Economic Aspects of "Love"

[American Dream]

The Religious Right And World Vision's "Charitable" Evangelism

by Michael Barker


"We analyse every project, every programme we undertake, to make sure that within that programme evangelism is a significant component. We cannot feed individuals and then let them go to hell."
—Ted Engstrom (former president of World Vision International) (1)


(Swans - December 28, 2009) Government organized foreign aid has long served as a vital means by which elite policymakers have cynically maintained a disparity of wealth between nations while simultaneously professing to do the opposite. In the United States, the major distributor of such "aid" is the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which presently has an annual budget in excess of $20 billion. Andrew Natsios, the former World Vision vice president, who has also served as the head of USAID (2001-05), demonstrated the manipulative nature of such large sums of money when he publicly acknowledged that he considers US-based organizations supported by this Agency to be "an arm of the U.S. government." It is however more normal for officials distributing such geostrategic funding to emphasize the apolitical nature of such monies. The mainstream media does little to challenge this myth and regularly plays up the altruistic intentions of the government. Unfortunately, this means that in recent years a large proportion of the US public has believed that foreign aid was one of the two largest items in the federal budget, even though "less than 0.5 percent of the budget went for anything remotely resembling foreign aid."

Despite their overestimation of their own government's altruism, the private philanthropy of many US citizens -- like those from many other wealthy countries -- is high. For example, according to the Giving USA Foundation, in 2005 "Americans gave away more than $260 billion to thousands of charities, philanthropies, churches, disaster relief funds, and myriad other do-good projects." This suggests that that if a sizable proportion of this money could be diverted to groups that addressed some of the root causes of injustice, the public alone could make a significant dent (independent of their government's own actions) in counteracting the influence of ruling elites. At present though, this is not the case, and most public donations are distributed (in good faith) to support charitable organizations that already obtain strong support from the US government. In part such public funding of elitist groups owes much to the fact that such organizations maintain favourable profiles in the mainstream media, and are also able to engage in expensive and sophisticated publicity campaigns to garner public support. World Vision is just one such group, and this article examines their historical ties to US foreign policy elites and New Right religious activists to demonstrate why buying a World Vision present for a loved one is not quite all it is cracked up to be.

World Vision's Cold Warriors

According to their Web Site, "World Vision began with the vision of one man -- the Reverend Bob Pierce" who, when on a trip to China in 1947, felt compelled to sponsor the upbringing of a "battered and abandoned" child named White Jade. Reverend Pierce then "began building an organisation dedicated to helping the world's children, and in 1950 World Vision was born." World Vision now works with children from all over the world, but their "first child sponsorship programme" was launched in 1953 "in response to the needs of hundreds of thousands of orphans at the end of the Korean War." The initial focus of World Vision's activities is particularly noteworthy because of the integral role that the Korean War fulfilled in the history of US militarism. (2)

Although not mentioned on World Vision's official "History" page, since 1947 Reverend Pierce had been a full-time travelling evangelist for the Youth for Christ movement -- an organization born in the mid-1940s -- which shortly took Pierce "to Asia to evangelize American servicemen." So it is intriguing that David Stoll observes that World Vision "was a product of the Cold War"; noting that one of Reverend Pierce's first overseas campaigns was in China, "where Youth for Christ hoped that evangelical Christianity would stiffen the resistance to communist advance." (3) Conceived as a bulwark against communism, World Vision's work in Vietnam and Cambodia was "heavily subsidized by USAID, [which] rais[ed] understandable fears about its objectives." (4)

In her book Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (South End Press, 1989), Sara Diamond writes of the "disastrous implications" of the "unchecked intervention in the culture and political economy of Third World communities" as manifested in the "escalation of Christian Right missionary relief and development work, [which is] increasingly organized in such a way as to attract both more participants and more grant money from the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID)." (5) Greg Grandin concurs with this analysis, observing how during the 1980s: "In order to bypass public and Congressional opposition, the White House outsourced the 'hearts and minds' component of its Central American wars to evangelicals." This war on people's minds is clearly a massive growth industry and the U.S. evangelical missionary project now "has an annual income of two billion dollars, equivalent to one fifth of aid transferred by [nongovernmental organizations] worldwide." (6) Given such well-funded trends, it is not surprising that in Ecuador (as reported in 1981) the Catholic human rights organization Pax Christi denounced World Vision as a "Trojan Horse" for US foreign policy. (7) Thus as Stoll writes:

One of the first things Ecuadorians noticed about World Vision was the discrepancy between what it said and what it did. Although the group described itself as Christian, not evangelical, it was channeling its help exclusively through evangelicals. Instead of working through the cabildo -- the elected council in Quichua villages -- it was bypassing them and turning its funds over to evangelical leaders. The ensuing quarrels were breaking up mingas, the communal workdays in Quichua culture.

