feminism

The wives and daughters of those who have fallen defending their country against terrorists are stepping forward to take their places. The terrorists, who have killed these husbands and fathers, and who have murdered many other unarmed Syrians, have been shamefully supported by the United States, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Israel and their allies, including Australia. This video report, of 7 October by Press TV, features an interview with one of the fallen Syrian soldiers before his death in battle. His daughter, who is volunteering to join the army to replace him, is also interviewed. The report also features interviews with daughters, wives and mothers of other fallen Syrian soldiers, who are also volunteering to join the Syrian Arab Army. The video also features scenes of the new women recruits in training.

#AppendixOf3521"> Appendix : Insurgent commander surrenders to the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units

Female members of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). File photo.

The commander of the al-Qaeda affiliated "Tawhid and Jihad Brigade" in al-Hasaka, north-eastern Syria, has surrendered his group's weapons to the Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG).

According to the pro-opposition and Britain-based group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the "Tawhid and Jihad Brigade", known in Arabic as "Liwa al-Tawhid wa al-Jihad", agreed to surrender as Kurdish protection units swept through the Jawadiya area of al-Hasaka.

"The weapons include a tank, 2 multiple rocket launchers, 4x4s with manned machine-guns, mortars and mortar launchers and others," the pro-opposition group wrote in a statement via their official Facebook page.

A statement earlier released by the "Tawhid and Jihad Brigade" suggest that the remnants of the group will merge with the "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" with its allies and continue their fight against the Kurds and YPG as well as the Syrian government.

The Kurdish People's Protection Units have had significant success battling Islamist militants in recent weeks and the YPG announced in a statement early Tuesday that it had gained full control over the villages of Tal A'lo Ghamer, Abu Hajar, Kari Fati, Karhouk, al-Yusufiya, al-Jneidiya, the al-Sawame' area, the Dajla oil company and the fields in Reef Jal A'gha suburb, all located in the al-Hasaka province.

A candobetter.net article written in 2011 "Anti-Growth Lobby: Women in politics: why don't more participate - or do they? (Melbourne, Australia)" asserted that "women dominate politics in Victoria, Australia - they just don't draw salaries." Margot Carrol is another case in point. Her importance extends well beyond Stonnington.

I watched her at the Supreme Court Case over Orrong Towers and admired her ability to sit unpaid through hours and hours of barrister-speak for the pure benefit of her community. Such a contrast to observing the antics of our paid, mosty male, parliamentarians.

Margot Carroll gets Mayor’s Award of the Year 2013 for outstanding voluntary service to the community

In Stonnington Council's news she has been recognised for this service:

Margot is a long-term resident of Stonnington who has been actively involved in community issues for about 30 years. She is extremely passionate about preserving Melbourne’s Heritage and livability from inappropriate developments.

One of her biggest battles in recent times was to stop the over development at 590 Orrong Road in Armadale. (See "http://candobetter.net/?q=node/3257.")She has worked tirelessly to ensure the community’s voice on this issue was heard. The battle is now in its fourth year, and throughout the entire time, Margot has demonstrated exceptional leadership and negotiation abilities – and was not prepared to give up.

Under her skillful leadership, Margot has helped prove that the Stonnington community is serious when it comes to protecting the character of the local area and shopping inappropriate development.

Margot has helped bring the community together over the issue, and is prepared to keep fighting until a favourable result is received."

Margot's importance and example extends well beyond Stonnington.

"Any encroachment into our green spaces is irreversible. On the other hand, remaining faithful to the original intention of the green wedges, would give us all a more disciplined, sustainable, and welcoming city for the future." (Lady Hamer on 29 August 2012 as the Libs prepare to give bulldozers open slather on our green wedges, destroying wildlife and natural amenity.) Labor and the Liberals response is less than edifying and does not solve the problem. Basically both parties are in cahoots with the developers against the people of Melbourne.

Lady Hamer defends green wedges in absence of parliamentary backbone

Lady Hamer, widow of Rupert Hamer, a former Liberal premier who planned for Melbourne to retain the green areas (typically spreading from some major water courses radiating through Melbourne), has come out courageously against the Liberal Planning policy to horribly amputate, for more intensive development, thousands of hectares of Melbourne's green wedges, without community or electoral approval. It is great to see an elderly woman stand up and be heard, and to speak so convincingly and confidently on a moral and environmental issue. We should also not forget the many other women in Melbourne who have also spoken out on this issue, again and again. See "Anti-Growth Lobby: Women in politics: why don't more participate - or do they? (Melbourne, Australia)."

Lady Hamer said,

"Any encroachment into our green spaces is irreversible. On the other hand, remaining faithful to the original intention of the green wedges, would give us all a more disciplined, sustainable, and welcoming city for the future." Lady Hamer on 29 August 2012.

Mathew Guy's excuse is no excuse

The state's planning minister, Mathew Guy, protested that the former Bracks and Brumby Labor Government significantly expanded development boundaries into green wedge land.

Yes, and that was wrong, because it was undemocratic, based on covert population engineering through mass migration, and aggressively reduced peoples' rights and quality of life. But that only highlights the urgent need to reverse the goose stepping army of planners who are trampling our society. It does not justify Mathew Guy continuing the destruction that Jeff Kennett began and Labor continued.

People voted Brumby out (and would have voted Bracks out if he had not suddenly resigned) because of their absurdly high-handed related attitudes to the green wedges, mass immigration, and local democracy.

Brian Tee, ALP, rewrites history

Brian Tee (Shadow minister for planning) only added to the shameful obfuscation when he posted to the ALP site a laughable greenwash piece entitled,"Lady April Hamer and Bracks unite to save green wedge," (August 29,2012) following Lady Hamer's speech.

Truly, the tradition in Victoria of requiring the people to believe six impossible things before breakfast continues, proudly led by parliamentarians. The people of Melbourne are treated like complete fools. We need a giant Alice to weep on us and wash away the caucus.

Victoria is a Destruction Zone for the profit of the growth lobby!

Victoria is a destruction zone. The earth is continually churned by machines driven by greedy developers and financiers. People are becoming mentally and physically ill trying to stand up to the orkish tyrants.

At the heart of all this is the utterly undemocratic pursuit by governments of massive population growth through economic immigration. See http://www.liveinvictoria.com.au

Attention Avaaz, Amnesty International, NATO, Hilary...
"Let the Syrian people alone. Let the Syrian people alone! Leave us alone! You are not bringing anything else but death, fear, chaos, instability, with your big declarations and with your big assemblies, and, also, with your big powers."
This is the transcription of the brave protest against foreign intervention in Syria by a Syrian-based Catholic nun, (video included) speaking for a number of Syrian leaders, whom she describes as including Muslims, pacifists, family and tribal leaders. Mother Mariam shows leadership in a new internet tradition where women are beginning to speak out against warmongers where their men cannot or will not. Mother Agnes Mariam and Syrian Girl Partisan are two great ladies speaking up for peace, truth and justice. We would like to encourage other women to magnify these women's voices and help them to forge a local, non-violent movement as well as to defend what is good in Syria.Attention Avaaz, Amnesty International, NATO, Hilary...

"Let the Syrian people alone. Let the Syrian people alone! Leave us alone! You are not bringing anything else but death, fear, chaos, instability, with your big declarations and with your big assemblies, and, also, with your big powers."
This is the transcription of the brave protest against foreign intervention in Syria by a Syrian-based Catholic nun, (video included) speaking for a number of Syrian leaders, whom she describes as including Muslims, pacifists, family and tribal leaders. Mother Mariam shows leadership in a new internet tradition where women are beginning to speak out against warmongers where their men cannot or will not. Mother Agnes Mariam and Syrian Girl Partisan are two great ladies speaking up for peace, truth and justice. We would like to encourage other women to magnify these women's voices and help them to forge a local, non-violent movement as well as to defend what is good in Syria.

The interview took place in Ireland on 12 August 2012 and was filmed and published on the Irish Times by Patsy McGarry.

Mother Agnes Mariam to Outside Powers

It's a life of fear, of insecurity and of lack of future. We are divided like a kind of tumour. In every part we have armed people coming and forcing people - civilians - to live following their orders.

And what they want is to paralyse civilian life so there is no more shops. If you need something ou can't find a worker. And, of course, you don't have nutrition, you don't have alimentation. Lack of food, lack of fuel, lack of electricity.

And this fear, because you don't know when it will be your turn to be considered as a collaborator. And we think that something is going wrong mroe and more in the general way of orienting this strive ... what's so-called for freedom an democracy.

On the totalitarian regime in Syria and its violent replacement

I am not Syrian, but I have been living in Syria for today almost 20 years. Syria was under a kind of totalitarian regime but not in only a way a repressive way but it was that all the decision would be taken by few persons. But there was security, there was food, education and people were living - of course not in ... kind that they would say their thinking in a loud voice.

Now, this totalitarianism is not good, and it's obsolete, but if the armed insurrection is implementing another totalitarianism which is maybe worse because there is blood, they can behead you, they can cut your - in last week in our village they cut the fingers of a so-called 'collaborator', who is not ev[en] from the village. Then they behead him, they cut him in piece and they left him in the street, where even children would see it.

So this kinds of acts of atrocities cannot help people to really believe that what is happening is a strive for freedom.

The majority of the Syrian population, I say, is taken as hostage, and sometimes as a tool, as [?enemy] by these armed, insurrection armed...armed insurrection people. They come and they take place in the civilian areas.

Why isn't the fighting in the desert instead of amongst civilian residences?

Why?

Why you don't make your combat - We have a lot of desert. It is against international laws.

Western world seems to be encouraging sectarian violence to topple Assad

But what really scandalises us and leaves us in distress is that the Western world seemed to be encouraging this rise of sectarian violence just to topple the regime.

We are, we are against violence and we are against justifying violence.

You can't say that this man is killing another man and he is justified to kill him. Moreover when, through his movements, he is putting in real danger and having terrible collateral damage, to a whole civilian population, which was not - That's what is happening in Aleppo.

You know, we are responsible and we are - if we are not responsible today, we are responsible tomorrow, to history.

To not speak out is to allow terrible atrocities to continue

Once all those atrocity will be revealed, when you will see a family whose girl has been abused, or, I have heard about collective abusing - whose son has been beheaded, whose father has been abducted.

You know that there are thousands of people we don't know where they are because they have been abducted.

Sometimes they are bandits. They say, "We are in the revolution," but they are bandits. Mafias who come to ask ransome.

Some others they have like sectarian hatred, so they take this one because he is [?Arab or Alep]; they take this one because he is a moderate Muslim.

So we don't know. It's a confusion, it's a chaos.

"What are they doing in Aleppo? Why are they doing? Why are they funded and helped and fueled with weapons and why are they introducing themselves in between the civilian population?"

International Community hypocritical, untrustworthy, funding violence

And what really grieve us is that the international community holds a paradox.

On one side they want, they say, with hypocrisy, "We want peace, we want to protect the civilian population." They even want to intervene in a military way like in other countries. But on the other hand, they are funding, sending intelligence helps and sending weapons to rebels - really you don't know from where they come.

Syrians are trying to forge non-violence movement

We are working with our religious leaders, with Muslim religious leaders, with pacifist, with also a leader - family leaders, tribal leaders - to say that there is a third way. And the third way is a way of non-violence, but real non-violence. When there is no attacks and aggression, there is not - there is no motivation for any repression.

Syrians asking International Community to respect their Human Rights and Geneva Convention

Second, the civilian society in Syria is upset and we are asking for human rights. Not only human rights for rebels, but human rights for the normal citizens, who are caught in between.

And we are asking also why should the combats be held in civilian areas, for example, in Aleppo, those people they came from outside. I have been talking with prelates, I have been talking with families. They don't know whom they are. They are foreigners. Either they come from Northern villages -from Idlib or from North Aleppo countryside, or they come from foreign countries. What are they doing in Aleppo? Why are they doing? Why are they funded and helped and fueled with weapons and why are they introducing themselves in between the civilian population? And then they say that the army is bombing civilian areas.

Please! Don't enter in civilian population. Don't enter in residence area. Go to the desert if you want to make your war. It is against human rights and it is against the Charter of Geneva.

Ghandi, Mandela - non-violent path the best, and finding common ground

So, I want to say to all who are looking at me, "I am a Christian, and I believe in God. I believe in Jesus Christ. Non-violence is the best way to get what we want. The non-violence. And in all good revolutions - you look at Ghandi, you look at Nelson Mandela - even, you look here, in Ireland, when you can stop violence and you can enter in a real path of dialogue, accepting the other. Sometimes you have to forget your interest. You cannot take everything. You forget it. We can arrive to a common ground. We can make a new social pact. You know.

Asks foreign powers: Please leave the Syrian people alone and don't encourage martyrs

And I want to also to ask: Let the Syrian people alone. Let the Syrian people alone! Leave us alone! You are not bringing anything else but death, fear, chaos, instability, with your big declarations and with your big assemblies, and, also, with your big powers. Leave the Syrian people alone. Enough, it's enough! Leave those people and stop funding weapons for 'rebels' you bring from I don't know what. We are crying also because those people they have a mother, they have a father, they are human beings and, sometimes, they don't know where they are. And they think that fighting in Syria or fighting where they are fighting, will open for them heaven and paradise, and this is alienating.

