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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/421/celebrations-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Celebrate the Major New Work by Bob Avakian!

Updated January 22, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

 

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/422/confront-the-woman-haters-in-dc-and-san-francisco-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Confront the Woman-Haters in DC and San Francisco, January 22 and 23

Forced Motherhood = Female Enslavement:
Abortion on Demand Without Apology

January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Important demonstrations are being mobilized by StopPatriarchy.org and others against the vicious war on women and women’s fundamental right to abortion and birth control, on January 22 in Washington, DC, and January 23 in San Francisco.

These demonstrations come at a time of extreme emergency: abortion clinics are being set on fire, vandalized, and shut down... anti-abortion fanatics are stalking, terrorizing, and even murdering people... women everywhere are being hounded, harassed, and shamed on their way into the clinics... growing numbers of women cannot access safe abortions and are risking their lives to self-induce abortions, with some even ending up in prison... the vicious LIES that it is women’s “duty” to bear children, that it is “selfish” of women to choose not to bring every pregnancy to term, that abortion is tantamount to “murder” or even “genocide,” are being pumped out by ruling class politicians, influential religious fanatics, and mainstream organs of culture and “news.”

Bob Avakian put it well:

Unbelievable as it may seem, in the 21st century there are still people—including people in positions of power and authority—who are determined to force women to bear children, regardless of the situation, the feelings, and the better judgment of those women themselves. That is a way of enslaving women to the dictates of an oppressive male supremacist, patriarchal system; and that is what the cruel fanatics who are determined to deny women the right to abortion are really all about.

None of this grotesque and Dark Ages oppression of women is necessary and no one should tolerate it. Fetuses are NOT babies. Abortion is NOT murder. Women are NOT incubators. Women have absolutely no obligation—to society, to the state, to the church, or to men—to bring a pregnancy to term or to have a child. Women are full human beings, capable of participating fully and equally together with men in every realm of human endeavor.

Yet, in 2016, on every corner of this planet women are treated like punching bags, breeding machines, sex objects, and slaves—their humanity denied, despised, broken, and sold. Women and girls in the millions upon millions are kidnapped and raped, pimped out and beaten, sexually tortured and humiliated—in war zones, in bedrooms, in schools and workplaces, in prisons, in churches and mosques, and in the multibillion-dollar porn and sex “industries.” From the moment they are born until the second they die, the half of humanity that is female and others who do not conform to patriarchal gender and sexual “norms” are heaped with thousands of years of shame, contempt, and cruel judgment for how they look, for how they love, for their sexual desires, for the violence that is inflicted on them, and for daring to defy patriarchal, male domination.

The only reason any of this outrageous oppression continues is because the world continues to be held hostage to the domination of capitalism-imperialism, backed up by armies, unjust laws, and a whole woman-hating, vicious culture. This system has the oppression of women knitted into its every nook and cranny. This system RELIES on this oppression. But that is not all! This same system unleashes its pigs to terrorize and murder Black and Brown people with impunity in Amerikkka while unleashing its military to carry out imperialist occupations, torture, and terror against innocent people abroad. This same system’s blind pursuit of profit is fueling—and can do nothing to stop—the mounting environmental emergency that threatens our very planet. This system is completely outmoded and must be swept aside at the soonest possible time in the only way it can be: through an actual revolution to emancipate humanity.

This revolution is possible. Because of Bob Avakian and the work he has done over several decades, summing up the positive and negative experience of the communist revolution so far, and drawing from a broad range of human experience, there is a new synthesis of communism that has been brought forward—there really is a viable vision and strategy for a radically new, and much better, society and world, and there is the crucial leadership that is needed to carry forward the struggle toward that goal.

Everyone who wants to see an end to slavery in every form needs to dig deeply into the work and leadership of Bob Avakian, actively spread this leadership throughout society, and join in the movement for revolution that he is leading today.

As one critical part of this, people should dig deeply into the compendium, Break ALL the Chains! Bob Avakian on the Emancipation of Women and the Communist Revolution, which builds on the best of what has been accomplished in previous revolutions while also going way beyond even the best of this. Everyone who wants to see real and lasting liberation must take to heart and act upon Bob Avakian’s recognition of how taking up the fight for the liberation of women is critical in both building up the strength to make a revolution, and in ensuring that this revolution goes all the way to the full emancipation of all humanity.

At the same time and very immediately, we all must confront that putting a STOP to the vicious attacks on abortion and birth control and going on to DEFEAT and REVERSE this entire war on women will not happen without a fight—without people going into the streets, raising hell, and putting themselves on the line.

In sum, two challenges must be posed very broadly:

1. Stand up against the woman-haters January 22 in DC and January 23 in San Francisco. Change yourself and others in the process, casting off centuries of tradition and shame while forging and modeling a new liberating morality. Be part of fighting to break many—especially many youth and women—out of the enslaving brainwash of anti-abortion religious fanaticism. Be part of waking up many others throughout society who do not want to see women slammed backwards but who do not yet understand the extremes of this emergency or the possibility of defeating this war. Spread the word to everyone you know—in your school or religious congregation, in your neighborhood or professional network. Let people know they are needed and then bring everyone you can from wherever you are to be in the streets on January 22 and/or 23.

2. Get into BA—Get with the science, the strategy, and the leadership for an actual revolution and a radically new society on the road to real emancipation!

BREAK ALL THE CHAINS!

UNLEASH THE FURY OF WOMEN AS A MIGHTY FORCE FOR REVOLUTION!

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/409/stand-up-for-abortion-rights-counter-protest-march-for-life-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

From Stop Patriarchy

Stand Up for Abortion Rights!
Counter-Protest the March for "Life"

January 22, 2016 in Washington, DC
January 23, 2016 in San Francisco

Updated January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Fetuses are NOT babies.

Abortion is NOT murder.
Women are NOT incubators.

Stand up for abortion on demand and without apology this January on both coasts.

Abortion rights are in a state of emergency! Clinics across the country have been forced to close through unjust laws and anti-abortion violence. Women and staff are shamed, harassed, and threatened. Christian fascist politicians are fighting to shut down Planned Parenthood. Thousands of women are once again risking their lives and prison to self-induce their own abortions. Eleven people have been murdered by anti-abortion terrorists. And a looming major Supreme Court case will affect abortion rights for decades to come.

The time is NOW to stand up for abortion on demand and without apology!

Each year, tens of thousands of fanatics march against women's right to abortion and birth control on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Be part of standing up in counter-protest, letting the world and the powers that be feel our demand that abortion be available to every woman without shame, restriction, or stigma.

Forcing a woman to have a child against her will is a form of enslavement. It traps women in abusive relationships, drives them into poverty, forces them to give up their dreams and forecloses their lives. Denying abortion rights is a keystone of the entire web of degradation, violence, rape, discrimination and oppression that women face throughout society.

This must be stopped! Women are not bitches, hoes, punching bags, sex objects, breeders or property of men. Women are full human beings!

Get organized. Be in DC and/or San Francisco for these counter-protests. Mobilize your school, religious congregation, community group, family and friends. Spread the word far and wide. Donate and raise funds. Do not let the future belong to the woman-haters. Be part of defeating the war on women.

Abortion On Demand and Without Apology!
Forced Motherhood is Female Enslavement!

StopPatriarchy.org
@StopPatriarchy
Facebook event for DC: www.facebook.com/events/754443141326468
Facebook event for SF: www.facebook.com/events/1660509807549937
For more info & to get involved:
For DC - StopPatriarchy@gmail.com
For SF - StopPatriarchyBayArea@gmail.com

Initiated by Stop Patriarchy

Endorsed by:
Carol Downer, co-founder of Feminist Women's Health Center, Los Angeles
Merle Hoffman, CEO, Choices Women's Medical Center
Cindy Sheehan, Peace Activist and Author
Sunsara Taylor, writer for Revolution newspaper
Deep Green Resistance
Joy of Resistance Multicultural Feminist Radio – WBAI
Occupied Wall Street Special Projects Affinity Group
PopularResistance.org
Women's Liberation Front (WoLF)
World Can't Wait

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/422/background-to-the-us-iran-nuclear-deal-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Background to the U.S.-Iran Nuclear Deal
Not a Victory for Diplomacy, a Risk-Filled Deal Between Reactionaries

January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Last summer, the U.S. and other major powers signed a major nuclear agreement with Iran. Since then, Iran has been working to fulfill its obligations under the deal to dismantle much of its nuclear enrichment program. This past week, Iran completed these steps. As a consequence, on Saturday, January 16, the U.S. and Europe began implementing their part of the deal by releasing some $100 billion in frozen Iranian assets and lifting crippling oil and financial sanctions (the most recent set of those sanctions were imposed in response to Iran’s nuclear program).

As this was taking place, two other issues were resolved that in the past could have become flashpoints. Earlier in the week, two U.S. Navy patrol boats were seized by Iran after they had entered Iranian waters in the Persian Gulf. The boats and their crews were released a day later after intense behind-the-scenes negotiations. Then, on Saturday, as the nuclear deal was being implemented, the U.S. and Iran exchanged prisoners (Iran had been holding five Americans, the U.S. had been holding seven Iranians).

