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? " »

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Posted In: Discrimination, Opinion, Politics, Race

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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.

A former Supreme Court justice in the Philippines has written a homophobic rant in his exclusive column to the Inquirer. Not just is it an abuse of freedom of speech and an expression of repressed homophobia, this is a classic case of the unbridled luxury that some powerful people still enjoy in the garb of opinionated columns. Illegal this is not yet. But inhuman? Read on:

The schools are now fertile ground for the gay invasion. Walking along the University belt one day, I passed by a group of boys chattering among themselves, with one of them exclaiming seriously, “Aalis na ako. Magpapasuso pa ako!” [“I’m leaving. I still have to breastfeed!”] That pansy would have been mauled in the school where my five sons (all machos) studied during the ’70s when all the students were certifiably masculine.

Is our population getting to be predominantly pansy? Must we allow homosexuality to march unobstructed until we are converted into a nation of sexless persons without the virility of males and the grace of females but only an insipid mix of these diluted virtues?

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will shortly announce their decision regarding Plan B emergency contraception (EC) without a doctor’s prescription.

Considering that years have passed since EC caused concerns to the conservatives, a “decision” must be welcomed at long last.

But what’s ironic is that even after EC is circulated in the market hopefully much better than previously, women who need it the most will not have access to the pills. In its pre-decision announcement, the FDA has restricted availability of EC only to women above 18.

Alan Guttmacher Institute research shows that in 2001 there were 271,000 pregnancies among women aged 15 to 17, and 87 percent of those pregnancies were unintended. Appears like either FDA is innocently ignorant, or deliberately apathetic towards the scenario of concern. Rather than helping the situation of unwanted pregnancies, the decision to restrict access is just a moralist position of negative value.

There is absolutely no good reason why the US should have waited for this long to legalize and market the EC for women. EC is available in many countries without any hassles. In France, even school nurses dispense pills to women below 18, without any parental consent.

Not only should EC be made accessible alongside condoms in places of distribution and sale, but there is no rationale except a conservative moralist political framework, as to why EC should be forbidden for women under 18.

Of course pitted against emergency contraception is the right-wing anti-abortion lobby. But despite suggestions to the contrary from medical professionals, the fact that FDA has bowed down to political pressure, is quite telling.

Continuing its legacy for delivering hollow promises, just as the Bush administration sure knew how to bargain for estate tax-cuts in name of minimum wage increase, now its FDA comes up to promote religious standards in the garb of legal underage barrier to emergency contraceptives.

How does one respond to the pre-decision announcement?
Thanks, but no thanks.

Molly McDonough for ABA Journal this month has authored an extensive coverage of “Family Responsibilities Discrimination” cases which have, according to the EEOC reports, increased by 31 percent between 1992 and 2005. Last year alone, the EEOC received 4,449 charges and resolved 4,321, recovering $11.6 million in monetary benefits (not including litigation).

The article cites three triggers for the suits: allegations of discriminatory practices during pregnancy, maternity/paternity leave, and requests for flexible schedules.

Furthermore, most FRDs are marked by subtle discriminations in form of implied stereotyped persona of working women. Despite FMLA, most employers still enforce discriminatory “pregnancy-blind” policies. Indeed, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act does not “require or allow preferential treatment for pregnant employees”.

However, amendments to the 1991 Civil Rights Act provided for damages in cases of intentional employment discrimination. This is supplemented by the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, passed by Congress in 1978, which states that an employer violates the law if it intentionally discriminates against pregnant employees or maintains a policy that adversely affects pregnant employees. The PDA also covers pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, including abortion.

Related entry here.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

We at Tuckner, Sipser, Weinstock & Sipser, LLP currently represent a client who was terminated in the midst of her "maternity" leave. The offending company employs less than 50 employees, so it (and she) are not "covered" by the Family and Medical Leave Act, hence the quotation marks. She is entitled to take the same disability leave that all employees are allowed, as a post-partum pregnancy leave is indeed a "disability," albeit a transient and "healthy" one, but this company decided to terminate her within two weeks of her leave, indicating that they could not "wait" the full 6 weeks for her to return to work.

As she was a single mother whose 25K per annum position was all that separated her from full-blown impoverishment, her joblessness with a nursing baby not yet 1-month old left her homeless inside of a 12 weeks, coincidentally, the same time period allotted under the FMLA for women who have borne or adopted a child. Her homelessness then rendered her incapable of finding suitable alternative employment, as even if she could seek another position without email, a permanent address or even appropriate bathing and dressing facilities within which to prepare for a job interview, it was beyond challenging to find someone reliable to babysit in the NYC shelter system. Now, approximately 10 months since her firing, she is still homeless and unemployed but beginning to pick up the pieces as she is imminently poised to move into a permanent, city-assisted housing unit.

We are currently prosecuting this matter at the administrative level and will be filing a court complaint shortly. While our college-educated client would be happy to share her experiences with the readers, it is an unfortunate reality that too often, working women bearing children are discriminated against and terminated from gainful employment simply as a result of the choice to bear children, a common occurrence that inordinately befalls inner city single women with little or no safety net.

It would serve us all, and the children we ostensibly care so much about in our-no- child-left-behind culture of wishful thinking, if the spirit and intent of the "human rights" laws were applied in practice to the protection of pregnant women in the workplace. The following pages are informational regarding the scope of coverage for women facing differential treatment on the basis of pregnancy in NY and its environs (please click on the images to access the original size).

Pregnancy Pause continues to mark the beginning of this century as one of the most crucial question in women’s rights movement. Essentially also because many women activists themselves are opposed to equating the pause with sexual discrimination consequence. Indeed, at the helm are concepts such as “good family”, “responsibility” “motherhood”, which sound too harmless to pose direct human rights violations.

In focus recently is Elizabeth Vargas, co-anchor of ABC's "World News Tonight" whose announcement that she was taking an extended maternity leave (basically implying that she was replaced by a male anchor), has led to feminists' organizations claiming Miss Vargas' announcement was a cover-up of a demotion based on sexual discrimination.

Chenoa McKnight, the assistant to the president at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute makes a conservative argument against feminists today in the Washington Times.

Although that is not very unusual, what strikes one are the manners in which mainstream media provides scope for publication of some views that, one thought had been answered at least a decade or two back in this country.

Let us revisit the classic right-wing arguments that McKnight proudly showcases, in her own words, in the article published today:

What do feminist leaders have against being a "stay-at-home" mom?

How many of these feminists are mothers?

It is a personal choice for each woman (and her husband) how she juggles family and a career.

Feminist leaders really are not pro-family and in more ways than one are not pro-women either.

What kind of role models for women are feminists seeking to support?

Barbara Bush said, "Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens at the White House but on what happens inside your house."

In the words of my wise father, the greatest legacy you can leave in this life is with your children.

If such deeply reactionary thoughts (affirming the colonial legacies of ‘stay-at-home’, husband’s choice, pro-family, role models, ‘inside your house’, and children concepts) reflect the acute intellectual vacuum of the neo-cons, their publications for wide dissemination surely indicate the slavery of the so-called fourth estate to the first three branches of phony religiously conservative democracies.

“Unsettling in the best sort of way, Are Women Human? shows her to be not only a prodigiously creative feminist thinker who can see the world from a fresh angle like nobody else (and I mean the angle of reality, as opposed to the usual one of half-reality) but also one of our most creative thinkers about international law. As elsewhere in MacKinnon's work, we find plenty of trenchant and eloquent writing; but we also find more systematic analysis and more extensive scholarship than we sometimes get, and the book is the richer for it.”

However, MacKinnon as known to her friends and critics alike, is not beyond scathing criticism, worst of which, from feminist circles themselves. Even Nussbaum herself is not fully convinced by Mackinnon’s several arguments. She writes:

About some of MacKinnon's specific claims, however, I have doubts. I wonder, for example, whether her expressed preference for civil over criminal law as a vehicle for pressing sex-equality claims is not unduly influenced by the particular success of her strategy in Kadic v. Karadzic. She is certainly right that criminal laws are frequently underenforced, and that when criminal prosecution is impossible, a civil suit may be a victim's only way of attaining justice. But that doesn't show that civil remedies ought in general to be "favored"; and surely women's lives will not improve much unless and until the criminal law in the place where they live has become both adequate in its content (defining rape appropriately, recognizing that it can take place in marriage, etc.) and adequately enforced. ……

MacKinnon sometimes comes quite close to saying that the modern state is a sexist relic that has had its day. Surely, however, the state is the largest unit we know of so far that is decently accountable to people's voices, and thus it is bound to be of critical importance for women seeking to make their voices heard. I think there is also a moral argument for the state: It is a unit that expresses the human choice to live together under laws of one's own choosing. Once again, it is the largest unit we yet know that expresses this fundamental human aspiration. A world state, should it exist, would either be too dictatorial, imposing on Indians and South Africans and Canadians alike a Constitution that each group might like to determine and fine-tune separately, or else it would be little more than a charade, as some international agreements are today.
…..

