Monthly Archives: February 2008

Moving women from bench warmers to captains

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By Linda Tarr-Whelan

Sometimes progress is measured by half-court movements. When I was in school, girls played basketball by different rules than the boys. We played on a half-court and could only dribble three times before passing the ball. Girls were regarded as too fragile to run the distance. Now, tell that to the women in the WNBA.

It’s good to measure positive change, like women’s full court professional basketball. Recognizing these changes is what we celebrate in March as Women’s History Month. But I’m done with simply celebrating where we’ve been. Instead, it’s time to look at March as more a celebration of our future: let’s call it “Women Making History Month.”

Old stereotypes still stand in our way. Even today, only two-thirds of adults in this country think a woman could be president, according to a CNN/Opinion Research survey. Meanwhile, state legislatures — the farm teams for future leaders — have only one-quarter representation by women, a pitiful ratio that has remained unchanged for a decade. The U.S. ranks 69th in the world for women’s legislative representation with only 16 percent women in Congress.

We’re missing a lot and it doesn’t have to be this way. The leaders of some countries have realized that it really does matter who makes the decisions. They see what our leaders have not yet recognized: having more women at the top is good business and smart politics. For example, in Norway, women make up 36 percent of the members on corporate boards, while in the U.S. progress seems stalled at not quite 15 percent. How did Norway they do it? In 2003, Norway passed a tough law that requires all public companies to ensure that their boards are 40 percent women. By 2007, 85 percent of their public companies met the mark.

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SC congressional delegation fails its children

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The Children’s Defense Fund Action Council (CDFAC) released its 2007 Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard, which grades every member of the House and Senate based on 10 key votes affecting children. The Scorecard showed some important legislative successes but noted some missed key opportunities to improve the lives of children in 2007, including Congress’s failure to override President Bush’s veto of legislation to extend health coverage to 3.1 million more uninsured children.

South Carolina’s Members of Congress collectively voted to protect the well-being of children only 41 percent of the time in 2007, ranking 47th among all 50 states.

The CDF Action Council website has put the entire Scorecard online, including an interactive database to find how each individual legislator in each state voted, as well as rankings of the best and worst Members of Congress and State Delegations. You can access all of these tools here.

SC legislators trump up fear of voter fraud

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By Brett Bursey
Director, SC Progressive Network

When I asked the 62 young people at Fairfield High school’s Teen Institute what “democracy” was last week, hands shot up. “One person, one vote,” one said. “Rule of the people,” said another. When I asked what country leads the world in democratic participation, a chorus of “USA” broke out.

They were shocked to find that the land of the free and home of the brave doesn’t rank in the top ten. In fact, the USA doesn’t even rank in the top 100.

The voting-age population in 138 other countries turn out at higher numbers than in the United States. In fact, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s “Global Report on Voter Turnout,” the U.S. ranks 139th, between Armenia and Nigeria, with an average of 47 percent of our voting-age population participating in elections.

So, no, the USA is not number one. What’s more, the Census puts South Carolina 34th in state rankings for voting-age participation in elections.

Which brings us back to Fairfield High School and the discussion on democracy. I went there to urge the Teen Institute to sign on to the SC Progressive Network’s “Missing Voter Project” (MVP), which is working to identify and engage South Carolina’s voting age-population (VAP) that isn’t registered or doesn’t regularly vote.

In the 2006 election, about 47 percent of the state’s registered voters cast a ballot – about 37 percent of the VAP. It gets worse. In Fairfield County, only 136 citizens between 18 and 21 – about 10 percent of that age group – voted.

In Fairfield, 79 percent of the county’s children qualify for a free lunch. The per capita income for the county is about $21,000. Twenty percent of the population lives below the poverty line, including 25 percent of those under age 18. Drop-out rates are high, good jobs are scarce. Fairfield County, which is 60 percent black, has not had a black representative in the State House since Reconstruction, some 110 years.

Why people aren’t voting is a complex equation of historic and systematic disenfranchisement that may take generations to overcome. Voter registration in this state was once limited to white, property-owning males, and has historically been used to restrict access to the ballot box, not facilitate it.

