Brigitte Marti

Brigitte Marti is an organizer researcher who has worked on reproductive rights and women's health initiatives in France and in the European Union and on women prisoners' issues in the United States.

Radio WIBG: Zoe Konstantopoulou: In Greece, a woman to defend women’s and human rights

December 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Zoe Konstantopoulou

Zoe Konstantopoulou

Progress may be illusionary. At the time of a global set back in terms of women’s human rights, with forceful movements of dispossession, the Greek crisis epitomizes this global process of dismantlement of social and democratic representation. In 2010, Greece was declared guilty of public debt. Consequently, Greece as a country was put in the custody of the Troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF), a non-elected extraterritorial jurisdiction. Zoe Konstantopoulou in her first term in the Hellenic parliament with Syriza showed her determination to change the regime of undemocratic, unattended corruption that reigned in the parliament at that time, allowing the odious measures of austerity to control the country.

Konstantopoulou resisted the outrageous mockery of democracy, as on September 2013, when a series of bills were declared by the President of the Hellenic Parliament (the Vouli) of the time Kiriakos Virvidakis, adopted unanimously without actual votes. No debates took place in the Vouli that day, and only Zoe Konstantopoulou, one of the three delegates present, was screaming and demanding proof of the vote, to no avail.

In January 2015, Syriza won the election and Zoe was elected with 60% of the vote as President of the Hellenic parliament. She immediately instilled an anti corruption climate. In addition, for her restoring the democratic process meant inviting the civil society to be finally recognized. She celebrated women’s struggles for social justice. In April 2015, she mandated an audit of the public debt, forming the Debt Truth Committee, which released a preliminary report in June 2015. She declared during a meeting in Paris last May: “austerity kills, it kills society, human beings, and kills democracy and the Europe of people.”

The recent report of the Independent Expert on the effect of foreign debt and other related Financial Obligations of States on the Full Enjoyment of all Human Rights concurred with Zoe’s analysis. It stated, “To think of Sovereign debt markets as totally independent from the notion and realization of social and economic human rights is something unacceptable…” (Article 55)

The report also emphasized that with a 35.7% increase of the number of people falling into poverty, “austerity appears to have exacerbated the social crisis in Greece and have failed to stimulate the national economy to the benefit of the Greek population.” The same report asserted the importance of an audit of public debt.

Zoe Konstantopoulou lost her seat after the coup that triggered the new election last September. After the election, the audit was abandoned and its preliminary report and process were erased from the parliament web site. Syriza was reformed without people like Zoe; nonetheless she continues the struggle in the name of justice.

Let’s listen to Zoe Konstantopoulou:

A longer set of interviews with Zoe Konstantopoulou is available, in French, here.

 

(Photo credit: Marie-Hélène Le Ny) (Interview by Brigitte Marti)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , ,

Radio WIBG: Sascha Gabizon and COP 21: “We need to include the language of gender equality”

December 7, 2015 by 2 Comments

Sascha Gabizon

COP 21 has opened in a difficult “climate.” After the attacks in Paris, a state of emergency has been declared. With that came the cancelation of all climate demonstrations organized by civil society. Nonetheless, a human-chain was organized gathering 10000 people; creative ways of demonstrating took place, thousands of shoes paved Republic Square to symbolize the march for the climate.

However, the abuses of the state of emergency are now being made visible and denounced, as 24 eco pacifist militants, some not even located in Paris, have been placed under a sort of house arrest during COP 21, marking the widening denial of democratic rights.

Climate change means the global elimination of people not only in Syria or Afghanistan but also generally in the global South. The COP negotiations work within the neoliberal market, shaping the climate paradigm as exchange value of the temperature degrees instead of taking into consideration the harshening condition of human lives, again ranked by gender, race and class.

In this context the task of Sascha Gabizon, one of the co-facilitators of the Women Gender Constituency, a large coalition of feminists and women’s movements, is going to be arduous.

Climate disasters target women. As Sascha recalled, in the 1991 floods in Bangladesh 90% of the casualties were women. As climate disasters occur regularly, as in the Philippines, they impact in majority women, mainly because of gendered distribution of labor and roles.

As a result, we see all kinds of radicalization against women with the widespread expansion of brutal practices against women, in their home, in their everyday life, in prisons and jails, as well as the erosion of women’s rights especially sexual and reproductive rights in an increasing number of countries.

