Women's Rights Employment Law Blog

"Violence against women has yet to receive the priority attention and resources needed at all levels to tackle it with the seriousness and visibility necessary."

UN Secretary-General’s in-depth study on violence against women (2006) (A/61/122/Add.1)

Before we reach another consensus on violence against women, let us examine the existing differences. For, whereas it is far easier (because it is pacifying) to share the knowledge that violence against women continues to exist, it is rather discomforting (because it is agitating) to throw lights on why it is so.

Like every year, academic and administrative reports of all kinds will be generated to commemorate March 8. After all, since we have a non-profit United Nations and we have corporate profiteers, we will eventually need to reach a consensus on issues such as violence against women. And amidst the thousands of articles and hundreds of televised tear-jerkers we will encounter in the coming month, the information overload would have done the damage, if we do not stay alert about few conditions that need addressing:

1. Suspect the Messengers: The kinds of messages about women may be misgivings. Indeed, most channels that provide news about women’s progress and violence are owned and controlled by men. Whereas it is undoubtedly true that many men are truly understanding of their gender positions and many women are too willing to play the assigned roles, it is still wise to suspect the men in the month of IWD message boards.

2. Women’s Rights are Universal Rights: Some will talk about women’s rights as a domain that applies to women only. Indeed, women’s rights are women’s prerogative only as a practice, but everyone’s concern as a scope. Just like they fool us by writing different history books for African-Americans, and the Americans as though American history does not include the minorities, it is highly suspect that women’s rights are not matter of concern for men.

3. Workplace for women vs Women for workplace: Most arguments about women’s rights focus on necessities to prepare the women for the workplace. Its like Amartya Sen saying that the question should not be if democracy is good for a country, but it should be directed towards making the country good for a democracy. Well, frankly speaking, he could be wrong. Just as JFK was while demanding that people give to the country without asking what the country can do for them. That’s the populist tone. The reality is women don’t need to be prepared for workplace. Workplaces need to be geared to serve women.

4. International Woman has a meaning: It means, women identify with each other across different boundaries. This identification has an undertone: that is, they accept the differences across cultures. To be truly international means understanding that there are differences across nations, and hence across women from different nations. There is no place for homogenization of women as one entity. So yes, White women are different from Black women are different from Asian women are different from Latina women are different from Muslim women are different from Hindu women are different from Swahili-speaking women who are different from Greek women. Women have different social locations among themselves, and hence understanding them holds the key. Let no one lead us into an essentialist notion of women’s problem. Different women face oppressions of different nature. The similarity is the most striking: that women are oppressed simply because they are women.

5. Are women human?: MacKinnon’s question is still valid. No amount of cultural excuses (from first world pornography to third world dowry) makes all women full human today. Ruling classes of the world still consider women as accessories to either their power ladder, or to their social justice tokenism. Their domestic adornment or cheap working class market value. Their television anchoring revenue system or their make-up kit industry. Just as Aishwarya Rai cannot be allowed to cry in public because Revlon will probably run into losses, Tamara MaidenName cannot challenge her greedy boss for uneven wages because he will merely retaliate.

International Women’s Day must not be allowed to promote card and gifts companies to indulge in exhibitionism of annual love to the mothers and sisters and wives and friends. It is rather a day to remind all of us in the world that a separate battle is on. This one is a battle of all. A battle that is waged by the true majority of the world, the women. A battle, that addresses the core inconsistencies of capitalism.

Opulence of wealth has truly married the filth of mind in an extravaganza that ridicules the last remnants of decency in our vulgar capitalism. As a result, even the age-old diplomacy that shrouded the despicable aspects of money market has given way to a new exhibitionist class society, and to that effect, New York Magazine has begun to celebrate classism and sexism.

An event titled “Natural Selection Speed Date—Rich Guys and Hot Girls” is being organized by Pocket Change and New York Magazine. Scheduled for February 7th, this Darwinian slip unashamedly declares that “Women want money in a man, men want beauty in a woman – this is a factual force of nature.”

Yes, you read it right. The Pocket Change event goes on to celebrate what it finds desirable, in its own words: “This genetic cleansing is how the wealthy stay beautiful.” Not only the event not finds such “genetic cleansing” criminal by intent and design, but it also decides to rejoice over the sordid class difference to commemorate the wealthy men, and their prize catches.

New York Magazine/Pocket Change may have found this beautiful and desirable, but we are sure for millions of sensible people, this is outright ugly, hideous and mocking. What’s worse, such an event is sexist to its core and inhuman in its essence.

