Downlo

The real ‘welfare queens’

An important point:

If someone who works is still eligible for food stamps and government assistance – it’s really the employer who is federally subsidized. These “job creators” are taking advantage of government programs so they won’t have to cut into their profit margins to pay living wages.

Conservatives aren’t just defending Herman Cain. They’re denying the very existence of sexual harassment

Make no mistake about it, Republicans are misogynists as well as fantasists. Cain defenders have almost uniformly suggested that women are hysterics and liars who bring on false sexual harassment suits for fame and money:

Welcome to the era of gender harassment denialism. The harassment skeptics claim that harassment, like racism, used to exist but is now over. Twenty years ago, when charges were leveled at Clarence Thomas, supporters of the accused refused to take the accuser seriously. Now supporters of the accused refuse to take the accusation itself seriously. We have gone from not knowing what sexual harassment is to not believing it still happens. All in less than 20 years.

Remember, we don’t know what happened, beyond the fact that several employees came forward with complaints and received cash settlements. That’s not a lot of information. Cain defenders could have stopped there. Instead, great swaths of them have opted to assert that there could never be a valid sex discrimination claim because the whole thing is just a racket.

[…]

The real lies here are the claims of millions of frivolous suits in which jurors award liars with pots of money and television contracts. The legal standard for proving a hostile work environment is high and usually requires showing a pattern of bad behavior. If anything, experts say that the current system under-punishes as opposed to over-punishes, and that most victims of sexual harassment on the job will never come forward at all. As E.J. Graff puts it: “If she leaves and sues, she ruins her standing in her field. She rarely wins—studies show that judges overwhelmingly throw out sexual-harassment allegations on summary judgment, before the case ever goes to trial—unless the behavior is so egregious that even the company’s lawyers know that juries will be appalled.” Sex discrimination still runs rampant. Ian Millhiser cites a new University of Michigan study finding that “one in 10 women in the workplace will at some point be “promised promotion or better treatment if they [are] ‘sexually cooperative’ with a co-worker or supervisor.”

…Even more than the outright antagonism of so many conservative pundits, what’s worrying to me is the indifference of so many Republican voters:  New poll results show that 70 percent of Republicans say the sexual harassment scandal makes no difference in their vote. It’s no longer just a Republican war on women. It’s a war on the idea that any woman might ever tell the truth.

(Source: Slate)

It’s not just Mississippi

The Mississippi amendment alters the state’s Constitution so that “the term ‘person’ or ‘persons’ shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning, or the functional equivalent thereof.” Nearly identical language appears in three bills that have been endorsed by scores of Republicans in Congress, including top House committee chairmen Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) and Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).

Like the Mississippi measure, these bills, which are not constitutional amendments, would extend the rights of legal personhood—including equal protection under the law—to a zygote, the single cell formed when a human sperm fuses with an egg…

[…]

Like the Mississippi amendment, none of the personhood bills being considered in Congress contain any exemptions for victims of rape or incest.

[…]

Sixty-three House Republicans, or over a quarter of the GOP conference, are cosponsors of HR 212, Rep. Paul Broun’s (R-Ga.) “Sanctity of Human Life Act,” which includes language that directly parallels that of the Mississippi personhood amendment. That bill declares that “the life of each human being begins with fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent…at which time every human being shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” Five committee chairmen, including budget wunderkind Ryan, support the bill. “There is no greater protection that we as a government can give to protect human beings all the way from the time of fertilization until they have natural deaths,” Broun says.

Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R-Calif.) HR 374, an ever-so-slightly tweaked version that includes a clause that says it does not “require”(although it does allow) “the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child,” has even more cosponsors—91, including Bachmann (R-Minn.). Nearly 40 percent of House Republicans back this bill, which, like HR 212 and the Mississippi amendment, has language saying that “human persons” exist from “the moment of fertilization” or from any “other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”

In the Senate, Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has introduced S 91, a companion bill to HR 374. Wicker has said he hopes his bill will “settle this important life issue once and for all.” More than a quarter of Senate Republicans back the proposal.

