Divide and Conquer: 350 Apologists

June 10, 2016

by Jay Taber

2011: Tom Goldtooth, Executive Director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Canadian author, Naomi Klein. Photo by Josh Lopez.

As I wrote in my op-ed Degrees of Evil: Savoring the Nuances of Co-optation, spectacle celebrities like Naomi Klein count on infantile consumers to maintain their activist credentials. As a board member of 350–funded by Rockefeller Brothers Fund and TIDES Foundation (Warren Buffett, et al)–Klein and her cohort Bill McKibben are in bed with CERES and Goldman Sachs. Yet, despite this blatantly obvious hypocrisy by the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of Climate Evangelism, the myth of 350 as a ‘grassroots’ organization persists.

This myth might be an amusing entertainment, were it not for the fact that 350 is complicit with Wall Street in Hijacking the Environmental Movement, and guilty as Agent Saboteur of the World Peoples Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth.

So it is disappointing, but not surprising, when people like Tom Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN)–funded by TIDES–perpetuate the myth of 350 as a small organization responsive to indigenous interests. While IEN has done some good things, they nevertheless know where their bread is buttered, and this leads them to speak half truths–which amount to whole lies. The Goldtooth interview Divide and Conquer, while enlightening about REDD, also serves as a warning about the insidious corruption of Wall Street-funded NGOs–IEN included.

[Jay Thomas Taber is an associate scholar of the Center for World Indigenous Studies and a contributing editor of Fourth World Journal. Since 1994, he has served as communications director at Public Good Project, a volunteer network of researchers, analysts and journalists defending democracy. As a consultant, he has assisted Indigenous peoples in the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations.]

Jun 09

2016

newWKOGadnim

350.org / 1Sky, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Foundations, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Rockefeller Foundation

350.org Break Free Campaign Buffett Conditioning Gates McKibben Rockefeller

Shearing Sheep

Endurance

May 29, 2016

by Jay Taber

A trial of the new automatic sheep shearing machine at the government’s agricultural experimenting station at Beltsville, Maryland, circa 1927. Getty Images.

When in Ireland, I witnessed a sheep farmer and his Border Collies herding sheep into an enclosure. Using whistle commands, the farmer instructed the Collies on which way to turn the sheep, when to bunch them, and when to move them into the pen.

I was reminded of this witnessing the Break Free ‘fossil-free’ campaign events, May 14-16. Assuming the role of the sheep farmer, 350 (led by Bill McKibben) blew the whistle commands, while Break Free organizers barked at environmental activists (the sheep)–herding them into protest encampments at oil refineries.

It was astonishing to witness such precision in action. Of course, this entertaining choreography would never have taken place without the enticement of a payoff for McKibben and his herders from the ‘wool merchants’, i.e. Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and the Rockefeller Brothers.

1948 — a sheepherding demonstration at the Rockefeller Center

Now, all that remains is the sheep shearing by on-the-take politicians–the wool taking the form of U.S. Treasury funds for nuclear-powered electrical generating stations, along with large scale solar and wind turbine farms, using highly toxic chemicals from the oil industry in their manufacture.

Now that’s an efficient, vertically-integrated operation.

Jun 09

2016

newWKOGadnim

Foundations, The Occupation of Haiti, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Clintons Haiti Pew Charitable Trusts USAID

The Clintons Do Haiti: Keep the Natives From Breeding

Counterpunch

March 15, 2016

by Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn

Anthony Correia / Shutterstock.com

Cut through all of Hillary Clinton’s reassuring lingo about “empowering women” and consider the realities of Clintonian population policy in Haiti.

As revealed in an internal U.S. Agency for International Development report, the fundamental goal of the American government is to keep the natives from breeding.

The June, 1993, document (unearthed by Ken Silverstein in CounterPunch) states policy “targets” for Haiti baldly: to obtain 200,000 new “acceptors” of contraception; a “social marketing component” target of “6,000 cycles of pills/month,” and the establishment of 23 facilities to provide sterilizations–soothingly referred to as “voluntary surgical contraception,” a goal that has been exceeded.

