(One of the event sponsors, Green For All, an organization based out of Oakland, CA, has committed to environmental and economic justice through the promotion of green jobs with justice. I honor and respect the work they are doing, and in particular am a huge fan of their founder, Van Jones. While Van left to serve in the Obama Administration  last year, they have continued a commitment to strong and inspiring leadership with Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins.)

I just moved back to New Mexico from the Bay Area, living there for over six years, and it was amazing to see Oakland come to the table with a broad coalition of stake holders here in Albuquerque to talk about a model for promoting jobs with justice that has had some success in Portland. The goal of the convening was to learn more about the pilot project in Portland and then collectively work to tweak the model so that it can work here in Albuquerque – bringing a triple bottom line model of environmental and economic justice to New Mexico.

The convening focused on Clean Energy Works Portland’s Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program that is operating within Portland’s Renewable Energy Financing District. In 2009 New Mexico approved SB647, known as the Renewable Energy Financing District Act, which allows local governments to make available bonds (through federal stimulus dollars) to the public for the express purpose of increasing clean, renewable energy use. The bill was sponsored by Senator Peter Wirth (D-Santa Fe-25). Up to this point, no one in the state has significantly moved on the opportunities the bill has opened up for New Mexico. Santa Fe and Los Lunas are looking into it, but have not created a program yet.

Clean Energy Works Portland is suggesting that Albuquerque take advantage of the new bill by instituting a PACE program, but crafting it so that it works with our communities’ specific needs. Some of the highlights of the program Portland is modeling include:

1. creation of “high road” jobs, which means jobs with promise of upward movement;
2. creation of jobs that focus on “community benefits,” meaning access to high road jobs for the entire community;
3. retrofits to existing structures, which means that people of all income levels can benefit from the program, not just those that can afford to build new structures’;
4. includes involvement of the city’s revolving loan fund, which means there are funds available to folks participating in this program that is borrowed from the city; since there is no money required up front, folks can save up and then pay back the loan through property tax or utilities; APRs on the loans are based on income-level, increasing the accessibility of participation in the program;
5. pre-qualified contractors are the only folks allowed to conduct the retrofits as part of the program, guaranteeing quality work, which will increase word-of-mouth and expansion of the program;
6. program contractors must build in “high road” jobs as they expand their workforce (because of increased demand from the program) and select folks from the program’s job training program as a stipulations of participation;
7. Clean Energy Works Portland expects to assist 10,000 families weatherize their homes, increase efficiency while decreasing the city’s carbon footprint, reduce utilities bills, support existing jobs and create 10,000 new jobs over the next 10 years.

The process for implementation of this program includes (but is not limited to):

1. Substance: strategies, targets and goals must be set as a coalition, including all stakeholders;
2. Adoption: signatures showing demand and city council resolution to implement the program is required;
3. Implementation: Mayoral-appointed committee to oversee the program.

Some of the goals of this program include (but are not limited to):

1. Diversity
2. Local Hires
3. Health Insurance for all workers who are part of the program (including those employed by participating contractors)
4. Diverse business participation
5. High Quality work
6. Creation of a Job Training Program as part of the PACE program, that trains local folks and has the promise of “high road” jobs at the end of the program.

The Albuquerque PACE program would require an addendum to the current legislation, which only allows for funds to be directed toward clean energy and not necessarily toward energy efficiency upgrades (which would effectively reach more working class folks). Senator Tim Keller believes that because the addendum is “budget neutral” that it could potentially receive no opposition in Albuquerque City Council. This program will serve to support the larger economic development goals of the city of Albuquerque.

Because this is not a “build it and they will come” kind of program, essential to its success will be drumming up the demand for the program. My specific work through Working America has the potential to play a key role in the coalition. Working America is the largest grassroots, progressive organization in New Mexico, with access to at least 40,000 members in the city of Albuquerque. We could play a significant part in educating the public about the benefits of this program, mobilizing them to pressure their representatives to support a city council resolution and offer them direct access to the program through our coalition connections.

Additionally, because of our expansive outreach in the community, our participation ensures that low income and communities of color – who have largely been left out of the “green wave” – are considered and included in the program in meaningful and significant ways.

Working America can also push to create language that effectively conveys the benefits of this program to a wide swath of folks – so that it makes sense (which it does) and appeals to lower income and working class folks and is not represented as a benefit that only higher income folks can afford – or have a right to. Energy inefficiency affects every level of society and bringing a program such as this to the doorstep of every American is critical in not only protecting the environment but also protecting consumers from increasing utility rates as our resources become more and more scarce. In addition, a program such as this is a boon to any city who adopts it, as it will surely boost job creation and economic development, bringing us all out of the recession with jobs with integrity and promise.

New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman has already sponsored the Home Star Program, in process of passing through legislation now, which would significantly increase the saving and overall cost of retrofitting homes to be more energy efficient – the perfect complement to the Clean Energy Works program. Senator Bingaman has a lot of influence in the state, so thus far the Clean Energy Works program has all the right elements to be created and be successful.

I was very excited to be part of this convening and vision how this diverse coalition could significantly contribute to a program that has at its foundation a triple bottom line: creation of Family-Supporting Jobs and supporting local businesses, save money for both consumers and tax payers,  and restore the environment.

Below is a link to more information about the Clean Energy Works Portland program – there you will find the full report back on the Clean Energy Works Portland program thus far; the Community Workforce Agreement; City Council Resolution and the Press Release. All to give a sense of how this program has worked thus far and could work for assisting with meaningful economic and job development in Albuquerque.

http://www.greenforall.org/what-we-do/cities-initiative/portland/clean-energy-works-portland

(C) 2010 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

Statement

I am here today before the board speaking on behalf of my family, my community, the many infants and children of my community. And most importantly, I speak on behalf of my own unborn children.

I’m so very proud to be a New Mexican, and because of this I can tell you today that New Mexico DESERVES to have every chance to be at the forefront of the global green economy. New Mexicans are some of the most hard working, honest, straight forward, unpretentious, down to earth, kind and caring folks I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. New Mexicans are willing to work hard for the progress that is promised through environmental regulations for some of the biggest, dirtiest corporations in New Mexico and the United States. Creating an emissions cap for New Mexico’s fossil fuel industry makes good business sense, is good for the health of all New Mexicans, promotes the sustained beauty of our landscape and most of all gives us the opportunity to jumpstart our economy in a meaningful way and stand, with pride, at the fore-front of the green energy revolution.

I’m currently employed at Working America, a community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. We go out into the communities of New Mexico every night, talking with and listening to the stories of everyday, average New Mexican – spanning the entire political and social spectrum – and what we are hearing is that New Mexicans are tired of the same old game in New Mexico: fossil fuel industry ruling New Mexico, wielding often unchecked power over the present and future of this state, receiving excessive federal and state subsidies while small business owners struggle to keep their doors open. These companies are also polluting our communities with no accountability.

We continually hear from the fossil fuel industry that any sort of regulation of them will destroy one of the state’s main sources of income, that they bring prosperity to the state of New Mexico and that any challenge of them will be detrimental to the state of New Mexico’s workers and their families.

I’m working class, I’m a citizen of New Mexico and I haven’t seen those benefits.  I haven’t seen them spread far and wide and benefit New Mexicans at large, which is what they have promised us. Instead I’ve seen the fossil fuel industry make a very few people very rich.

A few years ago, a National Academy of Sciences study, found that some areas of the country could be used for national priorities irrespective of the resulting permanent environmental damage, calling these places “National Sacrifice Areas.” Many of these areas were identified to be on Indigenous lands, and more specifically many of those lands are in New Mexico. The term “sacrifice” means that a person or group gives up something for the benefit of another or the greater good.

It seems to me, that the fossil fuel industry has asked New Mexico to sacrifice more than our fair share for the rest of the country to have access to cheap energy.

For example:

New Mexico is the second-largest gas-producing state in this country, and despite all that abundance, many Dine people, whether living on the Navajo Reservation or on land allotted by the federal government, still use firewood to heat their homes and to cook their meals; they often cannot afford gas or it is not even available where they live.

The Navajo Nation exports 1200% more energy than it consumes – these industries are promising that they will bring abundance to ALL New Mexicans and yet, over 50% of folks on the Navajo reservation don’t have running water or electricity, but live within close proximity of and work at facilities that process gas and electricity that the rest of the country enjoys use of.

After what’s turned into much ado about nothing, oil and gas aren’t bringing in long-promised increased revenue, and somehow are able to skirt their tax obligations, while our legislature is allowing working class people to be taxed on food!! Food!?!

NEW MEXICANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO SACRIFICE QUALITY OF LIFE IN FAVOR OF PROFITS FOR OIL AND GAS COMPANIES.

Families invested for generations in the fossil fuel industry are in large part reaping the benefits that old school monopoly affords them – the fossil fuel industry has seen record profits in past years.

New Mexico’s working class families have been setting their own records of late – they are experiencing record levels of unemployment. They are struggling at unprecedented levels to feed their families, to clothe their children, to pay their bills and to provide their children with a higher education.

The conventional energy industry employs armies of marketing pros to convince us that we need them, that they are capable of innovation if we just wait long enough, but we’ve really yet to see any of their promises come to fruition. The fossil fuel industry is based on the false premise of abundance and is struggling to fight an imminent death. Much like the auto industry, the energy industry is attached to a past filled with record profits which has blinded them to meaningful innovation and progress.

A cap on emissions by the dirty energy industry promises increased investment in progressive technologies, which will lead to jobs creation, new training and retraining of skilled workers and prestige for New Mexico as a leader, an example to the rest of the nation.

NEW MEXICANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO SACRIFICE THE PROMISE OF GOOD GREEN JOBS BECAUSE OF THE FOSSIL FUEL INDUSTRY’S NOSTALIGIC ATTACHMENT TO THE PAST AND REFUSAL TO HONESTLY AND DILIGENTLY PURSUE INNOVATION.

Air quality in New Mexico is one of the worst in the country, particularly on Native reservations and rural areas. Effluent from mining, burning and waste treatment of fossil fuels in the state have resulted in some of the highest rates of respiratory diseases, asthma, heart attacks, strokes and premature mortality.

The Four Corners Power Plant, owned by Arizona Public Service – one of the largest coal-fired plants in the country – is also one of the largest sources of air pollution in New Mexico. Each of the plant’s five units burns more than 10 million tons of coal each year, and releases 1,300 tons of particulates, 12,000 tons of sulfur dioxide and 42,000 tons of nitrogen oxides.

In particular, lung cancer and other serious respiratory illnesses have been found at increased rates in workers employed at power plants and other dirty industries, in addition to those living near to these facilities. New Mexican working class people employed by the fossil fuel industry are making cheap energy possible by paying with their health and lives.

NEW MEXICANS SHOULD NOT HAVE TO SACRIFICE OUR HEALTH TO FEED OUR FAMILIES OR LIVE IN THIS BEAUTIFUL STATE.

I will close by saying once again that we New Mexicans deserve better than the dirty legacy the fossil fuel industry has given us. We’ve sacrificed enough. New Mexico should not have to be the sacrificial lamb for the rest of the country’s addition to cheap, dirty energy. It’s our turn to shine. To show the rest of the country and the world what we are capable of.

We deserve fair and legitimate regulations on industry that only serve to create abundance for both the people of New Mexico and industry that operates here.

Our people deserve clean air and clean technologies that will allow people to feed their families safely and with dignity.

New Mexicans deserve the best that we can give ourselves.

(C) 2010 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.



Amidst all of the communal devastation, SEWA has remained vigilant in encouraging open communication between its members from different religious traditions in order that “From this exchange [of both positive and negative religious experiences] ideas for action and further organizing could develop, together with a strengthening of our own bonds.”[ii]

SEWA’s efforts at encouraging dialogue between members include touching on issues such as:

• communalism as a virus that, due to prolonged socialization, affects everyone and this internalization should be confronted;
• recognition and emphasis on the positive, humanistic aspects of religion;
• challenging the patriarchal, oppressive and divisive aspects of religion through a feminist lens is vital to creating alternatives, which are possible through introspection and collaboration;
• women’s roles in religion and religious women’s contributions to society should be highlighted and understood- and not just leaders, but average’s women’s contributions through ritual, folklore and songs;
• secularism needs to be addressed and an understanding of its role in dividing communities; disassociation from the definition of ‘religion’ used by communalists that only further divides communities and would-be allies;
• encourage minority women to take up leadership roles;
• encourage a ‘common civil code’ that respects everyone and is not co-opted by communalists and used to oppress women, dalits, the poor or religious groups.[iii]

(C) 2010 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Chatterjee, Mirai. “Religion, secularism, and organising women workers,” in Against All Odds: Essays on Women, Religion and Development from India and Pakistan. Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon and Nighat Said Khan, eds. Kali for Women: New Delhi. 1994. pp. 114-5.

In that sense, the designation of many Indian lands as National Sacrifice Areas is a disturbingly accurate recognition of present reality. Native communities are the scapegoats for Western consumer culture, bearing the burdens of the sins of the community. Indian communities have hosted toxic waste, a by-product of white middle class consumer lifestyles, without ever having benefited from those lifestyles.” – Jonna Higgins-Freese and Jeff Tomhave, in their article Race, Sacrifice, and Native Lands

As an ally to Native women environmental leaders throughout the Southwest, I have witnessed, first hand, that Native American grassroots and community groups are facing a multi-faceted fight when it comes to protecting their lands from continued environmental destruction and cultural genocide.

• Increasingly the federal government and private industry is looking toward Tribal lands for new and existing sources of domestic energy, as well as ground zero for launching domestic “green” alternative energy initiatives. For centuries, corporations and the federal government have exploited Native communities for their own gain, therefore those entities pushing for this renewed effort to source alternatives in Indian Country must be held accountable to those communities who will ultimately bear the brunt of the expansion and development.

• This effort to keep parties accountable is much harder than one might think. Tribal power over its own lands is a complicated matter, involving a “checkerboard” of intersecting, interwoven, complex relationships between federal, state and tribal policies.
  • Overall, it should be noted that more often than not, tribal governments answer to federal and state regulations, as opposed to the other way around.
  • Historically, the federal government has perceived Indigenous people of this land, first, as uncivilized “savages,” then when human rights were called into question, the perception shifted to recognizing their humanity, but deeming them infantile, so as to continue to exert power over them and their lands.

• Unfortunately, the department of the federal government that most directly affects tribal sovereignty when it comes to environmental considerations is the EPA. The reason this is unfortunate is because research shows that the EPA “ …more often than not, opposes congressional attempts to pass tough environmental laws… spends more time and money figuring out how to exempt corporations from regulations than it does enforcing them and …. the EPA’s will to regulate is so weak that a proposed regulation must be under a court-ordered deadline (brought by an environmental group) before it will even be considered for the EPA administrator’s signature.”[1

• Investigation into the relationships between decision makers and industry has cast a negative light on many projects brought to Indian Country. For its part, the EPA has a long record of administrators leaving the department and entering into highly lucrative positions with hazardous waste management corporations and other industry players. Therefore, it is critical to provide support, when called for, to Native American partners in seeking to untangle the web of intricate policies so that the voice of the grassroots is heard as new decisions are made regarding Native land use.

• With the onslaught of the recent economic downturn, both global and domestic, budget cuts to critical services that provide for some of the most impacted communities in this country are being enacted. The result is that impoverished communities are left disproportionately under-served by both governmental services and pro bono advocacy.

• And lastly, as our government seeks to assuage Americans’ economic and national security fears, solutions are being sought in the heart of Native country – federal and private interests are looking to the vast amounts of untapped petroleum-based resources that lie beneath the lands of this country’s Indigenous peoples, as well as those purported to be sustainable, “green” alternatives.

“Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet… we will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories.” - President Barack Obama

“Nuclear power is going to be an important part of our energy mix.. We will be building some [clean] coal plants… while we search for alternatives.” – Steven Chu, Nobel Prize winning physicist and Secretary of Energy.

• The largest consolidated pockets of fossil fuels in the United States (35%) lie directly underneath or close to Native lands. So as this country’s leaders propose “clean” coal and nuclear energy as alternatives to foreign oil in order to address America’s energy needs and decrease national threats, Native organizations are readying themselves for an increased push to locate these alternatives in their communities.

• Historically, corporations have sought to profit from the vast non-renewable energy resources such as fossil fuels and uranium located on Native lands.

• In this quest for unending profits, corporations have inflicted not only environmental devastation on Native communities, but also detrimental health effects due to the extraction, processing and transmission of the energy.

• From the Alaskan North Slope, to the mesas of the Navajo Nation, across the deep trenches of the Grand Canyon, and sweeping across the high plains of Nevada, resource extraction and processing has created innumerable adverse consequences including:
  • massive pollution clouds covering hundreds of miles;
  • toxic effluents in rivers and streams;
  • severe depletion of aquifers and water tables;
  • radioactive poisoning of miners and their families;
  • nuclear arms testing; industrial and nuclear waste dumps;
  • massive cyanide-heap leach pits from zinc, uranium, gold and other minerals.

While the devastation was wide-spread, the majority of our energy sources were still located outside of the US, but with the new push for increased domestic sourcing, Native American communities are bracing themselves for “yet another cycle of destruction characterized by the devastation of sacred sites, the drying up of aquifers, micro-climate changes, and the poisoning of our air and soil with toxins,” according to Clayton Thomas-Meuller, Native Energy organizer for Indigenous Environmental Network.

• Decision makers are proposing mythical alternatives like “safe and clean” nuclear energy and “clean coal” - while both are purported to mitigate the US carbon footprint, neither have been proven to significantly reduce other environmental and health impacts:
  • Extraction of coal and the resulting waste effluent have shown to have detrimental impacts on the health of workers and communities;
  • Mining, processing and disposal of uranium for nuclear power has been shown to cause outrageously high rates of cancer in both workers and surrounding communities, not to mention that fact that nuclear waste will persist for thousands of years.

