On Sunday, July 30, about 20 members of the Taliban provincial police raided the office of Hamisha Bahar Radio and TV in Jalalabad city, in eastern Nangarhar province, after receiving information about a journalism training workshop attended by both male and female journalists from the broadcaster, according to news reports and a journalist familiar with the situation, who spoke to CPJ via messaging app on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal. On Tuesday, armed members of the Taliban provincial police then shuttered the broadcaster’s operations and sealed its office, according to those sources.

“The Taliban must allow the broadcaster Hamisha Bahar Radio and TV to resume operations promptly and ensure its employees, including female journalists, are allowed unfettered access to professional training,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “It is appalling that the Taliban cracked down on a media outlet because of women’s participation at a journalism training session. Denying women of their rights has become the hallmark of the Taliban regime.”

Hamisha Bahar Radio and TV has 35 employees, including nine women, according to the journalist who spoke with CPJ. Under the Taliban, women face severe restrictions on education and employment, which the United Nations says have increased in recent months.

CPJ contacted Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid for comment via messaging app but received no response.

In August 2022, CPJ published a special report about the media crisis in Afghanistan showing a rapid deterioration in press freedom characterized by censorship, arrests, assaults, and restrictions on women journalists since the Taliban retook control of the country in 2021.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Arlene Getz/CPJ Editorial Director.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine shows that we have not learned the lessons of history and are paying a high price for it. Future generations will also pay a significant price for our generation’s sins: fractured and destroyed families; poor social and health services; and a polluted environment. Children with mental and developmental problems are the clearest examples of the intergenerational effects of war.

The tremendous stress of war increases the chances of interpersonal violence, particularly against women. When the victims of violence are pregnant women, the intergenerational effect manifests as the increase of still births and premature births among them. Mothers who were the children of Holocaust survivors were shown to have higher levels of psychological stress and less positive parenting skills. During the siege of Sarajevo, perinatal mortality and morbidity almost doubled, and there was a significant increase in the number of children born with malformations.

By analyzing the number of people killed indirectly by the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, a report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs estimates that the war in those countries resulted in 3.6 to 3.7 million indirect deaths, while the total death toll in those same countries could reach at least 4.5 to 4.6 million, and counting.

“Wars often kill far more people indirectly than in direct combat, particularly young children.”

Stephanie Savell, the Costs of War’s co-director and author of the report states, “wars often kill far more people indirectly than in direct combat, particularly young children.” Almost all the victims, says Savell, are from the most impoverished and marginalized populations. Most indirect war deaths are due to malnutrition, pregnancy, and birth-related problems, and infectious and chronic diseases.

According to the report, more than 7.6 million children under five in post-9/11 war zones are suffering from acute malnutrition. Malnutrition has serious long-time effects on children’s health. Among those effects are increased vulnerability to diseases, developmental delays, stunted growth, and even blindness, reports UNICEF. Those children affected with malnutrition are also prevented from achieving success in school or having meaningful work as adults.

Although using doctors, patients, and civilians as a human shield is a war crime, they are frequent targets of uncontrolled violence. Now in Sudan, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reports that their staff in multiple locations have been repeatedly confronted by fighters entering health facilities and stealing medicines, supplies, and vehicles. It is estimated that 70% of health facilities in areas in conflict are out of service, and 30 among them are targets of attacks.

In U.N.-sponsored health missions, I was able to see the consequences of war in countries such as Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, a sobering experience that left painful memories. The sadness and feeling of helplessness I saw in the eyes of women and children still haunt me.

Repeated violence has numbed us to its consequences, our senses overwhelmed by cruelty. Faced with the tragic complexity of life, we are unable to savor its sweet moments of care and tenderness. Eager to escape brutal reality, we watch the latest TV news and then mindlessly change the channel to a baking show.

But does war only produce negative effects? What we see now in Ukraine is that the Russian aggression against people of all ages—both soldiers and civilians—has produced millions of displaced people, but it has also given rise to the solidarity of Ukraine’s neighbors, who at high personal and social cost have provided refuge to tens of thousands of families fleeing the war.

Ukrainian women of all ages have also taken up arms to defend their country from Russian aggression. Currently, more than 60,000 Ukrainian women serve in the military, while tens of thousands more are helping their country as journalists, paramedics, teachers, and politicians. At the same time they continue being the center of support for their families. Because men are on the front lines, women must keep hospitals, schools and even villages themselves in operation, often without basic supplies.

Although these actions are an example of the best of the human spirit, they do not erase the harrowing cruelty of war.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Cesar Chelala.

The 19th century origins of Mother’s Day differ vastly in spirit and purpose from celebrations of it in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Mother’s Day was first inspired by two women with diverse but compatible social and political purposes. Prior to the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” to teach women the basics of sanitation in food preparation and drinking water in a time of high infant and child mortality.

After the war, she organized “Mothers Friendship Day,” bringing mothers of sons who fought on both sides of the Civil War “to promote reconciliation.” Her daughter Anna Jarvis carried her mother’s legacy forward and convinced President Woodrow Wilson to establish the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day. Jarvis became so disillusioned eventually with what she saw as the commercial sentimentalizing of and profiteering from Mother’s Day by the card, food, and floral industries that she disowned it.

Jarvis became so disillusioned eventually with what she saw as the commercial sentimentalizing of and profiteering from Mother’s Day by the card, food, and floral industries that she disowned it.

The first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally was held in New York City on June 2, 1872 at the inspiration of Julia Ward Howe, an ardent anti-war activist and promoter of world peace. Her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation passionately lamented the futile deaths in war and heralded action to stop future wars:

Arise then, women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts…

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have taught them of charity, mercy, and patience…

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!”…

Her Proclamation concluded calling for a congress of women all of nationalities to promote the “amicable settlement of international questions and the great and general interests of peace.”

This theme of engaging women across the world for peace has only grown more urgent. Try Googling “photos of negotiating to end war in Ukraine,” recommends Margot Wallström, Sweden’s former minister of foreign affairs: Women are largely absent. Despite a more than 20-year-old U.N. Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security that promotes including women “in all efforts for the promotion of peace and security, less that 10% of peace agreements have female signatories,” she states. Yet, research shows that with “more women involved in peace processes, more proposals are put on the table and agreements reached last longer.”

In my 2018 interview with Nigerian lawyer, mediator, peace activist, and member of WILPFAyo Ayoola-Amale, she underscored the critical impact of women in peace negotiations. “The Liberian 2011 Nobel Prize laureate Leymah Gbowee, together with Christian and Muslim women, pressured warring parties into the 2003 negotiations that eventually ended years of horrific war in Liberia. Research has shown,” she added, “that where women’s inclusion is prioritized, peace is more probable, especially when women are in a position to influence decision making… Women take an inclusive approach whether it is stopping conflict, contributing to peace processes, or rebuilding their societies after conflict or war.”

Restoring Political Roots to Mother’s Day

For the eighth consecutive year, the Black Mama’s Bail Out initiative is posting bond on and near Mother’s Day for Black mothers in jail, women languishing in “cages” without a trial because they are too poor to post bail. Their action has highlighted the profiteering of the bail bonds industry and inspired nationwide community action. The U.S. puts more women in jails and prisons than any other country in the world. And while comprising roughly 6% of the U.S. population, Black women make up 22% of women’s imprisoned population. Most are arrested for low-level drug use, some on false charges; and most are mothers. Support Black Mama’s Bail Out fund this Mother’s Day.

Postscript

I learned recently that “More phone calls are made on Mother’s Day than on any other day of the year.” And I understand why. As a child, I loved giving my mother a card and a present on Mother’s Day as an expression of my love and respect for her, and, after leaving home, I always called her on Mother’s Day. Now I look forward to honoring my sisters, cousins, and nieces as the wonderful mothers they are. But even more urgent is restoring the spirit of our original Mother’s Day—calling for World Peace, a call that is loud, persistent, insistent, public, and passionate.

Let us also remember that mothers wake up the morning after Mother’s Day to their social, economic, and political realities: poverty and food insecurity for almost 25% of single mothers, doing most of the unpaid domestic and caregiving work at home, pay discrimination, sexual violence for one in four women, and widespread sexual harassment. Rampant injustice that our society and the world must undo if we are ever to achieve peace.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by H. Patricia Hynes.

Part 1 of a two-part series on the one-year anniversary of the Taliban takeover. Read part 2 tomorrow: The Taliban’s Return Has Robbed Afghanistan’s Women and Girls of Their Future

A year after the fall of Kabul and the end of the US military mission in Afghanistan, the country remains a place of misery.

No foreign government has recognised the Taliban as the legitimate government, and much of the modern economy has collapsed. The new rulers have not kept earlier promises, including high-school level education for girls and an amnesty for former Afghan government soldiers and civil servants.

Following a survey earlier this year, the United Nations pointed to many outrageous deficiencies in internationally recognised human rights. Moreover, the July 31 drone killing of 9-11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri in a safe house in central Kabul showed that key elements of the Taliban leadership still harbour international terrorists, the original cause of the US intervention 21 years ago.

• READ MORE: Other reports on Afghanistan since the Taliban takover

Fragile rule
Afghanistan seems trapped in a vicious circle, and the 38 million people living in the country are the frontline victims of a profound and still deepening tragedy. Without human rights, the Taliban regime will not enjoy UN membership, widespread diplomatic recognition, robust international humanitarian assistance or a broader base of legitimacy.

Without outside support, which financially accounted for 40 to 50 percent of the Afghan GNP prior to the Taliban takeover, Taliban rule remains fragile.

The one positive element in this bleak picture is that military violence has lessened. Despite some resistance from the competing Islamic State Khorasan terrorist group, or ISIS-K, and various other factions, Taliban rule appears unchallenged in the short term.

But in the longer term, the inflexibility and fragility of the Taliban authorities raise fundamental questions about whether their victory a year ago was just another phase in a longer civil war.

In some rural areas of the south long under Taliban control, life goes on much as before. But the loss of jobs in the more modern urban sectors and the scarcity of food has forced many Afghans back into an almost primitive economy, selling household possessions and sometimes even children to survive.

The world cannot simply wash its hands of this situation. There are three overriding US and NATO interests; ensuring that Afghanistan does not again becomes a haven and training ground for international terrorists; easing the world’s largest humanitarian/human rights crisis; and assisting endangered Afghans eligible for emigration.

Honoring US commitments
The al-Zawahiri case demonstrated the need for a strong reminder to the Taliban of their obligation not to harbour terrorists. However, this goes beyond monitoring known terror groups and must include steps to prevent the rise of a new generation of extremists. There are reports and video evidence of madrassa religious schools being established all over Afghanistan, primarily by Pakistani extremist groups.

This must be a high priority in any international discussions with the Taliban.

On the humanitarian and human rights fronts, in the wake of the al-Zawahiri case the US initially terminated talks with the Taliban over a possible release of former Afghan government financial reserves for humanitarian assistance. But recently American officials decided to go ahead with the talks after all, in light of fears over a looming hunger crisis in the coming winter months.

Other humanitarian assistance is needed, but must be administered through established international humanitarian groups, not the Taliban itself. Moreover, the world needs to remain united in not recognising the Taliban until they extend fundamental, universally-recognised human rights to all citizens, including female ones.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In November 2020, I decided to create an Afghan news agency run by and for women—an online news service that would counter the prevailing patriarchal norms of Afghanistan. The news agency was named after a young woman, Rukhshana, who in 2015 was stoned to death by the Taliban in Ghor province for fleeing a forced marriage. 

At the time we started, I was also working as deputy director of media and public awareness for the Kabul municipality, and I was spending much of my salary—the equivalent of about $1,000 a month—to employ three other female journalists. Some of my friends worked voluntarily, bringing our full staff to six.

In Afghanistan, particularly in remote areas, many teenage girls are unaware of menstruation before it happens to them, and when suddenly experiencing it, they feel stressed and sometimes go into nervous shock. Menstruation was like a taboo, and we wanted to help normalize it. 

We also interviewed girls and women who had been raped, including the particularly upsetting case of a nine-year-old child. Other media reported that the rape had occurred in March last year, but we searched out the family and reported the details of what happened. The child lost a lot of blood in the assault and had to be taken to a hospital to undergo surgery. An aunt of the young girl, who was raising her at the request of the child’s father, told us that after the assault, neighbors and others looked on her family with contempt. The aunt said they did not know where to “take refuge.”

 Gender apartheid

That kind of reporting is now at risk. Like so many other Afghans, I never imagined that the Taliban would retake Afghanistan so quickly, and that my family and Rukhshana Media’s team of journalists would be forced into hiding or exile. Yet on August 15, 2021, we all faced an excruciating dilemma. Under the Taliban, we believed women would have only two choices: You either accept their oppressive laws and live by them, totally changing your identity, or you live as you did and risk getting killed. As someone who struggled hard to get where I am, both options were unacceptable. I couldn’t accept having to see the world through the prison bars of a burqa, nor did I want to die. So when I received a call from the British embassy on August 24 giving me a chance to board a flight out, I took it.

According to our reporting, the Taliban have banned the broadcast of women’s voices in some areas, as well as the broadcast of movies with female actors. Media outlets have been instructed to separate the offices of men and women, to prevent them from working together directly. In March this year, the Taliban banned private news channels in Afghanistan from rebroadcasting programs of the BBC, VOA, and Deutsche Welle, reportedly because of the way their news presenters dressed. In May, the Taliban ordered all female TV presenters to cover their faces. In some places, it has also banned female journalists from attending its press conferences.

