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Monday, October 03, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor | World | AlterNet
21st-Century Slaves: How Corporations Exploit Prison Labor | World | AlterNet
By Rania Khalek, AlterNetPosted on July 21, 2011
There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.
They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century.
Incarceration Nation
It’s no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands of detained undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting sentencing, or juveniles caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. Perhaps it’s reassuring to some that the US still holds the number one title in at least one arena, but needless to say the hyper-incarceration plaguing America has had a damaging effect on society at large.
According to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), US prison rates are not just excessive in comparison to the rest of the world, they are also substantially higher than our own longstanding history. The study finds that incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about 100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. After 1980, the inmate population began to grow much more rapidly than the overall population and the rate climbed from about 220 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753 in 2008.
The costs of this incarceration industry are far from evenly distributed, with the impact of excessive incarceration falling predominantly on African-American communities. Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for 40 percent of US prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6.5 times that of white males and 2.5 that of Hispanic males and black females are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of Hispanic females.
Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow that more black men are in jail, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved in 1850. Higher rates of black drug arrests do not reflect higher rates of black drug offenses. In fact, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at roughly comparable rates.
Incentivizing Incarceration
Clearly, the US prison system is riddled with racism and classism, but it gets worse. As it turns out, private companies have a cheap, easy labor market, and it isn’t in China, Indonesia, Haiti, or Mexico. It’s right here in the land of the free, where large corporations increasingly employ prisoners as a source of cheap and sometimes free labor.
In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit. By dipping into the prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who are not only cheap but easily controlled. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They don’t need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmate workers are full-time and never late or absent because of family problems.
If they refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges along with "good time" credit that reduces their sentences. To top it off, the federal government subsidizes the use of inmate labor by private companies through lucrative tax write-offs. Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), private-sector employers earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups” and they can earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target group workers."
Study after study demonstrates the wastefulness of America's prison-industrial complex, in both taxpayer dollars and innocent lives, yet rolling back imprisonment rates is proving to be more challenging than ever. Meanwhile, the use of private prisons and now privately contracted inmate labor has created a system that does not exactly incentivize leaner sentencing.
The disturbing implications of such a system mean that skyrocketing imprisonment for the possession of miniscule amounts of marijuana and the the expansion of severe mandatory sentencing laws regardless of the conviction, are policies that have to potential to increase corporate profits. As are the“three strikes laws” that require courts to hand down mandatory and extended sentences to people who have been convicted of felonies on three or more separate occasions. People have literally been sentenced to life for minor crimes like shoplifting.
The Reinvention of Slavery
The exploitation of prison labor is by no means a new phenomenon. Jaron Browne, an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), maps out how the exploitation of prison labor in America is rooted in slavery. The abolition of slavery dealt a devastating economic blow to the South following the loss of free labor after the Civil War. So in the late 19th century, an extensive prison system was created in the South in order to maintain the racial and economic relationship of slavery, a mechanism responsible for re-enslaving black workers. Browne describes Louisiana’s famous Angola Prison to illustrate the intentional transformation from slave to inmate:
“In 1880, this 8000-acre family plantation was purchased by the state of Louisiana and converted into a prison. Slave quarters became cell units. Now expanded to 18,000 acres, the Angola plantation is tilled by prisoners working the land—a chilling picture of modern day chattel slavery.”
The abolition of slavery quickly gave rise to the Black Codes and Convict Leasing, which together worked wonders at perpetuating African American servitude by exploiting a loophole in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The Black Codes were a set of laws that criminalized legal activity for African Americans and provided a pretext for the arrest and mass imprisonment of newly freed blacks, which caused the percentage of African Americans in prison to surpass whites for the first time. Convict leasing involved leasing out prisoners to private companies that paid the state a certain fee in return. Convicts worked for the companies during the day outside the prison and returned to their cells at night. The system provided revenue for the state and profits for plantation owners and wasn’t abolished until the 1930s.
Unfortunately, convict leasing was quickly replaced with equally despicable state-run chain gangs. Once again, stories of vicious abuse created enough public anger to abolish chain gangs by the 1950s. Nevertheless, the systems of prisoner exploitation never actually disappeared.
Today’s corporations can lease factories in prisons, as well as lease prisoners out to their factories. In many cases, private corporations are running prisons-for-profit, further incentivizing their stake in locking people up. The government is profiting as well, by running prison factories that operate as multibillion-dollar industries in every state, and throughout the federal prison system, where prisoners are contracted out to major corporations by the state.
In the most extreme cases, we are even witnessing the reemergence of the chain gang. In Arizona, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio, requires his Maricopa County inmates to enroll in chain gangs to perform various community services or face lockdown with three other inmates in an 8-by-12-foot cell, for 23 hours a day. In June of this year, Arpaio started a female-only chain gang made up of women convicted of driving under the influence. In a press release he boasted that the inmates would be wearing pink T-shirts emblazoned with messages about drinking and driving.
The modern-day version of convict leasing was recently spotted in Georgia, where Governor Nathan Deal proposed sending unemployed probationers to work in Georgia's fields as a solution to a perceived labor shortage following the passage of the country’s most draconian anti-immigrant law. But his plan backfired when some of the probationers began walking off their jobs because the fieldwork was too strenuous.
There has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison, which should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on prisons to manage any and all of society’s problems. According to the Wall Street Journal more than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed. They found that judges signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties. It appears that any act that can be criminalized in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will certainly end in jail time, further increasing the ranks of the captive workforce.
Who Profits?
Prior to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using prison labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing scandals. But in 1979, Congress began a process of deregulation to restore private sector involvement in prison industries to its former status, provided certain conditions of the labor market were met. Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day.
Federal prisoners receive more generous wages that range from $0.23 to $1.25 per hour, and are employed by Unicor, a wholly owned government corporation established by Congress in 1934. Its principal customer is the Department of Defense, from which Unicor derives approximately 53 percent of its sales. Some 21,836 inmates work in Unicor programs. Subsequently, the nation's prison industry – prison labor programs producing goods or services sold to other government agencies or to the private sector -- now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company (besides General Motors), and generates about $2.4 billion in revenue annually. Noah Zatz of UCLA law school estimates that:
“Well over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are working full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Perhaps some of them built your desk chair: office furniture, especially in state universities and the federal government, is a major prison labor product. Inmates also take hotel reservations at corporate call centers, make body armor for the U.S. military, and manufacture prison chic fashion accessories, in addition to the iconic task of stamping license plates.”
Some of the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake in the expansion of the prison labor market, including but not limited to IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. Between 1980 and 1994 alone, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Since the prison labor force has likely grown since then, it is safe to assume that the profits accrued from the use of prison labor have reached even higher levels.
In an article for Mother Jones, Caroline Winter details a number of mega-corporations that have profited off of inmates:
“In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace 'Made in Honduras' labels on garments with 'Made in the USA.'"
According to Winter, the defense industry is a large part of the equation as well:
“Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers' uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have 'produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)' and 'wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.' In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractorMicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.”
Oil companies have been known to exploit prison labor as well. Following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and irreparably damaged the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, BP elected to hire Louisiana prison inmates to clean up its mess. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American men. Coastal residents desperate for work, whose livelihoods had been destroyed by BP’s negligence, were outraged at BP’s use of free prison labor.
In the Nation article that exposed BP’s hiring of inmates, Abe Louise Young details how BP tried to cover up its use of prisoners by changing the inmates' clothing to give the illusion of civilian workers. But nine out of 10 residents of Grand Isle, Louisiana are white, while the cleanup workers were almost exclusively black, so BP’s ruse fooled very few people.
Private companies have long understood that prison labor can be as profitable as sweatshop workers in third-world countries with the added benefit of staying closer to home. Take Escod Industries, which in the 1990s abandoned plans to open operations in Mexico and instead moved to South Carolina, because the wages of American prisoners undercut those of de-unionized Mexican sweatshop workers. The move was fueled by the state, which gave a $250,000 "equipment subsidy" to Escod along with industrial space at below-market rent. Other examples include Ohio's Honda supplier, which pays its prison workers $2 an hour for the same work for which the UAW has fought for decades to be paid $20 to $30 an hour; Konica, which has hired prisoners to repair its copiers for less than 50 cents an hour; and Oregon, where private companies can “lease” prisoners at a bargain price of $3 a day.
Even politicians have been known to tap into prison labor for their own personal use. In 1994, a contractor for GOP congressional candidate Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty. He won his campaign claiming he had no knowledge of the scandal. Perhaps this is why Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced a bill earlier this year to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. After all, creating a national prison labor force has been a goal of his since he went to Congress in 1995.
In an unsettling turn of events lawmakers have begun ditching public employees in favor of free prison labor. The New York Times recently reported that states are enlisting prison labor to close budget gaps to offset cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue. At a time of record unemployment, inmates are being hired to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees. In Wisconsin, prisoners are now taking up jobs that were once held by unionized workers, as a result of Governor Scott Walker’s contentious anti-union law.
Why You Should Care
Those who argue in favor of prison labor claim it is a useful tool for rehabilitation and preparation for post-jail employment. But this has only been shown to be true in cases where prisoners are exposed to meaningful employment, where they learn new skills, not the labor-intensive, menial and often dangerous work they are being tasked with. While little if any evidence exists to suggests that the current prison labor system decreases recidivism or leads to better employment prospects outside of prison, there are a number of solutions that have been proven to be useful.
According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, having a history of incarceration itself impedes subsequent economic success. Pew found that past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. The study suggests that the best approach is for state and federal authorities to invest in programs that reconnect inmates to the labor market, as well as provide training and job placement services around the time of release. Most importantly, Pew says that in the long term, America must move toward alternative sentencing programs for low-level and nonviolent offenders, and issuing penalties that are actually proportionate with real public safety concerns.
The exploitation of any workforce is detrimental to all workers. Cheap and free labor pushes down wages for everyone. Just as American workers cannot compete with sweatshop labor, the same goes for prison labor. Many jobs that come into prison are taken from free citizens. The American labor movement must demand that prison labor be allowed the right to unionize, the right to a fair and living wage, and the right to a safe and healthy work environment. That is what prisoners are demanding, but they can only do so much from inside a prison cell.
As unemployment on the outside increases, so too will crime and incarceration rates, and our 21st-century version of corporate slavery will continue to expand unless we do something about it.
Rania Khalek is a progressive activist. Check out her blog Missing Pieces or follow her on Twitter @Rania_ak. You can contact her at raniakhalek@gmail.com.
By Rania Khalek, AlterNetPosted on July 21, 2011
There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.
They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century.
Incarceration Nation
It’s no secret that America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation in history. With just 5 percent of the world’s population, the US currently holds 25 percent of the world's prisoners. In 2008, over 2.3 million Americans were in prison or jail, with one of every 48 working-age men behind bars. That doesn’t include the tens of thousands of detained undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting sentencing, or juveniles caught up in the school-to-prison pipeline. Perhaps it’s reassuring to some that the US still holds the number one title in at least one arena, but needless to say the hyper-incarceration plaguing America has had a damaging effect on society at large.
According to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), US prison rates are not just excessive in comparison to the rest of the world, they are also substantially higher than our own longstanding history. The study finds that incarceration rates between 1880 and 1970 ranged from about 100 to 200 prisoners per 100,000 people. After 1980, the inmate population began to grow much more rapidly than the overall population and the rate climbed from about 220 in 1980 to 458 in 1990, 683 in 2000, and 753 in 2008.
The costs of this incarceration industry are far from evenly distributed, with the impact of excessive incarceration falling predominantly on African-American communities. Although black people make up just 13 percent of the overall population, they account for 40 percent of US prisoners. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), black males are incarcerated at a rate more than 6.5 times that of white males and 2.5 that of Hispanic males and black females are incarcerated at approximately three times the rate of white females and twice that of Hispanic females.
Michelle Alexander points out in her book The New Jim Crow that more black men are in jail, on probation, or on parole than were enslaved in 1850. Higher rates of black drug arrests do not reflect higher rates of black drug offenses. In fact, whites and blacks engage in drug offenses, possession and sales at roughly comparable rates.
Incentivizing Incarceration
Clearly, the US prison system is riddled with racism and classism, but it gets worse. As it turns out, private companies have a cheap, easy labor market, and it isn’t in China, Indonesia, Haiti, or Mexico. It’s right here in the land of the free, where large corporations increasingly employ prisoners as a source of cheap and sometimes free labor.
In the eyes of the corporation, inmate labor is a brilliant strategy in the eternal quest to maximize profit. By dipping into the prison labor pool, companies have their pick of workers who are not only cheap but easily controlled. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days, while simultaneously paying little to no wages. They don’t need to worry about unions or demands for vacation time or raises. Inmate workers are full-time and never late or absent because of family problems.
If they refuse to work, they are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges along with "good time" credit that reduces their sentences. To top it off, the federal government subsidizes the use of inmate labor by private companies through lucrative tax write-offs. Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), private-sector employers earn a tax credit of $2,400 for every work release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups” and they can earn back up to 40 percent of the wages they pay annually to "target group workers."
Study after study demonstrates the wastefulness of America's prison-industrial complex, in both taxpayer dollars and innocent lives, yet rolling back imprisonment rates is proving to be more challenging than ever. Meanwhile, the use of private prisons and now privately contracted inmate labor has created a system that does not exactly incentivize leaner sentencing.
The disturbing implications of such a system mean that skyrocketing imprisonment for the possession of miniscule amounts of marijuana and the the expansion of severe mandatory sentencing laws regardless of the conviction, are policies that have to potential to increase corporate profits. As are the“three strikes laws” that require courts to hand down mandatory and extended sentences to people who have been convicted of felonies on three or more separate occasions. People have literally been sentenced to life for minor crimes like shoplifting.