MacKinnon is a lawyer, and her imagination has always been galvanized by the experiences of women in specific legal situations, whether they are her formal clients or not: the plaintiffs in the landmark sexual harassment cases, the victims of abuse in the pornography industry whose testimony is gathered in her book In Harm's Way, the Bosnian women she recently represented. I think that this powerful empathy explains why she is impatient with the slow work of Constitution-making and Constitution-changing that is required for sex equality at the state level, and drawn to the more personal and informal encounters among women in the international women's movement. If the state has in many ways been deaf to women's voices, however, why should she believe that--without changing the nature of each liberal state, one by one--women can get good results at the international level? Surely the two levels need to work in tandem, informing each other. And both need to be informed by grassroots work at the most local level, as India's democracy has been powerfully influenced recently by the insights and achievements of women who now, by constitutional amendment, hold one-third of the seats in the panchayats, or local village councils.

So what is it that makes MacKinnon so fiercely volatile? What is so politically incorrect about her that appears so socially relevant nevertheless? Between administrative research and critical research traditions, we are aware that the larger battles of ideas are within the critical strands. But why is it that MacKinnon often upsets even the critical scholars so much that she does to feminism what Marx would have done to Marxism: to proclaim as Zinn’s Soho would have showcased: “I am not a Marxist”!

MacKinnon upsets the reviewer of The Nation (and you can say, that of Mother Jones, and The Progressive, and Democracy Now) through her sheer radical propositions that are still by and large missed out by most of liberals of the day today. By refusing to view feminism within the narrow framework of men-women equality, or through constitutional changes of existing systems of oppression, MacKinnon applies a “false consciousness” theory on most liberal feminists even of the third wave, that’s discomforting at times, and results in cognitive dissonance at others.

MacKinnon is a lawyer no doubt, but Nussbaum’s perception that her “imagination has always been galvanized by the experiences of women in specific legal situations” is far from the truth. In fact, a close reading of MacKinnon’s works would suggest quite the reverse. She may have won accolades from the legal profession and practice of academics. But she knows best that her efforts are directed essentially against these very ‘superstructures’ that guard the interest of the state in very sophisticated manner. For example, MacKinnon does not seek mere constitutional reforms, despite Bosnia case, rather she seeks a thoroughbred replacement of the structure that’s inherently sexist in nature. This was the reason why she has to radically project heterosexual relationships as patriarchal sexist exploitation of women, and pornography as abuse of women. Unlike the conservatives who pose as moral guardians by reforming the law in order to censor some obscene movies, she calls for declaration of pornography as sexual oppression by definition.

MacKinnon for example, is not interested in some state laws in favor of women, so that the country can be glorified as being progressive, for she knows well that, exploitation of women is a matter of human order of power equation that needs changes, not a matter of ill-informed judges.

That’s the reason why MacKinnon does not seek equality among sexes. She has, right from her championing against sexual harassment at workplace, always pointed out in various ways how there is inequality among women and men, that must require revolutionary replacement of order. For example, women get pregnant, men do not.

MacKinnon, like Marx for workers, seeks the solidarity of women across borders, and nation-states. What women stand to lose is nothing. What they stand to gain is an upper echelon in a new society that would be governed by women themselves. She is not seeking representation of women in the local village councils of India as Nussbaum envisages as a positive step, rather MacKinnon says not to fight the master with masters’ tools to begin with.

Why she prefers civil laws over criminal ones is precisely for this reason. It is in the body of the existing structure to be sexist by nature, not of some isolated actions somewhere. Feminists are divided over the punishment levels in cases of rape. There are debates about capital punishment for rapists. MacKinnon is not worried over why some women do not resent rape. She is worried why most women accept it to begin with. For she feels, marriage as a social institution promotes rape, as it plays into a legal system that defines rape—based on ‘consent’! She indicates that rape is not just violation of women’s body, but also encroachment of another man’s property, i.e., the women who is not the wife of the man, in most cases. The consent, she knows, she will not receive from many women she seeks to represent (because of what Marx would call false consciousness) but she fights on their behalf and hers, nevertheless.

A criminal act such as abuse of women at workplace and warplace is not a premeditated act of heinous nature initiated by some ill-meaning oppressing men. No, MacKinnon does not think so. She believes that men are geared up, and grown up, and cheered into becoming rapists by the existing socio-political system. Indeed, men just reflect the class character of their privilege by abusing women everyday.

MacKinnon has been controversial and been condemned by many conservatives for her outspoken ‘rhetorics’. But what is more disturbing is the lack of understanding that still continues to prevail within feminist circles whom she perceives as potential comrades, about her views. The issue is not reform or change, the issue is replacement of order. Issue is not that homosexuality is a matter of debate, the issues is heterosexuality is the root cause of the oppression. The issue is not if men are welcome into the women’s movement, the issue is if women are victims of a notion of liberation offered to them by men on a sexist plate that looks palatable but works to maintain the male domination in place.

As MacKinnon herself has said,

“When I speak of male dominance, I mean …. the facts have to do with the rate of rape and attempted rape of American women, which is 44 per cent...Some 4.5 percent of all women are victims of incest by their fathers, an additional 12 per cent by other male family members, rising to a total of 43 per cent of all girls before they reach the age of 18...If you ask women whether they’ve been sexually harassed in the last two years, about 15 percent report very serious or physical assaults; about 85 per cent of all working women report sexual harassment at some time in their working lives. Between a quarter and a third of all women are battered by men in the family. If you look at homicide data, between 60 and 70 percent of murdered women have been killed by a husband, lover, or ex-lover...About 12 percent of American women are or have been prostitutes.”

The issue is to notice the real failures of male domination, not perceived sustainable progresses. Because revolutions are not brought about in a gradual peaceful manner!

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

The failure to increase the minimum wage in the US for the first time in a decade (it is now still $5.15 per hour--decidedly not a living wage for anyone over 18 not living with their parents), is nauseating, to say the least.

It came by design, as the Congressional Republicans tied the success of the proposed $2.10 hourly increase for struggling lower and middle class workers to an obscene permanent reduction in the estate tax for individual millionaires (the proposal was to increase the tax-exemption amount on an individual's estate to 5 million dollars by 2015 and 10 million dollars for a couple).

The raw effrontery of wealthy, elected, amoral "law makers" such as Bill Frist to bark, shill and cover for purely greedy special interests is as astounding as it is infuriating and indefensible.

San Francisco Chronicle says today:

Instead of providing a clear vote on the minimum wage, Republicans teamed it with legislation that would have cut the estate tax. Republican leaders hoped the bill would allow them to defang the Democrats' criticism that the GOP was hostile to the working poor while also achieving one of their top goals -- reducing taxes for wealthy families.

To sweeten the pot, Republican leaders threw in a host of tax provisions they hoped would appeal to individual senators, particularly Democrats whose votes were needed. So the bill contained, for example, tax breaks for coal-mining companies, aimed at Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., and timber tax breaks aimed at Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

When women and children are killed, maimed, bombed and burned, leading to a world demonstrably less safe for our own kids, I tend to get a just a little bit testy. Outraged at the feral stupidity of it all.

Illustrator Charles Bragg recently described the Holy Land as That Unique Part of the World Where People of All Religions Can Get Together and Kill One Another. Yeah, baby. Keep 'em coming. The good news it, the jury just came in (they're deliberating evolution, remember?) and they decided against Intelligent Design. Let's face it, we're too staggeringly simple to have been designed by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent God. If there's a God in heaven, he'd have to be one weepy, inebriated Deity to cope with the mass carnage and pervasive self-destruction that he's wrought--all in the name of love .

The Nation's editorial this week is worth a read in this context:

The Fractured Mideast More than two weeks after Israel launched its countermilitary offensive against Lebanon, the Bush Administration continues to refuse to call for a cease-fire or to take other actions to rein in Israel's disproportionate response to Hezbollah's attack across its northern border. That attack, in which three Israeli soldiers were killed and two captured, was a clear violation of international law. But it was not grounds for an act of war. The US position is not only morally wrong; it thwarts the goal of securing stable and lasting peace in the region, upon which American interests and Israeli security depend.

Washington's tacit blessing of the Israeli military operations, along with its expedited resupply of Israeli munitions, means that the United States will be complicit in the death and displacement of Lebanese civilians beyond the 400 already dead and at least 600,000 displaced, as well as in added destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and the deepening of a humanitarian crisis. In short, Washington will be implicated in what UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has called possible war crimes, which will breed more hatred for the United States and Israel throughout the Islamic world. Adding to the sense of impunity were the deaths of four UN observers by an Israeli precision-guided missile, despite what the UN said were repeated Israeli assurances that UN posts were not being targeted.

Continue reading "How Many Kids Would Jesus Kill?" »

A new report by the Center for WorkLife Law (at the University of California Hastings College of the Law) has examined the growing trend of lawsuits filed by employees alleging that they were discriminated against because of their family caregiving responsibilities. As a culmination of three years of data collection on maternal wall lawsuits, the “family responsibilities discrimination” (FRD) cases involve workers – both women and men – who fulfill typically mothering or caregiving roles to family members.

The study, using 613 cases of caregiver discrimination, has identified lawsuits involving claims of sex stereotyping, “sex-plus” bias, pregnancy bias, hostile work environment, retaliation, disparate treatment, disparate impact, Family Medical Leave Act interference, discrimination and retaliation, Title IX violations, Employee Retirement Income Security Act violations, ADA associational discrimination, Equal Pay Act violations, breach of contract, tortious interference with contract, wrongful discharge.

This report empirically examines the ideas found in the germinal theoretical article by Joan Williams and Nancy Segal, “Beyond the Maternal Wall: Relief for Family Caregivers Who Are Discriminated Against on the Job,” (Williams & Segal, 2003).

