Pro-Gun Groups Attempting to use Gay Rights Bill to Move Agenda Forward
Pro-gun rights groups want to slip a provision into the Mathew Shepherd Hate Crime Legislation Bill making it legal to carry concealed weapons across state lines, in accordance with concealed carry laws. Ironically, although the idea is being pushed by GOProud, a new group of gay republicans that recently broke away from the Log Cabin Republicans, it would in reality help potential attackers travel more freely with their weapons.
This would be the second victory for pro-gun rights groups since the Obama administration took office. The first came as a provision tucked inside the recent credit card bill, allowing loaded weapons in national parks and preserves.
Health Insurance Companies Own Billions of Dollars in Stock in Cigarette Companies
According to the L.A. Progressive, “A new study just published in The New England Journal of Medicine documents how major health insurance providers in the US, Canada, and Britain hold billions of dollars in stock in companies that sell cigarettes and other tobacco products,” while at the same time, running public service ads encouraging people to quit smoking.
March Mass Layoffs Reach Highest Level on Record
Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that in March, employers took 2,933 mass layoff actions involving 299,388 workers, the highest levels on record. Mass layoff events increased by 164 from February, and initial claims increased by 3,911. Twenty-six states reached program highs for March in terms of average weekly initial claims.
CA Rep. Jane Harman Recorded on NSA Wiretap Agreeing to Intervene for AIPAC
CA Rep. Jane Harman was overheard on a FISA Court authorized wiretap talking with a suspected Israeli agent agreeing to lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee), the most powerful pro-Israel organization in Washington.
According CG Politics, Harman said “she would ‘waddle into’ the AIPAC case ‘if you think it’ll make a difference,’ according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.
According to an official who read the NSA transcript, Harman hung up after saying, ‘This conversation doesn’t exist.’”
Harman has denied these accusations.
Economic Distress Leads to Mass Suicide of 1,500 Farmers in India
Falling water levels have led to severe crop failures for farmers in India, many of whom are indebted and suffering economic distress. Read Full Story Here
AmazonFAIL: How Online Social Tools Can Wreak Havoc-and Repair It
By Deanna Zandt
The author explains what probably happened over the weekend to threaten sales of LGBT and feminist books on Amazon.com—and how social media instantly jumped into the fray.
April 13, 2009
Over the holiday weekend, a firestorm let loose on the Internet: For no apparent reason, books on Amazon.com with feminist, LGBT and sexual-empowerment themes were removed from the sales rankings, numbers that show how well a product is performing on the website.
Angry authors and readers responded by launching a full-on social media assault, using blogs, Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness and to collect signatures on a petition.
Rapid response campaigns not affiliated with any one organization are increasingly becoming the norm in the age of free communication tools. The Amazon incident (dubbed “AmazonFAIL,” drawing on usage of “fail” as an indicator of strong disapproval in online cultures) is a fascinating example in part because of the cultural motivation behind and the mechanics of the removal and the implications for sales of “banned” books.
For those just waking up to the scandal, here’s what happened: Amazon has a policy of removing books labeled as “adult” from its sales rankings (which by itself could discourage sales). This, in turn, has a ripple effect of removing books from elsewhere on the site, such as in search results and “related books” listings. The Amazon system is proprietary, so it’s hard for outsiders to determine the full implications of such a removal. Anecdotal evidence from authors searching for their banned books returned wildly different results at different points over the weekend, but it was clear that if allowed to go unchecked, the “adult” label would have a severe impact on sales—if the readers can’t find it, the readers can’t buy it.
What kinds of books received this “adult” label? Erotica with gay themes (but not heterosexual themes), rape survivor advocacy and rape culture criticism, and feminist missives were among those suddenly labeled adult material. Soft-core hetero porn (such as Playboy centerfold calendars), hetero-themed sex toys and anti-gay screeds were left untouched. Let the maelstrom begin.
Blog posts sprang up, but the social media service Twitter soon became the hotbed of information gathering and disseminating. Authors tweeted about missing books, readers posted links to breaking news and why-would-Amazon-do-this theories, and a petition demanding that Amazon rescind its adult policy gathered 10,000 names in less than 24 hours. By Sunday evening, Amazon responded via an interview with Publisher’s Weekly that the entire situation was a “glitch.”
