People say that even though Ron Paul is anti-woman and against freedom where a woman’s human right over her own body is concerned, he is the lesser of two evils to vote for and that women’s access to birth control and safe legal abortion is less important than the “big picture.” I disagree.

Anyone who trivializes depriving women of our most basic and fundamental human right to have control over our own bodies, i.e. control over our own reproductive health, wellbeing and lives, with a false dichotomy should really know exactly what they’re using their unearned male privilege to impose on us women and the depth and degree of the harm inflicted on us because of that.

In pre-Roe and pre-Griswold America when a woman’s human rights over her own body concerning reproduction were a “states’ rights” issue, countless women who couldn’t/didn’t want to go through pregnancy and childbirth for whatever reason were denied the right to get birth control, not just denied the right to a safe legal abortion. Many died from botched back-alley and/or DIY abortions as a result.

Young girls barely beginning to menstruate that were impregnated as a result of rape/incest faced either death or permanent disfigurement and disability from being forced by states’ laws to endure pregnancy and childbirth because of being unable to get a safe legal abortion. They were usually shipped off out of state to unwed mothers’ homes (called “homes for naughty ladies”) where they were constantly slut-shamed until they gave birth (and forced to give away their babies that they suffered tremendously in carrying and bearing), and frequently abused by nurses and doctors by being denied pain relief during labor and delivery as additional punishment for not keeping their legs closed in the first place. (Because everyone knows that rape and the resulting unwanted pregnancies only happens to “undeserving whores”, right?)

Those who were lucky to be born into upper-middle class families that actually gave a damn about them and viewed them as human beings rather than as disposable reproductive chattel had to pay through the nose for illegal semi-safe abortions that often required cross-country travel to procure.

Others who were not so lucky were either pressed into prostitution to get the money to pay for a black market abortion or risk death by hemorrhage or sepsis from a DIY abortion at home, like my ex’s late grandmother who was one of those many casualties. She suffered horribly from uncontrollable bleeding, swelling and septic shock for about 5 days before she finally died. She was desperate to terminate her 11th pregnancy (after the exhausting experience of giving birth to 10 kids back-to-back) because she just couldn’t physically or emotionally handle enduring one more pregnancy and childbirth. She was only 26 years old.

The “merry widower” dumped all ten of his kids off on nearby farms, in orphanages, and on relatives and then went on to find a replacement brood mare wife. He never once bothered to try and get his first children back and never cared about how the loss of their mother impacted them. His attitude was not unusual; most men are STILL like that. Especially white men, who think the “natural order of things” is an order where women are their “property.” [If you doubt this, then why were miscegenation laws aimed solely at punishing white women whereby we could be murdered with impunity for committing the "crime" of bearing a black or Indian baby as a result of making love with a non-white man?]

Of course, telling this inconvenient truth gets women like me accused of being “man-haters” and “lesbians” who are “anti-American” and out to “destroy capitalism” and “kill children.”

Another grisly truth about pre-Roe and pre-Griswold America is the “package deal” of psychological terror and being sexually assaulted by underground “doctors” willing to provide this medical service for women that was all part and parcel of getting a semi-safe abortion when one had to travel to states like New York where abortions were not legal but not really prosecuted, either.

Anyone who thinks a woman’s fundamental human right over her own body is “nothing” or is something expendable that should somehow be thrown under the bus in lieu of “more important issues” is obligated to know and fully understand EXACTLY what it is that they are advocating. Fuck the sugar-coated bullshit. And fuck you too if your delicate sensibilities are offended by the grisly truth of what unearned male privilege has really cost women and girls, and ultimately the whole planet. Women’s rights ARE human rights!

Women are people — not property. We are not “prizes” to be seized as war spoils (like in the Ron Paul/libertarian wet dream of “free market” Somalia), nor child chattel “brides” to be awarded to the highest male bidder in too many parts of the world that has been infested by the disease of patriarchy.

http://www.lifeandlibertyforwomen.org/gerri_twerdy_santoro.html

Jacqueline S. Homan, author of Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

Just what does it mean to join in solidarity with the 99% whose Occupy movement is upper-middle class and heterosexual white male centered?

A prison guard who makes $50,000/year or more plus health and dental benefits, a pension and paid vacation may not be part of that 1% on Wall Street, but can he really stand in solidarity with poor black males with NO jobs (let alone good-paying union ones) who have a 1 in 4 chance of becoming fodder for the prison-industrial complex that provides middle class jobs for men (not many women) at the expense of poor racial minorities and women?

Being poor and non-white significantly increases your chance for ending up wrongly convicted and slapped with the death penalty. How much solidarity should those most at risk for ending up strapped to an execution gurney feel with those whose middle class paychecks and benefits require participation in the carrying out of capital punishment?

And who else is in this 99% that many might have difficulty feeling solidarity with? Gary Leon Ridgeway (“the Green River Killer”) was not, by any definition, part of the wealthy 1%. Neither was Larry Singleton, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, or Robert “Willie” Pickton. These serial rapists and psycho killers who hailed from the 99% preyed on society’s “throw-away” women — poor, marginalized vulnerable women of all races at the very bottom of the 99% that no one ever really cared about, not even other men in the 99% who now want us to stand with them in “unity.” Asking poor and vulnerable women to feel solidarity with social predators of any stripe is like asking Jewish Holocaust survivors to feel solidarity with the Nazi guards who were “just doing their jobs” at those death camps.

Would any sane person really argue that Nazi bureaucrats and guards were “just as oppressed” as the millions of genocide victims whom they first dehumanized, socially and economically excluded, and then herded into sealed ghettoes from which they were marched at gunpoint onto the death trains bound for the death camps that were the size of small cities?

What about rapists and child molesters that are part of this 99%? Do we really want to sit in solidarity with them and hold hands and sing Koom-Bye-Ya? Their violation of women’s and children’s human rights has nothing to do with the economic abuses committed by the 1%, but everything to do with patriarchy and the culture of rape: Rape of women and children, rape of the earth, rape of everything — all excused and justified by “divine right.”

And what about middle class employees of utility monopolies who previously rationalized the enormous suffering they inflicted on the poorest of the poor at the very bottom of the 99% who weren’t lucky enough to have a good-paying job to afford their rent, food, utilities, clothing, and medical and dental care and access to an advanced education? Where was all this unity when poor women and children and poor seniors and the disabled were either left to freeze to death or die in fires caused by unsafe space heaters because middle class utility company workers — who had their good jobs, their food, their nice homes, and their winter heat — shut off utilities on the poor, leaving them to die because there really wasn’t “all this help out there”?

Sylvia Young, a destitute 29 year-old single mother in Detroit with seven children to support on her own with no opportunity and no middle class job, lost everything except the clothes on her back in March of 2010 when her gas got shut off by DTE Energy during a deadly cold snap. She had to scramble trying to make do with old space heaters — one of which started the fire that ended up claiming the lives of three of her seven children. Less than two hours before the fire started, the utility worker who shut off Young’s gas spoke with her face-to face. He saw the infant she held in her arms. He saw her other children. He saw the squalor and poverty that she and her children were condemned to live in. Poor women across racial lines never got a chance for anything in this “land of opportunity” where the haves and have-nots are divided along the lines of gender and/or race.

And what was this middle class man’s response to the pleas of Sylvia Young and countless other marginalized and poor women like her when she begged him not to shut off the gas and leave her and her children to freeze to death? His answer was, “Sorry, but I have to do my job.”

How nice for him that he had his good-paying job enabling him to afford plenty of good food to eat, medical and dental care, and a nice warm home! Two hours after he “did his job” of shutting off Sylvia Young’s gas, a raging fire broke out. She lost what little bit of nothing that she had. Three of her children burned to death. The worst was yet to come when Michigan’s Democrat judges and middle class social workers from the child welfare authorities took Sylvia Young’s remaining children away from her and criminalized her for being a poor woman. Where was all this middle and working class “solidarity” with the poor then? I don’t recall seeing much middle class support and sympathy for the poorest of the poor in my lifetime as a marginal woman who struggled all of my life to climb up from total destitution up to poverty, never having access to health and dental care outside of the emergency room, and never getting a chance to make it to even the lowest rung of the lower-middle class.

As of December 2010, there were approximately 10 million US households from the bottom of the 99% that were without at least one life-sustaining utility; poor households whose utilities were shut off due to extreme poverty. Long before now, 80% of those below poverty either couldn’t get enough help to make it or they got turned away and sent home empty-handed altogether. But no one ever talked about those of us at the very bottom of the 99% who were turned away from all those charities and social service agencies; denied adequate help, denied hope, and denied a fair fighting chance of ever being able to escape dire poverty in America (which had been denied by everybody else for a long, long time until Hurricane Katrina opened the world’s eyes).

The truth is that nobody ever cared about us. The middle classes dismissed us and claimed we had it made compared to the poor in the slums of Mumbai; that we should “shut up and stop whining.” Now they want to talk about “unity” and how we’re all part of this 99% and trot us out as the mascot for their movement — which is really only about getting a better deal for their middle class selves within the capitalist paradigm while nothing gets better for those of us at the very bottom.

My personal past experiences with cross-class social justice coalitions is that the poor always lose out every time. The only outcome that those of us in extreme poverty can count on is being thrown under the bus for the sake of “political compromise” while we’re chastised by our middle class “saviors” for not being “pragmatic” enough. I’m not interested in more of the same, thank you.

Approximately half a million dollars was donated to Occupy Wall Street protesters alone. It went to pay for supporting a movement that is dominated by middle class white males under age 40. How many truly poor and destitute Americans could that support have helped instead of going for the publicized building of a middle class ‘Skid Row’ just to make a political statement by pretending to be destitute and homeless after the real poor and homeless have been shoved out of mind and out of sight for as long as I can remember? The middle class was all too happy these past 30 years to push for laws that criminalized the truly homeless and destitute by voting for lawmakers and leaders who slashed what little miserly help there was for America’s poor prior to the Welfare Reform Act of 1996.

As a deeply impoverished woman over age 40 who has been unemployed since 2004 with no real hope of ever getting re-employed due to age and gender discrimination that has always been pervasive even in better job markets, I’m not getting the help I need to be able to make it — I suffer from long-term deprivation of basic human needs that are not being met: medical and dental care, nutritious food, adequate clothing, basic utilities, and adequate housing that isn’t substandard. I can’t afford reliable transportation (a necessity when one lives in a semi-rural area). I have no income other than a meager food stamp benefit. I can’t get Medicaid because I’m not a parent or a low-income senior citizen. And until the middle class found itself under the barrel of capitalism’s Hotchkiss guns, they were very eager and willing footsoldiers who lubed the gears in the bureaucratic machine that runs the world on behalf of the super rich by sacrificing the poor.

Funny how middle class people can always find tons of money to push their class interests to the front of the line, using those of us at the very bottom as their disposable poster child to further their own agenda at our expense while they never have any money and support to give directly to someone in poverty and really lift someone up out of utter destitution and despair. And this is what they call “unity” and “solidarity” with those of us who can’t afford the luxury of being able to travel to a protest, camp out, and get our voices heard because we can’t even afford to live?

I don’t find much solidarity with upper-middle class college kids, well-heeled union leaders and professional “activists” living large off of honorariums and donations who talk about the unearned wealth of those with trillions of dollars while they exert their own privileges to step on those of us who suffer the oppression of sexism and legitimized misogyny and/or racism and/or colonialism for whom the issues transcend the economic injustices of capitalism. Yet, when marginalized people suffering from the redistributive injustices of more than one oppressor try to speak out, we get accused of being divisive. We get silenced. Our concerns are excluded from the social justice agenda, and we get accused of engaging in “oppression Olympics.”