Ecuadorians were still debating a similar discrepancy in the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Despite claims to be a non-sectarian scientific organization, it had turned out to be an evangelical mission. Now that SIL had lost its government contract, Ecuadorian opponents suspected that World Vision had inherited the same objectives. It was as if the whole operation was calculated to sharpen conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, divide communities, and make it harder for peasants to fight for their rights. (p.289)

Billy Graham's Evangelical World Vision

To gain a little insight into the controversial nature of World Vision's humanitarian forays it is important to examine the influence of Youth for Christ's first full-time employee, the Reverend Billy Graham. Graham is an integral character in the global evangelical project, and the former president of World Vision International, W. Stanley Mooneyham (1969-82), had prior to taking up this appointment served as Graham's personal assistant, and then as vice president of international relations for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. Indeed, World Vision provides an excellent example of the philosophy of new evangelicalism in practice, and their work responds to the National Association of Evangelicals' call "for the application of Christianity to every aspect of life including the social." (8) Here of course it is vital to note that Graham played an important role in "leading the way" at the National Association of Evangelicals, ensuring that new evangelicalism was rapidly "transformed from a small group of denominational leaders into a national movement." (9) Furthermore, Graham's ties to World Vision continue through his son, Franklin Graham, as when Pierce was forced to resign from his position as World Vision's president in 1967, he founded a new organization, Samaritan's Purse, and Franklin "became Pierce's protégé"; then when Pierce died in 1978, the young Graham became Samaritan Purse's new president (a position he maintains to this day).

While Billy Graham is largely heralded by the mainstream media as an apolitical crusader for justice, this myth has been utterly dispelled by investigative journalist Cecil Bothwell. Indeed, Bothwell concludes his book-length review of Graham's life by surmising: "In every way, Graham was the spiritual father of today's right-wing religious leaders who inject themselves into the realm of politics." Bothwell adds: "More than any other public figure in our history, Graham undermined the Founders' sceptical deism and sought to rebrand the United States as a Christian nation, its armies the rightful instruments of Christian crusade and empire." (10) So while in the past Graham's evangelical career has been associated with moderate evangelism, in actual fact his pragmatic approach quickly brought him into close alliances with more conservative forces. Bearing this in mind it is appropriate that the well-known funder of the Religious Right, the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation, has been a major supporter of Graham's son's group, Samaritan Purse, as well as funding the work of other conservative groups like Campus Crusade for Christ (whose founders included Billy Graham; see later) and Servant Group International.

One reason so few people are aware of Graham's conservative pedigree is not least the support he has gained from the mass media. From his early days as an evangelist with Youth for Christ he had the backing of the strongly anti-communist Hearst media empire. Moreover, Graham's ability to harness the arts of "Madison Avenue" in the service of evangelism also helped ensure that he received the backing of "the hierarchy of New York's mainline Protestant denominations." As Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett recount in their book, Thy Will Be Done, the Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (HarperCollins, 1995), in the 1950s:

A vision of global missions persuaded [John D. Rockefeller] junior to OK a $50,000 donation. It was done quietly, without press releases or fanfare, a secret affirmation that helped make the New York Crusade "a turning point in Graham's American ministry." It also was a turning point for Fundamentalism, ending its isolation on the fringe of American religious life and giving the movement the second wind it needed to make its postwar revival a durable mass phenomenon.

[...]

Billy Graham's enormous success with Manhattan's business elite in 1957 signified that the U.S. Christian Fundamentalist movement, like the United States herself, was at the edge of a major transition. Graham's organization gave the movement a new corporate cohesiveness; his moderate evangelizing of modernist Protestants set the tone for the movement's future success. This success, in turn, fed upon a United States that was in cultural discontinuity with the old order. In the 1950s, the era of small-business ethics finally gave way in mainstream America to the march of the modern corporation and its big-business ethic of efficiency and conformity within a mass culture. (p.294) (11)

In addition to these excellent elite connections, Graham created his own evangelical media empire to further consolidate his views in the popular consciousness of US citizens, and one small but significant publication in this regard was Christianity Today. Founded in 1956 with the financial support of J. Howard Pew (of Pew Charitable Trusts fame), Christianity Today's founding executive director was Graham's father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell, who served in this position until his death in 1973. Here it is important to recognize that when Graham began dating L. Nelson Bell's daughter (and his future wife) Ruth McCue Bell in the 1940s her father was considered to be "one of the most powerful men in the Christian missionary world." Later in the 1960s, L. Nelson Bell even served as the head of the Asheville chapter of the radical anti-communist witch-hunters, the John Birch Society. (12)

Bible Translators, and the Vision (for a New Right) World

Long-time John Birch Society supporter Nelson Bunker Hunt (a man "not known for his scruples... own[ing] oil and gas leases all over the world") (13) can at this point be indirectly connected to Graham through the controversial Wycliffe Bible Translators -- an organization that works closely with the aforementioned Summer Institute of Linguistics. (14) This is because Graham served on Wycliffe's board of directors "from about 1958 until 1961," while some time later Hunt acted as a trustee of the Wycliffe Bible Translators' "largest undertaking to date, the International Linguistic Center." (15) Although Graham left Wycliffe's board because of a "dispute over the founder's fundraising tactics," his Billy Graham Evangelistic Association "continued to provide funds to Wycliffe well into the 21st Century." (16) Given these links it is fitting that just prior to his death in 1982, Wycliffe Bible Translators' founder, Cameron Townsend, was...

