Resisting America's Torture State

I have a new article up at the Center for a Stateless Society, discussing how America's mass use of solitary confinement amounts to institutionalized torture.

First Post at the Center for a Stateless Society

I now write at the Center for a Stateless Society, an anarchist think tank and media center.  My first op-ed, "ALEC is an Enemy of Liberty", was published yesterday.

In Memory of Presidents' Victims

On facebook, there is a liberal page titled "We survived Bush.  You will survive Obama."   This appears to define the people who matter as relatively privileged liberals and conservatives.  Privileged American liberals survived Bush.  Privileged American conservatives will survive Obama.  But what about those who don't survive the policies of presidents?  In American political discourse, we so often forget the victims of state violence.  We so often forget those who are killed as a result of presidents and their abusive policies.  This post is dedicated to those victims.

There were many who died as a result of George W. Bush's policies.  Iraq Body Count has documented between 107,055 and 116,979 civilian deaths from the Iraq War.  The Wikileaks Iraq War Logs reveal an estimated 15,000 additional civilian deaths.  A 2006 study estimated that around 600,000 Iraqis had been killed by the Iraq War.  Whatever the numbers, it is clear that a huge number of Iraqis did not survive Bush.  Further, Margaret Griffis uses the US military's own data to show that 4,486 American troops have died in the Iraq War.  Those soldiers did not survive Bush either.

While the Bush administration's greatest killing spree was in Iraq, people from other countries also died as a result of his policies.  Before the Iraq War, the Bush administration began a war in Afghanistan, a war that still rages today.  As a result, many Afghans did not survive Bush.  And the deaths that can be attributed to Bush policies did not simply occur in war zones.  While the Bush administration's torture program at Guantanamo was often discussed, it was rarely mentioned that at least 100 detainees died from US torture techniques.  These detainees did not survive Bush.

And just like many people throughout the world did not survive Bush, many others have not survived or will not survive Barack Obama.  It is known that President Obama has a secretive kill list.  Those on this list will not survive Obama.  The drone program directed by Obama shows virtually no concern for civilian casualties.  Obama's drones bomb funerals and rescuers.  Thus, many funeral goers and rescuers will not survive Obama.  In Yemen, the administration used cluster bombs, which many countries have agreed never to use, in a strike that killed 35 women and children.  Those women and children did not survive Obama.  The Obama administration has also redefined the word "militant", such that any adult male killed by a US bomb is assumed to be a "militant."  These supposed "militants" will not survive Obama.  Obama has presided over bombings in six countries: Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.  The victims of those bombings will not survive Obama.  Furthermore, Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan, resulting in increased US casualties.  Many Americans and Afghans will not survive Obama.

Obama's policies, like Bush's, kill through more than simply war.  For example, while the 2010 Haitian earthquake led to a moratorium on deportations to Haiti, the Obama administration resumed deporting Haitians in August of 2011.   At this point, the earthquake-ravaged country faced a cholera epidemic.  The situation was even worse in the crowded prisons and camps where deportees were sent.  Vincent Warren of the Center for Constitutional Rights wrote at the time that "as the U.S. government knows, deportations to Haiti amount to a death sentence for deportees." It appears some Haitians may not survive Obama.

Obama administration policies may soon also cost lives by decreasing access to medicine in the developing world.  It was recently revealed that the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an international trade agreement currently being negotiated by the Obama administration, would substantially expand the power of pharmaceutical patent monopolies.  This would create artificial scarcity, driving up medical costs, particularly in the developing world.   Peter Maybarduk of Public Citizen wrote that with these provisions "the Obama administration has again increased demands on developing countries to trade away access to medicines."  Judit Rius Sanjuan of Doctors Without Borders' Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines explained that  "Policies that restrict competition thwart our ability to improve the lives of millions with affordable, lifesaving treatments."  Fundamentally, the Trans-Pacific Partnership threatens to deny people in the developing world access to lifesaving medication.  If it passes with the current intellectual property provisions, sick people will probably die for a policy that inflates pharmaceutical industry profits.  These patients will not survive Obama.

While this post has focused on the Obama and Bush administrations, it should be understood that deadly policies are by no means unique to these two presidents.  Under Andrew Jackson, thousands of Native Americans died on the Trail of Tears.  Under Bill Clinton, UNICEF estimates that sanctions on Iraq killed around 500,000 children.  LBJ, Kennedy, and Nixon waged an unjustifiable war in Vietnam.  Reagan financed the murderous Contras in Nicaragua.  Woodrow Wilson sent the country into the bloody conflict of World War I, and jailed those who opposed that war.  Throughout US history, presidents and their policies have left gruesome trails of bodies.  When will we demand an end to these deaths?

An Open Letter to Stefan Molyneux and Other Anti-Feminists

Stefan Molyneux’s recent video, a defense of his statement that “feminism is socialism with panties” (from which he takes his title) is not so much an enlightening philosophical speech as an ill-informed rant. The title of the video is intellectually dishonest, dismissing generations of women and men struggling for equality as panty-wearing socialists. The title panders to vulgar misogynists and is insulting to all women, feminists or not, and to anyone else who believes in equality between the sexes. The ideas expressed in this video and other videos of his that discuss feminism in a negative way are not only inaccurate but also dangerous, negatively influencing society’s perception of what feminism really is.