With other “green” alternatives come other issues that have yet to be addressed with regard to whether or not these alternatives are truly “green,” sustainable or beneficial to the communities within which they will be sited. For example:

• Consideration of alternatives such as wind, solar or biomasss must also address things like expansion of power lines to carry this new alternative energy from Native lands to US cities.
• To build this expanded energy grid, large tracts of forest must be cut down, not to mention the fact that sacred, ancestral areas dot the Native landscape, so negotiation of grids bisecting these traditional lands must be done responsibly and respectfully.
• Additionally, hydro-electric as an alternative source of energy has been proposed, but implementation of this method must address the negative effects of damming rivers that zigzag Native lands and provide critical sources of irrigation for agriculture and subsistence fishing.
• In late January 2009, the DOE issued a Request for Information seeking input from Tribal people and other interested parties on the barriers to expanding renewable energy enterprises in Indian Country. While this could be a step forward, I am concerned that this negative framing will force Native people into a defensive position, as opposed to a collaborative partnership with the federal government and private industry

Younger generations of Native youth who are stepping up to lead much of the resistance to the corporate destruction are refusing to operate primarily from a place of defense, as was the case for many social movements in previous generations. Instead, many Native youth on the frontlines of these issues are not only addressing the negative impacts of conventional sources and methods of energy extraction, but they are forwarding viable solutions – solutions that are coming directly out of the communities to be impacted by this new push for “green” alternatives. For example:

• The 28 tribes on the White Earth reservation, located in the Western North Central United States, have recognized a plentiful renewable resource, the wind, that daily sweeps across their lands. They are working collaboratively to harness the wind for “green” energy in ways that are sustainable and appropriate for the health and economic well-being of their communities.
• Also, the Black Mesa Water Coalition, a coalition of Dine and Hopi communities, has created the Navajo Green Jobs campaign in partnership with many other grassroots organizations throughout the Southwest. The aim of this campaign is to conceive of and create green jobs on Native lands, which will create economic opportunities for Native people; economic tribal self-sufficiency and sovereignty; encouragement of and support for Native entrepreneurship; perpetuation of energy efficient projects like weatherizing housing, green construction and sustainable water projects; as well as continuing education and green job training for Native people.

As this growing market demand for domestically-sourced alternative energy finds its way to the doorsteps of Native communities, support must be rallied for Native American grassroots environmental leaders who are working diligently to make sure that outdated and dirty conventional methods are put to rest and that the alternatives are healthy, sustainable and honor the humanity of their communities.

Research compiled while serving as the Southwest Environmental Justice Coordinator at Women’s Earth Alliance, 2009.

(C) 2009 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

****

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Office contact information:

Telephone: (415) 554-6141
Fax: (415) 554-6160
Email: gavin.newsom@sfgov.org

MAKE  A QUICK CALL OR SEND AN EMAIL TODAY STANDING IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE OHLONE PEOPLE OF THE BAY AREA!!

INTRODUCTION

As a former colony of the British Empire, the United States is directly influenced by the history of European women’s plight prior to the “founding” of this country. Therefore, it is imperative to understand that history so that the near past and current state of affairs related to women’s health rights in this country can be understood in complete context.  The implications of a history that includes a legal system that stems from the struggles of women throughout Europe to defend their reproductive rights against some of the most repressive, genocidal, social and legal structures in history is critical in understanding how the rights of some of the most vulnerable groups of women in this country are infringed upon by existing legislation. It is also critical in grasping the gravity of the current legislative reform related to healthcare that is happening in this country.

This brief is not meant to be complete history of women’s rights in Europe nor the United States, rather a condensed listing of some of the most relevant issues that have lead to the current state of women’s rights in this country. The paper’s perspective is decidedly Western mainstream and certainly an overwhelming amount of information could be contributed if written from the perspective of the myriad cultures that exist in this country. But the for the purposes of this paper, this perspective is a first step in understanding the complete picture of the history of women’s rights in this country.

AN ANCESTRY OF GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION & DISAPPEARANCE OF PRIVACY

By the end of the 14^th century, European states began the subtle and slow transition from a nature-based society to mercantilism, which eventually evolved into capitalism. The effect this had on women and their reproductive, economic and class circumstances is a steady decline toward subjugation. Women went from positions of equity with men to being perceived as servile, infantile, commodities and reproductive machines. Increasingly, women were seen as reproductive beings, their most important contributions to society being the ability to increase the citizenry. This perspective lead to widespread social and legal restrictions on women’s access to traditional forms of birth control, abortion and holistic healthcare. Their autonomy in these decisions were completely stripped away and became affairs of the State.

There are many historical “moments” that have contributed to the current US social perception of women and legal barriers to their autonomy in controlling their reproductive choices. Some of which include:

• In the 16^th century Europe experienced a decline in population growth, which some historians attribute to “low natality rates and the unwillingness of the poor to reproduce themselves.” Sylvia Federici argues that this population crisis was the beginning of state intrusion into once-private reproduction issues. [i]

• By the mid 16^th century, the prevailing thought of the State was that a larger citizenry determined its stature on the world stage. French political thinker Jean Bodin wrote, “In my view, one should never be afraid of having too many subjects or too many citizens, for the strength of the commonwealth consists in men.” Additionally, Henry IV was known to say “the strength and wealth of a king lie in the number and opulence of his citizens.” This new widespread belief system signaled the beginning of laws punishing any behavior obstructing population growth.[ii]

• The Great Witch Hunt of the 16^th and 17^th centuries were a full on assault on women the world over. The primary focus of the witch hunts, says Federici, was to co-opt control over women’s bodies, seizing power of contraception and non-procreative sexuality from them. During this time, European governments enacted severe penalties against reproductive crimes, including contraception, midwifery and infanticide.[iii]

• There were also very strong social norms that developed indicating that women were incapable of controlling themselves and needed to be hidden away for their own and society’s benefit; women were popularly conveyed publically as unreasonable, vain, wild, wasteful, mouthy, gossipy, scolds, witches, etc. [iv]

• The Protestant Reformation broke ranks with Christian obsession with chastity and valorized women’s reproductive capabilities. Luther said, “Whatever their weaknesses, women possess one virtue that cancels them all; they have a womb and they can give birth.”[v] Thus more evidence of State and Church interest in women’s bodies, which also meant controlling their powers of reproduction.

• In the 17^th century, in both England and France, laws were enacted that favored marriage and family and penalized celibacy. Simultaneously, demographic recording began, as well as the official intervention of the State in supervision of sexuality, procreation and family life.[vi]

• During this time, women had to register their pregnancy with the State; capital punishment was the penalty for women whose infants died before baptism after concealing a pregnancy; hosting an unwed pregnant woman was illegal.[vii]

• This was also a time when women’s alliances through midwifery were destroyed as more midwives were also condemned and punished, not for incompetence as many report, rather for the prevention of infanticide.[viii]

• With the demonization of the midwife, the male doctor and medical practice took over control of women’s bodies and birthing, which also ushered in the introduction of the importance of the fetus over the health of the mother.[ix]

• Europeans brought their misogyny to the Colonies and continued to expand their control over the reproductive activities of all women, including African slaves and Native Americans. Initially alliances by colonists were made through marriage, but as the increase in mestizos threatened white rule, colonists began to wage war against women in the New World, including Indigenous, African and European women.[x]

• New laws were passed in Indigenous communities, influenced by European colonizers, including: married women became the property of men; women must follow their husbands to their homes; authority over children was placed in the hands of men; no one could separate wives from their husbands, forcing women to follow their husbands’ work, no matter the threat to their health in order that they could still produce more children as future workers.[xi]

• As the number of slaves began to diminish due to the prior method of “consuming slaves to death,” colonists began to implement breeding policies, including capital punishment for contraception. But this failed and the rates of African populations in the US did not increase until the abolition of slavery and establishment of free slave communities.[xii]

• It was not until the mid 20^th century that many of the restrictive laws against women were repealed, and yet women on average still make less money than men, do not have full legal rights over their bodies and continue to suffer restricted access to holistic healthcare.

LACK OF ACCESS AFFECTS THE MOST VULNERABLE WOMEN

National Overview

“Without preventive services, nearly 20 million women will have unsafe abortions in the coming year; related complications will injure several million women and kill nearly 70,000. With preventive services so they can plan their families, women are healthier, their children are healthier and their communities prosper.” -Elizabeth Maguire, President and CEO of IPAS

• Annually, approximately 500,000 women die due to pregnancy-related complications, which also have disastrous effects for their children left behind. This is due in part to the nearly 215 million women who lack access to family planning options.[i]

• Of the 95 million women ranging in age from 18 to 64, nearly 1 in 5 are insured. This is due in large part to the complicated network of various private and government insurance programs, which are incredibly difficult for even experts to navigate.[ii]

• Women are less likely to be covered by employer-sponsored insurance than are men, with only 38% insured by their employers. This gap creates a further burden because women are more likely to have dependents who also need coverage.[iii]

• Only 6% of women use private insurance, which often offers less coverage than that provided by employers, costs much more out of pocket, as well as having restrictions for pre-existing medical conditions which often causes denial of coverage.[iv]

• Medicare and other government-sponsored health insurance plans only cover 3% of women under 65 years of age, of which these women are either disabled or are the spouse/dependent of military personnel.[v]

• 18% of women under the age of 65 are uninsured because they do not qualify for Medicaid, do not have access to employer-sponsored insurance or cannot afford individual plans.[vi]

• In women ages 25-44, HIV infection is the third leading cause of death and the main cause of death among African-American women of that same group. According to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and the National Institutes of Health, “These women tend to be young, poor residents of disenfranchised urban communities.”[vii]

Local Impacts

• 50% of New Mexico’s Native women are uninsured. Comparatively, 29% of Hispanic women have no health insurance, while only 17% of white women are not insured.[viii]

• While 12.8% of US women are reported to have “fair or poor” health status, all of New Mexico’s minority women average 19.5% in fair to poor health.[ix]

• On average, 9.3% of Native women suffer from diabetes, as compared to the national average of 4.2%.[x]

• In 2009, 20.6% of all women in the state of New Mexico reported not getting a routine health exam in over two years and 20.4% cited prohibitive costs as a reason for not going to the doctor.[xi]

• 31% of all New Mexican women between the ages of 40 and 64 reported not having received a mammogram in the past two years, while 14% reported not having a pap test in the last three years.[xii]

• 61% of New Mexican women live in an area with a primary care health professional shortage.[xiii]

• 47% of women in New Mexico live in a county with no abortion provider.[xiv]

Low Income Women

• Medicare, the health program for the poor, covers 10% of women under the age of 65, and only those who are considered very low income and have special qualifying circumstances.[xv] This leaves an incredible amount of low income women uninsured with no available options for health care coverage.

• Nearly half of the 23% of Hispanic folks living in the United States in poverty are female-headed households. Add that to the 78% of Latinas lacking health insurance and you have a crisis of health coverage for low income Hispanic families.[xvi]

• Many African American women are disproportionately affected by immigration and welfare issues that will further complicate their access to healthcare.[xvii]

• Individual state bans could force women to have to travel to other states to get healthcare or family planning assistance, which is often not a choice available to low income women due to cost of travel, lack of extended child care and limited/unpaid time off from work.

Women of Color

• Nearly one quarter of women of color are currently uninsured.[xviii]

• Overall, women of color fare far worse than their white counterparts when it comes to access to healthcare.[xix]

• Because women of color are twice as likely to have no health insurance, “women of color are more likely to need publicly funded reproductive health and family planning services,” according to Sister Song.

• 77% of women infected with HIV/AIDS are women of color. African American women in particular are more likely to be infected and affected by the disease.[xx]

• Despite having the lowest overall rates of HIV/AIDS (a mere 1% of all cases), Asian/Pacific Islander and American Indian/Alaska Native women have experienced the largest increase of new HIV/AIDS cases in recent years, according to the Public Health Service’s Office on Women’s Health .[xxi]

• The lowest rates of cervical cancer screenings are held by Native American women, with Asian/Pacific Islander women coming in second for the lowest rates of screening. Of those not screened for cervical cancer in 1995, 55% were API women, 43% were Hispanic and 37% were African American.[xxii]

• Although Hispanic women make up 10.2% of all women in the US, they contract cervical cancer at nearly twice the rate of white women.[xxiii]
• According to the National Institutes of Health, African American women suffer very high rates of cervical and breast cancers, as well as reproductive track infections (RTIs).[xxiv]

• Federally controlled health care limits access for the majority of Native Americans. Only 34 Indian Health Service clinics serve over 1.3million Native people throughout the United States, leaving 75% of Native people without easy healthcare access.[xxv]

• Government suppression of traditional reproductive healthcare such as midwifery adds additional burdens to the already limited system available to many Native women in the US, according to the National Institutes of Health.[xxvi]

• Due to lack of cultural sensitivity, mainstream health education and disease prevention efforts are largely disseminated in English, leaving vast sections of immigrant populations “in the dark” when it comes to new and improved sexual and reproductive health information. Additionally, language barriers leave many non-English speaking women with compromised healthcare.[xxvii]

• With a historic relationship of mistrust between the medical community and Hispanic communities, use of available healthcare is still low. A National Fertility Study conducted by the Office of Population Control at Harvard University in 1970, found that 20% of Hispanic women had been forcibly sterilized. By this same time, it was found that 35% of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been surgically sterilized.[xxviii]

Single Mothers

• On average, single mothers have higher uninsured rates than women in other family arrangements, made possible by their limited economic resources.[xxix]

• 72% of single mothers live in families with incomes below 250% of poverty, forcing single mothers to regularly make difficult choices between healthcare and basic needs.[xxx]

• The healthcare system still frames coverage in terms of nuclear families, which puts single mothers at a distinct disadvantage given that women on average earn only ¾ what men earn in annual wages; additionally, the healthcare system is based on the assumption that income is pooled between all family members and access is equal.

• Only 41% of single mothers are covered under employer-based healthcare, compared to 68% of married women.[xxxi]

Young Women

• 25% of young women (aged 19-29) do not have health insurance.[xxxii]

• This lack of health insurance is especially problematic when one considers that fact that young people are at highest risk of diseases related to sexual reproductive health, including chlamydia, gonorrhea and human papillomavirus (HPV).[xxxiii]

• Of the roughly 3.5 million pregnancies of young women per year, many are carried out without the benefit of insurance coverage.[xxxiv]

• 60% of uninsured pregnant women are likely to delay prenatal care, 3 times more likely to experience complications after birth and 30% more likely to have newborns die.[xxxv]

• The laws in 33 states allow health insurance carriers to charge young women higher premiums based on age, gender and health status, with no restrictions.[xxxvi] This is discrimination at its worst.
• Many young people enter college with no health insurance coverage.
• Colleges require health coverage but do not include it in tuition costs; an at-cost system is in effect on most college campuses, but the coverage is shoddy and does not cover contraception for young women.[xxxvii]

Uninsured Women

• Nearly 17.2 million women are currently uninsured, which means they are more likely to have inadequate access to healthcare, receive a lower standard of care, have overall poorer health, delay filling prescriptions and go without preventative care such as mammograms and pap tests.[xxxviii]

• Women most at risk of being uninsured are low income and women of color.[xxxix]

• Of all groups, Latinas are most likely to be uninsured, and were especially hurt by the 1996 welfare law that reduced resources to their communities.[xl]

• Nearly 79% of uninsured women are part of families with at least one part-time or full-time worker; nearly 62% of uninsured women are part of families with at at least one full-time worker; and only 21% live in families with no working adults.[xli]

Female Prisoners and Parolees

• Prisoners are the only group of the US population with a constitutional guarantee of medical care, but the reality for incarcerated women stands in stark contrast.[xlii]

• Women inmates report having to submit numerous requests for health care before being attended to, as well as disruptions in HIV medications (which can lead to drug resistance).[xliii]

• A recent study found that reproductive health was especially susceptible to inconsistency and apathy on the part of the prison medical system; some women were required to pay for their pap test results, some were never given the results, as well as women who experienced male doctors giving exams insensitive to past sexual trauma and domestic violence.[xliv]

• Women prisoners are regularly, and inhumanely, shackled to beds during the birthing of their children, including leg irons and metal chains across stomachs during labor.[xlv]

• Access to abortions, which are not performed in prison, is problematic and often not available, as not all prison officials will agree to take prisoners to outside clinics to perform the procedure.[xlvi]

• Some US court judges have coerced women into taking contraceptives as a condition of their probation or parole.[xlvii]

• The US has a history of forced sterilization, contraception, castration, prohibition of fathering a child, pregnancy and engaging in sexual intercourse as conditions imposed by judges in both criminal and civil courts against defendants convicted of crimes having nothing to do with children or child-bearing (often the defendants had been convicted of robbery, forgery or drug possession).[xlviii]

• Despite popular belief that procreation is constitutionally protected, circuit court judges continue to violate the Constitution by implementing conditions against procreation as a part of sentencing– most of these defendants being women of color and poor.[xlix]

Women in the Military

• Women in the military do not have a right to medical privacy.

• Military hospitals are not allowed to perform abortions, except in the cases of life endangerment, rape or incest. In the case of rape and incest, women must pay for the procedure out of pocket. In the case of an elective abortion, women must use leave time and pay out of pocket to travel to a country that provides legal abortion services. “Here we have an example of women serving in the military, protecting our constitutional rights, yet their constitutional right for choice was not protected,” says Rep. Carolyn Maloney.[l]

• The Department of Defense does not provide emergency contraception to women in the military, which leaves women open to unwanted pregnancies and all of the economic and professional consequences that ensue.[li]

Lesbian, Transsexual, Transgender and Intersex Women

• Despite the fact that lesbian women are more likely to possess graduate degrees and managerial positions, they are also more likely to be uninsured than heterosexual women.[lii]

• Transgendered people are uninsured at one of the highest rates of any group, between 21-48%.

• Medical forms throughout the country still more often than not only offer the gender choice of either “male” or “female.”

