April 1, 2013, Issue
#190
HUDSON VALLEY
ACTIVIST NEWSLETTER
jacdon@earthlink.net,
P.O. Box 662, New Paltz, NY 12561
http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
———————
CONTENTS:
1. RALLY
AGAINST DRONES APRIL 13
2. BEHIND THE
U.S.-NORTH KOREA CONFLICT
3. JOCK CULTURE AND RAPE CULTURE
4. MY
SON AND STEUBENVILLE
5. ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURE FOR
NEW YORK
6. MARX’S REVENGE
7. FIVE
EXTREMES OF U.S. INEQUALITY
8. SURVIVING ON $7.25 AN HOUR
9. MINIMUM WAGE STRIKE
10. OBAMA’S PEACE
ANTICS IN ISRAEL
11. THE LEGACY OF
HUGO CHAVEZ
12. POSTAL WORKERS RALLY FOR SIX-DAY DELIVERY
13. MEN WHO KICK DOWN DOORS: TYRANTS HOME & ABROAD
14. HIJACKING
FEMINISM
15. NEW ECUADOR LAW,
“FEMICIDE,” FIGHTS VIOLENCE
—————————
ABOUT THIS ISSUE
Welcome to 70 new readers who signed up at our Defend
Women’s Rights rally a couple of weeks ago. They will be especially interested
in five of our articles dealing with women’s issues. Two of them focus on the
infamous Steubenville rape attack — one titled “Jock Culture and Rape Culture”
by progressive sportswriter By Dave
Zirin, and the other titled “My Son and Steubenville,” on raising boys written by
a San Francisco mother. There’s also an essay on male violence toward women by
Ann Jones headlined “Men Who Kick Down Doors: Tyrants At Home, And Abroad;” an essay
on “Hijacking Feminism” by Catherine Rottenberg, commenting
critically on the “new trend of high-powered women publicly espousing feminism;”
and a piece from Ecuador on a special new “Femicide” law punishing men who
murder women.
—————————
1. RALLY
AGAINST DRONES APRIL 13
By the Activist Newsletter
We encourage our Mid-Hudson Valley readers to
join us in New Paltz Saturday, April 13, to take a stand against pilotless drone warfare
abroad and intrusive domestic drone surveillance at home.
Our action
is part of a nationwide series of similar protests by the ANSWER Coalition the
same day urging Washington to remove its drones “from the Middle East, Africa
and everywhere.” We also demand tight regulations that respect civil liberties
be enforced to restrict the use of drones in the U.S.
The New
Paltz event will begin at 11 a.m. with a rally and vigil in front of the Elting
Library (93 Main St.). At 12 noon the participants will march with signs and
leaflets through the downtown area, returning to the library. Many will stand
with signs visible to heavy weekend traffic until 1:30 p.m.
The
protest will call on the Obama Administration to end its drone killings in
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia and halt plans to extend its drone
wars to Niger and possibly other countries in Africa. U.S. drone
attacks have killed over 4,000 people in the last few years, including more
than a thousand civilians. Washington has deployed more than 11,000 military
drones, up from fewer than 200 10 years ago.
The event is
being organized by the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter and is co-sponsored by
New Paltz Women in Black, Occupy Southern Ulster, Middle East Crisis Response,
Real Majority Project, Dutchess Peace, Dutchess Greens and other regional
groups. (If your group wants to co-sponsor, use email below.) In a statement,
the sponsors declared:
“Drones
are clearly becoming America’s weapon of choice in undeclared wars abroad and
will inevitably enhance
government spying at home to the detriment of civil liberties.
“The
American Civil Liberties Union argues that as drones become cheaper and more
reliable, law enforcement agencies may carry out persistent surveillance of
U.S. citizens. It is entirely possible that thousands of drone licenses
eventually will be issued to law enforcement, corporations and private citizens
in coming years. Drones come in many sizes — as small as a hummingbird or as
large as Boeing’s Phantom Eye, a hydrogen-fueled behemoth with a 150-foot
wingspan that can cruise at 65,000 feet for up to four days. More than 1,000
companies, large and small, are now in the drone business.”
An article
in Scientific American, noting that drones are a serious threat to privacy,
declared: “Because they can perch hundreds or thousands of meters in the air,
drones literally add a new dimension to the ability to eavesdrop. They can see
into backyards and into windows that look out onto enclosed spaces not visible
from the street. They can monitor wi-fi signals or masquerade as mobile phone
base stations,
intercepting phone calls before
passing them along. Using a network of drones, it would be possible to follow the movements
of every vehicle in a city.”
— Information,
jacdon@earthlink.net, Jack at (845) 255-5779, or http://activistnewsletter.blogspot.com/
—————————
2. BEHIND THE
U.S.-NORTH KOREA CONFLICT
By Jack A. Smith, editor
of Activist Newsletter
What’s happening between
the U.S. and North Korea to produce such headlines in recent days as “Korean
Tensions Escalate,” and “North Korea Threatens U.S.”?
The New York Times
reported. “This week, North Korea’s young leader, Kim Jung-un, ordered his
underlings to prepare for a missile attack on the United States. He appeared at
a command center in front of a wall map with the bold, unlikely title, ‘Plans
to Attack the Mainland U.S.’ Earlier in the month, his generals boasted of
developing a ‘Korean-style’ nuclear warhead that could be fitted atop a
long-range missile.”
The U.S. is well aware
North Korea’s statements are not backed up by sufficient military power to implement
its rhetorical threats, but appears to be escalating tensions all the same. South
Korean President Park Geun-hye also realizes the threats are rhetorical but
declared: "We should make a strong and immediate retaliation without any
other political considerations if [the North] stages any provocation against
our people."
Pyongyang obviously has
another objective in mind. I’ll have to go back a bit to explain the situation.
Since the end of the
Korean War 60 years ago, the Worker’s Party government of the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) has repeatedly put forward
virtually the same four proposals to the United States. They are:
1. A peace treaty to end
the Korean War. 2. The reunification of Korea, which has been “temporarily”
divided into North and South since 1945. 3. An end to the U.S. occupation of
South Korea and a discontinuation of annual month-long U.S-South Korean war
games. 4. Bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang to end tensions on
the Korean peninsula.
The U.S. and its South
Korean protectorate have rejected each proposal over the years. As a
consequence, the peninsula has remained extremely unstable since the 1950s. It
has now reached the point where Washington has used this year’s war games,
which began in early March, as a vehicle for staging a mock nuclear attack on
North Korea by flying two nuclear-capable B-2 Stealth bombers over the region
March 28. Three days later, the White House ordered F-22 Raptor stealth fighter
jets to South Korea, a further escalation of tensions.
Here is what is behind
the four proposals.
1. The U.S. refuses to
sign a peace treaty to end the Korean War. It has only agreed to an armistice.
An armistice is a temporary cessation of fighting by mutual consent. The armistice
signed July 27, 1953, was supposed to transform into a peace treaty when “a
final peaceful settlement is achieved.” The lack of a treaty means war could
resume at any moment. North Korea does not want a war with the U.S.,
history's most powerful military state. It wants a peace treaty and diplomatic
recognition from Washington.
2. Two Koreas exist as
the product of an agreement between the USSR (which bordered Korea and helped
to liberate the northern part of country from Japan in World War II) and the
U.S., which occupied the southern half. Although socialism prevailed in
the north and capitalism in the south, it was not to be a permanent split. The
two big powers were to withdraw after a couple of years, allowing the country
to reunify. Russia did so; the U.S. didn’t. Then came the devastating
three-year war in 1950. Since then, North Korea has made several different
proposals to end the separation that has lasted since 1945. The most recent
proposal, I believe, is “one country two systems.” This means that while both
halves unify, the south remains capitalist and the north remains socialist. It
will be difficult but not impossible. Washington does not want this. It seeks
the whole peninsula, bringing its military apparatus directly to the border with
China, and Russia as well.
3. Washington has kept
between 25,000 and over 40,000 troops in South Korea since the end of the war.
They remain — along with America’s fleets, nuclear bomber bases and troop
installations in close proximity to the peninsula — a reminder of two things.
One is that “We can crush the north.” The other is “We own South Korea.”
Pyongyang sees it that way — all the more so since President Obama decided to
“pivot” to Asia. While the pivot contains an economic and trade aspect, its primary
purpose is to increase America’s already substantial military power in the
region in order to intensify the threat to China, but next door North Korea is
well within this dangerous periphery .
4. The Korean War was
basically a conflict between the DPRK and the U.S. That is, while a number of
UN countries fought in the war, the U.S. was in charge, dominated the fighting
against North Korea and was responsible for the deaths of millions of Koreans
north of the 38th parallel dividing line. It is entirely logical that Pyongyang
seeks talks directly with Washington to resolve differences and reach a
peaceful settlement leading toward a treaty. The U.S. has consistently refused.
These four points are not
new. They were put forward in the 1950s. I visited the Democratic People’s
Republic of Korea as a journalist for the (U.S.) Guardian newspaper three times
during the 1970s for a total of eight weeks. Time after time, in discussions
with officials, I was asked about a peace treaty, reunification, withdrawal of
U.S. troops from the south, and face-to-face talks. The situation is the same
today. The U.S. won’t budge.
Why not? Washington wants
to get rid of the communist regime before allowing peace to prevail on the
peninsula. No “one state, two systems” for Uncle Sam, by jingo! He wants one
state that pledges allegiance to — guess who? In the interim, the existence of
a “bellicose” North Korea justifies Washington’s surrounding the north with a
veritable ring of firepower. A “dangerous” DPRK is also useful in keeping Tokyo
well within the U.S. orbit and in providing another excuse for once-pacifist
Japan to boost its already formidable arsenal.
The U.S.-South Korea war games
in March were preceded in February U.S.-Japanese war games named “Iron Fist.” In
both cases Washington implicitly demonstrated it would stand with Seoul or
Tokyo and against Pyongyang or Beijing if push came to shove. The U.S.-Japanese
effort was aimed at capturing an imaginary island — a direct military warning
to China, which claims possession to the Senkaku Islands, as does Japan.
According to a Feb. 15
article from Foreign Policy in Focus by Christine Hong and Hyun Le: “Framing of
North Korea as the region's foremost security threat obscures the disingenuous
nature of U.S. President Barack Obama's policy in the region, specifically the
identity between what his advisers dub ‘strategic patience,’ on the one hand,
and his forward-deployed military posture and alliance with regional hawks on
the other. Examining Obama's aggressive North Korea policy and its consequences
is crucial to understanding why demonstrations of military might — of politics
by other means, to borrow from Carl von Clausewitz — are the only avenues of
communication North Korea appears to have with the United States at this
juncture.”
Brian Becker, leader of
the antiwar ANSWER Coalition leader,
noted March 31: “The Pentagon and the South Korean military today — and
throughout the past year — have been staging massive war games that simulate
the invasion and bombing of North Korea. Few people in the United States know
the real situation. The work of the war propaganda machine is designed to make
sure that the American people do not join together to demand an end to the
dangerous and threatening actions of the Pentagon on the Korean Peninsula.
“The propaganda campaign
is in full swing now as the Pentagon climbs the escalation ladder in the most
militarized part of the planet. North Korea is depicted as the provocateur and
aggressor whenever it asserts that they have the right and capability to defend
their country. Even as the Pentagon simulates the nuclear destruction of a
country that it had already tried to bomb into the Stone Age, the
corporate-owned media characterizes this extremely provocative act as a sign of
resolve and a measure of self-defense.”
