This morning MLive posted their yearly story on what people can do with their Christmas trees now that the holiday is over.
The article mostly consists of information on where one can take their tree to be recycled. Besides listing where one can take their holiday trees the article cites the hotel manager for the downtown Grand Rapids Holiday Inn, which is offer free Christmas tree recycling this week.
However, the language that the MLive writer uses at the beginning of the article is worth noting, when he writes, “it’s time to give your lovely Douglas Fir the heave-ho before the carpet is completely covered in pine needles.”
This kind of language reflects the general attitude of the culture about Christmas trees that is similar to how the culture tends to view many living things……as nothing more than a commodity to be consumed and discarded once it has served our purpose.
Christmas tree production in the US is a major industry, with roughly 350,000 acres of land committed to Christmas tree production, with an estimated 25 – 30 million sold in the US each year.
If one were to do an online search about the ecological impact of Christmas tree production, most of the first few pages on any search would take you to sites by the Christmas tree industry. These sites of course are not only arguing that that Christmas tree production is “green,” but the industry frames the debate between real and artificial trees.
A good example of this “comparison” comes from the National Christmas Tree Association, with the headline, Making an Eco-friendly choice. However, the debate should not be limited to or focused on real trees versus artificial ones. Instead, we need to change the debate to, is Christmas tree production necessary and is it really environmentally sustainable?
Let’s look at the later question first. Most Christmas trees are grown as a mono-crop, which means that it’s usually the only thing planted in significant numbers in a specific area. Mono-crops are never good for any ecosystem, because they are more susceptible to disease and insect infestation. The usual way that Christmas tree growers deal with this problem is by applying pesticides. According to the group Beyond Pesticides, there are 25 different pesticides used in Christmas tree farming in the US. The use of these pesticides are “linked to one or more adverse effects, including cancer, hormonal disruption, neurotoxicity, organ damage, reproductive/birth defects, asthma, environmental effects and more.”
This means that the pesticides are brought into your home when you put up a Christmas tree, but it also means that the wildlife that interacts with the sprayed trees – birds, insects and small mammals – will also be adversely effected. In addition, those who work on Christmas tree farms that use pesticides will also be negatively affected. In the US there are small family owned Christmas tree farms and there are larger ones, which disproportionately rely on migrant workers. So, not only does the Christmas tree industry put migrant workers at risk of pesticide exposure, they also rely on paying low wages.
Now to the question of whether or not Christmas trees are even necessary. Christmas trees were incorporated into the Christian holiday centuries after the beginning of their religious tradition. Christians in northern Europe incorporated evergreen trees into their celebration because of their interaction with Druids. Druids worship these trees because they remained green even in the dead of winter. However, Druids did not kill the trees by cutting them down and putting them into their homes. This would have been antithetical to their religious beliefs.
However, since there has been a strong theological tendency within Christianity to view nature as there for human use, they had no problem killing the evergreen trees for their own religious purposes. However, it seems rather ironic that Christians kill something to celebrate a holiday based on the birth of their savior, use it for a few weeks and then discard it like any other commodity.
It seems that instead of encouraging people to recycle their Christmas trees, we might want to ask more fundamental questions like do we even need to grow these kinds of trees solely for the purpose of using them for a few weeks during a religious holiday? Not surprising, these are not questions that MLive reporters are asking.
Lowe’s All-American Muslim Fiasco and the Politics of Normalcy
This article by Michelle Chen is re-posted from Common Dreams.
Their slogan is “Never Stop Improving,” but lately, “Never Stop Denying” seems more fitting. Lowe’s has rebuffed a 200,000-signature petition to reinstate ads on the new reality television series All-American Muslim on The Learning Channel.
The retail giant stepped into a big political hubbub once word got out that the company decided abruptly to pull its advertising from the show, which depicts daily life in the Muslim American community, shortly after receiving some nasty backlash from a hardline evangelical group, the Florida Family Association. Apparently showing normal people on television who happen to be Muslim is a sin, and a threat to national security, and would make Jesus mad.
These arguments are nothing we haven’t heard before of course, but activists were jarred when they heard that a big box behemoth like Lowe’s would be cowed by the condemnation of a fringe group of anti-Muslim crusaders. Then again, the FFA did wage a rather virulent campaign to terrorize corporations who dared put their ads on the show. According to the group’s website:
the show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.
Aside from Lowe’s, the campaign also targeted such household names as Hershey’s and Campbell’s Soup, urging supporters to call customer service to voice their rage.
