Li'l Egypt

Sorry for the Cher version; I'm sick. I shouldn't be looking at something as serious at another Egyptian revolution-- there are already a couple dozen people dead and 14 million angry Egyptians in the street including some real assholes-- through the prism of U.S. pop culture, let alone my own travelogue. Morsi Muslim Brotherhood crackpots started screaming about martyrdom this week-- going out in a blaze of glory. At least that's what's being reported. How much we can know about a fluid situation like this so far away and through the linguistic, culture and political barriers is another matter entirely.

We do know that the military gave Morsi a 48 hour deadline (today) to... something and that Morsi rejected whatever it was. Reuters reported that the army is looking at suspending the constitution and the nullifying the elected parliament as part of their "roadmap." Awkward.

The sources told Reuters the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was still discussing details of the plan, intended to resolve a political crisis that has brought millions of protesters into the streets. The roadmap could be changed based on political developments and consultations.

Chief-of-staff General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called in a statement on Monday for Mursi to agree within 48 hours on power-sharing with other political forces, saying the military would otherwise set out its own roadmap for the country's future.

The president rebuffed the ultimatum and the main liberal and leftist opposition alliance has refused to talk to him, demanding along with youth activists that he resign.

The sources said the military intended to install an interim council, composed mainly of civilians from different political groups and experienced technocrats, to run the country until an amended constitution was drafted within months.

That would be followed by a new presidential election, but parliamentary polls would be delayed until strict conditions for selecting candidates were in force, they said.

The armed forces planned to open talks with the main opposition National Salvation Front and other political, religious and youth organizations once a deadline set for Mursi to reach a power-sharing agreement expires on Wednesday.

The sources would not say how the military intended to deal with Mursi if he refused to go quietly. The emerging roadmap could be amended as a result of those consultations, they said. Among figures being considered as an interim head of state was the new president of the constitutional court, Adli Mansour.

The emerging army blueprint closely resembles proposals for a democratic transition put forward by the NSF, which appointed former U.N. nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei on Monday to negotiate with the military on the way forward.

The military sources said the new transition arrangements would be entirely different from the military rule that followed the overthrow of autocratic President Hosni Mubarak in a 2011 popular uprising.

Then, the armed forces' council held effective power but was widely criticized by liberal and left-wing politicians for failing to enact vital economic and political reforms, and siding with the Muslim Brotherhood.

NBC's Richard Engel is in Cairo. He's better than any of the other network reporters so it's worth paying attention to his insights. Less than a minute-and-a-half:



Military coups aren't what progressives usually like to see. But against an increasingly divisive, religionist regime... there seems to be a lot of acceptance of the idea. Al Jazeera is reporting that international pressure is being applied to Morsi to... I'm not sure what... bow to pressure from the street?

The UN human rights office called on Morsi's government on Tuesday to listen to the demands of the Egyptian people and engage in a "serious national dialogue" to defuse the crisis.

Rupert Colville, the spokesman of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, also said the role of the Egyptian military was crucial.

"Nothing should be done that would undermine democratic processes," he said.

Earlier, the US President Barack Obama spoke to the Egyptian leader via phone. A White House statement said he "stressed that democracy is about more than elections; it is also about ensuring that the voices of all Egyptians are heard and represented by their government, including the many Egyptians demonstrating throughout the country."

...The crisis has triggered a series of resignations by cabinet ministers, leaving Morsi isolated.

Senior officials who have quit include foreign minister Mohamed Kamel Amr, who tendered his resignation on Tuesday.

Others to resign are tourism minister Hisham Zaazou; communication and IT minister Atef Helmi; the minister for legal and parliamentary affairs, Hatem Bagato; water minister Abdel Qawy Khalifa; and environment minister Khaled Abdel-Aal.

Morsi also lost the support of Sami Enan, his military adviser, who resigned and said the army would not “abandon the will of the people."

Opponents of Morsi viewed the army statement as an endorsement and continued to flood the streets to press on the president to step down.

Morsi supporters criticised the ultimatum as an attempted coup. A group of pro-Morsi parties, calling themselves the “coalition to defend legitimacy,” called for mass protests in support of the president during a late-night press conference.

“We reject attempts to use the army to attack the legitimacy of the president," said Safwat Abdel Ghani, a senior member of the Gamaa al-Islamiyya.

Gehad el-Haddad, a senior adviser to the Freedom and Justice Party of Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood, said the military was trying to paper over its own poor performance during the transitional period after Mubarak's ouster.

"The right of the people to choose the leader of the country will not be jeopardised by anyone, even by those with guns," he said in an interview.

This sounds like it could easily turn into a civil war and a military dictatorship. It's worth reading an interview with President Jimmy Carter about the deleterious impact on people's lives when religionists take over government. Jonathan Merritt explains that he was visiting The Carter Center to attend “Mobilizing Faith for Women: Engaging the Power of Religion and Belief to Advance Human Rights and Dignity.” The goal of the event was to “educate and mobilize religious leaders from around the world” on the incompatibility of their teachings with gender inequality. In his opening remarks, President Carter called abuses of women “the most pervasive and unaddressed human rights violations on earth.”

Eighty percent of slaves are women, and 80% of those are sold for sexual abuse. In Saudi Arabia, for example, women aren’t allowed to drive automobiles or vote in political elections. Though The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been ratified by every major nation on earth, it is often ignored on religious grounds.

...Jimmy Carter: "I think in the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention and in some Islamic countries, women are ordained to be inferior to men in their ability to serve God.

