SEXUAL ORIENTATION AND WAGES

We wrestle with the issue of whether or not discrimination, in favor of or against straight and gay people can account for wage divergences between these two groups of people. Section II is devoted to empirical evidence supporting the existence of a discrimination wage gap due to sexual orientation. The majority of studies provided have concluded that sexual orientation diminishes wages for homosexual and bisexual men, whereas it increases wage premiums for homosexual women. Discrimination due to sexual orientation, specifically homo/bisexual males, is present in foreign labor markets as well as in the United States. In these calculations, all other factors, such as age, education, race, marital status, etc., are identified and taken into consideration when calculating the effect of sexuality on wage differences. Section III strives to explain why the discrimination wage gap cannot exist through a theoretical approach. In equilibrium, sexual preference can play no role whatsoever in wage gaps. We are never in full equilibrium, but the “expected value” is that we are always exactly on point, in the absence of any reason to expect over or underestimating prices or wages. We expect that discrimination cannot account for gay people being paid less than straights, assuming equal productivity. At equilibrium, these economic boycotts are impotent due to profit opportunities. We conclude leaving the reader to decide which perspective is more true.

Solidarity and Implications of a Leaderless Movement in Hong Kong

In 2019, what began in Hong Kong as a series of rallies against a proposal to permit extraditions to mainland China grew into a raft of anti-authoritarian protests and challenges to Beijing’s grip on the city. Given the gravest political crisis confronting Hong Kong in decades, this research investigates why the protests have lacked centralized leaders and why the solidarity among the peaceful and militant protesters has been immense. This article also examines the strengths and limitations of this leaderless movement with different case studies. The authors argue that serious threats to the commonly cherished values in Hong Kong, amid the absence of stable and legitimate leaders in its democracy movement, underpinned the formation of a multitude of decentralized decision-making platforms that orchestrated the protests in 2019. Those platforms involved both well-known movement leaders organizing conventional peaceful protests and anonymous activists crafting a diversity of tactics in ingenious ways, ranging from economic boycotts, human chains around the city, artistic protests via Lennon Walls, to the occupying of the international airport. The decentralized decision-making platforms, while having generated a boon to the movement with their beneficial tactical division of labor, also produced risks to the campaign. The risks include the lack of legitimate representatives for conflict-deescalating negotiations, rise in legitimacy-sapping violence, and susceptibility to underestimating the risks of various tactics stemming from a dearth of thorough political communication among anonymous participants who had different goals and degrees of risk tolerance. In short, Hong Kong’s anti-extradition movement in 2019 sheds light on the basis of leaderless movements, and on both the strengths and risks of such movements.

Activism, Disasters, Elections

This chapter narrates in detail both TJMS philanthropy for and activism with African Americans—from HBCU scholarships, to working for black 9/11 survivors, to engaging in extensive and long-lasting charity for Hurricane Katrina victims—and their serious electoral activism over the decades. It details as well TJMS environmental reporting and their early civic activism with regard to economic boycotts. It provides a full accounting of TJMS coverage of and involvement in the 2000 and 2004, and especially their near-hysterical involvement in the 2008 and 2012, presidential elections, and their responses to the Obama presidency, as well as their political reporting and activism, especially on Republican voter suppression tactics, during each term.

The Civil Rights Movement in the Urban South

The civil rights movement in the urban South transformed the political, economic, and cultural landscape of post–World War II America. Between 1955 and 1968, African Americans and their white allies relied on nonviolent direct action, political lobbying, litigation, and economic boycotts to dismantle the Jim Crow system. Not all but many of the movement’s most decisive political battles occurred in the cities of Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee; Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. In these and other urban centers, civil rights activists launched full-throttled campaigns against white supremacy, economic exploitation, and state-sanctioned violence against African Americans. Their fight for racial justice coincided with monumental changes in the urban South as the upsurge in federal spending in the region created unprecedented levels of economic prosperity in the newly forged “Sunbelt.” A dynamic and multifaceted movement that encompassed a wide range of political organizations and perspectives, the black freedom struggle proved successful in dismantling legal segregation. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 expanded black southerners’ economic, political, and educational opportunities. And yet, many African Americans continued to struggle as they confronted not just the long-term effects of racial discrimination and exclusion but also the new challenges engendered by deindustrialization and urban renewal as well as entrenched patterns of racial segregation in the public-school system.

An Ethical Analysis of Japan’s Response to the Arab Boycott of Israel

Japan’s political, cultural, and geographic isolation, its symbiotic government-business arrangement, and its practice of practical, resources-oriented politics, trade, and diplomacy have led it to be the only major global economic power to strictly comply with the Arab boycott. A brief history and description of the boycott are presented here, along with an overview of the responses of major economic trading nations. Three issues are addressed: Japan’s global conscience, the framework appropriate to analyze the ethics of global economic boycotts, and the Japanese government’s excuse of leaving boycott decisions to business considering the historic relationship between the two. The logical conclusion of this analysis is that Japan as a nation must abandon its insularity and take a greater ethical responsibility in line with its economic power. From this comes the responsibility of the govenment to guide the business sector towards a corporate conscience, one that is grounded in global awareness.

The Arab Boycott of Israel

A boycott may be denned as ‘The refusal and incitement to refusal to have commercial or social dealings with offending groups or individuals’.1 More specifically, international economic boycotts are devices by which one or more states (or their citizens) attempt to inflict economic hardship upon a target nation. The method of coercion takes the form of a disruption of the target state's normal foreign trade and financial flows. In the vast majority of instances, the imposition of a boycott is a political act, designed to influence the practices and policies of the offending country, utilizing economic weapons as the coercive force. A boycott may be deemed successful if it attains the ends desired by its initiators. As a rule, economic sanctions must be effective (i.e. cause economic damage) in order to succeed; however, it is quite possible, indeed, often probable, that boycotts may be effective without being successful.