... listed as one of several dozen Christian leaders in the Religious Roundtable, a New Right vehicle "to fight in the political arena for pro-God, pro-family, pro-American causes." The Roundtable was organized in 1979 by a former Wycliffe Associates board member, E.E. McAteer, who had just introduced a flag and Bible entrepreneur named Jerry Falwell to his associates in Washington, thereby helping to launch the Moral Majority. (17)

Here it is important to pause to examine the organizations that eventually evolved into the Religious Roundtable, as the...

... first major effort to build a national movement of conservative evangelicals came in 1974. Arizona Congressman John Conlan and Bill Bright, president and founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, devised a plan to politicize and educate people in every Congressional district who would become part of a national grassroots effort to elect evangelical Christians sharing a conservative political agenda. At the center of their plan was Third Century Publishers, organized in 1974 to publish books and other materials promoting a conservative political and economic philosophy based on scriptural principles. Its chief publication was One Nation Under God by Rus Walton, intended for use in the study of "Christian economics." In addition to his post as editor-in-chief of Third Century, Walton was a director of the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Conservative Union. (18)

In the same year John Conlan and Bill Bright created the soon to be defunct Christian Embassy, an organization whose board included "religious leaders such as Billy Graham, W. A. Criswell, Norman Vincent Peale, and Harold Lindsell of Christianity Today." (19) Graham was a "long-time friend" of Bright, and upon his death in 2003, he commented: "He is a man whose sincerity and integrity and devotion to our Lord have been an inspiration and a blessing to me ever since the early days of my ministry."

Bright is best known for founding the Campus Crusade for Christ in 1951 with the help of Billy Graham amongst others -- an organization Bright had led until 2000 when he passed the reigns of the Crusade over to Steve Douglass (who presently leads the organization along with the associated Campus Crusade for Christ International). Not surprisingly, given the conservative nature of this organization, the right-wing philanthropist Nelson Bunker Hunt rears his head again, as he served as the past chairman of the executive committee of Campus Crusade for Christ International's Here's Life Campaign, and funded the production of Bright's world-famous Jesus film (1979). In 1994 Bright went on to co-found the right-wing Alliance Defense Fund with Larry Burkett (amongst others), (20) an individual who just over a decade earlier had founded the National Christian Foundation with Terry Parker (an individual who went on to serve as a board member of the neoconservative Family Research Council), and Ron Blue (who is presently a board member of Campus Crusade for Christ International). (21)

Returning to the conservative Wycliffe Bible Translators, to this day Wycliffe's work remains connected to World Vision luminaries. For example, Wycliffe board member Atul Tandon is the senior vice president of donor engagement for World Vision U.S. Furthermore, Wycliffe board member, and author of The U.S. Military/NGO Relationship in Humanitarian Interventions (US Army Peacekeeping Institute, 1996) Chris Seiple is the son of the former long-serving president of World Vision U.S., Robert Seiple (1987-98). (22) Like his father, Chris is intimately enmeshed within powerful elite networks and he is a senior fellow at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Research Institute, (23) a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), (24) and serves as the president of the Institute for Global Engagement (which was co-founded by his father). (25)

The current chair of the Wycliffe Bible Translators' fourteen-person-strong board of directors is former World Vision International board member Brady Anderson. Prior to becoming the US Ambassador to Tanzania (1994-7), Anderson had spent six years working with Summer Institute of Linguistics (in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania), and after vacating his post as the US Ambassador to Tanzania, he served for two years as the USAID administrator (1999-2001). (26) In 2001 Anderson was succeeded at USAID by Andrew Natsios, an individual who had previously served as a vice president of World Vision (from 1993 until 1998). As if this evidence of the intimate relations maintained between World Vision and the US government were not enough, in an interview conducted in 2004 Anderson observed how World Vision had been "the largest handler of food in the world, and almost all the food was donated by the U.S. government." (pdf) An important point given that the US government does not donate food out of generosity; rather their food distribution networks are considered to be an integral weapon through which to promote their geostrategic interests. (27)

The affiliations of another Wycliffe board member, Tom Lin, further serve to expand our understanding of the type of work being undertaken by World Vision, as he is presently the regional director (central US) of the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship -- an "evangelical campus mission" that was formed in 1941. Again the Fellowship is directly connected to right-wing elites, as their Internet editor and media coordinator, Gordon Govier, is the secretary of the arch-conservative organization Gegrapha. (28) Incidentally, World Vision's former events and communications director T. Diane Bryhn was appointed (in 2003) to be Gegrapha's first executive director. (29) World Vision also maintains direct connections to the Fellowship as the latter's board of trustees includes Dolphus Weary, who is a former board member of World Vision U.S., and the former president of the Fellowship, Stephen Hayner, is a board member of both World Vision International and the International Justice Mission. (30)

Finally, considering the longstanding allegations that global evangelism has served the foreign policy interests of the US government and their allied mining corporations, it is fitting that Kevin Jenkins, the new head of World Vision International, is a board member of the Canadian-based global energy company Nexen, a corporation that is involved in the highly destructive mining of Canada's tar sands on the land of Canada's First Nations people.

