Sarah Solon

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Lindsay Beyerstein on Majikthise shoots holes in a recent opinion piece from Dana Goldstein that argues outgoing New York Times opinions editor Gail Collins "couldn't have raised the profile of female opinion journalists because there just weren't any qualified female applicants for the opinion page."

Dear Dana: It's a problem when you both dismiss gender-focused analysis and also - in the very same opinion piece - lack the intellectual rigor to pull off gendered analysis of your own. Beyerstein does a great job of pointing to Goldstein's rhetorical pitfalls.

And, because it's just so well written, here's a re-printed chunk:

"If pundits are willing to repeat sexist canards about female politicians, they probably have similar attitudes about female journalists.

...If we see the trials and tribulations of Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, is it so hard to imagine that other women face similar career obstacles in other professions?

If so many Americans are hesitant to accept women as their political leaders, they probably also have issues with female opinion leaders. Instead of blaming women for their failure to offer their opinions on "serious" issues, Goldstein should examine the reluctance of the general public to take women's opinions seriously."

As should be clear to anyone who reads Majikthise, Firedoglake, mahablog, Feministing, half the people on Daily Kos or In These Times Magazine-- women do amazing opinion writing and not just on "women's issues" and other marginalized subjects. So before they give up on our entire gender, the next time the Times opinion section doesn't think the writing women are submitting is worthy of printing, they could ask Lindsey if she has something to get off her chest.

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DownWithTyranny calls "Anne Northup, who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in legalized bribes from Big Business to always vote in their interests and ignore the interests of her constituents" out on her shenanigans, saying that her record of blatantly ignoring middle class concerns belies her recent too little, too late attempts to attract middle class voters. Linking to DMI's Congressional Scorecard, on which Northup was "rated an F and [received] a ZERO on middle class issues, DownWithTyranny writes that the polls may finally be getting through to her:

"Today's AP poll that shows the middle class abandoning the GOP in droves...middle-class voters are embracing the Democratic Party and fleeing the GOP- just as they abandoned Democrats a dozen years ago and ushered in an era of Republican control. "

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Barbara Ehrenreich, high on the list of people we completely respect and adore, wrote a great analysis of shame for Alternet: "CEOs use shame and intimidation to keep workers 'productive,' but the real shame is on executives who make eight-figure incomes while their lowest-paid employees trudge between food banks." I find this comparison particularly compelling, not to mention particularly harrowing:

"The ultimate trick is to make people ashamed of the injuries inflicted upon them. In many cultures, rape renders a woman an unmarriageable pariah...Even in America, often a woman's first response to sexual harassment or assault is to feel soiled and shamed, as if she had brought the unwanted advances on herself. Something similar goes on in the case of the laid off and unemployed."

And speaking of people in power offering a raw deal to workers, Tula Connel from the AFL-CIO blog wrote on Kos how

After years of cutting job training funds and promoting trade deals that kill U.S. jobs, yesterday, with great fanfare, and just a little more than a week before an election where job security is a top issue on voters' minds, the Bush administration announced a new eight-state job training initiative...

Sounds great right but it actually by the U.S. Department of Labor's own estimates, the new so-called Career Advancement Accounts (CAAs) will reach just 500 people in each of the eight states that have agreed to participate in the program, and those states have agreed to foot half of the bill.

So if you are a dislocated worker better hope you're one of the lucky few who gets the grant money. But did we mention how the grants are so low they won't even cover the cost of a semester of community college? Did we mention the states the program applies to are all states facing tough elections? Additionally, saying that all dislocated workers need to do to get on their feet is take a tiny drop of education is not actually an "empowering" idea, as Labor Secretary Elaine Chao claimed. That whole line of thinking is really about blaming the victims for problems created by trade policy while even the most educated workers are suffering in this economy, as this blog commenter points out.

Dean Baker's blog Beat the Press has been writing some very interesting posts on how US trade policy favors protecting the jobs of some classes of workers over others. This post from September is a good summary of his arguments.

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Posted at 9:08 AM, Oct 28, 2006 in Blog Stroll
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