In conversation with Womensrightsblog, a Pocket Change newsletter subscriber Patricia Delhannon reverberated the views of most readers that were suppressed by mainstream publications such as New York Magazine in the due course of their decision to go ahead with such an event:

"I am personally a realistic woman, I recognize gender differences and I have never really called myself a feminist. I do however believe in the strength of women and (find) this is offensive and I feel offended as a woman. I'm not really experienced at any type of social action, but thought at least something should be done. I think as women, we can't support this or even allow this type of thing to take place.”

The leading precept of this event is that men who will enter into this exclusive contest will be solely judged by their wealth. Each must have all the following properties: a minimum of half a million earning, with invested assets of more than 1 million and trust money worth more than 4 million dollars.

What happens to women who want to enter the contest? Do they also need to be “successful”? Hell no. They are not expected to be working. They should only be rich in their “beauty”, which will be judged by celebrity matchmaker Janis Spindel.

So we are back in the ages where men are supposed to earn and women to be their slaves. Precisely, going by this “Natural Selection” event that will judge the “Rich Guys and Hot Girls”.

Readers of such media are bound to get shocked in a city that witnesses deaths due to winter, homelessness and lack of health coverage. But are the media any more bothered? Hardly, saving a few.

Faking Good Breeding has covered the story. So has Sex and The Upper East Side. And finally, Feministing has a compelling note.

But that’s mostly about it. Have we just been rendered less sensitive or are we choosing to get less educated? Jack Tuckner of Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP, says:

“Ideally, our corporate media should find interest in running this sordid story, and that would be wonderful; but decisions are often made to run stories for their own pecuniary reasons that have nothing to do with its newsworthiness or utility. This is the world of Girls Gone Wild shown increasingly on network television. This is the world where a nanosecond of Janet Jackson's breast is considered scandalous but Viagra advertisements depicting men staring lasciviously at women's lingerie are shown during the same Super Bowl presentation with nary a whimper of protest.”

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

In NY Times today, the article "For $7.93 an Hour, It’s Worth a Trip Across a State Line" is an empirical study that proves the thesis that affluent, business folk who identity as Republicans (including our fearless leader, his coterie of wealthy, power-hungry, morally vacuous advisors and congressional heavyweights), are hypocritical, mean-spirited, duplicitous, full-of-baloney landowners who want it all for themselves at whatever the cost.

The article describes how the state of Washington pays the highest minimum wage in the nation, almost $8.00 per hour, which is almost $3.00 per hour more than the minimum wage paid in neighboring Idaho. When the law raising the wage was passed almost 10 years ago, business owners decried voter’s largesse and predicted dire consequences and shriveling profits. Instead, business is booming in Washington “far beyond” the expectations of the worried rich. Another fascinating study in the power politics of money.

The complete story:

By Timothy Egan

Liberty Lake, Wash., Jan. 9 — Just eight miles separate this town on the Washington side of the state border from Post Falls on the Idaho side. But the towns are nearly $3 an hour apart in the required minimum wage. Washington pays the highest in the nation, just under $8 an hour, and Idaho has among the lowest, matching 21 states that have not raised the hourly wage beyond the federal minimum of $5.15.

Nearly a decade ago, when voters in Washington approved a measure that would give the state’s lowest-paid workers a raise nearly every year, many business leaders predicted that small towns on this side of the state line would suffer.

But instead of shriveling up, small-business owners in Washington say they have prospered far beyond their expectations. In fact, as a significant increase in the national minimum wage heads toward law, businesses here at the dividing line between two economies — a real-life laboratory for the debate — have found that raising prices to compensate for higher wages does not necessarily lead to losses in jobs and profits.

Continue reading "Capital in the Capitol: The Power Politics of Money" »

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

According to the National Priorities Project, which maintains a cost-of-war counter, as of today, the disgraceful Iraqi occupation has cost us 354 billion dollars and counting. If we wanted to use the money differently, we could have medically insured 212 million children for a year, hired over 6 million public school teachers, built over 3 million additional housing units, provided over 17 million four year college scholarships for deserving youth. In today's New York Times, Michael Wines reports an all too familiar story that we regularly read, cluck our tongues while eating our breakfast cereal and promptly forget in our mad rush to keep up with the bills and our kids' extracurricular soccer schedules. So--a brief New Year's reminder of how wacked-out we all are in our priorities as individuals, as a nation, as a species.

According to the article, 10,000 children under the age of five died last year in Ethiopia alone from malnutrition-related causes. Imagine the gut-wrenching awfulness of being one of those kids' parents, let alone what's it's like to be one of the many dying children. Possibly worse, almost half of Ethiopia's children are malnourished, and most don't die. Instead, they grow up sickly, weak and physically and intellectually stunted in a land that runs on manual labor. "Their hunger is neither a temporary inconvenience nor a quick death sentence. Rather, it is a chronic, lifelong, irreversible handicap that scuttles their futures and cripples Ethiopia's hopes to join the developed world." And Ethiopia has one of the most comprehensive programs on the continent to alleviate starvation.

