Lucky White Girl

some thoughts on corporate media and the US postal service, the "culture of violence" in the US and the passing of a great human rights activist

The US Postal Service is switching from giving small publishers cheaper rates for mailing magazines to giving the largest corporate media publishers the best deals.  What will this do to freedom of speech:

"The new rates, which go into effect on July 15, were developed with no public involvement or congressional oversight, and the increased costs could damage hundreds, even thousands, of smaller publications, possibly putting many out of business.

What the Post Office is planning to do now, in the dark of night, is implement a rate structure that gives the best prices to the biggest publishers, hence letting them lock in their market position and lessen the threat of any new competition. The new rates could make it almost impossible to launch a new magazine, unless it is spawned by a huge conglomerate" (read the full article on CommonDreams).

On the shootings at Virginia Tech I feel adding my own revulsion to the mix won't mean much.  I don't have any new or interesting takes on the matter.  I generally agree with this question:

How many mass killings does the American public have to witness before its government gets serious about gun control?...For America's federal government to take gun control seriously, nothing less than mass armed insurrection is required. Were the public ever to act on the principles of their own Declaration of Independence, for example - "That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive ... it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government" - Congress would shut down the gun industry in a heartbeat.  (editorial by Lionel Shriver for the Guardian, UK).

And the sentiments expressed in this editorial in La Jornada from Mexico about the connections between US foreign policy and creating a "culture of violence" here at home, a point never more eloquently made than in the film Bowling for Columbine.

“The United States is immersed in a culture of fear directed at the population by the government and special interests and orchestrated by the news media, mainly television stations.” It is a form of control, he emphasized, similar to that which was used by the Nazi regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945.

And finally María Julia Hernandez has died.  Who was she?  An intrepid human rights fighter who brought the horrors of cases like the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador to the world's attention.  She was 68.  To learn more about her and her life's work read this excellent obituary from The Economist.

What gifts they might bring.

Scott Simon had a beautiful commentary on Weekend edition today about how Anne Frank's family applied for asylum in the United States twice, in 1938 and again in 1941.  They were turned down.  What would it be like, he wondered if Anne Frank had made it here, lived, had children and wrote books.  A 77-year old grandmother living in Florida or New Jersey.   It's hard not to see the parallels, he says, with another flood of immigrants clamoring to escape extreme violence in their homeland.  What beautiful people with amazing stories might we be losing by turning them away?

A bit of history on guest worker programs

After noting that the previous Washington Post editorial on guest worker programs didn't even mention the human cost I discovered that yesterday they ran an editorial by Janet Murguía of the National Council of La Raza defending their decision to support guest worker programs: 

"Experience tells us that there is good reason to be concerned that a new worker visa program could repeat these mistakes, creating a permanent, sizable subclass of workers who endure harsh treatment while simultaneously undercutting their American co-workers"

But, she says,

"The immigration reform bill the Senate passed last year contains a much different model of a worker visa program than the unjust model we have lived with for decades. Workers would not be at the mercy of abusive employers in that they could change jobs and alert the authorities to mistreatment.
            A change of heart on guest workers

I hope she's right but she doesn't offer much evidence that this is anything other than wishful thinking.   A lengthy but detailed and super informative article from a website on immigration law says that from a legal point of view the Bracero Agreement would be the "historical and legal precedent for the program currently being developed" and that's scary because

"Though the [Bracero] program provided desperately needed jobs to Mexican workers, the bracero experience was characterized by poverty wages, substandard working conditions, social discrimination, and lack of even the most basic social services for braceros and their families.

And check this out, the year after the Bracero program was ended because of popular outcry (1964) the Mexican president at the time signed the Border Industrialization Program (BIP) which created the maquiladora zone (which NAFTA exanded to the rest of the country so no one would be left out of the glorious benefits of capitalist globalization).  They just moved the slave wage jobs across the border!  [incidently one of my other sources I cited in my previous post which talked about the link between the Bracero program and industry's efforts to sabotage farmworkers unionizing mentioned that the end of the program made possible the famous grape boycott and the wave of farmworker's rights campaigns].

"Overall, the maquiladora system has been a boon to U.S. capitalism, keeping the costs of production down and profits up in many critical U.S. industries"

So interestingly enough if any one thing's to blame for the flood of immigration from Mexico into the US, it's NAFTA.  Who wouldn't want to flee low-paying slave wage jobs for better ones across the border?

U.S. financial and political intervention in the national life of Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s, often carried out through the WTO, has pauperized the Mexican working class. It is they who have had to suffer the brunt of the mandatory austerity programs, strict debt restructuring, and privatization initiatives that were imposed on Mexico in the 1980s after the credit binge of the Mexican bourgeoisie during the previous decade. The result of this foreign intervention has been widespread unemployment and displacement from the land that has produced onerous hardship and sparked internal migration from the interior of Mexico to the industrialized border region and to the United States. It is widely acknowledged that NAFTA has exacerbated all of the problems created by the financial and political interventions of the 1980s

...Free trade in workers across international borders is a primary goal of global capitalism. While offshoring schemes, such as the Border Industrialization Program, transfer the work of manufacturing industries to regions with cheap labor, the goal of global guest worker programs is to import cheap labor for agriculture, site-bound manufacturing, and local service industries.

