Originally published at Socialist Worker.
I AGREE with Lisa Seibert and Russell Pryor ("Defending Wikileaks or Assange?") that the left should not uncritically defend WikiLeaks' Julian Assange from rape or sexual assault charges--several articles from leftists and progressives that tried to demonize Assange's accusers were shocking and disappointing in their sexism.
But there’s more to this question. The reality is that the rape allegations are being used to punish Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, not to challenge sexual assault.
First of all, writers other than left-wingers have treated the allegations similarly. Far-right pundit Glenn Beck went on a sexist rant about the case as well, using pictures of Barbie Dolls to represent Assange's accusers and raising the idea that the charges against Assange are part of an "uber-left" plot to "discredit the establishment." And the right-wing British tabloid The Daily Mail has published several articles undermining the accusers and calling their morality into question.
Nicole Colson is correct to point out that the charges against Assange, which had been dropped only to be brought up again after WikiLeaks' recent release of diplomatic cables, are being used in an attempt to extradite Assange to the U.S. to face manufactured charges here for exposing U.S. wrongdoing in Iraq, Afghanistan and now around the world ("WikiWitchhunt").
However, by formally "taking rape seriously" by going to such great lengths to retrieve Assange for questioning, the Swedish, British, and U.S. governments and Interpol, with the complicity and support of the mainstream media, are in actuality undermining genuine efforts to combat rape and sexual assault.
As Wendy Murphy points out in the San Francisco Sentinel, the attention paid by authorities to Assange's alleged perpetration of sexual assault is an anomaly: "If Assange were any other guy, he would not be sitting in a British jail, and there would have been no international manhunt, no matter how may times his condom broke during sex."
That the charges are being brought to punish and silence Assange and WikiLeaks for their efforts to expose government brutality and corruption--and not because the governments involved are genuinely crusading opponents of sexual assault--belittles the charges and exploits the women who brought them in this case and in any other.
The message is, as Murphy concludes, that "the value of a woman's autonomy is measured by the political benefits of prosecuting the man who took it," not as something that should be protected on principle as a prerequisite for women's equality.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BEYOND TRIVIALIZING rape and sexual assault by opportunistically using it as a tool for the political repression of Assange and WikiLeaks, press coverage of the scandal is serving the purpose of drawing attention away from the damning revelations brought to light by Wikileaks, which expose institutional crimes on a far grander scale than those for which Assange stands accused.
Among these is a cable that describes the efforts of Afghanistan's interior minister and U.S. diplomats to cover up reports that DynCorp, a military contractor hired by the U.S. government to train Afghan police and protect President Hamid Karzai, among other things, recently provided drugs and young boys for a party involving the boys dancing for and being sold for sex with Afghan police officers.
This is not the first time that DynCorp, a corporation that receives some 95 percent of its funding from the U.S. government, has been implicated for involvement in sex trafficking and child prostitution.
David Isenberg wrote in the Huffington Post that in 1999 DynCorp fired Kathryn Bolkovac, a whistleblower who accused DynCorp employees of "rape and the buying and selling of girls as young as 12.
"DynCorp, hired to perform police duties for the UN and aircraft maintenance for the U.S. Army, were implicated in prostituting the children, whereas the company's Bosnia site supervisor filmed himself raping two women. A number of employees were transferred out of the country, but with no legal consequences for them."
Another whistleblower, Ben Johnston was fired after alleging that these girls were kidnapped by DynCorp and trafficked to Bosnia from various countries across Eastern Europe.
Similarly, Isenberg describes a case in 2004 where DynCorp employees in Colombia "distributed [and sold] a video in which they could be observed sexually violating underage girls from the town of Melgar."
One of the girls shown in the video committed suicide in the aftermath of the video's release.
Despite repeated evidence of DynCorp's engagement in sex trafficking and child prostitution and sex slavery, they have received contracts from the U.S. government continuously since 1951, about $2 billion annually in recent years.
Over the years, the U.S. government has deployed DynCorp contractors everywhere from Bosnia to Angola, from Haiti to Afghanistan and Iraq, and even in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
If the Swedish, British and U.S. governments took sex crimes seriously no matter who the perpetrator, we would expect coordinated international efforts to investigate, expose and prosecute DynCorp for these allegations of engaging in the trafficking of minors for sex slavery on multiple continents.
And U.S. diplomats would be pushing for the U.S. to stop giving DynCorp lucrative multibillion-dollar contracts, rather than being exposed by WikiLeaks for helping to cover up these crimes.
But for the U.S. government and other powers, imperial might is a goal that trumps women's rights any and every day, as evidenced by the crisis levels of rape and sexual assault against women in the U.S. military, routinely covered up.
The astounding hypocrisy and crass opportunism brought to light by comparing the "international manhunt" for Julian Assange to the U.S. government's continued shoveling of billions to DynCorp in the face of their atrocious crimes brings to mind what the socialist Rosa Luxemburg said about capitalist "justice" some 100 years ago: it is "like a net, which allowed the voracious sharks to escape, while the little sardines were caught."
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Saddled with student debt
Originally published at Socialist Worker.
C. CRYN Johannsen, an "advocate for the educated indentured servant," wrote recently in the Huffington Post about the disturbing number of e-mails she receives from people whose student loans are so high that they've contemplated suicide as the only way out.
A recent article in the Valley Advocate, "Killer Loans," mentions a journalism graduate who owes $120,000 and anticipates paying as much as $1 million over 30 years, who said they would kill themselves if their cosigner, their mother, wouldn't be burdened with the debt.
As the Advocate points out, unlike many other forms of debt, student loans cannot be canceled by declaring bankruptcy, and lenders can take a cut of borrowers' paychecks or even Social Security checks if they fall behind payments on their loans.
"Delinquent" borrowers can even have their professional licenses revoked if they miss payments, an absurdity that makes it even more difficult for a borrower to pay.
According to the Los Angeles Times, "state budget cuts and declines in philanthropy and endowments helped push the cost of college tuition up much higher than general inflation across the country this year, amounting to an increase of 7.9 percent at public campuses and 4.5 percent at private ones."
Some states have seen even higher tuition hikes for public higher education, with students in Washington and Florida facing increases of well over 10 percent, and those in California facing increases as high as 30 percent.
This comes after decades of tuition hikes outpacing inflation. According to the College Board, in-state tuition at public four-year universities went up 54 percent from 1997-8 to 2007-8, and 49 percent the decade before that.
These increases are making higher education increasingly inaccessible for working-class people, especially people of color, and are saddling those who are able to make it through school with insurmountable debts in a historically poor job market (especially for young people), creating a situation where many recent graduates see suicide as the only way out of what Johannsen rightly refers to as modern-day "indentured servitude."
Instead of pursuing their dreams, graduates are forced to toil away, oftentimes at two or three jobs they hate (if they can even find a job) just so they can make their exorbitant monthly student loan payments.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MEANWHILE, AS the Advocate points out, lenders are making billions from interest and fees on student loans, profiting off of the misery of those who took on debt in order to finance their education, something that should be a basic human right.
Opponents of debt forgiveness argue that repaying one's student loans is a matter of "personal responsibility."
