by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 28, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Worker Exploitation
By Rhodri Davies / Al Jazeera
Emiliano Veria searches through knee-high piles of garbage, in a dump that stretches to the horizon.
It’s a daily fight between him, scores of other scavengers and carrion birds. Amid smouldering waste, the pickers look for metals and clothes to sell. Alongside the vultures, they hunt for food to eat.
“It’s not better here than elsewhere, but I can’t find work and I have no money. The little I find here is to buy food. If not, I have nothing. Nothing here, no work,” Veria said.
The 29-year-old has been working at Cambalache – on the edge of Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela’s eastern Bolivar State – for more than a year, usually for three months at a time.
He, like his wife and children with him, is a member of the indigenous Warao.
President Hugo Chavez has championed indigenous communities, which make up about two per cent of Venezuela’s population. Before taking power in 1998, he said he would pay back the state’s “historic debt” to the customarily marginalised groups, and subsequently recognised them in the constitution.
The Warao number more than 20,000 people, who usually live on the waterways of the Orinoco Delta – a sparsely populated area the size of Belgium. There, the Orinoco River spreads out along 360km of the Atlantic Coast.
Of about 80 families – some 400 people – living at Cambalache, almost all are Warao. Working off the city’s waste can be fatal. Rubbish trucks have crushed several children and adults during the past few years. The workers are also mindful of thieves, who carry out violent attacks in the area – particularly when pickers are working at night, lit only by torchlight.
There is also the constant threat of disease – measles, tuberculosis and other respiratory problems.
Unfulfilled promises
Furthermore, non-governmental organisations say HIV is a problem for the population there, with women sometimes reportedly drifting into prostitution.
The work is hard, as 45-year-old scavenger Miguel Lopez said: “Those who arrive early earn more. You can work up to ten hours and still you can afford almost nothing.”
Perhaps an irony of their work is that the metals they search for – such as aluminum and steel – are in abundance in the region. Ciudad Guayana, a city of about 350,000, has been experiencing a boom, powered by steel plants and aluminum smelters. The area is rich in supplies of iron ore and bauxite.
As the metropolis has grown economically, the Warao population at Cambalache has increased with it. It has more than doubled since 1998, when there were 35 families living off the dump. Now, alongside residents’ shacks, the government has provided 30 concrete homes and there is a metal structure that is used as a school.
But community representatives say the state has not fulfilled promises to build 45 homes and a permanent school.
“They promise to come and we are wasting our time waiting,” Raimundo Maica, a community leader, said. “Because we have to go to the dump every day to work and solve our problem of having no food. We are not made of iron. They say that they will come on a specific day and hour and we’ve waited with empty bellies. Why do they work for others and not us?”
Of those who make the journey from the Delta to Cambalache, most take months using boats. Some have died from dehydration on the way. But still Cambalache is seen as a more promising venture than staying at home.
The waterways of the delta provide scant economic opportunity. Subsistence fishing and harvesting a small amount of crops is the norm.
One such community, near the Delta’s capital, Tecupita, is the Moriche. Here about 700 locals live on the banks of the River Orinoco, listlessly lying in hammocks after securing a daily catch of fish. Chavez’s administration has made much publicity of social welfare programmes – named Las Missiones – which include educational stipends for such villages.
Read more from Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/201242295633429772.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 21, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, White Supremacy, Worker Exploitation
By Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman / TomsDispatch
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.
Rarely can you find workers so pliable, easy to control, stripped of political rights, and subject to martial discipline at the first sign of recalcitrance — unless, that is, you traveled back to the nineteenth century when convict labor was commonplace nationwide. Indeed, a sentence of “confinement at hard labor” was then the essence of the American penal system. More than that, it was one vital way the United States became a modern industrial capitalist economy — at a moment, eerily like our own, when the mechanisms of capital accumulation were in crisis.
A Yankee Invention
What some historians call “the long Depression” of the nineteenth century, which lasted from the mid-1870s through the mid-1890s, was marked by frequent panics and slumps, mass bankruptcies, deflation, and self-destructive competition among businesses designed to depress costs, especially labor costs. So, too, we are living through a twenty-first century age of panics and austerity with similar pressures to shrink the social wage.