"My own belief is that the Bible teaches the equality of men and women. In fact, Paul told the Galatians in chapter three that there is no difference between Jews and Gentiles, between slaves and masters, between men and women in their standing before God through Jesus Christ. And in the 16th chapter of Romans, when Paul delineates the leaders of the church in the early Christian era, there is about a third or almost half of those mentioned who were women who serve as priests and apostles and so forth.

"So, you can pick out particular verses in the Quran or the Bible to tell women they can’t be ordained or even adorned with jewelry or cut their hair and that sort of thing or to be subservient to their husbands. But at the same time, the Bible says that husbands should treat their wives with the same respect they treat Jesus Christ. So it’s this elective use of verses from the Quran and Bible that permits some male leaders to assert that women are inferior. I object to that no matter who the entity might be."

Morsi's national TV address this evening appears to have gone badly:

UPDATE: Deadline Passes-- Army Moves

There have been rumors all day that Morsi has either been taken into custody or is under house arrest. The military has taken over the state TV station. The Egyptian Brotherhood have been screaming "coup" all day and they're probably correct. Reports say that despite an offer for a consensus government, there are tanks on the streets, both in and outside of Cairo. And a travel ban has been announced for Morsi and high-ranking Brotherhood officials. My late afternoon, Morsi asked Egyptians to resist the coup peacefully, although one of his aides says there will be a great deal of bloodshed. Al Arabiya is posting a minute-by-minute update here.

•  4:15 pm Several hundred Egyptian soldiers, together with armored vehicles, perform a military parade on the main road near the Presidential Palace, Reuters reports

   • 4:10 pm Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi's message to all Egyptians is to resist a military coup peacefully, aide says

   • 4:08 pm Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi is still working at the republican guard barracks in Cairo, unclear if free to leave, aide says

   • 4:02 pm At least 37 people have been killed and 1600 injured in violence since Tuesday night, Al Arabiya correspondent reports

   • 3:57 pm  A military coup will not pass without bloodshed, Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi's adviser says

   • 3:56 pm Egyptian President Mohammed Mursi’s adviser says he expects army and police violence to remove pro-Mursi demonstrators

   • 3:55 pm The army begins to deploy in Giza, Al Ahram reports

  • 3:52 pm Mursi's security advisor: military coup is underway

  • 3:50pm Mursi, top Brotherhood leaders banned from traveling

   • 3:50 pm Egypt president's national security adviser says military coup under way

  • 3:48 pm The U.S. secretary of defense called his Egyptian counterpart yesterday

  • 3:46 pm The Egyptian army told President Mohammed Mursi it will postpone issuing its statement for hours to avoid bloodshed, Al Ahram reports

   • 3:42 pm The Egyptian president's national security adviser says a military coup under way.

   • 3:35 pm National Salvation Front: U.S. pressures on army not to act

   • 3:35 pm: National Salvation Front: Army will strip Mursi of legitimacy

   • 3:16 pm  Egypt state TV denied that employees evacuated TV building and reassured ongoing work

   • 3:13 pm Opponents of Islamist President Mohammed Mursi gather near Ittihadiya Presidential Palace in Cairo, calling  for his ouster

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Conservatives Can't Keep Up WIth Technological Developments

I wish I could remember his exact quote, but a high school history teacher impressed me by explaining how technological achievements galloped way ahead of society's ability to evolve spiritually, intellectually and morally to deal with those achievements. He said it so elegantly though. In her book, Murder in the Name of Honor, journalist/activist Rana Husseini makes a similar point about backward, morally-primitive conservatives and how they relate to women. Last weekend we looked at how horribly conservatives deal with women... and suddenly the Republican War Against Women was in a more international-- and timeless-- context.

Husseini's book deals with a litany of horrific crimes by conservative barbarians against women, including conservative barbarians who emigrate to more advanced countries, including our own. I noticed an ironic strand in her work about how technology and social media has lent itself to the murders and brutalizations of women, mostly by husbands, fathers and brothers. "A new addition to the list of murder weapons," she wrote, "is the mobile phone. In Kurdistan, where there has been a sudden influx of cheap mobile phones, men are using them to take photos and record audio and video clips of women and girls who are breaking social codes. These are then widely distributed, damaging women's reputations and putting their lives at risk. The first case is believed to have been in 2004, when footage of a seventeen year old girl having sex with a boy circulated in Erbil. Two days after the video was made public, the girl's family killed her... In 2006, 170 cases of mobile phone-related violence were recorded. By 2007, this figure had more than doubled to 350...

"Kurdistan [said an official of a women's rights NGO] is developing, but people still adhere to the old customs and traditions. And women are still the primary victims."

...The nineteen-year old Iraqi was, according to her father, murdered by her own in-laws, who took her to a picnic area and shot her seven times, Her crime: having an unknown number of her mobile phone.

...In another case that was reported in Al Hayat newspaper in 2003, a twenty-year old woman was stabbed to death by her brothers after she started listening to Um Kalthoum (a famous Arab singer known for her love songs). The brothers believed that her musical taste was evidence of an illicit affair, and, acting on their suspicion, killed her and then turned themselves into the police. Investigations later proved that the victim's husband had bought the tapes for his wife to listen to while he was away.



...[I]n August 2007, the Daily Telegraph reported a story about a young Saudi girl in Riyadh who was killed by her father after he walked into her room and found her chatting to a man on Facebook. The father reportedly beat up his daughter and then shot her to death.

The case remained unreported in Saudi Arabia until April 2008 when Saudi preacher Ali al-Maliki strongly criticized Facebook and called on the Saudi government to ban the internet site because it was corrupting Saudi youth.