Continues at: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/barker39.html

[seemslikeadream]

Nomi Prins on 'Black Tuesday' and Occupy Wall Street
Nomi Prins' new novel is about the 99 percent of us who get screwed by the big boys, and about the kind of courage it will take to reclaim our country.
October 19, 2011

When Nomi Prins bursts into the room, you feel enormous energy and the fresh air of freedom. When her feisty spirit runs up against injustice, you immediately feel the power of her outrage. And these days, like the rest of us, her outrage is directed against Wall Street, a place she knows all too well, having worked for over a decade in global investment banking, including as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, before quitting to make a more honest living.

In her 2009 book, It Takes a Pillage, Nomi Prins skewered the Wall Street practices that took down our economy. Unlike so many unfocused accounts, she helped us understand that Wall Street, and no one else, caused the crash and continues to cripple our economy.

But in her new work of fiction, Black Tuesday, Prins chooses a different mode of expression to deepen her critique. She dives into the eternal verities – love, power and money -- to build the core of the story. She chooses the 1929 stock market crash as a backdrop to an improbable romance between a Wall Street banker and a Russian-Jewish immigrant young woman, who, like Prins, is bursting with talent and courage. As Prins moves us from the Lower East Side to Park Avenue and back again, we feel the tensions of class and the ways our humanity can break through them. But these are not cardboard characters. Nor is this novel a rerun of agit-prop novels from the 1930s. Rather, the characters are alive with contradictions, weaknesses and valor. I’m not going to give away the plot, but rest assured, there are plenty of thrilling twists that will prevent you from putting the book down.

Just as she pointed out that the CDO and credit derivatives markets were time bombs in her first book, Other People’s Money, and argued for Glass-Steagall to prevent the combination of bank speculation with commercial activities, she appears equally prescient now. When Prins starting writing Black Tuesday, nothing much was happening in terms of taming Wall Street. It was business as usual for the elites who were again raking in billions. Meanwhile the nation was arguing about what we should sacrifice in order to pay for the gigantic debts created by the Wall Street crash.

Politically, the country seemed to be suffering form financial Alzheimer’s as we forgot about how the Wall Street casino caused both our mass unemployment and our debt problems. Yet, as Black Tuesday is published, all hell breaks out in the streets as Occupy Wall Street takes off. It’s a perfect match. More importantly, the book lends crucial spiritual support to the occupying young folks who know something is rotten in finance and refuse to buy mealymouthed political excuses for doing nothing about it.

At its core, Black Tuesday is about the 99 percent of us who get screwed by the big boys, and about the kind of courage it will take to reclaim our country and our own humanity. Prins doesn’t give us any elaborate blueprints or phony cheerleading. Rather she conveys the essence of what she has to give – the spirit of defiance. The people who are currently lighting the fires of resistance will love reading about another time and place where a similar outrage took place and about how leadership set a new course.

AlterNet caught up with Prins to hear what she has to say about her novel and what’s happening in the streets:

Les Leopold: It seems amazing that Black Tuesday is coming out just as Occupy Wall Street is emerging. Is there any connection between your novel and what's happening on the streets right now?

Nomi Prins: After It Takes a Pillage came out, I became increasingly convinced that we were on the brink of a Second Great Depression. Perhaps some of the comparative statistics were different, the kind that economists cite, but the downward spiral caused by the shady, fraudulent, self-serving financial chicanery driving the most powerful Wall Street banks and their leaders, is the same. I questioned why, with such obvious devastation, and such a mammoth opportunity to rein in the banks, that chance devolved into the whisper of the absolutely useless Dodd-Frank Bill. I realize this is rhetorical -- after all, we have a dangerous, symbiotic relationship between Washington and Wall Street -- but nonetheless, the question nags at me.

After 10 years of talking about the need to isolate banks into commercial vs. speculative activities ala Glass Steagall, I was mentally hoarse and emotionally spent. So I researched the historical conditions leading up to the 1929 crash which led to that 1933 act, specifically the dislocation between how financiers were being viewed and lauded vs. the actual effects of the “boom” on ordinary U.S. citizens, who weren’t living anywhere near the bankers’ high life.