We can all point to profound impoverishment, slavery, sex-selective violence, religious war carnage, speciesism, global deforestation and genocide to rationalize our collective inertia: the planet earth has always been a place of pervasive suffering and a brief, hardscrabble life for most of its inhabitants since we modern homo sapiens first walked upright out of our caves a mere 150,000 years ago. In geologic time, that's a blink of an eye but more than enough time for us to screw up the planet and create such ravishingly impressive inequities among ourselves that most of the world lives still lives in misery and despair, we've killed 260 million of our own men, women and children up to and excluding the atrocities of the 20th century (according to Professor Emeritus of Political Science Rudolf Rummel of the University of Hawaii) and all of it in the equally obscene and spiritually indefensible names of organized religion and power accumulation in one form or another.

Yet we continue as a nation to blithely accept the perverted corruption that passes for policy that is our current leadership (informed as it is by our own apathy, lethargia and culture of indulgence), because we only see the world through the prism of our consumer-driven, might-makes-right, jingoistic American lens. So, Goldman Sachs financial traders rake in record bonuses (average $650,000.00 per man--almost all of them men--what do these people actually do for a living--I always forget--how do they add value commensurate with these windfalls?)--while homelessness surges, 5 million US kids don't have health insurance and the rich pols in Washington again vote down a raise in the minimum wage so working people can actually earn a "living" wage. How many children might be saved in Africa--how much civilization could we purchase internationally and domestically for the rapidly increasing $354,000,000,000.00 it's cost us so far to perpetrate an illegal war on a blameless people, killing, maiming and destroying the infrastructure of a beautiful and ancient civilization, unleashing all holy hell in the process, minting thousands of righteously driven new terrorists and cultivating an international revulsion for our barbarous and piratical ways, and all with nary a high-level decision making, unelected rich person being held accountable. Nobody. Nothing. Oh well. Fast fade to commercial then back for more "reality" television viewing to distract us from reality.

One day--there'll be a backlash. Given our corporate media's penchant for serving its hegemonous, insatiable, unidimensional, ethically-compromised masters we can't expect the truth to make it through that US-currency-driven vetting process. Ultimately, the righteous anger of the world's dispossessed (and their conscious supporters everywhere) will move the earth to a place of less abject suffering and more true intelligence-driven-equality for all of us as well as this sorely abused old planet. It may take a cataclysm of sorts (full-blown economic depression, nuclear terrorism, global warming catastrophe, etc.) to catalyze such times but indeed it's coming. In the interim, we'd all serve our progeny if we daily asked ourselves what we can do to speak truth to power, to serve and empower the powerless, in whatever form that may take, and to question authority relentlessly with a view toward righting some fundamental wrongs, before it's too late--before we find ourselves, in the words of Bill Maher, totally screwed, blued and tattooed.

The complete story from NYT:

Malnutrition Is Cheating Its Survivors, and Africa’s Future

Continue reading "Our indifference, their malnutrition" »

As the Brown v. Board of Education is being revisited in a manner that may lay a foundation for "discrimination" to be perceived entirely from different lenses than ever before, two major strands of opinion develop.

One hints at the positive outcome of integration that should uphold the judgments. The other categorically refutes the need of the judgments (even while being considered as noble) to sway official policies, as long as people make voluntary decisions to segregate, if one may call it thus.

But, I think both major opinions leave out a significant “other” question: Is the so-called voluntary segregation a natural outcome of human preferences as now being adjudged, or is it thus, as a result of an effete, ineffective and reactionary tradition of official policies that have alienated the racial categories of people so much as to install distrusts among themselves?

If the latter is true, its not merely that the 1954 decision needs to be upheld, but in fact, the state and its citizens through progressive public policies will do well to recognize that the socio-economic foundation of American society needs a fresh breath of radical change for the economic emancipation of peoples eventually to be developed into proactive communities, than isolated racial groups posited against plutocratic dominations.

New York Times today has an opinion piece worth a note:

Brown v. Board of Education, Second Round By ADAM LIPTAK

IF there is a sacred text in the American legal canon, it is the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. It is the court’s one undisputed triumph, and no Supreme Court nominee who expressed doubt about the decision would ever be confirmed. Who can argue, after all, with the wisdom of putting an end to state-sanctioned racial segregation in the public schools?
But, as an extraordinary two-hour Supreme Court argument last week demonstrated, the meaning and legacy of Brown remain up for grabs. The court was considering whether school systems in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., could take account of students’ races to ensure racial balance.