"Facebook is a door to lust and young women and men are spending more on their mobile phones and the internet than they are spending on food," he said. The story was written up in the local press as an example of the "strife" that Facebook was causing in Saudi Arabia. Ali al-Maliki said women were posting "revealing pictures" and "Behaving badly" on the site, which has become very popular with young Saudis.

...In May 2007, nineteen-year old Shawbo Ali Rauf was taken from her home in Birmingham [England] to Iraqi Kurdistan where she was stoned to death, Her crime was having unknown numbers on her mobile phone-- which proved to her family that she was having an affair.

Conservatives don't "trust" new technology. It should have come as no surprise that Turkish conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan started blaming Twitter and Facebook when people in Istanbul demonstrated against her corruption for selling off the city's most beloved park to wealthy developers for a shopping mall. I don't think he has a Twitter handle but he called social media "a menace." Dictators and authoritarians have always hated media they can't control. "Now we have a menace that is called Twitter," Erdogan said. "The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society."

Unsurprisingly, news and rumours about the marches quickly spread on Twitter, which appeared to have galvanised support in other parts of Turkey. Police used teargas on demonstrators in Turkey's biggest city Istanbul, and also in Izmir and the capital Ankara, which sparked further outcry.

Protests were then held across the country, and nearly 2,000 people are said to have been arrested in 67 towns and cities.

Erdogan attacked Twitter for spreading misinformation and helping to fuel the unrest in Turkey. Perhaps he was referring to tweets such as these...

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Conservatives-- A Clear And Present Danger To Women The World Over

Conservative immigrants are not adequately screened. I've been reading a fascinating-- and horrifying-- book by Jordanian journalist and activist Rana Husseini, Murder in the Name Of Honor. The book goes beyond Jordan-- and beyond just the patriarchal practice of "Honor" Killing to the whole panoply of violence against women, basically a more extreme version of what Republican Party War On Women stalwarts, Lou Dobbs and Erick Erickson, have been yammering about this week on GOP propaganda outlets. The conservative practice of taking child brides, which at least isn't about murdering women, is one of the many manifestations of how conservative males try to assert their dominance over women... even in "advanced" countries.

Last week, the Atlantic reported on the rise of child marriages among desperate Syrian refugees. It's gigantic in India, where a 14 year old is legally considered marriage material. And in Uganda, "almost two million minors are forced or lured into alleged marriage." 46% of women under 18 are child brides. It's worse in Niger (75%) and Chad (72%).

Child marriage negatively impacts on the girls and their children and can affect generations ahead of them.

“These children have no say in the marriage, are prone to violence and sexually transmitted infections and other ills,” said Dr. V. Chandra-Mouli from the World Health Organisation.

He further explained that the child brides are cut off from their family and social network which creates a huge health effect on them and then because the girl does not have a say, her children also lack education or are married off at an early age.

Early marriages and the resultant pregnancies are the biggest cause of deaths among 15 to 19 year old girls, accounting for 20% of maternal deaths. Those who survive the pregnancies suffer lasting complications like fistula and disability.

Dr. Mouli said that the parents who marry off these children give several justifications which include poverty, lack of education, lack of laws prohibiting it, social-religious considerations and sexual activity of the child, which should not be used as the excuse. He said that parents simply want to get rid of the girl so that they do not have the burden of looking after her.

This week CNN looked into the child bride problem in Saudi Arabia, where young girls are sold to older men. Saudi Arabia's big reform, recently, was to set 16 as the minimum age for these weddings-- unless the girl's mother approves. Then there's no age limit.

We've covered a lot of the violence against women problems in Jordan already, here,here and here, so let's just move on to some other countries. Can you guess which one this is?

It has been argued that it is unfair that men can currently rely on a 'fit of fury' as a partial justification for killing their unfaithful wives, while women who have been physically abused by their husbands and who have killed them out of the fear of further abuse have been denied any such defense, and have no choice but to face the straightforward charge of murder.

Yes, barbaric Afghanistan enlightened Britain. And when reform groups attempted to change the law, conservative shithead, Nicholas Phillips, Baron Phillips of Worth Matravers, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, stood up firmly for male ownership rights and the significance of sexual fidelity. OK, England... how about this one, which country? "A rape victim can be prosecuted for adultery if she can't produce four male witnesses to the assault." Iraq-- after the U.S. occupied the place! In Iraq, another war-torn region of the world, women's rights have deteriorated dramatically since the start of the U.S.-led coalition's occupation of the country... There are currently no shelters for women in Baghdad or Basra... When U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration proclaimed that women's rights would be at the center of its project to make Iraq a democratic model for the rest of the Arab world. But violence against women is rampant, rising every day... Beheadings, rapes, beatings, suicide, genital mutilation, trafficking and child abuse (masquerading as marriage) of girls as young as nine are all on the increase-- and woman who dares to protest will immediately find her life in great peril." That's some model!

In the E.U., there has been a tendency to just consider violence against women in the immigrant community an unpleasant fact of life. It is simply regarded as a "cultural expression, and nothing to get involved in. The specifics of these cases across Europe-- let alone in Kurdistan and Pakistan-- are too horrible and too depressing for me to publish. And there really is only one thing that every single case, across all countries, has in common. The perps are always conservatives. We have enough problems with degenerate conservative American citizens. Remember how almost all of them voted against the Violence Against Women Act earlier this year? Am I urging that immigration officials profile would-be applicants for conservatism and keep them out? Of course I am. Who sane wouldn't?