Now here's the kicker: "The migrants’ visas are employer or contract bound, so they must remain employed to maintain their legal status", which they say "inevitably leads to abuse" as we've seen with the Bracero Program.  So here's the deal Ms. Murguía (and La Raza) if the new guest worker programs are NOT to be repeats of the past it seems to me that this is what you've got to pay attention to. 

Wow.  I've got to tell you again to GO READ THAT ARTICLE.  I've quoted it extensively because it's so long I'm afraid few will want to delve into it and I want you to at least get the gist of the argument but really I highly, highly recommend reading it.  I even passed it along to my old law professor for my Trade and Human Rights class because of the link it makes explicit between neoliberal globalization policies and workers' rights.
 

My letter-to-the-editor of NPRs Morning Edition

Regarding your story about the Guatemalan immigrants who came to this country legally on a guest worker program... This is not an isolated incident.  Fraud and exploitation are par for the course with guest worker programs which put the workers completely at the mercy of the corporation who "imports them".  If those who come to this country are treated as near-slaves, can be paid $2-3 dollars an hour, sleep in barracks style windowless boxes with no indoor plumbing or insulation, have their freedom of movement restricted by the company and can be deported for organizing for more just working conditions, [as per a segment on a PBS News Hour story that mentioned another company that employs workers under a guest worker program] is this any way to encourage legal immigration?? 

At a time when Bush is pushing for an expansion of such programs, the media have an obligation to report explicitly on these abuses they entail so that the citizenry can make informed decisions about whether guest worker programs truly represent American democratic values.

We should be outraged: Guest worker programs mean slavery and exploitation

I keep hearing more and more horrible stories about these guest worker programs.  Any conscienable citizen of this country should be outraged about this.  After I read this editorial by David Bacon I heard two news stories illustrating exactly the concerns he expressed in his article.

A story on PBS' News Hour last night about the shortage of workers on the Gulf coast reported that a company called Signal International uses a guest worker program to import 300 workers from India.  From a press release on their website,

"to make up for chronic labor shortages, Signal has... turned to a US Government guest worker program known as H2B. Visas are issued by the overseas US Consulates after a comprehensive background check of each foreign worker who applies, by the US Department of Homeland Security.  Once visas are granted the guest workers may come to the US and work for 10 months"

The PBS report included this segment [please note that this wasn't even the main topic of the story, as outrageous and enfuriating as it is which meant I had a hard time finding it this morning].  I transcribed the following two paragraphs from the audio clip available on their website:

"The Indian workers live in housing inside the shipyard. They have to pay room and board.  The company wouldn't let us shoot there, nor would they provide a representative for an on camera interview but off camera a Signal vice-president told us they also use hundreds of workers provided by labor contractors including many guest workers from Mexico.

The Mexican workers about 300 of them live in a fenced in compound in a site that's near the shipyard.  When we started to interview the workers, the labor contractor that brought them in, Knights Marine and Industrial Services, told us to leave.  They refused to answer any questions.  The workers live in wooden sheds without windows, plumbing or insulation.  They sleep in bunk beds six to a cabin, where they store food.  These pictures were taken and provided to us by workers who asked to remain anonymous saying they feared retribution"

The second news story I heard that illustrated the terrible exploitation of workers under guest worker programs came on NPRs Morning edition.  Again the story was framed not as a story about guest worker programs but as an isolated incident.  The title of the NPR story is "Guatemalan Immigrants Sue over Job Switch".  As if this type of thing isn't inherent in a program that creates a modern day caste system. 

I am so outraged over this, that not only such programs exist as ways for companies to return to 19th century exploitation of labor but also that the mainstream media is not reporting on it like they should.

A Google news search for "guest worker programs" turns up mostly news stories about Bush's plan and only a handful of editorials on the subject, mostly from a few years ago.  The one recent editorial I found is from the Des Moines Register on why guest worker programs are a bad idea.  The Christian Science Monitor had an editorial in 2004, Past has cautionary lessons for guest worker programs, which provides some history on guest worker programs, and in 2003 David Bacon had another article on Znet Is a New Bracero Program in our future? Other editorials such as this one from the Washington Post don't even mention the human cost of such programs.

This is a perfect example of an issue where bloggers can play a role in raising awareness about a horrible social justice issue today.  We need to raise an outcry about this.  Demand that the media cover these stories explicitly.  It is outrageous that companies can use these programs to get around all the privileges and protections workers have organized around and struggled for since the 19th century. 