These developments are being hailed by the Obama administration and many in the ruling class (including the New York Times) as a triumph of peace and negotiations over war and death and a “win-win” situation for the U.S. and Iran, as well as the region and the world. In his State of the Union message, Obama praised the Iran deal as an example of a “smarter approach” to U.S. strategy “that uses every element of our national power.” He said that “on issues of global concern, we will mobilize the world to work with us, and make sure other countries pull their own weight...That’s why we built a global coalition, with sanctions and principled diplomacy, to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. As we speak, Iran has rolled back its nuclear program, shipped out its uranium stockpile, and the world has avoided another war.”

Four critical things to understand:

The rulers of Iran and the U.S. are not acting to ensure peace and cooperation, they are acting to preserve their interests and role within a world of exploitation and oppression and dog-eat-dog competition between contending interests and powers. In the case of the U.S., this means maintaining domination of the Middle East.

The rulers of the U.S. and Iran came to this agreement to attempt to carve out ways to deal with a web of contradictions they each face in a region that is a hellish mess for the people with no good options for the reactionary powers. Moves the rulers of the U.S. have made in the region have made things worse for them.

These moves are fraught with all kinds of potential risks and dangers, not just for the parties in this agreement but for a whole mix of contending powers and forces.

In part because of those risks, this deal is an element of, and is intensifying, conflicts within both the U.S. and Iranian ruling classes.

And all of this poses a need for people to see through the bullshit, understand the potential explosiveness in this situation, and work to wrench a completely different kind of world out of the madness, including seizing on potential openings for revolution that might open up, including in unpredictable ways.

Interests of the Ruling Classes

Domination of the Middle East has been a linchpin in the position of U.S. imperialism as the dominant imperialist world power since World War 2. Today the rulers of the U.S. are confronting a complex, interwoven, and unpredictable set of challenges, ranging from the rise and moves of global powers like Russia and China, to the emergence of Islamic jihadists with their own reactionary agendas that conflict with those of the U.S. During the George W. Bush regime, there was an attempt by the U.S. rulers to steamroll over these conflicts with massive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq—invasions that have been a disaster for the U.S. New and more virulent strains of reactionary Jihad have emerged, rival powers have clashed with the U.S., and there have been stresses and strains with allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Within all this, the emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran has posed a major challenge for the rulers of the U.S. Iran has sponsored, supported, or served as an impetus for reactionary Islamic forces in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and other places. Both Iran and Russia back the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

The U.S. hit at the Islamic Republic of Iran with vicious “sanctions” whose most substantial impact has been increased suffering among the Iranian people, with the goal of isolating and destabilizing the regime. These sanctions and other measures have had an impact and created real problems for the functioning and stability of the Iranian ruling class.

In much of the Middle East and beyond, the U.S. and its ally Saudi Arabia are engaged in proxy conflicts with Iran, even as in some places the U.S. and Iran have had working agreements to combat mutual enemies like ISIS.

With both the rulers of the U.S. and Iran up against daunting challenges, sections of the ruling classes in each country have gotten behind the nuclear deal, with the intent that this will lead to broader cooperation.

Unpredictable Risks for the Rulers

But the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal poses serious dangers for each side. Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally, sees the nuclear deal as a major threat to its standing in a volatile region and has made moves, including executing a cleric with some ties to Iran, with the intent of inciting tensions and provoking an Iranian response. Israel—which plays a unique role as an enforcer for the interests of the U.S. empire—sees Iran as a major threat, and tensions between the U.S. and Israel have been intense since the deal was made.

For their part, the rulers of Iran have built their legitimacy and credibility on posing as standing up to “the Great Satan.” And they are embroiled in conflicts with U.S.-backed forces around the region (even as they are cooperating to some extent with the U.S. in Iraq against ISIS). And there are sections of the Iranian ruling class that see potentially fatal dangers in closer ties with the U.S.

For these and other reasons, in both the U.S. and Iran, major forces in each ruling class (represented in the U.S. to a significant degree by the Republicans, and in Iran by the Republican Guards and other “hard line” Islamic forces), there is fierce opposition to the nuclear deal and the associated developments in the relationship between Iran and the U.S.

These conflicts have nothing to do with “war vs. peace” or “diplomacy vs. war,” let alone the interests of the peoples of the region or the world. In particular, the U.S. ruling class is fighting over how to confront the dangers to their empire in the region while not getting so drawn in that other (imperialist) powers gain an advantage elsewhere, nor making things such a mess that the dominant order breaks down and generates new and even more unpredictable contradictions (which is what has happened in Iraq, Libya, and Syria).

Their Interests vs. Humanity

On both sides, this new treaty is itself a gamble, and there is absolutely no guarantee that the situation for either the U.S. or Iran will get better, including because it destabilizes previously existing alliances and intensifies others.

There is nothing positive in any of this for the vast majority of humanity. And rather than get behind any faction of the U.S. ruling class, including those represented by Obama, there is a great need for people in this country to break out of identifying with “their own” rulers, and instead to fight to bring forward a whole other kind of world, free of exploitation and oppression. Unpredictable events emerging from this deal could—with a revolutionary movement with a revolutionary communist vanguard at its core—be part of conditions that would make a serious attempt at revolution possible.

The U.S.-Iran nuclear agreement is about trying to preserve the interests of reactionary ruling classes. But as we have begun to explore here, and have analyzed in ongoing coverage of this deal at www.revcom.us, it is a move fraught on both sides, and beyond—with tremendous risks and dangers for them, including the possibility of dramatic setbacks that could open the door to accelerated work towards revolution. Preparing to seize on such an opportunity requires exposing the real nature of this deal, opposing the crimes of “our” ruling class, and preparing the people, preparing the ground, and preparing the vanguard for actual revolution.

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/421/video-rips-holes-in-officially-approved-chicago-police-murder-of-cedrick-chatman-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Police Murder of Cedrick Chatman Approved by Chicago Powers

This Cannot Go Down! This Cannot Go On!

Updated January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

In the midst of outrage over one horrendous police murder after another and exposures of the official cover-up from every institution, the video of the police shooting of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman in January 2013 was forced into the light of day after a battle by the city to suppress it. The family wanted the public to see the video to counter the official lies and verdict that Cedrick’s shooting was justified. “You see him running away from the officers as fast as he possibly could--he never even begins to turn,” Brian Coffman, the family lawyer, said. “Fry [the cop] never says anything. He just gets out of the car, watches him run with his gun trained on him, and fires.” Not only did they gun down Cedrick in the middle of the day on a busy South Side street corner, but there is the sickening sight of the other cop standing with his boot on the mortally wounded, handcuffed teenager, as though Cedrick is some kind of animal in a trophy kill. This horror gives graphic illustration to the reality expressed by many that it is “open season” on Black people. THESE HORRORS MUST STOP NOW!

What has come out around this case is the fact that all the “institutional processes” involved knew about and officially approved the cop’s right to shoot this unarmed Black youth while he was fleeing for his life. In this case both the state’s attorney and the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) cleared Fry of any wrongdoing. Neither cop faced any discipline and they have been on the street to this day.

The official police story was that Cedrick and others had carjacked a car. The police said they saw a car that matched the description, stopped it and that they saw Chatman reach down for something in the car and then get out of his car and run with a black object in his hand that they thought might be a weapon and that he turned slightly toward the pursuing cops, so “fearing for his life” the cop, Fry, opened fire. But the investigation of the scene showed that the object was a black iPhone box, there was no gun. And video footage from three nearby buildings shows Cedrick was sprinting away from the cops. Coffman, who initially was hesitant to take the case, said, “The more I saw, the more I realized, ‘Oh my god, this is a giant scam.’ It was unbelievable. They were fighting tooth and nail to cover this up from the very beginning.”

The only thing that was not pig business-as-usual in this case is that the lead investigator for IPRA, Lorenzo Davis, found that the shooting was unjustified and recommended firing Fry, the cop who murdered Cedrick. Fry was not fired, but Lorenzo Davis was fired for refusing to change his decision. Davis examined the video and concluded that “Cedrick was just running as the shots were fired. You’re taught that deadly force is a last resort and that you should do everything in your power to apprehend the person before you use deadly force. I did not see where deadly force was called for at that time.” The head of IPRA (who is appointed by the mayor), a supposed independent and impartial investigative body, was determined to protect the police and intervened directly and ordered Davis to change his decision to “justified” on this case (and five others including the police murders of Laquan McDonald and Flint Farmer). Davis, who had been a Chicago cop for 23 years, refused and he was fired for “anti-police bias!” After his firing, the higher-ups at IPRA changed the decision on the shooting to “justified.” No charges were brought by the state’s attorney either. Case closed. Officially-approved murder—signed, sealed, delivered.

THERE IS MORE. The murdering cop has a long record of brutality and at least one other death. The wrongful death civil suit filed by Chatman’s family is the fifth civil rights lawsuit since 2006 in which Fry is named as a defendant. The other four allege violations of excessive force, false arrest and illegal searches. They all ended in settlements. At least one involved the shooting of another Black teen. Fry has been the target of 30 complaints throughout his career and ALL were marked as “unsubstantiated." In fact, Fry has faced no discipline whatsoever in his whole career.

AND THERE IS MORE. Instead of charging the killer cop, two alleged accomplices in the alleged carjacking who were 10 blocks away at the time the cops killed Cedrick, were charged with Cedrick’s murder! The prosecutors wrote that the men “set in motion a chain of events that caused the death of Cedrick Chatman.” This is a twisted logic—cops kill a man and get away with murder and two youth who weren’t even on the scene are charged for his murder. The murder charges were used as a club to force them to plead guilty to lesser charges. They are now in prison for 10 years while the cops are free and on duty on the street.