Serendipitously, I walked into this magnificent public invention called the local library in West Hollywood during Great Gatsby month – which entailed among other things, readings of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic at various locales in Los Angeles. I went to one at a senior citizens home and discovered the most wonderful people bursting with stories of the Great Depression. One woman’s story, in particular, became the inspiration for the character arc of Leila’s Uncle Joseph, precocious little sister, Rachel, and worker-activist boyfriend, Nelson.

When I see the Occupy Movement, I see people from every background compelled to be involved, not only for personal reasons, but for a shared purpose – to alter the tide of economic injustice and corporate favoritism. I don’t think all of them are born activists, yet collectively they are creating an active, necessary national and global counter movement to the federal nepotism toward financial criminality.

LL: When you were writing the book, did you imagine that perhaps the country might actually rise up a bit more to tackle the Wall Street casino? Did you hope the courage of your main characters would perhaps inspire us a bit?

NP: I did envision a closer look at the past as being an inspiration for rising up in the present, without banging that notion over the reader’s head. My favorite line in the book is when Leila’s frail Aunt Rosa says to her, “Sometimes your cause finds you. There is a fight buried in us all.” Because, it’s true, not everyone is compelled to fight against injustice in the same way. People get there from different starting points, and the path isn't always clear and easy. And that's okay.

Leila’s boyfriend, Nelson embodies more visibly, the spirit of injustice and protest at a time when union battles with increasingly wealthy bosses were relegated to the back pages of the major newspapers that I examined, while stories of Wall Street boom took the headlines. Joseph embodies the man who strived to be financially prudent, but gets caught up in the bank hysteria. Rachel is a little girl growing up fast and aware of the basics that her family cannot afford, like the latest Winnie the Pooh book.

As the main protagonist, Leila herself is a reluctant heroine, she is an imperfect person trying to figure out her place in that turbulent world. Having survived tremendous violence at the hands of the Cossacks in her home country, she doesn’t at first believe that demonstrations and fist-pumping marches will change anything. But her heart draws her into a truth that she cannot ignore, despite trying, which propels her forward. Her inner conflict is as much a battle cry within her heart and head, as is the certainty of her boyfriend’s rabblerousing.

LL: When you chose to write a novel, rather than another dynamic expose of finance, were you trying to escape from what seemed like the futility of making change, or were you finding another way to embrace it?

NP: A bit of both. On the one hand, my imagination took me to an alternate view of the past and the characters began to write themselves, as flawed, emotional individuals, living through and dealing with, situations that may fuel action for our present. That is the impetus for the court scene toward the end of Black Tuesday. It’s so exasperating that we just haven't learned much from history and still allow these powerful banks and bankers to control our destinies.

For example, as I depict in the novel, there was a meeting of the most powerful bankers at the Morgan Bank that took place on Black Thursday, five days before the big crash on Black Tuesday. One of the men in that room, who was later influential in creating the Bank for International Settlements in Europe was Albert Wiggins, the CEO of Chase Bank. While he was conspiring with those bankers to pump money into stocks (depositors’ money) he was shorting his own bank's stock, even as he was trying to get the market to buy it. And that is very reminiscent of today where companies like Goldman Sachs were shorting against their clients and making fraudulent representations with relative impunity. It is tragic that this crime continues unabated and our government enables it.

Black Tuesday offers a unique story that centers around real people caught up in the real financial dealings of that day, without the dispersion of the kinds of general statistics and numbers that I put into my non-fiction work. At the end of the day, the book depicts humanity in all its glory and despair, and lives are mortally impacted. Black Tuesday, as a novel, provides a way of looking at similar financial times and the devastation of mismanagement and greed on everyone in society. It is also a story. And I hope in that way, it is enjoyed as an eye opening tale, as well as a call to embrace the notion that each of us can make a difference, even when we least expect we can.

[American Dream]

http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/0zpcq4

Kate Sharpley's Story
Albert Meltzer

One of our frequently asked questions is 'who was Kate Sharpley?' Many of our readers will know of her as 'One of the countless “unknown” members of our movement ignored by the official historians of anarchism.' We hope this tribute, written by Albert Meltzer in 1978 will help to fill that statement out a little. There are more details in Albert's autobiography I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels.




Kate's Tinwear

Sixty-five years ago Queen Mary was handing out medals in Greenwich, most of them for fallen heroes being presented to their womenfolk. One 22-year old girl, said by the local press to be under the influence of anarchist propaganda, having collected medals for her dead father, brother and boyfriend, then threw them in the Queen's face, saying, 'If you think so much of them, you can keep them.' The Queen's face was scratched and so was that of one of her attendant ladies. The police, not a little under the influence of patriotic propaganda, then grabbed the girl and beat her up. When she was released from the police station a few days later, no charges being brought, she was scarcely recognisable.

