Wednesday, December 15, 2010

A Fundraiser for Women's Earth Alliance: details here

image of W.E.A. newsletter masthead is from here


close-up of the W.E.A. logo is from here

I just got this email and am happy to pass along the information. I hope it helps generate funds for Women's Earth Alliance,
Hi Julian,

Thanks for having such a dynamic presence in the blogosphere. Bloggers like you have inspired Women's Earth Alliance this year!

This season, we are trying something completely new for us -- an e-card campaign called the Ripple of Giving (
www.makearipple.org).

We'd really appreciate your helping us spread the word by blogging about this campaign. If you’re interested, you can blog the following:


Send this e-card to support a great campaign supporting grassroots women leaders around the world,
www.makearipple.org.

Cheers,

Amira Diamond, Melinda Kramer and the Women's Earth Alliance Team

From that website:

By sending WEA's "Ripple of Giving" e-card to someone you love, you empower grassroots women leaders across the world with the tools they need to transform poverty, sickness, injustice, and degradation into health, sustainability, peace, and power. Join the ripple. When you invest in women, knowledge spreads, solutions emerge, and communities thrive.

Here's How it Works:
You send the Ripple e-card ($10 donation to WEA per card) with personalized messages to your loved ones. But that's not all...

The real ripple begins when you get others to do the same. You hand-pick 5 of your most connected friends and ask them to send cards as well. Then they pick 5 more friends, and on it ripples!

You become a central part of completing WEA's financial goals for 2010, while sending ripples of good thoughts to people you love! With each card you send, you contribute to clean water campaigns in Africa, training for women farmers in India, and advocacy support to Native American leaders
in North America.

Preview a clip of the card here...



Speaking Out Against U.S. Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq

image is from here

First, a video about the above action:  
Global Day of Listening to Afghans

What follows are two cross-posted pieces from progressive media sources. What that means is that women's experience and feminist analysis will not be brought to bear on the matter of war, militarism, and any other U.S. foreign terrorism.

From WarIsACrime.org:

We Want You Out: an open letter from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Afghans for Peace
As the Obama administration releases its December Review of U.S. war in Afghanistan, the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers, along with Afghans for Peace, have issued a review of their experiences. To express support for their letter, follow this link.

We Want You Out: an open letter from the Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers and Afghans for Peace

To all the leaders of our world, the leaders of the US-led coalition, the Afghan government, the ‘Taliban/Al-Qaeda’ and regional countries,

We are intolerably angry.

All our senses are hurting.

Our women, our men and yes shame on you, our children are grieving.

Your Afghan civilian-military strategy is a murderous stench we smell, see, hear and breathe.

President Obama, and all the elite players and people of the world, why?

America’s 250-million-dollar annual communications budget just to scream propaganda on this war of perceptions, with its nauseating rhetoric mimicked by Osama and other warlords, is powerless before the silent wailing of every anaemic mother.

We will no longer be passive prey to your disrespectful systems of oligarchic, plutocratic war against the people.

Your systems feed the rich and powerful. They are glaringly un-equal, they do not listen, do not think and worst, they do not care.

We choose not to gluttonize with you. We choose not to be trained by you. We choose not to be pawned by you.

We henceforth refuse every weapon you kill us with, every dollar you bait us with and every lie you manipulate us with.

We are not beasts.

We are Afghans, Americans, Europeans, Asians and global citizens.

Yes, you have the false, self-appointed power to arrest us over expressing the public opinion of ordinary folk, students, farmers, shepherds, labourers, teachers, doctors . . . , people who now have nowhere to turn and nowhere to hide. ( Open Letter to our World Leaders )

This world public opinion against the Afghan war has been clearly expressed and is larger than any number of Wikileaks you seek to suppress. So, come arrest us all as we civilly disobey you. Come arrest us all. ( See excerpt below from Wikipedia’s ‘International public opinion on the war in Afghanistan’ )

Yes, you have the army, police and apparatchik to smother us and to bribe those who are Pavlov-reflexed to money, but you cannot stop us from restoring our voice.

We refuse to prostitute our hearts and minds.

We refuse you.

Not you the human person, but you the greedy system of self-interested power.

