Dan Moshenberg

Dan Moshenberg is an organizer educator who has worked with various social movements in the United States and South Africa.

In Canada, five women set the spark

December 24, 2012 by 12 Comments

Thanks to five women, four of them First Nation women, who have had enough, winter in Canada suddenly turned very hot. Idle No More is sweeping the country with the heat of justice, democracy, emancipation, and peoples’ power. It’s a Native Peoples’ Northern Lights, and it could shine on all of us.

Five women have started a national movement with global reach. Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat First Nation is on the fourteenth day of a hunger strike. Her immediate demand is that the Prime Minister and the Queen meet face to face with her and other First Nation leaders to address the longstanding violations of treaties. First Nation peoples and communities have had enough of sitting on the sidelines of their own histories.

At the same time, Chief Spence has another, call it existential demand: life with dignity. Last year, Chief Spence drew international attention to the deplorable living conditions on her Northern Ontario reservation. Since then … nothing has improved. So, Chief Spence is saying that death-in-life, that survival without dignity, that being turned into something less than a shadow is unacceptable. And so she is on a hunger strike.

The hunger strike is as well part of a mass strike, initially organized by four women in Saskatchewan: Jessica Gordon, Nina Wilson, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean. The women were fed up with the intensifying assault against First Nation peoples by the Canadian government, not to mention the assaults by the State on Native women. The last straw was something called Bill C-45, a monster omnibus bill that threatens First Nations with loss of land, environment, life, agency and autonomy. To the four women, it seemed that Bill C-45, and the Canadian government and State, offered First Nations people, and everyone, loss and the promise of more and deeper loss as the only absolute value. And, of course, the State calls it democracy.

So they organized, and the organizing effort has spread like prairie fire. The lesson here is the lesson the women of Egypt, Sudan, Spain, Chile, have brought over the last couple years. It’s the lesson the women of the Indignados, Girifna, the Arab Spring, the Chilean Winter, Occupy, UK Uncut, and, behind them, of the Zapatistas and Ya Basta, and behind them …

The lesson is that hope is material. Hope must be maintained as a concrete, material part of all of our lives. When loss is offered instead of hope, when debt is offered instead of hope, when autocracy and kleptocracy are offered, in the name of democracy or security, instead of hope, it’s time to be idle no more. It’s time light the winter skies.

And that’s the star the five wise women of Canada and their sisters and brothers have taught us to follow this December. They are “opening the eyes of this land” and, hopefully, this world.

(Photo Credit: Idle No More)

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There are still songs to sing …Newtown, Connecticut, 2012

December 14, 2012 by 3 Comments

Friday, December 14, 2012, and the news from Newtown, Connecticut, is terrible. A nation says it is in anguish. The President speaks of the pain and the horror, of our children and our neighborhoods. Our tears flow. And the traffic in guns continues. And in these theaters of horror, more often than not, the shooters are men and the first targets are women.

We have been here before. It is all too familiar.

Near the end of a life spent trying to turn the pain, horror and anguish of mass violence into the possibility of understanding, Paul Celan found that the project of poetry, his life project, was “an impossible struggle, doomed from the start to disaster. For poetry cannot save the soul or retrieve a lost world. It simply asserts the given.”

And Celan wrote:

“THREADSUNS
above the grayblack wastes.
A tree-
high thought
grasps the light-tone: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.”

The thought that is tree-high is too high for our grasp. It is too late to sing songs beyond mankind. There must be songs to sing now. And they must begin by turning swords into ploughshares … now. Right now.

(Photo Credit: Panoramio.com)

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The Bangladesh factory fire was a massacre of women workers

December 7, 2012 by 10 Comments

 


On Sunday, November 25, 2012, Bangladesh suffered its worst-ever factory fire, at the Tazreen Fashions factory. At last count, 123 workers died. By all accounts, the workers were all or almost all women. Nothing here was new. Bangladesh has 4500 garment factories. The garment industry in Bangladesh employs more than 3 million people. Most of them are women. Many of them have died in `industrial accidents’.

There was no accident.