If you have a blog, please post about this.  If you have a local news paper, write a letter to the editor.  Write your local television and radio news stations; tell them to cover these stories.  People need to be informed.  If we let the people in this country know that this is what guest worker programs are that this is the kind of treatment that happens under guest worker programs, then we can make an informed decision about whether we want this country to allow such things.  How can we complain about people coming to this country illegally when this is what could happen to them if they come legally???  Is this the way to encourage legal immigration??? 

Until we get rid of exploitative programs such as these, I don't want to hear any right-wingers complaining about illegal immigration.  Bullshit.  This country is NOT about slavery and exploitation any more.  This country is supposed to be about freedom and opportunity and justice for all.  If you believe in that, then do something about this!  Say NO to guest worker programs.

Diversity --just plain smart.

"The very fact you have people of color in the workplace changes the way everybody in the workplace thinks" --interview with Columnist Shankar Vedantam on NPR's Morning Edition.

Substandard housing makes me mad

This makes me mad.  North Central Florida is filled with many migrant farmworkers, many of whom are illegal and all of whom are extremely poor and vulnerable.  And you have assholes like this who prey on them:

"[Pierson Town Council] Chairman [Samuel] Bennett has been cited for persistent violations of state law during the past 15 years. His mobile homes, rented to farmworkers and inspected under the less-stringent state law governing all mobile home parks, have been cited for infractions ranging from raw sewage flowing around the mobile homes and exposed electrical wires to roach infestations, according to Volusia County Health Department records. He has never paid a fine, records show." (Daytona Beach News-Journal).

Sounds like Mr. Potter in It's a Wonderful Life.

What we need is a Bailey Building and Loan to provide decent, safe, affordable housing for people.  What is a building and loan?  Why don't we have things like this today?  Or do we?... hmmm... a Google search for a CDFI (Community Development Financial Institution) revealed this from wikipedia:

"A CDFI may take one of several different forms: community development bank, community development credit union, community development loan fund (including microloan funds), or community development venture capital company.

One of the best illustrations of a CDFI is provided by the film, It's a Wonderful Life. The Bailey Brothers Building & Loan Association is shown as a vital source of financial services and loans to the working class and immigrants in Bedford Falls, helping them to graduate from being renters of Mr. Potter's slums to homeowners themselves."

I wonder if something like this exists in North Central Florida. 

On the death of a dictator

Latest foreign news translation, from Spain:
Recalling Kissingerian Tool, General Augusto Pinochet

The people united: Fast for Darfur

About a week ago I got an email from my sister saying how we should all boycott Citgo, the Venezuelan oil company, because their president (Venezuela's, not Citgo's) called our president a bad name.  Bush has used similar language in his own ideological speeches.  Nothing more encouraging than two heads of states acting like two six-year olds!  At the time I just rolled my eyes in exasperation at the childishness of some people, not only the name-calling heads of states but the boycott-calling people who take such rhetoric seriously (though the boycott wasn't my sister's idea; she just forwarded the email).

But when I wrote back to my sister (who surely will think twice about sending me anything political in the furture) I tried to not just say "hey this is a dumb idea".  I tried to find something positive to say about it.  So it occurred to me that there is some (surely unintended) good news in that email: it's an example that even for conservatives the power of the people to effect social and political change is far from forgotten.  Even conservatives know that "the people united can never be defeated".  And I was glad to see that when they saw something they didn't like, their first thought was to organize a boycott.  To me, that says something very reassuring about the citizenry of this country: they may be asleep a lot of the time but if they ever woke up, boy! watch out!  Despite what corporate controlled curricula would have us believe, here in the United States, we do have a long tradition of active social movements and popular resistence (just read People's History for a long list of examples).  We've always been that way in the past and if we wanted to, we could be a powerful force for change in the future as well.

So I thought this was appropriate today as I walked through campus and saw green fliers plastered everywhere about a very important event tomorrow (or today, depending on when you read this): International Fast for Darfur Day: "Tomorrow, Oct. 6, we, Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), are once again asking the community to stand up. STAND will be hosting Darfur Fast, an event designed to demonstrate unity with the people of Darfur, raise awareness of the genocide, and fundraise for relief efforts" (from their call to action).  Here in Gainesville some human rights groups are calling for people to wear green to express their solidarity.

I'm glad my sister and other concerned citizens of this country care about internatonal politics.  I'm glad they recognize the power they have inherent.  I'm glad they're willing to inconvenience themselves to take a political stand.  But when you think about the state of the world and the scope of the problems facing humanity, it doesn't take a genius to figure out which is more important: putting a stop to name-calling or putting a stop to genocide.  Even two six year olds could figure it out.

For more information:

SudanWatch blog

A Q&A on Darfur from the BBC...

The OTHER September 11th

In Memorium. 

September 11, 1973

Shift ---> keep awake.

