economy.[24] Scholars argue that this tension could be eased with the government’s involvement in social reproduction (with immigration, providing health services and public education, and elder assistance) as well as institutionalizing a new gender order (to help lift the large burden of unpaid care work off women).[25]

[American Dream]

Peggy Orenstein dissects girls’ passion for pink

February 3, 2011 by Frances Dinkelspiel



From her home in north Berkeley where she lives with her filmmaker husband Steven Okazaki and seven year old daughter Daisy, Peggy Orenstein has been opining for years for the New York Times magazine about the world of girls and feminism. Last week, her latest book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, was published and it is already climbing the bestseller list. (It will debut at #13 on the New York Times list on Feb. 13) The book is both an expose of and meditation about the corporate push to market princesses and pink and early sexuality to young girls...


Do you wear pink?

Of course I wear pink. I’m not a crazy person. But it’s such a tiny slice of the rainbow and although in one way it seems to celebrate girlhood, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls’ identity to appearance then it presents that connection not only as innocent but as evidence of innocence. And that innocent pink pretty quickly turns into something else, a kind of diva, self-absorbed pink and ultimately a sexualized pink.

What is Daisy’s position on the color now?

Truthfully, she was actually never that into pink, which is part of why I became so aware of it. It was never her favorite color, but people were constantly pressing it on her. I remember being in a drug store and the very nice clerk offered her a balloon, then asked what color she wanted and before she could answer, (I think she was going to say purple) said, “I bet I know,” and handed her the pink one. Daisy looked at me kind of confused, like she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to say thank you or no thank you. And I thought, really? When did THIS happen? I think last time I asked her, her favorite color was “rainbow.” That’s all right by me.


What’s the big deal about little girls being obsessed with princesses? Hasn’t that always been the case?

Comparing the way girls do Princess today to the way we played is like comparing a five-channel TV to a satellite dish. There are 26,000 Disney Princess products alone—considering they can’t slap them on cars, liquor, cigarettes anti-depressants or tampons, that means they’re on EVERYTHING. And it becomes this mandate, the only game in town. I remember going to Daisy’s preschool and they were doing a project where they were making a book, each one filling in the sentence “if I were a [blank] I’d [blank] to the store.” So if I were a ball I’d roll to the store. And the boys had filled the sentence in all kinds of ways. Yes, some said Lightening McQueen but they said puppies, bugs, raisins, all sorts of things. The girls said exactly four things: Princess, Ballerina, Butterfly and Fairy. One especially ambitious girl said “Princess, butterfly fairy Ballerina.” It’s too narrow. The teacher was really surprised—she’d been around a long time and this was really when the princess juggernaut was truly taking off. She had tried to get the girls to broaden their imaginations but said they just wouldn’t.

No question it’s cute. And it can feel empowering because you think, well, girls are freer to express their femininity and their sexuality and we’re not tamping that down or denying it anymore. But it’s part of this flume ride that defines girlhood as makeovers and spa birthday parties and princesses and Bratz dolls and being the fairest and ultimately the hottest of them all, that encourages them to define themselves from the outside in instead of from the inside out. It pretty quickly slides from playing pretty, to playing “sassy” to playing sexy, which does the opposite of what people might think in terms of girls’ emotional and psychological health. Being objectified—judging yourself by the way you think others see you–actually disconnects them from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual health as they get older. One of the most sobering conversations I had was with Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and desire. She told me that by the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them questions about how arousal or desire felt they respond by how they think they looked. She has to tell them looking good is not a feeling. As parents of daughters—and for those of us who are women ourselves—I think we understand that potential, that vulnerability, and it’s the last thing we want for our girls. So it’s the magnitude, the dominance and what, in the commercial culture, it’s channeling girls into that’s disturbing.

What accounts for the rise of the Disney princess phenomenon?

Money. That’s the short answer. The phenomenon is actually only about 10 years old. Obviously, there were princesses in movies before that and girls played princess, but Cinderella, Snow White even Belle and Jasmine, those movies were just family movies, not “princess” movies. They were like Peter Pan or Pinocchio. The movies came out, there’d be a little merchandise, a Halloween costume or two, and then they’d be gone until next time the film was released from “the vault.” Then in 2000 the new head of consumer licensing got this idea to market the female characters separately from the movies—for the first time in Disney history-and call them “princesses.” They rolled it out and the first year it was a $300 million business. By 2010 Princess took in $5 billion. And that’s just Disney. So they say, well, we just give girls what they want, as if magnifying a desire is less coercive than instigating it.

How can the emphasis on pink and princesses hurt girls in the long run?

There’s no a + b=c here. Im not saying if your daughter waves a magic wand she’s going to get an eating disorder. That would be absurd. But there’s a lot of effort into making us think it’s benign. The mythology that this represents more freedom for girls, and more power and greater sexual health and greater self-efficacy, all of that; I think the evidence is really very much to the contrary. And nowhere do you see it really like writ large more than in these other Disney princesses. You know, Miley and Lindsey and Britney and now Demi Lovato (who just got out of rehab). That flip from fetishizing wholesomeness to fetishizing what comes after.

One of the things I hadn’t thought of was the impact of this hyper-segmenation on the relationship between girls and boys. It’s natural for little girls to want to assert that they’re little girls with whatever the culture gives them, because they want to make sure they stay little girls, because the whole penis-vagina thing hasn’t quite kicked in and they don’t know if their anatomy might switch and they might grow up to be something else. That’s kind of scary, so they want to make sure that everyone knows you’re a boy and everyone knows you’re a girl. So you fixate on extremes that represent your gender, and that’s a natural thing to do. However, when it’s then packaged and sold to you in this extreme way, it separates the cultures of boys and girls, making it harder and harder for them to see one another as people—as the other sex rather than the opposite sex. It makes it very hard for them to be friends and to learn from one another. I ended up doing a lot of research on the value of cross-sex play for both boys and girls—cognitively, psychologically, emotionally, on their future relationships in the home and workplace. Turns out it’s incredibly important and valuable to them in the long run when it happens naturally, which it does ( you don’t need to force it). But you wonder, when everything is so gender-coded, how do you do that? How do you play with the boy next door if you’ve got the pink Magic 8 Ball and the scrabble set that says f-a-s-h-i-o-n on the cover? And conversely, I think girls begin to think if something is not pink, it’s not for them, and that’s problematic. I mean, there’s only one pink Lego kit. If pink is your only color, that’s the only one you can get; everything else is for boys.

And of course, pity the boy who likes pink. Unless, maybe he lives in the Bay Area.

Excerpted from: http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/02/03/ ... -for-pink/

[American Dream]

MAY BE TRIGGERING

Peggy Orenstein dissects girls’ passion for pink

February 3, 2011 by Frances Dinkelspiel

Doesn't the corporate agenda described above lead inexorably to an increasingly effed up culture?













http://rebeccadrobis.typepad.com/rebecc ... nd-tiaras/

[American Dream]

Capitalist Propaganda

[American Dream]

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