Continue reading "Revisiting Brown v. Board: What it entails? " »

Posted by Saswat Pattanayak | Permalink | Email This Post | Comments (0)

Posted In: Discrimination, Opinion, Politics, Race

Bookmark:                                                  

Marianne Means on Times Daily about how Bush is no comic character laughing away with meaningless syllables. He is in fact, a master crafter of his own agenda which have not died down any bit despite the recent polls. Not even when it comes to control the family planning programs. Well, that’s actually the start.
Here’s more:

President Bush's political fortunes have changed for the worst, but he himself is announcing that he hasn't changed a bit.

He still hates not getting his own way on everything.
…….

And just so he didn't overlook any area important to the religious right, Bush also appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who is opposed to contraceptives for women. Eric Keroack works at a Christian pregnancy counseling organization that calls the distribution of birth control pills "demeaning to women.'' He gets to advise the department on reproductive health and adolescent pregnancy, with $283 million in grants to provide "access to contraceptive supplies and information to all who want and need them.'' The appointment does not require Senate-confirmation.

Wall Street Journal editorial is comprehensive about how the University of Michigan lost the case for affirmative action. But the opinion clearly is one of great rejoice at the defeat of pro-affirmative action proponents.

This is shocking to hear the collective voices condemning affirmative action all of a sudden following a juridical decision, despite their earlier stances to the contrary. This speaks of intellectual opportunism or hidden agenda of wish fulfillment, I am not aware of. But certainly, in a country of media agenda-setting and mainstream propaganda, its not difficult to imagine the euphoria. Ironic, that Michigan State failed for the baits.

Not all movements are progress, Frederick Douglas needs to remind the ‘majority’ that fails to see the fruits of affirmative action and its relevance till progress has been attained. But in a celebrity laden fast food nation, who has the time to think?

(Click below to read the entire editorial).

Continue reading "Michigan Loses. But no one wins." »

Workers’ share of the economy has fallen in 4 of the Group of 7 industrialized nations. And that’s not even half of the untold saga of capitalism. All the industrialized countries put together, the average wages and benefits’ share of GDP in the industrialized countries between 2000 and 2005 shows a decline percentage of -14.5!

Whereas Britain and France muster up together with just 1 point increase, the rest of all major capitalist countries have a -15.5 change in percentage points.

What does this entail? Of course the corporate media may not yet declare it as the beginning of end of the global monopolists, but trends suggests workers’ discontent is so high amidst the prevailing contradictions that things to take shape may be equally unpredictable.

Academic cluelessness:
A New York Times report runs an extensive story about the reasons why such a change might have come about, and has reached about nowhere. Of course, the economists from Princeton and MIT are quoted as having failed to understand the decline even as the steady fall in workers share has characterized market economy since as many as four decades now!

The report claims that factors such as immigration, job exports, and arrival of new technologies have caused the mismatch. And that’s what the economists are thinking, according to the report, to be “eating into the workers’ share of the pie”.

Failed observations:
Amidst the disbeliefs and shocks at the apparent decline in workers’ share, attacking the symptoms rather than the cause seems to be a fatalistic observation. Trade unions have lost all their bargaining power today as opposed to during 1929, when workers enjoyed almost half of the economic pie: That’s true. Also true are the apprehensions around new technologies, immigration and job exports. But the main question that the acclaimed economists of the industrialized countries seem to be deliberately evading is centered around their own fallacious alignment with an economic system that is supposed to produce exactly what it is producing today. In fact, modern capitalism thrives on curbing workers’ rights (and hence they even buy off the labor unions), on encouraging cheap labor imports to the country (which is why immigrants work at inhuman wages to do the kinds of jobs they are called for), and through establishing sweatshops in underdeveloped countries so that the companies back in the industrialized countries can maximize their profits (which is basically the canon of capitalism) by any means.

To discount the question of economic imperialism as an advanced stage of modern capitalism is a deliberate omission in the zeal to advocate “free market” philosophy that only works towards disempowering workers world over as seen from recent experiences of American hegemony in Latin America (through monstrous anti-farmers measures by NAFTA), in Africa (through the IMF domination in forcing the resource-rich continent to remain poverty-stricken for centuries), and in Asia (through free-trade of cheap imports and sweatshops).

The Group of 7 countries have been notorious in their own domestic front in terms of treatment of workers, which is why they extend the trait of global capital to reinforce the “cheap call centers” in India and “cheap imports” from China. It is not enough to condemn the third world countries for the economic mess in the industrialized world. In fact, the case demands for quite the contrary standpoint.