Because Molyneux’s anti-feminist views are unfortunately shared by many libertarian men and some libertarian women, we think it is important to take a stand and point out what is wrong and misguided about these views. Each one of the individuals signing this document has seen libertarian and conservative men attacking feminism without knowing what it means; men who have read nothing more than a few newspapers articles or anti-feminist rants by others and have no idea of feminism’s rich and varied history. Their views, founded on little more than opinion, are merely knee-jerk “politically incorrect” responses that lack critical thinking and thoughtful analysis.

Anti-feminist libertarian and conservative comments abound on Facebook and other social media. These include the usual clichés such as “man-hater,” and “feminazis” as well as such claims as, for example, “feminists are so trapped in their victimhood thinking that they see potential male oppressors everywhere and blame everything that is wrong with their lives on ‘sexism’ and ‘patriarchy.’” Men who are supportive of feminist concerns are attacked as “little wussy boys” and “worse” than the feminists themselves. One man even called the Association of Libertarian Feminists an “oxymoron.” These childish and uninformed remarks by anti-feminist men not only show how little they know about feminism, but how little regard they have for women and women’s rights.

Some anti-feminists even call feminism “collectivist” because it is a movement. This is a strange misuse of the term. They confuse “collective action” with “collectivism.” The former simply means individuals working together for a common purpose, as for example, libertarianism or abolitionism. The philosophy of “collectivism” says that group goals are more important than individual goals. But the raison d'etre of feminism is to achieve equal individual rights for every woman; to allow individual women to pursue their lives as they see fit rather than submit to cultural stereotypes.

Feminism is, by common definition, “the belief that women and men are equal and should be equally valued as human beings and have equal rights.” From a libertarian point of view, this stance should not be in the least controversial since libertarians also believe in equal rights for all. Indeed, given this definition of feminism, all libertarians, if they are consistent, should also be feminists. This definition is the essence of feminism to which every stripe of feminist from Marxist to libertarian, from radical to liberal, will agree. What feminists differ upon is how to achieve this goal of equality and equal rights. But the anti-feminist libertarians, knowing little about the wide range of views within feminism, selectively choose those feminist views they find abhorrent and attack those views as if they represented all of feminism. Yet when liberals do the same to libertarians, misrepresenting a few of the most uncompassionate as representative of the whole, these same anti-feminist libertarians howl. This is an inconsistent, hypocritical, and unfair treatment of both of these rich and vibrant intellectual traditions.

Molyneux is only the latest in a long line of these uncritical anti-feminists. We use his videos as a starting point for analysis only because he is currently one of the most visible anti-feminist libertarians. Like other anti-feminists, he fails to actually define feminism before he attacks. He simply implies that the ones he selectively chooses to talk about constitute feminism. Though Molyneux admits it isn’t accurate to say that all feminists are socialists, he still defends his statement that “feminism is socialism with panties” and continues to talk as if all feminists are indeed socialists. This is more than an offensive accusation unsupported by sound reasoning; it represents the kind of sexist thinking feminism tries to combat. By using this sleight-of-hand, he continues to encourage his listeners to systematically categorize all "feminist" concerns as pitiful socialist garbage to be derided and dismissed.

In representing feminism as a primarily socialist-dominated movement, Molyneux ignores feminists of any other political ideology, including a long history of individualist feminists. His definition of socialism is as unclear as his definition of feminism; he uses the term interchangeably with “Marxism” without qualifying exactly what kind of socialists he is accusing feminists of being. What is clear is his belief that socialists of any kind are unappealing and deserving of ridicule.

Molyneux also uses the term “gender” incorrectly. He talks about the “two genders” but “gender” is not interchangeable with “sex.” Social scientists generally define “gender” in terms of psychological factors, i.e., societal views of gender, one’s self-perception, etc.  In fact there is a whole range of non-binary gender perceptions; including “transgender” people  who do not fit into the standard “male” and “female” categories. Even the term “sex,” which refers to anatomical distinctions, is more complex than simply “male” and “female” because some people are “intersex” with physiological elements of both female and male reproductive characteristics.  These people may call themselves “male” or “female” for convenience but many do not feel comfortable doing so.

There is a belief among such anti-feminists that feminism is inherently sexist because it emphasizes women. This is like saying that those who oppose discrimination against people of color are racists. Such anti-feminist thinking then assumes that women must desire preferential treatment. This is a typical claim made by anti-feminist men in articles and posts in social media, couched under the misdirecting plea, “but we’re all individuals.” It is similar to the claim that LGBTQ folks want preferential treatment simply because they want the same marriage rights as anyone else. Yet it is important to note that it is not women who have created the gender rights gap; it is a culture and society that has long seen women as secondary to men. Both culture and the government have been the biggest challenges feminists have faced in seeking equality. Government, reflecting the historical cultural prejudices against women, has enforced laws (opinions backed with guns, as Molyneux muses) against women since the beginning of the United States. Feminists, in working for equality, are therefore not working to support the state but rather desire to change it in order to eliminate the need for feminism. However, if libertarians categorically reject every attempt to challenge the presence of privilege in our culture, we should not be too shocked when feminists believe that the force of law is required to create a more humane and bearable space in which to exist.

