The Rag Blog

It was the summer of 2002 and I was traveling through a medium-sized town in Hungary when I looked up and saw a young woman coming toward me. Fifteen or sixteen years old, she wore a shirt that proudly proclaimed her to be a “Dirty Girl.”

Six months later, in Philadelphia, I found myself speaking at a women’s studies conference to an audience which included several young women wearing shirts with “Cunt” or “Bitch” written on their chest in an angry scrawl. Shortly after, I found myself in Panama watching a rotund 7 year old prance around in a hot pink tank top that shouted “Bling, Bling.” When I checked the web upon returning home, I discovered that “Dirty Girl” had been updated to “Stupid Dirty Girl” while another T shirt insisted “As long as I can be on top.”

Are the young women wearing such T-shirts liberated women who have taken control of their own bodies and now reap the benefits of the women’s movement or are they simply dupes? These experiences, and countless others like them, raise a broader question for me. They make me ask how the insights and goals of the Women’s Movement have been transformed and translated as they have been integrated into popular culture and daily life?

The Women’s Liberation Movement that began in the 60s was originally a radical movement seeking deep and fundamental change. It identified the ways in which male and other forms of privilege had been woven into every social, political, economic institution and cultural practice in our society and went on to challenge white supremacy, heterosexist privilege, class divisions as well as the images of gender that had been normalized and in this way rendered invisible The Women’s Liberation Movement I remember argued for the need for a radical transformation of all our institutions. It urged women to rethink every aspect of our lives, always asking us to reflect on whose interests were served by the ways in which society was organized and by the values we had been taught to embrace.

Central to this project was the distinction between sex and gender. In order to challenge the conservative view that women’s social role was determined by her nature, many feminists argued that while one is born either a man or a woman and that is a function of biology (and yes, many of us mistakenly thought that there were only two possibilities at that time), gender roles were determined by society. Women began to notice that how we were taught to define ourselves, what it meant to be a real woman, served the interests of men and capitalism. This made us suspicious of what we had been taught were our “natural” tendencies or inclinations and made us wonder about our so-called “free” choice.

A very important article of the period, a true classic, was entitled “Homogenizing the American Woman: The Power of an Unconscious Ideology” written by Sandra Bem and Daryll Bem. The authors pointed out that even if discrimination were to end tomorrow, nothing very drastic would change, because discrimination is only part of the problem. “Discrimination frustrates choices already made. Something more pernicious perverts the motivation to choose. That something is an unconscious ideology about the nature of the female sex….”… In other words, many of us began to realize that we had been socialized to want things that would replicate and reinforce the status quo.

The Women’s Liberation Movement of the Second Wave rejected prevailing standards of beauty, the Barbie doll image, (being thin and blonde), that were virtually unattainable by anyone who wasn’t white and by most of us who were white as well. The critique took the form of recognizing and challenging the ways prevailing standards of beauty and rules of dress and decorum both reflected and reinforced the existing race, class and gender hierarchy in society. Women of the Second Wave were tired of being turned into sex objects by the fashion industry and so they threw out their high heels (which were understood to be on a continuum with Chinese foot binding practices — a way of circumscribing women’s movement and keeping them dependent), took off their girdles and their bras, stopped trying to be a size 2, and focused on healthy eating healthy for them and the planet.

If we look at popular culture today what do we see? Well, Barbie is back with a vengeance. Little girls start dieting in fourth grade and never stop. This used to be more of a problem among white girls but it has spread to all ethnic groups. And dieting isn’t the half of it, anorexia and bulimia are occurring in alarming proportions.

Today many young women want to dress like, Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Mariah Carey, and L’il Kim. And it is not just women in their teens and older who are dressing this way, we have four year olds and six year olds dressed as sex objects. Cleavage is everywhere and we women can’t get enough of it so we go out and buy more. Some of us stopped buying bras in the 70’s; today women are busy buying bras and breasts to put in them.

The number of magazine stories about girls in their early and mid-teens who want breast augmentation surgery is increasing as are the number of teens who receive breast and nose jobs as birthday or high school graduation gifts. Dumb blondes are back in style: Jessica Simpson, Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton. Women hack off their toes to fit into high priced, designer shoes. We are a generation awash in plastic surgery and Botox.

