Cheerleading Used to Defund Women’s Sports

On By southwerkIn Opinion
Quinnipiac University

Quinnipiac University (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cheerleading is not a sport says the U.S. Court of Appeals, but is it?

Rachael Larimore: The court made the right decision. This was a cynical plan by Quinnipiac to keep the school within Title IX compliance while cutting women’s volleyball (and, incidentally, men’s golf and men’s track and field).

Competitive cheering might be an evolving sport—the Washington Post notes that the “activity” is growing more organized and has various outfits, such as the National Collegiate Acrobatics and Tumbling Association, working to make it a recognized sport. Cheerleading’s raison d’être is to root, root, root for the home team. If you take that element away, what’s all that yelling and cheering for, even during competitions?

Cheerleading is not a sport says the U.S. Court of Appeals, but is it?

This is pretty cynical. Title 9 says that colleges have to spend as much on women’s sports as on men’s. Quinnipiac is evading the rule by declaring Cheerleading a sport. Thus, they can count the money paid for it as money used for women’s sports and have more for the men.

I have no disagreement with the idea that it is tiring and a definite sign of social prestige but whether or not it’s a sport – well it seems it’s only considered a sport when you want to evade title 9 and that is not a good reason.

James Pilant

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Komen Charity Forgot Who Its Contributors Were

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Nancy Brinker resigns from Komen: Does the CEO’s departure even matter for the breast cancer organization?

Part of why Komen is likely to fail at picking up the pieces is that the entire battle exposed some tensions in its base of support—tensions that had largely been minimized by the genuine desire of a broad coalition to fight breast cancer. Part of what made the organization such a behemoth is that Komen was able to put together the traditional supporters of women’s health care, who are pro-choice and have feminist leanings, with more conservative women who had previously been afraid of the immodest implications of talking openly about breast health. They did this by pointedly desexualizing the issue in a sea of pink ribbons and teddy bears, something the more feminist supporters could ignore because of the greater good. Prior to the Planned Parenthood debacle, Komen seemed largely apolitical—not outwardly judging those of us who want comprehensive health care that includes an adult understanding that people are going to have sex. By crossing that line, they forced their supporters into a sluts vs. church ladies battle. Now the feminist side perceives the organization as swarming with prigs whose support for your health stops as soon as they know you’ve touched a penis, and a handful of prominent resignations can’t really do much to change that.

Nancy Brinker resigns from Komen: Does the CEO’s departure even matter for the breast cancer organization?

Was it ethical for Komen to embrace right wing politics and cut off funding to one of the most prominent sources of women’s health care? Apparently a great number of Komen’s event participants and contributors believe the organization’s decision was at odds with their own moral beliefs. What is interesting here is how Komen so misunderstood its base. Isn’t that one of the fundamental rules of any business organization – that you should understand who your “customers” are. By any measure, Komen failed this rule and the organization may never recover.

James Pilant

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Stock Market Increasingly More Casino Capitalism than Investment

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics1 Comment

Wall Street trading debacles raises fears | McClatchy

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Los Angeles, the top Democrat on the panel’s subcommittee that oversees capital markets, said she was very concerned about the volatility triggered by Knight. She supports hearings on the broader effects of the incident and other recent trading troubles.

“Like the problems with the Facebook initial public offering, events like this only further serve to undermine investor confidence in the markets,” Waters said. “Though we don’t yet know exactly what caused the problem with Knight Capital, with a drumbeat of financial market snafus continuing, it’s clear that the industry, with guidance from regulators, needs to strengthen their internal controls.”

Indeed, investors have stuck mostly to the sidelines after suffering crippling stock losses during the financial crisis. Many people have steered clear of sinking money into stocks, worried that big institutional investors and their high-speed tools can manipulate the market.

Knight’s losses reaffirmed Los Angeles retiree Robert Altman’s decision to pull nearly all of his investments out of stocks. Altman said his distaste for the market’s wild swings and technical glitches may confirm industry fears that recent Wall Street technical mishaps could scare off retail investors.

“I’m out of it,” said Altman, 73, who has plowed his savings into municipal bonds. “The little guy has no business in the market anymore.”

Wall Street trading debacle raises fears | McClatchy

Business ethics would seem to dictate that investors’ money should be handled with care. After all, the human beings  who invest have interests like long term returns to enable them to live a decent life. But as we can see from the headlines, stock market investment is more a matter of being sheared like a sheep than a fair deal . We’ve had enough scandals to call on the government to act. However, the interests that make money by these methods are well placed, very influential. If you want a safe investment, there are better places to go.

James Pilant

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Luke H. Lee Comments on the “Information Age”

On By southwerkIn Opinion

Realizing a better world

We have developed numerous “job-killing machines” in the real market (or supply chain process) through the use of IT and networking technology over the last 20 to 30 years of the Modern Information Age. These machines have significantly contributed to the shift to a more efficiency-oriented supply side environment by killing jobs and have altered the whole economic environment. Strangely, it seems nobody has recognized this yet, and no expert has considered this at all in his or her public ruminations about the economy.

Realizing a better world

 

It is always a pleasure to recommend my colleagues on the web and here I take another opportunity to do so. This is a very brief quotation from the article. Please go to Lee’s site and read in full.

James Pilant

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Ethics Bob Comments on the Penn State Sanctions and College Football

On By southwerkIn Opinion

I really enjoyed Ethics Bob’s concluding paragraph which I include below. Of course, for the real flavor of the article, you need to read it all and the link is just below the quoted section.