Convict labor has been and once again is an appealing way for business to address these dilemmas. Penal servitude now strikes us as a barbaric throwback to some long-lost moment that preceded the industrial revolution, but in that we’re wrong. From its first appearance in this country, it has been associated with modern capitalist industry and large-scale agriculture.
And that is only the first of many misconceptions about this peculiar institution. Infamous for the brutality with which prison laborers were once treated, indelibly linked in popular memory (and popular culture) with images of the black chain gang in the American South, it is usually assumed to be a Southern invention. So apparently atavistic, it seems to fit naturally with the retrograde nature of Southern life and labor, its economic and cultural underdevelopment, its racial caste system, and its desperate attachment to the “lost cause.”
As it happens, penal servitude — the leasing out of prisoners to private enterprise, either within prison walls or in outside workshops, factories, and fields — was originally known as a “Yankee invention.”
First used at Auburn prison in New York State in the 1820s, the system spread widely and quickly throughout the North, the Midwest, and later the West. It developed alongside state-run prison workshops that produced goods for the public sector and sometimes the open market.
A few Southern states also used it. Prisoners there, as elsewhere, however, were mainly white men, since slave masters, with a free hand to deal with the “infractions” of their chattel, had little need for prison. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery would, in fact, make an exception for penal servitude precisely because it had become the dominant form of punishment throughout the free states.
Nor were those sentenced to “confinement at hard labor” restricted to digging ditches or other unskilled work; nor were they only men. Prisoners were employed at an enormous range of tasks from rope- and wagon-making to carpet, hat, and clothing manufacturing (where women prisoners were sometimes put to work), as well coal mining, carpentry, barrel-making, shoe production, house-building, and even the manufacture of rifles. The range of petty and larger workshops into which the felons were integrated made up the heart of the new American economy.
Observing a free-labor textile mill and a convict-labor one on a visit to the United States, novelist Charles Dickens couldn’t tell the difference. State governments used the rental revenue garnered from their prisoners to meet budget needs, while entrepreneurs made outsized profits either by working the prisoners themselves or subleasing them to other businessmen.
Convict Labor in the ‘New South’
After the Civil War, the convict-lease system metamorphosed. In the South, it became ubiquitous, one of several grim methods — including the black codes, debt peonage, the crop-lien system, lifetime labor contracts, and vigilante terror — used to control and fix in place the newly emancipated slave. Those “freedmen” were eager to pursue their new liberty either by setting up as small farmers or by exercising the right to move out of the region at will or from job to job as “free wage labor” was supposed to be able to do.
If you assumed, however, that the convict-lease system was solely the brainchild of the apartheid all-white “Redeemer” governments that overthrew the Radical Republican regimes (which first ran the defeated Confederacy during Reconstruction) and used their power to introduce Jim Crow to Dixie, you would be wrong again. In Georgia, for instance, the Radical Republican state government took the initiative soon after the war ended. And this was because the convict-lease system was tied to the modernizing sectors of the post-war economy, no matter where in Dixie it was introduced or by whom.
So convicts were leased to coal-mining, iron-forging, steel-making, and railroad companies, including Tennessee Coal and Iron (TC&I), a major producer across the South, especially in the booming region around Birmingham, Alabama. More than a quarter of the coal coming out of Birmingham’s pits was then mined by prisoners. By the turn of the century, TC&I had been folded into J.P. Morgan’s United States Steel complex, which also relied heavily on prison laborers.
All the main extractive industries of the South were, in fact, wedded to the system. Turpentine and lumber camps deep in the fetid swamps and forest vastnesses of Georgia, Florida, and Louisiana commonly worked their convicts until they dropped dead from overwork or disease. The region’s plantation monocultures in cotton and sugar made regular use of imprisoned former slaves, including women. Among the leading families of Atlanta, Birmingham, and other “New South” metropolises were businessmen whose fortunes originated in the dank coal pits, malarial marshes, isolated forests, and squalid barracks in which their unfree peons worked, lived, and died.
Because it tended to grant absolute authority to private commercial interests and because its racial make-up in the post-slavery era was overwhelmingly African-American, the South’s convict-lease system was distinctive. Its caste nature is not only impossible to forget, but should remind us of the unbalanced racial profile of America’s bloated prison population today.
