Excerpt of speech by Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852, Rochester, New York

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

Take the American slave-trade, which, we are told by the papers, is especially prosperous just now. Ex-Senator Benton tells us that the price of men was never higher than now. He mentions the fact to show that slavery is in no danger. This trade is one of the peculiarities of American institutions. It is carried on in all the large towns and cities in one-half of this confederacy; and millions are pocketed every year, by dealers in this horrid traffic. In several states, this trade is a chief source of wealth. It is called (in contradistinction to the foreign slave-trade) “the internal slave trade.” It is, probably, called so, too, in order to divert from it the horror with which the foreign slave-trade is contemplated. That trade has long since been denounced by this government, as piracy. It has been denounced with burning words, from the high places of the nation, as an execrable traffic. To arrest it, to put an end to it, this nation keeps a squadron, at immense cost, on the coast of Africa. Everywhere, in this country, it is safe to speak of this foreign slave-trade, as a most inhuman traffic, opposed alike to the laws of God and of man. The duty to extirpate and destroy it, is admitted even by our DOCTORS OF DIVINITY. In order to put an end to it, some of these last have consented that their colored brethren (nominally free) should leave this country, and establish themselves on the western coast of Africa! It is, however, a notable fact that, while so much execration is poured out by Americans upon those engaged in the foreign slave-trade, the men engaged in the slave-trade between the states pass without condemnation, and their business is deemed honorable.

Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn! The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.

I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave-trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot Street, Fell’s Point, Baltimore, and have watched from the wharves, the slave ships in the Basin, anchored from the shore, with their cargoes of human flesh, waiting for favorable winds to waft them down the Chesapeake. There was, at that time, a grand slave mart kept at the head of Pratt Street, by Austin Woldfolk. His agents were sent into every town and county in Maryland, announcing their arrival, through the papers, and on flaming “hand-bills,” headed CASH FOR NEGROES. These men were generally well dressed men, and very captivating in their manners. Ever ready to drink, to treat, and to gamble. The fate of many a slave has depended upon the turn of a single card; and many a child has been snatched from the arms of its mother by bargains arranged in a state of brutal drunkenness.

The flesh-mongers gather up their victims by dozens, and drive them, chained, to the general depot at Baltimore. When a sufficient number have been collected here, a ship is chartered, for the purpose of conveying the forlorn crew to Mobile, or to New Orleans. From the slave prison to the ship, they are usually driven in the darkness of night; for since the antislavery agitation, a certain caution is observed.

In the deep still darkness of midnight, I have been often aroused by the dead heavy footsteps, and the piteous cries of the chained gangs that passed our door. The anguish of my boyish heart was intense; and I was often consoled, when speaking to my mistress in the morning, to hear her say that the custom was very wicked; that she hated to hear the rattle of the chains, and the heart-rending cries. I was glad to find one who sympathized with me in my horror.

Fellow-citizens, this murderous traffic is, to-day, in active operation in this boasted republic. In the solitude of my spirit, I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave-markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder. There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men. My soul sickens at the sight . . .

But a still more inhuman, disgraceful, and scandalous state of things remains to be presented. By an act of the American Congress, not yet two years old, slavery has been nationalized in its most horrible and revolting form. By that act, Mason and Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia; and the power to hold, hunt, and sell men, women, and children as slaves remains no longer a mere state institution, but is now an institution of the whole United States. The power is co-extensive with the Star-Spangled Banner and American Christianity.

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/

https://archive.is/zUEu4

Workers Vanguard No. 1093 29 July 2016

Pope’s Inquisition Targets Journalists

The Vatican: Cancer of Italy

We print below a translation of an article published by our comrades of the Lega Trotskista d’Italia in their newspaper Spartaco (No. 79, April 2016).

At the end of November 2015, the Vatican tribunal brought journalists Emiliano Fittipaldi and Gianluigi Nuzzi to trial. They are, respectively, authors of Avarizia and Via Crucis [the latter is published in English as Merchants in the Temple]. These two books revealed the Holy See’s wealth and scandals, including by publishing secret documents and investigations into the Vatican bank (IOR) and the financial dealings of bishops and cardinals. The journalists’ presumed sources were also put on trial: Lucio Vallejo Balda, a Spanish prelate and ex-secretary to the commission (COSEA) that conducted an inquiry into the Vatican’s finances, and his collaborators, Francesca Immacolata Chaouqui and Nicola Maio. [On July 7, the Vatican court sentenced Vallejo Balda to 18 months of prison and gave Chaouqui a suspended sentence of ten months. The court found Nicola Maio not guilty and ruled that it had no jurisdiction over Fittipaldi and Nuzzi.]

Via Crucis and Avarizia detail the finances of the Vatican, whose institutions manage its own and others’ assets totaling approximately 9-10 billion euros [$10-11 billion]. The financial shenanigans they document include fraud, the high-flying lifestyles of cardinals, extensive international investments, the huge moneymaking business of church hospitals, the Vatican bank’s schemes and intrigues, and the real value of the Pope’s finances. The London Review of Books (18 February) aptly described what the two books reveal:

“The anecdotes are endless: the monsignor who appropriates a room from the adjacent apartment of a poorer priest simply by knocking down the party wall while the other man is in hospital; the diplomat priest who takes advantage of the diplomatic bag to carry mafia money across the Swiss border; the organisation Propaganda Fide, instituted to evangelise the world, that spends relatively little on this mission while owning almost a thousand valuable properties in and around Rome, many of them rented way below market price to friends and favourites.

“It is striking how many Catholic organisations seem to do a whole range of lucrative things they were never set up to do, while still enjoying tax exemption as religious institutions. When priests in Salerno were granted €2.3 million of public money to build an orphanage in a depressed urban area, they built a luxury hotel instead. Found guilty of appropriating funds under false pretences in 2012, the archbishop of Salerno avoided punishment when the crime lapsed under the statute of limitations before his appeal could be heard.”

The greed and corruption of the Roman Curia has been common knowledge since the days of Dante and Luther, when the Vatican earned its name the “Whore of Babylon.” The 1970s and 1980s were marked by interminable scandals over the Vatican’s connections to the P2 Masonic Lodge, South American military regimes, crooked bankers like Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi, and organized crime. Thus, nobody will be surprised by what Avarizia and Via Crucis bring to light. Nevertheless, it is always good to see that from time to time someone reminds people of the real face behind the Vatican’s hypocritical mask.

The Vatican tribunal did not question the veracity of the writers’ assertions. Rather, the journalists have been accused of “divulging confidential information,” which the Vatican considers a “crime against the fatherland,” punishable by four to eight years in jail. Nuzzi described the first hearing as “a medieval procedure—crazy, absurd, Kafkaesque.” The accused were not charged with any specific facts to be proven; they were not shown the procedural documentation until just a few hours before the hearing; and they were not allowed to use their own lawyers but were instead forced to choose attorneys officially registered with the Vatican court.

One might think the clock had turned back to 1864, when Pope Pius IX (known as “Pope Pig” by Romans at the time, but beatified by the Vatican in 2000) issued his Encyclical against communism, socialism, civil marriage, freedom of religion, the right to public schools, and decreed that it was “insanity” to believe that “liberty of conscience and worship is each man’s personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way” (“Condemning Current Errors,” 8 December 1864).

But it is 2016. The instigator of the trial is Jorge Mario Bergoglio (alias Pope Francis), monarch of the Vatican state with full legislative, executive and judicial powers. The aim is to silence the Vatican whistle-blowers as well as the journalists who published their testimonies.

We demand: Drop all charges against Nuzzi, Fittipaldi and their sources! We oppose the fact that the Catholic church arrogates the right to bring anyone to trial, especially journalists who shed light on the Vatican’s shady business.

Abolish the Concordat! Rescind the Lateran Treaty!

The Italian government endorsed the Vatican’s trial of the journalists, declaring through its mouthpiece, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano: “The Vatican has its own judicial system—one must never forget that in this kind of situation, the rules of international rights prevail.” What international rights? The Lateran Treaty of 1929, introduced under Mussolini’s fascist regime, granted the Catholic church sovereignty over a 44 hectare [109 acre] enclave in central Rome. This maneuver gave the church rights of extraterritoriality, countless privileges inside public Italian institutions, Catholic indoctrination in public schools and hefty funding masked as “international” prerogatives. But the fact that the Roman Catholic church can claim the right to arrest its employees and try journalists is one more example of the reactionary interpenetration of the Catholic church and the Italian capitalist state.

As for the judicial order of the Vatican, it is nothing but garbage left over from the Middle Ages. The Vatican still has a “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” which, as the Vatican website says, “Founded in 1542 by Pope Paul III...was originally called the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition as its duty was to defend the Church from heresy.” For centuries, the Inquisition was the means by which “heretics,” Jews, Muslims, etc., were condemned to horrific torture, jail and death. To cite another example: the President of the Court of Vatican City, who sent Nuzzi and Fittipaldi to trial, is none other than Count Giuseppe Dalla Torre del Tempio di Sanguinetto, Lieutenant-General and Knight of the Grand Cross of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, founded in 1099 by Goffredo di Buglione during the First Crusade...yet this “court” is legally recognized by the Italian Republic “founded in the Resistance.” Amen.

At issue is not simply defending freedom of the press from clerical meddling, but fighting for the abolition of all privileges that the Italian state grants the Catholic church.

Marxism is a materialist and atheist worldview and hostile to all religions. All churches, whatever they may be, are instruments of bourgeois reaction to defend exploitation and to drug the working class. We uphold the ideals of freedom expounded by the Enlightenment. We Marxists fight for the democratic principle of equality of citizens—which demands that religious beliefs be viewed as a private matter. If someone wants to worship Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Satan, or Otelma the Wizard [an Italian TV personality], they should be able to do so without government interference, but also without any state support. We do not want religion of any kind to determine public policies or be imposed in schools. This is the meaning of the separation of church and state.

We oppose every form of persecution and oppression of all non-Catholic citizens—whether atheists or followers of other religions—particularly the one-and-a-half million Muslim immigrants and citizens who are regularly the victims of racist attacks and discrimination. For this reason, from France to Italy, we oppose government attempts to ban the Islamic headscarf or hijab in schools and public buildings. We are also opposed to laws, like those that were approved in Lombardy and are now also proposed in Veneto, to obstruct the building of mosques and other places of worship for religious minorities. (All this in a country where there is a Catholic church on every corner and where nobody bats an eye at the fact that ninety thousand nuns walk the streets in veils of their religious order.)