Again and again here in Afghanistan, we have seen a hope for non-violence light up; every day we see a yearning for humane relationships, and because of this, love is how we now firmly take our stand.

We will listen to the People on December 19th, on the Global Day of Listening to Afghans and we invite every one of you to pick up your phone to call us, to share one another’s pain, and to call our world to urgent reconciliation. We invite the world public opinion to overwhelm us! (email youthpeacevolunteers@gmail.com to arrange a call).

We wish to invite all the people of the world because when the powers are not listening to the people, listening becomes an act of love, it becomes a solidarity of non-violent resistance.

How can we do any less?

14-year-old Abdulai’s father was killed by the ‘Taliban’ and so, like every other human being, he copes with sorrow, hate, fear and anger.

But, he wakes up to the chronic war days in his land sensing that ‘something is very wrong with the world I’m caught up in’, ‘these elders of the world are not getting it…..’.

How does trillion-deficit killing, followed by the strategy of escalated killing and yet another review for more killing, work?

How does it make anyone safer?

How does it solve the incorruptible corruption, unequalled inequality and inviolate violence we face daily?

Your policies, skewed-ly ‘diagnosed’ and ‘reviewed’ in a cold clinical manner divorced from reality, have been deaf to the concerns and needs of the people, thus we endeavour to have a People’s Afghanistan December Review, because that’s what ordinary people can do.

We would try not to ‘throw’ our shoes at you. We would try to recognize the better side of all human beings and thus continue to serve our commoner’s tea and bread to one and all. But we do ask, plead and demand that you stop your unsustainable, superpower militarism.

We want peace.

We want you out.

With singular sincerity,

Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers

Afghans for Peace

Notes :

“My people, the suppressed millions, are my heroes. They are the real source of any positive change in Afghanistan and their power is stronger than anything else. And anti-war protesters around the world, those who are standing against the destructive policies of world powers. There is a superpower in the world besides the US government -- world public opinion.” Malalai Joya

Excerpts from Wikipedia:
International public opinion is largely opposed to the war in Afghanistan.
The 25-nation Pew Global Attitudes survey in June 2009 reported that majorities or pluralities in 18 out of 25 countries want U.S. and NATO to remove their military troops from Afghanistan as soon as possible.
Despite American calls for NATO allies to send more troops to Afghanistan, there was majority or plurality opposition to such action in every one of the NATO countries surveyed: Germany (63% opposition), France (62%), Poland (57%), Canada (55%), Britain (51%), Spain (50%), and Turkey (49%).
In Europe, poll after poll in France, Germany and even Britain show that the European public want their troops to be pulled out and less money spent on the war in Afghanistan
ABC News/BBC/ARD/Washington Post poll of 1,691 Afghan adults from Oct. 29-Nov. 13, 2010
Afghans indicated they were more pessimistic about the direction of their country, less confident about U.S.-led coalition troops providing security and more willing to negotiate with the Taliban than a year ago.
More than half of Afghans interviewed said U.S. and NATO forces should begin withdrawing from the country in mid-2011 or sooner.
“There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns. If I should die, and you should choose to carry on my work, you are welcome to visit my grave. Pour some water on it and shout three times. I want to hear your voice.” Malalai Joya


*          *          *

Next, from DissidentVoice.org,

The United States of War Criminals

People from poorer places and poorer countries have to call upon their compassion not to be angry with ordinary people in America.
– Arundhati Roy
More than half (53.3%) of US tax dollars go to a criminal enterprise known as the US Department of Defense (sic), a.k.a. the worst polluter on the planet. We hear about tax cuts this and budget that and all kinds of other bullshit from the US government and the corporations that own it…but the reality remains: Roughly one million tax dollars per minute are spent to fund the largest military machine (read: global terrorist operation) the world has ever known.

What do we get for all that money? To follow, is but one tiny example that mostly slipped through the cracks earlier this year.

On July 23, 2010, Tom Eley at Global Research wrote:

“According to the authors of a new study, ‘Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,’ the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.”