When the Taliban forced female presenters to wear the hijab, I edited the news with a heavy heart. To me, it meant that a form of social imprisonment was being reimposed. At about six o’clock that evening, I turned off the computer in my room here in London, far from Afghanistan, and for a moment I thought about the efforts and struggles of two decades—especially the struggles of Afghan women—and cried.

Despite all these restrictions, however, female journalists continue to work. A female presenter for a private television station told me she finds it challenging to wear a mask while working on-air—she can’t breathe properly and has difficulty pronouncing her words clearly—but added that she won’t give up doing on-air work. Some female reporters, meanwhile, have taken on male aliases, to better hide their identity and protect themselves.

Our first male reporter

After the Taliban takeover, Rukhshana remained committed to providing opportunities to female journalists. But fear prevailed, and we had difficulty recruiting—particularly in the provinces and outside the main cities. So almost two months after the Taliban took power, we hired our first male reporter. Since then, we’ve enlisted others who share our commitment to telling the stories of women.

Together, our female and male reporters, often working covertly, aim to report for their fellow Afghans but also for audiences around the world, so they too can know what the people of Afghanistan are going through in the current crisis. We publish in both Dari and English, and use social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Telegram to disseminate our news reports and video. 

All of our reporters in Afghanistan write under pseudonyms and have very little access to official information. Still, they try. In February this year, a reporter who goes by the name Nasiba Arefi called a Taliban spokesman for the police in western Herat to ask about two dead bodies that had been hung from the shovel of a giant backhoe. Instead of answering her questions, the spokesman made demands: First, he said the media outlet where she worked had to pledge to operate according to Taliban policies. Second, she should send any reporting to him for review before publication, and she should never use the term “Taliban group” (which is regarded as a term used by the Taliban’s enemies to delegitimize its rule). 

Rukhshana published the story with the information we had. The Taliban official later texted Arefi, asking her to provide him with the address and details of the media outlet where she worked. She declined, fearful that she could be arrested or harassed. 

We always have to tread carefully. In order to ensure the safety of our interviewees and reporters, we sometimes decline to publish sensitive stories. Once, we deleted a story from our website and social media accounts because I’d received a call from a man saying that if we didn’t delete it, “we will find your reporter.” 

‘I will never give up’

The remaining female journalists in Afghanistan have one thing in common: They love their work, and feel it is more vital than ever.  “I love journalism and I will never give up,” one Rukhshana journalist told me. Still, there are times when female reporters question themselves. A woman journalist for a television station in Kabul recently told Rukhshana that she can spend days trying to get comment or information from Taliban officials—without result. “This situation makes me more discouraged from working as a journalist every day,” she says.

Journalists also face financial stress. I started Rukhshana with the hope that when other media outlets realized the importance of our work, they might support us financially. But we did not receive that sort of backing, at least initially. Now that so many Afghan media organizations are shrinking or collapsing, such support is more important than ever, and even harder to get. 

Still, we’ve been very fortunate. Last year, a friend conducted a fundraising drive in Canada that brought in enough money to cover our operations for nearly a year, and more recently we received funding from Internews. We now have four full-time editors, seven staff reporters, and several freelancers who work for us regularly. We’re not exactly booming, but we’re far from folding. Too many women are rooting for us.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Zahra Joya.

Former National MP and Justice Minister Amy Adams says opposition leader Christopher Luxon is right to rule out restricting abortion laws in Aotearoa New Zealand, calling the alternative “absolutely soul-destroying”.

Speaking to RNZ, Adams also sounded a note of warning to her socially conservative former colleagues that their views are increasingly “out-of-touch” with the public.

Shortly after taking the helm of National, Luxon — who describes himself as “pro-life” — committed not to change abortion laws if elected prime minister next year.

• READ MORE:  Roe v Wade shows why abortion is at the heart of America’s divisions
• Decision on Roe v Wade will not end abortion rights in Hawai’i
• Roe reversal reignites Guam debate over ‘Heartbeat’ bill
• Other abortion rights reports

Following Friday’s Roe v Wade decision, Luxon went further, stating: “These laws will not be relitigated or revisited under a future National government, and these health services will remain fully funded”.

Adams told RNZ anything other than an unequivocal assurance would have put Luxon in a “very bad” position.

She said the vast majority of New Zealanders regarded abortion as a health issue.

“There is no place whatsoever for politicians and lawyers and judges to start determining what health procedures women are entitled to,” Adams said.

Conservative politicians ‘in peril’
“When political parties wade into that space, they put themselves in great peril and they risk getting substantially out of touch with those people they represent.”

Adams said the US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade was “outrageous” and “should scare women all over the world”.

“We can get quite complacent that our progressive movements… are set in stone, but actually it shows us that things can be undone and freedoms we perhaps take for granted… can be taken away from us,” Adams said.

“I felt quite sick… it made me really sad and actually very, very angry.”

Luxon: ‘I serve the common cause’
On Saturday, Luxon directed his Tamaki MP Simon O’Connor to remove a Facebook post showing support for the US Supreme Court ruling.

O’Connor posted “today is a good day” surrounded by love hearts.

Speaking to RNZ on Monday, Luxon said he felt the message was being “misrepresented as the National Party position”.

He said O’Connor was entitled to his own personal views but also believed the message was “insensitive to people on the other side of that debate”.

“It’s a sensitive and distressing issue, and I want to make sure that New Zealanders understand there will be no change under a National government.”

Luxon said all his MPs were united around the commitment not to change abortion law if elected next year.

“I serve the common cause of all New Zealanders,” Luxon said. “I’m not just here for one group or one interest or one topic.”

O’Connor did not return RNZ’s calls.

Questions also for Labour
Speaking at the regular post-Cabinet media conference, Acting Prime Minister Grant Robertson questioned whether Luxon’s assurance could be trusted.

“It’s great news if that is what Christopher Luxon says he’s going to do,” Robertson said.

“But I could also understand why people could be sceptical about that given what he has said in the past [and] given that over half of his caucus actually voted against [abortion reform].”

Robertson was also questioned over Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta’s tweet calling the Supreme Court ruling “draconian” despite voting against removing abortion from the Crimes Act.

He said Mahuta had dealt with the issue in accordance with her conscience and deferred questions to her.

“The Labour Party continues to support women in New Zealand to be able to access abortion services and to have reproductive rights. We passed the legislation, it was a government bill, and I stand by what we’re doing here.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

It was sometime in the late 1990s that I first interviewed Alan Webster about New Zealand’s part in a global Values Study.

It’s a fascinating snapshot of values in countries all over the world and I still remember seeing America grouped with many developing countries on a spectrum that had most English-speaking, democratic and developed countries grouped at the other end.

It charted belief in angels and other supernatural beings.

• READ MORE: Decision on Roe v Wade will not end abortion rights in Hawai’i
• Roe reversal reignites Guam debate over ‘Heartbeat’ bill
• Other abortion rights reports

It was a lightbulb moment that has always helped me remember how deep religious beliefs run in the US and how socially different it is from most Western, Enlightenment-inspired countries.

That memory came back to me when I awoke to the news that the US Supreme Court has overturned Roe v Wade in a 6-3 ruling, eliminating a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion — a right that has been in place since 1973.

Abortion rights will now be decided state by state, with 26 states ready to enact laws that ban abortion, often with no exceptions. That means no abortion even in cases of rape or incest.

It is undoubtedly a landmark moment in US politics and law, the latest step (not the end) in a decades-long campaign by conservative Americans to overturn America’s most controversial and divisive law.

‘Enflamed debate, deepened division’
Writing the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division”.

He’s right, but the implication that this ruling somehow calms the waters is either deeply naive or deeply cynical. It does nothing more than flip the issue, like the handover of the ball in a football game, with what has been the team on defence now going on attack and vice versa.

And because change in and of itself is fuel for any fire, this only ensures abortion remains THE divisive issue in American politics for, well, who knows how many years to come?

Abortion has divided the country for decades; more so than foreign wars, economic policy and even gun control. It is the answer to so many questions non-Americans have about US politics.

Many around the world have been perplexed by the growing divisions in US politics, the loss of civility, the rise of Trump. There are answers there about the influence of money, taxes, changing demographics and more.

But at the heart of US political polarisation, often unspoken, masked or downplayed, has always been abortion.

One of the most confounding of political mysteries in the past decade was why 84 percent of white evangelicals in 2016 voted for a thrice-married alleged sexual abuser as president and why “character” suddenly fell down their list of voting priorities.

Today’s court decision is the answer.

Evangelicals motivated by abortion
Evangelicals are motivated by abortion more than any other issue and Trump’s commitment to swaying the court against it convinced them to vote for him even when it was against their economic interests and compromised other values.

Many in conservative religious circles in the US compared Trump to King David, arguing that God has long used flawed and corrupt individuals to bring about his will.

That faith has been vindicated today and Trump’s status as a moral hero is enshrined, despite his many other sins.

Such is the strength of belief for or against abortion. Its power to divide is so strong because, seen through different lenses, it is so obviously right or wrong to those on either side of the debate.

It is, to those on either side, obvious that they are right and they are horrified — not just perplexed, but horrified — that anyone might disagree with them.

Those celebrating today’s overturn are celebrating the end of mass murder, because to them the decision to abort a foetus is the decision to take a life. (Others, to be fair, see it as a legal issue, one that is not in the Constitution and so should always have been viewed as a political debate not a constitutional right).

Those weeping over today’s ruling do not see a foetus as a human life and rather see the courts telling a woman what she can do with her body, right to the point of that woman’s life and death.

Matter of life over death
When both sides see their view as a matter of life over death, you can understand the depth of feeling and pain on both sides and that, whatever Alito may be hoping, today’s decision will do nothing to heal America.

What’s more, the impact of today’s ruling on US politics will be deep. Three things stand out:

• Reproductive rights will dominate the 2022 mid-term elections and the US presidential elections in 2024. The court has said abortion is not a constitutional right, therefore it is up for grabs politically. Debate over national bans v national rights has already begun. That will mean less political oxygen for pressing political issues such as climate change, China and the Ukraine invasion.
• This could be the start of a conservative pendulum swing in US politics, led by the US Supreme Court. Judge Clarence Thomas in his support of the majority opinion suggests the now reliably conservative court could dive further into America’s moral dilemmas, ruling on same-sex marriage and contraception rights.
• Perhaps most troubling, it undermines citizens’ faith in their major public institutions. A majority of Americans favour at least some rights to abortion and some gun control. This week the Supreme Court has issued rulings at odds with public opinion on both. At a time when core institutions such as Congress and the media are losing the trust of citizens, adding the courts to that list is a major worry. If the foundations of liberal democracy are not serving the people, then those people start to look for alternatives, the baby can be lost with the bathwater and whole systems of law, order and government can start to look fragile.

These are perilous days for the American project and that has implications for all of us. The’s court ruling is yet another polarising decision in these most polarising times and it’s hard to see where the healing can begin.

Tim Watkin is a founder of political news website Pundit, has a long career in journalism and broadcasting, and now runs the podcast team at RNZ. This article was originally published on Pundit and is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“46. See, e.g., Centers for Disease Control, Adoption Experiences of Women and Men and Demand for Children to Adopt by Women 18-44 Years of Age in the United States 16 (Aug. 2008) (“[N]early 1 million women were seeking to adopt children in 2002 (i.e., they were in demand for a child), whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted had become virtually nonexistent.”); Centers for Disease Control, National Center for Health Statistics, Adoption and nonbiological parenting, [link] (showing that approximately 3.1 million women between the ages of 18- 49 had ever “[t]aken steps to adopt a child” based on data collected from 2015-2019)”. [emphasis added]

Alito touched upon and opened the door to a very ugly truth behind the pro-choice debate that the “conservative legal industrial complex went to great lengths to downplay” as “trivial” with some claiming that pro-choice advocates mis-interpreted the leaked footnote asserting that it was not Alito who said it.

Be that as it may, many were shocked because the general public views adoption very positively as a benevolent act of “saving orphans” and “rescuing unwanted” children from neglect or abuse while others see it as a win-win for those who long for a child they cannot have on their own and a mother faced with an untimely, unintended pregnancy. There was thus shock at the use of the terms “supply and demand” to describe a seemingly altruistic act. But supply and demand are a very real part of adoption as anyone trying to adopt knows.

The fact is that there are 2 million prospective adopters or 36 hopeful couples and individuals vying for each newborn placed creating enormous demand and the ratio is likely higher when you factor in the number of same-sex couples added to the queue following the legalization of gay marriage. Despite the romantic aura of adoption, there is nothing noble or altruistic about paying tens of thousands of dollars to obtain an infant (preferably white and healthy) while nearly half a million children who could be adopted remain in state care.

Adoptees and other members of the adoption community – those whose lives have been irrevocably changed by adoption – as well as scholars, and investigative journalists have long decried adoption as a market-driven mega-billion dollar industry that commodifies babies and prices them based on race, age and health (also see) and that as the supply of babies for adoption has dwindled, expectant mothers continue to be pressured, coerced and made promises of open adoption in order to get them to sign over their rights and free their infants for adoption.

Conflating abortion with adoption is a red herring and very offensive to mothers who have lost children to adoption, labeling them potential murderers, and insulting to adoptees who, as a result of these artificially opposing comparisons, are positioned to feel gratitude for being alive when in truth those who are adopted are no more likely to have been aborted than children born to married parents. Barrett’s flippant mention of legal abandonment via “Safe Havens” also shows disregard for the well-being of adopted persons who are left with no birth records to access even in states that allow such access.