There is no mention of any “targets” with regard to women’s health.

The cynicism of the “empowerment” rhetoric is also apparent in the memo’s main recommendation, the “demedicalization or liberalization of service delivery.” The agency suggests “elimination of the practice of requiring physician visits” before doling out hormonal methods.

In plainer English, this means that AID feels that doctors in Haiti need not waste time with pelvic exams or pap smears; just get the “acceptors” on stream with the hormonal method of choice.

A Brooklyn-based Haitian women’s group, Women of Koalisyon, published a pamphlet detailing abuses at clinics in Haiti funded by AID.

Local clinics offered food and money to encourage sterilization. “Acceptors” were promised that vasectomies were not only reversible, but would help prevent AIDS. Women were offered clothing in exchange for agreeing to use Norplant (the five-year contraceptive implant), which led to a host of problems including constant bleeding, headaches, dizziness, nausea, radical weight loss, depression and fatigue. Demands that the Norplant rods be taken out were obstructed.

Such brute realities of population control are rarely mentioned in the United States, where reports from the U.N. population conference in Cairo have depicted a clash between libertarian respect for individual choice and the medieval tyranny of the Catholic or Muslim clergy. The Clinton Administration is not the first to flaunt its concern for individual rights where such issues are concerned. Back in 1974, in Nixon’s White House, Henry Kissinger commissioned National Security Study Memorandum 200, which addressed population issues.

Prefiguring the current “empowerment” shoe polish, Kissinger stressed that the United States should “help minimize charges of imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly the number and spacing of children.”

But the true concern of Kissinger’s analysts was maintenance of U.S. access to Third World resources. They worried that the “political consequences” of population growth could produce internal instability in nations “in whose advancement the United States is interested.” With famine and food riots and the breakdown of social order in such countries, “the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized.”

The authors of the report noted laconically that the United States, with 6% of the world’s population, used about a third of its resources. Curbs on Third World population would ensure that local consumption would not increase, and possibly affect availability of Third World resources. As a natural extension of this logic, the report favored sterilization over food aid.

By 1977, Reimert Ravenholt, the director of AID’s population program, was saying that his agency’s goal was to sterilize one-quarter of the world’s women. The gearing between Third World fecundity and First World prosperity is still a core policy theme. The immensely wealthy Pew Charitable Trusts–a cluster of foundations with an abiding interest in population control, recently issued a report that stated frankly: “The average American’s interest in maintaining high standards of living has been a prime motivator for U.S. population policy from its earliest formation and it is likely that this will continue for the foreseeable future.”

[Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His new book is Killing Trayvons: an Anthology of American Violence (with JoAnn Wypijewski and Kevin Alexander Gray). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. Alexander Cockburn’s Guillotined! and A Colossal Wreck are available from CounterPunch.]

Jun 09

2016

newWKOGadnim

Foundations, Non-Profit Industrial Complex, The Occupation of Haiti, Whiteness & Aversive Racism

Aversive Racism Haiti White Saviour Industrial Complex

FLASHBACK TO 2015: The Star Studded White Savior Industrial Complex in Haiti

The Feminist Wire

March 11, 2015

by Natalia Cardona

Patricia Arquette’s recent remarks during the Oscars made for strong debate among feminists of color and white feminists in the U.S. Arquette stated that women, in this case white women, helped gays and people of color in the U.S. in their struggles for their human rights, and that now it was their turn to help women [read: white women] achieve wage equality. The remarks spurred much anger and questioning of her white privilege. That same dynamic occurred when Sean Penn stood up to present the Academy Award for Best Picture to “Birdman” director Alejandro González Iñárritu and said, “Who gave this sonofabitch a green card?” The sentiment, widely shared on twitter by Latin Americans in the U.S., was that the Oscars proved that even when Latin Americans win the highest honor, someone will without a doubt ask for your papers.

For me, the question also became about what happens when people like Arquette and Penn take their white privilege into developing countries like Haiti, placing themselves in the role of white savior. Because what seems to have been overshadowed by both of their highly insensitive remarks about the gay community, communities of color in the United States, and immigrants is that both of these personalities believe themselves to be supporting Haiti’s sustainable development.