Will the economic analysts ever shun their comfortable alignment with the monopolists and think outside the box, at least now? If not, the time for atonement may be on the way, considering that workers have historically not held up for too long, or far too much.

(Following is the map of workers’ share, courtesy NYT)

Is it a grim irony of the free market globalization that American employees have to now seek uninsured healthcare in low-cost overseas facilities? Or is it just a smarter individual choice that an employee has as his/her right to make in regards to health?

Could be either way actually, as a recent New York Times article shows, which throws light on the recent trends in a healthcare-world going "flat"--to borrow Friedman's term. But in both, it appears like, the employees are the losers.

Costs and responsibilities:

"Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane"-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Healthcare is not just unfree in the United States, the policies around it are actually anti-people in many ways as well. As a result, the system has deprived 42.6 million people in the US from having basic insurance.

The World Health Report (WHO, Geneva, 2000) specifies three main features of a good healthcare system: Good health, responsiveness, and fairness in financing. And in most cases, costs drive the healthcare responsiveness.

As a result, the UN study among 191 countries indicates that the United States has by far the most expensive health care system in the world, based on health expenditures per capita (per person), and on total expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product. The US spends on an average more than $4,200 per capita on health care which is twice the OECD and way more than the next most expensive country (Switzerland, $2,700).

Likewise, in terms of access, a study entitled "Health Care in the US: Facts and the Choices", has found that the US is the only country in the developed world, except for South Africa, that does not provide health care for all its citizens.

Choices of Free Market:

The hugely exaggerated "free market" is a misnomer. Indeed, markets are meant not to be free, neither as in a free beer, nor as in freedom. Monopoly is a logical consequence of capitalism and healthcare sector can not remain unaffected by this feature.

But what is worse, are the choices that the monopolists provide: "Either you are with us, or you are with our debtors". Not just Nike thrives on its sweatshops, today the big pharma and medical industry aim at the world market for high profit margins as well.

India is surely a low-cost option for many American employees. But whether it is an effective option is still under consideration. Sure, the costs have come down for the American consumers, but owing to foreign money transaction, the costs have gone up quite high on an average, in local currency so much that it has been affecting the people back there. India, for example, used to have a stable and free healthcare system as part of its welfare economy, with all major hospitals in the country arising out of excellent state-funded medical university campuses. With the globalization process, today an average Indian national has nowhere to go, since the privatization of hospitals wooing foreign clients have left almost no option.

Creation of health haves and have-nots:

Even if we ignore the local plights of developing economies, will all Americans go overseas for treatments? The answer is no. In fact, when it comes to "quality of medical response", US ranks as number one in the world. In other words, if an American affords the best insurance package, he/she does not need to even change counties, let alone countries.

In effect, the current healthcare system in the US then, creates the following conditions:

1. A class society within the US among those who have no insurance and those who have.

2. An environment of differing access to healthcare depending on the cost status. Crudely it means, the richer one is, the better service there is. This is only logical since America has the most expensive and least accessible healthcare system.

3. Forces those with poor insurance or no insurance to seek healthcare support overseas. That is, it forces people to let go of their rights as American citizens to access the 'best healthcare quality' services.

4. Fosters further divides between the rich and the poor in developing economies like India where privatization of hospitals benefits those who carry in foreign currency of higher exchange value or only those within India who can match such bids.

What it says to the American employees?

All forms of research show that we need to understand why and under what conditions do most employees seek overseas benefits. The solution does not lie merely in preventing the person to travel abroad. Indeed, this could be violating the individual rights of the employee to make such a decision in his/her life's favor. Instead, the root cause needs to be addressed, and that is to say, the healthcare system of the US, akin to a white elephant, needs complete overhaul. It needs to be made universally accessible, almost free, and highly democratized for all citizens of this country for it to be even called a healthcare system. So far, it acts merely as a "healthfare" system.

Time has come to ask the slightly different question: Its not what people can do for their own healthcare, its what the healthcare system must be made to do for the people.

The New York Times article follows:

Union Disrupts Plan to Send Ailing Workers to India for Cheaper Medical Care

Continue reading "Why do employees opt for overseas care? " »

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

The frustration that we progressives feel living in American today is embodied within the frame of one Sidney Bender, a man possessed of 8 decades of high living, high educational achievement, high native intelligence and presumably, high significant resources. None of these gifts seems to have rendered Mr. Bender very wise in my eyes, as he had this to say about his patriotism, such as it is, when questioned by a reporter during the memorial services at Ground Zero on Sunday:

Near ground zero, where hundreds of people lined the streets to await the president, Sidney Bender, a 79-year-old lawyer from Searington on Long Island and a lifelong Democrat, said that he felt it was his patriotic duty to greet him.