Speaking to a crowd of demonstrators in front of a rural Louisiana courthouse last week, Alan Bean, a Baptist minister from the Texas panhandle, inveighed against injustice. “The highest crime in the Old Testament,” he declared, “is to withhold due process from poor people, to manipulate the criminal justice system to the advantage of the powerful, against the poor and the powerless.”

Bean was speaking at a rally organized by residents of Jena, Louisiana. In the space of a few weeks, more than 150 of this small town’s residents have organized an inspiring grassroots struggle against injustice. The demonstrations began when six Black students at Jena High School were arrested after a fight at school and charged with conspiracy to attempt second-degree murder. The students now face up to 100 years in prison without parole; in a case that King Downing, National Coordinator of the ACLU’s Campaign Against Racial Profiling, has said “carries the scent of injustice.”

Local activists say that this wave of problems started last September when Black high school students asked for permission to sit under a tree at an area of the high school that had, traditionally, been used only by white students. The next day, three nooses were hanging from the tree.

The following week, Black students staged a protest under the tree. At a school assembly soon after, Jena district attorney Reed Walters, appearing with local police officers, warned Black students against further unrest. “I can make your lives disappear with a stroke of my pen,” he threatened.

According to many in Jena, tensions simmered in the town over the fall, occasionally exploding into fights and other incidents. No white students were charged or punished for any of these incidents, including the students found to have been responsible for hanging the nooses. Bryant Purvis, one of the Black students now facing charges, explained to me that, after the incident, “there were a lot of people aggravated about it, a lot of fights at the school after that, a lot of arguments, a lot of people getting treated differently.”

In the first weekend of December, a Black student was assaulted by a group of white students, and a white graduate of Jena High School threatened several Black students with a shotgun. The following Monday, white students taunted the Black student who was assaulted over the weekend, and one of the white students was beaten up.

Within hours, six Black students were arrested. “I think the district attorney is pinning it on us to make an example of us,” said Purvis. “In Jena, people get accused of things they didn’t do a lot.”

Soon after, their parents discovered that these students were facing attempted murder charges. “The courtroom, the whole back side, was filled with police officers,” Tina Jones, Bryant’s mother, recalls. “I guess they thought maybe when they announced what the charges were, we were gonna go berserk or something.”

At last week’s demonstration, family members and allies spoke about the issues at the center of the case. “I don’t know how the DA or the court system gets involved in a school fight,” said Jones. “But I’m not surprised–there’s a lot of racism in Jena. A white person will get probation, and a black person is liable to get 15 to 20 years for the same crime.”

There is a great hue and cry over the May Day demonstrations in Los Angeles (legitimate) that saw the LAPD in their military gear – assaulting mostly Mexican immigrants. Nobody should suffer brutalization by the police.This has been given a great deal of coverage in the media. The thing that impressed me over the media coverage that this has been given; is that this assaulting and beating of people was being treated as if it was an anomaly! Those clubbed, gassed, shot with rubber bullets, at the conventions (Democrat and Republican) and at the various protests against treaty summits, received NONE of this outrage or an apology from the police? When you militarize local police departments and equip them with better weaponry and armor than those at war – you can expect them to treat all citizens as the ENEMY. I’m confused – is this the FREEDOM that we’re trying to export to Iraq etc?

SWAT TEAMS in the United States

In recent years, American police forces called out SWAT teams 40,000 times or more annually. What were these SWAT teams doing? They were serving routine warrants to people who posed no danger to the public. SWAT teams were once rare and used only for VERY dangerous situations, often involving hostages held by armed criminals. Today SWAT teams are deployed for routine police duties. In the United States today, 75% to 80% of SWAT deployments are for warrant service.

In a HIGH percentage of the cases, the SWAT teams forcefully enter the wrong address, resulting in death, injury and trauma to perfectly innocent people. Mostly the hundreds (documented) of these killings never make the national media and are reported only locally. 75 year old Reverend Williams (Boston) was sitting in his chair (his wife had gone to the grocery store) reading the Scriptures, when the Boston, black clad SWAT team, battered down his door without warning.

Terrified Reverend Williams ran to his bedroom, where burly SWAT police tackled him to the floor and handcuffed him. Terrified beyond imagination, he vomited and died of a heart attack! For those who are indifferent over such outrages – these dozens of innocent citizens were all killed by ‘mistake’- the next wrong address could be yours. Occasionally, highly keyed up police kill one another in the confusion caused by stun grenades.

