SECTION ELEVEN
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COLUMN
SIXTY-ONE, JULY 1, 2001
(Copyright © 2001 Al Aronowitz)
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* * *
DD VS. WOMEN
Subject: Why
"W" doesn't stand for women
Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2001 18:07:12 -0400
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Why 'W'
Doesn't Stand for Women
By Jennifer
Baumgardner
DISSENT/SPRING
2001 /VOLUME 48, NUMBER 2
On January
31, less than two weeks after George W. Bush became the forty-third president of
the United States of America, the Six Rivers Planned Parenthood in Eureka,
California, was fielding calls from worried patients. The clinic is nestled near
the Oregon border, just north of a breathtaking Redwood forest, and is the only
abortion provider within a hundred miles. Although the Six Rivers area is fairly
conservative politically, California itself has a strong majority of pro-choice
representatives. My writing partner, Amy Richards, and I were interviewing staff
at abortion clinics, gathering data as we traveled around the country on a book
tour. We wanted to figure out how to bridge the gap between patients and
politicians, with the hope that, armed with knowledge of what
Clinics house
many contradictions -- or at least complexities. For example, polls show the
majority of Americans to be pro-choice. We might assume, then, that the thirteen
thousand clients who pass through the Six Rivers clinic are part of that
majority. The truth is that many people who use services such as those offered
at Six Rivers (contraception, prenatal care, Pap smears, and testing for
sexually transmitted diseases [STDs], as well as abortion) probably don't vote,
just as 50 percent of the eligible electorate does not vote. Further, even among
those who do make it to the polls, there's no guarantee that they vote for
pro-choice candidates or even link the clinic's existence with pro-choice
representation and policies.
Our
late-January visit coincided with a spate of calls from clients who wanted to
know if Six Rivers Planned Parenthood was still open. After all, they had heard
on the news that Bush's first act as president was to reinstate the Mexico City
Policy or "global gag rule," which Bill Clinton had reversed as his
first order of business eight years earlier. "Clients didn't understand
what this policy meant for them," the clinic director told us. Nor did they
understand what the Bush presidency meant for them: "Many of the callers
didn't even know that Bush was pro-life until after he got into office."
The next day,
Amy and I visited a high school in Petaluma, California. The kids -- most of
whom were working class and middle class -- were very interested in the concept
of the male pill, wondering when it would be available (not for a while). They
were also extremely concerned that abortion had just been
"overturned." We explained that abortion was still legal, although
with several pernicious barriers. We then tried to make sense of the global gag
rule: "Um, it means that health organizations in poor countries won't get
any aid money from us unless they promise not to provide or counsel abortions as
a family planning option." The teenagers looked confused. So did we.
Welcome to
the world of passive-aggressive, anti-choice activism. Welcome to trickle-down
women's rights. Welcome to W.'s America, where no social ill is too sick to be
kissed by a platitude from the president and sent on its way. Amy Richards, who
is one of the founders of the Third Wave Foundation (a national organization for
feminist activists between the ages of sixteen and thirty), sums up W. this way:
"Bush has too much faith in individuals over leadership. His campaign
mantra was basically 'I trust Americans -- they're tolerant.' But tolerance is
exactly the problem. We tolerate the mistreatment of women and gay people in the
military, we tolerate not having Head Start, we tolerate unequal pay."
Certainly
W.'s opaque-but-friendly approach in the campaign foreshadows what we can expect
from the man. Remember the debate in which Al Gore called him on his health care
record in Texas that seemed to negate his "leave no child behind"
slogan? Faced with his shameful record of leaving thousands of eligible children
out of government-subsidized health care, Bush did what he does best: he changed
channels, accusing Gore of challenging W.'s good heart. But it's not his heart
we have to worry about, it's his politics, politics that so far has W. standing
for "white" and "well-heeled," but not, as the GOP contended
during the campaign, for women.
What is so
anti-woman about Bush and his leadership is hard to specify. W. doesn't dislike
women, clearly, but he doesn't see them as full human beings outside of their
traditional role. In his world, women are helpmates or mothers or daughters.
With that comes a fond disrespect that -- like his global gag rule and its
ensuing confusion for women who want clinic services -- is subtly paralyzing.
