Month: June 2009

By Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

Can we please stop talking about feminism as if it is mothers and daughters fighting about clothes? Second wave: you’re going out in that? Third wave: just drink your herbal tea and leave me alone! Media commentators love to reduce everything about women to catfights about sex, so it’s not surprising that this belittling and historically inaccurate way of looking at the women’s movement–angry prudes versus drunken sluts–has recently taken on new life, including among feminists. Writing on DoubleX?.com, the new Slate spinoff for women, the redoubtable Linda Hirshman delivered a sweeping attack on younger feminists for irresponsible partying, as chronicled on Jezebel.com, a Gawker-family blog devoted to “Celebrity, Sex, Fashion for Women. Without Airbrushing.” Likewise, a silly “debate” over whether Sex and the Single Girl did more for women than The Feminine Mystique followed the release of Jennifer Scanlon’s Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown. As Naomi Wolf wrote in the Washington Post, “The stereotype of feminists as asexual, hirsute Amazons in Birkenstocks that has reigned on campus for the past two decades has been replaced by a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland.” Pick your caricature.

What’s wrong with parsing feminism along a mother/daughter divide? Everything.

First of all, it’s chronologically off. If second wavers are those who made the women’s liberation movement in the late 1960s and ’70s, they are not the mothers of today’s young feminists but their grandmothers. Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Barbara Seaman and Del Martin are dead. Adrienne Rich is 80, Robin Morgan is 68. Gloria Steinem, still fabulous, celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday on March 25. The wave construct obscures the perspective of women ten or even twenty years younger, like, um, me–in 1966, when NOW was founded, I was a junior in high school–or Susan Faludi (b. 1959), bell hooks (b. 1952) or Anna Quindlen (b. 1952).

The same thing happens at the other end. “Third wave” was indeed intended to define a new generation–it was coined by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter–in 1992. The original third wavers, with their reclaiming of “girl culture” and their commitment to the intersectionality of race, class and gender are now touching 40; they hung up their Hello Kitty backpacks some time ago. Many, like Walker, have children: they are the mothers who, today’s “young feminists” complain, use up all the air in the room, according to Nation writer Nona Willis Aronowitz. But the term continues to be used to describe each latest crop of feminists–loosely defined as any female with more political awareness than a Bratz doll–and to portray them in terms of their rejection of second wavers, who are supposedly starchy and censorious. Like moms. Somebody’s mom, anyway.

The wave structure, I’m trying to say, looks historical, but actually it is used to misrepresent history by evoking ancient tropes about repressive mothers and rebellious daughters. Second wave: anti-porn; third wave: anything goes! But second wave was never all anti-porn–think of Ellen Willis, for heaven’s sake. It even gave us the propaganda term “pro-sex.” The ACLU is jampacked with feminist lawyers of a certain age. In fact, feminists in the ’70s and ’80s had the same conflicts over pornography that are playing out today among young women over raunch and sex work. You wouldn’t know it from the media, but there are plenty of young feminists who do not see pole-dancing as “empowering” and do not aspire to star in a Girls Gone Wild video. Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs sold very well on campus. These women don’t fit the wave story line, however, so nobody interviews them. The pairing up on sex issues is old/young, with the older feminist representing sour puritanical judgment.

The Nation for more

Or How to Stay Out of Sight While Profiting From the War in Iraq

By Pratap Chatterjee

The Houstonian Hotel is an elegant, secluded resort set on an 18-acre wooded oasis in the heart of downtown Houston. Two weeks ago, David Lesar, CEO of the once notorious energy services corporation Halliburton, spoke to some 100 shareholders and members of senior management gathered there at the company’s annual meeting. All was remarkably staid as they celebrated Halliburton’s $4 billion in operating profits in 2008, a striking 22% return at a time when many companies are announcing record losses. Analysts remain bullish on Halliburton’s stock, reflecting a more general view that any company in the oil business is likely to have a profitable future in store.

There were no protestors outside the meeting this year, nor the kind of national media stakeouts commonplace when Lesar addressed the same crew at the posh Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Houston in May 2004. Then, dozens of mounted police faced off against 300 protestors in the streets outside, while a San Francisco group that dubbed itself the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane fielded activists in Bush and Cheney masks, offering fake $100 bills to passers-by in a mock protest against war profiteering. And don’t forget the 25-foot inflatable pig there to mock shareholders. Local TV crews swarmed, a national crew from NBC flew in from New York, and reporters from the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal eagerly scribbled notes.
…
“Burn & Loot”
Halliburton has been doing work in war zones since the early 1960s, when it acquired the construction company Brown & Root and was tasked by the Pentagon with building the infrastructure for the Vietnam War. Back in those days, it was vilified as “Burn & Loot.” After more than three decades in news obscurity, in March 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, it suddenly returned to national attention. After all, not only had its former CEO been beating the public drums for an invasion, but its subsidiary KBR (the old Brown & Root) had been given a vast, open-ended, multi-billion dollar contract to build and maintain the new infrastructure of bases that the U.S. military was rushing to construct in that country.