What does this tell us? That the whole process and routine machinery of the police, the law, the supposed investigative and legal “checks and balances,” and the executive (mayor and city council) is set up to give the stamp of approval to police murder and terror and to hide what’s really going on so they can keep doing it. Who was punished? Not the cops, not the head of the IPRA. They fired the investigator who wouldn’t back off his finding. This is more than a code of silence, it is a system that is in place to allow the police to murder with impunity, and at the same time routinize it, cover it up, and make it look like the process is fair and equal by suppressing evidence and demonizing a whole section of people that they viciously repress.

Brian Coffman said, “the symmetry between our case and the McDonald case is pretty obvious...This is a bomb that’s about to drop in the city of Chicago, where everyone suddenly realizes the system is broken.”

What this actually reveals is how the whole system really works, and is meant to work, yes, in Chicago, but all over the country, as Bob Avakian sharply reveals in the video “Yes there is a conspiracy ... to get the cops off.”

Everyone who is sick of what they have seen on these videos, everyone who can’t sit silent while police murder more people like Bettie Jones and Quintonio Legrier, everyone who wanted 12-year-old Tamir Rice to have a chance to grow up, everyone who has been protesting and refusing to be quiet—you need to be in the streets and schools raising hell!

And you need to be at the Midwest Regional Conference of the Stop Mass Incarceration Network (SMIN) to STOP POLICE TERROR on Saturday, January 23, 12-6 pm at Trinity Episcopal Church, 125 East 26th Street, Chicago. (Go here for SMIN regional conferences coming up in other areas of the country.)

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/422/obamas-last-state-of-the-union-speech-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Obama's Last State of the Union Speech

The Reality of the "Change We Can Believe In"—More Wars, Continuing Environmental Catastrophe, Ongoing Horrors

January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On January 12, President Barack Obama gave his eighth and final State of the Union message.

Eight years ago, Obama was elected the first African-American president in U.S. history. There were massive celebrations, with millions hoping for major changes—a dramatic U-turn from the George W. Bush years and a real beginning to end war, racism, poverty, repression, and environmental devastation. Obama ran on these hopes—“Change We Can Believe In”—and fed them every step of the way. The night he won the vote, Obama told supporters his election proved that America is a “place where all things are possible” and that “change has come to America.” Why was all this possible? Because, according to Obama, of the promise and reality of the American Dream—“that through hard work and sacrifice each of us can pursue our individual dreams.... that each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will.”

So what has Obama actually done? Has he fulfilled those hopes? If not, WHY not? And what are the implications?

Reveling in USA No. 1—Imperialism and Mass Murder

A key theme of his State of the Union speech was how even in these times of huge, fast-paced changes reshaping the planet and posing new challenges, the U.S. does and can remain the world’s dominant power—and that people should not only believe this, they should revel in it. Eight years ago, many people had put hope in Obama as the “antiwar candidate”—even when he himself was telling them differently, like promising to send more troops to Afghanistan in order to win the war. Now, Obama sounded like a mafia boss, bragging about U.S. military dominance and his willingness to use it to kill:

[A]ll the talk of America’s economic decline is political hot air. Well, so is all the rhetoric you hear about our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker. The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It’s not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined.

The candidate who established his reputation by opposing Bush’s launching of the war in Iraq is now demanding that Congress authorize more war: “If this Congress is serious about winning this war, and wants to send a message to our troops and the world, you should finally authorize the use of military force against ISIL. Take a vote.”

And Obama brags that authorization or no authorization, the U.S. has already conducted 10,000 airstrikes against targets in Iraq and Syria, and enemies of the U.S. should understand that this president is ready to assassinate anyone, anywhere—like the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, murdered by a drone strike in Yemen with Obama serving as judge, jury, and executioner: “When you come after Americans”—in other words, threaten U.S. imperialist interests—”we go after you. It may take time, but we have long memories, and our reach has no limit.” Aside from Iraq and Syria, during his two terms Obama has ordered airstrikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, and Somalia.

Obama’s performance called to mind what Malcolm X said about the U.S., that it stands before the world like a smiling “bloody-jawed wolf.”

Obama targeted reactionary Islamic fundamentalists, saying, “Both al Qaeda and now ISIL pose a direct threat to our people.” But the reality is that the workings of U.S. imperialism over decades—its support of murderous fundamentalist tyrannies like Saudi Arabia and the brutal enforcer state Israel, and its wars and occupations, have created the towering horrors that have fueled the growth of Islamic jihadism. “The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia,” Obama declared. “We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis”—as if the U.S. had nothing to do with the 60 million people who are now refugees, or the million-plus dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, as if U.S. bombings, wars and occupations were benevolent efforts to “rebuild.”

All of this is training people to see the world through the eyes of the empire... to think that only American lives matter... and that in hopes of getting better jobs, education, and medical benefits, the people in this country should turn a blind eye to the murder and mayhem the U.S. spreads around the world and the hell for hundreds of millions right here on planet Earth.

“Reinventing” the Energy Sector... By Becoming No. 1 Oil Producer

Some people may argue that he has fulfilled his promises on the environment. Obama—the so-called “environmental” president—claimed that under his leadership, the U.S. had “reinvented” its energy sector, and that thanks to “the single biggest investment in clean energy in our history,” in many places “wind power is now cheaper than dirtier, conventional power,” and that “solar is saving Americans tens of millions of dollars a year on their energy bills, and employs more Americans than coal.” Meanwhile, Obama declared, “We’ve cut our imports of foreign oil by nearly 60 percent, and cut carbon pollution more than any other country on Earth.”

What’s the reality? At a moment when the planet is at a climate tipping point, with the fate of the environmental fabric of life at stake, and drastic action is required, Obama’s claims cover over the reality that under his leadership U.S. capitalism-imperialism continues to pour out greenhouse gases from massive use of fossil fuels—gases that are the key drivers of the climate change that is pushing the world toward environmental catastrophe. Wind power? It accounts for only four percent of U.S. energy consumption. Solar? Barely over one percent. Fossil fuels still account for 84 percent of U.S. energy (and this does not even take into account the millions of tons of greenhouse gases spewed into the atmosphere from overseas production for the U.S. market).

As for changes in the energy sector and cutting U.S. oil imports, this is something that has happened under Obama—but it’s nothing positive for humanity. More than Bush/Cheney or any other previous administrations, Obama has been the “oil president,” expanding fracking and increasing oil production 72 percent under his watch, turning the U.S. into the world’s biggest oil and natural gas producer. The U.S. uses these fuels and its dominance of fracking technology as a weapon in its rivalry with capitalist competitors. Clearly, these changes under Obama are hardly consistent with “combating climate change.”

Why Obama Couldn’t Fulfill His Promises

In other aspects as well, things have NOT gotten better under Obama—including the new Jim Crow facing Black people (which Obama said almost nothing about in his speech), the attacks on the right to abortion and other ways that women are under assault, and more. Far from turning around the vicious and heartless attacks on immigrants, Obama has presided over record levels of deportation of immigrants, including children and women fleeing violent hell in Central American countries that has its roots in the U.S. domination of the region in the first place.

The fact is that even if he had wanted to, Obama could never have fulfilled his promises. Why?

Not because Republicans have prevented him. Yes, there’s been sharp struggle in the halls of power, but this is a struggle within the class of capitalist-imperialist rulers over how to best manage the empire. The reasons go much deeper, to the very foundation of any society, including the U.S.—its economic base.

No matter what Obama had said, or even what he had intended—no political representative of this system can escape the laws that set the framework for what is, and what isn’t, possible under the current setup: the laws of capitalism and in particular its anarchic driving force of dog-eat-dog, expand-or-die competition between capitalists, and between the world’s capitalist powers. Whoever sits in the Oval Office is compelled by the needs of this system to fight to maintain the U.S.’s global economic, military, and political supremacy—including by having the biggest military and using that power (including acting through proxy powers) to pursue the interests of U.S. imperialism.

The dynamics of capitalism-imperialism are why environmental measures that are actually commensurate with the scope and scale of the planetary emergency are impossible. If somehow Obama, or any president, were to attempt a wholesale transformation of the way the economy and society as a whole is organized in order to make the kind of drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that are actually needed to seriously deal with the climate crisis, their plans would quickly run up against the workings of the capitalist-imperialist system—including their military and strategic necessities as they engage in cutthroat competition against their rivals around the world. Ask yourself: The U.S. military is the largest single institutional consumer of oil in the world—could the U.S. rulers dismantle their military in order to help save the planet? The answer is obvious.

The fundamental way capitalism-imperialism operates is also why eliminating the oppression of women, the horrendous mistreatment of immigrants, or other horrors is impossible under the current system.

Obama’s role for the last eight years has been to be the political representative of a system that has carried out more wars around the world, environmental destruction, terror against Black and other people of color, violence against and degradation of women, and other horrors—and to try to get people to go along with all this. People who voted for Obama believed that they had chosen him to carry out things they hoped to see. But the truth of the matter is that Obama was chosen by the powers that be to play the role he went on to play—because the ruling class was facing some serious contradictions, within the U.S. and across their empire. This is why powerful forces among the rulers did what they did with Obama—not only having this relatively unknown senator become a “viable” and “serious” candidate for the presidency, but carefully grooming and bringing him forward, including through the mainstream media, giving him an “audition,” and then anointing him to become the face of U.S. imperialism. This is the reality, no matter how much people got sucked into and deeply believed in the promotion of Obama as the “real one” who would finally bring about real “change” in the interests of the people.