Of course, wingnuts in Tampa aren’t the only ones who wield social media to spread their gospel. The reaction to the reports of Lowe’s pandering to anti-Muslim haters has proven to be much more of a political minefield than running a few commercials on show designed to be emphatically banal. the controversy has provided endless fodder for parodies about home-improvement jihadis, inspired a nationwide boycott, and prompted Russell Simmons to step up to replace the lost financing.
The interfaith Mecklenburg Ministries gathered 200,000 signatures to pressure Lowe’s to reverse its decision, but to no avail. Even in the wake of accusations of “engaging in Jim Crow-style discrimination,” the company’s damage control unit continues to insist that the pulling of the ads was a marketing decision and not a cave to FFA.
Still, Lowe’s spokespeople apparently have not settled on talking points about the influence of hate-mongering critics on their ad campaigns. While Lowe’s VP of Marketing Tom Lamb sheepishly told the Charlotte Observer that “The decision was absolutely not, despite what’s been reported in the media, influenced by any one group,” another spokesperson, according to the Hollywood Reporter, claims that “decisions to pull commercial spots from shows that are considered controversial are made perhaps 8-10 times a year.” As if outraged customers were supposed to find that reassuring.
But in the midst of the hooplah, you’ve got to wonder if the show is worth all the hype, positive or negative. Zaki Hazan had an alternative take on Huffington Post, questioning the hyper-assimilationist mission of the show:
My “meh” reaction to the program comes, I think, from my general dislike of the omnipresent desire among many to turn religions into demographics, and compartmentalizing a far-ranging faith group that includes so much diversity into a single reality cast and labeling it “All-American” just seems counter-intuitive to me. I’ve long held that the best way to demonstrate how “All-American” Muslims are is to just do it without hanging a lampshade on it. Muslim lawyers on lawyer shows, and it’s no big deal. Muslim cops on cop shows, and it’s no big deal. Because, guess what? It’s no big deal.
Now, fringe groups will always spout their bigotry, and probably no reality show will compel them to recognize their disconnect from the real world. What All-American Muslim ostensibly aims to do is to overcome stereotypes held by “average Americans” by showing them that the Lebanese neighbors next door aren’t so scary after all. But the real question is: what does that say about our public discourse? Maybe what prime time television needs right now isn’t a showcase of Muslims being as ultra-American as possible but a conscientious exploration of why our image of the “All American” is actually a complete fiction, why terms like “melting pot,” “tolerance” and “diversity” have become tools for sugar-coating racial and ethnic difference, masking ugly tensions that block honest dialogue and reinforce hierarchy. Lowe’s image problem will probably pass once the controversy subsides, All-American Muslim may or may not change public perspectives, and given the show’s current ratings, it seems many might just shrug and change the channel.
In any case, the bigger picture won’t get much airtime, because corporate television isn’t quite ready to shift the lens away from “Look! they’re just like us!” and toward an idea of “American” that isn’t bound up in assumptions of middle-class normalcy. What would happen if we all just stepped back from our television screens and turned our gaze toward the real America outside our living rooms?
11 things the wealthiest Americans could buy for the US
Editors note: We do not think that the wealthiest Americans will buy the 99% anything. The current wealth disparity in the US will only change when there is systemic change through an anti-capitalist uprising or some other form of revolution. Having said that, the following graphic does present wealth disparity in the US in an instructive way.
Your Christmas Gifts from the One Percent
It’s the most wonderful time of the year, the song says…for the top 1 percent of wealthy Americans, that is. For the rest of us, things are not looking so great.
The paid heavies of the 1 percent, also known as politicians, are as busy as elves in Santa’s workshop, issuing a series of coups against the poor, the unemployed, and the working class to wind up 2011. And some of their creations are real stunners.
In Congress, of course, there’s the payroll tax drama, which could force millions of working-class Americans to dish out more payroll tax in January; and will cost Americans on Medicare the care of those physicians who can’t afford to take another cut in payment for services. Happy New Year!
Here in Michigan, lapdog-to-the-rich Rick Snyder has delivered some great gifts to his wealthy handlers….but coals in your stocking and mine. We’ll be paying more taxes out of our dwindling paychecks in order to pay for Rick’s huge tax cuts to corporations. He’s put us in danger from Emergency Financial Managers who are pillaging our city and school assets, turning public parks into private playgrounds for Michigan’s wealthiest residents, and who are handing out fat privatization contracts for public services that we used to have some say in controlling.
Snyder also made heavy cuts and changes to workers’ compensation in the state, another enormous gift to employers. And of course his slashing of social services put our already vulnerable working poor and unemployed in even more daily jeopardy, but pours more money in the pot for the capitalists who are supposedly creating jobs for everyone.