Life works like a manual transmission, ya know?  Sometimes you have to shift gears.

I've been needing to shift gears for a long time now.  I'm going to shift a similie for a metaphor now too and say I've been sleep walking for the past year.  Or two.  Since I came back from Colombia.  But let me tell you, sleepwalking fits well with grad school.  In fact it may even be necessary.  If you are too awake, you will not stay and finish your degree.  You'll leave and go do something.  And maybe that something will be so overwhelming you'll have to go back to sleep again.  That's okay.  Just don't sleep forever.  Remember to wake up.

Please God help me to always remember to wake up! 

I just saw a movie that woke me up again.  It's called Sophie Scholl, you've seen it?  Go see it.  It's about the White Rose which is a story that has had a huge impact on my life.  If I ever have a kid, I will name her Sophie. I had a book about the White Rose, written by Sophie and Hans' sister who survived and preserved some of their letters.  The book might be out of print now, but if you don't know the story the links above should help.  And do go see the movie.  Maybe it will cause a shift in you too.  I needed a shift.  I desperately needed it.

After the movie I left thinking one thing: we are not doing enough.

Shift.

See the thing about Sophie Scholl that haunts me so much is that I can just so identify with her situation.  Being someone who looks around the world and realizes a.) how beautiful it is and b.) that the greatest threat to the peace and security of that world is your own country and the crazy old white men who run it.

We are not doing enough. 

Shift.

The difference between Hitler's Germany and Bush's US is ... what?  Some of the methods?  We're way more subtler today both in our techniques and our language.  Invading and occupying foreign countries?  Oh yeah, we got that.  A threat to our neighbors?  Definitely.  Killing people we think are not valuable?  We've got that too.  Is it less systemic?  No.  It's differently systemic.  Six million is a lot at one time, at one place, in the same way, true.  We haven't done it like that.  We do a little here and a little there, with both direct and indirect means but they are nonetheless systemic.  How many depends on when you start counting.  How many millions died in southeast Asia during the Vietnam War?  How many died in the wars and dictatorships we supported in Latin America throughout the 80s?  How many people in the Majority/Third World starve because we don't leave them enough resources to live, get sick because we don't want to share our medicines with them, or sweat their lives away to make our clothing?  All Holocausts are equally terrible, equally disturbing.  We have to recognize that we place more value on some people's lives than on others and we, yes, us, you and me here today right now expect to sacrifice other people --other people!-- so we can have this standard of living, this particular (false) expectation of security (whose security??)!

So tell me again, what's the difference?

Shift.

The difference between Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose is ... what?  That they were young enough not to have lost their sense of outrage.  They were outraged enough that they sacrificed their own lives to resist.  Nonviolently.  Sabotage the weapons, their fliers said.  Sabotage the weapons.  How can we sabotage the weapons of the world superpower today?

Shift  ---> keep awake!

I walked home thinking about internal resistance.  Rebellion from within.  It was easy for the Allies to be against the Nazis.  It was hard for the Germans to do so.  It is easy for people of color to hate white racism and supremacy.  It is hard for white people to do so.  It is easy for victims of Empire to hate imperialism.  It is hard for those of us who benefit from it to do so.  Internal resistance.  Rebellion.  Insurrection against moral wrongs, even when they benefit us.

Keep awake!  What Jesus told the disciples waiting in the garden.  Keep awake!  Don't fall asleep.  Don't become complacent.  Don't forget.  Never, ever, ever forget!  And it's not enough to feel gratitude for those who struggled in previous generations.  It's not enough to be grateful to them for doing what they did.  They only started something we have to continue.  It never stops.  We're not the beneficiaries, just the next in line.

International Relationship Work

Ok, forget what I said before (if you saw it, I already took the first version of this post down).  Here's my real introduction, which I think makes a good essay in and of itself.

On International Relationship Work

When I chose to study International Relations (IR) I did it without really understanding much about the field itself.  I simply knew that I was interested in the big questions of war and peace.  I read the newspaper and saw that war and violence were everywhere and I wanted to understand more about the terrible situation that the world is in and how we might begin to change it.  I discovered that an MA in IR was the degree I would need to work for the United Nations or some small human-rights focused non-governmental organization (NGO) and that’s how I, an English Literature undergraduate, ended up studying international relations.

When I actually began to study this thing called IR, I learned, however, that it was very different from what I expected.  The vast majority of my classmates wanted to work for either the State Department or were connected to the military in some way.  Human rights were barely on the horizon.  I stood out in various ways.  I was one of only three women in the incoming class and far from being a young Margaret Thatcher or Madeline Albright my politics were considered downright radical and my methods unconventional.  Not feeling like I was ever taken seriously I felt shoved into a role of providing comic relief for the more “serious” discussions of my (mostly male) classmates; discussions that were based on premises I didn’t even believe in.  Needless to say, I soon became discouraged and when I discovered a way to do my original goal (work for human rights) without the degree I left the academic program to go to Colombia.