It is great to see two politically engaged women speak out about Syria. On the one hand we have Syrian Girl Partisan, who has reported in around 20 home-made films. Now a Catholic nun based in Syria has stood up and denounced Western reporting on events there. What she and others seek in Syria is “reform, no violence, no foreign intervention.” She hopes for “a new, third way, a new social pact where the right to autodetermination without outside interference” would be respected.

This article with the video is republished from Global research TV

Click on arrow to watch video interview with Sister Agnes Mariam.

Media Coverage of Syrian Violence Partial and Untrue
by grtv

As posted on theIrish Times by Patsy McGarry:

A NUN who has been superior at a Syrian monastery for the past 18 years has warned that media coverage of ongoing violence in that country has been “partial and untrue”. It is “a fake”, Mother Agnes Mariam said, which “hides atrocities committed in the name of liberty and democracy”.

Superior of the Melkite Greek Catholic monastery of St James the Mutilated in Qara, in Syria’s diocese of Homs, which is in full communion with Rome, she left Ireland yesterday after a three-day visit during which she met representatives of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference in Maynooth.

She told The Irish Times she was in Ireland “not to advocate for the (Assad) regime but for the facts”. Most news reports from Syria were “forged, with only one side emphasised”, she said. This also applied to the UN, whose reports were “one-sided and not worthy of that organisation”.

UN observers in Syria had been “moderate with the rebels and covered for them in taking back positions after the withdrawal of heavy equipment, as seen so tragically in Homs”, she said.

When it was put to her this suggested the whole world was out of step except for Syria, Russia and China, she protested: “No, no, there are 20 countries, including some in Latin America” of the same view.

The reason the media was being denied easy access to Syria currently was because in the Libyan conflict journalists placed electronic devices for Nato in rooms used at press conferences in that country, she said. “So Syria didn’t want journalists,” she said.

Christians make up about 10 per cent of Syria’s population, dispersed throughout the country, she said. The Assad regime “does not favour Christians”, she said. “It is a secular regime based on equality for all, even though in the constitution it says the Koran is the source of legislation.”

But “Christians are less put aside [in Syria] than in other Islamic countries, for example Saudi Arabia,” she said. “The social fabric of Syria is very diverse, so Christians live in peace.”

The “Arab insurrection” under way in that country included “sectarian factions which promote fundamentalist Islam, which is not genuine Islam”, she said.

The majority of Muslims in Syria are moderate and open to other cultural and interfaith elements, she said. “Wahhabism (a fundamentalist branch of Islam) is not open,” she added.

Christians in Syria were “doubtful about the future if the project to topple the regime succeeded”. The alternative was “a religious sectarian state where all minorities would feel threatened and discriminated against”, she said.

There was “a need to end the violence”, she said. “The West and Gulf states must not give finance to armed insurrectionists who are sectarian terrorists, most of whom are from al-Qaeda, according to a report presented to the German parliament,” she said.

“We don’t want to be invaded, as in Aleppo, by mercenaries, some of whom think they are fighting Israel. They bring terror, destruction, fear and nobody protects the civilians,” she said. There were “very few Syrians among the rebels”, she said. “Mercenaries should go home,” she said.

What she and others sought in Syria was “reform, no violence, no foreign intervention.” She hoped for “a new, third way, a new social pact where the right to autodetermination without outside interference” would be respected. (Source: Irish Times)

Got 6 mins 25 secs to see this video about how Japanese women feel about nuclear power? Forget Hollywood. This is the Japanese reality!!This 6 min. 25 sec. will show you how Japanese women feel about nuclear power and how the Japanese male bureaucracy is trying to foist the deception of the century on the Japanese people by suddenly deciding to hold meetings behind closed doors!

See the video at:

A #Fukushima Woman Asks NISA Experts, "Are You Man Enough to Protect Women and Children?"

If you are shocked, tell your friends to see it too.

LET'S HAVE THIS ONE GO VIRAL!!!

We applaud the initiatives of the Gillard Federal Government today in refunding Aged Care. PM unveils $3.7bn overhaul of aged care, Friday April 20, 2012. We are particularly impressed to read that: "The [Gillard] government rejected a Productivity Commission recommendation that proposed allowing the use of reverse mortgage facilities to help fund care costs." Good on the Gillard government! Reverse mortgages steal inheritances, impoverish youth and render them homeless, and amount to double charges for old age care provision (on top of taxes). We republish a relevant and well-researched article on this matter. See also "Ageism" and ABC article on reverse mortgages.

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk. First published June 16, 2011. Republished for news relevance on April 20, 2012. Title changed at this time to include 'Reverse mortgage and other'.

Original 'teaser' for 2011 publication

This article applies to all Australians, including men. Women live longer, however, so age discrimination is actually also a feminist issue. The Australian system builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women. Any property women may have accumulated despite this bias is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care. If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day. Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or relatives who qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed. There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis, which amounts to secretly, and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian. And population pressure makes it all worse.

Main points

Women live longer so age discrimination is also a feminist issue

Any property ordinary people may have accumulated is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

• If you have assets worth more than $39,000 you may be levied up to $30.55 per day
• Unless the people who live in the house you occupied are your partner or qualify for income support, but then only if they qualify for some kind of income supplement, which is similarly assessed.
• There is a “financial hardship” provision but it is assessed on a case by case basis and, given the income criteria above, one would expect it to be Dickensian.

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

• This algorithm obviously doesn’t take property inflation into account, either as a cost or as a so-called “asset” and it doesn’t ensure that your children and grandchildren will be protected and sheltered after you have gone. It makes it even easier for the banks to own everything and for everything you have worked for to go into the hands of private business interests.

How the government is making the elderly pay again for their health care

Nursing home care: The residential care facility becomes the chronically ill person's home. It counts as medical care for income tax purposes, but is not counted as medical care for other purposes. Arguably this is a breach of citizens' rights to free public medical care in Australia, denied them on the basis of age.

High land costs erode affordability of nursing homes and shrink profit margins

What else is really wrong with the health care system: why so many elderly people occupy ?80% of beds

• Ambulances misused
• Lack of visiting nurses
• Lack of visiting GPs
• Lack of trained Personal Care Assistants
• Rental and Land costs erode funds for wages, so we cannot pay these people properly
• Many of the 80% elderly in hospital beds could be dealt with better and more cheaply at home

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

Conclusion: Why the costs of aged health care are not the taxpayer or the elderly person’s responsibility, but the government’s. (Land costs and failure to provide services in the community)

Women live longer so Age-Discrimination is a Feminist issue:

Although this article definitely concerns elderly men, age discrimination affects more women than it does men and they are materially more vulnerable to its effects. Why does age-discrimination affect more women? Simply because more women live longer, by a substantial margin.

We choose here to attract the attention of elderly women to this matter because it tends to take them unawares. We want men to read this article as well though because it directly concerns them as well. It also concerns peoples' children because it affects their inheritance rights to shelter in a country where most people can no longer guarantee indefinitely against homelessness.

The Australian System builds in a bias of financial vulnerability for women

Why are women more materially vulnerable to the effects of age-discrimination?

By materially vulnerable, we are referring to the average earnings, savings, shares, superannuation and property held by women. It is well-known that women earn less overall than men because women’s work is less well-paid. For elderly women this was actually true in legislation until 1972 when women were awarded equal pay for equal work, however 40% of women did not do work which was considered equal to men’s work, and this situation is still not entirely remedied. Many women also work fewer hours due to caring for children. Women are also less likely to be promoted into high management with higher pay in any workforce situation due to positive discrimination towards men in the work-force.

Any property Women accumulate is at risk in old age due to discrimination against the aged for health care

Some of the positive discrimination in the work force towards men is partly rectified by the tendency for wives to inherit from their deceased husbands. This however works against women whose husbands remarry, for it is likely to be the last wife who inherits what the husband has accumulated. Divorce also tends to leave women worse off than it leaves men if they have children, particularly if the married couple’s income relied on the man as the sole wage-earner. Although divorced couples are obliged to split up their property, they are not obliged to split up the wage ongoing. The man (or the woman’s wage) is their own. Courts will award payments to the children, but these tend to be rather inadequate. That means that if the woman is caring for the children and cannot work, she must rely on subsistence allowances from Social Security. If she is a mother then her chances of having a history of equal wages, education and training are less than a man’s, as are her future chances of getting these.

Historically British territories and colonies have tended to have inheritance laws favouring males, notably in Britain where, until 1922, only the first born male could inherit land. Although parents may now leave their estates to whomever they please, the tendency is still to leave more to boys than to girls. This situation puts women at an immediate disadvantage in life and is one of the reasons that women are intrinsically more dependent on marriage to raise children in our society than in France, for instance, where equal inheritance by children is the law.

Where a person marries more than once, the tendency of the law is to award all the estate to the latest spouse. This usually leaves any earlier wives, including de facto wives, in the cold, along with their children, who are very poorly protected under Australian law. These situations increase the bias against female property accumulation and mean that when women are old they have lesser means to enjoy their retirement and to pay for health care.

[There are exceptions which you can read about in a good 2010 transcript and interview on the ABC Law Report http://www.abc.net.au/rn/lawreport/stories/2010/3016770.htm] Note however, that few ordinary women can afford to pay a lawyer, let alone go to court.

Women and Age Discrimination in our Medical Care System

There is a lot, a lot wrong with the way that our medical system treats the elderly - male and female. Women however bear the brunt of this medical system age discrimination.

We are born in a women'’s hospital, a general hospital or at home. At this point in our lives all efforts are made to give us the best start in life. New babies are screened for medical and sensory defects and early intervention is commenced where any needs are detected. Whilst maternal care is probably not as luxurious as it was a few decades ago when mothers were relieved of normal responsibilities and full care of their babies for about 10 days after the birth, they are still at least cared for in hospital for a day or two, funded through the medical system.

During childhood, serious illnesses and accidents are dealt with through the medical system and children’s' hospitals. Of course where long term care is needed for a disability, the system is seriously inadequate. Institutions and processes caring for the seriously disabled are universally underfunded and under-resourced.

Treatment of other accidents or injuries are paid for through Medicare national medical insurance –(up to a point) in the public hospital system or the private hospital system where, ironically, if you carry private insurance, you end up paying far more in out of pocket expense than you would if you carried no insurance and were treated in the public system. Still - one has a choice – if one has the money!

How the situation changes when you are elderly

When you are classified as elderly, the situation changes. You go into hospital as a normal adult, with, for example, a leg break from a fall at home. When hospital treatment has gone as far as it can you are then assessed by a team of medical and social work professionals in conjunction with your family (if you have one). If, following this, you are unable to go home again you will need to go into long term care.

At this point your whole accumulated wealth over a lifetime and income will be assessed in determining how much you now pay for essential medical care.

If you have no wealth apart from your house, this may need to be sold or remortgaged to pay a deposit on a place in an aged care facility. Medicare does not care for your next hospitalization - the nursing home. The Act that provides for this is The Aged Care Act 1997. The exceptions for low-income earners are truly Dickensian:

According to Elderly Rights Advocacy (www.era.asn.au):

“The following people are not required to pay an accommodation charge:
• residents whose assets are worth less than 2.25 times the annual single age pension ($39,000 as at 20/3/11);
• users of respite care;
• anyone who is suffering financial hardship (this is decided by the Department of Health and Ageing);
• residents entering low level care or an extra service facility to receive either low or high level care (these residents may be asked to pay an accommodation bond instead): and
• “concessional” residents.”

Aged Care robs the poor of their Land and Inheritance

Whatever the thresholds and grab-back clauses, an important consideration that is never canvassed is the effect on peoples’ inheritance. Land and housing go out of the family and into private business. In a context of rising housing prices family homes and other assets which might have compensated children for the harsh economic conditions they have been born into, are not available to them.

What do people pay taxes for? Most people pay somewhere around one third of their income in income tax. On top of this there are rates and charges for services, and on top of these, the Goods and Service Tax (GST).

What do we get in return?

Before the second world war the rate of income tax was a great deal less – perhaps around 10%. Income tax was introduced to Australian states between 1880 and 1907. In 1849 in NSW income tax was introduced at the rate of 6 pence in the pound. (A pound contained 240 pence]

Overall we work harder for many less basics and we need more costly items, such as cars for travel. The major cost which has risen is the cost of land, which underpins all other costs and cuts profits.

The care of elderly people and of disabled people used to be provided mainly by the state, using crown land, for which no rent was charged. The state did not need to make a profit and costs were paid for by income tax. The state has since sold off most of the land where buildings with suitable services were provided to private developers. Most of those developers have turned this land over to private housing. So the services it once provided have disappeared. As population has increased in this country (due to government policies to increase it through immigration) the price of land for any building or business, including agriculture, has greatly increased – to levels among the highest in the world.

Nursing care and special accommodation is now provided by private business, which needs to make a profit.

Now old age care providers complain that they not only cannot make sufficient profits, but they cannot even make ends meet. All sorts of adjustments have been made to the supply and remuneration of labour in order to mitigate this problem. For instance doctors and nurses have been imported from other countries and these people are taxed at a much higher rate than Australian nationals. In this way the government actually cuts the cost of wages in some government facilities. Another instance is where registered nurses and state enrolled nurses have been replaced by Personal Service Attendants, with no professional health delivery training, who are placed in charge of frail and elderly persons with medical problems and who need their medication supervised.

The one adjustment that needs to be made is the reduction in the cost of land and rent.