Under Dick and Betsy DeVos’s tree, he’s placed a fabulous gift: anti-public-school legislation passed at the last minute before the legislature closed down for the holidays. This new law will lift the limit on how many charter schools Michigan can have. The DeVos family for years has dreamed of destroying public school education in the state, and here’s their Christmas wish come true.
For the workers of Michigan, Snyder has thoughtfully provided 2,000 jobs with living wages—his total full-time job creation for the state in his first year of office—for the half-million unemployed in Michigan to share equally between them. (It works out to a four-thousandth of a job per person who needs one.)
But maybe the most iconic Christmas surprise for workers is coming from the 1 percent via leading presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. Gingrich has proposed re-instating child labor in the United States.
No, you didn’t read that wrong.
In a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a series of follow-up press conferences this November and December, Gingrich called the laws that protect children against labor violations “stupid.” He subsequently explained why:
1. It deprives children of important life lessons. “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he explained. This dovetails with the conservative talk radio hosts who are constantly complaining about the laziness of the poor and unemployed. Gingrich feels that if children, starting at the age of 10, are forced to work, they will grow up learning better values than their elders.
He’s never one to be held back by facts. The majority of poor children live in households with at least one working parent, and often with parents who have multiple jobs. In the poorest households, those of America’s 9.9 million single mothers with children, 65 percent of those women hold at least one job.
2. Our current protective laws for children are creating a criminal class, according to Gingrich. At a fundraiser in Iowa, he elaborated on that idea, stating that children from poor families have no “habit” of earning money “unless it’s illegal.” Apparently, forcing them to work at an early age will keep children from all of the criminal activity in which they currently engage.
Again, facts don’t support his words. There’s been an alarming increase in child poverty in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated that in 2010, 2 million American children lived in poverty. Between 2008 and 2009 alone, the number had jumped 10 percent. But violent crime in the United States is currently at the lowest level in 20 years. And yet politicians, right-wing TV and radio shows, and law enforcement officials continue to claim that child poverty is now, or will very soon, make that rate skyrocket. Gingrich has hopped on that fear-mongering bandwagon.
3. Gingrich’s real reason for lifting child labor law protections? It’s his gift to the 1 percent, and a fat one: union-busting. He alluded to it in his Harvard address:
“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine,” Mr. Gingrich said. “You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”
So there’s your real reason for this idea in a nutshell: hiring children, in schools and elsewhere, supplies the wealthiest capitalists with a whole new, cheaper labor force—one that replaces “expensive” union employees with children who are required to work. The pro-child line that this would help kids begin to “rise” from their poverty is just the ribbon on the box. The 1 percent know that.
They also know that they would be placing children in dangerous working conditions. Take those school janitorial jobs. Janitors don’t just sweep floors and empty wastebaskets. They’re responsible for maintaining the furnace and cooling systems, for trouble-shooting electrical problems, for trash compacting and paper shredding, and for handling corrosive chemicals. In fact, janitorial jobs at schools are close to equal with police work in the number of non-fatal injuries, says the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And now we have Gingrich proposing that ten-year-old children without health care benefits be the ones handling those chemicals and crawling through airshafts to fix HVAC problems. Plus, those pesky unionized salaries and benefits will be a thing of the past—kids will work for pennies on the dollar!
Gingrich’s capitalist owners include Charles Schwab, Robert Wood Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson), Freddie Mac, and casino overlord Sheldon Adelson, one of the five richest people in America. All of them could benefit, directly or indirectly, from accessible and cheap child labor.
There are those who wishfully want to believe that ideas like this are linked to one political party or another. They aren’t. Both parties have politicians who are bought and paid for by the wealthiest Americans. It just happens that most of the 1 percent hold hyper-conservative opinions because those benefit business. But you’ll find plenty of so-called liberal politicians who are waging war on the working class as well, also at the behest of their political contributors. This isn’t politics. It’s class warfare.
Gingrich’s, Snyder’s, and other lawmakers’ Christmas gifts have all helped to make true overlords out of the wealthiest 1 percent, whose net worth during the past 30 years has increased 300 percent on average. CEO pay has reached an average of $9.3 million, while the average salary for the bottom half of Americans is $26,364 and predicted to fall as jobs continued to shift overseas.
It’s been a while since someone has channeled Dickens’ depiction of misery in London’s underclass with such a pitch-perfect tone as Newt Gingrich. But if we don’t stop the wealthy capitalist handlers of Gingrich, Snyder, and other politicians, just imagine what our Christmas gifts next year might look like in this new Gilded Age that is being built around us.