I loved it.  It was hard and painful work but it was also beautiful, important, and meaningful.  I spent a year there and formed new relationships and friendships.  The experience left me even more curious about a different kind of international relations: that is, relationships between people across borders.  I wondered why is it that this also is not part of the IR I encountered in grad school?         

I remain committed to human rights, to holding governments and other violators accountable, to supporting and encouraging the work of indigenous and international communities to organize and resist such violence and to be a good ally to other members of the human family.  I consider the defense and promotion of human rights and the pursuit of social justice to be “relationship work”.  Relationships amongst people are the foundation of human society.  War is the most extreme form of broken relationships on a large scale.  There is something problematic with a field that does not –that cannot– see critiques that point out inherent weaknesses within its own theoretical underpinnings.

If the goal of any academic discipline is a greater understanding of the world around us, a fearless questioning, even of our most fundamental beliefs, is essential.  And yet theory must go further even than that.  Investigation and explanation without critique is not neutral.  It is to further entrench and justify the current power differentials of our world. In that light, this paper will take a critical theory approach to critiquing some of the basic premises of the realist school of thought within International Relations, including who the major actors are in the study of IR, the nature of the global environment in which they exist and what defines security for them.

National Geographic: part of the problem?

Here's something to think about: National Geographic Magazine as a cog in the machine of colonialism and neo-colonialism.  From that post, Whose money feeds the sex slave trade? the author wonders what role the magazine might play in white Western men who go over to "exotic" third world countries to buy sex and/or young girls.  One of those men was interviewed by Mother Jones magazine for an article on Cambodian brothels and says:

"You know, it's funny. It was like I went through this Lolita syndrome. I was in la-la land for two years. Maxed out all my credit cards. Or, part of it, do you ever do something just because you can do it and you think it's the wildest thing and you want to do it? I mean to buy someone out of a brothel was so wild, something you read about in National Geographic in the Sudan or something".

And Alley Rat wonders about that reference to National Geographic:

Isn't National Geographic the first place many Western men see naked female breasts? It's okay to leave NG and its naked boobs on the coffee table while Playboy gets shoved under the bed because the people in NG not like us, they're more like animals in the jungle. Exotic, beautiful, different and far, far away. Almost like items in a catalogue, images we consume rather than real living human beings. Or something.

Mark, this white, privileged, but lonely American man, wants a taste of the exotic and finds himself with the just wild-and-crazy opportunity to actually live out the fantasy of being in a position to own another person, a person who seems a little bit less than human because of her resemblance to various exotic creatures in nature shows and magazines, featured not-quite-fully-clothed.

NG did do a story on human slavery referenced below but still.  They've also done stories on people in this country.  But still.  What's the first thing you think about when you think National Geographic?  Animals?  Nature? 

Interestingly enough, I was in Colombia when the human slavery issue came out and down there the Spanish version of the magazine had a picture of a person on the cover, related to the slavery story.  I heard from folks in the U.S. that the cover domestically was different.  It had a picture of a zebra.

Alley Rat, in the comments section of her post responds to someone taken aback by that reference to NG as colonialist tool:

There's this great book called "Reading National Geographic" that really goes through, step by step, how our view of the "exotic" parts of the world has developed and changed over time, and the role that NG played in shaping it.

NG started out when colonialism was still thought of as a good thing, and they were an important part of selling that view to the public. For decades they portrayed colonized (and post-colonized)people as child-like, helpless, animal-like, and "exotic." All of which make it just a little easier to consider exploiting them sexually (among other ways).

So, is NG an evil cartel selling girls and boys into slavery? No. Are they a small cog in the huge machine that makes such slavery possible? Unfortunately, yes.

What do you think?

The locus of control: An essay on prostitution as exploitation

Our readings this week in the trade/human rights law class focused on human trafficking (slave labor, the sex trade industry, modern-day indentured servitude etc.)  And, if you're interested in finding out more about modern-day slavery, I've added a section of links to some really good articles, on the left-hand sidebar.  They provide good background information for this post.  Two of these articles we just read for class this week (The New Yorker article and The National Geographic article). 

 One of the articles we read, "Both Work and Violence: Prostitution and Human Rights", argues that "mutually exclusive frameworks for understanding prostitution --one that characterizes it as violence and one that treats it as work --dominate the current human rights debate" over prostitution.  The author argues that prostitution is both  (i.e. it's exploitative work) and should be treated from a human rights point of view the same way we treat sweatshop labor and other forms of super exploitative work: as a form of slave labor. 