But why should individual workers be saddled with obscene debts in order to obtain a basic right like higher education, which benefits not just the individual student but all of society, which is enriched by the contributions of an educated populace? And meanwhile, the bankers who couldn't pay the debts they wracked up as a result of speculation, which crashed the economy, get bailed out.
Socialists should demand that all the debts burdening working-class people be erased.
Over the past 30-plus years, the top 1 percent has reaped almost all the gains of economic growth, exploiting the working class and poor at an ever-increasing rate. If anyone owes a debt, it's the rich who swim in more money than they could ever dream of spending, while the majority of people, those who produce that wealth, sink deeper into debt to pay for basic needs like education, housing, health care and food.
The bailouts and low interest rates for financial institutions reveal the capitalists' agenda: privatize profits, socialize the losses.
We should demand the opposite: socialize the wealth to meet the needs of all, and leave the lenders--almost always the wealthy lending us the money they appropriated by exploiting us in the first place--holding the bill.
C. CRYN Johannsen, an "advocate for the educated indentured servant," wrote recently in the Huffington Post about the disturbing number of e-mails she receives from people whose student loans are so high that they've contemplated suicide as the only way out.
A recent article in the Valley Advocate, "Killer Loans," mentions a journalism graduate who owes $120,000 and anticipates paying as much as $1 million over 30 years, who said they would kill themselves if their cosigner, their mother, wouldn't be burdened with the debt.
As the Advocate points out, unlike many other forms of debt, student loans cannot be canceled by declaring bankruptcy, and lenders can take a cut of borrowers' paychecks or even Social Security checks if they fall behind payments on their loans.
"Delinquent" borrowers can even have their professional licenses revoked if they miss payments, an absurdity that makes it even more difficult for a borrower to pay.
According to the Los Angeles Times, "state budget cuts and declines in philanthropy and endowments helped push the cost of college tuition up much higher than general inflation across the country this year, amounting to an increase of 7.9 percent at public campuses and 4.5 percent at private ones."
Some states have seen even higher tuition hikes for public higher education, with students in Washington and Florida facing increases of well over 10 percent, and those in California facing increases as high as 30 percent.
This comes after decades of tuition hikes outpacing inflation. According to the College Board, in-state tuition at public four-year universities went up 54 percent from 1997-8 to 2007-8, and 49 percent the decade before that.
These increases are making higher education increasingly inaccessible for working-class people, especially people of color, and are saddling those who are able to make it through school with insurmountable debts in a historically poor job market (especially for young people), creating a situation where many recent graduates see suicide as the only way out of what Johannsen rightly refers to as modern-day "indentured servitude."
Instead of pursuing their dreams, graduates are forced to toil away, oftentimes at two or three jobs they hate (if they can even find a job) just so they can make their exorbitant monthly student loan payments.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MEANWHILE, AS the Advocate points out, lenders are making billions from interest and fees on student loans, profiting off of the misery of those who took on debt in order to finance their education, something that should be a basic human right.
Opponents of debt forgiveness argue that repaying one's student loans is a matter of "personal responsibility."
But why should individual workers be saddled with obscene debts in order to obtain a basic right like higher education, which benefits not just the individual student but all of society, which is enriched by the contributions of an educated populace? And meanwhile, the bankers who couldn't pay the debts they wracked up as a result of speculation, which crashed the economy, get bailed out.
Socialists should demand that all the debts burdening working-class people be erased.
Over the past 30-plus years, the top 1 percent has reaped almost all the gains of economic growth, exploiting the working class and poor at an ever-increasing rate. If anyone owes a debt, it's the rich who swim in more money than they could ever dream of spending, while the majority of people, those who produce that wealth, sink deeper into debt to pay for basic needs like education, housing, health care and food.
The bailouts and low interest rates for financial institutions reveal the capitalists' agenda: privatize profits, socialize the losses.
We should demand the opposite: socialize the wealth to meet the needs of all, and leave the lenders--almost always the wealthy lending us the money they appropriated by exploiting us in the first place--holding the bill.
Monday, October 18, 2010
The week of LGBT betrayals
Published at Socialistworker.org.
THE OBAMA administration sprang into action last week to block LGBT rights--a stark contrast to its snail's pace when it comes to any initiative to promote equality and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
On October 12, the Justice Department announced it would appeal a decision by a federal judge that declared the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional because of its denial of benefits to same-sex couples married in Massachusetts.
DOMA was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton. It defines marriage as between one man and one woman, denies married same-sex couples over 1,100 federal benefits granted to heterosexual couples, and permits states to ignore same-sex marriages performed in other states.
As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama said he considered DOMA to constitute unjust discrimination and promised to work toward the law's repeal. Yet this isn't even the first time the Obama administration has defended DOMA in federal court.
In June 2009--within days of Obama declaring the first LGBT Pride Month of his presidency--Justice Department lawyers responded to a legal challenge to DOMA by arguing that the law was constitutional and non-discriminatory. As precedents, it cited laws that barred marriage in cases of incest and pedophilia.
Last week, the administration heaped more insult on injury when the Justice Department appealed another court ruling that was positive for LGBT rights--a September 9 decision by federal judge Virginia Phillips of California, who ruled that the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy unconstitutional.
A month after issuing the decision, Phillips ordered the military to end any investigations or discharges related to "don't ask, don't tell." The Justice Department responded with an appeal and a request for Phillips' order to be stayed--in other words, a green light for discharges and inquiries to go ahead.
DADT was also instituted by Bill Clinton and bars LGBT people from serving in the military if they are open about their sexual orientation. More than 13,000 veterans have been discharged under the policy since 1993, most losing their benefits in the process.
The administration's hypocrisy on "don't ask, don't tell" was on full display. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that President Obama "strongly believes that this policy is unjust [and that DADT] should end. We have to figure out an orderly way for it to end...that's consistent with our obligations in fighting two wars."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IF BARACK Obama and the Democratic Party he leads were truly the champions of LGBT equality they have so often claimed to be, they would have kept their promises and put an end to DOMA and DADT long ago.
But even setting aside the broken promises over the longer term, the Justice Department's actions last week are a slap in the face.
No one is "forcing"--as White House officials implied--the administration to appeal the decisions that declare DOMA and DADT unconstitutional. As columnist Dan Savage pointed out on his blog, the Justice Department under Bill Clinton declined to appeal a 1996 decision that overruled a ban on HIV-positive people from serving in the military.
The Democrats have a 75-seat majority in the House of Representatives, and an 18-seat edge in the Senate--they even had a filibuster-proof 60-seat supermajority in the Senate for most of last year. Plus Obama began his term in office riding a wave of historic enthusiasm and voter turnout, especially from young people and people of color demanding change after eight years of George W. Bush.
But in almost two years, the Democrats have done next to nothing to honor their promises on LGBT rights.
In fact, even in the lead-up to the 2008 election, there were hints of the betrayals and hypocrisy to come. Then-candidate Obama, while opposing California's Proposition 8 to overturn same-sex marriage, insisted that he believed "marriage is between a man and woman and I am not in favor of gay marriage."
Once in office, Obama dragged his feet on repealing DOMA and allowed the Pentagon to continue to discharge gay, lesbian and bisexual soldiers under "don't ask, don't tell." On top of that, despite months of promising a vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would have banned workplace discrimination against LGBT people, Democrats allowed the bill to die in committee yet again.
