According to the San Antonio newspaper, as of this morning, there are still 20,000 people stranded on roofs awaiting aid in the Mexican state of Tabasco. 1.5 million have been displaced from their homes due to heavy flooding.
There is much to be outraged about besides nature’s utter indifference to human suffering. Brownfemipower notes the racism of the coverage of the flood:
Fox News: Mexico Floods Swamp 900,000 Homes; Disease Outbreak Feared
UPDATED Fox News: Thousands Depart Mexico Flood Zone Amid Disease Fears, Reported Looting
CNN: Devastating floods prompt outbreak fears in Mexico
MSNbc: Headline news:Teacher arrested after allegedly fleeing with boy (scroll down and down and down some more, and there nestled between sports and politics, is a small little link announcing “Mexico state 80 submerged”
ABCnews: Headline News: “Teacher Arrested In Mexico” World news section: Nothing
Detroit Free Press: Mexicans flee as region floods: Infectious waterborne diseases could surface
AP: Mexico Fears Disease Outbreak From Flood
Bloomber.com:Mexico’s Red Cross Is Preparing for Disease in Flooded Tabasco
This should surprise no one; I remember how, in the wake of Katrina, conservatives were more angry that people were looting than the fact that there were corpses floating in the street, and the threat of even temporary price controls to keep people from dying of dehydration sent many a free market cheerleader straight to the fainting couch. That the majority of victims were black drove so much of the casual cruelty towards survivors.
Black Looks: Public Sector Strikes in Africa: Any Subversive Elements?
Women’s Experiences of Abuse as a Risk Factor for Incarceration.
Professor Black Woman has to deal with the racist stupid. (Hat tip: Shannon.)
I thought this was satire. Apparently, it isn’t. Maybe we can get MB to give her a new, “Most Unintentionally Funny Blog Post” award or something?
Shark-fu posts on the recent dustup between Brownback and Romney, and the uncomfortable reality for many conservatives that no, actually, not everyone’s Christian faith similar or palatable to others.
Psuedo Adrienne blogs about the stakes for Moroccan women in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Public sector workers in Israel may have to strike to get decent pay.
Finally, I know I’m an anti-consumerist pinko, but wow. These folks put me to shame. Then again, I don’t think I’d get such a sweet haul in the dumpsters in my neighborhood, which is definitely not affluent. You’ll find no working iPods tossed away.
Please, won’t someone think of the profits?Via
Fourteen years ago yesterday, the Kader Toy Factory in Bangkok burned down. 188 factory workers died, over 500 more sustained injuries. Most of these workers were women.
I don’t even know what to say in the face of this. We could call it a tragedy, but it’s not. Tragedies are things like dying from cancer or hydroplaning on a puddle and ending up in the hospital with grievous injuries. This wasn’t a tragedy.
It was an atrocity.
What else can you call the deaths of 188 people and the injuries of over 500 more, all in the name of cheap product to sell in the US? It’s a level of entitlement that is breathtaking on our part. We want those dolls, dammit. And those motherboards, and those pants, and that furniture, at cut rate prices. Or we want those things sold for a huge profit, so executive management and board members can make a nice, fat profit on their stock options. The spin of these policies are rife with myths.
Our way of life. Our way of life. We will fight and defend our way of life. And we will make damn sure other people pay for our way of life.
Now, I realize that pointing out injustices and entitled thinking is seen as victim-tripping in some camps. Because those girls could have bootstrapped themselves into a better job, dammit! And besides, didn’t you all know that naming the problem, speaking the truth, is unforgivable? How very grim.
I bring this up because the Triangle Shirtwaist fire usually gets all kinds of attention, as it should. This fire, I learned about a few years ago. If it made the news in a big way, I missed it. And that’s the point. It’s easier, much easier to not see and forget and refuse to question our own privilege. For instance: it sure is nice that I don’t work in a firetrap. That I don’t have to put up with sexual harassment and unsafe working conditions or lose my one source of income. That I don’t work for a contractor, and therefore there’s nothing the large multinational company that pays my employer can do. Conveniently, these companies are so terribly helpless. There’s not a thing they can do substantively–oh, they can spot check and be good corporate citizen and put guidelines into place–but they want low labor rates and high productivity and low, low overhead. And those they will get.
At a price, yes. But we’re not the ones paying the price.
Picture via Greenpeace/The Price of Oil.
I think one thing it would be helpful to keep in mind is… to get to you, they come through us first. Whether it is laws building up to something like the Patriot Act, or undermining the holy grail of abortion rights, there are usually many steps taken that initially primarily affect poorer people and people of color, but which are eventually felt in some way by the overall population.–Nanette, in the comments to this thread.
