Category Archives: Labor

Sheryl Sandberg Sandbagged For Forgetting To Blame Men

Feminism, Labor, Political Correctness, Regulation, Sex

As this individualist sees it, Sheryl Sandberg is a remarkable woman who holds unremarkable opinions. There is nothing remotely controversial about what the chief operating officer of Facebook, a Democrat, has said about women’s work on CBS’s “60 Minutes.”

Women are too nice. They don’t take credit for their greatness. They don’t raise their hand enough. They don’t “Lean In” (the trite title of Sandberg’s new book) as they should. They “attribute their success to luck, and help from other people,” while men will attribute their success to their own core skills.

Sandberg holds humdrum feminist views. According to this mainstream opinion, society and the patriarchy have conditioned women to be nurturing and apologize for any male-like, go-getter ambitions they harbor.

Interviewer Norah O’Donnell is the very embodiment of banality—and hypocrisy. O’Donnell’s beauty (she is certainly no brainiac) could not have damaged her career on the Idiot Box. Just in case her looks—sorry, “skills”—went unnoticed, O’Donnell has posed as a pin-up.

In any case, O’Donnell the pin-up was having none of it. “But some women will hear that and say, ‘Wow, she’s telling me I’m not working hard enough, I’m not trying hard enough. She’s blaming women…”

Matthew Cooper is another feminist with a Y (chromosome). Cooper took a tougher tack. So sinister were Sandberg’s pronouncements on women that she deserved to be exposed for all the bad (unrelated) things she’d done. Some of these were implied: “She made a billion” was a recrimination of sorts.

Some were asserted: Mr. Cooper saddles Sandberg with the deregulation of the financial sector [where? When?] and the financial crisis. She was only 30 when she helped “repeal the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that had separated investment banking from the commercial, insured kind. This was, in retrospect, a huge mistake,” noodles Cooper.

This is such bad journalism.

To those of use who put a premium on teasing out the issues with precision, there is no daylight between Sheryl Sandberg and her feminist foes.

Sheryl Sandberg is being sandbagged for forgetting the only acceptable meme: Saddle “society” and the “patriarchy” for any and all female failure.

Nobody has picked on Sandberg for failing to blame biology, which accounts to a greater degree for the observed, aggregate differences in drive and priority setting that separate the sexes.

NORA O’Donnell Showcasing Her Professional Skills :

Jobs: More Cover-Up Than Recovery

Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Labor

Although “The labor force participation rate, which measures workers and those looking for jobs … fell to a 32-year low of 63.5%, tied with where it stood in August 2012”—Mark Hanna at Euro Pacific gives out a “better than expected employment report”:

* The government reported a net 236,000 new jobs as the unemployment rate fell to 7.7%. Economists expected the 160,000 new jobs in February and the unemployment rate held steady at 7.9%.
* Service industries led the gains with 73,000 new jobs, while construction added 48,000 and health care provided 32,000. Retail also added 24,000.
* There was a downward revision in January’s data, from an initially reported 157,000 down to 119,000. December’s numbers, though, were revised up from 196,000 to 219,000.
* Average hourly earnings rose four cents to $23.82 an hour, while the average work week edged higher to 34.5 hours.

By Paul Craig Roberts’s assessment, this is “The Missing Recovery.” He pulls the curtain back on a declining “U.3 measure of unemployment rate”; declining “because it does not count discouraged job seekers who have given up looking for a job.”

AND:
• An “expansive monetary policy of bond purchases to maintain negative real interest rates continues 3.5 years into the recovery.” This comes “at the expense of interest income for retirees on their savings accounts, money market funds, and Treasury bonds.”

PBS admits too that, while unemployment dropped because people found work, “some 130,000 others stopped looking for work, so they were no longer counted.”

Robert Wenzel’s EPJ (Economic Policy Journal) has it right: This is a Ben Bernanke manipulated uptick.

We’re floating on a confetti of funny-money. How can we tell what’s real and what’s not real?

UPDATED: Rand Paul: Action Hero, Or Political Performance Artist?

Ethics, Labor, libertarianism, Morality, Paleolibertarianism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Republicans, Ron Paul, Taxation

“Rand Paul: Action Hero, Or Political Performance Artist?” is the current column, now on WND. Here’s an excerpt:

“Rand Paul is front-and-center in mainstream media, showing what some call ‘leadership.’ Not a week goes by when the son of Ron Paul—the legendary libertarian legislator from Texas—is not introducing one Act or another, ostensibly to lighten the incubus of government.