In Honor of Howard Zinn
This video is reposted from ZNet.
Noam Chomsky, noted author and philosopher, and Anthony Arnove, filmmaker and editor, spoke on Sunday, Dec. 4, at SUNY-New Paltz in tribute to the legacy and life’s work of the late Howard Zinn (1922-2010), American historian, activist and playwright.
This event was titled “Honoring Howard Zinn: An Historian Who Made History.” Presentations by Chomsky and Arnove considered Zinn’s leading role in promoting peace and social justice in the contemporary world. A question-and-answer session follow follows the formal lectures.
Zinn, who played a pivotal role in American civil rights and anti-war movements, wrote more than 20 books, including his best-selling and influential “A People’s History of the United States.” His memoir, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn’s life and work. He was Professor of Political Science at Boston University from 1964 to 1988.
How do we coddle the Super-Wealthy?
Groups vow to fight Snyder’s decision to sign legislation that eliminates domestic partner benefits
Yesterday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed House Bill 4770, which eliminates health care benefits for domestic partners who work in the public sector.
The Michigan ACLU and numerous LGBT organizations had aggressively fought the new legislation, which passed in the House in September and in the Senate earlier this month.
Voting on the bill was nearly unanimous along partisan lines, with Republicans voting for the legislation and Democrats against. Local State Representative Dave Agema introduced the bill, which adds to his long list of far right legislative proposals, along with anti-immigration, anti-union and anti-Muslim bills.
The statewide LGBT organization Equality Michigan responded to Snyder’s decision by saying, “The Governor’s support for this bill is appalling. He has put hardworking gay and lesbian couples and their children into harm’s way by eliminating important health care coverage.”
The Director for ACLU Michigan added, “The decision to take healthcare benefits away from families just in time for the holidays is mean-spirited and cruel. Governor Snyder had an opportunity to show real leadership and put an end to the political games; instead he approved an extreme policy that sets our state back, jeopardizes our economy and puts our families at risk. The bill serves no other purpose than to single out a small minority of people and deprive them of critical protections as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.”
Both the Michigan ACLU and Equality Michigan plans to fight this decision by Governor Snyder, although no specifics are available on what kind of a campaign either group will develop. We will provide updates when any efforts develop.
New Economic report underscores the money making function of ArtPrize
Yesterday, MLive reported on a new study that looked at the economic impact of ArtPrize this past fall.
The report was prepared by the Anderson Economic Group, which was contracted by the local group Experience Grand Rapids. The 37-page report provides an overview of the findings, attendance, attendance experience, economic impact analysis, quality of life benefits, cultural and long-term benefits.
The MLive article provides a brief summary of the findings and cites only three sources, a consultant with the Anderson Economic Group, the VP of marketing for Experience GR and the executive director of ArtPrize.
The MLive article doesn’t question the findings of the report or ask any independent questions of the sources cited. Instead, the story essentially communicates the message that downtown art event was an economically beneficial to Grand Rapids.
The commissioned report defines economic impact as the new economic activity directly or indirectly caused by ArtPrize. This excludes any activity associated with Art- Prize that merely replaces or displaces other economic activity in the region. The net benefits provide a true measure of the economic activity that would not have occurred without ArtPrize.
Some of the data shows that about 73% of those who attended traveled from outside of Grand Rapids and 31% traveled from outside of Kent & Ottawa County. The report also states that $15.4 million was generated directly because of ArtPrize and $4.6 million in new earnings for local households.
The data provided by the Anderson Economic Group certainly supports the normal arguments for the benefits of ArtPrize, which is that it is a great economic stimulator for Grand Rapids. However, the report and most news reporting on the local art extravaganza does not ask fundamental questions about which entities & individuals were the beneficiaries of the money spent by attendees and the ArtPrize organization.
As we have reported before, the primary beneficiaries of money spent by attendees were hotel owners, parking lot owners, downtown restaurants, bars and other retails shops. While one could add that wait staff may have made more money in tips during this time, the bulk of the money made from attendee spending went to a small group of business owners in downtown Grand Rapids.
When looking at the money spent by ArtPrize as an organization, the Anderson report states the bulk of this money was spent on local resources. This is a true statement, but incomplete. It’s incomplete in that a great deal of the money that ArtPrize spent went to a small circle of businesses, many of which are either owned by the DeVos family or closely connected to the DeVos family as we pointed out in another recent article based on 2010 filings. This is one area in which the Anderson report falls short, in that it does not qualify who the economic beneficiaries are. They do report that $4.6 million in new earnings for local households, but provide no analysis of who made up these local households.