The warm-fuzzy image of adoption masterfully crafted by billions of dollars in marketing compounded by the nary a person doesn’t know someone who has adopted or wants to create an environment in which being pro-adoption wins votes for politicians and lawmakers who constantly push to make the process quicker and faster for adopters – those with the money that fuels the powerful industry. While cats and dogs are granted 4-6 weeks before they can be adopted, human babies are placed immediately after birth so they can “bond” with adopters, denying them their mothers’ milk and colostrum.  Fathers’ rights are almost non-existent with putative father registries enacted in all states which are punitive, requiring to make men jump through impossible hoops that have led to many years’ long custody battles by loving fathers.

Adoption — being proposed as a solution to abortion — flies in the face of the fact adoption does not reduce abortion since it can only occur after birth. Cory L. Richards, former executive vice president and VP of public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, wrote in 2007:

“Politicians of all stripes, and whatever their position on abortion, should face reality.

Increasing the rate of completed adoptions, however valid on its own merits, is irrelevant to the abortion rate. And increasing the rate of newborn relinquishments, even assuming it could be done in an ethically and socially acceptable way, at best would be tinkering at the margins. Even if relinquishments doubled, and each one of them represented an averted abortion, it would make hardly a dent in the abortion rate.”

It also ignores the effect accessibility of birth control has had on the declining birth rate and the obvious fact that less babies being born results in less babies for adoption.

If the goal was truly to reduce abortions and if those supporting anti-abortion legislation were truly pro-life, they would not promote a two-option dichotomy that ignores the option to help women in crisis pregnancies keep their families intact by providing needed services for them to do so. If the goal was truly to avoid abortion, those who claim to be pro-life would support early and continuing sex education, affordable housing, free birth control including vasectomies, healthcare for all, affordable childcare, adequate paid parental leave, school lunches, and increases to WIC.  Unplanned, unintended pregnancies do not necessarily mean unwanted children. Nor does it mean unfit to parent. The lack of support for mothers in need is in direct opposition to the fact that it is the first choice of most who find themselves with an untimely pregnancy. They simply need the support to do so.

The Dutch boast the lowest abortion rate in the world with complication and death rates from abortion almost non-existent. Instead of tightening restrictions and enacting limitations, they accomplished this by making abortion and contraception freely available on demand, free, and covered by the national health insurance plan. Holland also carries out extensive public education on contraception, family planning, and sexuality. Rather than encouraging teens to have more sex, Dutch teenagers tend to have less frequent sex, and start at an older age, and the teenage pregnancy rate is 6 times lower than in the U.S.

Follow the money

While adoption can be a loving choice for adopters and children, it is, in fact, a transactional business faced with mounting demand and dwindling supply.  Domestic infant adoptions in the US are privatized and entrepreneurial. The industry is comprised of more than 40,00 businesses that employ over 232,000 people and even non-profit adoption agency businesses have overhead, including substantial compensation for agency directors. There are an estimated 135–140,00 children adopted per year in the U.S. each at fees of approximately $15–50,000 each, depending on race, age and health of the child. Some estimate child adoption at a total of $15.5 billion a year but adoption industry statistics set the figure of the adoption industry at $19.1 billion

From approximately 1945 to 1973 the shame of the “sin” of extra-marital sex for women created what became known as The Baby Scoop Era (BSE), a time during which it is estimated that up to 4 million parents in the United States had children placed for adoption, with 2 million during the 1960s alone.

Beginning in the 1970s, however, the tables began to turn. Birth control became more accessible. Women no longer needed their husband’s permission to obtain contraception and pregnancy termination became more widely available. Additionally, the shame of “unwed” pregnancies became far less of an influencing factor and single parenthood steadily became less stigmatized, to the point that single men and women now adopt. At the same time as the shame of pregnancy outside of marriage dissipated and less women felt the pressure to place children for adoption, women became encouraged to delay childbearing for graduate degrees and careers which added to rising rates of infertility and decreased that shame.  A huge reproductive technology industry grew, offering treatments including IVF which are painful, expensive and not always successful. Other options such as frozen embryos and surrogacy are also financially out of reach for many. The fallback, most affordable, position remains adoption.

All of these social factors combined to drastically reverse the supply and demand of babies for adoption as compared to prior decades.  It is no coincidence that it was at that time that ”Adoption not Abortion” and “Choose Life” became a rallying cry and common bumper stickers. And those same hackneyed obscenities are now being renewed with no option to parent in this “adoption not abortion” dichotomy as expressed by Amy Coney Barrett, who in December of 2021 suggested “requiring” women to remain pregnant against their will:

“It seems to me that the choice, more focused, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks, or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more, and then terminate parental rights at the conclusion.”

Forcing women to remain pregnant and hand over their child unwittingly turns women into unpaid surrogates making them unwilling Handmaid breeders and risking their lives continuing the “long, sordid history of using women’s bodies to incubate babies for the benefit of others.”  Forced pregnancies will also negatively impact women in the workforce and reduce family income. Will pro-lifers supplement their lost incomes?

It is shameful and egregious that at a time when the Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Scotland are issuing apologies for forced adoptions that occurred in past decades — and the same is in process in the UK –  the U.S. will encourage more forced adoptions by restricting abortion rights. And the reason has nothing to do with morality.

The latest polls show that more than 60% of Americans agree with the positions of the International Women’s Health Coalition and Amnesty International’s positions that access to safe abortion is a fundamental human right:

“Under international human rights law, everyone has a right to life, a right to health, and a right to be free from violence, discrimination, and torture or other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Forcing someone to carry a pregnancy against their will — for whatever reason — is a violation of those rights.”

Likewise, many religious leaders from all faiths are pro-choice. Among them is Catholic nun Joan Chittister, who is critical of anti-abortioniadsts who are anti-child and family:

“I do not believe that just because you are opposed to abortion, that that makes you pro-life. In fact, I think in many cases, your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, a child educated, a child housed. And why would I think that you don’t? Because you don’t want any tax money to go there. That’s not pro-life. That’s pro-birth. We need a much broader conversation on what the morality of pro-life is.”

 Jewish leaders argue that abortion access is not only a 14th Amendment issue, as the Supreme Court itself ruled with Roe v. Wade in 1973, but a 1st Amendment issue, in light of the fact that pregnancy termination is not only permitted by Judaism but, at times required.

“Alito’s leaked opinion has also been called to task for stating that the constitution makes no reference to abortion or the right to obtain one because women, at the time the constitution was written, were not included part of the political community embraced by the phrase ‘We the People.’”

Yet, ironically, we continue to discount men’s role and responsibility in conceptions in some cases that leads to abortion, including that which is incestuous, abusive, adulterous, totally inappropriate because of power imbalances, or out and out felonious. Where is any effort to hold men responsible for abortions when many of them are financing abortions for their wives, mistresses, girlfriends or casual dates? If women and abortion providers are to be criminalized where is any effort encouraging women to reveal who is paying for their abortions and criminalize them which might have a profound impact on reducing the number of abortions?

Blue states are moving quickly to protect the rights of their citizens from the attack on women’s reproductive rights and autonomy.  As was the case prior to Roe – those with the means will be able to travel to access pregnancy termination. The challenge will be protecting those who cannot afford to travel to blue states. Nearly three-quarters of Americans who obtain abortions are living in poverty, according to 2014 data from the Guttmacher Institute. Likewise poverty is the leading reason babies are placed for adoption.

Anti-abortionists want to remove rights women have relied on for 50 years and turn the clock back to the days of life risking illegal abortions. They want to save the unborn from being aborted yet offer no choice or support for mothers in crisis to parent.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mirah Riben.

• how can a woman stay in that sort of relationship?
• she could have left anytime
• didn’t see the red flags before committing?
• how can this go on for one, three, five, ten years . . . something is wrong with that woman
• it takes TWO to tango . . .
• women expect too much from men . . . yelling back and forth is not abuse
• leave this up to the courts and cops . . . if they can’t charge a man with DV, then leave it alone
• something is broken in this woman . . . she attracts that sort of relationship . . .

Oh, the stories go on and on. Even judges throughout this rot-gut land, blaming the victim, of course, in open court. Rape victims in their late teens, told they CAUSED the sexual assault by the way they dressed, where they went for drinks and for the drinks they drank.

Do the Gulag Google search — “judge blames girl for dress for rape”

Here ya go:

• Judge accused of victim-blaming in comments on rape case…
  Mar 10, 2017 — Campaigners say Lindsey Kushner QC’s sentencing remarks were ‘the kind of thing that deters women from reporting assaults’.
• Here Are 9 Times Clothing Was Blamed for Sexual Assault – Mich
  Apr 27, 2016 — A judge in 2006: “They made their intentions publicly known that they wanted to party.” · A police officer in 2011: “Women should avoid dressing …
• Jury blames woman’s clothing in rape case – UPI …
  Oct 5, 1989 — Broward County Circuit Judge Mark Speiser had the woman picked up by deputies after she failed to respond to subpoeanes for court appearances.
• Manitoba judge criticized for saying victim’s clothing, attitude …
  Feb 24, 2011 — A legal expert says a Manitoba judge’s comment during a rape sentencing that “sex was in the air” is a troubling legal throwback.
• Peru judge throws out rape case as woman was wearing red …
• Nov 4, 2020 — A Peruvian court has declared that a woman who wore red underwear to a party could not have been raped because the garment signalled she …
• Judge Tosses Teen’s Sexual Assault Conviction, Drawing …
  Jan 13, 2022 — Clinton’s conviction was “a clean and clear example of victim blaming.” By highlighting the girl’s clothing and chastising the hosts of the …
• Canadian Judge Robin Camp to woman in rape case – CNN
  Sep 13, 2016 — He blamed it on his “non-existent” knowledge of Canadian criminal law.
• Rape victim ‘inviting,’ so no jail: Judge rules woman’s clothes …
  It should be noted that the supposition that the judge is blaming the victim is … To say that a judge let a rapist off BECAUSE of the woman’s dress, …

Now, Google this — “domestic abuse blame the victim in USA”

• The Psychology of Victim Blaming – The Atlantic
  Oct 5, 2016 — After the Upright Citizens Brigade theater in New York banned a performer in the wake of several women accusing him of sexual assault and abuse, …
• Why We Blame Victims for Domestic Violence
  Aug 23, 2017 — At its core, says Elise Lopez, a researcher in sexual and domestic violence prevention and response at the University of Arizona, victim-blaming …
• Rape Culture, Victim Blaming, And The Facts
  What is Rape Culture? Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence is normalized and excused in the media and …
• Victim blaming – Wikipedia
  Secondary victimization of sexual and other assault victims — In efforts to discredit alleged sexual assault victims in court, a defense attorney may delve into an …

• Helping Survivors Can Be as Simple as Changing the Way …Dec 9, 2020 — In relation to domestic violence, victim blaming places the responsibility for the abuse on the survivor instead of the abuser. Blaming domestic …

• Victim Blaming: Why is it that some victims and survivors of violent crime get blamed for what has happened to them through no fault of their own? Crime victims are often …
  4 Reasons Why Victims Blame Themselves For Domestic …Jul 20, 2020 — As an experienced Fort Lauderdale domestic violence attorney, Vanessa L. Prieto can help you take the steps needed to protect yourself.
• Victim Blaming in Abuse and Relationships: In the arena of domestic violence, victim blaming is applied with a vengeance against survivors who stay with a primary aggressor beyond the first obviously …
  Why does everyone blame the victim in domestic violence …
• Abusers only abuse intimate partners behind closed doors. They are very charming and nice to the partner in front of others. Abusers are very manipulative and …
• Gaslighting & Abuse – House Of Ruth:
  Abuse may be physical, sexual, emotional, or financial. Learn the behaviors to be aware of. Domestic abuse comes in many forms. Understand emotional, verbal, physical & abuse signs.

Yes, there are a million graphics and reports and ways to frame this epidemic in the world:

But, when it comes to your door or your circle of life, you will deal with all manner of what happened and how to help a woman extract herself from the abuse. And, you will find that many communities do NOT have great domestic violence “resources,” and that shelters are few and far between. When a woman is single, has a big dog, and has no car, no bank account, no one in a new community where she and her spouse have ended up, the amount of emotional and psychic turmoil is magnified.

This one person just three days ago reached out via email to ask me for help. I barely knew her, having met her at a hardware store. And, also, I did briefly meet the woman and the construction guy at the house just up the way: amazing house, a dream, the ocean, and, well, I didn’t spend time with the woman and her husband, so the red flags or tremors of an abusive dude never hit me.

But, the email, then the phone call, then meeting the person away from the almost-completed-house, and then some plan of action. It turns out that the person is legally married, but she is working on a green card. She’s from the UK. She was in New Mexico, before the couple ended up here of all places, to build the dream home. They were working on a green card. They had flown out to NM, last Friday, and the dude, a massive alcoholic, started gulping down airline shots. A bender. And, then, the Albuquerque mother of this guy, well, she was beat down too, as a wife of this guy’s dad, who ended up flying bombers in the USA Air Force, and giving shots to the my friend’s husband and his younger brother when they were 9 and 7 respectively.

The Brit gets her Social Security card, but there are no photos of the married couple together. More than five years married, and he manipulated that. Five years now, and the house and land are in his name. One vehicle, that too in his name. He held all the money from a sale of a house from Santa Fe, which he took as cash up here. The green card is now precarious, an unknown, a probable “no.”