What does it mean when people who don’t recognize their white privilege or racist actions—Arquette recently dressed as a stereotypical “Chola” for Halloween and Penn never apologized for his remarks at the Oscars in fact he stated he “didn’t give a f*ck about all of this.”—go abroad to “help” Brown and Black people through development projects?

My Chola Costume- Sad Girl O.G Gower Street pic.twitter.com/vEHoUXSWiC

— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) January 11, 2014

Arquette’s commentary promotes the idea that the U.S. is a post-racial, post homophobic society with a civil rights movement that has achieved full equality for people of color and a gay rights movement that has secured gains for LGBTQ communities in all fifty states. These assertions are expressed in a country where 64,000 African American women are missing and where every week so far this year, one transgendered woman, most of whom are women of color, has been killed because of who they are. While Penn’s remarks were dismissed by Iñárritu as “hilarious,” many of us who are considered Latin Americans did not find them so funny. For us, it was another humiliation and a reminder that racism and white privilege are the forefront of some of the toughest challenges for Brown and Black freedom and true equality.

Don’t talk to me about privilege. As a kid I lived well below the poverty line. No matter where I am I won’t forget women’s struggle.

— Patricia Arquette (@PattyArquette) February 24, 2015

Given that Arquette doesn’t understand how she could possibly be White, a woman, poor, and still be privileged, I politely direct her to Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 article “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” Penn should know better given his liberal activist persona, but what kind of expectations can one have of a man who was charged with domestic assault and pleaded to a misdemeanor? Yes, these are the type of people that find it quite easy to go to developing countries, develop reputations as “do-gooders,” and become the epitome of white saviors without any question as to their backgrounds or even whether their skills are fit for the job. Whereas, Haitians who set the example for all Latin American nations by being the first to overthrow colonialism and ban slavery outright are constantly being viewed through a white gaze that has sought to entrench the prejudice that they are not capable of handling their own development and freedom. What does it mean when Arquette and Penn export this narrow and ahistorical view of the world to Haiti and other places in the Global South?

Arquette and Penn’s comments immediately reminded me of Teju Cole’s assessment of the industrial White savior complex and its impact on development policies that focus on people of color both at home, here in the U.S., and abroad. Cole has said that the “white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.” Sounds familiar?

The White savior industrial complex, according to Cole, plays an important role in the current system of global pillage. It provides a safety valve for unbearable conditions created by foreign imperialists in places like Haiti. In this context Arquette and Penn, as well as other white personalities, play an important role in sustaining that very oppressive system. The challenge for these white saviors, according to Cole, is in thinking beyond their prime objective of doing good and feeling good. These celebrities don’t see or don’t want to see the machinations of power behind extreme situations like those in Haiti. The role colonial powers like France, U.S. foreign policy, and non-governmental organizations play in undermining Haiti’s independence scape these White “saviors” because as Cole has already stated this industrial complex “is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

When I look at Arquette’s charity, Give Love, through this White savior lens and as part of an industrial complex I cannot help but challenge its role in Haiti. Arquette’s organization claims to support “Community-led sanitation projects to improve public health & create jobs around recycling,” but upon closer inspection of its website, it’s extremely difficult to identify how, in fact, communities in Haiti are leading these projects. If she is really trying to “help” people in Haiti, doesn’t it behoove her to ask Haitians if and how they want help and ensure Haitians themselves are leading the changes they want to see? When organizations like Give Love only pay lip service to community leadership they dismiss the autonomy, dignity, and self-respect of the very people they are claiming to help. If you ask Penn about his charity the first thing he will spout out and that is very evident in his website is that he hires mostly Haitians. Good for him! But hiring Haitians to implement your vision and that of others with privilege only perpetuates prejudices and reinforces the oppressive system that Haitians have been trying to fight off for centuries. In fact, Penn went from being a do-gooder whose ambitions may cause more harm than good to being a political operative when he asserted that the current president of Haiti, Michel Martelly, had transitioned to his post democratically and peacefully and then proceeded to dismiss the thousands of Haitians that regularly protest Martelly’s presidency and call for his resignation. Because as former Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive put it: “the line between intrusion, support and aid is very fine.”