This doesn’t just apply to discrimination and Draconian legislation. It also applies to human-influenced natural disasters and climate change. The poorest of the population are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. They are already paying the price. They feel the effects first, then we will.
When I talked about how the system of global feudalism is so huge, and how it destroys people, I got a lot of strong reactions. While a lot of commenters got what I was saying, a lot didn’t. It either sounded to them like I was going to pillory them for shopping at Wal-Mart, or trash them for not doing enough political action. Neither was true–what tends to stop up the works in this movement is the obsession with one or the other.
I’m a big fan of organizing and political action, myself, but I do think it’s helpful to keep ourselves appraised of where the things we buy come from, and at what cost. These small individual consumer choices won’t change the world, but it will help to keep us focused, and keep us mindful of what’s at stake. I also think it could go a long way toward eroding some of our sense of entitlement.
(more…)
The thing about news like the Michael Bianco raid in New Bedford, MA is that it’s the tip of a very large iceberg. By that I don’t mean ZOMG! the hordes of brown folks are like, totally invading our shores! No, it’s just one small indication of a huge system that grinds people into dust.
Our companies run from the very idea of paying a living wage. Better to pay executives the overinflated wage and bonus they now get rather than use the profits for the people who sweat for the companies. So companies will spend money to lobby for things like NAFTA and CAFTA. They will advocate and use export processing zones, also known as free trade zones, also known as “free to trade your lives for our mountains of plastic crap” zones.
Saying this invariably gets at least one person pissily declaring that I’m guilt-tripping them, that I’m acting like an elitist, and that I’m being mean. I know it’s oh-so-elitist of me to point out that maybe, just maybe, we don’t have a birthright to buy lots of stuff at other people’s expense. (more…)
The raid at Michael Bianco, Inc. in New Bedford, MA tore apart families. Working immigrant women and men were whisked off to detention centers out of state, while their children were left in Massachusetts.
The Department of Social Services is furious, as no one told them the raid was going to happen, and they had no support. There are still children in Massachusetts who do not know where their parents are (Texas, as it happens).
We can scream and holler all we want about undocumented immigrants and how awful they are, but until we understand and change the Byzantine system one must navigate to get visas, it’s time to shut up. Unskilled workers are not going to get the 140,000 immigrant visas for employment in the US–those are reserved for very highly skilled workers, as in engineers. They may have a shot at getting one of the 66,000 seasonal employment visas, but there’s going to be overflow. We make this overflow, and we make undocumented immigrants a necessity. (more…)
The ideal winner of the 2008 nomination.
John McCain’s nobody’s fool when it comes to pandering to today’s modern wingnut. He knows that given the choice between tolerating the fact that people do have sex and letting people die by the millions, there’s only one right answer and it’s the wrong one—no amount of death and destruction is too much in the battle against Teh Sex. Especially when those dying left and right live in not-America countries. Bean found a transcript at the NY Times Caucus blog where McCain explained that his major goal when it comes to stopping AIDS in Africa is to blow off stopping AIDS and confront the much more serious issue that someone might be getting off without James Dobson’s seal of approval.
Reporter: “Should U.S. taxpayer money go to places like Africa to fund contraception to prevent AIDS??
Mr. McCain: “Well I think it’s a combination. The guy I really respect on this is Dr. Coburn. He believes – and I was just reading the thing he wrote– that you should do what you can to encourage abstinence where there is going to be sexual activity. Where that doesn’t succeed, than he thinks that we should employ contraceptives as well. But I agree with him that the first priority is on abstinence. I look to people like Dr. Coburn. I’m not very wise on it.?
(Mr. McCain turns to take a question on Iraq, but a moment later looks back to the reporter who asked him about AIDS.)
Mr. McCain: “I haven’t thought about it. Before I give you an answer, let me think about. Let me think about it a little bit because I never got a question about it before. I don’t know if I would use taxpayers’ money for it.?
Q: “What about grants for sex education in the United States? Should they include instructions about using contraceptives? Or should it be Bush’s policy, which is just abstinence??
Mr. McCain: (Long pause) “Ahhh. I think I support the president’s policy.?
It gets even better. Watch as the Amazing McCain pretends he doesn’t know the sky is blue.
As Amanda notes below, today is International Women’s Day. If you pour through the print edition of the paper of record this morning, you’ll find Maureen Dowd’s magnum opus on Denis Collin’s green Eddie Bauer sportsjacket. But, you won’t find one word written about the the UN’s annual event. If you google-news in search of other US media coverage, you’ll find little more than press release-based wire copy.
