labor day

for the Old Mole

Today is Labor Day. Most nations celebrate Labor day on May first, to commemorate the eight hour work day and the Haymarket riot, while we in the US celebrate instead the less radical date associated with outdoor barbecue and the end of white shoe season.

But this Labor Day, I’m thinking about Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, set in a future American theocracy in which declining fertility has led to assigning still-fertile women the role of designated breeders, or handmaids. Along with dystopian controls on women’s roles and bodies, the novel’s regime features the rewriting of history. “Yesterday was July the Fourth,” the narrator recalls at one point, “which used to be Independence day, before they abolished it. September the first will be Labor Day, they still have that. Though it didn’t used to have anything to do with mothers.”

Of course it’s true that mothering is work even if it isn’t waged, and parenting is labor even if one doesn’t give birth.

But still. It is, after all, only one of the many forms of human labor.

I’m thinking about The Handmaid’s Tale in part because on August 22, the department of Health and Human Services proposed a regulation that would allow health care providers not only to refuse to provide abortion – as they are already permitted to do under existing federal employment law—but would further allow those health care providers not to refer a patient to another provider but simply to withhold information about available options. Moreover, because the regulation leaves the definition of “abortion” to providers, it is vulnerable to the mislabelling that has allowed some anti-choice activists to describe IUDs, Plan B Emergency contraception, and even birth control pills as forms of “abortion.”

HHS is accepting public comment on the regulation through September 25, and the Planned Parenthood website has a link that makes it easy to submit your responses.

Two years ago in Salon dot com, Priya Jain reported on the growing anti-contraception movement. She quotes Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, who notes, "When you peel back the layers of the anti-choice motivation, it always comes back to two things: What is the nature and purpose of human sexuality? And second, what is the role of women in the world?" Sex and the role of women are inextricably linked, because "if you can separate sex from procreation, you have given women the ability to participate in society on an equal basis with men."

Cristina Page, vice president of the Institute for Reproductive Health Access at NARAL Pro-Choice New York, notes that the anti-choice movement has succeeded in pushing legislation that, though seemingly unrelated to contraception, helps support its cause. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures , at least 19 states have fetal homicide laws that apply to "'any state of gestation,' 'conception,' 'fertilization' or post-fertilization" -- meaning that one can be convicted of manslaughter or murder for destroying a fertilized egg, even if it hasn't implanted itself in a woman's uterus.

Page says she has noticed, too, that some anti-choice groups tend not only to oppose birth control, they also oppose child care. In her book, "How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex," she points to some troubling statistics and anecdotes: “Ninety percent of senators who opposed the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act are anti-choice; in the 2004 Children's Defense Fund ranking of the legislators best and worst for children, the 113 worst senators and Congress members are all anti-choice; Web sites like Lifesite and that of theIllinois Right to Life Committee post reports linking child care and aggression; Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America stress the damage that day care can have on a child. (Most of their information comes from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Early Child Care Report, which has been debunked again and again and again.) "The trifecta is ban contraception, ban abortion, make child care impossible," says Page.”

Frances Kissling, of Catholics for Free Choice, agrees that the ultimate message is that "mommy should stay home and take care of the kiddies. This is bound up in this notion of men at the head of a family, of women's identity as linked to their biological capacity, that men and women are complementary and different, that a woman's primary function is motherhood."

Keeping women at home as caretakers fits with the neoliberal elimination of public sector social supports for families, as the authors of the Beyond Marriage statement have observed: “the Right has mounted a long-term strategic battle to dismantle all public service and benefit programs and civic values that were established beginning in the 1930s, initially as a response to widening poverty and the Great Depression. The push to privatize Social Security and many other human needs benefits, programs, and resources that serve as lifelines for many . . . is at the center of this attack. In fact, all but the most privileged households and families are in jeopardy as a result of a wholesale right-wing assault on funding for human needs, including Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, HIV-AIDS research and treatment, public education, affordable housing, and more.”

In fairness, not all anti-choice groups seem to oppose child care. Feminists for Life, a group that has gotten some public attention since one of its members became the Republican nominee for Vice President, claims that young women should have the right to bear a child and have access to high-quality, affordable child care. While no feminist would be likely to disagree with that point, Ruth Rosen reports that Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life, is “vague and evasive” about what excatly the group does to promote access to child care. Rosen notes that Foster speaks “as though she had invented the idea of child care and describes pioneer feminists of the 1960s and 1970s as selfish, diabolical creatures who never wanted women to have the choice to bear a child.” But—Rosen points out-- she's wrong. “The three demands made at the first national march in New York City in 1970 included child care, equal pay for equal work and the legal right to have an abortion. Many feminists, moreover, spent years trying to persuade the institutions where they worked that real equality for women required family-friendly policies, including child care.”

