Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Who’s Raping Whose Scapegoat?

The rape conviction of U.S. Lance Corporal Daniel Smith on December 4, 2006 in the Philippines highlights the geopolitical hypocrisy U.S. taxpayers are financing. He testified the sex in the back of a van was consensual, when both he and his accuser were drunk. Anyone who has spent any time in Olangapo or Subic knows that nice innocent virgins don’t get drunk and jump into vans full of Marines to read them the bible ─ even in religious Catholic Philippines.

The case not only raises the question of what are U.S. Marines doing in the Philippines, but why a U.S. Marine is sentenced to a harsh prison sentence for having consensual sex while the hundreds, if not thousands, of U.N. soldiers around the world on humanitarian peace missions who have been accused of rape, just get sent home quietly and are never prosecuted.

A “wall of silence” keeps U.N. sexual abuse cases from being investigated. Rapes are usually belittled as simple acts of prostitution, much as they used to be in the Philippines.

Under the Visiting Forces Agreement between America and the Philippines, U.S. Marines and other members of the U.S. armed forces are in the Philippines to advise the Filipino army and conduct joint military exercises to fight terrorism. Under the agreement, American military personnel are to be tried in Philippine courts.

For years the Philippines has been a haven for Jemaah Islamiah, a network that covers the arc of a predominantly Muslim region from the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, through Indonesia to Malaysia and Southern Thailand. The record of Islamic terrorism extends from vicious guerilla war waged by the extremist Abu Sayyaf on the islands of Basilan and Jolo, off southwestern Mindanao, to plotting against the U.S. by operatives in Manila under the guidance of their Middle Eastern masters.

The very public charges of rape, pedophilia and prostitution involving U.N. peacekeepers in Burundi, Bosnia, Cambodia, Haiti, East Timor, Ethiopia, Liberia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone pale in comparison to those made in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that highlighted the arrogance of U.N. criminal bureaucratic rapists. The 41-page report detailed 150 allegations of sexual misconduct by peacekeepers against women and girls, some as young as 12. That did not include the Congolese women working for the U.N. who were afraid to report supervisors’ demands for sex for fear of losing their jobs. More than a year after the shocking disclosures, nothing has been done to end the culture of impunity, exploitation and sexual chauvinism.

Before sending a mission abroad, the U.N. negotiates a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that, in almost all instances, deprives local authorities of criminal jurisdiction over peacekeepers. If there is no host-country government to negotiate with, as in East Timor or Kosovo, the countries providing peacekeepers and the U.N. determine the terms of the SOFA.

Comparing U.S. Marines sexual escapades on their R&R in the Philippines, for which they can receive a harsh prison sentence, to the sexual abuse U.N. relief workers inflict daily on their job for which they are excused, makes me wonder who is the real scapegoat in Lance-Corporal Smith’s sentence? American taxpayers for picking up the tab that put a U.S. Marine in jail.

Monday, February 12, 2007

The New Divide

Washington continues to be a city of divided government that has electorally at the ballot box re-captured the checks and balances so sorely lacking in America since 2000. The 2006 midterm elections elevated and reinforced the partisan confrontational gridlock, and warfare. The diversity of the democratic majority in the new Congress is representative of the new divide in American politics. The old school liberal leadership is reluctantly trying to embrace the moderate and conservative “Scoop” Jackson Democrats who are in many ways more aligned politically with the moderate wing of the Republican Party, while trying to minimize the inevitable clashes on foreign policy, especially towards China, and a Republican president and his staunch conservative party supporters who survived a near death experience.

The use of Congresses subpoena powers to investigate the president’s conduct of the war, Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret energy policy deliberations and White House links with Republican corruption scandals further widened the existing rapidly expanding fissure.

The lack of desire to compromise by Vietnam vintage politicians determined to investigate, indict, and impeach their fellow Vietnam era draft dodging architects of the war in Iraq ─ a war that lasted 44 months on election day 2006, the amount of time that elapsed between Pearl Harbor and VJ Day ─ and rapidly catching up to the length of the 10 year war in Vietnam, was a sequel to the Vietnam era Watergate hearings.

Congressman Henry Waxman, whose formidable combative Waxman-Berman political machine I have the memorable experience of handing its first electoral defeat in a Los Angeles City Council race in the early 70’s, lost no time as head of the House Government Reform Committee giving Bush’s team the real thumping they deserve. Impeachment investigations went into inquisition overdrive. Pay back time for the wasteful Republican led Clinton impeachment effort.

The political debates about increasing everything that is long overdue for an increase, starting with tax on oil and pharmaceutical company profits, minimum wage, Medicare benefits, immigration quotas, and simultaneously reducing the costs on fundamental human necessities such as education, health care, drugs for seniors and other entitlement programs, such as the mentally and physically impaired ─ and budget deficit ─ are a welcome respite from the dysfunctional divisive political rhetoric of denial in the interest of political self preservation and perpetuation of unnecessary wars.

The reality is that U.S. partisan, political posturing in preparation for the 2008 presidential election ─ by both parties and their presidential candidates ─ exposed the lack of new ideas or sweeping policy reforms so desperately needed for America to survive as a superpower.

The political debris left in the wake of the destructive political blue tidal wave that crashed on the shores of the Potomac in early 2007, is drowning America’s democratic form of government. A major political cleaning is needed and long overdue by We the Maids.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

New Political Landscape

The perfect political tsunami was brewing in America ─ disparity between growth in productivity and gross domestic product on the one hand and growth in wages for the average American worker on the other, Sino-U.S. relations and geopolitical realignments that could start crystallizing after the 110th Congress was sworn in in January 2007, if the Democrats swept the Republicans out.

I reflected on my 2005 U.S. book tour and the numerous radio interviews and callers who repeated their frustration with America’s policies that were emphatic about “America needs a change” and decided to see if We the Maids would clean house ─ and thankfully we started.

The concerns I raised and anger I voiced in Custom Maid Spin and Custom Maid War about hypocrisy, sex, corruption, lobbyists and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan thankfully resonated and registered with voters.

America is starting to wake up to the fact that international and national politics have an impact on their life and reject the popular truism that “all politics is local.” It is inter-local. Americans are not fools. They are just slow in making up their minds. That allows political opportunists and their financial backers to exploit their lapses.

Now that Congress is controlled by Democrats after their acrimonious mid-term-election gain of 30 seats, and a 233-202 House Majority, it can take back the control of national policy, spending and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ─ and can get America back on track before the 2008 presidential elections when partisan mudslinging starts all over again. Congress must re-assert its strong legislative oversight of the executive branch of government.

The Democrats promise to “drain the swamp that is Washington” by introducing stronger ethical guidelines is wishful thinking that hopefully will be achieved at the dawn of the 21st-century. The Democratic agenda of “six for ‘6” ─ the six promises on which they campaigned during the midterm elections have a greater chance of becoming law than any ethics legislation.

The six agenda items which are political, controversial and necessary for America to survive the 21st-century are: Strengthen Homeland Security, raise the federal minimum wage, reduction in college fee interest charges for the middle class, reversal of Republican tax break for oil companies, reduction in prescription drug prices for seniors, and protection of Social Security from privatization.

The brighter news is that the “do nothing Congress” will now have to work five days a week, compared to the less than four on election day.
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