A settlement for Native Americans: But is it enough?

HELL NO!!!!

[above image is from here]

Click on article title just below to link back to where I first read this @ National Indigenous Times Blog, which is where everything that follows is from.

A settlement for Native Americans: But is it enough?

Published on December 9th, 2009

Posted by Amy McQuire in Amy McQuire's Blog

There has finally been a settlement in the long-running class action case against the US government on behalf of 300,000 Native Americans who had their land and money withheld from them.

- Leading claimant Elouise Cobell

The Obama administration has placed the amount at $US1.4 billion, which Indian Country Today reports will provide all of the members of the action with a $1000 check, if the settlement is approved of course.
On NIT today:

President Barack Obama praised the settlement as “an important step towards a sincere reconciliation” between the federal government and about 300,000 beneficiaries of the law suits.


The agreement must be approved by the US Congress and the US district court of the District of Columbia, but if confirmed it would conclude a bitter class action suit first brought in 1996 by Elouise Cobell.



The suit claims the federal government mismanaged “acres of land and millions of dollars” under 19th-century laws that divided up Indian lands into small parcels that were held in trust for individual Native Americans.



“Between the accounting claims and the trust administration claims, the plaintiff class will receive approximately $US1.4 billion ($A1.5 billion),” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.


The government will also establish a $US2 billion fund to pay for the consolidation of the land under tribal ownership by paying off, on a voluntary basis, the several hundred thousand Indians with interests in the land.



In addition, it will set up a $US60 million ($A65.8 million) scholarship fund for Native American students.


Under the 1887 Dawes Act, tribal lands were broken up into parcels of between 16.2 hectares and 64.7 hectares and allotted to individual native Americans in a what proved to be a failed attempt to encourage their assimilation.

Held in trust by the US government, the land was passed to succeeding generations of heirs of the original owners so some parcels now have thousands of owners.



Thirteen years in litigation, Cobell vs Salazar is one of the largest class action suits ever brought against the US government.”

Indian Country Today reports Elouise Cobell as saying she is thankful for an outcome to an issue that should have been settled long ago.But she mentions that it falls far short of what claimants are really entitled to.

“Cobell said that there is “no doubt” that the settlement amount is “significantly less than the full accounting to with the class members are entitled.”



One settlement figure offered by lawyers for the Indian plaintiffs during legal proceedings was $47 billion.

But Cobell said that as the case has progressed through the years, some class members have passed away, and many are living in extreme poverty.


“A settlement can address the situation,” Cobell said, adding that she doesn’t believe trust reform should stop at this point.



She said she is hopeful Interior will work to permanently correct wrongs so Indian account holders will have knowledge of money that is rightfully theirs.

I am a bit saddened that the offer falls far short of what is needed, considering Australia’s own stolen wages scandal.

In Queensland, the take-it-or-leave-it reparations offer set up by the Beattie government was seen as an insult.

It only came to $55.6 million, a figure far from the $500 million estimated to have been withheld from Aboriginal pockets for decades.

But the interesting thing about the Cobell case has been it reversed the onus of proof back onto US governments.

Australia’s leading expert on stolen wages, Dr Rosalie Kidd, has in the past said that the courts could be the only answer for stolen wages claimants, as it directly puts the governments to account.

Last month, she told NIT that this was the case for the legal action taken by Conrad Yeatman, who lodged a legal action in the QUeensland District Court earlier this year, seeking to recover his decades of lost wages.

“What is new about the unions case is that they are reversing the onus of proof,” Dr Kidd told NIT. 



“They are saying that the government is a trustee of all that money that was taken while under its control.

”It acted as a banker effectively in terms of money coming in from wages, they controlled what they allowed people to spend…



“The case is saying that if you were the legal trustee of that money it is up to you as the government to do several things. 



“Firstly you have to keep a full set of records. They haven’t.

“Then they are not allowed to have a conflict of interest in managing people’s money. Their conduct on savings showed they had a conflict of interest and they used the money for their own benefit.”


Dr Kidd says that the good thing in taking the case is that it takes the “ball out of the government’s court”. 



“I think the government has trashed any political options. There is an overwhelming wealth of incriminating evidence generated from the government’s own files,” Dr Kidd says. 

”I think a court case would allow firstly all of the information to come out into the public. 



“The government has no standing to dictate the terms of what it might do and what it might not do, what it will admit to and what it won’t.
”The court will make its own judgement on whether it is relevant or valid. It takes the ball out of the government’s court.”