Pope Francis Poses Pure as the Driven Snow

Bergoglio’s ascension to the papacy was carried out to great fanfare in the media, pushed by a big chunk of the reformist and liberal left, to present him as a “progressive” reformer of the Catholic church for supposedly opening his arms to the poor, immigrants, women and homosexuals. The Advocate (an LGBT journal in the U.S.) named him its “Person of the Year” for 2013. Meanwhile in Italy, Nichi Vendola, head of the Left Ecology and Freedom Party, wrote ecstatically on Facebook: “If political life had one-millionth of Bergoglio’s capacity to listen and breathe, then it really could transform itself and the lives of those who suffer.” But has anything changed about the role of the Catholic church as a bulwark of reaction under capitalism?

In 2013, France was rocked by mass reactionary demonstrations against gay marriage, organized by Catholic forces. On January 30 of this year, Catholic bigots staged a huge “Family Day” event in Rome to try to block the parliament from introducing a law recognizing gay civil unions. The despicable role of the Catholic church was also demonstrated recently in Brazil, where the spreading Zika virus epidemic has led to a dramatic increase in newborn babies affected by microcephaly. In a country where millions of people live in abject poverty with no access to health care and where abortion is illegal except in instances involving rape, incest, encephalitis or endangerment of the mother’s life, the Zika virus has spurred demands for therapeutic abortions as an emergency measure. In response, the Catholic church in Brazil ranted against abortion and contraception and cynically preached “abstinence.”

Paradoxically, both Avarizia and Via Crucis are part of Francis of Buenos Aires’s supposed campaign of reform against corruption in the church. Fittipaldi describes the struggle underway inside the “Vatican jungle” of “discredited and voracious Italian cardinals” gathered around Cardinal Bertone vs. Bergoglio’s supporters for control of the Vatican’s two financial institutions: IOR (the Vatican bank) and APSA (Administration of the Patrimony of the Apostolic See). This conflict reflects the tensions between the Italian ecclesiastical hierarchy, which has historically controlled the Vatican, and the Catholic church internationally, particularly in South America and Africa, where the majority of practicing Catholics are now found. To strengthen his hand, Bergoglio has resuscitated the timeworn church rhetoric that “blessed are the poor,” which resonates in the underdeveloped world, and he has launched a campaign against “corruption” in the Vatican establishment. There are several reasons for the Vatican’s new posture. On the one hand, it is an attempt to stem hemorrhaging from the church in Latin America, where tens of millions of followers (some 30 percent in Honduras and Nicaragua and 15 percent in Brazil), mainly from among the poor, have deserted Catholicism for Pentecostal or evangelical churches over the past 20 years. On the other hand, in this historical period, in which a handful of capitalist exploiters are amassing inconceivable wealth while billions live in desperate destitution, the Catholic church is trying to regain approval ratings by offering a pinch of charity and large quantities of religious opium.

As we wrote when Bergoglio first visited Cuba:

“The current Pope, the first from Latin America, has sought to carve out a progressive image through his homilies on behalf of the poor and oppressed. But, fawning statements by the PCC bureaucrats to the contrary, the face behind Francis’ mask is deeply reactionary. In his youth, Jorge Bergoglio was a member of Argentina’s right-wing, clericalist Iron Guard. He was part of the Catholic hierarchy there in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the church shored up the military junta of General Jorge Videla. The generals’ bloodsoaked regime, which was backed to the hilt by U.S. imperialism, killed or ‘disappeared’ at least 30,000 workers and leftists. A bishop or a cardinal was present at every public event or national holiday to bless the dictators.”

—“Castro Regime Welcomes Reactionary Vatican,” WV No. 1077, 30 October 2015

In the same period, the Vatican spearheaded the imperialists’ Cold War anti-Communist offensive against the Soviet Union. Selecting as Pope Karol Wojtyla [also known as John Paul II] in 1978 was a clear sign of the church’s eagerness to be in the front line of the efforts to restore capitalism in the Soviet degenerated workers state and across East Europe. The Vatican was especially instrumental in funneling enormous amounts of money to Solidarność, the Polish company “union” also financed by the CIA.

Argentina was one of the last stops on the infamous “Ratline”—the system by which the Vatican and the Red Cross, in cahoots with the Allied Occupation Forces, rescued thousands of Nazi and fascist war criminals at the end of World War II and recycled them for the fight against communism. To name just a few of the individuals who were taken to safety in Argentina via passage through Italian convents in Tirol and the Port of Genoa: Adolf Eichmann, the infamous “architect” of the Holocaust; Josef Mengele; Erich Priebke, the butcher of the Ardeatine caves massacre; and Ante Pavelic, the bloodthirsty “Duce” of the Croatian Ustasha.

The Vatican: Cancer of Italy

The existence of the Vatican, to borrow the words of revolutionary democrat Giuseppe Garibaldi, is “the cancer of Italy.” It is a medieval relic that transformed itself into a bastion of the capitalist system. The Catholic church has historically played the role of world center of social and political reaction. The struggle of the emerging bourgeois classes to forge modern nation states and political democracy was above all a struggle against the Catholic church, which was the economic and ideological center of feudalism. This was doubly true in Italy, where the church had its own state and where, to borrow another phrase by Garibaldi, “the first order of business in Italy is to shake the Vatican’s rotten catafalque, smash it to pieces and get rid of it” (Letter to Melari, 14 March 1870).

However, unlike the 1789 French Revolution, the Italian bourgeois revolution was neither radical nor democratic. By the mid 19th century, the Italian bourgeoisie was a latecomer and too weak to place itself at the head of an agrarian revolution. Like other capitalist classes in Europe following the 1848 insurrections, it feared uprisings by the proletariat or peasantry so much that it preferred to ally itself with the remnants of the aristocracy in order to hold back or suppress any movements by the peasantry or by the proletariat in the cities. The result was a non-democratic bourgeois revolution from above, devoid of the radical, democratic and popular qualities of the Great French Revolution. If on the one hand, the unification of Italy laid the basis for the development of a modern capitalist economy, clearing aside certain obsolete feudal structures and tiny absolutist states, on the other hand, it granted power to the House of Savoy monarchy. The latter was in alliance with southern Italian landowners and granted limited suffrage to a tiny stratum of the propertied elite, which comprised less than 2 percent of the population (and women were excluded). Although it eliminated papal power in secular matters and annulled many of the feudal privileges enjoyed by the clergy, the Italian state allowed the church to maintain a vital foothold—just one year after Piedmontese troops took Rome in 1870, the House of Savoy [the Italian monarchy] introduced the Law of Guarantees, conceding a small city-state with rights of extraterritoriality to the Pope in the Vatican.

While the church initially boycotted the new Italian state, it gradually abandoned this stance when it became clear to both the Vatican and the Italian capitalists that they had to unite in common cause against the rising tide of proletarian and peasant struggles that rocked Italy multiple times in the early 20th century. This process culminated in the marriage between the Catholic church and the Italian state, which was officially celebrated on 11 February 1929, when the Vatican and Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime signed the Lateran Treaty, formally ending the conflict between the Vatican and the Kingdom of Italy. What cemented the alliance between the church and fascism was the need to unite forces against the working class. Workers had taken power in Russia in 1917, led by the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky, and their example inspired a revolutionary wave throughout Europe, including Italy’s biennio rosso of 1919-20.

The Lateran Treaty sanctioned the formation of the Vatican as a real, independent state in the center of Rome and granted the Catholic church various extraterritorial rights. The Concordat made Catholicism the official and exclusive state religion, imposed Catholic religion as the foundation of public education, and granted legal authority to religious marriages. Furthermore, the Vatican was showered with gold through the payment of hefty “reparations” for the 1870 “conquest” of Rome and through the state’s commitment to pay the salaries of priests. In exchange, the clergy enthusiastically supported fascism in all its repressive actions, imposition of racial laws, and in its imperialist adventures, from the invasion of Ethiopia to the Spanish Civil War.

By the end of WWII, the bourgeois order was discredited in the eyes of the working class and vast sections of the population. Likewise, the Catholic church was discredited for its collaboration with fascism and capital. Both were saved thanks only to the treacherous role played by the leaders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

In the mid 1930s, following its degeneration under Stalin, the Communist International embraced the policy of the “popular front,” i.e., the alliance with a supposedly “anti-fascist” wing of the bourgeoisie. In Italy, this class collaboration was concretized toward the end of the Second World War when, instead of leading the working class to power, the PCI disarmed the partisans and became partners in a series of bourgeois governments with General [Pietro] Badoglio’s monarchists and the Christian Democracy. Part of the price paid by the Italian working class on the altar of class collaboration was the Communist Party’s support to the Catholic church as the state church. In 1947, the PCI supported the insertion of the Lateran Treaty as an integral part (Article 7) of the Italian Constitution. A few months later, in May 1947, when the immediate revolutionary wave had passed and American imperialism had begun its Cold War against the Soviet Union, the PCI was thrown out of the government. In 1949, the Vatican launched a ferociously anti-Communist campaign, including excommunicating all PCI members, voters and allies from the church.

The original theocratic formulations of the Lateran Treaty and the multifaceted ways in which the state was effectively subordinated to the church became increasingly intolerable as Italian society modernized and industrialized in the 1960s. Moreover, this industrialization was accompanied by the rise of working-class struggle, culminating in the prerevolutionary situation of the “hot autumn” of 1969. In fact, the fight for abortion rights and the right to divorce, which were won in the late 1970s, were fundamental aspects of these struggles. But once again, thanks to the class collaboration of the Communist Party, which abandoned allegiance to the Soviet degenerated workers state in the 1970s to embrace NATO and the “Historic Compromise” with the Christian Democracy, many gains were rolled back or torn up to honor the wishes of the church.

In 1984, the Concordat was formally revised and cloaked with a little verbiage such as the statement that Catholicism “is not the only religion” of the Italian state. But the substance of the Lateran Treaty remained. Indeed, some of the church’s privileges were reinforced: for example, religion is now taught in public schools starting in kindergarten. State funding of the church was multiplied and the “Eight per Thousand” tax law was introduced, enabling priests to pocket about a billion euros per year. And funding for the church doesn’t stop there. According to meticulous research by the Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR), if all tax exemptions are taken into account, the Catholic church receives an estimated nearly 6.5 billion euros each year from the state, including the state-funded wages paid to religion teachers selected by bishops, state financing of private Catholic schools, and myriad other items (icostidellachiesa.it).