James Pilant

Penn State: do the sanctions punish the innocent? « Ethics Bob

What’s being taken away from the Penn State students is an illusion—the illusion that the quality of their college years depends on football championships. College years are a time for shedding childish illusions. Perhaps the innocent students aren’t being punished at all: they’re learning what’s important in the world. That’s a big part of what they are going to college for.

Penn State: do the sanctions punish the innocent? « Ethics Bob

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New York Police Hammered Occupy Wall Street Protestors

On By southwerkIn Economic Justice

14 Specific Allegations of NYPD Brutality During Occupy Wall Street – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic

Of the 14, I have selected this one for this posting. I would like all of you to read Mr. Friedersdorf’s full article.

A member of the Research Team witnessed officers arresting a protester. A number of officers took the protester to the ground, and restrained him as he lay face-first on the street. The Research Team member heard the protester cry out, and knelt down to observe the arrest. She then witnessed an officer pull back his leg and kick the protester hard in the face. Another witness also saw the incident. Efforts to obtain the badge number of the responsible officer were thwarted by police, who refused to identify the officer and then took him away in a police van.

14 Specific Allegations of NYPD Brutality During Occupy Wall Street – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic

 

 

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Americablog’s Author Suffers Health Care Loss

On By southwerkIn Politics

US Politics | AMERICAblog News: ObamaCare: A personal note

Without Obamacare 99% of the country is just one lost job, one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. And one frequently follows from the other.

Without insurance our family medical bill is in excess of $60,000 a year. That is a very large chunk of change even if you are a borderline 1%-er. It means that I have to continue to work just to keep our family health insurance. And not any job, it has to be a job with health care benefits.

US Politics | AMERICAblog News: ObamaCare: A personal note

I am in a similar position. My wife and I have separated and when our divorce goes through I will lose the health insurance I get from her job. Thus, I need to start looking for a job with health care benefits. I live in a nation where living without health care is considered by some to be a privilege. Great.

James Pilant

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Looking for Alternatives after the Wisconsin Vote

On By southwerkIn Politics

Political Animal – Could Climate Hawks Replace Labor?

The big discussion today is the long, seemingly unstoppable death of the labor movement. We seem to be faced with an insurmountable concentration of influence in corporations and the very wealthy. Plutocrats use their influence to swing elections, and then use the power there obtained to further eviscerate countervailing interest groups, so they can strip even more of the country’s wealth into their own pockets. Rinse and repeat. Ordinary middle class non-unionized workers seem to resent public sector unions and covet their benefits, instead of realizing that their lives could be easier if they were so organized. (I also think it’s important to recognize that public unions played no small part in their own downfall through greed and overreach.)

In any case, it seems unlikely that labor is going to rise from the dead. It took the Great Depression to break the power of the plutocratic elite last time around, and with this financial crisis elites have managed to keep the system from completely collapsing, though only just.

Political Animal – Could Climate Hawks Replace Labor?

The attacks on labor unions over the past decades has proven successful in public opinion, in law and in the courts. If progressive politics is to survive, one method would be to find new allies and new terrain to fight on. This isn’t a bad idea but environmentalists are currently under the same kinds of attacks that have impaired labor unions. An alternative media is necessary to put out progressive ideas but more important we need a new generation of progressive thought and investment in think tanks and other organizations to develop long terms plans for the decades. Planning needs to be long term to be effective.

James Pilant

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SceneTap Controversy Discussed by the Ethics Sage

On By southwerkIn Opinion1 Comment

Creepy Facial Recognition App Raises Privacy Concerns – Ethics Sage

You’re single and looking for someone to meet so you go to one of the bars in your home town. You decide to use a new app to scan the faces of patrons in the bars in the downtown area to determine the ages and genders of customers in the bars. You then check your smartphone for real-time updates on the crowd size, average age and male-to-female mix to decide whether the scene is to your liking. Then, you pick out the bar that best suits your needs and off you go to mingle with the crowd. Is it fact or fiction?

It is happening right now. On May 17, the Austin, Texas-based makers of SceneTap launched an app that can do just that. The app doesn’t identify specific individuals or save personal information. SceneTap’s ability to guess how old people are and whether they’re men or women relies on advances in a field known as biometrics. A camera at the door snaps your picture, and software maps your features to a grid. By measuring distances such as the length between the nose and the eyes and the eyes and the ears, an algorithm matches your dimensions to a database of averages for age and gender.

Creepy Facial Recognition App Raises Privacy Concerns – Ethics Sage

The computer has brought us many benefits but it also provides new opportunities to lose privacy. This one is apparently being used for lounge lizards to scan their female prey, not very edifying. So, what’s next – scanners that track your visits to stores, sidewalks and communities. What kind of privacy are we going to have left?

James Pilant

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Is Wal-Mart a Criminal Enterprise? Read Ethics Bob’s Take on the Subject!

On By southwerkIn Business Ethics

Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart « Ethics Bob

The headlines are from Saturday’s New York Times. The news article details how Walmart de Mexico—that nation’s largest employer—regularly paid huge bribes to Mexican government officials to approve permits for new stores; how senior management of the Mexican subsidiary was party to the bribery; how Walmart headquarters in Arkansas investigated the allegations of bribery, and how, when the investigations turned up hard evidence, hq proceeded to bury it.

Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart « Ethics Bob

Ethics Bob is using Wal-Mart’s recent bribery problems as a subject for class discussion in his business ethics class. I am using it in my business classes as well. I would be curious as to his classes’ response. Mine has been that there will be long term consequences for the company. Ethics Bob is tough on the company and he’s teaching business ethics where I am teaching the more generic business law. He may be getting a more critical response than I.

James Pilant

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