Written by Andrea Miller for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Monica has it good. A junior at Bard High School Early College on the Lower East Side, she has a twice-weekly health class this semester that includes one unit each on sex education and on HIV and AIDS. Two-hundred blocks north at Aerospace High School in the Bronx, eighteen-year-old Tamara has never been taught sex education, and it doesn’t appear on the syllabus for this semester’s health class. Somewhere in between, metaphorically anyway, eighteen-year-old Brandon at New Design High School has the option of choosing sex education as a one-week elective, alongside other options like sports, LGBTQ Alliance, and poetry. “It’s a shame you have to pick it,” Brandon said, because so many students don’t.
New York City’s universal standard for sex education, announced by schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott in a letter to middle school and high school principals on August 9, 2011, seeks to put an end to this loose patchwork of sex ed programs across the city.
There’s the top 1% of wealthy Americans (bankers, oil tycoons, hedge fund managers) and there’s the top 0.01% of wealthy Americans: the military contractor CEOs.
If you’ve been following the War Costs campaign, you already know that these corporations are bad bosses, bad job creators and bad stewards of taxpayer dollars. What you may not know is that the huge amount of money these companies’ CEOs make off of war and your tax dollars places them squarely at the top of the gang of corrupt superrich choking our democracy. These CEOs want you to believe the massive war budget is about security — it’s not. The lobbying they’re doing to keep the war budget intact at the expense of the social safety net is purely about their greed.
In many areas, including yearly CEO salary and in dollars spent corrupting Congress, these companies are far greater offenders than even the big banks like JP Morgan Chase or Bank of America.
Egregious Military Contractor CEO pay
The top 0.01% of earners make at least $9.14 million per year, a rarefied strata of income that includes defense company CEOs and Wall Street bank chieftains alike. But a deeper dive demonstrates how defense companies outpace the big banks’ knack for enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.
Military Contractor CEO Pay in 2010
- Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush: $22.84 million.
- Lockheed Martin CEO Robert Stevens: $21.89 million.
- Boeing CEO James McNerney: $19.4 million.
Just to put that in context, consider how these annual payoffs compare to the people we’re used to thinking of as poster children for the top 1 percent:
Financial Sector CEO Pay in 2010
- JP Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon: $20.81 million.
- Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf: $18.97 million.
- Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan: $1.94 million.
Considering how they stack up to financial sector heads, war industry CEOs aren’t just members of the 1%; they’re the super-elite among them, the one-hundredth of a percent.
Lobbying Domination
Disgusted by the overwhelming corporate influence in Congress? Look no further than the big military contractor companies, whose flagship companies spend enough on lobbying to dwarf even financial sector titans.
War Industry Lobbying Expenditures for 2010
- Lockheed Martin: $12.7 million.
- Northrop Grumman: $15.7 million.
- Boeing: $17.89 million.
Again, just to provide some context, here are the same lobbying totals for some of the most recognized names in the financial sector.
Financial Sector Lobbying in 2010
- JP Morgan Chase:$7.41 million.
- Wells Fargo: $5.43 million.
- Bank of America: $3.98 million.
The war industry gets away with blowing our money on job-killing spending because it can bend Congress to its whim. In the process, the industry is like a vacuum sucking up brain power and engineering resources that could and would establish and grow entirely new wholesome industries. It’s no surprise that Americans confront a 9.1% unemployment rate and an under-employment rate flirting with 20 percent this year.
Want to know where all the money went that could be putting people back to work or keeping U.S. manufacturing industries competitive? The war industry CEOs dumped lobbying cash on Congress and diverted all that wealth to their private bank accounts.
Striking a blow for democracy
The war contractors’ iron grip on the wealth and politics of our country has caught the attention of our friends at Occupy Wall Street, who are targeting war profiteers in its draft list of demands with a call to bring home “all military personnel at all non-essential bases” and to end the “Military Industrial Complex’s goal of perpetual war for profit.”
We’re allies of the Occupy movement, which swells from the 99%’s disgust and dysfunction with our system. A democracy for and of the people that favors the 0.01% at the expense of the 99.99% of us is no democracy at all.
We here at Brave New Foundation and the War Costs campaign have been inspired by the incredible work of the Occupy movement, so we created our latest video to help push this critical piece of their message: war for profit has to end. We’re asking viewers to share our video with their local Occupy groups and organize a guerrilla screening at an Occupy protest in your city.
The Occupy protests have a lot to teach us, and the leaderless movement is at minimum an indictment of our political system. They’ve stopped whispering, and we’ve all started shouting.