The girl was Kate Sharpley, who had been active in the Woolwich anarchist group and helped keep it going through the difficult years of World War 1. After her clash with the police she was sacked from her job 'on suspicion of dishonesty' (there was nothing missing but a policeman had called checking up on her…) and, selling libertarian pamphlets in the street, she was recognised by the police and warned that if she appeared there again she would be charged with 'soliciting as a prostitute' (which in those days would have been a calamity, and even today a disaster, if once convicted). Isolated from her family, and with the group broken up, she moved out of activity, away from the neighbourhood, and married.

I met her, by chance, last year in Lewisham. Twice widowed, she remembered the anarchist movement with nostalgia, and gave me a fascinating account of the local group in the years before World War 1. Unfortunately, she was already very ill, and a few weeks ago, she died, I was told by one of her neighbours.

I had, though, asked her for a message to the Anarchist movement today. Her answer: 'Tell the kids they're doing all right, they don't need any advice from me.' Especially she praised the young women of today: 'I wouldn't have had to take cover like I did if women of my day had any guts' she said. But she did have guts. A few only in 1917 dared take any action in bereaved England.

~ AM

[Allegro]

.
Very Young Girls | about the Project

Very Young Girls is a documentary film that chronicles the journey of young women through the underground world of sexual exploitation in New York City.

A 14-year-old girl is lured from her home, beaten, raped, held captive, and sold for sex in New York City. The police find her — and arrest her.

A man who has sex with an underage girl should be prosecuted as a criminal rapist. But there is a loophole: if the child accepts money in exchange for sex, the rapist is now a "john" and rarely is subjected to greater punishment than a fine. For the very same act, the girl is often prosecuted as a prostitute and sent into detention. The average age of entry into prostitution today in the United States is 13 years old.

The United States government likes to say it leads the world in combating sexual trafficking, and grades other countries on their compliance. If a woman has been brought from the Ukraine to Manhattan and coerced to have sex for money, the US government provides her services under the 2002 Sex Trafficking legislation. She is a victim. But if she is an African-American girl brought to Manhattan from the Bronx, she's a criminal and she's going to jail.

Our double standard arises partly from myths about prostitution, promoted in the movies, song, and reality TV — girls are empowered sex workers, strung-out crack whores, greedy "hos," or hookers with hearts of gold. Very Young Girls shows clearly, that with the average age of entry into prostitution in the United States at thirteen, that sexual exploitation is simply a commercial form of child sexual abuse, the effect of which can continue into adulthood and beyond.

The film follows the girls in real time, using verité and intimate interviews with the girls both when they are still working and when in recovery. The film also uses footage shot by pimps themselves that illustrate exactly how it all starts. Very Young Girls tells the story of girls who spend their teenage years being recruited and brainwashed by predatory pimps, bought and sold on the street, sent to jail, and then recovering from the trauma of sexual exploitation.

Recovery occurs through Rachel Lloyd, who runs GEMS [Girls Educational and Mentoring Services], the only survivor-led organization in New York that offers services to sexually exploited girls. Rachel rescued herself from sexual exploitation, and she and her staff are relentless in their mission to help girls sent by the courts to GEMS after being arrested, or found on the streets by GEMS staffers, to piece their lives back together in group therapy. But sessions reopen wounds as girls relive memories of the abusive homes they ran away from, pimps who convinced them that they were "in love" with, the nightly rapes they endured to make money so their pimp would give them attention instead of a beating; and the fear that they will never be anything but a "ho" in anyone's eyes — including their own. A few girls will succeed, some will remain suspended on the edge of two worlds, and others will be sucked back into the underground.

Very Young Girls is changing the way law enforcement, the media, and society as a whole look at sexual exploitation.

People:
Nina Alvarez | producer/co-director
David Schisgall | producer/co-director
Priya Swaminathan | producer/co-director
Rachel Lloyd | producer

Grants:
$50,000 in 2007 for post-production
$15,000 for outreach and audience engagement in 2007
$60,000 for outreach and audience engagement in 2009

Awards:
Official Selection of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival

[American Dream]

See also:

The Pedophocracy

by David McGowan



MAY BE TRIGGERING TO ABUSE SURVIVORS

[American Dream]

Also see:


Beyond the Dutroux Affair (2007)


La Nebuleuse (2008)


A closer look at child abuse networks in the Netherlands and Belgium (2010)




MAY BE TRIGGERING TO ABUSE SURVIVORS

[American Dream]

.

[American Dream]

Can your wife bake her own bread?
Can she get a kid's leg stitched and not phone you at the office until it's all over?
Find something to talk about when the TV set goes on the blink?
Does she worry about the Bomb?
Make your neighbors' children wish that she were their mother?
Will she say "Yes" to a camping trip after 50 straight weeks of cooking?
Let your daughter keep a pet snake in the back yard?
Invite 13 people to dinner even though she only has service for 12?
Name a cat "Rover"?
Live another year without furniture and take a trip to Europe instead?
Let you give up your job with a smile?
And mean it?

Congratulations.

