Transphobia at the golden arches

Published at Socialistworker.org.

I APPRECIATE Christine Darosa's coverage of the terrible assault against Chrissy Polis at a Baltimore McDonald's ("The bigotry behind a terrible assault"). I was outraged that a McDonald's employee would film the attack and encourage the assailants to flee, rather than coming to the aid of Polis.

McDonald's claim that "there's no room for violence under the Golden Arches" rings hollow, as does the rest of their statement: "McDonald's is a safe welcoming place for everyone. We share our customers' concern. We are doing everything possible to make sure the right thing is done."

McDonald's had plenty of warning that transphobia was a problem at their company and, judging by the actions of the employees in their Baltimore store, and by the fact that the word "transgender" does not turn up on their website, it is clear that they have not done "everything possible" to address the issue.

In December of 2009, a McDonald's manager in Orlando, Fla., left a telephone message for 17-year-old transgender job seeker Zikerria Bellamy telling her not to bother applying for a job at McDonald's because "we do not hire faggots."

After widespread outcry from the LGBT and activist community, McDonald's fired the manager in question.

Similarly, the company claims that in response to the attack at the Baltimore restaurant, its "franchisee continues to investigate the behavior and response of his employees," and that "appropriate action is taking place as warranted."

It's not enough to wait for incidents like these to occur, and then deal with them on a case-by-case basis only after there is bad publicity for the company. McDonald's still does not have a policy prohibiting discrimination against employees based on gender identity or expression.

Until they take the first step of banning discrimination against transgender employees and applicants, as well as training managers and employees on the need to oppose transphobia and hate crimes, McDonald's should be condemned for failing to take these issues seriously, despite two serious incidents involving their company in less than 18 months.

The anti-Muslim scapegoaters

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

SOCIAL CRISES have the potential to lead to radicalization and political action to change society. This potential has been on display since the beginning of the year in the actions of ordinary people in North Africa and the Middle East--and in the American Midwest--who shed their fear and stood together for democracy and for social and economic justice.

But there are also those who seek to exploit economic and social uncertainty to spread a message of hate and fear, aimed at sowing division. This scapegoating was on full, hideous display last month at an anti-Muslim rally in Yorba Linda, Calif., outside a charity event sponsored by the Islamic Circle of North America to raise money for women's and homeless shelters. The right-wing rally was captured on film by the California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

The demonstration was organized by various Tea Party groups, a right-wing rabbi from the area and Pamela Geller, whose organization "Stop Islamization of America" (SIOA) is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The event was an exhibition of bigotry reminiscent of the white Southern reaction to the civil rights movement. As liberal journalist Max Blumenthal wrote:

I could not help but think of Elizabeth Eckford, the African-American student who was forced to walk through a phalanx of violent white racists chanting "Lynch her! Lynch her!" during the federal government's first attempt to integrate Little Rock Central High School. This iconic image was immediately recalled by the video of Muslim-American children walking through a crowd of protesters calling them terrorists, threatening them and chanting "Go home!" as they proceeded toward a local community center for a charity event.

Eckford was badly scarred by her experience; the trauma affected her life for decades. I wonder how the children who had to be marched through the gauntlet of racists in Yorba Linda will remember their experience.

The anti-Muslim protesters were not simply from the far-right fringes of society--they included politicians such as Republican U.S. Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA) and Deborah Pauly, a Villa Park, Calif., councilwoman.

Pauly fired up the crowd with these words: "[W]hat's going on over there right now? Make no bones about it. That is pure, unadulterated evil. I don't even care, I don't even care if you think I'm crazy anymore. Because I have...a beautiful daughter. I have a wonderful 19-year-old son who is a United States Marine. As a matter of fact, I know quite a few Marines who will be willing to help these terrorists to an early meeting in paradise."

After these speeches worked the crowd into frenzy, protesters gathered near the entrance to the event, screaming, "Go home," "Terrorists" and "We don't want you here"--while families, including small children, walked past. Protesters hurled the vilest slurs, including one woman who yelled, "You beat your women and you rape your children."

As Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald wrote:

I think what was most striking about that video is that the presence of small children didn't give these anti-Muslim protesters even momentary pause; they just continued screeching their ugly invective while staring at 4-year-olds walking with their parents. People like that are so overflowing with hatred and resentments that the place where their humanity--their soul--is supposed to be has been drowned.