The main findings:
1. Working-class families face inflexible schedules that clash with family needs.

6. Flexibility is possible in working-class jobs.


Some startling snippets:
While only 6% of Swedish two job families with children work in excess of 80 hours/week, over two-thirds (64%) of U.S. families do.

“For most working class families, child care is often patched together in ways that leave parents anxious and children in jeopardy.”


Underpinnings of the growth
According to the report:

The number of FRD cases has grown from a total of eight in the 1970s, when the first case was heard in US courts (Phillips v Martin Marietta Corp, USSCt, 3 EPD ¶8088) to 358 in the first half of the 2000s. In Phillips, an employer was sued for barring females with school-aged children from applying for jobs that male employees with school-aged children occupied. While the employer claimed that it did not discriminate against females because it allowed women with no children to apply for those positions, the Supreme Court ruled that the employer still discriminated against women who were also mothers. In the last decade (1996-2005), the number of family responsibilities discrimination (FRD) cases filed grew nearly 400% from the previous decade, from 97 cases to 481.

Analyses show that rapid growth in FRD lawsuits began in the 1990s and continues today. Increases are correlated with: (1) media coverage of high-profile lawsuits involving maternal wall discrimination; (2) growth in the number of employed mothers; (3) diffusion of information about FRD cases amongst the legal profession; and (4) changes in law making it more attractive to file discrimination lawsuits. FRD lawsuits have now been heard in 48 of 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition, the report noted that more FRD cases have been filed by non-professional employees than by professionals, although the greatest number of cases in any single occupational category is in managerial/professional jobs, followed closely by those in technical, sales and administrative positions. By industry, the largest number of cases have been filed by employees working in service industries, followed by public administration.

Plaintiffs are more likely to win FRD lawsuits than other types of employment discrimination cases, the study finds. The mean award is $768,976, with the median just over $100,000 – the largest award to date is $25 million. The lawsuits analyzed in the report make a strong case that companies' effective handling of workers' caregiving responsibilities is an issue of risk management and companies that mismanage their work/life programs tend to fare poorly in court.

The study also revealed that small, local businesses make up the largest component of companies sued for family caregiver discrimination. Larger companies, however, are increasingly facing such lawsuits. Even companies publicly recognized for progressive work-family policies and practices and for treating employees well have faced FRD charges. Among companies sued for discriminating against workers with family responsibilities are nearly 30 that have been designated as "Best Companies to Work For" by Working Mother magazine or have been touted by Fortune's "Most Admired" list as amongst the best in the nation for treating employees well.

2. Litigating The Maternal Wall: U.S. Lawsuits Charging Discrimination against Workers with Family Responsibilities

Technorati: pregnancy discrimination

What does one do with former elected representatives who have a lavish time off the peoples’ tax money, and seats of power through hypocritical speeches? Worse, what does one do with such misguided missiles who still expound their debased racist theories of merit, success and competition?

Richard ‘Dick’ Lamm who served Colorado as a Governor for three terms, is one such illustrious manipulator of reactionary words. And incidentally, each time at office, he ran as a Democrat. Yet he always believed that Blacks and Hispanics are both underclass whose cultures were not “success-producing”.

In a Denver Post column yesterday titled, Minorities must look inward, he says,

“American students generally face educational challenges, but there is every reason to specifically examine minority underperformance. Blacks and Hispanics are not succeeding in numbers great enough to keep America competitive. I am increasingly convinced the key to prosperity for black and Hispanic America lies mostly in their own hands and by their own efforts.”

‘Their’ hands and ‘their’ efforts were well said. Only that, Lamm forgets to mention about our political economy creating an ugly class society, our biased law and order system, our educational system geared to teach exclusively historical lies that often are not understood to be relevant by Blacks and Hispanics etc etc. The list could go on. But let the likes of Richard Lamm first think inward.

Is homophobia the new blatant racism of 21st century America? So far, it definitely seems like it is. And our president seems to be the leader of the pack that thrives on manipulating gay marriage issue for political purpose.

Just when Bush’s approval rating fell to a historic low among voters since his reelection, one would have assumed him to have a change of heart --also considering that Laura Bush and Mary Cheney definitely urged him to rethink on the issue.

But George W. instead chose to use the politics of hate and fear—those unique selling proposition of Republicans—to seek clues. And he found it among the white evangelicals among whom his support had plunged a remarkable 22 percent! And As Charlie Cook of The Cook Political Report says, “If he wants to stem his losses, he has to find something other than the war in Iraq and Katrina and gas prices and budget deficits for his voters to focus on.”

Astrid Fiano recommends a recent Rolling Stone National Affairs essay by Tim Dickinson which surveys how gay-bashing is a continuation in the historic roadmap of oppression. Dickinson quotes Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco Mayor, “The same rhetoric that’s being used today against the gay community was used then against interracial couples.”

The president's steadfast refusal to eliminate the historic oppression already has GOP candidates like Rick Santorum (R-Homophobe from PA) enjoying a field day in their homophobic strides. Santorum has described homosexual acts as part of a class of deviant sexual behavior that are “antithetical to a healthy, stable, traditional family”. And more infamously: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." And considering that this man is in fact the chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the number-three job in the party leadership of the Senate, we have someone else to worry about now.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

Today’s NYT article regarding the codification of our jingoistic immigration policies is not an issue that demands isolated concern. In the larger schema of Capitalistic prison-military-industrial complex, the United States has become an epitome of everything regressive. Labor and employment issues, the plight of working women, undocumented workers, bullying, ethnocentrism, minimum-wage increase opposition, reproductive choice issues--and the shameful Israeli/American destroyer/occupation brigades, are all related to a corporate/consumer/capitalistic/amoral/ feeding frenzy--an orgy of dominion and control exercising--killing/maiming/bombing children--hello, anybody home?--wherever and whenever we want--in search of satiation of our unquenchable thirst for more control and power over the earth, other species and each other.

Please click on the play button to see how we are supporting chemical warfare targeted against children of Beirut

As the world and our capabilities expand through technological advances, we've become ever more Klingon in our evolution, or should I say devolution--becoming, first and foremost, voracious warriors with mighty brows--incapable of taming our baser instincts with our native intelligence. The crown of creation? We're Creation's Undoing. We are the perfect embodiment of The Peter Principle writ large, we've evolved to the point of perfect incapacity--like George W. Bush as leader, we occupy the highest rung on the evolutionary food chain and we're thoroughly unable to fulfill the responsibilities of the position. Perhaps we should consider stepping down--or at least aside. Things can only get better.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

Following the Washington Post coverage of the Medicare drug plans fiasco, its worth noting that there is a corrupt and rotting underbelly of NY's Medicaid system.

Billions of dollars are bilked by doctors, dentists, pharmacists and Big Pharma--and related industry businesses--on our tax dime--all under the glaucomic gaze of our legislators and law enforcement overseers, who pooh-pooh this scandal completely.

Why?

'Cause the criminals are our own physicians, dentists, accountants, friends and family members; you know--white, middle class people who we know, respect and love. People like us--people who are us. So, we'll spend billions of dollars to arrest, prosecute and incarcerate some black kid who sells a vial of cocaine to another kid who wants to get high and eat some Fritos in front of his television, but we give a complete pass to the arch criminals in our midst who rip us all off--and let our kids' educational needs and health care suffer at the felonious hands of the white collar corporate criminal, aided and abetted by our government watchdogs and our elected officials.

A New York Times report May last year sheds light on the “unscrupulous and the opportunistic” Medicaid program of New York State:

New York's Medicaid program, once a beacon of the Great Society era, has become so huge, so complex and so lightly policed that it is easily exploited. Though the program is a vital resource for 4.2 million poor people who rely on it for their health care, a yearlong investigation by The Times found that the program has been misspending billions of dollars annually because of fraud, waste and profiteering. A computer analysis of several million records obtained under the state Freedom of Information Law revealed numerous indications of fraud and abuse that the state had never looked into.

New York's Highest Court Issues a Wild and Crazy Opinion on Gay Marriage Licenses.... Queers Need Not Apply

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

"There are enough marriage licenses to go around."
-Chief Justice Judith Kaye in her Dissent.

"We really can't think of any valid reason to continue to bar same-sex couples from enjoying the many benefits of memorializing their love and commitment to each other in a legal union that consecrates their vows and provides respect, financial benefits, security and societal sanctification to the relationship. It's really the only civilized approach to take at long last.

Especially, given the plain fact, as the Court acknowledged, that same-sex couples, who must adopt or bear children by artificial means, provide, by definition, more uniformly stable home environments for kids than opposite-sex couples may, whose babies are sometimes accidentally made. In other words--committed same sex couples certainly deserve equal treatment--but--on the other hand--fuhgeddaboutit--they're fags."

With this embarrassing decision, the Court protects no one, hurts a minority class of our friends and loved ones and, once again, a panel of eminent and wise lawyers enshrine ignorance and unconsciousness upon us by stamping this shamefulness with its imprimatur of righteousness.

Therefore, the Court's thinking is flawed, medieval and intellectually dishonest. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. As Henry David Thoreau famously said, "It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right."