And doggone it if his wife, Laura, isn't openly pro-choice. No matter, no one is
worried that she'll be making policy, just as W.'s pro-choice mother (who was
once on the board of Planned Parenthood), Barbara, never got in the way of
George Sr.'s anti-choice agenda. Presidents' wives do make a difference in how
women are treated during an administration. Along with respect, being First Lady
comes with assumptions about staying in your place. Hillary Clinton broke that
mold, love her or loathe her. In fact, she wasn't really the First Lady in our
minds – she was Hillary, which is why she could make the transition to Senator
Clinton. Laura Bush's remarks have shied away from this type of ambition. A
former teacher obsessed with reading and possessed of a verbally challenged
spouse, she will travel across America to promote sound teaching practices. She
is already reassuring reporters that she is "not going to run for Senator
of New York."
If only.
Feminism is, of course, as much in favor of women having traditional professions
as it is of their breaking into male-dominated ones. The point of women's
liberation is to have the choice to be whoever you are. Still, it must be said
that in Washington, D.C., and in the world of politics generally, women are
outsiders. President Clinton, rural poor kid and son of a single mom, was also a
scrappy outsider (for a straight white guy). Even though he was disappointing to
progressives and sexually focused on women in a way that pulled attention from
his leadership, Bill Clinton has something many leaders do not. He more than
likes women, he empathizes with them. By contrast, W. was raised on the inside,
a vantage point that has given him little opportunity to empathize. In fact,
W.'s way with women hearkens back to a time before feminism, the days when women
weren't at the table. His Eisenhower-era, old-boys-club approach is tempered by
his having spent the last thirty years living in an America that has been
dealing with women's rights. This mix of traditional privilege and
feminist-influenced culture means that he knows enough to have women in his
cabinet, but not enough to represent women's interests in his administration.
Nowhere is
this more obvious than in his handling of abortion and other issues of sexual
choice for women. W. has selected John Ashcroft as attorney general, a man who
described abortion as "an atrocity against the future" and who has a
twenty-year anti-choice track record, including support for laws to criminalize
abortion and to define life as beginning at fertilization (which precludes many
forms of birth control). W.'s head of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson,
announced that he will take the approval of RU-486 under consideration again,
despite the fact that this abortifacient has been in use in Europe for nearly a
decade without mishap. Prolife organizations are lobbying heavily to ban
so-called "partial birth" abortions again. If Congress approves any
pro-life attack on women's access to safe and comprehensive reproductive health
services, Bush is likely to sign it into law (in sharp contrast, again, to
Clinton).
On February
27, 2001, George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote by half a million ballots,
addressed Congress. The applause for his simple statements was frequent and
deafening. In fact, the enthusiasm was so disproportionate to the content that
the applause had to be the sound of hundreds of hefty, white, male Republicans
patting themselves on the back. "I thank you for making a new President
feel welcome," said Bush to nonstop applause. The broader his platitudes,
the more insistent the standing ovation. Then came his plan: "Tax
relief," not pay equity or raising the minimum wage, both of which affect
women's incomes disproportionately. There was no mention of the fact that women
pay fewer taxes -- because they make less money -- and are therefore less likely
to benefit from even the $200 per year estimated increased refund.
"Education" comes with "triple-funding for reading" and
"character education." I think it's fair to say that character
education isn't going to include the feminist views on choice, birth control,
sexuality education, and the like, nor will it preach male accountability when
it comes to STDs or pregnancy.
W's vision
for women? Well, the camera winked briefly at Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national
security adviser, but we've already heard that she's about as powerful as a Mac
Plus, and that it is Vice President Dick Cheney (who sat behind the president,
fittingly, to his right) who calls the shots. W. listed many issues that affect
women more than men, but, with the minor exception of the prescription drug
benefit and its sibling Medicare (and his sentence about elderly women needing
this benefit the most), he never actually mentioned "women." Here's
one salient example: W. claims to want an army of mentors for kids with a parent
in prison. He doesn't say that the vast majority of parents in prison who
actually have custody and care for their children are mothers. The number of
women in prison has increased at least threefold in the last half-decade, as a
result of stiff mandatory sentences for possession of even small amounts of
drugs. These same women, many of whom have children, could be caring for their
own families if they weren't locked up so precipitously and if more help were
available within the community. Rather than mentors for kids after their parents
are incarcerated, how about mothers' helpers for poor women, after-school
programs for poor children, and a legitimate welfare-to-work plan? Nah, that
would be addressing women's needs. The closest Bush will come to that is to
claim support for children who are "innocently" dependent on the
system.