• More than half of US medical schools do not offer any training on LGBTQI issues, with some only providing an average of 2.5 hours of education throughout a four year program.[liii]

• An article in the Homosexuality Journal in 1999, found that 25% of 2^nd year medical students in a believe homosexuality to be “immoral and dangerous to the institution of the family.”[liv]
• Rates of Bacterial Vaginosis are higher in lesbian women (18-36%) than in heterosexual women (16%).[lv]

• Young bisexual and lesbian teen girls are twice as likely to become pregnant as their heterosexual counterparts.[lvi]

• Transgender women sex workers are more likely to contract HIV/AIDS because they are financially induced to engage in unprotected sex.[lvii]

• Evidence exists showing that trans youth of color are disproportionately impacted the HIV/AIDS epidemic.[lviii]

• High rates of unemployment and poverty for trans youth and trans folks of color contribute to the incidences of uninsured individuals, which increases the mortality rates and lessens the life span of transgendered people.[lix]

• Evidence exists to show that post-operative transsexual women are likely to lose insurance coverage if their provider discovers their transsexual status.[lx]

• Most insurance carriers in the US do not provide coverage for trans-related health care, including hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, etc.[lxi]

• Some insured trans people must deal with a medical system that does not have the appropriate language to diagnose or indicate procedural codes in order to be reimbursed for their treatments; there are some insurance carriers who simply refuse to deal with transgender patients at all.[lxii]

• For those transgender people who can’t afford the expensive mental health evaluations required before being prescribed hormones, many resort to unsafe, untested, black market hormones.

Undocumented Immigrant Women

• Undocumented women are more likely than US citizens to live in poverty, be unemployed and uninsured, as well as lacking education about preventative care.[lxiii]

• Publically-funded healthcare requires documentation of immigration status, thereby disallowing many immigrant women from accessing adequate care.[lxiv]

• Many undocumented women do not access healthcare at public health facilities for fear of detection and deportation.[lxv]

• Over 30% of immigrant households experienced a linguistic barrier to health and maternal care and services, including Pap tests, mammograms, and prenatal care.[lxvi]

• In 2000, 85% of migrant women workers in the US were uninsured, and only 42% accessed prenatal care during their pregnancy.

Older Women

• Because older women (over the age of 65) are more susceptible to chronic illness and are usually retired or leaving the workforce, maintaining or obtaining new healthcare coverage is often economically difficult.[lxvii]

• Retired women aged 50 to 65 lose insurance coverage and don’t qualify for Medicare, creating a significant barrier to accessing healthcare.[lxviii]

• Because of the current gender gap in salaries, one study estimates that after a 35 year investment, the average man’s social security portfolio would be 16% larger than the average woman’s.[lxix]

• Women have their working years interrupted more often than men, affecting their overall social security account contributions, which means a smaller likelihood older women can afford the costs of healthcare not covered by Medicare and other supplemental coverage.[lxx]

• Due to annuitization and the fact that women have a longer life expectancy than men, one study showed that in 2002 if a woman at the age of 65 has her life expectancy projected to be 19 years (as compared to the 15.9 years projected for a man of the same age) the woman would receive a smaller amount of benefits per months for the duration of her life. That is a smaller income replacement for women every month, simply because they are projected to live a longer life, whether that ends up being the case in reality or not.[lxxi]

Women in USAID Recipient Countries

• Three of five of USAIDs global health goals are devoted to sexual and reproductive health issues and those policies are overtly influenced by conservative religious traditions. “… multi-faceted distortions in U.S. foreign aid based on conservative interpretations of religious tradition… undercut the effectiveness of U.S. investments in foreign aid in health, wasting scarce resources and allowing preventable illness, suffering and death to continue,” says Bonnie Shepard of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin America Studies.[lxxii]

• In 2002, the U.S. government joined with Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and the Vatican at the UN Special Session on the Child to oppose comprehensive sexual health education and services for adolescents.[lxxiii]

• Abstinence programs are promoted above and beyond culturally appropriate family planning and therefore threaten the security of women’s health (unwanted pregnancies, dangerous and illegal abortions, high rates of contracting STD’s, etc.)

• Of the paltry amount promised by the US to fight the global AIDS epidemic, any organization that is part of that fight that also provides or even advocates abortions, does receive any foreign aid funding. Also, during the Bush administration, there was a push for programs to de-emphasize the use of condoms in prevention programs.[lxxiv]

• Despite research showing that abstinence only programs are ineffective for adolescents that have already begun to engage in sexual activity, a large portion of USAID money goes to funding abstinence only programs. “The logic is perverse: since it is morally frowned on for adolescents to have sex before marriage, programs should not protect their health when they do, thus subverting the very health goals of USAID strategy.”[lxxv]

• Despite a declaration from the World Health Organization that emergency contraception is not the same thing as abortion, conservative religious groups’ lobbying has effectively removed funding of programs that support the right of women and even rape victims to have access to emergency contraception.[lxxvi]

• Conservative political pressure on the Center for Disease Control caused the organization to change a key HIV website, “Facts about Condoms and their Use in Preventing HIV Infection,” shifting emphasis to abstinence, condom failure rates and the elimination of the section on correct condom use.[lxxvii]

• Another of the three goals of USAID devoted to the reproductive health of women misses the mark– programs devoted to prevention of maternal mortality. The “global gag rule” prevents any programs that receive US funds from advocating abortions, thereby assuring that women must use illegal and very dangerous means to abort unwanted pregnancies.[lxxviii]

HEALTH REFORM AFFECTS WOMEN

“Women have much at stake in the current health reform discussions. The steady growth in health costs has had a disproportionate effect on women because of their lower incomes and greater need for health care services throughout their lives due to their reproductive health needs and higher rates of chronic health problems. For many women, especially those with chronic health conditions, these affordability challenges have been compounded by discriminatory practices that charge women higher rates than men and don’t cover such essential services such as maternity care.” – Kaiser Foundation

As evidenced above in the section outlining this country’s European ancestry, which includes severe repression of women from the early middle ages and on through colonization, there was a gradual erosion of women’s rights throughout time in Europe. The most important element of this coup being the governments of Europe seizing a women’s right to privacy in matters related to procreation and family planning, intruding where the government had never dared before. Contraception, abortion, sexual activity of any kind became affairs of the State, and in particular, as these issues related to women. While women struggled against these restrictions courageously, they were subjected to some of the most severe and inhumane punishments for practicing personal autonomy, most often carried out through the trials and punishments of the Inquisition. This unfounded discrimination was transferred to the colonial government and absorbed by the societies of the New World.

Thankfully there have been some gains over the last century regarding women’s rights. The most notable is the gradual acknowledgement by the judiciary of the autonomy of individuals in matters related to procreation and family planning. – going so far in some cases to state that individuals are guaranteed a right to “zones of privacy” into which the government cannot intrude.[i]

Some legislative gains made in favor of women’s reproductive rights include:

• Griswold v. Connecticut,” a 1965 case striking down a state law prohibiting the use of contraceptives by married couples.[ii]

• Eisenstadt v. Baird followed shortly thereafter in 1972 guaranteeing the right to use of contraceptives by umarried people. The court stated in it’s decision that, “If the right to privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”[iii]

• In 1973 the landmark case of Roe v. Wade successfully eradicated previous laws prohibiting abortion and secured a women’s constitutional protection to choose abortion as a private matter. “Roe grounded the right to privacy in the protection of personal liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and it recognized a notion of liberty that includes a woman’s right to make fundamental decisions affecting her destiny, such as whether or not to terminate a pregnancy.” [iv]

• Also in 1973, in Doe v. Bolton, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of individual privacy and protection of the right of women to choose whether or not to continue a pregnancy.[v]

• In 1977 case, Carey v. Population Services Inter-national, the US Supreme Court struck down a law prohibiting the sale of nonprescription contraceptives to minors younger than 16.[vi]

• In 1993, in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, ruled that a state cannot block the right of a woman to have an abortion before fetal viability.[vii]

When ruling on Casey, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor made one of the most sweeping statements on Constitutional protection of personal freedom and privacy,

“These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life… It is a promise of the Constitution that there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter… For two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.“[1]

Despite the US proclamations of being the oldest and most successful democracy in the world, as well as the legal gains we just reviewed, the US has yet to ratify such international documents as the Convention to End All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) created at the 1994 Cairo International Conference on Population and Development. The document states the clear and straightforward human rights of all women, such as the right to protection of reproductive rights and family planning choices, the right to quality standards of sexual and reproductive health and the “ability of a woman to control her own fertility as fundamental to her enjoyment of the full range of human rights to which she is entitled.”[i] How can we declare ourselves to be a land where all rights are recognized when the State cannot publically announce its intention to protect the rights of all women?

To add insult to injury, with the Obama Administration’s push for a health care reform, we’ve seen some potentially dangerous setbacks to the gains we’ve made over the years with regard to women’s reproductive rights. The reform debate has ushered in such regressive, discriminatory legislation as the Stupak-Pitts Amendment. The amendment puts a ban on publicly-funded health insurance (the new Health Insurance Exchange) coverage of abortions, and even prohibits the right of women receiving a federal subsidy to purchase health insurance that includes abortion coverage, or to pay out of pocket for abortions. The amendment attempts to placate pro-choice supporters by offering the option of a separate, single-service “abortion rider,” which either do not exist or are not readily available in many states. This amendment would force insurance companies to create two separate plans, those that cover abortion for unsubsidized individuals and those that do not for subsidized individuals, which experts say is a highly unlikely prospect. Therefore, essentially the Stupak-Pitts Amendment is a ban on abortion coverage for all women, subsidized or not, which is directly counter to what the Obama administration has promised to the country of those currently insured not losing any coverage. This amendment most adversely affects women of color and immigrant women because of their likelihood to be poorer and less likely to afford uncovered abortion procedures;  which ultimately means they are at a higher risk of seeking unsafe alternatives.[ii] The Stupak-Pitts Amendment undermines all the gains made over the last century in favor of women’s reproductive rights and is a dangerous step is this country’s reform efforts.

Another blow to the rights instituted by Roe v. Wade is the attempt to “codify” the Hyde Amendment, a ban created in 1976 preventing low income women from accessing abortion services through the federally-funded Medicaid program. With the current reform discussion, Conservative Congressional representatives are eager to prevent private insurance companies participating in the Exchange from being able to offer abortion coverage – essentially denying women the right to an abortion. And more importantly, this amendment will deny low income women and women of color safe, accessible abortion procedures.[iii]

***Health Care Reform ToolKit***

Visit Planned Parenthood’s Action Center to learn the latest updates and actions you can take part in.

Declare that you are not a “pre-existing condition by joining the new campaign of the National Women’s Law Center.

Or, go to any of these sites to find the group that’s right for you:

National Asian Women’s Health Organization

Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice

National Latina Health Network

Black Women’s Health Imperative

Center for Reproductive Rights

National Organization for Women

**********************************

CONCLUSION

Women’s full participation in this country cannot be achieved without the recognition of those in power of a women’s autonomy and right to control her life circumstances, including whether, where and for how much she will work; family planning choices that incorporate access to all options including contraception and abortion; and access to the highest standards of care for any and all reproductive and general health care issues. There is no room for compromise in this cause. We have waited too long, struggled and sacrificed too much to continually have our needs put aside for the “greater good.”

We must move past our history of repression based on the perception that women cannot make informed decisions because they are “overly emotional” and irrational creatures. We must also stop thinking of women as a collective, homogenous group; women come from varied and diverse backgrounds and cultural systems that call for different ways of approaching issues. Women are fully capable of assessing their life circumstances and judging what options are most appropriate for them.

(C) 2010 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

[ii] Ibid. p.87.

[iii] Ibid. p.88.

[iv] Ibid. p.101.

[v] Ibid. p.87.

[vi] Ibid. p.88.

[vii] Ibid. p.88.

[viii] Ibid. p.89.

[ix] Ibid. p.89.

[x] Ibid. p.108.

[xi] Ibid. p.111.

[xii] Ibid. p.112.

[i] “The ‘SisterSong Collective’: Women of Color, Reproductive Health, and Human Rights.” American Journal of Health

Studies, 2001. pp. 79-88. http://www.sistersong.net/publications_and_articles/AJHS_SisterSong_2001.pdf.

[ii] “Impact of Stupak Amendment on Access to Abortion Coverage and Care.” Planned Parenthood Policy Brief.

http://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/healthreform/668.htm.

[iii] “Codifying” Hyde: How Pro-Choice is Our Government?” Abigail Eve. Change.org.

http://womensrights.change.org/blog/view/codifying_hyde_how_pro-choice_is_our_government.

Report on Public Policy. October 2003. Volume 6, Number 4. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/06/4/gr060404.html.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv]Ibid.

[v] ACLU website. http://www.aclu.org/guardians-freedom.

[vi] “What Lawrence v. Texas Says About the History and Future Of Reproductive Rights.” Cynthia Dailard. The Guttmacher

Report on Public Policy. October 2003. Volume 6, Number 4. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/06/4/gr060404.html.

[vii] Ibid.

http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/columnists_blogs/other_views/story/247764.html

[ii] Kaiser Foundation Women’s Health Policy Fact Sheet. October 2009. http://www.kff.org/womenshealth/upload/6000-08.pdf.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] “Putting Women’s Health Care Disparities on the Map: Examining Racial and Ethnic Disparities at the State

Level: New Mexico.” Kaiser Family Foundation. June 2009. http://www.kff.org/minorityhealth/7886.cfm.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Ibid.

[xv] Kaiser Foundation Women’s Health Policy Fact Sheet. October 2009. http://www.kff.org/womenshealth/upload/6000-08.pdf.

[xvi] “The ‘SisterSong Collective’: Women of Color, Reproductive Health, and Human Rights.” American Journal of Health

Studies, 2001. pp. 79-88. http://www.sistersong.net/publications_and_articles/AJHS_SisterSong_2001.pdf.

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Sister Song online. http://www.sistersong.net/.

[xix] Ibid.

[xx] “The ‘SisterSong Collective’: Women of Color, Reproductive Health, and Human Rights.” American Journal of Health

Studies, 2001. pp. 79-88. http://www.sistersong.net/publications_and_articles/AJHS_SisterSong_2001.pdf.

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Ibid.

[xxiv] Ibid.

[xxv] Ibid.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] Ibid.

[xxviii] Ibid.

[xxix] “Single Mothers in California: Understanding Their Health Insurance Coverage.” Roberta Wyn & Victoria D.

Ojeda. May 2002. UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/pubs/Publication.aspx?pubID=21.

[xxx] Ibid.

[xxxi] Ibid.

[xxxii] “What You Need to Know: Young People and Health Insurance.” RaisingWomensVoices.net.

http://www.raisingwomensvoices.net/storage/pdf_files/RWV-YoungWomenFactSheet.pdf.

[xxxiii] Ibid.

[xxxiv] Ibid.

[xxxv] Ibid.

[xxxvi] “Young Americans and Health Insurance Reform: Giving Young Americans the Security and Stability They

Need.” 2009. HealthReform.gov. http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/youngadults/index.html.

[xxxvii] “2004 Annual Conference on Access to Health Care, Medicare, and Social Security as Women’s Issues.” The

National Council for Research on Women. http://www.ncrw.org/research/Conference_Summaries/STEM/Healthcare.pdf.

[xxxviii] Kaiser Foundation Women’s Health Policy Fact Sheet, October 2009, http://www.kff.org/womenshealth/upload/6000-08.pdf.

[xxxix] Ibid.

[xl] “2004 Annual Conference on Access to Health Care, Medicare, and Social Security as Women’s Issues.” The

National Council for Research on Women. http://www.ncrw.org/research/Conference_Summaries/STEM/Healthcare.pdf.

[xli] Kaiser Foundation Women’s Health Policy Fact Sheet, October 2009, http://www.kff.org/womenshealth/upload/6000-08.pdf

[xlii] “Reproductive Rights in Theory and Practice: The Meaning of Roe v. Wade for Women in Prison,” Rachel Roth. 1/20/06.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/01/b1363953.html.

[xliii] Ibid.

[xliv] Ibid.

[xlv] “Giving Birth in Chains: The Shackling of Incarcerated Women During Labor and Delivery.” Anna Clark.

Reproductive Health Reality Check. 12/6/09. http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2009/07/06/giving-birth-chains-the-shackling-incarcerated-women-during-labor-and-delivery.

[xlvi] Reproductive Rights in Theory and Practice: The Meaning of Roe v. Wade for Women in Prison,” Rachel Roth.

1/20/06. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/01/b1363953.html.

[xlvii] “The ‘SisterSong Collective’: Women of Color, Reproductive Health, and Human Rights.” American Journal of Health

Studies, 2001. pp. 79-88. http://www.sistersong.net/publications_and_articles/AJHS_SisterSong_2001.pdf.

[xlviii] “Pregnancy and Reproductive Rights Related Sentencing and Probation Conditions.”

AdvocatesforPregnantWomen.org.

http://advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/issues/procreation_penalties/pregnancy_and_reproductive_rights_related.php

[xlix] Ibid.

[l] “Maloney: Restore Reproductive Rights Agenda.” Allison Stevens. WomensENews.org. January 26, 2009.

http://www.womensenews.org/story/washington-outlookcongresswhite-house/090126/maloney-restore-reproductive-rights-agenda.

[li] “Military Women Should Have Full Access to Reproductive Health Care.” National Women’s Law Center.

http://www.nwlc.org/pdf/AccessReproHealth.pdf.

[lii] “Sexual Orientation/Gender Identity Fact Sheet.”American Medical Student Association.

http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:orcLlmNA2nEJ:www.amsa.org/AMSA/Libraries/Initiative_Docs/LGBT.sflb.ashx+intersex+women+barriers+to+health+care&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a.

[liii] Ibid.

[liv] Ibid.

[lv] Ibid.

[lvi] Ibid.