Oppression Olympics is a term used to describe the dynamics of two or more groups competing to prove themselves more oppressed than the other. It’s a silencing tactic. It’s a way of invalidating others’ viewpoints by trying to place them lower down on a scale of significance. But the reality is that many people experience oppression daily in their lives from multiple fronts, and they’re not always comparable. To dismiss that by saying “we’re all in the same boat” ignores that oppression and even legitimizes it as part of the “sacrifice” some of us are expected to make for the benefit of those who ignore their own privileges and begin to exert them against us — in the name of “unity.”

When comfortably off union workers and wealthy union bosses in Ohio recently launched a political campaign by preaching unity among the middle class, the working class, and the poor, they were eager to get voter support for their Democrat candidates enabled through unity. But once their boys got in, that unity with the poorest of the poor went up in smoke — they protected their middle class wages and health benefits through Obamacare at the expense of eliminating access to medical care for the poorest of the poor — 84% whom are women, according to US Census data, human rights reports, and US Department of Health & Human Services records. The middle classes once again protected their own economic turf at the expense of the poor whom they threw under the bus — after benefiting from our solidarity with them.

We’re told that all of the 99% is equally oppressed by the 1%. Sorry, but no. No, we are not “all oppressed equally.” We are not “all in the same boat.” And openly acknowledging that is not being “divisive” or promoting “identity politics” — it’s simply telling the truth.

And it is not only many of us from poverty that are mistrustful of this Occupy movement, the Haudenosaunee also don’t seem to be supportive of it either. And mostly for very similar reasons: they were ill-used for others’ gain at their expense one time too many.  As Jessica Yee pointed out,

“Colonialism also leads to capitalism, globalization, and industrialization. How can we truly end capitalism without ending colonialism? How does doing things in the name of “America” which was created by the imposition of hierarchies of class, race, ability, gender, and sexuality help that?”

[Read the rest of her article here: http://www.racialicious.com/2011/09/30/occupy-wall-street-the-game-of-colonialism-and-further-nationalism-to-be-decolonized-from-the-left/ ]

In every war since Britain and France colonized North America — the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, the War of 1812, the Civil War, etc. — the Haudenosaunee fought to help the British and later, both the Americans (the Iroquois helped the North win the Civil War) and the Canadians in two devastating world wars resulting from imperialism. All they ever got for it was short-shifted. They got kicked out of the newly independent colonies after the end of the American Revolution (even though much of that land was their home) and offered a tiny tract as payment by the British Crown for their service in the American Revolution. But that land was already part of their traditional hunting territories anyway, and that land was held in trust, thus reducing the Iroquois (and other Aboriginals) to the status of diminished sovereigns. The Haudenosaunee lost lots of people in battle, fighting other people’s wars — rich, inbred foreign crowned heads’ wars — none of which were to their benefit.

As Rastia‘ta‘non:ha, a Seneca historian for the Iroquois Confederacy, says:

“Have we not been drawn into enough of their battles in the past, and look where it got us? This movement is bad for all Indigenous people, and none of us should be involved with it on any level.”

I have to agree with both Rastia‘ta‘non:ha and Jessica Yee. The original North Americans did not invite this trouble into their lives, just like they did not cause the “War on Terror” that they bear the consequence for with enormous border-crossing difficulties that neutered the Jay Treaty and put a “Berlin Wall” through the middle of their traditional territories.

I think this movement is also bad for the poorest non-Natives at the bottom of the 99% who are being used as pawns and tools for the preservation of unearned middle class white male privilege. Social justice solutions won’t be found within the non-reformable capitalist paradigm. The system of unearned privileges is the sine qua non of capitalism and its handmaiden, colonialism. If women and the poorest of the poor non-Indigenous are to be anyone’s ally, we should be allies with the original North Americans whose country this really is — not with a middle class white male centered 99% Occupy movement.

“A scholar of the Haudenosaunee, John Mohawk, wrote in 1977: “A strategy for survival must include a liberation theology-call it a philosophy/cosmology if you will-or humankind will simply continue to seek more efficient ways to exploit that which they have come to respect. If these processes continue unabated and unchanged at the foundation of the colonizers’ ideology, our species will never be liberated from the undeniable reality that we live on a planet of limited resources, and sooner or later we will exploit our environment beyond its ability to renew itself.”

I don’t hear that kind of thinking among the “Occupy Wall Street” activists. Their concern is money, its accumulation and its distribution. All derived from extraction economies and the economy of war.

Do not expect to see many Haudenosaunee people at Zuccoti Park except as non-committed observers.”

Read entire article here:http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/a-haudenosaunee-observation-of-the-ows http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/ict_sbc/a-haudenosaunee-observation-of-the-ows#ixzz1eEQzTbGh

AS Jessica Yee points out,

“Colonialism also leads to capitalism, globalization, and industrialization. How can we truly end capitalism without ending colonialism? How does doing things in the name of “America” which was created by the imposition of hierarchies of class, race, ability, gender, and sexuality help that?”

Read the rest of her article here: http://www.racialicious.com/2011/09/30/occupy-wall-street-the-game-of-colonialism-and-further-nationalism-to-be-decolonized-from-the-left/

When feminists talk about addressing institutionalized misogyny and legitimized sexism, and when North America’s Aboriginal people talk about decolonisation, they’re often scolded for being “divisive”, and admonished to put their own “special interests” aside for the greater good of all. But why can’t we talk about these things? Why can’t we talk about decolonization? Why can’t we talk about dismantling patriarchy and the treatment of women as rape toys, cheap commodities and reproductive chattel undeserving of rights over our own bodies? Why can’t we talk about racism, racial profiling, and the prison-industrial complex?

Accusing a member of an oppressed group of engaging in “oppression Olympics” is really just an excuse to prioritize your privilege to get a better deal for yourself at the expense of the least privileged and at the expense of more broad freedom. Anyone truly committed to any real social justice and transformative change  and sustainability would not think it is “divisive” to include anti-oppression in the discussion.

This movement struck me as being centered on young middle class white males, and they’re not welcoming or receptive of older people — including older people who have a lifetime’s worth of experience and battle scars from fighting the oppression created by unearned privilege. And according to Reena Walker, a seasoned older black woman and veteran activist, male privilege and how it is used by men in the 99% to beat women down and oppress us is ignored or rationalized by a busload of mansplaining. As a black woman who suffered a lifetime of poverty, sexism, racism and misogyny, Ms. Walker is hardly one of the 1% and yet the way she and other women are being treated at OWS sends the message that women (who make up 51% of the 99%) aren’t viewed as being human enough for harm against us to matter. Funny how freedom and economic justice is only for a few which usually does not include women. Some 99%ers are more equal than others.

It is no accident that women comprise over 70% of those living below poverty worldwide. The status quo of local and global capitalism depends on women’s unpaid/under-paid work. It could not survive without women’s unpaid work as primary caregivers, the childbearers, and the child-raisers. Capitalism is patriarchal to the core. The poorest of the world’s poor are women who also do upwards of two-thirds of the world’s work and own only 1% of the means of production and reproduction. Women hold up half the sky on our unpaid/under-paid backs.

Despite all of the claims by Occupy facilitators that rapes are not occurring at the Occupy Toronto camp at St. James Park, a few men from the Aboriginal community who are staying in the camp full time say otherwise. One of those men, identifying himself only as “Davine”, who is half Blackfoot and half Arab, said that the camp’s marshals have not been able to minimize or prevent sexual assaults on the women there and that “these [white] people are coming to us Natives for help.” What is really tragic in all this is that one of those Natives — Jayson Fleury — is a real opportunistic shmuck and sociopathic grifter who has ripped off poor and marginal women to support his lifestyle of partying across Canada 3-4 times a year. And he is one of a tiny handful of men who is willing to protect the women from rape. How sad is that?

What is supposed to be a movement about unity of the masses against the 1% is really looking more like the same ol’ same ol’: freedom and economic justice and a bigger slice of the pie for men; rape, invalidation, exploitation, abuse, oppression and discrimination against the poorest and most downtrodden victims of capitalism — poor women of ALL races. Somehow, I don’t find that very unifying, uplifting, or liberating as a poor and marginal woman.

And please don’t tell me that women’s human rights — including the right to a job with dignity, the right to an education, the right to food, housing, and healthcare, and the right to reproductive/sexual enfranchisement and bodily autonomy/self-determination, and most important of all, the right to NOT be raped and impregnated against our will at peril to our health, well-being, liberty, and lives — is less important that “the big picture” of those traditionally privileged members of the 99% getting their justice at poor and destitute women’s expense in the name of “social justice.” Sorry, but I’m not down with that.

As a woman from deep poverty who suffered more under capitalism than poor men due to institutionalized sexism, misogyny, and the social acceptance of patriarchy and its culture of rape, I have no interest in “taking one for the team” for the sake of the 99% movement (which is looking more like a Rapists’ Rights bowel movement) just so men can get a bigger slice of the economic pie while nothing changes for the better for women, especially poor and marginal women of all races.

Since colonization of North America, women in the US and Canada have been told to wait until after the men got all the more important issues resolved and then we women would eventually get our turn. But our turn never came — at least not for those of us in extreme poverty that never got to make it to even the lowest rung of the middle class. But then this Occupy movement has never been about us, has it?

A glaring example is the Occupy Vancouver list of demands included a call for the legalization of prostitution. Prostitution is rich white male-centered. It exists because capitalism is patriarchal and there’s a direct link between that and human trafficking and rape. Also at the crux of it is the larger societal view of women as non-persons, as cheap commodities that exist solely for male self-gratification.  These issues cannot be bifurcated.

Desperation, poverty, abuse, addiction, job and pay discrimination, lack of opportunities and a need to pay the rent and feed the kids, a history of colonialism, racism, sexism, and a misogynistic culture that devalues women and reduces us to disposable products to be bought and sold — all act in synergy to create a society where prostitution and sex trafficking exists and flourishes with men being the prime beneficiaries of it while women are further victimized.

What kind of social justice movement seeking to rectify the injustices of capitalism and the inclusion of women in the name of solidarity is this, anyway?

Why is the response to the rapes, the abuse, the exploitation, the trauma and the deaths that many poor and marginal women suffer as a result of being prostituted to simply treat this as “just another job”? What other job demands that the worker be raped, impregnated against their will, infected with an STD, violated, abused, and maybe even murdered? What kind of person supports that this sort of treatment should be legitimized? What kind of person seeking solidarity with women — especially poor and marginal women — would agree that women’s bodies should just be another disposable commodity available for purchase by men and that every woman should be OK with that?

Women need to be safe, but how safe are women when we’re not even viewed as full human beings? Yes, prostituted women deserve rights. But they also deserve to have real choices. Why would anyone think that johns will provide equitable treatment and respect for women? No man who thinks he has the right to trade in human flesh or take a woman against her will is a man who believes in real equality. A man who can do this is a man who doesn’t see women as being human enough for harm against us to matter. We should not have to accept and legalize exploitation and oppression from men in order to decriminalize the women being prostituted in the name of “unity.”

Legalized prostitution neatly sweeps under the wraps the insidious human rights catastrophe of the global human/sex trafficking industry. Women ensnared in that are literally forced into brutal sex slavery; bought and sold, beaten and raped over and over and over. Approximately 80% of those trafficked are women and girls. The average age of a trafficking victim is 14. The average life span once trafficked is 4 years. The victims usually die from HIV/AIDS related complications after being forced (often violently) to give unprotected sex to their male purchasers. Legalizing and sugar-coating the exploitation of women does not protect our human rights. It undermines them.

