Poverty – Page 10

War By Other Means

Published on May 3, 2007

It’s a tragic and criminal fact that where there’re modern armies there’s prostitution, child sex and human trafficking – Halliburton and Dyncorp in the Balkans war being a case in point – but prosttution was never historically organised openly by the Army command structure – was it? Shadow of The Hegemon has an outraged post at what’s emerged about the US’ postwar occupation of Japan: :

The Americans Kept Comfort Women

There are times when I feel that there’s no real point to keeping one of these things up… when I look at the readership stats and think “is it really necessary”?

Then I read something like this, and remember what it really is… a place to be able to speak out, at least in some small way, and say that THIS IS INTOLERABLE.

Japan’s abhorrent practice of enslaving women to provide sex for its troops in World War II has a little-known sequel: After its surrender — with tacit approval from the U.S. occupation authorities — Japan set up a similar “comfort women” system for American GIs.

An Associated Press review of historical documents and records shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war.

Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to U.S. troops until the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down.

The documents show the brothels were rushed into operation as American forces poured into Japan beginning in August 1945.

“Sadly, we police had to set up sexual comfort stations for the occupation troops,” recounts the official history of the Ibaraki Prefectural Police Department, whose jurisdiction is just northeast of Tokyo. “The strategy was, through the special work of experienced women, to create a breakwater to protect regular women and girls.”…

And now we’re finding out that the single most egregious crime of the Imperial Japan, sexual coercion (if not out and out slavery), was enthusiastically embraced by the American occupation? That the “heroes” of the Pacific War, the lions of history, the grandfathers and great-grandfathers that all Americans look up to and venerate were lining up en masse to pay to violate some poor Japanese girl over, and over, and over again?

With the official sanction of the American occupational government?

INTOLERABLE.

Read more.

We hear so little about other places in the world under historic American or allied ~~occupation~~ protection that it’s easy to forget that US and allied troops have been stationed for many years in large numbers elsewhere than Iraq or Afghanistan. Japan, for instance. It’s easy to take no notice of what they’ve been up to there when there’s much more exciting, photogenic stuff happening elsewhere. So when what really happened comes out, no wonder people are shocked.

Blogging Without A Home

Published on April 20, 2007

Don’t feel so smug, you with your mortgage 4 or 5 times your annual income: the way the housing economy’s going it could happen to you, too.

Blogger ddjango:

I am homeless. This is the second time in a year that I’ve been so. It ain’t easy.

Just about a year ago, I was laid off from a job I had held for four years. It was a pretty good job, doing research, geographic information systems, and data analysis for an institute at a local university. The layoff was unexpected. I drew unemployment for awhile, had an apartment.

Not long after the layoff, however, I went into a deep clinical depression, was hospitalized for awhile and have needed to spend a time recovering. Financially, however, I was a mess, lost my apartment, and spent several weeks in a local homeless shelter. Boy, did I learn a lot.

I got back on my feet, started looking for a job, got an apartment. I was doing all right, then got hit with another bout of depression and had to be hospitalized again.

Hospital bills, other unforeseen expenses, etc. I lost my apartment again about two months ago. So I’m homeless again, living in a shelter program.

I’m pretty lucky. (What?!! . . . “lucky”?!)

Yeah, lucky. Because the county I live in has a shelter which also provides a lot of services: substance abuse/alcoholism counseling, 12 step meetings, mental health care, including a psychiatrist, a case manager, job-hunting assistance, money management counseling, transitional housing, and connections to other services, like medical care. For free. It’s not a great place, of course: dormitory living with people in a very wide range of situations, like real street bums, active alcoholics, junkies, crackheads, mentally ill folks, folks in crisis like me, folks who lost their jobs and can’t find new ones, folks who lost relationships and/or got divorced and really screwed because of it, disabled veterans, released prisoners, and just damn unlucky, confused, and lonely folks.

But the place is fairly safe and the staff work hard. It got really fucking cold last week and the shelter crammed in as many folks as would fit. Food, clothing, shelter in a life-threatening situation.

This isn’t true in a lot of areas in this country. But you probably know that. I read an article yesterday about a homeless man who was beaten to death by a gang of suburban kids. This has happened often in the past few years. It seems it’s a brutal sport.

Yeah. Just ask Rachel Moran and her bar buddies.

On a personal note, we’re doing a fundraiser here at P!to keep me alive (and in cigarettes and bus fare) as I look for a job. My finances are trashed and I can use whatever help I can get. Please. Just donate what you can, if you can – I’ll be more grateful than you can imagine.

Thank you.