“The trouble is the country has forgotten about 9/11,” Mr. Bender said. “Most of the people have gone about their business, which is all right, but you can’t forget about it. You’ve got to make sure we’re constantly vigilant because we’re at war.” He added, “Five years later, I’m even more supportive of the president.”

The fact that our President's lies (and the lies of his factotums), deceits, dog-wagging-the-tale spin on all things political as they relate to the business of producing and keeping to oneself (or at least within the control of "the haves and the have mores") the vast reserves of money that he and his cadre control, the duplicity, hypocrisy, mean-spiritedness, craven adherence to only one principle--the principle of maintaining perfect control over the distortions you disseminate and your own party's (and friend's) ability to continue to profit from the death, pain and destruction of other peoples and other lands (including our own people and lands), is still utterly lost on the likes of Sidney Bender, a man charged with the ability to critically think, a man with access to power, information and money, a man who could afford to be kind and compassionate in the twilight of his years if he so chose.

The fact that Sidney Bender no doubt believes that George Bush is a good man--a man with his heart in the right place--a man simply out there gunnin' for the bad guy while the good guys flourish and prosper, is anathema even to an 8-year old with a working brain and heart before she's polluted by the all-evil-all-the-time Corporate American Media. If Sidney Bender still supports this President, in the face of a 6 year deluge of data evincing an amoral vacuous hole in the West Wing as large as the 16 acre gash in the earth at Ground Zero, sucking everything good into its vortex, what's an average, middle American, Fox-television watching, Murdoch-tabloid reading Joe going to do for truth, justice and the American way. Pray? Hey--pray for us all. As our Prez says, the jury's still out on evolution--so I say, pass the pot and turn on American Idol.

So, on this, the 11th day of September, 2006, 5 years into what should have been the permanent end of our consumer-poisoned, frivolous innocence, let's celebrate our resilience, our resistance, our ability to pick up the pieces and move on, stronger, wiser and nobler than before--and to that end, let's commit to behaving in a manner that the rest of the civilized world does not perceive with utter contempt, given our torturous, anything-for-a-buck-lying American ways. Let's find the resolve to be proud of ourselves again. Let's try thinking again--and doing what's actually right--and questioning authority--and pushing back--just a little and just for a change--before we die under the weight of own hubris. Peace out.

Please read Frank Rich's compelling thought on the state of our Union 5 years later......

Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12?


By FRANK RICH
Published: September 10, 2006

“THE most famous picture nobody’s ever seen” is how the Associated Press photographer Richard Drew has referred to his photo of an unidentified World Trade Center victim hurtling to his death on 9/11. It appeared in some newspapers, including this one, on 9/12 but was soon shelved. “In the most photographed and videotaped day in the history of the world,” Tom Junod later wrote in Esquire, “the images of people jumping were the only images that became, by consensus, taboo.”

Five years later, Mr. Drew’s “falling man” remains a horrific artifact of the day that was supposed to change everything and did not. But there’s another taboo 9/11 photo, about life rather than death, that is equally shocking in its way, so much so that Thomas Hoepker of Magnum Photos kept it under wraps for four years. Mr. Hoepker’s picture can now be found in David Friend’s compelling new 9/11 book, “Watching the World Change,” or on the book’s Web site, watchingtheworldchange.com. It shows five young friends on the waterfront in Brooklyn, taking what seems to be a lunch or bike-riding break, enjoying the radiant late-summer sun and chatting away as cascades of smoke engulf Lower Manhattan in the background.

Mr. Hoepker found his subjects troubling. “They were totally relaxed like any normal afternoon,” he told Mr. Friend. “It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.” The photographer withheld the picture from publication because “we didn’t need to see that, then.” He feared “it would stir the wrong emotions.” But “over time, with perspective,” he discovered, “it grew in importance.”

Seen from the perspective of 9/11’s fifth anniversary, Mr. Hoepker’s photo is prescient as well as important — a snapshot of history soon to come. What he caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. The young people in Mr. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. They’re just American. In the five years since the attacks, the ability of Americans to dust themselves off and keep going explains both what’s gone right and what’s gone wrong on our path to the divided and dispirited state the nation finds itself in today.

At the National Cathedral prayer service on Sept. 14, 2001, President Bush found just the apt phrase to describe this phenomenon: “Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘the warm courage of national unity.’ This is the unity of every faith and every background. It has joined together political parties in both houses of Congress.” What’s more, he added, “this unity against terror is now extending across the world.”The destruction of that unity, both in this nation and in the world, is as much a cause for mourning on the fifth anniversary as the attack itself. As we can’t forget the dead of 9/11, we can’t forget how the only good thing that came out of that horror, that unity, was smothered in its cradle.