After thirty
years of feminism, how did we end up with W." "He tried to telegraph his
concern for education and suburban values to women," says Nation columnist
and feminist Katha Pollitt, who noted that basically it worked with white women
during the election -- 49 percent of whom voted for him. "I think the drug
benefit is sort of aimed at women, and the supposed concern of women for
domestic 'caring and sharing' type issues." Simultaneously, however,
"he was telegraphing to the Christian Right how anti-abortion he was while
soft-pedaling it to the rest of us," says Pollitt. Which is why callers to
Six Rivers Planned Parenthood wondered whether the clinic was still open at the
same time that they expressed shock at W.'s pro-life stance.
"There
is something about him that is very manly in an exclusive way," says a
friend who, despite working for the pharmaceutical industry, finds Bush
terrifying. "He is like the glass ceiling." It's an apt metaphor: W.'s
America keeps barriers for women invisible but impenetrable. Why doesn't W.
stand for women? Because there is nothing in his life that would ask him to
stand up for women, including (so far) women themselves. The real reason that W.
doesn't stand for women is because, let's face it, he doesn't have to. And women
-- we who use clinics, or raise kids without health care, or are in prison, or
care about people who are -- are the only ones who can change that sexist
reality.
[Jennifer
Baumgardner is the co-author, with Amy Richards, of Manifesta: Young Women,
Feminism, and the Future and a frequent contributor to the Nation, Ms., and
Nerve, among other publications.]
__________________
Copyright
2001 by the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas,
Inc. If you have any questions about permissions, please contact
editors@dissentmagazine.org, or write to Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive, Suite
1201, New York, NY 10025. ##
* * *
ANOTHER TAINTED DD NOMINEE
Subject: Bush
nominates Central American Machiavelli
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 20:46:02 -0400
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Bush
nominates Central American Machiavelli as UN ambassador
By Pastor
Valle-Garay
(Special for
Granma International)
April 17,
2001
TORONTO.-
Pending U.S. congressional approval, the White House's next ambassador to the UN
will be a gray eminence of that country's bloody Central America policy during
the '80s.
In his
obsession to destroy the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the Farabundo
Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) of El Salvador, President Ronald Reagan
named John D. Negroponte as ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985.
Negroponte
engineered a dark tragedy of extraordinary proportions, which resulted in more
than 200,000 deaths and two million civilian refugees, who mostly fled to the
United States as a consequence of the armed conflict in
At the end of
the decade, the Sandinistas peacefully turned over power, after losing
democratic elections in which Washington's favorite candidate, Violeta Barrios
de Chamorro, was the victor. The FMLN reached a peace agreement with the
Salvadoran government and is now the second most important political party in
that country. Negroponte, the United States' Machiavellian ambassador to
Honduras during the contras' bloody and infamous proxy war led by Ronald Reagan
against Nicaragua and against the FMLN insurrection in El Salvador in the '80s,
has now been nominated U.S. ambassador to the UN by President George W. Bush.
Negroponte,
with 37 years of diplomatic service, was ambassador to Mexico in 1989 and
occupied the same position in the Philippines in 1993.
General Colin
L. Powell, national security director during the Reagan administration and
current secretary of state, named his personal friend Negroponte to the position
of assistant director of the National Security
ROMAN
PROCONSUL
When
Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras, he behaved like an arrogant Roman
Proconsul for Central America. His principle responsibility was to direct secret
operations to arm the contra rebels in the White House's merciless war, with the
objective of defeating the Sandinista government and the FMLN and, in the
process, take control of Honduras as if he were the de facto president of that
Honduras was
reduced to the rank of a U.S. military colony, used as a base of operations to
launch contra attacks which devastated Nicaragua and El Salvador.
During
Negroponte's time as ambassador, U.S. military aid to Honduras increased from $4
million to $77.4 million USD.