And now, less than two weeks later, the `discoveries’ begin. Today’s breaking news is the factory had no safety certificate. No one thought it did. Exit doors were locked. We knew that. Managers wouldn’t let workers leave until the flames were obvious, until it was too late. We `learned’ this week that Wal Mart actively blocked, or nixed, safety moves in Bangladesh, including in Tazreen Fashions factory. Are you surprised? Neither am I. The news is not that Wal Mart stopped a move towards worker safety, but rather than now the documents proving it have been made public as have the Wal Mart receipts left on Tazreen’s burnt floors. All of this has undermined Wal Mart’s account and credibility. Who believed Wal Mart in the first place? Who believes Wal Mart now?

Who believes the fashion industry when it claims shock and dismay? Who believes The New York Times or any other news outlet when they only now `discover’ a “gap in safety for local brands”?

Investigative reporting is important, as is research. So is accountability, including accountability in tone and diction. There was no accident, there was no gap, there was no absence, and there is no surprise. Call the event by its proper name: massacre. “An indiscriminate and brutal slaughter of people”, specifically of women. And the factory was no factory. It was a slaughterhouse. It always was, and we cannot claim to be surprised when the flames burst and the women workers’ bodies explode … again.

(Photo Credit: TheDailyStar.net)

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In criminalizing HIV transmission, the US and Canada lead a global war on women

December 3, 2012 by 1 Comment

The United States leads the world in prosecuting people for HIV transmission and exposure. Canada comes in second. All but two of Mexico’s 30 states criminalize HIV-status nondisclosure. North America leads the way … in a global war on women.

Globally, women bear the brunt of the HIV pandemic. In the United States, that’s particularly true for women of color. In the US, HIV-positive women of color face extraordinarily high rates of morbidity and mortality. They also report high rates of intimate partner violence. This doubles the risk of death for HIV-positive women. The house is a war zone, and then the State jumps in and intensifies it … through laws that universally and without distinction criminalize `everyone’ for nondisclosure of their status.

Women in abusive, toxic relationships are supposed to `share’ with their partners? It’s that simple? Cicely Bolden shared with her partner. He killed her. He justified his murder by claiming the disclosure drove him mad.

In October, the Supreme Court of Canada handed down two decisions concerning so-called criminal transmission. The Court claimed its decisions were meant to clarify some vagueness in a 1998 decision, R. v. Cuerrier. In that decision, the Court said people living with HIV and AIDS had to disclose their status before engaging in sex. To not do so constituted `fraud’. The two recent cases, R. v. Mabior and R. v. D.C., dismally clarified the Court’s understanding of what’s at stake here: risk.

Here’s the story of the D.C. case:

A woman living with HIV, D.C., had a partner for four years. The partner claims the first time they had sex together, she had not disclosed her status to him. When she did reveal her status, he said it was fine. They stayed together for four years. At some point, he became abusive and violent. Finally, he was convicted for beating D.C. and her son. That’s when he accused her of not disclosing her HIV+ status. Although she claimed that they used a condom the first time they had sex, the trial judge did not believe her and found that their first sexual encounter was unprotected. D.C. was convicted of sexual assault and aggravated assault for not disclosing her HIV status to her partner. The partner is HIV negative, by the way. On appeal, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned D.C.’s convictions on the basis that, even if no condom had been used for that first sexual encounter, her viral load was undetectable at the time. Based on her viral load, there was no “significant risk” of transmission. Non-disclosure, thus, was not a crime. That’s the case Supreme Court of Canada heard.

The Court decided against D.C. and, in so doing, declared that the risk of AIDS is so great that those living with AIDS must disclose, use condoms, and have low viral loads if they are to avoid criminal prosecution.

According to the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, with this decision “the Supreme Court of Canada made the law even harsher for PHAs: people must now disclose their status before having sexual relations that pose a `realistic possibility’ of HIV transmission. But in the Court’s view, a `realistic possibility’ encompasses almost any risk, no matter how small.”

For the Court, the risk of disclosure, especially for women, means less than nothing. In its decision, the Court further codified the absolute lack of value of a woman’s life. It ignored study after study and legal argument after legal argument, some local and others international, which demonstrate that criminalization of HIV-positive status does not impede the spread of AIDS. The Court ignored as well innumerable studies and legal arguments that clarify the impossible position HIV-positive women in dependent as well as abusive relationships face when forced to disclose.