And from Stratfor, the commercial
intelligence group that is often in the know: “Much of North Korea's behavior
can be considered rhetorical, but it is nonetheless unclear how far Pyongyang
is willing to go if it still cannot force
negotiations through belligerence.” The objective of initiating
negotiations with the U.S. is here taken for granted.
Pyongyang’s “bellicosity”
is almost entirely verbal — several decibels too loud for many ears, perhaps —
but North Korea is a small country in difficult circumstances that well
remembers the extraordinary brutality Washington visited up the territory in
the 1950s. Millions of Koreans died. The U.S. carpet bombings were criminal.
North Korea is determined to go down fighting if it happens again, but hopes
their preparedness will avoid war and lead to talks and a treaty.
Their large and
well-trained army is for defense. The purpose of the rockets they are building
and their talk about nuclear weapons is principally to scare away the wolf at
the door.
In the short run, the
recent inflammatory rhetoric from Kim Jong-un is in direct response to this
year’s month-long U.S.-South Korea war games, which he interprets as a possible
prelude for another war. Kim’s longer run purpose is to create a sufficiently
worrisome crisis that the U.S. finally agrees to bilateral talks leading to a
peace treaty, an end to Washington’s sanctions, the normalization of trade relations,
and removal of foreign troops from the south.. Some form of reunification could
come later in talks between north and south.
The present
confrontations will simmer down with the end of this year’s provocative war
games. The Obama Administration has no intention to create the conditions
leading to a peace treaty — especially now that White House attention seems
riveted on East Asia where it perceives an eventual risk to its global
geopolitical supremacy.
—————————
3. JOCK CULTURE AND RAPE CULTURE
[Two teen football players for the Steubenville, Ohio, high school were
convicted and ordered to
juvenile prison after a five-day rape trial March 17.
The state attorney general is continuing the investigation, which involved
dozens of their peers who failed to speak up during or after 16-year-old “Jane
Doe” was publicly raped, humiliated and photographed at parties during the
night. It has been alleged “Jane” was drunk but possibly the victim of a
date-rape drug. A grand jury will convene in April to evaluate
evidence from dozens of police interviews, including with the team's 27
coaches. Trent Mays, 17, and Ma'Lik Richmond, 16, were sentenced to juvenile
prison for a minimum of one year to a maximum of until they are 21. This case
has led to suspicions of a cover-up to protect the Steubenville High team — the
pride of this Rustbelt Ohio city of 18,000 people. Mays was ordered to serve an
additional year for photographing the underage girl naked, but it will be
concurrent. The convicted athletes broke into sobs when Judge Thomas Lipps
delivered his sentence, though they were hardly crying as they tormented their
victim.]
By Dave
Zirin
As a sportswriter, there is one part of the Steubenville High School rape
trial that has kept rattling in my brain long after the defendants were found
guilty. It
was a text message sent by one of the
now-convicted rapists, team quarterback Trent Mays. Mays had texted a friend
that he wasn’t worried about the possibility of rape charges because his
football coach, local legend Reno Saccoccia, “took care of it.” In another
text, Mays said of Coach Reno, “Like, he was joking about it so I’m not
worried.”
In this exchange we see an aspect of the Steubenville case that should
resonate in locker rooms and athletic departments across the country: the
connective tissue between jock culture and rape culture. Rape culture is not
just about rape. It’s about the acceptance of women as “things” to be used and
disposed, which then creates a culture where sexual assault—particularly at
social settings—is normalized. We learned at the Steubenville trial that not
only did a small group of football players commit a crime, but 50 of their
peers, men and women, saw what was happening and chose to do nothing,
effectively not seeing a crime at all.
We need to ask the question whether the jock culture at Steubenville was a
catalyst for this crime. We need to ask whether there’s something inherent in
the men’s sports of the twenty-first century, which so many lionize as a force
for good, that can also create a rape culture of violent entitlement. I am not
asking if playing sports propels young men to rape. I am asking if the central
features of men’s sports — hero worship, entitlement and machismo — make
incidents like Steubenville more likely to be replicated. There are many germs
in the Petri dish of sports. Growing up I had the great fortune of having
big-hearted, politically conscious coaches, some of whom patrolled sexism in
the locker room with a particular vigilance. As the great Joe Ehrmann has
written so brilliantly, a “transformational coach” can work wonders. But
different germs also exist. Ken Dryden, Hall of Fame NHL goalie,
once said, ”It’s really a
sense of power that comes from specialness…. anyone who finds himself at the
center of the world they’re in has a sense of impunity.”
[A probing article by William
Boardman into the many unanswered questions in this case, including whether numerous
witnesses are getting off free and whether the victim was drugged, is at
http://www.alternet.org/print/gender/good-two-steubenville-rapists-have-been-judged-guilty-are-dozens-more-community-getting-scot]
On colleges, there is reason to believe that the same teamwork, camaraderie
and “specialness” produced by sports can be violently perverted to create a
pack mentality that either spurs sexual violence or makes players fear turning
in their teammates. A
groundbreaking 1994 study showed that college
athletes make up 3.3% of male students but 19% of those accused of sexual
assault. One of the studies authors, Jeff Benedict, said, “Does this study say
participation in college sports causes this? Clearly, no. We’re not saying
that. We just think that at some point there is an association between sports
and sexual assault…. the farther you go up, the more entitlements there are.
And one of those entitlements is women.”
That was two decades ago but there is no indication that anything has
changed. In a February 2012 Boston
Globe article about sexual assault charges levied against members of the
Boston University hockey team, reporter Mary Carmichael
wrote about the findings of Sarah
McMahon, “a Rutgers University researcher who studies violence against women.”
McMahon “said it is unclear whether college athletes are more likely to commit
sexual crimes than other students. But she said her work had found a unique
sense of entitlement, sexual and otherwise, among some male college athletes,
especially those in high-profile or revenue-producing sports like BU hockey.”
You can’t extricate the entitlement at the heart of jock culture from
McMahon’s comments about its particular prevalence in revenue-producing sports.
The insane amounts of money in so-called amateur athletics and the greasy
desire of adults in charge of cash-strapped universities to get their share
also must bear responsibility for rape culture in the locker room. They have
created a system where teenage NCAA athletes can’t be paid for what they
produce, so they receive a different kind of wage: worship. Adults treat them
like heroes, students treat them like rock stars, and amidst classes, club
meetings and exams, there exists a gutter economy where women become a form of
currency. You’re a teenager being told that you are responsible for the
economic viability of your university and everything is yours for the taking.
This very set-up is a Steubenville waiting to happen.
If people think that this doesn’t translate to high school, they’re wrong.
I spoke with Jon Greenberg, an ESPN journalist and also a graduate of
Steubenville High. He describes a school “with a pretty high poverty rate” that
was still able to get state funds to build “a swimming pool, a new on-campus
gym, cafeteria and more.” The dynastic “Big Red” football program drove those
changes. As Greenberg says, “The football players themselves, at least in my
experience, weren’t treated as heroes or above the law, but the team itself was
put on a pedestal, especially when they were good…. There are some very good
people who played Big Red football and coached football. But there needs to be
some changes, most importantly a very serious seminar, for all male students,
on the definition of rape and similar curriculum.”
In thinking about Steubenville, thinking about my own experiences playing
sports, thinking about athletes I’ve interviewed and know, I believe that a
locker room left to its own devices will drift toward becoming a breeding
ground for rape culture. You don’t need a Coach Reno or a Bob Knight to make
that happen. [
Knight a Hall of Fame basketball coach (1998), is remembered for stupidly
declaring: “I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it.”] You just need good
people to say or do nothing. As such, a coach or a player willing to stand up,
risk ridicule and actually teach young men not to rape, can make all the
difference in the world. We need interventionist, transformative coaches in
men’s sports that talk openly about these issues. We need an economic setup in
amateur sports that does away with their gutter economy. But most of all, we
need people who recognize the existence of rape culture, both on and off teams,
to no longer be silent.
As for Steubenville, Coach Reno needs to be shown the door, never to be
allowed to mold young minds again. Football revenue should go toward creating a
district-wide curriculum about rape and stopping violence against women. And
“Jane Doe,” the young woman at the heart of this case, should be given whatever
resources she and her family needs to move if they choose, pay for college or
just have access to whatever mental health services she and her family require.
After the trial, testimony and verdict, they deserve nothing less.
— From The Nation, March 18, 2013. Dave
Zirin, The Nation’s sports
correspondent, is the author, most recently, of “Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.”
—————————
4. MY
SON AND STEUBENVILLE
By Kim Simon
When
Max was just a few months old, I sat cross-legged on the floor with him in a
circle of other mothers. The facilitator for our “Mommy and Me” playgroup
would throw a question out to the group, and we would each volley back an
answer.
“What
quality do you want to instill in your child? What personality
characteristic would you most like for your son to be known for?” she
asked.
One by
one, the mothers answered. “Athletic,” “Good sense of humor,” “Brave,” “Smart,”
“Strong.” The answers blended together until it was my turn to speak. I looked
down at the tiny human wiggling around on the blanket in front of me, his
perfectly round nose, his full lips that mirrored mine. I stroked the top
of his very bald head, and said with confidence “kind.” I want my son to grow up to be kind.
The
eyes of the other mothers turned towards me. “That’s not always a word
that you hear used for boys” one said. “But yes, you’re right….so I
guess, me too.” At the end of the day, we wanted our tiny, fragile,
helpless baby boys to grow up to be kind. Strong, resilient, athletic,
funny... but above all else, kind.
Max is
almost 4 years old. He knows nothing about the horrific things that young
men did to a young woman on the saddest night that Steubenville has ever
seen. He doesn’t know, but I sure do. I know that someone’s daughter
was violated in the most violent way possible, by someone’s son. By many
sons. The blame for that night falls squarely on the shoulders of the
young men who made terrible choices, but it also falls in the laps of their
parents.
Sexual
assault is about power and control. But it is also about so much
more. While it’s true that big scary monster men sometimes jump out of
bushes to rape unsuspecting women, most rapists look like the men who we see
every day. Acquaintance rape (or date rape) accounts for the majority of
sexual assaults that we see among young people. In colleges, in high
schools, at parties, in the cars and bedrooms that belong to the men who women
trust. These men are your fraternity brothers, your athletes, your
church-going friends. They are somebody’s son. Date rape is often
saturated with entitlement. It feeds off of the hero worship that grows
rampant like weeds on school campuses and in locker rooms. Young men are
taught to be strong, to be athletes, to be feared. Young women are taught
to be meek, to be feminine, to be small. As our young people begin to
sort out relationships with each other and relationships with alcohol, they
encounter an endless menu of ways to hurt each other.
As a
community we give our athletes free reign. Young men are filled with the
heavy power of triumph, their heroism illuminated by the bright lights of a
brisk Friday night football game. Young cheerleaders spend hours painting
signs for them, adorning hallways with fluorescent notes of
encouragement. Young men are known by their football number, their last
touchdown pass, their ability to get any girl they choose. Young women
fill the stands with hopeful smiles, dying to be noticed.
We
have created this. We have allowed this. We choose not to demand
more from our young men, because we see how big they grow in the
spotlight. We give them adult power, without instilling in them an adult
sense of responsibility and ethics.
Moms, it is time. Now is the time to make this
stop. If you are the mother of a son, you can prevent the next
Steubenville. It doesn’t matter if your boy is 4
or 14 or 24. Start now.
