Image by Andrew Ratto via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Mar 27, 2021
On the show this week, Chris Hedges discusses with journalist and writer May Jeong the deep American roots of the Atlanta shootings.
Image by Kaleb via Edmonton Public Schools via Flickr
by Howard Zinn
Writer, Dandelion Salad
Originally posted August 14, 2011
October 24, 2017
Chapter 6 from A People’s History of the United States.
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
Image by DualD FlipFlop via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
RT America on Nov 20, 2016
On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges has a raw conversation about the reality of selling sex with Rachel Moran, author of “Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution”. RT correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the prostitution law implemented in Sweden, and other countries, that criminalizes the purchase of sex, but allows the sale to continue.
Image by Imagens Evangélicas via Flickr
with Chris Hedges
On Contact Archive on Apr 6, 2022
Originally from RT America on Jul 2, 2016
In this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges sits down with two anti-trafficking campaigners discuss how to combat the sexual exploitation of women and girls. Suzanne Jay, co-founder of Asian Women Coalition Ending Prostitution, and Taina Bien-Aime, Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, delve into the controversial topic of decriminalizing prostitution. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil reports on the global scale of sex trafficking.
Image by Kaleb via Edmonton Public Schools via Flickr
by Howard Zinn
Writer, Dandelion Salad
crossposted at www.greanvillepost.com, July 20, 2011
Originally posted August 14, 2011
February 3, 2016
Chapter 6 from A People’s History of the United States.
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
November 9, 2013
Image by Imagens Evangélicas via Flickr
The act of buying and selling sits at the very heart of the global economy. A commercially motivated system, that P. Sainath rightly describes as “Market Fundamentalism”, in which competition and conservative uniformity are central elements. Creative independent thinking and originality are anathema to this relentless homogenous machine, which breeds conformity, crushes individuality and “Borg-like”, assimilates all into ‘The Collective’. Continue reading
by Graham Peebles
Writer, Dandelion Salad
London
September 4, 2013
Image by Rita Willaert via Flickr
To be born poor in our world, is to be born vulnerable and in danger of exploitation of one kind or another; to be incarnated female and poor is to greatly intensify the risks. If you are born a girl to parents of tea-pickers in Assam in North Eastern India (earning as little as US $1.50 a day) there is a good chance you will be sold to a local recruitment ‘agent’ by your loved ones for around $50, he will sell you on to a city ‘employer’ for up to $800 and into a life of abuse and suffering. Continue reading
by Graham Peebles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
London
January 6, 2013
Image by Imagens Evangélicas via Flickr
A woman’s lot
In the ancient land of India, where female deities deeply revered, Kali and Lakshmi, Sarasvati and Parvati, are held high upon the alter of Hinduism, where each day thousands of Hindu’s ritually bathe in the Holy waters of the Ganges, cleansed within and without by the Goddess Ganga, women and girls; in the forests, cities, villages and towns, on buses and trains, in the street, the office, at school and in the home are being violated, abused, raped and trafficked into prostitution and domestic slavery. Continue reading
by Graham Peebles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
London
December 17, 2012
Desperately seeking a future
Year on year the numbers of men, women and children leaving Ethiopia in search of work and freedom from repression in one of the Gulf States and beyond is increasing. Lured by the often hollow prospect of earning enough money to support their family, United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)[i] estimate around 85,000 men women and children, desperate and naïve, have this year, no matter the severe risks, made their way to Yemen, the hub of migration out of the Horn of Africa. In the last six years around 250,000 Ethiopians have made the dangerous journey into this very poor, deeply divided country besieged with internal problems, which has limited resources, the second highest rate of chronic child malnutrition in the world and where 45% of the population live in poverty.
by Finian Cunningham
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
East Africa
April 19, 2012
Get caught with a hooker in your hotel room and it’s a firing offence; get caught desecrating the corpses of dead Afghans and – nothing.
Two scandals emerging this week involving immoral conduct of US Secret Service and military personnel reveal starkly different reactions and priorities among the American ruling elite.
by Howard Zinn
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 12, 2011
Image via Wikipedia
Chapter 6 from A People’s History of the United States.
It is possible, reading standard histories, to forget half the population of the country. The explorers were men, the landholders and merchants men, the political leaders men, the military figures men. The very invisibility of women, the overlooking of women, is a sign of their submerged status.
In this invisibility they were something like black slaves (and thus slave women faced a double oppression). The biological uniqueness of women, like skin color and facial characteristics for Negroes, became a basis for treating them as inferiors. True, with women, there was something more practically important in their biology than skin color-their position as childbearers-but this was not enough to account for the general push backward for all of them in society, even those who did not bear children, or those too young or too old for that. Continue reading
by Brian McAfee
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
August 13, 2011
Image by C. Elle via Flickr
One of the most significant ongoing scourges that befalls humanity worldwide is the ongoing exploitation and sexual abuse of over two million girls and boys through sex trafficking. UNICEF estimates that two and a half million children, most of them girls, are tricked or forced into the multibillion dollar global sex industry.
by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Nov. 12, 2009
E.P. was a US expat kid who lived all over the world growing up and therefore naturally enough I guess wound up getting a superlatively useless liberal arts degree in Classical Chinese* and becoming a reporter for Reuters across Asia. She then jumped ship to epidemiology, getting a PHd in same in London and then working in Asia for the UN or for UN-affiliated NGO’s on AIDS transmission reduction programs for another decade or so. The book is her first-person account of her days in the trenches in the worldwide war against AIDS, and it is written in her distinct and delightful own voice. Her writing is in parts a model of skillful expository prose explaining the technical scientific issues of epidemiology and AIDS biology to the lay reader. It is also in parts a surprisingly informative sociological study of sexual practices in several Asian countries, first and foremost Indonesia. Another part is sociology of drug useage–sex and drugs being the two leading vectors for AIDS transmission–which gets frank and honest treatment, too. Other parts are first-rate explanatory reportage of the political issues in both the first and third world’s responses to the AIDS epidemic. And then there’s the autobiographical parts which are by turns wise, funny, brave, relentlessly honest, and full of human understanding and human decency.