Be at peace.

Despite my qualifications and experience I’ve been homeless with my children, this in a country with a welfare state, and if it hadn’t been for the help of good friends, socialist friends, I don’t know what I would’ve done. So many people have been or are homeless or underhoused, sleeping on friends sofas or their car or a series of cheap and nasty B&B’s, and it’s not from laziness, or fecklessness, its from what seems an unstoppable and insupportable series of shitty, shitty co-incidences and bureaucratixc indifference and incompetence.

It really could happen to anyone.

If you want to chip in and help ddjango click here. He also has a list of organisations helping the homeless, all of which could use support.

A Very Expensive Fumble In The Stationery Cupboard

Published on April 13, 20071 Comment

Phwarr, what a hunk of spunk. NOT.

I must say I’m enjoying seeing loyal Bushie and PNAC zealot Paul Wolfowitz left twisting in the wind at the World Bank over giving a job and pay rises to his mistress.

So far so typically corrupt, or at least that’s how this is being framed by the major media.

But it’s not as though his relationship with Shaha Riza wasn’t known about when he took the job and she’s hardly some brainless bit of arm candy. World bank employees complained at the time of his appointment in 2005:

From Inside the WB: Discontent over Riza We hear from Bank insiders that Shaha Ali Riza, whom Paul Wolfowitz has been dating for a couple of years, is not popular with her colleagues. As acting manager for External Relations and Outreach in the Middle East/North Africa region of the World Bank, she is to some degree the institution’s public face on that region.

Her personnel file at the Bank reportedly contains several complaints about her job performance as well as about a certain “lack of people skills.” This, we are told, is part of what is behind the World Bank Staff Association’s relatively more open disagreement with the U.S.’s choice.

The WBSA raised loud complaints a few years ago when Wolfensohn named Nick Stern as Chief Economist. Several staffers pointed out the Bank’s strict anti-nepotism laws should have prevented that move, since Stern’s brother was on staff at the Bank. Their complaints were never addressed seriously.

It should be noted that at least one civil society organization believes that Riza is one of the most effective gender experts working at the Bank.

But what’s not being reported is just how closely his Riza is connected in neocon and Bush/Cheney circles – she’s held some very powerful positions in the White House working alongside Liz Cheney on mid-east polcy and is closely connected to the total fuckup that is the Iraq invasion and occupation. No wonder she’s been called the most powerful Moslem in Washington.

A perfect match for Wolfowitz, himself instrumental in the Iraq debacle – truly these two are a poisonous pair.

2005:

Shaha Ali Riza, lately in the news as World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz’s Saudi-born girlfriend, has been assigned to the U.S. State Department. The move, which has not been announced by either huge agency controlled by the Bush regime, means that she’ll be working with Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney, a top official in the key Near East Affairs bureau.

That’s the word from one of my moles in the World Bank. This significant assignment — a hardened link between the money of the World Bank, which is supposed to focus on poverty, and the neocons’ aims of trying to salvage their privatization plans for Iraq — has not be reported anywhere else, to my knowledge, and I see no word of it on the World Bank website either.

This new loan by the World Bank is strictly from hunger, and it’s sure to do nothing to help us in the Arab world. Wolfowitz’s girlfriend and Cheney’s daughter, in charge together of the U.S. State Department’s Near East bureau? [My emphasis] W.B. Staffer One, as I’ve referred to this particular source, copied me on a September 16 internal memo from Christiaan J. Poortman, the W.B.’s vice president for Middle East and North Africa (MENA, in bank parlance), that says in part:

The Bank has received a request from the US State Department for the secondment of Shaha Riza — on external service — to the Near East Affairs Office of Partnership Initiative. In accepting this assignment Shaha will be responsible for setting up and managing an International Multilateral Foundation that will support reform in the MENA region.

I have agreed to this request which will allow Shaha to continue her work with civil society, complementing our own work on the reform agenda of our partners in the region. Shaha’s assignment will be effective September 19, 2005. Please join me in wishing Shaha the best in her new assignment.

Yeah, Poortman “agreed to this request.” At least it gets Riza out of the office. Wolfowitz got a grand sendoff by the Pentagon in late April, when he left to take over the World Bank. Maybe co-workers had cake for Riza, but maybe not. A similar public pronouncement of a new post didn’t happen for Riza, whose job at the World Bank — basically, head flack for the MENA office — caused plenty of grumbling about nepotism by other W.B. staffers.

More…

It’s not the nepotism that’s most important here, or the minor scandal of venality in office. That’s hardly anything new for Republicans.