[lvii] “An Overview of U.S. Trans Health Priorities: A Report by the Eliminating Disparities Working Group

August 2004 Update.” National Coalition for LGBT Health. http://www.lgbthealth.net/downloads/research/US_Trans_Health_Piorities.pdf.

[lviii] Ibid.

[lix] Ibid.

[lx] Ibid.

[lxi] Ibid.

[lxii] Ibid.

[lxiii] “Immigrant Women’s Health a Casualty in the Immigration Policy War.” Aishia Glasford and Priscilla Huang. National

Women’s Health Network. March/April 2008. http://www.nwhn.org/newsletter/article1.cfm?newsletterarticles_id=228.

[lxiv] Ibid.

[lxv] “The ‘SisterSong Collective’: Women of Color, Reproductive Health, and Human Rights.” American Journal of Health

Studies, 2001. pp. 79-88. http://www.sistersong.net/publications_and_articles/AJHS_SisterSong_2001.pdf.

[lxvi] “Immigrant Women’s Health a Casualty in the Immigration Policy War.” Aishia Glasford and Priscilla Huang. National

Women’s Health Network. March/April 2008. http://www.nwhn.org/newsletter/article1.cfm?newsletterarticles_id=228.

[lxvii] “MU researcher says older American women face unique barriers in healthcare.” News-Medical.net. 12/16/09.

http://www.news-medical.net/news/20091216/MU-researcher-says-older-American-women-face-unique-barriers-in-healthcare.aspx.

[lxviii] Ibid.

[lxix] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[lxx] Ibid.

[lxxi] Ibid.

[lxxii] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David

Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[lxxiii] Ibid.

[lxxiv] Jay, Dru Oja. “AIDS, Africa and Aid.” Monkeyfist online. 3/18/03. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/838.

[lxxv] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David

Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[lxxvi] Ibid.

[lxxvii] Ibid.

[lxxviii] Ibid.

“Today’s Young Republican is a young professional between the ages of 18 and 40 looking to make a positive difference in their community and the nation.”[i]

• The Young Republican National Federation currently has over 800 clubs in 46 states and continues to grow.[ii]

• Some polls show that an increasing amount of incoming students on college campuses hold conservative views on current issues. Conservative does not necessarily indicate students who identify themselves as right-wing or Republicans, says Linda Sax, the U.C.L.A. Institute’s associate director. She goes on to say, “Students’ opinions of particular issues are not always in line with their own self-placement on an ideological spectrum.” And so the conservative campus groups acknowledge this and work not to persuade college students to agree with their ideology, but rather convince the students that they already hold the conservative views inherent in the conservative Republican party.[iii]

• The CRNC includes 120,000 college students on 1,148 campuses throughout the country. The organization has claimed a tripling of its membership and credits its increase to outreach programs (such as the Field Program, Women’s Outreach, Minority Outreach and Jewish Outreach). The College Republican National Committee claimed the forefront of the effort to bring young college students to the Republican party as the country prepared for the 2004 elections, and now as the country prepares for four more years of the Bush administration.[iv]

• The creators of the Bucknell University Conservatives Club describe themselves and other conservative collegiates as “defenders of ‘individuality’ and ‘freedom’ against a campus, and world, overrun by groupthink liberalism and pious political correctness… despite the common perception of youth being synonymous with progressive, liberal ideals, the true spirit of their generation is solidly, if quietly, conservative.”[v]

• The CRNC lists as its shared values with minority constituents of the country some of the following: Some of these values include: “supporting strong communities and families, making a quality education available to every child and student, realizing the importance of a single market economy, opportunity and diversity, and ensuring that individual liberties are preserved.”[vi] None of this speaks to any specifics whatsoever; noting nothing that would signify that the minority communities suffer under different circumstances in this country that should be specifically addressed by the Republican party.

• “To find the best place to recruit young Hispanics, African Americans and other minorities to the Party, one needs not look farther then their own college campus. MPT (MI PARTIDO TAMBIEN, the Republican party’s campaign recruit young minorities to the Party) representatives are currently part of the CRNC field program and have been sent to targeted states for outreach.”[vii] While the Republican party is making a concerted effort to engage minority college students in their party’s efforts and interests, does this campaign really signify a sincere desire to engage the country’s minority citizens as a whole?

• 4.3 million minority students between the ages of 18 and 24 attended college between 2000-01 (up from just 2 million between 1980-81). Despite these gains, only 40 percent of African-Americans and 34 percent of Hispanics attend college, compared to 46 percent of whites.[viii] The director of the Office of Minorities in Education for the ACE (American Council on Education), William Harvey, said the study conducted by his organization are a direct reflection of American social norms, “The gaps relate to some of the real fundamental social and economic conditions in this country.”

• Young Americans for Freedom; Young America’s Foundation; the Leadership Institute; the Collegiate Network; the Intercollegiate Studies Institute; The College Republican National Committee; Young Republican National Federation; Young Republicans state chapters; Grand Old Cause; Students for Academic Freedom; Committee for Freedom; Leadership Institute; Hoosier Review;

HOW

“Through [these] coordinated activities, these groups have embarked in the last three years on a concerted campus recruitment drive to turn temperamentally conservative youngsters into organized right-wing activists.”[ix]

• The College Republican National Committee launched an aggressive direct-mail fundraising campaign, soliciting over $10 million from individual donors; much of their other costs are not met by corporations, but by a select group of individuals. This select group of wealthy individuals consists mostly of older Republicans, four individuals/couples that donated over $100,000 each and the RNC which donated $25,000 in 2002.[x]

• CRNC hired an independent direct-mail firm to manage the solicitations, Response Dynamics, Inc.[xi]

• Conservative groups are funding the push for an expanded right-wing presence on college campuses nationwide by: cash donations for the creation and maintenance of conservative campus newspapers; offering free training in ”conservative leadership,” and often paying for travel to their ”publishing programs”; lecture fees for celebrity right-wing speakers also provide extra funding.[xii]

• Conservative campus newspapers are on the rise again. The history of campus conservative newspapers is often nostalgically remembered as the victim of an overwhelming liberal campus presence, an atmosphere in which they are uncomfortably the minority. Their autobiographical account portrays the victimized conservative newspapers history as a “ continuing story of conservative journalism on campus. It is an inspiring story of shoestring budgets, sleepless nights, and perseverance in the face of what is still often fierce student, and occasionally administration, animosity. It is a story that demonstrates one of the founding premises of modern American conservatism. As the famous title of one of Richard Weaver’s books puts it, “Ideas have consequences.”[xiii]

STRATEGY

“The well-funded national organizations backing the young right encourage campus conservatives to see themselves as oppressed minorities. ‘Young America’s Foundation alleviates the isolation so many young conservatives face,’ says a brochure for the National Conservative Student Conference. Another YAF pamphlet says its speakers ‘energize students in the fight for freedom on campus against radically anti-American, leftist professors.’”[xiv]

• “Liberal Arts faculties at most universities are politically and philosophically one-sided, while partisan propagandizing often intrudes into classroom discourse. It is appropriate for faculty to want open-minded students in their classes, not disciples,” said conservative activist David Horowitz, which sparked a debate on the country’s college campuses about the repression of conservative student’s rights and representation on campuses in 2004.[xv]

• This is called framing, theorized as the selection of “…some aspects of a perceived reality [that] make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.”[xvi]

• Framing of conservative issues portrayed the necessity to protect and ensure the rights and representation of conservative student’s interests on college campuses due to perceived suppression by the academic institutions and progressive/liberal students. So, the Students for Academic Freedom, a conservative students group based in D.C., led the effort to pass the Academic Bill of Rights, “a proposal to ensure political diversity on campus.”[xvii]

• Due to the particular framing of this issue, college campus chapters of the Students for Academic Freedom have popped up on at least 135 campuses to protect conservative viewpoints.  The group, along with David Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture, has successfully assured its members and many of the college governments that it is appropriate to keep a record of professors’ party affiliation. The database reported that at 32 campuses Democrats outnumber registered Republicans, with a large number of faculty listed as unaffiliated. Particularly interesting is the lack of adequate information to indicate whether the registered faculty are conservative Democrats or liberal Republicans. Consequently, the study cannot provide adequate evidence to support its conclusion that “most students probably graduate without ever having a class taught by a professor with a conservative viewpoint.” This study and the efforts of the Students for Academic Freedom therefore cannot be regarded as a serious argument, rather as a framed story, one with an agenda and with no sufficient evidence to back it up.

If the frame of campuses dominated by left-wing professors is accepted then it doesn’t matter if the data used to support that position is faulty. Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist, David Kelly, wrote in a November 29, 2003 column: ‘Some students have complained of being forced to attend abortion-rights rallies, of being required to write essays critical of  the Bush administration and of having a strident anti-religion agenda pushed on them. Some who protested have said they received poor grades or were asked to leave the class.’ Kelly provides no evidence for these charges.[xviii]

• Defense of Civilization Fund, a right-wing think tank headed by Lynne Chaney published a report recently, Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can be Done About It, criticized both anti-war students and faculty expression of opposition to the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. The report contends that the solution to this threatening problem of American freedom of expression is rigorous curriculum devoted to promoting “…America’s continuing struggle to extend the principles on which it was founded…We need to know, in a time of war, exactly what is at stake.”[xix] Most distressing is the fact that the report lists the names and positions of 117 students and faculty and the “un-patriotic” statements that they have made. To make the list one’s statement need not to have been explicit; the report cites the some of the following as dangerous to national security and anti-American:

Break the cycle of violence.
We have to learn to use courage for peace instead of war.
Ignorance breeds hate.
We need to hear more then one perspective on how we can make the world a safer place.[xx]

• Yet another example of framing: A survey conducted and published by the Independent Women’s Forum last week has been used to reveal that there has been an “unprecedented swing to right-wing politics on college campuses” by a journalist for UWire, the internet-based U.S. university news source. The study and journalist cites evidence for this swing to an overwhelming swing to right by focusing on findings such as, “The study was aimed at gauging student reactions to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., and reported 96 percent of college students feel ‘changed’ since that time… A strong military is ‘extremely important’ to 80 percent of the 600 students from 300 college campuses who were included in the survey. That’s only an average of 2 students for each school that was surveyed!

Research compiled while serving as the Research Associate for Oakland Institute, 2005.

(C) 2009 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

[ii] Young Republican National Federation website, http://yrnf.com/portal/alias_Rainbow/lang_en-US/tabID_3332/DesktopDefault.aspx.

[iii] Colapinto, John, “The Young Hipublicans,” Young Americans for Freedom, http://yaf.com/hipublicans.shtml.

[iv] The College Republican National Committee website, http://crnc.org/default1.asp.

[v] Colapinto, John, “The Young Hipublicans,” Young Americans for Freedom, http://yaf.com/hipublicans.shtml.

[vi] The College Republican National Committee website, http://crnc.org/default1.asp.

[vii] The College Republican National Committee website, http://crnc.org/default1.asp.

[viii] “Number of minorities in college doubles, CNN.com, 10/09/03, http://cnn.com/2003/EDUCATION/10/09/colleges.race.ap/. This article laid out some of the findings of the Minorities in Higher Education Annual Status Report issued by the American Council on Education, a Washington-based umbrella organization representing the nation’s largest institutions of higher education.

[ix] Colapinto, John, “The Young Hipublicans,” Young Americans for Freedom, http://yaf.com/hipublicans.shtml.

[x] O’Donnell, Meghan, “Young Money: College Republicans show how to play the fundraising game,” Center for Public Integrity, 09/25/03, http://www.publicintegrity.org/527/report.aspx?aid=10.

[xi] O’Donnell, Meghan, “Young Money: College Republicans show how to play the fundraising game,” Center for Public Integrity, 09/25/03, http://public-i.org/527/report.aspx?aid=10.

[xii] Colapinto, John, “The Young Hipublicans,” Young Americans for Freedom, http://yaf.com/hipublicans.shtml.

[xiii] Kabala, Bolek, “The Alternatives: A brief history and celebration of conservative newspapers on campus,”   National Review Online, 1/23/03, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-kabala012303.asp.

[xiv] Wendling, Zach, “The Young Right Wing Conspiracy,” The Hoosier Review, 09/06/04, http://www.hoosierreview.com/archives/000253.html#000253.

[xv] Pike, Jon R., “The Right Wing on College Campuses and the Battle of the Frame,” The Free Press: Speaking Truth to Power, 12/01/04, http://freepress.org/departments/display/21/2004/962.

[xvi] Pike, Jon R., “The Right Wing on College Campuses and the Battle of the Frame,” The Free Press: Speaking Truth to Power, 12/01/04, http://freepress.org/departments/display/21/2004/962.

[xvii] Pike, Jon R., “The Right Wing on College Campuses and the Battle of the Frame,” The Free Press: Speaking Truth to Power, 12/01/04, http://freepress.org/departments/display/21/2004/962.

[xviii] Pike, Jon R., “The Right Wing on College Campuses and the Battle of the Frame,” The Free Press: Speaking Truth to Power, 12/01/04, http://freepress.org/departments/display/21/2004/962.

[xix] Bernt, Dave, “Right-wingers witch hunt universities,” Youth 4 Socialist Action, http://geocities.com/youth4sa/s11-universities.html. Review of a recent Time magazine article, The Rights New Wing, describing the surge in the new young right-wing, conservative campus groups and their strategies.

[xx] Bernt, Dave, “Right-wingers witch hunt universities,” Youth 4 Socialist Action, http://geocities.com/youth4sa/s11-universities.html.

Following the Second World War in 1944, President Roosevelt convened a United Nations-sponsored (the UN at this time not officially formed yet) monetary and financial conference at Bretton Woods to discuss redevelopment of devastated areas due to the destruction of the wars. Ultimately it was in the conferences’ plans to create a Bank of Reconstruction and Development. This “bank” is today known as the World Bank and the addition of the word “development” was a controversial move according to some of the conference members, specifically those from Latin American countries; for the concept of “development” was to indicate assistance given to economically disadvantaged countries that had long suffered under colonial occupation. The overall result of the end of World War II and the Bretton Woods conference was a general split of the world into two camps: the US-led capitalist ideological, political and economic bloc and the Soviet-led socialist ideological, political and economic bloc- and the two camps proceeded to battle for world allegiance through development aid and military programs.[2]

Starting in Europe, the United States made an agreement, the Marshall Plan, which instituted a new aid design, ultimately benefiting the supplier of aid, not the receiver. Marianne Gronemeyer says of the new deal, “In reality, the package of measures was the prototype of all future self-help, though it nevertheless remained a public gesture of giving. World politics had never before been so elegant. The boundaries between giving and taking were blurred to the point of unrecognizability.”[3]

In 1948, UN Resolution 200 aimed to recognize the “technical backwardness” of the “underdeveloped” nations of the world and the commitment of “developed” nations to assist them in modernizing. President Truman said of this new effort,

“More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas… We invite other countries to pool their technological resources in this undertaking. Their contributions will be warmly welcomed. This should be a cooperative enterprise in which all nations work together through the United Nations and its specialized agencies whenever practicable… The old imperialism – exploitation for foreign profit – has no place in our plans. What we envisage is a program of development based on the concepts of democratic fair dealing.”[4]

This became the basis for the hegemonic assault of the industrialized nations upon the rest of the world, not to mention the absolute refusal of these nations to recognize their part in creating the abject poverty experienced throughout the Global South.

The shift in focus from promoting individual and community subsistence that values diversity and local control, to a global-led marketplace that devalues such ideas and has allowed for the promotion and prioritization of development / aid projects that displace millions in the name of modernization; promote profits for corporations not people; undermine the autonomy of countries, subjecting them to the influence of richer and more politically and militarily powerful countries; culturally appropriate family planning and control by women over their own bodies and reproductive choices; an increased number of people unable to provide for their most basic needs with their own land and labor; destruction of  environments that for centuries have provided communities with all of their needs—these realities are the real foundation of modern aid programs. Enclosure of the commons throughout the world has also included the sale of communal lands to pay off national debt and the privatization of public services, all of which take communal control away from citizens and give it over to governments and corporations.

THE FACTS

• USAID is an independent federal government agency that is directed by the Secretary of State. USAID provides assistance to recipient countries through agriculture, democracy and governance, economic growth, education, environment, political partnerships and humanitarian assistance. There are different forms that this aid takes, for example “bilateral” or “multilateral” aid. Bilateral aid is when the donor country gives directly to the recipient country. Multilateral aid is when the donor country gives indirectly by giving the funds to institutions governed by member countries (such as the World Bank) who then decides which countries get aid and how much.[5]

• “A 2001 poll sponsored by the University of Maryland showed that most Americans think the United States spends about 24 percent of its annual budget on foreign aid—more than 24 times the actual figure.”[6] In fact, although the US gives the most in foreign aid (in dollar amounts) annually, the US is in last place when that amount is compared to the nation’s gross national income, giving less than 1% of America’s total economy.[7]

• In an attempt to convince the US public that USAID benefits American tax-payers, in 1995 the director of the U.S. aid agency defended USAID on the basis that 84 cents of every dollar of aid goes back into the U.S. economy in goods and services purchased. For example, in 2000, 71.6% of U.S. bilateral aid commitments were tied to the purchase of goods and services from the U.S.[8] While this may assuage the concerns of US tax payers, it does little to nothing to contribute to the alleviation of poverty and hunger throughout the world, instead lining the pockets of US corporations is the ultimate end of USAID. OECD (the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) and the World Bank criticized USAID’s self-serving agenda saying, “‘Among the big donors, the US has the worst record for spending its aid budget on itself – 70 percent of its aid is spent on US goods and services.”[9]
• Who and how countries receive US aid has always been determined by national goals and issues perceived to be important—it has little to nothing to do with poverty and alleviation of the suffering of the world’s poor. The Institute for Food and Development Policy says, “When our levels of assistance last boomed, under Ronald Reagan in the mid-1980s, the emphasis was hardly on eliminating hunger. In 1985, Secretary of State George Shultz stated flatly that “our foreign assistance programs are vital to the achievement of our foreign policy goals.”[10]

• This focus on fulfilling donor country interests has become more apparent since September 11^th with an increased push by the Bush administration to encourage capitalist democracy-building throughout the globe, especially in the Middle East. When countries goals fall in line with US political and economic ideology, the US has not hesitated to fund their efforts.[11]

• Although the Bush administration has given preference to aid grants over aid loans, “arguing that giving loans to poor states that can’t repay them simply drives them deeper into debt,” seems to convey a sense of compassion and altruism on the part of the United States.[12] Yet when one looks deeper at the conditions placed on “free money” grants, one begins to understand the real motives of the Bush administration. Conditions are put on the grants, for example to make recipient countries liable to trade agreements that make them import only from the US in certain industries and to produce national exports that provide for the US only. Not to mention instituting widespread privatization and elimination of critical public services, all in an effort to make the country more “profitable” and able to pay back its debts—this is known as Structural Adjustment Programs. The citizenry truly suffers at the hands of these “free money” grants.