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Tortured evidence: injustice at Guantanamo

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By Marjorie Cohn
Jurist

The Bush administration has announced its intention to try six alleged al Qaeda members at Guantánamo under the Military Commissions Act. That Act forbids the admission of evidence extracted by torture, although it permits evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment if it was secured before December 30, 2005. Thus, the administration would be forbidden from relying on evidence obtained by waterboarding, if waterboarding constitutes torture.

That’s one reason Attorney General Michael Mukasey refuses to admit waterboarding is torture. The other is that torture is considered a war crime under the U.S. War Crimes Act. Mukasey would be calling Dick Cheney a war criminal if the former admitted waterboarding is torture. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, has said on National Public Radio that the policies that led to the torture and abuse of prisoners emanated from the Vice President’s office.

The federal government is working overtime to try and clean up the legal mess made by the use of illegal interrogation methods. In a thinly-veiled attempt to sanitize the Guantánamo trials, the Department of Justice and the Pentagon instituted an extensive program to re-interview the prisoners who have undergone abusive interrogations, this time with “clean teams.” For example, if a prisoner implicated one of the defendants during an interrogation using waterboarding, the government will now re-interrogate that prisoner without waterboarding and get the same information. Then they will say the information was secured humanely. This attempt to wipe the slate clean is a farce and a sham.

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Pursuing new power plants squanders chances to cut greenhouse gases

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Duke Energy deception worsens regarding new plant’s emissions
By Jim Warren
Executive Director, NC Waste Awareness & Reduction Network (WARN)

We call on all news media and public officials to exercise the utmost scrutiny of continuing claims by Duke Energy and state officials about the costs and benefits of the Cliffside coal-fired power plant.  NC WARN stands behind our initial analysis, and Jan. 29 statement that the state has colluded with Duke to mislead the public about key facts involving the plant.

Furthermore, the deception has worsened since then, particularly in paid Duke Energy ads and statements made to the press following the Feb. 8 court ruling on mercury.  We do not make these charges lightly. Today NC WARN is publicizing three items showing the months-long deception that has misled many North Carolinians into thinking that building a huge, polluting greenhouse gas machine could somehow, as CEO Jim Rogers says, be “good for the environment.”

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Are US policies killing women abroad?

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By Michele Kort with Mary Kathomi Riungu,
reporting from Nairobi
Ms. magazine

Even as we commemorate the landmark 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade this year, U.S. reproductive health policies are having an inordinately negative effect outside of our borders. They’re causing women to die or be maimed. Harsh words, but true.

For the past 24 years, except during the Clinton presidency, U.S. administrations have maintained a global gag rule against providing counseling or referrals for abortions at U.S.-funded clinics in developing nations. It’s a rule that only thwarts safe abortions, while reducing the already limited availability of other family planning services. The global gag rule has also led to a pullback in overseas delivery of contraceptives, according to recent testimony by Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.) before the House Foreign Affairs Committee: “U.S. shipments of contraceptives have ceased to 20 developing nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. In some areas, the largest distribution centers for contraceptives have experienced decreased access for over 50 percent of the women they serve.”

Women’s health and rights activists in the U.S. have spent the past two decades fighting against such actions, and advocating on behalf of global reproductive health issues. But progress has come slowly. While maternal mortality has been declining at 1 percent annually, it needs to decline by 5.5 percent a year in order to be three-quarters reduced by 2015 (one of the United Nation’s Millenium Development Goals). Sounds like a lot – but it would require just about $6.1 billion more in annual funding – the price of three weeks of the Iraq war – to achieve that goal. Without that commitment, more than 500,000 women will still die annually from childbirth and its complications, with an estimated 70,000 of those deaths due to unsafe abortions.

Take, for example, the situation of women in Kenya, where abortion remains illegal unless the pregnant woman’s life is in danger (a loophole some compassionate doctors interpret liberally, as they know that desperate women will risk their lives to abort anyway). An estimated 250,000 to 320,000 abortions are carried out in the country each year, with unsafe procedures causing a shocking toll: Globally, 13 percent of maternal deaths result from abortion-related complications, but in Kenya it’s as high as 40 percent.