Please read Katha Pollitt in this month's The Nation for a brilliant look at today's duplicity and hypocrisy surrounding same-sex marriage. Or just read it here:

Continue reading "Court Legitimizes Discrimination against a Protected Class" »

Are Medicare and Medicaid Services designed to worsen the health needs of the older and disabled Americans who are living on low to moderate fixed incomes? Today’s Washington Post analysis dispels the myth of Medicare drug plans, as the Medicare’s new Part D prescription drug program forces seniors to fork out $2,850 each before the coverage can resume.

In the coming five months, several million Americans will find themselves unable to pay for the gap in insurance, called the “doughnut hole” thanks to the shady Medicare policy which is designed to be misunderstood.

The Post says, “Under a standard plan this first year, Medicare handles 75 percent of drug costs after a deductible until the bill reaches $2,250. It does not kick in again until those costs total $5,100.”

Campaign for America's Future , a Washington-based advocacy organization, says seniors enrolled in the program at the start of the year will, on average, reach the doughnut hole Sept. 22. As of now, there are 22.5 million people who are enrolled in this program! The organization says, “President Bush's Part D prescription drug disaster is costly, confusing and corrupt. It was written by and for big pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and will cost millions of dollars in excess cost to U.S. taxpayers, seniors and disabled.”

And there are three more months to go, before we are hit by another anti-people governmental plan. Yet again.

Technorati Tag: bush medicare health

It’s too early, and entirely inaccurate to declare Rev. Gregory A. Boyd as someone who has given up conservative politics. The New York Times article “Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock”, elaborates that Mr Boyd has been preaching to politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals about how the church should steer clear of politics, and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

Whereas these could be true, they are neither sufficient nor even necessary grounds for rejoicing. The current Middle East crisis has generated some strong emotions among conservatives. Even Mel Gibson’s alleged anti-Semite sentiments have been highly publicized already. Whether the preachers are taking a stand against the Israeli state or against the Jews should be an emerging question.

We need to evaluate if the preachers give up their core worldviews, not just their temporary stands on certain world events, before hailing them as progressives. For example, in the World War II, the Vatican stoically maintained indifference during Holocaust. One credible theory pointed that it was because the Pope was inclined more to contain Communism than to hear plights of Jews.

In the current scenario, we know that Mr Boyd is still holding onto every basic tenets of conservative church. He is still anti-LGBT, and he is still against women’s rights to choice. He still says “The light of the world and the hope of the world is Jesus Christ.”

This time, he may just be getting higher approvals in the Europe by saying America is no Christian country, and probably from the Democrats for not supporting Israeli occupation. But as long as the Church continues on its path of reformisms of various kinds, what we shall see possibly will be certain change of stance depending on circumstances –for example, what should be Christianity’s role in a fight between Jews and Muslims?—which may be merely opportunistic from a critical lens, but never a whole hearted radical rebirth –for example, how about supporting LGBT communities, caring for pro-choice, and getting rid of the One-God-As-Hope theory?

Technorati Tag: church conservative boyd

President Bush emphatically declares that the world needs western democracy to ensure freedom and peace. And to that end, he curses Hezbollah, and Kofi Anon, and supports a gruesome war against women and children of Beirut.

Ceasefire in the Middle East is not required, declares Israel with due support from Bush. As a man supposed to represent the world's superpower, when he rejects the idea of peace, how many countries exactly come forward to lend him support by saying NO to ceasefire?

And the countries that say YES to peace are…

Indeed, this is the largest opposition that any country has ever faced in the world history during a war time crisis. So much for the rule by the majority..oops..democracy!

Technorati Tags: bush politics lebanon

With the current legal and administrative rethinkings in matters of abortion rights, equal credit, pregnancy leave, anti-discrimination laws in education and employment, Martha Burk writes about how women in America are systematically forced to take two steps forward and one step back in many areas that were so secure a generation ago.

The full story here:

Summer isn’t over yet, but the heat on women is already at full blast. Catalyst, one of the top research organizations on the status of women in corporate America, reports this week that females are losing ground in the top echelons of the Fortune 500. Growth in female-held positions has fallen dramatically in the past three years. The National Women’s Law Center tells us that female degrees in math and computer science are way down. In what looks like a “back to the ‘50s move,” Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan signed a bill last week allowing the return of single-sex schools in her state. All abortions were outlawed in South Dakota this spring, setting up a challenge to Roe v. Wade that has a good chance of succeeding in a Roberts Court.

Continue reading "Women's Progress Curve" »

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.

Here's a guy who's so thoroughly gripless, so constitutionally indisposed to thinking--poisoned as he is by his native incapacity and incompetence, that he reverts to reflexive, boundary-less, childish actions such as massaging the shoulders of a female head of state in an unconscious bid to distract himself from his thoroughgoing inability to process the vital and important matters at hand. Is this job over his head?

Let me answer the question this way--If George W. Bush--the leader of the "free" world-- worked in the local hardware store and you walked in for the first time with your mate to purchase some light bulbs from him and he bantered about the weather while you paid him at the register, you'd leave the store and naturally quip, “he's a nice enough guy, but dumb as a rock.” So much for the virtues of our current democracy.
Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed piece in today’s NY Times is worth pondering:

“In two years and a few months Americans will vote again for president. I hope the long list of tragic failures by Bush & Co. prompts people to take that election more seriously than some in the past. If you were about to be lifted onto an operating table, you’d be more interested in the competence of the surgeon than in his or her personality.”

Continue reading "Gripless leader. Reflexive actor." »

One of the harshest homophobes in position of power, James E. West is no more.

As a former Mayor and a Senate Majority leader in Washington Legislature, the conservative Republican leader had etched out some nightmares for America. West was a fervent supporter of anti-gay bills that proposed to ban gays and lesbians from working in schools and day cares. He even proposed to make a law that would ban all sexual activity among persons under the age of 18.

As a Roy Cohn of modern times, most ironically West was recalled from his office over an internet gay sex scandal last year. Using the chat ID “Right-BiGuy”, he used to offer internships to young (high school graduating) gay men.

Not just his homophobic reactions to suppress freedom for LGBT communities, but also his own admission of private online relationships with young gay men worked against his reputation as a public official while he was living. After his death, one would have expected continuance of scathing criticisms of his legacy. But we find many interesting tributes paid to him in his death, including but not limited to the following:

Chris Vance, a political consultant and former Republican Party chairman, said, “Jim West was a great and well-respected member of the Legislature for 20 years.”

Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, a Spokane Democrat said, “He was a powerful political force here and in the state for decades.”

Dino Rossi, a former Republican Senate budget chairman, said West was a gifted politician who gave his colleagues room to get their jobs done. “He didn't micromanage things. When I was trying to balance the deficit, he showed up in my office, I think, once and that was because I asked him to come over.”

Sen. Margarita Prentice, a Democrat from Renton, quoted West as a good friend. “I just think he was one of the finest political minds. You had to be tough in order to get past him,” she said.

West’s successor in Spokane, Mayor Dennis Hession said “Jim West did some wonderful things for the city of Spokane and the state and that's how he should be remembered.”

Although there is nothing wrong in paying glowing tributes even to man who erred grievously in life, what rather alarming here is the comfort level politicians across party lines have shared while praising one of the most powerful homophobic in the United States.

Equally insightful would be to know why the country turned hostile towards West not so much when he was intolerant towards LGBT community, as when later on, he admitted his own alternative sexual orientation. Astrid Rachelle Fiano, Esq. says such hypocrisy would not exist in the first place, only if “people minded their own business, didn't equate sexual preference with morality; and/or the government enacted stronger protections to make homophobia as socially unacceptable as blatant racism.”

"The Teen Endangerment Act" is finally passed. Otherwise known as “The Child Custody Protection Act”, this anti-human rights Act was approved by the Senate tonight with a 65-34 vote. So the law of the land now says it’s a federal crime for anyone other than a parent or legal guardian to take a minor across state lines to have an abortion.

This drastic far-rightwing development took place following the review of pending Feinstein and Boxer Amendments. Anti-choice senators defeated an amendment offered by Sens. Robert Menendez and Frank Lautenberg, both Democrats from New Jersey, that would have funded programs to prevent teen pregnancy and help parents talk to their kids about tough topics like sex.

The letter sent by National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) to members of the US Senate yesterday was meant to apprise the Senators about the Act. In turn, it managed to pass the myths for facts:

“About 80 percent of the public favors requiring notification of or consent by a parent before an abortion can be performed on a minor daughter.”

Prevention or Punishment?
Owing to its ideological genealogy, the Act is punitive in nature, not preventive. Firstly it assumes a normal family for every teen, when it enforces a clause of compulsory parental involvement. Secondly it also assumes that teenagers will obediently disclose their dilemmas to legal or natural parents under all circumstances, or face undesirable consequences.

What the rightwing Senators Frist and Ensign and their collaborators do not seem to get is that teens are vulnerable in cases of pregnancy, not necessarily assertive, also because of the dominant patriarchal structure that has moralistic impositions related to abortion.

The moral police in the garb of Senators also preach refraining from sex until girls are married. Quite a few tragic assumptions ( that all girls are destined to marry) were made by Sen. Tom Coburn when he opined, “Abstinence is the best way to prevent teenage pregnancy."

What’s in store?
In sync with promoting self-centered individualism, the Act introduced by the ultra-conservatives, seeks to further isolate teens into forming their cocoon self, where all they have to look for, apart from television sets, would be their parents. Most teen pregnancies take place not due to lack of parental interventions, but because of existing parental neglects. To assume that already defenseless children would then go confide in their neglecting parents is grossly unjust.