Growth of Paramilitaries in the United States

The use of paramilitary police units began in Los Angeles in the 1960s (Attorney General Ed Meese) for the ‘war on drugs’. In 1988, Congress ordered the National Guard into the domestic drug war. In 1994, the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of military equipment and technology to state and local police, and Congress created a program “ to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies”.

LONDON — The chance that a child will live beyond age 5 has plummeted faster in Iraq than anywhere else in the world since 1990, says a report released today.

One in eight Iraqi children died of disease or violence before reaching their fifth birthday in 2005, according to the report by Save the Children, which said Iraq ranked last because it made the least progress toward improving survival rates.

Even before the latest war, Iraq was plagued by shortages of electricity, clean water and hospitals.

The publication, which used data from 1990-2005, also determined that gains in survival rates in some of the world’s poorest countries were declining, including in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Swaziland.

More than nine in 10 child deaths occur in just 60 countries, the report said. Of the 10 million children under age 5 who die every year, most could be saved with cheap solutions such as nets to protect against mosquito-borne malaria or antibiotics to treat pneumonia, according to the report.

Depleted uranium, which is used in armor-piercing ammunition, causes widespread damage to DNA which could lead to lung cancer, according to a study of the metal’s effects on human lung cells. The study adds to growing evidence that DU causes health problems on battlefields long after hostilities have ceased.0508 05 1DU is a byproduct of uranium refinement for nuclear power. It is much less radioactive than other uranium isotopes, and its high density – twice that of lead – makes it useful for armor and armor piercing shells. It has been used in conflicts including Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq and there have been increasing concerns about the health effects of DU dust left on the battlefield. In November, the Ministry of Defense was forced to counteract claims that apparent increases in cancers and birth defects among Iraqis in southern Iraq were due to DU in weapons.

Now researchers at the University of Southern Maine have shown that DU damages DNA in human lung cells. The team, led by John Pierce Wise, exposed cultures of the cells to uranium compounds at different concentrations.

The compounds caused breaks in the chromosomes within cells and stopped them from growing and dividing healthily. “These data suggest that exposure to particulate DU may pose a significant [DNA damage] risk and could possibly result in lung cancer,” the team wrote in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology.

Previous studies have shown that uranium miners are at higher risk of lung cancer, but this has often been put down to the fact that miners are also exposed to radon, another cancer-causing chemical.

Prof Wise said it is too early to say whether DU causes lung cancer in people exposed on the battlefield because the disease takes several decades to develop.

“Our data suggest that it should be monitored as the potential risk is there,” he said.

Prof Wise and his team believe that microscopic particles of dust created during the explosion of a DU weapon stay on the battlefield and can be breathed in by soldiers and people returning after the conflict.

More than half of the members of Iraq’s parliament rejected for the first time on Tuesday the continuing occupation of their country. The U.S. media ignored the story.

On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq’s parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.

It’s a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time; previous attempts at a similar resolution fell just short of the 138 votes needed to pass (there are 275 members of the Iraqi parliament, but many have fled the country’s civil conflict, and at times it’s been difficult to arrive at a quorum).

Reached by phone in Baghdad on Tuesday, Al-Rubaie said that he would present the petition, which is nonbinding, to the speaker of the Iraqi parliament and demand that a binding measure be put to a vote. Under Iraqi law, the speaker must present a resolution that’s called for by a majority of lawmakers, but there are significant loopholes and what will happen next is unclear.

What is clear is that while the U.S. Congress dickers over timelines and benchmarks, Baghdad faces a major political showdown of its own. The major schism in Iraqi politics is not between Sunni and Shia or supporters of the Iraqi government and “anti-government forces,” nor is it a clash of “moderates” against “radicals”; the defining battle for Iraq at the political level today is between nationalists trying to hold the Iraqi state together and separatists backed, so far, by the United States and Britain.

The continuing occupation of Iraq and the allocation of Iraq’s resources — especially its massive oil and natural gas deposits — are the defining issues that now separate an increasingly restless bloc of nationalists in the Iraqi parliament from the administration of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whose government is dominated by Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish separatists.