Sascha insists: “We need to include, in the first article of the COP 21 agreement, the language of gender equality, of equality in terms of human rights as defined in the United Nations charter including the rights of indigenous populations. Moreover, she remarks that in the current negotiations, this language is shockingly deemed unnecessary even by countries such as Norway.”

By the same token, she underlines the impossibility of women’s groups even the largest to use the financial system for the climate as currently defined for any of their projects simply because it requires a 10 million Euros investment, an amount of money impossible to collect for these organizations. Additionally, locking up countries in the current public debt system has dire impacts on any initiatives, local or state especially in emerging countries.

Finally, the reality of the increase of temperature means the elimination of lands and therefore populations. While we are justly appalled by the deaths from blind attacks in the streets of Beirut, Tunis or Paris, our eyes turn away from the surviving struggles of the populations of the South who have not produced this climate disaster.

Listen to Sascha Gabizon

and a longer interview, in French, is available here.

(Photo Credit: UN Women / Fabricio Barreto)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

In Greece, the presidents, the austerity measures, and the resistance of women

November 9, 2015 by 1 Comment
Women's Solidarity House banner

No women alone during the crisis!

While President Francois Hollande was visiting the Greek political elite in Athens and asking the Greek people, whom he would not meet, to make more efforts, the women of the Women’s Solidarity House in Thessaloniki told us what it means to live with making these efforts demanded by the politics of austerity.

They lost their jobs, their pensions, electricity, their way of life, and then they were asked for more money in taxes than they actually received. Meanwhile the Troika refused to tax companies at 12.5% while the VAT was raised to 23%. None of this is Mr. Hollande’s concern. He came to Greece with four ministers, especially his Minister of Finance, and a corporate escort. Entrepreneurial France is the fourth largest investor in Greece, after Germany, Luxembourg and The Netherlands.

The third memorandum accepted by Alexis Tsipras required the creation of a privatization fund of 50 Billion Euros. Francois Hollande presented himself as a friend of Greece. As a return on “political” investments, he brought a team to collect the last bargains on the market of privatization of public services and buildings. The politics of friendship can be brutal.

Alexis Tsipras was elected on the promise of opposing the power of the members of the Troika formed by three non-elected entities (the EU Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank), and their prescriptions that have already led to catastrophic recession and the destruction of the social structures of the country. In 2012, the Troika required the elimination of the Greek social housing program as well as housing support programs for low-income families in exchange for additional financial credit to pay the interests of an already odious debt. During the first mandate of Alexis Tsipras the head of the Hellenic parliament, Zoe Konstantopoulou, mandated The Debt Truth Committee, which has audited the debt with the support of the CADTM. The preliminary report’s results were edifying. This was embarrassing for the European commission that serves creditors. It could have derailed the perfect plan that they had in store for Greece. The coup was the dissolution of the assembly and the reelection of Mr. Tsipras on September 20th. He formed a new government with a new assembly then cleared out “the irritating” branch of his party that had demanded and supported the audit of the public debt.

At the Women’s Solidarity House no one is fooled. One morning, a woman stopped to say hello. To make ends meet, she is now reduced to selling lighters. She is from Veria, known for its cotton and clothing factories. At the end of the 80s with the advent of neoliberal policies of delocalization, the factories were moved to cheaper labor Bulgaria. Then, the debt crisis completed the desolation and now, she said, there is nothing.

At the Women’s Solidarity House women have organized a strong resistance to the austerity measures. As their banner states, “No women alone during the crisis.” Now that the third memorandum, probably the harshest of the three, is going to be implemented, the women’s belief that solidarity is their best weapon has grown even stronger.

Clearly, Mr Hollande did not wander the streets of Athens. He did not want to meet women such as those of the Women’s Solidarity House of Thessaloniki. In response to this financial deterritorialization that brought precarity, these women created a space where collaboration, solidarity, friendship, comfort and joy nourishes their determination to fight against austerity policies and the dictated unacceptable elimination of their rights.

We must challenge the purpose of the debt system that serves a minority and imposes on population the speculative exploitation of all sorts of corruptions and financial games and as a result disassembles social rights gained in the past decades without bringing any economic stability of course. Too bad that Mr. Hollande forgot to invite “experts” on women rights and human rights instead of investors!