We must teach our boys to be kind. A toddler can learn how to use words of
kindness. It’s never too early to teach empathy, compassion, and
awareness. “Friend, are you OK?” “I’m sorry friend, did you get a
boo-boo?” Encourage tiny boys to be aware of how others are
feeling. Name what they see. “Mommy is sad right now, honey.
Our friend G is sick, and I want her to feel better.” Give children tasks
that they can do to help someone in need. Bake cookies to take to the
local firehouse. Bring dinner to a mother on bed rest. Choose a toy
to share with the new child that just joined your preschool class. Teach
your child to go towards a child who is upset, instead of walking
away.
When I
picked Max up from school the other day, his teacher remarked on how “kind” he
was. He checks in on other students. He runs to them when they get
hurt. At first I was embarrassed….oh how my husband will tease me for
instilling my “Social Worker” traits in our son. He must be brave and
tough instead. But I am so proud that he is kind. That he is a
helper. That he sees the emotions of those around him. Would he
have hurt for the girl in Steubenville? Would he have felt her fear, and
said something? Teach your sons to tune in, name emotions for them, give
them words to match their feelings.
We must teach our boys what it truly means to be
brave. Bravery doesn’t always feel
good. I’ve heard it said that “Courage is being afraid, and doing it anyway.” How many
of those young men in Steubenville knew in their sweet boy hearts that what was
happening was wrong, but still they remained silent? They were afraid to
ruin their own hard-earned reputations, afraid of what their peers would think
of them. They were afraid of getting in trouble, afraid they wouldn’t
know what to say. Teach your boys that bravery can be terrifying.
Courage can be demanded of you at the most inopportune times. Let them
know that your expectation is that they are brave enough to rise to the
occasion. And show them how.
We must not shy away from telling our sons the truth
about sex. Of course this looks
different in a conversation with a 4 year old than it does with a 12 year
old. In our house, we are still working on giving body parts their appropriate names.
Making family rules about how we always
wear clothes when people come to visit (ok,
Sean and I are good on that one, but Max keeps answering the door in his
underwear). As uncomfortable as it is, the conversation needs to
evolve as your boy gets older. Sex feels good. Sex is
overwhelming. Sex is confusing. Sex tricks you into thinking that
you are receiving what you need (physical satisfaction, comfort, companionship,
love, respect). Sex education is more than just giving your child condoms
and reminding them about STDS.
As
parents, we need to worry about our sons being respectful of their sexual
partners, not just about them getting someone pregnant. Our boys need to
know that they will find themselves at a crossroads one night, or on multiple
nights. Their body will be telling them one thing, and their partner may
be telling them another. It is a young man’s responsibility to listen to
his partner. Explain to your son what consent looks like (and doesn’t
look like).
They
need to know what sex looks like. Not the Playboy magazine/online porn
version, but the logistics of how it actually works. Teach them to ask
their partners. Teach them to check in as they take the next step with
someone. Teach them to stop if they don’t think they’re getting a clear
answer.
We must give our sons the tools they need to protect
themselves, and each other. Can
your teenager call you in the middle of the night, no questions asked?
Can they tell you the truth, without you flipping out and getting angry?
Do they trust that you are on their team, that you will sit down and talk
things through with them, making a calm plan together? Role play with
your son about how to find help, who to go to for help, what numbers to
call. An embarrassed, terrified bystander in Steubenville could have
quietly snuck outside to call the police for help. Or to text an
anonymous tip. Or to call a parent or older sibling for advice.
Instead, at least a dozen sons were paralyzed by fear. And intoxicated.
And probably overwhelmed by the sexual feelings of their own that they were
experiencing….feelings that they were never given the context for.
Give
your sons the tools they need to understand that their sexuality is a powerful
thing, one that they are solely responsible for. Give them a framework
for understanding that sex carries an enormous responsibility, not just to
themselves, but to their partners. Does your son know what rape is?
Does he know what it means? Does he know that it’s not just creepy smelly
guys who hide in alleys who are responsible for rape? That it’s his
peers? Discuss the ways that a woman can give consent. Pull the
curtains back on the grey areas, and demand that your son learns how to protect
himself and his partner.
When I
found out that I was having a son, I was relieved at first. I thought I
had dodged a bullet, not having a daughter who I would have to protect
from the big, scary, violent world that is still so unkind to women. This
will be so much easier, I thought. But it’s not. It’s harder.
I am now pregnant with my second
son. As a feminist and a mother, a survivor and an activist, a human and
a writer, I have discovered that my job in preventing sexual assault is even
bigger than it would be if I had a daughter. Because every rapist is
someone’s son. We have the chance to fix that, one little boy at a time.
—Kim Simon lives in San Francisco
and blogs at http://mamabythebay.com.
——————————
5. ALTERNATIVE ENERGY FUTURE FOR
NEW YORK
By Science Today, 3-13-13
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will soon decide whether to approve hydraulic
fracturing for natural gas in the state. To date, no alternative to expanded
gas drilling has been proposed.
But a new study finds that it is technically and economically feasible to
convert New York's all-purpose energy infrastructure to one powered by wind,
water and sunlight (WWS). The plan, scheduled for publication in the journal Energy
Policy, shows the way to a sustainable, inexpensive and reliable energy
supply that creates local jobs and saves the state billions of dollars in
pollution-related costs.
Mark Z. Jacobson, a senior fellow with the Stanford Woods Institute for the
Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy, co-authored the study with
scientists from Cornell University and the University of California-Davis.
"Converting to wind, water and sunlight is feasible, will stabilize
costs of energy and will produce jobs while reducing health and climate
damage," said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental
engineering.
The study is the first to develop a plan to fulfill all of a state's
transportation, electric power, industry, and heating and cooling energy needs
with renewable energy, and to calculate the number of new devices and jobs
created, amount of land and ocean areas required, and policies needed for such
an infrastructure change. It also provides new calculations of air pollution
mortality and morbidity impacts and costs based on multiple years of air
quality data.
The study concludes that while a WWS conversion may result in initial
capital cost increases, such as the cost of building renewable energy power
plants, these costs would be more than made up for over time by the elimination
of fuel costs. The overall switch would reduce New York's end-use power demand
by about 37 percent and stabilize energy prices, since fuel costs would be
zero, according to the study. It would also create a net gain in manufacturing,
installation and technology jobs because nearly all the state's energy would be
produced within the state.
According to the researchers' calculations, New York's 2030 power demand
for all sectors (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, industry) could
be met by:
4,020 onshore 5-megawatt wind turbines
12,770 offshore 5-megawatt wind turbines
387 100-megawatt concentrated solar plants
828 50-megawatt photovoltaic power plants
5 million 5-kilowatt residential rooftop photovoltaic systems
500,000 100-kilowatt commercial/government rooftop photovoltaic systems
36 100-megawatt geothermal plants
1,910 0.75-megawatt wave devices
2,600 1-megawatt tidal turbines
7 1,300-megawatt hydroelectric power plants, of which most exist
According to the study, if New York switched to WWS, air pollution-related
deaths would decline by about 4,000 annually and the state would save about $33
billion -- 3 percent of the state's gross domestic product -- in related health
costs every year. That savings alone would pay for the new power infrastructure
needed within about 17 years, or about 10 years if annual electricity sales are
accounted for. The study also estimates that resultant emissions decreases
would reduce 2050 U.S. climate change costs -- such as coastal erosion and
extreme weather damage -- by about $3.2 billion per year.
Currently, almost all of New York's energy comes from imported oil, coal
and gas. Under the plan that Jacobson and his fellow researchers advance, 40
percent of the state's energy would come from local wind power, 38 percent from
local solar and the remainder from a combination of hydroelectric, geothermal,
tidal and wave energy.
All vehicles would run on battery-electric power and/or hydrogen fuel
cells. Electricity-powered air- and ground-source heat pumps, geothermal heat
pumps, heat exchangers and backup electric resistance heaters would replace
natural gas and oil for home heating and air-conditioning. Air- and
ground-source heat pump water heaters powered by electricity and solar hot
water preheaters would provide hot water for homes. High temperatures for
industrial processes would be obtained with electricity and hydrogen
combustion.
"We must be ambitious if we want to promote energy independence and
curb global warming," said study co-author Robert Howarth, a Cornell
University professor of ecology and environmental biology. "The economics
of this plan make sense," said Anthony Ingraffea, a Cornell engineering
professor and a co-author of the study. "Now it is up to the political
sphere."
To ensure grid reliability, the plan outlines several methods to match renewable
energy supply with demand and to smooth out the variability of WWS resources.
These include a grid management system to shift times of demand to better match
with timing of power supply, and "over-sizing" peak generation
capacity to minimize times when available power is less than demand.
—————————
6. MARX’S REVENGE
By the Activist Newsletter
Has Time Magazine —
the popular establishment publication for promoting American capitalism,
culture and consumerism — turned sharply to the political left? Not by any
means, but it has just published a long, thoughtful article by one of its major
correspondents suggesting that Karl Marx, author of the Communist Manifesto and
Das Kapital, “may have been right.”
Although American
academic disciplines — primarily economics, sociology and history — have
incorporated ideas associated with Karl Marx (whether or not it is
acknowledged), Marxism itself and socialist ideology are treated with contempt
by ruling circles in the United States. After all, Marx predicted, and
revolutionary socialists worked toward, their demise.
For the last five
generations, therefore, all Americans have been exposed to ceaseless
anti-Marxist invective from the capitalist state, the mass media, educational
systems, and religious institutions. Consequently, Marx has become anathema to
most Americans.
Could that be
changing? It’s too early to draw conclusions but there has been more
Marxist-type criticism in the U.S. in recent years. This is mainly the product
of increasing economic hard times experienced in recent decades by the working
class, lower middle class and more recently the middle class — all exacerbated
by the Great Recession and its lingering punishments for these sectors of
society. Opposition to the top 1% in wealth during the several months of the
Occupy Wall Street uprising attracted considerable support nationwide even
though it was in essence a class attack against big money and the ruling class
itself (which either comes from, or is in liege to, the 1%).
Now, Time (March 25)
has published an article titled “Marx’s Revenge: How
Class Struggle Is Shaping the World.” It was written by author, business
journalist and foreign correspondent Michael Schuman, who worked for the Wall
St. Journal and Forbes before coming to Time. Schuman is hardly a revolutionary
socialist. He just told the truth as a warning to those in power that working
people around the world remain capable of uniting and rebelling against those
responsible for gross economic inequality, repression and the corruption of
democracy. He wrote:
“With the global economy in a protracted
crisis, and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant
incomes, Marx’s biting critique of capitalism — that the system is
inherently unjust and self-destructive — cannot be so easily dismissed.
Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the
masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few,
causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working
classes. ‘Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation
of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at
the opposite pole,’ Marx wrote.
“A growing
dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right. It is sadly all too
easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle
class and poor are not. A September
study from the
Economic Policy Institute (EPI) in Washington noted that the median annual
earnings of a full-time, male worker in the U.S. in 2011, at $48,202, were
smaller than in 1973. Between 1983 and 2010, 74% of the gains in wealth in
the U.S. went to the richest 5%, while the bottom 60% suffered a
decline, the EPI
calculated. No
wonder some have given the 19th century German philosopher a second look….
“[T]he consequence of this widening inequality is just what Marx had
predicted: class struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing angrier and
demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S.
Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China,
political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between
capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the
20th century. How this struggle plays out will influence the direction of
global economic policy, the future of the welfare state, political stability in
China, and who governs from Washington to Rome. What would Marx say today? Says
Richard Wolff, a Marxist economist at the New School in New York: ‘Some variation of: “I told you so.” The
income gap is producing a level of tension that I have not seen in my lifetime’….
“Marx not only diagnosed capitalism’s flaws but also the outcome of those
flaws,” meaning social revolution. “If policymakers don’t discover new methods
of ensuring fair economic opportunity [reforms], the workers of the world may
just unite. Marx may yet have his revenge.”
Many Americans have been taught that the implosion of the Soviet Union and
China’s decision to create a state capitalist economy closed the book on
revolution and socialism. Today’s socialists understand that what was closed
was the first chapter of a much longer book. Time magazine is warning the
capitalist system that chapter two may still be written.
J.A.S.
————————
7. FIVE
EXTREMES OF U.S. INEQUALITY
Here are some of the facts involved in the relentless transfer of wealth in
the United States to a small group of rich families.
1. $2.13 per hour vs. $3,000,000.00
per hour. Each of the Koch brothers saw his investments grow by
$6 billion in
one year, which is three million dollars per hour
based on a 40-hour 'work' week. They used some of the money to try to
kill renewable energy standards around the
country.
Their income portrays them, in a society measured by economic
status, as a million times more valuable than the
restaurant server who cheers up our
lunch hours while hoping to make enough in tips to pay the bills.
A comparison
of top and bottom salaries within large corporations is much less severe, but a
lot more common. For CEOs and minimum-wage workers, the
difference is $5,000.00 per
hour vs. $7.25 per hour.
2. A single top income could buy
housing for every homeless person in the U.S.
On a winter day in 2012
over 633,000 people were homeless in the United
States. Based on an annual single room occupancy
(SRO) cost of $558 per month,
any one of the 10
richest Americans would have enough
with his 2012 income to pay for a room for every homeless person in the
U.S.
for the entire year. These ten rich men
together made more than our entire
housing budget.
For anyone still
believing "they earned it," it should be noted that
most of the Forbes 400
earnings came from
minimally taxed, non-job-creating
capital gains.
3. The poorest 47% of Americans have
no wealth. In 1983 the poorest
47% of America had $15,000 per family,
2.5% of the nation's
wealth.
In 2009 the poorest
47% of America owned 0% of the nation's
wealth (their debt exceeded their assets).
At the other extreme, the
400 wealthiest Americans own as much wealth
as 80 million families --
62% of America. The reason, once
again, is the stock market. Since 1980 the American GDP has approximately
doubled. Inflation-adjusted
wages
have gone down. But the stock
market has increased by
over ten times, and the richest
quintile of Americans
owns 93% of it.
4. The U.S. is nearly the most
wealth-unequal country in the entire world. Out of 141 countries, the U.S. has the
4th-highest degree of
wealth inequality in the world,
trailing only Russia, Ukraine, and Lebanon.
Yet the financial industry keeps
creating new wealth for its millionaires. According to the authors of the
Global Wealth Report, the world's wealth
has doubled in ten years, from $113 trillion to $223 trillion, and is expected
to reach $330 trillion by 2017.
5. A can of soup for a black or
Hispanic woman, a mansion and yacht for the businessman. That's literally
true. For every one dollar of assets owned by a
single black or Hispanic woman, a member of the
Forbes 400 has over $40 million.
Minority families once had substantial
equity in their homes, but after Wall Street caused the housing crash,
median wealth fell 66% for
Hispanic households and 53% for black households. Now the average single black
or Hispanic woman has about
$100 in net worth.
What to do?
End the
capital gains giveaway, which benefits the
wealthy almost exclusively.
Institute a
Financial Speculation Tax, both to raise
needed funds from a currently untaxed subsidy on stock purchases, and to reduce
the risk of the irresponsible trading that nearly brought down the economy.
Perhaps above all, we progressives have to choose one strategy and pursue it in
a cohesive, unrelenting attack on greed. Only this will heal the ugly gash of
inequality that has split our country in two.
—————————
8. SURVIVING ON $7.25 AN HOUR
By Allison Linn
Meet Crystal Dupont
and John White. Both are struggling to live on the federal minimum wage, one at
the start of her career and the other toward the end of his.
Dupont has no health insurance, so she hasn’t
seen a doctor in two years. She’s behind on her car payments and has taken out
pawn shop and payday loans to cover other monthly expenses. She eats beans and
oatmeal when her food budget gets low. When she got her tax refund recently,
she used the money to get ahead on her light bill.
“I try to live within my means, but sometimes
you just can’t,” said Dupont, 25. The Houston resident works 30 to 40 hours a
week taking customer service calls, earning between $7.25 and $8 an hour. That
came to about $15,000 last year. It’s a wage she’s lived on for a while now,
but just barely.
Dupont didn’t expect her working life to start
out this way. She graduated from high school in 2006, a year after her father
passed away, got a job and moved out of the family home. But Dupont soon
found that she couldn’t earn enough money to live on her own. She also needed
to be home to help her mother, who is disabled and can’t drive because she has
seizures.
Without her father’s income, Dupont and her
mother couldn’t keep up on house payments, and the home they’d lived in since
1998 went into foreclosure in 2009. They moved into an apartment and now live
on Dupont’s salary and her mother’s disability benefits and food stamps.
In January, Dupont started taking classes at
Houston Community College, where she is in the business technology and computer
science programs. She took out a $3,500 student loan but is hoping that she can
use scholarships and grants, or perhaps find a second job, to avoid taking on
more debt.
Low wage worker John White is 61. “It’s by the
grace of God that I am having ends meet,” said White, who was out of work for
20 months before he got his current, part-time job delivering pizzas for eight
hours a week. [He is among 22 million American workers seeking, but not
obtaining, full time employment.] White has applied for a number of jobs, but
he worries that at his age he is often overlooked for younger, more highly
trained workers.
He earns a base salary of $7.25 an hour when he
is prepping or doing other chores, but that drops to $4.50 an hour when he goes
out on a delivery because he is supposed to also earn tips.
The Department of Labor allows tipped employees
to be paid a base
salary that is below minimum wage, but the employer must be able to show the
employee receives minimum wage when tips are included.
In the past few years, White has relied on help
from his church when he couldn’t pay his electric or phone bill, or needed car
repairs. His fellow parishioners also helped him pick up odd jobs. He gets $135
a month in food stamps, now known as SNAP, but lost his state-subsidized health
insurance after he got his pizza delivery job. A lifelong bachelor, he lives in
a family home in Robesonia, Pa., that he and his sibling inherited.
White’s wages have fallen steadily over the past
decade. He worked in a warehouse of a regional department store for nearly 14
years and was earning $12.50 an hour before he was let go in 2003 after a
dispute with a co-worker. He was unemployed for about half a year until he got
a job as a security guard in 2004. He earned $10.60 an hour in that job, and
held it for six years until he was let go in June of 2010. He’s been in the
part-time pizza delivery job for nearly a year, but his financial situation
remains precarious.
About 3.6 million Americans were earning at or
below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in 2012, and those weren’t all
high school students flipping burgers. About half of them were 25 or older, a
little more than one-third were working full time and a little less than
three-fourths had graduated from high school, according to the most recent
government data.
A person
working full time for minimum wage would take home an annual salary of $15,080.
That’s a shade higher than the poverty threshold for a household containing two
adults. These are the workers who answer your customer service calls, deliver
your pizzas, take care of your children, bag your groceries and serve your
food….
President Barack Obama has called on Congress to
increase the minimum wage to $9 an hour by 2015.
[From the Activist Newsletter:
Conservatives, as usual, are opposing any hike., which is one of the reasons
that the real value of the federal minimum fell 30% since 1968. The right wing always charges
that a higher minimum hurts the economy, but opposite is true.
[Assuming the $9 proposal eventually passes Congress, it’s still way too
low. The Institute for Policy Studies noted recently: “Over the last 40 years,
minimum-wage workers have not seen the benefits of a growing economy. As
productivity has increased and the economy has expanded, the minimum wage has
been left to stagnate…. If the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages
and inflation —i.e., if minimum wage workers saw their paychecks expand at the
same rate as the average worker — it would be about $10.55 today.”]
— From NBC News, In Plain Sight, 3-6-13
——————————
9. MINIMUM WAGE STRIKE
By David Rovics
When I awoke one morning
There was a feeling in the air
Everything was quiet
Things were different everywhere
The Wobblies were back again
With Joe Hill at the mike
When all the minimum-wage workers went on
strike
There was no one flipping burgers
All the grills were cold
Onion rings were in their bags
Fries were growing mold
There were no baristas at Starbucks
Asking, "how many shots would you
like?"
When all the minimum-wage workers went on
strike
There was no one pumping gasoline
No one driving from town to town
No one at the registers
All the highways were shut down
The cars were stuck in their garage
Businessmen on bikes
When all the minimum-wage workers went on
strike
The fruit was falling off the trees
No one to load the trucks
Corn was rotting on the stalk
No farm hands to shuck
The workfare workers were hanging at home
Spending the day with their tykes
When all the minimum-wage workers went on
strike
Yuppie parents were housebound
Their nannies left the job
Wal-Mart workers said enough
Of our labor has been robbed
The Foot Locker was locked up
The boss had to take a hike
When all the minimum-wage workers went on
strike
—————————
10. OBAMA’S PEACE ANTICS IN ISRAEL
By Ramzy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle
At the precise
moment U.S. President Barack Obama's Air Force One touched down at Ben Gurion
Airport on March 20, persistent illusions quickly began to shatter. And as he
walked on the red carpet, showered with accolades and warm embraces of top
Israeli government and military officials, a new/old reality began to sink in:
Obama was no different than his predecessors. He never had been.
On the day of
Obama's arrival, Israeli rights group B'Tselem (Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories)
released a disturbing video. It was of Israeli soldiers carrying out a ''mass
arrest'' of nearly 30 Palestinian children on their way to school in the
Palestinian city of al-Khalil (Hebron). The children pleaded and cried to no
avail. Their terrified shrieks echoed throughout the Palestinian neighborhood
as they tried to summon the help of passersby. ''Amo'' (Uncle), one begged,
''for God sake don't let them take me.''
Nonetheless, several
military vehicles were filled with crying children and their school bags. But
what made the release of the video truly apt is the fact that it was released
on the day President Obama was meeting Israeli children at a welcoming ceremony
at the home of Israeli President Shimon Peres.
''Their dreams are
much the same as children everywhere,'' Obama said, referring to Israeli
children, of course. ''In another sense though their lives reflect the
difficult reality that Israelis face every single day. They want to be safe,
they want to be free from rockets that hit their homes or their schools.''
Many Palestinians
immediately pointed out the moral discrepancies in most of Obama's statements
throughout his stay in Israel. Still, his visit was ''historic,'' declared
numerous headlines in the U.S. and Israeli media.
However, aside from
the fact that it was his first trip to Israel as a president, it was barely
momentous. His unconditional support for Israel has been tedious and redundant,
predictable even. Those who have followed his unswerving pro-Israel legacy —
including his visit to Israel as a presidential candidate in 2008, his talks
before the Israeli lobby group AIPAC and many other examples — could barely
discern a shift, except perhaps, in the total disinterest in political
sensibility and balance.