Currently, most aid to Haiti is directed to more than 300 officially recognized non-governmental organizations (NGOs). This situation begs the question: are NGOs like Arquette’s and Penn’s good or bad for Haiti’s development and sustainable independence? Are they somehow less corrupt then the Haitian government, or are they just tools of foreign imperialist efforts, wittingly or unwittingly playing the role of undermining Haitian autonomy and independence?

A first glance at the work of Arquette’s charity in Haiti would have the average person nodding in support, myself included. Who wouldn’t agree with the need for improved sanitation in a global context where more people have a cell phone then a toilet! Would I donate the $50 so that a family or school has a toilet that will ensure sanitation needs are met? Sure, I would. And as for Penn’s work, he’s brought millions of dollars to Haiti but he also has done real damage to Haitian autonomy by working with the people in the halls of power including the U.S. government and army, MINUSTAH, and the IMF to implement projects that support the existing system, which was founded by imperialist nations including the U.S., rather than question that system and truly put Haitians in the proverbial driver’s seat of their own freedom!

Yes, there is much more to “making a difference” than making a donation, especially for privileged whites from the USA, given the role that U.S. foreign policy has played in the underdevelopment of Haiti! If Arquette and Penn want to support Haiti, they and their organizations should also consider addressing questions of U.S. foreign policy which has swung from invasion and military occupation to the removal of President Aristide. Because there is a very small difference between using your privilege to transform the world and just making yourself feel good.

[Natalia Cardona is from Guatemala. She has been active on issues of militarism and economic justice for more than a decade. She began her career at UNIFEM’s Andean Regional Office in Ecuador. Natalia also spent nine years at American Friends Service Committee lobbying to change U.S. military and economic policy in Latin America and the Caribbean region. She also worked as Program Director for the Center for Women’s Global Leadership leading their work on militarism and violence against women as well as social and economic rights. And is currently the Membership and Constituency Engagement Manager at the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (a global network of feminist organizations).]

Jun 09

2016

newWKOGadnim

Amnesty International, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism

Amnesty International Exploitation

Amnesty International Confirms it No Longer Supports Women’s Human Rights

Feminist Current

May 26, 2016

by Meghan Murphy

Amnesty International has formally adopted a policy calling for the legalization of prostitution around the world. The organization’s senior director for law and policy, Tawanda Mutasah, said:

“Sex workers are at heightened risk of a whole host of human rights abuses including rape, violence, extortion and discrimination. Far too often they receive no, or very little, protection from the law or means for redress.”

He fails to mention that, under legalization, these human rights abuses are amplified, nor does he consider how or why the law would address said abuses, once sanctioned under law. Mutasah adds:

“We want laws to be refocused on making sex workers’ lives safer and improving the relationship they have with the police, while addressing the very real issue of exploitation. We want governments to make sure no one is coerced to sell sex, or is unable to leave sex work if they choose to.”

“LOL,” said feminists across the globe.

This neoliberal policy, in the works for some time but now formalized, was developed, in part, by pimps and traffickers. Despite the fact that the system of prostitution exists in direct conflict with the human rights of women and girls, and despite ample evidence to show that legalization only increases abuse and exploitation, Amnesty International pushed forward with this policy, effectively abandoning any semblance of respect for women.

Men’s rights activists around the world can rest easy knowing that organizations like Amnesty International have their penises interests first in mind.

