Login
If we want to move toward a world that meets everyone’s needs, we will need to get serious about the role of money on the left.
In February 2020, Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry’s Director of Abolition at the time, published an op-ed titled, “Time to Shut Pornhub Down,” bringing attention to the fact that Pornhub was hosting child pornography and videos of trafficking victims on the site. This sparked a petition and accompanying campaign, Traffickinghub. Then, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, published a scathing exposé in the New York Times, titled, “The Children of Pornhub,” leading the company to leap to action, deleting 80% of their content overnight — about 10 million videos. Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cut ties with the site. In 2021, Canadian parliament began to investigate the Canadian-based company that owns Pornhub, MindGeek and a number of lawsuits were filed against the company on behalf of survivors. NCOSE — the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation — filed several of these lawsuits, representing victims seeking justice against MindGeek. NCOSE was featured in a documentary released on Netflix last money, purporting to address the scandal, called Money Shot.
I spoke to Haley McNamara, Director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the UK and a Vice President at the U.S. based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, about the situation at Pornhub, the Netflix documentary, and NCOSE’s efforts to stop exploitation in porn.
The post Pornhub was hosting videos of minors and trafficking victims — what’s next? appeared first on Feminist Current.
There’s a dirty trick many employers use to keep workers from getting a better job.
Some 30 million Americans are trapped by contracts that say if they leave their current job, they can’t work for a rival company or start a new business of their own.
These are called non-compete agreements.
They block workers from seeing higher wages or better working conditions. And they enlarge corporate monopoly power by stifling competition.
But a sweeping new rule from the Federal Trade Commission would put a stop to these non-compete agreements.
The FTC estimates that banning them could increase wages by nearly $300 billion a year overall by allowing workers to pursue better job opportunities.
But non-competes aren’t just bad for workers. They also harm the economy as a whole by depriving growing businesses of the talent and experience they need to build and expand.
Experts argue California’s ban on non-competes was a major reason for Silicon Valley’s boom.
For several decades, non-compete agreements have been cropping up all over the economy — not just in high-paying fields like banking and tech but as standard boilerplate for employment contracts in many lower-wage sectors such as construction, hospitality, and retail.
A recent survey found that non-competes are used for workers in more than a quarter of jobs where the typical employee only has a high school diploma. Another found that they disproportionately impact women and people of color.
Employers say they need noncompete agreements to protect trade secrets and investments they put into growing their businesses, like training workers.
Rubbish. Employers in states that already ban these agreements (such as California) show no sign of being more reluctant to invest in their businesses or train workers.
The real purpose of noncompetes is to make it harder (or impossible) for workers to bargain with rival employers for better pay or working conditions. Workers in states that have banned non-compete agreements have seen larger wage increases and more job mobility than workers in states where they are still legal.
As we learn again and again, the economy needs guardrails — and workers deserve protection. Otherwise, unfettered greed will lead to monopolies that charge high prices and suppress wages.
America once understood the importance of fighting monopolies. Woodrow Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914 to protect the public against the powerful corporate monopolies that fueled unprecedented inequality and political corruption.
In 1976, when I ran the policy planning staff at the FTC, it began cracking down on corporations under its then assertive chairman, Michael Pertschuk.
Corporate lobbyists and their allies in Congress were so unhappy they tried to choke off the agency’s funding, briefly closing it down. Pertschuk didn’t relent, but eventually he (and I) were replaced by Ronald Reagan’s appointees, who promptly defanged the agency.
Now, under its new Biden-appointed chair, Lina Khan, the FTC is back. Its ban on non-compete agreements nationwide marks the first time since Pertschuk that the agency has flexed its muscle to issue a rule prohibiting an unfair method of competition.