Now, the story really is of the woman, whose parents have heard the cry wolf story many times. Her friends, they too, although this woman, Vicky, has kept some friends in the dark about this guy’s consistent behavior. That’s typical — embarrassment, recrimination, fear, and shame.

We are talking about a 38-year-old woman. She speaks three languages. She had a restaurant in Spain. She’s traveled the world. But that fateful day in 2017, she tied the knot. And he has been a constant up and down freak show, emotionally abusive, and many times, physically abusive. She says she always thought she could fix him. This last time there was no hitting or punching. She has on her phone a video of him attempting to throw her out of the car with the dog. He says it all: “You own nothing. You are nothing without me signing over the Green Card paperwork. You are worthless and can’t do anything without me. I have all the cards. If you cross me, I’ll kill you.”

That, under the state of Oregon, is not an arrestable offense, and while it should be, don’t expect much in this rot-gut of a patriarchal killer society.

No vehicle, no savings, and thus, people like me had to fall into action, because, a, it takes a village/community to do something about this shit, and, b, the idea of a death or a beating on my watch is horrendous for a radical writer.

I found the place for her to stay, some 30 miles away, in the woods, with an amazing woman, aged 83, with her horses and dogs and chickens and trees and garden. The lady, Alice, told Vicky that she has a safe place for a few weeks. She also related how her second husband, a lawyer, fought for three years her attempt to divorce. There were two children involved, and this Alice’s original farm (as she calls it) was in this guy’s sights (he was a lawyer).

My sister is a social worker coordinator in Arizona. She came to the rescue since she also ran domestice violence shelters. She knows Arizona and New Mexico. She’s connected. She has helped this woman get some sort of stability. She’s talked to her, counseled her, and directed her to some resources once she hits NM.

This woman is now on the road, as the New Mexico mother-in-law is helping out with rental car and cash for gas.  Flights to NM were prohibitive. Just for the big dog, $775 one way, and that’s without the costs of a final vaccination and the big kennel bitive. The rental car was a huge hassle since they do not take debit cards, and they want the owner of a credit card to be there, in person. The mother-in-law is in New Mexico, an RN in her sixties.

This mother-in-law is warning Vicky “to get away from my son forever.” This mother-in-law was abused by her sons’ father big time. The kids were beaten by the father. And, even after she divorced this fascist pilot, the guy’s second wife had enough of the raging and hitting and so she shot him square between the eyes. Later days for an abuser. A week later, that second wife turned the gun on herself.

“I have lost myself. I can’t believe this has gone on and on. I used to be independent, gutsy. Heck, I set up my own restaurant in Basque country. I did that for six years. That’s where I met him.”

Yes, this entire society — male, female, LGBTQA+, young, old — gets into victim blaming as a common reaction to any sort of violence or assault on women in a domestic relationship.

Victim-blaming attitudes marginalize the victim/survivor and make it harder to come forward and report the abuse. If the victim/survivor knows that you or society blames survivors for abuse, they will not feel safe or comfortable coming forward and talking to you.

Victim-blaming attitudes also reinforce the manipulative tactics that abusers use to control their partner; abusers tell survivors that it is their fault this is happening. Committing violence is always the choice of the person who is abusing. It is NOT the victim/survivor’s fault or responsibility to fix the violence that an abuser is committing against them. By engaging in victim-blaming attitudes, society allows abusive people to perpetrate relationship abuse or sexual assault while avoiding accountability for those actions.

Victim-blaming attitudes prevent society from acknowledging and changing toxic masculinity and rape culture.

In order to stop victim-blaming, it is helpful to understand why it occurs in the first place. One reason that people blame a victim/survivor is to distance themselves from an unpleasant occurrence. This gives a false sense that this could not happen to them. By labeling or accusing the victim/survivor, others can see the victim/survivor as different from themselves. People use the Just World theory, Invulnerability theory, and Assumptive World theory in an attempt to feel like they have control over situations where they do not have control. People reassure themselves by thinking, “Because I am not like the victim/survivor, because I do not do XYZ, this would never happen to me.” We need to help people understand that a survivor’s actions do not contribute to a perpetrator’s decision to commit relationship abuse and sexual violence. It is our responsibility as members of society to support survivors and hold abusers accountable. (source)

Again, we are not in any enlightened moment. It’s 2022, but story after story shows the courts, the cops, the citizens, the collective we blame victims. We blame women when they come forward to accuse the rich and famous. Just look at the women accusing Weinstein or Trump or Biden. This is how these guys and their male and female handlers work the system. Having a standing president, Clinton, coerce Monica for sex, well, how many have said — “She was 22 and knew perfectly well what she was doing.”

Think about all the feminists and apologists defending that Clinton. Imagine, as a school teacher, if I coerced a student in my college class to have oral sex with me for benefit of her grade or in Monica’s case, advancement. These millions of men are criminals, sure, but worse. I’ve been lucky to take a bat to the heads of several rapists, when I was a senior in High School, and a few times in my 20s. Not now, Cancel Me Joe McCarthy!

And then, all the affairs this guy had as governor. And his “fun” with the royals, legals, governmentals, rich creeps who went to Epstein’s pedophilia island. Imagine that, a society that lets this just pass. And, then the Genocidal Joe, and his lies and his accusers:

A NEW PIECE of evidence has emerged buttressing the credibility of Tara Reade’s claim that she told her mother about allegations of sexual harassment and assault related to her former boss, then-Sen. Joe Biden. Biden, through a spokesperson, has denied the allegations. Reade has claimed to various media outlets, including The Intercept, that she told her mother, a close friend, and her brother about both the harassment and, to varying degrees of detail, the assault at the time. Her brother, Collin Moulton, and her friend, who has asked to remain anonymous, both confirmed that they heard about the allegations from Reade at the time. Reade’s mother died in 2016, but both her brother and friend also confirmed Reade had told her mother, and that her mother, a longtime feminist and activist, urged her to go to the police.

In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me. (source)

I only make these asides because, a, the society is sick. The media are sick. The people behind powerful figures are sick. But, even the dirt-poor or the deplorables or the mid-level folk, if men, accused of date rape, acquaintence rape, assault on a wife, beating a spouse, they are entitled on many levels since toxic masculinity is a face, and that we are in a rape culture. Forget about the Matt Taibbi types, or any of them, questioning the accusers of any number of thousands of powerful and in-the-news folk. They think the #MeToo movement is fake, on all accords.

Remember, here on these pages and elsewhere, I have written about my clients as a social services dude: homeless veterans and homeless folk. All my clients who were female were RAPED by their own soldiers, in this country, and some out of this country. Nah, not a rape culture, right?

It turns out that Vicky’s husband was a big shot at the University of New Mexico. Big shot in the fraternity. Big shot lording over women. Doing the old Ted Bundy soft shoe, but deep down hating women. He had many female friends — he’s tall, well built, a charmer, and, an amazingly open misogynist. Hates his mother. Uses the word “cunt” all the time, and bitch. Is he a product of a father with toxic military masculinity? A product of a military father who killed “the enemy” and bragged about it? A product of a death society enamored of military and macho and might? Is her 35-year-old husband worthless as a man? Full of sociopathic tendancies? Broken at a young age? Destroyed by booze? Determined to be all he can be as a sexist and shitty pig because he has no role models other than violent, piggish, misanthropes? The pigs and military, two of the highest rates of domestic violence of all sub-groups of baboon homo sapiens males. He is a product of that! TV, movies, sports, and toxic rape culture trapped in the DNA of men,

So, this person, Vicky, is out of here. She will have to withdraw from the toxicity. She’ll have to rewire her brain. Right now, she’s 800 miles away from the guy, but she had the shakes this morning, sweating, sick to her stomach. It’s the weight off of her soul, and it feels, well, discombobulating. Serotonin, dopamine, all the hormones in the fight or flight discharge. Cortisol loads. It’s an ugly reality that getting out of a toxic violent relationship is like getting off booze, coke, heroin. Or pills.

The body does rewire under strain and pressure and living in hell. It does create holes in mind processing. The body reacts to the hormones, the adrenal gland, all of that, including the gut and entire systems that keep a person from failing over with a heart attack at age 38.

Here, one of thousands of offending “judges”:

After the judge in her Wisconsin divorce case ruled that her ex-husband — a man who had sought treatment for anger and alcohol issues — would get legal custody of and equal time with their four children, Julie Valadez vowed to fight back.

But in every key ruling that followed, the Waukesha County Circuit Court judge overseeing her case, Michael J. Aprahamian, found Valadez’s concerns about her ex-husband not credible and her actions unacceptable. Aprahamian took away her ability to co-parent her children. He held her in contempt four times. And after Aprahamian ordered her arrest, she braced herself for jail.

Valadez, whose accusations of domestic abuse had led to her husband’s arrest, ran through a string of attorneys and represented herself at times. Eventually she found a Milwaukee civil rights attorney to represent her, along with a public defender, and enlisted the help of a Washington, D.C., legal service for domestic violence survivors. (source)

Yes, the court system — For Domestic Violence Survivors, Courts Can Be Another Abuse. They are living hells. There is no ethics in the law, and the rule of law, it is stacked against, well, fill in the blank_______________________________!  The Court System Is Stacked Against Survivors Of Sexual Violence!

The systems for Vicky are stacked against her. She’s been married to this felon (he has two DUI’s and an assault from his drunkenness) who has managed to not get any couple photos taken. She is at his whim. She is about to be in another state to work on counseling. DV services. Getting support for herself and her dog. A shelter? Can this punk track her down? She will need help with a divorce. She deserves half of whatever this house is worth — $350,000. He’s managed to beat her, and there is a hospital report of broken ribs and concussion with the words “assaulted by husband” on the report. That was 1.5 years ago. She never filed charges.

The healing process will take time. Funny thing, the lady who owns the rent-a-car outfit in Corvallis is a survivor, too. Ten years, no kids, and she said she hit the bottle when she got out of that hellhole. She now owns her own business.

And so there we go. It takes more than a village. It takes proactive and empathetic people to help lead a way or pathway out of people’s hell’s. Most people I know will not get involved, but their sick minds are putting those UkiNazi blue and yellow stripes up on their Facebook. They’ll give a dollar of their Big Mac order for guns for more UkiNazi’s in Ukraine, but they say — “Man, don’t get involved with her. Domestic Violence. If he finds out who’s helping her, man, he’ll come after you.”

That is the jelly consistency of most Americans’ spines. Except for the lady at the rent-a-car place. And my friend Alice in the mountains with her goats and dogs and fruit trees. She even gave Vicky a $100 for the road. This Vicky, mind you, is a new friend to both of us. No one I knew except for a 45-minute conversation in that hardware store parking lot a month ago.

Now, she is connected to me, to my friend, Alice, to my sister, to that car rental lady, to many many more folk. That’s how you help a person. It’s a team effort. And while the guy deserves a bat to the head, I am 65, with a spouse who is not into that sort of justice (she is, but not for the consequences of me going to jail). I have no problem with that sort of justice, but again, missiles and cluster bombs and napalm for UkiNazi’s, but not a finger lifted for a fellow human right in their community.

Note: Names, demographic and biographic stuff changed to protect the heroes and the victim. But the story is absolutely true crime, right from this writer’s horse’s mouth. I just got a text from her on the road. She’s in LA now, listening to Steve Miller, and the dog’s head is sticking out the window, and Vicky is moving on, south, a million mental miles away from a very bad relationship that would have ended in, well, a broken neck, or her death.

More, here: Battered Woman Syndrome

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Women Have Made Particularly Significant Gains Under the Second Sandinista Government Since 2006

Women, particularly those in the Third World, often find themselves with limited ability to participate in community organizations and political life because of the poverty and their traditional sex role imposes on them.

On them falls sole responsibility to care for their children and other family members, especially when sick; they maintain the home, cook the meals, wash the dishes, the clothes, bathe the children, clean the house, mend the clothes. This labor becomes unending manual labor when households have no electricity (consequently, no lights, no refrigerator, no labor-saving electrical devices), and no running water.

The burden of this work impedes the social participation, self-expectations, and education of the female population.

Women in the Third World (and increasingly in the imperial First World) face problems of violence at home and in public, problems of food and water for the family, of proper shelter, and lack of health care for the family, and their own lack of access to education and, thus, work opportunities.

In Nicaragua, before the 1979 Sandinista revolution, men typically fulfilled few obligations for their children; men often abandoned the family, leaving the care to women. It was not uncommon to hear the abuse that men inflicted on women, to see women running to a neighbor for refuge.

It was not uncommon to encounter orphaned children whose mothers died in childbirth, since maternal mortality was high. Common illnesses were aggravated because there were few hospitals and, if there were, cash payment was demanded.

After the 1979 Sandinista victory, living conditions for women dramatically improved, achievements the period of neoliberal rule (1990-2006) did not completely overturn. Throughout the second Sandinista period (2007- today), the material and social position of women again made giant steps forward.

The greatest advances have been made by poor women in the rural areas and barrios, historically without safety, electricity, water and sanitation services, health care, or paved roads.

The liberation women have attained during the Sandinista era cannot be measured only by what we apply in North America: equal pay for equal work, the right to abortion, the right to affordable childcare, freedom from sexual discrimination.

Women’s liberation in Third World countries involves matters that may not appear on the surface as women’s rights issues. These include the paving of roads, improving housing, legalized land tenure, school meal programs, new clinics and hospitals, electrification, plumbing, literacy campaigns, potable water, aid programs to campesinos and crime reduction programs.

Because half of Nicaraguan families are headed by single mothers, this infrastructure development promotes the liberation and well-being of women.