A genuine unity and people’s movement doesn’t consider women’s suffering irrelevant, or as a trivial “special interest”, or as titillating grist. Nor does it function as a microcosm of this capitalist economy with men competing for all the power, wealth, and status at the top while women serve as mere cheerleaders and poster children only to be trotted out for the convenience and benefit of male privilege.

Women deserve safety and decriminalized from doing what they have to do in order to survive, but women also deserve to have real options. As 51% of the population, women should be 51% represented in all mainstream jobs, instead of being herded into pink collar-ghettos, and the sub-poverty glass ceiling of Wal-Mart with the exploitative sex industry as the only other option available for poor women for whom college and grad school is as out of reach as a day trip to Sedna while male high school drop-outs and ex-felons get all the good-paying blue-collar union jobs in the skilled trades and all of the opportunities and hope for a better life that goes with that at the expense of women’s exclusion.

Women make up more than half of the 99%. Where is our liberation from male oppression and domination through rape, “honor killing”, FGM, hiring and pay discrimination, sexual and reproductive slavery, human trafficking, sexual exploitation, and domestic violence which are the all too common realities of women’s lives every day?  These are the realities that are disproportionally inflicted on poor and marginal women by men in the 99%. Yet these are all dismissed as “special interest issues” that are accepted as part of “the price of being born female”, which is why anti-oppression is needed.  And that is why a movement of unity for real social and economic change must be willing to accept constructive criticism and not get offended when male privilege is challenged.

What is uplifting, unifying, or liberating about Occupy camp facilitators designating untrained peers as “marshals” to serve as the “sexual assault response team” to deal with the rapes — not by offering rape kits that include emergency contraception and STD testing/treatment, and the arrest/removal of the rapist, but by counseling (read: pressuring) the women who’ve been raped against going to the police? (Not that the criminal justice system has ever been any panacea for women, especially rape victims — police, lawyers, and judges are products of the same patriarchal, misogynist, fetid capitalist sepulcher that has always oppressed and abused women through unearned male privilege at women’s expense. )

I have no interest in being ill-used and thrown under the bus for the sake of “solidarity” with fauxgressives just so that men can get justice while nothing changes for the better for poor women of all races.

If destitute and marginal women of all races are at these camps, it is because this shit is real for us. We have been the most oppressed, the most excluded, the most downtrodden, and the most harmed by the inherent injustices of capitalism which is inherently a gender war. Chronically poor and marginal women don’t have the safety nets that young working class and middle class white males have: the freedom from potentially life-threatening unwanted pregnancy, or the privilege of a job and/or families with resources to return to at the end of all this.

On September 2009, Archeological Services, Inc. (ASI), a firm owned by de-licensed archeologist Ron Williamson, presented a 19-page report to the City of Toronto Parks & Forestry Department concerning a contested mound site in High Park known as the Snake Mounds — a site that the Iroquois community holds is an ancient burial ground dating back 3,000 years or more.

The archeological report containing obscure, abstract jargon among its litany of big words, for which a glossary of terms was conveniently omitted, was prepared by Brian Narhi, Project Historian and David Robertson, Senior Archeologist and Project Manager, Debbie Steiss (Ron Williamson’s wife), Senior Archeologist & Partner, and Andrea Carnevale, Staff Archeologist. It claims that no evidence of any artifacts were found during ASI’s field investigation of Picnic Area 7 and the Snake Mounds portion of the park commonly referred to as the “Bike Pit” where BMX dirt bike ramps were built on the contested site. The executive summary reads as follows:

“The Stage 1-2 Archeological Resources Assessment of the High Park “Bike Pit” and Picnic Area 7 has been carried out in advance of any park management activities that may result in landscape alteration in either area. The Stage 1 assessment entailed consideration of the proximity of the previously registered archeological sites, the original environmental setting of the park, and its 19^th and 20^th century development history. The Stage 2 assessment involved completion of test pit surveys within both areas. No archeological remains were encountered during the field investigations. Accordingly, this report recommends that the Bike Pit and Picnic Area 7 may be cleared of any further archeological concern, with the proviso that the appropriate authorities must be notified should deeply buried archeological or human remains be encountered during any future work on the property.”

There are a few major problems with this report. First, there is only the say-so of ASI that 40 test pits of a depth of 6”-10” deep each were dug throughout the site on Friday September 4^th 2009 before Labor Day weekend.  Curiously, the team did all of this test-pit digging within a span of three to four hours, quitting before noon — as normal for archeological field work on a Friday. What an amazing feat when you consider that no automation or machinery was employed to aid in their expedition.

Moreover, standard industry practice is that you dig until you hit clay. You don’t hit clay at 6”- 10” in Ontario, Canada. Further, no pictures document this “work.” There is only a picture of one test pit, and that one was dug on the outer perimeter of the Snake Mound in a location where nobody goes because it not conveniently accessible and it is overgrown with poison ivy.

Why would these “professionals” with their $64 million dollar vocabularies and their ability to compose lofty, intimidating word salads that merely serve to baffle the public, fail to use their impressive educations — signified by their fancy degrees commensurate with the intellectual prowess they claim to possess — choose the wrong area for their one and only test pit that was shown in the report?

Why choose the poison ivy patch on the outer region that is in a remote area where it is unlikely that anything would turn up? That leaves one wondering whether these “professionals” are really as smart and competent as they say they are. Or did they purposely choose an area for their test pit that was unlikely to support the Iroquois community’s claims of a burial site, knowing that they should have instead dug in the middle while deliberately misleading the public with their word salad that amounts to verbal fertilizer?

In their report they use terms like “Stage 1”, “Stage 2”, “flutings”, and “drumlinized” without defining them for lay people to be able to understand, even if they read it with an Oxford dictionary on hand to look up half of the jargon they used. There can be only two possible reasons for doing that. Either they want to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes to get away with something, or they want to puff themselves up with self-importance like peacocks showing off their plumage with the specific intent of belittling and disparaging the Iroquois First Nations community who advanced the claim of a historical burial site just to make the Native community look bad.

Yet, it is precisely these types of highly educated and economically successful professionals that always seem to float to the top of the socio-economic pool — just like excrement.

It takes an enormous amount of ego and shameless narcissism for privileged people to knowingly, consciously, and deliberately use their social class privileges, prestige, and advanced educations to get over on others — especially others who overwhelmingly rank among the most downtrodden in society — without any regard for their human rights; including their right to culture.

Stage 1 means doing a cursory walk-about, looking on the surface for any archeological remains on the ground. Stage 2 means doing a small, shallow test pit, digging only 6”-10” deep. Had ASI done a Stage 1 in the mounds area itself, the area where the BMX bike ramps were built, they would have found what I, myself, a volunteer, a parks department worker, and those in the First Nations community found during the week of the peace and restoration camp this past May. They would have found the large chunks of obsidian, arrowheads, the large amounts of red and yellow ochre (which are not commonly found in such large quantities as natural deposits in this area as this had to be harvested and transported from elsewhere), the bone fragment; or the marine sea shells (these were also used in some funerary rites) that are consistent with a salian coastal plane environment — not consistent with downtown Toronto, or the shores of fresh water bodies such as Lake Ontario or Lake Erie. [See more about the artifacts on the Taiaiako'n Historical Preservation Society website.]

ASI’s report refutes the claim that the Snake Mounds is an ancient burial site because, in their collective “expert” opinion, ASI’s team of archeologists think that the Snake Mound site in High Park was formed naturally by wind, water, and glacier retreat; using the term “drumlinized” to describe that.

But that doesn’t square with what others have found at the Snake Mound site. You would not find obsidian, mica, white clay, marine animal shells, or an arrowhead or a bone fragment or a piece of an ancient stone plate (commonly used in these sorts of burial mounds as a marker) in a drumlin. Nor would a drumlin have hollowed out subterranean chambers, which you can tell by walking over. Any rock or other substance left by glacial retreat in a drumlin would be consistent with those typically found in an area of glacial retreat.

So how did they miss all that?

Had these highly educated “professionals” chosen their test pit another 3-4 feet in towards the center from the outer-most rim, they would have found what we found: The first arrowhead, followed by the second arrowhead that was uncovered in the middle of the mound during the peace camp’s deconstruction of the BMX dirt bike ramps. So how did ASI’s team of “experts” miss all that? Did they deliberately want to miss it, and if so, whose interests are being served?

Owing to environmental assessments and policy, archeologists are only required to test 10% of any given site under question. How convenient that ASI picked the most obscure, outer-most region to do their test pit where you’re not likely to find anything. Coincidence?

The executive summary of their report clears the City of Toronto of any responsibility to protect the Snake Mound site, and gives the city the green light to develop that portion of the park in any way they want — including perhaps even selling off that portion of the park to wealthy private real estate developers. Who stands to benefit under that scenario, and at whose loss and expense?

Let’s be honest, shall we. It is no secret that government and a phalanx of upper-middle class highly credentialed experts serve the interests of those who have been the most enriched and who have received the most societal benefits from an entire system of unearned privileges — the sine qua non of colonialism, feudalism, and capitalism.

And it is also no secret that the winners of this same system conveniently created the rules to favor the most privileged, dismissing aboriginal people’s oral histories by only recognizing documentation including confusing and intimidating word salads that really don’t say anything or serve any function other than to uphold and perpetuate a system of unearned privileges designed to enrich a few at the expense of the many under the habiliments of “democracy.”

Twilight Zone  ~ Golden Earring

“Help, I’m steppin’ into the Twilight Zone
Place is a madhouse
Feels like being cloned
My beacons been moved
Under moon and star
Where am I to go Now that I’ve gone too far
Soon you will come to know
When the bullet hits the bone”

On Wednesday September 28^th 2011, I entered the Twilight Zone. The High Park Resources Group which oversees the activities of Toronto’s High Park met to discuss Scott Laver’s agenda for a proposed BMX “skills building” park in High Park on the Owl Mound and the parking lot contiguous to the Owl Mound and the Snake Mound. Both of these mounds are of cultural significance to the Native community. The meeting was chaired by Jorge Ture, the supervisor of High Park.

Scott Laver, a Parks Department employee and liaison for the BMX community, came to the meeting — not to present a polite request for a BMX park in High Park, but to ram this plan down the Native community’s throats with no regard whatsoever for the Indigenous people’s threatened and endangered culture. Laver said that the kids involved with BMX “skill building” will continue their recreation on the Native mound sites and wooded areas of High Park anyway — implying that city might as well accommodate them by sacrificing a Native sacred site so the precious darlings don’t mess up the rest of the park or interfere with other people’s peaceful enjoyment of the park.

Laver apparently had already decided to foist this upon the public without any intention of seriously considering alternative sites, three of which were suggested by Graham Seaman, Vice President of the Toronto Off Road Bicyclists Association (TORBA):

Option 1 – Open grassy area in Kings Mill Park
Option 2 – Open grassy area in Humber Marshes Park
Option 3 – Open grassy area in South Humber Park

Laver insisted that High Park’s current permissible uses be changed to allow for a BMX park to be built, saying, “Emerging demands of BMXing is incompatible with High Park’s current uses.”

He said that the parking lot next to the Owl Mound and Snake Mound “had been identified to accommodate a professionally designed skills park facility” that would offer technically challenging riding in a controlled environment. He also said that the City of Toronto’s Parks Department had hired a BMX park designer, Jay Hoots from BC, for the project.