None of that mattered. All that mattered was `risk aversion.’

You know what has actually spread over the last decade? Criminalization of HIV disclosure. And you know who has pushed that spread? The United States Agency for International Development, USAID, which first funded and then `encouraged’ nations to adopt a so-called Model HIV/AIDS Law. Over 60 countries now criminalize HIV transmission or exposure. These laws do not protect women. These laws attack women and do them harm. It’s an active front in a global war on women, lead by the United States and Canada.

 

(Image Credit: Positive Women)

 

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The tragic and the everyday of the garment industry

November 26, 2012 by 6 Comments

 


On May 10, 1993, 188 workers died, or were killed, in a fire at the Kader Toy Factory, in Bangkok, Thailand. 177 of the killed workers were women. The factory had no fire alarms, no sprinklers, very few fire extinguishers, and practically no means of escape. Those not immediately burned to death jumped out of third and fourth story windows … and were killed or seriously injured.

On November 19, 1993, 87 workers, all women, died, or were killed, in a fire at the Zhili Handicraft Factory, in Shenzhen, China’s first Special Economic Zone. A month later, on December 13, 61 women workers died, or were killed, in a fire at the Gaofu Textile Factory, in Fuzhou.

On Sunday, November 25, 2012, Bangladesh suffered its worst-ever factory fire, at the Tazreen Fashions factory, one of 4500 garment factories in the country. At last count, 123 workers died. By all accounts, the workers were all or almost all women.

Nothing here is new. Industries rely on women’s `nimble fingers’ to produce goods. Factories filled with women are overcrowded, have no fire alarms or sprinklers, and have no means of escape. Many women are burned to death. In these more recent versions, as in the earlier Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the factories are the signature of the modern. They are proof positive of progress made, or so the public is told.

Until the fire next time.

And each time, the fire, the tragedy, `enlightens’ a public that was previously innocent of any knowledge of the circumstances of industrial women workers. Fortunately for the innocent public, the dead cannot speak, cannot contradict the protestations of surprise and the performances of dismay.

But the living can.

At almost the same time the Tazreen factory burst into flames, garment workers, women workers, gathered in Bengaluru, in India, to give testimony to their working lives and to make demands. Managers abuse the women verbally and physically. The production targets are impossible. The pay is bare. The list goes on. What do the women want? They want what every worker wants. They want dignity, they want a living wage, they want the right to organize. They want everything that constitutes dignity, they want everything that expands dignity.

The women know they are working in a factory that is all women workers because a factory full of women is a factory of low wages. They are told this is a sign of development, of modernity. The women know better.

As we enter into the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence, mourn the women workers who have died in the fires and support the women workers who continue to organize and make demands, as they produce clothing, toys, microchips, textiles, and more. Don’t let the brilliance of the fire obscure the urgencies of women workers’ everyday struggles for dignity and a living wage.

 

(Photo Credit: The Guardian)

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World Toilet Day is WORLD Toilet Day, not developing world toilet day

November 19, 2012 by 2 Comments

November 19, 2012: it’s World Toilet Day. Around the world, one in three women has no access to a safe toilet. The situation, especially for women, is desperate. It’s a global crisis, driven in many instances by taboos and stigma and in others by public policy. From Uganda, Mozambique, India, and the Solomon Islands to Mongolia and Vietnam to Haiti to Bolivia to South Africa and Kenya and Zambia and Ghana to Sri Lanka to Ethiopia, the situation is serious.  As Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organization, the real WTO, and one of the initiators of World Toilet Day has argued, it’s a human tragedy.

Women’s lack of access to safe toilets is a human tragedy everywhere. Not just in developing countries.

Last week, 20 women U.S. Senators gathered for an event. Before the event, they headed off to the women’s bathroom, only to discover there were only two stalls. While much levity has been generated by “first time ever traffic jam at the women’s Senators’ bathroom”, by women Senators hitting up against the porcelain ceiling, the Senators’ lack of access to a safe, clean, available toilet points to a more dire situation, in the United States.

Women prisoners often lack access to safe, clean, available toilets. Women living with disabilities who have been institutionalized often lack access to safe, clean, available toilets. In fact, women living with disabilities out on the streets often lack access to safe, clean, available toilets. Women and girls in schools often find going to the bathroom a hazardous journey.