[DrVolin]

I'll have to answer yes to all of that. And I'll have to add that none of it matters.

[American Dream]

The Consumerist: "Someone has graffitied this Burger King billboard in downtown Seattle
to transform it into criticism about how sugary fast food contributes to diabetes and the obesity crisis."

[American Dream]

http://www.cryfreetown.org/express1.html





“SENT OUT TO KILL AGED 9: DIAMONDS ARE SMUGGLED TO BUY GUNS FOR BRUTAL REBELS”

NIC FLEMING

SUNDAY EXPRESS, 09/01/00


In the West they are the ultimate symbols of love and wealth. Diamonds represent glamour, riches or eternal devotion.

But in a small West African state the same prized gems are responsible for almost inconceivable atrocities that have scarred the lives of millions. Diamonds smuggled out of Sierra Leoneís mines have financed the rebels fighting the state's brutal civil war.

It is a conflict that has seen some 20 000 children as young as nine kidnapped, drugged, tortured and forced to kill as child soldiers. Eight years of war have left 75 000 dead and more than 10 000 civilians as young as two with limbs hacked off as part of a savage campaign of terror by the rebels.

A documentary featuring award-winning footage shot at the height of the fighting a year ago will this week show interviews with child soldiers and civilians being shot and mothers and children being beaten.

The rebels organised boy soldiers into killing squads during an attack on the capital Freetown. When the rebels were later ejected they took 4000 children with them - boys as soldiers, girls as sex slaves.

Ibrahim Barry Junior, 16, was nicknamed General Shed Blood by the rebels and was in charge of 50 boys. Abducted at the age of nine, he was drugged and taught how to kill. He said: "I kill hundreds because I fought for long years. When I have taken my drugs I would even kill my brother. I feel happy to kill when I have taken the drugs. Sometimes I remove your heart and just chew your heart."

Ibrahim escaped and has been receiving trauma counselling. But there are only four rehabilitation centres in the country for the estimated 20 000 child combatants.

Pressure group Global Witness last year launched its Fatal Transactions campaign to highlight the role of the diamond trade in countries like Sierra Leone. Director Charmian Gooch said: “If you buy a diamond engagement ring for your girlfriend you have no way of knowing whether you are funding children having their hands hacked off or turned into child soldiers. We are not against the diamond trade as a whole. Most of it, in countries like South Africa, Botswana and Namibia, is legitimate. It is funding development and populations are benefiting. But in Sierra Leone it is widely accepted that diamonds have played a major part in funding the rebels who have committed horrific atrocities”.

The world's largest diamond company De Beers, controls the supply of 70 per cent of newly-mined diamonds through its central selling organisation in London. Referring to the rebels, a De Beers spokesman said: “It's quite possible they have been funded by the diamond trade. Smuggled diamonds may well find their way to places like Antwerp and Israel. What happens then is for the customs officers to deal with”.

The war between the Sierra Leone government and the Revolutionary United Front officially ceased after a UN-brokered peace deal in July which included an amnesty for all war crimes. But sporadic fighting continues and disarmament is yet to happen.

The Channel 4 documentary made by Insight News Television, features footage by Sierra Leonean cameraman Sorious Samura. He was the only journalist to stay in Freetown when the rebels attacked. He said: “Most of us in Sierra Leone have never seen a diamond. In the West a jewel is given as the ultimate symbol of love. But in my country rebels paid for their weapons by selling diamonds to the West for millions of dollars. It is no longer acceptable for the West to make excuses and look the other way”.

[American Dream]

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising- ... ges-135807

Perspective: Rock of Ages

Diamonds are nothing more than allotropes of carbon. Leave it to a marketer to make them all about a love that lasts forever By Robert Klara
October 20 2011


Harry Oppenheimer had a problem. It was September 1938, and with war smoldering in Europe, market prices of diamonds—a commodity that had been cornered by his father’s company, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd.—were plummeting. Concluding that the company’s survival lay in penetrating the American market, Oppenheimer came to Philadelphia and looked up the N.W. Ayer & Son advertising agency.

The result of the trip would be one of the most successful advertising slogans ever created.

Ayer worked the account for a decade—draping diamonds on Hollywood starlets, mostly—but struggled to find a tagline. Then in 1947, a young copywriter named Frances Gerety chanced upon a photo of two newlyweds on their honeymoon and scribbled “A Diamond Is Forever” along the bottom. De Beers adopted the tagline the following year. The 1957 ad below is a classic early example of its use, and as the ad opposite demonstrates, the company has employed the phrase ever since (having added a “because”).

Of course, kings and maharajas had made diamonds desirable for centuries. The genius of what Gerety did was to fuse together the idea of swooning, everlasting love with a sparkly rock. According to psychologist Robert Passikoff, who runs the consultancy Brand Keys, “people take certain signs of objects and imbue them with an unspoken meaning”—and thanks to De Beers, diamonds have come to be seen as a natural rarity, a precious embodiment of the marital pledge. In the early days, not all grooms (who make up 90 percent of diamond buyers) got it, and so the copy helped things along with lines like “Your engagement diamond, with noble fire, reflects the greatness of your love.”