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LESS THAN a month after the Orange County hate rally, two Sikh men, 67-year-old Surinder Singh and 78-year-old Gurmej Atwal, were shot as they walked in their Sacramento, Calif., neighborhood. Singh died on the spot, and Atwal remains in critical condition. With no other known motive, the shooting has all of the markings of a hate crime, as both men wore traditional turbans and beards when they were fired on by a man driving a pickup truck.

"In the wake of September 11," Julianne Hing wrote in an article for Colorlines, "Sikhs, who are often mistaken for Muslims, have dealt with a rise in hate crimes and assaults, racial profiling and bullying...According to a Sikh Coalition report released last December, one out of every 10 Sikh-Americans in the Bay Area report being the victim of a hate crime."

Whether or not the shooter was directly inspired by the Orange County rally, hate crimes targeting Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim are the result of acceptance of Islamophobia in the mainstream of American discourse. The rhetoric and policies of political leaders--from both main parties--have prepared the ground for the hate.

Since 9/11, Muslims have endured racial profiling, harassment, indefinite detention and even torture at the hands of government agencies. Many of these policies, such as those outlined in the PATRIOT Act, received a bipartisan stamp of approval.

Since Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009, he has continued most of the Bush-era policies in the realm of civil liberties, including indefinite detention and keeping the Guantánamo Bay prison camp open, in spite of his specific promise to close it. The Obama administration has refused point-blank to pursue prosecutions of Bush-era officials for sanctioning torture and other war crimes.

Sadly, this bipartisan complicity has silenced many former Democratic champions of civil liberties who criticized such policies when Bush was in charge, but who have remained quiet after Obama took ownership of Bush's wars and illegal prisons.

Last summer, when right-wingers like Geller whipped up a hysteria over the proposed Park51 Islamic community center in lower Manhattan--misnamed the "ground zero mosque"--Democrats like Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid not only didn't challenge the hate, but added fuel to the fire. Reid called for the center to "be built someplace else." Obama initially offered verbal support, but the next day backtracked to say that while he supported the right to build the center, he wouldn't comment on "the wisdom" of doing so.

These government policies and the accompanying rhetoric from politicians sends the message that Muslims are a threat to U.S. society. The mainstreaming of Islamophobia is the domestic front of the U.S. "war on terror," intended to justify and bolster support for the U.S. wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq, military attacks in Pakistan and Yemen, and support for unsavory regimes in the Middle East such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and the late Mubarak dictatorship.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media, especially the 24-hour cable news networks such as Fox and CNN, have provided sensational coverage stoking fears of "homegrown terrorism," presenting Muslims as potential "enemies within our midst," a lie reminiscent of Nazi propaganda about Jews or Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt against Communists and gays during the 1950s.

There are some exceptions in the mainstream media, such as Chris Matthews Keith Olbermann, and the Daily Show's Jon Stewart has made outspoken criticisms of Islamophobia. Nevertheless, far-right Islamophobes like Pamela Geller have gotten access to the national media to spread their message.

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THE SCAPEGOATING of Muslims reached a new low with Republican Rep. Peter King's Congressional hearing earlier this month.

Starting with its disgusting title "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response," King and his fellow Republicans used the hearing not only to stoke Islamophobia, but to attack those who oppose it. The Muslim civil liberties and advocacy group CAIR was targeted specifically. Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf declared, "I'm...concerned about its role attacking the reputation of any who dare to raise concerns about domestic radicalization."

Not only is Islamophobia increasingly acceptable in the mainstream, but simultaneously, it has become unacceptable to criticize groups like the Tea Partiers for their bigotry. The case of National Public Radio (NPR) executive Ron Schiller is a perfect illustration--both he and NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) left the radio network after he called the Tea Party movement "Islamophobic" and "racist" in a private meeting caught on hidden camera by right-wingers posing as potential donors.

The incident was also a perfect illustration of the cowardice of liberals in the face of the right's attack--NPR immediately went into full-scale retreat mode, and prominent on-air personalities released a letter apologizing for what is a perfectly accurate description of the Tea Party--remember, the NPR "scandal" happened after the release of the video of the anti-Muslim rally in Yorba Linda.