What Bob Avakian recently pointed out about elections is very relevant to this: “Choosing between oppressive rulers will not stop them from ruling over and oppressing you and committing horrific crimes against humanity. This is true of all the major presidential candidates, of both the Republican and Democratic parties, and it will be true of anyone who becomes president, or occupies any major political office, under this system. What supporting these people does accomplish is making you complicit with these crimes.(from “ON ‘PRINCIPLED COMPROMISES,’ AND OTHER CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY”)

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/422/awtwns-german-reaction-to-assaults-on-women-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

From A World to Win News Service:

German Reaction to Assaults on Women: “Don't Touch Our Property”

January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

January 11, 2016. A World to Win News Service. On New Year’s Eve, the central train station in Cologne, Germany, was a horrendous place to be for women. That is an understatement. More than 600 women have come forward to detail how they were surrounded by groups of dozens of men, unable to leave. The men ripped their clothes, groping them between their legs and down their shirts, leaving bruises on their breasts and buttocks. There were some instances of rape and many robberies. Similar assaults on a smaller scale took place in Hamburg, Stuttgart and Berlin.

The assaults were reportedly committed by groups of young men mainly of North African and other foreign origin. A demonstration called by the far right a few days later demanded an end to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy that has allowed in more than a million people fleeing war in Syria, Afghanistan and other countries. In a counter-demonstration, hundreds of women and men came to the train station with banners saying no to sexism and no to racism.

These horrendous New Year’s Eve acts fueled an already intense debate raging throughout German society from top to bottom and spreading across Europe. Merkel argues that accepting certain refugees is an opportunity for Germany to increase its population, expand its home economy and further strengthen its position as the leading power in a strong European Union. The governments of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic delighted in this Cologne outrage and self-righteously insisted that is why they refused to submit to German pressure to accept more migrants. They often claim an influx of people who profess the Islamic religion will lead to a collapse of culture and civilization in Europe.

The racist and fascistic far right (the anti-Islamic Pegida and right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany—AfD) are calling for an end to the migrant influx and for Merkel’s head. One comment on the blog Politically Incorrect encapsulates the vicious turn this debate has taken: “The crazy chancellor has allowed millions of male, sexually starved, asocial illegals from the Middle East and Africa to come to Germany. Blond German women are, according to the Koran, ‘prey-women’ who can be abused according to your whims or enslaved.” The real meaning of this insane rant is that the manhandling of German women should be reserved for German men.

Spurred by this outlook, a “manhunt for foreigners” has already resulted in attacks on six Pakistanis and a Syrian man on January 10 by small groups in front of Cologne’s train station.

These attacks on women have led to an uproar, creating major havoc for German imperialism. Whether they can control the political situation remains to be seen as Merkel tries to assuage the German right wing while insisting that EU members fall in line with German interests. Formerly seeking to play the compassion card, now she is calling for the deportation of asylum seekers and those who already have refugee status if they are convicted of any crime, regardless of whether they are sentenced to prison. This implicitly accepts the far right’s arguments.

Migrants, both newly arrived and others, correctly insist these rotten acts do not represent who they are. They are deeply worried how the acts of a few will bring new destruction in their already precarious lives. Driven from their home countries by wars and invasions conducted or spawned by the U.S. and its European partners, they have no place safe to go.

The deplorable statement by the female mayor of Cologne that women should keep strange men at “arm’s length” implies that women are complicit in the sexually aggressive behavior of men. Some progressive, courageous German women and men outraged by these events nonetheless have been hesitant to take a position on these attacks because they understand the backlash against foreigners, given the bloodthirsty mood in Germany today. They want to reach out to refugees as human beings while at the same time fight against the oppression of women. They cite the amount of sexual violence that existed in Germany long before refugees arrived, and the hypocritical concerns for women now that the blame is being directed at refugees.

The New Year’s Eve assaults went on for hours with the police watching. The initial police report the following day stated that the evening had passed uneventfully. It seems that the authorities saw nothing wrong with boys “having a little fun” on their night out until women’s outrage put them in an embarrassing position.

Sexual assaults can occur not only by intimate partners, or on a lonely, desolate street, but also at clubs, stadium games, on women’s evenings out and especially at Oktoberfest, Germany’s annual beer bacchanalia. “The way to the toilet alone is like running the gauntlet: within 50 feet, you can be sure to tally three hugs from drunken strangers, two pats on the ass, someone looking up your dirndl, and some beer purposely splashed right down your cleavage,” wrote Karoline Beisel and Beate Wild in 2011, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. An average of ten reported rapes take place each year at Oktoberfest while the estimated number of unreported cases is 200.

Patriarchy: Women’s Oppression and the Link Between Rape and Prostitution

Patriarchal societies worldwide came into being with the advent of private property and the resulting need to establish inheritance. The domination of women by men was established. With the rise of capitalism, relations of patriarchy and male supremacy, along with other oppressive social relations, became deeply ingrained in this exploitative economic system, a global system in which today a handful of countries fatten on the world’s peoples.

Today women’s oppression exists throughout the world, whether in the developed world of Europe, the U.S. and Japan or countries of the South, in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. What is particular to the different countries and regions are the forms of oppression, subtle and not so subtle, that are a consequence of patriarchal society. In the so-called modern world women are surrounded by a putrid culture and society that uses, abuses and degrades women whether at home or in the streets on a daily basis. Women are trafficked to Europe and North America from all parts of the globe. Male supremacist patriarchal society also exists in the Middle East with its own ugly methods of the oppression of women. All the major religions of the world uphold patriarchy and the social relations that come with it.

According to the UK Telegraph: “People think Amsterdam is the prostitution capital of Europe but Germany has more prostitutes per capita than any other country in the continent, more even than Thailand: 400,000 at the last count, serving 1.2 million men every day. Those figures were released a decade ago, soon after Germany made buying sex, selling sex, pimping and brothel-keeping legal in 2002. Two years later, prostitution in Germany was thought to be worth 6 billion euros—roughly the same as Porsche or Adidas that year. It’s now estimated to be 15 billion euros.” (http://s.telegraph.co.uk/graphics/projects/welcome-to-paradise/)

Prostitution and also pornography are only one step removed from rape. They are all pillars of a rapacious culture in which a woman’s body is a man’s entitlement, to be used and abused, bought or sold in any way they see fit, from sex shops to the trafficking of women to aspects of “normal” relationships and marriage deeply marked by male supremacy and the imprisonment of women in the roles of providers of sex and breeders of children.

In Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Frederick Engels writes about how capitalist society reflects the power relations of men over women that can be undone only with the elimination of capitalist society and its economic and social relations and deeply inculcated ideas: “What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up, [including] a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power.”

The refugee crisis and the oppression of women in society both arise from the insidious domination, oppression, exploitation and ways of thinking that are deeply embedded in capitalist-imperialist society. With revolutionary political power that can end this system and its rule of profit, women and men will be able to play an increasingly conscious, active role in the process of uprooting today’s economic and social relations and criticising the traditional ideas—“modern” and ancient—that are generated by them and reinforce them. Overnight rape and sexual assault, anti-immigrant attacks and other violent acts against the people will not be tolerated and a new liberating morality forged, one that instead of preaching resignation and surrender will value the struggle to liberate women as a motor in further revolutionizing all social relationships for the interests of all humanity.

People who hate the world as it is need to step forward and join with others to bring this new society into being.

 

A World to Win News Service is put out by A World to Win magazine, a political and theoretical review inspired by the formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic center of the world's Marxist-Leninist-Maoist parties and organizations.

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/422/flint-michigan-the-poisonous-system-behind-the-water-crisis-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Flint, Michigan: The Poisonous System Behind the Water Crisis

January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Well, a few months after the switch, we had already noticed rashes on my kids’ arms, their backs, my face. And they were different, because you couldn’t put any kind of lotion or cream on it without it burning. It felt like straight-out chemical burns. And every once in a while, our water would turn bright blue or yellow, and we had no idea why. They kept telling us that the water was fine...

—Melissa Mays, Flint resident, water-safety activist
(Democracy Now!, December 17, 2015)

For over 18 months, the State of Michigan knowingly poisoned the people living in Flint, Michigan, with drinking water contaminated with lead, a toxin that causes permanent and irreversible damage to the nervous systems of children. And until very recently, it has been covering it up, doctoring tests, slandering critics, and lying to people, telling them everything was alright.

Finally, on January 14, 2016, after many months of denials, in the face of angry protest by residents and of doctors and scientists who amassed damning evidence of this mass poisoning, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder could no longer ignore this crisis. It had become widely exposed that those who run this system were not only to blame for poisoning people, but had essentially done nothing to address the problem even after it became known. Snyder wrote to President Obama asking him to declare a federal disaster and to provide almost $100 million needed to provide clean drinking water and filters, and to replace the pipes that are leaching lead into the water. (On January 16, Obama declared a federal emergency, authorizing FEMA aid efforts and pledging only $5 million in aid. The Federal Government declined to declare this a "major disaster," which would provide more aid for a longer time.)

*****

For most of the 20th century, Flint was a booming center of the auto industry that was once a pillar of U.S. capitalism. Hundreds of thousands of people moved there from farms and sharecroppers’ plots, from Appalachia and the South and other places, to work in the many factories. In particular, Black people fleeing Jim Crow in the South and being driven from the land went to Flint and other industrial cities in the North.