I agree.  The crux of the matter is the illusion that economic necessity has no bearing at all on free choice.  That is a fallacy.  Except in some rare instances as I describe below, sex work is rarely a real choice, it's not liberating, it doesn't "empower" women.  Some pro-sex feminists have argued for the decriminalization of prostitution on the basis that it's a choice like anything else (e.g. Annie Sprinkle).  Others argue for the rights of prostitutes (or sex workers) as workers (Anne McClintock) which assumes that it's essentially the same as other forms of labor. But these approaches do not take into account the overwhelming force economics plays in a capitalist system.

I appreciate a sex-positive approach that tries to undo notions of sex as inherently "dirty" and "sinful" and I also appreciate trying to protect sex workers by legitimating the work in the hopes that we can regulate it and make it safer but I think that both approaches miss the point.  Under the global neo-liberal economic system in which women are at such a disadvantage, the overwhelming majority of prostitution is an exchange between economic unequals.  We have to look at the subject within it's own context and that context is the global capitalist system.  If it were possible for some deux-ex-machina to come along and remove the question from the world that surrounds it, those arguments might make more sense.  But the social sciences are not the physical sciences.  We cannot remove a particular social phenomena from its context and place it within a sterile environment for the purposes of study.  We have to look at social phenomena within it's own context that is the world around us.

Also, both of the above approaches argue that "prostitution is one of women's best economic choices".  It pays well.  And that's a good thing, they say.  But we have to ask why is it one of our best choices?  Why are our bodies the most valuable possession we have as women?  Getting more money isn't the end all and be all of liberation. It's a pseudo-liberation.  It is not full liberation if it preserves the underlying structure of inequality which exists under the global capitalist system we have today.  There's something inherently wrong with a system that makes women's bodies their most valuable possession.

It comes down to this: where is the locus of control?  Is it within the woman herself or within the capitalist system that makes sex-work a good economic choice for so many women around the world?  In a globalized neo-liberal economy very few people (any at all? considering that corporations are the new citizens?) retain the locus of control.  Much less for poor women.  This, then, is the problem, with arguing that prostitution is a choice.  Any choice made out of economic necessity is a false choice because the locus of control is not within the individual. 

This is not to say that I'm arguing that we should continue with the current system of criminalizing prostitutes themselves.  If a woman’s “best economic option” is prostitution, the problem is not with the women (prostitutes) it’s with the “filthy rotten system” that makes it so.   

To those who argue that prostitution should be legal, based on destigmatizing sex and getting women better pay, I have to say that I agree with both of those things, but accepting a system where so many poor women have to sell their bodies in order to survive is not the way to achieve either of those goals (a sex-positive society or economic security for women).  Until we have a more equitable economic system, the instances in which it could be fairly argued that prostitution is a true choice are going to be very, very tiny.  I don’t doubt it could happen.  But to the extent that it does in our world, I think it’s only in the upper classes (e.g. high-end call girls, Heidi Fliess etc.) who could be said to truly have a choice. I imagine someone who is otherwise economically well-off, definitely has other options but chooses a kind of sex-positive lifestyle choice purely out of personal preference.  Like I said, I think that’s very, very rare, but it is possible. 

Making those sorts of arguments about freedom of choice for women under a global capitalist system legitimates an oppressive economic system and paints poor women who have few other choices into a corner which tells them that this is the only thing (best thing) they can do and not only that it's liberatory for them.  That's offensive.  That's like arguing that farmworkers choose to be farmworkers and that people who work in sweatshops choose to work in sweatshops and that such work empowers them because they get paid more than they would otherwise would if they were unemployed.

Choice implies that a person has that locus of control.  The vast majority of prostitutes don’t have that.  Farmworkers don’t have that.  Sweatshop workers don’t have that.  (Unless they unionize.)   When we have an ideal (read: non-capitalist) world, then you can argue that women who have sex for money (which wouldn't make any sense in such a world anyway) do it as a choice and as a truly liberatory act.  Until then, no way.  Prostitution is exploitation not empowerment.

-----

For another aspect of the sex trade industry please READ THIS excellent post from Alley Rat: Whose money feeds the sex slave trade?

Anniversary.

By the way, I almost missed it, but yesterday was an important anniversary.  (I thought it was today)  On February 13, 1991 during the first Gulf War a shelter housing 400 civilians was bombed.  Was it an accident?  I'd like to think so, but there were no military targets in the area and the coaliton had the coordinates of the shelter and the knowledge that it was a bomb shelter for civilians.  Afterwards NATO said it had been a mistake.  It was hit by two of those "bunker busting" bombs we heard so much talk about back then.  Here's a report by journalist who visited the memorial site that stands where the Amiriya shelter once stood.

Legislated full employment?

Here's an idea!  An article in the Sunday New York Times about what full employment is, why we stopped talking about achieving it and why we should bring it back asks the following question: Given that we've only achieved it by market forces alone very rarely and very briefly, should the government legislate full employment? 