Contrary to what the anti-feminists such as Molyneux claim, feminists have in fact played a major role in some of the most significant triumphs for individual liberty against state and private aggression in the last two centuries. In the 19th century, they were in the forefront of major movements for individual freedom, including abolitionism, suffrage for women, individual conscience in regard to religion and sexual activity, and the protection of minority rights. Every woman today who has a college education, owns property, or votes can thank these feminists. In the 20th century, feminists were in the forefront of not only the vote for women and the civil rights movement, but also in the fight against discriminatory laws that kept women from having credit in their own name, police policies that treat victims of rape and domestic abuse as responsible for their own victimization, actions and laws that harm people whose identities, sexual preferences, and orientations do not match the mainstream, and let us not forget reproductive freedom!

The radical feminist activists that Molyneux and other anti-feminists so unthinkingly sneer at have almost always been primarily concerned with challenging and resisting patriarchal laws—abortion laws, rather famously—and with building non-state grassroots institutions (e.g., consciousness raising groups, battered women's shelters, rape crisis centers, underground abortion networks, women's self-help clinics, and an array of critical “awareness”/anti-sexist cultural campaigns and groups), a number of which, especially the medically-focused efforts, were in fact constantly targeted by the regulatory state for criminalization and destruction.

In his “feminists are socialists in panties” video, Molyneux states that feminists are state-serving “creatures” and “Frankensteins,” whose primary agenda is receiving preferential treatment from the government and society, an erroneous and insulting view. He commits the error that Frédéric Bastiat defines as the core error of socialists, by “confusing the distinction between government and society.” He misrepresents the feminist stance as categorically anti-family and requiring state intervention to fulfill. No matter that many feminists have actually long discussed how to apply their feminist views to marriage and family, with the intent to raise children in a non-stereotypical way that affords them the richest opportunities as adults. Their aim is not to raise children through the state as Plato asserted, but typically to raise them healthfully in an individual family with two parents. Only a handful of feminists have actually seriously talked about dismantling the family, primarily during the Second Wave, contrary to what anti-feminists like Molyneux claim.

Molyneux portrays feminists as ruthless women, quick to cut each other down and unwilling to support successful women who deviate from the underlying socialist ideology of feminism. He claims that this is why feminists never discuss Ayn Rand or Margaret Thatcher, who he sees as “neo-conservatives” that are “anti-government” and therefore can be dismissed. In actuality, Rand, is not a neo-conservative; her importance for women has even led to a scholarly book, Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand, published by a prestigious and well-known university press. In his rant against “ruthless” feminists, Molyneux even implies that because they did not rally to the cause of Bachmann’s candidacy that this is further proof of their cutthroat ideology. He thus implies that women should unconditionally support and praise each other despite differences in political views, even when the women themselves hold anti-feminist positions. The fact that Molyneux himself does nothing of the sort—he frequently attacks Ron Paul, a man, for example—is apparently beside the point. But unbeknownst to Molyneux, many feminists did in fact defend Bachmann, Clinton, and Palin from charges that veered from political disagreement to overt sexist dismissal.

In his video “The Life and Death of Radical Feminism,” Molyneux propounds the belligerently conservative argument that women taking on paid jobs won’t spend enough time with their children and thus will harm their development. This argument is fallacious on several grounds. First, it mysteriously leaves out one parent from the equation—the father. In fact, social science research shows that fathers have considerable impact on their children and that more interaction with their children is desirable. Second, there is a copious social science literature showing that children are not harmed when the mother works outside the home. A more important factor is whether the mother is satisfied with her situation, whether working outside the home or within. Third, it denies individual autonomy to women, chastising them for wanting to have a life or career outside the home and asserting that they should sacrifice their aspirations in order to allegedly achieve anti-authoritarian kids. Once again, this bears no resemblance to actual psychological research findings. The factors that have the most impact on authoritarian or anti-authoritarian views in children are warmth and non-punitive childrearing methods that teach empathy, not whether or not the mother stays at home. To blame moms for everything bad that happens to the children is yet another example of not only sexism but outright misogyny.

Molyneux, like many conservatives, seems to think that the 1950s was a golden age for families. The idea that the 1950s nuclear family was a model for liberated childhood or somehow ushered in the social movements of the 1960s is simply bizarre. Spanking, the abusive disciplinary action that Molyneux abhors, was far more prevalent in the 50s than it is now. In the 1950s, the spanking rate was 99%; the rate has been going down ever since. Isn’t this a curiously contradictory view? Furthermore, in the books and research about the student movements of the 60s, the main correlation between activism and parenting was having a parent who was also a political or social activist, not having a traditional nuclear family.

Anti-feminists have no idea what feminists really want. Feminists are not women who want to be treated as men. Feminists are people who want to be treated as people, people who should not be discriminated against. Feminism isn’t socialism. Feminism is actually more about individualism and the desire to be evaluated based on one’s merit’s and not on one’s sex or gender.

Yes, there are feminists who are socialists. There are also feminists who are anarchists and feminists who are libertarians and feminists who really have no political ideology but know that they deserve to be treated equally to men. There are feminists who wear panties and feminists who wear boxers because not all feminists have an underwear preference and not all feminists are women.

The majority of Molyneux’s arguments against feminism as well as his accusation that “feminism is socialism with panties” are grounded in flawed and misogynistic rhetoric as are the arguments of other anti-feminists. In reality, feminism attracts a diverse group of people just as any other idea or philosophy does. To attempt to diminish the impact of feminism and redefine it as an objectionable philosophy is repugnant. The statement itself is inherently sexist and is the kind of thinking that feminism—true feminism—works to change.