Year in and year out their labor produced billions of dollars in profits for the auto giants and the system as a whole. But when global political and technological changes opened up opportunities to exploit desperately poor people in the Third World, most of the Flint operations were shut down. General Motors once employed 80,000 people there; today it employs 5,000. Unemployment skyrocketed, the population dropped by half, infrastructure crumbled, the city tax base deteriorated.

You can’t talk about the situation in Flint without talking about the fact that more than half of those who live in this city of 99,000 are African-Americans who face systematic discrimination and oppression. Forty-one percent of people in Flint live below the poverty line and over 60 percent receive food stamps, and these conditions are even more extreme among Black people. When something like this water crisis hits, Black people―already living in the most impoverished conditions―are the hardest hit.

The same system that squeezed so much wealth out of the people of Flint now has no use for them. The state even took over the city government in order to impose “cost-cutting measures” ―in the logic of this system, why should the state be “burdened” with maintaining a decent life for people once it can no longer exploit them?

As part of this, in April 2014, the city switched from the Detroit water system to temporarily using the Flint River as the water source. People in Flint were alarmed―the Flint River was an industrial dump for decades and notoriously polluted. But the state went ahead with its plan.

Almost immediately, water started coming out of taps filthy and tasting foul. People were getting rashes, their hair was falling out, children were losing weight, developing anemia. Residents showed up en masse at city council meetings, bringing jugs of the vile water, but were assured it was “safe.” The then-mayor even pulled the stunt of drinking a cup of it on TV, as if the fact that he didn’t die on the spot somehow “proved” that the water was safe.

In October 2014, GM told the city that one of its plants in Flint would stop using the water because it was corroding their engine parts! In spite of this, the authorities, including the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), insisted the water, unsafe for steel, was fine for human beings.

In January 2015, the University of Michigan at Flint reported they had found high levels of lead in some of their drinking fountains. In June 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wrote a memo raising “major concern” about lead levels in the water―but the EPA did not send this to MDEQ or make it public, preferring to have “behind the scenes” discussions.

Then in September 2015, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, a local pediatrician, led a team of people to do testing of children and found that the number of children with dangerously high lead levels in their blood had doubled in the past year.

Lead is a toxin that attacks every organ and system in the human body, particularly the nervous system. It is especially harmful to fetuses and to children, causing premature and low-weight births, irritability, weight loss, lethargy, learning disabilities, and behavioral problems, among other symptoms. Any amount of lead in the body is harmful. And Dr. Hanna-Attisha pointed out that although the damage from lead is permanent, it only stays in the blood for about 30 days, and so many more children who had been poisoned already would test “clean” once they had stopped drinking Flint water. She was mocked and denounced by the authorities.

In September 2015, scientists from Virginia Tech released findings from tests in hundreds of Flint homes showing elevated lead levels. The Virginia Tech team determined that Flint water was 19 times as corrosive as Detroit water. And the biggest problem was that this corrosive water damaged the service pipes that brought water to people’s homes, many of which were made of or soldered with lead, causing it to leach into the water. So while the water left Flint’s water treatment plant lead-free, it came out of people’s taps with dangerously high levels.

The MDEQ responded by saying that these scientists specialized in “looking for high lead problems” across the country. “They pull that rabbit out of the hat everywhere they go. Nobody should be surprised when the rabbit comes out of the hat, even if they can’t figure out how it’s done.” (Michigan Live, “Flint Water Crisis: Key Figures,” November 11, 2015) But this was no “magic trick”―both scientific data and the experience of thousands of people proved that Flint water was not only unsafe to drink, but even to bathe or to wash dishes or clothes―the only thing it was safe for was flushing toilets!

Finally in October 2015―over a year after residents first raised the alarm―the state acknowledged that there might be some problem, and told people not to drink Flint water unless it was filtered or tested. But even then, THE STATE TOOK ONLY PALTRY MEASURES TO PROVIDE PEOPLE WITH FILTERS OR BOTTLED WATER.

So people were forced to either scrape up the money to buy bottled water or filters, or to drink and give their children poison. Some residents spent $500 a month on water, often diverting cash from food, medicine, and other necessities, but thousands simply could not afford to do that. Ordinary people, activists, and churches launched crowdsourcing campaigns to fund free water distribution, while the government did almost nothing!

Dr. Hanna-Attisha fears the Flint children who tested with elevated levels will suffer lifelong consequences. “If you were to put something in a population to keep them down for generation and generations to come, it would be lead. It’s a well-known, potent neurotoxin. There’s tons of evidence on what lead does to a child, and it is one of the most damning things that you can do to a population. It drops your IQ, it affects your behavior, it’s been linked to criminality, it has multigenerational impacts. There is no safe level of lead in a child.”

The Detroit Free Press characterized officials from the MDEQ as saying that the kind of testing that would have revealed the lead contamination “isn’t required under federal drinking-water rules and has never been done in Michigan. What’s more,” MDEQ argued, “the Flint River water, treated in the city’s plant, was already approved as a backup supply in case of interrupted service from Detroit.” In other words, faced with massive evidence that people were being poisoned, the authorities focused on proving that this contamination was legal under this system, and not on the fact that it was profoundly damaging thousands of lives.

Only in this past week has the government begun to take significant steps to alleviate the emergency, and these are still far from sufficient. For instance, Governor Snyder called out the National Guard, saying this would enable them to distribute water filters to the 30,000 households in Flint, at a rate of only 500 per day. The lack of safe drinking water in a major city demands a major mobilization of social resources to rescue children from grave danger, but the powers continue to act like there is really no emergency here.

And to add insult to criminality—some people in Flint are actually receiving water cut-off notices for not paying the bill for their poisonous water—which means that even when drinkable water does start flowing again, many in Flint will have to pay huge back bills before they can access it.

What kind of system is unable to provide something as basic as safe drinking water to its own population? What can you say about a system, possessing wealth undreamed of by empires of old, which poisons children as a “cost-cutting” measure? And what do you do with a system that cannot shut up about how great and powerful it is, but that lies and urges people to continue drinking this poison in order to try and preserve people’s belief in their legitimacy? This is a system that needs to be gotten rid of through revolution, nothing less.

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/422/porter-ranch-gas-disaster-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Porter Ranch Gas Disaster and the Poisonous Lies of the System

by Orpheus Reed | January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Since October 23, 2015, massive amounts of natural gas have been spewing from a broken well at Southern California Gas Company’s (SOCAL) Aliso Canyon gas storage fields near the community of Porter Ranch near Los Angeles. The gas eruption can’t be seen by the human eye, but infrared cameras show it as a huge plume pouring into the sky. Timothy O’Connor of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) called Aliso Canyon “a mega-leak” and said “the plume is about 1,000 feet high and several miles long.”

People in Porter Ranch have had their lives turned upside down. Many have been sickened and thousands have been forced to relocate. The leak is also a massive climate disaster, as methane, the main component of natural gas, is a potent greenhouse gas that causes global warming. The crisis has built to the point that Governor Jerry Brown was forced to declare a state of emergency on January 6.

This disaster has the fingerprints of the entire system all over it. It shows again that this system is incapable of protecting human health and life and the environment, because it’s not set up and structured to do this but instead is based on private interests and control, profitability, and competition.

Aliso Canyon is the largest natural gas storage facility in the western U.S. It is one of 14 fields in California alone, with hundreds of gas wells. At Aliso Canyon, gas coming from other places is piped in and collected in wells. Then it is injected thousands of feet underground beneath rock into reservoirs that once contained oil.

SOCAL says that the gas leaking at Aliso is from a well called SS-25 that was drilled in 1953 and converted to a gas well in the 1970s. Now the steel tubing, or casing, is corroding and causing the well to rupture some 500 feet underground. SOCAL says it may take several more months to stop the flow by drilling a relief well to cut off the broken pipe from below the leak.

Outrageously, this leak could have been stopped very quickly. SOCAL admitted that in 1979, it had removed a broken safety valve that would have stopped the leak—and that they never replaced it because it wasn’t easy to find a new part, and they didn’t consider the SS-25 a “critical well” because it wasn’t within 300 feet of a home! None of this was stopped or even commented on by any official. And there are reportedly other methane leaks in the field and other missing or leaking safety valves.

Anneliese Anderle, a field engineer for the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermic Resources, said of SOCAL’s Aliso project: “They have a beautiful facility. It’s gleaming. They have great roads and well-marked pipelines. Everything’s painted. But below the surface, it’s junk.”

There are hundreds more gas storage facilities like this in the U.S. This situation—of old, corroding pipes—is apparently a much more widespread problem than just Aliso Canyon or for that matter confined to California. To replace all this infrastructure would mean massive capital investment that would mean huge losses in profitability and competitiveness. So no political structures under capitalism are going to do that. Whatever regulations exist are paltry, and promises to “deal with the problem through new regulations” are not fundamentally possible given the deep necessities of the system. Beyond this, all this production and use of fossil fuels continues despite a screaming climate and environmental emergency.

Far from an aberration, the SOCAL disaster is just a concentration of a much larger problem. Research from the Environmental Defense Fund has shown that methane is leaked at every stage in the production and supply of oil and gas. And there are many other miles of aging, corroding pipelines. All of this is business as usual under this system, and it is only addressed when a major disaster breaks out. Promises are made about new regulations and changes in how things are done, and then everything goes back to normal.