Government programs that directly or indirectly shorten the hours of household drudgery free women to participate more in community life and increase their self-confidence and leadership. A country can have no greater democratic achievement than bringing about full and equal participation of women.

Women participating in 1979 Sandinista revolution. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Women’s Liberation Boosted with the FSLN’s Zero Hunger and Zero Usury Programs

These programs, launched in 2007, raise the socio-economic position of women. Zero Hunger furnishes pigs, a pregnant cow, chickens, plants, seeds, fertilizers, and building materials to women in rural areas to diversify their production, upgrade the family diet, and strengthen women-run household economies.

The agricultural assets provided are put in the woman’s name, equipping women to become more self-sufficient producers; it gives them more direct control and security over food for their children.

This breaks women’s historic dependency on male breadwinners and encourages their self-confidence. The program has aided 275,000 poor families, more than one million people (of a total of 6.6 million Nicaraguans) and has increased both their own food security and the nation’s food sovereignty.

Nicaragua now produces close to 90% of its own food, with most coming from small and medium farmers, many of them women. As Fausto Torrez of the Nicaraguan Rural Workers Association (ATC) correctly noted, “A nation that cannot feed itself is not free.”

Market in Managua selling locally produced food. [Source: tortillaconsal.com]

The Zero Usury program is a microcredit mechanism that now charges 0.5% annual interest, not the world microcredit average of 35%. More than 445,000 women have received these low-interest loans, typically three loans each.

The program not only empowers women but is a key factor reducing poverty, unlocking pools of talent, and driving diversified and sustainable growth. Many women receiving loans have turned their businesses into cooperatives, providing jobs to other women. Since 2007, about 5,900 cooperatives have formed, with 300 being women’s cooperatives.

Poverty has been reduced from 48% in 2007 to 25% and extreme poverty from 17.5% to 7%. This benefited women in particular, since single mother households suffered more from poverty. The Zero Hunger and Zero Usury programs have lessened the traditional domestic violence, given that women in poverty suffer greater risk of violence and abuse than others.

Giving Women Titles to Property Is a Step Toward Women’s Liberation

Since most Nicaraguans live by small-scale farming or by small business, possessing the title of legal ownership is a major concern. Between 2007 and 2021, the FSLN government has given out 451,250 land titles in the countryside and the city, with women making up 55% of the property-owners who benefited. Providing women with the legal title to their own land was a great step toward their economic independence.

Infrastructure Programs Expand Women’s Freedom

The Sandinista government has funded the building or renovation of 290,000 homes since 2007, free of charge for those in extreme poverty, or with interest-free long-term loans. This aided more than one million Nicaraguans, particularly single mothers, who head half of all Nicaraguan families.

In 2006 only 65% of the urban population had potable drinking water; now 92% do. Access to potable water in rural areas has doubled, from 28% to 55%. This frees women from the toilsome daily walk to the village well to carry buckets of water home to cook every meal, wash the dishes and clothes, and bathe the children. Homes connected to sewage disposal systems have grown from 30% in 2007 to 57% in 2021.

Now 99% of the population has electricity compared to 54% in 2006. As we know from experiencing electrical blackouts, electricity significantly frees our lives from time-consuming tasks. Street lighting has more than doubled, increasing security for all. Reliable home electricity enables the use of electrical labor-saving devices, such as a refrigerator.

Today, high-speed internet connects and unites most of the country, reducing people’s isolation and lack of access to information. Virtually everyone has a cell phone, and free internet is now available in many public parks.

Nicaragua’s road system is now among the best in Latin America and the Caribbean, given it has built more roads in the last 15 years than were built in the previous 200 years. Outlying towns are now connected to the national network. Now women in rural areas can travel elsewhere to work, sell their products in nearby markets, attend events in other towns, and take themselves or their children to the hospital. This contributes to the fight against poverty and the fight for women’s liberation.

New roads on the outskirts of Ésteli, Nicaragua’s third-largest city. [Source: bcie.org]

Better roads and housing, almost universal electrical and internet access, as well as indoor plumbing, greatly lessens the burdens placed on women homemakers and provide them with greater freedom to participate in the world they live in.

The Sandinista Educational System Emancipates Women

The humanitarian nature of the FSLN governments, as opposed to the disregard by previous neoliberal regimes, is revealed by statistics on illiteracy. When the FSLN revolution triumphed in 1979, illiteracy topped 56%.

Within ten years they reduced it to 12%. Yet by the end of the 16-year neoliberal period in 2006, which dismantled the free education system, illiteracy had again risen to 23%. Today the FSLN government has cut illiteracy to under 4%.

[Source: globalgiving.org]

The FSLN made education completely free, eliminating school fees. This, combined with the aid programs for poor women, has allowed 100,000 children to return to school. The government began a school lunch program, a meal of beans and rice, to 1.5 million school and pre-school children every day.

Pre-school, primary and secondary students are supplied with backpacks, glasses when needed, and low-income students receive uniforms at no cost. Now a much higher proportion of children are able to attend school, which provides more opportunities for mothers to work outside the home.

[Source: creativesocietiesinternational.com]

Nicaragua has established a nationwide free day-care system, now numbering 265 centers. Mothers can take their young children to day care, freeing them from another of the major hurdles to entering the workforce.

Due to the vastly expanded and free medical system, the  Zero Hunger, Zero Usury and other programs, chronic malnutrition in children under five has been cut in half, with chronic malnutrition in children six to twelve cut by two-thirds. Now it is rare to see kids with visible malnutrition, removing another preoccupation from mothers.

Schools and businesses never closed during the Covid pandemic, and Nicaragua’s health system has been among the most successful in the world addressing Covid. The country has the lowest number of Covid deaths per million inhabitants among all the countries of the Americas.

Nicaragua has also built a system of parks, playgrounds, and other free recreation where mothers can take their children.

Throughout the school system, the Ministry of Education promotes a culture of equal rights and non-discrimination. It has implemented the new subject “Women’s Rights and Dignities,” which teaches students about women’s right to a life without harassment and abuse and the injustices of the patriarchal system. Campaigns were launched to promote the participation of both mom and dad in a child’s education, such as emphasizing that attending school meetings or performances are shared responsibilities of both parents.

Women receive their diplomas from the National Technology Institute INATEC, where 62% of those enrolled are women.  [Source:radiolaprimerisima.com]

Sandinistas’ Free Health Care System Liberates Women 

In stark contrast to Nicaragua’s neoliberal years, with its destruction of the medical system, and in contrast to other Central American countries and the United States with their privatized health care for profit, the Sandinistas have established community-based, free, preventive public health care. Accordingly, life expectancy has risen from 72 years in 2006 to 77 years today, now equal to the U.S. level.

Health care units number more than 1,700, including 1,259 health posts and 192 health centers, with one-third built since 2007. The country has 77 hospitals, with 21 new hospitals built, and 46 existing hospitals remodeled and modernized. Nicaragua provides 178 maternity homes near medical centers for expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies or from rural areas to stay during the last weeks of pregnancy.

The United States is the richest country in the Americas, while Nicaragua is the third-poorest. Yet in the U.S. since 2010, more than 100 rural hospitals have closed, and fewer than 50% of rural women have access to pre-natal services within a 30-mile drive from their homes. This has disproportionately affected low-income women, particularly Black and Latino women.

Nicaragua has equipped 66 mobile clinics, which gave nearly 1.9 million consultations in 2020. These include cervical and breast cancer screenings, helping to cut the cervical cancer mortality rate by 34% since 2007. The number of women receiving Pap tests has increased almost five-fold, from 181,491 in 2007 to 880,907 in 2020.

In the pre-Sandinista era, one-fourth of pregnant women gave birth at home, with no doctor. There were few hospitals and pregnant women often had to travel rough dirt roads to reach a clinic or hospital. Now women need not worry about reaching a distant hospital while in labor because they can reside in a local maternity home for the last two weeks of their pregnancies and be monitored by doctors.

In 2020, 67,222 pregnant women roomed in one of these homes, and could be accompanied by their mothers or sisters. As a result, 99% of births today are in medical centers, and maternal mortality fell from 115 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006 to 36 in 2020. These are giant steps forward in the liberation of women.

Contrary to the indifference to women in the U.S., Nicaraguan mothers receive one month off work before their baby is born, and two months off after; even men get five days off work when their baby is born. Mothers also receive free milk for six months. Men and women get five paid days off work when they marry.

The Question of Abortion Rights

The law making abortion illegal, removing the “life and health of the mother” exception, was passed in the National Assembly under President Enrique Bolaños in 2006. There had been a well-organized and funded campaign by Catholics all over Latin America as well as large marches over the previous two years in Nicaragua in favor of this law.

Enrique Bolaños in 2002. [Source: nytimes.com]

The law, supported by 80% of the people, was proposed immediately before the presidential election as a vote-getting ploy by Bolaños. The Sandinistas were a minority in the National Assembly at the time, and the FSLN legislators were released from party discipline for the vote. The majority abstained, while several voted in favor. The law has never been implemented or rescinded.

Since the Sandinistas’ return to power in 2007 no woman or governmental or private health professional has been prosecuted for any action related to abortion. Any woman whose life is in danger receives an abortion in government health centers or hospitals. Many places exist for women to get abortions; none has been closed or attacked, and none is clandestine. The morning-after pill and contraceptive services are widely available.

Sandinista Measures to Free Women from Violence 

Nicaragua has created 102 women’s police stations, special units that include protecting women and children from sexual and domestic violence and abuse. Now women can talk to female police officers about crimes committed against them, whether it be abuse or rape, making it easier and more comfortable for women to file complaints, receive counseling for trauma, and ensure that violent crimes against women are prosecuted in a thorough and timely manner.

Nicaragua’s women in blue. [Source: breal.tv]

Women make up 34.3% of the 16,399 National Police officers, a high number for a police department. For instance, New York City and Los Angeles police are 18% women and Chicago is 23%.

The United Nations finds Nicaragua the safest country in Central America, with the lowest homicide rate, 7.2 per 100,000 (down from 13.4 in 2006), less than half the regional average of 19.

It also has the lowest rate of femicides in Central America (0.7 per 100,000), another testament to the Sandinista commitment to ending mistreatment of women.  The government organizes citizen-security assemblies to raise consciousness concerning violence against women and to handle the vulnerabilities women face in the family and community. Mifamilia, the Ministry of the Family, carries out house-to-house visits to stress prevention of violence against women and sexual abuse of children.

Nicaragua is the most successful regional country in combating drug trafficking and organized crime, freeing women from the insecurity that plagues women in places such as Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Women’s Leadership in the Nicaragua Government

The progress women have made during the second FSLN era is reflected in their participation in government. The 1980s’ Sandinista directorate contained no women. In 2007, the second Sandinista government mandated equal representation for women, ensuring that at least 50% of public offices would be filled by women, from the national level to the municipal.

Today, 9 out of 16 national government cabinet ministers are women. Women head the Supreme Electoral Council, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General’s office, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and account for 60% of judges. Women make up half of the National Assembly, of mayors, of vice-mayors and of municipal council members. Women, so represented in high positions, provide a model and inspires all women and girls to participate in building a new society with more humane human relations.

[Source: ipu.org]

No Greater Democratic Victory Than the Liberation of Women

The progress made in women’s liberation is seen in the Global Gender Gap Index: In 2007, Nicaragua ranked 90th on the index; by 2020, it had jumped to 5th place, exceeded only by Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.

Nicaragua is a country that has accomplished the most in liberating women from household drudgery and domestic slavery because of its policies favoring the social and political participation and economic advancement of poor women.

Women have gained a women’s police commissariat, legal recognition of their property, new homes for abused women and for poor single mothers, economic programs that empower poorer women, abortion is not criminalized in practice, half of all political candidates and public office holders are women, extreme poverty has been cut by half, mostly benefiting women and children, domestic toil has been greatly reduced because of modernized national infrastructure, women have convenient and free health care.

In their liberation struggle, Nicaraguan women are becoming ever more self-sufficient and confident in enforcing their long-neglected human rights. They are revolutionizing their collective self-image and ensuring their central role in building a new society. This betters the working class and campesinos as a whole by improving the quality of life for all and is a vital weapon in combating U.S. economic warfare.

As Lenin observed, “The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it.” Nicaragua is one more living example that a new world is possible.

• First published in CovertAction Magazine

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

[Death toll in Bangladesh garment factory fire rises – CBS News November 25, 2012 ]

My own roots are embedded with strong independent women mentors. For my Scottish grandmother, she came over to Canada as a teen and worked all her life as a cook, nanny, hospital nutritionist. She played the stock market on low wages and set up her only child with some decent funds.

My mother was a single mother with my half-sister. She went from Vancouver — where her husband was a playboy with a gambling problem who had the “mafia” after him — to Flagstaff, then to Hermosa Beach, and then she married my father. Mona, my mom, was the central force of several military wives groups in places like Paris, France, Munich, Germany and Tucson.

My aunt Edna came from England to Massachusetts with two other women from the old country. They opened up an ice-cream shop in Northampton, and then eventually got deep into the restaurant field setting up a high end eatery called The Whale Inn.

I went there on vacations, recalling the stories of Liz Taylor and one of her husbands having a marriage reception there.

I absorbed stories of my German great grandmother Elfrieda who, as a midwife in North Dakota and Minnesota, delivered hundreds of babies. Another relative, an aunt, survived the allied bombing of Dresden with her five children. She helped an entire neighborhood live by scurrying them into an abandoned warehouse cellar she had used for potatoes and cauliflower.