The Reinvention of Slavery
The exploitation of prison labor is by no means a new phenomenon. Jaron Browne, an organizer with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), maps out how the exploitation of prison labor in America is rooted in slavery. The abolition of slavery dealt a devastating economic blow to the South following the loss of free labor after the Civil War. So in the late 19th century, an extensive prison system was created in the South in order to maintain the racial and economic relationship of slavery, a mechanism responsible for re-enslaving black workers. Browne describes Louisiana’s famous Angola Prison to illustrate the intentional transformation from slave to inmate:
“In 1880, this 8000-acre family plantation was purchased by the state of Louisiana and converted into a prison. Slave quarters became cell units. Now expanded to 18,000 acres, the Angola plantation is tilled by prisoners working the land—a chilling picture of modern day chattel slavery.”
The abolition of slavery quickly gave rise to the Black Codes and Convict Leasing, which together worked wonders at perpetuating African American servitude by exploiting a loophole in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
The Black Codes were a set of laws that criminalized legal activity for African Americans and provided a pretext for the arrest and mass imprisonment of newly freed blacks, which caused the percentage of African Americans in prison to surpass whites for the first time. Convict leasing involved leasing out prisoners to private companies that paid the state a certain fee in return. Convicts worked for the companies during the day outside the prison and returned to their cells at night. The system provided revenue for the state and profits for plantation owners and wasn’t abolished until the 1930s.
Unfortunately, convict leasing was quickly replaced with equally despicable state-run chain gangs. Once again, stories of vicious abuse created enough public anger to abolish chain gangs by the 1950s. Nevertheless, the systems of prisoner exploitation never actually disappeared.
Today’s corporations can lease factories in prisons, as well as lease prisoners out to their factories. In many cases, private corporations are running prisons-for-profit, further incentivizing their stake in locking people up. The government is profiting as well, by running prison factories that operate as multibillion-dollar industries in every state, and throughout the federal prison system, where prisoners are contracted out to major corporations by the state.
In the most extreme cases, we are even witnessing the reemergence of the chain gang. In Arizona, the self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America,” Joe Arpaio, requires his Maricopa County inmates to enroll in chain gangs to perform various community services or face lockdown with three other inmates in an 8-by-12-foot cell, for 23 hours a day. In June of this year, Arpaio started a female-only chain gang made up of women convicted of driving under the influence. In a press release he boasted that the inmates would be wearing pink T-shirts emblazoned with messages about drinking and driving.
The modern-day version of convict leasing was recently spotted in Georgia, where Governor Nathan Deal proposed sending unemployed probationers to work in Georgia's fields as a solution to a perceived labor shortage following the passage of the country’s most draconian anti-immigrant law. But his plan backfired when some of the probationers began walking off their jobs because the fieldwork was too strenuous.
There has also been a disturbing reemergence of the debtors’ prison, which should serve as an ominous sign of our dangerous reliance on prisons to manage any and all of society’s problems. According to the Wall Street Journal more than a third of all U.S. states allow borrowers who can't or won't pay to be jailed. They found that judges signed off on more than 5,000 such warrants since the start of 2010 in nine counties. It appears that any act that can be criminalized in the era of private prisons and inmate labor will certainly end in jail time, further increasing the ranks of the captive workforce.
Who Profits?
Prior to the 1970s, private corporations were prohibited from using prison labor as a result of the chain gang and convict leasing scandals. But in 1979, Congress began a process of deregulation to restore private sector involvement in prison industries to its former status, provided certain conditions of the labor market were met. Over the last 30 years, at least 37 states have enacted laws permitting the use of convict labor by private enterprise, with an average pay of $0.93 to $4.73 per day.
Federal prisoners receive more generous wages that range from $0.23 to $1.25 per hour, and are employed by Unicor, a wholly owned government corporation established by Congress in 1934. Its principal customer is the Department of Defense, from which Unicor derives approximately 53 percent of its sales. Some 21,836 inmates work in Unicor programs. Subsequently, the nation's prison industry – prison labor programs producing goods or services sold to other government agencies or to the private sector -- now employs more people than any Fortune 500 company (besides General Motors), and generates about $2.4 billion in revenue annually. Noah Zatz of UCLA law school estimates that:
“Well over 600,000, and probably close to a million, inmates are working full-time in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Perhaps some of them built your desk chair: office furniture, especially in state universities and the federal government, is a major prison labor product. Inmates also take hotel reservations at corporate call centers, make body armor for the U.S. military, and manufacture prison chic fashion accessories, in addition to the iconic task of stamping license plates.”
Some of the largest and most powerful corporations have a stake in the expansion of the prison labor market, including but not limited to IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. Between 1980 and 1994 alone, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Since the prison labor force has likely grown since then, it is safe to assume that the profits accrued from the use of prison labor have reached even higher levels.
In an article for Mother Jones, Caroline Winter details a number of mega-corporations that have profited off of inmates:
“In the 1990s, subcontractor Third Generation hired 35 female South Carolina inmates to sew lingerie and leisure wear for Victoria's Secret and JCPenney. In 1997, a California prison put two men in solitary for telling journalists they were ordered to replace 'Made in Honduras' labels on garments with 'Made in the USA.'"
According to Winter, the defense industry is a large part of the equation as well:
“Unicor, says that in addition to soldiers' uniforms, bedding, shoes, helmets, and flak vests, inmates have 'produced missile cables (including those used on the Patriot missiles during the Gulf War)' and 'wiring harnesses for jets and tanks.' In 1997, according to Prison Legal News, Boeing subcontractorMicroJet had prisoners cutting airplane components, paying $7 an hour for work that paid union wages of $30 on the outside.”
Oil companies have been known to exploit prison labor as well. Following the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 workers and irreparably damaged the Gulf of Mexico for generations to come, BP elected to hire Louisiana prison inmates to clean up its mess. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state in the nation, 70 percent of which are African-American men. Coastal residents desperate for work, whose livelihoods had been destroyed by BP’s negligence, were outraged at BP’s use of free prison labor.
In the Nation article that exposed BP’s hiring of inmates, Abe Louise Young details how BP tried to cover up its use of prisoners by changing the inmates' clothing to give the illusion of civilian workers. But nine out of 10 residents of Grand Isle, Louisiana are white, while the cleanup workers were almost exclusively black, so BP’s ruse fooled very few people.
Private companies have long understood that prison labor can be as profitable as sweatshop workers in third-world countries with the added benefit of staying closer to home. Take Escod Industries, which in the 1990s abandoned plans to open operations in Mexico and instead moved to South Carolina, because the wages of American prisoners undercut those of de-unionized Mexican sweatshop workers. The move was fueled by the state, which gave a $250,000 "equipment subsidy" to Escod along with industrial space at below-market rent. Other examples include Ohio's Honda supplier, which pays its prison workers $2 an hour for the same work for which the UAW has fought for decades to be paid $20 to $30 an hour; Konica, which has hired prisoners to repair its copiers for less than 50 cents an hour; and Oregon, where private companies can “lease” prisoners at a bargain price of $3 a day.
Even politicians have been known to tap into prison labor for their own personal use. In 1994, a contractor for GOP congressional candidate Jack Metcalf hired Washington state prisoners to call and remind voters he was pro-death penalty. He won his campaign claiming he had no knowledge of the scandal. Perhaps this is why Senator John Ensign (R-NV) introduced a bill earlier this year to require all low-security prisoners to work 50 hours a week. After all, creating a national prison labor force has been a goal of his since he went to Congress in 1995.
In an unsettling turn of events lawmakers have begun ditching public employees in favor of free prison labor. The New York Times recently reported that states are enlisting prison labor to close budget gaps to offset cuts in federal financing and dwindling tax revenue. At a time of record unemployment, inmates are being hired to paint vehicles, clean courthouses, sweep campsites and perform many other services done before the recession by private contractors or government employees. In Wisconsin, prisoners are now taking up jobs that were once held by unionized workers, as a result of Governor Scott Walker’s contentious anti-union law.
Why You Should Care
Those who argue in favor of prison labor claim it is a useful tool for rehabilitation and preparation for post-jail employment. But this has only been shown to be true in cases where prisoners are exposed to meaningful employment, where they learn new skills, not the labor-intensive, menial and often dangerous work they are being tasked with. While little if any evidence exists to suggests that the current prison labor system decreases recidivism or leads to better employment prospects outside of prison, there are a number of solutions that have been proven to be useful.
According to a study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, having a history of incarceration itself impedes subsequent economic success. Pew found that past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. The study suggests that the best approach is for state and federal authorities to invest in programs that reconnect inmates to the labor market, as well as provide training and job placement services around the time of release. Most importantly, Pew says that in the long term, America must move toward alternative sentencing programs for low-level and nonviolent offenders, and issuing penalties that are actually proportionate with real public safety concerns.
The exploitation of any workforce is detrimental to all workers. Cheap and free labor pushes down wages for everyone. Just as American workers cannot compete with sweatshop labor, the same goes for prison labor. Many jobs that come into prison are taken from free citizens. The American labor movement must demand that prison labor be allowed the right to unionize, the right to a fair and living wage, and the right to a safe and healthy work environment. That is what prisoners are demanding, but they can only do so much from inside a prison cell.
As unemployment on the outside increases, so too will crime and incarceration rates, and our 21st-century version of corporate slavery will continue to expand unless we do something about it.
Rania Khalek is a progressive activist. Check out her blog Missing Pieces or follow her on Twitter @Rania_ak. You can contact her at raniakhalek@gmail.com.
Friday, July 08, 2011
U.S. Pumping AK-47's and Military Rifles Into The Hands Of Mexican Drug Cartels.
Why Is U.S. Pumping AK-47's and Military Rifles Into The Hands Of Mexican Drug Cartels? | World | AlterNet
By Andrew Kennis, AlterNetPosted on July 5, 2011
The atmosphere was tense and emotions were running high at the Phoenix field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) late last year. “Are you prepared to go to the funeral of a federal officer killed with one of [our] guns?” an ATF agent shouted at one of his superiors.
Another agent described the scene in the room as “ugly,” with a lot of “screaming and yelling.” A third agent gave what would be a prophetic warning: “This is crazy, somebody is gonna get killed.”
Somebody, as it turned out, did get killed by December 2010. When that somebody was a border patrol agent, anonymous testimonies offered to CBS this past February soon gave way to more detailed whistle-blower revelations and a flurry of controversy.
The agents were dissenting against the continuance of the previously classified “gun-walking” program named “Fast and Furious,” which deliberately permits gun sales to suspected “straw purchasers” (arms buyer conduits to drug cartels) for the sole purpose of tracking the weapons in the hope of prosecuting prominent drug cartel members when they use those guns to commit crimes or when the guns are seized by authorities. The program was first started in October 2009 and accelerated in September 2010.
In effect, a U.S. federal law enforcement organization charged with regulating guns was purposefully allowing the sales of high-powered weaponry, which included AK-47's and military-grade .50 caliber rifles, to flow directly into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
In spite of the internal dissent and the ensuing controversy, damning documentation and hours of Congressional testimony and ongoing investigations -- as well as seething anger on the part of the Mexican public -- there is no end in sight to the ill-fated program.
Revelations Sparked in Wake of Death, Strong Mexican Reactions Ensue
It was a typically chilly December night in Peck Canyon just north of Nogales, Arizona. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, along with three of his fellow agents, were in hot pursuit of suspects attempting to rob undocumented immigrants.
At about 11pm on December 14, a frenetic firefight ensued and Terry was shot and killed. Four suspects were initially apprehended while a fifth remained at large.
What made Brian Terry’s death unique was the fact that the guns captured at the scene of the firefight were traced back to the Fast and Furious program. The Phoenix ATF agent’s prediction had come true.
“You feel like shit. You feel for the parents,” a Phoenix agent lamented.
The program continues to this day, however, and many others have died, mostly Mexican civilians caught in the line of fire.
Estimates vary, but many experts put the death toll since the start of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s “drug war,” as high as 40,000, dating back to when Calderon took office in a disputed election in 2006.
Unsurprisingly, when news of the program arrived in Mexico in March, a firestorm of criticism ensued. Media coverage boiled even further in the wake of Congressional hearings into the program held on June 15.
Much of the criticism coming from Mexico, however, has been left out of stateside news coverage. Nevertheless, officials from across the political spectrum voiced outrage, as did the Catholic Church.
Isabel Miranda de Wallace, a drug-war activist, suffered through her son’s kidnapping in 2005. “The Americans seemed really upset when one of their agents died here,” she told the Center for Public Integrity. “But it appears that all of the Mexican lives lost in this don't add up to the same value for them. Instead of restricting violence, [operations such as these] generate even more of it.”
Wallace’s critique was echoed by the Mexican Archdiocese’s office, which lambasted U.S. officials for crafting a situation whereby, “one of the most fervently anti-immigrant states [Arizona] is also the prime site for permitting the illegal passage of arms to go right into the hands of Mexican criminals.”
One of Mexico’s most important political figures, former Presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, characterized the Fast and Furious program as, “one of the many intrusions by U.S. policy into Mexican sovereignty.” Cárdenas added he doubted that these previously secret policies reflected the will of the American people, tagging them as “convoluted” and “poorly thought out.”
The center-left People’s Democratic Revolutionary Party’s (PRD) candidate for governor in the State of Mexico, Alejandro Encinas, echoed those sentiments, describing the program as a “flagrant violation of sovereignty.” Encinas went further, accusing the Calderon administration of “tacitly supporting these types of violations.”
Calderon administration officials, such as Jorge Alberto Lara, Mexico’s Deputy Attorney General, claimed ignorance. “We could never have known, and we would have never approved an operation that entailed any sorts of arms trade, or a controlled traffic of weapons from the US into Mexico,” Alberto Lara said in a statement to the press.