More than six years later, KBR has taken in over $31 billion for a variety of services to the U.S. military, notably in the field of logistics, and the money continues to flow in. As of April 2008, under a renewed contract, the company estimated that it had served more than 720 million meals, driven more than 400 million miles on various convoy missions, treated 12 billion gallons of potable water, and produced more than 267 million tons of ice. While these numbers may be impressive, so are the multiple claims from Pentagon investigators of Godzilla-like overcharges and waste, not to speak of spiraling claims of workplace negligence, including faulty electrical wiring that led to deaths and injuries on bases KBR built, and a failure to provide adequately clean water supplies to the troops; and then there are those allegations of war profiteering made by activist groups and politicians.

In September 2004, Lesar announced that Halliburton was considering spinning off KBR as a separate company, in part he claimed because it was bearing the brunt of a “vicious campaign” of political attacks and its employees didn’t “deserve to have their jobs threatened for political gain.” It took three years, but in April 2007 the spin-off of KBR was completed. It is now officially on its own, and the results for both companies seem little short of miraculous. No protestors even attended the three annual shareholder meetings that KBR has since held, though its activities in the war zones have hardly changed, and only five made it to Halliburton’s in 2008. This year, of course, the protesting larder was bare.

Five shareholder activists did manage to attend Halliburton’s annual meeting, including me. (I own a single share of Halliburton stock.) When I asked Lesar about the company’s links to KBR, he responded unequivocally, “First of all, let’s be very clear, KBR and Halliburton are legally separated.”

Just three months ago, however, Halliburton didn’t hesitate to pay off $382 million in fines to the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the settlement of a controversial KBR gas project in Nigeria in which the company admitted to paying a $180 million bribe to government officials.

Tom Dispatch for more

By Pervez Hoodbhoy (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

First, the bottom line: Pakistan will not break up; there will not be another military coup; the Taliban will not seize the presidency; Pakistan’s nuclear weapons will not go astray; and the Islamic sharia will not become the law of the land.
That’s the good news. It conflicts with opinions in the mainstream U.S. press, as well as with some in the Obama administration. For example, in March, David Kilcullen, a top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, declared that state collapse could occur within six months. This is highly improbable.
Now, the bad news: The clouds hanging over the future of Pakistan’s state and society are getting darker. Collapse isn’t impending, but there is a slow-burning fuse. While timescales cannot be mathematically forecast, the speed of societal decline has surprised many who have long warned that religious extremism is devouring Pakistan.
Here is how it all went down the hill: The 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan devastated the Taliban. Many fighters were products of madrassas in Pakistan, and their trauma partly was shared by their erstwhile benefactors in the Pakistan military and intelligence. Recognizing that this force would remain important for maintaining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan–and keep the low-intensity war in Kashmir going–the army secretly welcomed them on Pakistani soil. Rebuilding and rearming was quick, especially as the United States tripped up in Afghanistan after a successful initial victory. Former President Pervez Musharraf’s strategy of running with the hares and hunting with hounds worked initially. But then U.S. demands to dump the Taliban became more insistent, and the Taliban also grew angry at this double game. As the army’s goals and tactics lost coherence, the Taliban advanced.
In 2007, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP, the movement of Pakistani Taliban, formally announced its existence. With a blitzkrieg of merciless beheadings of soldiers and suicide bombings, the TTP drove out the army from much of the frontier province. By early this year, it held about 10 percent of Pakistan’s territory.
Even then, few Pakistanis saw the Taliban as the enemy. Apologists for the Taliban abounded, particularly among opinion-forming local TV anchors that whitewashed their atrocities, and insisted that they shouldn’t be resisted by force. Others supported them as fighters against U.S. imperial might. The government’s massive propaganda apparatus lay rusting. Beset by ideological confusion, it had no cogent response to the claim that Pakistan was made for Islam and that the Taliban were Islamic fighters.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for more

By Ingrid B. Mork

(Copy of e-mail sent to office@leithfestival.com and gordon.munro@leithfestival.com)

As a Scot and a British subject, I am shocked and dismayed at the way various bodies in and around the city of Edinburgh; Scotland’s capital and British politics are being used and manipulated by the Zionist entity in order to further their evil agenda.