This discriminatory treatment of a whole class of citizens has far-reaching undesirable consequences for most of our population, but it advantages the property development and conveyancing industry. Probably due to their enormous influence over Australian governments, this economically and socially unsustainable situation continues to consolidate.

Ageist growth-spruikers normalise dispossession and unfair imposts

For instance Bernard Salt, of KPMG, and Andrew MacLeod, of The Committee for Melbourne, with the help of Murdoch's Herald Sun, recently tried to market the idea of older people selling their low density properties to make way for higher density ones for younger people.

"If they are an empty-nester living near a school they are actually taking a role that from a society's perspective would be better taken by a family." (Andrew MacLeod)

See the article, "Should Jeannie Pratt and Elisabeth Murdoch downsize to high rises in Activity Centers to give young people more room?" There was no acknowledgement that, in the normal course of life, old peoples' properties go to their children or other relatives who survive them. For the property industry, this traditional legacy is undesirable because it cuts down on their potential opportunities to make money on property transactions. It does this by avoiding a commercial transaction in the transmission of property. The state still makes a quid, through death duties, but the State and the property development hanger-ons (conveyancers/lawyers, subdividers, builders, agents etc) get few or no bites at the property of the deceased.

“Now Australia's "Productivity Commission," is advocating so-called "reforms" for the $10.1 billion sector, which would force people to pay between 5% and 25% of their incomes towards old-age care, and which would include their actual homes as part of their incomes. This proposal has been called "HECS for the elderly."” (April 22, 2011, Herald Sun

In fact this proposal does not seem much different from what is already happening. Basically no person with any assets above $39,000 can keep ownership of their home and get aged care unless those who live in their house are pensioners of some kind with similarly small asset bases.

Such measures entail mortgages being taken on the family home, to be paid after the death of the home-owner. This makes the bank the owner of the home and capable of dispossessing any future inheritors or that they simply inherit colossal debts.

Serfdom for Australians

This is a form of serfdom.

It is all part of a trend toward dispossession of a larger and larger class of people. Ask yourself what will happen when - as in feudal times - only a very few people in society own all the property, all the assets and all the means of production. Everyone else will have only their labour and skills to sell in an employers' market.

Why would any free people allow such a thing to happen? If Australia were really a democracy, how could any government auspiced commission dare to propose such abrogation of basic rights through enslavement and theft? The excuse is always 'economic efficiency', but this is really only an excuse. It does not stand up to examination because economic efficiency in Australia is constantly undermined by huge land and housing prices which erode profit margins. The only give in the system involves legislating for undemocratic wealth transfer - robbing the poor to give to the rich. Since the property moguls are constantly making laws and policies to push property prices up, that only leaves wages that can be pushed down and privately owned homes that can be acquired through debt induced by such government policies as mortgaging elderly peoples' homes by threatening to leave them with no services as they near death.

Under European law, the State not only has the duty of providing health care for people of all ages, but it also has the duty to provide shelter. And, when a person dies, if their property does not go to their nearest kin, taxes penalise those who acquire it. We need such laws in Australia.

What happens to elderly peoples' property when they go into homes? What happens to their children's inheritance? How much does it contribute to homelessness?
What can we do about it?

Can we demand back our rights to property?

Some fixes for the Oz Health Care system within the limitations of the current [insufficient] paradigm

80% of public hospital beds are taken up with people over 65 years old, of which a good proportion are over 75 years old. Private hospitals are different because people are admitted for elective surgery and discretionary treatments. Private hospitals can also pick and choose who they take.

Most hospitalisation for any person is in the last two years of life. Medically the most expensive time of anyone's life is in the last two years, regardless of age.

The aim of the nursing home care is to keep the person as independent as possible. Often the services they are paying for would cost less if they were delivered in their real homes.

Unfortunately, health cover - public and private - doesn't cover home care, except where it is provided by medical practitioners. Some private insurers do cover some post-hospitalisation care, such as rehabilitation.

Most chronic conditions could be treated preventatively and conservatively in the community. Take, for instance, the need of many diabetics for frequent continuing podiatry. With medicare you can get five visits per year, but this is often insufficient. Because podiatry access is insufficient, complications become more serious and require expensive and extensive hospitalisations for problems like ulcers, resistive infections and amputations. Those complications affect blood sugar and increase the risks of blindness, cardiac complications and muscle wastage.

People with chronic or end of life illnesses, like respiratory problems and heart failure, can live in the community for years with occasional medical crises and readjustments. When they have these crises in the community, their options boil down to General Practitioners, ambulances, hospitals and nursing homes. GPs are flat out and almost never make home visits any more. In many cases outside of big Australian cities, you just cannot get a G.P. if you don't already have one. You also cannot change to another if you don't like the first.

Ambulance services spend a lot of their very expensive time and taxpayer funds attending to crises caused by simple handicaps of age or disability - such as falls which interrupt the person's capacity to care for themselves only because the person is unable to get up unaided, even though they are not injured. These do not require specialist attention, but simple mechanical help. Just imagine if you could call 000 or another number and ask for prompt and necessary assistance from a non-specialist person employed by the council for residents. This could solve a lot of problems.

Respiratory problems and heart failure need good oversight in partnership with the patient in the home, as well as crisis plans. The person with such a slowly deteriorating condition should be able to ring their GPs if necessary. Because GPs are so busy, however, they ring 000, end up in a public emergency department, in an acute system, and the hospital goes into overdrive with admission, treatment, and tests.

Allied health professionals, such as physiotherapists, can be very useful for keeping people mobile. There are not enough allied health providers working in the community. For example, one large regional center might have only one physiotherapist for 10,000 people which is not sufficient, compared to three physiotherapists for six thousand, in an inner Melbourne suburb.

Personal Carers are skilled to help in all kinds of non-medical situations that can cause problems for people with medical conditions like frailty or poor balance. They can help with gardening, cooking, cleaning, tidying, posting letters, etc. Local government provides Personal Carers, but they are in high demand, badly distributed, and low-paid (of course). Wealthy people have greater access to them through private agencies, but it is very hard for ordinary people to get enough of these services. For this reason many people finish up in hospital with avoidable problems like malnutrition, falls, severe depression from isolation and helplessness.

In most states of Australia Community Care is very fragmented. You might get someone something through one scheme and someone else something through another scheme, but you need to know the ropes intimately. The knowledge and skills to source and find funding for scarce services is not available to everyone, which means that people often don't get access to things that are available and which they need, although often enough those things are not even available.

There is a crisis of insufficiency. It's not just a matter of coordination. Coordinating nothing does not lead to something. There is a catch-cry of "Stop Duplication," but why not have duplication if that is what is needed? Multiply services by four or five and you might begin to provide what is needed

Recommendation: Close beds and divert the funds to community-based care.

20 per cent of the population are admitted to Australian hospitals in any one year. This is much higher than in other countries.

It is obviously very costly to have lots of elderly people with mild problems taking up acute hospital beds. If we diverted the funds from a proportion of those beds to the training and deployment of usefully skilled non-medical staff in the community, so much more could be achieved, saving elderly Australians and their children from losing their homes to pay for unnecessarily expensive residential care.

So, why should Australians pay, not just with their taxes, but with their homes and inheritances, for aged care when the high costs of hospital care are ridiculous, avoidable, and not very effective?

Article by Sheila Newman with Jill Quirk, based on their presentation on 3RPP's Freewaves Feminist program, on 16 June 2011.

It is surprising to pick up a book about wealth statistics and find that it segues so readily into another about psychopathology in young girls. The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone takes a revealing look at how wealth is distributed within different developed countries and Reviving Ophelia illustrates the decline of women's rights in the face of aggressive pornography and its effect on girls. Children and the general public were not widely exposed to explicit pornography and sexual sadism in the ‘traditional’ mass media of the industrial age, although these notions were commonly implicit in images and concepts used for marketing all kinds of things. Between that time and now, in 2011, the depiction of women almost exclusively as victims and objects of violence and pornography, explicitly and for that sole reason, has become a global business which operates 24/7. The implicit violence and sexualisation of women in ordinary marketing has also continued. At the same time, the official message is that western women don’t need Feminism anymore because equality has prevailed.

Some people are more equal than others, especially if they are not women

In the Australian Financial Review, September 13, 2011, Deidre Macken writes, “After a week when economic statistics made a lie of our feelings of being worse off, it seems like an opportunistic time to check how good we are at reading ourselves. Obviously we are not good judges at assessing our economic well-being. Repeat after me – we are a lucky people, living in a country that’s never been luckier.”[1]

Without going into the adequacy of the indicators she used but does not reference, was Deidre talking about averaged statistics or was she talking about the way they are distributed throughout the nation?

I chose a quote from a female financial journalist to introduce the feminist implications of the theories of two books. One was published nearly two decades ago and the other was published last year. The earlier one is by Mary Pipher, with the title of Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls. It was published by Riverhead Books, New York, 1994. The second book is by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It’s title is The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, and it was published by Penguin in 2010.

Both books are about the impacts of inequality as you and I experience it, rather than the global economics of inequality between different countries by which the first and the third world are often defined. I found these books interesting particularly in the light of the recent inquiry into human rights in Australia, which ignored Australian citizens’ rights by concentrating on international rights. Citizens’ rights require active democracy and laws to facilitate this, whereas global human rights are relative abstractions, requiring recognition by national governments in hard-to-enforce treaties.

The Spirit Level: Why Equality is better for everyone

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, Penguin 2010 beg the question of defining countries as rich or poor according to their average wealth. The book points out that, although Australia or the United States might have relatively large GDPs for their total populations, large sections of those societies are politically, materially, socially and physically disempowered and disadvantaged by their relative poverty. The authors imply that these differences drive seriously negative outcomes in almost any area you care to think of. The more unequal you are with the people geographically close to you – in your neighbourhood, your state, your nation - the more anxious and dysfunctional you are likely to be. Inequality is actually an indicator of relative unhappiness and that unhappiness is linked to many social and physical ills, including violence and obesity.

Further on we will relate the lesser condition of women as a subclass within these unequal nations.

Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that, rather than comparing “rich countries with poor countries” we should compare rich countries and then look inside them to see how well they are actually looking after their people.

Within countries like Japan and some of the Scandinavian countries … the richest 20 per cent of people are less than four times as rich as the poorest 20 per cent of people. At the bottom of the [scale] are countries in which these differences are at least twice as big, including two in which the richest 20 per cent get about nine times as much as the poorest. Among the most unequal are Singapore, USA, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. (p.16-17)

The book makes no attempt to explain why Portugal should stand out in such a contrast to its continental European neighbours, which almost invariably outperform English speaking countries on equality and social conditions. I would suggest however that one reason lies in Portugal's inheritance laws, which reflect a tendency to disinherit children in favour of spouses, similar to English-style laws. In the other European countries roman-style civil codes provide for children before spouses equally, therefore men and woman come to adulthood with similar wealth.

Wilkinson and Pickett find that the countries with the worst social inequality have the worst social outcomes overall in health, violence, obesity, illiteracy, mental illness, addiction, and rates of teenage pregnancy.

The official message is that developed western countries have done their duty by their own populations in fulfilling their material needs, leaving a remaining task of bringing the poor of other countries up to the same material standard. It seems churlish of people in those first world populations to reproach the rich in their countries for ostentatious and dishonest living, while the poor in the third world suffer malnutrition and disease. The official message is really that the poor of the developed world need to put the needs of the poor of the undeveloped world ahead of theirs, rather than to exert their own rights locally. The normalization of competitiveness over cooperation and social trust is a strategy to justify the growing vast internal inequalities in the first world.

Importantly for Feminism, within these unequal nations there is a further sub-class, and that is the women of those nations.

Female obesity linked to inequality

Most women would be interested to know that the authors, Wilkinson and Pickett, are able to find a clear association between inequality, obesity and the female sex.

The World Health Organisation has found, from a study begun in the 1980s, that in the 26 countries it surveyed, rates of obesity have increased more among poor women than rich women. The countries with the worst inequalities – Australia, the United States, Portugal and the UK, also have the worst rates of obesity. The countries with the lowest rates of inequality have the lowest rates of obesity.(p.98)

Observing a relationship between anxiety and material and social inequality, the authors note that chronic stress stimulates the hormone, cortisol, of which high levels are associated with deposits of fat around the middle.(p.95) People with this kind of fat are at higher risk of other illnesses – notably diabetes. Diabetes is itself associated with depression.

The authors also refer to the concept of the ‘thrifty phenotype’ where birth weights are lower in women who have experienced stress during pregnancy. Are low-birth weight babies likely to squirrel away extra calories because the stress they encountered in utero led them to prepare for a harsh society, where they would expect to struggle for food? Instead, although they do grow up in a harsh society, it is a non-traditional variety where food remains plentiful but love and approval are at a premium. (p.98)

The book also notes that food may stimulate the brain in the same way as addictive drugs do in people who use food addictively. That is, that food may be used as a pain-killer. (p.96)

It is probably obvious that food marketing may also have a role in obesity, but what is that role? The authors find associations between eating for comfort and homely foods which remind people of childhood, but they note that fast food outlets aim to reassure and to provide the lower classes with a feeling of social mobility. They reassure through their reliability and clean surroundings, but they also provide an affordable opportunity to dine out, which was once the province of the rich. Of course when you dine out on fast food, you are taking in huge amounts of calories in the form of fats and sugars, to a degree not found in haute cuisine restaurants.(p.96)

The book also refers to a study which related obesity to people’s subjective sense of ranking low in the social pecking order. That is, how you feel you compare is more important than your absolute living standard.(p.101)

To recapitulate, this book is about how, once the basics are present, absolute living standard is outweighed by social ranking as measured by relative living standard.

