Perceptions of Housework Changing?

Cleaning guru Jolie Kerr: “The legacy of housework being the domain of women continues” – Salon.com

Housework is traditionally gendered — but as someone who writes for Gawker media sites directed at men and at women, and as someone who wants a wide audience for your book, do you think that’s fading out?

I do think that there are changes — and I think that’s a very good think. I think it’d be Pollyanna-ish of me to tell you there isn’t a gender construct in cleaning. The legacy of housework being the domain of women continues. And it’s going to continue for a long time, probably well after my lifetime. I wish that wasn’t the case, but that’s reality. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of socializing the perception of housework as women’s work. And women are more socialized, to this day, to think about cleaning and be aware of cleaning. They’re trained to clean. It’s less true now than it was forty years ago.

And one thing I love hearing about is women who are in their 20s and 30s saying “My mom never taught me to clean, and now I’m turning to a feminist website to teach me to clean.” That statement was made when I was working for the Hairpin. I’m hesitant to put words in the mouths of Jezebel readers, but I’m sure some Jezebel readers feel that way too. That personalization of women being the ones to clean has gone away to some extent. We like that, right? What isn’t so great is that the socialization of people to know how to clean has gone away. But cleaning is a human problem, not a male or female problem. I try always to act as if it is the case that cleaning is a human problem.

via Cleaning guru Jolie Kerr: “The legacy of housework being the domain of women continues” – Salon.com.

The riot police in the Ukraine are using armor piercing rounds strong enough to go through the engine block of a car.

It takes guts to go up against the security forces with fire bombs and fireworks.

I think using snipers with high powered military rifles against protestors is pretty cowardly.

Fukushima Leaks Again

I’ve written before about how this crisis is going to run for decades. Just because the media has lost interest doesn’t mean that radiation has stopped leaking. And we can depend on TEPCO continuing to mismanage the problem.

James Pilant

New Highly Radioactive Leak At Fukushima Plant

* Worst radioactive water leak at Fukushima since last August

* Utility says water unlikely to have reached ocean

* Tepco strongly criticised for reaction to 2011 meltdowns (Adds company quote, radiation measurement, more details)

TOKYO, Feb 20 (Reuters) – The operator of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant said on Thursday that 100 tonnes of highly contaminated water had leaked out of a tank, the worst incident since last August, when a series of radioactive water leaks sparked international alarm.

Tokyo Electric Power Co told reporters the latest leak was unlikely to have reached the ocean. But news of the leak at the site, devastated by a 2011 earthquake and tsunami, further undercut public trust in a utility rocked by a string of mishaps and disclosure issues.

“We are taking various measures, but we apologise for worrying the public with such a leak,” said Masayuki Ono, a spokesman for the utility, also known as Tepco.

“Water is unlikely to have reached the ocean as there is no drainage in that tank area.”

via New Highly Radioactive Leak At Fukushima Plant.

Post Office Banking?

I think this is an idea whose time has come (again!). Instead of payday loans and check cashing places we let the post office do it. The idea that the Post Office should provide banking services was one of the platforms of the Grange back at the turn of the 20th century.

Post Office banking would save people without current banking services hundreds of dollars a year and run out of business a good number of unsavory businesses who prey on the poor.

James Pilant

Poll: Americans Like Elizabeth Warren’s Call To Replace Payday Lenders With Post Office Banking

Nearly a fifth of the country doesn’t know what to make of the idea of getting basic banking services from the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), according to a new poll, but support for the idea outweighs opposition by a substantial margin among the rest of the populace.

The poll found 44 percent in favor of and 37 percent opposed to the idea put forth recently by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to have the USPS replace check-cashing and payday-lending businesses. The survey found 19 percent unsure of their position. That significant level of uncertainty in the YouGov/Huffington Post survey of nearly 1,000 people suggests that public opinion of the postal banking idea could still break in either direction. (While YouGov is an online polling system, it is not a haphazard one, and its methodology has been embraced as scientific by polling expert Nate Silver.)

The idea behind the proposal Warren made in early February is actually much older and comes from two seemingly disparate public policy problems. The first is payday lending itself. That predatory industry siphons more than $3 billion per year out of the country’s poorest communities by charging average annual interest rates of nearly 400 percent to people too desperate for cash to worry about the fine print. State-level crackdown efforts in the past have proven largely ineffective because the industry wields significant influence with lawmakers and because it simply changes tactics to evade the few regulations that do make it past their army of lobbyists. Federal oversight is finally coming to the industry after it had slipped through the regulatory cracks for years, and that scrutiny has caused major banks to drop their internal high-interest cash advance programs that duplicated some of the payday lending industry’s worst practices.

via Poll: Americans Like Elizabeth Warren’s Call To Replace Payday Lenders With Post Office Banking.

Tom Perkins, Fruit.

For every dollar paid in taxes, you should have one vote. Right. Let’s have a monied aristocracy and disenfranchise millions of Americans. We can redo the Medieval era! How about some sumptuary laws banning the peasants from wearing silks or bright colors? How about requiring some bowing and scraping to our betters like Tom Perkins who equates Progressives with Nazis.

Don’t you want the opportunity to jump off the sidewalk to the more comfortable gutter when the silk clad Wall Street investor parades his glory for all to see? Perhaps, he will momentarily recognize your presence and cast an approving look for a split second in your direction. Won’t you feel a sense of pride in that?