The rule is hardly a sure thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the radical-right Republicans, now in control of the House, tried to pull off a stunt similar to what the House tried in the late 70s. And corporations are sure to appeal the rule all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, kudos to Lina Khan and the FTC for protecting American workers from the unfettered greed of corporate America.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On Wednesday, Netflix released a new documentary looking at how Pornhub came to be and the controversies (and lawsuits) that ensued. Directed by Suzanne Hillinger, Money Shot: The Pornhub Story features interviews with both porn stars reliant on platforms like Pornhub and Onlyfans for income, as well as with the anti-trafficking activists who sought to stop the rampant exploitation, rape, and non-consensual imagery (including videos of minors) on the site.
The film begins with a cutesy complilation of porn stars sharing their first experiences with porn. A number of these stories are pre-internet, meaning they do sound quaint in comparison to what kids see now, at ever younger ages, online. We’re talking 80s Playboys and fairy tale-themed “erotic movies” on Cinemax. Even I found such things confusing and disturbing when I accidentally encountered them as a kid, but apparently people think this stuff is cute and kitschy nowadays — ah the fond childhood memories of adult sex. A young woman named Noelle Perdue, though, grew up in the internet age, and describes going onto Pornhub at 11 years old, where she discovered “an eight person geriatric gangbang” — more fitting of the modern day norm.
Perdue worked in the porn industry for a number of years — namely, she worked as a writer, producer, and talent acquirer at MindGeek. Despite this apparent conflict of interest, she served as a “consultant” on the Money Shot. Perdue appears not to be the only industry representative to have had input.
Though the documentary can claim to show “both sides,” the narrative is shaped by industry advocates disguised as “independent sex workers.” One interviewee, Asa Akira, is in fact Pornhub’s spokeperson and brand ambassador. The other porn performers interviewed may not literally have that job title, but are reliant on these kinds of sites for their income and are invested in ensuring their industry and the sites they profit from don’t get a bad rep or get shut down entirely.
While including industry voices in a documentary purporting to expose or at least delve into accusations of serious criminal activity and sexual exploitation is reasonable, allowing those invested in ensuring the industry is not shut down or that profit is not restricted in any way (say, by blocking consumers from using their credit cards on porn sites) to control the narrative is going to compromise the final result. No one working directly for Pornhub is going to admit the company and the industry as a whole profits from trafficking, exploitation, rape, and child porn.
Missing from the film are women who have left the porn industry, now free to tell the truth about their experiences; researchers who might offer data and insight into who goes into porn and why, mental health, STDs, and addiction in the industry; psychological or physical impacts on the women involved; and trafficking victims themselves. Even porn producers, as evidenced by Exodus Cry founder Benjamin Nolot’s series, Beyond Fantasy (in particular, the third episode in the series, “Hardcore,” which drops March 23), can offer insight into the manipulation, coercion, and sadism behind the scenes claimed as “consensual,” provided you ask the right questions. The producers could have asked the “consenting sex workers” featured about their pasts and experiences — how and why they ended up in porn, and what’s happened to them in the industry — but they chose not to.
The primary voices featured in the documentary who offer a critical view of the industry are connected to the anti-trafficking groups going after PornHub — namely Exodus Cry (founded by Nolot) and NCOSE — who are dismissed as Christian fundamentalists with ulterior motives.
Like many debates, the porn debate is treated as two-sided: there are the “sex workers” fighting for the right to sell sex legally, free from “censorship” (the little guy), and then there are the moralistic, anti-sex, religious conservatives who wish to repress sexuality and are campaigning against the little guy’s freedom.
We are offered “choice” or “no choice.” “Freedom” or “North Korea.” Pro-sex or anti-sex.
But this is not the story. It’s not even a story. In truth, porn is a multi billion dollar industry that uses a few “happy hookers” as politically convenient representatives to speak on their behalf, disguising the dark truth behind the sex trade.