Women as a sub-class within unequal first world nations

Importantly for Feminism, within these unequal nations there is a further sub-class, and that is the women of those nations.

In Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia: Saving the selves of adolescent girls, (Riverhead Books, New York, 1994) the subject is also about inequality and anxiety within high GDP, purportedly progressive societies. Despite the rhetoric, she argues, girls receive a consistent message that they don’t deserve equal treatment and must go to outlandish lengths for mere acceptance. For this reason the whole basis of their identities become at risk as they identify as women rather than as children. They learn that their psychological identities depend on the approval of men. This explains the very high rates of anorexia and risky lifestyles among young women seeking some control over their social and personal environments.

Harking back to Shakespeare’s Ophelia in Hamlet as a young woman who lost the approval of the important males in her life and then suicided, this book observes the increasing difficulty since the 1980s that adolescent girls and the women they become have in preserving a sense of self and self-worth as they transition between childhood and maturity. It finds that they are victims of an increasingly sexualized and pornographic society that defines them almost exclusively as sexual objects, despite the official rhetoric of women’s rights. The girls feel the need to justify themselves against these media popularized and reinforced social standards and, in doing so, to suppress their real feelings and ambitions.

The author observes that, whilst her 1960s generation grew into a western society where the Women’s Liberation movement had overturned official institutional barriers to women’s rights to career, property and political candidacy, the mainstream media preserved, then enhanced over the next decades, a picture of women as inherently less-deserving of these rights than men. Unglamorous, older women (the majority) rarely receive attention in the mass media, and beautiful women often seem only to deserve violent attention, as victims of elaborate predator screenplays. Women are increasingly bombarded by this kind of view at younger and younger ages.

This book, Reviving Ophelia, was published in 1994, at a time when the pervasiveness of the internet was in its relative infancy. Children and the general public were not widely exposed to explicit pornography and sexual sadism in the ‘traditional’ mass media of the industrial age, although these notions were commonly implicit in images and concepts used for marketing all kinds of things. Between that time and now, in 2011, the depiction of women almost exclusively as victims and objects of violence and pornography, explicitly and for that sole reason, has become a global business which operates 24/7. The implicit violence and sexualisation of women in ordinary marketing has also continued. At the same time, the official message is that western women don’t need Feminism anymore because equality has prevailed.

How does a girl, as her sexual personality awakens deal with the saturation marketing of femaleness as moronic and deserving of punishment and death? Mary Pipher argues that girl’s personalities die and that they often die with their personalities.

”Ironically, bright and sensitive girls are most at risk for problems. They are likely to understand the implications of the media around them and be alarmed. They have the mental equipment to pick up our cultural ambivalence about women, and yet they don’t have the cognitive, emotional and social skills to handle this information. They are paralyzed by complicated and contradictory data that they cannot interpret. They struggle to resolve the unresolvable and to make sense of the absurd. It’s this attempt to make sense of the whole of adolescent experience that overwhelms bright girls.

Less perceptive girls may miss the meaning of sexist ads, music and shows entirely. They tend to deny and oversimplify problems. They don’t attempt to integrate aspects of their experience or to ‘connect the dots’ between cultural events and their own lives. Rather than process their experience, they seal in confusion.

Often bright girls look more vulnerable than their peers who have picked up less or who have chosen to deal with all the complexity by blocking it out. Later, bright girls may be more interesting, adaptive and authentic, but in early adolescence they just look shelled.

Girls have four general ways in which they can react to the cultural pressures to abandon the self. They can conform, withdraw, be depressed, or get angry. Whether girls feel depression or anger is a matter of attribution – those who blame themselves feel depressed, while those who blame others feel angry. Generally they blame their parents. Of course, most girls react with some combination of the four general ways.” (p. 43.)

Girls deal with painful thoughts, discrepant information and cognitive confusion in ways that are true or false to the self. The temptation is to shut down, to oversimplify, to avoid the hard work of examining and integrating experiences. Girls who operate from a false self often reduce the world to a more manageable place by distorting reality. Some girls join cults in which others do all their thinking for them. Some girls become anorexic and reduce all the complexity in life to just one issue – weight.” (p.61)

Mary Pipher observes that the loss of confidence in themselves that girls experience as they mature sexually occurs just at the time when more confidence is required to tackle increasingly complex work in the later years of school. Because of this socially-induced lack of confidence, even some highly intelligent girls will give up at the first sign of difficulty, where less bright male students will persist.

The book contains many succinct case histories and concludes with useful ways to approach these problems.

Male treatment of this subject - Turning Angel

How do men deal with these realities that affect their daughters, mothers and intimates so badly? In conclusion, I will mention a book by a man exploring these themes. spirit-level.jpg by novelist, Greg Iles, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2006) is a highly readable thriller that dramatises the stresses of the normalization of sexism and pornography on young girls [and men] in their last years of high school and the particular vulnerability of highly intelligent young women from dysfunctional homes. Iles looks at the temptation for upwardly mobile professional men to exploit such young women. It is also well worth a read and testifies to the continuing usefulness of the novel as a medium for social comment as well as entertainment.

NOTES

[1] Deidre Macken, “I’m starting with the man in the mirror,” Australian Financial Review, September 13, 2011.

The islamist Libyan 'rebels', recognised by Australian Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd as the legitimate government of Libya and who are cheered on by phoney socialist organisations, intend to bring back the Sharia Law that Libyan President Muammar Gadhaffi abolished when he came to power in 1969. The rights enjoyed by women in Libya today, taken for granted by women in any modern western democracy would taken away if the NATO-backed "Transitional National Council" were to become the government of Libya. Gadhaffi's strongest supporters, amongst the overwhelming majority of Libyans who express their support for him every day at popular demonstrations, are the women of Libya who have no wish to return to domestic servitude.

Original article of 27 Jul 11 on Global Research by Susan Lindauer author of Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq.

For European bankers, it's a war for Libya's Gold. For oil corporations, it's a war for Cheap Crude (now threatening to destroy Libya's oil infrastructure, just like Iraq). But for Libya's women, it's a fierce, knock down battle over the Abaya— an Islamic style of dress that critics say deprives women of self-expression and identity.

Hillary Clinton and President Sarkozy might loath to admit it, but the desire to turn back the clock on women rights in Libya constitutes one of the chief goals for NATO Rebels on the Transitional Council.

For NATO Rebels—who are overwhelmingly pro-Islamist, regardless of NATO propaganda (see www.obamaslibya.com) — it's a matter of restoring social obedience to Islamic doctrine. However the abaya is more than a symbol of virtue and womanly modesty. It would usher in a full conservative doctrine, impacting women's rights in marriage and divorce, the rights to delay childbirth to pursue education and employment—all the factors that determine a woman's status of independence.

That makes this one War Libya's women cannot afford to lose. For those of us who support Islamic modernity, there are good arguments that Gadhaffi would be grossly irresponsible to hand over power to a vacuum dominated by NATO Rebels. Given the savagery of their abuses against the Libyan people (www.obamaslibya.com) —and the Rebel's agenda to reinstate Shariah and retract women's rights, Gadhaffi has an obligation to stand strong and block them for the protection of the people.

Indeed, it's somewhat baffling that France or Italy would want to hand power to Rebels, outside of an election scenario. Elections would be a safeguard that would empower Libyan women to launch a leadership alternative that rejects the Abaya. That's exactly what the Rebels fear, and it accounts for their deep, abiding rejection of the election process. Democracy poses a real threat to NATO's vision of the "New Libya."

The abaya carries so much weight in the battle for Islamic modernity that Gadhaffi pretty much banned Islamic dress from the first days of his government. Getting rid of the abaya was part of Gadhaffi's larger reform package supporting women's rights—one of the best and most advanced in the entire Arab world. The transformation of women's status has been so great that the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran imposed a fatwa against Gadhaffi years ago, declaring his government blasphemous to Islamic traditions.

To gain insider perspective on Gadhaffi's reforms for women, members of a fact-finding delegation in Libya spoke with Najat ElMadani, chairwoman of the Libyan Society for Culture and Sciences, an NGO started in 1994. They also interviewed Sheikh Khaled Tentoush, one the most prominent Imams in Libya. Imam Tentoush has survived two NATO assassination attempts, one that was particularly revealing.

Tentoush said that he and 12 other progressive Imams were traveling to Benghazi to discuss a peaceful end to the conflict. They stopped for tea at a guest house in Brega--- and NATO dropped a bomb right on top of them, killing 11 of the 13 Imams, who had embraced Islamic reforms that empower women's rights and modernity.

There were no military installations or Gadhaffi soldiers anywhere nearby that would have justified NATO bombing. This was a deliberate assassination of Islamic leaders who give religious legitimacy to Gadhaffi's modernist policies, and therefore pose a great threat to the conservative ambitions of Islamic Rebels. NATO killed them off.

What's got radical Islamists so upset in Libya? Here's a primer on women's rights under Gadhaffi:

No Male Chaperones in Libya

• In Libya, women are allowed to move about the city, go shopping or visit friends without a male escort. Unbelievable as it sounds, throughout most of the Arab world, such freedoms are strictly forbidden. In much of Pakistan, for example, a 5 year old male child would be considered a suitable chaperone for an adult woman in the marketplace. Otherwise she'd better stay home.  In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, women are frequently locked in their apartments while their husbands, brothers or fathers go off to work. Yes, there are exceptions. Some families individually reject these practices. However, before readers protest this characterization, you must be honest and acknowledge that the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Saudis/Kuwaitis aren't the only groups that constrain women's freedoms in the Arab world. This is common social behavior throughout large swaths of Arab society.

• In Libya, women are never locked in their homes, while their husbands, fathers and brothers go to work. Gadhaffi forbids restricting women's mobility.

• In Libya, women have full legal rights to drive cars—unlike their sisters in Saudi Arabia. In a lot of Arab countries, a woman's husband holds her passport. So she cannot travel outside of the country without his approval.

Marriage Rights

• Tragically, in Kabul, Afghanistan, a young woman can be locked in Prison for rejecting her father's choice of husband. Until she changes her mind, her prospective mother in law visits the prison every day, demanding to know why her son is not "good enough" for this girl. Why does she disobey those who know what's best for her?  That poor woman stays locked up in Kabul prison until she changes her mind. And it happens right under the noses of American and NATO soldiers. A NATO Occupation won't protect Libyan women, either.

• All over the Arab world—from Yemen to Jordan to Saudi Arabia to Iran— fathers and brothers decide what age a young woman will be given away in marriage, usually as soon as she hits puberty— She has no choice in the most important decision of her life. Frequently a young girl gets married off to one of her father's adult friends or a cousin. Throughout the Arab world, it's socially acceptable for a shopkeeper to ask a young Muslim girl if she has started to menstruate. A good Islamic girl is expected to answer truthfully.

• Not in Libya. To his greatest credit, bucking all Islamic traditions—from the first days of government, Gadhaffi said No Way to forced marriages. Libyan woman have the right to choose their own husbands. They are encouraged to seek love marriages. Under strict Libyan law, without exception no person can force a Libyan woman to marry any man for any reason.

• Forced marriages have been such a problem throughout the Arab world, that in Libya, an Imam always calls on the woman if there is an impending marriage. The Imam meets with her privately, and asks if any person is forcing her to marry, or if there's any reason she's marrying this person other than her desire to be with this man.  Both Najat and Imam Tentoush were very adamant on these points.

• In Libya, the Imams are expected to protect the woman from abuse by relatives.

Right to End a Marriage

• Divorce is brutally difficult for a woman throughout the Arab world. A husband can beat or rape his wife, or commit adultery or lock her in a room like a prison. No matter what a woman suffers, as a wife she has no legal rights to leave that marriage, even for her own protection.  When her father negotiates that marriage contract, she's stuck for life. A man can divorce a woman in front of two witnesses by repeating three times: "I divorce you. I divorce you. I divorce you." He can text that message on a cell phone, and it's over. The woman has no reciprocal freedom. She's stuck in that marriage until her husband lets her go.

• Not so in Libya.  A Libyan woman can leave a marriage anytime she chooses. A woman simply files for divorce and goes on with her life.  It is very similar to U.S. laws, in that a man has no power to stop her. It's completely within her control to initiate a divorce.

• In Libya, if a woman enters a marriage with her own assets and the marriage ends, her husband cannot touch her assets. The same is true of the man's assets.  Joint assets usually go to the woman.

These "abnormal" marriage rights stir deep anger among conservative Libyan men. Rebels particularly hate Gadhaffi's government for granting marriage rights to women. But consider how delaying marriage impacts women's opportunities in society.

Delayed marriage means delayed childbirth, which empowers young women to continue education and gain employment. Not surprisingly then, Libyan women enjoy some of the best opportunities in the Arab world. That might also cause simmering resentments among conservative Libyan men.

Education of Libyan Women

• In Libya more women take advantage of higher education than men, according to Najat.  There are professional women in every walk of life.  Many Libyan women are scientists, university professors, lawyers, doctors, government employees, journalists and business women.  Najat attributes that freedom and the range of choices to Gadhaffi, and his government's insistence that women must be free to choose their lives and be fully supported in those choices.  Najat and Tentoush said that some Imams in Libya would like it to be otherwise—especially those Imams favoring the Rebels— but Gadhaffi has always over ruled them. For example there are many women soldiers, and they are very strong and fully capable of contributing to the military defense of the country.