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How Buck McKeon's Mormonism Played Right Into The Military Rape Epidemic Coverup

Last summer the cover-up of the epidemic of military rapes at Lackland-- engineered by House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon-- began to unravel, due, primarily, to the tireless efforts by Protect Our Defenders. POD battled McKeon's determination to cover up the scandal and keep it out of the public view. At all times, he insisted on closed briefings rather than the public hearings this kind of scandal demanded. And who was McKeon's point person on the Committee, with his own peculiar take on rape? Todd Akin, of course. It was two of Congress' most backward, patriarchal and misogynistic Neanderthals that John Boehner put in charge of "protecting" the Pentagon... and leaving the rape victims to twist in the wind. This from last summer:

For one of the most misogynistic members of Congress, Buck McKeon, the decision on whether or not to have an open hearing on rape in the military was easy. No! That’s been the answer given to Protect Our Defenders (POD) and Lt. Paula Coughlin-Puopulo, USN (ret.) who delivered 10,000 signed petitions to McKeon asking for an open investigation into the sexual assaults at Lackland Air Force Base. Some may remember Lt. Coughlin as the whistleblower in the Tailhook Scandal in the early 1990’s where 83 women and 7 men were sexually assaulted in a Las Vegas Hotel. A statement from POD read, “More than 20 years ago, 87 servicewomen were sexually assaulted while serving in the U.S. Navy, in what became known as the “Tailhook scandal.” Paula was one of the 87. The former Naval aviator reported the incident to senior officers, but they did nothing. So she went public. Today, Paula is going public again demanding Rep. McKeon open a congressional hearing about Lackland and then legislate fundamental reforms.”

A closed briefing was held instead and one general reportedly asked McKeon not “to hobble base commanders” in determining how to handle sexual assault cases.

Military sexual assaults have been put back in the spotlight after 38 female Air Force recruits came forward with complaints of sexual assault or rape by instructors at Lackland AFB. Fifteen instructors have been implicated and two already found guilty. One awaits sentencing and another given only 30 days’ confinement and a reduction in rank-- a punishment criticized by POD asserting the military doesn’t take these crimes seriously.

I'm in the middle of reading Rana Husseini's courageous book on how men brutally enforce their will on women, Murder in the Name of Honor. Much of the book covers her beat as a journalist and activist: so-called "honor" crimes in her native Jordan. But she goes beyond Jordan and talks about the dynamics of these horrific and barbaric crimes against women around the world. Patriarchy is so ingrained that even many women are ready to blame the victims like this 25 year old Jordanian with a Masters degree in economics:

"Women are the source of seduction for men and if all women are chastised then men would become good on their own. We are in a Middle Eastern society and I am for punishing women more than men because men cannot resist the seduction of girls who are dressed improperly... When women are punished, fear of their families will build up among them and they will think twice before committing any immoral mistake."

She was talking about women who are brutally, savagely murdered by their own families because they are raped-- and about the murderers who go unpunished by patriarchal legal systems-- whether sharia courts in Muslim countries or outmoded military chain of command decisions in our own Pentagon.

In an interview with Jordan Member of Parliament Mahmoud Kharabesheh for the Jordan Times Husseini found an attitude that many privileged males feel all over the world: "Women adulterers cause a great threat to our society, because they are the main reason that such acts [of adultery] happen. If men do not find women with whom to commit adultery, then they will become good on their own." Well, if they can't find a woman to rape, some rape children or other men. Others turn to sheep. And when Jordan decided to start allowing women deputies in Parliament, religious conservatives there reacted the same way religious conservatives did here. A deputy from Amman's fourth district, explains Husseini, "strongly opposed the idea. He said that being an MP was a man's job; a woman can jeopardize her honor by going out late at night to take part in related social activities. If his daughter stayed out late at night he would shoot her himself, he added. He told the gathering that a woman's presence in Parliament 'would be damaging, since a woman in the house would distract make deputies and stir trouble when male deputies instinctively look at her breasts.'" Husseini traces these attitudes back to the primitive Bronze Age origins of the three Abrahamic religions:

This has its roots in numerous ancient texts, including the Old Testament, specifically Deuteronomy (22:12- 21), where proof of the bribe's virginity could be presented to both sets of parents in the form of stains on the bedsheets. If an unwed woman was found not to have been a virgin, then she was to be punished by being stoned to death.

This was convenient for men in a patriarchal society who might be paranoid about "his" woman comparing his prowess in the sack with other partners. And, all across the patriarchal world even murdering women who are perceived as not living up to the patriarchal rules, is forgiven because it is judged to be in "accordance with tradition." A Pakistani Senator insisted that "We have fought for human rights and civil liberties all our lives but wonder what sort of human rights are being claimed by these girls in jeans."

In February 2008 an Islamic fundamentalist shot and killed a government minister because of her refusal to wear a Muslim veil. Zilla Huma Usman, the Punjab Provincial Minister for Social Welfare, was shot as she prepared to address a public gathering in the town of Gujranwala. The attacker, Mululvi Ghulam Sarwar, said that he was opposed to the participation of women in politics and the refusal of many professional women in Pakistan to wear the veil.

Speaking to a local TV channel, he said, 'I have no regrets. I just obeyed Allah's commandment. Islam will not allow women to hold, positions of leadership. I will kill all those women who do not follow the right path. if I am freed again.'

What about Iraq, where the Bush Regime proclaimed that women's rights would be at the center of the project to make Iraq a democratic model for the rest of the Arab world? In Iraq women's rights have deteriorated dramatically since the start of the U.S.-led coalition's occupation.



And this kind of patriarchal mentality is certainly not unique to the Muslim world.

In Brazil, it is widely believed that a man can legitimately kill allegedly adulterous wife on the grounds of honor and such cases are regularly treated with leniency in the courtroom. Human Rights Watch has documented cases of women killed by their husbands from the 1970s to the late 1990s for leaving or divorcing their husbands, returning home late from work, refusing to sleep with their husband, suspicion of adultery or because they had been caught in an adulterous situation.