The Impacts on People in Porter Ranch

Porter Ranch is a middle-class community with nice homes, schools, and parks, a place where people can supposedly live nice lives. But now they have had to deal with an onslaught of sickening gas that has made their lives a nightmare. Thousands can’t stay there now without suffering continual health problems. The scale and scope of the disaster and the danger has been covered up, as they’ve been lied to by not only SOCAL but the media and overall representatives of the system.

Initially, SOCAL didn’t even admit the spill existed, despite people being sickened. Then they claimed this leak was nothing more than an inconvenience, that natural gas immediately disperses in the air, and that there was no threat to public safety.

At least dozens of people have reported headaches, nosebleeds, nausea, breathing problems, vomiting, and other symptoms. People are preventing their children from playing outdoors. Some parents have had to take their babies to the emergency room with shortness of breath. People’s pets are vomiting. Sharon Mousavi-Dormani, who has been forced to leave Porter Ranch with her family, says of the impacts of the gas, “It’s like a fog in your brain—it feels like you’re having a stroke. Every time I go back I get sicker and sicker.” Parents report children having cold- and flu-like symptoms and increasing problems with asthma, and say they are deeply worried about what all the long-term impact will be. Three thousand families have been relocated, and there are more than 3,000 more who are still waiting to be relocated, despite being almost three months into this crisis.

With all this, SOCAL, public health officials, and most of the mainstream bourgeois media repeatedly tell people that methane itself is not toxic. But there is well-founded reason to doubt this. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), in high concentrations methane gas can displace oxygen in your lungs and can lead to “suffocation and loss of consciousness... headache, dizziness, weakness, nausea, vomiting, and loss of coordination.” Methane can inflame lung tissue. Some of these are the very symptoms people are reporting. Further, there is differing information on the long-term effects of methane poisoning, and it doesn’t seem very well studied. Methane gas is also highly flammable, meaning there is danger of explosion.

It has also come out that the brown residue some residents have found coating things in the neighborhood is likely from oil residues mixed in with the escaping gas. Inhaling hydrocarbons in oil is damaging to health, and hydrocarbons are also carcinogenic. And SOCAL understated the number of days and instances where the cancer-causing chemical benzene had been detected in the air at levels above the normal or background rate. The level of exposure Porter Ranch residents have had to benzene and hydrocarbons is not known, but this is something that should be urgently studied, along with studying and combatting impacts of methane. But none of this is being handled as a serious emergency by state health officials or anyone else associated with the system.

A Disaster for the Climate

The Porter Ranch eruption is a climate disaster. The main component of natural gas is methane. Over a 20-year time period, methane is 84 times more powerful in warming the planet than carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. Already, over 84,000 metric tons of methane have escaped through this huge leak. As of late December, according to the California Air Resources Board, 1.9 billion standard cubic feet of gas had spewed out—as much greenhouse pollution as produced by 330,000 cars in a whole year. This leak has doubled the amount of methane emissions from natural gas production in the state.

All this only adds more to the escalating climate emergency on the planet. It further exposes the false claims by the world’s powers that they are now moving to address this in the wake of the Paris climate agreement. This is a developing crisis that some have said is the largest environmental disaster in the U.S. since the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

There has been an increasing outcry from Porter Ranch residents and environmental groups and calls to shut down the SOCAL facility. To try to contain the crisis, on January 6, California Governor Jerry Brown finally declared a state of emergency. Brown said he was ordering the company to stop any further injection of gas into the underground storage site, calling for inspections of other gas facilities, and would make the company offset the climate impacts of the huge methane releases.

But every step in this whole situation reveals a system that is incapable of preventing or dealing with environmental disasters and protecting people’s health and lives, and deals with people’s concerns by lying to try to cover its tracks.

Brown himself was a big player at the Paris climate talks, where he and California were toasted for doing great things to decrease the state’s greenhouse emissions—at the same moment that the state was experiencing a big climate disaster that was being hushed up. California has announced plans to make big cuts in greenhouse emissions over the next decades, including by reducing its 2013 level of greenhouse emissions 7 to 8 percent by 2020. But the Aliso Canyon leak already cuts into that planned reduction by about a quarter, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.

Again and again we hear speeches from “liberal” representatives of this system promising that environmentally “clean” capitalism is just around the corner with the passage of a few more laws, the signing of a new agreement, the election of a new president. And again and again, the deeper, profit-driven workings of that very system generate new and even worse disasters, bringing more suffering to the people and bringing our planet closer to ecological catastrophe. Each time this happens, the whole system goes into gear to cover up or downplay the ways that people are being poisoned and the environment damaged, and lies to us that we have nothing to fear, until finally, when the damage can no longer be covered up and bursts into public view, we get feeble apologies... and a new round of promises.

The reality is that this system, the capitalist system, cannot protect the environment or the people.

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/421/interview-with-david-cohen-untold-stories-of-anti-abortion-terrorism-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

Interview with Law Professor David Cohen

Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism

January 12, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

In December 2015, Sunsara Taylor interviewed David Cohen about the book he co-authored, Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2015). Cohen is a law professor at Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law, where he teaches constitutional law and gender and the law. Prior to teaching, Cohen was a staff attorney at the Women's Law Project in Philadelphia and litigated cases involving abortion clinic safety, reproductive rights, Title IX, and LGBT family law.

From the preface to Living in the Crosshairs: “Because of their work, abortion providers have been murdered, shot, kidnapped, assaulted, stalked, and subjected to death threats. Their clinics have been bombed, attacked with noxious chemicals invaded, vandalized, burglarized, and set ablaze. Individual abortion providers have been picketed at home and have received harassing mail and phone calls. Their family members have been followed where they work, their children have been protested at school, and their neighbors’ privacy has been invaded. Partly as a result of this terrorism, medical facilities providing abortion services have decreased by almost 40% since 1982, 89% of counties in the United States have no abortion provider, and only 14% of obstetrician gynecologists perform the procedure.”

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Sunsara Taylor: David Cohen, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. You, not long ago, co-authored the book, Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, together with Krysten Connon. Could you start by describing this book and telling us why you wrote it?

David Cohen: Sure. Thanks so much for having me here for the discussion. The book looks at the lives of abortion providers around the country and in particular at the types of targeted harassment and individualized terrorism they face as a result of being abortion providers. The book came out of a case I’d been working on for a long time and then Krysten, my co-author, helped at the very end, representing an abortion provider in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who had been sued by protesters who protested her clinic. The protesters not only sued her individually with some crazy claims, but they also picketed her home, they sent fliers to her neighbors calling her a “murderer,” giving out her personal information. They sent mail, hate mail to her mom who lived somewhere completely different than she did, and one of the protesters who wrote an online newsletter, still does write an online newsletter that he mailed to people in jail for committing violence against abortion providers, included her name and information about her as well.

Because of this, she wore a bulletproof vest to work and it really was one of those things where, you know, I’d actually been doing this work for a long time and I knew the full story, but Kysten heard this for the first time and, shame on me for not reacting this way since I’d known this for so long, but Krysten’s reaction was, “This is horrible! And this is something people don’t know about, that someone who is engaged in a lawful job in the United States, providing constitutionally protected health care, wears a bulletproof vest to work because she fears for her life.”

So it was really from starting to think about her experience from that lens, which is: a lot of people don’t know about this. People might know about protesting that happens outside a clinic or just the general debate about abortion. But we didn’t think people knew about the ways that anti-abortion extremists target individuals, and that’s why we wrote the book, and the book tells the stories of people around the country who have suffered from this kind of targeting and talks a little bit about what the law can do better to try and improve their lives, and offers some solutions to the issue.

ST: I found myself very emotional reading these stories. It’s disturbing, the level of harassment, the invasiveness of it, the way it permeates every aspect of abortion providers’ lives, and I wonder, precisely because it is so unknown and untold, if you could take us through a few of the stories so people really get a vivid sense of what this means.

David Cohen: Absolutely. I mean, if people know anything about this topic, what they know is the high-profile violence, like what happened in Colorado Springs a couple of weeks ago. That certainly got all the media attention it deserved and it probably deserved more, because it quickly left the media landscape once San Bernardino happened. But, you know, that kind of thing gets the attention. When Dr. Tiller was murdered or assassinated in 2009, that made national news and there’s been seven other killings in the past 20+ years of abortion providers, and those things are known and people hear about them. But what they don’t hear about are the everyday experiences of abortion providers. We are not trying to say this happens to all abortion providers, that’s far from it, but it happens to a lot and it happens all over the country. Not just in the most conservative parts of the country but in liberal parts, too. And it really affects abortion providers’ lives.

What we’re talking about are things like home-picketing, showing up at someone’s house on a Saturday or Sunday morning, with anywhere from five to 100 people, or even more. The picketing could be, you know, very peaceful except for the invasion that just being outside someone’s home is, to very loud and aggressive and seemingly very threatening. This happens to abortion providers around the country.

We talked with people who have been followed around town. They’ve been followed leaving work. They’ve seen anti-abortion protester extremists who followed them into a local business and started harassing them and yelling at them in the middle of the hardware store, or while they’re eating dinner at a restaurant and they’re recognized.

We heard many stories of death threats that are conveyed through the mail or online or on phone calls to the house. One of the people we talked to, her kids answered the phone and she got a death threat. Or her kids got the death threat. Other people told us stories of their kids’ schools being protested as a way to get at the parent who is working at an abortion clinic.