By “separatists,” we mean groups who oppose a unified Iraq with a strong central government; key figures like Maliki of the Dawa party, Shia leader Abdul Aziz Al-Hakeem of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (“SCIRI”), Vice President Tariq Al-Hashimi of the Sunni Islamic Party, President Jalal Talabani — a Kurd — and Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, favor partitioning Iraq into three autonomous regions with strong local governments and a weak central administration in Baghdad. (The partition plan is also favored by several congressional Democrats, notably Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware.)

Iraq’s separatists also oppose setting a timetable for ending the U.S. occupation, preferring the addition of more American troops to secure their regime. They favor privatizing Iraq’s oil and gas and decentralizing petroleum operations and revenue distribution.

CONCORD, New Hampshire (AP) — Three retired generals challenged a dozen members of Congress in a new ad campaign Wednesday, saying the politicians can’t support President Bush’s policies in Iraq and still expect to win re-election.

“I am outraged, as are the majority of Americans. I’m a lifelong Republican, but it’s past time for change,” retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste told reporters.

“Our strategy in Iraq today is more of the same, a slow grind to nowhere which totally ignores the reality of Iraq and the lessons of history,” Batiste said. “Our president ignores sound military advice and surrounds himself with like-minded and compliant subordinates.”

Batiste and Paul Eaton, also a retired major general, are featured in the ads by VoteVets.org. They challenge the president’s argument that he listens to his commanders on the ground in Iraq and say the president’s Iraq policies endanger U.S. security.

The former CIA chief is earning big money from corporations profiting off the war — a fact not mentioned in his combative new book or heard on his publicity blitz.

05/08/07 “Salon” — – May. 07, 2007 | If you go by the book jacket of his new memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” George Tenet is enjoying the life of a retired government servant teaching at Georgetown University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 2004. The former CIA director played up the academic image when he kicked off the recent media blitz for his new book by doing an interview for CBS’s “60 Minutes” from his spacious, book-lined office at the university. His academic salary, and the reported $4 million advance he received from publisher HarperCollins, should provide the former CIA director with more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his days and leave a substantial fortune to his children.

But those monies are hardly Tenet’s entire income. While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.

When Tenet hit the talk-show circuit last week to defend his stewardship of the CIA and his role in the run-up to the war, he did not mention that he is a director and advisor to four corporations that earn millions of dollars in revenue from contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense. Nor is it ever mentioned in his book. But according to public records, Tenet has received at least $2.3 million from those corporations in stock and other compensation. Meanwhile, one of the CIA’s largest contractors gave Tenet access to a highly secured room where he could work on classified material for his book.

Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA’s hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet’s closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.

By joining these companies, Tenet is following in the footsteps of thousands of other former intelligence officers who have left the CIA and other agencies and returned as contractors, often making two or three times what they made in their former jobs. Based on reporting I’ve done for an upcoming book, contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence. But exactly how much money will remain unknown: Four days before Tenet’s book was published, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided not to release the results of a yearlong study of intelligence contracting, because disclosure of the figure, a DNI official told the New York Times, could damage national security.

That may be a real break for Tenet. Under his watch, according to former CIA officials and contractors I’ve interviewed, up to 60 percent of the CIA workforce has been outsourced. A spokesman for the CIA told me last week that that figure “is way off the mark,” but wouldn’t provide the actual figure, which he said is classified. But publication of that number could prove embarrassing to Tenet, particularly in light of his own deep involvement in the privatization of U.S. intelligence.

Despite making himself available for plenty of airtime of late, Tenet was not available for an interview with Salon, said Tina Andreadis, his publicist at HarperCollins. She referred me to Bill Harlow, Tenet’s co-author and his former director of public affairs at the CIA, who said Tenet’s work on corporate boards “is all a matter of public record.”

Tenet’s ties with contractors were underscored last week in a dispute between two groups of former CIA officials over Tenet’s legacy. On April 28, six former intelligence officers wrote to Tenet, saying he shared culpability with President Bush and Vice President Cheney for “the debacle in Iraq,” and suggesting he donate half the royalties from his book to Iraq war veterans and their families. All of the signatories had severed their ties to U.S. intelligence, although three of them, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro, work as consultants for news organizations, corporations and government agencies outside of intelligence.

Even the mayor of Los Angeles admits “Nobody, nobody should be victimized in a way we saw women, children and families victimized just a few days ago.”