(All emphasis mine)

Should these bills become law, not only would abortion—a constitutional right—be legally equivalent to murder, but so would the morning after pill/Plan B and intrauterine devices (IUDs). Indeed, even spontaneous abortions/miscarriages in the earliest stages of pregnancy could be criminally prosecutable if there’s evidence that the women in question were doing anything that might have contributed.

The redefinition of zygotes as legal ‘persons’ is a de facto redefinition of women as zygote-carriers. Republican lawmakers are trying to give more self-determination and protection rights to cells than to women. The GOP is anti-woman and pro-zygote—don’t ever forget that.

(Source: Mother Jones)

This land was made for you and me

I recently listened to an interesting segment by On The Media about the etymology of the word, “occupy”. It brought to mind a thought that has been percolating awhile: Public spaces like parks and streets are not really ‘ours’. We, the people, pay for their creation and maintenance, but we don’t actually own these places in the sense that you or I might own a piece of land. Public property is public only in the sense that it’s owned by the state.

On its face, this seems like a total ‘duh’ statement, but it’s actually kind of strange when you consider something like the Occupy Wall Street protests.

What I find endlessly fascinating about the Occupy movement is that its main action so far has been claiming and occupying public sites like parks and municipal buildings. In a way, it might be more accurate to describe the Occupiers’ actions as reclaiming places that are supposedly open to all of us. The Oakland Occupiers were pointing out, by their very presence, that their City Hall wasn’t a place for everyone. Or at least, not for the unemployed, the homeless, the young, the dark, the marginalized, the poorly dressed, and the non-conforming. They were highlighting the fact that very few of us are actually welcome in our seats of government.

That’s why I find the advice that Occupy protesters dress in business casual to be terribly misguided (and fishy, given some of the sources of this kind of advice). Of course well-dressed people with the appropriate licenses and permits, and the funds to buy these things, are welcome in public places. The lesson: you should look and behave exactly like the people who are oppressing you in order to be taken seriously. Of course.

Besides deploring the fashion sense of protesters, pundits and public officials have expressed concerns about keeping public sites like Zucotti Park orderly, clean, and sanitary—that is, lawful

The obsession with the aesthetics of the Occupy protests (in every respect) perhaps makes sense if you compare the (temporary) situation of protesters to homeless people. It’s a matter of course for the police to harass and evict homeless people who sleep or even just sit in parks, bus shelters, and sidewalks. Neither the Occupiers nor the homeless are using these public sites as, according to the law, they ought to be used. They are breaking the law simply by their presence. Parks are for approved recreational activities during sanctioned hours. Bus shelters are for travelers. Standing or sitting aimlessly on a sidewalk can get you a ticket for ‘loitering’. Living in any of these places is illegal.

If one views these facts through a vaguely Marxist filter (as one does), then the pro-capitalist intention behind these ordinances against misappropriating public spaces becomes clearer. Being obviously unemployed in public places is illegal. Being obviously poor in public places is unlawful. One is reminded of the Anatole France quote:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Tweak this a bit and the absurdity of official and police actions against the Occupy protests is stark:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep in parks in wintry conditions to protest pro-corporate government policies, and to be tear gassed and injured by the police while demonstrating against the undemocratic concentration of power in the economic elite.

The Occupy movement chose its name wisely. The protesters are occupying spaces that are public in name only. Living in Zucotti Park and other spaces supposedly intended for the public’s use—when they are actually spaces reserved for the (visibly) employed and non-impoverished—is a means of reclaiming these spaces for all of the people…not just business men on their lunchbreaks. The continuing occupation of these public sites without official permission is a symbolic rebuke of inegalitarian government policies that favor the few at the expense of the many.

Simply by being in places where they’re not supposed to be, the Occupy protesters are saying, “this land is our land”—a message that politicians, pundits, journalists, and the wealthy have forgotten. The United States of America is not their land; it’s our land.