In a talk about the economy earlier this week, Representative Andre Carson (a member of the Congressional Black Caucus) suggested that the Tea Party are the same people who in another time would have loved to see black people “hanging on a tree.”
Such language is by its very nature controversial. It is also overwrought because an allusion to lynching and the “strange fruit” of this country’s recent memory conceals more than it reveals. In much the same way that black conservatives and their white handlers deploy the horrid language of “the plantation” and “run away slaves” to describe African Americans who make a choice to support the Democratic Party, an appeal to lynching as a means to describe the motives of one’s political foes has to be handled with great care and precision.
For those reasons, Carson’s suggestion was problematic. But perhaps not in the ways that many would assume.
Let’s begin with a simple question. What do we know about the Tea Party? Who are its members? What do Tea Party members believe? What is their rhetoric? What are their dreams and goals for the country?
From recent public opinion research, we know that the Tea Party’s membership is made up of older, almost exclusively white folks, and that they want to “return” the country to “Christian values” and “the Constitution.” We also know that their animus and upset did not take full form until the election of Barack Obama, America’s first Black President. Moreover, public opinion data has revealed that Tea Party members are more likely to believe that blacks are not hard working, are lazy, and complain too much about racism. Tea Party members, as a function of their Conservative political orientation, are awash in racially resentful attitudes. The Tea Party uses the language of secession and the neo-Confederacy. They also advocate violent solutions to removing an “illegitimate” and “Socialist” President: these are the Tea Party’s dreams of civic virtue and justice.
In all, the Tea Party is in many ways a group of white folks who feel “oppressed” because of their race and believe that they are victims of prejudice in the Age of Obama.
The signs at their rallies which depict the President as a monkey or witch doctor, the statements of their leaders, as well as the private emails and other documents which have come to light, are all plain in the face types of evidence for the role of bigotry and prejudice as driving factors in the Tea Party movement.
A second question. What do we know about the lynchings of black Americans?
Thousands of black Americans were lynched between the 1880s and the 1930s. In fact, the last lynching occurred in 1981. Lynchings took place all over the country and not just in the South. They were a form of racial terrorism by Whites against blacks that was intended to maintain their dominant position across the colorline. No one–children, women (some who were pregnant) and men–was spared the threat of death by rope, bonfire, gun, pipe, truncheon or other foul weapon.
Lynchings were a type of ritualized violence. This is a critical fact that cannot be overlooked. Lynchings were festive civic events, where whites would buy souvenirs (often human body parts from the victims), take photos, and circulate said images on postcards all over the country. In total, racial violence was a way of creating White community in a White supremacist society. Take for example the oft cited lynching of Sam Hose:
The train carrying Hose to Newnan was packed with people who were eager to witness the man’s execution. As soon as Hose was off of the train, a huge mob crowded around him and marched him to the jail, cheering and shouting along the way. Plans were made to take Hose back to Palmetto for his execution; however, several prominent members of the community spoke out, pleading with the mob to allow justice to take its course. Governor Candler ordered even ordered out the troops. Upon hearing this, the mob decided that the execution needed to take place immediately and within minutes, Sam Hose was hanging from a tree.
Hose’s execution was extremely brutal. Hose initially refused to confess, but after his ears were cut from his head, he claimed responsibility for the crimes. The Atlanta Constitution reported that 2000 witnesses watched as he was burned alive and his body cut and mutilated. Peculiarly, the man responsible for dousing Hose’s body and clothes in kerosene was a stranger from the North, who was reported as saying that, though he did not know how people from his part of the country would respond to this, he felt the need to avenge the terrible crimes that had been committed. “For sickening sights, harrowing details and bloodcurdling incidents, the burning of Holt is unsurpassed by any occurrence of a like kind ever heard of in the history of the state’. Even Hose’s bones were taken from the scene as souvenirs.
To the eyes of 21st century “post-racial” Americans, this description of barbaric violence seems like something out of a dark, anachronistic past. The participants were “bad” people, outliers, and most whites were “good” people who would never do such a thing. The reality suggests otherwise.