[Meghan Murphy, founder and editor of Feminist Current, is a freelance writer and journalist. She completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her dog. Follow her @meghanemurphy]

Jun 08

2016

newWKOGadnim

Uncategorized

Biodiversity Biomass Canada Carbon Canopy Group Dogwood Alliance Drax E-ON Project False Solutions France Gardanne Marseille Mediterranean Forests monoculture Old Growth Forests Quebec Radio Zinzine UK United States

WATCH: Biomass – an Ecological Facade | A Massive Threat to the World’s Forests

WKOG disclaimer: Keep in mind while watching this film that while Dogwood Alliance may publicly denounce Enviva’s biomass (the burning of trees) practices, Dogwood Alliance has partnered with Coca-Cola along with other corporations and NGOs to create the Carbon Canopy Group – a coalition “that seeks to leverage markets for ecosystem services” [Source] and “offset” pollution via carbon credits. More false solutions. In fact, one could easily argue that biomass stands to cut into future profits to be made by the expanding commodification and privatization of trees/nature by Dogwood Alliance, Coca-Cola, Staples et al. (You can read more about this is the upcoming segment of the ongoing Divestment series.)

Jun 08

2016

newWKOGadnim

Uncategorized

Climate Change Ecology Fort MacMurray Fort McMurray KXL Land Theft Mass Exodus Nature Bats Last Racism The Trail of Tears

Exodus To A Brand New World

Wrong Kind of Green

June 8, 2016

by Forrest Palmer

Between 1830 and 1850, the United States committed one of the most genocidal movements in the history of this country, although still unacknowledged as such to this very day. During the aforementioned time period, the U.S. government forcibly removed all of the major indigenous tribes from their homelands in the Southeast portion of the country to West of the Mississippi River in the Oklahoma territory and the surrounding areas. This mandatory migration came to be known as The Trail of Tears. The removal was comprised of the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” (given this moniker because they were seen to be most equipped to appropriate the traits of Western civilization, such as clothes, customs, economy, Christianity and other signs of being ‘humanized’, i.e. white). These five tribes included the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muskogee, Creek, Seminole and Cherokee Nations. Yet for all of these tribes perceived signs of being “civilized”, when the land that they inhabited was needed by the state, their designated ethnic inferiority was the single most reason for them being compulsorily extracted from their only home. During the migration, these indigenous First Nation members were made to walk the entire length of this most inhuman journey, which was over 1,000 miles. Of the approximately 60,000 total members of the tribes who were expelled from their homelands, anywhere from 8,700 to 17,000 were killed by making this treacherous trek , which is between 14.5% to 28.3% of the victims.

Mississippi Choctaw group wearing traditional garb, c. 1908. Photographer unknown. Public document.

Most recently, approximately 2,000 miles to the North of the general vicinity where the natives in the U.S were finally housed in the most deplorable conditions imaginable on the reservations, there was another exodus that happened recently in Alberta, Canada that had similar characteristics. As a result of a raging, out of control forest fire, there was a mass evacuation out of this region that was reminiscent of what we saw a couple of hundred years ago during the native death march to the south. The primary difference is that this exodus wasn’t done at the barrel of a gun, but at the behest of something much more powerful than any weapon devised by man: Mother Nature.

A giant fireball is seen as a wildfire rips through the forest 16 kilometres south of Fort McMurray, Alta. on Highway 63 Saturday, May 7, 2016. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

In the energy oasis of northeastern Alberta, Canada where the oil tar sands are found, approximately 88,000 residents of Fort McMurray had to leave their community with wildfires nipping at their heels. Fort McMurray is the primary residence of the people that work in the Alberta Tar Sands, comprising about 80,000 “permanent” citizens and 40,000 expatriates who came to Great White North seeking fortune in the lucrative yet environmentally destructive tar sands oil development. The region is most famous due to the Keystone XL pipeline and the ongoing attempts to run this pipeline from Alberta, Canada to refineries in the United States, primarily located in Houston Texas. Although the tar sands oil provides millions of barrels of oil today, this effort has still been used as a red herring by the mainstream environmental movement to give the false impression that it isn’t daily business as usual in the fossil fuel industry which is the problem, since this global effort VASTLY outweighs the drop in the bucket contributed by the tar sands, whether or not Keystone XL comes online or not. (Unbeknownst to most, the pipeline is already up and running with the fourth and last phase being the only one under dispute and the other three phases already being used right now, as well as rail moving significant amounts of tar sands oil as I write this).