There are many reasons to oppose the sex industry — including impact on users’ brains, mental health, and relationships, as well as impact on the women and girls in porn — yet most the critical are framed as “hating women’s bodies,” “trying to control women’s sexualities,” or “ being prudish/anti-sex.” Dismissing critics as religious extremists is always popular, as it scares off liberals and progressives from engaging with anti-porn arguments. Including voices like mine — a free speech and civil liberties advocate who comes from a leftist and feminist background and is far from “anti-sex” — complicates the narrative. Broadening context to include women’s stories about their pasts and experiences in the industry disrupts the simplified “consenting adult” narrative. Talking about men’s choices to consume abusive and dehumanizing pornography, or porn that sexualizes “teens” or childern is almost always left out of the conversation.
The “let adults do what they like” almost always applies to women, except when framed as “policing people’s sexualities,” which implies a form of thought policing, but conveniently excludes the fact that porn is not relegated to people’s imaginations.
Industry advocates are sure to restrict the discussion of disturbing categories like “teen” to one of “consenting adults” who are free to imagine whatever they like. Perdue claims the “teen” category “doesn’t necessarily refer to teenagers,” and that “it’s more in reference to a body type” — a rather genius defense, because it ignores the fact that sexualizing minors and encouraging men to masturbate to their degradation creates a market for actual teen porn and encourages men to view teen girls as sexual objects.
Siri Dahl, a porn performer featured extensively throughout the film, seems only to be concerned about categories like “teen,” in terms of finding “solutions to tagging” that don’t “police people’s sexualities, which they’re allowed to have because they’re a legal adult.” In other words, it’s not the content itself, it’s that the “teen” category doesn’t sound great on paper. Unfortunately, Pornhub’s customers love it, so what can you do, eh?
Just to hammer in the point, the producers include another performer, Cherie Deville (playing a creepily stepfordesque character), saying:
“We’re providing entertainment within the legal bounds for consenting adults, and within that buffet of pornographic content, that adult, if they choose to consume it, can choose… anything.”
It all felt incredibly rehearsed, as though Pornhub lawyers have fed lines to these women. By carefully presenting performers as “independent, empowered sex workers,” the film’s producers construct a conversation about “free choice,” and are able to avoid the fact porn sells abuse, objectification, and exploitation, regardless of “consent.” And that within that “consent” — those contracts signed, what happens on set involves a hell of a lot of coercion.
When we talk about porn, we aren’t talking about independents — we are talking about a massive, multi-billion dollar industry. Shoving “independent sex workers” to the forefront to pretend as though holding Pornhub execs to account is really an attack on these empowered women, just trying to get by so–please-be-nice-and-stop-talking-about-trafficking-it’s-awkward-for-us is gross.
I don’t know if the makers of Money Shot were simply naive, or if they had biased intentions from the get go, but they buy into the manufactured David and Goliath narrative full force.
The intent behind Money Shot is to argue that porn is a clean, happy industry full of enthusiastically consenting women, and that the “dark side” — child porn, trafficking, and nonconsensual content — is completely separate from that and only a tiny minority of the industry (in fact, they claim it’s not a part of the industry at all) — an accident led by bad actors who are dragging the industry’s reputation down unfairly.
This is not the case. The happy hooker fantasy has always only represented a tiny minority of women, and usually doesn’t tell their whole story anyway. The few stories of exploitation and abuse that make it into the mainstream represent only a sliver. Indeed, even the so-called “consenting” women tell horrific tales once they are free to do so and able to reflect back honestly.
~~~
The documentary does of course acknowledge that a few bad things went down on Pornhub.
MindGeek, the company that owns Pornhub, was sued by numerous plaintiffs who accused them of distributing and profiting from child pornography and nonconsensual sex videos. The company was undoubtedly aware that this content was displayed on Pornhub, as numerous women and teen girls had emailed them, desperate to have their images removed from the site, but the company was not pressed to do anything about it. Nonconsensual videos would stay up for months after complaints were filed, and when they were removed, they would immediately pop up again on the site.