In a Jim and Jane Crow America, with its sundown towns, and rites and rituals of both formal and informal white supremacy and racism, lynchings were a relatively common event. In a post-Civil Rights moment where white savior movies such as The Help flatten history by depicting an America where most whites were decent, and only a few bad people were racist villains, it is hard for many in the public to accept a painful truth: the thousands of white people who attended Sam Hose’s lynching thought that they were doing patriotism’s work; they represented the silent majority. In the context of an unapologetically racist America, where whiteness was the very definition of “American” and “citizen,” they indeed were.
In the White imagination of Jim and Jane Crow, the lynching of black people was an act of civic virtue. Its rhetoric and ritual was centered around white men protecting white communities (and in particular white women) from the “violence” of blacks. Ultimately, lynching was a physical representation of an “us vs. them” ethos and the necessity of the colorline.
The counterfactual of the Tea Party equals the white supremacist violence of lynching and the hanging tree is a difficult one because we cannot transport individuals through time. But, there is an eerie resonance and echo of continuity between an America where Sam Hose and others were carved up as human souvenirs for the the delight of a debased White Soul and the often mouth frothing rage and hostility by the Right and the Tea Party towards Barack Obama, the country’s first black president.
If Carson were more nuanced and precise he would have instead suggested that the Tea Party and the lynching crowd come from the same political wellsprings and share the same political imagination. Of course, white supremacy has changed and evolved over time. Consequently, the expression of such white rage will most certainly be altered. The Tea Party’s language of “we want our America,” the naked pandering to white resentment and fear, their abuse of patriotic rhetoric and symbols, overt racial appeals, and how symbolic racism and anti-black sentiment drive their ideology are part of a long lineage reaching back to the John Birch Society, the White Citizens’ Councils, and Jim Crow.
And yes, this does include the heinous and evil legacy of lynching where thousands of black folks were burned alive, disfigured, dismembered, and hung from trees.
The Tea Party and its white populist foot soldiers would likely not have held the rope at the lynching party. But, like the many thousands who attended Sam Hose’s murder, the Tea Party’s members would have dressed in their finest Sunday clothing and brought the kids along on a picnic. The more blood thirsty would have howled and cheered as the victim was torn asunder and their genitals mutilated. The shy and cowardly would have stood on the edge of the crowd catching a peek of the ritual, satisfied that “their” country was safe and that “the blacks” were being taught to know their place.
History is not fair. It is often ugly. It can be uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the racist origins of White Conservative populism are an uncomfortable truth that must be exposed if we are to truly understand the dynamics of race in the Age of Obama.
Written by Editor-in-Chief Jodi Jacobson for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
It’s not often that I agree with Michael Gerson, the conservative former speech writer for President George H.W. Bush, advocate for abstinence-only policies in U.S. global AIDS programs, and columnist for the Washington Post.
Today, however, I am in near-full agreement with him on a piece he published in today’s Post.
Gerson just returned from a trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo sponsored by CARE during which he and others saw firsthand the struggles of women who live in societies in which they have little control of whether, when and whom they marry, and whether, when and how many children they bear. In these settings, women bear more children than they want and can afford to raise, infant and child mortality rates are high, and complications of both pregnancy and unsafe abortion are the leading cause of deaths among women ages 15 to 49. Medical care is largely inaccessible.
Reproductive and sexual health and rights advocates have always argued that ensuring that women have unfettered access to family planning information and counseling and consistent contraceptive supplies is a “pro-life” strategy, because voluntary family planning dramatically improves the quality of life and survival rates of both children and their mothers, and by extension, families and societies.
But the anti-choice movement in the United has moved from opposing abortion per se to opposing all forms of birth control, an agenda it was always suspected to have in the first place. As such, this movement, led largely by male religious leaders, Congressmen or virulently anti-choice male activists opposes support for family planning services and birth control methods both at home and abroad.
Having a “card-carrying” conservative evangelical columnist support family planning as a “pro-life” intervention not only speaks to reality, it is what I hope to be a welcome first step in pushing back against anti-choice positions that cost far more lives–those of women and children–than they ever “save.”
Visiting the village of Bweremana, Gerson writes….