He truly delivered
in Israel. This was to the total satisfaction of the Israeli prime minister and
his pro-settler government which was assembled shortly before Obama's arrival.
Obama spoke as if he were entirely oblivious to the political shift to the extreme
right underway in Israel.
Indeed, the new
Israeli government is more right-wing than ever before. The extremist Jewish
Home party has three important ministries, including Jerusalem and Housing, and
the ultra-nationalists of Yisrael Beiteinu have been awarded the tourism
ministry. It means that the next few years will be a settlement construction
bonanza, ''ethnic cleaning'' and greater apartheid.
''It's good to be
back in The Land [Israel],'' Obama said in Hebrew, at the Tel Aviv airport.
''The United States is proud to stand with you as your strongest ally and your
greatest friend.''
It is believed that
for four years, though he tried his best, Obama has failed to live up to the
nearly impossible expectations of Israel. Israel requires a president with good
oratory skills to emphasize the ''eternal'' bond between his country and
Israel, as Obama did, and who is able to sign big checks and ask few questions.
Obama has of course
done that and more. Aside from the $3.1 billion in annual financial support, he
has rerouted hundreds of millions of U.S. funds to bankroll Israel's air
defense system, the Iron Dome, whose efficiency is questionable at best.
Obama's past
transgression, as far as Israel is concerned, is that he dared ask the right-wing
government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to temporarily freeze
settlement construction as a pre-condition to restart the stalled — if not dead
— peace process. Of course, there is the widely reported matter of Obama's lack
of fondness of Netanyahu, his antics and renowned arrogance. But that matters
little, since Israel's illegal settlements continued to thrive during Obama's
first term in office.
Expectedly,
Netanyahu was gloating. He has managed to assemble a government that will cater
mostly to extremist Jewish settlers in the West Bank and also masterfully
managed to humble the U.S. president, or at least quash his ambitions that Washington
is capable of operating independently in the Middle East, without Israeli
consent or interests in mind.
Now that Jewish
colonies are flourishing — with occupied East Jerusalem area EI being another
major exploit — Netanyahu is once more aspiring for a war against Iran, one
that would not be possible without U.S. funding, support and likely direct involvement.
''Thank you for
standing by Israel at this time of historic change in the Middle East,''
Netanyahu said while standing near the mostly U.S.-funded Iron Dome. ''Thank
you for unequivocally affirming Israel's sovereign right to defend itself, by
itself against any threat.''
Obama did in fact
spare a few, although, spurious thoughts for Palestinians.
''Put yourself in
their shoes — look at the world through their eyes,'' he said to an Israeli
audience. ''It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state
of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the
movements of her parents every single day.''
One would even
applaud the seeming moral fortitude if it were not for the pesky matter that
the U.S. had voted against a Palestinian state at the United Nations last
November and tried to intimidate those who did. And of course, much of the
horror that Palestinian ''eyes'' have seen throughout the years was funded and
defended by U.S. money and action.
If Obama is trying
to resurrect the myth that Washington is a well-intentioned bystander or an
''honest broker'' in some distant conflict, then he has utterly failed. His
country is fully embroiled in the conflict, and directly so. Many Palestinian
children would still be alive today if the U.S. government had conditioned its
massive support of Israel by ending the occupation and ceasing the brutality
against Palestinians.
In a joint press
conference in Ramallah, alongside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud
Abbas, Obama even demanded Palestinians drop their condition (proposed by Obama
himself) of a settlement freeze in order to return to the so-called peace
talks.…
Meanwhile, the
families of the 30 children kidnapped by the Israeli army in Hebron will have
many days ahead of them in Israeli military court. But that, of course, is a
different matter, of no concern to Obama and his many quotable peace antics.
—————————
11. THE LEGACY OF
HUGO CHAVEZ
[The U.S. government
and most of the corporate mass media always despised Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who died at age 58 from cancer March
5. Obituaries from these sources were mostly grudging. Chavez, like his hero,
Simon Bolivar, was a liberator — a liberator from poverty, oppression and
imperialism. The Yankee press often described him as a dictator — this of a man
who won three honest presidential elections with greater victory margins than
recent American presidents. He served from 1999 to 2013, during which time he
started to bring socialism to Venezuela. The hope of much of the world — at
least in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America — is that it is allowed
to develop far into the future. The following political analysis of Chavez and
his government by James Petras takes an honest measure of this extraordinary
political figure.]
By James Petras
President
Hugo Chavez was unique in multiple areas of political, social and economic
life. He made significant contributions to the advancement of humanity. The
depth, scope and popularity of his accomplishments mark President Chavez as the
“Renaissance President of the 21st
Century.”
Many writers have noted one or another of his historic contributions
highlighting his anti-poverty legislation, his success in winning popular
elections with resounding majorities and his promotion of universal free public
education and health coverage for all Venezuelans.
In this essay we will highlight the unique world-historic contributions
that President Chavez made in the spheres of political economy, ethics and
international law and in redefining relations between political leaders and
citizens. We shall start with his enduring contribution to the development of
civic culture in Venezuela and beyond.
From his first days in office, Chavez was engaged in transforming the
constitutional order so that political leaders and institutions would be more
responsive to the popular electorate. Through his speeches Chavez clearly and
carefully informed the electorate of the measures and legislation to improve
their livelihood. He invited comments and criticism – his style was to engage
in constant dialogue, especially with the poor, the unemployed and the workers.
Chavez was so successful in teaching civic responsibilities to the Venezuelan
electorate that in 2002 millions of citizens from the slums of Caracas rose up
spontaneously to oust the U.S.-backed business-military junta which had
kidnapped their president and closed the legislature. Within 72 hours – record
time – the civic-minded citizens restored the democratic order and the rule of
law in Venezuela, thoroughly rejecting the mass media’s defense of the
coup-plotters and their brief authoritarian regime.
Chavez, as all great educators, learned from this democratic intervention
of the mass of citizens, that democracy’s most effective defenders were to be
found among the working people – and that its worst enemies were found in the
business elites and military officials linked to Miami and Washington.
Chavez’ civic pedagogy emphasized the importance of the historical
teachings and examples of founding fathers, like Simon Bolivar, in establishing
a national and Latin American identity. His speeches raised the cultural level
of millions of Venezuelans who had been raised in the alienating and servile
culture of imperial Washington and the consumerist obsessions of Miami shopping
malls.
Chavez succeeded in instilling a culture of solidarity and mutual support
among the exploited, emphasizing “horizontal” ties over vertical clientelistic
dependency on the rich and powerful. His success in creating collective
consciousness decisively shifted the balance of political power away from the
wealthy rulers and corrupt political party and trade union leaders toward new
socialist movements and class oriented trade unions. More than anything else
Chavez’s political education of the popular majority regarding their social
rights to free health care and higher education, living wages and full
employment drew the hysterical ire of the wealthy Venezuelans and their undying
hatred of a president who had created a sense of autonomy, dignity and "class
empowerment” through public education ending centuries of elite privilege and
omnipotence.
Above all Chavez’ speeches, drawing as much from Bolivar as from Karl Marx,
created a deep, generous sense of patriotism and nationalism and a profound
rejection of a prostrate elite groveling before their Washington overlord, Wall
Street bankers and oil company executives. Chavez’ anti-imperialist speeches
resonated because he spoke in the language of the people and expanded their
national consciousness to identification with Latin America, especially Cuba’s
fight against imperial interventions and wars.
At the beginning of the previous decade, after 9/11/01, Washington declared
a “War on Terror.” This was a public declaration of unilateral military
intervention and wars against sovereign nations, movements and individuals
deemed as adversaries, in violation of international law.
Almost all countries submitted to this flagrant violation of the Geneva
Accords, except Venezuela. Chavez made the most profound and simple refutation
against Washington: “You don’t fight terrorism with state terrorism.” In his
defense of the sovereignty of nations and international jurisprudence, Chavez
underlined the importance of political and economic solutions to social
problems and conflicts – repudiating the use of bombs, torture and mayhem. The Chavez Doctrine emphasized
south-south trade and investments and diplomatic over military resolution of
disputes. He upheld the Geneva Accords against colonial and imperial aggression
while rejecting the imperial doctrine of “the war on terror,” defining western
state terrorism as a pernicious equivalent to al-Qaeda terrorism.
One of the most profound and influential aspects of Chavez’ legacy is his
original synthesis of three grand strands of political thought: popular
Christianity, Bolivarian nationalist and regional integration, and Marxist
political, social and economic thought. Chavez’ Christianity informed his deep
belief in justice and the equality of people, as well as his generosity and
forgiveness of adversaries even as they engaged in a violent coup, a crippling
lockout, or openly collaborated and received financing from enemy intelligence
agencies. Whereas anywhere else in the world, armed assaults against the state
and coups d’état would result in long prison sentences or even executions,
under Chavez most of his violent adversaries escaped prosecution and even
rejoined their subversive organizations. Chavez demonstrated a deep belief in
redemption and forgiveness. Chavez’s Christianity informed his “option for the
poor,” the depth and breadth of his commitment to eradicating poverty and his
solidarity with the poor against the rich.
Chavez deep-seated aversion and effective opposition to U.S. and European
imperialism and brutal Israeli colonialism were profoundly rooted in his
reading of the writings and history of Simon Bolivar, the founding father of
the Venezuelan nation. Bolivarian ideas on national liberation long preceded
any exposure to Marx, Lenin or more contemporary leftist writings on
imperialism. His powerful and unwavering support for regional integration and
internationalism was deeply influenced by Simon Bolivar’s proposed “United States of Latin America” and
his internationalist activity in support of anti-colonial movements.
Chavez’ incorporation of Marxist ideas into his world view was adapted to
his longstanding popular Christian and Bolivarian internationalist philosophy.
Chavez’ option for the poor was deepened by his recognition of the centrality
of the class struggle and the reconstruction of the Bolivarian nation through
the socialization of the “commanding heights of the economy.” The socialist
concept of self-managed factories and popular empowerment via community
councils was given moral legitimacy by Chavez’ Christian faith in an
egalitarian moral order.
While Chavez was respectful and carefully listened to the views of visiting
leftist academics and frequently praised their writings, many failed to
recognize or, worse, deliberately ignored the president’s own more original
synthesis of history, religion and Marxism. Unfortunately, as is frequently the
case, some leftist academics have, in their self-indulgent posturing, presumed
to be Chavez’ “teacher” and advisor on all matters of “Marxist theory.” This
represents a style of leftist cultural colonialism, which snidely criticized
Chavez for not following their ready-made prescriptions, published in their
political literary journals in London, New York and Paris.
Fortunately, Chavez took what was useful from the overseas academics and
NGO-funded political strategists while discarding ideas that failed to take
account of the cultural-historical, class and rentier specificities of
Venezuela.
Chavez has bequeathed to the intellectuals and activists of the world a method of thinking which is global
and specific, historical and theoretical, material and ethical and which
encompasses class analysis, democracy and a spiritual transcendence resonating
with the great mass of humanity in a language every person can understand.
Chavez’ philosophy and practice (more than any “discourse” narrated by the
social forum-hopping experts) demonstrated that the art of formulating complex ideas in simple language can move millions of people to “make
history, and not only to study it.”
Perhaps Chavez greatest contribution in the contemporary period was to
demonstrate, through practical measures and political initiatives, that many of
the most challenging contemporary political and economic problems can be
successfully resolved.
