Monday, April 23, 2012

"Female Professional Staff Members have been the Target of Unsolicited Sexual Advances by Ed Crane"

It's starting.

From Breitbart:
In the latest development, perhaps emboldened by the raging shareholder dispute, former staffers of this gold-standard of libertarian think tanks have actively come forward to paint a disturbing picture of the work environment at Cato under Ed Crane’s leadership – suggesting that it is, at least according to them, hostile and degrading to women.

“It’s hardly the climate you would want your daughter working or interning in,” said one former Cato employee in an interview with Breitbart News. “Most of the scholars at Cato are fine, decent, and sincere people. But Ed Crane’s dismissive and degrading attitude toward women can make them feel more like meat than equals.”

“I think it’s pretty open knowledge inside of Cato that most attractive female professional staff members have been the target of unsolicited sexual advances by Ed Crane,” another former Cato employee told Breitbart News. Asked why such behavior was tolerated, the one-time Cato employee replied: “In a place with no formal system of redress there becomes a complacent attitude of ‘Oh, that’s just Ed.’ Or ‘He’s probably had too much to drink.’”

Contacted by email for comment, Director of Media Relations Chris Kennedy responded, "If anyone wants to cite any actual legal complaints ever made against Ed or other members of Cato's management, we'd respond to them. But we're not going to respond to baseless rumor and innuendo leveled by unnamed sources."

14 comments:

  1. No, it's not starting: on the contrary, it is a preemptive strike, with a watered down and tootles half-accusations launched by a moderate republican website which supports Romney, in order to help Cato. Where is the "bombshell" - a girl drugged and raped by a high official of the Cato institute?

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    1. Ivan, you need to take a chill pill. There is little here that could be considered a limited hangout. Especially when they quote Wenzel at the bottom of the page with a link!

      It appears RW has them scooped and they don't have the sources that RW has so they can't advance the story any further. More than anything, though, Breitbart will have more people paying attention to the story. A death by a thousand cuts is very effective.

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    2. It always starts like this. First a trickle and then a flood.

      Do readers of this site need reminding: "At this juncture . . . the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained".

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  2. Although I'm indeed very far from being an Ed Crane supporter in this matter, I still can't see what's wrong with "unsolicited sexual advances" if the guy can take "no" for an answer :)) Criminalizing natural primate behaviour under the influence of the unholy alliance of the religious and the feminist prudes is, in my humble opinion, one of the most repugnant and from a broader anthropological perspective least defensible traits of the current US legal system.

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    1. The point is not criminalization but common decency. Would you want your daughter to work in such an environment?

      And if it goes as far as the use of date rape drugs, wouldn't that be a bit unlibertarian?

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    2. It's not criminal, but neither is publicizing a creepy old man's attempts to bed young women in his employ. It helps protect other women who might not want to put themselves into that environment.

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    3. Where it gets coercive is when the person doing the propositioning is one's superior, when they can affect what happens to you in your career.

      Pretty women don't have a right to not be asked for sex, but I'd argue that they do have a right to not have men who can fire them ask them for sex. That's a form of force, and it's also arguably the lifeblood of the DC culture.

      Unless somebody is willing to put their name on the date rape drug thing, though, this is basically just an acknowledgement that CATO is like most congressional offices.

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    4. @5:27
      methinks your understanding of a right is different than mine.

      its very simple, if you don't like the work environment you go to another more tolerable one. In fact, it appears there may be a business opportunity centered around providing attractive, young, libertarian women with a more comfortable work environment. Damned if that doesn't sound like a fun startup, I'd really like to mine that labor pool.

      Seriously, apparently this guy blew Murray Rothbard out of the organization. Do you need any further confirmation that he's a total creep? Maybe the work environment around cato is the reason they have had, like, ZERO influence in promoting liberty over the years...

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    5. I certainly wasn't talking about date rape drugs, I understand "unsolicited sexual advances" as purely verbal (and if they stop being purely verbal or continue after the person in question has clearly indicated she isn't interested more than, say, two or three times - allowing for the famous propensity of the fair sex to saying no when they in fact mean maybe :) - then it is indeed at least tasteless or, in more extreme cases, worthy of criminalizing :) ). I have no daughters that I know of, :) but if I had them, I certainly wouldn't mind if they worked in a place where a bit of flirting isn't considered an inexcusable breach of "common decency" :) And why should anybody have any special protection from bosses given to making "unsolicited sexual advances", provided, again, that they remain exclusively verbal: if they don't like it, as somebody said above, they're free to quit and find a different kind of environment better suited to their ideas of "common decency" the same as theit boss should be free to fire them for any reason he deems sufficient, including their unresponsivness to his "unsolicited blah-blah-blah". I wouldn't think highly of him if that were the case, but, in my book, that doesn't make him any less entitled to do as he damn pleases...

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  3. "‘Oh, that’s just Ed.’ Or ‘He’s probably had too much to drink.’"

    Wow, nice slander. Any other baseless, unprovable charges you'd like to 'float' this morning?

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  4. This is an anonymous allegation of a garden-variety Title VII "hostile work environment." That's not a "start." It's a massive step back from your previous allegation that a felony has been committed at Cato.

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  5. "gold-standard of libertarian think thanks...."

    More like the FIAT standard of libertarian think thanks.

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  6. Can't you see that it's the lawlessness type of environment of those libertarian environments that foster these type of situations? Is there a smell of that subtext here or am I just imagining it?

    Anyway, this is a bunch of baseless crap. I am sorry to see RW name anywhere on it.

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  7. "gold-standard of libertarian think tanks"

    lol.

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