This is a collective rejoinder written and agreed upon by the following signers
1-31-2011.


Ankur Chawla
Amanda Davis
Christine-Marie L. Dixon
Nathan Goodman
Charles H. Johnson
Ross Kenyon
Matt Mortellaro
Nicholas O’Connell
James Peron
CBP
Sharon Presley

Also joining us:
Brad Spangler
Andrei Pemberton
Jeffrey Young
Thomas J. Webb
Kyle Bush
George H. Smith
Thomas L. Knapp
Keith Taylor
John L Robinson
Michael Scandirito
James Tuttle
Neil Ball
TheElMoIsEvil
Megan Arnold
Adam Reed
Tom Ender
Alisa Clanin
Andrew Taranto
Erin Miller
Mike J. Gogulski
Robert Steel
Dan Bier
Nick Ford
Grant Babcock
Jason Lee Bynas
Lindsey A. Jacobs
Leah Farrow
Alex Strekal
Benjamin Nichols
Kaitlyn Emerick
Roman Pearah
Rocco Fama
Art Smith
Judy Purrington
Jim Davidson
Jason Bessey
Neha Sinha
Luke Clayborn Hopper
Vincent Patsy
Luca Gattoni-Celli
Natasha Shebeko
Julia Riber Pitt
D. Frank Robinson
Jad Davis
Moriah N. Costa
Nick Saorsa
Matt Zwolinski
Don Pomeroy
Halina Reed
Isa Rizal Bufano
Lucy Betageek Hanouille
Josh Latimer
Jason Phillips Love
Teresa Warmke
Currer Bell
Jon Anselmo
Joan Mitchell
Alejandro Oquendo
Kevin Carson
Corey Moore
Edgar Aroutiounian
Tyler Johnson
Alexander Habighorst
Stewart Thorpe
Alice Raizel
Ruth Gilburt
Thomas Gramstad
Nate West
Joseph Rasch
Sorcha NiBhuaigh
Steve Horwitz
Mike Moceri
Carol B. Low
Irena Schneider
Harold Gray
Carl Agoric Codling
Zachary Caceres
John Sabin Adkins
Janet Neilson
Bob Wammy
Shawn P. Wilbur
Jordan Jetson
Scott LeGear
H. Raymond Solberger
Jim Minardi
Juan Garibay
Jack Artagan Mackenna
Lee Avedon
Jackie Bradbury
Adam Marketanarchopacifist Berkowicz
Adam Cicco
Tim Starr
Rob Tarzwell
David McGraw
Jake Smith
Victor A. Reyes
Punk Johnny Cash
Vicki Moore
Ben Arzate
Fred Curtis Moulton, Jr.
Matthew Brenycz
Lex Alexander
Chris Bradshaw
Nancy Quinn Dale
Katherine Gallagher
Pedro Eidt
Zak Slayback

The Prison Industrial Complex vs. the Queer and Trans Community

Jane Marquardt is a major figure in Utah's LGBTQ community.  In 2010 she and her partner Tami jointly received Equality Utah's Allies for Equality Award.  Jane now sits on the advisory council for Equality Utah.  Yet in addition to their work within the LGBTQ community, the Marquardts profit off of mass incarceration.   You see, Jane Marquardt is the Board Vice Chair for Management and Training Corporation, and served as a director and legal counsel for the company between 1980 and 1999. Management and Training Corporation is the third largest private prison profiteering company in the United States.   In addition to incarcerating convicted criminals, MTC receives federal contracts to operate immigration detention centers.  In order to guarantee continued profit off of those contracts, MTC has pushed anti-immigrant legislation by backing Arizona's Russell Pearce, the sponsor of the infamous SB 1070.

In profiting off of incarceration and backing anti-immigrant politicians, Marquardt puts herself not only on the wrong side of immigration and criminal justice, but also on the wrong side of human rights abuses against the LGBTQ community.  Discrimination against the queer and trans community puts us at higher risk of being locked away in prisons and immigration detention centers.  And once queer and trans people are locked up, they face a litany of human rights abuses.

Criminalizing Our Communities

Some communities are more likely to have their members incarcerated than others.  The racial and class biases that plague our criminal justice system and our immigration enforcement system are well documented and will not be discussed much here.   Instead, I want to discuss the policies which criminalize the queer and trans communities, making us more likely to be housed in prisons and detention centers, including those operated by the Management and Training Corporation.

The first major factor that marginalizes and criminalizes members of our community is homelessness. According to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, "Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless American youth, between 20 and 40 percent identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT)." The task force also reports that "26 percent of gay teens who came out to their parents/guardians were told they must leave home; LGBT youth also leave home due to physical, sexual and emotional abuse."  In addition to being more likely to participate in criminalized activities like drug use and sex work, homeless LGBTQ youth face the many criminal sanctions which explicitly target the homeless.  According to a 2009 report by The National Coalition for the Homeless:

Even though most cities do not provide enough affordable housing, shelter space, and food to meet the need, many cities use the criminal justice system to punish people living on the street for doing things that they need to do to survive.  Such measures often prohibit activities such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and/or begging in public spaces and include criminal penalties for violation of these laws.  Some cities have even enacted food sharing restrictions that punish groups and individuals for serving homeless people.  Many of these measures appear to have the purpose of moving homeless people out of sight, or even out of a given city.