What is important is the way all this corrupt manoeuvring has tied World Bank lending policy to White House foreign policy like a horse to a buggy. Where the neocons drive, Wolfowitz and the bank follow – Bushco, by using Wolfowitz’ besottedness with his girlfriend, has managed to subvert the bank’s putative independence and to the great consternation of international development NGOs and governments worldwide the World Bank (not that the it was exactly a fair insitution to begin with) from being previously just US-inclined, has now become the de facto banking arm of Bushco neoconnery and imperial expansion.

This is a lot more important than than just a quick bit of illicit nookie over the desk.

Mind the Gap

Published on April 11, 2007

‘Sofia Coppola feminism’, and its close relative ‘hipster feminism’ is a phrase being used by some bloggers to describe the phenomenon of the feminism of the privileged – who mean well, but really, they have no idea of the pyramid of suffering that their comfy positions depend on.

Super Babymama, (via Donna) illustrates this and the massive class differences and gaps in perception that still exist between American women in the US, in response to a Pandagon. post by Roxanne on tourism and ‘ugly Americans’.

(Speaking of which, I saw a prime example puking up his guts outside one of my former favourite Amsterdam coffeeshops last week. Yes, it’s spring again. But I digress.)

[…]

I don’t begrudge those with money their money. Depends on how they got it, and except for the very wealthy I’d imagine most people who have saved enough to do a bit of travelling for a week or two probably worked hard for their stuff. So let ’em go on their jaunts.

One commenter, though, said what I’d been thinking:

I don’t usually comment, but this post somewhat bugged me, because it’s written only from the perspective of someone who has the freedom and resources to “acquire” foreign cultures firsthand. Sure, it must be nice to have an illuminating conversation with an Indian woman over breakfast in the Himalayas, but most people in America will never be able to do that, not necessarily because they don’t want to, but because they can’t afford to. Until everyone can afford a trip around the world, “remote control acquisition of culture” will remain the best way to find out about non-American cultures for a lot of people.

Whoo boy! That brought out the middle class defensiveness in some people!

And Amanda said this:

I’m sorry, but your comment aggravated me, seeing as how you are privileged enough to use a computer to make it. Until everyone has that opportunity, I don’t see why you should get on the computer and just comment. It’s very insensitive.

Oh bullshit, Amanda. Just…bullshit. And I suspect you know that was some bull, so maybe you were being post-modernly ironic or something. But then again–well, fuck that.

This “you can’t be too broke or you wouldn’t have a computer/tv/fat belly/car,” business is such tired nonsense. You know as well as I do that not everybody who comments on a blog is doing so from their super-fast deluxe home internets system; lots of people get internet at their jobs. Lots of people use computers at the library. Lots of people had a bit of extra money, one time in their lives, and bought themselves a computer, and just hope that the damn thing keeps working cuz they’ll probably not be able to afford another one any time soon. Lots of people maybe got a computer as a gift. Or their internet access is underwritten by some government program.

The point is that those of us with limited resources, or those of us with no resources, deserve to have those little luxuries that make us happy just as much as the rest of the world. And if we decide to do without this, in order to have that, because having that makes us happy, then fuck you for questioning our right to that little bit of what the middle class has. Perhaps you’d like to see us all pay less rent on our little apartments and team up together, real old-school, five families to a flat and a toilet down the hall. And then we’d be authentically poor enough to spit out an opinion that fucks with your comfort zone.

Well, quite.

Even when at my absolute poorest, a lone parent over my head in debt and late with the rent, I paid for internet access. I got my first computer, a 286, through a very cheap deal and used nearly all my student grant to pay for it; the eventual replacement was bought with a very unexpected small legacy. Through all the late phone bills and cutoffs I kept the connection going because I realised it was important to my and my children’s future that we be computer and and internet literate. It was an investment and it proved a wise one. I have to say that to accuse someone of being insufficiently deprived because they can access a computer may be one of the more condescending, asinine online remarks I’ve read recently and smacks of blinkered complacency.

There are those self-described liberals and feminists who are so smugly enamoured of their own particular copacetic niches in life that they fail to acknowledge the reality of others’ situations and their right to choose how to best employ their own meagre resources to their own and their families’ best advantage.

Equal access to computers and the internet is essential to lift people out of poverty because in this modern global society, to be out of communication, to have no access to digital media, no mobile phone or landline or email address, is to be a non-person, as that exchange so amply proves.