It will be interesting to see what comes of the Yeatman case, and whether Aboriginal people may have to go to the courts like Elouise Cobell. Of course, as we have seen in this long running class action, this in itself could take an even longer time.

Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching women without being maced

[image is from here]

When you approach me, I will begin to evaluate the possibility you will do me harm. That possibility is never 0%. For some women, particularly women who have been victims of violent assaults, any level of risk is unacceptable. Those women do not want to be approached, no matter how nice you are or how much you’d like to date them. Okay? That’s their right. Don’t get pissy about it. Women are under no obligation to hear the sales pitch before deciding they are not in the market to buy.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

What follows is from here.

Schrödinger’s Rapist: or a guy’s guide to approaching strange women without being maced

2009 October 8

by Sweet Machine

Phaedra Starling is the pen name of a romance novelist and licensed private investigator living in small New York City apartment with two large dogs.  She practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu and makes world-class apricot muffins.

Gentlemen. Thank you for reading.

Let me start out by assuring you that I understand you are a good sort of person. You are kind to children and animals. You respect the elderly. You donate to charity. You tell jokes without laughing at your own punchlines. You respect women. You like women. In fact, you would really like to have a mutually respectful and loving sexual relationship with a woman. Unfortunately, you don’t yet know that woman—she isn’t working with you, nor have you been introduced through mutual friends or drawn to the same activities. So you must look further afield to encounter her.

So far, so good. Miss LonelyHearts, your humble instructor, approves. Human connection, love, romance: there is nothing wrong with these yearnings.

Now, you want to become acquainted with a woman you see in public. The first thing you need to understand is that women are dealing with a set of challenges and concerns that are strange to you, a man. To begin with, we would rather not be killed or otherwise violently assaulted.

“But wait! I don’t want that, either!”

Well, no. But do you think about it all the time? Is preventing violent assault or murder part of your daily routine, rather than merely something you do when you venture into war zones? Because, for women, it is. When I go on a date, I always leave the man’s full name and contact information written next to my computer monitor. This is so the cops can find my body if I go missing. My best friend will call or e-mail me the next morning, and I must answer that call or e-mail before noon-ish, or she begins to worry. If she doesn’t hear from me by three or so, she’ll call the police. My activities after dark are curtailed. Unless I am in a densely-occupied, well-lit space, I won’t go out alone. Even then, I prefer to have a friend or two, or my dogs, with me. Do you follow rules like these?

So when you, a stranger, approach me, I have to ask myself: Will this man rape me?

Do you think I’m overreacting? One in every six American women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. I bet you don’t think you know any rapists, but consider the sheer number of rapes that must occur. These rapes are not all committed by Phillip Garrido, Brian David Mitchell, or other members of the Brotherhood of Scary Hair and Homemade Religion. While you may assume that none of the men you know are rapists, I can assure you that at least one is. Consider: if every rapist commits an average of ten rapes (a horrifying number, isn’t it?) then the concentration of rapists in the population is still a little over one in sixty. That means four in my graduating class in high school. One among my coworkers. One in the subway car at rush hour. Eleven who work out at my gym. How do I know that you, the nice guy who wants nothing more than companionship and True Love, are not this rapist?

I don’t.

When you approach me in public, you are Schrödinger’s Rapist. You may or may not be a man who would commit rape. I won’t know for sure unless you start sexually assaulting me. I can’t see inside your head, and I don’t know your intentions. If you expect me to trust you—to accept you at face value as a nice sort of guy—you are not only failing to respect my reasonable caution, you are being cavalier about my personal safety.

Fortunately, you’re a good guy. We’ve already established that. Now that you’re aware that there’s a problem, you are going to go out of your way to fix it, and to make the women with whom you interact feel as safe as possible.

To begin with, you must accept that I set my own risk tolerance. When you approach me, I will begin to evaluate the possibility you will do me harm. That possibility is never 0%. For some women, particularly women who have been victims of violent assaults, any level of risk is unacceptable. Those women do not want to be approached, no matter how nice you are or how much you’d like to date them. Okay? That’s their right. Don’t get pissy about it. Women are under no obligation to hear the sales pitch before deciding they are not in the market to buy.

The second important point: you must be aware of what signals you are sending by your appearance and the environment. We are going to be paying close attention to your appearance and behavior and matching those signs to our idea of a threat.

This means that some men should never approach strange women in public. Specifically, if you have truly unusual standards of personal cleanliness, if you are the prophet of your own religion, or if you have tattoos of gang symbols or Technicolor cockroaches all over your face and neck, you are just never going to get a good response approaching a woman cold. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed to a life of solitude, but I suggest you start with internet dating, where you can put your unusual traits out there and find a woman who will appreciate them.