For those unfamiliar with the US attacks on Fallujah, first of all: You should be fuckin’ ashamed of yourselves. Secondly, here’s Patrick Cockburn’s basic description:
US Marines first besieged and bombarded Fallujah, 30 miles west of Baghdad, in April 2004 after four employees of the American security company Blackwater were killed and their bodies burned. After an eight-month stand-off, the Marines stormed the city in November using artillery and aerial bombing against rebel positions. US forces later admitted that they had employed white phosphorus as well as other munitions. In the assault US commanders largely treated Fallujah as a free-fire zone to try to reduce casualties among their own troops. British officers were appalled by the lack of concern for civilian casualties.
Of crucial importance is this: A high proportion of the weaponry used by the US in the assault contained depleted uranium (DU).

And you and I paid for it all.

The aforementioned study found that the cancer rate “had increased fourfold since before the US attack” and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are “similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation.”

Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Yeah, Americans paid for those bombs, too.
In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies:
• 24 percent were dead within the first seven days • 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed
Cockburn writes of a “12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighboring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.”

Dig this: After 2005, thanks to this “major mutagenic event” (DU), the proportion of girls born in Fallujah has increased sharply likely because “girls have a redundant X-chromosome and can therefore absorb the loss of one chromosome through genetic damage,” explains Eley.

And you and I paid for it all.

“The impact of war on civilians was more severe in Fallujah than anywhere else in Iraq because the city continued to be blockaded and cut off from the rest of the country long after 2004,” adds Cockburn. While I could go on with the gory details, I’d much rather you ask a few questions:
• Now that you know these facts (and they are just the tiniest proverbial tip of a massive proverbial iceberg), how do you feel and what are you going to do about it? • Is it time you stop buying military video games, hanging yellow ribbons, and allowing our hard-earned money to finance mass murder? • Can enjoy “the holidays” while women in Fallujah are petrified to have children? • Are you still able to insulate yourself with all those cute puppy videos on YouTube? • Are you ready to stop believing there’s a difference between the two wings of the same corporate/military party and start accepting that they’re all accessories to heinous crimes? • Will you still “support” the volunteer mercenaries as “heroes” or will you recognize them as willing—and paid—accomplices to war crimes? • Are you okay with 85.1% of US wealth being owned by the top 20% while 53.3% of your tax dollars subsidize atrocities, torture, oppression, occupation, and the literal destruction of the planet’s eco-system? • What is your threshold? Which taxpayer-funded horror story is the one that will finally make you scream “enough”? • When you’ve screamed “enough,” what can/will you do and how soon will you start doing it?
You don’t have to tell me your answers. I’m a co-conspirator just like you.

Save your answers for the children of Fallujah. I’m sure they’re wondering why the fuck we all choose to remain silent and inactive.

Mickey Z. is probably the only person on the planet to have appeared in both a karate flick with Billy "Tae Bo" Blanks and a political book with Howard Zinn. He is the author of 9 books—most recently Self Defense for Radicals and his second novel, Dear Vito—and can be found on the Web

Genocidal Atrocities Perpetrated by the U.S. and other Industrialised Nations Against Indigenous People Globally: Two Reports from Bolivia

photograph/portrait of one Guarani family is from Wikipedia, here

An excerpt from the first of who news reports below:
Recent scientific reports show that 300,000 people already die each year from climate change-related disasters. This text threatens to increase the number of deaths annually to one million. This is something we can never accept.

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.

Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change. When Bolivia said we did not agree with the text in the final hours of talks, we were overruled. An accord where only the powerful win is not a negotiation, it is an imposition.

What follows is a cross-post from the Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources website. Please click on the title below to link back and read much more news of import. Two reports on Bolivia appear in this post along with other information about the Guarani People.

Wednesday, 15 December 2010 14:14

Bolivia: Bolivia Decries Adoption Of Copenhagen Accord II Without Consensus


Statement Issued by the Bolivian Government

The Plurinational State of Bolivia believes that the Cancun text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus, and its cost will be measured in human lives. History will judge harshly.

There is only one way to measure the success of a climate agreement, and that is based on whether or not it will effectively reduce emissions to prevent runaway climate change. This text clearly fails, as it could allow global temperatures to increase by more than 4 degrees, a level disastrous for humanity. Recent scientific reports show that 300,000 people already die each year from climate change-related disasters. This text threatens to increase the number of deaths annually to one million. This is something we can never accept.