FDR wanted it back in 1944, arguing that the right to a job is a human right (indeed, article 23 and 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says exactly that).   If the number of people seeking jobs is larger than the number of jobs that are vacant, the government could create those needed jobs.  We actually did this back in the 70s under the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) (until Reagan ended it, of course). But the article profiles William Darity Jr., an economist at UNC Chapel Hill, who argues that we should do something like that again.

"not to supply make-work jobs, but to satisfy pressing social needs with projects like public school construction or a national teachers corps or high-speed rail lines. 'Certainly there are areas that the private sector does not find profitable,' Mr. Darity said, 'but the public needs and the private sector would find useful'."

I think it sounds great.  What do you think?

Time for reparations for less developed countries?

Last semester I read a book by an African Studies professor in which the author argued that war-making and state-making go hand in hand and the path to a highly organized nation-state lies in going through centuries of warfare. The reason there are so many failed states in Africa is because they didn't do this (mostly because of the geography of the land and resources). He didn't flat out say Africa just needs to have more wars but that was the unstated conclusion.

This week in Trade and Human Rights Law, we talked about the intersection of trade agreements and labor rights.  It turns out that the most vocal opponents of inscribing labor laws into trade agreements are less-developed-countries (LDCs) because, they argue, cheap labor is their comparative advantage and since well-off countries had to go through a period of slave-labor and gross exploitation in order to get to where they are today, we should be accorded the same leeway.  Should be obvious that the people in the LDCs who argue this are not the people who would have to work in the sweatshops.

My response to that is this: While I recognize the basis of the argument that well-off countries got well off because they exploited other countries, (really, if wealth were based on possession of natural resources Guatemala would be one of the richest countries in the world instead of one of the poorest), I'm suspicious of this idea that the only path to "development" is by exploitation, if not of the labor of other countries' citizens, then by the labor of your own. Like the "war is the path to building strong states" argument, there are obvious ethical implications which are hugely problematic here. I can't believe any serious-minded person would actually consider telling African states to try to have more wars; the corollary statement, saying to LDCs that they should have more sweatshops, is just as repugnant.

So let's go back to where these well-off countries got their wealth. We got it from slavery, from colonialism, from war-making... etc. From exploiting other people. Workers create all wealth. The more you can get them to work for little or nothing, the more wealth you create for yourself. Veronica's right. It's not sustainable. We can have so much only because others have so little . Considering that this is where our wealth comes from (the stolen labor of millions of people in the Third World), I'd argue that the most logical response to helping LDCs move upwards is to think about REPARATIONS. We stole it from them, the answer is not for them to steal it from someone else (or from their own workers). It's for us to give it back!

Development is a terribly misleading word for so many reasons, (remind me to write a post on some of the other ones one day).  One of those reasons is that it frames the issue in a way that leads us to think of world productivity in terms of a zero-sum game. Winners win only at the cost of the losers' loss. Under such a system, sure, the only way to raise standards of living come by reducing someone else's. What we want, though, is not to shift the wealth and poverty around but to distribute it more equitably. Don't think "development" think "redistribution".

UPDATE: While visiting nosweatapparel.com I wanted to find an image I could put up here on the blog and found that not only do that allow that but they'll give me 7% of any sales that come from someone clicking thru that link!  So if you're in the market for some new duds and want also to help fund Lucky White Girl... feel free to click away!
 

Students reject Coke's human rights abuses

Yay!  Congratulations to the students at the University of Michigan and NYU!  They successfully kicked Coca-Cola off their campus for human rights abuses in Colombia and pollution in India.  Good for them!   See the Businessweek story here.  And the NPR story here.  Other newspapers ran supportive editorials, like this one from the Minnesota Daily News.

Disparity.

Maybe not so astonishing to some of you but important to put out there to those who haven't seen them yet:

The richest fifth of the world's people consumes 86 percent of all
goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent. Indeed, the
richest fifth consumes 45 percent of all meat and fish, 58 percent of all energy used
and 84 percent of all paper, has 74 percent of all telephone lines and owns 87
percent of all vehicles.

The three richest people in the world have assets that exceed
the combined gross domestic product of the 48 least developed countries.

The average African household today consumes 20 percent less than it did
25 years ago.

The world's 225 richest individuals, of whom 60 are Americans
with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion -- equal
to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the entire world's population.

                                                             --source UN Human Development Report

We need another Roosevelt

Doing the readings for my trade and human rights law class I came upon this quote from FDR, about the "four freedoms".  It's used to illustrate how exceptional it was for a US president to embrace anything other that the individual-oriented civil and political rights.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded
upon four essential human freedoms. The first is the freedom of speech and expression everywhere in the world. The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his[/her] own way everywhere in the world. The third is the freedom from want, which translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear - which translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor- anywhere in the world.

This was cited in the notes to an article I read this morning called "Human Rights through a Gendered Lens: emergence, evolution and revolution" by my professor Berta Hernandez.  It goes on:

"Id. Later in his State of the Union message to Congress delivered January 11, 1944, President Roosevelt articulated many of these economic rights as part of his vision for a truly free United States of America. He noted that "true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence", that "[p]eople who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made..."