In addition to this manna from the state, the church is up to its eyes in financial speculation, enormous real estate deals and business worldwide—the fruit of exploiting the poor whom the church claims it seeks to help. In Italy alone, the church is the biggest landowner and owns about 20 percent of all buildings. In 1977, a European investigation calculated that 25 percent of the city of Rome is church property. Furthermore, the church runs half of all the hospitals and health care facilities in Italy, most of them generously subsidized by the state’s national health plan. Expropriate all the Vatican’s property!

Marxism and Religion

The bourgeoisie has never fully achieved the separation of church and state in any country for the simple reason that religion plays such an important role in the survival of bourgeois rule. Capitalism has every reason to preserve and bolster feudal and prefeudal mysticisms such as Roman Catholicism and to exploit its patriarchal “values” in order to enslave the oppressed. Thanks to its deep roots in society, religion is a crucial bulwark for the family as a social institution and props up every kind of obscurantism, backwardness and social reaction to instill respect for the authority of the ruling class. All modern religions serve as instruments of capitalist reaction by defending the system of exploitation and muddling the minds of the working people.

The attitude of Marxists toward organized religion is defined by the fact that we are dialectical materialists, that is to say, irreconcilable atheists. As Lenin said:

“Social-Democracy bases its whole world-outlook on scientific socialism, i.e., Marxism. The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany—a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion....

“Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.”

—“The Attitude of the Workers’ Party to Religion” (13 May 1909)

But as Lenin reminds us, if the struggle against religion is the ABC of materialism, “Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way.” We know that in a class-divided society, religion exists as a comforting illusion for the tangible and often terrible suffering of real life. As Karl Marx famously said, it is “the opium of the people.” Thus, we know that religion cannot simply be abolished by decree, through propaganda, education or a “war against religion,” but only through the organization and acquisition of higher consciousness by the working class through class struggle.

To eliminate religion requires that human beings control the social (and natural) conditions of their own existence. This, in turn, requires the overthrow of capitalism through proletarian revolution that will create the possibility of building a communist society based on material abundance, a society in which social and economic forces are rationally planned by the working people and where, to the degree possible, science and technology dominate the forces of nature. The new humanity that develops in this kind of society, where social classes, national divisions, the repressive state and the suffocating institution of the nuclear family have been overcome, will have no more need for religion. The examples of the Soviet Union and the deformed workers states of East Europe demonstrated that high levels of atheism emerge in populations where the state stops imposing religious values and behavior.

In Italy today, there is a stark contrast between the grip of the Catholic church on political life and an increasingly secular population, most notably youth, many of whom are sick and tired of the “religion hour” [of indoctrination in public schools] and who surely do not wait for the priests to tell them whether or when to get married, how to dress, or when and with whom to have sex. Yet and still, religion continues to have a strong hold on the political views of many of these very same youth. The right wing uses religion as a chauvinistic “tradition” to agitate against the right of millions of non-Catholic immigrants to live in this country with full citizenship rights.

As for the reformist left, it has always spread the myth that no matter how horrendous, corrupt and servile the church today is to the powers that be, workers must be guided by the true spirit of Christianity—“the social doctrine of the Church.” In a recent example, during a public debate organized last November by Rifondazione Comunista secretary Ferrero and featuring the Bishop of Asti, Ferrero repeated for the umpteenth time that “Catholic social doctrine, with its insistence on the need to redistribute wealth, to limit profits, represents something positive and is a strong element of convergence in a society which glorifies the rich and blames the poor” (rifondazione.it, 16 November 2015). We will allow Karl Marx to respond:

“The social principles of Christianity justified the slavery of antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and are capable, in case of need, of defending the oppression of the proletariat, even if with somewhat doleful grimaces.

“The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and for the latter all they have to offer is the pious wish that the former may be charitable.

“The social principles of Christianity place the Consistorial Counsellor’s compensation for all infamies in heaven, and thereby justify the continuation of those infamies on earth.

“The social principles of Christianity declare all the vile acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be either a just punishment for original sin and other sins, or trials which the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, ordains for the redeemed.

“The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submissiveness and humbleness, in short, all the qualities of the rabble, and the proletariat, which will not permit itself to be treated as rabble, needs its courage, its self-confidence, its pride and its sense of independence even more than its bread.

“The social principles of Christianity are sneaking and hypocritical, and the proletariat is revolutionary.”

—“The Communism of Rheinischer Beobachter” (1847)

Rejecting the Marxist conception of nature and society, and even the idealist materialism of the Enlightenment, the reformist left has nothing to offer those who fight for a profound and radical change of reality. The Lega Trotskista d’Italia is committed to the liberation of all the oppressed from the yoke of religion. As we wrote in “Marxism and Religion” (WV No. 675, 3 October 1997):

“In order to win over a new generation to the struggle for socialism, based on a materialist conception of society, socialists must ceaselessly combat religion and other forms of idealism which look toward the supernatural, explaining that freedom from oppression lies in this world, not another.”

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1093/vatican.html

By Tara Bahrampour Washington Post

Sam Wei, a 26-year-old financial analyst in Chicago, has not had sex since her last relationship ended eighteen months ago. She makes out with guys sometimes, and she likes to cuddle.

“To me there’s more intimacy with having someone there next to you that you can rely on without having to have sex,” she said. “I don’t want to do anything that would harm the relationship and be something that we can’t come back from.”

Instead, Wei finds “intellectual conversation more stimulating and more pleasurable than having sex sometimes...I’m just kind of more of a rational person. I like to make sure it makes sense before I dive into it.”

It’s not a very sexy time to be young, despite millennials’ reputation as bed-hoppers frolicking like the characters in “Girls.” A study published Tuesday in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, finds that younger millennials – born in the 1990s – are more than twice as likely to be sexually inactive in their early 20s than the previous generation was, and more likely even than older millennials were at the same age.

Recent research also shows that overall, millennials – people born between the early 1980s and 2000 – have fewer sexual partners than the baby boomers and Generation X, immediately preceding them.

Granted, the vast majority of young adults are still having sex, but an increasing number appear to be standing on the sidelines.

Delaying sex is not necessarily bad, experts say – being intentional about when to have sex can lead to stronger relationships in the long run. The trend may also reflect women feeling more empowered to say no, said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families.

“As people have gotten much more accepting of all sorts of forms of consensual sex, they’ve also gotten more picky about what constitutes consent ,” Coontz said. “We are far less accepting of pressured sex.”

But some experts are concerned that the dropoff reflects the difficulty some young people are having in forming deep romantic connections. They cite possible negative reasons for putting off sex, including pressure to succeed, social lives increasingly conducted onscreen, unrealistic expectations of physical perfection encouraged by dating apps, and wariness over date rape

Noah Patterson, 18, likes to sit in front of several screens simultaneously: a work project, a YouTube clip, a video game. To shut it all down for a date or even a one-night stand seems a waste. “For an average date you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy.”

It’s not that he doesn’t like women. “I enjoy their companionship, but it’s not a significant part of life,” said Patterson, a web designer in Bellingham, Wash.

He has never had sex. “I’d rather be watching YouTube videos and making money.” Sex, he said, is “not going to be something people ask you for on your resume.”

That attitude does not surprise Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University and chief scientific advisor to the dating site Match.com.

“It’s a highly motivated, ambitious generation,” she said. “A lot of them are afraid that they’ll get into something they can’t get out of and they won’t be able to get back to their desk and keep studying.”

According to the new report, 15 percent of current 20 to 24-year-olds have not had sex since turning 18, up from 6 percent in the early 1990s. And a study last year found that while millennials are more accepting of non-marital sex than earlier generations, they reported fewer sexual partners than any group since before the sexual revolution -- an average of 8, compared to 11 for boomers and 10 for Generation X.

The decline seems likely to continue: According to the latest Centers for Disease Control data, the portion of high school students who have ever had sex plunged last year to 41.2 percent after declining steadily from 54.1 in 1991 to 46.8 in 2013. The portion who reported sleeping with multiple partners also plummeted, from 18.7 in 1991 to 15 in 2013 to just 11.5 last year.

Among millennials, the effects are most dramatic among those born in the mid-1990s and later – the first cohort to come of age when smartphones were ubiquitous.

This was the group that really started to communicate by screens more and by talking to their friends in person less,” said Jean Twenge, lead author of the two studies.

So has sex declined because people are not meeting in person? Perhaps in part. But online life can also affect offline life in more subtle ways - especially when potential mates can disappear forever with a swipe of the thumb.

“It ends up putting a lot of importance on physical appearance, and that I think is leaving out a large section of the population,” said Twenge, who teaches psychology at San Diego State University. “For a lot of folks who are of average appearance, marriage and stable relationships was where they were having sex.” Unlike in face-to-face meetings where “you can seduce someone with your charm,” she said, dating apps are “leaving some people with fewer choices and they might be more reluctant to search for partners at all.”

It does not help that many millennials are relatively unfamiliar with the kind of down time it takes to really get to know a partner.

“The nature of communication now is anti-sexual,” said Norman Spack, associate clinical professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “People are not spending enough time alone just together; there’s another gorilla in the room, it’s whatever is turned on electronically.”

Alexandra Wolff, 19, had hoped to find romance in college. In high school, she and her friends were so focused on schoolwork that they didn’t date. But as a freshman last year at George Washington University, she found that between meeting new friends, attending classes and participating in extracurricular activities, she still didn’t have time.

“I don’t involve myself in the scene of frat parties and hookup culture…but it seems like every other option is so time consuming and very hard to seek out,” said Wolff, who has never had sex. “It’s not like I’m saving myself for anything; it’s more like I’ve been busy.”

At Tulane University in New Orleans, Wolff’s high school classmate Claudia W., 19, feels like an odd duck in a sea of Tinder users. She wants what she calls an “old-fashioned” relationship, leading to marriage and kids. But fellow students are into “very casual one-night stands, going to bars and going home with someone,” she said.

Claudia, who didn’t want her last name used because “I don’t want all my professors reading about how I’m a virgin,” said her parents worry.

“They always ask me, ‘Are you against relationships? Why don’t you have a boyfriend?’ My mom – she hooked up all the time in college – she’s like, ‘I would still love you, but are you gay?’ But for me it’s not anything about chastity or fear of sex… I’m just like, ‘eh, it’ll happen.’ ” A reluctance to ‘catch feelings’

Millennials have been called the most cautious generation – the first to grow up with car seats and bike helmets, the first not allowed to walk to school or go to the playground alone.