Had the city checked out Jay Hoots, they would know that Hoots got his panties in a wad over losing the contract to build the Kitchener BMX park because he overcharged and then allegedly harassed the actual builder for out-bidding him. Jay Hoots will cost Torontonians more money — twice as much — for the same type of park that could be designed and built by locals with equipment and experience. Why aren’t the taxpayers of Toronto getting a say in whether or not a local contractor hiring local labor is used to plan and build the park?

Rastia’ta’non:ha, Director of the Taiaiako’n Historical Preservation Society (THPS), previously said “no” to this same proposal given by the Parks Department back in May and that this position remains unchanged. Laver argued that “the kids have nowhere else to go.”

Adrian Rhodes challenged that claim, pointing out that there were other more suitable areas that many BMXers also were agreeable to, including a small parkette just north of High Park and that there already were three existing BMX facilities, including the Wallace & Emerson BMX park.

Additionally there was an old unused hockey rink that could be converted for BMXing. But Laver said the existing places were unsuitable, that the kids had set fire to the ramps at Wallace & Emerson rendering it unusable, and that the hockey rink was a no-go because the kids want a BMX park in a natural terrain.

When it was suggested that the BMX park could be built in the Humber Bay area, which is a natural environment, Laver rejected that idea as well, saying “If we build it there, they won’t come. It has to be in High Park” — which implies threats of mayhem from the tantrum-throwing BMX community who bully others in order to get their way. Catherine Tammaro of Huron-Wendat descent and THPS Board member responded by asking why children and adults who had virtually destroyed a large area of forested oak savannah in the park and a sacred space, should be placated as a preventive to further illegal and destructive behavior on their part, in fact seemingly rewarding them for such behavior. She also suggested that all mounds in the park be preserved and protected which would bring admiration from the global community, rather than serving the wants of a very small, ill-behaved group.

Posts from the BMX community at Dropmachine.com forums suggest that BMXers are not the sort of people who believe the law applies to them. One of the posts states that “No one but the riders, ourselves, can determine what will make the park fun and desirable. Not the city.” These aren’t exactly the types who are willing to observe any ordinances and stay in their areas allowed by the city, regardless of what is built for them or where.

If these kids and young adult BMXers have such little appreciation for one of the sites they already had that they set on fire, why should these punks and thugs be rewarded for arson and vandalism by getting another one built for them on taxpayer money just so they can eventually destroy that one too? That money would be better spent on the poorest of the poor who have nothing, to give them a chance for something resembling a nice life.

Dirt jumps or BMX style tracks take up a LOT of room, disturb the landscape, and are not aesthetic. They also require regular maintenance — which costs money. Who will be forced to pay for that? Dirt jumps and pump tracks are pretty much dedicated to BMX. The price of a BMX bike ranges from $350 and go as high as $1,500. A used 2007 Gary Fisher Mullet BMX bike in good condition needing only the rear brakes fixed is going for $380 or best offer. So that leaves out poor kids who are lucky to be able to afford a $100 bike from Wal-Mart or Canadian Tire.

In the states, where tens of millions of poor people struggle just to stay alive, suffering without healthcare or any economic safety net, the price tag for one BMX bike that will only end up getting wrapped around a tree or dashed to bits on rocks could easily keep a family mired in poverty with no hope and no end in sight from freezing to death this winter by paying for utilities, firewood, or biomass pellets.

If a bunch of spoiled rich kids can afford the high-priced ticket of a BMX bike for their aggressive and dangerous sport, then they can afford to pay the costs of buying and building their own BMX facility without looking to Toronto taxpayers to foot the bill for this high-risk activity that is classist at its core since poor youth can’t afford to even get into the game. Any park subsidized by the public should not exclude society’s underprivileged; it should be accessible to all. Poor kids from Toronto at least could enjoy the free zoo at High Park, which the city is shutting down because it “can’t afford it.”

Is it fair that, owing to budget cuts and limited funds, one of the only recreational facilities that poor kids have should be shut down while monies from the public get diverted to pay for the designing and building of a BMX park that caters only to society’s more privileged teens and adults?

This is exclusionary and smacks of elitism and classism against Toronto’s poor youth. That issue alone outweighs any perceived advantage to a publicly funded BMX park that only affluent kids will benefit from. The adage of “live simply so that others can simply live” is apparently lost on the selfish BMXers, and on the city officials supporting them — due in no small measure to the dynamics of unearned social class privilege (who their affluent parents rub elbows with).

It’s also ironic that having a natural terrain BMX park is a non-negotiable “must have” when Scott Laver’s proposal was to put it in the tiny parking lot in High Park’s south east corner — especially when all of the other areas suggested were much bigger than a parking lot barely big enough to turn a car around in; a parking lot that many park-goers use — including members of various Native communities when they drive into Toronto for their ceremonies at the sacred sites.

Passing around a color-printed handout about Hoots Inc., a company located in BC, Laver said, “They’ve compromised on the activity side, and we’ve compromised on the nature side.” Rejecting all of the very reasonable suggestions for alternative sites because the BMXers must have High Park is no compromise by any definition. Laver’s demands that the Native community “be fair” about this was a slap in the face.

“Fair” means that everyone gets what he or she needs. The BMXers already have three existing places to go, plus many suggestions for additional alternative sites. But the Native communities, the Haudenosaunee in particular in this case, are not getting what they need. They cannot simply move their 3,000 year-old burial mounds and sacred sites — and they should not have to!

The majority of their burial mounds and sacred sites were utterly destroyed and desecrated when High Park was built up over the past 150 years — especially when Bloor Street was constructed and an untold number of ancient Native skeletal remains were unearthed. None of these remains and funerary artifacts were ever repatriated to the Native community. No one seems to know what happened to them. The cultural disruption caused by colonization followed by brutal assimilation policies have nearly wiped out all vestiges of Aboriginal people’s cultures. The continuity of a threatened population’s culture is a need; destroying yet another Native sacred site for someone else’s fun is not. The architects of the UN Declaration would agree.

All of this seemed to fall on deaf ears. Councillor Sarah Doucette, who supports Laver’s plan for the BMX park in High Park, said “Mothers don’t want their young children to have to cross Lakeshore Boulevard” in response to another suggested BMX site nearby outside of High Park.

But BMXing is a sport not engaged in by little kids. It’s a high risk activity enjoyed by teens and young adults up through their 30’s — hardly a demographic that wouldn’t be able to cross a busy street without their mommies at one of the designated cross-walks. BMXing has an injury rate that is high enough to result in being surcharged for health and life insurance, if not declined. BMXing is a very dangerous, high risk sport. Crossing Lakeshore Boulevard is not. People of all ages cross Lakeshore Boulevard all the time to catch the streetcar.

Matti Lehikoinen, a pro Downhill Mountain Biker and BMXer from Finland, suffered serious injuries more than once. In 2008, he fractured both wrists while BMXing, needing extensive reconstructive surgery because the fractures were so bad. 12 screws, 3 metal plates and 3 pins later, Matti was back on the BMX trail. He was injured again while racing at the Nordic Downhill Championships in Kungsberget-Sweden over the September 24^th and 25^th 2011 weekend. He was hospitalized and had to have brain scans. His partner Anna said, “Matti’s jaw, cheekbone, teeth, and nose are pretty badly damaged, and he will have surgery on Wednesday.”

Native rights to cultural preservation are only one of the major issues; liability issues for injuries and risks to public safety are another — passersby can be injured by BMXers. Is Toronto willing to cut off its nose to spite its face just to shove the Native community aside?

Cheryl Hart, who was also present at the meeting, sits on the High Park Resource Group’s board representing the Colburn Lodge which is concerned with maintaining High Park’s Anglo history, particularly the memory of John Howard — the wealthy British official who bought the land and established the park in the early 1800’s with the proviso that the Iroquois community remain stewards of the park among many other conditions.

In response to concerns about the destruction to the Native community’s long, rich history in the area and the loss of sacred sites, Cheryl Hart said, “there’s no historical value to the land.” Apparently, “historical preservation” doesn’t count when it is Aboriginal people’s history, traditions, and culture.

Councillor Doucette added that at a previous meeting, Laurie Waters, a Cree and board member of the THPS, said there would be no problem with putting a BMX park where Laver wants to put it because “there’s nothing sacred about a parking lot.” Yet, Laurie Waters states that she never said this. High Park is a very special place to Laurie as an Indigenous person who comes to the burial mounds for ceremonies honoring the ancestors.

BMXers won’t be content to remain within the area Scott Laver proposes; not with the tempting wooded and hilly terrain of the Owl Mound and Snake Mound right there. But that didn’t seem to concern Jorge Ture, who said that “there are procedures for getting Native burial grounds archeologically designated.”

But Toronto has a track record of using unlicensed archeologist Ron Williamson — an Indiana Jones wannabe who doesn’t have any love for Native people and who has engaged in shady practices. Toronto has a very ugly long-standing history of wiping out all traces of Aboriginal history and burying any evidence that it ever existed. There is plenty of archived information that proves a strong indigenous history of a vibrant and rich culture. Archived old newspaper articles cite the burial mounds in High Park and an ancient Indian tombstone — a petroglyph rock — which mysteriously disappeared during the late 1800’s when Bloor Street was put in.  It seems that Toronto’s non-Native city leadership is behind burying Native history, including the burial mounds, deliberately.

The attitudes displayed by Jorge Ture, Scott Laver, Sarah Doucette, and Cheryl Hart — all of whom talked dismissively of Aboriginal history — reveal an undercurrent of prejudice thinly masked beneath a veneer of polite civility. They acted like Donna Powless, Josephine Sandy, Catherine Tammaro, and Rastia’ta’non:ha and his helper, Sean (a shy Métis kid) weren’t even there. This shows just how bigoted Toronto’s city officials and upper-middle class civic leaders are against the Aboriginal community.

After the meeting ended, Scott Laver was asked why he felt no shame for what he was demanding of the Native community and told to look three of them in the eye and explain to them why he felt no shame, he refused to answer. He did not look at the Faithkeeper. He did not look at the Clanmother. He did not look at Rastia’ta’non:ha who is one of Chief Arnie General’s helpers. He did not see these three very real human beings standing right there in front of him.

One can only conclude that comfortably off teens and adults who can afford to spend $350 – $1,500 for a bike that will only get busted up or wrapped around a tree are spoiled, self-important brats with entitlement attitudes who think their “right” to fun supersedes a threatened community’s human rights to culture.

The following Internet forum posts from the BMX crowd say a lot about the sort of group that the City of Toronto is catering to and what these BMX people really are:

“Hey! So I’m currently in the city, I have everything from Mississauga’s residential cyclist (mostly road) friendly stuff, to downtown Toronto at my disposal (short of the dirt park in High Park recently torn down by Native Mohawk “Canadian” liars, or pricks as I call them)…”

The full post by “Ghotet” can be seen at: http://www.pinkbike.com/forum/listcomments/?threadid=118755

And these posts on another BMX forum in response to “Redstone” who asked why the BMXers couldn’t pick a different spot and insisted on High Park on a Native burial mound last year. (One of the posters, “j-teeple” threatened “Redstone”): http://www.pinkbike.com/forum/listcomments/threadid=107390&pagenum=2

“I’d love to see you start moving dirt. I can honestly say you will not get too far into it without something happening. I know a LOT of people who would like to see you become part of the jumps. But I invite you to go ahead and try. Just try. You’ll see what happens…I gave you fair warning.”

Followed by this one from “recklessness”:

“I live in Toronto and would love to set up a meeting to discuss this issue rationally in person. If you want to go ahead and post your full name and address, I would be happy to drive down and mock you in person. I will even bring my shitty car because it will probably get stolen in your hood. Hell, I can even lend you a shovel because you are obviously poor.”