The first women’s day in the USA – February 28, 1909 — occurred a year after the Manhattan garment workers’ strikes when 15,000 women marched for better wages and working conditions. Most of them were teenage girls who worked 12-hour days. Then, in 1911, in one factory, Triangle Shirtwaist Company (where female employees were paid $15 a week in sweatshop conditions: low level lighting, in tight conditions at sewing machines) 145 female workers were killed in a fire. This pushed lawmakers to finally pass legislation meant to protect factory workers through stringent safety measures.

[Triangle Factory Fire Photograph by Granger]

Fast-forward to today: I’m teaching a memoir writing class at OCCC-Waldport with mostly women in attendance. Memoirs are different than autobiographies, and this publishing arena is now greatly populated by women memoirists. All three “textbooks” I use in the class were written by women. Additionally, Mary Karr’s The Liars Club, and Cheryl Strayed’s, Wild, are two memoirs we reference.

Time and time again, memoir writing classes I’ve facilitated in Texas, Washington and here have been predominately attended by women who for all intents and purposes are the keepers of the family history.

Throughout my career as educator and journalist, I have seen more and more women take the lead in many fields. One magazine article I published focused on the graduating class at Washington State University’s veterinarian sciences program. All those DVM graduates were women.

The dean of the school stated there is an active recruiting campaign to get “more men into the field.” Imagine that, women undertaking vet sciences, which in 1950 was almost exclusively a male-dominated field.

The reasons for the shift in gender representation are complicated, but one truism stands: Veterinarian sciences is largely a pet field, one where communication with pet owners is vital. It is a field where the patient is actually the human. From field, to barn, to yard, to house, to bed – that’s the shift in the veterinarian field, as illustrated by our dogs and cats.

It begs the question: Are men as empathetic and responsive to the patient’s owner’s psychological and spiritual needs as women?

One of my areas of study, marine sciences, has seen a break in the male domination to sometimes a 50-50 representation of women in some grad programs.

But there are still rough waters: In 2019, on World Oceans Day, the theme was “gender and the ocean.” According to Robin Nelson, a biological anthropologist at Santa Clara:

We frame science as this idea that folks with the best ideas, folks who are willing to work hard, are those who are going to succeed. But absent safeguards protecting vulnerable scientists, she said, those folks who could be super talented, wonderful scientists get pushed out of our fields.

Peter Girguis, an oceanographer at Harvard University, echoes this:

In the absence of gender equality, we’re doing mediocre science.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter proclaimed “Women’s History Week” in March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Seven years later, Congress declared all of March to be “Women’s History Month.”

There are problems with “a month,” as Kimberly A. Hamlin, an associate professor of history at Miami University in Ohio and author of Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, states:

But Women’s History Month unintentionally reinforces the prevailing idea that when women do something, it is called ‘women’s history,’ and when men do something it is called ‘history.’ Women’s History Month also allows state school boards and curricular committees to feel as though they are including women without doing enough to update textbooks and state standards, ultimately undermining the very goals that reformers and historians aimed to achieve with the designation.

I clearly remember when I was the only “guy” in the women’s literature class I took at the University of Arizona where I eventually received a BA and BS. I learned so much about women in history, not just female writers.

We are talking 102 years ago when the 19th amendment granted some women the right to vote (a number of other laws prohibited Native American women, Black women, Asian American women, and Latinx women from voting, among others).

In that lit class, I learned a bit of historical misstatement: What was deemed the first expedition to sail around the globe on a voyage to study and sample the world’s oceans occurred in 1872. Of the 243 people on board the Challenger, not one was a woman.

However, it wasn’t the first. Nearly a century before the Challenger voyage, a woman — Jeanne Baret — sailed around the world on a scientific expedition of her own. She disguised herself as a male assistant on a 1766 voyage led by a French explorer to document plants and ecosystems in distant countries. Baret is the first woman on record to have circumnavigated the globe.

“7 Countries With Horrific Sweatshop Situations”

+–+

To continue with the piece above, which will be in the local rag, out here in Lincoln Co, Oregon (Central Coast — Newport News Times), I have to put in some work of a feminist and radical, Linda Ford:

Elizabeth McAlister, in jail since April, remains steadfast, modest and unassuming. She hesitates to give interviews. She did write after her arrest about why she resists the Empire’s weapons: ‘We came to Kings Bay Submarine Base animated by the absurd conviction that we could make some impact on slowing if not ending, the mad rush to the devastation of our magnificent planet.’

Such sentiments, such absurd convictions, that anyone can interfere in the Empire’s global destruction, have to be punished. Such female dissenters have to be jailed and silenced. There should be no more silence surrounding America’s women politicals. Whether considered terrorist threats because, like Aafia Siddiqui, they are part of a group deemed an enemy race; or considered terrorist threats because, like Elizabeth McAlister, they resist and expose America’s global domination—such women will be made political prisoners of the Empire.

— “Women Politicals of the American Empire” by Linda Ford (DV)

“In The Eye of the Beholder: USA History of Imprisoning Women Politicals” (DV) Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart

and

“Long Live the Armed Struggle!” (DV) Part Two of book review, and … The Revolution Will Not Be Televised or plugged onto Twitter, or in the Streets with Your Placards, or Sending in ‘Save the Whale’ Postcards

I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.

— Dorli Rainey (In conversation with author Paul Haeder)

I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.

— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart)

*Quote from, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In Spokane, WA, 19 years old. She went to lumber camps in Montana and Washington, speaking at IWW meetings. She stated she fell in love with her country.

+–+

This is not a blanket endorsement of all women, all of those of the female persuasion not having baby blood on their hands. In capitalism, the male dominated death machine is easily transferred to the other sex.

[ Women in Defense, a career development and networking organization affiliated with the National Defense Industrial Association, a leading industry group. ]

Offensive-polluting-skin peeling-depleted uranium fed-bunker busting-napalm spreading-TNT concussions Industries, described by the misnomer as Defense Industries (Edward Bernays would be smiling), they have garnered the woke label with their CEOs in pant suits and skirts: Definitely do not ask these women over to babysit — that is, if the baby is not blue-eyed, blond, white or of the red-white-and-blue variety.

As of Jan. 1, the CEOs of four of the nation’s five biggest defense contractors — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and the defense arm of Boeing — are now women. And across the negotiating table, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer and the chief overseer of the nation’s nuclear stockpile now join other women in some of the most influential national security posts, such as the nation’s top arms control negotiator and the secretary of the Air Force. (How Women Took Over the Killing Machine, AKA, MIC!) 

It’s a watershed for what has always been a male-dominated bastion, the culmination of decades of women entering science and engineering fields and knocking down barriers as government agencies and the private sector increasingly weigh merit over machismo.

And, as Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson told POLITICO, it’s also the result of “quieting that little voice in your head that doubts whether you can do that next job or take on that special assignment.”

But turn yourself blue trying to convince the Norte Americanos that war is bad, that when Nazi’s get supported by the USA in places like, err, Ukraine, that THAT in itself is really that region’s issue, and that missiles and guidance systems and bioweapons and cluster bombs, the lot of it, guided by these hailed women above, well, they do the bloody work the same, whether the CEO is male or female. Though, I have to say, all this macho stuff pushed down the Marvel Comic Book bred Norte Americanos, for decades, you know, the Charlie’s Angels jujutsu and now the Black Double Oh Seven, it has done the job of convincing redneck women that their role in this game is to, well, kill babies descriminately and indescriminately.

Because they are baby killers!

Yet, feminists should not view this ​“rise” of women as a win. Feminism, as the most recent wave of imperial-feminist articles shows, is increasingly being co-opted to promote and sell the U.S. military-industrial complex: a profoundly violent institution that will never bring liberation to women — whether they are within its own ranks or in the countries bearing the greatest brunt of its brutality. As Noura Erakat, a human rights attorney and assistant professor at George Mason University, put it in an interview with In These Times, women’s inclusion in U.S. military institutions ​“makes the system subjugating us stronger and more difficult to fight. Our historical exclusion makes it [appear] desirable to achieve [inclusion] but that’s a lack of imagination. Our historical exclusion should push us to imagine a better system and another world that’s possible.” — (“Against the Feminist-Washing of US Militarism“)

Here, the real heroes, a la women:

[Global Witness report points out that women who act as social leaders are the main victims of murder for carrying out their work. / Photo: Global Witness NGO ]

Finally, put a dress on this person. A little bit of eyeliner. High heels. Hmm, replace one criminal, a male, with a female criminal, and we still have criminalty:

“Exclusive: The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud Exposed
How US military spending keeps rising even as the Pentagon flunks its audit.”

“Holding U.S. Treasurys? Beware: Uncle Sam Can’t Account For $21 Trillion.”

Or not:

Meet the first female 3-star general in the US military]

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Paul Haeder.

Women in the Third World (and increasingly in the imperial First World) face problems of violence at home and in public, problems of food and water for the family, of proper shelter, and lack of health care for the family, and their own lack of access to education and thus work opportunities.

In Nicaragua, before the 1979 Sandinista revolution, men typically fulfilled few obligations for their children; men often abandoned the family, leaving the care to women. It was not uncommon to hear the abuse that men inflicted on women, to see women running to a neighbor for refuge. It was not uncommon to encounter orphaned children whose mothers died in childbirth, since maternal mortality was high. Common illnesses were aggravated because there were few hospitals and if there were, cash payment was demanded.

After the 1979 Sandinista victory, living conditions for women drastically improved, achievements the period of neoliberal rule (1990-2006) did not completely overturn. Throughout the second Sandinista period (2007- today), the material and social position of women again made giant steps forward.

The greatest advance has been made by poor women in the rural areas and barrios, historically without safety, electricity, water and sanitation services, health care, or paved roads. The liberation women have attained during the Sandinista era cannot be measured only by what we apply in North America: equal pay for equal work, the right to abortion, the right to affordable childcare, freedom from sexual discrimination. Women’s liberation in Third World countries involves matters that may not appear on the surface as women’s rights issues. These include the paving of roads, improving housing, legalized land tenure, school meal programs, new clinics and hospitals, electrification, plumbing, literacy campaigns, potable water, aid programs to campesinos, and crime reduction programs.

Because half of Nicaraguan families are headed by single mothers, this infrastructure development promotes the liberation and well-being of women. Government programs that directly or indirectly shorten the hours of household drudgery frees women to participate more in community life and increases their self-confidence and leadership. A country can have no greater democratic achievement than bringing about full and equal participation of women.

Women’s liberation Boosted with the FSLN’s Zero Hunger and Zero Usury programs

These programs, launched in 2007, raise the socio-economic position of women. Zero Hunger furnishes pigs, a pregnant cow, chickens, plants, seeds, fertilizers, and building materials to women in rural areas to diversify their production, upgrade the family diet, and strengthen women-run household economies. The agricultural assets provided are put in the woman’s name, equipping women to become more self-sufficient producers; it gives them more direct control and security over food for their children. This breaks women’s historic dependency on male breadwinners and encourages their self-confidence. The program has aided 275,000 poor families, over one million people (of a total of 6.6 million Nicaraguans), and has increased both their own food security and the nation’s food sovereignty.

Nicaragua now produces close to 90% of its own food, with most coming from small and medium farmers, many of them women. As Fausto Torrez of the Nicaraguan Rural Workers Association (ATC) correctly noted, “A nation that cannot feed itself is not free.”

The Zero Usury program is a microcredit mechanism that now charges 0.5% annual interest, not the world microcredit average of 35%. Over 445,000 women have received these low interest loans, typically three loans each. The program not only empowers women but is a key factor reducing poverty, unlocking pools of talent, and driving diversified and sustainable growth. Many women receiving loans have turned their businesses into cooperatives, providing jobs to other women. Since 2007, about 5,900 cooperatives have formed, with 300 being women’s cooperatives.

Poverty has been reduced from 48% in 2007 to 25% and extreme poverty from 17.5% to 7%. This benefited women in particular, since single mother households suffered more from poverty. The Zero Hunger and Zero Usury programs have lessened the traditional domestic violence, given that women in poverty suffer greater risk of violence and abuse than others.

Giving Women Titles to Property Is a Step Towards Women’s Liberation

Since most Nicaraguans live by small-scale farming or by small business, possessing the title of legal ownership is a major concern. Between 2007 and 2021, the FSLN government has given out 451,250 land titles in the countryside and the city, with women making up 55% of the property-owners who benefited. Providing women with the legal title to their own land was a great step towards their economic independence.

Infrastructure Programs Expand Women’s Freedom

The Sandinista government funded the building or renovation of 290,000 homes since 2007, free of charge for those in extreme poverty, or with interest free long-term loans. This aided over one million Nicaraguans, particularly single mothers, who head half of all Nicaraguan families.

In 2006 only 65% of the urban population had potable drinking water; now 92% do. Access to potable water in rural areas has doubled, from 28% to 55%. This frees women from the toilsome daily walk to the village well to carry buckets of water home to cook every meal, wash the dishes and clothes, and bathe the children. Homes connected to sewage disposal systems have grown from 30% in 2007 to 57% in 2021.

Now 99% of the population has electricity compared to 54% in 2006. As we know from experiencing electrical blackouts, electricity significantly frees our lives from time-consuming tasks. Street lighting has more than doubled, increasing security for all. Reliable home electricity enables the use of electrical labor-saving devices, such as a refrigerator.

Today, high speed internet connects and unites most of the country, reducing people’s isolation and lack of access to information. Virtually everyone has a cell phone, and free internet is now available in many public parks.