Eventually, the dudes glommed on—and they haven’t forgotten. While both the 2011 ad and its 1957 forerunner use beautiful diamonds as a thematic centerpiece, the contemporary ad has dispensed with all explanatory copy. “Over time,” Passikoff says, “consumers have a stronger perception of what the diamond represents, so you don’t need the copy. The meaning has endured. Why screw with success?”

But the strongest proof of the efficacy of “Diamonds Are Forever” isn’t measured in the endurance of the phrase, but its ability to cloud the heads of grooms-to-be (who drop an average of $3,200 on an engagement ring) with a sweet-smelling, fictional mist. Not only are diamonds not rare (De Beers holds back so much supply that if all the world’s diamonds were dumped onto the market, they’d be worth less than $30 each), but what they symbolize isn’t forever, either. According to the National Center for Health Statistics 43 percent of new marriages will end in the first 10 years.

So maybe diamonds aren’t forever—but a good slogan sure is.

[American Dream]

An artist's drawing of Robert Pickton during his first-degree murder trial at BC Supreme Court in New Westminster,
Monday, Nov. 26, 2007.


Prostitutes’ only relief, inquiry hears, is self-medication with drugs
JAMES KELLER
VANCOUVER— The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011

Many women working as prostitutes in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside have lives so marred by poverty, abuse and violence that they suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder, a public health nurse has testified.

Catherine Astin told the inquiry into the Robert Pickton case on Wednesday that drug addiction among those women is simply an effort to self-medicate their condition, and sex work a way to pay for their habit.

Ms. Astin told the inquiry she has worked with residents of the Downtown Eastside for more than a decade. She painted a dire picture of life for women such as those Mr. Pickton brought back to his farm to murder – several of whom Ms. Astin had met.

She said many of the women she encounters in her work tell of being sexually abused as children and of traumatic childhoods in foster care. They often lived on the streets in their early teens.

Their world is one in which violence – whether rape or assault – is a daily reality, she testified.

“A lot of them use the drugs because they're self-medicating, because nothing else makes them feel better,” said Ms. Astin, who works at a program called Sheway, which provides health and social services to pregnant women and mothers in the Downtown Eastside.

“The women didn't really have an education that would allow them to access work. They had a history of posttraumatic stress disorder, and the first time they used the drugs they're addicted to, it made them feel better.”

The hearings are looking at the failure of police and prosecutors to stop Mr. Pickton before his arrest in 2002, but the first set of witnesses has dealt with the broader social issues facing women living in the Downtown Eastside, from drug addiction and poverty to Canada's prostitution laws.

Ms. Astin, who worked as a street nurse from 1997 to 2005 before joining Sheway, said women in the troubled neighbourhood ply their trade in isolated back streets, which she described as dark, gloomy and “Dickensian.”

When they are finished, they return to low-income housing. Some are in and out of jail.

“Would you agree that the women from the Downtown Eastside involved in the sex trade with whom you dealt were living in the most inhumane, squalid conditions?” asked Cameron Ward, a lawyer who represents the families of 18 of Mr. Pickton's victims.

“For the most part, I would say yes,” Ms. Astin replied.

Continues at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nat ... le2207293/

Three times as many sex trade workers than clients charged, expert tells inquiry

BY NEAL HALL, VANCOUVER SUNOCTOBER 20, 2011


VANCOUVER -- An analysis of federal justice statistics showed that three times as many street-level prostitutes as clients were charged over a 10-year period, the Missing Women inquiry was told Thursday.

"For every client charged, three sex workers were charged," prostitution expert John Lowman testified about his analysis of the statistics gathered between 1987 and 1997.

At the same time, he pointed out, Vancouver police largely ignored the "indoor" sex trade, which includes massage parlours and escort agencies, which are licenced by the city.

He suggested a solution to the problem would be to change the law, which now makes it illegal to keep a bawdy house, to allow small-scale, non-profit brothels.

Lowman also suggested there should be better monitoring by police of prostitution strolls to reduce the violence and a better links established between police and sex workers to encourage street prostitutes to report rapes and assaults by customers.

Most street-level prostitutes don't trust police, so are reluctant to report violence from customers, he said.

Lowman, a Simon Fraser University criminologist, resumed his testimony, which was adjourned earlier this week.

He testified earlier that the Vancouver police department had a policy of displacement and containment, which pushed street prostitution into a dark, isolated area of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (DTES).

The sex workers were displaced from residential areas of the city, where citizens complained about the nuisance factor, until it was moved into a largely industrial area of the DTES, where serial killer Robert Pickton preyed on his victims and is believed to have killed dozens of women.

Continues at: http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Three+ ... story.html

[American Dream]

[American Dream]