Moreover, this totalitarian-style control invited appalling brutalities in response to any sign of resistance: whippings, water torture, isolation in “dark cells,” dehydration, starvation, ice-baths, shackling with metal spurs riveted to the feet, and “tricing” (an excruciatingly painful process in which recalcitrant prisoners were strung up by the thumbs with fishing line attached to overhead pulleys). Even women in a hosiery mill in Tennessee were flogged, hung by the wrists, and placed in solitary confinement.
Living quarters for prisoner-workers were usually rat-infested and disease-ridden. Work lasted at least from sunup to sundown and well past the point of exhaustion. Death came often enough and bodies were cast off in unmarked graves by the side of the road or by incineration in coke ovens. Injury rates averaged one per worker per month, including respiratory failure, burnings, disfigurement, and the loss of limbs. Prison mines were called “nurseries of death.” Among Southern convict laborers, the mortality rate (not even including high levels of suicides) was eight times that among similar workers in the North — and it was extraordinarily high there.
The Southern system also stood out for the intimate collusion among industrial, commercial, and agricultural enterprises and every level of Southern law enforcement as well as the judicial system. Sheriffs, local justices of the peace, state police, judges, and state governments conspired to keep the convict-lease business humming. Indeed, local law officers depended on the leasing system for a substantial part of their income. (They pocketed the fines and fees associated with the “convictions,” a repayable sum that would be added on to the amount of time at “hard labor” demanded of the prisoner.)
The arrest cycle was synchronized with the business cycle, timed to the rise and fall of the demand for fresh labor. County and state treasuries similarly counted on such revenues, since the post-war South was so capital-starved that only renting out convicts assured that prisons could be built and maintained.
There was, then, every incentive to concoct charges or send people to jail for the most trivial offenses: vagrancy, gambling, drinking, partying, hopping a freight car, tarrying too long in town. A “pig law” in Mississippi assured you of five years as a prison laborer if you stole a farm animal worth more than $10. Theft of a fence rail could result in the same.
Read more from AlterNet: http://www.alternet.org/rights/155061/getting_paid_93_cents_a_day_in_america_corporations_bring_back_the_19th_century/?page=entire
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 15, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification, Worker Exploitation
By John Sweeney / The Guardian
Glencore, the commodity and mining firm worth £27bn, stands accused in the Democratic Republic of Congo of dumping raw acid and profiting from children working 150ft underground.
The revelations come as the notoriously secretive Swiss-based company, which floated on the London Stock Exchange last year, seeks to merge with mining firm Xstrata in a £50bn-plus deal. When Glencore floated in London, five of its partners became billionaires, but the biggest winner was Glencore’s chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, whose stake is worth £4bn. The company was founded in 1974 by Marc Rich, once one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, but now pardoned and outside Glencore.
In his first television interview, Glasenberg said that Glencore took corporate responsibility seriously, saying: “We care about the environment. We care about the local communities.”
But an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama has found Glencore dumping acid into a river and it discovered children as young as 10 working in the Tilwezembe mine, which was officially closed by Glencore in 2008. International law prohibits anyone under 18 working in a mine. Undercover researchers at Tilwezembe found under-18s who climbed down hand-dug mineshafts 150ft deep without safety or breathing equipment to dig copper and cobalt.
Glencore’s flotation prospectus says it stopped operating at the mine in 2008 because of a fall in the price of copper. The metal has since bounced back to record highs. In the meantime, the mine has been taken over by a local firm that pays artisanal or freelance miners, including under-18s, fixed prices for copper-ore nuggets. Glencore still owns the concession and plans to restart mining.
The number of accidents at Tilwezembe is extraordinarily high: Panorama was told that 60 miners died there last year, making the mine one of the most dangerous in the world.
Glasenberg said: “We definitely do not profit from child labour in any part of the world. This is adhered to strictly.” The child miners were part of a group of artisanal miners whom Glasenberg said “raided our land in 2010 against all of our authorisation. We are pleading with the government to remove the artisanal miners from our concession”.
But there is strong evidence that Glencore receives copper indirectly from the child labour mine. Panorama tracked a lorry laden with copper from Tilwezembe for 27 hours to a plant run by a major Glencore partner in Congo, Groupe Bazano. Copper from the Bazano plant has then been sent to Glencore’s smelter in Zambia, according to documents obtained by the programme.