Secondly and as a graver consequence, the Act will punish those who most genuinely want to help a teenager simply because the person is not “authorized” as a parent. So watch out, this Act indeed says grandmothers will go to jail if they are more trusted by girls. And this Act may also be entirely overlooking the stark reality afflicting thousands of girls who are victims of domestic child sexual abuse, often in the hands of their parents.

“Aerodynamics have proven that the bumblebee cannot fly. The body is too heavy and the wings are too weak. But the bumblebee doesn’t know that, and it goes right on flying, miraculously.” --Mary Kay Ash

Mary Kay, who always wore a diamond lapel pin shaped like a bumblebee, created the first corporate culture for women in America when her company got listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1976.

Exactly 40 years have passed by, and it appears that either the American corporate houses are wary of bumblebee miracles, or are threatened by them. Either way, as “In the Lead” column of Wall Street Journal reported today, the male corporate bastion would let women employees work only at positions that do not threaten their status quo.

Columnist Carol Hymowitz writes that although women hold more than half of all management and professional jobs, the vast majority are concentrated in entry-level and middle positions. Last year, women held 16.4% of Fortune 500 corporate officer jobs, up just 0.7% from 2002.

Going by the rate of progress over the past decade (which has been on an average, one-half of one percentage point per year), it would take 70 more years of corporate struggles for women to attain parity with men (that is, for women to have just 50% of Fortune 500 board seats)!

And going by the current growth rate, will women of color ever reach any parity whatsoever? Apparently not! As further victimized at the corporate alter, women of color hold only 3.4% of officer jobs (as compared to 16.4% overall).

Currently, one in every nine Fortune 500 companies has no women on its board! And for those women who are on board, they are systematically excluded from key leadership, agenda-setting and decision-making opportunities, since they are astoundingly underrepresented as chairs of most powerful board committees, including audit, compensation, and governance.

Such systematic exclusion of women from decisive positions has become essential for the male supremacy to reign over its industrial complexes. As a result, at the topmost position, women have represented less than 2 percent of the Fortune 1,000 CEOs and just 1.4 percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs.

‘Came a long way, baby?’

Some proponents of workforce diversity are quick to point out that the growth of women will be gradual. Factors attributed to this optimism include widening corporate opportunities, scope for higher education, Civil Rights legislations etc. But this assumption of eventual progress is clearly based on a flawed historical understanding of women at the workplace. Most often we are led to believe that the women ‘have come a long way’ (remember Virginia Slims cigarette ads?), from being homemakers to being CEOs. And hence the facilitating passage must be the ideal one.

Now that we are grimly reminded that women occupy less than 2% of the CEOs positions, let us visit the workplace landscape to understand if they are indeed making progress, and if so, of what type.

In 1950, there were 18.4 million working women in the US. This has grown to an amazing 70 million now. Now this is some real growth here. According to Business and Professional Women’s Foundation, women represent 47% of the total labor force of America! Among women workers, 61% are African-American women, 60% white women, 58% Asian women, and 56% Latina women.

Whereas on one hand there is such an overwhelmingly high participation of women in the US workforce, comprising half of the entire labor, on the other hand, less than 2% of women actually own any major corporate house, and less than 20% even work as corporate officers.

If statistical analysis alone could help, then wars would not be taking place in modern times. It is imperative to go beyond the numerical analysis that’s done periodically by several profit and non profit agencies, and focus on ways to radically change the scenario. With sustained increase of this rate (which has been consistently been the case since decades now), there is no way an equity can be achieved. In fact, as seen from the disparity among women workers and women owners, the gender gap is not one of quantity, but of qualitative power.

It is about trenchant lack of women’s empowerment in the era of corporate globalization. The way is to radically change the structure from the top, starting from the “Fortunes”. And no amount of waiting for a noble legislation or of depending on just gestures from old guards of capitalism will do. Systematic oppression requires systematic upheavals.

By Jack Tuckner, Esq.



"Step on it twice, make four times what you pay, divide the labor costs and still come away with enough to play."
--Gangsta Rapper Shyne on inner city crack dealing

A Wall Street Journal story by David Armstrong entitled “Financial Ties to Industry Cloud Major Depression Study” is an over the-top expose, otherwise little known or cared about, regarding the endemic corruption pervading our country's mainstream medical establishment, or the medico-pharmaceutical complex, if you will.

Our country's most eminent leading physicians--Harvard-educated, board-sitting, regularly published doctors who tour, speak and get paid mad money to shill for the drug companies. No better than two-bit hookers selling themselves for a throw. This particular scandal involves the crème de la crème of docs recommending that women maintain their use of psychotropic meds while pregnant, lest they begin to feel a tad bummed out again--this recommendation comes notwithstanding the substantial concerns raised by independents regarding the obvious risks to the fetus. Why??

Because Pfizer and Merck, et al are paying for the research, paying for the speeches and generally buying these nickel-bag cretins so that they will sell their colleagues, as well as the duped end user, on the safety and efficacy of ingesting certain synthetic chemicals--a.k.a. drugs--that these mega-billion dollar companies have significant vested interests in promoting. Hello? Disingenuity at its finest--raw greed--unabashed criminality. And of course, apart from this latest Journal revelation--which is really old news--corporate Media is too threatened by the thought of speaking truth to these omnipotent entities to even make a peep.

And of course, none of these top docs reveal this financial connection--it's deemed unimportant--while they fence drugs to pharmacies and their colleagues. Pure corruption--capitalism at it's morally-compromised worst, money for nothing and your chicks for free. While we continue to lock up 1 vial crack sellers for up to 25 years under the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, we let these "legal" drug pushers off scot-free and super wealthy--with nary a thought--or negative comparison--or any accountability. We reward all colluders with extreme abundance. At least the one-vial crack buyer knows what she is buying and why--there's truth in advertising there--the product sells itself--the same cannot be said of the women fooled into continuing to anesthetize themselves during pregnancy at the not so gentle prodding of our most trusted experts.

So, like the women who gave birth to mutated children and then died horrible deaths from uterine cancer from the mispromoted use of DES in the 50's, we have a scandal of far greater proportion unfolding here--and this is of course, just the tip of the iceberg.

War is the greatest threat to the working class people everywhere. The ongoing war on Iraqi people naturally has ugly repercussions on the American working class. And just like any other, this war has hurt women workers the most.

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) which is supposed to address issues of employment injustice in the US is burdened with responsibilities it cannot fulfill in time owing to financial crunch. Systematic reduction in budget for the lead enforcement agency in the area of workplace discrimination has grown to be matter of considerable concern.

EEOC currently has far too many unfilled positions. The agency has employed 20 percent fewer staff members over the past five years because of a hiring freeze. The White House has cut next year’s proposed budget by $4 million from $23 million this year. As an instance, the EEOC call center in Lawrence, Kansas which was funded with $4.9m recently because of its poor performance is handling only 20 percent of the calls from victim workers.

As a result, EEOC has 33,562 cases filed last year as backlog in job discrimination cases alone. Only in 2005, there have been additional 22,278 retaliation complaints from workers lodged with the EEOC. Just on the ground of job discrimination (without including race, age, gender, disability or sexual orientation complaints etc), there is a chance that EEOC will need to deal with nearly 48000 discrimination cases this year.

Statistically speaking, more than 24,000 callers a month speak with EEOC-trained Customer Service Representatives (CSRs). Through its Frequently Asked Questions posted on the EEOC's web page and an Interactive Voice Response telephone system available 24 hours a day, another 15,000 customers a month are making enquiries.

Understaffed and under-resourced, and with all the significant workloads the agency has, the current result of operations sheet shows a negative balance of $24 million.

What does it entail?
Unfortunately we live in times where nukes are considered more worthy than human lives. As a result, the fact that thousands of people are being systematically discriminated against, and their human rights are abused right here in the famed workplaces across the US, is simply lost on the ruling nexus that assumes it as a secondary priority in relation to its greater need to invade foreign lands to ‘teach’ different religions some cruel lessons.

Civil Rights Act of 1964 being signed. July 2, 1964

EEOC was not founded on impulsive decisions of some war mongering politicians attacking Vietnam. Nor was it based on sudden realization of some good men of this country’s political elites. EEOC was a necessary consequence of years of struggles waged by millions of discriminated people of the US who took to streets defying the legal orders and challenged the powerful to stop awhile and reflect critically. It was implemented during the time of turbulent sixties and it became part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

On June 11, 1963, President John F Kennedy spoke as the conscience of a guilt-ridden country as he became the first president to favor the Civil Rights Act and work towards implementing it:

“We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the scriptures and it is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated . . . [O]ne hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet free from the bonds of injustice. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all of its citizens are free.
Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events of Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently ignore them. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met with repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations on the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. Next week I will ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

Or even the fact that, despite all glorious trumpets heralding the “victory” in the cold war, harassments of workers in the US workplace have only been on the rise over the years, as the country has seen less of citizens’ welfare, and more of private business freedoms.

In most times, the critical question never asks for a simplified solution in the propagandist rhetoric of “less government”. Whereas less of a rule by a draconic bunch of liars is desirable, the more pressing need at this juncture is to demand more “social responsibility” from the rulers, than absolve them of their duty by shifting focus to conservative utopia of “more corporate governance” holding any key.