“Recklessness” deserves an A+ in Economics of Racism, Classism and Unearned Privilege 101. Are his parents proud of raising such a self-centered spoiled brat whose carbon footprint is larger than that of 100 poor people combined? How nice that the rest of society gets to put up with him, and all the others like him who have no consideration for anyone else because they think everything is all about them.

And the day after the High Park Resources Group meeting, this comment was posted by “Ajmckerihen” on the Pinkbike forum:

“Hello mountain bikers and BMXers, This is to inform you that the City of Toronto staff have recently closed an informal BMX freestyle  area(skills park) in High Park to restore an ecologically sensitive area. The site has been replanted, fenced off and is currently being monitored for any further cycling activity. A new skills park, offering technically challenging riding in an accessible and controlled environment, will be built on the site of the existing parking lot in the south east corner of High Park. City staff are currently working with accomplished skills park designer, Jay Hoots www.hoots.ca, to develop the new site that will include appropriate off-road cycling features, skills areas and landscape amenities. Please join Jay Hoots and City of Toronto staff on Wednesday, October 19^th from 6:00 – 8:30 PM, at the Rousseau Room, Swansea Town Hall, to participate in the design consultation for the new skills park in High Park. Jay wants to hear from you.”

Natural Environment Trails Program

www.toronto.ca/trails

That post says almost verbatim what was written on Scott Laver’s outline that he presented at the High Park group’s meeting on September 28^th. Is “Ajmckerihen” Scott Laver? The post’s signature gives a good clue: the Natural Environment Trails Program, which Scott Laver is involved with. Following the link and perusing the site, it is interesting to note that the City of Toronto paid for a study on the feasibility of installing a bio-toilet in the park. (One must be environmentally correct in matters of defecation; but a tree-destroying, soil-eroding upper-middle class white male “sport”— well, that’s a whole other story.) It is also interesting to note the backdoor meeting scheduled for October 19^th between these rich kids and the City of Toronto’s staff and policymakers.

Several attendees at the September 28^th meeting voiced concerns about the BMX park provoking a conflict with the Native community.

Jerry Hodges told Laver that if he and the BMXers stubbornly go ahead with their BMX park plans it would ignite a very unpleasant confrontation with the Native community that could get very ugly, and nobody wants that.  Kim Jackson of Friends of the Snake Mounds said, “I’m just shocked that there is so much concern for these BMX kids, but there is none at all for the Aboriginal community.”

It is easier to relocate the plans for a BMX park than it is to relocate a 3,000 year-old burial mound. The Native community has, over the past several decades, been forced to compromise far more than anyone else has had to but the BMXers don’t care about that. Maybe the whole BMX issue isn’t really about a sport. If it was about a place for a recreational activity, then Scott Laver would not have summarily rejected all of the reasonable suggestions of alternative sites without fully exploring them. There is only one logical conclusion: This is about a lot of beneficiaries of unearned privilege who want Aboriginal people to fade away into oblivion.

Apparently, Native culture is something they only care about so long as they can exercise total control over it by restricting it to museums. A living, breathing, vibrant Native community freely enjoying their culture and traditions — a thriving people whose human rights are equally valued and respected as everyone else’s — is anathema to many, including the BMXers. They don’t want to deal with Aboriginal people who refuse to be pushed around and relegated to the silent, stoic role of iconic wooden cigar store Indians and mascots consigned to the ash heap of Manifest Destiny.

Big Bucks, Tax-Exempt Real Estate to be Made by Using Dead Indians in Sham

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right

Eugene Strong in red shirt, leading the 2010 "March for the Ancestors"

When Eugene Strong claimed that he was trying to force Carnegie Museum to return the human remains and funerary artifacts that they currently hold in their custody that had been excavated over a hundred years ago from the McKees Rocks Mounds, Eugene told the Post-Gazette reporter Anya Sostek that his grandfather was Potawatomi.[1]

In another article, he said he was 1/8^th Ojibwe.[2] He says that gives him the right to gain control/ownership of the mounds and get custody of his ancestors’ remains.

The problem is that those mounds do not contain his ancestors. (One way to tell whose ancestors they are is to do DNA tests on members of the Native American community of closest cultural affiliation.)

Strong also previously told news reporters that he is working through the Gun Lake Potawatomi tribe in Michigan — a tribe that only recently got federal recognition and which had amassed quite a bit of money within a short time of their recognition, enabling them to move forward with a lucrative casino project. OK, fine. No one begrudges Indians anything, or at least they shouldn’t. After a century of dishonor that followed the cruel invasion of Columbus’s merry band of opportunistic social predators, sadists, and rapists, no one who is any sort of a decent human being should begrudge Native Americans a couple of casinos if that’s what they want.

But should the public allow non-Natives to grab money, grants, and other benefits specifically earmarked for Native Americans who truly need it while Native elders, women and children languish in Third World poverty on reservations? What kind of individual, or group, thinks it’s OK to take limited resources away from poor women and children?

The Gun Lake tribe has not confirmed that Eugene Strong is one of its members, nor any sort of spokesperson on their behalf acting on their authority. Had the Post-Gazette done some cursory checks into Strong’s background, they would have seen that Eugene Strong lied about his lineage. Had they done their homework, they would have also seen that having Native lineage is not a prerequisite for being accepted into a Native community. Maybe then they would have done some real investigative reporting.

Knowing Eugene Strong’s age from his Facebook profile and personal conversations as well as what was stated in previous news articles about his annual “March for the Ancestors” at the McKees Rocks mounds, his cell phone number, and where he lived was enough to get an accurate dossier from Intellius on this guy — which anyone can obtain on any US resident if they want to make sure that they’re not going on a long road trip to an AIM pow-wow with an axe murderer.

Now, the exhaustive information listed on a full background Intellius report was enough to get a running start on tracing Strong’ genealogy through Ancestry.com or any other credible genealogy sites. Starting with the fact that Eugene Strong’s son, Eugene F. Strong III, died under suspicious circumstances in 2010, this tells us that the Eugene Strong of the McKees Rocks mounds is really Eugene F. Strong II (or Eugene F. Strong, Jr.).

Scouring the newspaper archives for Indiana County, PA where Strong is originally from, several newsworthy items show up for him and his family (all of which are public record) — his maternal great-grandparents’ lavish 50^th wedding anniversary[3]; his own birth[4]; the funeral notice for his paternal grandfather Ernest W. Strong who was a WW I veteran[5]; Eugene’s 10^th birthday celebration on the Ricky and Copper program on WTAE Channel 4[6]; a car accident involving his mother and her parents, himself, and his siblings[7], and another car accident in which Eugene was the 18 year-old driver.[8]

Although the subject of blood quantum is a very contentious issue, examining one’s genealogy because they’re making a claim in order to get federal grant monies, ownership of an ancient burial ground through cash donations through a “non-profit” organization, and custody of Native human remains and funerary artifacts helps weed out the frauds and shysters. And lately, there has been an epidemic of frauds and charlatans misappropriating Native people’s culture for profit.

Since the linchpin of Eugene Strong’s goals for the McKees Rocks mound and getting custody of ancient Native remains from Carnegie Museum rests on Strong’s claim of Native blood through a Native grandfather born on a reservation, checking out Strong’s background and genealogy is quite relevant.

In the US, tribal enrollment requirements vary from tribe to tribe. Tribal enrollment criteria are set forth in tribal constitutions, articles of incorporation, or ordinances. Since the criteria vary, uniform membership requirements and acknowledgment of “who is Native American” don’t really exist. But two common requirements for membership are lineal descent from someone on that tribe’s base roll or relationship to a tribal member who descended from someone on that base roll.[9]

Many US tribes’ enrollments are based on blood quantum (except in cases where a non-Native person is formally adopted into the tribe), and the amount of blood quantum varies with some requiring 1/16^th as their minimum, such as the Eastern Cherokee; while others require as much as ½ such as the Mississippi Band of Choctaws. Blood quantum refers to the degree of Native ancestry for an individual of a specific racial or ethnic group. Many tribes don’t impose a blood quantum as condition of membership but that does not mean that they let just anyone enroll. Usually, applicants seeking membership must still prove they’re direct descendents of original tribal enrollees.

And just because a particular tribe may accept you for membership, or adopt you formally into their fold, that won’t automatically make you eligible for certain US federal programs, benefits, and money. Most US federal programs designed to benefit Native Americans do require a minimum blood quantum in order to be eligible for services, including grant monies.

Since Strong claims he is Potawatomi because his grandfather was Potawatomi and born on an Indian reservation, using the information available to the public made it quite easy to trace his genealogy to his great-grandparents — none whom are listed in any official records as having any Native blood. And tracing them wasn’t difficult considering that Strong is from a small, rural southwestern coal mining town and grew up in Homer City — a town of 1,844 in the heart of Indiana County, Pennsylvania.

Tiny hamlets like Homer City that dot Indiana County’s landscape are the kind of small towns where everybody knows everybody else’s business and unlike a big city, the chances of there being people with the same exact names and birthdates and spouses (as shown in old censuses) are slim to none. So, assuming that Eugene Strong isn’t using a stolen identity, and assuming that the available historical data, including old newspapers and military records, are accurate; the genealogical records for both of Strong’s grandfathers and all four of his great-grandfathers are as follows:

Eugene F. Strong II’s paternal grandfather, Ernest Walton Strong (aka Ernest W. Strong) who was born in Kansas in 1891 to Albert and Clara Strong (née Brengle).[10] Albert Strong was the son of a German immigrant father and Scots-Irish mother. Clara was born to a pioneer couple in Indiana in 1869-70. Clara’s father was Richard Logan Brengle (aka Richard L. Brengle), a Civil War veteran[11] and a minister born in 1835 Kentucky and Mary A. Brengle (née Vermillion) who was born around 1835 in Illinois.[12] The Brengles were listed as “white” as were their children[13], and so were the Strongs.

Ernest Strong’s birth date, birth place, and race (“white”) listed in the 1900 US Census and in the US 1910 Census match his WW I draft registration card. Sometime after the end of WW I, Ernest Strong met and married Goldie Clawson (born about 1902, died in 1975)[14], daughter of Sarah Mae Clawson (née Greer) and Jonathon Clawson (all whom are “white”)[15]. Ernest Strong and his wife Goldie raised a family in Lucerne Mines, Indiana County, Pennsylvania and achieved the American Dream.

When Ernest Strong died at age 86, the Indiana Evening Gazette and the rest of the community bid a fond farewell to the decorated WWI veteran, mining company employee, preacher and magistrate. He had lived a full life and experienced many things. But being a Potawatomi Indian born on a Michigan reservation was not one of them. So that rules out Eugene Strong’s paternal grandfather.

Going back to the beginning with the newspaper archives starting with his maternal grandparents’ golden wedding anniversary; we see that this was a pretty expensive soirée according to the write-up in the Indiana Post-Gazette which described this lavish celebration as a “party for about 100 guests that was held in the daughter’s home.”

To be able to accommodate 100 guests, all in formal attire, presents and food galore, you would need a mansion. Eugene is named as one of the great-grandchildren who presented the great-grandmother with her corsage. From the looks of the old newspaper photo accompanying the article, this shindig was no casual affair. Cross-referencing the names of the couple and their adult children through the old census records and the Social Security Death Index, we find that the “Mr. and Mrs. R. L. Smith” listed in the write-up on this fancy party were Eugene Strong’s maternal grandparents — Robert Lee Smith (aka Robert L. Smith) originally from Michigan and Viola “Betty” Smith (née Snyder) from Pennsylvania.