All this is despite a recent Associated Press-GfK poll showing that a majority of people support the right to same-sex marriage--a first--and numerous polls showing more than 75 percent of people, including large majorities of Republicans, support LGBT people serving openly in the military. Nearly 90 percent of people support ENDA, according to polls--even 77 percent of Republicans oppose employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Obama could have put an end to discharges under DADT by executive order. Instead, the House voted in May to attach repeal to the 2011 defense spending bill, which spurred a Republican filibuster spearheaded by Sen. John McCain. The defense bill never came to a vote in the Senate.
The language of the House amendment calls for repealing DADT after the end of a Pentagon study supposedly aimed at assessing the impact of dropping the policy. The study is an insult, amounting to an invitation for anti-gay troops to weigh in on a civil rights question that should not be up for debate in the first place. As James Withers pointed out at 365Gay:
As SocialistWorker.org columnist Sherry Wolf pointed out on her blog: "We are equal and must start being treated that way legally. While politicians of both parties treat our rights as if they are playthings, we don't need to act as if theirs is a sane strategy."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ONE MORE sign of how low the Obama administration has sunk: By appealing decisions that would have overturned DOMA and DADT, the Obama administration has been outflanked on LGBT rights by Republicans--such as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in September refused to appeal a federal ruling overturning Prop 8, and members of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group whose challenge of DADT in the courts led to Phillips' decision.
Hell, even Dick Cheney now supports same-sex marriage!
With the administration's appeals to block court rulings in favor of LGBT civil rights and with Congress refusing to pass pro-gay legislation, it's clear who's standing in the way of progress toward LGBT equality--Obama and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate.
When Robert Gibbs says that "we have to figure out an orderly way for [DADT] to end," it's obvious that the Obama administration is telling LGBT people to wait for their rights.
We should remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
THE OBAMA administration sprang into action last week to block LGBT rights--a stark contrast to its snail's pace when it comes to any initiative to promote equality and justice for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
On October 12, the Justice Department announced it would appeal a decision by a federal judge that declared the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional because of its denial of benefits to same-sex couples married in Massachusetts.
DOMA was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton. It defines marriage as between one man and one woman, denies married same-sex couples over 1,100 federal benefits granted to heterosexual couples, and permits states to ignore same-sex marriages performed in other states.
As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama said he considered DOMA to constitute unjust discrimination and promised to work toward the law's repeal. Yet this isn't even the first time the Obama administration has defended DOMA in federal court.
In June 2009--within days of Obama declaring the first LGBT Pride Month of his presidency--Justice Department lawyers responded to a legal challenge to DOMA by arguing that the law was constitutional and non-discriminatory. As precedents, it cited laws that barred marriage in cases of incest and pedophilia.
Last week, the administration heaped more insult on injury when the Justice Department appealed another court ruling that was positive for LGBT rights--a September 9 decision by federal judge Virginia Phillips of California, who ruled that the U.S. military's "don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) policy unconstitutional.
A month after issuing the decision, Phillips ordered the military to end any investigations or discharges related to "don't ask, don't tell." The Justice Department responded with an appeal and a request for Phillips' order to be stayed--in other words, a green light for discharges and inquiries to go ahead.
DADT was also instituted by Bill Clinton and bars LGBT people from serving in the military if they are open about their sexual orientation. More than 13,000 veterans have been discharged under the policy since 1993, most losing their benefits in the process.
The administration's hypocrisy on "don't ask, don't tell" was on full display. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters that President Obama "strongly believes that this policy is unjust [and that DADT] should end. We have to figure out an orderly way for it to end...that's consistent with our obligations in fighting two wars."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
IF BARACK Obama and the Democratic Party he leads were truly the champions of LGBT equality they have so often claimed to be, they would have kept their promises and put an end to DOMA and DADT long ago.
But even setting aside the broken promises over the longer term, the Justice Department's actions last week are a slap in the face.
No one is "forcing"--as White House officials implied--the administration to appeal the decisions that declare DOMA and DADT unconstitutional. As columnist Dan Savage pointed out on his blog, the Justice Department under Bill Clinton declined to appeal a 1996 decision that overruled a ban on HIV-positive people from serving in the military.
The Democrats have a 75-seat majority in the House of Representatives, and an 18-seat edge in the Senate--they even had a filibuster-proof 60-seat supermajority in the Senate for most of last year. Plus Obama began his term in office riding a wave of historic enthusiasm and voter turnout, especially from young people and people of color demanding change after eight years of George W. Bush.
But in almost two years, the Democrats have done next to nothing to honor their promises on LGBT rights.
In fact, even in the lead-up to the 2008 election, there were hints of the betrayals and hypocrisy to come. Then-candidate Obama, while opposing California's Proposition 8 to overturn same-sex marriage, insisted that he believed "marriage is between a man and woman and I am not in favor of gay marriage."
Once in office, Obama dragged his feet on repealing DOMA and allowed the Pentagon to continue to discharge gay, lesbian and bisexual soldiers under "don't ask, don't tell." On top of that, despite months of promising a vote on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would have banned workplace discrimination against LGBT people, Democrats allowed the bill to die in committee yet again.
All this is despite a recent Associated Press-GfK poll showing that a majority of people support the right to same-sex marriage--a first--and numerous polls showing more than 75 percent of people, including large majorities of Republicans, support LGBT people serving openly in the military. Nearly 90 percent of people support ENDA, according to polls--even 77 percent of Republicans oppose employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, Obama could have put an end to discharges under DADT by executive order. Instead, the House voted in May to attach repeal to the 2011 defense spending bill, which spurred a Republican filibuster spearheaded by Sen. John McCain. The defense bill never came to a vote in the Senate.
The language of the House amendment calls for repealing DADT after the end of a Pentagon study supposedly aimed at assessing the impact of dropping the policy. The study is an insult, amounting to an invitation for anti-gay troops to weigh in on a civil rights question that should not be up for debate in the first place. As James Withers pointed out at 365Gay:
The irony is that DADT is still the law of the land, but the very soldiers most severely impacted by the policy have no right [to] talk. No one is keeping gay grunts from speaking up at town hall meetings, but coming out will lead to dismissal. So an up-and-down study of what it means to have out gay troops has no gay troops publicly and honestly talking (unless they want to get booted).On top of that, the repeal was attached to a bloated military budget at a time when the U.S. is engaged in multiple unjust wars and occupations, while millions suffer unemployment and cuts to the social safety net at home--a cynical attempt to pit the LGBT civil rights movement against antiwar forces.
As SocialistWorker.org columnist Sherry Wolf pointed out on her blog: "We are equal and must start being treated that way legally. While politicians of both parties treat our rights as if they are playthings, we don't need to act as if theirs is a sane strategy."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ONE MORE sign of how low the Obama administration has sunk: By appealing decisions that would have overturned DOMA and DADT, the Obama administration has been outflanked on LGBT rights by Republicans--such as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who in September refused to appeal a federal ruling overturning Prop 8, and members of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group whose challenge of DADT in the courts led to Phillips' decision.
Hell, even Dick Cheney now supports same-sex marriage!