Glencore denies buying the metal from Bazano. On the issue of whether copper from Tilwezembe goes to the Bazano plant, Glasenberg said: “I don’t know what the Bazano plant does. We don’t buy copper from Groupe Bazano.”
Asked if Glencore had taken copper in the past from Groupe Bazano, Glasenberg replied: “No, we don’t buy copper from Groupe Bazano.” Told by Panorama there was documentary evidence to the contrary, he said: “It cannot be.” Glasenberg said the company operated a strict policy whereby all copper was mined correctly, placed in bags with numbered seals and then sent to the smelter.
For its part, Groupe Bazano said it did not profit from child labour and had not taken copper ore from Tilwezembe since the mine was closed by Glencore.
Glencore is also facing criticism for damaging the environment in Congo. For three years it has run a large copper refinery at Luilu in Katanga province. Ore containing minerals is burnt with acid to free up the copper but the heavily polluted waste has been pumped straight into the Luilu river.
Glencore’s acid waterfall stank of toxic fumes when I visited it a few weeks ago. Upstream, the river used by local people to wash and fish was clear; downstream of the Glencore pipe, there was brown sludge. One local complained: “Fish can’t survive the acid. Glencore lacks any respect for people. No one would do that to another human being. It’s shocking.”
A Swiss NGO tested the acidity of the wastewater and found a pH value of 1.9, where 1 is pure acid and 7 neutral.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/apr/14/glencore-child-labour-acid-dumping-row
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 4, 2012 | Prostitution, Worker Exploitation
By Edith M. Lederer / Associated Press
The U.N. crime-fighting office said Tuesday that 2.4 million people across the globe are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 percent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves.
Yuri Fedotov, the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told a daylong General Assembly meeting on trafficking that 17 percent are trafficked to perform forced labor, including in homes and sweat shops.
He said $32 billion is being earned every year by unscrupulous criminals running human trafficking networks, and two out of every three victims are women.
Fighting these criminals “is a challenge of extraordinary proportions,” Fedotov said.
“At any one time, 2.4 million people suffer the misery of this humiliating and degrading crime,” he said.
According to Fedotov’s Vienna-based office, only one out of 100 victims of trafficking is ever rescued.
Fedotov called for coordinated local, regional and international responses that balance “progressive and proactive law enforcement” with actions that combat “the market forces driving human trafficking in many destination countries.”
Michelle Bachelet, who heads the new U.N. agency promoting women’s rights and gender equality called UN Women, said “it’s difficult to think of a crime more hideous and shocking than human trafficking. Yet, it is one of the fastest growing and lucrative crimes.”
Actress Mira Sorvino, the U.N. goodwill ambassador against human trafficking, told the meeting that “modern day slavery is bested only by the illegal drug trade for profitability,” but very little money and political will is being spent to combat trafficking.
“Transnational organized crime groups are adding humans to their product lists,” she said. “Satellites reveal the same routes moving them as arms and drugs.”
Sorvino said there is a lack of strong legislation and police training to combat trafficking. Even in the United States “only 10 percent of police stations have any protocol to deal with trafficking,” she said.
M. Cherif Bassiouni, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said to applause that “there is no human rights subject on which governments have said so much but done so little.”
Laws in most of the world criminalize prostitutes and other victims of trafficking but almost never criminalize the perpetrators “without whom that crime could not be performed,” he said.
Bassiouni said the figure of 2.4 million people trafficked at any time is not reflective of the overall problem because “at the end of 10 years you will have a significantly larger number who have gone through the experience.”
He urged a global reassessment of “who is a victim and who is a criminal” and called for criminalizing not only those on the demand side using trafficked women, children and men, but all those in the chain of supplying trafficking victims.
From The Washington Post:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 22, 2012 | Human Supremacy, Movement Building & Support, Worker Exploitation, Worker Solidarity
By Stephanie McMillan
Environmental destruction is the most urgent and immediate problem we face. If we don’t solve it, nothing else will matter. I would argue that it’s the principle contradiction of the current period. Through it, the common ruin of contending classes is becoming increasingly likely, but as the economic and ecological crises converge, the possibility of liberation and social transformation also opens up. But only if we organize to make that happen.