So what does this have to do with Buck McKeon's Mormonism and how he orchestrated the cover-up of the military rape epidemic? After all, Mormonism isn't the same as the Muslim faith, even if both were rooted in extreme patriarchy and polygamy... right?

Anyone who has lived among Mormons has observed the sect’s legendarily happy families and tight-knit communities. They are self-satisfied, devout and abstemious; overwhelmingly white and middle to upper class. Hard working, acquisitive, conservative and disciplined. A whopping majority of them consider helping the poor a top priority-- an admirable quality even if their anti-poverty efforts are mostly directed at their own ranks.

...Mormonism is a valid issue of concern not as a religious test for office, but for its most distinctive characteristic — male authoritarianism. The controversial and secretive religion is a multibillion-dollar business empire ruled by a stern patriarchal gerontocracy. Only “worthy males” can ascend to positions of power-- both now and in the afterlife-- and women are relegated to supporting roles. Male dominance is the essence of the faith, as the Mormon feminist Sonia Johnson found when she was excommunicated for her support of the Equal Rights Amendment. In her memoir, From Housewife to Heretic, Johnson describes a patriarchal world in which everyone is taught that "God, being male, values maleness much more than he values femaleness, that God and men are in an Old Boys’ Club together, with God as president.”

Protecting the victims of rape was the last thing on Buck McKeon's mind as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Protecting the old boys' network at the Pentagon was. This week President Obama called the military heads into his office for a chat. He had a very different perspective:

[O]ne of the great honors of my life is serving as Commander-in-Chief to what I consider to be the best military in the history of the world. And I am in awe of the work that the vast majority of our men and women in uniform do.

But the reason we are so good is not because of the fancy equipment. It’s not because of our incredible weapon systems and technology. It’s because of our people. And the capacity for our men and women in uniform to work as a team, a disciplined unit looking out for each other in the most severe of circumstances, is premised, as Ray Odierno said, on trust. It comes down to do people trust each other and do they understand that they’re all part of a single system that has to operate under whatever circumstances effectively.

The issue of sexual assault in our armed forces undermines that trust. So not only is it a crime, not only is it shameful and disgraceful, but it also is going to make and has made the military less effective than it can be. And as such, it is dangerous to our national security  So this is not a sideshow. This is not sort of a second-order problem that we’re experiencing. This goes to the heart and the core of who we are and how effective we’re going to be.

Now, the good news is I am absolutely confident that everybody in this room and our leadership, starting with Chuck Hagel and Marty Dempsey and the Joint Chiefs, as well as our top enlisted men and women, they care about this. And they’re angry about it. And I heard directly from all of them that they’re ashamed by some of what’s happened.

But it’s not fixed yet, and that’s clear. So even though I think there’s a level of concern and interest that is appropriate, we haven’t actually been able to ensure that our men and women in uniform are not experiencing this, and if they do experience it, that there’s serious accountability.

So what I’ve done is I’ve asked Secretary of Defense Hagel and Marty Dempsey to help lead a process to continue to get at this. That starts with accountability, and that means at every level. And that includes accountability not just for enforcing the law, but also training our personnel effectively, putting our best people on this challenge.

I think Secretary of the Army McHugh made a very good point, which is I’m not sure we’ve incentivized some of our top people to understand this is as core to our mission as anything else. And we’ve got to reward them, not think of this as a sideline for anything else that they do, but incentivize ambitious folks in the ranks to make sure that they understand this is important. So that’s part of accountability.

Empowering victims. We’ve got to create an environment in which victims feel that they’re comfortable coming forward and they know people have their backs, and that they will work through this process in a way that keeps the focus on justice and make right what’s been wrong as opposed to suddenly they’re on trial, it may weaken their position, it make compromise their ability to advance.  That’s going to be important. They’ve got to know that they should have no fear of retaliation, no fear of stigma, no damage to their careers, and certainly no protection for criminals.

Third thing is justice for the victims. When victims do come forward, they deserve justice. Perpetrators have to experience consequences. And I’m pleased that Secretary Hagel has proposed reforms that would restrict the ability of commanders to overturn convictions after trial. Those reforms have my full support.

...I want to emphasize-- everybody in this room has heard from me directly. They’ve heard from Secretary Hagel, and they’ve heard from Marty Dempsey. They all understand this is a priority and we will not stop until we’ve seen this scourge, from what is the greatest military in the world, eliminated.

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How Would You Feel If Someone Wrote, "We Need Fewer Women In Congress?"

Women make up just about 51% of the population. Women hold 98, or 18.3%, of the 535 seats in the 113th US Congress-- 20, or 20.0%, of the 100 seats in the Senate and 78, or 17.9%, of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. So, objectively, you would have to be an idiot to not see that there is a real need to elect more women to Congress-- as well as to elect a woman president and more women throughout the government. But not bad ones. Replacing, for example, a progressive senator like Brian Schatz with a more conservative woman, Colleen Hanabusa-- who's record even on women's health issues isn't nearly as good as Schatz's-- is doing anyone any good, except making the percentages look better.

Yesterday Nancy Pelosi, who was the first female Speaker of the House-- as well as one of the best speakers in history and certainly the best Speaker in recent times-- was on Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC show talking about the need for more women in Congress. I doubt she has women like Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Virginia Foxx (R-NC), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Martha Roby (R-AL) in mind. These women work actively against policies are in the best interests of women who don't happen to be in the top 1% of income earners. I'm certain what Pelosi wants to see more women like this elected. More women like Barbara Lee (D-CA), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Judy Chu (D-CA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Donna Edwards (D-IL)...

