U.S. Gov't Sez: Earn Your Rights By Killing People

Imagine you were a parent who couldn't feed your daughter, who crossed into the U.S. illegally to find work and put food on the table. Your daughter was a little girl then, "undocumented" as they say, but no less of a person for it. Now she's almost finished high school -- one of your dreams for her. But many doors are closed because she lacks either a green card or citizenship.

Applicants wait in Langley Park, MD to apply for the Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals program. (Jose Luis Magana/AP Photo)  source: ABC News

You can't afford to put her through college. Maybe it's a blessing that she can't get a federal student loan -- at least she may escape the debt servitude of her generation among the working class.

Employers will be able to exploit her because of her legal status (how convenient for them). 

She can't visit her grandparents or cousins back in the place you both came from because of the risk that she might not be able to return to you.

How might you feel about the news that she can now "earn" a path to citizenship by enlisting in the military?

Pvt. Marleni Cruzcarranza of Sterling, Va., receives a hug from best friend Lauren Sanchez after receiving her U.S. citizenship during a naturalization ceremony Thursday morning at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island. Pvt. Cruzcarranza, formerly a citizen of Honduras, will graduate from Marine Corps bootcamp today (01/04/2013). - Sarah Welliver /ASSOCIATED PRESS  source: TheState.Com

How would you feel knowing that signing up for the Army is your daughter's best bet as a reliable fast track option for "earning" citizenship?

Now, as an enlistee she could also be expected to actually fight in combat (Falguni Sheth's blog post examining this as "progress" for women" is not to be missed). Your daughter might be required to kill people in Afghanistan, Yemen (or wherever may be the war du jour) as part of the much vaunted "path to citizenship."

How might you feel about recruiting ads aimed at her, some designed to play on family loyalty? A marketing strategy that counts on the fact that she's probably low-income, that unemployment is high? The poverty draft is blowing like a gale wind force through families like yours, and it is now pushing the daughters even more than the sons. The daughters who earn less for the same work done by men. The daughters who have a lower net worth for a lifetime than any man of any class or race whatsoever.
The daughters of color who disproportionately enlist in these crappy economic times.


How might you feel about Democrats are bragging about what they are offering your daughter?

Nancy Pelosi tweet: "House Dems support President’s principles of comprehensive #immigrationreform, promise of earned citizenship + keeping families together."

Rights are not earned, they are claimed. No government can bestow rights upon its people. Humans are born with them, whether or not they are able to realize this in their lifetime. The history of groups who were offered the chance to "earn" their rights in the past is not a particularly good one.

Africans and African American slaves were offered the chance to support combat troops for the North in the U.S. Civil War. They came home to lynching and the rise of the KKK, Jim Crow segregation laws, and voter suppression. Thanks, vets!

Japanese Americans who had been in the military still got put into illegal internment camps during WWII.

Native American veterans do no better economically or socially for having been in the military. In fact, they are more likely to end up addicted and/or homeless than the other members of their community. 

Actually, so are vets of any ethnic group. 

Apparently a right to quality health care if injured while on active duty is not one of the rights that can be earned -- although I'll bet you anything that's what recruiters told them was part of the package. "We'll take care of you AND your family if something happens to you," is what recruiters reportedly say. Ask the 900,000+ vets whose claims are backlogged at the VA right now if that claim turned out to be true.

And if you're one of the many who succumb to suicide while waiting to be helped with your PTSD or brain injury, your family gets nada.

In recent times, the Pentagon has shown its appreciation for families by having young mothers on active duty arrested, sometimes causing their children to be taken into protective services when the moms fail to report for duty due to childcare being unavailable. (Not like anybody in the patriarchal empire of the united bloody states thought there was ever any possibility of earning the right to universal high quality child care!)

Spc. Alexis Hutchinson, a 21-year-old Army cook, appears in fatigues in the photo held by her mother and viewed by her baby. The baby was taken from her when Alexis was arrested for not deploying.

Warm and fuzzy soft recruiting tactics aimed at high schoolers sure don't make it seem like the military would be such a mean boss. From the Jobs for Maine's Graduate program newsletter on a service learning project providing gifts to needy families over the holidays:

"We partnered with the Army National Guard in Skowhegan to facilitate wrapping the gifts and delivering them to the distribution sites."

Partnered is such a cozy verb, isn't it?

Militarization is the poison pill in every liberal offering these days.

Corporate Media Does Heavy Lifting For Perpetual War

The news that the Pentagon plans to send women into combat dominated two consecutive front pages of my local newspaper the Waterville Morning Sentinel. The Sentinel is one of a group of papers bought last year by the billionaire husband of Rep. Chellie Pingree, who "serves" on the House Armed Services Committee. The group includes the paper of record in our state capital (Kennebec Journal) and of Maine's largest city (Portland Press Herald).

Day #1, above the fold:

Day #2, above the fold, three related headlines:

As if lifted straight from a Pentagon press release, further along in this article are the rocks of unexamined assumption upon which empires are built -- and eventually run aground:

The necessities of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, propelled women into jobs as medics, military police and intelligence officers that were sometimes attached -- but not formally assigned -- to battalions. So while a woman couldn't be assigned as an infantryman in a battalion going out on patrol, she could fly the helicopter supporting the unit, or move in to provide medical aid if troops were injured. 

And these conflicts, where battlefield lines are blurred and insurgents can lurk around every corner, have made it almost impossible to keep women clear of combat.

In the second story, the only veterans interviewed by the Sentinel's reporter were all in favor of the idea.

In the story that ran side by side with the one about veterans, the newspaper couldn't find one single college student who didn't think this was a good idea -- really?