This week it’s the REINS Act (‘Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2013’). Last week it was the ‘Sequester Alternative Plan.’

I like the Senator from Kentucky’s energy. The question is: Is this political Brownian motion—the case of activity substituting for achievement—or real Randian energy in furtherance of liberty? …

… Rand Paul’s latest political song and dance saw the senator return $600,000 in savings, accrued in the course of running a cost-efficient office, to the US Treasury, where it does not belong.

The savings belong to taxpayers. Stolen goods stuffed down the maw of the federal beast will disappear without trace. For all we know, and given the fact of fungibility, these savings could be diverted into the domestic drone program.

Yes, Sen. Paul followed legal protocol in returning taxpayer property to the Treasury. However, the positive man-made law is not a libertarian loadstar. From the son of Ron more is expected.

But should this be the case? Perhaps Rand Paul deserves a break.

All too familiar is the libertarian type that has nothing to say about policy and politics for fear of compromising theoretical purity. Suspended as he is in the arid arena of pure thought, this specimen has opted to live in perpetual sin: the sin of abstraction.

The ‘ideal of liberty,’ philosopher-pundit Jack Kerwick has urged, must be ‘brought down from the clouds to the nit and the grit of the history and culture from which it emerged.’

But should the command to lead an earthbound existence push us into political compromises? …”

The complete column is “Rand Paul: Action Hero, Or Political Performance Artist?” Read it on WND.

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UPDATE (Marc 1): “On the heels of Barack Obama’s Las Vegas run-on ramble on the necessity of immigration ‘reform,’ this week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced that he too had ‘evolved’ overnight on the issue. “I’m … open-minded enough to say that it is an issue that we do need to evolve on,” the senator vaporized.”

The Republicans found religion on immigration, and so did Rand Paul “evolve” along with them.

UPDATE II: Freedom To Choose? Only When It Comes to Abortion (BHO Agrees)

Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Justice, Labor, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Liberty, Reason

For a libertarian, it is “highly problematic to insist that by virtue of her fertility, a woman loses a title in her body.” It is equally wrong to tell a dope-head (or a fat-head, for that matter) what not to ingest, inject or smoke.

In libertarian law, the legislator has no place in a voluntary exchange between adults, as dodgy and as dangerous as these may be (like dwarf tossing).

Ever selective, and never principled, about the freedoms they champion, left-liberals (as opposed to classical liberals) believe that the right to have an abortion (at the public’s expense) is sacred. Nobody should come between a woman seeking such a procedure and her doctor. (Agreed, so long as she and not me pays for the termination.)

Forget about the right of the same woman to work for whomever she wants to without the intervention of a third party (a union). Freedom of association holds no sway with liberals when it comes to labor law. Pinko pukes religiously believe that it is good and just to compel an employee to join a union and remit union dues.

The Michigan Statehouse has changed this sorry state of affairs. “Organized crime” is outraged.

Predictably, CNN reporters and anchors have utterly ignored individual rights in their coverage of the Michigan vote, focusing the network’s collective bias on the fact that wages in right-to-work states are freer to adjust with the market (read lower):

The House approved two bills, which the Senate already passed last week. Both chambers are dominated by Republicans.
On Tuesday evening. Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, signed the legislation, which allows workers at union-represented employers to forgo paying dues.
Thousands of people, many of them union workers, gathered outside the statehouse, chanting and holding signs as snow fell. At least three school districts were closed as teachers traveled to Lansing to protest.
There are 23 states which have right-to-work laws, mostly in the South and western plains states, where union membership is relatively weak. Nationwide, union membership stands at 11.8%. …”

UPDATE: BHO Agrees. The language of rights doesn’t belong in the “escalating fight over changing Michigan into a right-to-work state.” Rights are about things like publicly sponsored abortion, welfare, and so on.

The ass with ears (AWE) said that “the State Legislature’s move to ban the required paying of union dues was all about politics.”

That’s a non sequitur, professa. For even if the Michigan Legislature’s vote were political, whatever that means—everything politicians do, by definition, is political—it does not make it wrong.

Logic was never “The Ass With Ears'” strong suit.