This criminalization of homelessness is not limited to cities conventionally seen as conservative.  To the contrary, the same 2009 report ranked both liberal Berkeley and the famously queer friendly San Francisco among their "10 Meanest Cities" for criminalizing homelessness.  These criminal sanctions put queer and trans homeless youth at increased risk of eventual incarceration.

Beyond the specific issue of youth homelessness, a variety of factors contribute to structural poverty for certain segments of the LGBTQ community.  Queer and transgender people face discrimination in housing and employment.  Furthermore, many face educational barriers, due to harassment and bullying in school, or even an inability for transgender people to apply to schools due to discrepancies in their IDs.  This graphic from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project is useful for explaining the interlocking discrimination that can trap many people in poverty, particularly as it applies to the trans community.

Once one is trapped in poverty, one is exposed to profiling and disproportionate police presence in poor communities.  One is also more likely to be subject to the criminal laws which target the homeless.  Furthermore, members of the transgender community can face criminal charges simply for living in accordance with their gender identity.   For example, they can be arrested for using the "wrong" bathroom, due to suspicious discrepancies in their ID, and even on trumped up charges of solicitation.  This flow chart from the Sylvia Rivera Law Project explains the phenomenon well.

The combination of employment discrimination and criminalization particularly impacts queer and trans immigrants.  In America's labyrinthine legal immigration system, finding skilled employment is one of the few paths to legal immigration status.  When that is closed off by discrimination, one is far more likely to be an undocumented immigrant.  This difficulty is compounded by the structural poverty and criminalization already discussed here, as once an undocumented immigrant is picked up by police, they are likely to be sent to a detention center and eventually deported.

In addition to the risk factors detailed here, evidence from the juvenile justice system demonstrates that once arrested, LGBTQ youth are more likely to be placed in pre-trial detention.  According to an article in The Nation:

The road to incarceration begins in pretrial detention, before the youth even meets a judge. Laws and professional standards state that it's appropriate to detain a child before trial only if she might run away or harm someone. Yet for queer youth, these standards are frequently ignored. According to UC Santa Cruz researcher Dr. Angela Irvine, LGBT youth are two times more likely than straight youth to land in a prison cell before adjudication for nonviolent offenses like truancy, running away and prostitution. According to Ilona Picou, executive director of Juvenile Regional Services, Inc., in Louisiana, 50 percent of the gay youth picked up for nonviolent offenses in Louisiana in 2009 were sent to jail to await trial, while less than 10 percent of straight kids were. "Once a child is detained, the judge assumes there's a reason you can't go home," says Dr. Marty Beyer, a juvenile justice specialist. "A kid coming into court wearing handcuffs and shackles versus a kid coming in with his parents—it makes a very different impression."

This initial bias makes it clear that queer and trans youth are disproportionately locked up in this country, even before they are given a trial.

The Brutality Within (Trigger warning for rape, misgendering, and bigoted violence)

To explain the brutal human rights violations faced by queer and trans inmates and immigration detainees, I will begin with the story of Tanya Guzman-Martinez.   Guzman-Martinez, a transgender woman, faced a horrific litany of abuses, including sexual assault, while she was held in Arizona's Eloy Detention Center, an immigration detention center run by the prison profiteers at Corrections Corporation of America.  In a classic case of the misgendering systematic in our prison system, Guzman-Martinez was housed with male inmates despite the fact that she had "surgically altered her breasts, buttocks, hips, and legs to appear more feminine."  According to a lawsuit filed recently by the ACLU,  she was harassed and assaulted by inmates and guards many times at the detention center.   Both inmates and guards regularly called her "dog," "faggot," and "boy."  One guard told inmates that in exchange for "three soup packets" they could "have" Guzman-Martinez, an obvious encouragement of rape.  Allegedly she was also "often inappropriately patted down," in other words groped, by male guards.

As if this frequent sexual harassment from guards and inmates were not enough, Guzman-Martinez faced two instances of violent sexual assault while she was detained at Eloy.  In one case a fellow inmate pushed her up against a wall, groped her, and threatened to have her beaten and raped if she reported the incident.  The other was perpetrated by Justin Manford, a guard at the CCA detention center.  According to the ACLU complaint:

Manford maliciously forced Ms. Guzman-Martinez to watch him masturbate into a white styrofoam cup and then demanded that she ingest his ejaculated semen. Failures by Defendants CCA, DeRosa and Manford to adequately screen and monitor Manford, and to prevent situations where a male officer such as Manford is alone with a transgender woman detainee and out of sight of others, enabled this horrific assault on Ms. Guzman-Martinez.

The assault followed a history of frequent inappropriate behavior and inquiries by Manford about Ms. Guzman-Martinez, including questions about her sexuality, whether she had a boyfriend, and whether other inmates had seen her breasts.

During the commission of the assault, Manford made offensive gestures, faces, and comments towards Ms. Guzman-Martinez and threatened that he could have her locked up in “the hole,” lengthen her detention or have her deported to Mexico if she did not follow his demands.

While Guzman-Martinez reported Manford and he was convicted of "attempted unlawful sexual contact", justice certainly was not done.  Manford was only sentenced to two days, time served.

