Lily Salter's Blog, page 1026
August 9, 2015
Austerity kills: The sad, sick truth about right-wing economics’ body count
Austerity pushes people to the edge
“This government will not cut [the] deficit in a way that hurts those we most need to help, that divides the country, or that undermines the spirit and ethos of our public services.” (David Cameron, in a speech in June 2010)
“If austerity were tested like a medication in a clinical trial,it would have been stopped long ago, given its deadly side effects.... One need not be an economic ideologue – we certainly aren’t – to recognize that the price of austerity can be calculated in human lives.” (David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu, authors, "The body economic:Why austerity kills," 2013)
The mental strain unleashed by cuts:
Helpline caller number 1: ‘David’ is getting more anxious and more agitated the more calls he makes to the suicide helpline. He has mental health problems. He tells the volunteer manning the phone that he is finding it difficult to cope. He is terrified. His benefits ‘situation’ is causing him enormous distress. It is early March 2013 when he first calls after being told that from April he would have to pay the ‘Bedroom Tax’.There is no way he can find the money from his incapacity benefits. He doesn’t eat for days at a time.The benefits office doesn’t seem to take any notice of what he is telling them. He can’t sleep. It is the end of March.The call log ends.
“No one stops to think about the babies”: How do black youth feel when they see the people they love being murdered or mass incarcerated?
Samuel DuBose was on his way home to watch a movie with his 9-year-old son, Samuel Jr. According to Samuel Jr., "He was coming home that night and we had a projector so we were going to watch a movie on it but we didn't get to do that ... because he died." University of Cincinnati Officer Ray Tensing shot Samuel in his head after pulling him over for a missing license plate. And while Officer Tensing gets to go home to his family after posting bond, Samuel Jr. and his 12 brothers and sisters will never see their father again.
“I can’t get him back," Samuel Jr. told WLWT-TV, “he's gone, he's watching me right now, I can't see him or talk to him or nothing.”
In April of this year the New York Times published an article called "1.5 Million Missing Black Men":
In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.
They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars.
The poisoned poor: In poor countries man-made toxic pollutants spread like cancer. Here’s why you should care
It started out simply enough: peering into an open-cut mine and watching my feet to make sure I didn’t slip on the ice. The pit was several hundred feet deep and about half a mile across. We were at the edge of an old cinnabar mine near the town of Horlivka, in the eastern part of Ukraine.
The Russians had mined the cinnabar for mercury but the pit had lain abandoned for some time. I was there with a dozen other environmentalists in a training workshop to identify polluted sites. This place certainly qualified. High levels of mercury had been found in the soil of a nearby village; we were there to assess the risk. My biggest concern at the moment, however, was keeping myself from slipping on the icy edge of the mine and falling in. One glance was enough to tell me it was a long way down, and dark.
Vladimir was our local coordinator. He tugged at my elbow.
“Uh-oh,” he said in a low voice.
I followed his gaze and saw two big black SUVs pull off the road about fifty yards away. A window in the lead vehicle rolled down, and someone within barked a few words in Russian. Vladimir scurried over, listened for a moment, and jogged back. The look on his face was grim.
Bernie Sanders takes it to the Christian right: Why he’s speaking to the Jerry Falwell crowd
Wednesday night, the Bernie Sanders campaign announced that he will be giving a speech in September to an unexpected venue: Liberty University, the evangelical university founded by the late Reverend Jerry Falwell. In a statement, Sanders explained that the invitation came from the school itself and he views it as a way to talk to an audience whose views on many issues may differ from his:
Liberty University was kind enough to invite me to address a convocation and I decided to accept. It goes without saying that my views on many issues — women’s rights, gay rights, education and many other issues — are very different from the opinions of some in the Liberty University community. I think it is important, however, to see if we can reach consensus regarding the grotesque level of income and wealth inequality in our country, about the collapse of the middle class, about the high level of childhood poverty, about climate change and other issues. It is very easy for a candidate to speak to people who hold the same views. It’s harder but important to reach out to others who look at the world differently. I look forward to meeting with the students and faculty of Liberty University.