Nicaragua’s road system is now among the best in Latin America and the Caribbean, given it has built more roads in the last 15 years than were built in the previous two hundred. Outlying towns are now connected to the national network. Now women in rural areas can travel elsewhere to work, sell their products in nearby markets, attend events in other towns, and take themselves or their children to the hospital. This contributes to the fight against poverty and the fight for women’s liberation.

Better roads and housing, almost universal electrical and internet access, as well as indoor plumbing greatly lightens the burdens placed on women homemakers and provide them with greater freedom to participate in the world they live in.

The Sandinista Educational System Emancipates Women

The humanitarian nature of the FSLN governments, as opposed to the disregard by previous neoliberal regimes, is revealed by statistics on illiteracy. When the FSLN revolution triumphed in 1979, illiteracy topped 56%. Within ten years they reduced it to 12%. Yet by the end of the 16-year neoliberal period in 2006, which dismantled the free education system, illiteracy had again risen to 23%. Today the FSLN government has cut illiteracy to under 4%.

The FSLN made education completely free, eliminating school fees. This, combined with the aid programs for poor women, has allowed 100,000 children to return to school. The government began a school lunch program, a meal of beans and rice to 1.5 million school and pre-school children every day. Preschool, primary and secondary students are supplied with backpacks, glasses when needed, and low-income students receive uniforms at no cost. Now a much higher proportion of children are able to attend school, which provides more opportunities for mothers to work outside the home.

Nicaragua has established a nationwide free day care system, now numbering 265 centers. Mothers can take their young children to day care, freeing them from another of the major hurdles to entering the workforce.

Due to the vastly expanded and free medical system, the  Zero Hunger, Zero Usury and other programs, chronic malnutrition in children under five has been cut in half, with chronic malnutrition in children six to twelve cut by two-thirds. Now it is rare to see kids with visible malnutrition, removing another preoccupation off mothers.

Schools and businesses never closed during the covid pandemic, and Nicaragua’s health system has been among the most successful in the world addressing covid. The country has the lowest number of covid deaths per million inhabitants among all the countries of the Americas.

Nicaragua has also built a system of parks, playgrounds, and other free recreation where mothers can take their children.

Throughout the school system, the Ministry of Education promotes a culture of equal rights and non-discrimination. It has implemented the new subject “Women’s Rights and Dignities,” which teaches students about women’s right to a life without harassment and abuse and the injustices of the patriarchal system. Campaigns were launched to promote the participation of both mom and dad in a child’s education, such as emphasizing that attending school meetings or performances are shared responsibilities of both parents. 

Sandinista Free Health Care System Liberates women 

In stark contrast to Nicaragua’s neoliberal years, with its destruction of the medical system, in contrast to other Central American countries and the United States with their privatized health care for profit, the Sandinistas have established community-based, free, preventive public health care. Accordingly, life expectancy has risen from 72 years in 2006 to 77 years today, now equal to the US level.

Health care units number over 1700, including 1,259 health posts and 192 health centers, with one third built since 2007. The country has 77 hospitals, with 21 new hospitals built, and 46 existing hospitals remodeled and modernized. Nicaragua provides 178 maternity homes near medical centers for expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies or from rural areas to stay during the last weeks of pregnancy.

The United States is the richest country in the Americas, while Nicaragua is the third poorest. Yet in the US since 2010, over 100 rural hospitals have closed, and fewer than 50% of rural women have access to perinatal services within a 30-mile drive from their home. This has disproportionately affected low-income women, particularly Black and Latino ones.

Nicaragua has equipped 66 mobile clinics, which gave nearly 1.9 million consultations in 2020. These include cervical and breast cancer screenings, helping to cut the cervical cancer mortality rate by 34% since 2007. The number of women receiving Pap tests has increased from 181,491 in 2007 to 880,907 in 2020.

In the pre-Sandinista era, a fourth of pregnant women gave birth at home, with no doctor. There were few hospitals and pregnant women often had to travel rough dirt roads to reach a clinic or hospital. Now women need not worry about reaching a distant hospital while in labor because they can reside in a local maternity home for the last two weeks of their pregnancies and be monitored by doctors. In 2020, 67,222 pregnant women roomed in one of these homes, and could be accompanied by their mothers or sisters. As a result, 99% of births today are in medical centers, and maternal mortality fell from 115 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006 to 36 in 2020. These are giant steps forward in the liberation of women.

Contrary to the indifference to women in the US, Nicaraguan mothers receive one month off work before their baby is born, and two months off after; even men get five days off work when their baby is born. Mothers also receive free milk for 6 months. Men and women get five days off work when they marry.

The Question of Abortion Rights

The law making abortion illegal, removing the “life and health of the mother” exception, was passed in the National Assembly under President Bolaños in 2006. There had been a well-organized and funded campaign by Catholics all over Latin America as well as large marches over the previous two years in Nicaragua in favor of this law.

The law, supported by 80% of the people, was proposed immediately before the presidential election as a vote-getting ploy by Bolaños. The Sandinistas were a minority in the National Assembly at the time, and the FSLN legislators were released from party discipline for the vote. The majority abstained, while several voted in favor. The law has never been implemented nor rescinded.

Since the return to power of the Sandinistas in 2007 no woman nor governmental or private health professional has ever been prosecuted for any action related to abortion. Any woman whose life is in danger receives an abortion in government health centers or hospitals. Many places exist for women to get abortions; none have been closed nor attacked, nor are clandestine. The morning after pill and contraceptive services are widely available.

Sandinista Measures to Free Women from Violence 

Nicaragua has created 102 women’s police stations, special units that include protecting women and children from sexual and domestic violence and abuse. Now women can talk to female police officers about crimes committed against them, whether it be abuse or rape, making it easier and more comfortable for women to file complaints, receive counseling for trauma, and ensure that violent crimes against women are prosecuted in a thorough and timely manner.

Women make up 34.3% of the 16,399 National Police officers, a high number for a police department. For instance, New York City and Los Angeles police are 18% women and Chicago is 23%.

The United Nations finds Nicaragua the safest country in Central America, with the lowest homicide rate, 7.2 per 100,000 (down from 13.4 in 2006), less than half the regional average of 19. It also has the lowest rate of femicides in Central America (0.7 per 100,000), one more testament to the Sandinista commitment to ending mistreatment of women.  The government organizes citizens security assemblies to raise consciousness concerning violence against women and to handle the vulnerabilities women face in the family and community. Mifamilia, the Ministry of the Family, carries out house-to-house visits to stress prevention of violence against women and sexual abuse of children.

Nicaragua is the most successful regional country in combating drug trafficking and organized crime, freeing women from the insecurity that plagues women in places such as Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

Women Leadership in the Nicaragua Government

The progress women have made during the second FSLN era is reflected in their participation in government. The 1980s Sandinista directorate contained no women. In 2007, the second Sandinista government mandated equal representation for women, ensuring that at least 50% of public offices be filled by women, from the national level to the municipal. Today, 9 out of 16 national government cabinet ministers are women. Women head the Supreme Electoral Council, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General’s office, the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and account for 60% of judges. Women make up half of the National Assembly, of mayors, of vice-mayors and of municipal council members. Women so represented in high positions provides a model and inspires all women and girls to participate in building a new society with more humane human relations.

No Greater Democratic Victory than the Liberation of Women

The headway made in women’s liberation is seen in the Global Gender Gap Index. In 2007, Nicaragua ranked  90th on the index, yet by 2020 had jumped 5th place, behind only Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden.

Nicaragua is one country that has accomplished the most in liberating women from household drudgery and domestic slavery because of its policies favoring the social and political participation and economic advancement of poor women. Women have gained a women’s police commissariat, legal recognition of their property, new homes for abused women and for poor single mothers, economic programs that empower poorer women, abortion is not criminalized in practice, half of all political candidates and public office holders are women, extreme poverty has been cut by half, mostly benefiting women and children, domestic toil has been greatly reduced because of modernized national infrastructure, women have convenient and free health care. In their liberation struggle, Nicaraguan women are becoming ever more self-sufficient and confident in enforcing their long-neglected human rights. They are revolutionizing their collective self-image and ensuring their central role in building a new society. This betters the working class and campesinos as a whole by improving the quality of life of all and is a vital weapon in combating US economic warfare. As Lenin observed, “The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it.” Nicaragua is one more living example that a new world is possible.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

How many of you about to read this have heard of Sylvia Pankhurst? Our guess is, not many. She seems to have fallen through the cracks of socialist and suffragette movement literature. Her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst and sister, Christabel Pankhurst are still looked up to as leaders in the suffragette movement. What is overlooked is the fact that they only supported suffrage for women who had property. This, of course, completely eliminates women in the working class and women who are poor. Sylvia, on the other hand, devoted her life to supporting those women and giving them a voice. We find it ironic that Emmeline and Christabel were considered rebels even though later in life both became pro-war, conservative and religious fundamentalists. However, it was Sylvia who was the true revolutionary. Her name and work should become familiar to all socialists, and especially feminist socialists. Sylvia is an important woman to know about for all women – and men – who want to learn about the history of significant women in the struggle for socialism and women’s equality.

Sylvia lived a life of courage, strength, and conviction. Born in 1882 into an upper middle-class family in Manchester, England, her parents were founding members of the Independent Labor Party. Both Richard and Emmeline Pankhurst were firm supporters of women’s rights. Sylvia grew up attending public talks, demonstrations and surrounded by friends of her parents who were considered radicals.

We learned all this from reading Rachel Holmes’s book Natural Born Rebel: Sylvia Pankhurst.

Political Work

In her long years as a socialist and feminist she never stopped working, whether in the arts or in politics. Her early years until the Russian Revolution were dominated by the Suffrage movement. After the Russian Revolution she devoted herself strictly to socialism and supported the Russian Revolution for the first four years. However, she ultimately split with Lenin over his reinstitution of a partly capitalist economy. Sylvia became associated with the Soviets, or workers’ councils, and advocated for them as political bodies over parliaments. She opposed fascism in both the 1920s and 1930s and supported Ethiopia against both Italian and English imperialism.

Sylvia moved to Bow in the East End of London in 1912 when she was 30, a traditionally working-class neighborhood. It was here that she set up the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Emmeline and Christabel did not approve. She did many things to support working women and women whose husbands were away at war. She established a café that was free, called Cost Price Restaurant. She also put women to work by organizing a cooperative toy factory. She established The Mother’s Arms, a school for toddlers whose mothers were working. At this school the children were taught according to the Montessori method. When the children arrived in the morning in dirty and torn clothing, they would be given uniforms to wear while their clothes were washed and mended.

Sylvia was extremely imaginative in her strategies and tactics in agitating and organizing as a suffragette. She regularly gave public talks and handed out pamphlets, often on the streets, agitating and encouraging women to fight back against the oppressive system in which they lived. She marched in more demonstrations than she could count. In fact, she said later in life that she didn’t like to go on walks unless they were marches of protest. She constantly outfoxed the police who tried to shut these events down and arrest her, smuggling herself into meetings where she was banned. She hid inside furniture, and impersonated a pregnant woman by stuffing newspapers down her dress. She was full of surprises.

Sylvia was arrested 15 times in her life campaigning for the rights of women. It’s been said that the 19th century – extending into the early 20th century – was the century of the penitentiary. Over one 18-month period she was imprisoned 13 times. This had adverse effects on her health throughout her life. In fact, it’s remarkable that she lived to be 78. The first time Sylvia was arrested, for yelling and causing a ruckus in court in defense of other women being sentenced in 1906, when she was only 24, she was placed in the harshest division, the third division. In the third division the women were denied their own clothing, reading, and writing materials, and were fed rotten food. She endured torture through force-feeding because of her fasting as a means of rebellion. All of this changed her life – physically and politically.

She took part in demonstrations where women were dragged down side streets, beaten up, and sexually assaulted by the police, as they were on Black Friday, November 18, 1910. In 1913 the government passed a bill called Temporary Discharge for Ill Health because they feared that too many women would die, turning the public against them. The suffragettes called this bill “The Cat and Mouse Act”. They were released on the terms that they would be returned to prison when they had regained their strength. However, most of them went to “safe houses” till they were stronger, then promptly returned to militancy. They were awarded medals by other suffragettes when they were released which they wore with pride. Emmeline was never subjected to force-feeding because she was too high-profile among the middle and upper-middle classes. Sylvia was subjected to it repeatedly.

Sylvia had constant fights with her mother and sister over her desire to combine feminism with work in the Labor Party. As a result, she was driven to the margins of the suffragette movement in Britain. The gap between she, her sister and her mother widened when she campaigned against British involvement in World War I. The differences became an abyss when Sylvia supported the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution.

As early as 1921, Sylvia understood the dangers of fascism and though her involvement in socialist parties waned, she was a life-long fighter against fascism. During the 1930s she became involved in the cause of Ethiopia and its fight against Italian fascism. She defended Ethiopia against all imperialist stirrings, including that of Great Britain. By the end of 1950s, with her 30-year soulmate Silvio Corio dead and constant harassment from the British government, there wasn’t much left for her in England. She was invited by the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie to move to Ethiopia. She spent the last four years of her life there involved in plans for improving their educational and health care systems. She was beloved by Ethiopians and when she died in 1960 she was honored and buried along with all the other Ethiopian fighters against fascism.