As I mentioned yesterday, I'm in the middle of reading Rana Husseini's classic book on women's activism in the Middle East, Murder in the Name of Honour. Conservatives in Jordan-- like conservatives everyone and throughout time-- have fought long and hard to keep women from achieving any sense of equality. I'll get into the psychological infirmities the conservatives suffer when I discuss Husseini's book in greater detail. But I do want to point out a Parliament Deputy Mahmoud Kharabsheh insisting that brothers have the right to murder their sisters if they suspect the sisters are bringing "dishonor" to the family-- like by being the victim of rape. He adamantly opposed an initiative to overturn a law that permits this, claiming "the control over women prevents sexual diseases and mixed paternity." He claimed he wanted women to be protected, respected and afforded dignity, but added, "Jordan is still a male-dominated society and men are more capable than women are. Women have not developed themselves yet; they are not experienced enough, having not held high positions in authority as men have." Now there's a self-fulfilling prophesy of the universal conservative mind-- even if you believe that the only thing men are more capable of them women in pleasuring their own puds.

Let's forget for a moment that Michele Bachmann (R-MN) is the chair of the House Tea Party caucus, an anti-Choice fanatic and one of the most viciously anti-LGBT Members of Congress and let's make believe she's just a normal conservative congresswoman. Can you call her desire to shred the social safety net "anti-woman?" She doesn't just want to privatize Social Security and wreck Medicaid, she wants to ween everybody off Social Security and Medicare. Lee Fang recorded her in 2010 addressing a conservative group in St. Louis using fake Glenn Beck stats as the justification for ending Social Security.

Is the country too big to fail? No, the country can fail. We can, we’re not invincible. And we’re so close now to being at that point because the thing is, as Glenn Beck said last night, it is true. The $107 trillion that he put on the board. We’re $14 trillion in debt, but that doesn’t include the unfunded massive liabilities. That’s $107 trillion, and that’s for Social Security and Medicare and all the rest. You add up all those unfunded net liabilities, and all the traps that could go wrong we’re on the hook for, and what it means is what we have to do is a reorganization of all of that, Social Security and all. We have to do it simply because we can’t let the contract remain as they are because the older people are going to lose. So, what you have to do, is keep faith with the people that are already in the system, that don’t have any other options, we have to keep faith with them. But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet, we can’t do it. So we just have to be straight with people. So basically, whoever our nominee is, is going to have to have a Glenn Beck chalkboard and explain to everybody this is the way it is.

Is that anti-woman? Well... not anti-rich women. This comes from the Social Security Administration:

• With longer life expectancies than men, elderly women tend to live more years in retirement and have a greater chance of exhausting other sources of income. They benefit from Social Security's cost-of-living protections because benefits are annually adjusted for inflation.
* Women reaching age 65 in 2011 are expected to live, on average, an additional 20.7 years compared with 18.7 years for men.
* Women represent 56 percent of all Social Security beneficiaries age 62 and older and approximately 68 percent of beneficiaries age 85 and older.

• The Social Security system is progressive in that lower-wage earners receive a higher percentage benefit than higher-wage earners do. The system returns a greater percentage of pre-retirement earnings to a lower-wage worker than to a higher-wage worker. Women who are low-wage workers receive back more benefits in relation to past earnings than do high-wage earners.
* In 2011, the median earnings of working-age women who worked full-time, year-round were $36,500, compared to $48,000 for men.

• In 2011, the average annual Social Security income received by women 65 years and older was $12,188, compared to $15,795 for men. Social Security provides dependent benefits to spouses, divorced spouses, elderly widows, and widows with young children.

• In 2011, for unmarried women-- including widows-- age 65 and older, Social Security comprises 50 percent of their total income. In contrast, Social Security benefits comprise only 36 percent of unmarried elderly men's income and only 31 percent of elderly couples' income.

• In 2011, 48 percent of all elderly unmarried females receiving Social Security benefits relied on Social Security for 90 percent or more of their income.

• Elderly women are less likely than elderly men to have significant family income from pensions other than Social Security. In 2010, only 22.6 percent of unmarried women aged 65 or older were receiving their own private pensions (either as a retired worker or survivor), compared to 27.3 percent of unmarried men.
* Participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans is increasing for women in today's workforce. In 2011, 55.2 percent of women employed full-time participated in an employer-sponsored public and private sector plan compared to 52.5 percent of men. Women generally receive lower pension benefits due to their relatively lower earnings.

Sure, Pelosi wants to see more women in Congress, but I bet she'll be supporting Jim Graves when he runs against Bachmann next year. Last week, Graves, a successful businessman with a clear middle-American perspective, told me he's focused on "fixing" Social Security. His plan is very different from what Bachmann says and in contrast to Bachmann's voting record. "Let’s be clear," he began, "in that Social Security is an earned benefit that hard working Americans have paid into over the life of their working careers-- they’ve earned it, it’s not an entitlement."

Here are some of the specific ways he feels we can bolster and strengthen Social Security:

1. Let’s broaden the contribution base to all income. Why should rich folks that get their incomes from “carried interest,” “preferred dividends, and all forms of unearned income not pay into the pool? Hard working folks that get their income through a payroll should not carry the entire burden.

2. Adjust the income cap from $113,700 to a sustainable level. By expanding the tax base to all personal income (earned and unearned), the income cap should be adjusted to an amount needed to keep the Social Security Trust Fund solvent for a projected 75 year period. The average folks in my district make about $50,000 per year, so they are paying in on 100% of their incomes. All the while those with massive amounts of unearned income pay little if any into the fund.