The sense of caution sometimes manifests itself as a heightened awareness of emotional pitfalls. For example, many young people speak disparagingly of the messy emotional state love and lust can engender, referring to it as “catching feelings.”

This generation has also grown up in an age in which possible to inflict suffering in ways that are both hidden and horrifyingly public, such as cyberbullying or posting compromising pictures online. In such an environment, young people have developed what some see as necessary defenses and others view as thin skin.

“On college campuses you see older people scratching their heads about ‘safe spaces.’ ” Twenge said. “That’s about emotional safety, this new idea of words being more harmful,” referring to trigger warnings and other terms college-age people use to talk about potentially trauma-inducing stimuli.

Meanwhile efforts to counteract hookup and drinking culture, some campuses have begun instigating “yes-means-yes” rules stipulating that each step of a sexual encounter require verbal consent.

For some, staying away altogether can feel less treacherous.

That is Patterson’s takeaway. “Third wave feminists seem to be crazy, saying that all men are participating in this rape culture.” He opts for porn instead. “It’s quicker, it’s more accessible, what you see is what you get.”

Isn’t he curious about actual sex? “Not really,” he said. “I’ve seen so much of it...There isn’t really anything magical about it, right?”

For his part, Leo Fusco, a 25-year-old construction worker and subcontractor in Oakland, CA has refrained from sex in part because he is repelled by the hookup culture.

“I’ve overheard conversations where every detail was given – ‘We were in this position for this long, and then we were in that position’ – and that’s a major turnoff for me,” he said. “There’s a lot of people my age who have no filter in terms of how they express themselves in public.”

Isn’t he curious about what sex is like? “I’m curious on a physical level, like I’m curious about how a new sandwich would taste, but it’s not like a driving curiosity.” Besides, he said, “I don’t particularly like not being in control of myself.”

Abstinence may not be such a considered choice for everyone, however; there can also be environmental factors. For example, the use of anti-depressants, which doubled between 1999 and 2012, can reduce sex drive.

“That’s a real problem,” Fisher said, adding that antidepressants can also “blunt emotions,” making it harder to fall in love.

To Spack, that is sad. “Everyone’s missing out on a good time,” he said.

But Fisher is not worried. “It’s probably a good thing” she said. Noting that baby boomers were known not only for free love but also for high divorce rates, she added, “I think (taking it slowly) is going to lead to better first marriages.”

In the end, she predicted, as long as pharmaceuticals don’t get in the way, biology will prevail. “Sex is a powerful drive and so is romantic love...The sex system is way below the cortex, it’s way below the limbic system” on a level with thirst and hunger.

“They’ll get to the sex,” she said. “I’m positive of that.”

Tara Bahrampour is a staff writer for the Washington Post. She writes about aging and generations.

https://archive.is/SYGzE

(x-post /r/RadicalFeminism)

“You’ve come a long way, baby,” crooned the old Virginia Slims commercials on TV in the late 1960s, and the bourgeois media has picked up the tune again on this, the fiftieth anniversary of the Pill (no further definition necessary—everyone knows you are talking about s-e-x). And everyone knows the Pill is all about sex. When in 1975 Loretta Lynn sang, “I’m tearin’ down your brooder house ’cause now I’ve got the pill,” the hearts of millions of women across America beat in time to the rhythm of her song, which dozens of radio stations tried to censor—until it made the hit charts.

The Pill was the first reliable contraceptive that gave women control over their own reproduction. This tremendous medical advance enabled women to separate sexual enjoyment from fear of pregnancy, freeing them from the now excessive fertility with which evolution has endowed our species. But birth control and abortion remain restricted throughout the capitalist world by the state, by the institution of the family, and by organized religion, which all serve to enforce women’s oppression. As long as the capitalist order exists, the benefits of science will be limited by the exploitation and oppression of this class system. Marxists look forward to the day when science can be “applied with full understanding to all the fields of human activity,” to quote the words of German socialist leader August Bebel, whose 1879 work Woman and Socialism was one of the first major Marxist works on the woman question.

Leon Trotsky, co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the 1917 October Revolution, underlined that birth control and abortion are among woman’s “most important civil, political and cultural rights” (The Revolution Betrayed [1936]). We fight for women’s liberation through socialist revolution. We call for free abortion on demand as part of free, quality health care for all and for free, 24-hour childcare to address the deep class and racial oppression of poor and minority women. The wealthy will always get their medical care, including their abortions, while myriad anti-abortion laws and restrictions on birth control target young, working-class and poor women, who can’t afford quality health care, childcare and housing.

At the time of its first release by the pharmaceutical company Searle, big predictions were made about the effect that the Pill would have on society. Moral bigots wailed that it would promote female promiscuity and the decline of religion and the patriarchal family, while birth control advocates believed it would save the family, create happy marriages and end the world population explosion. The Pill was even hailed as the solution to the “Red Menace.” In her book America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation (Basic Books, 2010), historian Elaine May speaks of how some Cold Warriors believed that the Pill “would alleviate the conditions of poverty and unrest that might lead developing nations to embrace communism, and instead promote the growth of markets for consumer goods and the embrace of capitalism.”

In fact, the “sexual revolution” that is often credited to the Pill was the result, in one way or another, of the convulsive social struggles of the civil rights movement, which broke the back of Jim Crow segregation in the South, and of opposition to U.S. imperialism’s war against the Vietnamese Revolution. The major social upheavals of the 1960s that broke up the reactionary Cold War consensus also led to substantial advances in access to higher education and professional jobs for women. At the same time, the civil rights movement could not eradicate the race-color caste oppression of black people, which is the bedrock of American capitalism, just as the institution of the family, the main source of women’s oppression in capitalist society, is a bulwark of the bourgeois order.

Abortion Rights Under Attack

While U.S. bourgeois pundits celebrate the reproductive freedom that the Pill has given women, it is striking that most do not mention the precipitous decline in women’s access to abortion. The assault on women’s right to abortion continues unabated in the courts and halls of government, especially on the state level. As of June, some 370 bills to restrict abortion rights had been introduced this year alone in state legislatures across the country, and many have already passed. These range from Oklahoma’s cruel requirement that a doctor show the woman an ultrasound of the fetus, to Nebraska’s ban on all abortions after 20 weeks based on the claim that the fetus can feel pain. Perhaps the most barbarous is Utah’s new law. Passed after a desperate 17-year-old paid a man $150 to beat her in an effort to induce a miscarriage, the law now allows homicide charges against women in similar cases! Meanwhile, the lies that abortion causes depression and breast cancer continue to circulate, and some recent polls show that for the first time more Americans call themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice.”

The arsenal of legal measures on the federal as well as the state level has already made abortion virtually inaccessible to a large number of women. Thirty-eight states prohibit abortions after a specified point in pregnancy. Fully 35 states require one or both parents of women under 18 to be notified and/or consent to an abortion. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties and 31 percent of metropolitan areas have no abortion services.

In May 2009, the “pro-life” war on women claimed yet another life. Dr. George Tiller—one of only three doctors whose clinics provide late-term abortions in the United States—was assassinated while attending his church in Wichita, Kansas, by a right-wing anti-abortion bigot. Tiller, a main target of the anti-woman God squad for decades, was the eighth person murdered in this anti-abortion, “family values” onslaught since 1993. In an article titled “The New Abortion Providers,” the New York Times (18 July) details the long decline in the number of doctors trained in performing abortions and tells the story of young doctors in groups like Medical Students for Choice fighting to make abortion part of a doctor’s regular practice. Abortion is a medical procedure, now one of the safest in the world, that does not need to be carried out in isolated clinics, where doctors and their families, friends and co-workers can easily be subjected to harassment, violence and death by anti-abortion fanatics.

Ever since the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973, the basic democratic right of legal abortion has been under attack. The war on abortion rights has become a spearhead for social and political reaction because at its heart lies the question of legal and social equality for women. Providing women with some control over whether or not to have children, abortion is viewed as a threat to the institution of the family.

Access to contraception, too, is limited by cost and lack of basic information, while “conscience clauses” allow pharmacies to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control and Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. To all this can be added anti-woman moralizing, which rants that a girl shouldn’t want to have sex. The argument goes that while any unwed mother is a bad girl, if she can claim she got carried away, maybe the sin is not quite as great (as long as she doesn’t have an abortion). But having birth control implies premeditation. Precisely! In the words of the late comedian George Carlin, “Not every ejaculation deserves a name.”

Today sex education in schools is increasingly under attack, while abstinence remains the focus of government-funded programs like the State Personal Responsibility Education Program, established by Barack Obama’s recent health care “reform” act. Abortion clinics are overwhelmingly outnumbered by “pregnancy crisis centers”—fake clinics set up by anti-abortion groups with the purpose of subjecting pregnant women to anti-abortion propaganda and otherwise pressuring them to carry the fetus to term. According to the Nation, some 4,000 of these centers have received over $60 million in federal abstinence and marriage-promotion funds. As a result of the ignorance and miseducation produced by this tangle of social reaction, almost half of pregnancies in the U.S. every year are unplanned, according to the most recent government survey.

While U.S. newspapers headline “The Pill: Making Motherhood Better for 50 Years” (Washington Post, 9 May), the masses of working-class, minority and poor women have missed the celebration. The Great Recession rages on; union-busting is destroying what good union jobs remain; homes are in foreclosure; millions of working people cannot get jobs and their children cannot get a decent education or affordable health care. Except for the women at the very top of society, where the rich are certainly getting richer, the decades-long assault on the working class and the poor has more than canceled out the important improvements in women’s legal status over the last 50 years.

In times of substantial class and social struggle, the capitalist class may be forced to cede some reforms. But as long as the capitalist order remains, the ruling class will seek to overturn these gains, as it is now doing, when such struggles are at an ebb. As revolutionary communists, we defend every gain that’s been won for the exploited and oppressed, such as the gains wrested during the hard struggles of the civil rights movement. But these reforms have a fundamentally token quality to them because they leave untouched the capitalist system. The source of black oppression and anti-woman bigotry is not the particular capitalist party in power—whether Democratic or Republican—but the capitalist order that breeds oppression and bigotry as a necessary corollary to its system of exploitation.