Women's Solidarity House meeting

Women’s Solidarity House meeting

 

(Photo Credit: Marie-Hélène Le Ny)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Pierrette Pape: Women need to organize to face neoliberal fragmentation

November 5, 2015 by Leave a Comment

This year’s CADTM Summer University insisted on feminist struggles as a starting point to understand the deleterious impacts of politics of austerity measures that have been applied in Europe and elsewhere. In Europe, the troika (the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission), despite warnings from economists at the IMF, pressured by the United States forced austerity measures onto the population of Greece.

Representing the European Women’s Lobby, Pierrette Pape specifically addressed the pernicious ramifications between neoliberal capitalism and women’s rights. As Silvia Federici explains, women are the shock absorbers of economic globalization. Moreover, sexual and reproductive rights that have been won with so much difficulty are being attacked from various angles. Women, minorities, and generally low-income populations are being marginalized as bank bailouts with public funds become normalized.

Neoliberal strategies to rein in social advances and rights work hand in hand with conservative views that have traditionally hindered women’s emancipation. In the United States, for example, the situation of sexual and reproductive rights is dire with the constant attack on women’s rights especially with Planned Parenthood being currently pilloried on false claims. In Spain, after many failed attempts to curtail abortion rights, the recent “mordaza” (Gag) bill has effectively reduced access to abortion for minors requiring parental consent. Feminist movements have shown in Spain their ability to unite with large networks representing various aspects of resistance, which led to the election of activist women as mayors of Barcelona and Madrid, respectively.

Although women are on the forefront of the struggle against austerity, the neoliberal system lays traps to reduce the impact of resistance.

Let’s listen to Pierrette Pape:

 

(Photo Credit: RTBF.be)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , ,

Radio WIBG: Najla Mulhondi: Linking feminist struggles and the debt system

October 21, 2015 by Leave a Comment

 

Najla Mulhondi

At the plenary session of the summer university of the CADTM, Amina Amzil from Attac Morocco reminded the audience how the Structural Adjustment Programs SAPs have changed the development of emerging countries in the neoliberal global market and what it means for women.

SAPs are the austerity programs of the South. The World Bank with the FMI institutionalize the neoliberal measures of austerity in the “there is no alternative” dogma. The World Bank impeded any plans for development of public investments instead becoming an instrument of economic blackmail for developing countries disregarding human rights.

Amina Amzil explained that in Morocco 78% of the GDP is engulfed in the debt repayment, slimming budget for education and health care reducing public services. Women are particularly hit by these cuts. Still, 52% of women are illiterate compared to 33% of men. The World Bank ordered a drastic cut of 30% in public employment the traditional sector in which women find services and work. Now, women unemployment is higher in all sectors; in particular 25% of women with higher education diploma are unemployed while women constitute only 6.7% of higher education graduate. In addition, women suffer of lack of access to health care especially evident with a maternal mortality rate of 112/100000 one of the highest in the region. Finally, SAPs were completed with trade agreements that open the emerging countries to the rich countries rendering women vulnerable as perceived as docile and exploitable in informal sectors.

Being a member of the CADTM in Liege (Belgium), Najla Mulhondi would not miss its annual meeting.

For Najla, the agronomist, the public debt system meant globalization of agro-industry merchandize that works only because of the existence of inequalities. But this year, she said, she had to focus on the link between feminism and the public debt system. Realizing that inequalities are gendered, she attended the “feminist struggles” workshops of the CADTM.

We talked with her after the workshop moderated by Christine Vanden Daelen entitled “Some pedagogical tools to arm women against all kind of austerity.”

This workshop presented some educative tools for women, chiefly vulnerable women, to regain control over the neoliberal discourse and understand that they don’t owe anything on the contrary their work has been largely utilized for free. Najla makes the connection with the land grabbing and globalized markets that forced the farmers of the South to produce crops, roses etc, for the North.

In her interview in French, she mentioned the issue of “all these natural resources purloined from the South”, she said, “I don’t know how one/we will give back to the countries in the South, we’ll have to ponder.”

Clearly, in these unequal relationships feminist struggles bring about another solidarity to open what has been closed by this neoliberal order.

Listen to Najla who felt the need, “to spread this new openness.”