Since Eugene’s grandfather Strong wasn’t the Potawatomi (or Ojibwe) Indian born on a Michigan reservation, we now turn our attention to his grandfather Smith.

Robert L. Smith was born in 1889 in Marine City, St. Clair County, Michigan[16] to Ellen Clara Raymond (born in 1867 in New Baltimore, Michigan and died in 1940 in Mount Clemens, Macomb County, Michigan[17]) and her husband Robert Abel Smith — all whom are listed as “white”.[18] According to the Michigan state government’s database, there are no Indian reservations in either Saint Clair County or Macomb County. So, if Eugene’s grandfather Smith was born in Saint Clair County, he was not born on an Indian reservation.

The 1930 US Census show Eugene’s grandfather Smith as married to his second wife, Viola, who was born Cambria County, Pennsylvania. Robert. L. Smith and his wife Viola and their children are all listed as “white.” At some point the Smiths moved to Viola’s home state, Pennsylvania and Robert Lee Smith died in Homer City, Indiana County in 1970. It was one of their daughters who married Eugene Strong’s father, Eugene Strong, Sr. All of this rules out Eugene’s grandfather Smith as being the Potawatomi Indian born on a Michigan reservation.

Although the issues of race, gender, and socio-economic class converge in ways to perpetuate and support an entire system of unearned privileges (white privilege, male privilege, and middle class privilege) that gave rise to many mixed race people “passing as white” if they looked European enough to pull it off, there is no way to prove for certain that Eugene’s grandparents or great-grandparents were part Native.

Even if one of his great-grandparents was part Native, that still does not square with the fact that Eugene lied by claiming that his grandfather was Potawatomi and born on a reservation when all available public records indicate otherwise.

The issue here is that someone publicly claiming they’re something that they’re not as part of an elaborate ruse to get his hands on federal monies intended to benefit Native people who really need it.

The issue is about a “non-profit” organization whose director is asking for the public to donate money to his group so that he can buy 5+ acres of borough-owned land and capitalize off of its Native cultural significance.

It’s really sad that so many people out there fortunate enough to have good jobs and money to throw around prefer to donate to charities and non-profits (which only seem to exist to provide cushy jobs and cash flows for high-level executives and administrators from the middle class), that take up trendy causes while real individuals in desperate need go without.

A common sentiment among many in the Native community is that the comfortably off would rather spend money for museums to warehouse empty cradle boards while living Native women and children suffer in grueling Third World poverty on isolated reserves with contaminated soil and drinking water — complete with untreated maladies such as permanently disabling conditions stemming from malnourishment and untreated helminth infections caused by parasitic worms; marginalized and excluded on the perimeters of society and then told that if they’re not making it, it’s their own fault.

Not counting the Intellius background report, the genealogical research on Eugene Strong includes 48 different historical records — none of which supports his claim. So either all those records are wrong, or Eugene Strong is wrong.

The info section on his Facebook page under the part “About Eugene” states “YOU CANNOT BUY SACRED!” Yet, he is openly soliciting money from an unsuspecting public at large to do just that. He also stated on his Facebook page in the info section that he is Potawatomi, and his grandfather was Potawatomi — which has not been proven to be true.

What is proven to be true is that Strong is trying to capitalize off of a Native American burial site through attempts to get federal grant money earmarked only for Native Americans and cash donations from the public at large in order to get 5+ acres (or more) of land sitting on an ancient Native burial mound plus a nice cash stream for himself and the non-Native people on the executive board of his “non-profit” group — including Mark Gruber, the former anthropology professor and ex-priest fired from St. Vincent College for using his office’s computer to “create and download pornography”[19] of young men, some who may have been underage boys.

The McKees Rocks borough just granted Strong a permit to hold his “March for the Ancestors” (his Walkathon for money) again on September 17^th and 18^th, 2011. Giving Eugene Strong and his group a permit to march is effectively giving them permission to use the public square to bolster their scam. Why should we be forced to give shysters a platform to aid in their fraudulent designs?

Last year, he paraded his dead son’s ashes as part of his ploy at his 2010 “March For the Ancestors.” He told news reporters that “he and his group plan to apply for federal grants to pursue their cause”, which is to buy the borough-owned portion of the mounds which was valued at $267,400 according to an Allegheny County property assessment website and much of that land is vacant.[20]

How about this for a reality check: Civil and decent people don’t pimp their dead child’s cremated remains in an attention-whoring scheme to “steal the sacred” by misappropriating one Native community’s culture in order to hijack another Native community’s burial ground for a bargain basement price — using other people’s money to boot — all in order to make a buck by erecting a tourist center and charging admission fees, while violating NAGPRA protocols and federal laws for repatriation and protection of Native burial grounds.

That’s not “honoring” anyone’s ancestors or “saving” anything. It’s capitalizing off of dead Indians at the expense of their living descendents, and the public at large that is being scammed into donating money during these tough economic times towards Eugene Strong’s shambolic venture.

Anyone supporting Eugene Strong in this endeavor apparently doesn’t know the meaning of the word “integrity”, much less have any themselves.

If Strong really, truly cared about “honoring the ancestors” in the McKees Rocks mounds, why is he fighting so hard to silence the voices in the closest culturally affiliated Native community?

Why is he bypassing the appropriate authorities and chain of command in that community and thumbing his nose at NAGPRA regulations?

Why did he and his buddies tell a real Indian, a Bear Clan Mohawk named Nikki Maracle who is traditional Longhouse, that she is “misguided” and doesn’t know her own people’s history?

Is this how someone “honors the ancestors” — by cutting out their descendents and denying them a voice at the table, and violating protocols despite repeated requests from Native people who have asked Strong to step aside and let them handle it?

Are Indian graveyards and empty cradle boards on display in tourist centers more important than real, living, breathing, thinking, feeling Native people?

One of the best ways to “honor the ancestors” is to have some consideration for their Native descendents today. Eugene Strong has not done this, and neither have those who are supporting him and his “non-profit” organization, the Mounds Society of Western Pennsylvania.

The middle class “feminists” who claim to be allies of their poorest and most downtrodden “sisters” haven’t a clue what a poor woman’s daily struggle in deep poverty is like.

Even the most generous, non-materialistic middle class “allies” of America’s poorest women refused to comprehend or accept the poor welfare mother’s preoccupation with their very urgent and pressing need for money.

Most of these so-called allies, who have never lived the savage realities of destitution and being among the ranks of America’s economically disappeared, viewed poor women’s concerns about money as an “entitlement mentality.”

Petty bourgeois feminists referred to poor single mothers as “con artists” who wanted to get money for “doing nothing”, accusing poor women of “only getting pregnant for the welfare check” — buying into the sexist, patriarchal capitalist idea that pregnancy and childbirth is “nothing” for women to go through even though pregnancy and childbirth complications still kill more women in the US than in many other countries, and that the unpaid work that women have always traditionally done is “nothing”; that home-making, care-taking or child-raising isn’t “work.”

What care-takers do IS work — just ask anyone who has ever had to choose between their McJob or their sick child, or forego a job search in order to take care of an aging parent or a terminally ill spouse (or domestic partner). And mothers need a hell of a lot more than a cheap box of chocolates and a ten cent Mothers’ Day card. Poor women need money.

Yet, because of being sold out or abandoned altogether by Eurocentric middle class feminists, America’s poorest of the poor — women on welfare (before Welfare Reform eliminated AFDC and reduced benefits) — found themselves in situations where those who didn’t have to live with the consequences of “pragmatism” and political “compromise” were the ones defining the situation.

There’s a huge difference between the slightly better off working class guy in temporary poverty who just needs a job and a chronically poor woman who has been out of the job market for many years, serving as a care-giver or as a sole parent. Care-givers and mothers really need, and deserve, an adequate income.

Yet, as the Reagan Revolution’s War on the Poor right along up to Clinton’s Welfare Reform Act, which was driven by most middle class “feminists”, each subsequent part of “welfare reform” grew more punitive as America’s poorest women were told by suburban-dwelling soccer mom feminists who claimed to be allies, that poor women on welfare had to be “pragmatic” because “compromise” via benefit reductions and 2-5 year time limits coupled with “work requirements” were necessary. But all of those pragmatic “compromises” were no compromise at all because America’s poorest women got nothing but subjected to economic terrorism with a proverbial gun pointed right at our heads. We gained nothing at all, and lost all the way around.

The final slap in the face was that there wasn’t even a guaranteed right to a living wage job as part of this “welfare reform.” No one knows exactly how many poor, hard-to-employ women remained jobless and were plunged into homelessness and utter destitution after being thrown off of welfare at the end of their 5 year lifetime benefit limit. Homeless people have been criminalized and driven underground, including children, who were also denied a basic public education for lack of an address.

Middle class “feminists” ignored that issue, after talking down to their poorer “sisters”, lecturing us on the need to be “pragmatic.” Well, with poor people’s life expectancy rates, preventable blindness and other disability rates, infant death rates, and maternal mortality rates that have now surpassed those in several other Third World countries; we see exactly what middle class pragmatism gets us.

This is what happens when middle class “allies” and activists lead and run social justice movements, presuming the right to “speak for” the poor. They think they’re the only ones qualified for the job to act as brokers and middle-men for the poor, and that their class status gives them that qualification. Others end up having to suffer the losses they personally won’t ever have to live with (or die from). And they expect poorer people to do all of the really hard, thankless and unpaid work while they get to speak at all the events, collect all the honorariums, get all the media attention and press coverage, and take all the credit for brokering the deal.

But they don’t want to do all of the unglamorous, energy-sapping and time consuming and grinding work of survey-taking and petition-signing, and doing what it takes to get 200 people to a rally. And that does take a lot of work. All those people don’t just show up simply because they saw someone’s name on a flyer!

While the bourgeois feminists’ movement was preoccupied with battling lifestyle-related issues, poor women have been fighting in the trenches for our rights to equal access to societal resources and benefits — including equal rights to the living wage jobs and equal pay. We didn’t care if we could burn our bras or publicly make out with a partner of the same sex. We care about being able to survive. We’re struggling for equal access to adequate employment, educations, and for the legitimization of income support as compensation and recognition for care-givers and mothers.

The class restrictions that kept white middle class women in the kitchen wasn’t our reality; poverty, racism, and sexism was. Although NOW made an official statement saying it was committed to protecting the now-extinct miserly and inadequate safety net of AFDC, including abortion and dental care covered by Medicaid for poor women, the majority of NOW ‘s petty bourgeoisie membership didn’t follow through. The rights of gays and lesbians to marry (albeit an important right) was far more important than poor women’s fundamental human right to life, to adequate food, utilities, shelter, a job and/or income support, and to birth control and abortion access and the right to medical and dental care — all of which are life and death matters for poor women.

In wandering into the morass of the trivial issues of bra-burning and trashing Playboy, petty bourgeoisie feminists completely betrayed the struggle for women’s most fundamental human rights and that has had a devastating impact on the lives of poor women without jobs or any means of income support.

Women suffering the real oppression of daily economic terrorism that poverty is, including the repercussions of forced pregnancy and forced childbirth-promoting laws that led to the criminalization of miscarriages and stillbirths, and the conscription of poor women into reproductive chattel slavery at peril to our health, wellbeing and lives — all of this has been ignored by middle and upper class feminists.

What they won’t ever admit is that they have benefited from the ongoing oppression and exploitation of their much poorer “sisters.” They never intended for poor women to benefit from all that equality they were seeking for themselves.