We heard stories of physical assault, trespassing, vandalism, personal information being disclosed that is usually private information, hate mail being sent to someone’s home or their parents. Probably, you know... it’s all outrageous... it really is all outrageous but probably the most outrageous thing that we heard, and we heard two stories about this, was a provider’s parent being protested at their nursing home. Here we have someone who’s taking their extremism to such a level that they go to a nursing home to protest or scream or harass someone whose kid is working at an abortion clinic. That level, it just boggles my mind still. When I look at those sections of the book, and read those stories, to think that someone would do that.... But these kinds of stories, they happen all over the country and they really show what abortion providers, many abortion providers in this country, have to live with in order to provide this legal, necessary medical care.

ST: It’s shocking, the level of harassment that the individual providers go through. In addition to the threats, the kinds of things, targeting their children, or in your book, you detail protesters coming to the wedding of a provider’s son or the funeral of a provider’s husband, and these kinds of things that even encroach upon what ought to be a part of somebody’s very private and personal life.

David Cohen: Yeah, we call this in the book “secondary harassment” because most of what we talked to people about was directed at the providers themselves but some of it is directed at other people. It’s almost like the extremist is saying, “I know that by harassing you, the provider, I’m not gonna get anywhere because you’re so stubborn and pigheaded and I’m not gonna affect you. BUT if I harass someone or terrorize someone who is close to you, whether it’s your neighbor or your kid or your parent or your spouse or anyone close to you, then maybe you’ll stop doing this because you care about them.” So this kind of secondary harassment, and I think your reaction is the same we have, which was everything we write and talk about in this book should be, people should look upon it negatively and not part of the normal democratic process, but this kind of targeting of someone else whose, you know, kids or parents, or other loved ones or neighbors, it just feels particularly worse. Maybe it shouldn’t feel worse, because it’s not like the abortion providers deserve it in any way—so, I guess, there’s maybe a sense of these other people deserving less, but no one deserves it and it should happen to no one. It just shows how outrageous these anti-abortion extremists who target individuals are, that they would go to all of these lengths to try and stop abortion.

ST: You also brought out the ways the anti-abortion terrorists and harassers utilize the state, and I’d like to ask you to talk about this in a couple different ways. One that you highlighted is lawsuits and other ways that anti-abortion fanatics use the state to go after providers and then get all kinds of personal information about them or tie them up in the courts and waste their money. Then, the other was people who are actually in law enforcement who are in positions of the state who really abuse their authority and their power to themselves target providers.  

David Cohen: Yeah, I mean it’s absolutely both of them. So you know if you get a really determined anti-abortion extremist in political power they can use the power of the state in some very abusive ways. We saw that with Dr. Tiller in Wichita, Kansas, before he was assassinated. The attorney general for the State of Kansas, Phil Kline, was doing everything he could possibly imagine to harass Dr. Tiller, and actually ultimately Phil Kline was disbarred because of what he was doing. He was using the power of the state to indict Dr. Tiller and investigate him and get his patient records and put him on trial and literally put him on trial, and it was when he was ultimately... Dr. Tiller was acquitted in the trial just a few months before he was assassinated. And Scott Roeder, who assassinated George Tiller, was sitting in the courtroom when Dr. Tiller was acquitted, and it was... he said it was his disappointment and horror that Dr. Tiller was acquitted that led him to ultimately assassinate Dr. Tiller. You see, there the power of the state used in this way just egged on this extremist.

That’s one category, like you said; the other category is the anti-abortion extremists who are not part of the state but use the state to investigate providers and harass providers, filing complaints, often anonymously alleging that the provider is doing something wrong; or filing a lawsuit and doing the same thing, and that means that the provider is now tied up in the state investigatory apparatus. That takes up time, that takes up energy, and [there are] potential penalties. And you see this as a tactic all over the country with anti-abortion protesters monitoring the clinics so that if they ever see an ambulance leaving the clinic they report that and they file complaints against the clinic for doing that, when in reality that’s actually good medical practice. If there’s a problem—abortion has one of the lowest complication rates of any surgical procedure, it’s incredibly safe, but as with any medicine, there can be complications and when they arise, if something happens that is outside the skill of the doctor, then it’s good medical practice to call an ambulance and have that person transported to the local hospital to be taken care of. That is following the guidelines. That’s doing exactly what you’re supposed to. It is not a problem. But the anti-abortion extremists turn it into a problem and start investigations because of it. It’s a big problem to be able to use the state in that way. Abortion providers face this targeting from not only the individuals, but also the state apparatus.

ST: You mentioned that some people have heard about the high-profile cases of now 11 people who have been murdered by anti-abortion violence, clinics that have been bombed, clinics that have been destroyed and vandalized, although even those things don’t get as much attention as they should. But what you’re describing altogether is actually a much bigger sea of anti-abortion terrorism. These are not isolated acts. They are not all centrally coordinated, but it truly is a movement in which thousands and thousands of people participate in different forms and different levels of harassment of different providers all over the country. Is that true?

David Cohen: Yeah. I mean, I haven’t thought about it numerically the way you just put it, but if you think of all the home protests targeting individuals and you think of all the hate mail that’s been sent and phone calls and personal information that’s been used against people, you’re right, there’s thousands and thousands of people out there targeting abortion providers. And I agree with exactly what you said, which is we are not saying in our book and no one is saying that these people are a part of a secret organization that’s coordinating this targeted form of harassment. That’s not what’s happening here. But they are all part of the United States where this kind of targeted harassment flows from extreme rhetoric that’s used around abortion and they are sort of just carrying out what’s part of the political dialogue. When you call people murderers, when you call them killers, when you say that they are selling baby parts, there are gonna be people who hear that and say, Wow, I have to do something about that and I’ll do things that are beyond the normal course of political recourse.

ST: This goes a little bit beyond the scope of what you address directly in your book, but I’d like to explore your thinking in terms of what you think is the view of women that animates this anti-abortion movement—both from those in power, people demonizing abortion and passing laws that are closing down abortion clinics across the country, as well down to the level of people acting on their own, or with their congregation, or with these decentralized ways on the street to harass the women or providers of abortion. What is the view of women, and what would this society look like if they actually had their way?

David Cohen: I don’t think it’s just one thing, but it’s all negative. For some people, women are just absent, they don’t even care about women’s lives, women’s health, women’s needs, women’s wants; they just completely erase the woman from the picture, which is a huge problem, obviously. With other people, I think there’s this idea that women are public, their bodies are controllable by the public, and the public has an interest in what women’s bodies do. For other people, it’s a matter of control over women, controlling women’s sexuality, controlling women’s reproduction, controlling women’s place in society. I think there can be a lot of different strands to this that sort of answer the question, “What does it say about women in society and people’s view of women in society,” and it’s all negative and it’s all horrible and it’s all against a progressive view of equality and gender equality, and I think it really goes to the heart of what’s happening here, which is that these people don’t think of women as fully participatory people within our society.

ST: You detail all of these horrendous things that abortion providers have to go through—the amount of harassment, the amount of stigma, the amount of shame, the amount of isolation, the amount of fear that’s instilled by the anti-abortion movement. This has taken a toll. But overwhelmingly the people that you spoke to were pretty defiant in the face of this, and I want you to share a little bit of what were some of the motivations that made them feel that it was worth it to withstand all this.

David Cohen: We’re very lucky that, for the most part, abortion providers do not let this make them stop. It does prevent some people from going into the field and that’s a huge problem. That’s not the only reason people don’t go into the field, but it’s one of the reasons people don’t go into the field, and that’s a big problem. But once people are in the field, they tend to say that, for various reasons, they’re not gonna let this kind of terrorism and kind of targeting stop them.

Of the 87 people we talked to for the book, only one of them stopped performing abortions because of the harassment we talked to them about, and that’s consistent with studies that have found numerically that less than 2 percent of abortion providers around the country leave the field because of this kind of targeting.

But the reasons that people continue are really inspiring and just show the level of care and commitment that abortion providers have. Some of it is because they feel this really close connection with their patients and this satisfaction they get from helping them in this time of need and this time of medical need, as well as physiological and social need. If you think about it, being an abortion care provider is one of the areas in medicine where you can solve a person’s immediate medical problem relatively quickly. You think of a lot of other medical issues and they take years to resolve, if they can ever be resolved, and they take a lot of care, whereas abortion is, especially a first-trimester [abortion], is a quick, easy procedure with very few complications that will change someone’s life and change it for the better. It won’t solve any of the problems a person had that led them to this moment in life, but it will solve that medical problem, and for some providers it’s really rewarding to be able to help women through that time in their life and be able to solve that problem.

Others feel this deep commitment to the movement, whether they identify the movement as reproductive rights, reproductive choice, reproductive justice, women’s rights, human rights, whatever it is. They see whatever they are doing as being part of this broader movement, which is something that most medical care providers don’t have. And so the people we talked to identified this as a major part of it in saying, “I could have been a dermatologist but what would I have been connected to?” That as an abortion provider, they’re connected to this movement.

Another reason is that some people are just stubborn, where they say, “If I leave, I’m gonna leave on my own terms, I’m not gonna leave because someone forces me out.”