With due apologies to Bryan Adams, the Summer of ’69 was the summer of Stonewall. New York City became a beacon for social justice in the otherwise hostile world when for the first time, the gays—ever oppressed as non-masculine—organized their confrontation against the American police and legal order—ever privileged as the symbol of masculinity.

In more ways than one, Stonewall rebellion is the single most valiant act of resistance of the oppressed against the oppressors in the recent history. And the many marginalized resistors of New York City stood at the helm of this progressive activism.

However, this path of defying the towering institutions of Big Apple has been strewn with many struggles. The latest one unfolded today at the court. Even as almost four decades have passed, the Summer of ’06 has exhibited how backward, how oppressive, and how conservative our law and order system still continues to be. How adamantly ignorant, and how repulsively inconsiderate the human judgments are till date proving to be.

With its legal verdict against gay marriage, New York State could not finally secure a position as the second enlightened state in the US (the only one is Massachusetts). One hoped, sincerely hoped, the city famous for peoples’ movements against the existing unjust orders, would have also acknowledged this one struggle by the people marginalized because of their sexual orientation. But that was not to be. Rather, the city, post-Stonewall, has now reverted back to conservatism of a shameful order and perhaps now has been turned into a beacon for social injustice—to declare gay marriage as illegal everywhere!

A Mockery of Justice:
Judge Robert S Smith on behalf of majority view rationalized Thursday:

“Until a few decades ago, it was an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived, in any society in which marriage existed, that there could be marriages only between participants of different sex. A court should not lightly conclude that everyone who held this belief was irrational, ignorant or bigoted.”

While opining these callous statements, Judge Smith has not brought in the slightly alternative and hugely profound perspectives that until a few decades ago, it was also an accepted truth for almost everyone who ever lived in any society in which human beings existed, that we had only a few elite white privileged men ruling over the majority in most inhumane manner imaginable, and it used to be considered that they were the ones to decide the definition of civilization and the barbaric. Not very long ago, everyone assumed that it was perfectly judicious to enslave people of color as it was considered that people who were not white, and people who were not men, were indeed not full humans.

Despite all trumpets that ‘Greek democracy’ exemplified, for centuries until only a few decades back, it was well taken for granted by everyone who ever lived that only a small number of ‘free men’ were qualified to conduct elections and define democracy in the world. Till then it was considered only so normal that people needed to be segregated to study in different schools basing on their skin color so that only some elite white men ended up owning all three branches of governance and left the manual works for the slaves.

So Judge Smith’s brilliant exposition to justify decision against gay marriage lacks this small authenticity of history fact-sheet.

Mockery is the norm?
On an even closer perusal, it will be well noted that Judge Smith was actually correct in his assumptions, only that the present era needed to be integrated in the historical perspective that he has taken. The fact is, its not “until a few decaded ago”, but even today under this current legal structure, we have widespread unjust social practices. White men are still being paid dozen times higher than Latina women for the same work. Poor workers are being retaliated against by their employers for bringing up harassment charges. And gay people are still being denied their basic human rights. Immigrants are being called ‘illegal aliens’ in the ‘modern’ country founded solely by immigrants. Poverty, homelessness, lack of access to basic healthcare are formidably overbearing upon the American society in 2006 Common Era.

The judgment against gay marriage in New York is a blot in the history which will be invariably questioned generations later and all of us will be held responsible for such irresponsible and apathetic sensitivity. Law is at times based on conventions, but if going by Judge Smith’s summarizations, law is solely based on conventions, then we do not need a court of justice to demarcate the norms. We only have to look at the utterly racist, sexist, homophobic society of today for solution. When the courts of justices are approached, it is done in want of judgments that are absent amidst conformism, not to seek vindication of unjust conformities that have been present “at all ages” or being practiced by “all human beings that ever lived.”

In what could be blatantly misinformed opinions, the court has passed verdicts to uphold traditional monogamous heterosexist marriages, in the following manner:

“It (the legislature) could find that an important function of marriage is to create more stability and permanence in the relationships that cause children to be born. It thus could choose to offer an inducement - in the form of marriage and its attendant benefits - to opposite-sex couples who make a solemn, long-term commitment to each other. “

Some of us could be highly amused by the naivety of these thoughts, springing as they are, from prepositions that are invalid. The judgment that decries the gay marriage citing scientific evidence (“Despite the advances of science, it remains true that the vast majority of children are born as a result of a sexual relationship between a man and a woman”) is itself unscientific insofar as the fact remains that the world has not seen so far many cases where “child benefits from having before his or her eyes, every day, living models of what both a man and a woman are like.” The point is not whether children without parents have done progress (which the judge dismisses as exception), but the fact is the “living models of men and women” are actually thousands or million times more outside the family than inside it. The judgment is unsound; basing as it is on unscientific claims.

What lies beneath?
If we shift from the amusement, one can note that the more serious side to this exercise lies in the systematic perpetuation of historical injustices by the oppressive class.

Sociologist and critical political theorist Frederick Engels while challenging the status quo of monogamous marriage had said (in “Origin of the Family Private property and the State”, p 218):
“What will most definitely disappear from monogamy…is all the characteristics stamped on it in consequence of its having arisen out of property relationships. These are, first, the predominance of the man, and secondly, the indissolubility of marriage..”

Engels way back in 1880 said,

“Marriage based on sex love is by its very nature monogamy. We have seen how right Bachofen was when he regarded the advance from group marriage to individual marriage chiefly as the work of the women; only the advance from pairing marriage to monogamy can be placed to the men’s account, and historically, this consisted essentially in a worsening of the position of women and in facilitating infidelity on the part of the men.” He said in a socialist economy alone, the women would have “regained the right of separation, and when the man and woman cannot get along they would prefer to part. In short, proletarian marriage is monogamian in the etymological sense of the word, but by no means in the historical sense” (ibid p. 209-210).

Alas, the judgment of the US court has acknowledged the aspect of marriage only in the historical sense. Only in the dominant historical interpretation of monogamous heterosexist marriages that prevented a) the women to refuse domestic oppression, and b) people from practicing their different sexual orientations or refusing assigned gender roles. A history that has denied self-expression to majority of people who have either not found solace in the preaching of the Church or in the actions of the elite ruling classes. A history that speaks the dominant narrative of the establishments, not of the peoples’ version of how the establishment thrived on exploitation legacies. A history that has hitherto stood by the side of the unjust conventions of war as a solution, oppression as a ruling tool, and fraud as a valid tactic of gaining powerful positions.

Although the mainstream history would be funded to picture New York City through the lens of its founding ‘fathers’, its mayors, its judges, and the owners of the ‘Statue of Liberty’; the peoples’ history of the city will not forget this day as one of shame, and of systematic sham.

Joe Solmonese has an almost brilliant analysis on GLBT rights exclusively for the CNN.

As president of Human Rights Campaign, the largest organization representing people of alternative sexual orientations, Solmonese rightfully does a scathing criticism of American politicians unprepared to take up GLBT rights as crucial for the country’s progress.

However, the thesis that he has proposed through CNN mainly consists of applauds to the private sector companies of America for being progressive in direction of LGBT welfare.

In reality, this is hardly the case. More than many of us, Solmonese is himself aware of the great disparity of treatments that exists between straight people and GLBT people in this country, and at the same time, the great deal of reliance that the private sector companies and the government have on each other in ensuring mutual progress.

How then the HRC report presents a different picture? A closer critical look at the findings of “The State of the Workplace 2005-2006” belies the CNN headline. Here is a small analysis.

CNN Myths:

1. For the first time, more than half of all Fortune 500 companies offer domestic partner health insurance benefits to their employees, according to the Human Rights Campaign Foundation's annual "State of the Workplace" report.

2. 10 times the number of Fortune companies cover gender identity today compared to 2001.

3. We have also seen wins in anti-discrimination and benefits policies at the state and local levels. Our survey found that seven states prohibit discrimination in private sector employment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity -- California, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Rhode Island and Washington, plus the District of Columbia. Ten additional states ban workplace discrimination based exclusively on sexual orientation.

What’s important to note here is that there is not much of a difference between the way private sector and public sector treat the issue of GLBT rights so far. Statistics do not overwhelmingly support such a thesis. Secondly, a pat in the back of few private companies help in diverting from the real issue –that huge percentage of such companies do not have a policy. Thirdly there is a critical difference between “having a policy” and “implementing” it. No studies of worth has been conducted to see how many companies indeed have gone ahead and “hired” employees from the GLBT communities.

Political Economy:

A political economic critique of the state of affairs would have surely presented a very different image than what has been portrayed by HRC here. On their own admit, the GLBT consumers in the US are worth $641 billion. When 69% of GLBT people have indicated their shopping decisions would be influenced by companies’ workplace policies supporting equal and fair treatment of their peoples, companies (although reluctantly) must merely be reciprocating a favor.

Finally, while analyzing the healthcare benefits to domestic partners, the biggest point goes amiss. When the big private companies can monopolize on commodity prices, and can collaborate with the state on mutual profits, to what extent have they demanded to support the technical amendments of GLBT rights provisions so far? First, the partners of GLBT people are not federally recognized as spouses yet. Secondly, no federal law is yet in place to ban any employment discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. At such a juncture, how many private companies have actually lobbied for radical measures? Without doing so, any amount of reformisms are just suspect to their intent of mincing profits off the $641 billion marketforce. After all, even the domestic partner health benefits issue is based on inequality. Current federal law taxes contributions to a domestic partner's health insurance premium as part of the employee's income. So if an employee makes $50,000 a year and his/her partner's insurance is worth $300 a month, then the employee will be taxed on $53,600 at the end of the year. A married couple in the same situation would be taxed only on the salary of $50,000.