Watchdog groups that monitor hate crimes say that violent attacks on Muslims have been on the rise over the past year, including several cases of attempted arson and bombings at mosques across the country. In this climate, the possibility for a more organized and violent Islamophobic right wing to emerge is very real.

Pamela Geller is a case in point. Her organization Stop Islamization of America has fostered ties between Tea Party groups and the English Defense League (EDL), a violent far-right group in Britain that specializes in anti-Muslim slander and violence.

The EDL, whose leadership includes members of the fascist British National Party, regularly mobilizes hundreds and sometimes thousands of angry, often drunken young men to rampage through Muslim neighborhoods. In an undercover report, theGuardian summarized, "The EDL claims it is a peaceful and non-racist organization only concerned with protesting against 'militant Islam.' However, over the last four months, the Guardian has attended its demonstrations and witnessed racism, violence and virulent Islamophobia."

This was the organization that Geller invited to participate in the rally last fall against the Park51 community center in lower Manhattan. She has since established further collaboration with the EDL, whom she defends against accusations of racism and Islamophobia.

As Devin Burghart of the Kansas-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights told the Guardian: "Geller is acting as the bridge between the EDL and the Tea Party. She plays an important role in bringing Islamophobia into the Tea Party. Her stature has increased substantially inside the Tea Party ranks after the Ground Zero mosque controversy."

Any attempt to bring the racist street-fighting tactics of the EDL to the U.S. and channel the bigotry behind the recent string of anti-Muslim hate crimes and rallies into a more organized force must be met with firm and organized resistance from the left in the U.S.

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FORTUNATELY, THE rising tide of Islamophobia in the U.S. has not gone unchallenged. Last summer, activists in Murfreesboro, Tenn., organized hundreds to defend a mosque from a right-wing campaign against it. And last fall, New York activists organized counter-mobilizations against the anti-Park51 rallies of the right--to the point that those in solidarity with Muslims outnumbered Geller and the Tea Party bigots. More recently, demonstrators in New York confronted Peter King over this anti-Muslim hearings.

Not only did these counter-protests challenge the prevailing Islamophobia in the media and U.S. politics, but the revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East have provided further evidence that most people don't accept the lies of the anti-Muslim bigots.

During the revolution in Egypt, a Gallup poll concluded that 82 percent of Americans were sympathetic with the mass protests, and more than two-thirds of people were following events in Egypt "very" or "somewhat closely." That sense of solidarity was evident on the streets of Madison, Wis., in the demonstrations against Gov. Scott Walker's assault on public-sector unions--demonstrators carried signs that read "Protest like an Egyptian" and celebrated the messages of solidarity sent from Cairo.

Not only do the pro-democracy uprisings in the majority-Muslim Arab world shatter the myth that Islam "isn't compatible with democracy," but the solidarity between Egyptians and protesters in Wisconsin highlights how struggle can break down divisions fostered by those in power--and reveal the common interests of working people across the world.

The U.S. government spends hundreds of billions of dollars per year to wage war in the Muslim world--a sum that could easily cover all the state government deficits being used as a pretext to attack union rights and wages and benefits for public-sector workers, not to mention be used to promote economic and political equality in the countries the U.S. bombs and occupies.

Islamophobia is a central component of justifying U.S. wars abroad and the vast sums spent to wage them. Challenging the lies and bigotry against Muslims is essential to any campaign to end America's wars and to meet the needs of working people at home.

What's next for Tunisia?

Published in Socialist Worker.

Co-written with Alan Maass.

THE STRUGGLE over the future of Tunisia is continuing in the days following the overthrow of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years of brutal and corrupt rule.

The cabinet for a supposed "unity government" met for the first time on Wednesday, but it was without ministers representing the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT, by its French initials) and several opposition parties, who resigned over the presence of numerous officials from Ben Ali's old regime in the new government.

While the cabinet met, hundreds of protesters rallied in the capital of Tunis, demanding that members of Ben Ali's Constitutional Democratic Rally (RCD) be excluded from the government. The demonstration was smaller than previous days, but represented a continuation of the mass mobilizations that forced Ben Ali to flee late last week. As demonstrator Salem Ben Yahia, a filmmaker and former political prisoner, told the Guardian:

"We don't want our revolution hijacked. We forced a dictator out the door, and now he's come back in the window. His old ministers are still in a majority in this transition government, and that has to change. Police have already shot at us and beaten us to stop us protesting, but we come back again like a tide."