Written by Toni K. Thayer for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
The legal landscape for abortion is changing rapidly in Ohio, as it is in many states. Our governor recently signed into law a measure requiring as-yet-unspecified “viability testing” on women seeking abortions past 20 weeks. At least half a dozen other restrictive measures were recently passed or are on the horizon, including the “Heartbeat Bill,” which seeks to outlaw abortions as early as 6 weeks (before many women know they are pregnant). It’s unclear what this will all mean for clinics and for women. At my clinic, Preterm, the largest independent abortion provider in the state, women are calling us daily asking if abortion is still legal.
At the same time, Ohio clinics and our patients are now dealing with the effects of a restrictive law passed several years ago. Caught up in court challenges until last spring, this law dictates the way medication abortions—induced by a combination of mifepristone (mife), also known as RU-486, and misoprostol (miso)—must be performed in Ohio. It requires doctors to use an outdated FDA regimen, established during trials in the 1990s, instead of a lower-dose evidence-based regimen that has been used safely and effectively all over the U.S. for more than a decade.
Essentially, the FDA regimen shortens the time a medication abortion can be used from 63 days to 48 (or from 9 weeks of pregnancy to just under 7), triples the amount of mife used (and at $90 a pill that adds up!), and increases the required number of clinic visits from three to four, so that a doctor can watch the patient swallow the miso at the clinic rather than allowing her to dissolve it inside her cheek at home.
Our First Case
The first medication abortion patient we saw at Preterm after the new regulations went into effect was exactly one day over the new legal limit for taking the combo of pills that is used to end an early pregnancy without surgical intervention. Denise had estimated that she was within the stipulated 48 days, but her ultrasound measured her at 49 days. “It took a lot of work for her to even get here,” explained Director of Counseling Samara Knox, “and she was really devastated when we told her she was too far.”
Denise had had a difficult time with her abortion decision. She was sure she could not keep the pregnancy, but she wrestled with the stigma, shame, and fear that so often surround abortion in our culture.
Celebrate Labor Day. Really, celebrate. It’s important.
Wear a t-shirt announcing to the world the name of your union and march in a parade, chanting and whooping it up about how glad you are to belong to an organization whose members are devoted to looking out for each other. If you’re among those without a union, proclaim your profession and declare your pride in the hard work you do. Make some happy noise. Infect your fellow marchers with your zeal.
Invite your most beleaguered neighbors, friends and co-workers over for a picnic. Raise a pint, braise some burgers and praise your companions for their skill, devotion and compassion. Recognize them for all they’ve persevered through since this relentless recession began in December of 2007. Build esprit de corps among your fellow workers.
This is one day devoted to labor, to the middle class, to the majority. One day out of 365. On this holiday, everyone gives an obligatory nod to workers. So don’t fret this Labor Day. Don’t waste it away in apathetic doldrums. Don’t let the minority rich and their purchased politicians take this celebration away from us too.
Some, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, have called for protests on Labor Day. They say workers must use this opportunity to demand that Washington solve the real crisis debilitating this country – dogged joblessness.
Reich is right. But it’s too early for that. Ultimately, workers must flip this ugly situation upside down so that once a year it’s Rich People’s Day. Once a year, the middle class gives the frivolous Kardashians and tax-shirking GEs of the world an obligatory nod. But every other day, 364 days a year, is labor day.
Then, we would have a country committed to the wellbeing of the majority, the middle class, the workers, whose labor creates wealth.
Getting there is a long haul from where we are now, though. We must develop some self-confidence before we start protesting. Achieving the change we want requires an uprising of hope and anger. There’s plenty of anger out there. The populace is seething after suffering years of “no, not-for-you” politics from country club conservatives:
No more unemployment insurance extensions. No more Social Security and Medicare as you and your parents know it. No public option, providing health insurance for all. No end to tax breaks for corporations that off-shore jobs. No more Trade Adjustment Assistance workers who lose their jobs because of off-shoring. No end to tax breaks for corporate jets. No end to tax breaks for oil companies making billions. No end to income tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. No extension of the payroll tax break for the middle class. No reasonable restrictions on the big Wall Street banks that got bailed out with taxpayer money. No help for unemployed homeowners threatened with foreclosure. And no, there won’t be any jobs program. The country club conservatives must sustain high unemployment to regain the White House. So too bad for the jobless.