Nothing is more difficult than changing the social structure, institutions and
attitudes of a rentier petro-state
[depending on the export of oil], with deeply entrenched clientelistic
politics, endemic party-state corruption and a deeply-rooted mass psychology
based on consumerism. Yet Chavez largely succeeded where other petro-regimes
failed. The Chavez Administration first began with constitutional and
institutional changes to create a new political framework; then he implemented
social impact programs, which deepened political commitments among an active
majority, which, in turn, bravely defended the regime from a violent U.S.
backed business-military coup d’état. Mass mobilization and popular support, in
turn, radicalized the Chavez government and made way for a deeper socialization
of the economy and the implementation of radical agrarian reform. The petrol
industry was socialized; royalty and tax payments were raised to provide funds
for massively expanded social expenditures benefiting the majority of
Venezuelans.
Almost every day Chavez prepared clearly understandable educational
speeches on social, ethical and political topics related to his regime’s
redistributive policies by emphasizing social solidarity over individualistic
acquisitive consumerism. Mass organizations and community and trade union
movements flourished – a new social consciousness emerged ready and willing to
advance social change and confront the wealthy and powerful. Chavez’ defeat of
the U.S.-backed coup and bosses’ lockout and his affirmation of the Bolivarian
tradition and sovereign identity of Venezuela created a powerful nationalist
consciousness which eroded the rentier mentality and strengthened the pursuit
of a diversified “balanced economy.” This new political will and national
productive consciousness was a great leap forward, even as the main features of
a rentier-oil dependent economy persist. This extremely difficult transition
has begun and is an ongoing process. Overseas leftist theorists, who criticize
Venezuela (“corruption and bureaucracy”) have profoundly ignored the enormous
difficulties of transitioning from a rentier state to a socialized economy and
the enormous progress achieved by Chavez.
Throughout the crisis-wracked capitalist world, ruling labor, social
democratic, liberal and conservative regimes have imposed regressive “austerity
programs” involving brutal reductions of social welfare, health and education
expenditures and mass layoffs of workers and employees while handing our
generous state subsidies and bailouts to failing banks and capitalist
enterprises. Chanting their Thacherite slogan, “there is no alternative,”
capitalist economists justify imposing the burden of capitalist recovery onto
the working class while allowing capital to recover its profits in order to
invest.
Chavez’ policy was the direct opposite: In the midst of crisis, he retained
all the social programs, rejected mass firings and increased social spending.
The Venezuelan economy rode out of the worldwide crisis and recovered with a
healthy 5.8% growth rate in 2012. In other words, Chavez demonstrated that mass
impoverishment was a product of the specific capitalist formula for recovery.
He showed another, positive alternative approach to economic crisis, which
taxed the rich, promoted public investments and maintained social expenditures.
Many commentators, left, right and center, have argued that the advent of a
globalized economy ruled out a radical social transformation. Yet Venezuela,
which is profoundly globalized and integrated into the world market via trade
and investments, has made major advances in social reform. What really matters
in relation to a globalized economy is the nature of the political economic
regime and its policies, which dictate how the gains and costs of international
trade and investment are distributed. In a word, what is decisive is the class character of the regime
managing its place in the world economy. Chavez certainly did not de-link from
the world economy; rather he has re-linked
Venezuela in a new way. He shifted Venezuelan trade and investment toward Latin
America, Asia and the Middle East — especially to countries which do not
intervene or impose reactionary conditions on economic transactions….
Chavez’ programmatic and comprehensive reconfiguration of Venezuela from a
disastrous and failed neo-liberal regime to a dynamic welfare state stands as a
landmark in 20th and 21st century political economy.
Chavez rejected privatization – he re-nationalized key oil related
industries, socialized hundreds of capitalist firms and carried out a vast
agrarian reform program, including land distribution to 300,000 families. He
encouraged trade union organizations and worker control of factories – even
bucking public managers and even his own cabinet ministers. In Latin America,
Chavez led the way in defining with greater depth and with more comprehensive
social changes, the post neo-liberal era. Chavez envisioned the transition from
neo-liberalism to a new socialized welfare state as an international process
and provided financing and political support for new regional organizations
like ALBA, PetroCaribe, and UNASUR. He rejected the idea of building a welfare
state in one country and formulated a theory of post-neo-liberal transitions
based on international solidarity. Chavez’ original ideas and policies
regarding the post-neo-liberal transition escaped the armchair Marxists and the
globetrotting Social Forum NGO pundits whose inconsequential ‘global alternatives’
succeeded primarily in securing imperial foundation funding.
Chavez demonstrated through theory
and practice that neo-liberalism was indeed reversible – a major
political breakthrough of the 21st century.
The U.S.-EU promoted neo-liberal regimes have collapsed under the weight of
the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Massive unemployment
led to popular uprisings, new elections and the advent of center-left regimes
in most of Latin America, which rejected or at least claimed to repudiate
neo-liberalism. Most of these regimes promulgated legislation and executive
directives to fund poverty programs, implement financial controls and make
productive investments, while raising minimum wages and stimulating employment.
However few lucrative enterprises were actually re-nationalized. Addressing
inequalities and the concentration of wealth were not part of their agenda.
They formulated their strategy of working with Wall Street investors, local
agro-mineral exporters and co-opted trade unions.
Chavez opened a new path to socialism based on free elections, re-educating
the military to uphold democratic and constitutional principals, and the
development of mass and community media. He ended the capitalist mass media
monopolies and strengthened civil society as a counter-weight to U.S.-sponsored
paramilitary and fifth column elites intent on destabilizing the democratic
state.
No other democratic-socialist president had successfully resisted imperial
destabilization campaigns – neither Jagan in Guyana, Manley in Jamaica, nor
Allende in Chile. From the very outset Chavez saw the importance of creating a
solid legal-political framework to facilitate executive leadership, promote
popular civil society organizations and end US penetration of the state apparatus
(military and police). Chavez implemented radical social impact programs that
ensured the loyalty and active allegiance of popular majorities and weakened
the economic levers of political power long held by the capitalist class. As a
result Venezuela’s political leaders, soldiers and officers loyal to its
constitution and the popular masses crushed a bloody rightwing coup, a
crippling bosses’ lockout and a U.S.-financed referendum and proceeded to
implement further radical socio-economic reforms in a prolonged process of
cumulative socialization….
Chavez’ legacy is multi-faceted. His contributions are original,
theoretical and practical and universally relevant. He demonstrated in theory
and practice how a small country can defend itself against imperialism,
maintain democratic principles and implement advanced social programs. His
pursuit of regional integration and promotion of ethical standards in the
governance of a nation – provide examples profoundly relevant in a capitalist
world awash in corrupt politicians slashing living standards while enriching
the plutocrats….
— James Petras is a former long-time professor at
Binghamton University (SUNY) in New York. He is the author of more than 60
books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional
journals. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in
particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In
1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin
America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, La Jornada.
—————————
12. POSTAL WORKERS RALLY FOR SIX-DAY DELIVERY
By Donna Goodman
Rallies were held in hundreds of towns and big cities March
24 on a National Day of Action sponsored by the National Association of Letter
Carriers (NALC) and backed by other postal unions. The purpose was to demand
retention six-day mail delivery and prevent the closing of many post offices
and distribution centers.
Thousands of postal workers, their families and supporters
attended a spirited rally in New York City that day in opposition to budget
cutters in Washington, backed by President Obama, who want to reduce delivery
to five days a week, eliminating thousands of jobs.
Over 70 Mid-Hudson Valley unionists joined the rally, mostly
from a bus organized by the Hudson Valley Area Labor Federation and Local 137
of the NALC, with many others traveling to the city on their own. In addition
to NALC, local unions and organizations represented on the bus were the
American Postal Workers Union, Workforce Development Institute, and United
University Professions (UUP)
In the upper Hudson Valley, some 300 postal workers and
supporters rallied in the Capital District.
Supporting the “USA for Six Day Delivery” campaign, the New
York State AFL-CIO declared: “The Postal
Service’s plan to end Saturday mail is an attack on the future of this great
institution, on the customers who need it, and on the employees who support it.
The American people depend on Saturday delivery to keep us connected and to
facilitate our business. Eliminating a day of delivery will hit rural
communities, small businesses, and senior citizens the hardest. This isn’t a
change the American people want or that the Postal Service needs.”
The New York City rally took place across from the immense,
historic James A. Farley Post Office in midtown Manhattan. Protesters were
packed into block-long metal pens — the NYPD’s method of treating peaceful
demonstrators like potential rioters.
Speaker Charlie Heege, president of NALC Local 36, demanded
of Congress and Postmaster General Patrick Donohoe: "Do not cut Saturday
delivery. Do not dismantle the Postal service."
George Mignosi, vice president of the NALC, reminded the
crowd of the importance of postal delivery for the elderly and those in remote
rural areas who have no Internet access. He pointed out the folly of the
proposed cuts, which would reduce service by 17% for a cost savings of 3%.
Chants of "Donohoe must Go!" and "Five Days
No Way! Six Days the Only Way!" were accompanied by the constant din of
honks of support from passing motorists and by roars from the crowd, especially
when Post Office trucks passed by.
According to Postal Service management, cutbacks are needed
to make up for the loss of revenues caused by the public's reliance on the
Internet and email for their communications. However, the real culprit is a
Congressional mandate, passed in 2006, that requires the Postal Service to
pre-fund retiree health benefits for 75 years into the future. These benefits
must be paid in 10 years. There is no other enterprise, public or private, that
is required to pre-fund benefits in this way, and this mandate has cost the
Postal Service more than $32 billion, pushing it to its debt limit and forcing
it to operate in the red. (In 2005 the USPS was debt free.)
Postal workers and their allies claim that the proposed
cutbacks will destroy the postal service and the postal unions, the largest
population of unionized federal workers. Reducing mail delivery to five days
would cost 80,000 jobs in the postal service alone. The loss of these jobs
would have a ripple effect on local economies all over the country.
Despite the draconian pre-funding rule, there is
considerable support for six-day delivery in Congress. The New York State
delegation is almost unanimous in its support: 26 of its 27 members of Congress
are co-sponsors of H.R. 30, which would retain six-day delivery. Fourteen of
the 27 are co-sponsors of H.R. 630, which would overturn the pre-funding mandate.
Donohoe sought to end six-day service this coming August. Congress has extended
funding through September.
Congressman Jerrold Nadler said: " We will protect six-day
delivery service. We will protect the post office. We will protect all the
jobs, and we will repeal the mandate for 75 years' pre-funding of pensions…. We
won't let them use the pension system as an excuse to destroy unions, to
destroy the federal services, to destroy your jobs…." He called the
pre-funding rule a "plot" to privatize the postal service by
producing an "artificial crisis and an artificial deficit." He
compared the postal deficit to the federal deficits that are being used as an
excuse to attempt cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
The most moving speech of the afternoon was delivered by
Victoria Pannell, a13-year-old community activist from Harlem. She began:
"Being a child, my first thought was: what about the children's Christmas
toys? Then my thoughts went deeper. How are the postal workers' children going to
college?" She expressed concern for the residents of rural areas, where
poverty rates are higher than the national average and whose post offices would
be the first ones targeted to close if services are cut back.
Speaking truth to power, Jonathan Smith, president of New
York Metro Area Postal Union, APWU, declared: "Sometimes the fight comes
down to right and wrong. And the Postal Service works. And it was working until
Congress decided to steal to supply wars."