MindGeek claimed it “instituted the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history,” but until the lawsuits had only 30 human moderators employed to monitor millions of videos on Pornhub and did not have any verification process in place for users uploading content. Even after a verification process was put into place (which women like DeVille and Perdue claimed “sex workers” were begging for, as it would resolve the problem of pesky rape videos popping up on the site), there was still no age or consent verification required for the women featured in the videos. Anyone with an ID could still upload what they liked.
~~~
In an article for Rolling Stone, a DeVille writes, “anti-sex-trafficking campaigns are anti-porn campaigns in disguise.” She complains that the “war on Pornhub is a proxy war to take down the entire legal sex work industry” and that “what they really want is to shut down Porn Valley.”
And honestly she’s right.
I don’t want to just stop child pornography or trafficking on Pornhub. I don’t want to just see Pornhub shut down on account of isolated incidences of rape and nonconsensual videos found on the site. I want to make it next to impossible to profit from pornography, because I want it to be next to impossible to profit from the exploitation, abuse, and dehumanization of women and girls. I don’t want to simply “take down” the “legal sex industry,” because of course much of what happens in the sex trade is not legal — I actually believe that the porn industry as a whole should be illegal. I do not think it should be legal to pay another person for sex or to profit by coercing another person to engage in sex acts.
Realistically, I don’t believe we can end porn or prostitution entirely. But we could make it impossible for companies like Pornhub to exist, make profiting from porn illegal, and ensure a porn set must comply with labour standards, including health and safety standards and laws against sexual harassment and assault, thereby rendering everything that happens on a porn set illegal.
One of the common threads throughout Money Shot was the one of the empowered independent performer, making her own content happily, from the comfort of her home, under attack by these attempts to go after trafficking and abuse in the industry. And while I feel very badly for women who feel dependent on porn for survival, I don’t feel bad for the women who could choose something else — who have the means, education, options, and privilege — but instead choose to shill for a vile industry responsible for the trauma of countless women and girls around the world. The idea that the horror of the industry should be accepted because one woman managed to buy a house with her earnings is not good enough for me.
Whether they intended to or not, the filmmakers did little more than produce propaganda for an industry that hardly needs a boost.
For further discussion of this film and the debate surrounding the industry, you can watch a conversation between Benji Nolot, Alix Aharon, and myself which aired live on YouTube Thursday, March 16th.
The post Money Shot’s big lie appeared first on Feminist Current.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Think your grocery bill is high now? Just wait.
A massive corporate merger could send skyrocketing food prices through the stratosphere, unless the government sees the deal for what it is — a rotten egg.
Supermarket giant Kroger is in the process of finalizing a nearly $25 billion deal to acquire its jumbo-sized competitor Albertsons, combining their 5,000 supermarkets into one mega company.
Corporate concentration in the grocery market is already a huge problem, with estimates showing that just five companies control over 60 percent of American grocery sales
This means less consumer choice, and more opportunity for grocery stores to jack up prices — which they’ve already been doing lately under the cover of inflation. Let’s be clear: Big corporations are using the excuse of inflation to pass price increases through to you.
Now you may think this merger won’t affect you because you don’t have a Kroger or Albertsons where you live, but here’s the kicker: Both stores already control dozens of other grocery brands across the country. So you may not even know you’re actually shopping at Kroger or Albertsons.
All told, this deal could affect grocery stores relied on by 85 million households.
What’s to stop this new goliath from continually raising prices if customers have nowhere else to shop? With grocery bills already going through the roof, Kroger buying Albertsons gets rid of the roof altogether.
A Kroger-owned mega company can also get away with paying workers even less than it already does — because fewer competitors means grocery workers have fewer choices of whom to work for.
According to one survey, 75% of Kroger workers were food insecure and 14% have experienced homelessness. One out of every five Kroger workers has relied on government aid to survive.This is no secret to Kroger execs either. Recently leaked internal documents reveal that the company has known about the plight of its workers for years.