...What we do not want to do is privatize Social Security that only defeats the purpose of the program. Social Security is to protect and provide a safety net for our seniors when they get to an age that they should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Privatizing the program is great for the rich, but it destroys the program for those that most need it. The entire reason that Social Security works is that it creates a pool for the social good-- it averages the risk over a larger demographic. And we definitely do not want to move the retirement age up from 65 years like Bachmann and Ryan would like to do. If you worked your entire life laying bricks, hoisting boxes, building houses…your back is sore and body is tired.

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We're Still In Afghanistan To Save The Ladies?

And what happens if we stay?

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the same week the CIA reassured Hamid Karzai that nothing-- including the Sequester here-- would slow down the cascade of bribes for him and his circle, he assured the Pentagon they could keep 9 bases in Afghanistan after the occupation officially "ends."

The C.I.A.’s station chief here met with President Hamid Karzai on Saturday, and the Afghan leader said he had been assured that the agency would continue dropping off stacks of cash at his office despite a storm of criticism that has erupted since the payments were disclosed.

The C.I.A. money, Mr. Karzai told reporters, was “an easy source of petty cash,” and some of it was used to pay off members of the political elite, a group dominated by warlords.

The use of the C.I.A. cash for payoffs has prompted criticism from many Afghans and some American and European officials, who complain that the agency, in its quest to maintain access and influence at the presidential palace, financed what is essentially a presidential slush fund. The practice, the officials say, effectively undercut a pillar of the American war strategy: the building of a clean and credible Afghan government to wean popular support from the Taliban.

Instead, corruption at the highest levels seems to have only worsened. The International Monetary Fund recently warned diplomats in Kabul that the Afghan government faced a potentially severe budget shortfall partly because of the increasing theft of customs duties and officially abetted tax evasion.

Fancy that! Well, "we" get the 9 bases (if Karzai isn't hung by his heels the day the U.S. flies out of Kabul-- if he isn't on that last helicopter or already living comfortably in Dubai or New York).

The U.S. wants to keep nine bases in Afghanistan after American combat troops withdraw in 2014 and the Afghan government will let them as long as it gets "security and economic guarantees," President Hamid Karzai said Thursday in his first public offer in talks about the future relationship between the two uneasy allies.

Not long ago, I got into a friendly argument with a couple of progressive congresswomen who are unambiguously antiwar. And they both vote that way. But they had mixed feelings about withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan "yet." Their concern, an understandable-- if wrongheaded-- one, was that "we" needed to help liberate Afghan women. Don't get me started. I lived in Afghanistan twice-- in 1969 and, for a briefer time in 1972-- and not just in Kabul, but in smaller towns and in the countryside in a settlement with two family compounds. Afghan women need help, all right-- but it's not coming at the end of a bayonet... or a drone strike.

I arrived in Delhi last year on the day of the horrific gang rape that shut the city down for a week. On local TV I noticed that everyone was angry about the rape-- very angry. But eventually I figured out that there were two distinct camps with anger pointed in very different directions. At first all the man-in-the-street interviews were with folks in Delhi, men and women, and they were outraged that their society was still so primitive and backward and conservative that gang rapes like this happen frequently. Eventually the man-in-the-street interviews started including unpaved streets. In the villages the anger was directed towards the victims of these sexual assaults. "How dare these women dress like that or go out without a brother or father accompanying them?" These women were ruining India. 

India is at least a century ahead of Afghanistan by any measure. So are longtime American allies Morocco and Jordan. Right now I'm in the middle of Rana Husseini's heartbreaking book, about "honor" killings in Jordan, Murder in the Name of Honor. I'll be talking at greater length about Husseini's book in the future but I was started today when I read the reaction to her activism on behalf of women by a Member of Parliament who is the former Justice Minister, Abdul Karim Dughmi: "All women killed in cases of honor are prostitutes. I believe prostitutes deserve to die." Believe me, if relatively modern, westernized countries like India, Morocco and Jordan have this kind of mindset-- watch the video below-- the U.S. doesn't have the attention span or the will to help the women in far more backward, xenophobic and conservative Afghanistan.



UPDATE: Not Much Progress

Onta Abadi brought Ms redaers up to date with all the progress we're making on behalf of women in Afghanistan.

Afghan lawmakers on Saturday rejected the Law on Elimination of Violence Against Women, which would criminalize child marriage, forced marriage, domestic violence and the exchange of girls and women to settle arguments, among other things. The law would also make it illegal for women to face criminal charges for adultery for being raped. (You heard that right.)

Conservative religious lawmakers argue that the law encourages “disobedience,” and says the law goes against Islamic principles (the familiar blame-God-for-the-freedoms-we-take-from-you argument). Mandavi Abdul Rahmani, one of the conservative lawmakers who opposes the law, said the Koran makes it clear that a man can beat his wife if she does not obey him, as long as she isn’t permanently harmed. (Hey, bruises go away! Even broken bones heal!) He added, “Adultery itself is a crime in Islam, whether it is by force or not.”

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Washington, DC Needs Women... But Not Women Like Penny Pritzker

This week, EMILY'S List launched a program, Madam President, to elect a woman president. The idea is GREAT. America is overdue and really needs a woman president. EMILY'S List, though, is the wrong organization to lead the effort, not much better than if the GOP launched the effort to push Michele Bachmann, Virginia Foxx or Kelly Ayotte. We've seen many times before that EMILY'S List's modus operandi is to viciously and baselessly attack progressive men with sterling records on women's issues, in order to push forward their own hackish candidates-- like Nikki Tinker-- who happen to be females, regardless of the damage those candidates' conservative agendas are likely to cause. What America needs is a strong, progressive woman president.