Mexican Experts Decry Lack of Official Action on Both Sides of the Border
Rhetoric from Mexico was fiery when revelations of the Fast and Furious program first came out, but when it's come to substantive action on the issue, analysts say the Calderon administration has been largely quiet.
“There hasn’t been a lot of interest on the part of the Calderon administration. He hasn’t really wanted to touch this topic and has maintained a distance from it,” said Carlos Zamudio, who is a researcher at the Collective for an Integrated Approach to Drugs (CUPIHD), a Mexico City-based think-tank.
Back in March, legislators called for hearings seeking testimony from high-ranking officials. Congressman Porfirio Muñoz Ledo of the Worker’s Party told AlterNet, “The Congress issued a condemnation of the program, but the Calderon administration only went the ‘diplomatic’ route.”
Muñoz lamented this strategy, adding that the root of the problem goes even further than the Fast and Furious program and calling for the decriminalization of drug use, which he said would neutralize illicit programs like Fast and Furious.
“The killer isn’t the marijuana that the people smoke, it’s the arms that kill,” Muñoz told AlterNet.
An international investigatory commission convened by former presidents, including Cardoso of Brazil, Gaviria of Colombia and Zedillo of Mexico, as well as former U.N. head Kofi Annan, agreed with Muñoz.
Earlier in the month, the Commission purposefully coincided the announcement of its findings to shortly precede the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s launch of his “war on drugs.” In its findings, the commission called for the decriminalization of drugs, dubbed the “war” on drugs a failure and called for a variety of treatment options for addicts as part of a comprehensive policy change on the issue.
Brutal Murders Inspire Social Movement
Seven young adults – Julio César Romero Jaimes, Luis Antonio Romero Jaimes, Álvaro Jaimes Avelar, Jaime Gabriel Alejo Cadena, María del Socorro Estrada Hernández, Jesús Chávez Vázquez and Juan Francisco Sicilia Orteda – went for a ride in Cuernavaca, the city of eternal spring located some 60 miles west of Mexico City, on March 28. None of them ever returned home, and their dead bodies would later be found by federal authorities.
Were it not for the fact that one of the dead, Juan Sicilia, was a son of a prominent poet and author, Javier Sicilia, the odds are that no investigation or arrests would have ever occurred (only 5 percent of drug-war related murders are ever investigated by Mexican authorities). By May 25, however, Julio de Jesús Radilla, a drug cartel member of the South Pacific Cartel, was arrested for having ordered the murder.
An enormous and sprawling social movement has been spawned by the murders of Juan Sicilia and his friends. Juan's father, Javier Sicilia, has become the moral leader and spokesperson for the movement, and has routinely led marches in the tens of thousands, including a nation-wide, cross-border caravan that recently ended with gripping testimonies and accounts of families of victims of the drug war in El Paso, Texas.
The movement Sicilia is leading has been adamantly opposed to Calderon’s tactics of state-led violence and military-like confrontations with the drug cartels. Sicilia told AlterNet these tactics were nothing short of “stupid.” The demands of the social movement have included the decriminalization of drugs, the retreat of military forces from the streets, and at one point, the removal of Felipe Calderon as president.
“This strategy is mistaken,” Sicilia elaborated. “Treating the problem of drugs as a national security issue, when it is clearly one of public health policy, is a grave mistake.”
“There is a responsibility very strong on the part of the United States for the violence that is incurring in the drug war,” Sicilia explained, adding that the roots of the drug war find themselves, “inter-woven with the flawed policies inspired by the U.S. and the drug war Calderon is fighting on their behalf, with the overwhelming majority of the costs of the war flowing to the pueblo (people in the community) of Mexico.”
Agent Says 'There’s No Excuse' For the Program
Back in the States, the Fast and Furious program continues to have its share of critics. John Gibler, a specialist on the drug war, dubs the program, “another example of how the U.S. government's ideological commitment to failure on drug policy leads again and again to incompetence and horror.”
Laura Carlsen, an analyst on U.S.-Mexico relations who heads up the Americas Program in the Center for International Policy and has long resided in Mexico, agrees with Gibler. Carlsen said, “They came out with absolutely nothing in terms of results on this.” She boiled the issue down to the following:
The whole problem was that it wasn't even illegal to go in and get assault rifles, in grand part thanks to NRA successfully lobbying against gun-control laws, so they couldn’t get to them that way. The thing is, they lost track of many of the guns they let across the border and thus couldn’t “prove” any crimes or eventual wrongdoings.
The ATF has gone on record admitting some 1,998 high-powered firearms have been allowed to be sold to straw purchasers dating back to even before the program had its official start in October 2009. Of those "tracked" guns, only 602, or about 30 percent, were recovered in the US and only 195, or just under 10 percent, were recovered in Mexico.
Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Congressman Daniel Issa, R-California, have led the charge against the program. The latter held a Congressional hearing that lasted a full afternoon and featured gripping testimony from members of Brian Terry's family, as well as ATF whistle-blowing agents. Thirty-one Congressional Democrats wrote the president on June 3, asking for greater transparency.
ATF officials, for their part, have offered the convincing case that their hands have long been tied by the NRA in terms of their ability to prosecute straw purchasers. The Justice Department released a report late last year that was highly critical of the ATF’s ability to get to the Mexican drug cartels, particularly honing in on the failed past focus on straw buyers and their inability to prosecute them.
By September 2010, this pressure only resulted in the ATF further strengthening the Fast and Furious program. Mark Chait, the ATF’s assistant director in charge of field operations, told the Center for Public Integrity that he personally attended to the expansion of the program.
It wasn’t long after this that the dissenters in Phoenix began to raise their voices, as well as Darrin Gil, the former ATF attaché for the US embassy in Mexico, who resigned in protest over the continuance of Fast and Furious.
Gil, Dodson and others revealed to the media that their superiors were fully aware and supportive of the program, in spite of the fatal consequences they warned would surely happen. Gil said that Senior Justice official Lanny Breuer considered the program to be “getting good results,” while Melson, ATF's acting director, told Gil that “it's a good case, it's still going on … and we'll close it down as soon as we possibly can.” In Dodson's case, his superior told him, “If you’re going to make an omelet, you’re going to scramble some eggs.”
Both Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder denied having knowledge of the program. Obama told Univision, “this is a pretty big government … I got a lot of moving parts.” Meanwhile, in Congress, Holder told Senator Grassley, “I frankly don't know” what happened.
In spite of these high-level denials, damning information continued to flow in on U.S. responsibility for fatal flaws in the drug war, while Mexican reactions continued to be more strident.
Headlines were recently generated in Mexico in the wake of a report released by Senator Diane Feinstein and two other senators citing Government Accountability Office findings that, depending on the time period, anywhere from 70 percent to 87 percent of the arms seized by Mexican authorities could be traced back to gun sales back in the States. Many of these arms were seized from drug cartel members.
President Calderon also cited the report and criticized U.S. policies, imploring the U.S. to strengthen its weak gun control laws.
Findings like these, some officials reasoned, pointed to an inability of the ATF to “control” illegal gun trafficking by ordinary means. Dodson and his fellow agents, however, are not swayed by such arguments.
Agent Forcelli responded by telling AlterNet, “There’s no excuse for this program, there’s simply and absolutely no excuse.”
What is clear is that expert analysts in Mexico, dissident public officials and the vast swaths of the Mexican population that are forming a growing social movement roundly agree with Forcelli that “there is no excuse.” Instead, many Mexicans are not only hoping to see a quick end to a program that provides the guns to the cartel members who are killing many of their people, but also an end to the ineffective “war on drugs.”
Andrew Kennis is an investigative journalist, an adjunct professor and an academic researcher. More of his work can be found here.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151517/
By Andrew Kennis, AlterNetPosted on July 5, 2011
The atmosphere was tense and emotions were running high at the Phoenix field office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) late last year. “Are you prepared to go to the funeral of a federal officer killed with one of [our] guns?” an ATF agent shouted at one of his superiors.
Another agent described the scene in the room as “ugly,” with a lot of “screaming and yelling.” A third agent gave what would be a prophetic warning: “This is crazy, somebody is gonna get killed.”
Somebody, as it turned out, did get killed by December 2010. When that somebody was a border patrol agent, anonymous testimonies offered to CBS this past February soon gave way to more detailed whistle-blower revelations and a flurry of controversy.
The agents were dissenting against the continuance of the previously classified “gun-walking” program named “Fast and Furious,” which deliberately permits gun sales to suspected “straw purchasers” (arms buyer conduits to drug cartels) for the sole purpose of tracking the weapons in the hope of prosecuting prominent drug cartel members when they use those guns to commit crimes or when the guns are seized by authorities. The program was first started in October 2009 and accelerated in September 2010.
In effect, a U.S. federal law enforcement organization charged with regulating guns was purposefully allowing the sales of high-powered weaponry, which included AK-47's and military-grade .50 caliber rifles, to flow directly into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
In spite of the internal dissent and the ensuing controversy, damning documentation and hours of Congressional testimony and ongoing investigations -- as well as seething anger on the part of the Mexican public -- there is no end in sight to the ill-fated program.
Revelations Sparked in Wake of Death, Strong Mexican Reactions Ensue
It was a typically chilly December night in Peck Canyon just north of Nogales, Arizona. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, along with three of his fellow agents, were in hot pursuit of suspects attempting to rob undocumented immigrants.
At about 11pm on December 14, a frenetic firefight ensued and Terry was shot and killed. Four suspects were initially apprehended while a fifth remained at large.
What made Brian Terry’s death unique was the fact that the guns captured at the scene of the firefight were traced back to the Fast and Furious program. The Phoenix ATF agent’s prediction had come true.
“You feel like shit. You feel for the parents,” a Phoenix agent lamented.
The program continues to this day, however, and many others have died, mostly Mexican civilians caught in the line of fire.
Estimates vary, but many experts put the death toll since the start of Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s “drug war,” as high as 40,000, dating back to when Calderon took office in a disputed election in 2006.
Unsurprisingly, when news of the program arrived in Mexico in March, a firestorm of criticism ensued. Media coverage boiled even further in the wake of Congressional hearings into the program held on June 15.
Much of the criticism coming from Mexico, however, has been left out of stateside news coverage. Nevertheless, officials from across the political spectrum voiced outrage, as did the Catholic Church.
Isabel Miranda de Wallace, a drug-war activist, suffered through her son’s kidnapping in 2005. “The Americans seemed really upset when one of their agents died here,” she told the Center for Public Integrity. “But it appears that all of the Mexican lives lost in this don't add up to the same value for them. Instead of restricting violence, [operations such as these] generate even more of it.”
Wallace’s critique was echoed by the Mexican Archdiocese’s office, which lambasted U.S. officials for crafting a situation whereby, “one of the most fervently anti-immigrant states [Arizona] is also the prime site for permitting the illegal passage of arms to go right into the hands of Mexican criminals.”
One of Mexico’s most important political figures, former Presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, characterized the Fast and Furious program as, “one of the many intrusions by U.S. policy into Mexican sovereignty.” Cárdenas added he doubted that these previously secret policies reflected the will of the American people, tagging them as “convoluted” and “poorly thought out.”
The center-left People’s Democratic Revolutionary Party’s (PRD) candidate for governor in the State of Mexico, Alejandro Encinas, echoed those sentiments, describing the program as a “flagrant violation of sovereignty.” Encinas went further, accusing the Calderon administration of “tacitly supporting these types of violations.”
Calderon administration officials, such as Jorge Alberto Lara, Mexico’s Deputy Attorney General, claimed ignorance. “We could never have known, and we would have never approved an operation that entailed any sorts of arms trade, or a controlled traffic of weapons from the US into Mexico,” Alberto Lara said in a statement to the press.
Mexican Experts Decry Lack of Official Action on Both Sides of the Border
Rhetoric from Mexico was fiery when revelations of the Fast and Furious program first came out, but when it's come to substantive action on the issue, analysts say the Calderon administration has been largely quiet.
“There hasn’t been a lot of interest on the part of the Calderon administration. He hasn’t really wanted to touch this topic and has maintained a distance from it,” said Carlos Zamudio, who is a researcher at the Collective for an Integrated Approach to Drugs (CUPIHD), a Mexico City-based think-tank.
Back in March, legislators called for hearings seeking testimony from high-ranking officials. Congressman Porfirio Muñoz Ledo of the Worker’s Party told AlterNet, “The Congress issued a condemnation of the program, but the Calderon administration only went the ‘diplomatic’ route.”
Muñoz lamented this strategy, adding that the root of the problem goes even further than the Fast and Furious program and calling for the decriminalization of drug use, which he said would neutralize illicit programs like Fast and Furious.
“The killer isn’t the marijuana that the people smoke, it’s the arms that kill,” Muñoz told AlterNet.
An international investigatory commission convened by former presidents, including Cardoso of Brazil, Gaviria of Colombia and Zedillo of Mexico, as well as former U.N. head Kofi Annan, agreed with Muñoz.
Earlier in the month, the Commission purposefully coincided the announcement of its findings to shortly precede the 40th anniversary of President Nixon’s launch of his “war on drugs.” In its findings, the commission called for the decriminalization of drugs, dubbed the “war” on drugs a failure and called for a variety of treatment options for addicts as part of a comprehensive policy change on the issue.
Brutal Murders Inspire Social Movement
Seven young adults – Julio César Romero Jaimes, Luis Antonio Romero Jaimes, Álvaro Jaimes Avelar, Jaime Gabriel Alejo Cadena, María del Socorro Estrada Hernández, Jesús Chávez Vázquez and Juan Francisco Sicilia Orteda – went for a ride in Cuernavaca, the city of eternal spring located some 60 miles west of Mexico City, on March 28. None of them ever returned home, and their dead bodies would later be found by federal authorities.