Still, Superbaby Mama is anxious to bridge the divide and in the interest of furthering feminist amity offers the tourists commenting on Roxanne’s post a unique tour of her home town:

[…]

For entertainment we’d have our choice of sitting on the porch and listening to my neighbor’s radio playing salsa, or my other neighbor’s radio playing R & B, or maybe the random hothead behind tinted windows, driving down the street bumping Jay Z.

I could point out the weed house, and its awesome history of having been a weed house for the entire 12 years I’ve lived here. How many nickle bags do you suppose have changed hands on that porch? I could take them on a guided tour of the street memorials that pop up, here and there, sad reminders of gunfights past.

For the horny guys, there’s no shortage of working girls, most of whom have been walking the neighborhood so long they’ve watched my kids grow up. Rosie, Woodie-woo, Cheyenne, Dellia, always good to run an errand for you if there’s a dollar at the end of it. Always good for a blowjob in the front seat of your car if there’s a dime at the end of it.

And before my tourists leave, I’d impart some good old-fashioned local wisdom on them, so they can feel truly enlightened. Something like, “don’t believe that guy hanging out at the gas station who says he just needs 50 cents for a phone call,” or, “the best place to buy arros con gondules is at Pueblo foods over on Holton.” Maybe I’d even let them touch my daughter’s exotic, curly mass of hair, and exclaim over how smart and well-spoken she is.

I think that would be a vacation to remember. Don’t you?

Indeed it would. I’d go further and make it a mandatory six weeks every summer in a poor urban neighbbourhood as soon as the temperature hits 85 degrees and the kids are out of school. That might exercise the empathy muscles a little bit.

Meanwhile, In Other News: UK Quietly Reauthorises Slavery

Published on March 3, 2007

For all the pious hooha that’s been spouted this past few weeks by the likes of that permatanned fraud Peter Hain and the risible John Prescott about the sanctity of William Wilberforce and the Abolition Movement they somehow failed to mention, as lenin points out, that quietly, New Labour has been repealing employment legislation thus allowing the effective reinstitution of slavery – not in some far-off, easily hidden colony this time, but on its own soil.

Slavery in the UK. posted by lenin

It seems Tom DeLay was not the only one to learn from the perfect petri dish of pure capitalism. New Labour is to abolish laws that provide the most basic protection for migrant workers. Workers who receive visas to enter domestic service are “legally entitled to leave their employer if they are abused or exploited and to receive basic protection – including the minimum wage – under UK employment law.” Now, if they are abused or mistreated by an employer, either they must suck it up or flee back to their country of origin. Even Barbara Roche, the former Home Office minister who used to put on a hideous freak show by appearing at the docks and interrogating lorry-drivers about any human cargo they might inadvertently be carrying, is alarmed: “These new proposals are a very retrograde step. Workers who suffer abuse from employers will feel absolutely alone. I can’t believe a Labour government which has taken such a firm stance against trafficking will want this to happen.” Oh, you’d be surprised, Barbara.

This comes as a recent report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found an enormous amount of slavery operating in the UK. There are said to be 10,000 gangmasters operating in the UK, who supply labour that operates under the threat of extreme physical violence to various sectors of British capital. These include everything from domestic service, where the new laws will apply, to agriculture, manufacturing, restaurant workers, food processors, care work, hotels and so on. Among these are tens of thousands of sex slaves, who include thousands of children – and not all of those children come from overseas. If you try to protest about your treatment, you “may be beaten, abused, raped, deported or even killed.”

Read whole post.

Those of us on the anticapitalist left have long been derided as out-there hysterics when we’ve warned that the increased slavery and exploitation so apparent elsewhere is spreading to the developed world and that this is the natural outcome of the neoliberal economic polices that Blair and Brown have been pursuing.

Blindly tribal Labour supporters who still harbour the hope that Gordon Brown’s ascendance to the premiership would herald some sort of shift towards humanity and away from rapaciousness, when Brown himself willingly enables that rapaciousness is out of their tiny mind,

Just look at the money the party has just taken from private equity groups – largely unaccountable conglomerations of private money which buy take private and proceed to asset-strip other companies, They’re run by fund managers, unlike publicly regulated corporations they have no shareholders and they have little social accountability compared to public companies. Plus the Gordon Brown gives them a tax break!

Anyone who’s still with Labour despite everything, and that includes a number of people I was once was close to and thought highly of, deserves to go down with the rest of them.

Did you ever think, staunch union actvist and Labour loyalist, when you were sitting under that tree at Tolpuddle with the union banner at your feet and a cold drink in your hand, that your party would one day be the party of slavery?.

Well now it is and it’s all down to you and your blind loyalty to party over principle. Fuck you, you little Eichmanns.