When F.D.R. used the phrase “the warm courage of national unity,” it was at his first inaugural, in 1933, as the country reeled from the Great Depression. It is deeply moving to read that speech today. In its most famous line, Roosevelt asserted his “firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Another passage is worth recalling, too: “We now realize as we have never realized before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.

”What followed under Roosevelt’s leadership is one of history’s most salutary stories. Americans responded to his twin entreaties — to renounce fear and to sacrifice for the common good — with a force that turned back economic calamity and ultimately an axis of brutal enemies abroad. What followed Mr. Bush’s speech at the National Cathedral, we know all too well, is another story.

On the very next day after that convocation, Mr. Bush was asked at a press conference “how much of a sacrifice” ordinary Americans would “be expected to make in their daily lives, in their daily routines.” His answer: “Our hope, of course, is that they make no sacrifice whatsoever.” He, too, wanted to move on — to “see life return to normal in America,” as he put it — but toward partisan goals stealthily tailored to his political allies rather than the nearly 90 percent of the country that, according to polls, was rallying around him.

This selfish agenda was there from the very start. As we now know from many firsthand accounts, a cadre from Mr. Bush’s war cabinet was already busily hyping nonexistent links between Iraq and the Qaeda attacks. The presidential press secretary, Ari Fleischer, condemned Bill Maher’s irreverent comic response to 9/11 by reminding “all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” Fear itself — the fear that “paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” as F.D.R. had it — was already being wielded as a weapon against Americans by their own government.

Less than a month after 9/11, the president was making good on his promise of “no sacrifice whatsoever.” Speaking in Washington about how it was “the time to be wise” and “the time to act,” he declared, “We need for there to be more tax cuts.” Before long the G.O.P. would be selling 9/11 photos of the president on Air Force One to campaign donors and the White House would be featuring flag-draped remains of the 9/11 dead in political ads.And so here we are five years later. Fearmongering remains unceasing. So do tax cuts. So does the war against a country that did not attack us on 9/11. We have moved on, but no one can argue that we have moved ahead.

Dignity For All Students Act "authorizes the commissioner of education to establish policies and procedures affording all students in public schools an environment free of harassment and discrimination based on actual or perceived race, national origin, ethnic group, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender or sex."

Such texts by no means sound anti-democratic. Quite the contrary, they sound just as healthy for students—the future citizens—as anything ever can be. Anti-discriminatory legislations in the 21st century should not spring surprises for the oldest democracy in the world.

And yet, someone sees red at this. Mayor Bloomberg has an issue with the proposal, and that’s the reason why despite having been passed in the Assembly for over three years now, it stands rejected as a force (the Mayor had in fact gone ahead to exercise his veto power in order to stall it). On the other hand, the Empire State Pride Agenda has called for people’s active participation in favoring the proposed law.

What’s at stake?
Researches indicate that a large number of people who engage in high-risk behaviors like drug use, alcohol abuse, and suicide have been drop-out students who were harassed and stigmatized owing to hostile school atmosphere. The DASA bill is crucial at this juncture to check that students do not fall victims to discriminations at their early years in manners that may continue to haunt their perception in a long run.

The GLSEN’s National Climate Survey reveals the following significant findings:

90% of students attending public schools in New York report hearing homophobic remarks frequently or often in their schools.

64.8% of New York students reported feeling unsafe at their schools based on their sexual orientation and 29.7% based on their gender identity/ expression.

31.4% of students in New York report missing one or more days of school in the past month because they felt unsafe.

Students who did not have (or did not know of) a policy protecting them from violence and harassment were nearly 40% more likely to skip school than those who did.

Similarly, a survey that was conducted for the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth had found that homosexual students, or those perceived to be gay, have a 20% higher high school dropout rate, contend with a 50% risk of being rejected by their families, while 42% of participants in the survey stated that they were homeless or had been “thrown away” by their families.

Interestingly, the aforesaid Commission was recently abolished (only last month) much to the dismay of the LGBT activists, after its 14 year run as the country’s first such commission to focus on harassments faced by gay and lesbian youths.

What’s politics got to do with safe space?

Everything. Students who face discrimination owing to their sexual orientations are more likely to grow up either suppressing this knowledge much to the delight of the conservatives, or in cognizance of their limitations to express themselves in defiance of state power wrath—much like the tradition has been for the LGBT communities in this country since the Stonewall revolution was oppressed.