• Women receive education scholarships equal to the men's. All Libyans can go abroad and study if they so desire— paid for by Gadhaffi's government. Single women usually take a brother or male relative with them, and Najat said all expenses are covered for both the woman and her companion.

• In Libya, women are not required to seek a husband's permission to hold a job, and any type of job is available to her. In contrast, many employment opportunities are proscribed in many other Arab countries, because work puts women in daily proximity to men who are not their husbands. That eliminates many types of job opportunities.

Bashing Women's Rights

These are some of the reasons why Rebels consider Gadhaffi an "infidel." They frequently express a desire to reinstate the Shariah. It's an open secret in Arab circles. In ignoring this point, NATO resembles the three monkeys. See no truth. Hear no truth. Speak no truth. But the Arab community understands this dynamic. Rebels are going to pat Hillary Clinton and Sarkozy on the head right up until they capture power. Then they're going to do exactly what they started out to do. Reinstate Islamic law—under the protection of the United States and NATO governments. Conservative social codes will be enforced just like Afghanistan.

Libyans understand this point, even if Americans and Europeans are lost in denial. It should surprise no one, therefore, that some of Gadhaffi's greatest support comes from Libyan women. Nor should it surprise Libya watchers that Gadhaffi's not exactly "clinging to power" as the corporate media likes to suggest. Quite the contrary, Gadhaffi's support has skyrocketed to 80 or 85 percent during this crisis. President Obama, Sarkozy and Bersculoni would be thrilled to enjoy such intense popular support.

NATO bombing has backfired and alienated the Libyan people from the Rebel cause, destroying community infrastructure that Libyans are truly proud of. Rebels are chasing pro-Gaddhaffi families out of Benghazi, a sort of political cleansing. But they have no street credibility that would give them power in negotiations with other Libyans, because losers don't get to dictate the terms. NATO can propagandize until Sarkozy falls over in a fit, but the people have resoundingly rejected these Rebels.

NATO is pushing a political resolution, because Europe wants off the merry-go-round. In truth, the music is getting uglier every day. NATO never should have jumped on this bandwagon in the first place. There's no sense to it. They're fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and embracing Al Qaeda and conservative Islam in Benghazi.

Those of us who support Islamic modernity should be relieved that Libya's people are smarter and savvier than NATO bureaucrats. And we should all say a prayer that Gadhaffi holds on.

Susan Lindauer covered Libya and Iraq at the United Nations from 1995 to 2003, and started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial. Lindauer is the author of Extreme Prejudice: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq.

Global Research Articles by Susan Lindauer

This article was adapted from a radio program I hosted on 3RPP with Jenny Warfe as my guest, called "Women in Politics, Why don't more participate?" The program found that participation rates depend on definition. Indeed, we found that women dominate politics in Victoria, Australia - they just don't draw salaries. Inside we look at three classical theories for why women participate less in politics than men; argue that the Real Politics are outside Parliament, (Indian theory); give examples of Victorian women in politics outside Melbourne's parliament; analyse these women's political roles as more reactive and militant than planned-for and careerist. We also note that women led the French Revolution and we ask, "Are Female environmental activists in Victoria leading a new political movement?"

Illustration: "Boadicea Haranguing the Britons,"
by H.C. Selous (c. 1840) (her ill-fated daughters at her feet)

Women in politics in Australia and Melbourne

I was recently criticised (by new male management) for talking about the environment and interviewing female environmentalists on the Feminist radio show, Freewaves, 3RPP.

My defense is that the environment is the main game in politics and activism down here on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, in the rest of Australia, and everywhere, actually. The other side calls it “Planning,” but it involves the same living envelope that surrounds all our senses and keeps us alive, well and happy.

Corporate Commerce vs Democracy

It boils down to corporate commerce versus democracy. Symptomatically in Australia, corporate commerce increasingly mislabels 'democracy' as 'populism.'

An example of this tendency is to be found in The Australian Industry group's "wish-list" to "Reject populism and overhaul the public sector."[1]

Official political voices in parliament mostly represent corporate lobby groups which make money out of doing stuff to our environment, which many of us do not want, but for which we pay in impacts, charges, tolls and taxes. In fact women, who own much less property and financial wealth than men are far more immediately dependent on the ‘common wealth’ of public amenity, natural environment and public services. For this reason, women are naturally on the front-line in suffering the effects of privatisation, annexation of parkland, commercialization of public swimming pools, destruction of forests and wild green spaces, loss of backyards, cruelty and destruction of wildlife at the suburban interface,[2] and the commercial co-option of natural and vital resources, like water and food.

Although there are a few more women at the official "top" (i.e. in parliament - see the graph[3]) going by the mainstream media, male parliamentarians still hog the limelight with aggressive activities in infrastructure and land-use planning, using a moot justification of a need to accommodate population growth in order to ram through massive infrastructure projects. Women who get the limelight in official politics mostly engage in similar professional lobbying behaviour for such interests, like Anna Bligh and Christine Keneally.

Perhaps a lot of women don't join in official politics because they are taught to have childlike faith in a fatherly authority and simply assume that the 'government' is doing its job. On the other hand, most women's political activities are under-reported or not reported at all in the mainstream media, which markets an official view of reality which hardly reflects women's existence beyond their function as consumers, producers of children, and wage-hands. It is therefore perhaps not so surprising that it takes some women a long time to realise that most of what they worry about is actually political. Some women become involved in politics, especially later in life, when they realise that, after all, important things are not being taken care of by the people who are being paid by taxes to look after everyone.

Before we cite some interesting examples and look at where they may be taking us, let us look at some useful theory on the matter of female participation in politics.

Three classical theories for why women participate less in politics than men

Theory 1: The political socialization process discourages women from playing an active political role (Socialisation) (mooted above);

Theory 2: Family responsibilities keep some women at home and out of the work force (Situational);

Theory 3: Women are overrepresented in demographic groups that have low participation levels (structural). For instance, more women have less wealth and less education.

In Susan Welch’s “Women as political animals? A test of some Explanations for Male-female political participation differences,” American journal of political science,[4] the researcher found that, once situational and structural variables were controlled there were no systematic differences in levels of male-female participation. In light of these findings, she questioned the validity of the political socialization explanation.

The Real Politics are outside Parliament, (Indian theory)

Ashok Kumar, “Political Participation of Women,” [5] suggests that we do need to broaden our definition of the political process in order to better detect women's participation:

“The concept of political participation of women is broader than the one covering women’s participation only in the electoral and administration processes. It includes the gamut of voluntary activities with a bearing on the political processes, including voting, support of political groups, communication with legislator, dissemination of political views and opinions among the electorate, and other related activites. However, political participation can be considered to include an involvement in any from of organized activity that effects, or seeks to effect, these power relationships. It refers broadly also to ‘activities by those not formally empowered to make decisions, these activities being mainly intended to influence the attitudes and behaviour of those who have powers for decision-making.’

New perspectives on old processes may highlight latent political conflict.

“Minimally, a political perspective requires that some activity called ‘politics’ be differentiated from other activities, relationships, and patterns of action. If all conceptual boundaries are blurred and all distinction between public and private are eliminated, no politics can exist by definition. The relatively open-textured quality of politics means that innovative and revolutionary thinkers are those who declare politics to exist where politics was not thought to exist before, should their reclassifications stick over time and meaning of politics – indeed of human life itself may be transformed. Altered social conditions may also provoke a reassessment of old, and recognition of new, ‘political’ realities. However, the theme of political participation of women has raised a major dilemma. On the one hand, it is the fundamental right of every citizen to contribute to the decision-making process. It is, in fact, the citizen’s duty as well as in based on the presumption that each member has adequate means and conditions to achieve a full realization of his personality as an entity in society. On the other hand, from a feminist perspective, an analysis of women’s participation in political process has questioned the narrow definition of political participation as accepted by mainstream of political scientists and policy-makers.

Politics involves power relationships and reactions to these:

“Political participation can be considered to include an involvement in any form of organized activity that affects, or seeks to affect, these power relationships. It refers broadly also to ‘activities by those not formally empowered to make decisions, these activities being mainly intended to influence the attitudes and behaviour of those who have powers for decision-making.’ In fact, protests and demonstrations against those in power also form part of political participation. Women’s participation has covered a range of activities including movements, protest and support meetings on all issues connected with labour, dowry, rape, domestic violence, pressurize, food adulteration and deforestation, as also movements for the promotion of peace.

Some examples of women in politics outside parliament

Here is a list of women who are strongly engaged in politics in Victoria, Australia. It is not exhaustive and is simply what I came up with in a couple of minutes from memory. (I would welcome similar lists of politically engaged women in other states and countries.)

Mary Drost, Planning Backlash
Julianne Bell, Protectors of Public Lands
Jenny Warfe of Blue Wedges, who ran as a Radical Independent in 2010 Federal elections.
Jill Quirk - a connection in many groups and leader of Sustainable Population Victoria
Sheila Newman (myself) through her writing on population, land-use planning and democracy, at candobetter.net
Jan Beer, Plug the Pipe - a farmer who ran against Brumby’s North South Pipeline
Jill Redwood - Long-running leader of Environment East Gippsland, recently led the first prosecution of VicForests and the Victorian government in the Brown Mountain case.
Janice Rossiter Militated against the sale of Footscray pool and other undemocratic and unwise privatisations (Became a councilor)
Gloria O'Connor - swimming pools and rate payers in Packenham
Maryland Wilson - President of The Australian Wildlife Protection Council
#10; <a href=" http:="">Vivienne Ortega - leads (through her writing on candobetter.net) on wildlife and wilderness activism in Christianity
Elida Radig who started the Rye women's group over 30 years ago. It is the oldest and almost the only surviving independent women’s group and safety house in Victoria.
Catherine Manning – Hastings infrastructure project activist and child pornography activist (joined the Greens).
Gillian Collins – The Pines Protectors (joined the Greens)
Christine Pruneau, planning activist for Massedon Ranges Residents Association
Marilyn Canet, activist extraordinaire who exposed corruption in Brimbank Council

The women on the list started up lobby groups or emerged as leaders in spontaneous processes to change laws or behaviour or protests by community groups seeking recognition of natural or legal rights.

Few or none are predominantly known for their activity in official political parties, only through their alternative creations and activities.[6]

What's happened in Victoria is that these women have come together because their concerns converged due to the fact that they were all about the treatment of public land, and its non-commercial occupants, such as flora, fauna, women and children. The mainstream parties, however, were about exploiting these or were not helping to stop this exploitation, or only dealing with peripheral issues.

For this reason these women emerged as significant leaders in spontaneous new groups.

Men can be concerned about these things but they are more likely to become professionalised in politics, like Charles Berger of the ACF, or Serge Thomann, who headed a council activist group then became a councillor in St Kilda. Men often become involved in politics because it enhances their professional opportunity or because they are defending or seizing mainstream political opportunity and activity in such groups can boost their profile. You get quite a few planning, construction and conveyancing professionals as dilettants in local activist groups.

Are Women in Victorian politics reactive rather than careerists?

Not reactionary, but REACTIVE to injustices and dangers rather than choosing establishment politics as a career. That is, they don't plan to have political careers; they become politicised, radicalised in response to injustice and bullying. Most are natural leaders rather than followers. This is a reflection of their need to foray into uncharted waters as outsiders in conflict with the official system. Thus they take on the political responsibility of being a leader. They step into vacuums created by our commercially dominated society. Very few men will spend most waking moments defending something they don't hope ultimately to get paid for. [7] Also, these women tend not to be employed in the area in which they are activists, or they are retired, or 'home-makers' so they can speak out without much fear of being sacked for going against in house policies. It seems that men are less inclined to be politically active outside their professional areas of expertise. Why is this?

Men perhaps would tend to join political parties because they have more chance of getting somewhere in them. Retired men are often active in groups, but rarely lead them, perhaps because so very much unpaid work is required to make a group function. A woman might form a group where none existed before and in which there was no chance of making money; a man is less likely to. Or men might belong to traditional alternative political groups, such as the Marxist ones, which are strong on rhetoric and short on practical representation. One man who stands out as an exception is Joe Toscano, a geriatrician who has been a strong and committed activist in the anarchist movement for many years in Victoria and who is particularly concerned with the abrogration of public space by private enterprise and the community's loss of political assembly rights in these places.

Women don't own major mainstream media

Women don't own mainstream newspapers or television channels or radio stations, so how could they influence public perception in a powerful way? They don't own nearly as much property as men, therefore value public land more and are less likely to profit from things like urban densification and privatisation of public lands and other assets. They tend to benefit from laws for public protection, public access and basic standards. Perhaps, just as men are less likely to take good care of their health than women, they are less likely to take care of their civil rights.

Women led the French Revolution

5 October 1789: The Women’s march on the Palace of Versailles
Armed with stakes, sticks and forks, something like 7000 women from Paris – where people were starving – walked from Paris to the palace at Versailles – a distance of 16km as the crow flies or around 20km by road today. They were reacting in part to news that, during a banquet in honour of the Flemish Regiment, members of the king’s personal guard had trampled the tricolour rosette, which was the symbol of the revolution and the bill of rights. But they were also marching on the palace to demand food, since they and their families were starving.