Skill in the arts

She was multi-talented in the creative arts. She was a good enough artist to receive a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1900.  Her drawings and paintings were rooted in the experience of the working class. She created portraits of workers both on and off the job, as well as of women in prison. She used her skills to design leaflets, posters and banners for up-coming protests and strikes. She was conflicted throughout her life about whether or not to focus on her art or to focus on her political activism. In fact, she managed to incorporate both into her work.

She also wrote plays and as she got older, she wrote mammoth sized books on the suffragette movement as well as the cultural history of Ethiopia. She regularly wrote articles for her own and other publications. The first newsletter she published after she moved to the East End of London was the Women’s Dreadnought, which later became the Worker’s Dreadnought. The tile came from a type of rope with a knot at the end of it that women used to protect themselves from attacks by the police and others during demonstrations.

Personal Life

Sylvia’s father, Richard was a radical lawyer whom she loved dearly and who was a significant influence in her life. Her father gave her a great deal of intellectual support and their home was filled with books along with a revolving door of guests from all kinds of social movements.  He was a suffragette from before Sylvia was born. Her father was an atheist. He led Sylvia to agnosticism through reading and rational argument.  She later became an atheist as well. She met Eleanor Marx, Wilhelm Liebknecht, many revolutionaries, and radicals, and listened to discussions on Fabianism, socialism, and Marxism in their home.

Sylvia’s relationship with her mother and older sister was stormy from early on. She spent many long years trying to gain her mother’s approval despite their deep political differences during and after the Russian Revolution.

Sylvia had two major loves in her life. The first was a long affair with socialist Keir Hardie that lasted for about 15 years. Hardie was committed to staying with his wife, and Sylvia grew impatient with his being on the road constantly and his affairs with other women. They were great political collaborators when they worked together and Hardie looked after her when he was in town. He was probably her greatest political influence. However, she had to keep their love for each other secret from the rest of the world. Her second major love was an Italian anarchist named Silvio Corio. Silvio moved in with her and supported her work during the 30 years they were together. He cooked, did carpentry, and they collaborated in the production of newspapers Sylvia founded and wrote for. They never married but had a child, Richard Pankhurst, born in 1927.

Shortcomings

Sylvia had many of the quirks that are all too typical of socialists. Her eating habits were terrible and erratic until Silvio started cooking. Her clothes were terribly out of date, and she walked around at times with her blouses inside out. She did not have good boundaries and she went to prison too many times for her to not pay for it with her health. In spite of plenty of positive feedback from all those whom she encountered throughout her life, Sylvia wasted way too much time trying to get her mother’s and sister’s approval. We found ourselves hoping for her mother to die so Sylvia would stop obsessing about her. Despite that, she charmed everyone and her house in East London was a popular watering hole for socialists and Pan Africanists. She created in her home a similar atmosphere as her father Richard created for her growing up.

In reading her biography, we realized we have mixed feelings about her. There are obviously things we love about her. We love her move towards socialism and even militancy. Her refusal to remain attached to the original suffragette mantra or votes for middle and upper-middle class women took tremendous courage, particularly as it meant going against what her mother and older sister promoted. She steadfastly rejected the institution of marriage, and while she had two great loves in her life she never married. She was brave to have a child out of wedlock in moralistic Britain in 1927. Her artistic skills and how she used them in the service of promoting issues she valued were considerable. She had the ability to move people and be persuasive with her speeches. Her speech impediment, which made her pronounce her ‘r’s as ‘w’s – she talked about “wevolution” and the “misewies of the industwial worker”, only made her more human and lovable.  She was an excellent, indefatigable writer, and spread the value of socialism and equality in her own publications and those of others. Her relationship with her son, Richard was a strong one, and she led by example, helping him to grow into as much of an activist as she was. She even went on Richard’s honeymoon with his wife Rita (with Rita’s permission). They moved with her to Ethiopia and are all buried in the same sacred place in Ethiopia.

We also were impatient with the amount of time Sylvia spent focusing on the suffragette movement before she moved closer to socialism and anti-militarism. While she supported the working and lower classes, she did not spend time systemically organizing the entire working class, not just women. Even though she knew socialists like Eleanor Marx, Karl Liebknecht,

Alexandra Kollontai, Rosa Luxembourg, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn she never committed fully to being part of a socialist organization after she lost interest in the Russian Revolution. Instead, she wasted her time dogging the likes of Winston Churchill, writing letters, and sending petitions for change in parliament. What does this have to do with socialism? Britain has consistently proven itself to be extremely conservative and reactionary. Why couldn’t she understand that?

Finally, her insistence on going on hunger strikes, water strikes, even sleep strikes while in prison – all of which ruined her health, was hard to read. This, to us, smacks of martyrdom. We believe that in order to be effective in creating change, the individual must take care of themselves. It’s much more difficult to lead a revolution if you are strong in spirit but weak in flesh.

Quality of the book

Size of the book

Sylvia Pankhurst had a long and eventful life, so it is understandable that her biography would be a big book. What do we mean by big? Between 400-600 pages. Rachel Holmes’ book is 976 pages. There is just too much unnecessary detail, such as the names of every person she engaged with and every event she took part in. One of us had to have her book broken down and bound into 3 separate books so she could more easily hold it.

Jumping around within a single chapter

A second problem is that the chapters don’t stick with simple chronology. For example, a chapter roughly covering the period of 1917-1918 will have references to events that happened ten years before and 10 years after. We were constantly trying to figure out exactly what period the author was describing.

Lack of structure within or across chapters

When we read, we like to see the skeleton of a chapter in the form of subheadings that are clear and not cutesy. In other words, within a 20-page chapter there might be five subheadings. That way, before reading the chapter we tie the subheadings together so we can say to ourselves, “Ah – so this is where this is going”. There was none of that.

We also would have really appreciated a list of her milestones – bullet points of years and events that might cover 3 or 4 pages. Is it too much to ask to be given a map before beginning the journey? We don’t like mysteries. We want to know where we are going to determine if we want to go there at all.

The distribution of focus

We felt there was way too much time spent on the suffragette movement for the first half or more of the book. We also felt there was too much time spent on Sylvia’s relationship with her mother and sister. We found it surprising that the life of Sylvia’s romantic companion of thirty years, Silvio, was given so little time. Lastly, Sylvia’s relationship with socialism was essentially dropped after about 1927. Surely Sylvia has opinions about what became of the Soviet Union. What did she think about the Spanish Civil War and the anarchist collectives and the workers councils in Spain which lasted for 3 years and involved millions of people? Would she not care about worker self-organization which was like the Soviets on a much grander scale? How she might have felt about Khrushchev’s revelations?

In spite of these criticisms Rachel Holmes is a good writer and kept us engaged. We were very happy and pleased to learn about the life of a wonderful heartful revolutionary as Sylvia Pankhurst. She was, indeed, a natural born rebel.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce and Barbara MacLean-Lerro.

In a June 29, 2021, interview, Fauci called the Delta variant ‘a game-changer’ for unvaccinated people, warning it will devastate the unvaccinated population while vaccinated individuals are protected against it. Alas, in the real world, the converse is turning out to be true, as the Delta variant is running wild primarily among those who got the Covid jab.

Given the drug’s many and varied beneficial effects and its excellent long-standing safety profile, most rheumatologists believe that Hydroxychloroquine should be taken by people with lupus throughout their lifetime. [Italics added]

Hydroxychloroquine sulfate may only be used to treat adult and adolescent patients who weigh 50 kg or more and are hospitalized with COVID-19, for whom a clinical trial is not available, or participation is not feasible.

Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, dozens of new studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of Hydroxychloroquine and its first cousin, Chloroquine, against Covid. These studies occurred in China, France, Saudi Arabia, Italy, India, New York and Michigan. However, such proof of Hydroxychloroquine’s benefit to patients with Covid has posed an existential threat to Gilead sales throughout the Covid outbreak.

WHEREAS, thousands of physicians are being prevented from providing treatment to their patients, as a result of barriers put up by pharmacies, hospitals, and public health agencies, rendering the vast majority of healthcare providers helpless to protect their patients in the face of disease. Physicians are now advising their patients to simply go home (allowing the virus to replicate) and return when their disease worsens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary patient deaths, due to failure-to-treat;

WHEREAS, this is not medicine. This is not care. These policies may actually constitute crimes against humanity.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by David Penner.

Last month, to mark one year since the death of a female icon, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) shit all over her memory with a misogynist tweet (below). The once-revered ACLU has become so #woke that they now ban words like “women” and “she” and “her” in the name of virtue signaling.

Next, consider this excerpt from the ACLU mission statement:

For nearly 100 years, the ACLU has been our nation’s guardian of liberty” taking up “the toughest civil liberties cases and issues to defend all people from government abuse and overreach.

Then check out another hypocritical tweet to witness how the ACLU has fully sold out by supporting authoritarian (and anti-science) vaccine mandates. So much for these cowards standing up to “government overreach.”

The organization that (rightly) defended the First Amendment rights of Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan is now reduced to calling women “vulva owners.” They are endorsing U.S. citizens being segregated based on their personal medical decisions. They do more than endorse all that, they help fund it. Click here to see all the #woke Democrats the ACLU contributed to in 2020.

Speaking of Democrats, please watch this 1.5-minute video of New York Governor Kathy Hochul going off the deep end about Jesus and the vaccine before taking a hard left to connect it all to (of course) “systemic racism”:

Women don’t exist. Medical privacy doesn’t exist. Separation of church and state does not exist. But systemic racism? That exists everywhere. Welcome to Clown World, my friends. What will YOU do to stand up to the mass hypnosis?

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia’s 34-year-old de facto ruler, has been on a tear recently. He arrested members of his own royal family and initiated an oil price war with Russia that has sent the price of oil—and the world’s stock markets—plummeting. Behind the headlines, however, another critical event will take place in Saudi Arabia starting March 18: women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul, who was arrested almost two years ago for advocating the right to drive, is due in court. The diabolical MBS wants the world to believe he is the Arab world’s liberal reformer and took credit for eventually granting women the right to drive, but he is also the one who had al-Hathloul and nine other women thrown in prison, charging them as foreign agents and spies. The imprisonment of these peaceful women activists exposes the brutal nature of MBS’s regime and the duplicity of the Western democracies that continue to support him.

Loujain al-Hathloul gained notoriety in 2013 for campaigning against the driving ban when she posted videos of herself driving as an act of civil disobedience. She was first arrested in December 2014 when she attempted to drive from the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia and spent 73 days in prison at that time. Al-Hathloul has also been an outspoken advocate for an end to the male guardianship system that treats women as no more than children throughout their entire lives.

On May 15, 2018, a group of armed men from the state security agency raided Loujain’s family’s house and arrested her. For the first three months of her detention, she was held incommunicado with no access to her family or a lawyer. According to the communication she was later able to have with her family, during those three months, she was beaten, waterboarded, given electric shocks, sexually harassed, and threatened with rape and murder.

Loujain languished in a Saudi prison for almost a year before the public prosecutor’s office finally announced that it had concluded its investigation and alleged that Loujain was involved in activities that “aim to undermine the Kingdom’s security, stability, and national unity.” She was accused of contacting “enemy groups”—a reference to cooperation with the United Nations and human rights groups such as Amnesty International.

Loujain’s initial hearing was in March 2019, but she was not allowed access to a lawyer or to hear the charges prior to the hearing. Her family members were permitted to attend, but the court was closed to both diplomats and journalists.

According to her family, in August 2019, al-Hathloul was offered her freedom in exchange for denying, on video, that she was subjected to torture. She refused. For her incredible bravery and determination to fight for women’s rights, eight members of the U.S. Congress have nominated al-Hathloul for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The case of al-Hathloul and the other women’s rights activists on trial in Saudi Arabia is a tremendous embarrassment for MBS, who has been putting an enormous effort into convincing his Western allies that he is a reformer and that Saudi Arabia is becoming more liberal. But behind the facade of new musical concerts and theme parks, the Crown Prince has overseen a vast crackdown on all forms of opposition and dissent. In November 2018, the CIA concluded that MBS was the one who ordered the gruesome assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS is also responsible for dragging Saudi Arabia into an internal conflict in Yemen, where constant Saudi bombings have decimated what was already a poor country.

The fact that MBS lifted the driving ban and simultaneously put in prison those who had campaigned and suffered for such reforms makes clear his actual motive: to silence dissent and prevent these women’s voices from being heard. Loujain’s sister Lina al-Hathloul says that the regime arrested these women’s rights activists “so that they make the [Saudi] people understand that change only comes top down. And the people should not even try to make the changes.” This sentiment was echoed by Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America. “These gutsy women have challenged one of the world’s most notoriously misogynist governments, inspiring the world with their demand to drive, to govern their own lives, and to liberate all Saudi women from a form of medieval bondage that has no place in the 21st century,” she said.

“The very existence of this sham trial pulls the veil off of the authorities’ so-called push for reforms in the Kingdom,” said Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s Middle East research director. “How can they initiate change in the country when the very women who fought for these reforms are still being punished for it?”

The bogus trial against Loujain al-Hathloul taking place this week should compel governments around the world to put more pressure on the Saudis and demand al-Hathloul’s immediate and unconditional release. Her imprisonment—as well as MBS’s arrest of royal family members and Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen—should be particularly embarrassing to the world community in light of the G20 meeting scheduled to take place in Saudi Arabia in November. How can the world’s leaders pretend that it is acceptable to meet in a country that imprisons and tortures peaceful women activists and bombs civilians in Yemen? It isn’t.

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

Ariel Gold is the national co-director of CODEPINK and runs the organization’s Middle East program.

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.