They’ve been silent for over 30 years since the passage of the Hyde Amendment in 1976 followed by the Rapists’ Rights Lobby’s “conscience clause” and “fetal personhood” laws that have cropped up over the last 20 years, and the decimation of the meager and inadequate safety net that welfare was prior to 1996 when Slick Willy eliminated welfare as we know it, plunging 14 million poor single mothers into instant destitution and homelessness under the guise of “tough love.”

There is no comparison between the “quiet desperation” of affluent women like the late Princess Diana of Wales who got tricked into miserable marriages with over-privileged inbred crowned heads or members of the financial aristocracy merely to serve as an incubator for the economic cannibal class’s parasitic progeny after buying into the Cinderella-Prince Charming myth and wanting all that royalty has to offer, versus the very real crushing and life-endangering exploitation and abuse suffered by poor women and girls from the underclass — like 15 year-old Rennie Gibbs, who began her life imprisonment sentence this 4^th of July (ironically, on the day American’s celebrate “Independence”) by a Mississippi court for the “crime” of delivering a premature stillborn, thanks to all of the “pro-life” laws and a Christian Right state in which there is no Planned Parenthood or any abortion clinic.

We still do not know anything about the male co-conceiver, such as whether he drank or did drugs which resulted in defective sperm which could have precipitated a miscarriage or stillbirth. We don’t even know if the sex (or the resultant pregnancy) was consensual.

But nobody cares about the plight of poor women, especially those of us who have been marginalized and excluded from the workforce for two or more generations — due in no small measure to the stigma of poverty and all the other barriers of classism that go with that which serve as obstacles to beat poor women down over and over and over, as vacuous middle class spoiled brats who are lucky enough to have good jobs tell us that no matter what we’ve tried to do to be “deserving” of a chance, we’re not doing anything right, not trying hard enough, not responsible, or just plain not good enough.

Dealing with issues of race and gender doesn’t meant you’ve dealt with classism and unearned privilege. There’s a world of difference between the working poor who struggle to get by from paycheck to paycheck who are one car breakdown away from losing everything and the very poor who’ve been trapped by generational poverty and all of the stigma and obstacles to getting a job (when there’s never been enough jobs for everyone anyway) that chronic poverty imposes.

The long-term poor who have been excluded and marginalized suffer the worst; neglected and abandoned on the outer fringes of society, struggling in destitution outside of the “primary labor market” of steady jobs. Those who are lucky enough to have enjoyed steady employment think that those of us with nothing in chronic poverty lack work ethic and discipline.

But it takes a hell of a lot more work ethic and discipline to survive even just one day in our lives, than it does to simply show up and perform some tasks assigned by some boss at an office.

Try scrounging money for food or a utility bill by salvaging scrap metal off the street in all kinds of weather, stripping wire until your hands are bleeding and calloused, and getting all cut up from handling scrap metal for 80 hrs/week just to get maybe only $100 (or whatever meager price the salvage yards feel like paying out based on prices that they set, depending on what the metals commodity brokers dictate). Then come and talk to me about “being responsible” and your “work ethic.”

Try having to live like that, hoping to get enough money to put towards a cheap prepaid cell phone just so you have a means of communication for things like being able to call the police or fire department in an emergency, or being able to keep trying to get a job while suffering from dental problems that you can’t get treated because you have no money and no job with dental benefits — never mind maybe eventually being able to repay that unaffordable student loan debt you incurred in hopes of being “worthy” of a chance for a job so you could climb out of poverty before getting “too old” for anyone to hire.

And of course, those of us in poverty who tried to do “all the right things” get nothing but slapped in the face by middle class snobs who always tell us how “irresponsible” we are if we have no income and have no way to document the fact that we have no income to the satisfaction of some snippy rude middle class bureaucrat at the student loan servicing center, and therefore we’re told we can’t qualify for any deferment or income-contingent repayment plan.

Middle class snobbishness and pragmatism blinds society’s more fortunate and luckily employed from that savage reality of poverty and classism. For those of us who have never had a moment’s comfort and security throughout our entire lives, pragmatism is merely a license for maintaining a status quo in which nothing ever gets better for us and there is no hope that anything will ever change.

Middle class (and often working class) pragmatism really amounts to “how can I get a better deal for ME” by using those of us at the very bottom as their poster child to further their own agenda while never sticking by the poor to help us get a better deal, too. Instead, we get jettisoned the minute they get a few token bones tossed their way. And what do chronically poor women get? Nothing. Or worse.

We get our food stamps and Medicaid cut, our LIHEAP funding cut while utilities skyrocket and things like heat in the winter or a hot shower are unattainable luxuries. Now we got our social security cut, and we lost our access to reliable birth control through Planned Parenthood as defunding Title X caused them to close their doors in several states already.

Chronically poor and jobless women like those of us from generational poverty were never included or accepted in the job market even during the “better times” — and we’re supposed to grateful to our middle class “benefactors” for their “wins” of pragmatism that always benefit everybody else except us? For us, these are life and death realities; not a tally of “wins” in the game of political football.

Until middle class feminists and the steadily employed working class “social justice activists” realize this and deal with their classism, they will continue to alienate the very poor and lose what little bit of trust we may have had in them in the first place. They have yet to do right by their poorest and most marginalized “sisters.” I won’t hold my breath in hopes that they ever will.

Because poor people never win in coalitions. Cross-class coalitions mean using the chronically jobless poor for the ends of middle class people. Those of us from generational poverty were never meant to be included. So what’s the point in voting when we’re always neglected or offered up as the convenient sacrificial lambs at first chance?

While women lucky enough to have a job, even if only a crappy one, can now get their birth control through Obamacare without co-pays, chronically poor women without jobs (or any chance of ever being able to get one) have lost everything with cuts in Medicaid and Planned Parenthood closings, leaving us with nothing — not even basic maternity and post-partum care to at least reduce the already higher chances of death and disability for us as a result of having no options other than carrying unwanted pregnancies to term. And for this, we’re supposed to be grateful to our middle class “saviors?” When we get a share of the pie for once and get access to real choices and options, then we’ll do the victory dance, too.

By Jacqueline S. Homan, author: Classism For Dimwits and Divine Right: The Truth is a Lie

Pseudo-progressive group MoveOn.org posted on its site a 2 minute video featuring Robert Reich, the former Labor Secretary under the Clinton presidency. The video, titled “The Truth About the Economy”, gave a very abbreviated half-of-the-story illustration of the cause for the middle class’s current plight. But it completely whitewashed and ignored the role that the middle class played in its own demise by deliberately hurting the poor during the “better times” of the Reagan Revolution followed by the Clinton-era of prosperity.

The middle class suburban-dwelling voters — most of them white males with “soccer mom” wives — literally drove the Welfare Reform engine which eliminated what miserly inadequate safety net there was for the poorest of the poor on the very bottom economic rung (most whom are women).

Now that many in the middle class are falling into poverty as the long-term unemployed middle-aged are jettisoned and left on the permanently unemployable scrap heap, the middle class is outraged. They’re demanding a bigger share of the pie for themselves while still begrudging the very poor even the tiniest morsel. They never learn. You’d think that the middle class would “get it” by now, but I won’t hold my breath.

Almost all of the posters commenting on the Robert Reich video whined about the loss of their middle class living standards. But they refused to see that what is now being done to them they first did to the poor, and therefore set the stage for their own demise. Karma is a bitch.

None of them cry “restore the safety net for the poor” — it’s all about the middle class, as if they’re the only ones with valid economic claims. They refuse to admit that in order to “save America” by “saving the middle class”, they first needed to start by defending the least empowered and most vulnerable citizens at the very bottom economic rung that were targeted by the Reagan Revolution. But instead of saving the poor, they destroyed the poor and they’re still doing it. And by the evidence in the voluminous comments stream on MoveOn’s site, no one in the middle class has any remorse about that.

Major Disconnect is What Happened to the Middle Class

Between 1990 and 1997, the National Student Loan survey by Nellie Mae reported that students borrowed $140 billion to meet their college education expenses. Over 25% used credit cards to help augment their education costs. All of the surveyed respondents had non-education related debt, too. The majority of respondents also said that unaffordable student loan debt caused them to do one or more of the following: drop out of college, delay or forego homeownership and buying a car, or having children.

According to Business Week in 1994, “Tuition and fees have risen 94% since 1989, nearly triple the 32.5% increase in inflation. Even as a college education has become the litmus test in the job market, the widening wage chasm has made it harder for low-income people to go to college. Kids from the top quarter have no problem: 76% earn bachelor’s degrees today vs. 31% in 1980. But less than 4% of those in the bottom quarter families now finish college vs. 6% back then [in 1980].”

While job opportunities rapidly disappeared for women without college degrees, wages for the working class were falling and college costs surpassed the cost of living index — leaving America’s poor marginalized and economically excluded from the dot com prosperity of the Clinton years — former president Bill Clinton didn’t lift a finger to help the poor who had been devastated by the previous 12 years of Reaganomics as the Reagan Revolution machine mowed down the poor and crushed the underprivileged underfoot. Reagan was twice elected by a middle class voting majority.

During Clinton’s two-term presidency, not one of the budget cuts to the now-eliminated social programs for the poor (including restoring the funding for Pell grants that the Gramm-Rudman Bill slashed) had been reversed. While the poor suffered from being trapped in miserable poverty with no way out, the middle class was living large; buying suburban McMansions, mutual funds, stocks and bonds — while criminalizing the homeless and scoffing at the poor who weren’t making it, telling us that our conditions of poverty and deprivation were our own fault for “not trying hard enough.”

How the poor were supposed to “bootstrap” their way up out of poverty and into mainstream middle class America remained unanswered and ignored. All was well in white male dominated middle classdom, to hell with poor women who had no chance at all of ever being able to make it thanks to a legacy of sexism, job discrimination, and pervasive misogyny on top of the additional systemic barriers of classism. It was the middle class majority voting constituency that voted for Reagan (twice), George Bush I, George Bush II (twice), and former-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and shaped economic and social policy during Clinton’s presidency.

Public opinion polls and Freudian psychoanalysis techniques were used by Stanford researchers to help the Clinton administration get a feeling for the political pulse among the middle class majority. The feedback provided by those research polls shaped social and economic policy and dictated the language of the draconian Welfare Reform Act of 1996.

Now in 2011, many who had previously enjoyed middle class comforts and security are crying foul. They wonder how the government could let things get so out of hand and ask how a regime of inverted totalitarianism could sneak up on them. Wiping the Rip van Winkle sleep dust from their eyes, they angrily blame the Republicans and sell-out “Blue Dog” Democrats for the assault on unionized public sector employees. But where were these same disgruntled middle class voices these last 30+ years that the War on the Poor was launched in full swing? What did they think would eventually happen to the middle class after three decades of destroying the poor? The writing was on the wall in 1985, in 1996, and in 2001.

The red flags were raised repeatedly throughout the late 1980′s and 1990′s by scholars and researchers like the folks at United for a Fair Economy, the Brookings Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; homeless activists like Marian Kramer and Cheri Honkala with the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, and Keith McHenry who founded Food Not Bombs.

Scholars and authors like Dr. Michael Parenti, Jonathon Kozol, Vine Deloria, and indigenous law professor Robert A. Williams had all in their own ways made multiple contributions to the literary world highlighting the mounting despair, injustices, inequality and poverty. How many educated middle class folks read their works? It’s not like all the warnings weren’t there. The middle class knew. They chose to ignore it when all was fine in their own little worlds.

In Michael Parenti’s 1997 book Blackshirts & Reds, everything was practically drawn out in crayon for middle class Americans who love to boast of their superior literacy and academic achievements while praising the unparalleled value of their “print culture.” Too bad most of these educated high achievers didn’t read Parenti, who eloquently mapped out for them how “rational fascism” renders service to capitalism and how corporate power undermines democracy because plutocrats always choose autocrats. They put their literacy on a permanent vacation as they swayed to the seductive tempo of the “ownership society” song that the klepto-plutocracy sold them.