• In 2004, US aid to the Middle East reached 38 percent of the total $38.7 billion Congressional-appropriated funds for foreign aid. At the top of the list of aid recipient countries, Iraq received $18 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars; Israel was second in line, receiving $2.62 billion, followed closely by Egypt, who received $1.87 billion; and Afghanistan received $1.77 billion.[13] The vast majority of aid is not going to the poorest countries in the world, thereby further supporting the fact that the USAID program is not ultimately set up to eliminate the world’s social crises, but to fund its global political, economic and military allies.

AID THREATENS A COUNTRY’S AUTONOMY

• The underlying intent of aid programs takes its lead from the past exploits of colonialism, which in effect were intent on destroying the infrastructure of a colony in order to establish and maintain the colonies’ dependence on the “Mother” country. [14] This being the ultimate foundation to US aid assistance was never more clearly stated than by former Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, when in 1982 he was quoted as saying, “I have heard . . . that people may become dependent on us for food. I know that was not supposed to be good news. To me that was good news, because before people can do anything they have got to eat. And if you are looking for a way to get people to lean on you and to be dependent on you, in terms of their cooperation with you, it seems to me that food dependence would be terrific.”[15]

• Development not only proposes to aid in the easing of social crisis such as hunger and disease, but also intends to advance the economic standing of an “underdeveloped” country. Yet the system under which development aid is currently enacted (and has been for centuries) disallows for the advancement of an economically weaker country to develop a strong economic base. This is mainly based on the intent of development agreements forcing countries to switch their economies to export-based commodities, ultimately setting up poorer countries to become suppliers for the needs of the richer countries and the dumping grounds for the rich countries’ surplus commodities. Measures are in place to squelch any kind of attempt by the poorer countries to develop a sustainable domestic economy, such as: the stigmatization of these countries of practicing import substitution; the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to regulate trade amongst the nations of the world from a perspective that ultimately benefits the more industrialized nations; only lending to countries that agree to invest in domestic industry that is competitive within the global market (basically export commodities).[16]

• In the early 1950’s one of the first devastating results of the aid programs was the destruction of food producing technology and the ability of “Third World” countries to feed themselves. The very influential farm lobby convinced the US Congress to pass PL480 Food for Peace in 1945, ensuring that immense US, Canadian and eventually all industrialized nations’ crop surpluses could be dumped on the “Third World”; churches and other charitable organizations eagerly joined in the “superdumping” which eventually destroyed “underdeveloped” countries ability to rely on traditional technologies and ways of knowing how to nourish their own people.^[17]

• “…food aid-based development projects continue to depend on foreign expertise, knowledge, and outside resources to generate income. These projects are not self-sufficient, nor are they sustainable when the aid ends. Not surprisingly, food aid-based development projects have historically been failures.” Michael Maren, former food-aid manager, says, “Africa is littered with the ruins of such projects.”[18]
• Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) created by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and instituted through loan agreements, demand that borrowing countries must dismantle the vast majority of domestic, economic and social structures in order to free up all resources for repayment of aid loans through various channels: the destruction of welfare provisions and universal health care; the removal of protective tariffs on imports that are set up to protect local economies; removal of regulations against foreign investment which threatens local industry; the conversion of local agricultural enterprises into export-oriented monocultures; the elimination of price controls; the imposition of wage controls, ensuring that more and more people remain in poverty; the privatization of government agencies that result in less and less democratic control of public services and resources.[19]

• When a country signs on for USAID grants or loans it must then agree to certain terms in order for the aid to continue. These terms are called “conditionalities.” The way these conditionalities are instituted is by a process of breaking down the aid into small disbursements, which are only released when a country has instituted policy changes directed by the “covenants” of the aid agreement between the two countries. For example, the US and Costa Rican government aid agreement included twenty structural changes to the Costa Rican economy implemented between 1982 and 1990, which included such stipulations as: the elimination of a grain market board that assisted small farmers; drastic reduction in prices of locally grown corn, beans and rice; further opening of the market to US imports; and the elimination of many regulations on foreign investment and capital flows.[20]

• Bush’s initiative, the Millennium Challenge Account, is designed to improve bilateral giving to poor countries throughout the world. Despite Bush’s efforts to ensure that the MCA is as effective as possible by declaring that it will be an independently run body, one cannot ignore the fact that the MCA will have a CEO appointed by the President and approved by Senate and run by US cabinet-level officials.[21] Non-biased running of the MCA seems unlikely when all staff is approved by the President and surely influenced by his administration’s political ideology and goals. Further highlighting this gratuitous influence, conditions for eligibility into the Millennium Challenge Account include assessment by the Institutional Investor Magazine of a country’s credit rating and the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s assessment of a country’s liberal trade policies.[22]

• Nancy Alexander, director of the Citizens’ Network on Essential Services (a development organization concerned about western aid’s history of being used a as a way to promote corporate interests in poor countries) says of Bush’s MCA, “With this kind of program, there’s so much more leverage on poor countries to cave in to what the West’s view of good policies is.” Also highly critical of the MCA, Doug Hellinger, president of the Washington policy group Development GAP, says “It looks like the money will be used to bribe countries to follow the neo-liberal path at a time when that whole adjustment paradigm has proved to be a failure.”

• Refusal in the past by the G8 to forgive the overwhelming debt burden carried by the poorest countries in the world has promoted the inability of many of these countries to provide necessary services to their citizens in deference to obligations for paying back debt. For example, over the past decade, African countries have been forced to institute SAPs which have included cuts to critical health services that could have slowed or stopped the AIDS crisis.[23]

• At the most recent G8 meeting, a decision was reached on the cancellation of the world’s poorest countries’ debt burden—100% of IMF and multilateral debts for 18 deeply indebted countries was forgiven. While this is a great victory, there is still much to be concerned about with regard to the process of relieving the overall debt held by the poorest countries in the world; for example, for a country to be considered for debt relief, it must institute devastating SAPs that ultimately benefit corporate interests over the wellbeing of the citizenry. These required policies are outlined in the HIPC Initiative (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) and, more importantly, these conditions have not been proven to increase per capita income growth or reduce poverty. The US Jubilee Network is demanding that they be dropped from debt cancellation agreements and that the G8 extend the debt relief to an additional 62 countries that are dangerously entrenched in illegitimate debt.[24]

AID IS DIRECTLY TIED TO INCREASED MILITARISM

• “While less than 1% of the U.S. budget goes to foreign aid, making it rank low among developed nations in the amount of humanitarian aid it provides to poorer countries, the U.S. government has given aid more often to reward political and military partners than to advance social or humanitarian causes abroad.”[25]

• Since Pakistan’s alliance with the US in the war in Afghanistan, the US has lifted a ban on aid to Pakistan and arranged for the World Bank to forgive $1 billion in loans to the country. Turkey, who previously never received any military aid from the US, is now the recipient of $17.5 million in military aid for providing assistance to the US in tracking terrorist networks in the region.[26]
• Since 9/11, there has been a significant increase of credits given to foreign militaries for the acquisition of US weapons and equipment—up $700 million dollars to a staggering $5 billion in such credits. [27]

• “Through trafficking, arms sales, and military aid, the United States helps keep dozens of civil wars and other armed conflicts around the world alive and kicking.” In the decade between 1985 and 1995, forty-five global conflicts were supplied with $42 billion in US military weapons and equipment. In one year alone (1993-1994) the US supplied one or more of the parties engaged in the fifty most serious conflicts across the globe with arms and other military equipment.[28]

• During their 35 year illegal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel has had the support of the US. Israel is not subject to the same conditions for aid that other countries are subject to; for example: Israel receives their aid in large lump sums of money at the beginning of each fiscal year (other countries are allotted only quarterly disbursements); Israel deposits its aid money directly into its general fund, which disallows for tracking and record keeping of how the aid money is used (other countries are given money for very specific purposes and must account for all expenses); Israel receives approximately 1/3 of US foreign aid budget for the fiscal year—this is unprecedented in the history of US foreign aid. All of this despite the fact that Israel is one of the wealthiest countries (highest per capita income) and only makes up .001% of the world’s population. The US aid to Israel accounts for more money than is given to all of Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean (when you leave out Egypt and Columbia).[29]

• “The direct and indirect aid from [2001] should put the total U.S. aid to Israel since 1949 at over one hundred billion dollars. What is not widely known, however, is that most of this aid violates American laws. The Arms Export Control Act stipulates that US-supplied weapons be used only for ‘legitimate self-defense.’”[30]

• This year Israel is receiving $2.04 billion in military aid and only $720 million in economic aid. Historically US aid to Israel has been 40% economic and 60% military, but recently a new plan has been implemented that will ensure that by 2008 all economic aid will be phased out and replaced by all military aid.[31]

• Despite Indonesia’s history of brutal repression and human rights abuses, the Bush administration has decided to reinstitute military ties and funding to Indonesia. Military aid will include US soldiers’ training of the Indonesian military in close-quarter combat and human rights issues, as well as adding Indonesia to the list of countries offered credits to obtain US weapons and military technology. [32]
• US militarization of regions that have received aid? The middle east has seen the increase in US military presence since the Gulf War.

WEAPONS INDUSTRY AND CORPORATE INTERESTS BOOM THANKS TO USAID

• “Over and above its foreign aid program, through numerous other public channels (not to mention covert ones like the CIA), the U.S. government supports policies that promote business interests, often in ways diametrically opposed to the interests of the hungry.”[33]

• Regarding Bush’s January 2003 reassessment of increasing aid to fight the global AIDS epidemic, some critics have proposed that the increase is just a way to subsidize pharmaceutical companies that lost out in political battles in the WTO. “What looks like a moment of heartfelt generosity on the part of the Bush regime is, in fact, a hard-nosed recognition that pharmaceutical companies around the world aren’t winning the PR battle to justify their monopolies,” said Raj Patel, a policy analyst and visiting fellow at UC Berkeley.[34]

• It has been suggested that the famine in Zambia, while very serious, was greatly exaggerated by biotech companies in an effort to boost sales of their genetically modified products. The case of aid to Zambia was an especially complex case because Zambia as a nation decided not to allow any genetically modified agricultural products or livestock into the country and therefore their acceptance of USAID, which consisted of GM grains, was rejected. The US not only denied having sufficient supplies of non-GM grains to provide to Zambia, it threatened to completely cut off aid to the country if Zambia did not bend to America’s agenda of dumping unpopular GM food surpluses as aid. Dr Charles Benbrook, leading US agronomist and former Executive Director of the Board on Agriculture for the US National Academy of Sciences, said, “There is no shortage of non-GMO foods which could be offered to Zambia and to use the needs of Zambians to score ‘political points’ on behalf of biotechnology was unethical and indeed shameless.”[35]

• Close to 25% of food aid provided by the US is in the form of PL480 Title I sales, which includes food sold to governments in the Global South intended for sale to local livestock industries and processing companies responsible for making such items as pasta, bread, cooking oil, etc. The catch is that the funds provided to the local business are to be used for purchasing US grains, thereby creating new and expanding markets for US agricultural corporations– Title I aid is basically corporate welfare. A study published by the University of Nebraska Press found that, “The food-aid program represents a free government service designed to help grain-trading companies expand both their current and future sales. Title I sales generate the same profits for the big U.S. grain companies as does any other commercial export. The only difference is that the U.S. government immediately pays the bill. From the point of view of the grain corporations, then, Title I creates immediate markets by having the U.S. government finance purchases that otherwise might not have been made. The recipient countries, meanwhile, come to depend on these foreign food supplies. . . . By encouraging the growth of poultry farms, wheat mills, and soap and vegetable-oil factories, PL 480 helps create a structural dependence on continued imports. When the food aid stops, these industries, needing the supplies to continue their level of operations, will pressure their governments to keep importing the commodities on commercial terms.”[36]

• Another food aid program, Food for Progress, created in 1985 was developed to “reward” governments for instituting SAPs in an effort to make their economies more profitable—ultimately leaving the citizens and their issues of survival by the wayside. Food for Progress was “designed to expand free enterprise elements of the economies of developing countries through changes in commodity pricing, marketing, import availability, and increased private-sector involvement.” The Institute for Food and Development Policy says of the legislation, “In other words, food is once again being used as a lever to open markets for U.S.-based corporations.” [37]

• According to many Indonesian NGOs, USAID funding of at least one environmental justice organization (the Indonesian Mining Advocacy Network, a Jakarta-based advocacy group known as JATAM) has been cut due to criticism of US mining corporations operating in Indonesia. Since democratically elected president, Abdurrahman Wahid, many government officials and environmental justice groups have openly criticized contracts signed under former dictatorships that ultimately aid in profit-making for the corporations and not the people or environment of Indonesia. In 1999, JATAM cited multiple human rights and environmental abuses due to mining, particularly critical of the Denver-based Newmont Mining Corporation. JATAM found that Newmont was dumping thousands of tons of toxic waste from mining operations directly into rivers and coastal waters from its Minahasa Raya gold mine located in North Sulawesi. Shortly after reporting their criticism to Newmont, the US Embassy in Indonesia said they received a complaint from Newmont admonishing the use of US taxpayers’ money to fund JATAM’s campaign against the US company. Kim Walz, a spokeswoman for USAID at the time confirmed that JATAM’s funding was not renewed, saying, “Doubts were raised about JATAM’s ability to give impartial assistance to communities and we determined that this was harmful to US goals.”[38]

AID DOES NOT ADDRESS THE REAL ISSUES

LABOR:

• “While the U.S.-funded [aid] programs, at times, have contributed to improving the technical capacity and infrastructure of the region’s labor ministries; provided employer and worker trainings on collective negotiations and labor dispute management; and published materials on labor relations in the region, none of these initiatives have successfully addressed the fundamental obstacles to workers’ human rights: inadequate labor laws and enforcement agencies that lack the political will to uphold labor rights.” [39]

• Starting in the 1980’s, USAID’s focus for development in foreign countries has included pushing agricultural laborers into competitive global export markets. So far USAID’s bullying of foreign agricultural markets to focus on these Non-Traditional Agricultural Exports have resulted in: risky ventures for already indebted and impoverished farmers; inability to produce for critically needy local consumption; a deepening of the impoverishment of already critically poor countries.[40] “… Unable to compete with better-financed growers, and heavily in debt because of high production costs, many small farmers have been driven out of business by trying to produce nontraditional exports. At the same time, chemical pesticides and fertilizers have seriously degraded the productive capacity of the soil in many regions and contaminated the environment,” says the Institute for Food and Development Policy.[41]

• The superdumping of US agricultural surpluses and the NTAE program has overwhelmed many poor countries with cheap, subsidized products that ultimately squeeze out local producers and commodities that cannot compete. Thus millions of small farmers have been put out of business, losing their ancestral lands, driving them into urban centers to compete for scarce, low-paying jobs and often putting these women into dangerous situations where they must now work at maquilladora factories and/or the sex-trade industry, often in unknown cities by themselves.[42]

• Title II development food aid is yet another program of USAID. This program hires those without jobs to do manual labor on infrastructure projects such as road work, bridge building, irrigation projects—work in exchange for food. The problem with this program is reminiscent of the old adage, “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime.” The program serves the immediate hunger needs of the poor and jobless, but in the end it ultimately only serves to line the pockets of wealthy land owners. Funding for the infrastructure projects are distributed to community leaders (which often is a single family or a few families that hold the most resources and wealth) who ultimately invest in projects that benefit their interests. The unemployed get temporary jobs and food, but often to the detriment of their own long-term domestic obligations (such as upkeep of their own land). Food-for-work programs do not serve to create sustainable solutions to hunger or poverty.[43]

THE GLOBAL HIV / AIDS CRISIS:

• As of December 2004, 37.2 million adults and 2.2 million children were reported to be infected with the AIDS virus. [44]

• In 2004, 4.9 million people were newly infected, of this 640,000 were children. [45]

• 3.1 million people died from AIDS in 2004. [46]

• By the end of 2003, 15 million children became orphans, losing their parents to AIDS.[47]

• Despite these staggering and heartbreaking numbers, the world’s eight richest countries (Germany, USA, Italy, France, Canada, Russia, Japan and UK), who promised in 2001 to make sure that the UN’s estimate of $10 billion needed to adequately fight AIDS be fulfilled, none of the countries have followed through with their promises. As of 2003, only $500 million had been contributed by the G8, that is less than 5% of the projected funds needed to cover global AIDS prevention and treatment programs. Bush tried to make amends by promising $15 billion in 2003 to go to such programs. The catch– Bush proposes the $15 billion be spread out over a four year period, thereby assuring that people who need the help now will still not receive it. For comparison sake: according to the G8’s 2001 plan, the US’s share of funding to go toward fighting AIDS is supposed to be $3.5 billion per year and yet the administration has appropriated $15 billion annually to go toward building nuclear weapons.[48]

WOMEN’S ISSUES:

• Three of five of  USAIDs global health goals are devoted to sexual and reproductive health issues and those policies are overtly influenced by conservative religious traditions. “… multi-faceted distortions in U.S. foreign aid based on conservative interpretations of religious tradition… undercut the effectiveness of U.S. investments in foreign aid in health, wasting scarce resources and allowing preventable illness, suffering and death to continue,” says Bonnie Shepard of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin America Studies.[49]

• In 2002, the U.S. government joined with Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and the Vatican at the UN Special Session on the Child to oppose comprehensive sexual health education and services for adolescents.[50]

• Abstinence programs are promoted above and beyond culturally appropriate family planning and therefore threaten the security of women’s health (unwanted pregnancies, dangerous and illegal abortions, high rates of contracting STD’s, etc.)