These unremitting attacks on the middle class have left workers feeling beaten up and beaten down. Workers are suffering from what author, psychologist and social critic Bruce E. Levine calls “battered people syndrome.” Exhausted, depressed, and blaming themselves for the country’s problems, too many workers feel unable to challenge the elite overlords.
This combination of anger and hopelessness produces destruction and self-destruction, like the riots that left London burning last summer. Hopeless about their future and angry at the rich for bilking the poor and at expense-padding British politicians imposing “austerity,” the city’s jobless ruffians abandoned morals, just as the wealthy and the ruling class had.
Frances Fox Piven counsels in her book, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America that hope is crucial, that constructive change arises from the mix of hope and anger. In places like Libya and Egypt this Arab Spring, wealth proved insufficient to overpower the majority invigorated by hope and anger.
The bitch for the rich in a democracy like America’s is that majority rules. And, frankly, the rich and corporations (newly dubbed persons by the U.S. Supreme Court) are a tiny minority in America.
Even though we’re the majority, workers can’t win until we hope we can, until we feel some assurance that we can overcome. It’s a long haul to hope from resignation and pessimism.
So let’s put some effort into fostering optimism. Let’s strengthen each other this Labor Day. We must raise that hope before we organize Reich’s protests.
Rile yourself up and pump up a friend this Labor Day so we can unite in anger and hope to push back the naysayers and make every day Labor Day. This video helps.
***
Leo W. Gerard also is a member of the AFL-CIO Executive Committee and chairs the labor federation’s Public Policy Committee. President Barack Obama recently appointed him to the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations. He serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance and on the boards of the Apollo Alliance, Campaign for America’s Future and the Economic Policy Institute. He is a member of the IMF and ICEM global labor federations and was instrumental in creating Workers Uniting, the first global union. Follow @USWBlogger
Not quite a year ago, NASA climatologist James Hansen joined hundreds of Appalachian coalfield activists, including Teri Blanton, Maria Gunnoe, Bo Webb, Larry Gibson, Mickey McCoy and Bob Kincaid at a sit-in in front of the White House, and called for the abolition of mountaintop removal mining.
In an extraordinary act of solidarity, Blanton and other Appalachian coalfield leaders will join the growing climate justice sit-in at the White House today, calling on President Obama to deny the TransCanada Keystone pipeline permit. Hansen, who has defined the pipeline decision as a litmus test for the Obama administration’s commitment to dealing with climate change, was arrested earlier this week.
“If this pipeline is built and they continue to mine tar sands the climate that I have enjoyed over my lifetime in Kentucky will forever be changed. It is already changing, and our people are drinking poison water and breathing unhealthy particles from the extraction, transporting, processing and burning of coal,” Blanton said. “We must take back our democracy and demand that decisions be made based on sound science, just as the President said he would. There is nothing sound about building a pipeline across our country.”
No one understands the reckless devastation from tar sands operations better than coalfield residents, especially affected residents in central Appalachia. Strip mining, in fact, takes place in 24 states across the country. If the White House can’t end the disastrous pipeline or mountaintop removal mining–an egregious criminal operation that provides less than 5 percent of our national coal production and has unleashed one of the most urgent humanitarian crises in our country–any just transition to a clean energy future seems dim.
Tar sands mining operation, photo courtesy Tar Sands Action
Mountaintop removal mining operation, photo courtesy of Plundering Appalachia
Earlier this spring, Blanton and other Kentucky activists, including nationally acclaimed author Wendell Berry, invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for civil disobedience in a sit-in at the Kentucky governor’s office, demanding an end to mountaintop removal mining. Yesterday, in fact, Blanton and a cadre of Appalachians stood before the Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial, where passages of the civil rights leader’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in 1963 remain as relevant as ever in an age of climate destablization and environmental injustice:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.
Teri Blanton, photo courtesy of Colleen Unroe
As they take their place on the sit-in line today, Appalachian activists have also brought a new version of one of their celebrated anthems to the White House protests: Which Side Are You On, the famous labor ballad written for coal mining union organizers by Florence Reece in Blanton’s native Harlan County, Kentucky, in 1932:
Which side are you on, Obama?
Which side are you.
Which side are you on, Obama?
Which side are you.