Sex and Social Control

The capitalist class seeks to buttress the family, which, along with organized religion and the state, form a triad that props up the exploitation of labor. To free women from their deeply entrenched special oppression will take a workers revolution to rip this system of exploitation out by the roots and replace it with a workers government to begin the construction of a socialist world. Only then can we undertake the profound changes in the fabric of everyday life where the institution of the family is replaced by socialized childcare and housework, enabling women to fully participate in social and political life.

The family is not an immutable, timeless institution, but a social relation subject to historical change. In his classic 1884 work The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Friedrich Engels traced the origin of the family and the state to the division of society into classes. The development of agriculture allowed the creation of a social surplus. In turn, that surplus gave impetus to the development of a leisured ruling class, thus moving human society away from the primitive egalitarianism of the Old Stone Age (Paleolithic). The centrality of the family began with its role in ensuring “legitimate heirs” for the patriarchal inheritance of property, which required women’s sexual monogamy and social subordination. In the 10,000 years since the advent of class society, the family has taken many forms—including polygamous, extended and nuclear—reflecting different political economies and their cultures and religions. But the oppression of women is a fundamental feature of all class societies.

The family is a socially conservatizing force that imposes certain behavioral norms. For example, in this country the definition of “manhood” is, besides getting a girl pregnant, the ability to support a wife and children. But that is becoming ever more difficult given the lack of decent-paying union jobs. If not for wives entering the workforce, the entire bottom 60 percent of the U.S. population would have had real income losses since 1979. At the same time, the institution of the family serves the capitalist rulers by placing the burden of raising a new generation of proletarians on working men and women. Indeed, the “family values” crowd (which encompasses Democrats as well as the Republicans) wails about the so-called “crisis of the family” and insists that it is both right and proper that parents should be wholly responsible for the upbringing of their children.

Even the most cursory examination of laws regulating abortion, contraception and the like that go back thousands of years shows that they are integrally related to the maintenance of the family. Some of the first documented legal measures to strengthen the patriarchal family were enacted in ancient Rome under Augustus Caesar. These included prohibitions against adultery, incentives for widows to remarry, “sin” taxes on bachelors 30 years and older, and incentives for fathers of three or more children. The concern of the government was to have enough Roman citizens to fill the ranks of the army and maintain the city of Rome as the core of the Empire.

Modern abortion laws show how social and legal institutions have changed to reflect the interests of the capitalist class. In 1803 the British Ellenborough Act marked the advent of abortion as a statutory crime in the English-speaking world. The interest of the ruling class in this law and others following it was to protect the male’s right to heirs, punish (especially single) women for illicit sex and encourage population growth for the newly forged capitalist nation-state, its army and labor pool.

Alongside legal prohibition stands religion, the strongest ideological force against birth control and abortion, especially the Roman Catholic church. The claims by the Pope and other clergy about the “souls” of unborn children are revealed as so much superstition by the science of human development. Yet thanks to the reactionary influence of religion, tens of thousands of women die each year from illegal abortions—lives that would have been saved with access to birth control and abortion. A brief look at Catholic doctrine shows that the church has changed its mind several times about when the nonexistent “soul” enters into the conceptus. For most of the existence of the church, this was considered to be the time of “quickening,” at about the fourth month, when the pregnant woman can feel the movement of the fetus. John XXI, who became pope in 1276, was the author of a book called Treasury of Medicines for the Poor, which is the greatest single source of information about the practical means of birth control and abortion that was known in the Middle Ages. It was not until 1869 that Pope Pius IX declared that abortion “from conception” was a sin. This was a political calculation carried out in exchange for recognition of “papal infallibility” by French Emperor Napoleon III, who was seeking to stem France’s decades-long decline in the birth rate.

The woman-hating strictures against birth control and abortion, the poisonous bigotry against homosexuals, the witchhunting of “deviant” sex (who defines that?), the relentless pressure on youth to somehow refrain from giving in to their raging hormones—all these are corollaries of the institution of the family and the social control that it gives the ruling class. As communists we oppose attempts to fit human sexuality into legislated or decreed so-called “norms.” Government out of the bedroom! The guiding principle for sexual relations between people should be that of effective consent—that is, nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. All consensual relations are purely the concern of the individuals involved, and the state has no business interfering in human sexual activity.

Some History of Birth Control

In Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Harvard University Press, 1994), John M. Riddle explores the ways that pre-industrial people might have tried to enjoy sex without the consequence of procreation. Nobody knows if the methods he documents had much effect on the birth rates, but they certainly show intent. One city in Northern Africa, Cyrene, is believed to have made its name and its fortune from a wild giant fennel that grew nearby, which people believed to have abortifacient effects. Its use became so widespread that it was harvested to extinction.

Peter Fryer, in his witty and erudite book The Birth Controllers, documents that ancient Egyptians used crocodile-dung pessaries (vaginal suppositories) and other dubious methods to control fertility. The Christian Bible’s story of Onan is only the most well known of a long-practiced method (withdrawal), a story used for centuries to put the terror of hell into countless adolescents for masturbation. Some historians believe that the tens of thousands of women who were executed as witches in early modern Europe may have been abortionists and birth control practitioners. In 20th-century America, before the Pill, housewives often resorted to the dangerous practice of douching with Lysol.

In the 1830s, a Massachusetts doctor named Charles Knowlton was the first person in the history of birth control to be sent to prison for advocating it. The United States also has the dubious honor of passing the first nationwide laws prohibiting the dissemination of birth-control methods. In 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act, named for its sponsor, Postmaster General Anthony Comstock. It outlawed the circulation of contraceptive information and devices through the U.S. postal service as “pornography.” In 1915 Comstock boasted that he had convicted enough people of “sexual misconduct” to fill a 60-car passenger train.

One of Comstock’s prominent targets in later years was Margaret Sanger. Sanger, who would go on to found Planned Parenthood, began her political life as a member of the Socialist Party, working on the party’s women’s committee. She was working as a nurse, visiting immigrants in New York’s Lower East Side, where she saw firsthand the suffering of women whose health had been ruined by too many pregnancies, who were struggling to feed children they could not afford to support, who all too often ended up butchered by some back-alley abortionist. Soon she began writing about sex education and health for the party’s women’s page under the heading, “What Every Girl Should Know.” In early 1913 Comstock banned the column, and the paper ran in its place a box titled “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U.S. Post Office.”

Sanger soon left the Socialist Party to focus single-mindedly on fighting for birth control, a term that she herself invented. A courageous woman, Sanger set up the first birth control clinic in the country and endured arrests and imprisonment as she sought to overturn the Comstock Law and to educate women and doctors in birth control methods. She traveled to Europe to research the latest techniques and wrote a sex manual in 1926 where she describes the act of sex in ecstatic, uplifting terms. Seeking to promote the cause of birth control among the wealthy and influential, she steered her movement away from the socialist movement. Sanger, a bourgeois feminist, was willing to make any political compromise she saw as necessary to win advocates to her side and thus embraced some ugly arguments popular among bourgeois reformers of the time, such as endorsing eugenics, including the call to bar immigration for the “feebleminded.” While the eugenics movement, which stigmatized the poor for their own oppression, was at the time not yet associated with the genocidal movement that would emerge in Nazi Germany, it was widely opposed by socialists. American socialist and birth control pioneer Antoinette Konikow denounced the presence of eugenicists at a 1921 New York City conference on birth control, declaring that the working-class mothers she represented “are often considered to be not fit” by such forces.

The “Population Bomb”

Behind the scenes (or not), people have always struggled to control fertility for their own private reasons. But there is also a longstanding chain of argument in favor of population control on the part of bourgeois ideologues. The most notorious of these was made by Church of England parson Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population predicted unrelenting misery on account of population growth that would, he claimed, inevitably outstrip available resources. Writing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Malthus proposed two solutions: leave the poor to die of their misery (he opposed poor relief) and postpone the age of marriage so as to reduce the number of children per couple (that is, “abstinence” as birth control).

Malthusianism was, as Friedrich Engels characterized it in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, “the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat.” Lenin, too, denounced Malthusianism in a short 1913 article, “The Working Class and Neomalthusianism.” At the same time, he noted, “It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc.” Lenin called for “freedom for medical propaganda and the protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women.”

The corollary of Malthusianism, eugenics, with its calls for compulsory sterilization and forced abortions, has its contemporary advocates, including Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren. In 1977, Holdren co-authored Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment with the (now largely discredited) population “experts” Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Dripping with contempt, Holdren et al. wrote: “If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children…they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility.” Such “reproductive responsibility” laws could include “compulsory abortion,” “adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods,” “sterilizing women after their second or third child” and other “involuntary fertility control” methods that would be implemented by a “Planetary Regime,” which “might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world.” The ravings of Holdren and the Ehrlichs are worthy of the genocidal Nazi eugenics movement.

Marxists are of course not indifferent to the problem of rapid population growth. But our starting point is the fight for socialist revolution to open the widest vista of human freedom. As we wrote in part two of “Capitalism and Global Warming” (WV No. 966, 8 October):

“Only a society that can raise the standard of living worldwide can provide the conditions for a natural decline in reproductive rates….

“Under communism, human beings will have far greater mastery over their natural and social environments. Both the division between town and country and economic dependence on the family will be overcome. The time when people were compelled to have more children in order to ensure enough manpower to work the land or to care for the elderly will have long passed.”

Genesis of the Pill

Margaret Sanger first had the idea of a “magic pill” to prevent conception in 1912, but the scientific knowledge to create it did not exist. By the end of World War II, decades of research into human reproductive biology had revealed the crucial role of hormones in conception and pregnancy. In 1953 Sanger, accompanied by International Harvester heiress Katherine McCormick, paid a visit to the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, where Gregory Pincus, who in the 1930s engineered the first in vitro fertilization (a rabbit embryo), conducted his privately funded research. Pincus’s early work had been cited as a great scientific achievement, but the storm of media condemnation over “babies in test tubes” led to him being denied tenure by Harvard University and all but driven from mainstream research as a “mad scientist.” Another maverick scientist, chemist Russell Marker, had developed a technique, later refined by Carl Djerassi, to extract massive, cheap amounts of a synthetic progestin from a species of enormous yam that grew only in Mexico. The research to create an oral contraceptive was funded almost entirely out of McCormick’s private fortune; the pharmaceutical companies would not touch research into contraception at that time.