Are you wearing a tee-shirt making a rape joke? NOT A GOOD CHOICE—not in general, and definitely not when approaching a strange woman.

Pay attention to the environment. Look around. Are you in a dark alley? Then probably you ought not approach a woman and try to strike up a conversation. The same applies if you are alone with a woman in most public places. If the public place is a closed area (a subway car, an elevator, a bus), even a crowded one, you may not realize that the woman’s ability to flee in case of threat is limited. Ask yourself, “If I were dangerous, would this woman be safe in this space with me?” If the answer is no, then it isn’t appropriate to approach her.

On the other hand, if you are both at church accompanied by your mothers, who are lifelong best friends, the woman is as close as it comes to safe. That is to say, still not 100% safe. But the odds are pretty good.

The third point: Women are communicating all the time. Learn to understand and respect women’s communication to you.

You want to say Hi to the cute girl on the subway. How will she react? Fortunately, I can tell you with some certainty, because she’s already sending messages to you. Looking out the window, reading a book, working on a computer, arms folded across chest, body away from you = do not disturb. So, y’know, don’t disturb her. Really. Even to say that you like her hair, shoes, or book. A compliment is not always a reason for women to smile and say thank you. You are a threat, remember? You are Schrödinger’s Rapist. Don’t assume that whatever you have to say will win her over with charm or flattery. Believe what she’s signaling, and back off.

If you speak, and she responds in a monosyllabic way without looking at you, she’s saying, “I don’t want to be rude, but please leave me alone.” You don’t know why. It could be “Please leave me alone because I am trying to memorize Beowulf.” It could be “Please leave me alone because you are a scary, scary man with breath like a water buffalo.” It could be “Please leave me alone because I am planning my assassination of a major geopolitical figure and I will have to kill you if you are able to recognize me and blow my cover.”

On the other hand, if she is turned towards you, making eye contact, and she responds in a friendly and talkative manner when you speak to her, you are getting a green light. You can continue the conversation until you start getting signals to back off.

The fourth point: If you fail to respect what women say, you label yourself a problem.


There’s a man with whom I went out on a single date—afternoon coffee, for one hour by the clock—on July 25th. In the two days after the date, he sent me about fifteen e-mails, scolding me for non-responsiveness. I e-mailed him back, saying, “Look, this is a disproportionate response to a single date. You are making me uncomfortable. Do not contact me again.” It is now October 7th. Does he still e-mail?

Yeah. He does. About every two weeks.

This man scores higher on the threat level scale than Man with the Cockroach Tattoos. (Who, after all, is guilty of nothing more than terrifying bad taste.) You see, Mr. E-mail has made it clear that he ignores what I say when he wants something from me. Now, I don’t know if he is an actual rapist, and I sincerely hope he’s not. But he is certainly Schrödinger’s Rapist, and this particular Schrödinger’s Rapist has a probability ratio greater than one in sixty. Because a man who ignores a woman’s NO in a non-sexual setting is more likely to ignore NO in a sexual setting, as well.

So if you speak to a woman who is otherwise occupied, you’re sending a subtle message. It is that your desire to interact trumps her right to be left alone. If you pursue a conversation when she’s tried to cut it off, you send a message. It is that your desire to speak trumps her right to be left alone. And each of those messages indicates that you believe your desires are a legitimate reason to override her rights.

For women, who are watching you very closely to determine how much of a threat you are, this is an important piece of data.

The fifth and last point: Don’t rape. Nor should you commit these similar but less severe offenses: don’t assault. Don’t grope. Don’t constrain. Don’t brandish. Don’t expose yourself. Don’t threaten with physical violence. Don’t threaten with sexual violence.

Shouldn’t this go without saying? Of course it should. Sadly, that’s not the world I live in. You may be beginning to realize that it’s not the world you live in, either.

Miss LonelyHearts wishes you happiness and success in your search for romantic companionship.

Debating Prostitution: in India and in the U.S., men want women and girls for rent or for sale

Illustration by Sorit

[image above and most of what follows is from here]

A brown hand offering up a white woman to black hands?

As if most women in South Asia are white. And as if men in India,

and the international purchasers, traffickers, and procurers are Black.