Image: Racism At Core Of Native Teen Suicides [Source: Red Power Media]

As a testament that the abuse of the natives really knows no end, the indigenous were spared no mercy at the hands of the state yesterday nor the corporations today. Over past fifty years when the first barrel of oil rolled off the assembly line in 1967, there have been harmful effects visited upon the indigenous community in the surrounding region over time due to the amount of cancerous byproducts that are dumped into Lake Athabasca. The tailing ponds (the dumping ground for the polluted water that is used to assist in tar sand extraction and production) measure about 30 square miles (77 square kilometers) and reside in close proximity to Athabasca River. Although unacknowledged by the industry, the state or the mainstream media, the sediment from the tailing ponds has been leaking into the Athabasca River. This river is a contributory downstream to Lake Athabasca, where the community of Fort Chipewyan uses for fishing and a freshwater source. This community is comprised of approximately 1,000 people, almost entirely indigenous First Nation. As proof of the deleterious effects of the tar sands pollution, the community has experienced the rarest forms of cancers that belie such a small community somehow logically showing up with such disproportionate illnesses as compared to the general population . Yet, this medical anomaly doesn’t even fall on deaf ears since the people don’t even have a voice.

Tar sands at night. Alberta Oil Sands: “Twenty four hours a day the oil sands eats into the most carbon rich forest ecosystem on the planet. Storing almost twice as much carbon per hectare as tropical rainforests, the boreal forest is the planet’s greatest terrestrial carbon storehouse. To the industry, these diverse and ecologically significant forests and wetlands are referred to as overburden, the forest to be stripped and the wetlands dredged and replaced by mines and tailings ponds so vast they can be seen from outer space.” [Source]

In relation to this turn of events with Fort McMurray currently, the definition of the term ‘poetic justice’ is experiencing a fitting or deserved retribution for one’s actions. In destroying the environment and visiting unacknowledged depredations to the people of Fort Chipewyan and the surrounding areas, as well as contributing to the devastation of which they are facing presently since the entire community relies on the fossil fuel industry, it is poetic justice by any honest estimation that these residents had to run fleeing from their comfortable houses in the middle of the night. This is even more justified since the people in the Fort McMurray area are indicative of the climate change denier clique as only 33% accept that anthropogenic climate change is real to any degree. Hence, these people are unwilling to even accept that their own hands were on the trigger that caused their own communal maiming through the most dangerous game of Russian roulette known to humanity.

The reason that this is the case is because the masses were in the region specifically to rape the land and destroy the environment. There is no rationally sane debate that wouldn’t admit ecological devastation and the resulting climate disruptions increased the likelihood to something such as this happening to almost a certainty. Hence, if their actions were the singular, primary or only a contributing factor to their speedy migration from Fort McMurray, it must be acknowledged that the mere physical presence of the now fleeing residents in the city was the reason that they had to run from a hell of their own making. To be succinct, if the residents wouldn’t have put their economic wants above their environmental needs, they wouldn’t have been in a position of vulnerability since the only reason the population was so large in the area was due to the oil industry. Ultimately, any impartial assessment of the situation comes to the conclusion that the citizens have no one to blame but themselves for this self-inflected catastrophe.

Therefore, we are now in the beginning stages of seeing a grand change in the migratory patterns of humanity. More times often than not migration was due to the collapse of civilizations by way of a lack of resources, which are the basis of any society. As Western civilization has been able to move masses of people to whatever area of the world that it needed in order to continue the economic system of capitalism, be it the forced migration of the indigenous in North America to the concentrations camps called the reservation, or the worldwide diaspora of the African through the global slave trade, or the coolie labor system where Southeast Asians were dispersed across various continents, it has fostered a god complex in the Western world that only the system and the people who control it can ever dictate who goes anyplace at a given moment in time.

+++

As such, the Western world has lived under the delusion that it had conquered nature itself and was the ultimate arbiter of who and what was going to go where and when. This latest episode is just a single example of many recent ones that are increasing in rapidity in the Western world. The Westerner embodied in the prototypical anglo male is now being made to do the one thing that he thought he was immune to in this world: forced to go somewhere he didn’t want go when he didn’t want to leave.