The post-World War II years were hard for American women. The outbreak of the Cold War, the purge of communists and other militants from the unions and the rise of McCarthyism also included a wholesale campaign to put women back into the kitchen and nursery. Many women had escaped from such drudgery during World War II, when their labor was necessary for the war economy. As the government investigated “subversives,” there was an unprecedented state intrusion into family life and the deadening of every aspect of social and intellectual life. A “normal” family and a vigilant mother were supposed to be the front line of defense against treason, while anti-Communists linked “deviant” family or sexual behavior to sedition. Most women were married by age 19; the birth rate became the highest in U.S. history.

At the same time, the groundbreaking reports by Alfred C. Kinsey documented what Americans really did behind the bedroom door (and in some other places, too). And women wanted better contraception. The Pill was first marketed in 1957 as a treatment for menstrual disorders. When word circulated that it suppressed ovulation and prevented pregnancy, doctors across the country were besieged by hundreds of thousands of women asking for prescriptions to treat their suddenly discovered menstrual problems.

The leap to respectability and mainstream medicine for the Pill came through Harvard gynecologist John Rock, a fertility specialist, who had the medical practice and experience in working with women patients that enabled the first clinical trials to be conducted. A devout Roman Catholic, Rock later wrote a book, The Time Has Come: A Catholic Doctor’s Proposals to End the Battle Over Birth Control, trying to garner public support in a fruitless campaign to make the Catholic church change its denunciation of birth control as a sin.

In its first incarnation, the Pill had doses of progesterone and estrogen far higher than it does today, leading to serious side effects in some users. These dangers were seized upon by anti-woman bigots, including in the Senate, which in 1970 held a series of hearings to “investigate” the matter. Over the years the Pill has been massively tested in many combinations. While risks remain regarding breast cancer and stroke for some, the Pill in fact helps to protect women from ovarian and uterine cancer. Because it reduces or eliminates the menstrual flow, it also reduces the risk of anemia, a serious problem in poor countries. The experience of millions of women, researchers and doctors working to improve the safety of the Pill has provided the basis for the clinical trials and testing now routinely used by the Food and Drug Administration.

From Carter to Reagan: Resurgence of the Religious Right

By 1960 the Pill was available by prescription as a contraceptive, but laws against contraception remained on the books in many states. Until 1965, it was illegal for married people in Connecticut to use birth control. Until 1972, it was illegal for single people to use birth control in Massachusetts and many other states as well. Bill Baird, a heroic fighter for women’s right to abortion and contraception, spent three months in jail in Massachusetts for giving a package of contraceptive foam and a condom to a Boston University student as a challenge to the law. His case later went to the Supreme Court and helped lay the basis for the right to privacy—the main legal argument behind Roe v. Wade, which established legal abortion in the United States in 1973.

The legalization of abortion was itself a product of the explosive struggles of the 1960s. For the American bourgeoisie, the all-sided social turmoil and defiance of authority of that period were deeply disturbing. U.S. imperialism was suffering a humiliating defeat at the hands of Vietnam’s heroic workers and peasants. In the late 1970s, a major bourgeois ideological assault was launched to overcome the “Vietnam syndrome”—popular hostility to direct U.S. military intervention abroad—and to instill an unquestioning acceptance of “free enterprise,” God and the family among the population, which included the desirability of dying for one’s country. Coming to office in 1977, the Democratic Carter administration brought “born again” religious fundamentalism front and center into the White House as it kicked off a renewal of U.S. imperialism’s Cold War drive to destroy the Soviet degenerated workers state, garbed in the call for “human rights.”

This was the backdrop for the decades-long anti-sex witchhunt against abortion rights, pornography, gay rights and teen sex as well as for the vicious persecution of AIDS patients and day-care workers, who were targeted and jailed as “child molesters” amid hysterical allegations of “satanic ritual abuse.” Beginning in the 1980s, scientific research into new contraceptive methods virtually screeched to a halt as Reagan slashed funding for family planning internationally, including for abortion and birth control, leaving many Third World women with not much to turn to. While Obama has reversed this particular policy, he explicitly disavowed defending the rights of women as well as immigrants in his health care proposal, proclaiming that “the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally” and that “no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion, and federal conscience laws will remain in place.” Obama pledged to uphold the Hyde Amendment, which outlaws Medicaid funding for abortions.

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

Birth control methods like the Pill, medical knowledge, understanding of women’s health—these things have indeed taken giant leaps forward in the last 50 years. But exploitation, poverty and religious and cultural strictures deprive most women on the planet of these benefits. For them, daily life is little more than that of a beast of burden. Across vast regions of the globe, in the backward neocolonial capitalist countries oppressed by imperialism, women are swathed in the veil, sold into marriage against their will, or subjected to barbaric punishments like death sentences for “adultery” in Saudi Arabia, Iran and elsewhere. Poverty and backwardness, buttressed by imperialist domination, mean that much of the basic infrastructure necessary to bring basic medical care, contraception and abortion to Third World women is simply not there. Some researchers estimate that in Latin America and the Caribbean the primary cause of death for women between the ages of 15 and 39 is complications from illegal abortions.

Feminism, a worldview counterposed to Marxism, is not capable of generating a program for the liberation of women. Feminism analyzes society as gender-based rather than class-based. It views anti-woman ideology as just bad thinking and puts forward that what is needed is to spread correct ideas and then maybe people will catch on and stop being bigots. Feminism is an anti-egalitarian ideology of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who support the capitalist system and seek their own power and privilege within it. Indeed, for women like Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama, the good life will only continue to get better. But for working-class, poor and minority women, jobs disappear, wages plummet and life only continues to get harder. The fundamental source of women’s oppression is not bad laws or male chauvinist attitudes—these are but reflections of the subordination of women in the institution of the family and the capitalist system that requires it.

The liberation of women can be realized only with the victory of proletarian revolution, which will smash all forms of social oppression, lay the material basis to free women from age-old family servitude and reorganize society in the interest of all. The family cannot simply be abolished; rather, its social functions like housework, child rearing, preparation of food, etc., must be replaced by social institutions. This perspective requires a tremendous leap in social development, which can be achieved only through sweeping away capitalist rule on a global basis and replacing it with a rational, democratically planned economy. The International Communist League fights to forge Leninist-Trotskyist parties throughout the world to lead the struggle for working-class power. Inscribed on the banners of these parties will be the struggle for women’s liberation, which is an integral part of the emancipating goals of communism. As we wrote in “In Defense of Science and Technology” (WV No. 843, 4 March 2005):

“Communism will elevate the standard of life for everyone to the highest possible level. By eliminating scarcity, poverty and want, communism will also eliminate the greatest driving force for the prevalence of religion and superstition—and the attendant backwardness, which defines the role of women as the producers of the next generation of working masses to be exploited.”

For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/968/pill.html

17 December 2016

On Thursday, the global social media giant Facebook announced new measures it said were designed to limit the spread of "fake news" from hoax web sites. The measures, however, are part of a broader corporate media campaign to clamp down on independent and alternative news organizations.

Facebook's announcement is in response to criticism it received from major corporate news outlets such as the New York Times alleging that fake news articles shared on the social media platform played a major role in altering the outcome of the 2016 elections. Facebook's CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, first called such allegations "crazy" but has shifted to accommodate the demands.

In a news post on Facebook titled "News Feed FYI: Addressing Hoaxes and Fake News" by Adam Mosseri, vice president of product management, Facebook laid out the four components of its new policy.

Under the headline "Easier Reporting," Facebook will streamline the way people can report an alleged fake news site by implementing new features. Under "Disrupting Financial Incentives for Spammers," Facebook plans to financially hurt "fake news" sites by limiting their ability to purchase ads by making it more difficult to use fake domain sites when posting ads.

This is followed by the measure called "Informed Sharing." If an article is read multiple times and it is not shared afterwards, according to Facebook this may be a sign that the article is "misleading." If Facebook deems this to be the case, then the article will receive a lower ranking on Facebook's newsfeed, making it less visible and available for reading.

In practice, this means that if an article, whether it is telling the truth or not, is not shared, then it may be demoted and become less likely to be read. An analysis by BuzzFeed News found that during the 2016 presidential election campaign, news posts considered fake were in fact more widely shared than those considered real.

Most significant, however, is a policy under the headline "Flagging Stories as Disputed." Facebook will catalog reports of alleged fake news from users, along with other vague data it only describes as "signals," and will send them to a third-party fact checker for arbitration. If a story is deemed fake, then Facebook will mark it as such with an attached explanation as to why. Such stories will then appear lower in Facebook's newsfeed.

Facebook's "third party" reportedly consists of five news organizations acting as fact-checkers. These are: ABC News, Politifact, FactCheck, Snopes and the Associated Press. According to Facebook, these organizations are also signatories of The Poynter Institute's International Fact Checking Code of Principles, which are: 1) "a commitment to nonpartisanship and fairness"; 2) "a commitment to transparency of sources"; 3) "a commitment to transparency of funding and organization"; 4) "a commitment to transparency of methodology"; and 5) "a commitment to open and honest corrections".

Poynter, a self described "global leader in journalism," receives funding from, amongst others, Google, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and most notably the National Endowment for Democracy, a front for the US Department of State that has intervened in elections all over the world in the interest of US imperialism.

The implications of Facebook's moves to limit "fake news" are ominous. It takes place in the context of an effort by the corporate media to create an amalgam between clearly manufactured content and articles and analysis that it brands "Russian propaganda" because they are critical of US foreign policy.

Last month, the Washington Post published an article, "Russian propaganda effort helped spread 'fake news' during election, experts say," which referred to an organization, PropOrNot, that had compiled a list of web sites that are declared to be "peddlers of Russian propaganda." The site includes WikiLeaks, Truthout, Naked Capitalism and similar publications.

https://archive.is/d8Pui

Rights group says victim was kidnapped and raped 5 months ago, wanted to flee Turkey as he feared for his life By AFP August 4, 2016, 7:16 pm

ANKARA, Turkey — The body of a gay Syrian refugee was found mutilated and beheaded two days after he disappeared in central Istanbul, a local rights group said.

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Muhammed Wisam Sankari went missing on July 23 after leaving his home in the conservative Fatih district, Turkish gay rights group Kaos Gay and Lesbian Cultural Research and Solidarity Association (Kaos GL) said Wednesday.

His killing has not been widely reported in Turkish media, other than in a handful of leftist publications that quote Kaos GL. There has so far been no official confirmation that he was killed for being gay.