Were it not for the fact that one of the dead, Juan Sicilia, was a son of a prominent poet and author, Javier Sicilia, the odds are that no investigation or arrests would have ever occurred (only 5 percent of drug-war related murders are ever investigated by Mexican authorities). By May 25, however, Julio de Jesús Radilla, a drug cartel member of the South Pacific Cartel, was arrested for having ordered the murder.
An enormous and sprawling social movement has been spawned by the murders of Juan Sicilia and his friends. Juan's father, Javier Sicilia, has become the moral leader and spokesperson for the movement, and has routinely led marches in the tens of thousands, including a nation-wide, cross-border caravan that recently ended with gripping testimonies and accounts of families of victims of the drug war in El Paso, Texas.
The movement Sicilia is leading has been adamantly opposed to Calderon’s tactics of state-led violence and military-like confrontations with the drug cartels. Sicilia told AlterNet these tactics were nothing short of “stupid.” The demands of the social movement have included the decriminalization of drugs, the retreat of military forces from the streets, and at one point, the removal of Felipe Calderon as president.
“This strategy is mistaken,” Sicilia elaborated. “Treating the problem of drugs as a national security issue, when it is clearly one of public health policy, is a grave mistake.”
“There is a responsibility very strong on the part of the United States for the violence that is incurring in the drug war,” Sicilia explained, adding that the roots of the drug war find themselves, “inter-woven with the flawed policies inspired by the U.S. and the drug war Calderon is fighting on their behalf, with the overwhelming majority of the costs of the war flowing to the pueblo (people in the community) of Mexico.”
Agent Says 'There’s No Excuse' For the Program
Back in the States, the Fast and Furious program continues to have its share of critics. John Gibler, a specialist on the drug war, dubs the program, “another example of how the U.S. government's ideological commitment to failure on drug policy leads again and again to incompetence and horror.”
Laura Carlsen, an analyst on U.S.-Mexico relations who heads up the Americas Program in the Center for International Policy and has long resided in Mexico, agrees with Gibler. Carlsen said, “They came out with absolutely nothing in terms of results on this.” She boiled the issue down to the following:
The whole problem was that it wasn't even illegal to go in and get assault rifles, in grand part thanks to NRA successfully lobbying against gun-control laws, so they couldn’t get to them that way. The thing is, they lost track of many of the guns they let across the border and thus couldn’t “prove” any crimes or eventual wrongdoings.
The ATF has gone on record admitting some 1,998 high-powered firearms have been allowed to be sold to straw purchasers dating back to even before the program had its official start in October 2009. Of those "tracked" guns, only 602, or about 30 percent, were recovered in the US and only 195, or just under 10 percent, were recovered in Mexico.
Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Congressman Daniel Issa, R-California, have led the charge against the program. The latter held a Congressional hearing that lasted a full afternoon and featured gripping testimony from members of Brian Terry's family, as well as ATF whistle-blowing agents. Thirty-one Congressional Democrats wrote the president on June 3, asking for greater transparency.
ATF officials, for their part, have offered the convincing case that their hands have long been tied by the NRA in terms of their ability to prosecute straw purchasers. The Justice Department released a report late last year that was highly critical of the ATF’s ability to get to the Mexican drug cartels, particularly honing in on the failed past focus on straw buyers and their inability to prosecute them.
By September 2010, this pressure only resulted in the ATF further strengthening the Fast and Furious program. Mark Chait, the ATF’s assistant director in charge of field operations, told the Center for Public Integrity that he personally attended to the expansion of the program.
It wasn’t long after this that the dissenters in Phoenix began to raise their voices, as well as Darrin Gil, the former ATF attaché for the US embassy in Mexico, who resigned in protest over the continuance of Fast and Furious.
Gil, Dodson and others revealed to the media that their superiors were fully aware and supportive of the program, in spite of the fatal consequences they warned would surely happen. Gil said that Senior Justice official Lanny Breuer considered the program to be “getting good results,” while Melson, ATF's acting director, told Gil that “it's a good case, it's still going on … and we'll close it down as soon as we possibly can.” In Dodson's case, his superior told him, “If you’re going to make an omelet, you’re going to scramble some eggs.”
Both Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder denied having knowledge of the program. Obama told Univision, “this is a pretty big government … I got a lot of moving parts.” Meanwhile, in Congress, Holder told Senator Grassley, “I frankly don't know” what happened.
In spite of these high-level denials, damning information continued to flow in on U.S. responsibility for fatal flaws in the drug war, while Mexican reactions continued to be more strident.
Headlines were recently generated in Mexico in the wake of a report released by Senator Diane Feinstein and two other senators citing Government Accountability Office findings that, depending on the time period, anywhere from 70 percent to 87 percent of the arms seized by Mexican authorities could be traced back to gun sales back in the States. Many of these arms were seized from drug cartel members.
President Calderon also cited the report and criticized U.S. policies, imploring the U.S. to strengthen its weak gun control laws.
Findings like these, some officials reasoned, pointed to an inability of the ATF to “control” illegal gun trafficking by ordinary means. Dodson and his fellow agents, however, are not swayed by such arguments.
Agent Forcelli responded by telling AlterNet, “There’s no excuse for this program, there’s simply and absolutely no excuse.”
What is clear is that expert analysts in Mexico, dissident public officials and the vast swaths of the Mexican population that are forming a growing social movement roundly agree with Forcelli that “there is no excuse.” Instead, many Mexicans are not only hoping to see a quick end to a program that provides the guns to the cartel members who are killing many of their people, but also an end to the ineffective “war on drugs.”
Andrew Kennis is an investigative journalist, an adjunct professor and an academic researcher. More of his work can be found here.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151517/
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Woman Gang-Raped by 7 Halliburton Employees "Signed Away" Her Right to Sue? How Justice Has Become the Privilege of Corporations | Gender | AlterNet
Woman Gang-Raped by 7 Halliburton Employees "Signed Away" Her Right to Sue? How Justice Has Become the Privilege of Corporations | Gender | AlterNet
By Laura Flanders, The Guardian
Posted on June 29, 2011
Worried about the influence of money in American politics, the huge cash payouts that the US supreme court waved through by its Citizens United decision – the decision that lifted most limits on election campaign spending? Corporations are having their way with American elections just as they've already had their way with our media.
But at least we have the courts, right?
Wrong. The third branch of government's in trouble, too. In fact, access to justice – like access to elected office, let alone a pundit's perch – is becoming a perk just for the rich and powerful.
Take the young woman now testifying in court in Texas. Jamie Leigh Jones claims she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq (at the time, a division of Halliburton). Jones, now 26, was on her fourth day in post in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven contractors and held captive, under armed guard by two KBR police, in a shipping container.
When the criminal courts failed to act, her lawyers filed a civil suit, only to be met with Halliburton's response that all her claims were to be decided in arbitration – because she'd signed away her rights to bring the company to court when she signed her employment contract. As Leigh testified before Congress, in October 2009, "I had signed away my right to a jury trial at the age of 20 and without the advice of counsel." It was a matter of sign or resign. "I had no idea that the clause was part of the contract, what the clause actually meant," testified Jones.
You've probably done the very same thing without even knowing it. When it comes to consumer claims, mandatory arbitration is the new normal. According to research by Public Citizen and others, corporations are inserting "forced arbitration" clauses into the fine print of contracts for work, for cell phone service, for credit cards, even nursing home contracts, requiring clients to give up their right to sue if they are harmed. Arbitration is a no-judge, no-jury, no-appeal world, where arbitrators are (often by contract) selected by the company and all decisions are private – and final.
Deadly small print is not only for subprime mortgage-seekers – and neither are the costly repercussions. When corporations evade the bills for harm, no matter how huge (for medical malpractice, say, or pension fund collapse), the liability is passed on to individuals, and then to taxpayers. A new documentary, Hot Coffee, premiering 27 June, on HBO, lays out the whole picture – and it's devastating.
First-time filmmaker Susan Saladoff starts where for many Americans, the term "tort reform" first appeared. Stella Liebeck, an 81-year-old woman, sued McDonald's over coffee that was "too hot" – and became the "welfare queen" of tort reform. Pilloried in corporate-funded PR and in the media after a jury imposed an initial $2.7m in punitive damages, lobbyists used Liebeck's case to deride "frivolous" lawsuits and bludgeon congressional and state legislators into passing laws that set maximum "caps" on damages. (Politicians all the way up to President George W Bush needed no bludgeoning: "frivolous suits" became a campaign trail hit.)
But look at the pictures Saladoff shows in Hot Coffee and you'll see Liebeck's legs seared by savage, third-degree burns, which covered over 16% of her body. As any reporter could have discovered at the time, McDonalds' protocols kept its coffee at 82-87ºC (180-190ºF). Over 700 people had been burned by it. Ten years of suits and claims had forced no change. Liebeck's suit was anything but "frivolous".
Likewise, Jones's suit. Or the big-business funded effort to unseat justices opposed to "tort reform" – also profiled in Hot Coffee. It's taken Jones nearly six years and a hearing in the US Senate to force her employer, Halliburton into open court, at last, in Houston this week. Jones tells Saladoff she's driven by concern for other young women in her position – in no position, that is, thanks to mandatory arbitration, to know the truth about past claims and what they may be getting into when they sign an employment contract.
Saladoff, a plaintiff's attorney for 25 years, is driven, too – by a belief in the seventh amendment right to a jury trial. "Tort" is a complicated word for a simple thing – "harm," she explains. The courts are supposed to be the branch of government where citizens and corporations have an equal shot. The US supreme court in Dukes v Walmart recently rejected 1.6 million workers' attempt to bring a class action case – making it a whole lot harder for Americans to band together to hold corporations accountable. Go it alone and the deck is stacked, thanks to decades of effort by corporations and the politicians they pay for.
They don't pay fair wages; they don't pay their fare share of taxes. They evade liability. What gives? Says Saladoff: "When corporations harm, there should be some way to hold them accountable."
Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv, Mon-Thursday on Free Speech TV (Dish Network chn. 9315) and streaming at GRITtv.org.
© 2011 The Guardian All rights reserved.
By Laura Flanders, The Guardian
Posted on June 29, 2011
Worried about the influence of money in American politics, the huge cash payouts that the US supreme court waved through by its Citizens United decision – the decision that lifted most limits on election campaign spending? Corporations are having their way with American elections just as they've already had their way with our media.
But at least we have the courts, right?
Wrong. The third branch of government's in trouble, too. In fact, access to justice – like access to elected office, let alone a pundit's perch – is becoming a perk just for the rich and powerful.
Take the young woman now testifying in court in Texas. Jamie Leigh Jones claims she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq (at the time, a division of Halliburton). Jones, now 26, was on her fourth day in post in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven contractors and held captive, under armed guard by two KBR police, in a shipping container.
When the criminal courts failed to act, her lawyers filed a civil suit, only to be met with Halliburton's response that all her claims were to be decided in arbitration – because she'd signed away her rights to bring the company to court when she signed her employment contract. As Leigh testified before Congress, in October 2009, "I had signed away my right to a jury trial at the age of 20 and without the advice of counsel." It was a matter of sign or resign. "I had no idea that the clause was part of the contract, what the clause actually meant," testified Jones.
You've probably done the very same thing without even knowing it. When it comes to consumer claims, mandatory arbitration is the new normal. According to research by Public Citizen and others, corporations are inserting "forced arbitration" clauses into the fine print of contracts for work, for cell phone service, for credit cards, even nursing home contracts, requiring clients to give up their right to sue if they are harmed. Arbitration is a no-judge, no-jury, no-appeal world, where arbitrators are (often by contract) selected by the company and all decisions are private – and final.
Deadly small print is not only for subprime mortgage-seekers – and neither are the costly repercussions. When corporations evade the bills for harm, no matter how huge (for medical malpractice, say, or pension fund collapse), the liability is passed on to individuals, and then to taxpayers. A new documentary, Hot Coffee, premiering 27 June, on HBO, lays out the whole picture – and it's devastating.
First-time filmmaker Susan Saladoff starts where for many Americans, the term "tort reform" first appeared. Stella Liebeck, an 81-year-old woman, sued McDonald's over coffee that was "too hot" – and became the "welfare queen" of tort reform. Pilloried in corporate-funded PR and in the media after a jury imposed an initial $2.7m in punitive damages, lobbyists used Liebeck's case to deride "frivolous" lawsuits and bludgeon congressional and state legislators into passing laws that set maximum "caps" on damages. (Politicians all the way up to President George W Bush needed no bludgeoning: "frivolous suits" became a campaign trail hit.)
But look at the pictures Saladoff shows in Hot Coffee and you'll see Liebeck's legs seared by savage, third-degree burns, which covered over 16% of her body. As any reporter could have discovered at the time, McDonalds' protocols kept its coffee at 82-87ºC (180-190ºF). Over 700 people had been burned by it. Ten years of suits and claims had forced no change. Liebeck's suit was anything but "frivolous".
Likewise, Jones's suit. Or the big-business funded effort to unseat justices opposed to "tort reform" – also profiled in Hot Coffee. It's taken Jones nearly six years and a hearing in the US Senate to force her employer, Halliburton into open court, at last, in Houston this week. Jones tells Saladoff she's driven by concern for other young women in her position – in no position, that is, thanks to mandatory arbitration, to know the truth about past claims and what they may be getting into when they sign an employment contract.
Saladoff, a plaintiff's attorney for 25 years, is driven, too – by a belief in the seventh amendment right to a jury trial. "Tort" is a complicated word for a simple thing – "harm," she explains. The courts are supposed to be the branch of government where citizens and corporations have an equal shot. The US supreme court in Dukes v Walmart recently rejected 1.6 million workers' attempt to bring a class action case – making it a whole lot harder for Americans to band together to hold corporations accountable. Go it alone and the deck is stacked, thanks to decades of effort by corporations and the politicians they pay for.