The women were joined later at the rear by men and the National Guard. At the palace, the women demanded to see the Queen, a woman loathed as a foreigner who influenced the king against listening to his people. During the night palace guards were killed. Eventually the people returned to Paris with the king and his family, preceded by a cart full of flour and followed by cartloads of grain. The royal family was then put under house arrest in the Tuilleries, a large palace which had been built in the 16th century. They remained under arrest until they were executed some time later. Shortly after this mass uprising, the king signed the 4th of August abolition of feudal privileges.

Are Female environmental activists in Victoria leading a new political movement?

Insofar as no-one else is defending the rights of citizens to retain the quality of their built and natural environment, groups of women in Victoria seem to be leading the only effective action against a growth lobby which seems to have taken over government and to have emptied much of our normal political processes of effectiveness, in the service of a commercial agenda which demands the overturn of democracy.

Candobetter.net would like to hear from any similar activists and groups in other states.

NOTES

[2] Increasingly in Australia, commerce mislabels 'democracy' as 'populism', as in The Australian Industry group's "wish-list" to "Reject populism and overhaul the public sector." See, "O'Farrell will have his hands full," Australian Financial Review, 10 March 2011, p.5. (Note that small business tends to be in favour of democracy and to complain of being unrepresented.)

[3] "Composition of Australian parliaments by Party and Gender as at 5 January 2011", Politics and Public Administration group, Parliamentary Library, www.aph.gov.au/library/intguide/pol/currentwomen.pdf.

[3]As the traditional custodians of home and gardens, women are more likely than men to notice when the magpies stop singing and the wattlebirds stop doing their displays, and the possums no longer come out with the moon and the wallabies and kangaroos simply disappear. Often they take care of wounded wildlife and grieve intensely, as do their children. Men, the traditional cooptees to the salaried workforce in the industrial system often have less time at home, although this is also changing for the worse as our system demands increasing hours of toil away from our homes and real lives, in the service of the appetite of commerce.

[4] American journal of political science

[5 Ashok Kumar, “Political Participation of Women,” in Sunit Gupta, Mukta Gupta (Eds.), Role of women in the twenty-first century, Anmol Publications, Daryaganj, New Delhi, 1996.

[6] Someone reminded me of Victoria’s first woman Premier’s origins in parents' groups at schools: Joan Kirner became the first woman Premier of Victoria -1988 to 1990. After leaving paid politics she helped with the LandCare movement then focused on the creation of Emily’s List Australia, based on a U.S. originating list which aims to fund pro-choice women in politics all over the world. Disappointingly for Victoria's independent candidates, the Australian list only seems to fund Labor candidates.

[7] This reluctance of men to work for nothing is in part due to their greater traditional responsibility as breadwinners and the regimented nature of their salaried lives.

International Women's Day will once again be celebrated in all its darkness and its lightness at the Women's House at 3 Lyons Street Rye, on 8 March 2011. As usual there will be debates with women at the microphone. This time a feature will be women and Sharia Law. Known as "That Purple Place," the Women's Resource Centre was founded in 1982 by Elida Radig, a local and international tower of strength and force for good in Australia. Elida is also known for her creation of the Women's House program, where different female voices present "Freewaves" on 3RPP, Thursdays, 3-4pm. Rye Victoria's Women's Resource Centre is one of very few totally independent forces for women. It receives no government funding but is self-supporting, mostly through sales at its second hand store, which is one of the best loved in Victoria. There is also a cafe on the premises. The centre also provides hands-on support for women and their children in crisis.

Celebrate International Women's Day, Tuesday March 8th, 2011 at the Women's Resource Centre in Rye, Victoria

3 Lyons Street, Rye
Tel: 59855955
(That's a Victorian number so preface with 03 if you are dialing interstate and with 613 if you are dialing internationally.)

www.thatpurpleplace.com

Program for 2011 International Women's Day at Rye

Events go from 10am to 6pm with the microphone open to all women all day.

10.00 am *At Rye Pier: Memorial Ceremony of Water & Flowers for women who have died, including victims of war.

10.30 am * Back at the Women’s Centre for scones & cream.

10.45 am * Welcoming & acknowledgment of the Sisterhood of all women on planet Earth.

11.00 am * MORNING OPEN FORUM- Your opinion is important

Issues: What do we want?
Platform for Action

This is a consciousness-raising forum

12.30pm * INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY LUNCH

Barbecue, salads and cakes under the shade of the Hibiscus tree

2.00pm * VAUDEVILLE HOUR

Carol Jamieson, her guitar and friends.

Singers/ Comedians/Jokes.

Belly Dancing with Clara & dancers.

3.00pm * AFTERNOON OPEN FORUM – Your opinion is important.

Issues: Sharia law in Australia?

The stoning of women.

This is a political forum

4.00pm * CIRCLE OF WOMEN

5.00pm * INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY DINNER

Self-serve yummy left overs.

In sisterhood is our strength

It has become an unwritten rule of political correctness that in order to criticize people or their ideology one must share a biological characteristic of the people being criticized. The inherent racism or sexism of this assumption is lost on those who insist upon it. Nevertheless the rule, in all of its absurdity, persists. Good arguments are routinely dismissed not on their merits, but by the fact that they are waged by someone thought to be racially or sexually disqualified to comment on the issue. This cannot apply here, for Madeline Weld, President of the Population Institute of Canada, is a woman, and she reproaches the fem-left for its collusion in the crippling of the Program of Action as set out by the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo 16 years ago. Ms. Weld asserts that the feminist wing of the so-called "Environmental Justice" movement be held to account for their part in scuttling effective population stabilization programs in developing countries. Take this Betsy Hartmann!

Population growth, development, and stability: Egypt as an example

Reports on the upheaval spreading like wildfire across the Arab world overlook a crucial factor underlying the collapse of the old order: overpopulation. Given the pivotal role that Cairo has played in unleashing the current rage, it is perhaps ironic that, 16 years ago, it hosted a conference convened precisely to address that issue. In September of 1994, Cairo hosted the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) under the auspices of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) with great fanfare and even greater expectations.

Let's consider the situation in Egypt from a population perspective. In 1994, Egypt had 60 million people, now it has 85 million—a 42% increase in 16 years. The UNFPA projects 130 million by 2050. Rapid growth is fuelled by the youth of the population: one-third under 14 years of age, 20% between 15 and 29 years old, and only 5% over 65.

That Egypt can't cope with this growth is reflected in its staggering unemployment rate (83% for those between 15 and 29), its inability to educate its people (the over-15 illiteracy rate is 25% for men and 42% for women), its inability to provide adequately for its people (40% at or below the poverty level) and its inability to feed itself (it imports about half of its staples). The 3% of its surface area consisting of arable land (nearly all around the Nile Valley) is being encroached upon by development. The Nile River that irrigates the fertile land no longer reaches the Mediterranean Sea, thanks to overuse by Egyptians and their southern neighbours. The building of the Aswan Dam—to provide energy for a growing population—has reduced the silting and therefore the fertility of the Nile floodplain.

Egypt's population growth is destroying its ability to feed itself. In 1960, Egypt had 26 million people and was self-sufficient in almost all basic food commodities. In recent decades, it has depended on revenues from oil exports to import about half of the staple foods it needs. Now, with its oil reserves running dry (if you haven't yet heard about "peak oil", google it right after reading this article) and its growing population needing more oil for its own uses, Egypt is about to become an oil importer. But the oil exports paid for food subsidies which many Egyptians depended on, and the threat to discontinue the subsidies due to dropping oil revenues no doubt contributed to the unrest that eventually toppled the government. The fact that these biophysical realities are ignored in most reports about developments in Egypt does not diminish their importance or their consequences.

Some variant of the above applies to any number of countries where population growth looms large. It is why some countries can't pull themselves out of poverty and some are endlessly in conflict—and more often than not those two conditions overlap. Growth rates in the "least developed countries" or LCDs have fallen since 1994, but not spectacularly, from 2.7% annually to 2.3% (which means their doubling times are now 30 years instead of 26). That the Cairo conference had so little impact on population growth isn't because it couldn't see what was coming. The Programme of Action, the document that arose from the Cairo conference, was clear on the potential for trouble ahead. It specifically recognized that the large proportion of young people in many developing countries would result in extremely rapid growth at current fertility rates, and that this growth would cause enormous social and environmental problems that their governments were very poorly equipped to handle. And that is exactly what is happening right now—not just in those countries whose turmoil is currently dominating headlines. The impact of the population factor is not negated by the existence of corrupt and despotic governments, bad governance, unfavourable trade conditions, or anything else.

The International Conference on Population and Development: stymied by ideology

Why did the Cairo conference fall so short of the mark? Therein— precisely—lies the problem. There was really no mark because the Cairo conference fled from numbers. It focussed on the rights of women, the poor, and the disempowered. As it happens, the poorest, most disempowered women are often found in the countries with the most rapid population growth. But the Programme of Action offered no guidelines for governments or international organizations such as the World Health Organization to implement ethical, practical programs for slowing population growth and bringing population levels in line with the resource base available to support them. Instead, it stated that “All couples and individuals have the basic right to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children and to have the information, education, and means to do so.”

If the Programme of Action recognized that rapid population growth was taking many countries down a dangerous road at great speed, why did it refuse to actively promote the use of brakes? The usual suspect is the Vatican, whose "observer status" at the United Nations allowed it to participate at the Cairo conference where it did everything it could to put roadblocks to providing poor women with access to contraceptives and abortion. It sought alliances with Muslim countries over concerns about statements on topics like abortion, homosexuality, and sex outside of marriage. But the religious forces were the obvious and identified adversaries. They constituted a formidable but surmountable obstruction. The "P" in ICPD was essentially erased—thereby effectively sabotaging the conference—by those who purported to support its goals: the feminist and social/environmental justice alliance of the political left who constituted most of the NGOs (non-governmental organizations) participating at the conference.

The Cairo conference and its Programme of Action were stamped with the same taboo of the feminist and social justice left that has, for the last several decades, snuffed out any serious public discussion about population growth which had been so much a part of the early days of the environmental movement. This attitude in fact made them strange bedfellows of the Vatican and other religious interests at the Cairo conference. While not explicitly stated in the Programme of Action, it was implicitly understood that anything remotely resembling demographic targets was racist, anti-woman, anti-poor, and flirting with eugenics.

Putting the development cart before the population horse

With the "P" sidelined by ICPD's refusal to countenance population control, the emphasis for a path out of poverty fell on the "D." It was assumed that development would lead to a reduction in population growth. Poverty would be eradicated through "through sustained economic growth in the context of sustainable development" (implicitly assuming that the Earth would support this sustained economic growth along with the rapid population growth that was inevitably going to occur for some time). Population growth would be slowed through "education, especially for girls; gender equity and equality; infant, child, and maternal mortality reduction; universal access to reproductive health services, including family planning and sexual health."

The wishful thinking that the indirect effects of development alone can overcome the problems created by rampant population growth is based on a belief in a silver bullet known as the demographic transition. The idea is that parents have fewer children when they see that those they have are likely to survive and at the same time, with increasing rural to urban migration, they realize that children cost money rather than provide free labour. The trouble with the demographic transition theory is that it is treated like a law of physics when in fact it is only one of many possibilities. A major problem is the slowness at which it kicks in. The lag time between the child mortality rate falling and the desired family size also dropping can be very long indeed. In western and middle sub-Saharan Africa, the desired family size is still six children. In the countries of Chad and Niger, it is over 9. With no international consensus for governments to promote small families, "freely and responsibly" continued to be defined by cultural values, which remained strongly pronatalist in many countries. Consequently, many countries fall into the demographic trap on their unhurried path to the demographic transition: the large families beget poverty and impede development—negatively impacting the environment, food security, the government's ability to provide services, social stability, and the likelihood that these countries will ever actually achieve the demographic transition—at least not in the happy way envisioned by the Cairo conference.

Given the subordinate status of women in many developing countries, their lack of access to education, and the absence of cultural values that include family planning, one might have asked just how "freely and responsibly" they would actually be to plan the size of their families. Early marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), and honour killings, all effective tools in subjugating women, are still widely accepted cultural practices (despite both real efforts and lip service to abolish them). A significant part of a woman's "decision" (insofar as it even occurs to her that she has any say in the matter) may be based on what her husband or mother-in-law wants, or what the local mullah or priest has to say. Wealthier people are more likely to know about contraception and to have the means to access services. On average, the wealthiest women are four times more likely to use contraception than the poorest. In some countries, the rate is 12 times higher. Without education programs that let the poor know about contraception and its benefits, they are much less likely than the rich to want contraceptive services or use them if they are even available. And without the political will on the part of governments to make them available, the poor are often unable to access services.

That political will is sorely lacking in many countries and the international community. While 55% of all population assistance went to family planning in 1995, the proportion of current funding has plummeted to 5%. Over half of current funding goes to AIDS programs. The prevalence of contraceptives of what the UNFPA defines as the "least developed countries" or LCDs is only 28% and 22% for "any method" and "modern methods", respectively, 16 years after the Cairo conference.