Rather than follow the path of Serrin Foster or The Handmaid’s Tale, we should remember our history. Making contraception and abortion illegal will not mean the end of abortion, any more than abstinence education actually results in abstinence.

Earlier this summer, a retired ob-gyn wrote in the New York Times about his experience, in the days before Roe versus Wade, of treating women who had had illegal abortions or tried to self abort. He concludes, “it is important to remember that Roe v. Wade did not mean that abortions could be performed. They have always been done, dating from ancient Greek days. What Roe said was that ending a pregnancy could be carried out by medical personnel, in a medically accepted setting, thus conferring on women, finally, the full rights of first-class citizens — and freeing their doctors to treat them as such."

naming rights

Doesn't it give anyone the creeps that the DNC was at Pepsi Center and INVESCO Field ?

I hate that the civic stadium is PGE Park .

Get Your War On: The Watch List

http://www.236.com/video/2008/get_your_war_on_the_watch_list_1_8056.php

"utopia"

via

wall-e

For The Old Mole, we review WALL-E, the latest Pixar animation, also brought to us by Disney.
The title character is a lonely trash compactor, a Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth-class—the last operating robot on a desolate planet Earth, with mountains of garbage to compact—and to collect. In the 700 years since humans left, our solar-powered hero has developed a personality and a fondness for human detritus, including an old tape of the musical Hello, Dolly!, which he watches over & over. His isolation ends when another robot shows up—EVE is an Earth Vegetation Evaluator, sleek and powerful. Her directive is to seek plant life, and when she finds some, she goes into hibernation until she’s picked up by her space shuttle. WALL-E protects her from the weather while she’s in stasis and follows her back to the enormous cruise liner the Axiom, where humans have been getting fatter and lazier for the last 700 years. The plant life is supposed to be a signal that it’s now safe to return to earth, but this plan is temporarily interrupted by the ship’s autopilot. Everything is still owned and run by the Buy-N-Large Corporation, whose last president on Earth had despaired of ever rehabilitating the planet, and so had secretly ordered ships not to come back. But WALL-E, EVE, the captain, a group of malfunctioning robots, and a couple of humans -knocked out of their floating deck chairs and away from their personal video screens - all work together through a slapstick chase to save the plant and return to the planet.

The film has gotten almost uniformly positive reviews—8.9 out of 10 at the internet movie database, 94 from metacritic, 97% positive at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s also been criticized from the right for its purported environmentalism, and from further left for its hypocrisy; it's also been criticized for vilifying fat people and blaming them for the global overconsumption of planetary resources.

We look at it in relation to commodity fetishism.

on the relation between queer and immigrant movements

Certainly both groups have faced legislative attacks. Richard Fricker on Consortium News is only one of several recent writers to note what he calls a “surge of theocracy tinged with white racialism,” which he sees in a series of recent measures in Oklahoma.

But of course it’s not just Oklahoma.

In the last ten years, twenty seven states have held popular votes putting in place bans on same sex marriage, domestic partnership, or both. One of those in 2004 was Oregon’s Measure 36, recently upheld by the Marion County Court of Appeals. This year, Measures 144 and 145 would, if qualified and passed, repeal Oregon’s domestic partnership legislation and remove sexual orientation from the list of grounds on which it is illegal to discriminate.

Oregon is also participating in the wave of anti-immigrant legislation. Ballot Measure 112, if qualified and approved, tighten immigration enforcement and entail tighter cooperation between local law enforcement and the federal bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, I-C-E, or ICE. Abid Aslam reports for InterPress Service that more than 1,400 initiatives targeting immigrants have been introduced at state and local levels in the last year, compared to 1,300 in the past 10 years, and Hate crimes against Latin Americans have risen by 35 percent over the past four years.

We’ve also recently seen a surge of ICE raids targeting workers, including the one in Iowa last month that netted nearly 400 people—but has not resulted in any charges for their employers Immigration proceedings are up nearly 150 percent in the last 5 years, and in 2007 alone, more than 276,912 US residents were deported. Community groups have noted that raids appear speculative and that many of those arrested have turned out to be victims of mistaken identity or have been released for various reasons—although not before being photographed, fingerprinted, interviewed, and generally harassed. A recent edition of KBOO’s Friday radiozine featured an interview with Eric Ward of the Center for New Community , who noted that the groups targeting immigrants now have a larger anti-progressive agenda. In particular, debates on immigration are coded debates about race.