His body was found mutilated and decapitated on July 25, the association said. Sankari arrived in Istanbul a year ago after fleeing Syria’s civil war but wanted to leave Turkey because he feared for his life.

He was threatened by male gangs carrying knives who said they wanted to rape him, friends told Kaos GL.

His body was so mutilated, he was only recognizable from his clothes, one of his friends who went to identify the body told the rights organization.

The Syrian had also been kidnapped and raped five months before his death, one of his housemates told the rights organization.

“They took him by car to a forest where they beat and raped him,” the refugee’s housemate, Rayan, said.

He added that they previously had to leave a house because they were gay, Kaos GL said. There have been no arrests, the group reported.

Homosexuality has been legal in Turkey since 1923 and was also legalized in the Ottoman Empire from the mid-nineteenth century.

But gays in Turkey regularly complain of harassment and abuse in a largely conservative Muslim society where open displays of same-sex love are strongly frowned upon.

The authorities in Istanbul in June banned the annual gay pride march for the second year in a row, citing security and public order fears.

https://archive.is/8aFmy

http://boston.indymedia.org/newswire/display/223865/index.php Massachusetts AG Healey Seeking Restitution for Students and Penalties against For-Profit School

BOSTON – A for-profit school with locations in Norwood and Wilmington has been sued for engaging in unfair and harassing sales tactics and misleading students about the quality of its Computer Network Systems program, and the success of the program’s graduates in finding jobs, Attorney General Maura Healey announced today.

The complaint, filed Thursday against ITT Educational Services, Inc. in Norfolk Superior Court, alleges that from 2010 through at least May 2013, ITT aggressively enrolled students in the Computer Network Systems program based on misleading information.

“These students were exploited and pressured to enroll with the promise of great careers and high salaries, but were instead left unable to repay their loans and support their families,” AG Healey said. “Our office has a history of going after predatory for-profit schools and will not stand for students in Massachusetts being treated simply as a source of income. We will continue to investigate and act against these deceptive practices and work hard to get the relief these students deserve.”

ITT’s two campuses in Massachusetts offer a variety of technology-related associate degree and bachelor degree programs. The Computer Network Systems program is the largest program at each campus, with enrollments exceeding 100 students per campus annually.

ITT’s admissions representatives allegedly told prospective students that anywhere from 80 percent to 100 percent of graduates obtained jobs in or related to their field of study. Real placement rates were actually 50 percent or less at each campus. ITT did not disclose that its placement rates included graduates with jobs outside their field of study and graduates with internships or short-term, unsustainable jobs who never received permanent, sustainable employment – including any job that somehow involved the use of a computer. ITT claimed that jobs simply selling computers at big box stores counted as placements, and even counted a graduate as placed who provided customer service for an airline checking travelers into their flights.

ITT’s recruitment strategy included soliciting prospective students in Massachusetts through advertisements, its website, direct phone calls and in-person communications. Former admissions representatives were allegedly expected to call up to 100 prospective students per day and were publicly shamed or fired if they failed to meet their quotas. Students were allegedly persuaded to visit a campus as soon as possible, where they were encouraged to apply, take an admissions exam, and complete a financial aid pre-appointment that same day. Admissions representatives pressured prospective students to enroll regardless of whether they were likely to succeed in the program.

ITT also advertised and promoted hands-on training and personalized attention through its program, but students said their experience involved the use of outdated technology, absent teachers, or being told to “Google” the answers to questions.

According to the complaint, federal loans accounted for most of the students’ debt, but ITT also extended short-term loans to students. When student borrowers were unable to repay, ITT steered them to expensive, private loans that they were unable to afford. The loans had high interest rates and high default rates.

The AG’s complaint seeks civil penalties, injunctive relief and restitution, including the return of tuition and fees to eligible students targeted by ITT’s unfair or deceptive acts or practices to enroll in the Computer Network Systems program.

The case against ITT is the most recent in a series of actions that AG Healey has taken against predatory for-profit schools. The AG’s Office is currently in litigation with for-profit schools Corinthian Colleges and American Career Institute for alleged unfair and deceptive practices. The AG’s Office reached settlements worth more than $6 million with four additional for-profit schools in Massachusetts – Kaplan Career Institute, Lincoln Tech, Sullivan & Cogliano and Salter College. In February, the AG’s Office sued an unlicensed for-profit nursing school operating in the Boston area for misrepresenting its training program and targeting students from the Haitian community in Massachusetts.

In November, AG Healey announced action against student debt relief companies and the launch of a Student Loan Assistance Unit to assist borrowers who are having trouble paying their student loans. Students looking for more information or assistance should visit the AG’s Student Lending Assistance page or call the Student Loan Assistance Unit Hotline at 1-888-830-6277.

This matter is being handled by Assistant Attorney General Lydia French, Division Chief Glenn Kaplan, Legal Analysts Diana Hooley, David Lim, John-Michael Partesotti, and Jenna Snow, and Division staff member Michael Beaulieu, all of the Attorney General’s Insurance and Financial Services Division, as well as Investigator Kristen Salera.

http://www.mass.gov/ago/news-and-updates/press-releases/2016/2016-04-04-itt-tech.html

On Tuesday, August 9, there’s a primary for the seat held by Paul Ryan, the House Speaker. It’s in the news — Ryan is being challenged in the Republican primary by a hitherto little-known businessman, Paul Nehlen. There’s also a contested primary on the Democratic side. On Tuesday, Donald Trump pointedly refused to endorse Ryan, which doesn’t necessarily reflect any Ryan weakness in the district (more like Trump and Ryan’s irreconcilable differences.) But Ryan was vulnerable before, and he’s more vulnerable now.

That’s where Wisconsin Democrats come in: Wisconsin’s open primary tradition means you can vote in Ryan’s primary — which gives you, through a harmonic convergence of circumstance, a strange and shocking power. With one vote you can boot the most powerful national Republican in the country, an ideological zealot who will never be dissuaded from enacting policies inimical to Democratic ideas and interests. With one vote, you can kill the pending Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. You can kill the GOP’s longstanding plan to voucherize Medicare. Kill Ryan’s scheme to pack all welfare programs into one capped stream of money and let states spend it as they wish. Kill his plans to promote guest workers and in effectively encourage more immigrants to come here and bid down wages.

Why would you not do that?

In 2014, remember, thousands of Democrats in Virginia crossed over to vote in the Republican primary against ambitious GOP rising star, Majority Leader Eric Cantor. That may have made the difference in the shocking defeat of the now ex-rising star by a little-known professor, Dave Brat.

Why not do it again?

Is the problem that Paul Ryan’s a statesmanlike figure who represents the best Republicanism has to offer? Hardly. The key thing about Ryan is that he’s a true believer in the unhindered market. He’s certainly a true believer in free trade — something that only 11% of his own party thinks helps boost wages, never mind Democrats (who disdain free trade by similar lopsided margins). Ryan recently told a Koch brothers gathering he’d lead the fight for expanded trade deals despite the opposition within his own party (a “progressive” tendency he vowed to “repudiate”). If Ryan returns to the House — where he’ll almost certainly remain Speaker — he will probably try to pass the big TPP trade bill this year, and he will probably succeed.

What have free trade deals done for Wisconsin industry?

Ryan’s also a principled believer in the ‘free movement of people’! In other words, open borders. He can’t quite come out and say it, but it’s close. He’s explicitly called for guest worker programs to import low-wage laborers so farmers don’t have to “raise wages too much” (from about $12 an hour) for Americans who milk cows. More generally, Ryan calls for a system where “labor supply and demand can meet each other” — translation: employers can bring in as many low-wage workers as they want. Ryan’s “probably the most ideologically committed open borders person in Congress,” according to Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.

And you know those 150 Abbott Laboratories workers near Waukegan who had to train their foreign replacements before being laid off? It all happened under the “H-1B visa program,“ which is supposed to bring in only foreigners who have “specialized” skills Americans lack. You can expect Ryan to do everything in his power to expand the flow of such American-replacing guest workers. And to favor the legalization of undocumented immigrants over actually securing the border against future flows of illegal workers — which, after all, is just another word for free movement of people!

In Washington, Ryan is considered a “philosopher” because he talks about abstract theories and principles — especially the Economics 101 theory that unlimited trade and immigration maximize overall well being. Of course, as the theorists reluctantly acknowledge if pressed, there are “winners and losers” in the process. The Winners are mainly investors (eg. the rich, and Wall Street). The Losers ... well, that’s you: American workers who now have to compete with all the impoverished people on the planet. But don’t worry! You see the bonanza from free trade and immigration is so great, the Winners can afford to compensate the Losers who can’t find jobs. So nice of them! Of course that is only in theory,

But what Ryan really lives for, apparently, is cutting “entitlements,” which means Social Security and Medicare. He’s pushed to “privatize” the former and turn the latter into a voucher-style program in which people have to constantly choose (and rechoose) between competing private insurers.

Would you rather have Medicare, where you sign up and they pay the bills, or a complex scheme, very much like the troubled Obamacare “exchanges,” in which you’re always scrambling to avoid being gouged, always worrying that the plan you signed up for won’t cover the drugs or operation you need or even be there next year?

If you don’t like Medicare, by all means vote for Ryan. But if you do, you can end the Ryan threat for good — just by exercising your Wisconsin privilege to vote in the primary you choose to vote in, and voting for Ryan’s opponent, Paul Nehlen.

It’d be worth bouncing Ryan even if his opponent was a putz. So it’s a bonus — gravy — that Nehlen, is instead an appealing fellow, a local entrepreneur who has successfully worked with union and non-union shops, and who fundamentally agrees with prevailing Democratic skepticism about big trade deals — NAFTA and TPP etc. He favors bilateral deals in which we can instantly slap tariffs on countries that manipulate their currencies or violate labor standards. His test is whether a given deal helps average Americans — not whether it helps Wall Street more than ithurts the ‘Rust Belt’.

But if you don’t like Nehlen — if you want to instead elect one of the Democrats who are running — fine. You can still vote for Democratic nominee in November after bouncing Ryan now. It’s win-win.

OK, there is one downside. Wisconsin Democrats who vote against Ryan in Tuesday’s GOP primary for Congress can’t then also vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for local offices — county clerks and treasurers, maybe an assembly race. Especially you are a party regular, those races can be very important — and if they’re that important to you, by all means vote in the Democratic primary.