The other main conclusion from the report in that ArtPrize provides long-term cultural benefits. The report identifies these benefits as ARTcation – where schools are bringing children on field trips to downtown Grand Rapids; University participation and the educational speaker series that was held during ArtPrize.
Providing children an opportunity to experience art is a valuable cultural experience, but ArtPrize is not the only cultural event in Grand Rapids that would be beneficial for children to be exposed to. In terms of local university participation the report concludes it was beneficial to students and the local campuses indentified. In contrast, there are local students and faculty that this writer has talked with that have a critical perspective of ArtPrize, which are not acknowledged in this report.
Lastly, the speaker series identified in the Anderson report consisted of eight separate events where a speaker or a panel spoke on issues related to ArtPrize. The report does not provide any details on the speaker series, but if the event we wrote about at GVSU was any indication of the quality of the speaker series then that conclusion should also be questioned.
The report concludes by stating that ArtPrize is beneficial to Grand Rapids because it makes it a stronger tourist destination “highlights the city’s ability to foster creativity and entrepreneurship.” This concluding comment in many ways sums up the real purpose of ArtPrize, which is to make money, particularly money for those who are disproportionately in a higher income bracket.
Occupy Doesn’t Have a Platform — It is a Platform
This article by Kevin Carson is re-posted from the Center for a Stateless Society.
The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal establishment) for not offering a clear list of official demands — for, in other words, not offering a platform.
But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn’t have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform — a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn’t a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them. Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands — with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.
Although the ends are quite different, the model of organization is much like that of al Qaeda: An essentially leaderless organization, a loose network of cells, each of which adopts the al Qaeda brand or franchise for its own purposes. It’s a much more effective use of resources to provide a common platform and then let a thousand flowers bloom.
A conventional, hierarchical activist institution wastes enormous resources on administrative apparatus and endless negotiations just to get everyone on the same page, before anyone can do anything.
A common platform allows any number of movements, made up of voluntary aggregations of individuals with shared goals, to build on it on a modular basis, and to act without waiting for permission from the headquarters of the One Big Movement. And whenever they do anything that seems to work well, any other node in the network can adopt that tactic as its own without asking anyone’s leave.
That’s why the glocal Occupy movement is throwing off innovations like a fission reaction throws off neutrons. If anything, it’s done so even more since the wave of shutdowns in the U.S. divorced it from occupation as a primary tactic and scattered its seeds to the wind.
But let’s go back a ways. The Pentagon Papers weren’t published pursuant to an official decision by a nationwide anti-war movement, and Woodward and Bernstein didn’t try to found a national political movement to impeach Nixon. In both cases, the immediate actors simply published the information, and allowed anyone who would to leverage that information. They thereby created a free platform that could be developed by any number of antiwar and anti-Nixon activists for their own ends.
Fast forward to Summer 2010. Julian Assange simply published the cable dump at Wikileaks. Every single activist movement that piggybacked on that platform, starting with the uprising in Tunisia, did so on its own initiative, making — its own judgment — the best use of the free, common platform offered by Assange. So it’s gone from Tunisia to Egypt, to the Arab Spring, to Madison, to the demonstrations in Britain and Spain and Greece, to Occupy Wall Street, and back out to the global Occupy movement in hundreds of cities around the world.
Now, with the Occupy movement (thanks to Bloomberg et. al) no longer wedded to occupying public squares, the wave of innovations seems to roll in on a weekly basis. First Occupy Our Homes, and now Occupy the Ports.
According to Lester MacGurdy at Oakland Occupier, Occupy Oakland has begun to deal with police evictions by retreating, waiting until the cops are gone, then going back. Police are essentially heavy infantry who move slowly and ponderously into place, and can move only as quickly as their bloated logistical train moves with them. Protestors are light infantry who can disperse and re-concentrate on short notice. ”The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.” You can bet this will be standard procedure for every Occupy group in America in a week’s time.
The corporate state and its thugs in black uniforms and kevlar are big, impressive, and make lots of loud noise — just like a T. Rex blundering into a tar pit. The resistance is small, agile and resilient — just like a swarm of piranha. And in the end, we’ll hang their bleeding heads on our battlements.
In the immortal words of Bob Marley: “The stone that the builder refused shall be the head cornerstone.”
Rape in the US Military: America’s Dirty Little Secret
This article by Lucy Broadbent is re-posted from ZNet.