In public hospitals such as Kenyatta National in Nairobi, about 20,000 Kenyan women are treated each year for abortion-related complications. Nearly two-thirds of the beds in the notorious gynecological section – Ward 1D – are occupied by those patients, who suffer everything from excessive bleeding to injured organs to sepsis. Those sufferers include women such as Wangui (not her real name), who drank a boiled concoction made from trees and took several doses of an anti-malaria drug in order to abort because her impoverished household couldn’t support a fifth child. She ended up in Ward 1D because she required an urgent blood transfusion to save her life.

Women’s rights groups in Kenya have been pushing for a new national law on reproductive rights, as well as supporting a continental protocol on the rights of African women and a patients’ bill of rights. But they’re not helped in their efforts to improve reproductive health care by the global gag rule, which has forced a number of clinics to turn down U.S. funds rather than stop discussing abortion. Three clinics of the Family Planning Association of Kenya (an affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation) and two clinics of Marie Stopes International (the U.K.-based reproductive-health NGO) have been closed for loss of funds, according to a 2004 report from the Center for Reproductive Health Research and Policy in San Francisco.

Maternity care in general is problematic in Kenya’s public hospitals. The 2007 report “Failure to Deliver,” produced by the Federation of Women Lawyers-Kenya (FIDA Kenya) and the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York, pointed out that public health facilities often suffer from lack of supplies and congestion. Claris Ogangah-Onyango, legal counsel for FIDA Kenya, points out the obvious: When the majority of beds in maternity hospitals are occupied by women with post-abortion complications, there is not enough space and care for other women.

“The government is mostly concerned with post-abortion care,” she says, “and most of the funding goes to that. But they’re not doing anything to stop [unsafe] abortions.”

“What has really affected our work in Kenya is that we have very few women in our parliament [just 18 of 222 members],” says Ogandah-Onyango. “When we take our issues to the government, they are blocked. FIDA and other women’s organizations have approached the candidates for the next parliament to sign a document that they will support gender-friendly bills. Putting more women in government would make a big difference.”

And what can women in the U.S. do to help their Kenyan sisters? “Lobby for change in the policies that govern reproductive health,” she says. U.S. women can also support the efforts of groups such as FIDA Kenya, which is now part of the Reproductive Health and Rights Alliance in Kenya.

Sisterhood is a global mission. Economics and politics and even social conscience aside, we know that only by empowering all women can we ensure the future of the world.

For the full article, see the Winter 2008 issue of Ms., now on newsstands and by subscription from www.msmagazine.com.

Getting MAD

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By Ted Volskay
Simpsonville, SC

To those of you who do not know me very well, my daughters are on their HS debate team. HS Debate is wonderful because it makes students look at both sides (pro/con) of an issue. As a parent who values what debate has to offer including development of critical thinking skills in-lieu of blind faith, I actively support my daughters and the debate team with my participation as a parent/volunteer judge. I usually judge the Lincoln-Douglas (LD) or Public Forum Debates (PFD). This weekend I was judging PFD and the resolution for debate was “Russia is a threat to United States interests”. Two student teams are randomly selected (by coin toss) to argue the PRO or the CON side of the issue. After hearing several rounds (this week and prior debates), I was bothered by a recurring argument for those who argued in favor (PRO) of the resolution. Their argument was:

Russia is a threat to U.S. interests because Russia has threatened to aim their missiles at proposed U.S. missile defense installations in Eastern Europe which will be installed only for defensive purposes.  

The name “Missile Defense,” like many of the Bush Administration initiatives (“Patriot Act” and “Clear Skies Initiative”) is an oxymoron for the following reason:

Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is the unwritten policy whereby those countries (US, Russia, China) that possess long-range missiles armed with nuclear warheads co-exist in peace. It is very unlikely that a country will initiate a nuclear war with another country that is capable of retaliating with nuclear weapons. In other words, the US won’t launch a nuclear strike against Russia (and visa-versa) because we know that Russia is capable of retaliating with nuclear weapons from remote locations. There is little incentive to wage nuclear war if the likely outcome is mutual/self annihilation. Consequently, the MAD policy apparently works. There have been no nuclear exchanges between countries since the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan in 1945. 