Sexual assaults like these are not isolated incidents for queer and trans inmates and detainees.  A 2007 study  found that “[s]exual assault is 13 times more prevalent among transgender inmates, with 59 percent reporting being sexually assaulted.”  This same study found that 67% of inmates who identified as LGBTQ reported being sexually assaulted while incarcerated, a rate 15 times more prevalent than that of the general inmate population.  According to a fact sheet from Just Detention International, "LGBTQ inmates are frequently labeled as ‘queens,’ ‘punks,’ or ‘bitches’ for the duration of their detention,  permanently marking them as targets."   After being assaulted, queer and trans inmates then face bigoted victim blaming.  As the JDI fact sheet explains, "Corrections staff tend to confuse homosexuality and transgender status with consent to rape, and trivialize the problem. LGBTQ inmates frequently describe officials ignoring or even laughing at reports of sexual violence. To make matters worse, LGBTQ inmates who report abuse are often subjected to further attacks, humiliating strip searches, and punitive segregation."

Beyond mere heterosexism and cissexism on the part of guards and inmates, policies such as misgendering systematically abuse queer and trans inmates.   As the Just Detention fact sheet explains:

The homophobic culture of corrections is compounded by policies that do not take into account the specific concerns of LGBTQ prisoners. For example, transgender women are typically housed with men, in accordance with their birth gender, and are required to shower and submit to strip searches in front of male officers and inmates. In addition, gay and transgender inmates often seek protective custody because of their heightened risk for abuse, only to be placed in solitary confinement, locked in a cell for 23 hours a day, and losing access to programming and other services.

Thus, official policies in the prison system subject queer and transgender inmates to serious psychological discomfort, while heightening their already severe risk of sexual abuse.

In addition to violence, harassment, and sexual assault, queer and trans inmates are often denied access to appropriate medical care.  According to Masen Davis, Executive Director of the Transgender Law Center, “Prisons have a legal duty to provide adequate health care, but LGBT people in prisons often face extra barriers to accessing basic and necessary medical treatment.”  One example of this is denying transgender inmates access to hormone treatment, even if they were using such hormones prior to incarceration.  In Wisconsin, the ACLU had to file a lawsuit to overturn a law that banned medical treatment for transgender prisoners.   Another example concerns HIV positive inmates.   A 2010 report from Human Rights Watch details the systematic discrimination faced by HIV positive prisoners in South Carolina.

Abuse of queer and trans inmates is not limited to adult prisons and detention centers.   A report for The Nation titled 'I Was Scared to Sleep': LGBT Youth Face Violence Behind Bars vividly describes incidents of violence and harassment that LGBTQ youth have faced in America's juvenile justice system.  From beatings to victim blaming to bigoted slurs from guards, queer and transgender youth are regularly abused in juvenile corrections facilities.  They are faced with human rights violations as brutal as those faced by their adult counterparts.

Deportation as a Death Sentence


For companies like Corrections Corporation of America, GeoGroup, and Management and Training Corporation, the money comes from keeping people locked up.  But when you're operating an immigration detention center, the end result for many detainees is inevitably deportation.  In order to secure more detainees, all three of these corporations have financially backed anti-immigrant legislation, and such legislation almost certainly means an increase not just in rates of detention, but in rates of deportation.

So what sorts of consequences can deportation have for queer and transgender immigrants?  In some cases, it can mean that they will be deported to countries where they are very likely to be persecuted, perhaps even killed, for who they are.  For example, Tanya Guzman-Martinez, whose ordeal in a CCA detention facility we already discussed, applied for and received asylum on grounds that she would be persecuted in Mexico for being transgender.   When HIV positive immigrants are deported, it can be a death sentence if they are sent to a country without access to necessary medication.  A 2009 Human Rights Watch report, Returned to Risk, discusses deportation of HIV positive migrants in detail.

What kind of ally profits from this?

This essay is mostly intended to educate people about the ways prisons, immigration detention centers, and the deportation process oppress the queer and transgender community, not to attack Jane Marquardt.  However, it's well worth asking:  What kind of ally to the LGBTQ community profits off of these sorts of human rights violations?  Jane Marquardt is a respected and influential member of Utah's LGBTQ community, but if she profits off of a system that oppresses us, how good of an ally is she?  While I have not yet found specific details regarding how her company, Management and Training Corporation, handles sexual assault against queer and trans inmates, there are multiple documented cases of sexual assault and illegal strip searches in their facilities.  Furthermore, regardless of how MTC handles their own facilities, they have pushed for laws that increase rates of immigration detention and deportation.  In doing so, they have backed the caging, rape, harassment, abuse, and possibly even wrongful death of queer and trans immigrants.

This also raises a question for the LGBTQ movement more generally.  Where will our focus as activists be?   Are we going to solely focus on easy issues like gay marriage and Don't Ask Don't Tell, or will we confront the caging of queer and trans people, as well as the subsequent harassment, rape, assault, and deportation they face?  This question decides whether we will be allies merely to privileged queers or to all queers.

Has (or can) the internet make pornography less misogynistic?

