Tuesday, December 2, 2003

Matriarchal Revolution FEATURED ARTICLES - Hogtied and Abused at Fort Benning, by Kathy Kelly, - Wooing the Single Women Vote, By Lakshmi Chaudhry, - V is for Volcano, By Jane Fonda, QUOTE OF THE DAY "You hear about 'constitutional rights,' 'free speech,' & the 'free press.' Every time I hear these words I say to myself, 'That man is a Red....' You never hear a real American talk like that." - - Frank Hague (Mayor of Jersey City 1917-47) KNOW YOUR HISTORY - DECEMBER 2nd 1954 -- The US Senate censures Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor & disrepute," thereby ending the Senate's witch hunts into alleged Communist infiltration. The House of Rep's & many states continue their own investigations. Several southern states later convert these committees into apparatus for harassing & jailing civil rights supporters. 1964 --  Joan Baez sings on Sproul Hall steps at UC Berkeley. That night the Free Speech Movement (FSM) holds an overnight sit-in protesting discipline of 4 who took part in the October police car sit-in; 800 arrests result. Early '60s high point of the student movement. 1980 -- El Salvador: Four Catholic missionary women killed by government-backed "death squads" (heavily supported by the US). Same Day :  The Russell Tribunal, an international human rights body, finds the US, Canada, & several Latin American countries guilty of cultural & physical genocide in their present-day treatment of their Indian populations. 1986 -- Eurythmics lead singer Annie Lennox rips off her bra while performing "Missionary Man" in front of 10,000 fans in Birmingham, England. 1990 -- Guatemala: U.S.-backed army kills 14 civilians at Santiago Atitlan. RHINO HERE: Today's BOTTOM LINE is by Jane Fonda. Her essay entitled, "V is for Volcano," is a rallying cry for a woman (and vagina friendly men) led revolution to change the way the U.S. Government does business. Her call inspires today's blog title, "Matriarchal Revolution" & in that vein, I also offer Kathy Kelly's first hand account of being arrested at the recent School Of The America's protest, & an Alternet essay on the vital role that "the single women's vote" may play in next year's presidential election. Hogtied and Abused at Fort Benning by Kathy Kelly, CommonDreams.org, 11/27/03 On Sunday, November 23, I took part in a nonviolent civil disobedience action at Fort Benning, GA, to protest the U.S. Army´s School of the Americas (SOA, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation -- WHISC)  Shortly after more than two dozen of us entered Fort Benning and were arrested, US Military Police took us to a warehouse on the base for "processing." I was directed to a station for an initial search, where a woman soldier began shouting at me to look straight ahead and spread my legs. I turned to ask her why she was shouting at me and was ordered to keep my mouth shut, look straight ahead, and spread my legs wider. She then began an aggressive body search. When ordered to raise one leg a second time, I temporarily lost my balance while still being roughly searched and, in my view, 'womanhandled.' I decided that I shouldn't go along with this dehumanizing action any longer. When I lowered my arms and said, quietly, "I'm sorry, but I can't any longer cooperate with this," I was instantly pushed to the floor. Five soldiers squatted around me, one of them referring to me with an expletive (this f_ _ _ er) and began to cuff my wrists and ankles and then bind my wrists and ankles together. Then one soldier leaned on me, with his or her knee in my back... MORE: http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1127-01.htm Wooing the Single Women Vote By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet, December 1, 2003 Meet the single woman, breadwinner, cultural icon, and the star of every liberal's dream of regime change. Whether she is a divorced waitress in Harlem, a welfare mom in Iowa, or that thirty-something singleton sipping a Cosmopolitan at your local bar, the unmarried woman may hold the fate of the 2004 elections in the palm of her hand.  "Unmarried women, given what they think and feel, are the group with the greatest potential to be agents of progressive change in this country because of their size, their desire for change, and their record of under-voting," says Page Gardner, manager of the "Women's Voices Women's Vote" project. Never-married, divorced or widowed women constitute a whopping 20 percent of the electorate and 42 percent of all registered women voters. In the 2000 elections, they represented the same percentage of the electorate as Jews, blacks, and Latinos combined. In terms of voting muscle, few can compete with the girl power of this constituency... MORE: Wooing the Single Woman Vote 7:41:15 AM    comment

RHINO'S BOTTOM LINE - V is for Volcano V is for Volcano By Jane Fonda, AlterNet ( http://www.alternet.org/ ), November 24, 2003 ...It's possible that the extreme, neo-conservative version of Patriarchy which makes up our current Executive branch will over-play its hand and cause the house of cards to collapse We know that this new "preventive war" doctrine will put us on a permanent war footing. We know there can't be guns and butter, right? We learned that with Vietnam. We know that a Pandora's box has been opened in the Middle East and that the administration is not prepared for the complexities that are emerging. We know that friends are becoming foes and angry young Muslims with no connection to Al Qaeda are becoming terrorists in greater numbers. We know that with the new tax plan the rich will be better off and the rest will be poorer. We know what happens when poor young men and women can only get jobs by joining the military and what happens when they come home and discover that the day after Congress passed the "Support Our Troops" Resolution, $25 billion was cut from the VA budget. We know that already, families of servicemen have to go on welfare and are angry about it... ...So our challenge is to commit ourselves to creating the tipping point and the turning point. The time is ripe to launch a unified national movement, a campaign, a tidal wave, built around issues and values, not candidates. That's why V-Day, The White House Project and their many allies are partnering to hold a national women's convention somewhere in the heartland, next June of 2004. Its purpose will be to inspire and mobilize women and vagina-friendly men around the 2004 elections and to build a new movement that will coalesce our energies and forces around a politic of caring. The convention will put forward a fresh, clear, and concise platform of issues, and build the spirit, energy and power base to hold the candidates accountable for them. There will be a diversity of women from across the country who will participate in the mobilization. There will be a special focus on involving young women. There will be a variety of performers and artists acknowledging that culture plays a powerful role in political action. There will be a concurrent Internet mobilization. Women's organizations will be asked to sign on and send representatives to the convention. There will be a caravan, a rolling tour across the country, of diverse women leaders, celebrities and activists who will work with local organizers to build momentum, sign people up, register them to vote, get them organized and leave behind a tool kit for further mobilization through the election and beyond... READ THE ENTIRE PIECE AT: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17248 "RHINO'S BLOG" is the responsibility of Gary Rhine. (rhino@kifaru.com) Feedback, and requests to be added or deleted from the list are encouraged. SEARCH BLOG ARCHIVES / SURF RHINO'S LINKS, AT: http://www.rhinosblog.info RHINO'S OTHER WEB SITES: http://www.dreamcatchers.org (INDIGENOUS ASSISTANCE & INTERCULTURAL DIALOG) http://www.kifaru.com (NATIVE AMERICAN RELATIONS VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES) Articles are reprinted under Fair Use Doctrine of international copyright law. http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html All copyrights belong to original publisher. Tell a friend about Rhino's Blog 6:18:09 AM    comment

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