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“Poverty and persecution should not be actively sought after, but they are the logical consequence of total struggle against the existing system.”
-Camilo Torres Restrepo, Message to Students
The Greenhorns is an organization that recruits, promotes and supports young farmers in America.
Their eponymous film is touring the country this summer. Find out more at their website!
Chart from Mother Jones
This image comes from the latest issue of Mother Jones, in the cover story All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup. After reading the article, I realized that I’ve been exploited by the “speedup” mentality, even in the non-profit sector.
In the non-profit world’s eagerness to emulate the business sector and “take lessons” from successful corporations, increasing violations of their workers’ rights are a given. At one human rights non-profit, I was hired as an “Administrative Assistant”, but quickly learned that I was expected to be the Operations Manager, Facilities Manager, Administrative Director, IT Specialist, Executive Assistant, and Servant to the various JDs and PhDs employed there. I was berated and called names when I couldn’t be all these things at once, and you should have seen the fireworks the day I suggested my workload was unreasonable.
At a second non-profit, this one assisting low-income women, within 6 months of my start date about 75% of the staff was fired or quit. Management had implemented the practice of firing anyone whose will they couldn’t break, then, instead of hiring someone to fill the position, dumping the entire workload on the lowest ranking employees and berating them if they couldn’t do twice the work in the same amount of time and for the same pay. As you can imagine, morale was dismal.
This Mother Jones article is a great reminder: it’s not just me! (or you!) Here are some interesting tidbits from the article:
Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans.
The differential isn’t solely accounted for by longer hours, of course—worldwide, almost everyone except us has, at least on paper, a right to weekends off, paid vacation time (PDF), and paid maternity leave. (The only other countries that don’t mandate paid time off for new moms are Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, and Swaziland.
For 90 percent of American workers, incomes have stagnated or fallen for the past three decades, while they’ve ballooned at the top, and exploded at the very tippy-top: By 2008, the wealthiest 0.1 percent were making 6.4 times as much as they did in 1980 (adjusted for inflation). And just to further fuel your outrage, that 22 percent increase in profits? Most of it accrued to a single industry: finance.
“We had to put in a lot of pressure to have the third gender counted in the census,” said gender minority rights activist Sunil Babu Pant.
“It was only after we said that we would go to court that the officials agreed to include the third gender as a category.”
If the case had gone to court, it would likely have been upheld thanks to a landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling that directed the state to end discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and decriminalize “unnatural sex.”
It also decreed the issue of citizenship certificates that clearly indicate an individual’s choice of gender identity.
…Among those happy to stand up and be counted in the third gender category is Dilu Buduja, 35. “I was born as a girl, but as I grew up I felt I was a boy. Today I totally feel like a man,” he said.
So I’m not entirely clear on who claims third gender status. Do people who are assigned one gender at birth but later realize they are a different gender (what Westerners would call trans people) consider themselves third gender? Do LGB people also consider themselves third gender? So many questions…
Kathmandu Pride!
If you live in the Tampa area, and you are thinking about making a trip to the doctor soon, you best look out for this guy:
From CBS Miami:
Would you want a convicted rapist as your doctor? In Florida, that’s apparently OK, according the the Florida Board of Medicine, which voted Friday to allow a doctor who raped a co-worker to return to medical practice. The board decided being a rapist had nothing to do with being a good doctor.
The board, meeting in Ft. Lauderdale, made the decision in the case of Tampa doctor Mark Seldes a former Air Force flight surgeon who was serving in South Korea when he was accused of raping a civilian co-worker. He was convicted in a military court-martial in 2008, served 3 years in prison, and was dismissed from the service for rape and adultery. He was also forced to be registered as a sex offender, and appears in the Florida Sex Offender Registry.
The person he raped was sedated due to medication when the crime occurred. Clearly, a scenario that would never occur in the medical profession, and therefore the board’s decision that “being a rapist had nothing to do with being a good doctor” is obviously reasonable, and justifies the Florida Board of Medicine’s 7-3 vote to allow him to practice.
The state agreed not to put him on formal probation, after Seldes argued that probation might make it hard for him to get a job in the future.
Yeah, wouldn’t it be a terrible injustice if this rapist’s reputation were tarnished by formal probation? It’s best not to trouble this fine gentleman any further.