They don't pay fair wages; they don't pay their fare share of taxes. They evade liability. What gives? Says Saladoff: "When corporations harm, there should be some way to hold them accountable."
Laura Flanders is the host of GRITtv, Mon-Thursday on Free Speech TV (Dish Network chn. 9315) and streaming at GRITtv.org.
© 2011 The Guardian All rights reserved.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Fighting the Culture Wars With Hate, Violence and Even Bullets: Meet the Most Extreme of the Radical Christians | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet
Fighting the Culture Wars With Hate, Violence and Even Bullets: Meet the Most Extreme of the Radical Christians | Tea Party and the Right | AlterNet
By Alex Henderson, AlterNet
Posted on June 27, 2011
If there is one name some residents of Amarillo, Texas wish they could forget, it’s Repent Amarillo. Based in that North Texas city, Repent Amarillo is a militant Christian fundamentalist group whose antics have ranged from staging a mock execution of Santa Claus by firing squad to posting a “spiritual warfare” map on its Web site that cited a Buddhist temple, an Islamic center, gay bars, strip clubs and sex shops as places of demonic activity.
Repent Amarillo is also infamous for mercilessly harassing a local swingers club called Route 66. Throughout 2009, members of Repent Amarillo made a point of showing up at Route 66’s events, where they would typically wear military fatigues, shout at Route 66 members through bullhorns and write down the license plate numbers of people attending the events. After finding out who the swingers were, Repent Amarillo’s members would find out where they worked and try to get them fired from their jobs (according to Route 66 coordinator Mac Mead, at least two members of the club lost their jobs because of Repent Amarillo).
None of that has kept Repent Amarillo founder David H. Grisham from dabbling in local politics; earlier this year, he ran for mayor of Amarillo and lost to former city commissioner Paul Harpole.
But Repent Amarillo is hardly alone when it comes to promoting a decidedly radical and militant brand of Christianity. From the Army of God to the Hutaree Militia to Gary North and his Christian reconstructionists, radical Christianity is alive and well in the United States—and Christianists aren’t shy about turning up the heat when it comes to fighting the "culture war." Some radical Christianists have employed bully tactics and hate-mongering rhetoric without resorting to actual violence (Repent Amarillo, the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church), while others have committed acts of terrorism and said the culture war will have to be won with bombs and bullets.
When religion is discussed, it is important to make a distinction between radical and non-radical practitioners. Radical Christianity is not representative of Christianity any more than al-Qaeda is representative of Islam. The average Lutheran or Episcopalian minister is no more a threat to public safety than the average member of Islam’s Sufi sect, who are arguably the Hare Krishnas of Islam. Not all Christians are Christianists; not all Muslims are Islamists. But an abundance of disturbing events bear out the fact that radical Christianity, like radical Islam, is quite capable of violence—and contrary to what Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter would have us believe, the examples are numerous.
Active since the early 1980s, the Army of God is a loose network of radical anti-abortionists with a long history of promoting terrorism and premeditated murder in the name of Christianity. The Army of God has published an anti-abortion training manual that offers instructions on bomb-making, arson and other ways to attack clinics.
The group’s Web site praises a long list of Christian terrorists who have been convicted of violent crimes, including Paul Jennings Hill (who was executed by lethal injection in 2003 for the murders of abortion provider John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett), Scott Roeder (who was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2009 shooting of George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed late-term abortions), Michael Frederick Griffin (who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn, an ob/gyn based in Pensacola, Florida), James Charles Kopp (who shot and killed Barnett Slepian, a physician who performed abortions, in 1998), Matthew Lee Derosia (who, in 2009, rammed his SUV into the front entrance of a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul and told police that Jesus ordered him to carry out that attack) and John C. Salvi (who attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1994, shooting and killing receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols and wounding several others).
The Web site describes Tiller’s murder as “justifiable homicide” and describes Lowney and Nichols not as victims of domestic terrorism, but as women who got exactly what they deserved; Salvi, who died in prison in 1996 and may have committed suicide, is hailed as a hero for killing them. The Army of God exalts Hill, Rudolph, Roeder, Griffin, Derosia and Salvi as martyrs for Christianity in much the same way al-Qaeda consider Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers martyrs for Islam.
The Army of God has also been a vocal supporter of Eric Rudolph, who is serving life without parole for a long list of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Christianity. Rudolph’s crimes include bombing an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, a suburb of Atlanta, in 1997; bombing the Otherwise Lounge (a lesbian bar in Atlanta) in 1997; and bombing an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama in 1998. The Birmingham bombing caused the death of Robert Sanderson, a Birmingham police officer and part-time security guard, and resulted in serious injuries for nurse Emily Lyons, who lost an eye. Rudolph is best known, however, for carrying out the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics; that blast killed spectator Alice Hawthorne and wounded 111 others.
Another Christian terrorist who has been associated with the Army of God is Shelley Shannon, who shot Tiller in 1993 but didn’t kill him; in addition to being convicted of attempted murder for her attack on Tiller, Shannon was involved in a series of arson attacks on abortion clinics in different states. One person who considered Shannon a good friend was fellow Army of God terrorist Scott Roeder, who visited her frequently in prison and finished what she started when he murdered Tiller in 2009. The Army of God Web site calls Shannon “a warrior soldier in the Army of God.”
In 2010, a North Carolina-based Christianist named Justin Carl Moose was arrested by the FBI for plotting to help blow up an abortion clinic; Moose, the FBI said, considers himself an Army of God member and an organizer of a terrorist cell for that group. According to the FBI, Moose described himself as a Christian equivalent of Osama bin Laden on his Facebook page but openly advocated violence against Muslims; he also praised Timothy McVeigh (mastermind of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995, which killed 168 people and injured 450 others).
The FBI said that Moose wrote on his Facebook page: “If a mosque is built on Ground Zero, it will be removed Oklahoma City style. Tim’s not the only man out there that knows how to do it....I have learned a lot from the Muslim terrorists and have no problem using their tactics.” Moose, according to the FBI, met with an FBI informant and offered advice on how to make TATP, the explosive used in the London subway bombings of 2005. Earlier this year, Moose was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The Army of God’s Web site has, in the past, been managed by the Rev. Donald Spitz, who is so extreme that even the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue disowned him for promoting violence. The Virginia-based Spitz has publicly argued that killing abortion doctors is justifiable homicide, and Spitz has published the writings of Paul Jennings Hill, Eric Rudolph, Shelley Shannon and other Christian terrorists on the Army of God’s Web site. Spitz, who considered himself Hill’s “spiritual adviser” during the final months of Hill’s life, heads his own Christianist group, Pro-Life Virginia, and has said that Muslims “should not be allowed to live in the United States.”
In the U.S., the far-right militia movement has often been secular in nature; Timothy McVeigh, for example, was raised Catholic but described himself as an agnostic. But occasionally, the militia movement and radical Christianity have overlapped. A perfect example is the Hutaree Militia, a Michigan-based group with extreme Christianist views. In 2010, nine members of Hutaree were arrested for an alleged plot to assassinate police officers using firearms and explosives; allegedly, Hutaree saw that plot as part of a battle with forces of the "Antichrist."
Christian reconstructionism is one of the most disturbing schools of radical Christianist ideology. Founded by the late Calvinist theologian Rousas John Rushdoony (who died in 2001), the Christian reconstructionist movement believes in abolishing any separation of church and state and establishing a government that adheres to a rigid approach to Mosaic Old Testament law; adultery, homosexuality and blasphemy would be punishable by death under a Christian reconstructionist government.
Even on the Christian Right, Rushdoony (who was a defender of slavery and considered democracy incompatible with Christianity) is controversial. The type of government Christian reconstructionists long for would, in many respects, mirror the Taliban of radical Islam. Rushdoony’s teachings have a following that includes his son, the Rev. Mark Rushdoony (who now heads the Chalcedon Foundation, the organization his father founded) and Gary North (who was R.J. Rushdoony’s son-in-law and now heads his own Christian reconstructionist organization, the Institute for Christian Economics). According to David Holthouse (formerly of the Southern Poverty Law Center and now with Media Matters), Mark Rushdoony “now leads a small army of true believers whose fundamentalism is so hardcore they make garden-variety right-wing evangelicals seem like Unitarians at a Peter, Paul and Mary sing-along.”
North has written that under a Christian reconstructionist government, stoning should be the method of execution for gay men, adulterers and women who have had abortions. North has said that stoning (which is still practiced by radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and other countries) is preferable to other methods of execution because it is more economical; he has also said that a stoning can be a community event for Christian families.
Of course, not everyone on the Christian Right is guilty of committing or promoting violence. But even without actual violence, Christianists often resort to bully tactics and violent rhetoric. After the January 8, 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona that killed six people and left Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seriously wounded, Fred Phelps praised the shooter and said that he was doing God’s work. Phelps, who ran for political office several times as a Democrat in the 1990s, said, “Congresswoman Giffords, an avid supporter of sin and baby killing, was shot for that mischief…Westboro Baptist Church prays for more shooters...and more dead.”
Journalist Chris Hedges has often said that actual violence is preceded by the "language of violence,” and the language of violence is quite common among Christianists. In 2007, when Hindu minister Rajan Zed was asked to deliver an opening prayer for the Senate, Christianist groups like the American Family Association, Operation Rescue/Operation Save America and Faith2Action angrily protested and made it clear that they had no use for Hinduism. And Repent Amarillo isn't shy about trying to bully its victims into accepting the group's extremist view of Christianity. Certainly, the language and rhetoric of violence is a part of “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” a video game that deals with holy war in the name of Christianity and is part of the Rev. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ apocalypse-obsessed Left Behind series. Author Frank Schaeffer, who used to be part of the Christian Right but has since renounced it, has said that the Left Behind novels and games “represents everything that is most deranged about religion.”
But despite all the extremist views, hate-mongering and terrorist violence associated with Christianists, radical Christianity typically gets a pass from Republican politicians and the Republican talk radio hosts who support them. When, in 2009, Janet Napolitano warned of the threat of violence coming from the far right (including anti-abortion extremists), she was called anti-Christian by many people on the Christian Right. But when Rep. Peter King of New York called for Congressional hearings on radical Islamic activity in the U.S., he was applauded by neocons and many of his fellow Republicans.
Far-right talk show hosts have spent a considerable amount of time talking about radical Islam, but they seldom, if ever, have anything to say about radical Christianity. They have no problem with a group like Repent Amarillo, which hasn't actually resorted to physical violence even though it has employed an abundance of violent, militaristic imagery. It’s safe to say that if an Islamist group held a mock execution of Santa Claus and harassed people at work, it wouldn’t be taken lightly in GOP circles. And if an Islamist group released a video game as twisted as “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” it wouldn’t get a pass from Republican talk radio.
One person who has been outspoken about the Republican/far-right double standard when it comes to radical Christianity vs. radical Islam is Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State and author of three books on the Christian Right. “From where I’m sitting, the main organizations that are trying to impose religion on other people in this country are fundamentalist Christian in nature,” Boston said:
“I can’t remember the last time, for example, that a Muslim group tried to get Islamic doctrine posted in a courthouse or attempted to ban same-sex marriage by pointing to passages in the Koran, or tried to force Islamic prayers in the public schools. But fundamentalist Christian groups do these things all the time. So if anybody is trying to impose religion on Americans, it’s not Muslims; it’s extreme fundamentalist Christian groups.”
Boston added that just as it is wrong for atheists to make broad generalizations about people of faith, it is equally wrong to automatically associate terrorism and extremism with Islam:
“Christian groups will complain if they are painted with too broad a brush—and rightly so. Christianity in America is diverse. There are Christian groups that are theologically very moderate, and there are Christian groups that are very, very conservative. Not everyone who is a Christian in America is a fundamentalist or an evangelical. We always have to remember that there is a lot of diversity out there. Yet, the same conservative Christian groups that complain about being caricatured will do the same thing to Islam; they portray the one billion Muslims in the world as if they are exactly the same. But anybody who has spent any time talking to Muslims quickly learns that there is just as much diversity in that community as there is in the Christian community about how holy books are to be interpreted and how society is to be ordered.”
Boston continued:
“I just find the whole thing ironic because if you look at the agenda of the Islamic extremists, their agenda is anti-women’s rights and anti-gay rights, and it’s about religion controlling the government. Well, what other movement do you know of that believes in those things? The Christian Right. Culturally, those movements are very similar. And there’s a reason for that. It’s not religion that’s the problem; it’s fundamentalism that’s the problem. I always remind people of that when I’m giving speeches. Sometimes, I run across people who think that religion in general is bad and that religion is why we have all these problems. And I tell them, well, religion can persuade people to do a lot of good things in the world. It’s not religion that’s the problem—it’s fundamentalism."
Some people have described Timothy McVeigh as the ultimate Christian terrorist. This is inaccurate, because while McVeigh was raised Catholic, he appeared to be motivated by extreme anti-government/militia beliefs rather than religious motives. But there is no doubt that McVeigh was responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil prior to 9/11.
American Muslim activist Haroon Moghul, who serves as executive director of the Maydan Institute and frequently lectures on Islam, said he sees a major disparity between the way radical Christianity and radical Islam are covered by the right-wing media. “I think the biggest difference in the way Islam and Christianity are covered by the right is that when it comes to Islam, the assumption has been that Islam is inherently violent or inherently political and that Islam has to prove otherwise,” the New York City-based Moghul said.
“When it comes to radical forms of Christianity or more extreme forms of Christianity, it’s always seen as an aberration by the right. But any sort of Muslim behavior that is violent or extreme or intolerant is assumed to be inherent to Islam. So the burden of proof is on a Muslim community or a Muslim individual to prove otherwise. If Osama bin Laden said something, it was assumed that it was inherent to Islam. If it’s Hutaree or something like that, it’s assumed that it is just a lone wolf or a fringe group—and it’s disconnected from the rest of what’s happening in America. Hutaree isn’t assumed to be the product of something bigger than themselves.”