Luckily, the Western world still has the resources and the economic ability to move with relative ease when disasters like this occur, although this will not be the case for too much longer. Soon, the daily movements that are effortlessly accomplished by plane, train, ship, car and automobile will lead to having to hurriedly leave a demolishing area with the only thing that nature has given us to move and will be the last thing we have when the infrastructure isn’t available to utilize the previously mentioned contraptions : our feet. The same feet that carried the native all those hundreds of miles in the distant past.

Illustration by Gord Hill, Kwakwaka’wakw

As our feet will be the thing to carry us to parts unknown as we will have to go to places we have no choice to go for survival in the not too distant future, I would think that poetic justice would include that we be relegated to the same existence that was imposed on the ones so long ago by such a self-designated exceptional civilization such as this.

Poetic justice indeed.

[Forrest Palmer is an electrical engineer residing in Texas. He is a part-time blogger and writer and can be found on Facebook. You may reach him at forrest_palmer@yahoo.com.]

Jun 08

2016

newWKOGadnim

Amnesty International, Neo-Liberalism and the Defanging of Feminism

Adam Smith Institute Exploitation Framing Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP) Jacobin Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) Linguistics Prostitution World Health Organization (WHO)

The Dangers of Rebranding Prostitution as ‘Sex Work’

June 7, 2016

by Kate Banyard

In an extract from her new book, Pimp State, activist Kat Banyard argues that prostitution is sexual exploitation. Decriminalising this industry only legitimises the abuse of women.

‘Using the term “sex work” as if it was an adequate and appropriate shorthand serves a deeply political goal. ‘ Photograph: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

The steady creep of “sex work” into 21st-century vernacular is neither incidental nor accidental. The term didn’t just pop up and go viral. The Global Network of Sex Work Projects (NSWP), an organisation that openly campaigns for brothel-keeping and pimping to be recognised as legitimate jobs, credits itself as largely responsible for “sex work” replacing “prostitution” as the go-to terminology for institutions such as the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

“More than mere political correctness,” the NSWP proudly states, “this shift in language had the important effect of moving global understandings of sex work toward a labour framework.” The fact that prostitution involves sexual acts and some kind of payment is a given. However, engaging with it first and foremost as a labour issue, using the term “sex work” as if it was an adequate and appropriate shorthand for what takes place in strip clubs, on porn sets and in brothels, serves a deeply political goal. Not only does this framework shrink the field of analysis to the seller (to the exclusion of men’s demand and its social impact), it hides what should be front and centre of our response to the transaction: the inherent sexual abuse.

The notion that being paid to perform sex acts should be recognised as a kind of service work is the rationale underpinning legalised prostitution regimes. It’s an idea that has managed to unite an eclectic mix of left and rightwing voices. Peter Frase – a member of the editorial board of Jacobin, a magazine billed as a leading voice of the American left – is in favour of “legalising all forms of sex work for adults”. He claims: “Not only does sex work destabilise the work ideology, it also conflicts with a bourgeois ideal of private, monogamous sexuality.” Tim Worstall, writing for British rightwing thinktank the Adam Smith Institute, shares Frase’s policy conclusion, though his reasoning contrasts somewhat. As a type of commercial activity, Worstall insists the prostitution trade is “obviously free market” and that “renting out body parts is and should be no different from lending them out for fun or for free”.

The whole point of the sex industry is that it offers men the chance to buy sexual access to women who do not want to have sex with them – otherwise they wouldn’t have to pay. Masking its fundamental purpose thus becomes the primary PR challenge for the prostitution, pornography and strip club trades if they are to survive – maybe even thrive – in a society that has decided, at least in principle, that women are not subordinate sex objects and rape is a bad thing.

Perhaps the single most effective strategy hit upon so far is to pump out the myth contained in the term “sex work”: the myth that it is possible to commodify consent.