Occupy your city and show this video to your community.
Written by Luisa Cabal for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
Beatrice Wajiku was not a typical 14-year-old. Like most young girls, she enjoyed playing in the neighborhood and sharing secrets with friends. But unlike most teenagers she was the primary breadwinner for a family that had been wholly devastated by unbelievable poverty, crime, and tragic illness.
Her father had died of AIDS and tuberculosis. Her brother and his wife were also dead: Thugs killed him. AIDS killed her. Her mother—while still alive—was incapacitated by two years of battling complications from tuberculosis, including spinal damage and limited mobility. Beatrice was left to pick up the pieces for the remaining family – four younger siblings and two nieces. At age 13, she left school in Nairobi, Kenya, to wash clothes for other women, and when work was scarce, her desperation led her to have sex with men for as little as two dollars per encounter.
Unsurprisingly, Beatrice eventually became pregnant.
Written by Allison Korn for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
On November 8th, 2011, Mississippians will vote on Proposition 26, a ballot measure that, if passed, would alter the state constitution, redefining the word “person” to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof. While a similar measure was defeated in Colorado by wide margins, in 2008 and again in 2010, many people fear that such a measure could easily pass in Mississippi. What few—in Mississippi or beyond—anticipated was the strong grassroots opposition that has emerged against the measure.
I’d like to introduce David Bouie, who is fighting back against the Koch brothers as an important part of our Koch Brothers Exposed campaign.
I want Charles and David Koch to come visit me first hand and see how their factory and pollution have hurt my neighbors. I have heard from thousands of people all across the country, but I am still looking and listening for a RSVP from Charles and David themselves.
I told the Koch brothers I would take care of them as my guests. My wife and I would prepare pork chops or anything they wished. I simply wanted to walk with them around South Penn Road. Of 15 houses here, about 11 people have died from cancer.
I would tell Charles and David Koch that it would be a memorable experience for all of us. This is an opportunity for them to do something for good and the community here that made their factory prosper. They can stop this with a stroke of a pen.
I’m renewing my invitation to the Koch brothers. I want the Koch brothers to see the effects of their factory on our community. Their company donates to local schools and churches, but it’s poisoning our part of town.
The comments I saw, which responded to our community’s uphill appeal to the Koch brothers, were incredible. And I’m wondering what the Koch brothers themselves have to say about everything that’s happened since we on South Penn Road have gone public with our plight, as well as why they’re hiding from me.
A fog hangs over our homes, and the smell is putrid. You can even smell it three miles away from our neighborhood. The stench comes from streams near my street, and the wind blows it over our homes. How can I describe the scent? It’s like a rotten egg, but a lot of times the smell changes between all four seasons and the hour of day.
My experience with friends, neighbors, strangers, what have you, everyone typically acknowledges an offer of hospitality. But the Koch brothers ignored my olive branch invitation and me.
Instead, I read about the Koch brothers’ website that smeared my integrity. All I wanted was for Charles and David Koch to see with their own eyes what I see everyday.
The Koch brothers need to experience this first hand. I continue to pray that my neighbors and I might convince the Koch brothers to rectify our plight and relocate us like their company, Georgia-Pacific, did for other communities like ours.
A few blocks from here, the neighborhood of Thurman Road was relocated years ago by Georgia-Pacific. Please be a good neighbor to us too. We cannot relocate without some help, and that’s a fact.
Charles and David, if you’re reading this, would you come be my guest in Crossett?
Recently, the National Organization for Marriage really decided to raise the bar for unashamed audacity. The organization is now demanding that Obama’s Justice Department pay for Speaker of the House John Boehner’s defense of DOMA ( the Defense of Marriage Act):
In response to Democratic Rep. Mike Honda of California’s calls for hearings on the cost of the House’s defense of DOMA, the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) released this statement:
“John Boehner and the House are stepping in to do the job that President Obama refused to do: defend a law passed by bipartisan majorities. The cost of hiring lawyers to defend DOMA should be deducted from the budget of the Justice Department,” said Brian Brown, President of NOM. “The $1.5 million cost of defending DOMA represent less than one-one hundredth of one percent of the Justice Department’s huge $28 billion budget. President Obama’s defection of duty is responsible for incurring this cost; he should trim some fat and find the money to pay for it.”
The Obama Administration decided not to defend DOMA because it felt that the law could not be defended. Speaker of the House John Boehner decided to take up the slack . . . and stepped into a hornet’s nest. He is now set to spend over $1 million on the defense of DOMA. The amount of the defense was earlier set at $500,000 but apparently the lawyer handling the case, Paul Clement, quickly went through this amount.
Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the defense of DOMA was rooted in chicanery and junk science:
1. Clement tried to sneak in the testimony of former NOM chair Maggie Gallagher in a way which would have kept her from being cross-examined.
2. A professor cited by Clement in a brief defending DOMA, Lisa Diamond, complained that her work was being distorted.
3. Clement is also citing – in a second hand fashion – junk science from discredited researchers. In his defense of DOMA, Clement cites the work of Case Western Reserve University law professor George W. Dent, Jr. But Dent’s work – which Clement uses - cited both Paul Cameron and George Rekers, two discredited researchers. Cameron has been censured or rebuked by several organizations for his bad methodology in his studies. He has published work which claimed, among other nauseating false things, that gays stuff gerbils up their rectums. (Editor’s note- the piece Cameron cited to make this claim – The Straight Dope – actually said that this claim was not true. Cameron dishonestly “flipped the script” to make it seem that The Straight Dope was affirming this claim.) Rekers lost a lot of credibility for last year’s scandal when he was caught coming from a European vacation with a “rentboy.”
It is for these reasons that Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) demanded a hearing on how money is being spent on the defense of DOMA.
Even if no one ignored that Boehner’s defense of DOMA is rooted in bad techniques and junk science – which I noticed NOM did ignore - the audacity of the organization here is astounding.
NOM just lost a court case in which it sought to sought to hide donors in CA who contributed to the successful effort to pass Proposition 8.
Perhaps NOM shouldn’t worry who is paying for the defense of DOMA and focus on releasing its donors as it has been ordered to by law and the courts.
The National Organization for Marriage has been accused at times of stooping pretty low in its attempts to keep marriage away from the gay community. The following is par for the course. Check out the photo:
Jeremy Hooper from Goodasyou.org (who deals with NOM’s lies at a level that even closer than me – I admire his strength and strong stomach) instantly suspected it to be a fake.
And he was right:
From Hooper:
Yes, that’s right: They lifted a Reuters photo. From another state. From more than three years ago. Featuring a man who stands against NOM’s agenda in most every way possible.
In the long run, it doesn’t matter how many victories NOM receives – even though the organization is going to eventually lose this fight against lgbtq equality – the organization has shown itself to be totally devoid of integrity and morality.
Seems to me that anyone looking to this organization to protect marriage or anything they perceive to be “good” and “noble” is barking up the wrong tree.
Cross-posted from Tikkun Daily.
by Jeff Pozmantier
Gilad Shalit reunites with his father after five years in Hamas captivity. / Photo Courtesy of Israeli Defense Forces
What are the lessons to be learned from the deal to release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for more than one thousand Palestinian prisoners?
It took only a few days for the Palestinian and Israeli role players and tactic leaders to get into their costumes and (depending on their assigned parts) either beat the justification or criticism drums. Self-reflection on the timing was as missing as Shalit was for five years. Why not just put away the talking points and revel in the fact that, after a heart-wrenching absence, a son of Israel’s extended family was finally coming home?
Here are some of the most frequently cited lessons, along with some of my thoughts on the teachers and their resource materials: READ FULL POST
Like many of you, I have been following the Occupy Wall Street Movement for some weeks now. I thought it would have been a moment that came and went, an episode which crystallizes the frustration that Americans are feeling in the time of the Great Recession, a boil once popped that deflates in a moment of cathartic release.
I still remain worried that the powers that be, will at some point, pull a Douglas MacArthur Bonus Army move and commence to head-cracking. I am also impressed by folks speaking truth to power, and finding their voice in a moment of declining civic engagement, a time when emotional, financial, and spiritual exhaustion could easily lead them to disengage and surrender.
There are numerous challenges ahead regarding the Occupy Wall Street Movement. These include the need for the Occupy Wall Street Movement participants to come up with a dominant frame, find a leader or spokesperson, and form a national organization.
In this regard, Occupy Wall Street’s decentralized nature is both a strength and a weakness. It gives flexibility and makes the movement (ironically in some ways) a bit harder for elites to derail. Decentralization also makes it difficult to develop a fixed, clear, and coherent set of policy goals to advocate for in the arena of normal politics.
Occupy Wall Street also faces a practical hurtle, one that at first glance seems insurmountable: can people power have any impact on the decision-making processes of a financier class who are by their very nature(s) both anti-democratic and plutocratic?
Race and class are intimately and inseparably tied together in American society. Blacks and Latinos have been particularly hard hit by the Great Recession. Extreme wealth and income inequality, even as made worst in recent years, are the predictable and intended results of centuries-long government policies that economically disadvantaged people of color while simultaneously subsidizing the creation of the white middle class in America.