3 reasons Joe Biden should stay far way from the presidential race
No. Definitely not.
This article is a response to the recent rumors that Vice President Joe Biden is going to make a run for the White House in 2016. I’m not going to speculate as to the man’s intentions (I have no way of knowing them), but rather discuss in a point-by-point fashion why a Biden presidential campaign would be a bad idea. Let’s start from the top:
1. He could never beat Hillary Clinton … or Bernie Sanders, for that matter.
Donald Trump’s incoherent, megalomaniacal religion: Why his courting of evangelicals reveals the depths of his ignorance
The Donald Trump candidacy confronts us with the atrocious spectacle of an oft-incoherent megalomaniac billionaire vaunting his loyalty to a contemptible yet hallowed ideology based on wishful thinking, preposterous ancient myths, and servitude to a make-believe celestial tyrant who, if he did exist, would rival said billionaire in incoherence and megalomania, and, of course, vastly exceed him in wealth. Donald Trump owns a fortune, to be sure. But the Lord, were He real, would own Donald Trump – and for all eternity.
At the same Family Leadership Summit in Iowa at which he recently called John McCain a “loser” (but a loser whose 2008 presidential campaign he then and there boasted of having helped finance), Trump reminded us of his resurgent religious sensibilities, if in an oddly offhanded sort of way. When the moderator asked him if he had ever sought the Lord’s pardon for anything, Trump replied: "I am not sure I have. I just go on and try to do a better job from there. I don't think so. I don't bring God into that picture."
The secret history of “cuckservative”: The fetish that became a right-wing rallying cry
Humans are social beings. Humans invented politics in order to manage conflict and decide how resources should be distributed in society. It is almost inevitable then that politics would become a stage on to which we project some of the most basic -- and base -- parts of the self.
In a recent article at Salon, Joan Walsh did an excellent job in navigating the political effluence that is the American right’s newborn obsession with “cuckservatives.”
There, she noted how:
“Cuckservative” started showing up in my Twitter mentions last week, after I suggested Donald Trump supporters might not be the brightest bulbs. As I clicked around, I came to a shocking conclusion: I’ve been uncharacteristically downplaying the amount of racism and misogyny powering the right today. The spread of the epithet “cuckservative” is a sign that the crudest psycho-sexual insecurity animates the far right.
“Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it.
OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man. Lewis explains it this way: “A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.”
Paul Krugman’s shameful colonialism: Why the progressive economist has Puerto Rico all wrong
Since joining the New York Times as a columnist in 1999, Paul Krugman has emerged as a hero of sorts for the American left, and with good reason. He's been a dogged critic of George W. Bush's foreign and domestic policies and a fierce defender of the current administration's Affordable Care Act. His contempt for austerity and the hawks that champion it at home and abroad is palpable. But even the fiercest of progressives have their blind spots, and El Señor Krugman's happens to take the shape of my native Puerto Rico.
August 8, 2015
I didn’t realize I was being trafficked
“Stop, you’re hurting me,” I wailed.
“If you can’t take this, then how can you take a penis?” the doctor said, glaring at me while she shoved the massive, ice-cold, metal speculum deeper inside my vagina.
I winced. My face scrunched, eyes shut tight, I cried as the she forced it in. As it scraped along the narrow walls, I tried to pull away, but only made it worse.
More from DAME: "My 'Magic Mike' Moment Was Truly Magical"
“Doctor, please! Stop!” I bawled, writhing in pain.
“Stop,” she yelled. “Stay still or I can’t do this.”
I was 16. It was my first time ever seeing a gynecologist.
I had been a healthy child, so I’d rarely ever even seen a pediatrician, except for a few extreme situations: when I was rendered unable to walk from a urinary tract infection at age 8; when I’d sprained a palm and thumb at 9; and when I’d hemorrhaged, a few months prior to this, during my first-ever period. It was brought on by miscarriage, after I’d lost my virginity on my 16th birthday. I’d thought that because this doctor was a woman she would be nice. I was wrong.