For a longer interview with Najla, in French:

(Photo Credit: 50-50 Magazine)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Collateral damage is a crime

October 14, 2015 by 2 Comments


With the execution of Kelly Gissendaner recently in Georgia and many others waiting on death row, we are seeing executions being rushed, not only on the mainland but elsewhere. Death sentences were also rushed in Afghanistan on October 3d, with the bombing of an MSF hospital, killing 12 staff members and 10 patients, including children, and wounding 37 people. Both Kelly Gissendaner and the MSF hospital executions were justified under the same ideology.

It did not matter that this hospital in Kunduz was the only running hospital in the North East of the country. It was hectic at the hospital in the past weeks because of the battles between the Taliban forces and the Afghan military. Of course these battles sent many civilians, men, women and children to this hospital. MSF rightly treats everyone regardless of their origin: Taliban, military, and civilian casualties. This principle of equal treatment has been questioned in past decades with invasions, dehumanization campaigns and the criminalization of humane and compassionate actions.

The bombing of the MSF hospital by US Air Force is a moral failure and a crime, and yet the immediate response by US and Afghan authorities was to make it appear as normal collateral damage. They sent all their “thoughts and prayers” while asserting their legitimate role of deciding who may live and who must die, to borrow from Achille Mbembe.

At the time of the announced precise and clean war, the death toll of civilians, women, children and healers is rising. The drone program has already proven to be in the logic of an arbitrary decision of who may live and who must die. The collateral damages were in the hundreds and still unaccounted for; the drone program is the warrant of peace, they say.

This ideology that justifies these crimes runs on contradictions; it legitimates deterritorialization of arbitrary death sentences while claiming the restoration of peace.

Let’s bring a poem by Pramila Venkateswaran to examine this modern ethical and moral depravity:

Between Good and Evil

Dark blossoms wither on healthy soil,
indigo embracing light cannot be pried apart.

Ecological activists turn terrorists, good Samaritans-
turned-politicians walk off with money saved for the poor.

Peace lovers during war execute prisoners without trial.
We throw bombs, then food, on the same piece of land.

Violent Hindus desire a “pure” country of Hindus.
Each political party sounds like its rival.

Sense is nonsense is sense. Every exhortation
means its opposite and not: Morality is a crapshoot.

 

(Photo Credit: Medium / Victor J. Blue)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , ,

Radio WIBG: Emilie Paumard: Women’s oppression and the debt work together

October 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Emilie Paumard

Emilie Paumard

Emilie Paumard opened the plenary session of the 4th summer University of the CADTM. She presented the debt crisis in only 12 minutes. She used cynical humor to explain how seven years ago in the North neoliberal capitalists realized that the subprime crisis was also an opportunity to dismantle social protections that had emerged in Europe over the past 50 years. These countries’ labor and sexual and reproductive laws went too far; they had to be put back in the ranks. They just had to rewrite history.

And so it came to pass.

It was not deregulation of the finance economy or financial derivatives products that caused the mess. It was the people, the women, the workers! They lived beyond their means, they should return to the “traditional” oppressive way of life! It was not 30 years of neoliberal politics!

Emilie explained that the experience of the South, ravaged by Structural Adjustment Programs, gave her the necessary insights into the system of debt and creditors to become active in the North. In addition, as a woman and as a lesbian woman, she is subjected to a system of oppressions and restrictions.

She sees the citizens’ debt audit as an important public tool that can be vector of grassroots organizing to lead to transformative initiatives. That is most needed to face this cynical and dreadful system that dispossesses the population of their rights.

The secretive functioning of the financial speculative market pulled apart necessary regulations to protect the public system. This allowed the derivative markets to become 10 times the world GDE while political discourse bragged about controlling the banks. Emilie

Paumard believes that the citizens’ debt audit allowed the oppressed population to comprehend and then organize the struggle against these opaque mechanisms that serve the neoliberal elite.

This is a feminist struggle. Now, listen to Emilie Paumard:

For a longer interview with Emilie, in French:

(Interview and photo by Brigitte Marti) (Video interview by Brigitte Marti and Marie–Hélène Le Ny at 50/50)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Georgia did not listen: They killed her.

October 2, 2015 by 1 Comment

Kelly Gissendaner at her theology graduation ceremony

They did not listen; they killed Kelly Gissendaner at a state prison in Jackson, Georgia, Wednesday, September 30, early in the morning.