That's also what America needs in the House, the Senate, in state legislatures, in the Cabinet and across government. I was surprised-- though why I don't know-- to read this morning that although women are 51% of the nation, they make up just 8% of House Republicans. (It’s 30 percent on the Democratic side, which isn't something to be that proud of either.) And only 20% of the current senators are women. Obama's nominated 15 of his 16 Cabinet members-- and just 4 are women, Kathleen Sibelius, Janet Napolitano, Sally Jewell and now Penny Pritzker.

And that fact that she's a woman shouldn't make Pritzker any more palatable for a progressive. That's really scraping the bottom on the barrel and I'd love to see the Republican obstructionists in the Senate do soemthing worthwhile with their filibuster regime for a change. Pritzker is a real Greg Palast nightmare. "You made fun of me," he wrote, "when I suggested that President Barack Obama would nominate a confessed bank scammer, a loan-sharking mortgage predator, to his cabinet. But thar she blows! Today, Obama has named Penny Pritzker Secretary of Commerce. As the President says, It's a milestone: the first female fraudster to hold that post. No longer will criminal bankers have to lobby the administration-- because now they'll have one of their own in the Cabinet. Obama goes way back with Pritzker in Chicago Democratic politics.

Pritzker's net worth is listed in Forbes as $1.8 billion, which is one hell of a heavy magic wand in the world of politics. Her wand would have been heavier, and her net worth higher, except that in 2001, the federal government fined her and her family $460 million for the predatory, deceitful, racist tactics and practices of Superior, the bank-and-loan-shark operation she ran on the South Side of Chicago.

Superior was the first of the deregulated go-go banks to go bust-- at the time, the costliest failure ever. US taxpayers lost nearly half a billion dollars. Superior's depositors lost millions and poor folk in Sen. Obama's South Side district lost their homes.

Penny did not like paying $460 million. No, not one bit. What she needed was someone to give her Hope and Change. She hoped someone would change the banking regulators and the Commerce Department so she could get away with this crap.

Pritzker introduced Obama, the neophyte state senator, to the Ladies Who Lunch (that's really what they call themselves) on Chicago's Gold Coast. Obama got lunch, gold and better-- an introduction to Robert Rubin. Rubin is a former Secretary of the Treasury, former chairman of Goldman Sachs and former co-chairman of Citibank. Even atheists recognized Rubin as the Supreme Deity of Wall Street.

Rubin opened the doors to finance industry vaults for Obama. Extraordinarily for a Democrat, Obama in 2008 raised three times as much from bankers as his Republican opponent.

So what did Citibank's Rubin get for showering Obama with gold? Obama agreed to take care of Rubin's poodles, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. They became Obama's first cabinet picks: Summers as Economics Czar and Geithner as his czarina, Secretary of the Treasury.

Geithner and Summers were the gents who, under Treasury Secretary Rubin, designed the deregulation of banking. In effect, they had decriminalized the kind of financial flim-flammery that brought the planet to its knees while bringing Rubin, Pritzker and the banksters loads of lucre.

...In return, in 2008, Obama decided to make his patron Penny the Secretary of Commerce. But then, in November 2008, just as Obama was about to submit her nomination to Congress, a bunch of Pritzker's victims marched on Washington. They were not from her busted bank, but unhappy workers from the lucrative nursing homes that her family owns through a string of complex offshore trusts. Obama slammed the door on Penny pronto.

The Pritzker family made its billions mostly from Hyatt Hotels and Hyatt nursing homes. Penny, on the Hyatt board of directors, is an infamously combative anti-union apostle. UNITE HERE, the union that represents Hyatt workers, has called for an international boycott of Hyatt hotels. In 2012, UNITE HERE and its parent, the AFL-CIO, were crucial to Obama's winning Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. So, in this last campaign, Obama had to keep his billionairess heiress on the down-low.

Obama appeared to keep the door shut on Pritzker throughout the 2012 campaign, reducing her to hosting an election fundraiser at her Gold Coast digs, which she had to bill as a Goldman Sachs PAC event. This marks possibly the first time and last time anyone used Goldman Sachs as a PR cover.

But today, with the unions' money and votes already pocketed and counted, Obama can give working folks The Finger and give Penny her pound of flesh: the Commerce post.

The New York Times says that, "At Commerce, Ms. Pritzker could provide the president with a new way to reach out to the business community." The last time Pritzker reached out to the business community was to sell them sub-prime mortgage securities, worthless bags of financial feces manufactured by Superior Bank.

By giving Penny, the Piggy Banker, Commerce, we have to change Obama's rating to sub-prime. I do note that some woman's organizations are applauding the appointment of the first female to the Commerce post.  But I prefer to honor the victims of the Chicago femme fatale. Most of Penny's victims, busted bank borrowers and underpaid health care workers, are women, too. But, unlike those wounded and destroyed by Pritzker, she worked hard for her money: it was not easy inheriting her first billion from her daddy.

Obama mislead the public when he introduced this sack of crap to the public. “Penny is one of our country’s most distinguished business leaders. She’s got more than 25 years of management experience in industries including real estate, finance and hospitality. She’s built companies from the ground up.” He left out the part about her being vehemently anti-union, both on the Chicago School Board and on the board of Hyatt. And he neglected to mention that FDIC action against her bank and her role in pioneering the re-packaging of subprime loans.

We want more women in government-- but not women like Michele Bachmann and not women like Penny Pritzker. And, by the way, when will ordinary working women-- rather than multimillionairesses and billionairesses-- get some representation. They sure need some-- on every level. But, of course, EMILY'S List has no interest in working class women either.

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