When the Chickens Come Home to Roost

In 2011, public sector employees in Wisconsin — from teachers to police to firefighters to welfare caseworkers — howled in protest at the looming specter of more measures assaulting what remained of unionized workers’ rights. They’re up in arms that Democrats operated in cahoots with Republicans and powerful union bosses to sell them out.

But who did these disgruntled middle class workers vote for during these past 30+ years? Did they vote for some of the same elected officials and lawmakers that built lucrative political careers by hurting the poor, particularly poor single mothers? Did they heed the previous warnings of creeping fascism and the rise of inverted totalitarianism?

Instead of being too preoccupied with reading their 401(k) statements and the latest issue of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, they should have read Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts & Reds. Everything now being visited upon the middle class now was done before in history; workers and the poor were crushed underfoot to protect the interests of capital, which finally turned with rending claws on the middle class.

In 1924 in Germany, Social Democrat officials in the Ministry of Interior used Reichswehr and Free Corps fascist paramilitary groups to attack leftist demonstrators. They imprisoned 7,000 people. In 1932, three candidates ran for president in Germany: Conservative Party candidate Paul von Hindenburg, Communist Party candidate Ernst Thaelmann, and Nazi candidate Adolf Hitler. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for von Hindenburg was a vote for Hitler and Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced Thaelmann’s claims as “Moscow inspired.”

Right-wing governments have always been about maintaining the existing order of unearned privileges and calling it a “free market”; keeping the world safe for the empowered hierarchies and wealthy classes of the world which overwhelmingly have a white male face. Meanwhile, leftist “totalitarians” wanted to abolish exploitative property systems and create a more shared and egalitarian economic system. The left’s favoring the have-nots over the haves made them the hated targets of the unjustly enriched beneficiaries of unearned privilege.

That’s why any real democratic movement that tried to relieve the misery and suffering of the poor has been villainized over and over; having to defend their position. And when the majority of that public is comfortably middle class, they’re not interested in rocking the boat to save the poor whose life chances and human rights they’ve jettisoned. Even the most sincere anti-communist progressives wilted in fear of being accused of being “Communist” or a “socialist.”

Many of the so-called leftist intellectuals cheered the undermining and overthrow of communist and socialist governments in the former Soviet Union and the East Bloc nations throughout the 1980′s and 1990′s. They thought that democracy would finally have its time in the sun. But they knew better because among these left-leaning intellectual circles it was widely known that the IMF and the multinational corporations of Western Europe were the prime forced that actively undermined and overthrew Soviet communism and socialist economies in the former East Bloc. The pseudo-left thought they would finally be free of the communist albatross, or, as Richard Lichtman put it, “liberated from the incubus of the Soviet Union and the succubus of Communist China.”

As part of the overthrow of communism, “free market” right-wing forces in various Eastern European nations received financial backing and organizational assistance from US-financed agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy — the AFL-CIO’s Free Trade Union Institute, which was in bed with the CIA.

Meanwhile, capitalist restoration impoverished the former East Bloc countries and the former Soviet Union and undermined many Third World liberation struggles against the tyrannical yoke of colonialism. Those Third World nations no longer received any aid from Russia and the fall of Soviet communism and East Bloc socialism opened the door for a whole new crop of neo-fascist right-wing governments to spring up; ones that worked hand-in-glove with US/Western Europe counter-revolutionaries and trans-national capitalist interests around the world.

In the immortal words of Richard Levins, “Capitalism with a human face has been replaced by capitalism in your face. So, in the new exuberant aggressiveness of world capitalism we now see what communists and their allies have held at bay.”

That Dreaded C-word

Because American-style cowboy capitalism has enjoyed cult status, it was taboo to utter the C-word (“class”). The only times the C-word may be used is in its linguistic power to reaffirm the rights of the exploiter classes and defend the system of unearned privileges that serve to guarantee a permanent pool of exploitable surplus labor — most whom are members of oppressed groups, women and racial minorities.

The C-word is allowed to be used when prefaced with the word “middle” or as a suffix on the word “under” — as in “underclass”, the desperately poor struggling on the margins of society on the very bottom economic rung, who get the least of everything while being blamed for their victimization. Political pundits, poverty pimps, talking heads, and right-wing hacks in the media and well-heeled “experts” get offended at any reference to an owning class and screech “class warfare” at the most subtle hint that the rich are oppressing the poor.

But references to the negative stereotypes of the very poor in the underclass are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy of unearned privileges and justify the abuse and deprivation routinely heaped upon America’s most downtrodden. The savage realities of classism and the oppression of the very poor by the middle class is whitewashed and obscured by an ideology summed up in the following credo: “We’re all middle class and we’re free to be as economically successful in life as we want because America is the land of opportunity.”

What they leave out, however, is “whom.” America is the land of opportunity for whom? In a capitalist society, somebody always has to lose so that someone else wins. Somebody always has to get left out. Somebody always has to be at the bottom. The “opportunity” to escape the crushing stranglehold of deep poverty is nearly non-existent for the majority of the poor, especially for poor women — particularly poor women over age 40 that have been unable to get any kind of job after several years of searching. There just aren’t enough opportunities, jobs, and lucky breaks to go around for everybody. And it is overwhelmingly poor women who are bypassed for what scant opportunities remain.

All conservative ideologies justify the draconian treatment of the poor and discrimination against women and all other existing inequities as “the natural order of things.” But if the rich and comfortably off middle class — who are overwhelmingly white males — are so naturally superior in talent, skills, and social worth, why then must those who already have everything be provided with so many unearned privileges under the law, so many bailouts, tax write-offs, subsidies, price supports, and a host of other special considerations at the public’s expense?

And what exactly are those naturally superior talents of society’s favorite sons? Their naturally superior abilities seem to lie within an array of unethical and illegal subterfuges such as job discrimination, price-fixing, collusion, stock and commodities manipulation, insider trading, fraud, tax evasion, harmful products, unsafe workplace conditions, environmental destruction, and the violent enforcement of unfair competition and stealing credit for others’ work and ideas. At that, the overprivileged overclass is a resounding success.

So what exactly are these self-appointed demi-gods contributing or producing to justify their favored treatment over everyone else? By all accounts, the only things being produced and reproduced are oppression, discrimination, theft, social misery, and injustice. Not exactly the stuff they deserve so many rewards for. Yet, middle class America bought into the “ownership society” lie propagated by rich white men who elected themselves king of the planet. The middle class shut their ears and eyes to the harsh truth about poverty in their own backyards. The middle class has always been part of the problem.

Those who have never gone without medical and dental care, heat in the winter, or hot water to bathe properly because of being repeatedly denied opportunities for a good job due to gender/race/age discrimination on top of the barriers of systemic classism had convinced themselves that bad shit only happens to bad people, that “giving money to the poor only hurts them” (justification for being selfish), and that George W. Bush was right when he said, “We’re all middle class now.”

No Virginia, We Are Not “All Middle Class Now”

In 1999 just three years after the Welfare Reform Act of 1996 was passed, a study by the Urban Institute found that nearly 3 in 10 low-income families were unable to pay their rent or mortgage or utility bills and nearly half of all low-income families had difficulty affording food. Low-income workers increasingly had to turn to food pantries which, like homeless shelters and other charities, could not meet the rising need.

In its 1998 survey, the US Conference of Mayors found that requests for emergency food assistance rose by 14% in 1997 and 1 out of 5 requests for food assistance went unmet. The American Journal of Public Health reported in 1998 that 10 million Americans (including 4 million children) didn’t have enough to eat. The majority were families with at least one employed adult.

In 1999, a team of researchers, scholars and social justice advocates published a 94-page booklet citing all of the growing problems of mounting poverty that was becoming increasingly inescapable, a burgeoning permanent underclass, and a shrinking middle class. The booklet includes 9 pages of credible source citations from reports compiled from the data provided by multiple government agencies and private charities and university studies. Some of those reports were from those who were on the inside of policy-making; not people with a “political agenda.”

A February 2006 report from America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s food bank network, found that 45% of their clients reported having to choose between buying food and paying utility bills.

The Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) that is supposed to help the poor with basic utilities has always been underfunded. Since utilities have been deregulated and public protections from price-gouging in the form of rate caps have been removed, the problem has been made worse.

In 2002, the Joyce Foundation reported that in the wake of welfare reform and utility deregulation, those who had left welfare after their five-year lifetime limits were up were still poor, if not poorer. Throughout the American Rust Belt, the following percentages of people whose utilities had been cut off as of 2002 were:

• 15% of Wisnconsin’s poor
• 15% of Ohio’s poor
• 25% of Indiana’s poor
• 11% of Michigan’s poor

In 1988, only 37% of the poor got energy assistance from LIHEAP and what they got was not enough to stave off utility shut-offs. In 2000, only 20% of the poor got helped due to LIHEAP funding cuts. The middle class convinced themselves that “there is all this help out there” for those in dire straits. But nobody wants to talk about the outcomes for all the poor people who are increasingly turned away: all the hypothermia deaths and residential fires caused by desperate poor people resorting to unsafe alternative heating sources.

In March of 2010, David Fox of the National Low-Income Energy Consortium said that prior to funding $1.8 billion in funding cuts for LIHEAP in 2010; only 20% of all eligible extremely poor households were able to be served. After the funding cuts in 2010, only 10-15% of the poorest of the poor will be able to get helped.

Given the number of long-term unemployed whose benefits ran out in 2009 (only 40% of American workers are eligible to receive unemployment benefits), in addition to the already suffering 5 million jobless poor who were poor single mothers booted off of welfare but unable to get or keep any job and whose sole income is food stamps, the number of US households without life-sustaining utilities reached 10 million as of December 31^st 2010. Consequences of utility shut-offs include homelessness, illness, death, poor child development, and the disintegration of families.

According to the annual survey conducted by the National Energy Assistance Director’s Association (NEADA), 60% of LIHEAP recipients couldn’t pay their utility bills because they lost their jobs or had a reduction in income. 92% of LIHEAP recipients had a pregnant woman, an elderly person, or a child in the home.

The truth about unearned privileges, job discrimination, and lack of enough jobs for everyone in need of a job who is able to work, poverty in America with a wealth of information about it has always been out there. This isn’t news. How can anyone lucky enough to be middle class today in 2011 say they “didn’t know” what was going on and where this country was headed? Sorry, I’m not buying it.

Like the “good Germans” 75 years ago who claimed they “didn’t know” what the industrial and financial elite and their Nazi government was doing to the Jews, America’s middle class has always known what was being done to America’s poor. 84% of those struggling below poverty in this country are WOMEN. The middle class didn’t care. They didn’t have a problem with all of the redistributive injustices caused by capitalism (which is, essentially, a gender war) until they found themselves under the firing line of capitalism’s Hotchkiss guns.

And even now, most of the middle class you see whining and howling about assaults on their “rights” are cutthroats and back-stabbers who would stick it to their own less fortunate family members who have fallen on hard times in order to “keep theirs.” Trickle-down economics was supposed to stop at the middle class and never reach the “undeserving” poor whose throats they’ve always been eager to cut to advance their own agenda and class interests — which almost always, without exception, are aligned with the rich whom they jealously aspire to become.

If the poor on society’s margins on the very bottom economic rung harbor any hostility, resentment, and distrust for the now-disgruntled middle class, it is wholly justified.

http://youtu.be/JTzMqm2TwgE