Last year, everyone recognized that Copenhagen was a failure both in process and substance. Yet this year, a deliberate campaign to lower expectations and desperation for any agreement has led to one that in substance is little more than Copenhagen II.

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.

While developing nations - those that face the worst consequences of climate change - pleaded for ambition, we were instead offered the “realism” of empty gestures. Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change. When Bolivia said we did not agree with the text in the final hours of talks, we were overruled. An accord where only the powerful win is not a negotiation, it is an imposition.

Bolivia came to Cancun with concrete proposals that we believed would bring hope for the future. These proposals were agreed by 35,000 people in an historic World People’s Conference Cochabamba in April 2010. They seek just solutions to the climate crisis and address its root causes. In the year since Copenhagen, they were integrated into the negotiating text of the parties, and yet the Cancun text systematically excludes these voices. Bolivia cannot be convinced to abandon its principles or those of the peoples we represent. We will continue to struggle alongside affected communities worldwide until climate justice is achieved.

Bolivia has participated in these negotiations in good faith and the hope that we could achieve an effective climate deal. We were prepared to compromise on many things, except the lives of our people. Sadly, that is what the world’s richest nations expect us to do. Countries may try to isolate us for our position, but we come here in representation of the peoples and social movements who want real and effective action to protect the future of humanity and Mother Earth. We feel their support as our guide. History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.

*          *          *

Please click on the title to link back to the source website.

Bolivia: Captive Communities: Situation Of The Guarani Indigenous People And Contemporary Forms of Slavery In The Bolivian Chaco


I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. In this report the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereinafter "Inter-American Commission" or "IACHR") analyzes the situation of the Guaraní indigenous people in the region known as the Bolivian Chaco, focusing particularly on the situation of Guaraní families subjected to conditions of debt bondage and forced labor. This phenomenon, which affects approximately 600 families, is known by reference to “captive communities,” and it clearly involves contemporary forms of slavery that should be eradicated immediately. In addition, this report analyzes the situation these captive communities face in order to gain access to their ancestral territory.

2. The report was preceded by a working and observation visit conducted June 9-13, 2008, by Commissioner Luz Patricia Mejía Guerrero, in her capacity as Rapporteur for Bolivia, and by Commissioner Víctor E. Abramovich, in his capacity as Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

3. The Commission deplores the existence in Bolivia of practices of bondage and forced labor, which are absolutely prohibited by the American Convention on Human Rights and other international instruments to which Bolivia is a party. The Commission also observes that the situation of bondage and forced labor in which the captive communities live is an extreme manifestation of the discrimination that indigenous peoples have suffered historically and continue suffering in Bolivia.

4. Despite the efforts made by the Bolivian State (hereinafter "the State," "Bolivia," or "the Bolivian State") to address the situation of bondage and forced labor and to facilitate the reconstitution of the Guaraní territory, there are still captive communities whose members are subject to performing forced labor for debts supposedly contracted and who most of the time do not receive any salary for their work.

5. The report concludes with recommendations aimed at cooperating with the Bolivian State in its efforts to eradicate these contemporary forms of slavery and to guarantee and protect the human rights of the Guaraní indigenous people, especially their collective property, their right of access to justice, and their right to a dignified life. The recommendations include actions to: (1) prevent, investigate, and punish contemporary forms of slavery; (2) reconstitute the territory of the Guaraní indigenous people; and (3) guarantee access to justice for the Guaraní indigenous people and all other indigenous peoples in Bolivia.

*          *          *

See also:
http://www.davidhogsholt.com/html/guarani.html

And note how Wikipedia's introduction to the Guarani People doesn't mention that they are being enslaved and killed by Global Western/Northern most powerful nations like the U.S. Why is that, do you think?