Moghul views the Christianity good/Islam bad narrative of the far right as symptomatic of the soundbite culture that exists in America. “There really isn’t room for a lot of different opinions in our political discourse in the United States,” Moghul said. “Whether the two-party system makes that better or worse, I don’t really know. But you generally see that nuance disappears in our political discourse.”
Another voice of sanity on the subject of Islam and Christianity is journalist Leonard Pitts, Jr., author of Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood and a syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald. In his columns, Pitts has had a lot to say about the way some people on the far right will try to paint Islam in general as a violent religion (as opposed to making a distinction between radical and non-radical Islam). And they get away with that double standard, according to Pitts, because it is easier to attack what is a minority religion in the U.S.
“Christianity is a known element in the United States, whereas Islam is a foreign faith,” Pitts explained. He continued:
“Most people of faith in the United States are Christian. Most Americans know a lot of Christians but don’t know any Muslims. So it’s easy to look at the craziest, most dangerous Muslims and assume that they are representative of Islam as a whole. Christians in the United States will look at the Army of God and say, ‘That has no relation to any Christianity I have ever known. That has absolutely nothing to do with any Christianity I have ever known,’ but moderate Muslims will say the same thing about Muslims who commit acts of violence.”
In one of his columns, Pitts pointed to four scriptural quotes that could be construed as violent—one from the Qu’ran, three from the Bible. His point was that cherry-picking parts of the Qu’ran in order to prove that Islam is an inherently violent or dangerous religion is as intellectually dishonest as cherry-picking parts of the Bible in order to depict Christianity as inherently violent.
The far right, according to Pitts, often neglects to mention the fact that Muslims themselves have been the victims of Muslim extremists, including the Muslims killed on 9/11. “People forget that a lot of Muslims died that day,” Pitts said. “You’re not going to attack Lower Manhattan that way and not kill Muslim people.” He added: “I don't fear Muslims, I don’t fear Christians. But I fear Muslim and Christian extremists. I fear extremists period.”
If stoning proponent Gary North is mentioned at all in the Republican media, he is painted as a harmless eccentric and not part of a radical Christianist movement. But if someone in a mosque in Detroit or Oakland promoted stoning, talk-radio Republicans would be screaming about it for days.
The bottom line is that extremism in the name of religion is cause for concern regardless of whether the extremists identify themselves as Christian or Muslim. Those who claim that Christian extremism is any less dangerous than Islamic extremism are being disingenuous.
“When people embrace any kind of extreme ideology, whether it’s religious or secular, and can tolerate no dissent,” Boston said, “we’re in for trouble."
Alex Henderson's work has appeared in the L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Spin, and other publications.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151436/
By Alex Henderson, AlterNet
Posted on June 27, 2011
If there is one name some residents of Amarillo, Texas wish they could forget, it’s Repent Amarillo. Based in that North Texas city, Repent Amarillo is a militant Christian fundamentalist group whose antics have ranged from staging a mock execution of Santa Claus by firing squad to posting a “spiritual warfare” map on its Web site that cited a Buddhist temple, an Islamic center, gay bars, strip clubs and sex shops as places of demonic activity.
Repent Amarillo is also infamous for mercilessly harassing a local swingers club called Route 66. Throughout 2009, members of Repent Amarillo made a point of showing up at Route 66’s events, where they would typically wear military fatigues, shout at Route 66 members through bullhorns and write down the license plate numbers of people attending the events. After finding out who the swingers were, Repent Amarillo’s members would find out where they worked and try to get them fired from their jobs (according to Route 66 coordinator Mac Mead, at least two members of the club lost their jobs because of Repent Amarillo).
None of that has kept Repent Amarillo founder David H. Grisham from dabbling in local politics; earlier this year, he ran for mayor of Amarillo and lost to former city commissioner Paul Harpole.
But Repent Amarillo is hardly alone when it comes to promoting a decidedly radical and militant brand of Christianity. From the Army of God to the Hutaree Militia to Gary North and his Christian reconstructionists, radical Christianity is alive and well in the United States—and Christianists aren’t shy about turning up the heat when it comes to fighting the "culture war." Some radical Christianists have employed bully tactics and hate-mongering rhetoric without resorting to actual violence (Repent Amarillo, the Rev. Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church), while others have committed acts of terrorism and said the culture war will have to be won with bombs and bullets.
When religion is discussed, it is important to make a distinction between radical and non-radical practitioners. Radical Christianity is not representative of Christianity any more than al-Qaeda is representative of Islam. The average Lutheran or Episcopalian minister is no more a threat to public safety than the average member of Islam’s Sufi sect, who are arguably the Hare Krishnas of Islam. Not all Christians are Christianists; not all Muslims are Islamists. But an abundance of disturbing events bear out the fact that radical Christianity, like radical Islam, is quite capable of violence—and contrary to what Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter would have us believe, the examples are numerous.
Active since the early 1980s, the Army of God is a loose network of radical anti-abortionists with a long history of promoting terrorism and premeditated murder in the name of Christianity. The Army of God has published an anti-abortion training manual that offers instructions on bomb-making, arson and other ways to attack clinics.
The group’s Web site praises a long list of Christian terrorists who have been convicted of violent crimes, including Paul Jennings Hill (who was executed by lethal injection in 2003 for the murders of abortion provider John Britton and his bodyguard James Barrett), Scott Roeder (who was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2009 shooting of George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who performed late-term abortions), Michael Frederick Griffin (who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1993 murder of Dr. David Gunn, an ob/gyn based in Pensacola, Florida), James Charles Kopp (who shot and killed Barnett Slepian, a physician who performed abortions, in 1998), Matthew Lee Derosia (who, in 2009, rammed his SUV into the front entrance of a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Paul and told police that Jesus ordered him to carry out that attack) and John C. Salvi (who attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1994, shooting and killing receptionists Shannon Lowney and Lee Ann Nichols and wounding several others).
The Web site describes Tiller’s murder as “justifiable homicide” and describes Lowney and Nichols not as victims of domestic terrorism, but as women who got exactly what they deserved; Salvi, who died in prison in 1996 and may have committed suicide, is hailed as a hero for killing them. The Army of God exalts Hill, Rudolph, Roeder, Griffin, Derosia and Salvi as martyrs for Christianity in much the same way al-Qaeda consider Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 hijackers martyrs for Islam.
The Army of God has also been a vocal supporter of Eric Rudolph, who is serving life without parole for a long list of terrorist attacks committed in the name of Christianity. Rudolph’s crimes include bombing an abortion clinic in Sandy Springs, a suburb of Atlanta, in 1997; bombing the Otherwise Lounge (a lesbian bar in Atlanta) in 1997; and bombing an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama in 1998. The Birmingham bombing caused the death of Robert Sanderson, a Birmingham police officer and part-time security guard, and resulted in serious injuries for nurse Emily Lyons, who lost an eye. Rudolph is best known, however, for carrying out the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics; that blast killed spectator Alice Hawthorne and wounded 111 others.
Another Christian terrorist who has been associated with the Army of God is Shelley Shannon, who shot Tiller in 1993 but didn’t kill him; in addition to being convicted of attempted murder for her attack on Tiller, Shannon was involved in a series of arson attacks on abortion clinics in different states. One person who considered Shannon a good friend was fellow Army of God terrorist Scott Roeder, who visited her frequently in prison and finished what she started when he murdered Tiller in 2009. The Army of God Web site calls Shannon “a warrior soldier in the Army of God.”
In 2010, a North Carolina-based Christianist named Justin Carl Moose was arrested by the FBI for plotting to help blow up an abortion clinic; Moose, the FBI said, considers himself an Army of God member and an organizer of a terrorist cell for that group. According to the FBI, Moose described himself as a Christian equivalent of Osama bin Laden on his Facebook page but openly advocated violence against Muslims; he also praised Timothy McVeigh (mastermind of the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing of 1995, which killed 168 people and injured 450 others).
The FBI said that Moose wrote on his Facebook page: “If a mosque is built on Ground Zero, it will be removed Oklahoma City style. Tim’s not the only man out there that knows how to do it....I have learned a lot from the Muslim terrorists and have no problem using their tactics.” Moose, according to the FBI, met with an FBI informant and offered advice on how to make TATP, the explosive used in the London subway bombings of 2005. Earlier this year, Moose was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The Army of God’s Web site has, in the past, been managed by the Rev. Donald Spitz, who is so extreme that even the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue disowned him for promoting violence. The Virginia-based Spitz has publicly argued that killing abortion doctors is justifiable homicide, and Spitz has published the writings of Paul Jennings Hill, Eric Rudolph, Shelley Shannon and other Christian terrorists on the Army of God’s Web site. Spitz, who considered himself Hill’s “spiritual adviser” during the final months of Hill’s life, heads his own Christianist group, Pro-Life Virginia, and has said that Muslims “should not be allowed to live in the United States.”
In the U.S., the far-right militia movement has often been secular in nature; Timothy McVeigh, for example, was raised Catholic but described himself as an agnostic. But occasionally, the militia movement and radical Christianity have overlapped. A perfect example is the Hutaree Militia, a Michigan-based group with extreme Christianist views. In 2010, nine members of Hutaree were arrested for an alleged plot to assassinate police officers using firearms and explosives; allegedly, Hutaree saw that plot as part of a battle with forces of the "Antichrist."
Christian reconstructionism is one of the most disturbing schools of radical Christianist ideology. Founded by the late Calvinist theologian Rousas John Rushdoony (who died in 2001), the Christian reconstructionist movement believes in abolishing any separation of church and state and establishing a government that adheres to a rigid approach to Mosaic Old Testament law; adultery, homosexuality and blasphemy would be punishable by death under a Christian reconstructionist government.
Even on the Christian Right, Rushdoony (who was a defender of slavery and considered democracy incompatible with Christianity) is controversial. The type of government Christian reconstructionists long for would, in many respects, mirror the Taliban of radical Islam. Rushdoony’s teachings have a following that includes his son, the Rev. Mark Rushdoony (who now heads the Chalcedon Foundation, the organization his father founded) and Gary North (who was R.J. Rushdoony’s son-in-law and now heads his own Christian reconstructionist organization, the Institute for Christian Economics). According to David Holthouse (formerly of the Southern Poverty Law Center and now with Media Matters), Mark Rushdoony “now leads a small army of true believers whose fundamentalism is so hardcore they make garden-variety right-wing evangelicals seem like Unitarians at a Peter, Paul and Mary sing-along.”
North has written that under a Christian reconstructionist government, stoning should be the method of execution for gay men, adulterers and women who have had abortions. North has said that stoning (which is still practiced by radical Islamists in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and other countries) is preferable to other methods of execution because it is more economical; he has also said that a stoning can be a community event for Christian families.
Of course, not everyone on the Christian Right is guilty of committing or promoting violence. But even without actual violence, Christianists often resort to bully tactics and violent rhetoric. After the January 8, 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona that killed six people and left Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords seriously wounded, Fred Phelps praised the shooter and said that he was doing God’s work. Phelps, who ran for political office several times as a Democrat in the 1990s, said, “Congresswoman Giffords, an avid supporter of sin and baby killing, was shot for that mischief…Westboro Baptist Church prays for more shooters...and more dead.”
Journalist Chris Hedges has often said that actual violence is preceded by the "language of violence,” and the language of violence is quite common among Christianists. In 2007, when Hindu minister Rajan Zed was asked to deliver an opening prayer for the Senate, Christianist groups like the American Family Association, Operation Rescue/Operation Save America and Faith2Action angrily protested and made it clear that they had no use for Hinduism. And Repent Amarillo isn't shy about trying to bully its victims into accepting the group's extremist view of Christianity. Certainly, the language and rhetoric of violence is a part of “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” a video game that deals with holy war in the name of Christianity and is part of the Rev. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ apocalypse-obsessed Left Behind series. Author Frank Schaeffer, who used to be part of the Christian Right but has since renounced it, has said that the Left Behind novels and games “represents everything that is most deranged about religion.”
But despite all the extremist views, hate-mongering and terrorist violence associated with Christianists, radical Christianity typically gets a pass from Republican politicians and the Republican talk radio hosts who support them. When, in 2009, Janet Napolitano warned of the threat of violence coming from the far right (including anti-abortion extremists), she was called anti-Christian by many people on the Christian Right. But when Rep. Peter King of New York called for Congressional hearings on radical Islamic activity in the U.S., he was applauded by neocons and many of his fellow Republicans.
Far-right talk show hosts have spent a considerable amount of time talking about radical Islam, but they seldom, if ever, have anything to say about radical Christianity. They have no problem with a group like Repent Amarillo, which hasn't actually resorted to physical violence even though it has employed an abundance of violent, militaristic imagery. It’s safe to say that if an Islamist group held a mock execution of Santa Claus and harassed people at work, it wouldn’t be taken lightly in GOP circles. And if an Islamist group released a video game as twisted as “Left Behind: Eternal Forces,” it wouldn’t get a pass from Republican talk radio.
One person who has been outspoken about the Republican/far-right double standard when it comes to radical Christianity vs. radical Islam is Rob Boston, senior policy analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State and author of three books on the Christian Right. “From where I’m sitting, the main organizations that are trying to impose religion on other people in this country are fundamentalist Christian in nature,” Boston said:
“I can’t remember the last time, for example, that a Muslim group tried to get Islamic doctrine posted in a courthouse or attempted to ban same-sex marriage by pointing to passages in the Koran, or tried to force Islamic prayers in the public schools. But fundamentalist Christian groups do these things all the time. So if anybody is trying to impose religion on Americans, it’s not Muslims; it’s extreme fundamentalist Christian groups.”