With the administration's appeals to block court rulings in favor of LGBT civil rights and with Congress refusing to pass pro-gay legislation, it's clear who's standing in the way of progress toward LGBT equality--Obama and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate.
When Robert Gibbs says that "we have to figure out an orderly way for [DADT] to end," it's obvious that the Obama administration is telling LGBT people to wait for their rights.
We should remember the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail": "For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Super-rich and super-angry
Originally published at Socialist Worker.
ANGER IS on the rise in America. People are looking at the policies coming out of Washington, they're fed up--they're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore.
Only the outrage you're most likely to hear about in the mainstream media isn't coming from the people you'd expect: the millions of people facing unemployment, for example, or the victims of racist scapegoating.
Amazingly, it turns out that Wall Street and the richest 1 percent of the U.S. population are just furious.
They're sick and tired of the U.S. government "whackin' them with a stick," as Anthony Scaramucci, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund manager, whined to President Barack Obama at a recent CNBC town hall.
Then there's Stephen Schwarzman, whose $4.1 billion fortune makes him the 69th richest person in the United States, according to Forbes magazine. Schwarzman compared Obama's move to close a tax loophole--one that allows Wall Street investors like Schwarzman to pay only 15 percent in taxes on private equity income, about the same rate as someone making $38,200--to Hitler's invasion of Poland.
And there are those who are complaining about the Democrats' plan to extend Bush-era tax breaks for everyone but those in the top income bracket. Under this measure, taxes on income over $250,000 would go from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, affecting approximately the top 2 percent of the U.S. population.
It's important to realize that this higher tax rate would only apply to income above $250,000 in a year. So a household making $260,000 a year wouldn't pay 4.9 percent more on their total income, only on the last $10,000: their tax bill would increase by $460.
Nevertheless, to Todd Henderson, a law professor at the University of Chicago, the proposal to not extend the Bush tax cuts on the super-rich is proof that "the world we are now living in has that familiar Marxian tone." (If only.) Henderson says he and his wife, a doctor, could be "subject to a big tax hike," and he worries that he might have to give up such "necessities" as his gardener and housekeeper.
After decades of tax cuts, the lion's share of which have benefited the wealthy, and in the wake of an economic meltdown that saw the banks get bailed out while the rest of us are left to pick up the tab, the rich have some nerve complaining about a minor tax increase and a few harsh words from the president.
Apparently not content to have their asses saved, they expect them to be kissed as well.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE'S PLENTY to be angry about, but the rich aren't the ones with a reason to complain.
They've enjoyed rising wealth for decades, while working people have compensated for stagnant wages and the rising costs of housing, education and health care by taking on record levels of household debt, and working longer hours for lower wages and fewer benefits.
Income inequality is at an all-time high in the United States. As noted in the Huffington Post's report on a study by Emmanual Saez, in 2007, "The top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000...as of 2007, the top [10%] of American earners...pulled in 49.7 percent [of all income]."
Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer explains how it's possible that median household income increased by only 2 percent since 1989, while total Gross Domestic Product increased 63 percent. Incomes for the top 5 percent went up 75 percent, with gains concentrated at the very top:
Meanwhile, foreclosures are on the rise, and the most recent Census Bureau data shows poverty at a record high of 43.6 million people.
As David DeGraw points out at Alternet, the federal poverty line ($22,050 for a family of four) and gaps in the statistics grossly understate the real crisis of poverty: they fail to count millions, low-ball what qualifies as "poor," and ignore important factors like household debt. According to DeGraw:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
UNFORTUNATELY, THE Obama administration is paying more attention to the anger emanating from Wall Street than to the crisis of poverty and unemployment faced by the majority of Americans.
Another sign of the White Houses priorities: Obama's top economics adviser Larry Summers is stepping down, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the most likely candidate to replace him is former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy. According to Democracy Now! Mulcahy laid off 30 percent of Xerox workers during her time at the helm of the company, and cut health benefits for retirees.
While once upon a time, Obama talked tough about Wall Street, calling the executives and investors "fat cats," in office, he continued the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and signed toothless financial reform legislation, while simultaneously doing next to nothing to ease the impact of the crisis on the majority of people.
And now, Obama is softening his rhetoric still further in response to criticism from the wealthy. As he said at the CNBC town hall meeting, "I've constantly said what sets America apart...is we've got the most dynamic free-market economy in the world. And that has to be preserved."
We should be the ones who are angry--that the top 1 percent are sitting on $13 trillion while states cut social services, health care and education just when people need them most because of budget shortfalls and cutbacks we're told are inevitable.
While the anger of the wealthy has been making headlines--and eliciting a response from the politicians in Washington--the truth is that the anger of U.S. workers is very real and is directed at both parties of big business. According to a recent Associated Press-GfK poll, support for both parties in Congress is hovering in the 30 percent range, and about six in 10 disapprove of the way both Democrats and Republicans are handling the economy.
The October 2 One Nation march on Washington for Jobs, Justice and Education will provide thousands the opportunity to channel our anger into a demand for a shift in priorities toward policies that put working people first and reject the scapegoating of immigrants, Muslims and people of color.
While the main organizers will be calling for participants to vote for the Democrats, hundreds of socialists and others seeking to build a left alternative will meet at the corner of 12th and Constitution Avenue (NW) at 10 a.m. on October 2 for a feeder march that will send the message that "change can only be brought about as it has been in every period of American history by independent social movements that are active for more than a single march."
Bring your friends, family and co-workers, and don't forget to bring your anger--let's see if we can drown out the whining coming from Wall Street.
ANGER IS on the rise in America. People are looking at the policies coming out of Washington, they're fed up--they're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore.
Only the outrage you're most likely to hear about in the mainstream media isn't coming from the people you'd expect: the millions of people facing unemployment, for example, or the victims of racist scapegoating.
Amazingly, it turns out that Wall Street and the richest 1 percent of the U.S. population are just furious.
They're sick and tired of the U.S. government "whackin' them with a stick," as Anthony Scaramucci, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund manager, whined to President Barack Obama at a recent CNBC town hall.
Then there's Stephen Schwarzman, whose $4.1 billion fortune makes him the 69th richest person in the United States, according to Forbes magazine. Schwarzman compared Obama's move to close a tax loophole--one that allows Wall Street investors like Schwarzman to pay only 15 percent in taxes on private equity income, about the same rate as someone making $38,200--to Hitler's invasion of Poland.
And there are those who are complaining about the Democrats' plan to extend Bush-era tax breaks for everyone but those in the top income bracket. Under this measure, taxes on income over $250,000 would go from 35 percent to 39.6 percent, affecting approximately the top 2 percent of the U.S. population.
It's important to realize that this higher tax rate would only apply to income above $250,000 in a year. So a household making $260,000 a year wouldn't pay 4.9 percent more on their total income, only on the last $10,000: their tax bill would increase by $460.
Nevertheless, to Todd Henderson, a law professor at the University of Chicago, the proposal to not extend the Bush tax cuts on the super-rich is proof that "the world we are now living in has that familiar Marxian tone." (If only.) Henderson says he and his wife, a doctor, could be "subject to a big tax hike," and he worries that he might have to give up such "necessities" as his gardener and housekeeper.