The problem is accelerating because of capital’s constant need to expand into new areas. They have entered a period of extreme extraction, on a scale never before seen: fracking, oil from tar sands and deep sea drilling, mountaintop removal. Because of the falling rate of profit, capitalism can never economically catch up with itself and must constantly break through its limits in a vain attempt to resolve its own inherent internal contradiction.
Feudalism and all forms of class society have had internal contradictions that drove them to expand. But capitalism has taken this to a new level, because instead of just requiring more resources to continue existing (to feed an expanding agrarian population, for example), it requires constant growth of production to expand for its own sake. The needs of the population aren’t the point, and commodities aren’t even the point—accumulating surplus-value to expand capital itself is the entire point. This is what pushes it to exceed limits on a scale previously unimaginable.
But we live on a finite planet with physical limits, that are being reached. This is a difference from earlier economic crises. Capitalism is driven to consume everything external to itself, converting it to commodities, and it won’t stop doing so on its own until it kills all life on the planet. Capitalism is fundamentally in contradiction with life itself.
As this problem becomes more acute, and affects people more immediately, more people will come into motion to oppose it. We need to find ways of uniting those who can fight capitalism from both the standpoint of class liberation, and from an environmentalist perspective, or more precisely, biocentrism. Alone, neither can achieve a sustainable and classless future society. These movements are allied and complementary. Each will have different strategies and approaches, but both will have better chances for success the more they cooperate in the immediate period.
Each movement currently has gaps, which are filled in by the other. The major flaw in movements for class liberation has been anthropocentrism, a total focus on human needs and a utilitarian view of nature.
The major flaw of environmentalism (and the contemporary labor movement in the US as well, which has been destroyed or co-opted by sold-out unions) has been a lack of class analysis and a lack of understanding of capitalism as a system that needs to be dismantled, an economic system characterized by class domination and protected by a state that needs to be defeated. Because of this incomplete picture, many fall victim to illusions of reformism, bourgeois democracy, technotopianism, lifestylism, green capitalism, and other dead end schemes.
Many radical or deep green environmentalists get closer to the heart of the problem and fight to defend land and decrease production. These are both necessary, but not alone sufficient. We can not win—we can neither liberate ourselves nor save the planet—without defeating and dismantling the entire system of capitalism and fundamentally transforming the structure of society on a classless basis.
We can attack capitalism on many fronts, but at the center of it is the conversion of raw materials (life) into commodities through the capitalist exploitation of labor. The point is the extraction of surplus value from the worker. There is no other reason for commodities to be produced. So we must break the social relation of class domination that makes exploitation possible, and which characterizes a mode of production that requires the extraction of resources and results in the destruction of the environment.
On the left, the theory of productive forces has led to a widespread productivist/mechanical view of reaching socialism: by developing and fully mechanizing production, we will reach reach abundance and the end of labor itself. It is increasingly obvious that this scenario at odds with the reality around us, yet there is a general reluctance to tell the truth: that a lot of production, everything not necessary for survival, simply has to end. No one likes being the person who brings the bad news that we have to make do with less. It’s harder to organize around.
And so the idea of socialism, the common ownership of the means of production and equitable distribution of goods, also doesn’t go far enough. We need to change our relationship with the natural world. It is not there for us to use, but instead we are part of it and depend on its overall health. We need to define a different relationship with it than as a set of resources. A sustainable economy can only involve production that is subordinate to nature and that fits within its physical limits to reproduce itself—that is determined not by human desires and whims, but by our actual needs, which are dependent on a healthy planet above all.
The system fosters the illusion of a contradiction between the interests of the dominated classes (the working class in particular)—and the ecosystem that we all depend upon for life. Through the dispossession of land-based peoples at its stage of primary accumulation, capitalism creates a situation of dependency for workers, who no longer have access to their own traditional means of subsistence.
This is how they’ve set us up to demand that our needs be satisfied in ways that actually help the enemy and harm ourselves. For example, the demand for jobs is almost unquestioned in the labor movement, but this demand only helps the capitalist to further exploit us at cheaper rates. What we should be demanding is a universal income, which would hinder exploitation, hurt capital, and would be compatible with the ecological necessity of reducing production.