Women in traditionally all-male fields often lack access to safe, clean, available toilets. For example, women in the building trades often describe “limited access to sanitary toilets.”

Many women farm workers find no toilets in the fields, and when there is one, it’s often a site of sexual harassment. They find the housing provided to farm workers has a similar lack of functioning toilets, as well as a lack of functioning sewage and potable water.

And of course, across the United States, when landlords look to move tenants out in the name of `development’, the first line of attack is maintenance. Along with failure, or refusal, to repair public spaces, such as hallways and lobbies, landlords use broken plumbing in their `assault by blight’. Across the United States, women, mostly women of color, living in targeted neighborhoods struggle with lack of access to safe, clean, available toilets.

World Toilet Day is WORLD Toilet Day, not developing world toilet day.

(Image Credit: United Nations)

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Kadi Sesay, a Sierra Leonean feminist leader and builder of democracy

November 16, 2012 by 2 Comments

All eyes are on Sierra Leone and its cliffhanger elections tomorrow. It actually is a crucial election, with a great deal at stake (even if The New York Times has thus far not mentioned a word). And one group that is precariously positioned in this election is women.

Out of 538 candidates for Parliament, only 38 are women. Of 1,283 candidates for local council seats, a mere 337 are women. Many women activists, such as Barbara Bangura, the director of the women’s organisation Grassroots Empowerment for Self Reliance, lay much of the blame on current women parliamentarians who failed to get the Parliament to pass, or even seriously consider, the Gender Equality Bill. The Gender Equality Bill would have mandated that 30% of the legislators be women.

Why did the Bill fail? Some in the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus claim there was confusion. Others say intimidation of women candidates and office holders is all too common.

Whatever the reason, there will be a sharp decline in the number of women in Parliament and in local offices. For that reason alone, women are already organizing to re-table it post election.

While the numbers are fairly dismal, there’s one number that shows some promise: 2. And that number 2 has a woman’s name: Kadi Sesay. The opposition party, Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), is running Kadi Sesay as vice-president. If Julius Maada Bio becomes President, Sierra Leone will have a woman Vice-President for the first time.

Sesay has been a first woman on a number of occasions, from academic head of department to National Commission head to Ministerial positions. She’s a groundbreaker Sierra Leonean feminist leader and feminist builder of real democracy who, for decades and at every step, has worked closely with women’s groups, women’s movements, women.

While the election of one woman to a high office won’t resolve the extraordinarily high maternal mortality rate in Sierra Leone, nor the crisis of women’s high indebtedness, nor the challenges women farmers face either in the rural zones or in the cities, nor the inequities women face in the courts,  it’s still something.

According to the BBC tomorrow’s election is all about becoming an adult: “Sierra Leone may be about to prove it has grown up.”

The possible accession of Kadi Sesay to the Vice-Presidency of Sierra Leone is not a passage into adulthood. Sierra Leone is not a child. Tell the BBC. Tell them, as well, about Kadi Sesay, an African feminist leader.

 

(Photo Credit: SierraExpressMedia.com

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The agony of Savita Halappanavar

November 14, 2012 by 21 Comments
Savita Halappanavar

Savita Halappanavar

Savita Halappanavar died, or was killed, because an Irish hospital refused to perform a medically necessary abortion until they were absolutely positively sure the fetal heartbeat had stopped. The life of the mother was of no concern. Savita Halappanavar spent more than two days in agony, and died, or was killed, in agony.

The agony of Savita Halappanavar is a commonplace globally, according to the UN’s  The State of World Population 2012, released today. From Poland to Armenia to Uganda to Swaziland to India to Nicaragua to the United States, and all points between and beyond, pregnant women, women in childbirth, women die in agony, thanks to criminalization, stigma, public policy and more.

They die in agony like so many prisoners, begging for care, screaming for mercy. They receive neither. Why? What is a global culture of women-dying-in-agony? A little over 50 years ago, Frantz Fanon had an answer to that question: “Le colon oubliait singulièrement qu’il s’enrichissait de l’agonie de l’esclave.” “The colonist forgot strangely enough that he was getting rich on the agony of the slave. In fact what the colonist was saying to the colonized subject: “Work yourselves to death, but let me get rich!”