“It was eight years before I was able to say the word that describes what happened to me,” says Maricella Guzman. “I hadn’t even been in the Navy a month. I was so young. I tried to report it. But instead of being taken seriously, I was forced to do push-ups.”
“I can’t sleep without drugs,” says Kate Weber. “But even then, I often wake up in the middle of the night, crying, my mind racing. And I lie there awake in the dark, reliving the rape, looking for a second chance for it to end with a different outcome, but he always wins.”
Rape within the US military has become so widespread that it is estimated that a female soldier in Iraq is more likely to be attacked by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. So great is the issue that a group of veterans are suing the Pentagon to force reform. The lawsuit, which includes three men and 25 women (the suit initially involved 17 plaintiffs but grew to 28) who claim to have been subjected to sexual assaults while serving in the armed forces, blames former defence secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates for a culture of punishment against the women and men who report sex crimes and a failure to prosecute the offenders.
Since the lawsuit became public in February, 400 more have come forward, contacting attorney Susan Burke who is leading the case. These are likely to be future lawsuits. Right now they are anxiously awaiting a court ruling to find out if the lawsuit will go to trial. The defence team for the department of defence has filed a motion to dismiss the case, citing a court ruling, dating back to 1950, which states that the government is not liable for injury sustained by active duty personnel. To date, military personnel have been unable to sue their employer.
Whether or not the case goes to trial, it is still set to blow the lid on what has come to be regarded as the American military’s dirty little secret. Last year 3,158 sexual crimes were reported within the US military. Of those cases, only 529 reached a court room, and only 104 convictions were made, according to a 2010 report from SAPRO (sexual assault prevention and response office, a division of the department of defence). But these figures are only a fraction of the reality. Sexual assaults are notoriously under-reported. The same report estimated that there were a further 19,000 unreported cases of sexual assault last year. The department of veterans affairs, meanwhile, released an independent study estimating that one in three women had experience of military sexual trauma while on active service. That is double the rate for civilians, which is one in six, according to the US department of justice.
“For years, I thought I was the only person this had happened to, but it’s an epidemic,” says Weber, 36, who recounts being raped 16 years ago in Germany, and describes herself as a “high-functioning” sufferer of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result.
She is now married and lives in San Francisco with her four children, but even after years of therapy, still cannot sleep at night. “Rape is so widespread in the American military, it’s sick.”
Worse still, the victim is likely to be blackballed by her own unit, and sometimes even demoted, according to Weber. “I first tried reporting the rape to my staff sergeant, he told me to be quiet and not tell anyone. So then I tried to tell a woman sergeant, who was beneath him, because I thought she’d be more sympathetic. She just cursed me for jumping the chain of command and not coming to her first. I went to the doctor, who did at least make a record of it, but he did nothing. I also told my ‘battle buddy’, a fellow female soldier. She said, ‘I know that guy. He’s married and he would never do such a thing. You’re a liar and a slut.’ Before long, I was being called a whore and a bitch by everyone. The guys were warning each other: ‘This one will accuse you of rape, so stay away from her.’ I was 18 years old, it was the first time I had ever been away from home. I had no idea what to do.”
Stories such as Weber’s are commonplace. On mydutytospeak.com, where victims of military rape can share their experiences, there are breathtaking tales of brutality and mistreatment. Only 21 years old, and weeks into her military training, Maricella Guzman says she ran to tell her supervisor in the hours after her rape at a military boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. “I burst into his office and said, ‘I need to speak to you,’ ” explains Guzman, now 34, and a student at a college in Los Angeles studying psychology, who talks about many lost years when she couldn’t function as a result. “One of the procedures if you want to speak to someone in the navy is you have to knock three times on the door and request permission to speak. But I didn’t do that. I was too upset. So my supervisor said ‘Drop’, which means push-ups. So I did the push-ups. But I was still in tears. I said, ‘I need to talk to you.’ He said ‘Drop’ again. Every time I tried to say anything, he made me do push-ups. By the time I was composed in the way he wanted me to be, I couldn’t say anything any more. I just couldn’t.” After that, Guzman didn’t try to tell anyone for another eight years.
It is so well known that sex offenders go unpunished and victims penalised for reporting incidents, that most say nothing. Michelle Jones describes how she was still lying on the floor of her room in the barracks, her ripped shorts by her ankles, when her rapist stood over her and said, “I’ll tell everyone you’re a dyke and you’ll get booted out if you report this.”