After decades of tax cuts, the lion's share of which have benefited the wealthy, and in the wake of an economic meltdown that saw the banks get bailed out while the rest of us are left to pick up the tab, the rich have some nerve complaining about a minor tax increase and a few harsh words from the president.
Apparently not content to have their asses saved, they expect them to be kissed as well.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THERE'S PLENTY to be angry about, but the rich aren't the ones with a reason to complain.
They've enjoyed rising wealth for decades, while working people have compensated for stagnant wages and the rising costs of housing, education and health care by taking on record levels of household debt, and working longer hours for lower wages and fewer benefits.
Income inequality is at an all-time high in the United States. As noted in the Huffington Post's report on a study by Emmanual Saez, in 2007, "The top .01 percent of American earners took home 6 percent of total U.S. wages, a figure that has nearly doubled since 2000...as of 2007, the top [10%] of American earners...pulled in 49.7 percent [of all income]."
Doug Henwood of Left Business Observer explains how it's possible that median household income increased by only 2 percent since 1989, while total Gross Domestic Product increased 63 percent. Incomes for the top 5 percent went up 75 percent, with gains concentrated at the very top:
The top 1 percent was up over 100 percent. The top 0.01 percent--the 12,000 or so richest households, with incomes averaging $35 million a year--were up 215 percent...almost 30 times the increase of the bottom 90 percent of the population. In other words, an enormous portion of the gains of economic growth have gone to just a few thousand hyper-rich.The gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm, and it's only getting worse. The latest news, according to Forbes, is that the wealth of the richest 400 Americans increased by 8 percent last year, to a combined $1.37 trillion.
Meanwhile, foreclosures are on the rise, and the most recent Census Bureau data shows poverty at a record high of 43.6 million people.
As David DeGraw points out at Alternet, the federal poverty line ($22,050 for a family of four) and gaps in the statistics grossly understate the real crisis of poverty: they fail to count millions, low-ball what qualifies as "poor," and ignore important factors like household debt. According to DeGraw:
A key metric to judge the overall economic security and hardship level of a country is the percentage of the population living paycheck to paycheck. Anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck can tell you about the stress and psychological impact it has on you when you know your family is one sickness, injury or downsizing away from economic ruin...77 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. This means in our nation of 310 million citizens, 239 million Americans are one setback away from economic ruin...Tens of millions of Americans are wondering how they are going to pay their bills, while the people who caused this crisis, [the top 1%], are rolling around in $13 trillion. The robber barons have been displaced as America's most despotic and depraved ruling class.
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UNFORTUNATELY, THE Obama administration is paying more attention to the anger emanating from Wall Street than to the crisis of poverty and unemployment faced by the majority of Americans.
Another sign of the White Houses priorities: Obama's top economics adviser Larry Summers is stepping down, and according to the Wall Street Journal, the most likely candidate to replace him is former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy. According to Democracy Now! Mulcahy laid off 30 percent of Xerox workers during her time at the helm of the company, and cut health benefits for retirees.
While once upon a time, Obama talked tough about Wall Street, calling the executives and investors "fat cats," in office, he continued the multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Street and signed toothless financial reform legislation, while simultaneously doing next to nothing to ease the impact of the crisis on the majority of people.
And now, Obama is softening his rhetoric still further in response to criticism from the wealthy. As he said at the CNBC town hall meeting, "I've constantly said what sets America apart...is we've got the most dynamic free-market economy in the world. And that has to be preserved."
We should be the ones who are angry--that the top 1 percent are sitting on $13 trillion while states cut social services, health care and education just when people need them most because of budget shortfalls and cutbacks we're told are inevitable.
While the anger of the wealthy has been making headlines--and eliciting a response from the politicians in Washington--the truth is that the anger of U.S. workers is very real and is directed at both parties of big business. According to a recent Associated Press-GfK poll, support for both parties in Congress is hovering in the 30 percent range, and about six in 10 disapprove of the way both Democrats and Republicans are handling the economy.
The October 2 One Nation march on Washington for Jobs, Justice and Education will provide thousands the opportunity to channel our anger into a demand for a shift in priorities toward policies that put working people first and reject the scapegoating of immigrants, Muslims and people of color.
While the main organizers will be calling for participants to vote for the Democrats, hundreds of socialists and others seeking to build a left alternative will meet at the corner of 12th and Constitution Avenue (NW) at 10 a.m. on October 2 for a feeder march that will send the message that "change can only be brought about as it has been in every period of American history by independent social movements that are active for more than a single march."
Bring your friends, family and co-workers, and don't forget to bring your anger--let's see if we can drown out the whining coming from Wall Street.
Thursday, August 19, 2010
The real "monuments to terrorism"
Originally published in Socialist Worker.
THE REPUBLICANS are stirring up outrage against the "Ground Zero mosque" (actually a prayer room in a Muslim community center to be built on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory a couple of blocks away) to gain an edge in the November elections.
The right wing has called the proposed Cordoba Center a "monument to terrorism" on "hallowed ground," implying that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11, and therefore do not have the right to worship in lower Manhattan. Clearly, equating Islam (there are over 1 billion Muslims in the world) with terrorist extremists is as absurd as it is disgusting.
Socialistworker.org and others have done a good job explaining why this controversy is nothing but vile bigotry and an attempt to justify the imperial slaughter of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But what about the actual monuments to terrorism in the United States?
For example, the official Mississippi state flag incorporates an image of the Confederate flag, which has long been a symbol of terror against African Americans in Mississippi.
From the days of the Civil War, when it represented the battle to preserve slavery and white supremacy, through the height of lynching and Klan terror, the murder of civil rights activists, the fire-bombing of churches with children inside and integrated buses during the Freedom Rides, and many more murders, beatings and bombings over the years, the Confederate flag has been the flag of racist terrorists.
The fact that it is part of the state flag is a slap in the face to every African American in Mississippi and across the country--on what should be "hallowed ground" in the sense that Mississippi was a reactionary center of one of the worst crimes in human history (American racial slavery) and its bitter legacy of Jim Crow.
For those of you who thought I was going to leave the North off of the hook, take the town of Amherst, Mass., right down the road from where I live.
It (and Amherst College, one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation) is named for Lord Jeffery Amherst, a terrorist who slaughtered Native Americans, pioneering the use of germ warfare. He approved giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans, as well as ordering his troops "to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."
So Amherst and Amherst College are "monuments to terrorism" right in the heart of what used to be, before people like Jeffery Amherst came through, Native American land. Should this not also be considered "hallowed ground" in remembrance of the genocide of the Native Americans?
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ACTUALLY, IF you want to find a state-sanctioned monument to terrorism, you don't have to look any further than your wallet. As comedian Dave Chappelle said in For What It's Worth, our money "looks like baseball cards with slave owners on it."
For example, Andrew Jackson's face is on the $20 bill, which honors a slave owner whose policies of "Indian removal" directly lead to the Trail of Tears, the ethnic cleansing that killed over 4,000 Cherokee men, women and children.
Finally, Columbus Day is still a national holiday in honor of a mass murderer and enslaver of Native Americans.