—————————
13. MEN WHO KICK DOWN DOORS:
TYRANTS HOME & ABROAD
Picture this. A man, armored in tattoos, bursts into a living room
not his own. He confronts an enemy. He barks orders. He
throws that enemy into a chair. Then against a wall. He plants himself in
the middle of the room, feet widespread, fists clenched, muscles straining,
face contorted in a scream of rage. The tendons in his neck are taut with
the intensity of his terrifying performance. He chases the enemy to the
next room, stopping escape with a quick grab and thrust and body block that
pins the enemy, bent back, against a counter. He shouts more orders: his enemy
can go with him to the basement for a “private talk,” or be beaten to a pulp
right here. Then he wraps his fingers around the neck of his enemy and begins
to choke her.
No, that invader isn’t an American soldier leading a night raid on an
Afghan village, nor is the enemy an anonymous Afghan householder. This
combat warrior is just a guy in Ohio named Shane. He’s doing what so many men
find exhilarating: disciplining his girlfriend with a heavy dose of the
violence we render harmless by calling it “domestic.”
It’s
easy to figure out from a few basic facts that Shane is a skilled predator.
Why else does a 31-year-old man lavish attention on a pretty 19-year-old
with two children (ages four and two, the latter an equally pretty and
potentially targeted little female)? And what more vulnerable girlfriend
could he find than this one, named Maggie: a neglected young woman, still a
teenager, who for two years had been raising her kids on her own while her
husband fought a war in Afghanistan? That war had broken the family
apart, leaving Maggie with no financial support and more alone than ever.
But the
way Shane assaulted Maggie, he might just as well have been a night-raiding
soldier terrorizing an Afghan civilian family in pursuit of some dangerous
Talib, real or imagined. For all we know, Maggie’s estranged
husband/soldier might have acted in
the same way in some Afghan living room and not only been paid but also honored
for it. The basic behavior is quite alike: an overwhelming display of
superior force. The tactics: shock and awe. The goal: to control the
behavior, the very life, of the designated target. The mind set: a sense
of entitlement when it comes to determining the fate of a subhuman
creature. The dark side: the fear and brutal rage of a scared loser who
inflicts his miserable self on others.
As for
that designated enemy, just as American exceptionalism asserts the superiority
of the United States over all other countries and cultures on Earth, and even
over the laws that govern international relations, misogyny -- which seems to
inform so much in the United States these days, from military boot camp to the Oscars to
full frontal political assaults on a woman’s right to control her own body --
assures even the most pathetic guys like Shane of their innate superiority over
some “thing” usually addressed with multiple obscenities.
Since
9/11, the further militarization of our
already militarized culture has reached new levels. Official America, as
embodied in our political system and national security state, now seems to be
thoroughly masculine, paranoid, quarrelsome, secretive, greedy, aggressive, and
violent. Readers familiar with “domestic violence” will recognize those
traits as equally descriptive of the average American wife beater: scared but
angry and aggressive, and feeling absolutely entitled to control something,
whether it’s just a woman, or a small wretched country like Afghanistan.
It was John Stuart Mill,
writing in the
nineteenth century, who connected the dots between “domestic” and international
violence. But he didn’t use our absurdly gender-neutral, pale gray term
“domestic violence.” He called it “wife torture”
or “atrocity,” and he recognized that torture and atrocity are much the
same, no matter where they take place -- whether today in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
Wardak Province,
Afghanistan, or a bedroom or basement in Ohio. Arguing in 1869 against
the subjection of women, Mill
wrote that the Englishman’s habit of household tyranny and “wife torture”
established the pattern and practice for his foreign policy. The tyrant
at home becomes the tyrant at war. Home is the training ground for the
big games played overseas.
Mill
believed that, in early times, strong men had used force to enslave women and
the majority of their fellow men. By the nineteenth century, however, the
“law of the strongest” seemed to him to have been “abandoned” -- in England at
least -- “as the regulating principle of the world’s affairs.” Slavery
had been renounced. Only in the household did it continue to be
practiced, though wives were no longer openly enslaved but merely “subjected”
to their husbands. This subjection, Mill said, was the last vestige of
the archaic “law of the strongest,” and must inevitably fade away as reasonable
men recognized its barbarity and injustice. Of his own time, he wrote
that “nobody professes” the law of the strongest, and “as regards most of the
relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practice it.”
Well,
even a feminist may not be right about everything. Times often change for
the worse, and rarely has the law of the strongest been more popular than it is
in the United States today. Routinely now we hear congressmen declare that the U.S. is the greatest nation in the
world because it is the greatest military power in history, just as presidents
now regularly insist that
the U.S. military is “the finest fighting force in the history of the
world.” Never mind that it rarely wins a war. Few here question
that primitive standard -- the law of the strongest -- as the measure of this
America’s dwindling “civilization.”
Mill,
however, was right about the larger point: that tyranny at home is the model
for tyranny abroad. What he perhaps didn’t see was the perfect
reciprocity of the relationship that perpetuates the law of the strongest both
in the home and far away.
When
tyranny and violence are practiced on a grand scale in foreign lands, the
practice also intensifies at home. As American militarism went into
overdrive after 9/11, it validated violence against women here, where
Republicans held up
reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (first passed in 1994), and celebrities who
publicly assaulted their girlfriends faced no consequences other than a deluge
of sympathetic girl-fan tweets.
America’s
invasions abroad also validated violence within the U.S. military itself.
An estimated 19,000 women soldiers were sexually assaulted in
2011; and an unknown number have been murdered by
fellow soldiers who were, in many cases, their husbands or boyfriends. A
great deal of violence against women in the military, from rape to murder, has
been documented, only to be casually covered up by the
chain of command.
Violence
against civilian women here at home, on the other hand, may not be reported or
tallied at all, so the full extent of it escapes notice. Men prefer to maintain
the historical fiction that violence in the home is a private matter, properly
and legally concealed behind a “curtain.” In this way is male impunity and
tyranny maintained.
Women
cling to a fiction of our own: that we are much more “equal” than we are.
Instead of confronting male violence, we still prefer to lay the blame for it
on individual women and girls who fall victim to it -- as if they had
volunteered. But then, how to explain the dissonant fact that at least one of every three female
American soldiers is sexually assaulted by a male “superior”?
Surely that’s not what American women had in mind when they signed up for the
Marines or for Air Force flight training.
In fact, lots of teenage girls volunteer for the military precisely to escape
violence and sexual abuse in their childhood homes or streets.
Don’t
get me wrong, military men are neither alone nor out of the ordinary in
terrorizing women. The broader American war against women has intensified
on many fronts here at home, right along with our wars abroad. Those foreign
wars have killed uncounted thousands of civilians, many of them women and
children, which could make the private battles of domestic warriors like Shane
here in the U.S. seem puny by comparison. But it would be a mistake to
underestimate the firepower of the Shanes of our American world. The statistics
tell us that a legal handgun has
been the most popular means of dispatching a wife, but when it comes to
girlfriends, guys really get off on beating them to death.
Some
3,073 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the United States on 9/11.
Between that day and June 6, 2012, 6,488 U.S. soldiers were killed in combat in
Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the death toll for America’s war on terror at
home and abroad to 9,561. During the same period, 11,766 women were murdered in the
United States by their husbands or boyfriends, both military and civilian.
The greater number of women killed here at home is a measure of the scope
and the furious intensity of the war against women, a war that threatens to
continue long after the misconceived war on terror is history.
Think
about Shane, standing there in a nondescript living room in Ohio screaming his
head off like a little child who wants what he wants when he wants it.
Reportedly, he was trying to be a good guy and make a career as a singer in a
Christian rock band. But like the combat soldier in a foreign war who is
modeled after him, he uses violence to hold his life together and accomplish
his mission.
We know
about Shane only because there happened to be a photographer on the
scene. Sara Naomi Lewkowicz had chosen to document the story of Shane and
his girlfriend Maggie out of sympathy for his situation as an ex-con, recently
released from prison yet not free of the stigma attached to a man who had done
time. Then, one night, there he was in the living room throwing Maggie around,
and Lewkowicz did what any good combat photographer would do as a witness to
history: she kept shooting. That action alone was a kind of intervention and
may have saved Maggie’s life.
In the
midst of the violence, Lewkowicz also dared to snatch from Shane’s pocket her
own cell phone, which he had borrowed earlier. It’s unclear whether she
passed the phone to someone else or made the 911 call herself. The police
arrested Shane, and a smart policewoman told Maggie: “You know, he’s not going
to stop. They never stop. They usually stop when they kill you.”
Maggie
did the right thing. She gave the police a statement. Shane is back
in prison. And Lewkowicz’s remarkable photographs were
posted online on February 27th at Time magazine’s website feature Lightbox under the
heading “Photographer As Witness: A Portrait of Domestic Violence.”
The
photos are remarkable because the photographer is very good and the subject of
her attention is so rarely caught on camera. Unlike warfare covered in
Iraq and Afghanistan by embedded combat photographers, wife torture takes place
mostly behind closed doors, unannounced and unrecorded. The first
photographs of wife torture to appear in the U.S. were Donna Ferrato’s now iconic images of violence against women at home.
Like
Lewkowicz, Ferrato came upon wife torture by chance; she was documenting a
marriage in 1980 when the happy husband chose to beat up his wife. Yet so
reluctant were photo editors to pull aside the curtain of domestic privacy that
even after Ferrato became a Life photographer in 1984, pursuing the same
subject, nobody, including Life, wanted to publish the shocking images
she produced.
In
1986, six years after she witnessed that first assault, some of her photographs
of violence against women in the home were published in the Philadelphia
Inquirer, and brought her the 1987 Robert F. Kennedy journalism award “for
outstanding coverage of the problems of the disadvantaged.” In 1991,
Aperture, the publisher of distinguished photography books, brought out
Ferrato’s eye-opening body of work as Living with the Enemy (for
which I wrote an introduction). Since then, the photos have been widely
reproduced. Time used a
Ferrato image on its cover in 1994, when the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson
briefly drew attention to what the magazine called “the epidemic of domestic
abuse” and Lightbox featured a small retrospective of her
domestic violence work on June 27, 2012.
Ferrato
herself started a foundation, offering her work to women’s groups across the
country to exhibit at fundraisers for local shelters and services. Those
photo exhibitions also helped raise consciousness across America and certainly
contributed to smarter, less misogynistic police procedures of the kind that
put Shane back in jail.
Ferrato’s
photos were incontrovertible evidence of the violence in our homes, rarely
acknowledged and never before so plainly seen. Yet until February 27th,
when with Ferrato’s help, Sara Naomi Lewkowicz’s photos were posted on Lightbox
only two months after they were taken, Ferrato’s photos were all we
had. We needed more. So there was every reason for Lewkowicz’s work
to be greeted with acclaim by photographers and women everywhere.
Instead,
in more than 1,700 comments posted at Lightbox, photographer Lewkowicz
was mainly castigated for things like not dropping her camera and taking care
to get Maggie’s distraught two-year-old daughter out of the room or
singlehandedly stopping the assault. (Need it be said that stopping
combat is not the job of combat photographers?)
Maggie,
the victim of this felonious assault, was also mercilessly denounced: for going
out with Shane in the first place, for failing to foresee his violence, for
“cheating” on her already estranged husband fighting in Afghanistan, and
inexplicably for being a “perpetrator.” Reviewing the commentary for the Columbia
Journalism Review, Jina Moore concluded,
“[T]here’s one thing all the critics seem to agree on: The only adult in the
house not responsible for the violence is the man committing it.”