She was two-thirds of her way through her service. “I didn’t want to lose my job,” says Jones, 39, who is now an IT consultant living in San Jose, California, and gay. Under the (now-repealed) USDon’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, openly gay people were barred from the military. Jones wasn’t even sure she was gay at the time. But it wasn’t worth the risk of reporting. “If I had spoken out, I would have been the one investigated,” she says. “And it wouldn’t have done any good anyway. I could tell you about 15 other women I know who had tried to report a rape and got nowhere.”
Rape in any circumstance is brutal, but in the military the worst effects are compounded. Victims are ignored, their wounds left untended, and the psychological damage festers silently, poisoning lives. Survivors are expected to carry on, facing their attacker on a daily basis. “Unlike in the civilian world, a military rape survivor cannot quit his or her job and move on,” explains Anu Bhagwati, executive director of theService Women’s Action Network, an organisation spearheading a campaign to reform this aspect of military life. “It’s like rape in the family. Many victims often receive additional threats from their attackers.”
Bhagwati refers to the case of 24-year-old lance corporal Maria Lauterbach, a marine preparing to testify that she was raped by fellow marine, Cesar Laurean, when she went missing in 2007. Although it was never proved that Laurean raped her, he was later convicted of her murder. Weber found her attacker hiding in her room three times in the months that followed the rape. “He’d lie in wait just to scare me,” she says.
Rape by a fellow serviceman also represents the most unfathomable betrayal to a soldier, according to Bhagwati. “You have to understand that from day one when you sign up, you are told that the people you work with are your family, that you will risk your life to save theirs. You live that uniform. It’s who you are. And then, to be raped by one of your fellow servicemen? It’s institutional misogyny.”
There are too many stories of military rape for the Pentagon to ignore. “This is now a command priority,” says a spokesman for the department of defence. “We clearly still have more work to do.” But the sheer statistics beg the question: why is rape in the American military so common in the first place? “We looked at the systems for reporting rape within the military of Israel, Australia, Britain and some Scandinavian countries, and found that, unlike the US, other countries take a rape investigation outside the purview of the military,” explains Greg Jacob, policy director at the Service Women’s Action Network. “In Britain, for example, the investigation is handed over to the civilian police.
“Rape is a universal problem – it happens everywhere. But in other military systems it is regarded as a criminal offence, while in the US military, in many cases, it’s considered simply a breach of good conduct. Regularly, a sex offender in the US system goes unpunished, so it proliferates. In the US, the whole reporting procedure is handled – from the investigation to the trial, to the incarceration – in-house. That means the command has an overwhelming influence over what happens. If a commander decides a rape will not get prosecuted, it will not be. And in many respects, reporting a rape is to the commander’s disadvantage, because any prosecution will result in extra administration and him losing a serviceman from his unit.”
With men and women cooped up in barracks away from home, living in an atmosphere where domination through strength is part of daily training, opportunity is another undeniable factor. Most rape survivors blank out the awful details of their attack, but all describe the ease with which it was engineered. Guzman had been on night watch training. “It was the middle of the night and someone grabbed me from behind. He pulled me into this dark space, a room of some kind. The door shut. He grabbed my throat and I remember being thrown to the wall.”
Weber says she was lured outside a dance by an officer, who told her he wanted to discuss military business. “He led me up the fire escape of this building, and began to kiss me,” she explains. “I resisted, but then he turned me around so my rear was at his front. He kicked my legs apart, and tore off the back of my skirt and underwear and raped me.”
Jones says her attacker refused to leave her room in the barracks after a group of fellow soldiers had been partying together there. “Everyone had left except for him. I opened the door for him to leave, but he grabbed my neck from behind, and forced himself on me.”
But military rape is not only a women’s issue. According to the Veterans Affairs Office, 37% of the sexual trauma cases reported last year were men. “Men are even more isolated than women following rape,” Bhagwati says. “Because it has an even bigger social stigma.”
Rick Tringale is one of few men to speak about what happened to him. He was 18 years old and in his first few weeks of training, he says, when he woke up in his bunk in the middle of the night thinking that it was raining. Someone was urinating on him.
“As I came to consciousness, I realised that I was being held down with a blanket and then I was beaten.” Tringale, 43, says his life changed for ever following a brutal gang rape, that led to him going AWOL from the army, and subsequently becoming homeless.