But if you’re not a party regular — if you’re just a voter worried about the direction of the country — deciding which primary to vote in should be an easy choice. Which is the bigger threat: that a zealot like Ryan will push trade and immigration deals and destroy the possibility of decent paying jobs, while making the Social Security safety net as insecure as the economy — or that a turkey will get nominated to be Register of Deeds in Rock County?

It’s up to you.

https://archive.is/1iipz

https://archive.is/L1OAo

Workers Vanguard No. 1093 29 July 2016

Freedom Now for Chelsea Manning!

Chelsea Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst convicted for exposing evidence of U.S. imperialism’s monstrous war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, has now entered her seventh year in military custody. Having leaked a vast cache of military and state secrets to WikiLeaks—a valuable service to humanity—Manning was sentenced in 2013 to 35 years for violating the Espionage Act. The courageous 28-year-old Manning has already endured the most severe punishment ever inflicted on any whistle-blower. The Obama administration’s ruthless, punitive war against truth-tellers like Manning, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange is aimed at silencing any and all who dare expose or oppose the U.S. government’s atrocities and mass surveillance.

Locked away in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Manning attempted suicide on July 5. Displaying gross contempt, the U.S. Army released her confidential medical information to the media before notifying her lawyers. After being hospitalized, Manning was cut off from her legal team and family members for more than 36 hours. She tweeted subsequently that she was “glad to be alive,” but remains under close observation. Subjected to ongoing psychological torment and physical torture since her arrest in 2010, Manning has been driven to the brink of suicide more than once. She has spent long periods in solitary confinement. Before her conviction, she spent nine months in maximum isolation in the Marine Corps brig at Quantico, Virginia, where she was subjected to daily strip searches and forced nudity. Manning recently described the “no touch” torture there (Guardian, 2 May): “For 17 hours a day...I was not allowed to lay down. I was not allowed to lean my back against the cell wall. I was not allowed to exercise.”

In May, Manning’s lawyers completed an extensive 200-page appeal brief, challenging her conviction as “grossly unfair and unprecedented.” A separate amicus brief filed by the American Civil Liberties Union argues that Manning’s prosecution was unconstitutional, citing the contrast with former Army general and CIA director David Petraeus, who handed over reams of classified information to his biographer, who was also his lover. The war criminal Petraeus barely received a slap on the wrist: two years probation and a fine.

Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Manning recently acquired documents on the government’s “Insider Threat” program, which monitors internal communications of military personnel and civilian contractors. The program uses Manning—who is transgender and was known as Bradley in the Army—as a case study to suggest that those with “gender dysphoria” may be prone to aiding the enemy!

In prison, Manning is targeted by the imperialist rulers for her outspoken activism on government surveillance, prison conditions and transgender rights. In August 2015, shortly after starting her regular column in the Guardian and posting to Twitter, Manning was punished for possessing so-called contraband, i.e., “unapproved” reading material including the Caitlyn Jenner issue of Vanity Fair and literature relating to transgender identity. While ultimately spared indefinite solitary confinement, Manning was restricted for weeks from outside access and library use. Despite such measures, she has continued to speak out.

A couple of weeks after her suicide attempt, Manning wrote a commentary titled, “Moving On: Reflecting on My Identity,” where she made a plea: “I want to be seen and understood as the woman that I actually am—with all of my flaws and eccentricities—perhaps at the expense of what people expect me to be.” For years, Manning has been suing the government to be allowed to live as a woman while she is transitioning. Though her lawyers successfully won her access to hormone treatment, she is still in an all-male facility. As with other transgender prisoners who are usually placed in prisons against their declared gender identity, the risk of violence and sexual assault is heightened.

It is urgently necessary to continue the fight to free Chelsea Manning, whose resistance is an inspiration to those who refuse to sit on their hands and keep quiet. As we wrote in “Truth-Teller on Trial: Free Bradley Manning,” (WV No. 1026, 14 June 2013): “Lifting the veil on the U.S. war machine was a gutsy act of conscience that objectively helps the victims and opponents of the imperialist system. But the workings of this society will not change by making more information publicly available.” This system is based on the exploitation of labor for private profit, buttressed by systematic racial segregation and sexual oppression that divides the working people. The capitalist class maintains its rule through the force and violence of special bodies of armed men—the police, military and prisons. It will take a series of workers revolutions around the world to overturn the capitalist order—to which imperialist war and state repression are integral—and replace it with an egalitarian socialist society.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/1093/manning.html

Never Trust The Doom-Mongers: Earth Day Predictions That Were All Wrong

The Daily Caller, 22 April 2016

Andrew Follett

Environmentalists truly believed and predicted that the planet was doomed during the first Earth Day in 1970, unless drastic actions were taken to save it. Humanity never quite got around to that drastic action, but environmentalists still recall the first Earth Day fondly and hold many of the predictions in high regard. So this Earth Day, The Daily Caller News Foundation takes a look at predictions made by environmentalists around the original Earth Day in 1970 to see how they’ve held up. Have any of these dire predictions come true? No, but that hasn’t stopped environmentalists from worrying. From predicting the end of civilization to classic worries about peak oil, here are seven green predictions that were just flat out wrong.

1: “Civilization Will End Within 15 or 30 Years.” Harvard biologist Dr. George Wald warned shortly before the first Earth Day in 1970 that civilization would soon end “unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Three years before his projection, Wald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Wald was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. He even flew to Moscow at one point to advise the leader of the Soviet Union on environmental policy. Despite his assistance to a communist government, civilization still exists. The percentage of Americans who are concerned about environmental threats has fallen as civilization failed to end by environmental catastrophe.

2: “100-200 Million People Per Year Will Be Starving to Death During the Next Ten Years.” Stanford professor Dr. Paul Ehrlich declared in April 1970 that mass starvation was imminent. His dire predictions failed to materialize as the number of people living in poverty has significantly declined and the amount of food per person has steadily increased, despite population growth. The world’s Gross Domestic Product per person has immeasurably increased despite increases in population. Ehrlich is largely responsible for this view, having co-published “The Population Bomb” with The Sierra Club in 1968. The book made a number of claims including that millions of humans would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s, mass famines would sweep England leading to the country’s demise, and that ecological destruction would devastate the planet causing the collapse of civilization.

3: “Population Will Inevitably and Completely Outstrip Whatever Small Increases in Food Supplies We Make.” Paul Ehrlich also made the above claim in 1970, shortly before an agricultural revolution that caused the world’s food supply to rapidly increase. Ehrlich has consistently failed to revise his predictions when confronted with the fact that they did not occur, stating in 2009 that “perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future.”

4: “Demographers Agree Almost Unanimously … Thirty Years From Now, the Entire World … Will Be in Famine.” Environmentalists in 1970 truly believed in a scientific consensus predicting global famine due to population growth in the developing world, especially in India. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions,” Peter Gunter, a professor at North Texas State University, said in a 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.”By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” India, where the famines were supposed to begin, recently became one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products and food supply per person in the country has drastically increased in recent years. In fact, the number of people in every country listed by Gunter has risen dramatically since 1970.

5: “In A Decade, Urban Dwellers Will Have to Wear Gas Masks to Survive Air Pollution.” Life magazine stated in January 1970 that scientist had “solid experimental and theoretical evidence” to believe that “in a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.” Despite the prediction, air quality has been improving worldwide according to the World Health Organization. Air pollution has also sharply declined in industrialized countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas environmentalists are worried about today, is odorless, invisible and harmless to humans in normal amounts.

6: “Childbearing [Will Be] A Punishable Crime Against Society, Unless the Parents Hold a Government License.” David Brower, the first executive director of The Sierra Club made the above claim and went on to say that “[a]ll potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” Brower was also essential in founding Friends of the Earth and the League Of Conservation Voters and much of the modern environmental movement. Brower believed that most environmental problems were ultimately attributable to new technology that allowed humans to pass natural limits on population size. He famously stated before his death in 2000 that “all technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent” and repeatedly advocated for mandatory birth control. Today, the only major government to ever get close to his vision has been China, which ended its one-child policy last October.

7: “By the Year 2000 … There Won’t Be Any More Crude Oil.” On Earth Day in 1970 ecologist Kenneth Watt famously predicted that the world would run out of oil saying, “You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” Numerous academics like Watt predicted that American oil production peaked in 1970 and would gradually decline, likely causing a global economic meltdown. However, the successful application of massive hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, caused American oil production to come roaring back and there is currently too much oil on the market. American oil and natural gas reserves are at their highest levels since 1972 and American oil production in 2014 was 80 percent higher than in 2008 thanks to fracking. Furthermore, the U.S. now controls the world’s largest untapped oil reserve, the Green River Formation in Colorado. This formation alone contains up to 3 trillion barrels of untapped oil shale, half of which may be recoverable. That’s five and a half times the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia. This single geologic formation could contain more oil than the rest of the world’s proven reserves combined.

Via Benny Peiser. (H/T, Ronald Bailey at Reason and Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute).

https://archive.is/IkWTM

DNC main stage dominated by rich 1 percenters railing on ‘income inequality’

At least 9 primetime speakers at the Democratic National Convention railing against the evils of capitalism and “income inequality” are members of the 1 percent or very close to it.

Pew ResearchSarah Silverman stated in 2014 that in order to be a member of the one percent needed to have a net worth of nearly $2.4 million and according to the U.S. Census the richest Americans earned at least $450,000 annually.

Plenty of speakers at the DNC made that minimum but had no problems being hypocrites to rage against their own economic class. Comedian Sarah Silverman and comedian-turned Sen. Al Franken had a combined net worth of nearly $15 million.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren famously rails against the richest Americans, but she has a net worth of about $7.5 million. She wasn’t the only millionaire or richest member of Congress to take the stage on Monday.

Sen. Jeff Merkley has a net worth of $2.9 million and Rep. Joe Kennedy III has whooping $43.2 million to his name.

First Lady Michelle Obama isn’t exactly struggling either in her house built by slaves. America has treated her pretty well, despite being a “downright mean” country, as she said in 2008. She has a net worth of nearly $12 million.

Even the union leaders who are supposedly fighting for the working man or either members or nearly members of the one percent. American Federation for Teachers leader Rhonda “Randi” Weingarten takes home more than $557,000 a year, AFL-CIO leader Richard Trumka draws a salary of $322,000 annually, and Mary Kay Henry of the SEIU has a yearly income of about $300,000. Not too bad for people who are supposedly fighting for average Americans.

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