• Of the paltry amount promised by the US to fight the global AIDS epidemic, any organization that is part of that fight that also provides or even advocates abortions will not receive any funding. Also, it appears that Bush is advocating for programs to de-emphasize the use of condoms in prevention programs.[51]

• Despite research showing that abstinence only programs are ineffective for adolescents that have already begun to engage in sexual activity, a large portion of USAID money goes to funding abstinence only programs. “The logic is perverse: since it is morally frowned on for adolescents to have sex before marriage, programs should not protect their health when they do, thus subverting the very health goals of USAID strategy.”[52]

• Despite a declaration from the World Health Organization that emergency contraception is not the same thing as abortion, conservative religious groups’ lobbying has effectively removed funding of programs that support the right of women and even rape victims to have access to emergency contraception.[53]

• Conservative political pressure on the Center for Disease Control caused the organization to change a key HIV website, “Facts about Condoms and their Use in Preventing HIV Infection,” shifting emphasis to abstinence, condom failure rates and the elimination of the section on correct condom use.[54]

• Another of the three goals of USAID devoted to the reproductive health of women misses the mark– programs devoted to prevention of maternal mortality. The “global gag rule” prevents any programs that receive US funds from advocating abortions, thereby assuring that women must use illegal and very dangerous means to abort unwanted pregnancies.[55]

• “Indeed, the Global Gag Rule violates two central tenets of U.S. foreign assistance: 1) to administer taxpayer funds efficiently, with maximum benefits to the recipients of U.S. aid and 2) to promote and support American democratic values abroad. Indeed, the Gag Rule is contrary to freedom of speech, a basic principle of democracy historically defended by the U.S., and also to a key foundation of international relations: respect for national sovereignty,” says Shepard.[56]

• Historically, women have been solely relegated to the “welfare sphere” of development aid plans and thus to invisibility and lowest of priorities for development concerns. Basically women’s needs have been defined as those related to being housewives and mothers and addressing how to help women be more efficient at those two roles and most importantly the facilitation is described and implemented with no consultation of the women themselves. It seems development aid in these areas has been more medicinal than preventative or empowering. Change in this perspective began a slow climb with the UN making special mention of women’s needs increasingly throughout the decades of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Finally, the 90’s were declared to be the decade “… to translate greater understanding of the problems of women into altered priorities…Empowering women for development should have high returns in terms of increased output, greater equity and social progress.” The International Women’s Conference of 1975 was concerned with equality (not just assistance) and the creation of a reality that allowed women to be equal economic contributors to their communities. ^[57]

• Despite the goals of the 1975 International Women’s Conference, recent studies have found that women are neither beneficiary nor agent of development assistance programs and, in fact, development often works against the lives of women.[58] Troublesome are these governmental and Western-influenced development agencies’ tendency to make proclamations of being in the service of uplifting women, when in fact their schemes are void of any meaningful empowerment.  Their schemes tend to be more lip-service, as they rarely allow women to be active agents through self-definition of needs/priorities and culturally appropriate solutions. Consequently, the women are twice oppressed, by the cultural discriminations they often face and the backstabbing of the development programs that promise power to affect liberation but that ultimately shut them out of the decision-making process.

• For example, Congress responded to the gender disparity in aid programs by passing a new requirement to be added to USAID projects—that the projects’ descriptions include both “women and men” as beneficiaries. Replacement of the word “men” with both “women and men” has not successfully implemented any serious changes to how women are regarded in assistance programs; at most, it has only included their gender in formal documents and allows any compliant against the projects to be countered with the proclamation that both women and men were included in the projects considerations.[59]

ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION:

• In 2002 the Secretary of State Colin Powell was to report to Congress on US compliance with regulations required of the aerial spraying program, designed to eradicate illegal cocoa plants in Columbia. Funding of this program is provided through US aid to Columbia and the program is required to adhere to all regulations as outlined by the Environmental Protection Agency here in the US. To ensure the accuracy of the State Department’s report to Congress, an independent group of multiple organizations, scientists and analysts reviewed the report and confirmed that the US-supported and funded Columbian cocoa eradication program was negligent on several points of environmental and human health safety regulations, including:

1. The pesticide as well as the main additive in the pesticide (Cosmo-flux 411f) used in the eradication program is not made or sold in the US, therefore making the ingredients and means by which it is produced quite possibly below necessary safety standards;
2. the speed and altitude at which the pesticide is applied to the crops is not in compliance with EPA standards;
3. appropriate restricted entry intervals (time periods after spraying that would lessen human exposure to the pesticide after being sprayed) are not enforced by the eradication program officials;
4. the program was supposed to switch to a less toxic pesticide and the new pesticide used does not comply with EPA label standards;
5. the State Department claimed that the eradication program followed the EPA standards for spraying the pesticides in “non-agricultural” areas, but the review panel found that use of the aerial spraying in the cocoa growing regions of Columbia, described by the program as a “non-agricultural” area, was unjustified—the likelihood that spraying of food crops and farmer access to crops immediately after spraying was high;
6. the State Department failed to mention that the Columbian Public Defenders Office and the Controller’s Office both expressed concerns that the eradication program was not complicit with federal regulatory laws;
7. in fiscally sponsoring the eradication program, the State Department failed to mention that the Columbian Narcotics Agency stated in December  2001 that it did not have the resources to lawfully adhere to the Columbian Environmental Management Plan during implementation of the eradication program;
8. the State Department did not determine conclusively that the pesticides that are used to spray the crops “do not pose unreasonable risks or adverse effects to humans or the environment.”[60]

RESISTANCE!

The Bandung Conference in 1955, organized by many of the world’s poorer countries, confirmed their efforts of resistance to imperialistic hegemony from either the capitalistic bloc or the socialist bloc. The nations declared that they wished to benefit from the Western countries’ aid without having to align themselves to any hegemonic ideologies.^[61] The attempt to massively organize the Global South as a unified resistant force against the industrialized Western nations has not had much success in the past, but the efforts of local struggle are significant and inspiring.

PALESTINE:

• There is increasing attention being paid to the Palestinian plight at the hands of Israel’s illegal occupation (relative to the past decade of quality and quantity of attention paid to the issue). Media coverage is tending more and more to highlight Israeli human rights abuses and there have been an increased amount of pro-Palestinian op-eds in major journalistic publications. US representatives are also taking notice and putting pressure on the Bush administration, calling attention to the “condition-less” money that is given to Israel and raising questions as to the lawfulness of the way in which Israel uses its aid money. Also the US left has taken to highlighting the human rights disaster in Palestine and has become a major focus on the fight against “the war on terrorism.”[62]

• Organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine (based at the University of California at Berkeley) and SUSTAIN (Stop US-funded Tax Aid to Israel Now!) are modeled on divestment campaigns in order to stop US aid to Israel and the facilitation of human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. Additionally, Jewish organizations have taken up the anti-occupation battle, such as Not in My Name and Jews Against the Occupation, and have brought attention to the fact that the anti-occupation struggle is also a struggle of anti-corporate globalization, anti-war and anti-imperialism.[63]

ZAMBIA:

• Despite pressure from USAID, the World Food Program, the World Health Organization and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation, Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa, rejected food aid from the United States that included genetically modified maize in June of 2002. Zambia’s rejection of the food aid came under such intense criticism because the country was stricken with famine at the time of the rejection. But the Zambian government and citizenry decision were based on the determination to protect their national sovereignty and indigenous varieties, as well as protect the country from possible rejection by overseas markets (many of which have banned the importation or growing of genetically modified livestock or agriculture). The US insisted that not enough non-GM food was available to send to Zambia in place of the GM stocks, but this has been proven untrue by several sources, including the former Executive Director of the Board on Agriculture for the US National Academy of Sciences, Dr Chuck Benbrook, who is also a leading US agronomist. Other excuses by the US to deny Zambia’s request have included the impossibility to separate the non-GM food from the genetically modified foods, which also has been denied by experts: “The US says it cannot provide guaranteed GM-free maize [to governments requesting it in Southern Africa] because there is no requirement in place to separate GM and non-GM grains in the US. Strange that a 2001 American Corn Growers Association survey showed that more than 50% of US elevators can and do segregate GM and non-GM grains. The US position is one of choice, not necessity.”[64]

• Although Zambia has instituted the ban, it did agree to a compromise of purchasing gm maize that had been processed into flour but the US rejected that compromise. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, co-founder of the Institute for Science in Society, says, “The US has refused to provide non-GM maize or cash, and refused even to provide cash to mill the maize. It has violated the 1999 Food Aid Convention, of which it is a signatory. This Convention stipulates that food aid should be bought from the most cost- effective source, be culturally acceptable and if possible purchased locally so that regional markets do not suffer.”[65]

• A strong coalition of over 184 NGOs have joined forces to publicly support Zambia and any other country’s right to refuse to import culturally inappropriate food aid and have also condemned USAID’s food policy of donating GM food. Also more than 140 representatives from 26 African nations signed a statement by the African civil society that fully supports Zambia’s stance on food aid and refusal to be the victim of GM food dumping by any country, including the United States.[66]

PERU:

• Feminists in Peru fought hard and won a victory on the issue of family planning within in aid assistance programs after highlighting Peru’s human rights abuses in its family planning programs (the media exposed President Fujimori’s coercive sterilization program throughout Peru in the 1990’s). The Tiahrt Requirements forbids any family planning programs to have quotas on any services, thereby preventing any particular form of contraception to be pushed on clients and also guarantees that full information regarding all choices, risks and benefits are presented to clients. The Tiahrt Requirements also ensure that any programs funded by USAID are based on principles of an informed, voluntary choice by individuals.[67]

WHAT YOU CAN DO

• The 50 Years is Enough Campaign against the IMF and the World Bank, with over 200 member organizations, calls for the end of illegitimate debt for the world’s poorest countries. The Institute for Food and Development Policy, a member organization, says, “Aid dollars could be made into something positive and noninterventionist if they were spent on debt relief-as long as they were not tied to structural adjustment-like conditions, which are so onerous for the poorer majorities.”[68]

Research compiled while serving as the Research Associate for Oakland Institute, 2005.

(C) 2009 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

[2] Gelinas, Jacques B. “Fifty Years of Development and Underdevelopment.” Global Citizens for Change online. 5/9/05. http://www.citizens4change.org/global/interdev/interdev_02.htm.

[3] Gelinas, Jacques B. “Fifty Years of Development and Underdevelopment.” Global Citizens for Change online. 5/9/05. http://www.citizens4change.org/global/interdev/interdev_02.htm.

[4] Gelinas, Jacques B. “Fifty Years of Development and Underdevelopment.” Global Citizens for Change online. 5/9/05. http://www.citizens4change.org/global/interdev/interdev_02.htm.

[5] USAID official website. http://www.usaid.gov/.

[6] “Foreign Aid.” Council on Foreign Relations online. 6/5/05. http://cfrterrorism.org/policy/foreignaid.html.

[7] Goodridge, Melissa. “Who gets America’s foreign aid?” Originally published in the Mississippi Sun Herald. 5/31/05. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1413585/posts.

[8] Mittal, Anuradha. “Aid Watch.” Oakland Institute online. 6/7/05. http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/186.

[9] Ho, Mae-Wan. “African Consumer Leaders Support Zambia.” Institute of Science in Society online. 6/5/05. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ACLSZ.php. For more information on the GMO and Food Aid debate, refer to http://www.consumersinternational.org.

[10] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[11] Goodridge, Melissa. “Who gets America’s foreign aid?” Originally published in the Mississippi Sun Herald. 5/31/05. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1413585/posts.

[12] “Foreign Aid.” Council on Foreign Relations online. 6/5/05. http://cfrterrorism.org/policy/foreignaid.html.

[13] Goodridge, Melissa. “Who gets America’s foreign aid?” Originally published in the Mississippi Sun Herald. 5/31/05. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1413585/posts.

[14] Mander, Jerry. “Introduction: Facing the Rising Tide” in The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco. 1996. p. 13.

[15] Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, in naming US Public Law 480 which ensures that food aid never interferes with “domestic production or marketing.” Wall Street Journal, May 7, 1982.

[16] Mander, Jerry. “Introduction: Facing the Rising Tide” in The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco. 1996. p. 13.

[17] Gelinas, Jacques B. “Fifty Years of Development and Underdevelopment.” Global Citizens for Change online. 5/9/05. http://www.citizens4change.org/global/interdev/interdev_02.htm.

[18] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[19] Mander, Jerry. “Introduction: Facing the Rising Tide” in The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, eds. Sierra Club Books: San Francisco. 1996. p. 13.

[20] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[21] Lobe, Jim. “Millennium Challenge Account: New US aid initiative gets mixed reception.” 11/29/02.

http://www.cyberdyaryo.com/features/f2002_1129_02.htm.

[22] Lobe, Jim. “Millennium Challenge Account: New US aid initiative gets mixed reception.” 11/29/02.

http://www.cyberdyaryo.com/features/f2002_1129_02.htm.

[23] Jay, Dru Oja. “AIDS, Africa and Aid.” Monkeyfist online. 3/18/03. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/838.

[24] “Jubilee USA Encouraged By Apparent G-8 Agreement for 100% Cancellation of IMF, Multilateral Debts.” US Jubilee Press Statement in Reaction. 6/11/05. www.jubileeusa.org.

[25] Mittal, Anuradha. “Aid Watch.” Oakland Institute online. 6/7/05. http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/186.

[26] “Foreign Aid.” Council on Foreign Relations online. 6/5/05. http://cfrterrorism.org/policy/foreignaid.html.

[27] Mittal, Anuradha. “Aid Watch.” Oakland Institute online. 6/7/05. http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/186.

[28] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[29] Bowles, Matt. “US Aid- Lifeblood of the Occupation.” SUSTAINCampaign.org. 6/7/05. This article was originally published in the March/April issue of Left Turn magazine but can also be found at http://www.sustaincampaign.org/about_usaidtoisrael.html.

[30] Bowles, Matt. “US Aid- Lifeblood of the Occupation.” SUSTAINCampaign.org. 6/7/05. This article was originally published in the March/April issue of Left Turn magazine but can also be found at http://www.sustaincampaign.org/about_usaidtoisrael.html. The author was provided this particular statistic by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and includes the years 1949 to 2001.

[31] Bowles, Matt. “US Aid- Lifeblood of the Occupation.” SUSTAINCampaign.org. 6/7/05. This article was originally published in the March/April issue of Left Turn magazine but can also be found at http://www.sustaincampaign.org/about_usaidtoisrael.html.

[32] Mittal, Anuradha. “Aid Watch.” Oakland Institute online. 6/7/05. http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/?q=node/view/186.

[33] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[34] Jay, Dru Oja. “AIDS, Africa and Aid.” Monkeyfist online. 3/18/03. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/838.

[35] Ho, Mae-Wan. “African Consumer Leaders Support Zambia.” Institute of Science in Society online. 6/5/05. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ACLSZ.php. For more information on the GMO and Food Aid debate, refer to http://www.consumersinternational.org.

[36] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[37] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[38] Knight, Danielle. “US Aid Cut To Indonesian Environmental Groups That Criticized US Mining Corporations.” Common Dreams online. 5/16/00. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/051600-01.htm.

[39] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[40] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[41]Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[42] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[43] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[44] “Worldwide HIV and AIDS Epidemic Statistics.” Avert.org. 6/8/05. http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm.

[45] “Worldwide HIV and AIDS Epidemic Statistics.” Avert.org. 6/8/05. http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm.

[46] “Worldwide HIV and AIDS Epidemic Statistics.” Avert.org. 6/8/05. http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm.

[47] “Worldwide HIV and AIDS Epidemic Statistics.” Avert.org. 6/8/05. http://www.avert.org/worlstatinfo.htm.

[48] Jay, Dru Oja. “AIDS, Africa and Aid.” Monkeyfist online. 3/18/03. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/838.

[49] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[50] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[51] Jay, Dru Oja. “AIDS, Africa and Aid.” Monkeyfist online. 3/18/03. http://monkeyfist.com/articles/838.

[52] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[53] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[54] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[55] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[56] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[57] Kabeer, Naila. Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. Verso: London. 1994. p. 2.

[58] Vats, S. and Shakuntala Mudgal. Modernisation and Its Impact on Indian Women. Om               Publications: Faridabad. 1999. p. 42.

[59] Lappé, Frances Moore,  Joseph Collins and Peter Rosset, with Luis Esparza.  “World Hunger: 12 Myths, Chapter 10.” Global Policy Forum online. October 1998.  http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/ffd/2002/AidPov1998.htm. This chapter, an original production of the Institute for Food Development and Policy (or Food First, as it is also known), was reproduced on the Global Policy website with the permission of Food First.

[60] “Findings from Independent Reviews of the State Department Report on Aerial Spraying in Colombia

Regarding Compliance with Requirements in the FY2002 Foreign Appropriations Act.” Center for International Policy’s Columbia Program online. 6/5/05. http://www.ciponline.org/colombia/otheranal.htm.

[61] Gelinas, Jacques B. “Fifty Years of Development and Underdevelopment.” Global Citizens for Change online. 5/9/05. http://www.citizens4change.org/global/interdev/interdev_02.htm.