The poverty draft is a big factor in the lives of young people in the areas served by these newspapers. Maine has the highest per capita deaths in Afghanistan of any state, because even kids that trained to be welders or dieticians are out of work, along with those that graduated from U Maine with 4.0 GPAs and cannot get a call back from chain restaurants where they put in job applications.

Lucinda Marshall writing in Common Dreams reported on how the poverty draft disproportionately affects women in Why Serving in Combat Does Not Serve Women (Or Anyone Else) Well:

The take away here should be that we need to take a good hard look at the ways in which we are failing these women in regard to job training and job availability in the civilian world because as it stands now, we are effectively asking the most disenfranchised among us to fight our wars, and this move only makes it more dangerous for them, regardless of rank and benefits. (Emphasis mine.)

Ms. Marshall was among the few journalists who connected the (rather obvious) dots between this story and the other leading story about women in combat these days: the epidemic of rape in the military.

It is also hugely ironic that Panetta’s announcement came the same day that Congress was holding yet another hearing on the intractable problem of sexual assault in the military.  The truth is that women are more likely to be attacked by other members of our military than by any enemy. The New York Times’ Gail Collins makes the unfortunate suggestion that having more women rise in the ranks might,

make things better because it will mean more women at the top of the military, and that, inevitably, will mean more attention to women’s issues.

Sexual assault in the military is not a woman’s issue.  It is an epidemic and a national disgrace that is a direct result of the misguided notion of militarism that posits that strength comes from asserting power over others.  (Emphasis the author's.)

And in fact the New York Times and the head of the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff were marching to the same drummer on this one. As reported by Hayes Brown in ThinkProgress:

Instead of taking the stance of some commentators that adding women to combat units would diminish their effectiveness or “humiliate” the men serving alongside them, Dempsey rightly focused on the risk of assault that women in the armed services face. Approximately one in three military women have been sexually assaulted, about double the rate of those in civilian life.

With a compliant, corporate-controlled press in charge of the information provided to the vast majority of U.S. citizens, this relentless march to a fully militarized society isn't likely to end anytime soon.

Nor is it likely to end well.

Full report coming soon on the Feminist Values discussion I helped organize last Sunday in Augusta as the 19th Changing Maine Gathering. Suffice it to say for now that our collective attempt to sum up what we mean by feminist values in a sentence produced this gem: "Respect for the Earth, and for each other."

Bruce Gagnon at Portland No Tar Sands march Sat. Jan 26, 2013. Full story of the Pentagon's carbon footprint may be found in The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism by Barry Sanders.

Cannon Fodder Knows No Gender In 21st Century Wars

Clay Bennett in Chattanooga Times Free Press

Big post-inaugural announcement by the war machine firmly in control of the purse strings in Congress, the signing pen in the White House, and the leashed judicial "check" function: women will be officially sent into combat. USA Today helped by reporting that the president is all for the idea.

"Today, by moving to open more military positions -- including ground combat units -- to women, our armed forces have taken another historic step toward harnessing the talents and skills of all our citizens," Obama said in a statement Thursday.

Not surprising, since turning mothers into cannon fodder is what passes for equality in the milItarized 21st century reality funded by you and me.

Recruiting ads aimed at women play on their sense of duty toward their families i.e. Be a good daughter and earn money by enlisting. This is in keeping with studies showing that women lie to protect other people, and embezzle to help other people. Also in keeping with twin facts: austerity wears a woman's face, and the poverty draft in the U.S. is in full swing.

Supporters of the plan are willfully ignorant of the fact that the biggest danger faced by women in every branch of the military rape and other violent assault by their "fellow" soldiers. This is well-documented in the film The Invisible War which is up for an Academy Award and is a must-see for anyone paying attention to rape culture.

The president is not paying attention to this culture in the slightest as he uses the bully pulpit to spew b.s. about female cannon fodder:

"Today, every American can be proud that our military will grow even stronger with our mothers, wives, sisters and daughters playing a greater role in protecting this country we love."

Right, I'm sure that his daughters will be first in line to sign up when they graduate high school.

Mother Jones reported yesterday that the U.S. "defense" secretary (always a male) sat straight faced while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (always a male) claimed sending women into combat was a policy actually designed to reduce the incidence of rape.

Having studied the issue of rampant sexual misconduct in the ranks, Gen. Martin Dempsey... noted that he has concluded that the phenomenon exists partly because women have been subordinated to men in military culture: "It's because we've had separate classes of military personnel." 

No more second class citizens, no more rape --- see how easy that was?

I have become somewhat obsessed with the play "Mother Courage" by Bertholt Brecht. It's an historical play set in a grim Europe theater of perpetual war. The title character makes a living off provisioning the army while trying to save each of her three children from it; in the end, the recruiters get one son, the war profiteers get another, and PTSD due to witnessing atrocities gets her daughter. Only the mother survives, sort of.

Turning the daughter into cannon fodder would only makes sense in a culture so sickened by violence that it calls for arming teachers and sending them to school ready to gun down intruders.

In the 21st Century, we are all Mother Courage -- living by the sword, and dying by the sword.

But women are rising up against the glorification of violence. The 21st century will see women striking, dancing, and overturning the structures that allow violent patriarchy to dominate the airwaves and colonize young minds.

Feminist values are on the side of life, not of dealing death.

Authentic feminist courage was on display yesterday in the blood soaked halls of the U.S. Senate as 19 year old college student and CODEPINK intern Lachelle Roddy called out to warmonger John Kerry:

 “We’re killing thousands of people in the Middle East who are not a threat to us. When is it going to be enough? When are enough people going to be killed? I’m tired of my friends in the Middle East not knowing if they’re going to live to see the next day!”

Here's what greeted her as she emerged from jail (yup, she was arrested for speaking out of turn -- because we are such a free country):

My sentiments, exactly.