Boston added that just as it is wrong for atheists to make broad generalizations about people of faith, it is equally wrong to automatically associate terrorism and extremism with Islam:
“Christian groups will complain if they are painted with too broad a brush—and rightly so. Christianity in America is diverse. There are Christian groups that are theologically very moderate, and there are Christian groups that are very, very conservative. Not everyone who is a Christian in America is a fundamentalist or an evangelical. We always have to remember that there is a lot of diversity out there. Yet, the same conservative Christian groups that complain about being caricatured will do the same thing to Islam; they portray the one billion Muslims in the world as if they are exactly the same. But anybody who has spent any time talking to Muslims quickly learns that there is just as much diversity in that community as there is in the Christian community about how holy books are to be interpreted and how society is to be ordered.”
Boston continued:
“I just find the whole thing ironic because if you look at the agenda of the Islamic extremists, their agenda is anti-women’s rights and anti-gay rights, and it’s about religion controlling the government. Well, what other movement do you know of that believes in those things? The Christian Right. Culturally, those movements are very similar. And there’s a reason for that. It’s not religion that’s the problem; it’s fundamentalism that’s the problem. I always remind people of that when I’m giving speeches. Sometimes, I run across people who think that religion in general is bad and that religion is why we have all these problems. And I tell them, well, religion can persuade people to do a lot of good things in the world. It’s not religion that’s the problem—it’s fundamentalism."
Some people have described Timothy McVeigh as the ultimate Christian terrorist. This is inaccurate, because while McVeigh was raised Catholic, he appeared to be motivated by extreme anti-government/militia beliefs rather than religious motives. But there is no doubt that McVeigh was responsible for the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil prior to 9/11.
American Muslim activist Haroon Moghul, who serves as executive director of the Maydan Institute and frequently lectures on Islam, said he sees a major disparity between the way radical Christianity and radical Islam are covered by the right-wing media. “I think the biggest difference in the way Islam and Christianity are covered by the right is that when it comes to Islam, the assumption has been that Islam is inherently violent or inherently political and that Islam has to prove otherwise,” the New York City-based Moghul said.
“When it comes to radical forms of Christianity or more extreme forms of Christianity, it’s always seen as an aberration by the right. But any sort of Muslim behavior that is violent or extreme or intolerant is assumed to be inherent to Islam. So the burden of proof is on a Muslim community or a Muslim individual to prove otherwise. If Osama bin Laden said something, it was assumed that it was inherent to Islam. If it’s Hutaree or something like that, it’s assumed that it is just a lone wolf or a fringe group—and it’s disconnected from the rest of what’s happening in America. Hutaree isn’t assumed to be the product of something bigger than themselves.”
Moghul views the Christianity good/Islam bad narrative of the far right as symptomatic of the soundbite culture that exists in America. “There really isn’t room for a lot of different opinions in our political discourse in the United States,” Moghul said. “Whether the two-party system makes that better or worse, I don’t really know. But you generally see that nuance disappears in our political discourse.”
Another voice of sanity on the subject of Islam and Christianity is journalist Leonard Pitts, Jr., author of Becoming Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood and a syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald. In his columns, Pitts has had a lot to say about the way some people on the far right will try to paint Islam in general as a violent religion (as opposed to making a distinction between radical and non-radical Islam). And they get away with that double standard, according to Pitts, because it is easier to attack what is a minority religion in the U.S.
“Christianity is a known element in the United States, whereas Islam is a foreign faith,” Pitts explained. He continued:
“Most people of faith in the United States are Christian. Most Americans know a lot of Christians but don’t know any Muslims. So it’s easy to look at the craziest, most dangerous Muslims and assume that they are representative of Islam as a whole. Christians in the United States will look at the Army of God and say, ‘That has no relation to any Christianity I have ever known. That has absolutely nothing to do with any Christianity I have ever known,’ but moderate Muslims will say the same thing about Muslims who commit acts of violence.”
In one of his columns, Pitts pointed to four scriptural quotes that could be construed as violent—one from the Qu’ran, three from the Bible. His point was that cherry-picking parts of the Qu’ran in order to prove that Islam is an inherently violent or dangerous religion is as intellectually dishonest as cherry-picking parts of the Bible in order to depict Christianity as inherently violent.
The far right, according to Pitts, often neglects to mention the fact that Muslims themselves have been the victims of Muslim extremists, including the Muslims killed on 9/11. “People forget that a lot of Muslims died that day,” Pitts said. “You’re not going to attack Lower Manhattan that way and not kill Muslim people.” He added: “I don't fear Muslims, I don’t fear Christians. But I fear Muslim and Christian extremists. I fear extremists period.”
If stoning proponent Gary North is mentioned at all in the Republican media, he is painted as a harmless eccentric and not part of a radical Christianist movement. But if someone in a mosque in Detroit or Oakland promoted stoning, talk-radio Republicans would be screaming about it for days.
The bottom line is that extremism in the name of religion is cause for concern regardless of whether the extremists identify themselves as Christian or Muslim. Those who claim that Christian extremism is any less dangerous than Islamic extremism are being disingenuous.
“When people embrace any kind of extreme ideology, whether it’s religious or secular, and can tolerate no dissent,” Boston said, “we’re in for trouble."
Alex Henderson's work has appeared in the L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Spin, and other publications.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/151436/
Monday, June 27, 2011
Alice Walker: Why I'm Joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza | World | AlterNet
Alice Walker: Why I'm Joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza | World | AlterNet
Alice Walker: Why I'm Joining the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza
By Alice Walker, The Guardian
Posted on June 26, 2011
Why am I going on the Freedom Flotilla II to Gaza? I ask myself this, even though the answer is: what else would I do? I am in my 67th year, having lived already a long and fruitful life, one with which I am content. It seems to me that during this period of eldering it is good to reap the harvest of one's understanding of what is important, and to share this, especially with the young. How are they to learn, otherwise?
Our boat, The Audacity of Hope, will be carrying letters to the people of Gaza. Letters expressing solidarity and love. That is all its cargo will consist of. If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman. This should go down hilariously in the annals of history. But if they insist on attacking us, wounding us, even murdering us, as they did some of the activists in the last flotilla, Freedom Flotilla I, what is to be done?
There is a scene in the movie Gandhi that is very moving to me: it is when the unarmed Indian protesters line up to confront the armed forces of the British Empire. The soldiers beat them unmercifully, but the Indians, their broken and dead lifted tenderly out of the fray, keep coming.
Alongside this image of brave followers of Gandhi there is, for me, an awareness of paying off a debt to the Jewish civil rights activists who faced death to come to the side of black people in the American south in our time of need. I am especially indebted to Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who heard our calls for help – our government then as now glacially slow in providing protection to non-violent protesters – and came to stand with us.
They got as far as the truncheons and bullets of a few "good ol' boys'" of Neshoba County, Mississippi and were beaten and shot to death along with James Chaney, a young black man of formidable courage who died with them. So, even though our boat will be called The Audacity of Hope, it will fly the Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner flag in my own heart.
And what of the children of Palestine, who were ignored in our president's latest speech on Israel and Palestine, and whose impoverished, terrorised, segregated existence was mocked by the standing ovations recently given in the US Congress to the prime minister of Israel?
I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left. One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.
As adults, we must affirm, constantly, that the Arab child, the Muslim child, the Palestinian child, the African child, the Jewish child, the Christian child, the American child, the Chinese child, the Israeli child, the Native American child, etc, is equal to all others on the planet. We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.
I once asked my best friend and husband during the era of segregation, who was as staunch a defender of black people's human rights as anyone I'd ever met: how did you find your way to us, to black people, who so needed you? What force shaped your response to the great injustice facing people of colour of that time?
I thought he might say it was the speeches, the marches, the example of Martin Luther King Jr, or of others in the movement who exhibited impactful courage and grace. But no. Thinking back, he recounted an episode from his childhood that had led him, inevitably, to our struggle.
He was a little boy on his way home from yeshiva, the Jewish school he attended after regular school let out. His mother, a bookkeeper, was still at work; he was alone. He was frequently harassed by older boys from regular school, and one day two of these boys snatched his yarmulke (skull cap), and, taunting him, ran off with it, eventually throwing it over a fence.
Two black boys appeared, saw his tears, assessed the situation, and took off after the boys who had taken his yarmulke. Chasing the boys down and catching them, they made them climb the fence, retrieve and dust off the yarmulke, and place it respectfully back on his head.
It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put – without delay, and with tenderness – back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice and respect because the injustice and disrespect have been so severe. But I believe we are right to try.
That is why I sail.
The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir by Alice Walker is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. A longer version of this article appears on Alice Walker's blog: alicewalkersgarden.com/blog
After the excitement of the Arab Spring, has the Palestine issue slipped out of view, asks Emine Saner
Just over a year ago, in the middle of the night, Israeli commandos boarded a Turkish ship in international waters just off the coast of Israel, opened fire and killed nine activists. The Mavi Marmara was one of six ships in the Freedom Flotilla, which was attempting to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza, and the actions of Israel's military brought widespread international condemnation.
This time, as Freedom Flotilla II sets sail over the next week, with 10 ships carrying many of the same activists who travelled last year, including Swedish writer Henning Mankell, American human rights campaigner Hedy Epstein, and writer and academic Alice Walker, the Israeli government's response will be closely watched.
This week Ron Prosor, Israel's ambassador to the UN, wrote a letter saying: "Israel calls on the international community to do everything in their ability in order to prevent the flotilla and warn citizens … of the risks of participating in this type of provocation." The purpose of the flotilla, he said, is "to provoke and aid a radical political agenda". He later added: "We are very determined to defend ourselves and to assert our right to a naval blockade on Gaza."
"The threats of violence won't deter us," says Huwaida Arraf, one of the flotilla organisers. "Nobody is going in to this lightly, but we feel it has to be done. Israel has to realise its violence against us is not going to stop our growing civilian effort to challenge its illegal policies. The size of this flotilla, the number of people involved in organising it, even after Israel killed nine of our colleagues last year, is testament to that."
She says half a million people applied for the few hundred places: depending on how many of the 10 boats are seaworthy in time, there should be around 400 people on the flotilla.
The campaign began in August 2008, when 44 activists on two small fishing boats set off from Cyprus and managed to reach Gaza. Later that year, the Free Gaza Movement, as it became known, organised several other voyages, usually sending single boats containing small but symbolic supplies such as medicine and toys, and volunteers, including doctors, lawyers and politicians. Amid allegations of violence and hostility from Israel's naval forces at sea, the activists decided they would need to send a flotilla, and after months of fundraising and negotiating with NGOs from other countries, particularly Turkey, several ships met in the Mediterranean sea in May last year with the intention of reaching Gaza.
"We didn't make it to Gaza and we lost a lot of colleagues," says Arraf, "but one of the things that was achieved was that people realised what Israel's policies meant, and the violence Israel was using to maintain them. We think our action will put pressure on Israel to end its blockade on Gaza, and we hope the respective governments of all the people participating will take action and do what they should be doing, instead of having their nationals putting their lives at risk like this."
There is a danger, says Chris Doyle, director of the council for Arab-British understanding, of the Palestinian issue being overlooked – in the west at least – as focus shifts to countries going through the extraordinary changes in the Arab spring. "There is a danger that people forget how important this issue is, and that it is boiling. It is still an unresolved issue. At a time when international politicians – Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy and others – are concentrating so much on other areas of the region, the issue of Palestine has not gone away."
"Everyone has been so amazed and shocked at the beauty of the Arab revolutions, seeing these incredibly brave and wonderful citizens, that it quite naturally seizes the attention, but at the heart of the Arab revolutions is Palestine," says Karma Nabulsi, an academic and expert on the Middle East. "I would say it hasn't been properly covered in the west, but Palestine is central to what people – the Arab media, the people who are participating in the Arab revolutions – talk about all the time."
So where does Palestine fit into the Arab spring? Doyle says: "A Palestinian spring is more than possible. Many senior people within Fatah and the Palestinian authorities have been saying this is the way to go because the negotiations are not seen as credible, and they will have to adopt different tactics. I think that, on the one hand, those tactics could be against the Israeli occupation, but also it represents a threat to the Palestinian authority itself, both to Fatah and Hamas."
The flotilla "gives people heart and encouragement, that the struggle for freedom has friends and supporters", says Nabulsi. "What the flotilla did last year, these plucky little boats, was bring the entire world to look at what [the Israeli government] were doing. Not just because of the brutality of the response of the military, but it shows how simple gestures get to the heart of the issue – breaking through the silence and the siege, and all the things that seem so big and impossible to do. They did it and they're going to do it again, and that's what is so remarkably brave."
Previewing the BET Awards: Where Are the Lady Rappers?
Previewing the BET Awards: Where Are the Lady Rappers?
BY Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
A glance at Justin Bieber’s stacked trophy shelf will tell you music awards shows generally reward sales over all other criteria. When they deviate from this rubric, there’s a price to pay, as when the enormously talented jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding nabbed last year’s “Best New Artist” Grammy from the Biebz and his fans hijacked her Wikipedia page in anger and retaliation. Smaller musicians are rarely rewarded if even recognized, and with the exception of shows geared towards niche audiences — MTVu’s Woody Awards, for instance — the shows generally serve to reinforce the machinations of the corporate music industry, so the masterminds can pat themselves on the back.