From OutlookIndia.com here:

[Part of what follows the editorial in the comments section:]

[M]aking a choice between prostitution and death is not a choice. However let's take the United States as an example where the average person never makes choices between death and one alternative. We know that women (including Indian women) are trafficked to the United States. Lesser known, however, is that 90% of prostituted women in the United States are sold by a pimp. (This includes women sold within legal brothels in the state of Nevada.) The average age for a woman to first be prostituted in the United States is 13 while the age that she can legally consent to sex is 16-18 depending on the state. The entrepreneur woman who freely chooses prostitution from a range of options and who sells herself without being sold by a pimp or trafficker is exceptionally rare in the world if she exists at all. Trafficking exists because prostitution does and we seem to be clinging to prostitution without realizing what it is like. I agree with the author that eliminating prostitution by criminalizing the demand would be a small price to pay for a world where women and girls do not have to fear being trafficked.

Whitney.LRuss@gmail.com

New Delhi, India

To Let / For Sale?

Legalising prostitution is not the answer. Nab the traffickers. 

by Ruchira Gupta

When a problem is big and tends to profit a powerful group, there’s a time-honoured temptation to sweep it under the rug by assuming it’s natural and inevitable. This was true of slavery until the abolitionist movement of the 19th century, and of colonialism until the contagion of independence movements in the 20th century. Now these same forces are at work in attitudes toward the global and national realities of sex slavery. The biggest normaliser of profiteering from the rental, sale and invasion of human bodies is the idea that it is too big to fight, that it has always existed, and that it can be swept under the rug by legalising and just accepting it. Those who profit—in this case, the global network of sex traffickers, sex tourism operators and brothel owners—are the major force behind the argument to legalise and increase profits that already rival those from the global arms and drug trade.

What will diminish and end this injustice? Exposing its reality: the lack of alternatives for those who are prostituted; the addiction and inability to empathise among those who create the demand, and the disastrous results wherever the selling or renting of human beings for sexual purposes has been legalised and normalised.
In Australia and the Netherlands where prostitution has been legalised, for instance, trafficking and the harms that come with it have only increased. In Victoria, Australia, it not only allowed legal brothels to proliferate, but illegal brothels increased by 300 per cent in a year. A hospitable environment for sex tourists and other buyers drove up demand local women and girls had too many alternatives to becoming the supply, they had to be trafficked from Southeast Asia.

The same is true of Amsterdam where trafficked East European and North African girls outnumber Dutch citizens in brothels. The mayor of Amsterdam reports that the red-light district has become a centre for illegal immigration and money laundering. In Germany and in an area near Las Vegas where prostitution has been legalised, government agencies tried to make applicants for unemployment benefits show they had attempted to find ‘work’ in the so-called ‘hospitality industry’ of prostitution in order to become eligible for such benefits. This was only defeated by massive organising by women’s movements.

In the few countries that have legalised prostitution—with the idea that it would reduce harm to prostituted women, as is now being argued by some in India—rates of assault and rape against the prostituted have not dropped.  There is also no corroborated evidence that legalisation increases the use of condoms or women’s power to demand such use. On the contrary, an official emphasis on condoms has often made it possible for brothels to demand more money for unprotected sex, while also causing them to conceal the number of prostituted women and children who have lost their lives to AIDS.

In Calcutta, a group of women who had asked for the unionisation of prostitution to guarantee workers’ rights  admitted to facing violence when they’re alone with the client. “They paid for it, we cannot stop it.” A doctor working for this group said he left after having to stitch up the vagina of a fifteen-year-old Nepali girl—for the third time. 

But there is some good news. It comes from countries where traffickers have been pursued, and prostituted women and children have been given services and alternatives. Sweden has gone after traffickers and pimps, confiscated their illegal assets, and made them compensate for damages while also decriminalising and offering services to prostituted women and children. By imposing penalties on those who create the demand and providing ‘John schools’ that address their addiction to dominance, they diminish the problem itself.

The result has been a significant decrease in sex trafficking and the commodification of sex. In ’99, it was estimated that 1,25,000 Swedish men bought about 2,500 prostituted women one or more times per year, before the law came into force. By ’02, this figure had fallen to no more than 1,500 women. The only truly effective way to curb trafficking is to see it for what it is, an outrage to human rights; one that can diminish, just as labour slavery and colonialism have come to do. Prostitution has not existed in all societies: it is a function of the inequality of women and the equation of masculinity with domination. All men in the present are not dependent on prostitution.

Commodification of human beings creates a separate class  of people whose bodies can be rented or sold—the very opposite of the universal protection of human dignity enshrined in the body of the Indian constitution.

---

(The author is the founder and president of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an anti-trafficking organisation.)
___________________

The comments, many by heterosexual men, are pro-prostitution because it serves misogynist men's sexual appetites to be for it, even while they complain endlessly about how much it costs. As if they are forced to pay.