Moreover, the destruction of America’s central cities by post-Fordist, neo-liberal economic policies put a brown and black face on the American poor in the popular imagination. These early efforts at the shock doctrine, deep retrenchment by the State, and austerity as a policy (and not as a temporary condition or corrective) were first perfected on the poor and working classes in America’s central cities. History comes full circle as the knife sharpeners are now at the throats of the (white) American middle class.
Eventually, Occupy Wall Street will have to deal with how differences of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship complicate their movement culture and policy goals. Diversity can be an asset; it can also make for real difficulties in getting self-interested, albeit well-intentioned, agents to work together towards a common goal.
Like their intellectual fore bearers in the American Communist Party in Harlem circa 1930, some on the Left, the most orthodox and doctrinaire types especially, will insist that the Occupy Wall Street movement is all about class and not race. Moreover, from their perspective, any talk about race is a distraction from more “important” issues.
This is a dangerous and problematic script where even among Progressives and the Left, white (male) privilege threatens to win out, even as the participants in Occupy Wall Street wrap themselves in the power of the “human microphone.”
White liberals and white conservatives are both infected by white supremacy and white privilege. In addition, both are invested in the white racial frame and a type of racial heliocentrism where “whiteness” equals normality: in this aspect, I have long suggested that white liberals and white conservatives differ only in how the disease that is white racism manifests itself.
This suggestion offends liberals, because to them, racism is a particular sin of their ideological adversaries–and being politically correct on matters of race is a badge to be worn and a flag flown with (oftentimes) smug moral superiority over others who are not as “enlightened.”
By comparison, conservatives react with a mix of defensiveness and aggression as they default to a tired script of white victimology, where in the Age of Obama, anti-racism is the new racism; ironically, for racially resentful white conservatives in particular, the act of naming a thing for what it actually is becomes the greater sin.
In all, white conservatives and white liberals both imagine themselves to be the natural masters of the universe. Liberals are ashamed of this fact. Conservatives revel in it. What will happen to the Occupy Wall Street Movement when black and brown folks assert the relevance of their own experiences? When they/we/us grab the human microphone and take center stage?
The participatory democratic culture of the Occupy Wall Street Movement is fraught with the same challenges of power, inequality, and identity as American society writ large. It would be naive to expect otherwise.
In my reconnaissance of Daily Kos, I closely followed the fallout from a post called “A Black Woman Who Occupied Wall Street: Why She Won’t Be Going Back.” The comments by (majority white) “Kossacks” to the author’s experiences are quite–for lack of a better word–fascinating.
I am all for being alert to how Right-wing types could potentially play the role of agent provocateurs. Yet, I also find it curious, that the general idea, i.e. that “gosh race could be a variable!” in the Occupy Wall Street Movement, was treated with such skepticism.
As is my tradition, I have some questions:
Have any of you been to the Occupy Wall Street rallies? If so, what dynamics of race, class, and gender have you observed?
Is the human microphone really that inclusive? Or are some voices and experiences being censored and excluded?
Are those who are the Other outside of the Occupy Wall Street Movement being treated as others within that counter-cultural setting? Or is the dynamic reversed where black and brown folks give a sense of “authentic” resistance, (and do pardon my obvious pun) some “oppositional color,” to what at present appears to be a very white Occupy Wall Street movement?
Written by Ahu Kumar for RH Reality Check. This diary is cross-posted; commenters wishing to engage directly with the author should do so at the original post.
In a hospital in Nicaragua, after a total ban on abortion was passed, a woman with an ectopic pregnancy was allowed to languish, waiting for her fallopian tube to rupture before a doctor agreed to perform the procedure necessary to save her life and future fertility. Even though there was no doubt regarding the outcome of her pregnancy, the doctor refused to operate until the fetus was certifiably dead, and with no ultrasound available in that rural hospital, there was only one way to make sure.
This is the world that Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) would like to bring to America with the passage of H.R. 358, the so-called “Protect Life Act,” a bill that would deny pregnant women access to emergency treatment, insurance coverage for abortion services and even information about how she could pay for an abortion. It’s bad enough that one member of Congress would be willing to put women’s lives at risk this way; that a majority of the House of Representatives voted for it is appalling.
While in the United States we may treat abortion restrictions as a political issue, elsewhere around the world, advocates and experts understand such restrictions to be public health and human rights issues. And in the United States this year, we have seen law after law passed that clearly violates international human rights standards.