As most in the social media sphere attacked Amazon directly for purposely removing the books, technologists familiar with “distributed attacks” (attacks that are carried out by people not belonging to any one identifiable, formal group) started to speculate on the source of the takedowns. They understood that it’s unlikely that Amazon itself enacted a homophobic, misogynist campaign to selectively label certain books as adult and thus damage the sales of these books.
Blogger Dely at livejournal.com explains:
Now, let’s just put ourselves in Amazon’s shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in f****** Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist. Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as “adult” content? Why would this happen over a weekend?
It’s obvious Amazon has some sort of automatic mechanism that marks a book as “adult” after too many people have complained about it. It’s also obvious that there aren’t too many people using this feature, as indicated by the easy availability (and search ranking) of pornography and sex toys and other seemingly “objectionable” materials, otherwise almost all of those items would have been flagged by this point. So somebody is going around and very deliberately flagging only LGBT(QQI)/feminist/survivor content on Amazon until it is unranked and becomes much more difficult to find.
It’s far more likely that a group of tech “enthusiasts,” let’s call them, organized some sort of campaign over a holiday weekend (when Amazon was likely operating with a shoestring staff) to delist books they found objectionable. When I say enthusiasts, I’m referring to loosely associated hacker-types who enjoy wreaking havoc purely for the sake of the havoc. Rarely do they have a formal political agenda. Often women, particularly feminists, and queer folk are the targets (though recently, one notorious group called 4chan targeted and found a teenager who had posted a video of himself torturing a cat).
It would be easy to dismiss this, and other cases, as Internet-gone-wild making the world unsafe for women and LGBT folk. Somewhat harder to discern, and admit to ourselves, is that the anonymity and freedom that the Internet provides pulls back the curtain on our culture: at work are the illusive mores of misogyny and homophobia that continue to shape our culture and lives.
Written by Deanna Zandt for The Women’s Media Center (www.womensmediacenter.com). The WMC is a non-profit organization founded by Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan, dedicated to making women visible and powerful in the media.
Quiet Push to Recognize Suffrage Sites
by Peggy Simpson
Spearheaded by New York Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, powerful chair of the House Rules Committee, legislation was signed into law at the end of last month that will help celebrate the not-so-ancient history of how women won the vote in the United States.
Virtually unnoticed by the national news media, a Votes for Women History Trail in western New York has been authorized to recognize the suffragists who helped transform this country. The trail will be operated by the National Park Service (NPS) if Congress provides follow-up funding for the bill, which passed Congress in late March and was signed into law by President Obama shortly before his European trip.
A Votes for Women History Trail would create a drivable route that visits up to 20 significant sites in the suffragists’ prolonged battle for the vote, from the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in Auburn, near Syracuse, to the Waterloo and Seneca Falls sites of the first women’s rights conventions, to the trail’s western anchor in Rochester, the Susan B. Anthony House. Point person for the trail has been Representative Louise Slaughter, D-NY—a former chair of the congressional women’s caucus—who has sponsored the bill since 2002.
“So many people forget that it was just 89 years ago that women were finally allowed to vote in this country,” Slaughter said. She praised Obama for signing the bill “to celebrate the historic events and recognize the important sites that served as the backdrop in the struggle for women’s equality.” The Votes for Women trail will let Americans “learn more about the heroines who changed history and opened the doors of opportunity for future generations of women.”
Good political strategy helped move the trail into reality. Slaughter’s counterpart in the Senate had been Hillary Clinton, now secretary of State. As a stand-alone bill, the Votes for Women trail had faced one obstacle after another. Slaughter, now the House Rules Committee chair with much clout in the New York delegation, worked with Senator Charles Schumer, D-NY, to get the Votes for Women bill included (with 160 other House-passed bills) into the 2009 Omnibus Public Land Management Act.
In addition to the trail, the new law will expand the current National Register travel website, “Places Where Women Made History.” As of now, only 44 percent of the 298 sites relevant to women’s rights are included in this. And only 57 of those listed are national historic landmarks, including the Susan B. Anthony House.