[62] Bowles, Matt. “US Aid- Lifeblood of the Occupation.” SUSTAINCampaign.org. 6/7/05. This article was originally published in the March/April issue of Left Turn magazine but can also be found at http://www.sustaincampaign.org/about_usaidtoisrael.html.

[63] Bowles, Matt. “US Aid- Lifeblood of the Occupation.” SUSTAINCampaign.org. 6/7/05. This article was originally published in the March/April issue of Left Turn magazine but can also be found at http://www.sustaincampaign.org/about_usaidtoisrael.html.

[64] “Force-feeding the Hungry: A Primer on the Food Aid Crisis.” Norfolk Genetic Information Network. 10/22/02. http://ngin.tripod.com/221002c.htm.

[65] Ho, Mae-Wan. “African Consumer Leaders Support Zambia.” Institute of Science in Society online. 6/5/05. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ACLSZ.php. For more information on the GMO and Food Aid debate, refer to http://www.consumersinternational.org.

[66] Ho, Mae-Wan. “African Consumer Leaders Support Zambia.” Institute of Science in Society online. 6/5/05. http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ACLSZ.php. For more information on the GMO and Food Aid debate, refer to http://www.consumersinternational.org.

[67] Shepard, Bonnie. “When Ideology Undermines Public Health: Distortions in the U.S. Foreign Aid Program.” David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies online.  http://drclas.fas.harvard.edu/revista/?issue_id=28&article_id=841.

[68] 50 Years is Enough Campaign. 1025 Vermont Ave. NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC, 20005. http://www.50years.org.

Social Security is more than a retirement program—it is an insurance program that takes care of vulnerable families at all stages of life. Funding private retirement accounts by diverting money away from the current system would increase retirement insecurity and undermine the viability of the survivor and disability components of the social Security system—the very programs upon which African-Americans [as well as numerous other minority groups] and their children heavily rely.
-Urban League’s Maya Rockeymoor, Senior Resident Scholar

The Bush administration announced on Thursday, November 4, 2004, his intention to reform the ailing social security system. But is it really in need of reform? For six decades, the Social Security Administration has helped Americans avoid abject poverty in their retirement years, as well as during times of the death of a working family member or in the case of disability. According to the numbers popularly crunched, even by Bush’s commission, Social Security is adequate enough to cover benefits for everyone for the next 38 years with no changes. In fact, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates social security’s adequacy to extend into the next 48 years. “Yet social security ‘reformers’ have spent the last decade and a half convincing most of the public that social security is in dire straits.”[2]

The Bush administration is jumping the gun and creating a system that would benefit the wealthy in the long run and leave the young workers of today struggling just the same as they would if social security was left to its original design. The Bush administration is not creating a solution to the possible crisis of Social Security, instead their plans are only creating divergent ways of reaching the same critical point in the future. What are not being talked about are the critical issues that are the source of the problem. The fact that the amount of contemporary workers is out numbered by the amount of today’s beneficiaries may have something to do with outsourcing and other such policies that favor sending jobs overseas while Americans are left to struggle to make ends meet while searching for jobs. The Healthcare crisis in this country could be reformed so that when workers hit retirement age not quite so many of them would have to rely on social security medical benefits as do today.

The Facts:

• Today more than 150 million people are covered by Social Security.[3]
• More than 45 million Americans  collect retirement, survivor and disability benefits from Social Security today.[4]
• Myth: Unless we do something bold, soon, Social Security will go bankrupt. While government projections foresee a complete depletion of the Social Security Trust Funds by 2042 despite the current yearly addition of $150 billion, if the economy fairs well in the coming decades the trust funds can be revived by at least 75%. “Therefore, what we face is a possible shortfall almost four decades in the future, not an immediate crisis or impending collapse.”[5]
• Despite this possible shortcoming, the Social Security system has faired well through other difficult periods and has managed to make payroll taxes from workers cover contemporary beneficiaries throughout.[6]
• Bush’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security was weighted heavily with pro-privatization advocates; three plans were proposed. [7]
• Bush’s plan proposes supplementing the current system with the private accounts. Supposedly the gains made by private market investing would make up for the subsequent loss in traditional benefits.[8]
• Essentially the Reform Plan 2, the plan the Bush administration is leaning toward proposing, means a sizeable loss of social security benefits for most Americans now, instead of the possible loss of benefits in 40 years. “The plan [still] provides a net loss for the vast majority of Americans.” [9]
• Privatization of social security means big cuts to benefits and tax-free risky investing, that only presently less than 5% of employees participate in in the form of tax-free market investing in 401 (k)s or Individual Retirement Accounts.
• Some critics have estimated that the privatization transition of social security would cost over $2 trillion dollars, only adding further to the ever-increasing national deficit. But Bush has claimed that it would cost more to continue with the present system in tact. [10]
• It’s not surprising that the Bush administration has wrangled favorable language to describe the social security reforms and succeeded in convincing many that the proposals are appealing and necessary: “the opportunity to invest a small portion of payroll taxes in stocks.”[11]
• The process of converting the system has severe consequences:
  1. younger generations will bear the brunt of the financial conversion costs
  2. huge increases in federal borrowing will be necessary to finance these new accounts
  3. current payroll taxes will continue to finance existing benefits for current retirees, leaving scant and risky income sources for the next generation of retirees.[12]

• In order to fix the long term problems, either cuts in benefits or a hike in taxes is required to provide sufficiently for the Social Security Trust Fund.[13]
• Bush is opposed to raising the cap on payroll taxes in order to get the funding for privatization, so where is the money going to come from?
  1. raising the borrowing limit? Amidst an ever increasing deficit? “The [Bush] administration is considering some creative accounting that will not count borrowed funds in the budget as part of the skyrocketing deficit. Supporters view borrowing as a pre-payment, comparing it to paying off a 30-year mortgage loan early.”[14]
• 1 in 3 beneficiaries is not a retiree, but a survivor or person with a disability.[15]

Privatization Will Affect the Young Workers of Today!

• Younger generations must take into account many risks when considering privatization reforms:
  1. costs not felt now will surely be felt in the future in the form of higher taxes or reduced government services
  2. uncertainty of the market presents undesirable risk when considering future income necessity and stability
  3. with the reduction in government benefits due to reliance on the resources that privatization will supposedly meet for retirees, administrative costs and annuitization may drain further the insubstantial benefits proposed by Bush administration’s privatization scheme. [16]

• “A twenty year old just entering the labor force would lose 34% of his or her expected benefits under this plan. This would amount to almost $134,000 over a lifetime of retirement. They would have a chance to gain back, on average, about $47,000 from an individual account—provided the stock market doesn’t tank like it did from 2000-2001, just in time for their retirement.”[17]
• One study conducted by economists compared the current system with the former-Governor Bush’s privatization proposition (similar to the proposals he is advocating for currently) and found that overall the average worker would suffer significant cuts to social security benefits if the system was reformed. For example, an average worker who retired in 2037 (age 67) would receive 20% less under Bush’s proposed reforms than under the traditional system.

Women are Affected by Social Security!

• Because of the current gender gap in salaries, one study estimates that after a 35 year investment, the average man’s portfolio would be 16% larger than the average woman’s.[18]
• The majority of social security checks are sent to women because women tend to live longer than men.[19]
• Women tend not to own private pensions as much as men do and so they greatly rely on social security. When women do own private pensions, their checks are, on average, half that of a man’s.[20]
• The current system works in favor of lower income, predominantly female, earners; but a privatized system would favor higher income earners who are predominantly male.[21]
• Cuts in order to finance the transition costs will be necessary and will affect women as the primary beneficiaries of the current system.[22]
• Personal accounts will not overwhelmingly provide guaranteed benefits for length of your life, and those who are living longer are women.[23]
• Women have their working years interrupted more often than men, affecting their overall social security account contributions.[24] This will only decrease with the proposed reform plan by Bush.
• Due to annuitization and the fact that women have a longer life expectancy than men, one study showed that in 2002 if a woman at the age of 65 has her life expectancy projected to be 19 years (as compared to the 15.9 years projected for a man of the same age) the woman would receive a smaller amount of benefits per months for the duration of her life. That is a smaller income replacement for women every month, simply because they are projected to live a longer life, whether that ends up being the case in reality or not.[25]

The Elderly are Affected by Social Security!

• If privatization were implemented, the elderly would suffer. The elderly population, in 2004, is provided with an average of $863 a month in Social Security benefits and without this the vast majority of them would plunge below the poverty line.[26]
• In 2001, over 60% of America’s elderly depended on Social Security checks for at least half of their income.[27]
• Due to the assistance, provided to the elderly by Social Security, poverty rates among seniors have declined from 35% in 1959 to about 10% in 2004.[28]
• For 65% of all American seniors, Social Security provides 50% or more of their income: 2/3 of seniors depend on Social Security as an additional source of income. 1/3 of seniors depend on Social Security as their only source of income.[29]

Low Income Workers are Affected by Social Security!

• Social Security as it currently works benefits low wage workers by distributing higher benefits to these retirees than they were able to contribute in the past. With Bush’s proposed reforms to Social Security, there would be no redistribution of retirement benefits.[30]
• This is a problem when one considers that in 2002, 40% of American families living below the poverty line with only an average $35,000 annual income were barely able to make end meet on a daily basis. These difficult living circumstances would only be complicated further with the added stress of being unable to put sufficient funds into a private account for the future. “Privatization would create winners (those who command high wages and salaries during their working years) and losers (those who don’t).”[31]
• Higher wage earners can contribute more to their future benefits than can low wage earners, but the Social Security formula has been set up so that lower wage earners get a higher percentage of their working-years-earnings in retirement benefits.[32]

Minorities are Affected by Social Security!

• Among private sector workers, only 1/3 of minorities receive pension coverage in retirement, as compared to nearly half of white Americans with that coverage.[33]
• Because this gap is apparent in pre-retirement years due to wage inequality, minorities are less likely to accumulate wealth during working years in the form of savings, stocks, bonds, etc.[34]
• In 1996, nearly half of all minority retirees relied on Social Security for more than half of their income: 1/3 of all African and Hispanic Americans relied on Social Security for all of their income, while only 1/6 of Anglo Americans relied on Social Security for the majority of their income.[35]
• While circumstances have gotten better in the last 50 years, African Americans still suffer from higher rates of infant mortality, persistent poverty, discrimination, dangerous job employment, and less access to medical services and insurance. For this reason, African Americans rely more on disability benefits much more than others: 25% of African Americans collect disability, as compared to only 12.5% of Anglo Americans.[36]

Research compiled while serving as the Research Associate for Oakland Institute, 2005.

(C) 2009 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.

[2] Weisbrot, Mark, “Who Wants to Cut Social Security Benefits?,” Center for Economic Policy and Research, 12/3/04, http://cepr.net/columns/weisbrot/mark_weisbrot_12_03_04.htm.

[3] “The Future of Social Security,” Social Security Administration’s Electronic Booklet, January 2004, http://ssa.gov/pubs/10055.html.

[4] “The Future of Social Security,” Social Security Administration’s Electronic Booklet, January 2004, http://ssa.gov/pubs/10055.html.

[5] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[6] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338

[7] Weisbrot, Mark, “Who Wants to Cut Social Security Benefits?,” Center for Economic Policy and Research, 12/3/04, http://cepr.net/columns/weisbrot/mark_weisbrot_12_03_04.htm.

[8] Zuckerman, Diana, “Social Security that Works for Women Too,” Detroit Free Press online, 11/29/04, http://freep.com/voices/columnists/ezucker29_20041129.htm.

[9] Weisbrot, Mark, “Who Wants to Cut Social Security Benefits?,” Center for Economic Policy and Research, 12/3/04, http://cepr.net/columns/weisbrot/mark_weisbrot_12_03_04.htm.

[10] Branigin, William, “Bush Presses Second Term Agenda: President Pledges to Fight Terrorism and Reform Social Security,” Washington Post online, 11/4/04, http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25006-2004Nov4.html.

[11] Perl, Libby, “Too Good to Be True,” The Century Foundation, 11/30/04, http://socsec.org/commentary.asp?opedid=793.

[12] Perl, Libby, “Too Good to Be True,” The Century Foundation, 11/30/04, http://socsec.org/commentary.asp?opedid=793.

[13] Zuckerman, Diana, “Social Security that Works for Women Too,” Detroit Free Press online, 11/29/04, http://freep.com/voices/columnists/ezucker29_20041129.htm.

[14] Leigh Strope, “Bush faces formidable obstacles in plan to create Social Security private accounts,” SF Gate online, 12/11/04, http://sfgate.com/-cg-bin/article.cgl?f=/news/archive/2004/12/11/national1232EST0505.DTL

[15] “The Future of Social Security,” Social Security Administration’s Electronic Booklet, January 2004, http://ssa.gov/pubs/10055.html.

[16] Perl, Libby, “Too Good to Be True,” The Century Foundation, 11/30/04, http://socsec.org/commentary.asp?opedid=793.

[17] Weisbrot, Mark, “Who Wants to Cut Social Security Benefits?,” Center for Economic Policy and Research, 12/3/04, http://cepr.net/columns/weisbrot/mark_weisbrot_12_03_04.htm.

[18] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[19] Zuckerman, Diana, “Social Security that Works for Women Too,” Detroit Free Press online, 11/29/04, http://freep.com/voices/columnists/ezucker29_20041129.htm.

[20] Zuckerman, Diana, “Social Security that Works for Women Too,” Detroit Free Press online, 11/29/04, http://freep.com/voices/columnists/ezucker29_20041129.htm.

[21]Zuckerman, Diana, “Social Security that Works for Women Too,” Detroit Free Press online, 11/29/04, http://freep.com/voices/columnists/ezucker29_20041129.htm.

[22] Zuckerman, Diana, “Social Security that Works for Women Too,” Detroit Free Press online, 11/29/04, http://freep.com/voices/columnists/ezucker29_20041129.htm.

[23] Zuckerman, Diana, “Social Security that Works for Women Too,” Detroit Free Press online, 11/29/04, http://freep.com/voices/columnists/ezucker29_20041129.htm.

[24] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[25] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[26] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[27] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[28] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[29] “The Future of Social Security,” Social Security Administration’s Electronic Booklet, January 2004, http://ssa.gov/pubs/10055.html.

[30] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[31] “Social Security Privatization: Eleven Myths,” The Century Foundation, 3/1/04, http://socsec.org/publications.asp?pubid=338.

[32] “The Future of Social Security,” Social Security Administration’s Electronic Booklet, January 2004, http://ssa.gov/pubs/10055.html.

[33] Helen Lachs Ginsberg and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, “Social Security and Minorities,” National Jobs for All Coalition, August 2001, http://njfac.org/us25.htm.

[34] Helen Lachs Ginsberg and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, “Social Security and Minorities,” National Jobs for All Coalition, August 2001, http://njfac.org/us25.htm.

[35] Helen Lachs Ginsberg and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, “Social Security and Minorities,” National Jobs for All Coalition, August 2001, http://njfac.org/us25.htm.

[36] Helen Lachs Ginsberg and Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg, “Social Security and Minorities,” National Jobs for All Coalition, August 2001, http://njfac.org/us25.htm.

Global competition requires that countries vying for foreign investment keep their production costs low and so many of these countries have fallen into the habit of reducing worker protections in order to entice multinational corporations to set up factories in their countries. The penny-pinching corporate habit of seeking “discount bargains” has now spread to the consumer market and it is creating a fatal squeeze on factory owners and their employees. The result is forced overtime, low wages, punishments and fines for slow work and mistakes, worker intimidation, child labor, and other abuses—otherwise known as sweatshop conditions.