This is the story of monopolization, folks. Corporate consolidation is bad news for everyone except the super-rich. It’s awful for consumers, workers, and the economy as a whole — and it’s driving the most extreme wealth imbalance in over a century.
But the good news is that this Kroger-Albertsons deal is far from being fully baked. The Federal Trade Commission has the power to intervene and stop it. Several labor unions, produce growers, antitrust experts, and state Attorneys General are already urging the FTC to block it.
We can’t afford to let another supermarket giant gobble up an even bigger piece of the American pie.
I keep hearing “no one wants to work anymore.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporate America’s biggest lobbying group, claims there are over 10 million job openings right now in the US for which employers can’t find workers.
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell says the U.S. is dealing with a “structural labor shortage” that won’t be resolved anytime soon.
But here’s the truth: there is no labor shortage.
There is a shortage of jobs paying sufficient wages to attract workers to fill them.
When a problem is wrongly described, the solutions posed often turn out to be equally wrong.
For most Americans, real inflation-adjusted wages continue to drop. Any pay increases workers may have earned in the past few years have actually been pay cuts, because wages have lagged behind the rising costs of basic necessities — like housing, food, childcare, and healthcare.
You don’t have to be a financial wizard to see why some workers might say the hell with it.
So, what should be done about the difficulty employers are having finding workers?
Simple. If employers want more workers, they should pay them more.
Many corporations are raking it in right now, they can clearly afford to.
Of course Jerome Powell and his colleagues at the Fed don’t want to hear this. They’re aiming to deal with the so-called “labor shortage” by slowing the economy so much that employers can find all the workers they need without raising wages.
But the Fed increasing interest rates to slow the economy will prevent millions of people from getting desperately-needed raises and cause millions more to lose their jobs — disproportionately low-wage workers, women and people of color.
Meanwhile, Republicans and some corporate economists blame the “labor shortage” on overly generous unemployment benefits. They say the way to get more people into jobs is to make their lives outside jobs less tolerable.
Rubbish. Most unemployed people are already hard up.
Pandemic benefits are long over, and even before COVID, America’s unemployment system was already the least generous of any rich nation.
Taken to its logical extreme, the corporate Republican argument holds water only if you don’t give a damn about workers.
Sure…you could eliminate all safety nets and at some point people without jobs will hurt so much they’ll have to take any available job, at any wage, whatever it demands.
But do this, and we’ll end up with an economy that’s even crueler than today’s economy.
Look: If we want more people to take jobs — AND we wish to live in a moral society where people can maintain decent lives — the answer is to pay people more.
Instead of saying “no one wants to work anymore,” we should be saying, “no one wants to be exploited anymore.”
In America, it’s expensive just to be alive.
And with inflation being driven by price gouging corporations, it’s only getting more expensive for regular Americans who don’t have any more money to spend.
Just look at how Big Oil is raking it in while you pay through the nose at the pump.
That’s on top of the average price of a new non-luxury car — which is now over $44,000. Even accounting for inflation, this is way higher than the average cost when I bought my first car — it’s probably in a museum by now.
Even worse, the median price for a house is now over $440,000. Compare that to 1972, when it was under $200,000.
And when you get back after a long day of work, you’ll likely be met with bills up the wazoo for doctor visits, student loans, and utilities.
So what’s left of a paycheck after basic living expenses? Not much.
All of this comes back to how we measure a successful economy.
What good are more jobs if those jobs barely pay enough to live on?
Over one-third of full time jobs don’t pay enough to cover a basic family budget.
And what good are lots of jobs if they cause so much stress and take up so much time that our lives are miserable?
And don’t tell me a good economy is measured by a roaring stock market if the richest 10 percent of Americans own more than 80 percent of it.
And what good is a large Gross Domestic Product if more and more of the total economy is going to the richest one-tenth of one percent?
What good is economic growth if the way we grow depends on fossil fuels that cause a climate crisis?