Andrew Jackson, Jeffery Amherst, Christopher Columbus and other perpetrators of slavery and genocide are celebrated by the mainstream media and politicians, while their crimes are glossed over and excused if mentioned at all. Over the years, campaigns to change the name of Amherst, Mass., or to teach the real history about Christopher Columbus receive nowhere near the amount of attention paid by media and oliticians to the "Ground Zero Mosque" hysteria.
That is because a U.S. government responsible in recent years for the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis (and over 500,000 children killed by sanctions in the 1990s) and tens of thousands in Afghanistan, has more in common with the perpetrators of the great crimes of history than with their victims.
Just as Black slaves and Native Americans were deemed inferior in order to justify their enslavement and extermination, so today are Muslims dehumanized in order to justify the occupation of Muslim nations abroad.
THE REPUBLICANS are stirring up outrage against the "Ground Zero mosque" (actually a prayer room in a Muslim community center to be built on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory a couple of blocks away) to gain an edge in the November elections.
The right wing has called the proposed Cordoba Center a "monument to terrorism" on "hallowed ground," implying that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11, and therefore do not have the right to worship in lower Manhattan. Clearly, equating Islam (there are over 1 billion Muslims in the world) with terrorist extremists is as absurd as it is disgusting.
Socialistworker.org and others have done a good job explaining why this controversy is nothing but vile bigotry and an attempt to justify the imperial slaughter of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But what about the actual monuments to terrorism in the United States?
For example, the official Mississippi state flag incorporates an image of the Confederate flag, which has long been a symbol of terror against African Americans in Mississippi.
From the days of the Civil War, when it represented the battle to preserve slavery and white supremacy, through the height of lynching and Klan terror, the murder of civil rights activists, the fire-bombing of churches with children inside and integrated buses during the Freedom Rides, and many more murders, beatings and bombings over the years, the Confederate flag has been the flag of racist terrorists.
The fact that it is part of the state flag is a slap in the face to every African American in Mississippi and across the country--on what should be "hallowed ground" in the sense that Mississippi was a reactionary center of one of the worst crimes in human history (American racial slavery) and its bitter legacy of Jim Crow.
For those of you who thought I was going to leave the North off of the hook, take the town of Amherst, Mass., right down the road from where I live.
It (and Amherst College, one of the most prestigious colleges in the nation) is named for Lord Jeffery Amherst, a terrorist who slaughtered Native Americans, pioneering the use of germ warfare. He approved giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans, as well as ordering his troops "to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."
So Amherst and Amherst College are "monuments to terrorism" right in the heart of what used to be, before people like Jeffery Amherst came through, Native American land. Should this not also be considered "hallowed ground" in remembrance of the genocide of the Native Americans?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ACTUALLY, IF you want to find a state-sanctioned monument to terrorism, you don't have to look any further than your wallet. As comedian Dave Chappelle said in For What It's Worth, our money "looks like baseball cards with slave owners on it."
For example, Andrew Jackson's face is on the $20 bill, which honors a slave owner whose policies of "Indian removal" directly lead to the Trail of Tears, the ethnic cleansing that killed over 4,000 Cherokee men, women and children.
Finally, Columbus Day is still a national holiday in honor of a mass murderer and enslaver of Native Americans.
Andrew Jackson, Jeffery Amherst, Christopher Columbus and other perpetrators of slavery and genocide are celebrated by the mainstream media and politicians, while their crimes are glossed over and excused if mentioned at all. Over the years, campaigns to change the name of Amherst, Mass., or to teach the real history about Christopher Columbus receive nowhere near the amount of attention paid by media and oliticians to the "Ground Zero Mosque" hysteria.
That is because a U.S. government responsible in recent years for the deaths of over 1 million Iraqis (and over 500,000 children killed by sanctions in the 1990s) and tens of thousands in Afghanistan, has more in common with the perpetrators of the great crimes of history than with their victims.
Just as Black slaves and Native Americans were deemed inferior in order to justify their enslavement and extermination, so today are Muslims dehumanized in order to justify the occupation of Muslim nations abroad.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Making a mockery of rape
Originally published at Sex Under Capitalism and in Socialist Worker.
IN LATE July, an Israeli court sentenced a Palestinian man to 18 months in prison for engaging in consensual sex with a Jewish woman who claims to have believed he was a Jew.
The charge? "Rape by deception."
The judge said: "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated...The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price--the sanctity of their bodies and souls."
The level of racism and sexism here is astounding; this case illustrates the colonial, apartheid nature of the state of Israel, where separate laws, roads and other public facilities apply to Jews and Palestinians, and where Palestinians are dehumanized to such an extent that military units make T-shirts promoting the murder of pregnant women and children (to be worn by soldiers sent to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza and elsewhere).
Not only are Palestinians denied self-determination in the Occupied Territories and reduced to second-class status within the state of Israel, but the Israeli courts have deemed Arab men a threat to Jewish women.
As Tsafi Saar wrote in Haaretz, "Alongside 'They'll take our jobs,' the utterance 'They'll sleep with our women' is one of the most emblematic claims of racists."
Richard Seymour breaks this case down well in a post at the Lenin's Tomb Web site called "Racist Patriarchy in Israel." It is worth quoting him at length:
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IN A society based on the institutionalized supremacy (legal racism) of one group over another (in this case, Jews over Palestinians), opposition to "inter-marriage" is an odious but inevitable result.
A system based on upholding the "purity" of one group must control and police the sexuality of women within that group, who are tasked with giving birth to and raising the next generation of the dominant group--and "protect" them from men from the oppressed group.
Although the judge and other opponents of Arab/Jew relationships claim to be acting in the interest of Jewish women, their actions are as sexist as they are racist. Marriage (and divorce) laws in Israel are hopelessly reactionary, based on biblical mandates. Jews cannot marry non-Jews within Israel, but must travel abroad to do so. The marriage is only recognized upon the couple's return to Israel.
All marriages in Israel must be performed by official religious institutions (for Jews, this is the Chief Rabbinate of Israel). The same goes for divorce, a fact that underlines that while this ruling claims to be about protecting the "sanctity of their bodies and souls," Israeli law is shockingly sexist.
Divorce is a basic right for women, a gain that had to be fought for and won. It is a step toward women's liberation from the family, an oppressive institution that has historically placed women under the legal control of their husband.
Divorce law in Israel treats men and women differently, with women in an inferior position. For example, a man (in a Jewish marriage) whose wife is committed to a mental hospital as "incurably ill" may remarry if he receives permission from a rabbinical court, while a woman cannot.
Not only are Jewish women reduced to the role of wombs capable of carrying the next generation of Israeli Defense Force soldiers, but they are also denied their right to choose their own partner free of harassment. As one woman said: "I'm not stupid or gullible or looking for trouble. I'm a Jewish girl who happened to meet a guy I like, who happens to be Arab. It's my business."
Such a climate only emboldens those who use violence to enforce this racist morality.
Such policies are not unique to Israel. Prohibitions against "race-mixing," or "miscegenation" were passed in Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow South (and across the U.S.--they weren't ruled unconstitutional until Loving v. Virginia in 1967), and apartheid South Africa.
Also common in these societies, where racism was the law of the land, was propaganda promoting the idea that the oppressed "other" is a predatory threat to women of the dominant group.