The consequences of wishful thinking

Not surprisingly, population growth has remained rapid in many of the UNFPA-defined "less developed regions". As a result of population pressure, widespread environmental deterioration has occurred, through deforestation, erosion and salination of overused land, falling water tables, depletion of the water and fish stock in rivers, pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Rather than being subjected to government or international initiatives promoting small families, the poor in many countries are being subjected to the "coercion" of their deteriorating environment. And while population control programs can be quite benign (such as those in Thailand, Kerala in India, Bangladesh), environmental coercion is often very cruel. The environment is also totally impervious to political pressure from the right or the left, from religionists or Marxists. It is completely indifferent to ethics, human rights, public opinion, and the pronouncements of religious leaders.

The Fund for Peace has published a Failed State Index annually since 2005. The number of states with a score of 100 or more (out of a maximum 120) was 7 in 2005 and 15 in 2010. Rapid population growth is closely associated with a high ranking. For 2010, 15 of the top 20 failed states had population growth rates between 2 and 4% a year (which would result in doubling times of 17 to 35 years); in 14 of them, at least 40% of the population was under 15. Nineteen of the top 20 failing states (and forty other countries) depend on the UN World Food Programme for food. All of the top 20 failing states are depleting their natural assets (forests, soils, aquifers) to sustain their rapidly growing populations. Deteriorating infrastructure—roads, power, water, sewage systems—is another feature of failing states.

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the violence seen in many struggling countries (e.g., Rwanda, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Somalia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, and many others), the concept of human rights tends to fall by the wayside when too many humans are fighting over the same dwindling resources. Failing states are highly likely to experience a breakdown in law and order and the loss of personal security, in which women often face extreme discrimination and brutalization. The viciousness of atrocities committed in states in a downward spiral are almost beyond our capacity to comprehend. Both the prevalence and brutality of rape, often committed with weapons or other implements, are staggering.No population control program in any country has ever come close to inflicting upon women the horrors that millions of them have experienced during the environmental and social collapse of some of the world’s most overpopulated and conflict-ridden regions.

Conflicts in failing states often spread to neighbouring countries, as when the genocide in Rwanda spread to the DRC, where at least five million people lost their lives. Nevertheless, as in the DRC, most of the deaths are often caused by the war's indirect effects, such as hunger and disease. Hunger and disease are likely to be significant agents of mortality in future conflicts over dwindling resources.

Who's the bad guy?

China used genuine coercion in addition to persuasion and education in its population control program and is often singled out for particular reprobation. But those who deplore China's policies should perhaps compare China with countries like Rwanda, the DRC, Somalia, and Haiti, all of which illustrate the coercion of environmental, political and social collapse. Would a China with 400 million more people—the number of births it estimates to have averted—be a better place? It could well be argued that the world owes China a thank you for the 18 million tons of carbon dioxide it averted each year by preventing those 400 million births. Every country that has taken deliberate measures to reduce its rate of population growth (China, Thailand, Bangladesh, Iran—now unfortunately reverting to pronatalism) is better off than if it had not done so).

The world's population is still increasing by almost 80 million each year, about 220,000 each day. Virtually all of the growth is happening in the developing world. Rapid growth in developed countries (such as Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia) is driven by immigration from developing countries. Many who call themselves green say that consumption, not population, is the problem. Understandably, poor people in developing countries want a higher standard of living. By definition, increased prosperity means more consumption, when those now underfed get more to eat, those now uneducated go to schools and universities, those now unemployed have jobs and consume more products, those now walking drive cars and need more roads. But such an increase in consumption by billions of people will have an enormous environmental impact.

Human beings have already appropriated to themselves all the land that is in any way suitable for agriculture. They have converted the habitat of other species to their own uses, depleted the oceans of much of their fish stocks, and introduced pollutants into every part of the Earth. Such has been our impact that scientists say we are causing the sixth great extinction. There is no greater favour we could do to ourselves, future generations, and all life on Earth, than reducing our numbers.

It is also by no means clear that we will be able to feed all the extra people. There is not likely to be another green revolution. That the green revolution was a one-time breathing space that would allow humans to slow the growth of their numbers was recognized by Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work on increasing crop yield. Borlaug said that the agencies that fight for increased food production and those that fight for population control must unite in a common cause. Unfortunately, the fight for population control was sidelined, and population growth ate up the gains of the green revolution.

Deadly ethics? Questions for Betsy Hartmann

The concern over human rights as implicitly interpreted in the Programme of Action of the Cairo conference raises several hard ethical questions. Do ethics operate in a vacuum or are we obligated to consider the consequences of our ethical choices? Does the right of a woman to have as many children as she chooses trump the right of her own and other people's descendants to have a liveable environment? Does it trump the right of the global community in general to live on a healthy planet? Do those of us now living have any obligations to husband resources for future generations? Does the human species have any ethical obligations to non-human life—to protect Earth's biodiversity? These questions, however, were never addressed in the Programme of Action—an irresponsible act of avoidance.

Those concerned with population growth have, over the past decades, offered many olive branches to the feminist and social/environmental justice left. But the latter have not changed their stance one iota. Perhaps uncharitably, I have concluded that their major concern is not for the dispossessed or the environment, but to retain the purity of their Marxist-oriented ideology. Whatever their intentions, the impact of the population taboo enforced by the social justice left is the same as that of the abortion politics used by the primarily religious right. They synergize to deprive poor women of access to birth control that is affordable and specifically suitable to their needs.

Dislodging the dogmatists

Many population activists are ready to take on the dogmatically based religious injunctions against family planning and abortion. But when it comes to the dogmatically based feminist and social justice arguments against population control, we often fail to challenge their faulty premises and misguided conclusions. We have allowed them to appropriate for themselves the moral high ground on this issue, which they have held not with reasoned arguments, but with unsubstantiated accusations of racism, sexism, colonialism, not wanting to share the wealth, and other ad hominem attacks. We have allowed ourselves to be intimidated by these bully tactics to the detriment of all living things—human beings and the biodiversity of Earth. It is time to drive the ideologues off the territory they are illegally occupying with a "fact-based revolution" —by simply presenting the facts, fearlessly and persistently.

At the Cairo conference in 1994, the world fled from numbers. But, as current events in Cairo and elsewhere are showing, we can't flee from the consequences of those numbers. The Marxist feminist/social justice ideology that denies the population factor and vilifies those who address it is as long-lived as some of the dictators in the Arab world and, like them, finds itself on shaky ground, because ideology cannot trump reality. An ideology that claims to promote social justice but does not recognize that the Earth is finite is more than unethical. It is dangerous to those now living, to future generations, and to all life on Earth. It must be overthrown. We have all the weapons we need: arguments based on hard facts and actual data.

Let the charge of reason begin!

Madeline Weld
February 24, 2011

Rudd's Ministry after being sworn in on 3 December 2007

The process of leadership replacement where a political party can suddenly replace a Prime Minister or a State Premier without electoral involvement is undemocratic. Political parties are elected on the merit of their leader. That merit earns an electoral mandate. If that mandate is not fulfilled, it is for the electorate to judge.

Australia now has an unelected prime Minister and an unelected Premier of the country's most populous state, NSW - both appointed by the Labor Right factions. Irrespective of the personalities or gender of these two leaders, that they may be seen as factional appointments should be cause for concern by Australians that a undemocratic process and an unaccountable political group can control government at federal and state levels simultaneously. Where does the real power and control lie?

Such power must be realised, then properly curbed and restored to the people, even if such a leadership change were to be trigger a compulsory election. Until there is a general election Gillard's Government is not credible.

On the back of these two issues, Australia has its first female Prime Minister in Julia Gillard. This is an historic achievement, but it shouldn't be. What has take us so long? This is 2010 and all Australians are supposed to be equal and feminism has been fighting since the suffrage movement on the 1880s. Gender shouldn't even be a factor in a mature civilized society, just like ethnicity or age. It is an indictment on Australians that few indigenous people are in politics and that it is probably many generations away before we can celebrate an Aboriginal woman as Prime Minister.

That our socio-political mindset is so hung up on the abilities and performance of one person in the role a leader is a rather vulnerable insecure position for the electorate and the media to be in. It means that the success or failure of the entire nation hinges on the whim of one personality. In Rudd, we trusted him on his promises, but even though he was quickly distracted by the GFC and then lost focus on key issues, he didn't end up being an axe murderer, luckily. American voted for George W. Bush and look what they got - someone who condoned torture and sent Americans to invade another country!

Our dependence on one person to lead the nation poses an unnecessary 'key man' risk. It is the Government and specifically a Cabinet team of ministers who should be running the country, not Rudd, not a gang of four, not just Julia Gillard. Running a country is immensely complex. It is a shared responsibility that of course demands leadership, but for effective delivery requires layers of delegation and good governance.

Gillard would be wise to better utilise the talents of her elected representatives than trying to do everything herself like Rudd tried to do but failed. Gillard should be about leadership of the Cabinet. Gillard's Government should be about managing the national interest as directed by Cabinet. The two functions are distinctly different. Rudd' experiment with autocracy should be learnt from. He started off with a progressive approach to listening to the electorate in his 2020 Summit. Perhaps his incapacity to interpret criticism constructively saw him become insular - lessons we can all learn from.

If we consider some of our more longer serving leaders at both federal and state levels who were popular with the electorate and not divisive, we may learn from what works for Australian political stability. Deakin, Menzies, Hawke, Wran come to mind. Liberal and Labor are ideologically the same so it matters little which is in office. Listening and consultation followed by decisive action is a good start and this is one of the first indicators of Gillard's style she announced on taking the helm.

I wish her new government well. It would be reassuring for voters to think they can look forward to a long period of political stability in Australia, without the usual cycle of new leader euphoria...disappointment...complacency...anger...contempt...followed by let's give the Opposition a go.

But we must have an election soon. Until we do, Australia does not have a 'government of the people, by the people, for the people.' [Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 19th November, 1863, Pennsylvania, USA].

“ In sisterhood is our strength” Monday March 8 is International Women's Day. The Rye Women's House at 3 Lyons Street, Rye, Victoria, Phone 59 855 955, on the Mornington Peninsula will be celebrating its silver anniversary. Founded by Elida Radig, It is perhaps the oldest independent feminist institution of its kind in Victoria and it does an awesome International Women's Day. Please come along and experience the intellects, the humour, the politics, the music, the food... They mean what they say when they say, "The microphone is open to all women all day".

MONDAY, 8th MARCH 2010 is INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

We are celebrating it at Rye, just near the beach
at

3 Lyons Street, Rye, Victoria
Phone 59 855 955 "That Purple Place"

Please come and join us!

...

PROGRAM

THE MICROPHONE IS OPEN TO ALL WOMEN ALL DAY

10.00 am *At Rye Pier: Memorial Ceremony of Water & Flowers for the

women who have died. Including victims of war.

10.30 am * Back at the Women’s Centre for scones & cream.

10.35 am * Welcoming & acknowledgment of the Sisterhood of all women

on planet Earth. ‘Wild Woman’ with Shellabelle & wild women.

11.00 am * MORNING OPEN FORUM- Your opinion is important

Issues: “INEQUALITIES IN AUSTRALIA”

Facilitator: Gian Wild

12 noon * INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY LUNCH

Barbecue, salads and cakes under the shade of the Hibiscus tree

1.30pm * VAUDEVILLE HOUR

Carol Jamieson, her guitar and friends

Singers/ Comedians/Jokes.

Belly Dancing with Clara & dancers.

3.00pm * AFTERNOON OPEN FORUM – Your opinion is important.

Issues: “ARE WOMEN CHANGING WOMEN’S ‘ROLE’?”

Facilitator: Lynne Black

4.00pm * CIRCLE OF WOMEN

5.30pm * INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY DINNER

Self-serve yummy left overs.

“ In sisterhood is our strength”

This article comes from the background research for the Freewaves Feminist Magazine Show on 3RPP Radio Port Phillip, Victoria, Thursday, 20 August 2009. On the show with me was Catherine Manning, who wrote “Would you like porn with that?” for Candobetter, who has started up an internet site focused on removing porn from children’s eye level in stores.

Before we did the show together, I did a bit of research into the nature of pornography and why it might be good, or bad. I had difficulty coming to grips with the subject at all for some strange reason. I think that, like a lot of people, I have learned to tune out from the skin-marketing all around me, so focusing on the subject and related issues required an effort. I found a lot of very interesting writing and some very funny blogs.

This is what I came up with.

What is pornography anyhow?

Pornography is not just about getting naked, or having sex, or even recording, depicting or describing it.

The word pornography is made up of the Greek word for ‘prostitute’or ‘sex slave’ – porne- and the word for ‘writing’ graphein. The word pornographos designated a person who writes about prostitutes. Women in Ancient Greek society did not have the status of citizens and slaves had no status at all.

Pornography as we know it today still contains the ingredients of body sale and slavery. Slavery, in many instances these days, is commuted to objectification rather than frank chattel status.

‘Commuted’ in the sense of being paid for. Now you are not owned as a performing slave, but you rent yourself out. The person giving their body to pornography is assumed to be doing so from freedom of choice in order to make money.

Initially the pay for pornography, as in prostitution, may be higher than for other jobs available. Or the pornography may carry, falsely or really, some acting or modelling component and may be seen as an opportunity to get into something more skilled.

Pornography offers the vendors profits where none might otherwise exist. The ability to turn the girl next door, the schoolgirls on the bus-stop, your wife, daughter or girlfriend into cash may be very hard to knock back.