Viewers
of these photographs -- photos that accurately reflect the daily violence so
many women face -- seem to find it easy to ignore, or even praise, the raging
man behind it all. So, too, do so many find it convenient to ignore the
violence that America’s warriors abroad inflict under orders on a mass scale
upon women and children in war zones.
The
U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq had the effect of displacing millions from
their homes within the country or driving them into
exile in foreign lands. Rates of rape and atrocity were staggering, as I
learned firsthand when in 2008-2009 I spent time in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon talking with Iraqi
refugees. In addition, those women who remain in Iraq now live under the rule of
conservative Islamists, heavily influenced by Iran. Under the former secular
regime, Iraqi women were considered the most advanced in the Arab world; today,
they say they have been set back a century.
In
Afghanistan, too, while Americans take credit for putting women back in the
workplace and girls in school, untold thousands of women and children have been
displaced internally, many to makeshift camps on the outskirts of Kabul where
17 children froze to death last
January. The U.N. reported 2,754
civilian deaths and 4,805 civilian injuries as a result of the war in 2012, the
majority of them women and children. In a country without a state capable
of counting bodies, these are undoubtedly significant undercounts. A U.N.
official said, “It
is the tragic reality that most Afghan women and girls were killed or injured
while engaging in their everyday activities.” Thousands of women in Afghan
cities have been forced into survival sex, as were Iraqi women who fled as
refugees to Beirut and particularly Damascus.
That’s
what male violence is meant to do to women. The enemy. War itself
is a kind of screaming tattooed man, standing in the middle of a room -- or
another country -- asserting the law of the strongest. It’s like a reset button
on history that almost invariably ensures women will find themselves subjected
to men in ever more terrible ways. It’s one more thing that, to a certain
kind of man, makes going to war, like good old-fashioned wife torture, so
exciting and so much fun.
—————————
14. HIJACKING
FEMINISM
By Catherine
Rottenberg
A new trend is on the rise. Suddenly high-powered women are publically
espousing feminism. In her recently published book, “
Lean In: Women,
Work and the Will to Lead” Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg
advocates for a new kind of feminism, maintaining that women need to initiate
an “internalized revolution.”
Sandberg's feminist manifesto comes on the heels of Ann-Marie Slaughter's
much-discussed Atlantic opinion
piece, "
Why Women
Still Can't Have It All,” which rapidly became the most widely read essay in
the magazine's history. In her piece, Slaughter explains why professional women
are still finding it difficult to balance career demands with their wish for an
active home life: social norms and the inflexibility of U.S. workplace culture
continue to privilege career advancement over family.
The buzz that has surrounded these two
"how-to-reinvigorate-feminism" programes suggests that Sandberg and
Slaughter have struck a deep cultural chord. Indeed, the two women are quickly
becoming the
most
visible representatives of U.S. feminism in the early 21st century.
Part of the media hype, however, involves their public disagreements. But
the attempt to pit these two women against one another is actually ironic,
since their fundamental assumptions about what constitutes liberation and
progress for women are virtually indistinguishable.
Sandberg urges women to reaffirm their commitment to work, while insisting
that this will provide women more choice about how to carve out a felicitous
work-family balance. Slaughter urges women to reaffirm their commitment to
family, while asserting that this will provide women more choice about how to
carve out a felicitous work-family balance.
Thus, despite the surface disagreement, both women ultimately agree on the
basics, while the difference is merely a matter of emphasis. Sandberg focuses
on changing women's attitudes about work and self. Slaughter focuses on
legitimating women's "natural" commitment towards families, while
urging social institutions to make room for these attitudes.
In both cases, there is a deeply held conviction that once high potential
women undertake the task of revaluing their ambition (Sandberg) or the
normative expectation that work comes first (Slaughter), then all women will be
empowered to make better choices.
Transforming women's orientation and attitude, which in academic parlance
is now called affect, becomes the necessary condition for ensuring women's
liberation and happiness as well as changing society. Ultimately, both
feminists offer affective solutions that they claim will allow women to stay in
the rat race. These two aspects — positive affect as antidote and the
importance of balance — mark an extremely disturbing cultural shift.
These two women's worldview is clearly informed by the still dominant and
uncritical feminist narrative of progress in the U.S., which unfolds in this
manner: traditionally, middle and upper class women were confined to the
domestic realm, but as a result of first-wave feminism's mobilisation at the
end of the 19th century, women increasingly demanded recognition as public
subjects.
Women's participation in the war (WWI) effort, the passage of the
19th Amendment in the U.S. and the coalescing of the modern New Woman norm
were all fruit of this long-standing demand and activism. Freedom, especially
for middle-class women who had been associated with the domestic realm,
translated into the ability to transcend the private sphere and enter into the
public world of political representation and work.
Consequently, throughout the 20th century, upwardly mobile women were often
forced to make choices between having a family and pursuing a career — between
traditional definitions of womanhood and progressive ones.
Even after the accomplishments of second wave feminism in the 1970s, it was
still very difficult for middle-class women to bridge both spheres, and
except for a few Superwomen, most women had to choose between family and a
successful professional career; according to this narrative, the private and
public have always been framed as either/or for women.
Sandberg insists that it has finally become possible for women to bridge
private and public spheres at the same time. She is convinced that by leaning
into their careers women will fare better at balancing their lives (since too
many are still opting out of the fast track), which will, in turn, allow them
to stay in the game and make it to the top.
For Slaughter the emphasis is slightly different. She is convinced that
only once high powered women speak out about the value of family and insist on
transforming workplace norms, social institutions will begin changing those
norms; and changing these norms, in turn, will facilitate women's ability to
pursue their own happiness project, which is inextricably related to the right
work-family balance.
Yet the ideal for both women remains the same — having a very successful
career and a heteronormative family and being able to enjoy them both. From
Private Woman through the New Woman and Superwoman, it has finally become
possible to speak about the Balanced Woman.
This, unfortunately, is how the "truly liberated" woman of the
21st century is increasingly being construed. What is particularly
troubling about this feminist moment — especially since both women espouse
liberal ideals — is exactly how little emphasis either Slaughter or Sandberg
ultimately places on equal rights, justice or emancipation as the end goals for
feminism.
The move from a discourse of equal rights and social justice to
"internalising the revolution" or, in Slaughter's case, "a
national happiness project" is predicated on the erasure or exclusion of
the vast majority of women. Put differently, the feminist project these women
advocate does not and cannot take into account the reality of the vast majority
of U.S. women. A national project it is not.
Writing for Al Jazeera,
Lynne
Huffer has already reminded us that Sandberg is addressing a tiny group of
elites, while ignoring the fact that capitalism is profit-driven economic
system shaped like a pyramid, with workers at the bottom and executives like
Sheryl Sandberg at the top. Also,
Zillah
Eisenstein calls this imperial and trickle-down feminism. And the numbers prove
them right.
Figures show, for example, that in 2009, 27.5% of African-American women,
27.4% of Hispanic women and 13.5% of white women in the U.S. were living below
the poverty line. Moreover, 35.1% of households headed by single moms were food
insecure at some point in 2010, meaning that they did not have enough food at
all times for an active, healthy life.
Many working mothers in the U.S. are working double shifts, night shifts or
two to three jobs just in order to provide for their families.
Given these blatant class and race-biases, there is something profoundly
illiberal — and fundamentally incongruous — in the re-envisioning of liberated
womanhood as a reorientation of affect and as a better balancing act. U.S.
women do not need to change their attitude; they need, first, job security,
good childcare, livable wages for the work they do, and physical
security.
If Sheryl Sandberg is serious about sparking a conversation, then perhaps
she should start by asking who the cleaning women at Facebook are and how much
money they take home every month. Do they have a viable pension plan? Do they
receive paid holidays? And what kind of childcare services does Facebook offer
them?
Indeed, it is extremely disturbing that for these high-powered women the
"woman problem" is no longer about social justice, equity and women's
emancipation — as if these have already been achieved — but about affect, behavior
modification and well-roundedness.
Articulated at a time when Western liberal democracies are loudly decrying
women's lack of freedom in the Muslim world while lionizing gender equality in
their own societies, it actually makes a kind of cultural sense to shift the
conversation away from the gendered division of labor and profound social
injustices upon which U.S. liberalism itself is constituted.
The turn to the language of balance, internalizing the revolution and a
happiness project, in other words, puts the burden of unhappiness, failure and
disequilibrium once again on the shoulders of individual women while diverting
attention away from U.S. self-scrutiny with respect to its own "woman
problem.”
—Catherine Rottenberg is currently a visiting scholar
at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and has most recently edited
“Black Harlem and the Jewish Lower East Side: Narratives out of Time.” Article
from Al
Jazeera.
—————————
15. NEW ECUADOR LAW,
“FEMICIDE,” FIGHTS VIOLENCE
By Angela Melendez
QUITO, March 25, 2013 (IPS):
Ecuador hopes to reduce violence against women with a new law in the penal code
— “femicide,” meaning gender-motivated killings. Femicide is to be punishable
by up to 28 years in prison, similar to the sentence handed to hired killers.
The first statistics on gender violence in this South
American country were presented in 2012, indicating that 60% of women had
suffered some kind of mistreatment. The aim now is to include the crime of
femicide in the penal code reform introduced in Congress in late 2011. The new
code is expected to be approved by the legislature to be sworn in on May 24.
The bill describes femicide as the murder of a woman
“because she is a woman, in clearly established circumstances.” It goes on to
describe these circumstances: the perpetrator unsuccessfully attempted to
establish or re-establish an intimate relationship with the victim; they had
family or conjugal relations, lived together, were boyfriend/girlfriend,
friends or workmates; the murder was the result of the “reiterated
manifestation of violence against the victim” or of group rites, with or
without a weapon.
Ecuador follows on the heels of other Latin American
countries that have adopted femicide in their legislation: Argentina, Bolivia,
Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru. However, in several
of those countries — most notoriously Mexico and Guatemala — the classification
of femicide as a crime has failed so far to reduce the wave of violence against
women.
Ecuador adopted the crime of femicide after academic
studies and police reports indicated that crimes against women increased
sharply. The Metropolitan Observatory of Citizen Security reported 21 femicides
in Quito in 2012 and 28 in 2011.
In the most populous city, Guayaquil, on the Pacific
coast, of 137 murders of women committed between January 2010 and June 2012, 47
were femicides and just four ended in prison sentences, according to the report
“The paths of impunity,” presented Mar. 14 by the Ecuadorean Centre for Women’s
Promotion and Action (CEPAM).
Another reason that femicide was classified as a crime
was the shockwaves sent out by recent murders of women. Karina del Pozo, 20, went missing in Quito on Feb. 20.
Her body was found eight days later in an empty lot on the north side of the
city, showing signs of abuse and a blow to the head that caused her death.
According to the police investigation, she was allegedly killed by three young
male acquaintances when she refused to have sexual relations with one of them,
after a party which they attended together.
In mid-February, the body of a 16-year-old adolescent
girl was found in a burlap sack in the Andean province of Cotopaxi in the
center-north of the country, with signs of sexual violence. And on Feb. 28,
24-year-old Gabriela León was strangled and her body was dumped in a bag in the
northern city of Ibarra. In every case, the suspects or confessed murderers
were men.
Thousands of people took to the streets to demand
greater security, and the families of victims organized to demand that femicide
be classed as a specific crime.