Quite apart from the horrific Zionist agenda of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their land is their sinister and in many cases, successful attempts to corrupt public offices and governments in various parts of the world.

Anyone who allows themselves to be corrupted by anyone associated with Zionism is complicit in the crimes which have been committed and continue to be committed against Palestine and the Palestinian people.

I live on a strip of land here in Norway called Vevelstad, probably equal in size to the Gaza Strip and similar also to the Gaza Strip, this fertile strip of land called Vevelstad is populated mainly by farmers and fishermen but there the similarity ends. Unlike farmers and fishermen in Gaza, the farmers here on Vevelstad are allowed to grow crops and graze their animals and fishermen to fish in perfect peace, the farmers and fishermen of Gaza have been driven to poverty by the Zionist entity.

Scotland and the city of Leith and its festival must rise above the temptation of being associated in any way with anyone associated with Zionism, which is akin to being associated with and corrupted by, the worst form of occupation and oppression of an indigenous people in modern times.

Ingrid B Mørk can be reached at ingridbm.mrk279@gmail.com

Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign

On Saturday 13 June Edinburgh Leith Festival Gala Day will be sponsored by Veolia Water, a company complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid and colonisation of Palestine.
Leith Festival organisers have not responded formally to the Scottish PSC appeal to refuse any association with a company that is:
• involved in Israel’s tramway project that links illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank to Jerusalem
• directly implicated in maintaining illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)
• playing a key role in Israel’s attempt to make its annexation of Palestinian East Jerusalem irreversible

Veolia is actively involved in furthering Israel’s violations of international law and the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people. Veolia is using Leith Festival as a cynical public relations exercise – the same company that violates international law in Palestine, also discharged raw sewage into the Firth of Forth (fined £13,500). Artists for Gaza have also written to the Leith Festival and also have not had any formal reply.

Members of the Leith Festival board of directors are sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinian people. Words, however, are not enough. Leith shouldn’t be going against the world-wide rejection of Veolia for its involvement in Israeli crimes. Veolia
• lost the eight-year, $4.5 billion dollar contract to operate Stockholm county’s subway
• lost a 700 million contract in Bordeaux in France
• was told to get lost by Sligo and Galway councils in Ireland
• is losing as much as $7.5 billion in lost contracts

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Write to Leith Festival and urge them to:
• refuse Veolia sponsorship and associating Leith Festival and the city of Edinburgh in Veolia involvement in crimes against the Palestinian people
• accept the Scottish PSC request to deliver a presentation to them on Veolia and Israel’s criminal occupation, apartheid and colonisation of Palestine
• Join Scottish PSC, Artist for Gaza and others in leafleting the Leith Festival Gala Day, Saturday 13 June – email campaign@scottishpsc.org.uk for details.

Leith Festival contact details (please copy your correspondence to Scottish PSC at campaign@scottishpsc.org.uk

office@leithfestival.com
gordon.munro@leithfestival.com (chair of the Leith Festival board)

Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign
(Submitted by Ingrid B. Mork)

(The Economist)

Stocking up on the necessities of life
“I Eat, therefore I hunt”, reads a camouflage T-shirt on sale at Gun City USA, a small gun store in Nashville. But the rows of military-style assault rifles and display cases showing semi-automatic handguns suggest that most of Gun City’s clientele are not looking to shoot game.

Even in a recession, business is booming. “It has never been better,” says Dan McGlamery, an affable salesman who owns roughly 90 guns and has a loaded .45 calibre Kimber handgun on his belt, just in case. “In tough times like these, people need the necessities—bread, milk, water—and I think guns for protection go along with that.”

Tennessee is awash with guns. More than 1,300 licensed vendors sell them. Residents who have not committed a felony are allowed to carry a handgun in most public places, concealed or not, after they have taken a safety course. A recent law banned the list of permit-holders from public scrutiny after a newspaper website published it, revealing a handful of felons. As of last month, 222,000 Tennesseans hold permits to carry guns, up from 181,000 a year ago.

This spring the state legislature proposed a clutch of bills allowing people to carry guns in previously restricted public areas. One bill allows handguns in bars and restaurants, as long as the owner sanctions it and the gun carrier does not drink alcohol. Another permits handguns in state and local parks. Both passed by wide margins. A third bill allowing judges to carry handguns, even in the courtroom, awaits a final vote and is expected to pass.

Phil Bredesen, the governor, is not so keen. On May 28th he vetoed the bill allowing guns in bars and restaurants. This was brave; but 25% of legislators have gun permits and Mr Bredesen’s veto was promptly overridden.

