politics

Dmitriy T.M. pointed out a post at Jezebel about an odd aspect of the Forbes “Power Women” list. Forbes has a general list of the “world’s most powerful people” (with 67 entrants, 3 of whom are women), as well as one specifically of the world’s 100 most powerful women. Here’s a sample bio from the general list, which is representative of what they all look like (I didn’t include the paragraph below each photo that explains why they’re powerful):

Now let’s check out a profile from the powerful women list:

Notice the difference? Almost all of the women’s profiles, but none of the profiles on the “general” power list, include their marital status (84 do, 16 don’t), and many list how many children they have. It’s fairly common to have a woman listed as married but without any comment about children; I could only find one (Ana Patricia Botin, #38) where she is listed as having children but her marital status isn’t provided, and none who were listed as single (as opposed to married, divorced, or widowed) but having children. (Also, Jenny Goudreau wrote an article about diversity on the list that’s rather interesting.)

To be fair, on some occasions Forbes has included marital/parental information on lists that are dominated by men. Why they didn’t decide to be consistent here, I don’t know. The inconsistency in this case leaves the unfortunate impression that Forbes is endorsing the tendency to see powerful men are individually interesting, while still judging powerful women by their family roles.

Third Way, which describes itself as “the leading moderate think-tank of the progressive movement,” proposes that taxpayers should get a receipt showing where their taxes go. They point out,

For many Americans, the amount they pay in taxes is larger than any purchase they make during the year, but studies show they know almost nothing about where that money goes to. This contributes to ridiculous beliefs, like the view that 20% of government spending goes to foreign aid, for example.

They provide a sample receipt for a taxpayer making $34,140, the median income in 2008; the receipt doesn’t include everything, but major categories of interest or that taxpayers tend to be very unclear how much money is spent on:

Via Talking Points Memo.

It’s not a receipt, but you can calculate how much you pay in taxes to various programs based on your income here.

American politicians are currently wrangling over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Word on the street is that extending these cuts will cost the U.S. treasury $2.7 trillion over the next ten years.  A graphic from the New York Times shows how much people with different incomes benefited from these tax cuts. If you look at the far right column you’ll see the average number of dollars left in people’s pockets between 2004 and 2010; the dollar amount rises from the poorest 29% of Americans (top with $355) to the richest 1% (bottom with $2,326,607).

Click over for a larger image; via BoingBoing.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

As you may have heard, this week the Republican Party released what they’ve termed a “Pledge to America,” a document that lists their agenda for the next legislative session. Erin Echols, a student at Kennesaw State U., took a look at it and was struck by the contents, particularly the images.

Of the 48 total pages of the document, 14 consist of images, either a single one or a collage of several. Of course, in a document of this sort, you’re going to have the required patriotic images — the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Capitol and other buildings in D.C. Nothing surprising there. But Erin points out that the cowboy seems to be a recurring theme.

It reminded me of a post by Macon D. over at Racialicious a while back about some ads by a Republican primary candidate for Agricultural  Commissioner in Alabama:

The hat, the horse, the rifle, the sweeping music that makes me think of old Western movies… it all evokes what Macon D. calls the “Independent (White) Cowboy Myth,” a version of rugged, stand-alone, honest manhood. Macon D. quotes Mel at BroadSnark:

In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Here’s the follow-up ad he made after losing:

And, for the record, I’m not arguing this presentation of Dale Peterson is necessarily fake; for all I know he dresses and acts like that all the time. People do; I’m related to some of them. I’m not saying Peterson is a fraud who really wears tuxes and has never been on a horse. That’s irrelevant. What I’m interested in is the power of a particular cowboy mythology, the one on display in Peterson’s ads.

As Macon D. points out, Ronald Reagan actively appropriated the cowboy persona, often wearing cowboy hats and jeans, sometimes alongside a horse (he had also played cowboys in a couple of movies). He openly identified with the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” an effort by groups in the western U.S. in the ’70s and ’80s to stop designation of federal lands as protected wilderness areas, push for more mining and livestock grazing rights on public land, and oppose some other environmental and land use regulations, depicted as impositions from distant elites.

Macon D. quotes Sarah Watts on the appeal of the White cowboy myth when Theodore Roosevelt first used it:

…he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

The cowboy myth, then, arose partly to allay deep anxieties about changes in American society. But the myth is just that — a myth, a romanticized notion largely unmoored from the realities of cowboys’ lives. Mel says,

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs.  Many did not even own the horse they rode.  Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la Bonanza).  The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

This isn’t true just in the past. I know people who work as hired hands on ranches now. They love many aspects of the life. But most of them aren’t particularly well-paid; they don’t have retirement benefits or health insurance; they aren’t on a path to being able to buy their own ranch and be a self-reliant family farmer. Some become managers, with more responsibility and money, as in any occupation. But sometimes what initially seemed like a great deal — getting free housing as part of the job — turns out to have downsides, such as being expected to be available round-the-clock since you’re right there on the property, or fearing that if you piss off your employer and get fired, you’re out of a place to live immediately as well.