She is the first woman executed in Georgia since 1945. Her execution was postponed after the lethal liquid was declared improper for killing because it was too cloudy. This decision was made after a series of botched executions, that left the condemned to death screaming and shaking for too long before dying. Just a reminder that the death penalty is first a violent act committed by the state.

All her appeals for clemency based on numerous testimonies that she changed her life were denied and early Wednesday morning Kelly Gissendaner received shots to die.

Now it is the turn of Richard Glossip in Oklahoma. His execution was stayed just before he was going to be executed by lethal injection. He was accused of a hired murder. Many elements have been assembled to assert that Richard Glossip is most likely innocent and was set up by the actual murderer who denounced him for a plea bargain to avoid the death penalty for himself.

None of this matters. The sentence was confirmed, and the delay is only due to the fear that he was going to be another botched execution because of the injection.

Everything was arranged so this little dirty business could go on, they even turn off the microphones, which is allowed since the last incident, so the torture-victim will not be heard.

They want blood at all price, and as Sister Helen Prejean explained, “The system in our criminal justice system, and particularly the administration of the death penalty, is so corrupt, it is so messed up.”

The eye for an eye law outweighs innocence or rehabilitation; that is not justice!

This cynical game must cease. No technology or protocol will change the fact that the death penalty is nothing other than a violent and arrogant form of oppression and has nothing to do with crime reduction or with reparation for victims’ families. It exacerbates violence in society and reinforces the process of dehumanization, adding to economic, racial and gendered forms of dehumanization. As some states are abolishing the death penalty, others are accelerating a kill-them-all policy.

It is time to stop the death penalty!

 

(Photo Credit: Ann Borden / The Emory Wheel)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Radio WIBG: Christine Vanden Daelen: Fighting the debt system is a feminist struggle!

September 29, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Christine Vanden Daelen

Christine Vanden Daelen

The CADTM summer university was articulated around five themes, one of which was Feminist Struggles. Christine Vanden Daelen was the coordinator of the workshops on feminist struggles in a time of debt and austerity.

According to Christine Vanden Daelen, debt is a dictatorial system over states, first in the South and now in the North, that oppresses populations. The system is supported by a network of international institutions that purport to work for the development of these states while imposing constraints and controls over their sovereignty.

For Christine, becoming aware of these mechanisms is key.

CADTM’s motto reads, “Create alternatives that free humanity from all forms of oppression: social, patriarchal, imperialist, racial…”

Christine Vanden Daelen joined the CADTM eight years ago after becoming aware that a social movement that intends to work against this system must have a feminist approach. The CADTM is also a feminist network as declared in its charter.

The structural adjustment programs in the South and the austerity measures in the North have impacted the most precarious populations. 70% of these populations are women. Women are the most dependent on social protection and public services, and so are the first ones to be dismantled by this system of debt. Thanks to work distribution, women comprise the vast majority of the public sector workers and the reproduction/care unpaid workers without which the society would be scrambling.

Christine says women have no debt to repay. It is the state that works in liaison with all the instigators and actors of the system of debt that should be paying them.

Let’s listen to Christine who launched with her colleagues a feminist audit of the debt:

For a longer interview with Christine, in French:

(Interview by Brigitte Marti) (Photo by Brigitte Marti) (Video interview by Brigitte Marti and Marie–Hélène Le Ny at 50 / 50)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , ,

Radio WIBG: Lauren Tooker on student debt and women bearing the brunt

September 20, 2015 by Leave a Comment

At the CADTM Summer University, the workshop on private debt and resistance broached the system of private debt as debt that is forced on people as public debt is forced on States. The workshop covered micro lending in Morocco, mortgage loan based eviction in Spain, financialization processes in Eastern Europe, and student loans in the UK.

Lauren Tooker talked to us about the student loan crisis in the UK. In 2012 a reform swept the universities in the UK introducing an important increase in education fees. This reform came with a system of loans specially designed to create a source of profit at the expense of equality in education. With a student debt system, women and minorities are losing space and rights.

The United Kingdom is the first European Country that has followed the path of the United States in the direction of for-profit education. As the scandal of the student unfair loan system in the United States is becoming more visible, finally hitting the news, the UK students have decided to organize and take action. Lauren came to the CADTM to link their struggle to the anti debt movement in general.

Resistance comes with conscientization, building spaces and organizing. Listen to Lauren Tooker.

(Recording by Brigitte Marti) (Debt Strike image: The Guardian)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Previous Page
Next Page »