White & class privilege much? Just saying.
Via Shakesville.
48% of college-educated gay workers are closeted in the US. Now, why might that be?
It’s not the corporate policies that keep workers from coming out at work – it’s the attitudes of their co-workers.
According to the study, 37% of straight women and 52% of straight men say that they prefer gay people keep their personal lives to themselves, and 29 states do not prohibit employers from discriminating against LGBT workers.
Huh- homophobia. Whodathunkit?
Between 1920 and 1970, the United States government forcibly sterilized 60,000 Americans because they were poor and/or people of color. The justification was that there would be future savings for welfare programs.
Elaine Riddick was 14 years old when she was raped. When she gave birth 9 months later, the government labeled her “promiscuous” and “feeble-minded” and had her sterilized.
Elaine Riddick speaks out.
From WCTV:
When Elaine Riddick gave birth to her son 43 years ago, doctors sterilized her on orders from the State of North Carolina.
“They cut me open like I was a hog,” says Elaine Riddick, a sterilization victim.
Riddick was only 14 at the time, a victim of rape. She didn’t realize until years later, when she was married, that she would never again have children. The state had deemed her too feeble-minded to have them.
“I am not feeble minded, I have never been feeble minded,” Riddick says.
…”The people who were the focus of this movement were the dispossessed of society, the poor, common criminals and in some cases, simply people of color,” says Paul Lombardo, Georgia State University.
It seems like somebody knew what they were doing was probably wrong…
Most of the sterilization laws, including North Carolina’s, were written to give states immunity from lawsuits.
-From CBS
LAND OF THE FREE HOME OF THE BRAVE!!!
“Some would blame our current problems on an organized conspiracy. I wish it were so simple. Members of a conspiracy can be rooted out and brought to justice. This system, however, is fueled by something far more dangerous than conspiracy. It is driven not by a small band of men but by a concept that has become accepted as gospel: the idea that all economic growth benefits humankind and that the greater the growth, the more widespread the benefits. This belief also had a corollary: that those people who excel at stoking the fires of economic growth should be exalted and rewarded, while those born at the fringes are available for exploitation.”
-John Perkins, in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004
“America was founded very early on the basic premise that he who is poor deserves to be poor; he who is rich is entitled to the fruit of his power.”
-John Gerassi, Violence, Revolution, and Structural Change in Latin America, 1969
Data compiled by the US Department of Labor indicates that the share of income taken home by workers is looking pretty pathetic:
More discussion here.
From The Statesman, by Ann Daly:
A woman graduating with a bachelor’s degree last year earned a median starting salary of $36,451. For a man, it was $44,159. When you calculate a lifetime of percentage raises and compound interest, that nearly $8,000 difference is staggering.
As demoralizing as the findings of “Gender and College Recruiting” might be for this year’s female grads, its implications for future generations of women in the workplace are downright alarming. NACE’s analysis, which painstakingly isolates a systematic gender effect by taking into account the differential salary levels among majors and then comparing salaries within the same major, gives lie to the conventional wisdom that paycheck parity will somehow materialize for women with the mere passage of time.
“The war on drugs functions like the new Jim Crow trapping an increasing population of black people in a permanent under caste.”
-Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow
The 40th anniversary of the War on Drugs is June 17th. Earlier this month, the Global Commission on Drug Policy issued a report stating that the War on Drugs has failed.
But informed observers have noted this for a long time. So why do we keep this “war” going? Why do we fund it?
Read this insightful commentary on Jack & Jill Politics: Our Most Successful War……… on Black People .
From that article:
If you believe as I do that the “war on drugs” has less to do with combatting drug use than it does with maintaining the ability to subjugate and marginalize black people, then the drug war has actually been one of the U.S. government’s most successful wars to date. It’s been successful in restoring a significant percentage of the black population to a condition of penal servitude; it’s been successful in increasing the rate of black on black violence (particularly among young men); it’s been successful in destroying countless families ravaged by addiction, incarceration, child welfare policies and homelessness; it’s been successful in maintaining high risk for drug-related HIV infection in black and Latino communities; it’s been successful in reducing the political power of black communities by disenfranchising millions of potential voters for felony drug convictions but most significantly it’s been successful in creating a wedge between the black middle class and the black poor.
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