The true character of the "unity government" is evident at the very top. The president is Fouad Mebazaa, the former speaker of parliament, and Mohamed Ghannouchi remains prime minister. Both men were members of the RCD. They attempted to distance themselves from Ben Ali by resigning from the party on Tuesday, and Mebazaa promised "a complete break with the past" in his first televised speech as president the next day. But that won't fool protesters.

The announcement of the new government the day before was greeted with anger. In addition to Mebazaa and Ghannouchi, RCD leaders were left in charge of the ministries of interior, defense, foreign affairs and finance. Members of moderate opposition parties and three UGTT officials were given minor posts, such as the ministries of health and regional development. The Tunisian Workers' Communist Party and Islamist parties were excluded.

Demonstrations erupted anew. According to the New York Times, more than 1,000 people marched down the main road of the capital, chanting, "Citizens and martyrs, the government is still the same...We will protest, we will protest, until the government collapses!" Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets, but the demonstrations continued in different parts of the city into the night.

A member of the moderate opposition Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), outraged that PDP leader Ahmed Najib Chebbi had accepted a post in the new government, reportedly told Chebbi: "The people, who bled and died for us and our children, need to decide! How can the murderer [Ghannouchi] be our leader today?"

The three UGTT ministers led the resignations from the government the same day it was announced--and the union federation held a general meeting that decided to withhold recognition of the government, according to reports. As British socialist Richard Seymour commented on his Lenin's Tomb blog:

"The significance of this is clear. The political elite, the ruling class it is integrated into, and in all probability a phalanx of EU and U.S. diplomats wanted a constitutional lash-up that would preserve the same basic pyramid of control, with some more inclusive, and slightly more representative, structures...

The ruling class is clearly weak and divided, its institutions of repression unable to keep control. In some cities, the population has been able to effectively take full over. No government that does not include organized labor in some capacity will have any legitimacy."

What happens next will depend on the continued mobilizations by union members, left-wing organizations and others, which pressured the UGTT leaders and opposition figures to leave the government.

Mebazaa and the government will attempt to masquerade as opponents of the old regime. As the cabinet met on Wednesday, 33 members of Ben Ali's family were arrested on suspicion of "crimes against Tunisia," according to local television reports that showed images of gold and jewelry seized in raids. But, of course, RCD members like Mebazaa were collaborators with the Ben Ali kleptocracy until last week.

The struggle will continue to drive out members of Ben Ali's party from the government. Another looming question is that of elections. The new government will have to hold them, but will they take place under the old constitution that cemented the power of Ben Ali's regime?

Rached Ghannouchi, leader of the banned Islamist party Hizb al-Nahda, gave voice to a widely supported sentiment for a new constitution in an interview with the Financial Times:

The [current] constitution was a tyranny. The state was reduced to one man, who had in his hands the executive, judicial and legislative powers and was not accountable to anyone. How can such a constitution point towards building a democratic system, even as a starting point?

The first step of building a democratic system is to build a democratic constitution. For this, we need a founding council for rebuilding the state, one in which political parties, the trade unions and the civil society join. This council will rebuild the democratic constitution and will be the basis for building the democratic system.

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RATHER THAN focus on the struggle over the composition of the new government, much of the Western media coverage of Tunisia since Ben Ali's ouster has revolved around sensational reports of "chaos" and "rioting." But the calls from the media and political leaders--as well as from establishment voices in the Arab world--for "stability" don't address who is really behind the continuing violence: loyalists among Ben Ali's paramilitary police.

Over the weekend, after the dictator fled Tunisia for Saudi Arabia, members of Ben Ali's militia committed acts of terrorism against civilians, with snipers seizing government buildings and banks to fire on civilians and even units of the military--sections of which appear to have broken with Ben Ali and the police apparatus that defended his regime.

Rather than be intimidated by this reign of terror, ordinary Tunisians armed themselves with clubs and set up ad-hoc self-defense groups, manning barricades to defend their neighborhoods and round up Ben Ali's thugs. This is a significant development, as bodies of popular defense challenge the state's monopoly on the use of force and provide a glimpse of the ability of masses of people to ensure their safety in the face of state violence.