The Missile “Defense” initiative threatens to change the calculus of the MAD policy. There are many reasons why the Missile “Defense” shield may never work as advertised; however, if it does work to the satisfaction of those who control it, it would enable the United States to launch a first strike against Russia and survive because the Missile “Defense” system would hypothetically protect us against certain nuclear retaliation by Russia. Consequently, the Ronald Reagan/George W. Bush Missile “Defense” initiative accomplishes the following:

1) It disrupts the peaceful equilibrium achieved by the MAD policy;
2) Hypothetically, it would allow the US to launch a nuclear strike against Russia and survive;
3) It resurrects the Cold War between the US and Russia;
4) The response by Russia (Russian missiles aimed at US Missile “Defense” systems in eastern Europe) will foment mistrust between the US and Russia and another layer of irrational fear among an ill-informed and disengaged American electorate; and
5) Most importantly, it provides yet another reason to increase military spending (feed the military-industrial complex that REPUBLICAN President (and Army General) Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell address warned us about:

According to NPR, President Bush’s proposed budget freezes domestic spending and increases military spending. If approved, the military budget alone will be $750,000,000,000 ($750 billion) or more than the entire military budgets of every country in the world combined. If you listen to this link to NPR, you will realise that insane military spending is a bipartisan effort. After all, who wants to be accused of being weak on defense? As a former Navy officer, I agree with General Eisenhower: strong defense? ABSOLUTELY!; self-perpetuating, self-serving out of control military-industrial complex? -NO! I predict that the insanity of out of control defense spending will eventually stop but only when the country is literally bankrupt and the real fear of spiraling inflation, unemployment, and Americans living in third world conditions displaces the irrational fear that cuts in defense spending will lead to imminent attacks by Russia, China, Castro, Hugo Chaves, North Korea, and terrorists sneaking across every border.  

Thoughts on television

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Reflections on the submerging culture
By Cecil Bothwell
Asheville, NC

A couple of weeks ago I was pleased to note that the television in the downtown Asheville post office had been removed, hopefully for good—though the clerks were unable to confirm my optimistic question.

I definitely don’t miss the constant chatter of talking heads and advertisements that used to blast down at customers waiting for service, and I have no idea how clerks could handle the onslaught throughout the day. Queried about programming choices, employees had told me they were only permitted to tune to CNN or the Weather Channel, which I guess must have been deemed by some distant bureaucrat to be content-neutral, though both channels are heavily laden with ads and therefore represent a tacit government subsidy to private business. (This point is tangential to the current subject, but I’m looking into it. Perhaps another network successfully challenged the commercial favoritism.)

The first time I was aware of that particular TV was in the week before Bush invaded Iraq. CNN was running a teaser for the upcoming war coverage which would presumably offer more of the great high-tech fireworks delivered in the first Gulf War while bodies were charred and homes and families destroyed. The teaser used a staccato repetition of Bush bringing down his arm as he intoned, “Let’s roll!”

“Let’s roll! Let’s roll! Let’s roll!”

I understood why former New York Times journalist Richard Reeves refers to America’s TV networks as PNN: The Pentagon News Network. And I had never felt more like I was being forced to attend to Big Brother. At least such propaganda wasn’t being piped into my house, since I quit watching TV at home 30 years ago.

Of course, one can’t function in modern society and entirely avoid television and its discontents. The local daily paper features front page reports on the Super Bowl, American Idol and Britney’s hijinks, and I occasionally expose myself to TV in other people’s homes. But I have noticed that banishment of the medium from my day-to-day existence has left me more sensitized to it than most other folks appear to be. I find the presence of an operating television to be extremely distracting and annoying. I find conversation difficult and the atmosphere uncomfortable.

Comfortable watching of TV is a learned activity and I have evidently unlearned it.

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