Instead of demanding a temporary job building a pipeline, for example, we need to be insisting on the right to a livable income whether we have a job or not. And if we’re unemployed, we should be spending our time joining those who are putting themselves on the line to stand in the way of oil pipelines, mountaintop removal, and nuclear power plants – such as the five Lakotas who were arrested a couple of weeks ago for participating in a successful community blockade of trucks that were coming onto Pine Ridge Indian land in South Dakota with materials for building the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.
We must build organizations that bring to bear the energy and interests of all the popular classes and social groupings against capitalism. For reds, a major task is to build autonomous organizations of the working class to break capitalists’ ability to accumulate surplus value. In addition, capital should be blocked at the various points in its flow, and alliances are needed to build mass movements that can attack capitalism at each of these points—including and especially (as the ecological crisis becomes increasingly acute), defending the land by preventing extraction.
Indigenous struggles, in particular, need to be supported and allied with as part of any anti-capitalist initiative. For one thing, it must be acknowledged and addressed that the land that provides all our sustenance has been stolen and colonized. Furthermore, indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers are the only groups who have practice with living sustainably, who can offer alternatives to this way of life that have been proven successful.
The extraction of resources and the exploitation of labor could not even occur without dispossessing people of the land that previously sustained them, a dispossession that continues and a subsequent degradation that has accelerated to an apocalyptic rate. These economic processes are intertwined, mutually compulsory, defining elements of capitalist production, and a combined effort to stop both have a much better chance of defeating our common enemy.
From Press Action: http://web.archive.org/web/20130419191311/http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/mcmillan03202012/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 10, 2012 | Male Supremacy, Worker Exploitation
By Gail Dines / Counterpunch
Ever since Rush let out his true feelings about women as “sluts” and “prostitutes” – and inadvertently revealed his porn use – the media and blogosphere has been alive with discussions about the Republican “war on women”. You have to hand it to these Republican fools, they do seem to be getting themselves into trouble a lot lately with their inability to mask their putrid misogyny. Yes, there is a war on women, but is it is not just the Republicans who have been waging this.
What gets less air time is the never-ending war that both Democrats and Republicans have been waging against women with policies that create an economic climate that makes women and children’s lives intolerable. Cutting education, healthcare, and welfare programs always hurts women and children the most. And while we are at it, we may as well admit that most men aren’t having such a wonderful time either, as they struggle to survive in a society where the rich seem to have limitless greed and a blood lust for destroying the lives of those of us who don’t have a country club membership.
Yes, I am enraged when the ridiculous right come out with new and improved statements about women being wanton whores and all, but I can’t help having a grudging admiration for the Republicans because what they are doing makes good political sense. Creating media distractions is not a new strategy. In the past, the demonization of African Americans has been an excellent way to get the white working class to vote against their class interests. Who can forget Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queen” speeches, or George H. W. Bush’s Willy Horton rampage? Those in power will do whatever it takes to get the working class to take their eyes off the rich, and if this means holding up an entire race as the cause of America’s problems, then so be it.
And now it is women’s turn. With our insatiable sexual appetites, our fondness for aborting “unborn children”, and our love of reproducing outside of state sanctioned marriage, we are, it seems, slowly but surely destroying everything that made this country great. The social conservatives are doing their buddies, the fiscal conservatives, a great service here because the latter get to carry on stealthily dismantling this country piece by piece, while the media spend time talking about whether women are indeed sluts!
My solution is that all women should admit that we are indeed wanton for having a vagina, and then insist that the media move on to discuss the way the elite, who control both the Democratic and Republican parties, are destroying this country. We should refuse to play their game by defending ourselves against stupid, adolescent slurs, and instead redefine the problem. And the problem is that women have to live in a male dominated society that systematically and willfully denies them a life of economic, political and sexual equality. Things may get a bit worse under the Republicans, but let’s not forgot that is was Bill Clinton who spearheaded the assault on welfare mothers, while of course, busy spilling his semen into the lap of a woman young enough to be his daughter.
I am so happy that Rush seems to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but please don’t let us squander this moment by focusing just on his sex-baiting slurs. We need to think bigger and bolder than this, and push for a more politically ambitious goal of redistributing wealth and power. We should never, ever have to beg men for our rights, and the only way to put an end to this, is to dismantle the racist, sexist, capitalist structures that still dominate America.
GAIL DINES is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. Her latest book is Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked our Sexuality (Beacon Press)
From Counterpunch: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/09/a-putrid-misogyny/