The current issue of Monthly Review includes more about that point in an essay from César Hernández titled “No Human Being Is Illegal: Moving Beyond Deportation Law.” As he puts it,

The border and the Border Patrol are children of the same xenophobia, justified by the pseudoscience of eugenics. In 1882 Congress responded to widespread hostility to Chinese immigrants by enacting the first law that effectively excluded all members of a particular nationality from the United States. By 1911 eugenics had gained so much support within policy-making circles that the Senate’s Dillingham Commission concluded that the country would be debased unless migration from southern and eastern Europe—mainly Italians, Jews, and Poles—was substantially curtailed. … In 1924, the federal government created the Border Patrol—the predecessor of today’s ICE and its cousin along the border, the Customs and Border Protection Agency…. Historically, immigration law has been used as a mechanism of social control…. According to what’s known as the plenary powers doctrine, immigration law and deportation procedures are quasi-judicial. Immigration courts and judges are part of the Executive Office of Immigration Review; they are not part of the federal court system. More fundamentally, immigration law lacks basic procedures commonly associated with judicial proceedings. Most notable among these are a lack of due process protections, a lack of protection against dispensation of disproportionate punishments for an illegal act, and a lack of legal representation in immigration proceedings…..The bifurcated regime that identifies some immigrants as “legal” necessarily designates others as “illegal.” These “illegal” residents become the perfect scapegoats for xenophobes who have converted them into criminals in the popular consciousness.

Moreover, just as the legal/illegal distinction is invidious, so too the citizen/noncitizen distinction breaks down when it comes to ICE raids. Jacqueline Stevens in latest issue of the Nation Magazine estimates that since 2004 ICE has held between 3,500 and 10,000 US citizens in detention facilities and deported about half of those. She writes, “US citizens are a small percentage of ICE detentions for this period, which totaled around 1 million, but in absolute terms the figure is staggering.” Indeed. Some 5,000 US citizens deported, some of them native-born, some of them mentally ill, none of them accorded due process.

And probably, some of them queer.

Kerry Eleveld noted a couple of years ago in the New York Blade that LGBT rights and immigrant rights have several practical points of convergence beyond disenfranchisement. For instance, U.S. immigration policy essentially bars HIV-positive individuals from getting a green card or even a temporary visa unless they meet very strict criteria for a waiver. And Detention is particularly harsh for LGBTQ and HIV positive detainees. Rape, harassment, abuse, and denial of HIV treatment/hormone therapy are some of the routine forms of hardship that LGBTQ people face in detention.

Also, since LGBT immigrants cannot legally marry their partners, they do not have a path to legalization afforded to straight couples. One proposed remedy for that disparity would be the Uniting American Families Act. But as Yasmin Nair has noted, “if we queers are really concerned about immigration, we need to stand with Immigration Rights activists and consider reform for the long term and for all. This means being critical of the rhetoric of “family reunification,” which privileges family and erases issues of labor. Consider the story about workers who're denied legally mandated medical coverage by bosses who exploit their fears of deportation. Consider asking your favorite gay advocacy group: How will you advocate for change even if and after the Uniting American Families Act gets passed? We need to work on reform that matters to all of us, not just because it validates gay bodies and relationships.”

Two years ago, the group Queers for Economic Justice, issued a Vision Statement on Queers and Immigration, noting that

Two of the most divisive issues in the United States today are those concerning Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer rights and immigration. There is little discussion of how immigration is also an issue for queer people, and even less analysis of the structural similarities between queer and immigrant struggles. Queer immigrants are marginalized or invisible at the intersection of two identities. As a whole, more complex family structures—such as those of binational same-sex couples and extended families—are completely absent from the larger struggle for immigration reform. The immigrant advocacy movement places undue emphasis on heteronormative relationships and conceptions of normality in an effort to gain basic citizenship rights. The mainstream LGBTQ rights movement tends to focus on those immigrants who are partners of US citizens. This leaves out the predicament of, for instance, single people and/or those who do not define themselves within conventional relationships like marriage or conjugality. Both movements are depriving themselves of the power and strategic insights that LGBTQ immigrants can provide. We call for an end to the stigmatization of queer individuals, the recognition of our varied, unique, and flexible kinship networks, the end of the restrictive and dangerous criminalization of migrant and queer communities, and an immigration reform package that puts progressive labor reforms into practice.

As César Hernández puts it, the left’s ultimate goal should be to replace the current model of immigration control with a radically different model premised on the inherent right to travel and thrive, even across borders. This June, as we celebrate Pride month, and the resilience, resistance, and persisting presence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and other generally queer folks, we can remember Yasmin Nair’s point that our interest lies in dismantling the status quo, changing the paradigms, and asking for a more complex but more just world.

for The Old Mole

mother's day for peace

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and by some counts it was the one-hundredth anniversary of Mother’s Day in the US . In 1870, social activist Julia Ward Howe wrote her Mother's Day Proclamation as a call for peace and disarmament, a call to unite women to organize against war.