According to the Guardian:

"[T]he full horror of repression over four weeks of demonstrations is beginning to emerge. Human rights groups estimate at least 150-200 deaths since December 17. In random roundups in poor, rural areas, youths were shot in the head and dumped far from home so bodies could not be identified. Police also raped women in their houses in poor neighborhoods in and around Kasserine in the rural interior."

Meanwhile, ordinary Tunisians have targeted businesses owned by members of Ben Ali's family and that of his wife, Leila Trabelsi, who reportedly stole $60 million in gold from the treasury before fleeing the country with her husband.

This comes after years of corruption and looting that enriched a tiny handful of elites connected to Ben Ali and his wife at the expense of the majority of Tunisians. According to Juan Cole on his Informed Comment blog, a U.S. State Department cable revealed by WikiLeaks estimates that "50 percent of Tunisia's economic elite were related in one way or another to [the couple]."

The blame for the violence today lies squarely at the feet of Ben Ali and his family, the paramilitaries, and his former colleagues in the RCD who now lead the "unity government."

To call for "stability" under an interim government headed by a party that oversaw more than two decades of corruption and human rights abuses is to ask the Tunisian people to acquiesce to injustice and surrender the gains they sacrificed so much for.

Furthermore, it would be absurd to trust leaders of Ben Ali's own party to oversee a "transition to democracy" or to investigate the wrongdoing for which their party is responsible--never mind to look out for the interests of the Tunisian people who, until a few days ago, they were openly engaged in repressing.

When Western leaders talk about "stability," they mean the return of conditions that are favorable to Western business interests. For the last two decades, "stability" in Tunisia has meant worsening economic inequality, sharp increases more recently in food prices and unemployment, and a repressive security state that denied ordinary Tunisians any semblance of human, civil or democratic rights.

It was "instability"--caused by the Tunisian people rising up against injustice--that finally toppled the Ben Ali dictatorship.

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EVEN MORE worrisome to the U.S. and other Western powers than what is happening inside Tunisia is the threat that the uprising will be contagious--and infect with the spirit of rebellion those living under oppressive Western-backed dictatorships in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and elsewhere.

The news of Ben Ali's overthrow rocked the Arab world. Millions of Arabs know the same problems that the Tunisian people rose against: rising costs of food and other necessities, high unemployment, endemic poverty and repressive dictatorships. In addition, they live under regimes that support, openly and behind the scenes, not only the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but Israel's crimes against the Palestinians.

As one Egyptian put it in a Twitter post: "Every Arab leader is watching Tunisia in fear. Every Arab citizen is watching Tunisia in hope and solidarity."

Beyond the region, too, the Tunisian uprising represents a popular reaction against the economic policies of neoliberalism that have immiserated workers and the poor across the world.

One immediate spark for the struggle in Tunisia when it began in mid-December--as for protests in neighboring Algeria and in Jordan--was rising food prices, which are due in no small part to speculation by wealthy commodities traders in the West. As Canadian socialist David McNally put it, "[T]he massive spike in food prices is directly connected to the turmoil in the world economy that has been raging since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2008."

Similar speculation was at the root of food price increases that sparked rioting in more than two dozen countries in 2008, including Egypt, which saw an extensive trade union struggle develop at the same time.

Meanwhile, in the Global North, workers and students in Europe took to the streets by the millions last year to oppose austerity measures that are the result of the same economic crisis.

Resistance to the effort on the part of capitalists worldwide to impose the costs of the economic crisis on the masses of workers and the poor is what ties the heroic struggle in Tunisia not just to those of people across the Arab world, but to the fight of workers and the poor everywhere.

Mass. activists stop auction

Originally published in Socialist Worker.

SPRINGFIELD, Mass., --More than 40 protesters joined Noelia Ramos outside her home on December 23 to successfully prevent a foreclosure auction and keep her family in their home for the holidays.

The auction, organized by PHH Mortgage Solutions, would have sold off the home of Ramos, her daughter and her 2-year-old granddaughter two days before Christmas, tossing them onto the streets at the beginning of a bitter New England winter.