When the basic precepts do not change, all the jubilation on progress towards "American Dream" are mere rhetorical. Its not some law owing to some intrinsic moral values or few kind hearted legislators or a humane company (not the least, the big profiteers of Fortune 500 gang) that make inroads for radical changes in society. It is through informed vigilant citizenry, that people take up the causes of human progress and bring normalcy to halt, and progress to take over. Till then, basking in half-glories are steps taken backwards.

Reminds us, what Frederick Douglas had so aptly quipped: “Not all movements are progress”.

A recent focus groups poll commissioned by National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) has found out where the public stands on the issue of trans-inclusive non-discrimination laws. A vast majority of those surveyed support trans-inclusive laws, despite being asked transphobic language in their questions by the pollsters.

“We used a trans-unfriendly language to describe what we were talking about, and we said a law that would protect people from discrimination on the basis of gender identity would specifically protect transgender people. Transgender people are men who identify or present themselves as women and women who identify or present themselves as men and includes transsexuals, cross dressers, and people who have had or are considering sex change operations… And now I’m going to ask you again, I’m not going to ask you about your values, I’m going to ask you do you favor a law that protects people on the basis of both sexual orientation, gender identity, one or the other or neither? And we got 59 percent said both, nine percent one or the other, 23 percent said nobody. It’s good news,” said Candy Cox, NGLTF’s communications senior strategist.

Amidst applauds during last September, the House of Representatives passed a hate crimes bill that provided protections for transgender individuals. The lead co-sponsors of the House version were Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who is gay, Rep. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), who is a lesbian, and Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich), Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), and gay Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.).

However, the bill went through rough weather in the Senate. US senators Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) and Gorden Smith (R-Ore) refused to make the Senate version of the bill trans-inclusive. They apprehended the bill with a change of language could not have even seen light of the day. Their concerns were genuine, considering past overall hostilities towards similar gay civil rights bills.

In essence, both the House and Senate versions of the legislation had called for amending an existing federal anti-hate crimes statute that authorizes federal prosecution for hate crimes based on someone’s race, religion and ethnicity. The Kennedy-Smith bill in the Senate then went ahead and added sexual orientation, gender, and disability to the categories covered under the existing law. The House version also had added the categories of sexual orientation, gender, disability and gender identity.

Not all is well:
Although the House version had added gender identity, it pertains only to the hate crimes bill, not to the employment sector. The leading co-sponsor in the House Rep. Barney Frank opposes adding transgender language to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA. ENDA calls for banning employment discrimination in the private sector based on sexual orientation. Relevant to note here is the fact that ENDA itself is lying dormant in Congress since the 1970s. This has lent more apprehensions for Frank who says adding a transgender clause to ENDA would result in fewer co-sponsors.

The mainstream applied logic is that transgender clause helps prevent physical attack, and hence it should be suited for hate crimes bill. And considering that ENDA’s destiny is doomed in the Republican-controlled Congress as such, even without a transgender clause, any further alteration would harm the prospects ever greater.

What’s the real issue?
Well, few things have emerged. First off, categorizing people as LGBT would help only when they are provided with equal in-group access. In other words, the LGB people and the transgender individuals do not share the same concern, much less do they enjoy similar privileges.

As is becoming of a system of governance which has historically oppressed few groups and privileged certain others (in some unsophisticated terms, Malcolm X had alluded to this as ‘divide and rule’ policy), the current administration more so has been actively vocal about creating the distinctions more apparent. That the LGBT people do not enjoy similar rights as heterosexual people is no new knowledge. But to mar the united opposition to this systematic discrimination, the LGBT peoples themselves have been divided since some time now, in terms of the degree of their access to resources and rights.

Latest in the lowest ladder of oppression are the transgendered people, who have found absolutely no support from either the House or the Senate. If the House supports their inclusion in Hate Crimes bill, it refuses them access to ENDA. As for Senate versions, not even the Hate Crimes bill has time for the transgender.

The layers of difficulties that have been systematically in place to seclude the transgender people from the minimum safety and comfort that most heterosexual people take simply for granted poses few serious questions.

The ones that currently surface, even as the recent poll shows solidarity to causes of the transgender individuals include but are not limited to, the awareness of transgender, the privilege of the heterosexuality, and the redundant administrative hurdles.

Awareness of the transgender: It’s not just a few history textbooks filled with systematic lies for consumption of school children, its also the composite lot of media, military and industrial nexus that have refused to deal with the whole truths. As a result, heterosexuality has been taken for granted to such an extent as a religiously accurate norm, that any alternative is considered to be one non-normal group called LGBT. At this point, the dismissal of the minorities are done at the alter of celebration of the norm. Therefore, most are kept oblivious of distinguishing the nuances of gender and sexuality.

Without education of an understanding of what constitutes “gender identity” or “gender identity and expression”, we are finding resistance to their inclusion as forming the explicit language that’s needed to be there in proposed legislations. The transgendered people are absolutely accurate in their fear that the proposed laws will continue to discriminate against them, since judges may interpret the victims from a lens that’s indifferent or silent about covering them.

In the process, the politicians are acting on priority to ensure passage of the bill, and looking at the technicalities that will facilitate the process. They are in no way interested to get educated on the crucial differences between the LGB and the T communities and how non-inclusion of some languages might actually work in detriment to the transgender peoples’ right in the civil society and employment sector.

Privilege of heterosexuality: The ruling elites have always advocated the inevitability of hierarchy of oppression. And so, it is considered that sustainable reforms, not radical changes need to take place while all along posing one oppressed group against another. So different systems of oppressions such as race, sex, gender, etc are poised in a prioritized hierarchy, and not as constituents of a multi-layered complex that is exploited all at once.

To quote Audre Lorde from a chapter in “Oppression and social justice: Critical frameworks.” (5th ed., p. 51, Edited by J Andrzejewski, 1996), “Within the lesbian community, I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black.” The privilege of heterosexuality ignores the fact that heterosexuality itself is not a privilege by default any longer once one considers the oppressions of other race, class and gender variants.

Administrative hurdles: Administration poses deliberate problems because it gains from the divisive tendencies. The monopolist politicians who have thus far believed in standardized notions of the male supremacy have not stopped either at ensuring draconic laws that recognize marriage only between a man and a woman and grant them the best of civil rights, they have also countless number of times prevented progressive proposals from becoming legislations.

I am tempted to quote Lorde again, “It is not accidental that the Family Protection Act, which is virtually anti-woman and anti-Black, is also anti-gay. As a Black person, I know who my enemies are, and when the Ku Klux Klan goes to court in Detroit to try and force the Board of Education to remove books that the Klan believes “hint at homosexuality”, then I know I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”

That’s a serious lesson for our well-meaning politicians if they are genuinely contemplating to benefit the people thus far discriminated against. Not merely for the representatives to see their names hit the halls of fame, for passing of yet another ineffectual bill.

The city animal services department of Los Angeles had to wait till today when massive protests by activists over the last week finally changed its stance towards participating in a planned bikini contest called “Hooters for Neuters” for spaying pets.

It speaks volumes about the department’s reactionary compositions that have lent administrative helps to an organization systematically aimed at degrading women. Although, from one angle, it does appear to be natural to collaborate with the Hooters, since the department itself espouses spay and neuter as the methodical solution to welfare of animals!

However, the department has technically not backed out of the event. It has merely assured that it will not receive any money from the event. So the “Hooters for Neuters”, a conservative, anti-animal rights, sexist organization of disrepute will still continue to use the city department as its partner on all its publicity campaigns and gain legitimacy.

Under pressure, the Hooters website has undergone several changes since last week. In the beginning the official poster had a bikini clad woman supporting animal sterilization.

After severe protests from many feminist organizations, the city Controller Laura Chick responded in support of the activists. “Are we going backward here? We are a city with all kinds of progressive programs that empower women and end discrimination in the workplace, and now we're being connected with a Hooters bikini contest. It isn't right.”

Animal Services General Manager Ed Boks finally got convinced that the poster was at least degrading to women, and the poster accordingly changed on Hooters restaurant chain website, replacing the woman with a dog wearing a T-shirt that says “Hooters for Neuters”!

And now after more forced introspections, Boks has released a press note saying that the department will bow out of the July 13 fundraiser at the Hollywood nightclub hosted by the Hooters restaurant chain.

However, the Hooters on their part still mention the LA Animal Services department on their new amended poster.

In the meantime, according to reports, Councilwoman Jan Perry said the department's attempt to be creative in telling pet owners to sterilize their animals “crosses the line.” And animal activist Judy Cairns of San Pedro said she could live with the bikini contest on the condition that city officials — namely the men — also show some skin. “I want to see Mayor Villaraigosa's legs,” Cairns said.

Let’s do a reality check. No woman has ever led the presidential ticket of a major political party in the United States. Only one—Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984—has been nominated for vice president by either the Republicans or the Democrats.

Earlier, Shirley Chisholm as the first black woman ever to run for President of the United States made an unsuccessful bid even for the 1972 Democratic nomination.