Can you imagine a US president saying that today?  My God!  Traditionally human rights have been grouped into two (and now three) categories: civil and political rights which are based in the Western tradition, especially the French and American Revolutions.  These are rights that protect individuals from their governments (also known as negative rights).  Their supposed opposites are social, cultural and economic rights which are like those Roosevelt was talking about above and they usually involve rights that governments owe to their people like the right to fair housing and a living wage.  They're rooted in the socialist tradition.  But I learned that there's a third category of rights now called solidarity rights, which are kinda collective or group rights: the right to self-determination, the right to be free of imperialism and colonialization, for example.  These come out of the majority (third) world tradition of newly independent countries.

But regarding those freedoms that Roosevelt was talking about... not exactly the ones Bush has in mind!

First day Human Rights class

Wow, what a great class!  I am so psyched!  The profs seem very cool.  One's from trade law; one's from human rights law.  They just gave a brief overview this morning which was really simple and kinda redundant but that adds up to a reassuring first day.  Especially when you're taking a course outside your own department. If I'd had no idea what they were talking about, I woulda been intimidated and overwhelmed which is NOT a good thing.

I think this class is gonna be so useful.  I've already learned a lot just from the readings.  One thing that I was kinda new to me that I had never thought of before in this way was how both international trade laws and human rights laws were different reactions to the same thing (World War II).  The GATT (now part of the WTO) grew out of the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944:

From the Wikipedia article on Bretton Woods:

"Also based on experience of interwar years, U.S. planners developed a concept of economic security—that a liberal international economic system would enhance the possibilities of postwar peace. One of those who saw such a security link was Cordell Hull, the U.S. secretary of state from 1933 to 1944.¹ Hull believed that the fundamental causes of the two world wars lay in economic discrimination and trade warfare. Specifically, he had in mind the trade and exchange controls (bilateral arrangements) of Nazi Germany and the imperial preference system practiced by Britain (by which members or former members of the British Empire were accorded special trade status). Hull argued that:

[U]nhampered trade dovetailed with peace; high tariffs, trade barriers, and unfair economic competition, with war... if we could get a freer flow of trade... freer in the sense of fewer discriminations and obstructions... so that one country would not be deadly jealous of another and the living standards of all countries might rise, thereby eliminating the economic dissatisfaction that breeds war, we might have a reasonable chance of lasting peace.

Which turned out to not exactly be true, but that's what they thought at the time.

And of course also in the post-war years the international human rights law began to be formulated with the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

So the interesting thing to note here is given their shared history and interconnectedness why are these two areas so isolated from each other? 

Close the SOA/WHISC: School of Assassins

For years every November a caravan of students, activists, retirees, parents and concerned citizens travel up to Fort Benning, GA to commemorate the murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter in El Salvador 16 years ago.  Their assassins, members of El Salvador's death squads  were trained at the US Army's School of the Americas, (you can find a more detailed history of the school here from SOA Watch).  It's been located at Fort Benning, GA ever since it was kicked out of its orginal home in Panama for being unconducive to the principles of democracy. 

The purpose of the school is to train the leaders of foreign militaries, specifically those of Latin America.  Now bear in mind that inter-state warfare in Latin America is not the main concern/motivation here.  Bolivia does not fear an invasion by Brazil.  Costa Rica has no designs on Nicaragua.  The militaries of Latin America overwhelmingly exist to control their own populations.  Their targets are their own people and insurgent populations. 

The School of the Americas (SOA) has for years been the target of immense political pressure here in the US because of its dismal track record in human rights; many of the graduates of this school go on to commit human rights abuses in their own countries (click here for more info on the graduates of the school). 

During a time when the rhetoric coming out of Washington is all about hunting down terrorists and those who harbor and train them it is immensely hypocritical to maintain such a school, under whatever name (the SOA was renamed a few years ago to the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation), whose very raison d'etre is repugnant.  This year a record number of 16,000 people gathered outside the gates of the school to mourn the dead and call for an end to a US training school for Latin American terrorists.  Thanks to all those folks who made the pilgrimmage to the SOA this year.  Your witness speaks volumes about real American values.

Happy Birthday, Stetson!

Stetson Kennedy, one of Florida's great folklorists and activists, turns 89 today.  Kennedy, a white man, went undercover and investigated the local KKK in Florida in the 1930s.  He went on to write numerous books and was a major actor in the local civil rights movement.

Happy birthday, Mr. Kennedy and thanks.

Profile in the St. Pete Times

Journalist searches for mass graves in Colombia

Juan Ferero, a photojournalist for the New York Times travelled recently to Colombia to investigate reports of mass graves of those disappeared by the paramilitaries.  You can watch a multimedia presentation of his work here.