Practically
overnight, Honduras, one of the poorest countries in the Americas, was
transformed into one of the most militarized countries in the hemisphere,
without a visible or invisible enemy. Honduras' militarization also brought with
it, under Negroponte's auspices, the systematic violation of the human rights of
Hondurans suspected by the U.S. puppet government of being Communists or
Communist sympathizers.
Negroponte
was instrumental in creating Battalion 3-16, trained by the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and better known as the fearful death squad, responsible for the
disappearance of no less than 184 political opponents
TORTURER
DEPORTED FROM CANADA
Since the
beginning of this year, there has been a series of "coincidences" in
the United States which appear to be designed to remove any obstacles to
Negroponte's confirmation as UN ambassador.
In January
2001, Juan Angel Hernández Lara, a Honduran suspected of forming part of
Battalion 3-16, was deported from Florida. José Barrera, one of the Battalion's
interrogators, was expelled from Canada on February 20.
Meanwhile,
Honduran General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, one of the founding members of the
Battalion 3-16 paramilitary group who had been named by Honduras as a
high-ranking diplomat at the UN in 1996, lost his position in New York one month
ago. Discua, whose appointment to the UN was presumably to allow him
Discua rarely
fulfilled the responsibilities of his UN post. He preferred to spend his days in
Miami, where he owns a lot of property and where for various years he was the
target of constant accusations of human rights violations by Honduran and U.S.
organizations. After having ignored the accusations, the protests suddenly took
effect: in February, three weeks before Bush nominated Negroponte as ambassador
to the UN, Colin Powell's State Department revoked Discua's diplomatic visa,
alleging that he had not fulfilled his diplomatic
Days after
his return to Honduras, Discua told the Honduran newspaper La Prensa that in
1983 the White House had sent him to the United States to organize Battalion
3-16 and to work with the anti-Sandinista contra forces. According to Berta
Oliva di Nativi, the director of a group representing the families of the
disappeared, Discua is sending "an explicit message to the United States:
if it continues to do him damage, he will reveal Washington's role in the
creation of Battalion 3-16 and what happened during that period." This
could delay the
Since his
expulsion to Honduras, Discua has been talking openly on Honduran radio and
television, implicating the White House in the Death Squadron's operations.
ANOTHER HAWK
IN COMMAND
There is no
doubt, however, that Negroponte has more lives than a cat. When the Iran-Contra
scandal almost brought down Ronald Reagan's government for selling arms to Iran
in order to supply funds to the contras - breaking two U.S. congressional bans -
Negroponte, who directed those operations along with Colonel Oliver North from
the National Security offices located on the ground
Once more,
Negroponte has the formidable support of his former buddy, now secretary of
state in the Bush administration. According to reliable sources, Powell
personally selected Negroponte for the post of UN ambassador. It's a case of one
hand washing the other.
The
nomination has to be approved by Congress. It's possible that there will be
opposition from the Democratic Party, although those opposed to his nomination
would probably be incapable of counteracting the power of Powell, the chief hawk
on Bush's team. John F. Kerry, on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is one
of those opposed. Kerry recently stated that there is fresh information
suggesting that the U.S. ambassador to Honduras knew more than he informed
Congress and the public about human rights violations. Kerry went on to say that
in the '80s John Negroponte was at the center of a profound head-on clash
concerning the role that the United States should have in Central America and,
even more significantly, on the often secret manner in which U.S. foreign policy
was conducted. All of that will be reduced to rhetoric and redundancy once
Negroponte receives congressional approval.
If his
nomination is okayed, the Bush government will be creating an oxymoron in regard
to the U.S. mission at the UN: a fanatical anticommunist hawk in a position of
exceptional influence, precisely when the cold war has passed into history. In
other words, an impenitent dinosaur whom his friends have labeled a loyal
American and his critics in Washington call "amoral."
For Cuba,
Negroponte's probable approval means that the U.S. stance in relation to the
island will continue unchanged. For Nicaragua, where it is thought that Daniel
Ortega, leader of the Sandinista Party, will be the favorite in the end-of-year
presidential elections, it would constitute a return to the '80s, a period
during which Ortega and Negroponte were bitter enemies. The Bush
Pastor Valle-Garay
is a professor at York University, UK. ##
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