by Eileen Coles
Guest Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted at www.docudharma.com/diary
August 17, 2009
While I was serving at Ramstein during Desert Storm, “Overseas!” magazine came out with an article with that incredibly cheesy title. It featured a tough looking gal in chocolate chip cami’s with a firm set to her jaw and a pair of the ubiquitous 1980’s ZZ Top “cheap sunglasses” that were being offered for sale in every AAFES store, BX, PX, and commissary. I believe she was either standing there holding a weapon or standing behind a gun emplacement. The very idea that this woman would be in combat was laughable at the time, women were having enough problems being allowed to fly C130 cargo missions for USAFE’s arm of the Desert Storm operation, Proven Force.
Posted with permission by Green Left Weekly
by Peter Boyle
Green Left Weekly
24 May 2008
A pile of bags and clothing on an old shopfront verandah on Cuff Road in Singapore’s Little India is “home” to a group of about 50 migrant workers who have been spat out by an economy that relies heavily on so-called “guest workers”.
All are men from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, lured to Singapore by shady labour agents who had extracted heavy fees from them.“When they landed, some found there were no jobs waiting for them. Others, unaware of regulations here, were tricked into entering on social-visit passes, which do not allow them to work. A few workers even claimed they were met at the airport by ‘agents’, who took the return portion of their air tickets and disappeared”, the local Straits Times reported on March 18.
Others worked legally for a while, but were tossed out by their boss after incurring work injuries.
Jobless, desperate, homeless and hungry, some of them tried to work illegally and were arrested, jailed and flogged. Corporal punishment, like the death penalty, still remains a feature of modern Singapore law.
To cap it off, some of these men are not allowed to leave Singapore because the labour ministry — which administers the approximately 900,800 transient migrant workers that comprise more that 40% of the island state’s total labour force — requires them to stay to appear as witnesses in a string of court cases.
“They find themselves in a debt trap, having borrowed money to pay agency fees and plane tickets, many continue to borrow money to pay for basic necessities now”, explains Sha Najak from Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a small charity which is helping feed the men and championing the cases.
Receiving no funds from the Singaporean government and struggling to stay afloat, TWC2 was formed out of outrage following the 2001 killing of 19-year-old Indonesian domestic worker Muawanatul Chasanah, following months of brutal assault by her employer. Chasanah’s autopsy revealed some 200 caning, scalding, punching, kicking, and burning injuries at the time of her death.
Some 170,000 of the nearly one million transient workers work as domestics and one of TWC2’s current campaigns is for these migrant domestic workers to be guaranteed at least one day off in a week!
Model program
Yet Singapore’s “guest worker” scheme is presented as a model for the world by some right-wing forces. An article in the January edition of the right-wing “libertarian” US magazine, Reason, supported US President George Bush’s call for a guest worker scheme that would partly legalise the exploitation of “illegal” migrant workers in the US, without ending the vulnerability and super-exploitation that arise from being denied the right to legally settle in the US.
Similar arguments are now being raised by advocates of the Rudd Labor government’s plan of continuing in substance (though under another name) the former Howard government’s notorious 457 visa regime for temporary overseas workers.
Singapore is seen as a model because it is a relatively wealthy island in South East Asia, with average incomes (adjusted for price parity) only slightly below that of the tiny oil-state of Brunei. The Reason article, by Kerry Howlett, argued that its guest worker scheme is a win-win solution.
According to a 2008 report from the Asian Development Bank: “The Singapore government estimates that foreign labour contributed 3.2 percentage points of its annual growth rate of 7.8% in the 1990s.” Singapore gets the hard and dirty jobs done and workers from poverty stricken countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh get to send money home to their families.
Across the causeway in Malaysia, the situation for “guest workers” is a lot worse, as Newsweek conceded in a March 15 article entitled “Bottom of the barrel”.
Captives
Malaysia is one of the “most notorious” host countries, according to the Newsweek article. It has an estimated 2.5 million foreign workers, many of whom fit the UN’s definition of forced laborers.
“Malaysian law effectively makes every foreign worker a captive of the company that hired him or her. In the name of immigration control, employers … are required to confiscate guest workers’ passports and report any runaways to the police.”
Newsweek cited the case of a local computer component manufacturing company — which probably made the casings for hard drives in many of the top-brand computers used around the world — which exploits a virtually enslaved migrant workforce. The article quotes a company executive pitying these workers who were “fooled hook, line and sinker” by sleazy labour brokers. They had tricked the workers into paying huge placement fees for jobs that yield a net income close to zero.
“This is the dark side of globalization: a vast work force trapped in conditions that verge on slavery. Most media coverage of human trafficking tends to focus on crime, like the recent scandals involving migrant laborers who were kidnapped and forced to work at brick kilns in China.
“And forced prostitution, of course, which accounts for roughly 2 million people worldwide, according to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization … The ILO reckons the worldwide number of forced laborers today at some 12.3 million. It’s a conservative estimate; other approximations rise as high as 27 million.”
[An article in a future issue of Green Left Weekly will look at the situation for guest workers in Australia.]
Dandelion Salad 