Ramos, who was laid off in 2008 from her job teaching in the Springfield Public Schools, made payments as long as she could, through most of 2009, before asking PHH for a loan modification. PHH claimed to be working on the details of a modification, only to tell the Ramos family in July that they planned to foreclose instead.

Though the economy is supposedly in recovery, for homeowners, the crisis is only getting worse, disproportionately impacting Black and Latino working-class families. According to Newsday, "When the books close on 2010, banks will have repossessed a record 1.2 million U.S. homes, up 33 percent from 2009."

Springfield, a multiracial, working-class city in western Massachusetts, has had more completed mortgage foreclosures in the first 11 months of 2010 than any other city in the state, according to The Republican newspaper. This is despite having a population less than one-fourth that of Boston, the largest city in Massachusetts.

Ramos' case is typical: she wants to renegotiate the terms of her loan so she can afford to stay in her home, but the servicer has refused. Government efforts at foreclosure prevention have only prevented a fraction of foreclosures and lack the teeth necessary to force lenders to negotiate. As Newsday pointed out, "In our system of bundled, resold mortgages, the companies that service the loans can sometimes make more money by charging fees throughout the foreclosure process."

Similarly, Ramos is one of the hundreds of thousands of local public-sector workers who have lost their jobs since the financial crisis in 2008 (more than half in education, according to Barrons ), as public-sector workers and homeowners are paying the price for declining government revenue and the cost of bailing out the banks in the wake of the housing crash.

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THE PROTEST, called by the No One Leaves Coalition in collaboration with the Springfield Bank Tenants Association, demanded that the Ramos family remain in their home and that PHH "negotiate a modification that reduces the principal and is affordable." As their statement said, "The Ramos' are NOT leaving their home without a fight, and [we] are prepared to stand up and fight back to keep the Ramos family in their home!"

Some 20 protesters gathered on the Ramos family's lawn by 3:30 p.m., and the number grew to more than 40 by the time the auction was scheduled to begin at 4 p.m. Ramos stood in front of her home with a sword and shield made of cardboard and tinfoil, joined by members of No One Leaves, Western Massachusetts Jobs with Justice, the UMass Graduate Employees Organization (United Auto Workers), the International Socialist Organization and other community members.

Also supporting the Ramos family was Carlos Peña, whose own home was saved from auction the previous week after a protest called by No One Leaves bought him enough time to declare bankruptcy and freeze foreclosure proceedings.

Protesters formed a line between the home and the street, chanting, "Banks get bailed out, we get thrown out" and "What do we do when the banks attack? Stand up, fight back!" Neighbors driving by gave the thumbs up, and some stopped to talk to protesters, including a mailman who expressed his support.

Addressing the crowd, Ramos said that PHH waited until the last minute to tell her they were auctioning her home two days before Christmas: "I have been here 20 years...the people from the bank never talked to me or negotiated, even when I said I wanted to pay. I decided I wanted to fight for my house, and I will never leave!"

Miriam Kudler-Flam, an organizer with No One Leaves, said, "With all those billions in bailouts...the banks need to make meaningful modifications. No more homeless in our communities!"

Shortly after the auction was set to begin, no potential buyers had attempted to get past the line of demonstrators, although protesters did spot two people in a late-model SUV who were parked for a few minutes up the street, but drove away.

An employee of PHH appeared and walked up to Keith Peters, who was leading chants with a bullhorn from the Ramos' front steps. Peters confronted him, saying, "Nobody is buying this house today!" The employee said that he was there to inform Noelia Ramos that the auction was being postponed for one month, until January 25.

Protesters immediately began cheering and chanting "Sí se puede" and "We'll be back." Ramos thanked protesters for their solidarity, saying, "They're not just dealing with one person, they're dealing with all of us."

Kudler-Flam said, "This is a victory. For now, Noelia Ramos can stay in her house, but we will be back to support her [if PHH does not renegotiate]."

With the action at the Peña home one week before, this was the second victory for the newly formed No One Leaves coalition, which one protester pointed out is "two for two." The coalition is modeled on City Life/Vida Urbana, a grassroots organization with the motto "Building solidarity to put people before profit" that has played a leading role in stopping foreclosures and evictions in Boston.

Do they really care about rape?

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.

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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."

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.

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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.

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."


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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."


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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."