Opponents claim that the laws will increase gun violence, especially in bars. They can point to grim statistics: roughly 950 people were killed by guns in Tennessee in 2006, according to the National Centre for Injury Prevention and Control.

But “the only person that stops a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun,” says Andrew Arulanandam, an NRA spokesman. More pro-gun legislation is planned for next year in Tennessee. “In my opinion the only place where people should not be allowed to carry guns is in prison,” says Dwayne Hayes, a firearm instructor. “As for churches and restaurants, I don’t see a problem with that.”
The Economist for more
(Submitted by reader)

By Edward S. Herman (Z Magazine)

In a system where corporations are central in economic activity, economic crises have always and necessarily produced plans and programs of renovation and improvement designed to make corporations more responsive to the public interest. Of course, there have always been some who urged nationalization or worker control; i.e., the replacement of the corporate system with a genuinely new order. Thus far, the system has been able to fend off all such demands, although government ownership has sometimes spurted in emergencies, so far only briefly (e.g., during World War II and as a result of the Savings & Loan crisis), followed by subsequent divestment. Over time, government ownership has declined as the business system has sought to occupy all space in which profits can be made. Thus, as the military budget has grown, in-house arms production has largely disappeared, displaced by the “contract state.” The triumph of neo-liberalism and the parallel intensified class war has been associated with further “privatization,” which has not only opened up more avenues for private profits, but also weakened the state as a potential agent of ordinary citizens.

A similar point can be made as regards worker control. It does not fit well into a neoliberal system in which worker protection at all levels tends to be eroded in favor of “flexible” labor markets. Workers’ rights got a major boost during the Great Depression, with the Wagner Act and the federal government serving to some extent as an employer of last resort. But class warfare was renewed with the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and the “red scare” and purges of the Truman-McCarthy era. It subsided for the next decade or so, but the Vietnam War, peace and civil rights protests, and new competition from abroad revitalized business class war aggressiveness. The resultant decline of the labor movement and reduced labor bargaining power has manifested in a weakened safety net, stagnant wages, greater inequality, and increased worker insecurity and loss of control.

Other long-standing reform strategies have been decentralization—breaking up the large corporations so as to reduce their political muscle and enhance competition—and regulation, sometimes involving the establishment of government bodies to oversee corporate activities and approve or disapprove corporate decisions. These have a long history, reflected in antitrust laws and policies and regulatory authority over many activities, from railroads, banks, and public utilities to alcoholic beverages and waste dumps. Regulation surged in the Great Depression, forcing the separation of commercial and investment banks and establishing the SEC and securities regulation. Antitrust was revitalized and public utility holding companies were broken up.

Today there is talk of breaking up the giant financial conglomerates that are “too big to fail” and there is some possibility that large companies like GM and Chrysler, as well as AIG, might be sold off in pieces as part of bankruptcy proceedings (and government ownership actions as regards AIG). But with respect to the largest financial institutions, there has been a tendency to favor them with extraordinary subsidies and guarantees and to encourage them to merge into still larger entities. The situation is still volatile, but major decentralizations would appear less likely than greater concentration, along with an increased unwillingness to allow the super-giants to fail and an even closer relationship between big finance and big government.

Z Magazine for more

By Noam Chomsky (Z Net)

A CNN headline, reporting Obama’s plans for his June 4 Cairo address, reads ‘Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world.’ Perhaps that captures his intent, but more significant is the content hidden in the rhetorical stance, or more accurately, omitted.

Keeping just to Israel-Palestine — there was nothing substantive about anything else — Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to ‘point fingers’ at each other or to ‘see this conflict only from one side or the other.’ There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered.

Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.

Obama once again praised the Arab Peace Initiative, saying only that Arabs should see it as ‘an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities.’ How should the Obama administration see it? Obama and his advisers are surely aware that the Initiative reiterates the long-standing international consensus calling for a two-state settlement on the international (pre-June ’67) border, perhaps with ‘minor and mutual modifications,’ to borrow U.S. government usage before it departed sharply from world opinion in the 1970s, vetoing a Security Council resolution backed by the Arab ‘confrontation states’ (Egypt, Iran, Syria), and tacitly by the PLO, with the same essential content as the Arab Peace Initiative except that the latter goes beyond by calling on Arab states to normalize relations with Israel in the context of this political settlement. Obama has called on the Arab states to proceed with normalization, studiously ignoring, however, the crucial political settlement that is its precondition. The Initiative cannot be a ‘beginning’ if the U.S. continues to refuse to accept its core principles, even to acknowledge them.