They say on this planet
There are no neutrals there
You’re either for the people
Or the grubbin profiteers
Which side are you on, Obama?
Which side are you.
Which side are you on, Obama?
Which side are you.
Don’t build that pipeline
Don’t tear our mountains down
Us poor folks don’t stand a chance
Unless we organize
As the Super Congress eyes trillions in budget cuts that will undermine the quality of life for most Americans, here’s a stunning fact to contemplate: Twenty-five hugely profitable U.S. companies paid their CEOs more last year than they paid Uncle Sam in taxes.
In other words, the more CEOs dodge their civic responsibilities, the more lavishly they’re paid. That’s the key finding of a new Institute for Policy Studies report, Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging, which I co-authored.
These artful dodgers include the CEOs of Verizon, Boeing, Honeywell, General Electric, International Paper, Prudential, eBay, Bank of New York Mellon, Ford, Motorola, Qwest Communications, Dow Chemical, and Stanley Black and Decker. Their average annual compensation totaled $16.7 million, well above last year’s average of $10.8 million for the CEOs of S&P 500 companies.
Instead of paying their fair share, these companies spend millions lobbying for additional tax breaks and loopholes. Twenty of the 25 companies spent more lobbying Congress last year than they paid the IRS in federal corporate taxes. General Electric invested $41.8 million in lobbying and got $3.3 billion in tax refunds. Boeing spent $20 million on lobbying and got a $35 billion contract from the U.S. government, while paying a paltry $13 million in U.S. taxes for a company with $4.3 billion in U.S. income last year.
Eighteen of the 25 companies aggressively use off shore tax havens to shift profits around the globe to avoid U.S. taxes. These 18 companies together had 556 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands, Singapore, Ireland, and other havens. The offshore scam works like this: companies pretend their profits are earned in low-tax or no-tax jurisdictions — and then feign losses from their U.S. operations at tax time.
Whatever happened to corporate civic leadership? A previous generation of CEOs would have been ashamed to be compensated so lavishly while their companies abandoned responsibility for paying their fair share. They would have been embarrassed to go year after year contributing little or nothing to the public investments that make the United States a vibrant business environment.
Here are a few examples of these champion tax-dodgers:
- Chesapeake Energy paid its CEO Aubrey McClendon $21 million last year but paid zero federal corporate income tax in 2010. Chesapeake is fracking the tax code, drilling it for every possible subsidy it can extract — while lobbying to preserve antiquated tax breaks for oil and gas industry.
- Online retailer eBay paid its CEO John Donahoe $21.4 million last year while collecting a federal tax refund of $131 million. eBay’ 31 subsidiaries in Switzerland, Singapore, and seven other tax havens facilitate its efforts to move money around the planet as a tax-dodging strategy.
- Insurance giant Marsh & McLennan paid its CEO Brian Duperrault $14 million yet collected a $90 million tax refund from Uncle Sam. The company has 105 subsidiaries in 20 off shore tax havens, including 25 in Bermuda — a favorite locale for insurance companies seeking to avoid both taxes and regulation.
These super-moocher companies happily benefit from the privileges and advantages of doing business in the United States. If a competitor tries to steal their product or idea, these corporations rush to the U.S court system and law enforcement agencies for remedies and justice. The U.S. military guards their global assets.
They use the fertile ground of publicly funded research and infrastructure to bolster their own profits. They create new products from a foundation of Uncle Sam’s investments in medical and scientific research and government funded technologies like the Internet. Our taxpayer-funded roads, ports, and bridges bolster their business environment. Our public schools and universities educate the workers these companies rely on. In fact 16 of these 25 CEOs attended public universities. They personally were educated with help from U.S. tax dollars.
These CEOs profess to love America. But when it comes time to pay the bills, they’d rather outsource that job over to you or the small business down the road.
Congress should pass the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act which would limit some of these tax shenanigans. In the face of growing fiscal austerity, these companies should contribute to the solution and pay their fair share of U.S. taxes.
For more information, see the new Institute for Policy Studies report, Executive Excess 2011: The Massive CEO Rewards for Tax Dodging.
Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas speaks at the 2007 World Economic Forum during a session entitled "Enough is Enough - Israel and the Palestinian Territories." Photo by the World Economic Forum.