Which is partly why the nominees for next week’s BET Awards 2011 caused such an outrage — the “Best Female Hip-Hop Artist” category, in particular. Headed up by last year’s winner Nicki Minaj — a clear shoo-in — the rap chops (and broad appeal) of the nominees dropped precipitously thereafter. Atlanta diva Diamond, the former Crime Mob rapper who’s shined on a series of mixtapes since that group split, was a respectable runner-up. But the last two nominees seemed to dip into absurdity. There was Lola Monroe, who rap fans knew first as video girl and frequent King magazine model Angel Lola Luv, but who has made efforts to shed the “eye candy” trope and refashion herself as a rapper with a high-pitched, mafia moll flow. And then there was Cymphonique, a 14-year-old singer with a Nickelodeon contract and the honor of being Master P’s youngest show-biz progeny. To many rap fans, the line-up looked like a joke. Upon the announcement, Twitter lit up with “#Fail” hashtags. Blogger The Hip-Hop Diva suggested that “Every female hip hop artist should submit every video they ever release to BET.” And XXL summed it up succinctly with a headline bearing the unprintable acronym “FOH.”
The line-up was thin, but there was also a noticeable snub: longtime Miami rapper Trina, who’d not only released the independent chart-topping album Amazin, but had been featured in several videos in heavy BET rotation — including Lola Monroe’s “Overtime,” on which the veteran handily bested the newcomer. Trina took to Twitter to protest her exclusion — as did Nicki Minaj and Diamond — which resulted in a long, soul-searching phone conversation with BET head Stephen Hill in which he explained that she’d submitted her video outside of the qualifying dates, blah blah blah. And yet, barring Trina, maybe there really were no other viable contenders for the Best Female Hip-Hop Artist category — for one, it takes big budgets and industry clockwork to place a video in BET rotation, and what labels are pulling that kind of weight for lady rappers today?
Mini-controversies go down practically every minute on the rap internet, beef and battles inherent to the genre, so this one blew over within a matter of weeks. But it illustrated a deeper problem within the music industry. BET felt like it had to stretch for nominees because there is a constant dearth of space for female rappers. Since the heyday of strong, powerful, positive and feminist MCs piqued in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s — with Queen Latifah, Salt n Pepa, MC Lyte and YoYo at the helm — at any given time there have only been three or so female rappers topping the industry.
Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill remain the gold standards, and Lil Kim, Foxy Brown and Eve had their day. But before Nicki Minaj stomped and snarled her way into mass consciousness, arguably the last female rapper to gain as much industry respect and recognition as her male counterparts was Remy Ma — who’s been incarcerated since 2008 after shooting her best friend in a Manhattan parking lot.
“Since ‘97 it’s really just been Kim, Foxy and Missy, and then a rotating feature of crazy ladies,” says Judnick Mayard, rap and R&B columnist at Fader’s Suite903. “But they were never included or even paid attention to unless they could at least stand a bit on the level of those top three. If you’re a female rapper, you have to prove yourself on so many levels and be so many different things.”
This is not to say there is a paucity of female rappers, nor do any of them have to fit in a sexed-up Kim/Foxy mold — though some do. The Georgia rapper Lady became a web meme in February for her song and video “Yankin,” which described in detail her particular anatomical talents. A personal favorite, Atlanta’s Rasheeda, flips explicit sex rhymes into calls for female liberation — it’s not exaggeration to say every other track she cuts includes a line advocating cunnilingus.
But in the wilds of the internet, there’s infinitely more space for varied personalities and styles. There’s been a small flurry over Kreayshawn, an off-kilter, diminuitive white girl from Oakland, who parlayed her infectious summer hit “Gucci Gucci” into a million-dollar contract with Columbia Records. (The race issues — and the Ke$ha vibes — around that deal are a whole other column entirely.) The slow but steady rise of Kid Sister and Amanda Blank — not to mention the acceptance of MIA, more of a chatter than a rapper, into mainstream hip-hop — has ensured those with less conventional styles have a place. Chipper Florida teen Dominique Young Unique raps like confetti over electro beats, UK grime divas like Lady Leshurr are gaining wider acceptance in America, and more traditional hip-hop modes live on in Brooklyn through inveterate spitter Jean Grae and rising star Nitty Scott. Another favorite of mine, Azealia Banks, barely 20, has transformed her biting, Harlem-cut style into multiple flavors, spanning double-dutch battles and pounding, ravey rap anthems complete with diva vocals.
Meanwhile, Cymphonique’s newest song is undeniably, 100% R&B (BET Awards have a whole separate category for that). It’s also quite good, the type of hip hop-informed love jam that dominated the mid-’90s and made Keyshia Cole’s first album a classic. (Cole, in another dramatic turn, was also snubbed.)
I’ve just barely touched on the lady rappers I’m into (for a daily dose of old and new, femalerappers.tumblr.com is a good source). So why does it seem like the music industry has no room for more than two or three at a time? Partly, it seems, it won’t let them be great. Meaning: industry executives seem to bet on the idea that men won’t want to listen to talented female rappers, and they’re given less opportunities in general. In some cases, they might be right — even with a history of skilled lady rappers, hip-hop still sometimes seems like a man’s game, with a glass ceiling just as impenetrable as the corporate one. Trina, who’s completing her sixth album this year, is the only female rapper outside of Missy Elliott to release so many albums. Longevity in hip-hop is tough to attain, but even so, that fact seems insane. Surely my friends and I aren’t the only rap fans dying to see a multiplicity of voices in one of our favorite genres, dying for an alternative to the dense hypermasculinity that rules it. Nicki Minaj has been a godsend and possibly a lifesaver, but how much more interesting would things be if she had formidable opponents? (Sorry, 2011 Lil Kim doesn’t count.)
Like so many lady CEOs before her, Azealia Banks’ solution is to come at the game like a man. “It’s kinda like, if you punch a dude in the face, don’t expect him not to hit you back just because you are a girl,” she says. “If you’re gonna fight a man, be prepared to fight a man, right? Sounds crazy, but it’s the same deal. I definitely think the novelty of being a female rapper has worn off completely, so you’re not getting any points for being cute anymore. As a hip-hop artist who just so happens to be female, I definitely have to step my shit up and keep stepping my shit up. Not only because of male pressure, but just because of musical pressure. I want my music to be able to stand up against everyone’s music, not just other rappers.”
It’s a reasonable response — and certainly the right attitude for an artist who’s trying to win on every level. Still, to me it doesn’t seem like the problem is that female rappers can’t go toe to toe with their male counterparts — it’s a matter of who’s willing to listen in an industry where gender bias is still entrenched at every level.
So I’ll watch the BET Awards this Sunday, psyched to see Lil Wayne and Jill Scott, Mary J. Blige and Rick Ross. But when no female rappers perform — not even Dear Old Nicki — I’ll be stewing and salty on the couch, wondering when, or if, we’ll stop being seen as second string.
BY Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
A glance at Justin Bieber’s stacked trophy shelf will tell you music awards shows generally reward sales over all other criteria. When they deviate from this rubric, there’s a price to pay, as when the enormously talented jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding nabbed last year’s “Best New Artist” Grammy from the Biebz and his fans hijacked her Wikipedia page in anger and retaliation. Smaller musicians are rarely rewarded if even recognized, and with the exception of shows geared towards niche audiences — MTVu’s Woody Awards, for instance — the shows generally serve to reinforce the machinations of the corporate music industry, so the masterminds can pat themselves on the back.
Which is partly why the nominees for next week’s BET Awards 2011 caused such an outrage — the “Best Female Hip-Hop Artist” category, in particular. Headed up by last year’s winner Nicki Minaj — a clear shoo-in — the rap chops (and broad appeal) of the nominees dropped precipitously thereafter. Atlanta diva Diamond, the former Crime Mob rapper who’s shined on a series of mixtapes since that group split, was a respectable runner-up. But the last two nominees seemed to dip into absurdity. There was Lola Monroe, who rap fans knew first as video girl and frequent King magazine model Angel Lola Luv, but who has made efforts to shed the “eye candy” trope and refashion herself as a rapper with a high-pitched, mafia moll flow. And then there was Cymphonique, a 14-year-old singer with a Nickelodeon contract and the honor of being Master P’s youngest show-biz progeny. To many rap fans, the line-up looked like a joke. Upon the announcement, Twitter lit up with “#Fail” hashtags. Blogger The Hip-Hop Diva suggested that “Every female hip hop artist should submit every video they ever release to BET.” And XXL summed it up succinctly with a headline bearing the unprintable acronym “FOH.”
The line-up was thin, but there was also a noticeable snub: longtime Miami rapper Trina, who’d not only released the independent chart-topping album Amazin, but had been featured in several videos in heavy BET rotation — including Lola Monroe’s “Overtime,” on which the veteran handily bested the newcomer. Trina took to Twitter to protest her exclusion — as did Nicki Minaj and Diamond — which resulted in a long, soul-searching phone conversation with BET head Stephen Hill in which he explained that she’d submitted her video outside of the qualifying dates, blah blah blah. And yet, barring Trina, maybe there really were no other viable contenders for the Best Female Hip-Hop Artist category — for one, it takes big budgets and industry clockwork to place a video in BET rotation, and what labels are pulling that kind of weight for lady rappers today?
Mini-controversies go down practically every minute on the rap internet, beef and battles inherent to the genre, so this one blew over within a matter of weeks. But it illustrated a deeper problem within the music industry. BET felt like it had to stretch for nominees because there is a constant dearth of space for female rappers. Since the heyday of strong, powerful, positive and feminist MCs piqued in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s — with Queen Latifah, Salt n Pepa, MC Lyte and YoYo at the helm — at any given time there have only been three or so female rappers topping the industry.
Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill remain the gold standards, and Lil Kim, Foxy Brown and Eve had their day. But before Nicki Minaj stomped and snarled her way into mass consciousness, arguably the last female rapper to gain as much industry respect and recognition as her male counterparts was Remy Ma — who’s been incarcerated since 2008 after shooting her best friend in a Manhattan parking lot.
“Since ‘97 it’s really just been Kim, Foxy and Missy, and then a rotating feature of crazy ladies,” says Judnick Mayard, rap and R&B columnist at Fader’s Suite903. “But they were never included or even paid attention to unless they could at least stand a bit on the level of those top three. If you’re a female rapper, you have to prove yourself on so many levels and be so many different things.”
This is not to say there is a paucity of female rappers, nor do any of them have to fit in a sexed-up Kim/Foxy mold — though some do. The Georgia rapper Lady became a web meme in February for her song and video “Yankin,” which described in detail her particular anatomical talents. A personal favorite, Atlanta’s Rasheeda, flips explicit sex rhymes into calls for female liberation — it’s not exaggeration to say every other track she cuts includes a line advocating cunnilingus.
But in the wilds of the internet, there’s infinitely more space for varied personalities and styles. There’s been a small flurry over Kreayshawn, an off-kilter, diminuitive white girl from Oakland, who parlayed her infectious summer hit “Gucci Gucci” into a million-dollar contract with Columbia Records. (The race issues — and the Ke$ha vibes — around that deal are a whole other column entirely.) The slow but steady rise of Kid Sister and Amanda Blank — not to mention the acceptance of MIA, more of a chatter than a rapper, into mainstream hip-hop — has ensured those with less conventional styles have a place. Chipper Florida teen Dominique Young Unique raps like confetti over electro beats, UK grime divas like Lady Leshurr are gaining wider acceptance in America, and more traditional hip-hop modes live on in Brooklyn through inveterate spitter Jean Grae and rising star Nitty Scott. Another favorite of mine, Azealia Banks, barely 20, has transformed her biting, Harlem-cut style into multiple flavors, spanning double-dutch battles and pounding, ravey rap anthems complete with diva vocals.
Meanwhile, Cymphonique’s newest song is undeniably, 100% R&B (BET Awards have a whole separate category for that). It’s also quite good, the type of hip hop-informed love jam that dominated the mid-’90s and made Keyshia Cole’s first album a classic. (Cole, in another dramatic turn, was also snubbed.)
I’ve just barely touched on the lady rappers I’m into (for a daily dose of old and new, femalerappers.tumblr.com is a good source). So why does it seem like the music industry has no room for more than two or three at a time? Partly, it seems, it won’t let them be great. Meaning: industry executives seem to bet on the idea that men won’t want to listen to talented female rappers, and they’re given less opportunities in general. In some cases, they might be right — even with a history of skilled lady rappers, hip-hop still sometimes seems like a man’s game, with a glass ceiling just as impenetrable as the corporate one. Trina, who’s completing her sixth album this year, is the only female rapper outside of Missy Elliott to release so many albums. Longevity in hip-hop is tough to attain, but even so, that fact seems insane. Surely my friends and I aren’t the only rap fans dying to see a multiplicity of voices in one of our favorite genres, dying for an alternative to the dense hypermasculinity that rules it. Nicki Minaj has been a godsend and possibly a lifesaver, but how much more interesting would things be if she had formidable opponents? (Sorry, 2011 Lil Kim doesn’t count.)
Like so many lady CEOs before her, Azealia Banks’ solution is to come at the game like a man. “It’s kinda like, if you punch a dude in the face, don’t expect him not to hit you back just because you are a girl,” she says. “If you’re gonna fight a man, be prepared to fight a man, right? Sounds crazy, but it’s the same deal. I definitely think the novelty of being a female rapper has worn off completely, so you’re not getting any points for being cute anymore. As a hip-hop artist who just so happens to be female, I definitely have to step my shit up and keep stepping my shit up. Not only because of male pressure, but just because of musical pressure. I want my music to be able to stand up against everyone’s music, not just other rappers.”
It’s a reasonable response — and certainly the right attitude for an artist who’s trying to win on every level. Still, to me it doesn’t seem like the problem is that female rappers can’t go toe to toe with their male counterparts — it’s a matter of who’s willing to listen in an industry where gender bias is still entrenched at every level.
So I’ll watch the BET Awards this Sunday, psyched to see Lil Wayne and Jill Scott, Mary J. Blige and Rick Ross. But when no female rappers perform — not even Dear Old Nicki — I’ll be stewing and salty on the couch, wondering when, or if, we’ll stop being seen as second string.
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