“Next thing I remember is being dragged down the hallway. There was a lot of blood, a lot of pain, I was crying and I remember trying to run away, but I was dragged to the latrine, and hit a whole lot more. I remember the white tiles splattered with blood and seeing familiar faces and they were all hitting me. More guys were crowding into the bathroom too, and they’re yelling, ‘Kill him, kill him, kill him.’ ”
Tringale believes he was either knocked unconscious or what happened next was too horrible for his memory to recall. All he remembers is waking up in his bunk the next day, with his platoon dormitory empty. He says his face was a mess, his nose broken, his whole body beaten and he had been raped. He made it to the emergency department, but in the middle of the examination by the doctor, who was initially sympathetic, the phone rang. “The doctor was talking to someone, and looking at me. Then, when he came off the phone, he said: ‘You’re a phoney, your company says you shouldn’t be here, and you’re fine.’ He sent me away. I became a different person after that. Everybody in the squad platoon knew what had happened – there was no way anyone could have missed it.”
Tringale completed his training, but he became known as the “crazy guy” because any part of his training that was dangerous, he would push himself to the limit, like holding on to hand grenades so long they were seconds from exploding in his hand. He tried killing himself three times. It was after the third attempt while stationed in Germany, after being talked down off the roof of a building, that he was sent to a civilian psychiatrist, whom he told about his experience. She diagnosed PTSD and recommended Tringale be sent home. But he was also seen by a military doctor, who told him, “If there’s something wrong with your mind, you’ll have to stay here in this locked ward.”
“I looked around at this locked ward,” says Tringale. “That was when I decided I had to get out. I went AWOL.” For the past 25 years, Tringale has lived with the nightmares and trauma. Because he was not honourably discharged, he lost his paycheck, his pension, and he has not had the regular support of the programmes set up by the veterans affairs department for those suffering from PTSD. For a while he held a job on a paramedic ambulance, but like many veterans who suffer from PTSD, he was also homeless for many years. He neither drinks, nor takes drugs. Two years ago he married, and became a stepfather to three children. He has never shared his story with his wife. “Our society treats men differently when they have been raped,” he says. “In society’s eyes I am somehow less of a man because I have been raped, or I must be a latent homosexual. Rape is a very emasculating thing.”
Like the others in this article, Tringale wants to share his story in order to help those who might have experienced the same. “Eighteen veterans kill themselves every day,” he says. “That’s the statistic. We don’t know what percentage of them are victims of rape, but if I can share my story and make someone else feel that they are not alone and there is hope, then I have done my duty.”
Suicide and homelessness are common outcomes for sufferers of MST (military sexual trauma). Forty per cent of homeless women veterans have reported experiences of sexual assault in the military, according to the Service Women’s Action Network. “Other common effects of MST are feelings of isolation, sleeping problems, hyper-vigilance, depression, and substance abuse,” explains Dr Amy Street, a clinical psychologist at the VA Hospital in Boston who works with victims (VA hospitals are run by the veterans affairs department). “Victims talk about feeling numb, being cut off from emotions, unable to function. The best treatments are therapies, which require sufferers to talk about their attacks. This is very uncomfortable for them, but they are effective.”
But because most victims do not report their attacks, it is usually many years, if at all, before they find their way to such therapy groups. Guzman began talking about what happened to her only because she met a therapist who was working at a VA hospital who recognised some of her symptoms. Guzman was depressed, couldn’t keep up friendships, unable to function. She, too, had tried to kill herself. “I was an empty shell of a person,” she explains. “I’d heard of PTSD before, but I’d associated it with people who had seen combat. Not me. When I was diagnosed, everything started to click in. I wasn’t crazy. All the things I’d suffered started to make sense. Bear in mind, the rape had been my first sexual experience. I grew up in a very strict Catholic culture and rape is such a big taboo in my community. It wasn’t something I could talk about. I felt very ashamed.”
But talking has helped her. “I have no shame talking about it any more,” she explains. “My family and friends all know now, and that’s been an important part of my recovery. On a daily basis, I am still sleep deprived, and I have a lot of nightmares. I still find relationships with men very difficult, and I don’t think I’m ever going to get married and have children. It’s one of the costs of this trauma. But this year at school, I’ve had A grades back to back, which has been amazing. That’s simply because of the support I’ve been getting.”
Weber also speaks highly of the VA hospital where she received therapy three times a week. “I used to live in my robe. Wouldn’t go out. Stay awake all night. I developed a substance abuse problem, because numbing yourself is all you want to do. I went through two marriages, and lost my bearings in life completely. But I’m doing better now than I’ve ever done before. In therapy you learn that not everyone is out to get you, that you’re not about die. They teach you how to live life without so much fear.
“I’ve been clean and sober for two years. But I don’t blame the other survivors I know that still want to stay loaded or die, for this type of pain I feel is indescribable. But I’m grateful that I’ve survived. What’s important now is to get the word out and make the case for change.”