Perkins delusions of grandiosity are all to prevalent among our modern gilded age would-be aristos. Talk of being “job creators” and contempt for the “47% takers” has gone to their brains. You can see from this post, that their every word is a vital message requiring air time and editorializing in the media world.

If you or I say something highly intelligent, the media might at most yawn, but this wealthy buffoon can get his fifteen minutes of fame over and over again.

James Pilant

Tom Perkins is desperately trying to extend his 15 minutes of infamy.

The 82-year-old venture capitalist, who recently made a lot of people angry by comparing progressives to Nazis, told an audience in San Francisco Thursday that people who pay more money in taxes should get more votes.

“The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins said, according to CNNMoney. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”

The audience responded to his claim as any sane humans would: with laughter. After all, that’s not really how democracy works. And not that Perkins would care, but his proposal wouldn’t really be fair given that poor Americans already fork over a larger share of income to Uncle Sam than their richer counterparts, according to a 2009 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

Unfortunately, Perkins wasn’t joking around, telling the CNNMoney reporter offstage, “I intended to be outrageous, and it was.”

via Tom Perkins: People With More Money Should Get More Votes.

A Purchasable Public Broadcasting System?

If a multi-millionaire can buy a documentary or just the news on PBS, then it is no longer public.

There is no need for analysis here. Bought news is wrong. It is doubly wrong coming from what is supposed to be television in the public interest.

There is a simple choice here. Either this kind of bought journalism on PBS stops and stops now or public funding must cease.

If PBS wishes to become the Plutocratic Broadcasting System, that can be arranged.

Without public money they will be free to beg, crawl, kowtow, and abase themselves in any manner they see fit.

Prostitutes are often forced into the profession. The producers of news at PBS have no such excuse.

James Pilant

When did PBS become the Plutocratic Broadcasting Service? – Salon.com

In a world of screaming cable television hosts and partisan media outlets, PBS is supposed to be the last refuge for honest news. This is ostensibly why taxpayers still contribute money to the public broadcasting system. That money is appropriated to try to guarantee that there remains at least one forum for unvarnished facts, even if such facts offend those with money and power.

The problem, though, is that because our government spends so little on public media as compared to many other industrialized countries, our most prominent public media outlets are becoming instruments for special interests to launder their ideological agenda through a seemingly objective brand. Starved for public resources, these outlets are increasingly trying to get their programming funded with money from corporations and wealthy political activists — and that kind of cash comes with ideological expectations.

Case in point is the Public Broadcasting Service, as evidenced by the major report we published this week at PandoDaily. In that story, we meticulously documented how PBS’s flagship affiliate, WNET of New York, solicited funding from former Enron trader John Arnold. The $3.5 million Arnold contributed was earmarked for a “Pension Peril” series now airing in PBS NewsHour broadcasts on stations throughout the country.

If that was the entire story, it might not be much of a story. However, at the same time the billionaire Arnold is funding PBS’s pension-related coverage, he is also sponsoring the nationwide legislative push to slash public employee pension benefits. Indeed, with his massive contributions to super PACs, think tanks and local front groups, Arnold is financing a national movement to convince legislators to, in the words of his foundation, “stop promising a [retirement] benefit” to public workers.

This is likely why the Arnold-backed PBS pension series has loyally echoed the billionaire’s anti-pension themes. Knowing its benefactor’s message, PBS has echoed the Arnold foundation by promoting cuts to public workers’ retirement benefits as the primary solution to state budget problems. PBS has done this in its “Pension Peril” segments without mentioning that pension fund shortfalls are dwarfed by the amount state and local governments are spending on taxpayer-funded corporate subsidies. PBS has also done it without explicitly disclosing its connection to Arnold.

via When did PBS become the Plutocratic Broadcasting Service? – Salon.com.

Women Get Less Paid Leave

I don’t understand. Women have reproductive circumstances that call for leave but otherwise their need for leave should be identical with males. Therefore, you would conclude that women would and should get more leave than men.

But they get less.

How does that work? What kind of decision making produces this outcome?

I had a look at the study and found no conclusions as to why this disparity exists. But it does tend to vindicate the view that there is still a long way to go before women attain equality in the workplace.

James Pilant

Women Get Less Paid Leave From Work Than Men | ThinkProgress

Women are far less likely than men to get paid leave from their workplaces, according to a new survey commissioned by American Women, the National Partnership for Women & Families, and the Rockefeller Family Fund. They are also less likely to get extended leave when they need it.

In a survey of likely voters in 2014, less than a third of women — 27 percent — reported that they were paid their full wage when they took leave, but nearly 40 percent of men were paid full wages. Meanwhile, 30 percent of women didn’t receive any pay at all, but that was true for less than a quarter of men.

Women were also less likely to get paid leave when they needed to take off more than seven days to care for themselves, a sick family member, or after the arrival of a new baby. Yet men and women have a similar need for this kind of leave.

A lack of paid leave doesn’t just make it hard for new parents or those caring for the sick and elderly to balance those needs with the demands of work. It can have serious impacts on women’s financial stability. A woman who gets 30 or more days of paid family leave is over 50 percent more likely to see her wages increase afterward than those who can’t take any paid time off. Women who receive partial pay or no pay at all during leave often struggle to get by, with a third borrowing money, dipping into their savings, and/or putting off bills, while 15 percent end up relying on public assistance. Even worse, a quarter have to quit or are let go from their jobs when a new child arrives because they can’t take paid leave.

via Women Get Less Paid Leave From Work Than Men | ThinkProgress.