Senator Thomas K. Duane (D WFP Manhattan) who first introduced DASA is entirely clueless about the reasons behind Senate Republicans’ opposition to it. Although DASA has received full support of Senate Democrats, not one Senate Republican has sponsored the bill. “I can only guess at the reasons why my Republican colleagues do not want to see this bill pass. Is it the fact that it offers protection from harassment for students based on their gender identity and expression? Until we have a floor debate and vote, I’ll never really know.”

One never knows what’s with the Republicans’ minds, considering that it’s already past thousands of years since human civilization was supposed to have established itself firmly, and also considering that the leader of Republicans apparently heads the most glorified civilization of the present era—and yet these people still practice such pre-history reactionary theories.

Not losing all hopes, we tried to dig little bit further. And here is what appears to be the case: a populist reactionary dismissal of progressive stances by citing the all powerful dollar.

Republican Daniel L. Hooker (R-127th Assembly district) blames it on his interest to save the tax money (after all, a war on Iran sounds inevitable). Let’s not waste the local school tax dollars that we have, he says, for “things like the jazz band and the girls basketball team and into teaching five year old kindergartners about sexuality”. Hooker, also a military reservist, emphatically stresses while discussing the Dignity for All Students Act.

Black musicians, women players, and LGBT communities. Political attacks of such direct nature smacking of racism, and sexism are rare. And have the conservatives stopped from declaring the minority groups as illegal too? Look back at Mayor Bloomberg whose administration says an attempt to protect students from discriminations is actually illegal. “DASA is an illegal bill”. This is an unedited official quote.

So who are we trying to convince about the bill, again?

White House is against race-based admissions policies in educational institutions and the president has made it very clear. His administration had even filed a brief against the University of Michigan for considering race as an admission criterion. Fortunately, the Supreme Court had rejected White House logic in favor of the university.

More recently, the republicans have been harping on the need to oppose race-based admissions policies in K-12 schools. And Washington Post columnist Charles Lane has offered a comprehensive commentary today elaborating why the administration is opposing such policies.

Indeed, nothing to be surprised here since the talk about “equality” has almost become a rhetoric of the privileged in this country. But what's indeed dangerous here are the myths that are floating in the mainstream media through exaggeration of the issue. Let us try to deconstruct some of the issues.

Firstly, race-based admissions policies are not pro-segregation, as the media often assume. Indeed they are consciously integrative as they ensure that there be proportional representation, and students of a specific race do not get oversubscribed at high volumes.

Secondly, these policies are neither universal nor enforced. In fact, just like University of Michigan was the only practicing institute for higher education, Louisville and Seattle are the only cities that are applying race-based admissions for public schools. Why race-based admissions criteria must not be applicable to all institutes (private and public) is a question worth reflecting over considering the statistics of public schools in certain regions today indicating overwhelmingly black population and private schools in general overwhelmingly white.

Thirdly, the national debates are mostly focusing on race-based admissions when it comes to ensuring students of color in an institute. It’s usually lost to notice that the normal process of admissions in fact encourages active segregation. Anti-segregation does not mean a competitive platform for all irrespective of race, rather it should imply a fair and conscious attempts to integrate students from marginalized racial groups along with the white students. And as long as such attempts are not made, it is unlikely that a classroom will reflect diverse population. There have been numerous studies indicating the wide segregation in practice today under the existing ‘equal’ rules. Affirmative action must apply in its positive spirit (proactive enforcement) and not just in its negative scopes (to bar discriminations).

Fourth, the long-term effects of non-enforced school environment has damaging consequences, those that lead to sustenance of a racist society since students from childhood begin life with minimal contacts with multicultural population in a country that’s house to most number of ethnic groups in the world. The mismatch between the years of growing up with the exposure to the professional world creates serious levels of identity politics that usually targets those groups with whom one has had least contacts. This fosters serious stereotypes as well as renders most people ignorant of how to deal with diverse cultural groups with distinct languages, codes and unique ethos.

Lastly, only with the race-based admissions policies can the educational institutes force themselves to radically replace their textbooks (that overwhelmingly speaks of a dominant history), teaching methods (which is today more of instructional style than dialogic pedagogy), and contextualization (equating individual achievement as success is not the normative for many racial groups which stress on cooperative progress as success).

Whereas it may sound politically correct to oppose race-based admissions policies and equate it with racism, one needs to acknowledge that since race do matter in a racist society, its high time, the effects are minimized with some proactive, rather than idealistic, policies that work towards forcing proportionate representation. The society outside the ivory tower windows should not look very different from how it looks inside the classroom. Sooner we realize, the easier the path towards social justice shall be.