According to the United Nations Human Development Reports for 2002 and 2003, extreme poverty and hunger, after decreasing in the 1970s and 1980s, have both been increasing in the 1990s, particularly in countries that have adopted the one-size-fits-all World Trade Organization rules for trade and economic development. (The United Nations argues that policy changes, not charity, are necessary to overcome poverty).[1]

Sweater: employer who underpays and overworks his employees, especially a contractor for piecework in the tailoring trade. ( Standard Dictionary of the English Language, 1895)

Sweatshop: A usually small manufacturing establishment employing workers under unfair and unsanitary conditions. (Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 1993)

************************************************
THE FACTS

What is a sweatshop? Under such pressures [ of globalization], factory and farm managers typically pass on the costs and risks to the weakest links in the chain: the workers they employ. For many producers, their labour strategy is simple: make it flexible and make it cheap.[2]

• Sweatshops are most frequently defined as a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions. That definition is expanding to include any place where workers are exposed to extreme exploitation including hazardous working conditions, arbitrary discipline, low wages, and denial of dignity and basic human rights.[3]
• Clothing is not the only sweatshop product, there are a vast variety of sweatshop products on the market currently: shoes, toys, rugs, coffee, chocolate, bananas, etc.[4] Meat packers, poultry processors, asbestos removers and farm workers are often also subject to sweatshop-like conditions in the workplace.[5]
• For a dress that is made in a sweatshop and retails for $100, the workers usually only receive $6.00, that’s less than 1% for all the workers. The retailer is at the top of the profit hierarchy, keeping $50 of the price of the garment.[6]
• The wage disparity between the workers and those that are profiting from the sweatshop system are blatantly apparent when one looks at the hourly rates of pay for corporate CEO’s: Philip Marineau (Levi Straus & Co.) makes $11,971/hr, Tommy Hilfiger makes $10,769/hr, Ralf Lauren makes $2,163/hr, Paul Fireman (Reebok) makes $1,490/hr and Philip Knight (Nike) makes $1,312/hr.[7]
• The money allocated for Marineau’s recent raise to $25.1 million/year, or $11,971/hr (nearly 15 times what he earned in 2001), could have accommodated a 50 percent pay increase for more than 7,500 minimum wage workers in Saipan (where Levi’s has a plant), helping to lift whole communities out of poverty.[8]
• Sweatshop employees do not generally earn what is known as an hourly wage, instead many are paid a piece-rate; which is a set (but often arbitrarily changed) rate of pay per piece of product the worker completes. More often than not, the piece-rate for workers is not sufficient enough to take care of their families and subject to quota pressures that if not reached by the employee may result in non-payment by the factory owners.[9] Therefore,  more often than not, the average “hourly wage” for sweatshop workers varies across the globe, but none of them offer adequate means for workers to provide for their families: $1.75 in Mexico, $1.08 in El Salvador, $0.86 in China, $0.71 in India, $0.24 in Indonesia and $0.23 in Pakistan.[10]

Who works in sweatshops? According to the U.S. Department of Labor, workers on American Samoa “were beaten…and provided food so inadequate that some were walking skeletons…” while producing clothes for major U.S. retailers such as Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, Sears, and Target.[11]

• 90% of sweatshop workers are women.[12]
• Generally speaking, sweatshop workers are young women, employed due to financial constraints on their families and so they must seek employment at the sake of their own education.[13] Many are rural folks who have migrated to urban centers due to neoliberal policies that have forced small farmers and businesses to sell their products at drastically reduced prices on the global market.[14]
• “Guest worker” schemes are a popular way of enticing desperate people, more often than not young women, from poverty stricken nations to work in sweatshop factories. Ex: Unbeknownst to many women and others, they are promised high paying jobs “in America” and charged $6,000 (more or less in some cases) for a three year work contract. Many ddo not find their dreams fulfilled and instead find themselves, “…locked behind barbed wire, held under conditions of indentured servitude, forced to work 19 hours a day, seven days a week, beaten, sexually harassed, and cheated of hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to them.”[15]
• It is estimated by the International Labor Organization (ILO) that 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 work in developing countries (61% in Asia, 32% in Africa and 7% in Latin America). For the majority of the children, their employment is suspect: many work against their will due to financial constraints on their families; their employment serves to deny them a change at a normal childhood or an education; some are confined within the factory grounds (not allowed to see their families) and/or chained to machines they work at; almost all of them face unprovoked beatings; while many are abducted and forced to work against their will.[16]
• In the United States, the majority of sweatshop workers are recent or undocumented workers, unaware of their rights (even as undocumented workers) as laborers and frequently not union members. In order for the sweatshops to make the most profit, they must employ people that are largely ignorant of their rights as workers and so sweatshops predominantly employ: non-unionized workers; employees signed to short-term contracts or no contracts at all. Some of the conditions these workers are illegally subject to: women are not allowed maternity leave and have been, in many circumstances, strong-armed to take birth control and are subject to monthly pregnancy tests; sick days are disallowed and can be used as a reason for firing; bathroom breaks are often times regularly denied; work days more often than not consist of 14 hour days or more that are worked 6 to 7 days per week.[17]

For more than 150 years, the sewing machine has been, and today remains, the best way of making clothes. The basic method of garment production continues to be a worker, usually a woman, sitting or standing at a sewing machine and piecing together portions of cloth. Every blouse, every pair of jeans, every t-shirt, and every pair of shoes has to be tailored by a person doing the work. Everything we wear is made by someone.[18]

When were sweatshops created?

• The concept of sweatshop labor has been around for centuries, the silver mines and galleys of ancient Rome are just two such examples.[19]
• The Industrial Revolution saw the organized and increased use of sweatshop labor practices to provide maximum profits.
• In the 19^th Century, the term “sweatshop” referred to a system of subcontracting in which manufacturers farmed out work to competing contractors. The contractors “sweated” profit from workers by paying them rock-bottom wages for long working hours under dangerous conditions.[20]
• These early 19^th century workers were predominantly seamstresses, spread throughout American cities; they often worked from home (so that they could also fulfill their domestic obligations and rearing of children), stitching together bundles of pre-cut fabric into clothing for Southern slaves, Western miners and New England gentlemen. Dressmakers, different from these seamstresses, were responsible for producing whole dresses and could make a descent wage; but seamstresses were only paid by the piece, working at least 16 hour days and often subject to retailers finding the smallest of faults with their garments and refusing to pay for work done.[21]
• During this time, contractors were engaged in fierce competition and recent immigrants were desperate for work, which resulted in the prime conditions for exploitation of workers. Many small apartments in tenement buildings were converted to contract shops and doubled as living quarters. Still, the vast majority of these immigrants had to lean on charity to support their families.[22]
• Sweatshop production came out of hibernation in the late 1960s. A combination of forces at home and abroad contributed to their reappearance: changes in the retail industry, a growing global economy, increased reliance on contracting, and a large pool of immigrant labor in the U.S.[23]

Where are sweatshops located?

• The poorer a country is, the more likely it has sweatshop factories within its borders. Third World countries are most likely to not have tough labor regulations in place and therefore its citizens are more susceptible to labor violations by local, national and foreign multinational corporations.[24]
• 200 countries have thousands of garment factories that employ tens of millions of laborers as sweatshop workers.[25]
• These factories are also here in the U.S. In fact, L.A. is the “sweatshop capital” of the U.S., with 67% of its factories underpaying workers.[26]
• According to the Department of Labor, over 50% of U.S. garment factories are sweatshops. Many sweatshops are run in this country’s apparel centers: California, New York, Dallas, Miami and Atlanta.[27]

************************************************
Dispelling the Myths About Solutions to Sweatshops

Being employed in a sweatshop for such low pay is better than not being employed at all.

• According to a 2003 National Labor Committee report: “…a Honduran worker sewing clothing for Wal-Mart at a rate of 43 cents an hour, after spending money on daily meals and transportation to work… is left with around 80 cents per day for rent, bills, child care, school costs, medicines, emergencies, and other expenses. Not surprisingly, many workers are forced to take out loans at high interest rates and can’t even think about saving money to improve their lives as they struggle to meet their daily needs.”^[39]

An increase in wages to workers results in higher consumer prices.

• With foreign sweatshop workers’ pay amounting to as little as ½ of 1% of the consumer price, even a doubling of workers’ pay would only affect the retail price incrementally.[40]
• A 1997 report conducted by Global Exchange showed that relatively little impact to corporations financial situations results from paying workers wages that can keep them out of poverty. Ex: when regarding Nike’s employees’ wages in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia, “… the report shows that the company could use a mere 2% of its advertising budget to raise 25,000 Vietnamese workers out of poverty by increasing their daily wages from $1.60 to a decent $3.00 (the living wage in Vietnam according to the Vietnam Labor Watch).”[41]
• A 1999 survey by Marymount University’s Center for Ethical Concerns found that the majority of consumers would pay more to ensure that workers making the products they buy are treated fairly. The 1999 survey is just one in a series of yearly surveys that have found that increasingly, consumers believe it is the responsibility of both retailers and manufacturers to guarantee that workers rights are being upheld. Overall, consumers agreed that they would be willing to pay a 5% mark up to ensure that decent working conditions are upheld.^[42]

It cost more to monitor corporations’ ties to sweatshops, and that comes out of taxpayers’ pockets.

• According to Co-op America, “… most corporations already track their goods to the subcontractor or factory level in order to monitor the quality of their products… Around the world, name-brand retailers are investing in new technologies—information systems, international shipping firms, quality assurance monitoring, business-to-business software, bar codes, universal numbering systems, and more—all of which can facilitate better oversight for the factories at products’ points of origin.”[43]

Boycotting is the only way to make corporations responsible.

• While sweatshop factories that produce many goods we buy here in America are deleterious to workers’ human rights, they do provide critical employment for many people that have no other employment options. Simply boycotting a company may have an undesirable result: the company can “cut and run” from a factory location and leave hundreds or thousands of people unemployed. Boycotts should be left to the workers themselves, in this way they are more directly responsible for negotiations with the company.[44]
• According to Co-op America, “A good way to help improve conditions for workers is to contact the retailers and manufacturers of the products you buy and ask for guarantees that their workers were paid a living wage and given basic rights. Include the tag from inside a garment with your letter to let the company know you are already a customer. If you can find the product that you need produced by a company you know to be responsible in its labor practices, you should reward that company with your business.”[45]

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San Francisco’s Relationship with Sweatshops

Generations of Asian Pacific immigrants and their descendants have been part of the American sweatshop experience, particularly as seamstresses and other workers. During the nineteenth century, they made jeans, work clothes, and shoes in big cities and small towns from San Francisco to New England. After World War II, many Japanese American women, in returning to Los Angeles and other West Coast locales after being incarcerated in internment camps, worked in sweatshops to help their families regain their financial footing. Today, they represent a significant proportion of the workers as well as contractors of garment industries in Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area, and other metropolitan areas.[28]

• In 1990, the Bay Area hosted over 30,000 garment factory workers. Movement overseas has created a drastic decline in the number of factories and consequently those employed in these jobs, down to only 3,500 workers as of January 2005. The state Department of Industrial Relations listed 204 garment factories in San Francisco; in 1998, it listed 406.[29]
• According to the State Employment Development Department, sewing machine operators in 2004 were reportedly earning an average of $357/wk in the San Francisco metropolitan area; many of these workers are Chinese immigrants that have basic levels of education and do not speak English fluently.[30]
• South of Market district, the Mission, Potrero Hill and other industrial areas in San Francisco serve as the locations of the majority of the factories, usually within rundown buildings.[31]
• Wins of California, Inc. located here in San Francisco is contracted by such customers as the U.S. Army and Air Force, Wal-mart, Sears and Kmart. The garment producer was under attack in 2001 for back wages owed to 200 employees, mostly Chinese immigrants, totally $850,000.[32]

“NO SWEAT” Nation-wide Campaigns

• The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 officially prohibited sweatshops. Due to understaffing at the Department of Labor and the inefficiency of monitoring systems, as well as the increasing pressure and tendency of corporations to contract out manufacturing to foreign locations, the legislation’s results have not been as favorable to the average worker as they were intended.[33]
• As of 1997, Stop Sweatshops Bills were introduced in Congress that would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to hold companies responsible for the labor violations of their contractors. Additionally, during President Clinton’s terms in office, an Apparel Industry Task Force was created; made up of both labor rights and corporate interest groups, the Task Force was designed to address the issues surrounding sweatshops but in the end lacked real “teeth” to address many of the most important issues of workers.[34]
• In recent decades numerous organizations have sprouted up around the country and world wide to take up the anti-sweatshop issue and defend the rights of workers everywhere.
• Currently, anti-sweatshop laws have already been passed nationally in 4 states (including California), 28 school districts, 10 counties and 26 cities.[35]

• The city of Los Angeles recently passed the most stringent of the anti-sweatshop ordinances to date, ensuring not only that the city no longer procures any supplies or services from sweatshop contractors and subcontractors, they city has devoted substantial funding for the monitoring and enforcement of the ordinance. In addition, an oversight committee will be formed, including local, national and international activists.[36]
• Much of the Los Angeles anti-sweatshop procurement ordinance success is due to the No More Sweatshops! campaign, which is currently seeking to spread its campaign to cities across the country.

The Bay Area joins the No More Sweatshops! Campaign

• San Francisco spends nearly $1 billion on goods and services every year. 
• The city procures such items and services as: vehicles: cars, trucks, vans, petroleum: fuel/lubricants, office supplies, printed forms, paper, computer hardware and software, food and food services- for hospitals and jails, animal feed and supplies, medical equipment and supplies, pharmaceuticals, laboratory equipment and supplies, castings, chemicals, institutional clothing and laundry service, electrical supplies, lamps, glass, pipe, fittings, valves, hardware, tools, locks, shovels, rakes, lumber; services such as: janitorial, security guard, pest control; construction projects such as: buildings, street repair, park and playground improvements; services such as: management consulting, accounting and auditing, medical, legal, computer software design and consulting, architecture and engineering, facilities management.[37]
• Back in June 1997, San Francisco signed a “No Sweatshop” public purchasing resolution, which was passed by the Board of Supervisors; with a $400 million procurement budget, the city hoped to have a huge impact on city suppliers.[38]
• Due to the inability to back up the passing of the resolution with a stringent enforcement strategy IN 1997, the No More Sweatshops! campaign has brought to issue to the table once again

[2] “Trading away our rights: Women working in global supply chains.” Oxfam, 2/04, http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/trade/trading_rights.htm.

[3] “What is a Sweatshop?”, National Retail Federation Foundation, 2/21/05 http://www.sweatshops-retail.org/nrf%20website/sweatshop%20def.htm.

[4] Vegan Peace, 2/21/05, http://www.veganpeace.com/sweatshops/sweatshops_and_child_labor.htm.

[5] Moberg, David, “Work Ethics,” In These Times magazine, 3/31/97, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/New_Global_Economy/WorkEthics_ITT.html.

[6] Sweatshop Watch, http://sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/questions.

[7] Sweatshop Watch, http://sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/questions.

[8] Co-op America, 2/24/05, http://www.sweatshops.org/faqs.html.

[9] “Piece Rates: A viable incentive for improving productivity?” Pursuit Magazine online, June-July 2002 volume. http://www.pursuit.co.za/archive/junjul02_piece.htm.

[10] Sweatshop Watch, http://sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/questions.

[11] Clean Clothes Connection, 2/24/05, http://www.cleanclothesconnection.org/sweatshopqa.htm.

[12] Given, Olivia, “Frequently Asked Questions About Sweatshops and Women Workers,” Feminist Against Sweatshops, 1997,  http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html.

[13] Given, Olivia, “Frequently Asked Questions About Sweatshops and Women Workers,” Feminist Against Sweatshops, 1997,  http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html.

[14] Clean Clothes Connection, 2/24/05, http://www.cleanclothesconnection.org/sweatshopqa.htm.

[15] Clean Clothes Connection, 2/24/05, http://www.cleanclothesconnection.org/sweatshopqa.htm.

[16] Vegan Peace, 2/21/05, http://www.veganpeace.com/sweatshops/sweatshops_and_child_labor.htm.

[17] Given, Olivia, “Frequently Asked Questions About Sweatshops and Women Workers,” Feminist Against Sweatshops, 1997,  http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html.

[18] Global Exchange, 2/21/05, http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/sweatshops/sweatshopsfaq.html.

[19] “Sweatshops in America: From The Jungle to El Monte,” National Retail Federation Foundation, 2/24/05,  http://www.sweatshops-retail.org/nrf%20website/history.htm.

[20] Clean Clothes Connection, 2/24/05, http://www.cleanclothesconnection.org/sweatshopqa.htm.

[21] Liebhold, Peter and Harry Rubenstein, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place:  A History of American Sweatshops 1820-Present,” History Matters online, July 1998, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/145.

[22] Liebhold, Peter and Harry Rubenstein, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place:  A History of American Sweatshops 1820-Present,” History Matters online, July 1998, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/145.

[23] Liebhold, Peter and Harry Rubenstein, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place:  A History of American Sweatshops 1820-Present,” History Matters online, July 1998, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/145.

[24] Given, Olivia, “Frequently Asked Questions About Sweatshops and Women Workers,” Feminist Against Sweatshops, 1997,  http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html.

[25] Sweatshop Watch, http://sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/questions.

[26] Sweatshop Watch, http://sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/questions.

[27] Given, Olivia, “Frequently Asked Questions About Sweatshops and Women Workers,” Feminist Against Sweatshops, 1997,  http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html.

[28] “Sweatshops,” Saxakali People of Color Portal online, 7/02/00, http://www.saxakali.com/immigration/ss1.htm.

[29] Hua, Vanessa, “Lifting of import quotas a blow to garment factories: Bay Area apparel industry tattered by overseas competition — immigrant workers try to start over after layoffs,” SF Gate online, 1/18/05, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/18/MNG49AS6ND1.DTL.

[30] Hua, Vanessa, “Lifting of import quotas a blow to garment factories: Bay Area apparel industry tattered by overseas competition — immigrant workers try to start over after layoffs,” SF Gate online, 1/18/05, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/18/MNG49AS6ND1.DTL.

[31] Hua, Vanessa, “Lifting of import quotas a blow to garment factories: Bay Area apparel industry tattered by overseas competition — immigrant workers try to start over after layoffs,” SF Gate online, 1/18/05, http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/01/18/MNG49AS6ND1.DTL.

[32] Lazarus, David,  “Law closing in on factory: S.F. garment maker accused of not paying workers for 3 months,” San Francisco Chronicle, 8/17/01, http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/headlines/2001/wins_aug2001.html.

[33] Given, Olivia, “Frequently Asked Questions About Sweatshops and Women Workers,” Feminist Against Sweatshops, 1997,  http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html.

[34] Given, Olivia, “Frequently Asked Questions About Sweatshops and Women Workers,” Feminist Against Sweatshops, 1997,  http://www.feminist.org/other/sweatshops/sweatfaq.html.

[35] Global Exchange fact sheet by Valerie

[36] Oakland Institute.org, http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/Sweat%20Free%20Page.html.

[37] Office of Contract Administration for the city and county of San Francisco, 2/21/05, http://www.sfgov.org/site/oca_page.asp?id=26534.

[38] Infoshop.org, 2/21/05, http://www.infoshop.org/news_archive/sweatshops.html.

[39] Co-op America, 2/20/05, http://www.sweatshops.org/faqs.html.

[40] Clean Clothes Connection, 2/24/05, http://www.cleanclothesconnection.org/sweatshopqa.htm.

[41] Clean Clothes Connection, 2/24/05, http://www.cleanclothesconnection.org/sweatshopqa.htm.

[42] “The Consumer and Sweatshops November 1999,” Marymount University, 2/21/05, http://www.marymount.edu/news/garmentstudy/overview.html.

[43] Co-op America, 2/20/05, http://www.sweatshops.org/faqs.html.

[44] Co-op America, 2/20/05, http://www.sweatshops.org/faqs.html.

[45] Co-op America, 2/20/05, http://www.sweatshops.org/faqs.html.

Research compiled while serving as Research Coordinator for Oakland Institute, working closely with former Senator Tom Hayden and Eric Zeitlin, 2005.

(C) 2009 By Shannon Laliberte Parks. All Rights Reserved. Please Obtain Permission to Copy.