The agony of Savita Halappanavar is part of the ongoing global crisis of the wretched and the damned: women. Slavery has not ended; it has simply changed clothes for the new season. Colonialism has not ended; it has moved the furniture around. The colonists continue to forget strangely enough and continue to enrich themselves on the agony of women.

(Photo credit 1: The Irish Times) (Photo Credit 2: The Journal)

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Where are the women of rural Mozambique?

November 11, 2012 by 1 Comment

In an otherwise informative article this past Sunday, the New York Times reported on a rural Mozambique without women. Reporting on the “rural poor…left behind”, and pushed around, by multinational mining and natural gas companies and by the national government, the Times mentioned not a single Mozambican woman. In the accompanying slide show, there’s a slide of “people gathered by a river to bathe, play and wash their dishes”. The `people’ are, not surprisingly, all women and girls. Another slide shows, and names, Beatriz Jose, condemned to living in a tent, thanks to the dismal housing provided by the mining companies. And that’s pretty much it.

Where are the women of rural Mozambique? On the farms and in the countryside of Mozambique, the women are everywhere. Study after study has described the relentless feminization of poverty in rural Mozambique. As one study, conducted for the Mozambican government, explains, “The majority of agricultural workers in Mozambique are women and an increasing number of households are being headed by females.” Eighty percent of Mozambique’s population is rural, and 80% percent of rural workers are women. An exceptionally high number of those rural women workers are divorced, separated or widowed. That means a very large numbers of households are headed by single women. The feminization of poverty has been accompanied by the feminization of household headship. At the same time, women farmers have organized into cooperatives and cooperative associations, such as MuGeDe – Mulher, Genero e Desenvolvimento (Women, Gender and Development).

Thanks to labor migration of men, to the HIV and AIDS pandemic, and to women’s organizing on the ground, the lives of women in rural households and in the fields has been constantly changing in Mozambique. Personal and structural, or sectoral, vulnerability has intensified at the same time that women’s formal and informal organizing has intensified. It takes real work to write about rural Mozambique and avoid any mention of women.

And that’s precisely what The New York Times did this weekend.

 

(Photo Credit: La Via Campesina)

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Ashley Smith, who haunts the Correctional Service of Canada

November 9, 2012 by 14 Comments

 

Ashley Smith and her guards

On October 19, 2007, 19-year-old Ashley Smith, a prisoner under suicide watch, killed herself. Seven guards watched and did nothing to stop her. They were under orders to let her go. Someone wanted to teach her a lesson, not to be `a nuisance’. And so, she died … or was killed by active neglect.

Now, five years later, perhaps, the Canadian government will finally conduct an inquest. The murder of Ashley Smith didn’t stop at her death. For five years, the Correctional Service of Canada has fought tooth and nail to bury any evidence of the event … other than the corpse of Ashley Smith, the pain of her family and friends, and the horror.

For five years, the Canadian prison system first denied the existence of the damning videos released, finally, just recently. They didn’t inform the parties in the inquiry of the existence of the tapes. Then, when the tapes could no longer be denied, the Correctional Service tried to keep the public from having access.

If Ashley Smith were the only young woman prisoner who was effectively tortured in prison, left to die slow death or `self-inflicted’ death in solitary, left to die while monitored in suicide watch, her death would indeed be a tragedy.

But Ashley Smith is not alone in her fate. Many prisoners, and especially women prisoners, living with mental health disabilities, find themselves deep in a system of abuse and exploitation. Many prisoners, and especially women prisoners, find their attempts at self-harm are not viewed as symptoms of a need to be treated but rather as bureaucratic inconveniences. Taking care of mentally ill prisoners `costs’ too much. Caring about the welfare of mentally ill prisoners costs way too much. Caring about the destiny and lives of young women … priceless.

There has been and will continue to be much condemnation, much finger pointing, all of it well deserved. But at the same, Ashley Smith’s death by proxy was precisely part of the `service’ the Correctional Service offers. Adjudicating those involved is important, getting the details of the story is important, too. Transforming the system and the nation and world that built it is necessary.

That won’t bring Ashley Smith back. That won’t mean she didn’t die in vain. But it could mean something for those who follow.

 

(The Globe and Mail)

 

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