The law also will direct the Department of Interior to establish a public-private National Women’s Rights History Project Partnership, to help develop interpretive and educational programs dramatizing the national women’s rights history. The partnership would be run by a non-governmental entity and would provide grants to state historic preservation offices for up to five years to survey, evaluate and nominate women’s rights history properties to be added to the National Register of Historic Places.
The National Park Service already operates the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls. Its mission would expand to developing brochures, interpretive documents, maps and an official uniform symbol to mark the Votes for Women History Trail.
Deborah L. Hughes, executive director of the Susan B. Anthony House, said that while they probably would get no direct funding under the trail project, she expects national and international visibility to increase dramatically. She is in the midst of a membership and fundraising drive to retrofit the Anthony house and to develop an adjacent carriage house as a place for workshops and programs.
It’s something of a miracle that the house still exists—in much the same configuration as it was when Anthony lived there from 1866 until 1906. It remained in private hands until 1945.
At that time, Hughes said, the Rochester Federation of Women’s Club approached the owners to see if they could put a sign on the house. That’s how they learned the house was about to be sold again. The federation bought it and preserved it, with volunteers only, until a first staff person was hired in 1992. Hughes came 18 months ago and, in addition to fundraising, is expanding links with scholars to alert them to the five boxes of Anthony’s correspondence, which individuals have donated over the years. Most scholars have no idea these invaluable original sources exist, Hughes said, since Anthony donated her papers to the Library of Congress.
In a feasibility study on the trail, the NPS said that “by any measure, the women’s rights movement is among the fundamental, far-reaching, modern reformist traditions in U.S. history. In its many manifestations, the women’s rights tradition has been characterized by its challenge to women’s subordination to men and its insistence on a standard of equal treatment, opportunity and rights. …
“Far from being confined to a corner of American history as a ‘special interest,’ the battle for women’s rights lies at the center of the public traditions of the nation. The long pursuit of equality between the sexes has had immense consequences in American history.”
In the 19th Century, New York State was at the cutting edge of the women’s rights movement.
On July 19, 1848, the first Women’s Rights Convention was held at Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, Jane Hunt and Mary Ann M’Clintock. The Declaration of Sentiments, calling for a broad range of rights for women including suffrage, was signed by 68 women and 32 men.
Susan B. Anthony later formed the Equal Rights Association which refuted ideas that women were inferior to men and fought for the right of women to vote, own property, keep their own earnings and have custody of their children. She persuaded the University of Rochester in 1900 to admit women.
In 1869, Stanton, Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage and others formed the National Woman Suffrage Association and Lucy Stone, Henry Blackwell and others formed the American Woman Suffrage Association. These two groups merged in 1890 and held mass campaigns to win the vote over the next three decades. That finally occurred with passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, certified on August 26, 1920.
The precise locations to be included in the Votes for Women History Trail will be decided later, but the NPS feasibility study included a map featuring these sites:
1. Susan B. Anthony House in Rochester
2. Antoinette Brown Blackwell childhood home in Henrietta
3. Ontario County Courthouse in Canandaigua (where Anthony was convicted for illegally voting)
4, 5. M’Clintock house and the Jane Hunt house in Waterloo
6, 7, 9. Jacob P. Chamberlain, Lorina Latham and Elizabeth Cady Stanton houses in Seneca Falls
8, 10, 11,12 Wesleyan Chapel, First Presbyterian Church, the Race and Hoskins houses in Seneca Falls
13. Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged in Auburn
14. Harriet May Mills house in Syracuse
15. Matilda Joslyn Gage house in Fayetteville
Written by Peggy Simpson for The Women’s Media Center (www.womensmediacenter.com). The WMC is a non-profit organization founded by Jane Fonda, Gloria Steinem, and Robin Morgan, dedicated to making women visible and powerful in the media.
Starbucks, Whole Foods, CostCo Propose Alternative to Employee Free Choice Act – Hold the Choice
Starbucks, Whole Foods and CostCo CEOs have come up with an “alternative” proposal to EFCA. According to the Washington Post, “… the three companies are opposed to two of the Employee Free Choice Act’s components — a provision that would allow workers to form a union if a majority sign pro-union cards, without having to hold a secret-ballot election, and one that would impose binding arbitration when employers and unions fail to reach a contract after 120 days.” Read this analysis of their compromise suggestion at Firedog Lake.
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