Guaraní ("wuarani") are a group of culturally related indigenous peoples of South America. They are distinguished from the related Tupi by their use of the Guaraní language. The traditional range of the Guaraní people is in what is now Paraguay between the Uruguay River and lower Paraguay River, the Corrientes and Entre Ríos Provinces of Argentina, southern Brazil, and parts of Uruguay and Bolivia.[1] Although their demographic dominance of the region has been reduced by European colonisation and the commensurate rise of mestizos, there are contemporary Guaraní populations in these areas. Most notably, the Guaraní language, still widely spoken across traditional Guaraní homelands, is one of the two official languages in Paraguay, the other one being Spanish.[2] The language was once looked down upon by the upper and middle classes, but it is now often regarded with pride and serves as a symbol of national distinctiveness.[citation needed] The Paraguayan population learns Guaraní both informally from social interaction and formally in public schools.

"Trans Politics on a neo-Liberal Landscape" (and the Dangers of Trickle-Down Social Justice Movements). THANK YOU, Dean Spade!! (See video here.)



I've been hoping someone would say all this. And now my hopes have come true. Well, they came true when Dean Spade put together this presentation/argument. And here is part of it, above.

And thanks to the commenter below, here is the full speech/video!! Source here: http://vimeo.com/4596216


Dean Spade from BCRW Videos on Vimeo.


This is the full-length video of Dean Spade's lecture, "Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape," delivered on February 9, 2009 at Barnard College. This video was created by the Barnard Center for Research on Women. For additional videos and podcasts of this event and others like it, please visit barnard.edu/​bcrw .

Readers, what do y'all think of what is being said here?

Also, here is Dean Spade's homepage:

http://www.deanspade.net/

The White Queer Condundrum

image of Dan Savage and the U.S. flag is from here

It seems to me that if white queer activists are to move forward, we must do so by agreeing on a some basic political realities: that our oppression is bound up with the oppression of people of color across sexuality; that our oppression is a product of misogyny and other patriarchal values; and if we take white and male supremacy seriously as two interwoven ideologies that are acted out against all of us who are not white, men, and het, then we'd form a rather large base of resistance against the forces committing the racist heteropatriarchal atrocities against us, including gynocide and genocide.

What would have to happen is that white gay men with class privilege would have to stop trying to reach the pinnacle of social-economic-political-structural success, and be willing instead to assess the cost to others of having those privileges and organising to achieve them. If white gay men succeed in obtaining all the rights and entitlements of white het men, then they become as much the oppressor of girls and women of all colors and all sexualities as white het men, do they not?

If whites queer organisations don't examine and challenge how their white and male privileges are shaping their political agendas and projects--specifically, how they are classist, misogynistic, and racist, as well as anti-Indigenist and ecocidal, then whose responsibility is it to challenge them to be more accountable to those they oppress?

My problem with some contemporary political discourse is that once a group is defined primarily as "oppressed" or "without some form of privileges" (you know who you are), that means they ought not be challenged at all on the privileges they do have. Since when has that been a code of responsible political conduct? That has never been part of the radical ethics I've most valued. All my adult life, gay political agendas have been interrogated (most consistently by lesbian feminists). But so too have lesbian politics. So too have white-led and white-majority political organisations; so too have the agendas and values of queer class-privileged people. So too have Black liberation groups. So too have anti-war movements. No group in the last sixty years has gotten a break from this level of political interrogation.

Why should any group with some structural privileges be able to be exempt from direct accountability to the ways they are perpetuating and perpetrating genocide and gynocide?

A case in point:
What I see a lot of online in the blogosphere is non-trans progressive to liberal women being challenged by a few trans folks to first own and then eliminate their transphobia; I see some liberal and progressive non-trans women be very careful to own their cis gender privileges and to work to eliminate them or at least be responsible for them. I see no such similar challenge by those trans people directed at men on men's blogs. Regardless of political persuasion. Men, it appears to me, and anti-feminists generally, get a pass, for some strange reason. And what I also see is that when any non-trans woman calls out the male privileges of some trans people, those women are systematically silenced and shunned. They are not respectfully engaged. They are not regarded as people who might actually know when and where male supremacy lives and breathes--down non-trans women's backs. Non-trans women are cast as oppressors, not the oppressed. And trans people are cast as only oppressed, and not ever oppressors. That's not a bandwagon I'm leaping onto any time soon, because the blatant misogyny of it ought to make everyone take notice and protest, including trans folks who are also discriminated against because of misogyny and male supremacy.