One reply to the comments:

In reading these comments I see several themes emerging that do not make sense to me.

1) "A poor country like India will always have lots of poor women flooding the brothels and the demand for prostituted sex cannot meet this supply." If this were true, there would be no trafficking industry. There would be no mafia-like structure making crores from the kidnapping, trafficking, and selling of young girls into brothels to meet the demand. The very existence of international trafficking suggests that no where in the world does the supply excede the demand, India included.

2) "Erradicating prostitution forces religious morality on women." Prostituted women are beaten, raped, kidnapped, coerced, infected, and killed as a regular part of the job. I reaquainted myself with atheism, humanism, and even satanism for the purpose of this post and found all would agree that such treatment of people is wrong (even in the absence of God's opinion). These are the wrongs the author refers to and I see no connection to whether or not God wants humans to have sex with each other.

3) "Trafficking is wrong but prostitution is not." This idea must come from the notion that there are women prostituted freely and of their own volition. First, making a choice between prostitution and death is not a choice. However let's take the United States as an example where the average person never makes choices between death and one alternative. We know that women (including Indian women) are trafficked to the United States. Lesser known, however, is that 90% of prostituted women in the United States are sold by a pimp. (This includes women sold within legal brothels in the state of Nevada.) The average age for a woman to first be prostituted in the United States is 13 while the age that she can legally consent to sex is 16-18 depending on the state. The entrepreneur woman who freely chooses prostitution from a range of options and who sells herself without being sold by a pimp or trafficker is exceptionally rare in the world if she exists at all. Trafficking exists because prostitution does and we seem to be clinging to prostitution without realizing what it is like. I agree with the author that eliminating prostitution by criminalizing the demad would be a small price to pay for a world where women and girls do not have to fear being trafficked.

Whitney.LRuss@gmail.com

New Delhi, India

___________________

Typical misogynist man's response:

Women organisations are ALWAYS looking to increase the PRICE payable for SEX.

While males are starved for sex, except through the HIGHLY EXPENSIVE form of marriage, they have no option as of today, but to pay through their noses, indeed, through their lives! This is because, in our society, the male is by default, the buyer, and the female, the seller of sex. Whether in prostitution or marriage, the male is always the BUYER!

Anti male and anti-gay laws - authored by the British - have been buried at last by a bold Indian High Court. Now, when will TWO other, anti-male laws - also made by the same ancient Church - now be given a burial too?

1.) PORNOGRAPHY : though internet is full of pornography, our convent-school- brainwashed-moral police, punishes pornography! Indian women critics of pornography, still consider it demeaning to their sacred bodies! Will the media support the struggle for better sexual avenues, especially for males, in the 21st century?

2.) ALIMONY : alimony originated in England, because the divorced husband continued to remain the property owner even if divorced, and the wife depended upon him for her sustenance under this ridiculous churchian rule, Therefore, a law for support from the husband arose. In 1867, in the first recorded case of alimony, a Nevada court expanded the concept of alimony pendente lite to assist the wife with travel expenses of witnesses.

Prostitution, like pornography, is cheaper sex for the average male. And therefore, anti-male forces have always found a way to bad mouth it through a friendly media and to ban it.

WAKE UP, MALES! SPEAK UP!

Partha persistent spammer

chennai, India

_________________

My response to Partha persistent spammer follows:

Why do men have to rent human beings in order to have sex? Ever hear of "going solo"? The assumption that women and girls have to be used for men to have "sex" is ridiculous. Males take care of themselves without paying for it when they are adolescents, right? So adult men won't die without prostitution. But a lot less women will suffer. This assumes people care about women suffering more than men having access to girls and women.

All pimping and procuring and trafficking should be criminalised, and boys, girls, and women who are being trafficked, pimped, and procured should not be criminalised, which is a very different approach than legalising prostition. Sweden did this and prostitution went down by 75%. Do you really think Swedish men are "suffering" because of this? No, they are not. They simply aren't using women as things to ejaculate into and on. This is a human rights issue, not a moral one.

Any man--especially you, [Partha persistent spammer]--above who has stated that prostitution should be legal: you get paid to have yourself be ejaculated on and in for one month, daily, by many men each day--men who think of you as a thing to be used and abused, and then tell me you want that to be legal.

Finally, anti-Black racism of the image used to introduce this piece is ridiculous. Black hands coming at a white woman? Most violence in the West is done by white men against women of all colors, when you combine interpersonal and institutional violence. Are most of the women and girls being trafficked in prostitution in India, white? I doubt it.

Julian