How can sexual consent be a thing that can be bought and sold, yet we can still talk with a straight face about there being such concepts as healthy sexual relationships and meaningful consent? If, while having sex with someone, you feel repulsed by them touching you, afraid of what they might do, degraded and humiliated by the sexual acts, hurt by the hateful words they’re whispering in your ear, sore because he’s the fifth man you’ve had sex with today, exhausted from it all, traumatised, abused – the fact that you’ll get a bit of cash at the end does not change anything. There is no invisible hand in the prostitution market that magically disappears the lived experience of sexual abuse.

‘The term “sex work” is a myth: the myth that it is possible to commodify consent.’ Photograph: Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty Images

Poverty can, of course, play a highly influential role in women’s entry into prostitution. However, bluntly asserting that poverty is the singular cause of the prostitution trade fails to acknowledge that men’s poverty has not begot a global demand from women to pay them for sex acts, that without men’s demand there would be no trade at all, or the highly specific abuses that so commonly characterise women’s entry into it.

Research by the British Medical Journal found that, in three UK cities, half of women in outdoor prostitution, and a quarter of women in indoor prostitution, reported having been subject to violence by a sex buyer in the previous six months. Of the violence they had ever experienced at the hands of sex buyers, women on the streets most frequently reported being kicked, slapped or punched, while women in saunas or flats most frequently reported attempted rape (17% of women based indoors had experienced this, as had 28% of women on the streets). A separate study, in Sociology of Health and Illness, involving more than 100 women engaged in flat-based prostitution in London, highlighted how an indoor setting can have its own particular coercive influence. Each day women had to pay up to £250 in rent, as well as up to £60 a day for a maid (who, in practice, often operated like a pimp, sometimes controlling which sex buyers the women saw), plus a range of other expenses. On average, a woman was paid for sex by 76 men each week.

The Economist’s 2014 article, titled A personal choice, warding off “puritans and do-gooders” from meddling with the sex trade, insists that governments should “leave consenting adults who wish to buy and sell sex to do so safely and privately online”. This builds on the claim that prostitution is sex work by attempting to frame that work simply as a series of individual, private exchanges set apart from the rest of society. Milton Friedman, the late economist and proponent of unbridled free-market capitalism, implied much the same when asked about prostitution in 2006. “You put a willing buyer [with] a willing seller, and it’s up to them. You can argue with them that it’s foolish, you can argue with them that it’s a bad thing to do, but I don’t see any justification for bringing the police into it.” But the sex industry, like any market, doesn’t operate in a vacuum, leaving the rest of society miraculously untouched by its presence. Markets are,as philosopher Debra Satz says, social institutions: “All markets depend for their operation on background property rules and a complex of social, cultural, and legal institutions.” Markets are a matter for everyone.

Neon sign advertising a live model or prostitute. Photograph: Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

Trades weave themselves into the fabric of society. We know this. We place all kinds of restrictions and prohibitions on markets precisely because of this. Because the risks, particularly to the most vulnerable and marginalised in society, are just too high. Commercial exchanges that people may agree to participate in without a gun being held to their head – such as sales of human organs, voting rights, bonded labour contracts – are nonetheless deemed legally off limits. It’s the line in the sand that societies draw to say that the harm to those directly involved, to third parties, or to the bedrock principles necessary for equal citizenship, is simply too great. Some trades are too toxic to tolerate.

A basic principle that is utterly indispensable to ending violence against women, not to mention to our fundamental concept of humanity, is that sexual abuse is never acceptable. Not even when the perpetrator has some spare cash and the person he’s abusing needs money. Cheerleaders of brothels, porn sets and strip clubs would have us believe that the sex trade levitates above the level of social values and cultural beliefs. But no one can opt out of its effects. A market in sexual exploitation, accepted and tolerated, influences who we all are as individuals, and who we are as a people.

A society that acts in law and language as if men who pay to sexually access women are simply consumers, legitimately availing workers of their services, is a society in deep denial about sexual abuse – and the inequality underpinning it.

[Pimp State: Sex, Money and the Future of Equality by Kat Banyard (Faber & Faber, £12.99). To order a copy for £10.39, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call the Guardian Bookshop on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.]

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