I trust radical lesbian feminists to know about and be able to accurately name male privilege and practice, among other oppressive realities. And while some of the insults that go around and around on the blogosphere against all groups are indeed hurtful and sometimes degrading, and ought not be considered non-hurtful, at some point those of us with past or present male privileges need to be responsible for and with them, even if we are oppressed in some ways. And the way to be responsible is not to simplistically reject the analysis of radical lesbian feminists--because there is disagreement on one issue, for example.

That most contemporary white queer activists, particularly and especially spokespeople representing gay men, liberal queers, and trans people, view Mary Daly with more contempt and discuss her with more disrespect that is aimed at liberal queer activists whose agenda is implicitly gynocidal and genocidal. This is something that needs to be called out as pure misogyny and anti-feminism. The same holds true for gross condemnation by some white trans people and white gay men of Sheila Jeffreys.

Daly and Jeffreys are two of the most important radical lesbian feminist theorists and writers of the last forty years. This isn't to say each woman didn't or doesn't have privileges. This isn't to say those privileges ought not be called out. But their work ought to be engaged with sustantively and respectfully, in my view, using Lorde's letter to Daly as a prime example of how to do exactly that.

Audre Lorde calling out Mary Daly's racism was NOT used by Lorde as an opportunity to bash radical feminism--or Mary Daly; it was an taken as an opportunity to strengthen radical feminism. Far too many gay male and trans activists don't respect radical feminism, lesbian or not. This is a sign to me that there's a deep-seated male supremacist politic and contempt for non-trans women lurking perhaps not terribly far from the surface. And it is grossly misogynistic. And it is terribly heteropatriarchal.

The white queer community must engage responsibly and respectfully with Jeffreys' book Unpacking Queer Politics, for example. It is far and away the best book on the subject I've seen (please let me know if there's any better analysis of what is liberal and male supremacist about contemporary Western/white queer politics). What I see across the blogosphere, from MRA sites to trans sites, is that not only is the book rejected as ludicrous and oppressive, but all of Jeffreys' work is as well.

I hold some critiques of Jeffreys' work as I do about everyone's work. But to not be willing to engage with it except to dismiss it as "man-hating" or "transphobic" is unacceptable political practice, if you call yourself progressive or radical. It is predictably neoLiberal and neo-Conservative behavior. I expect MRA sites to reject all radical feminist writing as "oppressive" (to--cough--men). Men deny patriarchy because men benefit from it, as a class. And at this point I expect liberal queer folks to reject all radical feminist writings as "not helpful" because the liberal queer project hasn't been to uproot white het male supremacy for many decades. White queer politic work, by and large, only seeks to challenge the ways that the het part leaves some privileged queer people outside the realm of having het privilege. This agenda is apparent in causes like being able to join the army to being able to marry. That political work does nothing to end genocide and gynocide, or even to expose the deadly dynamics of white and male supremacy. It is liberal reform work.

How many girl-slaves do their have to be in the world for white queer activists to take up sexual trafficking as "our" issue? How many Indigenous girls need to be lost to their heritage? How many poor girls have to endure the indignities and illness that comes with the kind of poverty corporate capitalism and globalisation both maintain and intensify?

Within the last day or so, the white het men who are the richest in the U.S. won the right to not have their first ten million dollars taxed at all if they pass it on to their children or other heirs. Not taxed at all. And the rest gets taxed at about 33%. Why is the tax rate for the richest 5% comparable to that of the middle class when the rich earn about 80% of all earnings in this country and the remaining 20% of earned income is expected to house, feed, educate, clothe, and supply medical care to the bottom 95% of the population? Do the math: that means the rich can only get richer, even when they drive their companies into the ground through inept or corrupt management.

And the rich are not going to pay more in taxes because President Obama worked out a deal with the greedy WHM supremacist criminals and thieves to keep more of what they earn, that will not create anything at all except more rich Western WHM supremacy.

When will white queer organisations make the deadly connections between corporate capitalism and heterosexism? Between anti-Indigenism and individualism? Between prostitution, militarism, and marriage as interlinking systems and institutions that are necessarily misogynistic and genocidal?

I'm asking. And I would like some of the representatives of white queer agendas, such as Dan Savage, to please explain to me what is respectable or humane about liberal political work.