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Don't Tax the Rich, Smash Their Privilege: A Response to Warren Buffett

Recently the progressive blogosphere was abuzz with approving links to billionaire investor Warren Buffett's latest New York Times op-ed, "Stop Coddling the Super Rich."  In this piece, Buffett concisely exposes the various loopholes that allow the wealthiest Americans to pay far fewer taxes than their middle class, working class, and poor counterparts. While the tax code in all its complexity certainly privileges the wealthy at the expense of most Americans, this barely scratches the surface of the ways the state oppresses poor and working people to line the pockets of the opulent.  Buffett's article never mentions direct corporate welfare or the numerous privileges that the wealthy hold thanks to intellectual property, the land monopoly, regulatory barriers to entry, suppression of labor movements, and imperialism, to name a few.  To illustrate the extent to which government intervention privileges the super rich at the expense of everyone else, I will examine Warren Buffett's stock portfolio and expose how his wealth stems from violence, coercion, imperialism, and statism.

Coca Cola, Human Rights, and Labor Suppression

According to http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, the #1 corporation in Warren Buffet's stock portfolio is Coca Cola.  Coca Cola has an abysmal human rights record, most noteworthy thanks to its colorful history of repressing labor organizing.  According to an article by Jeremy Rayner for the John F. Henning Center for International Labor Relations:

There is mounting evidence that American companies are complicit in the persecution of trade unionists at their Colombian operations. In the case of the Coca-Cola bottling plant in Carepa, where Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered, the union Sinaltrainal argues that Coca-Cola knowingly stood by and allowed the plant's manager to bring in paramilitaries to destroy the union. The workers at the Carepa plant had been asking both Coca-Cola and its bottler, Bebidas y Alimentos, to intervene on their behalf for two months before Isídro Segundo Gil's murder. The plant manager, Ariosto Milan Mosquera had announced publicly that he had asked the paramilitaries to destroy the union. His declaration had been followed by a series of death threats from the paramilitaries, which had prompted the union to send letters to both Coca-Cola and Bebidas y Alimentos asking that they intervene to secure their workers' safety.  And this was not the first time that threats against workers had been carried out. Just two years before, in 1994, the paramilitaries had killed two trade unionists at the same plant. It should have surprised no one when two and a half months after the union's plea for help, Isídro Segundo Gil was murdered and the union busted.

Unionists have also been assassinated at other Coca-Cola bottling plants in Colombia, both before and after the incident at Carepa. One unionist, José Avelino Chicano, was killed at a Coca-Cola plant in Pasto in 1989. In 2002, despite the limited publicity surrounding the events at Carepa, a union leader named Oscar Dario Soto Polo was killed during the course of contract negotiations at the plant in Bucaramanga. Despite the remarkable courage and perseverance of Colombia's labor activists, the campaign of intimidation has necessarily taken its toll on worker organizing. The president of Sinaltrainal, Javier Correa, reported last year that the number of unionized workers at Coca-Cola plants had dropped by more than two thirds since 1993-from 1,300 workers to only 450.

Such campaigns of violent intimidation have been aided and abetted by US tax dollars.  Many of those involved with these anti-union campaigns of violence were graduates of the Defense Department's infamous School of the Americas.  The right wing paramilitaries which regularly slaughter labor organizers are closely connected to the Colombian military, which receives huge amounts of aid from the US government so as to fight the drug war as well as a dirty war against the anti-capitalist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Thus, even if Warren Buffett were to pay more in taxes, at least some of that money would go to violence against labor organizers.

In addition to brutality in Colombia, Coca Cola has been implicated in violence and intimidation against unionists in Guatemala.   These and other Coca Cola human rights violations are profiled in detail at http://killercoke.org/.

Note that, contrary to Buffett's progressive image, he profits immensely off of Coca Cola's human rights violations.  If Buffett really wants to "get serious about shared sacrifice," he should sacrifice the profits he has gained through the corrupt tactics of Coca Cola and use some of his immense wealth to help the Coca Cola workers suffering throughout the globe thanks to those tactics.  He should also repudiate the US government's military aid and imperialist intervention in countries like Colombia.

Wells Fargo and the Prison Industrial Complex

The number two corporation in Warren Buffet's stock portfolio is Wells Fargo.   Wells Fargo is a major beneficiary of corporate welfare.  For instance, they received $43.7 billion in federal taxpayer bailout money. But far more destructive is Wells Fargo's investment in prison profiteers.  Wells Fargo owns 4 million shares in the Geo Group, the second largest private prison corporation in America, and 50,000 shares in the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison corporation in the country.  These shares combined are valued at more than $120 million (Source: http://www.cjjc.org/en/news/50-immigrant-rights/215-wells-fargo-divest-from-prisons ).

Companies such as the Geo Group and CCA do not earn their money by providing goods or services to customers.  Rather, they make their money solely from the government, and solely for locking human beings in cages, mostly for non-violent offenses.  Further, these companies actively lobby for unjust laws, largely using the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporatist conservative political group.  As Bob Sloan and Mike Elk wrote in a recent article for The Nation:

ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Timesinvestigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

These laws increase the number of peaceful people locked in cages, as well as the lengths of their sentences.  Those they lock up are almost without exception members of the working class, and they are disproportionately people of color.  Meanwhile, Geo Group and CCA gather obscene profits from these racist and classist laws.   Wells Fargo then profits by investing in these firms, and Warren Buffett profits by investing heavily in Wells Fargo.  If Warren Buffett were to pay more in taxes, at least some of those taxes would go to the prison industrial complex and then head straight back to Warren Buffett's unfathomably large bank account.