These standard measures – jobs, the stock market, the GDP – don’t show how our economy is really doing, who is doing well, or the quality of our lives.
People who sit at their kitchen tables at night wondering how they’re going to pay the bills don’t say to themselves
“Well, at least corporate profits are at record levels.”
In fact, corporations have record profits and CEOs are paid so much because they’re squeezing more output from workers but paying lower wages. Over the past 40 years, productivity has grown 3.5x as fast as hourly pay.
At the same time, corporations are driving up the costs of everyday items people need.
Because corporations are monopolizing their markets, they don’t have to worry about competitors. A few giant corporations can easily coordinate price hikes and enjoy bigger profits.
Just four firms control 85% of all beef, 66% of all pork, and 54% of all poultry production.
Firms like Tyson have seen their profit margins skyrocket as they jack up prices higher than their costs — forcing consumers who are already stretched thin to pay even more.
It’s not just meat. Weak antitrust enforcement has allowed companies to become powerful enough to raise their prices across the entire food industry.
It’s the same story with household goods. Giant companies like Procter & Gamble blame their price hikes on increased costs – but their profit margins have soared to 25%. Hello?
They care more about their bottom line than your bottom, that’s for sure.
Meanwhile, parents – and even grandparents like me – are STILL struggling to feed their babies because of a national formula shortage. Why? Largely because the three companies who control the entire formula industry would rather pump money into stock buybacks than quality control at their factories.
Traditionally, our economy’s health is measured by the unemployment rate. Job growth. The stock market. Overall economic growth. But these don’t reflect the everyday, “kitchen table economics” that affect our lives the most.
These measures don’t show the real economy.
Instead of looking just at the number of jobs, we need to look at the income earned from those jobs. And not the average income.
People at the top always bring up the average.
If Jeff Bezos walked into a bar with 140 other people, the average wealth of each person would be over a billion dollars.
No, look at the median income – half above, half below.
And make sure it accounts for inflation – real purchasing power.
Over the last few decades, the real median income has barely budged. This isn’t economic success.
It’s economic failure, with a capital F.
And instead of looking at the stock market or the GDP we need to look at who owns what – where the wealth really is.
Over the last forty years, wealth has concentrated more and more at the very top. Look at this;
This is a problem, folks. Because with wealth comes political power.
Forget trickle-down economics. It’s trickle on.
And instead of looking just at economic growth, we also need to look at what that growth is costing us – subtract the costs of the climate crisis, the costs of bad health, the costs of no paid leave, and all the stresses on our lives that economic growth is demanding.
We need to look at the quality of our lives – all our lives. How many of us are adequately housed and clothed and fed. How many of our kids are getting a good education. How many of us live in safety – or in fear.
You want to measure economic success? Go to the kitchen tables of America.
It is very rare to find a book you like, written in a style you like, published in a way you like. Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money is one of those rare books.
It’s not only a validation of my own approach to money — stay out of debt, live below your means, save as much as you can, take a long view, let compounding do its magic over time — it’s also written in opposition to the “one long slow idea book.”
In a conversation with Ryan Holiday, Housel said the book was rejected everywhere and that his agent had to fire herself because she couldn’t sell it. He said he went with Harriman House because they were the only publisher that would take it. (I’d never even heard of them.) They’re doing the free download with purchase of a physical copy thing that record companies have been doing for years, but publishers still resist. It’s now sold over two million copies!
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Labour says inflation may force more students to drop out, as those in England get just £200 more on average
Students from Wales will get £1,000 more to help with the cost of living crisis while those in England get just £200 on average, as Labour MPs said inflation may force more students to drop out of university.
The Welsh government said maintenance loans and grants for its students would rise by 9.4% from September, with support for full-time students increasing from £10,710 to £11,720 on average. Students in England will get a rise of just 2.8% in the next academic year after the Westminster government’s announcement last week, with the average maintenance loan increasing by about £200.
Continue reading...
FreshRSS 