According to a classified cable obtained by Haaretz, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, has informed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that Israel has no chance of preventing the U.N. General Assembly from recognizing Palestine as a state.
Prosor’s assessment is consistent with what has been observed for some time: that only a handful of U.N. member states plan to vote against the Palestinian initiative in the General Assembly, with an expected 130-140 countries voting in favor. And among Western nations, only five so far have pledged to vote against recognition of a Palestinian state: Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and the United States.
Of those five countries, which nation stands alone in refusing to consider changing its voting stance if the Palestinians include language indicating a continued commitment to peace talks with Israel in its U.N. bid? The United States.
America’s isolation is stunning. But it gets worse.
The United States is the only country currently standing in the Palestinian Authority’s way in its push to attain full U.N. member status for Palestine. In order to become a full U.N. member state, the Palestinians must go through the U.N. Security Council (UNSC), which consists of 15 nations, five of which have veto powers. One of those five nations, China, recently stated publicly that it would vote in favor of Palestinian statehood in the UNSC. However, the Obama administration has made clear that it intends to veto any efforts by the PA in the UNSC, effectively blocking any chance for Palestine to become a state according to international law. (For U.N. resolutions dealing with statehood to be legally binding, they must first be passed by the UNSC.)
What remains uncertain is whether or not Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas will formally go to the UNSC first and force the U.S. to cast its veto vote. Such a move would certainly be bold, for it would be done with the sole intention of highlighting America’s obstructionist and isolationist stance toward Palestinian statehood as the entire world watches.
While it’s unclear if Abbas will test the U.S. in this way, what is certain is that Abbas will seek a vote in the General Assembly for a nonbinding resolution calling upon the international community to recognize Palestine as a state. Such a resolution, while having no legal force, will almost certainly pass (with a U.S. “no” vote), and will be a symbolic victory for the Palestinians in the face of American opposition.
With peace talks between the PA and Israel stalled largely due to Netanyahu’s intransigence, and with settlement construction continuing apace, eating away at more and more of Palestinian land in the West Bank, the Palestinians had to make a move. And considering that the U.N. is the traditional forum where such issues can be resolved, it’s entirely appropriate for Abbas to be seeking statehood through the U.N.
What is entirely inappropriate, in my opinion, is the level of American obstructionism. The Obama administration claims that it cannot support such a unilateral move by the Palestinians. However, seeking statehood through the U.N., when all other options have been exhausted, is a multilateral move. The irony is that Israel’s continued, illegal settlement construction is unilateral, and yet this construction evokes from America nothing more than rhetorical slaps on the wrist.
The PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, has argued that U.N. membership could actually enhance the chances for a peaceful settlement with Israel in that it would legally force geopolitical issues, such as the occupation and settlements, to be resolved.
The Obama administration disagrees.
What happens after the U.N. vote is anyone’s guess, as not many parties seem to have thought through this process entirely, including the Palestinians.
However, whatever happens, one thing is sure: America will be on the outside looking in.
Add your voice to Tikkun’s petition for the recognition of Palestine by the U.N.
David Harris-Gershon’s work has appeared in the Jerusalem Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Colorado Review and elsewhere. His memoir, Shrapnel, is currently making the rounds. He received his MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and has worked extensively as an educator, teaching creative writing at the university level and Israeli History / Jewish Studies at the high school level.
To read more pieces like this, sign up for Tikkun Daily’s free newsletter, sign up for Tikkun Magazine emails or visit us online. You can also like Tikkun on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Written by Yifat Susskind for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Amal* left her village in Somalia when she realized that there was nothing left there for her. There was no food and no water. So she gathered her emaciated children and began the long trek to the refugee camps in northeastern Kenya. She thought that being forced to leave her home would be the worst thing to ever happen to her.
That was until she was attacked and raped by bandits on the way.
I recently returned from Kenya, where Somali women and families are seeking refuge by the thousands. I met with Hubbie Hussein Al-Haji of MADRE’s sister organization, Womankind Kenya, a grassroots women’s organization of Somali pastoralists. We talked about the most urgent needs for famine refugees—for food and water—and about how MADRE and Womankind Kenya can work together to provide for them.