Today an AP report focuses on how US lags behind in female political representation. Yet, the report would not mention how the country could learn from others that have implemented radical quota systems to ensure women participation in the legislation. In fact the report attributes some unnamed experts as saying that factors helping female politicians outside the U.S. include financial support, women-focused reforms within individual political parties, and an organized effort by the media and the general public to champion political parity.

Whereas all these factors might be valid, the fact that countries like Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Chile, Liberia, apart from Israel and UK have had absolute success in electing women politicians to the highest office does not much support the thesis of financial support and media reforms. In addition, a concerted effort to prevent women from joining the highest political battlefield can only be overcome through an equally passionate effort at ensuring participation, not by merely opening the platform to unfair competition.

"Not all movements are progress"
Frederick Douglas

In an excellent overview on women CEOs in corporate America, Donecia Pea writes today that women represent less than 2% of the Fortune 1,000 CEOs and just 1.4% of the Fortune 500 CEOs!

According to a study, on the Fortune 500 corporate boards, in last decade, the average rate of increase in women’s representation was one half of one percentage point per year! And if women held only 14.7% of board seats, only 3.4% were women of color. At this rate, it would take another 70 years for women to hold approximately 50% of board seats (Catalyst. Right-click to save in PDF)!

The problem persists on the front of statistics, no doubt. But what’s also needed within discourse of the number studies is a critical emphasis on the genealogy of disparity and ways to work on it.

Such a trenchant corporate disparity can not be merely incidental. And the rate of increase in women's participation is not indicative of any progress. It’s perpetuation of a system of oppression in terms of both gender and race producing a class division. Current forms of implementations of civil rights laws are proving ineffectual to handle the inequity, and fresh radical steps need be taken to undo the centuries of exploitation. It’s not the ladder of fair competition that women are not stepping up on; it’s the unfair monopolists who are not ready to inch away from the seats of power that’s creating hostile prospects.

Its Gay Pride Season!
The March of Heritage may go smooth this Sunday in New York City, but the Journey Thus Far has not been. Is it time then that we posed similar assumption-based questions to the mainstream population, those that have been used to discriminate the people of alternative sexual orientations? Let's try putting it up at workplaces....

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?

2. When and how did you first decide you were heterosexual?

3. Is it possible heterosexuality is a phase you will grow out of?

4. Is it possible you are heterosexual because you fear the same sex?

5. If you have never slept with someone of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer that? Is it possible you merely need a good gay experience?

6. To whom have you disclosed your heterosexuality? How did they react?

7. Why are heterosexuals so blatant; always making a spectacle of their heterosexuality? Why can’t they just be who they are and not flaunt their sexuality by kissing in public, wearing rings, etc?

Continue reading "Is Heterosexuality Normal?" »

Absolutely not. Well, almost.

The fine line is treaded by more than 70 million U.S. women who work, and almost three-quarters of them who have children.

Resultantly, according to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the claims of pregnancy discrimination are increasing, up 31 percent from 1992 to 2005. In Fiscal Year 2005 itself, EEOC received 4,449 charges of pregnancy-based discrimination, resolving 4,321 pregnancy discrimination charges and recovering $11.6 million in monetary benefits for charging parties and other aggrieved individuals (not including monetary benefits obtained through litigation).

Few relevant issues that surface in matters of pregnancy discrimination includes the fact that federal law does not require even minimal accommodation for pregnancy-related disability, as long as the employer treats pregnant employees at least as well as other temporarily disabled employees. But pregnancy not being inherently disabling, many women can work just fine (in comfortable settings such as being an academician), and at the same time, for those women who are in specific jobs requiring physical movements, even normal pregnancy poses limitations.

The pressing needs of the hour then demand that a stable, uniform legislation be in place that makes it a point for the employers to provide accommodation irrespective of the nature of work. A social adaptation to understanding the needs of pregnant women workers, their indispensability, an enforced rule to require employers to keep them in job despite pregnancy, and welcome them back to the job soon after they rejoin after the duly paid leave, is the starting point.

The pregnant pauses by women professionals operate on entirely different dynamics. The women say, these are pauses entirely decided upon by them. Not with any work pressure, and certainly not because of any management misconduct.

This is where the non-essentialist nature of women resurfaces for careful perusal. In the lower economic class bracket, women struggle hard to keep their current jobs, owing to the fact that the manual jobs are the only source of economic sustenance. These are the jobs they rely on to pay the bills, and take care of children. This also leads them to feel the need of confronting the management in case of unjust treatment during pregnancy. The financial factor apart, the women from lower economic strata also do not feel inhibited in claiming discrimination, because often times that’s the last logical resort to attain justice.

In contrast, career professional women in high-profile jobs (television anchors) often tend to underestimate the possible consequences of job loss, one, because they are more certain to get a job back after the ‘phase’ is over, and two, their own reputation is publicly connected with that of their organization (like the masthead rules supreme).

Hence one should not be surprised at statements coming from high profile women professionals today, who even while stepping down from their positions do not ascribe the causes to any sexist organizational structure. They rather prefer to take the onus of decision entirely upon themselves. At times to the extent that they even become defensive.

Just look at ABC “World News Tonight” anchor Elizabeth Vargas’ statement to Philadelphia Inquirer last week, “I'm not a pregnant working mother wronged. I played a crucial and active role in this decision.”

Her need to assert that she had played an active role in this decision is part of a dynamic that has layers within. Before being replaced by 63-year-old Charles Gibson, from a coveted anchor chair position Vargas announced on the television “For now … I need to be a good mother.”

Vargas is forced to play into the stereotypes that foster male domination in an almost invisible manner. By refusing to identify with “wronged” working mother, she affirms the male perspective, that not all pregnant working mothers are wronged if they relinquish the jobs. Or the statement that to be a “good mother” she needed to leave the job, is another vindication of male norms.

In the entire process of assertive positions of privilege, fundamental system of gender oppression remains entirely unquestioned. Why does a woman have to make a decision that will tantamount to her “leaving” the job? Even if the decision is made “actively”, how informed is the decision? Why would not the organization insist that she does not leave the job especially considering that the audience was looking forward to receiving Vargas, a pregnant Vargas with all the warmth? Finally, why would the onus of proving a good parent necessarily lie on a woman? And why becoming a good mother should entail closed door disconnect from one’s profession one so carefully shapes up throughout?

Unlike railroad miners or fast food counter cashier women, high-profile women may not be in desperation of a source of financial sustenance. But exactly like them, they are exploited systematically in the male myth world of a value system of adjudging a pregnant woman as weak, a working woman as bad mother and an assertive working woman as limited conditional resource.

A pamphlet prepared by members of the Carnegie Mellon University Women's Center has extremely valuable explanations of terms that will be useful to heterosexual people and those who are planning to come out. The work says it will help the heterosexuals to learn basic common terms related to the gender and sexual identity communities, so that they can speak somewhat intelligently with members of these communities without seriously offending people or appearing totally clueless. Here is the entire list:

Continue reading "LGBT terms explained" »

In an attempt to discredit Sub-comandante Marcos, one of the Zapatista leaders in southern Mexico, government officials there tried to spread the idea that Marcos was gay. Considering how machismo runs strong in Mexico, the administration thought that this image would tarnish the leader’s credibility.

In our world of capitalistic standards (or one may say, Fascist standards), societal normatives are imposed in various disguises. At some level, they are called laws, at another moral principles. Some walls read out the Commandments, and some schools teach Supreme Intelligent Design. Media represent the standards of beauty that the elite men desire. Women are granted freedom in phases, and are expected to be grateful in return. Historical discriminations are natural corollaries of capitalistic settings of production. With a manufactured consent around what must prevail in order to suit the class interests of the elite corporate domains, the minorities are divided, and then ruled over.

So, did Marcos think he was part of the minority? Yes.
Hence, hopelessly defeatist? Hell, no!

Marcos responded to the “charges” by writing a poem. He owned up the charge, embraced it and displayed how the weak are in reality the strong, the minorities are actually the majority:

“Yes, Marcos is gay
Marcos is gay in San Francisco
Black in South Africa
An Asian in Europe
A Chicano in San Ysidro
An anarchist in Spain
A Palestinian in Israel
A Mayan Indian in the streets of San Cristobal
A Jew in Germany
A Gypsy in Poland
A Mohawk in Quebec
A pacifist in Bosnia
A single woman on the Metro at 10pm
A peasant without land
A gang member in the slums
An unemployed worker
An unhappy student and, of course,
A Zapatista in the mountains.
Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized, oppressed minorities resisting and saying ‘Enough’.
He is every minority who is now beginning to speak to every majority that must shut up and listen.
He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak.
Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable – this is Marcos.”
[From Social Justice E-Zine #27.]

Blog is one such platform, where every minority speaks to every majority. Intrinsically a communication that is not top-down, but bottom-up. Blogosphere today consists of noise, albeit undistinguishable noise that represent a spiral of silence; where the medium works as a great educator, a fine agitator and a solid organizer.

But what’s a fine law firm like ours doing with a blog? Considering that Law is highly professional because it’s articulate, while Blog is generalist effort because its so random?

Well, the answer is inherent. Law is as specific as pertaining to the case. Blog is as random as it is allowed to be. This is a Blawg, a legal blog. One which will highlight, showcase, fervently advocate for, and unabashedly champion the cause of the underprivileged, historically dispossessed and professionally harassed. This will be an honest attempt at offering multiple perspectives within the struggle for social justice. And you, the reader, are most welcome to visit us anytime, everyday. We value your feedback and unwavering support!