We see it in Nazi propaganda. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmet Till was murdered in Mississippi for talking to a white woman. Rabbis in Israel speak of the "seducing" of Jewish girls" as "another form of war" by Arab men.
Israel's credibility has taken a major hit in the wake of its savage assault on Gaza in 2008 (Operation Cast Lead) and the recent massacre aboard the Mavi Marmara "Gaza Freedom Flotilla." The movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people is picking up steam.
In this context, Israel is attempting to clean up its image by portraying itself as an "oasis" of LGBT equality in the Middle East, in addition to the racist caricature of Islam as uniquely sexist.
However, the same marriage laws that require mixed couples to leave Israel to marry apply to same-sex couples, who must marry abroad in order to receive recognition of their union.
Supporters of sexual (and human) liberation should reject and expose Israel's lies, join the growing movement for equal rights for Palestinians and Jews in the land that is currently Israel and the Occupied Territories, and demand freedom of association between people of all races and religions.
IN LATE July, an Israeli court sentenced a Palestinian man to 18 months in prison for engaging in consensual sex with a Jewish woman who claims to have believed he was a Jew.
The charge? "Rape by deception."
The judge said: "If she hadn't thought the accused was a Jewish bachelor interested in a serious romantic relationship, she would not have cooperated...The court is obliged to protect the public interest from sophisticated, smooth-tongued criminals who can deceive innocent victims at an unbearable price--the sanctity of their bodies and souls."
The level of racism and sexism here is astounding; this case illustrates the colonial, apartheid nature of the state of Israel, where separate laws, roads and other public facilities apply to Jews and Palestinians, and where Palestinians are dehumanized to such an extent that military units make T-shirts promoting the murder of pregnant women and children (to be worn by soldiers sent to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza and elsewhere).
Not only are Palestinians denied self-determination in the Occupied Territories and reduced to second-class status within the state of Israel, but the Israeli courts have deemed Arab men a threat to Jewish women.
As Tsafi Saar wrote in Haaretz, "Alongside 'They'll take our jobs,' the utterance 'They'll sleep with our women' is one of the most emblematic claims of racists."
Richard Seymour breaks this case down well in a post at the Lenin's Tomb Web site called "Racist Patriarchy in Israel." It is worth quoting him at length:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Are you getting it yet? Sex with an Arab constitutes a violation of the sanctity of body and soul--an "unbearable price." This is not a freakish opinion in Israeli society. For example, half of Israeli Jews believe intermarriage between Arabs and Jews is equivalent to national treason (that "demographic time bomb," you see).
Some are determined to enforce this sexual separation through violence or policy. Gangs of men in a Jerusalem neighborhood roam around, behaving as a de facto vice and virtue squad, to "protect" young Jewish girls from Arabs. One local authority has set up a squad of counselors and psychiatrists to "rescue" Jewish girls who are dating Arabs.
Hostility to inter-marriage and cross-ethnic dating pervades Zionist culture and is reproduced at structural and institutional levels from the cradle to the grave. There has been a raft of legislative measures since 1948 that are designed to frustrate socialization between Jews and Arabs, and the existing structures of segregation in education and housing ensure that intermarriage is already very rare.
IN A society based on the institutionalized supremacy (legal racism) of one group over another (in this case, Jews over Palestinians), opposition to "inter-marriage" is an odious but inevitable result.
A system based on upholding the "purity" of one group must control and police the sexuality of women within that group, who are tasked with giving birth to and raising the next generation of the dominant group--and "protect" them from men from the oppressed group.
Although the judge and other opponents of Arab/Jew relationships claim to be acting in the interest of Jewish women, their actions are as sexist as they are racist. Marriage (and divorce) laws in Israel are hopelessly reactionary, based on biblical mandates. Jews cannot marry non-Jews within Israel, but must travel abroad to do so. The marriage is only recognized upon the couple's return to Israel.
All marriages in Israel must be performed by official religious institutions (for Jews, this is the Chief Rabbinate of Israel). The same goes for divorce, a fact that underlines that while this ruling claims to be about protecting the "sanctity of their bodies and souls," Israeli law is shockingly sexist.
Divorce is a basic right for women, a gain that had to be fought for and won. It is a step toward women's liberation from the family, an oppressive institution that has historically placed women under the legal control of their husband.
Divorce law in Israel treats men and women differently, with women in an inferior position. For example, a man (in a Jewish marriage) whose wife is committed to a mental hospital as "incurably ill" may remarry if he receives permission from a rabbinical court, while a woman cannot.
Not only are Jewish women reduced to the role of wombs capable of carrying the next generation of Israeli Defense Force soldiers, but they are also denied their right to choose their own partner free of harassment. As one woman said: "I'm not stupid or gullible or looking for trouble. I'm a Jewish girl who happened to meet a guy I like, who happens to be Arab. It's my business."
Such a climate only emboldens those who use violence to enforce this racist morality.
Such policies are not unique to Israel. Prohibitions against "race-mixing," or "miscegenation" were passed in Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow South (and across the U.S.--they weren't ruled unconstitutional until Loving v. Virginia in 1967), and apartheid South Africa.
Also common in these societies, where racism was the law of the land, was propaganda promoting the idea that the oppressed "other" is a predatory threat to women of the dominant group.
We see it in Nazi propaganda. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmet Till was murdered in Mississippi for talking to a white woman. Rabbis in Israel speak of the "seducing" of Jewish girls" as "another form of war" by Arab men.
Israel's credibility has taken a major hit in the wake of its savage assault on Gaza in 2008 (Operation Cast Lead) and the recent massacre aboard the Mavi Marmara "Gaza Freedom Flotilla." The movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel in solidarity with the Palestinian people is picking up steam.
In this context, Israel is attempting to clean up its image by portraying itself as an "oasis" of LGBT equality in the Middle East, in addition to the racist caricature of Islam as uniquely sexist.
However, the same marriage laws that require mixed couples to leave Israel to marry apply to same-sex couples, who must marry abroad in order to receive recognition of their union.
Supporters of sexual (and human) liberation should reject and expose Israel's lies, join the growing movement for equal rights for Palestinians and Jews in the land that is currently Israel and the Occupied Territories, and demand freedom of association between people of all races and religions.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
DOMA overturned in Massachusetts
Originally published at Socialist Worker.
A FEDERAL judge in Massachusetts, ruling in two related cases, declared the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional on July 8, a victory for supporters of marriage equality.
DOMA, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton, defined marriage as between one man and one woman and allowed states to not recognize same-sex marriages performed legally in other states.
The law denies over 1,100 federal benefits to same-sex couples married in states where gay marriage is legal. These include the right to file joint tax returns (often at a lower rate), share Social Security and food stamps, receive spousal employment benefits (such as health insurance) or sponsor an immigrant spouse for legal residency or citizenship.
In other words, DOMA relegates same-sex couples legally married in states such as Massachusetts to second-class status in the eyes of the federal government.
The first case, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, was filed by a federal employee whose lawyers from Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders argued that because the bill prevented her and her same-sex spouse from receiving federal employment benefits, DOMA denied her equal protection under the law--a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
The second case, Commonwealth v. Health and Human Services, was brought by the state of Massachusetts, which argued that DOMA interferes with a state's right to define marriage as it chooses by requiring it to discriminate against same-sex couples or lose millions of dollars of federal money yearly.