In the background is the Obama administration’s goal, enunciated most clearly by Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to forge an alliance of Israel and the ‘moderate’ Arab states against Iran. The term ‘moderate’ has nothing to do with the character of the state, but rather signals its willingness to conform to U.S. demands.

What is Israel to do in return for Arab steps to normalize relations? The strongest position so far enunciated by the Obama administration is that Israel should conform to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, which states: ‘Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).’ All sides claim to accept the Road Map, overlooking the fact that Israel instantly added 14 reservations that render it inoperable.

Overlooked in the debate over settlements is that even if Israel were to accept Phase I of the Road Map, that would leave in place the entire settlement project that has already been developed, with decisive U.S. support, to ensure that Israel will take over the valuable land within the illegal ‘separation wall’ (including the primary water supplies of the region) as well as the Jordan Valley, thus imprisoning what is left, which is being broken up into cantons by settlement/infrastructure salients extending far to the East. Unmentioned as well is that Israel is taking over Greater Jerusalem, the site of its major current development programs, displacing many Arabs, so that what remains to Palestinians will be separated from the center of their cultural, economic, and sociopolitical life. Also unmentioned is that all of this is in violation of international law, as conceded by the government of Israel after the 1967 conquest, and reaffirmed by Security Council resolutions and the International Court of Justice. Also unmentioned are Israel’s successful operations since 1991 to separate the West Bank from Gaza, since turned into a prison where survival is barely possible, further undermining the hopes for a viable Palestinian state.

Z Net for more

By Alexander Cockburn (Counterpunch)

As they drafted his speech to the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo on Thursday, President Obama’s speech writers strove to suggest that cordiality towards Islam is soundly embedded in America’s cultural history. The first Muslim congressman, Obama confided to his vast audience across the Muslim world, was sworn into the House of Representatives with his hand on Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran.

No names were mentioned, but this would have been Keith Ellison of Minnesota, a Democrat elected in 2006. On his victory night rally the local crowd shouted “Allahu Akhbar!”. During the race Ellison understandably downplayed past associations with the Nation of Islam.

Obama also reminded the world that Morocco had been the first nation to recognize the infant United States, signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, which declared in its preamble that the United States had no quarrel with the Muslim religion and was in no sense a Christian country. The second US President, John Adams said that America had no quarrel with Islam.

It’s a stretch. As my father Claud said, Never believe anything till it is officially denied. Adams and Jefferson both saw it as a vital matter of national security to settle accounts with the Muslim world, as represented by the Barbary states.

America needed free access to the Mediterranean and the Barbary “pirates” controlled the sea lanes and, furthermore, supposedly had some Christian slaves, all no doubt using the opportunity of captivity to imbibe the first principles of algebra, whose invention Obama took the opportunity in Cairo correctly to lay at the feet of the mathematicians of Islam, though ancient India deserves some credit too, or at least the Chinese thought so. He also credited Islam with the invention of printing and navigation which should surely require the Chinese People’s Republic to withdraw its ambassador in Washington DC. in formal diplomatic protest.

An early version of the “Star Spangled Banner” by Francis Scott Key, written in 1805 amid the routing of the Barbary states, offered a view of Islam markedly different from Obama’s uplifting sentiments in Cairo:

In conflict resistless each toil they endur’d,
Till their foes shrunk dismay’d from the war’s desolation:
And pale beamed the Crescent, its splendor obscur’d
By the light of the star-bangled flag of our nation.
Where each flaming star gleamed a meteor of war,
And the turban’d head bowed to the terrible glare.
Then mixt with the olive the laurel shall wave
And form a bright wreath for the brow of the brave.

In 1814 Key rehabbed this doggerel into the Star Spangled Banner. So America’s national anthem began as a gleeful tirade against the Mahommedans. And of course every member of the U.S. Marine Corps regularly bellows out the USMC anthem, beginning “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”

In short, America’s march to Empire was minted in the crucible of anti-Islamic sentiment. (One admirer of this early chapter in America’s imperial confrontations with Islam is that ardent Crusader, C. Hitchens who cites Joshua London’s Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation, on the origins of the Star Spangled Banner.)

This is not to detract from Obama’s laudable efforts to rewrite history into a parable of tolerance and mutual respect. And some of the history Obama did get right. He’s surely the first president to state before several million people that the United States did play a role in overthrowing Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. But his address signals the problem with presidential speeches professing moral purpose of the purest ichor. The higher the phrases soar, the more people start reminding themselves of the facts on the ground.

Counterpunch for more