Warren Buffett the War Profiteer


Never does the government "coddle the super rich" more than in times of war.  In war, poor and working people are sent to fight and die in a foreign land.   They are sent to kill the populations of poor countries, and those killed disproportionately represent the country's working class.  Meanwhile, corporate executives and investors profit heavily by selling the weapons, vehicles, and other devices used to murder poor people in a distant land.   It should not surprise you to learn that Warren Buffett is among the investors profiting off of the American military industrial complex.

According to http://warren-buffett-portfolio.com/, Buffett owns 7.8 million shares of General Electric stock.   GE produces a wide variety of products, and their war profiteering portfolio is no less diverse.  General Electric has sold the US military aircraft, missiles, bombs, and battlefield computer systems, to name a few.  Further, GE has been charged multiple times with defrauding the US government in relation to their defense contracts.

Warren Buffett also owns 34.2 million shares in ConocoPhilips and 0.4 million shares in Exxon Mobil, both of which are oil companies which have profited from the invasion of Iraq.  Earlier this year Buffett seriously considered investing in General Dynamics, a company which earns all of its revenue through military contracts.

An increase in Warren Buffett's tax burden would not change this dynamic in the slightest.  Indeed, the bulk of tax dollars go to so called "defense spending," which amounts to nothing more than blood stained subsidies to these and other military industrial complex corporations.

Monsanto and the Patent Monopoly


CNN Money reported in 2010 that Warren Buffett owned stock in Monsanto.  Monsanto is a controversial agribusiness and biotechnology firm, best known for developing genetically modified organism (GMO) crops. For this reason, they have been strongly opposed by many environmental groups.  The impact of GMO crops is a topic for scientific debate which I will not discuss here.  However, it is incredibly noteworthy that Monsanto has enlisted patent law to crush small producers, in a dramatic illustration of the "patent monopoly" long written about by individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker.

Monsanto's genetically modified seeds are all patented, granting the company monopoly privileges and the ability to use state violence to harass any farmers who save seeds, or even those whose fields are cross pollinated by Monsanto's GMO crops.  Monsanto has filed over 100 patent lawsuits against farmers.  One, Kem Ralph, has had to pay $3 million dollars and serve prison time, simply for saving seeds, a common agricultural practice.   Such aggressive tactics from Monsanto have prompted a group of farmers represented by the Public Patent Foundation to fight back:

On behalf of 22 agricultural organisations, 12 seed businesses and 26 farms and farmers, the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) is suing the biotech company in the federal district court in Manhattan and assigned to Judge Naomi Buchwald.

The organic plaintiffs had to pre-emptively protect themselves from potential patent infringement in case of accidental contamination of their crops by genetically modified organisms (GMOs), said PUBPAT.

“This case asks whether Monsanto has the right to sue organic farmers for patent infringement if Monsanto’s transgenic seed should land on their property,” said Dan Ravicher, PUBPAT’s executive director and a law professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. PUBPAT is a non-profit legal services organisation based at Cardozo law school. Its stated mission is “to protect freedom in the patent system.”

“It seems quite perverse that an organic farmer contaminated by transgenic seed could be accused of patent infringement, but Monsanto has made such accusations before and is notorious for having sued hundreds of farmers for patent infringement, so we had to act to protect the interests of our clients,” he said in a press release.

It is disturbing that such a lawsuit is necessary. It is disturbing that a corporation can use the state to exercise this sort of control and intimidation against small farmers. It is perhaps more disturbing that a billionaire who invests in and profits from these coercive business practices is being held up as a progressive icon.

Time to Fight Back in the Class War

Warren Buffett famously said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."  Buffett was talking about the tax code, but that barely scratches the surface of the violent and rapacious class warfare the super-rich are waging against ordinary people.   It becomes a bit difficult to make tax law your top priority when you realize that labor leaders are being murdered, unnecessary wars are being fought, peaceful people are put in prison, and farmers are coerced into bankruptcy, all for the sake of corporate profits.  Changes to the tax code will never fix that.  So what will?

Every problem I have identified here stems from the same source: Unaccountable centralized power.   When a centralized state is granted the power to wage war, its killings are presumed to be "policy" rather than crimes, and corporations can influence state policy, wars for profit are the inevitable result.   When a centralized state is given the power to lock up peaceful people in cages, it will.  When businesses are owned and controlled by a few wealthy investors and CEO's rather than through workers' self management, the workers will see their material conditions suffer and their free association under vicious assault.  People should have control over their own lives, rather than seeing their most important decisions made from Washington, DC or some corporate board rooms.  It's time to build a real resistance to coercive power and authority.  It's time to resist wars and prisons, to stand up for workers, to build networks of mutual aid, to create grassroots alternatives to government programs and capitalist corporations.  It's time to build a new society in the shell of the old.

This is a message you won't receive from Warren Buffett.  Surface changes to the tax code would give him a slightly more stable society with a happier population.  But he would still be able to profit from rapacious violence and coercion against poor and working people.  A real revolution, a society in which people organize from the bottom up and reject institutional violence, would be disastrous for Warren Buffett.  Because in a free society, billionaires like Buffett might have to learn to work for a living.

Further reading:
http://www.corpwatch.org/
http://infoshop.org/
http://mutualist.org/
http://all-left.net/
http://www.iww.org/
http://libcom.org/
http://c4ss.org/