U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro's rulings apply only to same-sex couples married in Massachusetts, and they only declare unconstitutional the part of DOMA that defines marriage as between one man and one woman, so states will still be able to ignore same-sex marriages performed in other states.
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NOW, THE question is whether Barack Obama's Justice Department will appeal the Tauro's decision to a higher court in the federal system.
During the 2008 election campaign, Obama repeated again and again that he opposed DOMA. For example, his campaign Web site declared: "I...believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples--whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage."
Candidate Obama went so far as to cite his support for a repeal of DOMA as a reason to choose him over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries: "Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)--a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate...Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does."
Obama renewed this commitment as president when he spoke at the Human Rights Campaign dinner on the eve of the National Equality March in October 2009.
But despite this record, the Obama Justice Department is widely expected to appeal the decision in the Massachusetts' cases to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals--and potentially to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The administration claims that it's up to Congress to repeal DOMA, and in the meanwhile, it has to "uphold existing law." The Gay City News explained the administration's tortured logic in defending a law its chief claims to oppose:
[T]he Obama Justice Department devised the bizarre claim that DOMA was an attempt by Congress to preserve the status quo "pending the resolution of a socially contentious debate taking place in the states over whether to sanction same-sex marriage." The government argued that DOMA was necessary "to ensure consistency in the distribution of federal marriage-based benefits," and to avoid the disruptions from having to deal with different definitions of marriage in different states.
If administration officials do appeal the rulings in Massachusetts, it wouldn't be the first time the Obama Justice Department defended DOMA in federal court. In June 2009--within days of Obama declaring LGBT Pride Month--Justice Department lawyers claimed that DOMA was constitutional and non-discriminatory, citing as precedents laws that barred marriage in cases of incest and pedophilia.
Some left-wing commentators think it would be a good thing for the Justice Department to appeal Tauro's decisions, because if the cases go to the Supreme Court and the Court rules against DOMA, it would strike a blow against the marriage ban at the national level, rather than just Massachusetts.
Jim Burroway, editor of Box Turtle Bulletin Web site, makes the case that a Supreme Court decision against DOMA following an appeal by the Justice Department is more likely to succeed than passage of a Congressional repeal, such as the Respect for Marriage Act introduced in 2009 by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). "With the next Congress likely to be much more hostile to LGBT issues as this Congress," Burroway wrote, "I've got lottery tickets with better odds than Congress repealing DOMA."
But the struggle for marriage equality can't depend on hoping for justice from a federal court system stacked with conservative judges. Nor should we accept a lengthy appeals process that could take years before the Supreme Court rules on DOMA.
Instead, we should use the momentum we have build in the past two years, including the enthusiasm generated by this victory in Massachusetts, to demand full equality now. We should demand that the Obama administration live up to the promises of its president and stop defending DOMA in court, and we should call for Congress to get to work on the job of repealing DOMA once and for all.
A FEDERAL judge in Massachusetts, ruling in two related cases, declared the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional on July 8, a victory for supporters of marriage equality.
DOMA, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton, defined marriage as between one man and one woman and allowed states to not recognize same-sex marriages performed legally in other states.
The law denies over 1,100 federal benefits to same-sex couples married in states where gay marriage is legal. These include the right to file joint tax returns (often at a lower rate), share Social Security and food stamps, receive spousal employment benefits (such as health insurance) or sponsor an immigrant spouse for legal residency or citizenship.
In other words, DOMA relegates same-sex couples legally married in states such as Massachusetts to second-class status in the eyes of the federal government.
The first case, Gill v. Office of Personnel Management, was filed by a federal employee whose lawyers from Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders argued that because the bill prevented her and her same-sex spouse from receiving federal employment benefits, DOMA denied her equal protection under the law--a violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.
The second case, Commonwealth v. Health and Human Services, was brought by the state of Massachusetts, which argued that DOMA interferes with a state's right to define marriage as it chooses by requiring it to discriminate against same-sex couples or lose millions of dollars of federal money yearly.
U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Tauro's rulings apply only to same-sex couples married in Massachusetts, and they only declare unconstitutional the part of DOMA that defines marriage as between one man and one woman, so states will still be able to ignore same-sex marriages performed in other states.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
NOW, THE question is whether Barack Obama's Justice Department will appeal the Tauro's decision to a higher court in the federal system.
During the 2008 election campaign, Obama repeated again and again that he opposed DOMA. For example, his campaign Web site declared: "I...believe that the federal government should not stand in the way of states that want to decide on their own how best to pursue equality for gay and lesbian couples--whether that means a domestic partnership, a civil union, or a civil marriage."
Candidate Obama went so far as to cite his support for a repeal of DOMA as a reason to choose him over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries: "Unlike Senator Clinton, I support the complete repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)--a position I have held since before arriving in the U.S. Senate...Federal law should not discriminate in any way against gay and lesbian couples, which is precisely what DOMA does."
Obama renewed this commitment as president when he spoke at the Human Rights Campaign dinner on the eve of the National Equality March in October 2009.
But despite this record, the Obama Justice Department is widely expected to appeal the decision in the Massachusetts' cases to the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals--and potentially to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The administration claims that it's up to Congress to repeal DOMA, and in the meanwhile, it has to "uphold existing law." The Gay City News explained the administration's tortured logic in defending a law its chief claims to oppose:
[T]he Obama Justice Department devised the bizarre claim that DOMA was an attempt by Congress to preserve the status quo "pending the resolution of a socially contentious debate taking place in the states over whether to sanction same-sex marriage." The government argued that DOMA was necessary "to ensure consistency in the distribution of federal marriage-based benefits," and to avoid the disruptions from having to deal with different definitions of marriage in different states.
If administration officials do appeal the rulings in Massachusetts, it wouldn't be the first time the Obama Justice Department defended DOMA in federal court. In June 2009--within days of Obama declaring LGBT Pride Month--Justice Department lawyers claimed that DOMA was constitutional and non-discriminatory, citing as precedents laws that barred marriage in cases of incest and pedophilia.
Some left-wing commentators think it would be a good thing for the Justice Department to appeal Tauro's decisions, because if the cases go to the Supreme Court and the Court rules against DOMA, it would strike a blow against the marriage ban at the national level, rather than just Massachusetts.
Jim Burroway, editor of Box Turtle Bulletin Web site, makes the case that a Supreme Court decision against DOMA following an appeal by the Justice Department is more likely to succeed than passage of a Congressional repeal, such as the Respect for Marriage Act introduced in 2009 by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). "With the next Congress likely to be much more hostile to LGBT issues as this Congress," Burroway wrote, "I've got lottery tickets with better odds than Congress repealing DOMA."
But the struggle for marriage equality can't depend on hoping for justice from a federal court system stacked with conservative judges. Nor should we accept a lengthy appeals process that could take years before the Supreme Court rules on DOMA.
Instead, we should use the momentum we have build in the past two years, including the enthusiasm generated by this victory in Massachusetts, to demand full equality now. We should demand that the Obama administration live up to the promises of its president and stop defending DOMA in court, and we should call for Congress to get to work on the job of repealing DOMA once and for all.
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