If you believe as I do, that the rise of religious fundamentalism is one of the greatest threats of the 21st Century and that understanding the changing role of women in cultures across the globe is the key to understanding and combating the rise of fundamentalism, then you might find this lack of coverage disconcerting.
Oh, well. Maybe someone in MSM will catch on by 2008.
Sake health center, Goma, Eastern Congo. Jan 2006. Young woman, a victim of rape, waits to give birth. Rape is frequently used as a weapon of war. Tens of thousands of women and girls have been raped since fighting broke out in 1998. Credit: Tineke D’haese/Oxfam
I wrote this yesterday:
…the explosive growth of the Internet over the last ten years took place, in large part, on the backs of a specific group of poor women of color. And most people who use the net are to at least a small degree complicit in those women’s suffering, which renders all online political purism somewhat ridiculous. I’ll explain in tomorrow’s post.
I was referring to this:
It had been no secret that nearly all sides in the Congo’s complex civil war resorted to systematic rape among civilian populations, and estimates were as high as a quarter million victims of sexual assault during the four-year-long conflict. But once fighting died down, victims began coming out of the jungles and forests and their condition was worse than anyone had imagined. Thousands of women had been raped so brutally that they had fistulas. They wandered into hospitals soaked in their own urine and feces, rendered incontinent by their injuries. “Pastors would say to me, ‘Jo, I can’t preach because the church is too smelly,” says Dr. Jo Lusi, a gynecologist and medical director at HEAL. (He and Lyn Lusi are husband and wife.) “No one wanted to be around them. These women were outcasts even more than rape victims usually are. They would say to me, ‘Dr. Jo, am I just a thing to throw away when I smell bad?’ “
What does the horrifying rape war in the Congo — still in progress, despite widespread reports to the contrary — have to do with Internet-based political purism? What, in fact, does it have to do with the Internet at all?
The answer: tantalum, a valuable metal which you are most likely using to read this blog.
From Flickr
The US is finally going to kindasortamaybe do its share and let in 7,000 refugees. This is a big gain of the 600-plus Iraqi refugees we have allowed in up until now, so I’d say we’ve solved the problem nicely.
Or maybe not. Since we invaded Iraq, 3.8 million Iraqis have been displaced and have fled. People can go on and on about how it was the "insurgents" or the "terrorists" who did it, but let’s face it–those "insurgents" and "terrorists" wouldn’t have gotten a chance to recruit and bomb and shoot people if we didn’t invade.
Not that this should be news to anyone who follows the research on these issues, but the UN has released a report on the state of the world’s children for 2007 and one of the big conclusions is that in order to improve the health of children, you must start with women’s rights. Chris Rock has a routine justifying the traditional spoils of male privilege—about how Dad is the leader and he works hard so he automatically gets the biggest piece of chicken—and that’s the sort of tradition that can be very damaging in families where there’s not enough food to go around. In fact, the UN report determines that the less empowered women are in their households, the higher the chance that the children living in those households will suffer from malnutrition.
Ampersand quoted the summary at the end of the 2nd chapter in the report (PDF here), and I think I’ll just imitate him here, because some of the statistics shocked me.
* A growing body of evidence indicates that household decisions are often made through a bargaining process that is more likely to favour men than women. Factors underlying women’s influence in decision-making processes include control of income and assets, age at marriage and level of education.
* According to data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, in only 10 out of the 30 developing countries surveyed did half or more of women participate in all household decisions, including those regarding major household spending, their own health care and their visits with friends or relatives outside the home.
* The consequences of women’s exclusion from household decisions can be as dire for children as they are for women themselves. According to a study conducted by the International Food Policy Research Institute, if men and women had equal influence in decision-making, the incidence of underweight children under three years old in South Asia would fall by up to 13 percentage points, resulting in 13.4 million fewer undernourished children in the region; in sub-Saharan Africa, an additional 1.7 million children would be adequately nourished.
* A woman’s empowerment within the household increases the likelihood that her children, particularly girls, will attend school. A UNICEF survey of selected countries across the developing world found that, on average, children with uneducated mothers are at least twice as likely to be out of school than children whose mothers attended primary school.
* Men play a vital role in promoting egalitarian decision-making. Through simple and direct strategies, such as sharing responsibility for household chores and childcare, men can help combat gender discrimination in households and communities.
* Women themselves are the most important catalysts for change. By challenging and defying discriminatory attitudes in their communities, women’s groups can advance the rights of girls and women for generations to come.