And then the final answer we got that we weren’t really expecting, frankly, when we asked the question why do you continue, was that some people said they continue because they remember or they were told stories from a relative about the era of when abortion was illegal, and when abortion was illegal women were injured by unskilled abortion providers, back-alley providers, and some women died. A lot of women died. So they remember this time when illegal abortion didn’t mean no abortion, it meant unsafe abortion, and they said to themselves that if I leave because of this terrorism, then I am getting us one step closer to that time when abortion was not available from skilled practitioners and women will have to resort to other means that will make them unsafe. So they saw their continuing on as a way to protect women’s health and to prevent us from slipping back into that era before Roe v. Wade.

ST: Over the last few summers, I’ve been part of, with the organization StopPatriarchy.org, been part of traveling the country and organizing people to stand up for abortion rights and that was one of the things, too, that the first time we traveled—up to North Dakota, down to Mississippi, from coast to coast—every single place we stopped, and this blew my mind, it was not something I was anticipating, every single stop we made strangers came up and told us about loved ones who died from illegal abortion. And these are stories that people have carried, largely in secret, in shame—but they’re very, very common. I think almost everybody has a story like that in their family and most people have no idea.

David Cohen: Exactly, that’s exactly true, and I mean part of the reason that the title of the book says “untold” is not just because the media isn’t telling these stories, but in some respects a lot of the people that we’ve been talking to haven’t been telling these stories. Their story of their great grandmother who died of an illegal abortion is not something that they tell to many people, and because of abortion stigma and because of the shame that surrounds the issue in this country, they keep quiet about it. And it’s the same thing with the harassment, the harassment is something they internalize, they look at it as normal in their field so they don’t think it’s worth talking about and because of that, that’s another reason why these stories are untold, people just not talking about it.

ST: I just wanted to note, a minute ago you said of the 87 providers you interviewed, only one stopped providing abortion because of the harassment. I wanted to note for our readers that of the 87 that you interviewed, all but five of them have experienced this harassment directly. So this is not something that happens to 10 out of 100 and only one quit, this happens to the overwhelming majority of people with only a very small number quitting. I just think that’s worth noting.

David Cohen: Right, although we didn’t have like a representative sample of providers around the country. We were certainly trying to find people who have had these experiences. But the Feminist Majority Foundation did a study that was released earlier this year that found that this kind of targeted harassment of providers has gone up in the past four years. They did a similar study in 2010 that found about a quarter of clinics around the country had staff members who were suffering this kind of targeting, and the most recent survey found that last year, 2014, four years later, over half of the clinics in the country had staff workers who suffered this kind of individual targeting. So it’s more than doubled in the past four years, the incidents of this kind of targeting, which is VERY concerning.

ST: What’s your sense of why that is?

David Cohen: I think is has a lot to do with the political climate, that there’s been a record number of abortion restrictions passed around the country over the past four years. Ever since the Tea Party took over a lot of state legislators in 2010 there’s been this huge domination in the political realm of thinking: what are we gonna do to restrict and stop abortion, and so the legislators do it through the political process but there’s always extremists who take their message and do it through this targeting. So I think that they go hand in hand and I think that’s what we’re seeing.

ST: I wanted to circle back because I think perhaps we didn’t draw it out fully enough for everybody who may not be as familiar with it. But we both talked about people’s personal information, address, name, children’s names, this sort of thing being disclosed by anti-abortion harassers, but I wondered if you could just describe why is that significant and how does it fit into this picture?

David Cohen: Using people’s personal information is a key tactic of this anti-abortion targeting and terrorism because the anti-abortion extremists dig through public records, they do whatever they can to find out as much information as they can about abortion providers and then make that information public. Knowing people’s personal information can be a very innocent thing, but when it’s done by the people that we’re talking about, there’s a subtle and often not-so-subtle message behind it which is, “I know who your kids are, I know where you live, I know what car you drive, I know where your husband goes to work, and I’m telling you I know this information, not so that we can strike up a bond and have a deep, meaningful relationship, but I’m telling you this information so now you know that I know this personal information about you, and maybe I’ll use it in a way that will harm you, so if I know your kids’ names, then I might be able to go to their school and picket, and if I know where your husband works, I know I can do the same thing, if I know where you live, I can come to your home.” The use of this personal information is either the first step into doing something worse or it’s a not-so-veiled threat that I’m gonna do something worse now that I have this information.

ST: And of course it’s a threat against a backdrop where there’s all kinds of people who have been motivated to carry out that violence. Even if you yourself don’t do anything to further target a provider, if you are putting that information out publicly you are knowingly making it available to a whole sea of people who have been whipped up to think that providing abortions is tantamount to murder, and some of whom have been whipped up to feel they are called on by god to act violently—or even murderously—against the provider. So, you are handing it over to all that.

David Cohen: That’s exactly right. All of this takes place against the backdrop where there have been extreme acts of violence. Now 11 people murdered by anti-abortion violence, arsons and bombings and other physical attacks. And abortion providers know this. They are keenly aware of this history that’s happened to people in their profession, and so having this personal information, showing up at someone’s house, going to their other work place, it is particularly threatening to an abortion provider because of this history, and the anti-abortion extremists know it and play on that and they use that to their advantage because they know that all they have to do is stand in front of someone’s house and it makes that person scared because of this history. So it really is this deliberate use of fear of violence to try and accomplish their political goal, and that’s why we call it terrorism.

Terrorism is violence or the fear of violence to try and accomplish a political goal that people can’t accomplish through normal political channels, and that’s where anti-abortion extremists find themselves. They’ve been unsuccessful for 43 years now, next month, in overturning Roe v. Wade, but they’ve been very successful at restricting access to abortion, though abortion is still legal throughout the country as much as they’ve tried to make it otherwise, and they are frustrated. They are angry that this is not something they have been able to resolve through normal political process, and so they resort to violence and so they resort to fear of violence to try and accomplish that goal. That is terrorism.

ST: Well, that was going to be my last question. Why do you call it terrorism? So, I’ll just ask you one more thing related to that, which I thought was very interesting. The Department of Homeland Security had actually categorized anti-abortion extremism as a form of domestic terrorism at one point, but because of political backlash, they removed it from being categorized as domestic terrorism. This was just a few weeks before Dr. Tiller was assassinated. Do you want to say anything about why that was removed, what were the forces that pushed back against that?

David Cohen: There was a lot of political pushback to the release of those two documents in 2009. It was in 2009 that the Department of Homeland Security released those documents. Anti-abortion forces were pissed about this. Military forces were angry because the document also talked about the risk of terrorism from people who used to be in the military and then get involved in these militia movements. There were a lot of organizations that really pushed back against these documents. Janet Napolitano, who was the head of the Department of Homeland Security at the time, issued a statement saying that these documents were released before they were supposed to and she withdrew them. So the backlash worked. It made the Department of Homeland Security fearful of labeling the anti-abortion extremists as terrorists and of course, as we said, a few weeks later Dr. Tiller was assassinated by domestic terrorists. They called it what it was supposed to be called and then they backed off and then they were proven right.

ST: Any closing words?

David Cohen: One thing that I think is important to talk about a little more is that this deeply affects abortion providers’ lives in ways that make them change what they do with their life, in terms of taking different routes to and from work, wearing disguises to and from work, thinking about where they own property so that it’s a safer location, and ultimately thinking about having a bulletproof vest or purchasing a gun or carrying a gun to protect themselves. Some of these things I just mentioned, it’s just shocking when you take a step back and you say these are doctors, nurses, and administrative assistants, volunteers who work for a lawful profession, providing health care in the United States, not in a military zone, and they’re thinking about bulletproof vests and guns, something is REALLY wrong when that’s the reality for a lot of abortion providers.

ST: Well, I agree with that, and I thank you for coming back to that. I do think that everyone who is reading this, people who are learning about this and haven’t heard this before, we have a responsibility to stand up and be part of changing the political atmosphere and taking on and defeating the war on women that is driving all this. You are absolutely right, this is not a situation that anybody should have to live with, and no one should accept. That is on all of us! I want to thank you, David, for joining us for this interview, thank you for the work you did on the book, and I hope to talk to you again soon.

David Cohen: Thank you so much. I really appreciate this.

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/422/the-veil-is-not-a-form-of-power-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016

From a Revolution Club Member:

The Veil Is NOT a "Form of Power"

January 18, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

Dear Revolution newspaper,

I just saw a clip going around Facebook from a Daily Show interview with Dalia Mogahed [Obama’s adviser on Muslim affairs] that infuriated me. There were parts I appreciated, like when she challenged some of the anti-Muslim bigotry that is so pervasive in this country and spoke about the importance of acceptance towards gays and lesbians and others who are oppressed.

However, what was infuriating was when she defended the veil. She argued that the hijab is just about making women’s sexuality private, that it is a form of power, and argued that it’s oppressive to challenge it. She gets Trevor Noah won over to great applause.

This struck me as being so upside down, such a slavish mentality. So, not wrapping yourself up if you’re a woman means that your sexuality is no longer private? What does that even mean!? Unwrapped women’s sexuality should belong to the public? And power? That power is being able to maneuver within patriarchal domination?

No! Real power for the oppressed comes from ENDING oppression—ending the oppression of women by men in every form, as well as rising up to put an end to all other forms of oppression, exploitation, enslavement and degradation! That’s what an actual revolution is—and that is what humanity really needs.

 

 

 

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Permalink: http://revcom.us/a/419/children-make-desperate-journey-seeking-safety-en.html

Revolution #422 January 18, 2016