In the absence of women taking more control of their own incomes, including ownership of land and assets, the only thing stopping third parties from making a living this way would be a moral code to resist assisting the exploitation of women and their public exhibition of their bodies, which is generally deemed to be demeaning and damaging, unless it is artistic, which is to say, not titillating.

Some women would say that pornographic work is only damaging because women are seen to be objects owned by men and renting their bodies out for any purpose lowers the value of the object.

Can a woman enjoy displaying her body in a provocative pose to an unknown range of anonymous magazine browsers? The associated notoriety has become more and more apparently acceptable in public mores, possibly due to the expansion of visual media and the associated expansion of profit opportunities.

Who makes the money out of pornography?

So, why don’t men do it with their bodies too? Or is their main role as agents, salesmen and owners?

Who makes the most money out of pornography – the women who pose or the men who sell it? Obviously the employer has to stand to make more than the subject of the picture or there would be no profit in it.

It is said that one of the richest men in the world, Rupert Murdoch, made a lot of his money out of his famous ‘Page 3’ girlie photos at a time when the print media were constantly expanding.

The divisions and oppositions by gender in our species are political and economic

Steve Biddulpf writes that:

“Boys have many positive impulses around sexuality. Deep down most teenage boys are deeply romantic, capable of quite spiritual feelings towards women and girls.” (Steve Biddupf, “How we turn boys into creeps.”)

But the domination driven culture of capitalism undoes them.

A man with a big car and a couple of semi-naked young women sitting on it looks rich and successful to other men, according to Ape and marketing logic.

A woman surrounded by young naked men would also look rich and successful, as if accompanied by slaves, but we don’t see this so much. This is probably because our society is dominated by men who reject the popularization of women with male slaves. Why? Because we are against male slavery and its portrayal. But not that of women.

Catherine Manning’s concern that young girls will early identify as inevitable the public sexualisation of their gender as objects has deeper significance than ‘mere’ psychological trauma. With the huge expansion in volume and exposure of pornography, the risk is of the perpetuation and exacerbation of the attitudes that underlay the slave societies of Ancient Greece and England and her colonies before the 20th century, where women had no rights to property or citizenship and could not even have custody of their children in the event of a divorce.

Does it seem too way out to imagine our society being prepared for such a future? Think of how Russia has become a source of prostitution for the world with the simultaneous arrival of the capitalist press and economic decline. And South East Asia.

Mr Murdoch as a porn hustler; more than just an industry

Consider the influence that Mr Murdoch, the man who designed the Page 3 girls to become our social norm, now has on the production of political parties and leaders in Australia and throughout the English-speaking world, and even, more and more, in Europe.

Consider his influence on our dogma of economic and population growth, commodification and privatization, his impact on food habits and acquired cultures and values.

Could this kindly old man, solid patriarch and deliverer of Boyer Lectures really be the same man who brought the English-speaking world the Page 3 soft porn? Well, if that’s the worst he can do, is it any big deal?

I wonder if, however, in his vast network empire, Murdoch ever thought about investing in something a little more sophisticated?
Well, as it happens, Newshounds Are Us at www.newshounds.us/ (an online news-site which arose with the original researchers for the film Outfoxed about Fox TV) report in 2009 that Rupert Murdoch,

“… the born-again Christian who chairs media giant News Corporation, has been secretly building a stable of wholly-owned pornographic channels for his BSkyB subsidiary. The Business has learnt that BSkyB now owns and operates its own pornographic channels – the 18+ Movies selection – after years of hosting third-party content only. The company has also been entering into partnerships with companies that broadcast pornographic television channels on BSkyB, such as Sport XXX Babes, XXX Housewive and Playboy. BSkYB has agreed retail distribution agreements with these companies. With Playboy, for instance, BSkyB now not only hosts the channel but sells its service, and collects and shares in the revenues from Playboy customers.”

They further inform us of another old man who owns newspapers and made a fortune from pornography, saying that,

“For years the Murdoch press has labelled rival newspaper baron Richard Desmond a pornographer in articles charting his business which has included pornographic magazines and TV channels.” http://www.newshounds.us/2006/02/12/rupert_murdochs_pornography_profiteering.php

Desmond owns the Daily Express and OK magazine.
Silvio Berlusconi’s personal control over Italy’s ideas is even more direct. He is the Prime Minister of Italy, in the first place, but has been estimated to have personally

[…]The hallmarks of Mediaset television are blizzards of commercials, interspersed with AC Milan soccer matches – Berlusconi is the team's owner – game shows, "reality TV" serials and vaudeville extravaganzas featuring leggy troupes of scantily-clad young women.”

Berlusconi also

“controls more than a third of all book and magazine publishing and a leading national newspaper.”
Source: Frank Viviano, CBS5, “The Resurrection Of Silvio Berlusconi.”

But wait, there’s more: A report called, “The Porn Standard, Children and Pornography on the internet”, found that the “large and lucrative internet pornography industry is flooding the Web and seeking mainstream acceptance.”

It also found that

“The online pornography industry generates $12 billion in annual revenue roughly equal to the annual revenue of ABC, NBC, and CBS combined”[…], and, that “The two largest purchasers of [internet] bandwidth [space] are companies in the adult entertainment industry.

Household names in manufacturing own these global investments in Porn:

“The report found that, already in the year 2000, “General Motors Corporation (through its subsidiary DirecTV®) was selling more pornographic films each year than Larry Flynt of Hustler®. EchoStar Communications, which is heavily backed by Rupert Murdoch, now generates more revenue from pornography than Playboy®.

Other major players in the pornography business today include AT&T®, Hilton®, Marriott International. [Source: Sean Barney, “The Porn Standard: Children and pornography on the internet,” http://www.thirdway.org/products/14]

Maybe we looking at a porn-led international economic recovery?

So is this where the banks and big corporations are investing our funds now? Are they aiming for a porn-led global financial recovery?

If this phenomenon is so pervasive, so irrestistible, and it relies so much on women’s bodies, how come we are still letting a bunch of old men run our show?

If there is so much money in pornography, shouldn’t the women and children who wear the costs at least get control of the profits – not to mention the industry? Go here for the Celebrity Bestiality report on making money out of porn. That report concludes that only the big investors get anything out of the business.

Corporations and governments in the old-fashioned role of pimps

This is where we came in: Female gender slavery and prostitution make money for the masters, not for the individuals who perform the work.

Pimps tend to be men who are able to attract a few women by fair or foul means, but who are not too fussed about renting them out for sex. Perhaps this is one of the ways in which capitalism began.

Did the case ever happen where women were able to attract men and then were not too fussed about renting them out for sex? To whom? In capitalist societies women generally did not own anything, whereas men were able to own them. It therefore seems that the tendency for many more women to be prostitutes than men probably resulted from women’s marginalization and then further marginalized them.

But are women’s bodies the only ones objectified like this? No, pornographic objectification happens to men and to children of both sexes, although in the latter case it is not yet deemed acceptable.

Male gender slavery and objectification in war

And there is another way in which men are objectified by the same kinds of commercially organized forces which is just as demeaning and destructive – and that is in war. In war young men are convinced or forced to risk their bodies, minds and lives for the sake of profits, yet told that what they are doing is honorable.

And women and children suffer in war of course as well, often in pornographic ways that are beyond ordinary imagination.

Porn and war seem to be human issues of economic and political disenfranchisement in contexts of removal of power to distant locations and persons who do not have to face the people who wear the consequences.

Another argument in favour of relocalisation.
.

That’s not the end of it, but here’s a good song to pause on – “JPEG Baby”. It's sung by the writer of the Celebrity Bestiality report.

Send us your thoughts in a comment.
And maybe take a look at http://www.sayno4kids.com/blog/ - Catherine Manning’s page proposing simply moving pornographic magazine displays to above children’s eye-level.

"As a nurse, I was in contact with the ill and the infirm. I knew something about the health and disease of bodies, but for a long time, I was baffled at the tremendous personal problems of life, of marriage, of living, and of just being. Here indeed was a challenge to “build beyond thyself.” Where was I to begin? I found the answer at every door. [...]

For these beliefs I was denounced, arrested, I was in and out of police courts and higher courts, and indictments hung over my life for several years. But nothing could alter my beliefs. Because I saw these as truths, I stubbornly stuck to my convictions."
See also: "Progress ideology, colonial racism, right to life and family planning"
Image source was http://www.nwhm.org/ProgressiveEra/birthcontrol.html

Only in 1965 did the practice of contraception become legal between married couples in the United States, through a 1965 Supreme Court decision, Griswold v. Connecticut. Only a few months later, on September 6, 1966, Margaret Sanger, a nurse, and the founder of the US birth control movement, died at the age of 86.

(See bottom of article for details of summer internships at the Margaret Sanger institute.)

Margaret Sanger's 1953 speech about standing up to the authorities to defend her convictions

This I believe, first of all: that all our basic convictions must be tested and transmuted in the crucible of experience–and sometimes, the more bitter the experience, the more valid the purified belief.

As a child, one of a large family, I learned that the thing I did best was the thing I liked to do. This realization of doing and getting results was what I have later called an awakening consciousness.

There is an old Indian proverb which has inspired me in the work of my adult life. “Build thou beyond thyself, but first be sure that thou, thyself, be strong and healthy in body and mind.” To build, to work, to plan to do something, not for yourself, not for your own benefit, but “beyond thyself”–and when this idea permeates the mind, you begin to think in terms of a future. I began to think of a world beyond myself when I first took an interest in nursing the sick.

As a nurse

As a nurse, I was in contact with the ill and the infirm. I knew something about the health and disease of bodies, but for a long time, I was baffled at the tremendous personal problems of life, of marriage, of living, and of just being. Here indeed was a challenge to “build beyond thyself.” Where was I to begin? I found the answer at every door. For I began to believe there was something I could do toward increasing an understanding of these basic human problems. To build beyond myself, I must tap all inner resources of stamina and courage, of resolution within myself. I was prepared to face opposition, even ridicule, denunciation. But I had also to prepare myself, in defense of these unpopular beliefs, I had to prepare myself to face courts and even prisons. But I resolved to stand up, alone if necessary, against all the entrenched forces which opposed me.

Supported by patients; harassed by authorities

I started my battle some forty years ago. The women and mothers whom I wanted to help, also wanted to help me; they, too, wanted to build beyond the self, in creating healthy children and bringing them up in life to be happy and useful citizens. I believed it was my duty to place motherhood on a higher level than enslavement and accident. I was convinced we must care about people; we must reach out to help them in their despair.

For these beliefs I was denounced, arrested, I was in and out of police courts and higher courts, and indictments hung over my life for several years. But nothing could alter my beliefs. Because I saw these as truths, I stubbornly stuck to my convictions.

Something had to be done

No matter what it may cost in health, in misunderstanding, in sacrifice, something had to be done, and I felt that I was called by the force of circumstances to do it. Because of my philosophy and my work, my life has been enriched and full. My interests have expanded from local conditions and needs, to a world horizon, where peace on earth may be achieved when children are wanted before they are conceived. A new conciousness will take place, a new race will be born to bring peace on earth. This belief has withstood the crucible of my life’s joyous struggle. It remains my basic belief today.

This I believe–at the end, as at the beginning of my long crusade for the future of the human race.

From a speech made by Margaret Sanger, a population activist, in November 1953, known as "This I believe".
The original electronic source is at http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/news/this_i_believe.html

Listen to an

mp3 recording of Margaret Sanger's November 1953 broadcast

Summer Internships at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project in New York

Contact: Cathy Moran Hajo [mailto:cathy.hajo[AT]nyu.edu] Sent: Fri 16/01/2009 15:54 Subject: Summer Internships at the Margaret Sanger Papers Project in New York The Margaret Sanger Papers Project is pleased to announce its summer internship program for 2009. We seek applications from graduate or advanced undergraduate students to work with the editorial staff at the Project's offices in New York City. This is a wonderful opportunity for students to become proficient in primary and secondary research, and the process of editing historical documents for publication. Interns can apply for internships working with the book or digital edition.

BOOK INTERNSHIP: Interns will be working on Volume IV of the Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, covering the years 1920-1966 and focusing on her efforts to create a global birth control movement. Interns will work under the supervision of editors on specific topics, tracing people, places, events and issues covered in the documents. The research will be used to produce annotation and introductory material for the volume. Research will be conducted in the Project's offices, using the comprehensive microfilm edition and other primary sources, as well as at local libraries and with resources available on the Internet.

DIGITAL INTERNSHIP: We have two digital projects available for interns this summer.
1) We are preparing a digital edition on Margaret Sanger's 1922 trip to Japan for the Women and Social Movements web collection. Interns will transcribe, encode, and conduct research for essays and interpretation on the documents for this small collection.

2) We are also continuing work on our digital edition of Sanger's speeches and articles, focusing on texts written by Margaret Sanger in the 1930s.

Interns will be proofread the texts, add XML encoding, and draft subject index entries for the documents. Interns will conduct research as needed to verify dates, titles, and publication information, or to identify the names of people, organizations and books mentioned in the documents.

More information and application information can be located on our website, at:
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger/aboutmspp/internships.html The deadline for applications is March 1, 2009.

Cathy Moran Hajo, Ph.D.
Associate Editor/Assistant Director The Margaret Sanger Papers Project Department of History, New York University
53 Washington Square South New York, NY 10012 (212) 998-8666 (212) 995-4017 (fax)
[email protected] Visit our website at: http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sanger