He was referring to the openly brutal assault by the LAPD on a peaceful rally of migrant families and their supporters on May 1 in LA’s MacArthur Park, where dozens of pigs in riot gear viciously and repeatedly fired volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd of Brown families with children and babies, even before a helicopter hovered overhead announcing–in English only–that the Park must be vacated. The rally had a permit until 9 P.M. But, according to eyewitness accounts collected by the National Immigrant Solidarity Network, hundreds of cops arrived at 6, a mere hour after the event started, and, unprovoked, immediately began harassing a crowd watching Mexica/ Azteca danzantes, driving their motorcycles straight into the onlookers and sending a wedge of riot clad cops into their midst. More people gathered in the area to denounce this outrage, as waves of cops shot their way into the crowd of ten thousand nearby. The LAPD tried to blame “agitators” and “anarchists” for their attack, but this as a straight up lie.

Reporter Ernesto Arce of LA’s KPFK told Democracy Now!, “they were trying to clear the Alvarado Street for ongoing traffic, and there was a gathering, a large gathering, a circle of people that were gathered around Aztec danzantes, or pre-Columbian Mexican dancers, and they were holding a ceremony. And police on motorcade decided to forcibly break that up, and they drove their motorcycles through this crowd.”

A reporter for Telemundo said “One minute I was on live, the next minute I was running for my life. It was excessive force. They basically hit women, children, and journalists.”

Another reporter wrote, “Television news crews captured images of the police swinging their batons at an arm’s length of a frightened child who cried as he stood frozen in the chaos.

Let’s be clear. This would never happen to a gathering of white suburban families. No one would tolerate it for a moment if white babies were fired on by pigs using “less than lethal” weapons” that have been known to kill, hurling projectiles with the force of a 95 mile per hour baseball. Is a 95 mile per hour baseball “less than lethal” when hurled at an infants’s skull? If it strikes a baby’s eye? About 600 cops, including 100 from the ultra elite Metro Division, fired hundreds of rubber bullets and tear gas canisters and systematically beat Brown mothers, fathers, youth, and members of the news media with batons. Tear gas projectiles have long been known to have lethal potential. LA Times writer Ruben Salazar was killed by the LAPD with a tear gas canister during the police riot against the anti-war Chicano Moratorium as far back as 1970.

But Brown children are expendable in Los Angeles, and migrants are the new scapegoats for a nation steeped in a deep tradition of white racism.

The race equation, the hate equation, is that simple. The Conservative voice website called the families “criminals” taking to the streets, and, in an effort to justify the LAPD attack, launched a racist war of words on the children themselves ,saying “the children of illegals, who are themselves illegal (sic), do not share their parents’ work ethic or docility. The children are often lazy, are predominantly hateful, and commit crimes at rates far above the American statistical norm. Imitating the worst qualities of American blacks, they refuse to patiently work their way up the ladder of social mobility, and despise everything that America stands for. Meanwhile, they demand that everything that law-abiding Americans have worked so hard for be taken from them and given to the second-generation illegals.”

The website called the families “Thugs hiding behind children, and backs the claim with a citation from the virulently racist website VDARE:

I wonder if the plan to Boycott America also includes not giving birth to their ‘jackpot’ babies, not driving while drunk, not accepting welfare payments, not using food stamps, not dealing drugs, not murdering, stealing or raping, not attending government schools, not buying homes using government financing, not clogging our court system, not sending remittances to Mexico, not breaking our laws by being here and not insisting that we speak Spanish?

The essay concludes that white “Americans” should “begin exercising their legal right (sic) to effect citizens’ arrests of illegals.” What the Right wants is for even more intense brutality to be unleashed on the Brown community, by police and vigilantes alike. “The Americans, writes the Voice,” will need to break into march lines, make citizens’ arrests, and force policemen to choose their allegiances: To America’s laws and citizens, or to foreign criminals and their American accomplices.”

The Hate Equation is so simple and so transparent that the nation’s most brutal police chief, William Bratton, was forced to apologize- but his early efforts were apologies wre to the brutalized news media, and to the cops themselves, for “what happened” to them – not to the families who were attacked.

Bratton finally admitted, ” “I’m not going to defend the indefensible. Things were done that shouldn’t have been done.”