The examples I’ve given here have all been Republicans. Democrats use the cowboy mythology as well — Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is well known for often appearing in a cowboy hat and nearly always wearing a bolo tie rather than a necktie. However, Republicans seem to appropriate the cowboy persona more often, or at least more successfully.

Anyway…back to Erin’s analysis of the “Pledge to America.” The other interesting feature of the images is their overwhelming Whiteness. Some examples of group photos:

Overall, the photos show a sea of Whiteness. As Erin says, whether it’s an unintentional oversight or a calculated choice, the resulting message is that America’s citizens, the hard-working, patriotic folks who matter and to whom the party is making pledges, are White. Given the current racialized tone of much of our political debate (especially regarding Hispanic immigrants and Muslims, a racialized group often conflated with “Arabs”), it’s a portrait of America that is likely to speak to, and soothe, the fears of some groups more than others.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

In an analysis of the language newspapers used to describe waterboarding, four Harvard students — Neal Desai, Andre Pineda, Majken Runquist, and Mark Fusunyan — discovered that the use of the word torture significantly declined after the Bush administration began contesting its definition as such (read the full paper here).  The figures below, for the New York and the Los Angeles Times, shows that in the last decade the newspapers switched from calling it “torture,” to using descriptors (they call it “softer treatment” and include adjectives like “harsh,” “controversial,” or “aggressive”), or simply calling it waterboarding (“no treatment”).

According to BoingBoing, the executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, argues that to use the term “torture” would be to take sides.  The authors of the study argue that the reverse is true, especially given that the change coincided with the Bush administration’s dismissal of waterboarding’s definition as torture.  They conclude:

The status quo ante was that waterboarding is torture, in American law, international law, and in the newspapers’ own words.  Had the papers not changed their coverage, it would still have been called torture.  By straying from that established norm, the newspapers imply disagreement with it, despite their claims to the contrary.  In the context of their decades‐long practice, the newspaper’s sudden equivocation on waterboarding can hardly be termed neutral.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In the TED video below, Lisa Margonelli of the New America Foundation Energy Policy Initiative gives a fascinating 17-minute talk on the political psychology and the political economy of oil… and how the former distracts us from the latter.

Among other revelations, she tells us that:

1.  Oil pumps are purposefully designed to look like ATMs to make us feel better about using them.

2.  Having a car that runs predicts employment more than a GED.

3.  Oil production reform has amounted, largely, to exporting the risk to other countries, and…

4. We pay for our oil dependence not only at the pump, but with our taxes.

Watch:

Via BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in an interesting discussion of tax collection in Pakistan by the New York Times.   The narrator argues that rich Pakistanis, among others, do not pay taxes, forcing the government to rely on foreign aid.  Essentially, then, it is argued, “[t]he American taxpayer is subsidizing the Pakistani rich.”   Since the politicians are rich themselves, and happily evading taxes, there is little will to change the system.

One solution? Send in a team of transgender people to embarass homeowners into paying their property taxes, of course!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Plans to build an Islamic community center near the site of Ground Zero, the site of the destroyed World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, have stirred up the political right who have dubbed it the Ground Zero Mosque.  The proposed site (A) is about two blocks from where the twin towers once stood (B):

Objection to the project is based on a false conflation of the attacks with Islam.  Bin Laden drew on Islam to mobilize support for the attack, but this in no way makes the attacks Islamic.  Many Muslims died in the attacks and Muslims around the world condemn them.  When Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller for performing abortions, we didn’t call that a Christian attack.  It is prejudicial to paint entire groups based on the actions of a few.

Notice, however, how this ad opposing the community center identifies all Muslims (“they”) as America’s enemy (found here).  The ad’s narrator explains, “They declared war against us” and “to celebrate that murder of 3,000 Americans, they want to build a monstrous, 13-story mosque at Ground Zero…”  Trigger warning for those sensitive to images of the 911 attacks:

The campaign against the community center, then, is a good example of our refusal to notice that many Americans are Muslims and that not all Muslims are America’s enemy.

It also misunderstands life in that region of the city.  The ad names says that the site of the World Trade Center is “sacred” and Sarah Palin says that it is “hallowed ground.”  To that, Daryl Lang took it upon himself to photograph some of the Manhattan corners and storefronts that were the same distance from Ground Zero as the proposed center.  “Look at the photos,” he writes, “This neighborhood is not hallowed… The blocks around Ground Zero are like every other hard-working neighborhood in New York, where Muslims are just another thread of the city fabric.”

Thanks to Dmitriy T.M. for sending the link to Daryl Lang’s photos!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.