One of Howe’s inspriations was Ann Jarvis, a young Appalachian homemaker who, starting in 1858, had attempted to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for better sanitary conditions for both sides, and in 1868 she began work to reconcile Union and Confederate neighbors. When Jarvis died in 1907, her daughter started the crusade to found a memorial day for women. The first such Mother's Day was celebrated in 1908. From there, the custom caught on, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national Mother's Day, as a day for American citizens to show the flag in honor of those mothers whose sons had died in war.

Ironically, then, a holiday first intended to promote peace and reconciliation was turned instead to support nationalism and militarism.

But activists with Code Pink have revived Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation , and call for a reclaiming of Mother’s Day.

Maybe the Congress heard about this move, since last week a majority of House Republicans voted against a resolution in support of Mother’s Day, leading the Washington Post to run a headline reading "Republicans vote against moms; no word yet on puppies, kittens."

Anyway, Code Pink Portland held a rally yesterday, and the Code Pink website has a petition you can sign, asking Nancy Pelosi and the rest of Congress to put our money where their mouths aren’t, and to fund refugee support instead of the continuing Iraq war, which has created so many refugees, most of whom are women. More than 70 percent of the four million people forced out of their homes in the past five years in Iraq have been women and children.

Many observers, including  Nadje Al-Ali, have noted that, as she puts it, Iraq's women have become the biggest losers in the post-invasion disaster. Women in Iraq have been particularly hard-hit by poverty, malnutrition, lack of health services and a crumbling infrastructure. The lack of clean water, electricity, and vaccination services has led to a marked increase in the mortality of children under 5 in Iraq.  As in the humanitarian crisis during the sanctions period, women suffer particularly as they are often the last ones to eat after feeding their children and husbands. They often watch powerlessly as their sick and malnourished children do not obtain adequate health care.

But women in Iraq have also been working together to respond to the disaster. There has been a flourishing of locally based women’s initiatives and groups, mainly revolving around practical needs related to widespread poverty, lack of adequate health care, lack of housing, and lack of proper social services provided by the state. Women have also pooled their resources to help address the need for education and training, as well as income generating projects The organization MADRE recently released a tribute to some of the activists they’ve been working with around the world, including Yanar Mohammad, founder of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI). Yanar has dedicated herself to meeting the needs of Iraqi women and families suffering as a result of the US invasion and the rising religious extremism it has unleashed. Together with MADRE, OWFI has founded a network of women’s shelters in Iraq. In addition, OWFI’s Freedom Space project brings together young poets and artists of varying religious and ethnic backgrounds to create art and express their hopes for a peaceful Iraq where human rights are cherished.

But today, of course, women are not just the casualties of war, and not just the mothers and wives and daughters of soldiers, they are also soldiers themselves, comprising 15% of US military enlisted personnel. As Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib revelations, in light of what we know today, no one can think that the mere presence of women in the military will make it more humane; "a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience; menstrual periods are not the foundation of morality."

But some of the women who have been in the military have, like some of the men who have been soldiers, have also begun working for peace. Women like Eli PaintedCrow, a founder of the Service Women’s Action Network, a group of women veterans who have gathered to heal from the trauma of military service and war, to document their stories and to support their transformation from soldiers to peacemakers. They also work with the Women of Color Resource Center, which has a curriculum of peacegames for community education--some of which is available free on their website, including information on military recruiting and its targeting of women and of men of color.

Bad as things are for the women under occupation and who have lost loved ones in the current wars, things aren’t so great for the women in the US military, either. Representative Jane Harman of California, citing a recent Department of Defense report, has noted that women in the military in Iraq are “more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire,” though some of those who are raped are apparently also murdered by fellow soldiers . Moreover, if any of those rapes lead to pregnancy, the women have limited recourse, since military hospitals will not perform abortions. A recent federal court ruling allows women employed by defense contractor Halliburton/KBR to bring charages for sexual assaults by their coworkers, despite having signed a contract that Halliburton/KBR argued would have submitted such claims to binding arbitration rather than criminal trial.

But we cannot rely only on the legal system to make the world safe for mothers or people who have mothers. Let us, as Julia Ward Howe declared,

take counsel with each other as to the means

Whereby the great human family can live in peace...

To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,

The amicable settlement of international questions,

The great and general interests of peace.