And Hubbie told me about Amal and other women like her, who are arriving in northeastern Kenya traumatized not only from famine and displacement—but also from being raped along the trek.
The professional carwash industry is a $23 billion enterprise, one which more and more Americans make use of every year. If you visited a carwash lately – which judging by the latest industry report you probably have or will in the near future – you may have noticed the fast and arduous labor of carwash workers. You have seen that even in the most extreme heat or cold weather, carwash workers are hard at it – focusing on every nook and cranny of your vehicle. What you probably missed – as is the case in many carwashes across the country – is that this work is accompanied by obscene labor abuses, health hazardous conditions, employer exploitation and intimidation. Carwash workers are the face of the new American sweatshop.
Carwash operators routinely violate basic employment laws like those requiring workers be permitted to take rest breaks or have access to shade and clean drinking water. Workers frequently work more than 10 hours a day, more than 6 days a week, without even the slightest thought of overtime. In fact, car wash workers are often paid much less than the legal minimum wage, sometimes earning less than $3 an hour or working for cash tips alone. Employees who complain about the exploitative conditions at the workplace are often intimidated and threatened by car wash operators.
A majority of carwash workers are Latino and immigrants – many do not have a clear understanding of their rights, which opens the door for abusive car wash operators to take advantage. Cuéntame has launched a documentary video and a national campaign exposing the sweatshop practices and is calling for individuals who have witnessed these or other abusive conditions at their local car washes to submit there stories on their website.
Cuéntame has documented how carwash workers are subject to health and safety hazards such as constant exposure to water and to dangerous chemicals without protective gear. Workers in the industry have reported severe kidney damage, respiratory problems and nerve deterioration. Most lack health insurance, services or protection and end up using up all their earnings to pay their medical bills. It is a shameful and vicious cycle with no apparent end.
According to the Community Labor Environmental Action Network (CLEAN), an advocacy organization working to protect car wash workers’ rights, in Los Angeles, CA alone there are approximately 10,000 carwash workers that are potentially exposed to this abuse on a daily basis. This past June, the Clean Carwash Campaign helped a former Los Angeles carwash worker win an $80,000 lawsuit against his ex-employers who forced him for years to work early in the morning but prevented him from clocking in officially until later in the day. The campaign has been working to improve conditions and to ensure that carwash employers meet labor standards and abide by fair workplace practices, but there is still much more that needs to be done.
The exploitation of car wash workers is the face of a new American sweatshop, one that operates in plain daylight in our communities, in our neighborhoods and at our corner carwash. It’s time to stop turning a blind eye to it.
Written by Saul Paau Maaz for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
This fall, world population will reach 7 billion people at a time of accelerated environmental disruption. This article is part of a series commissioned by RH Reality Check with Laurie Mazur as guest editor. The series examines population and environmental change from various perspectives and explores the policies and actions needed to both avoid and mitigate the inevitable impacts of these changes.
Here, Saúl Paau Maaz explains how his people, the ancient Mayans—and their indigenous descendants in Guatemala—saw the profound interconnectedness of human reproduction and stewardship of natural resources, and practiced respectful restraint. But traditional ways are being destroyed, and new solutions are needed.
All of the articles in this series, Seven Billion People, can be found here.
Growing up in the deep, lush jungle of Petén, under an endless green canopy, I learned that human life and the natural world are inseparable. My parents and grandparents taught me that people are just one element of Mother Nature; her protection and care is our responsibility.
For generations, my people, the Maya Q’eqchi’, have inhabited the Petén, which has always been sacred for its forests, which shelter a diverse array of animals and plants. The wealth of those forests extends well beyond Guatemala’s borders: in fact, researchers describe them as the Americas’ “third lung” because of their oxygen production.
But today, my homeland is in trouble. Its biological wealth is threatened by drug farms, road building, cattle ranching, forest fires, and rapid population growth. Multinational companies are destroying the forests, as are sprawling human settlements. The jungle where I was born is now a disaster area, plundered and exploited. Every year, 100 to 150 square miles of forest are lost. In less than three and a half decades, Petén’s forest cover has shrunk from 90 percent to 50 percent of the land mass.
It Hasn’t Always Been this Way….
