Don’t know even where to start with this one – PB/TK
Women on the Move: Can Three Women and a Truck Quell the Tide of Sexual Violence and Domestic Abuse?
Decades of neoliberal leadership exacerbated socio-economic disparities, diminishing individuals’ social and political rights at the same time that Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission expanded corporations’ “personhood,” giving them the green light to spend unlimited sums on advertising and liberating nonprofit corporations’ independent political expenditures. While the so-called “Washington Consensus” was no picnic, the proto-fascist regime to which it gave rise has installed a new level of widespread fear. The forty-fifth president of the United States was elected on a platform of white supremacy, xenophobia and misogyny, guided by an advisor hell-bent on expediting the apocalypse in the name of ethnic pride. The United States was founded on genocide and the commodification and fungibility of racialized others. It is ludicrous to imagine redressing our bad faith democracy with superficial, band-aid fixes and the inclusion of select individuals from marginalized groups in positions of power. Now the band-aid has been ripped off. People of color, Muslims, queers and women find themselves at newly heightened risk; as of January 2017, racially motivated brutality and domestic violence and sexual assault (DVSA) are morally and (de facto) legally condoned by the United States government. Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court appointment foretells the intensification of reactionary policies given, among other things, his “originalism,” defense of “date rape,” endeavors to block women from litigating discrimination claims and tacit approval of South African apartheid. Most recently, Fox News’s sluggish and ambivalent ouster of Bill O’Reilly mirrors the ethos of our new administration, begrudgingly slapping the hand of a rampant sexual predator and handing him twenty-five million dollars as he walks out the door.
Progressives are grappling with how to respond while simultaneously succumbing to paralysis. Concurrent with the alarming acceleration of state-sanctioned violence, we are witnessing a mounting wave of complacency and acceptance of Trump’s polices as business as usual. Many on the left have already been shocked and awed into a state of numbness, overwhelmed by the daily onslaught of appalling bad news. In the first weeks of Trump’s administration, critics of the regime tuned in voraciously to reports of the latest horror stories, attending the Women’s March and airport protests in droves in response to the so-called “immigration pause.” A few weeks later, the ever-so-slightly sanitized Muslim ban elicited virtually zero protest, nor have the shelling of Syria, the President’s 3.3 million-dollar Mar-a-Lago weekends and Trump Tower’s daily half-million-dollar security expenditures, the restriction of access to health care and abortions or Trump’s interminable tweets in language so halting that a high school applicant for the job of 7/11 clerk would be deemed incapable of communicating with customers. The dropping of the Massive Ordinance Air Blast (also known as the Mother of all Bombs, MOAB) on Afghanistan was the latest instance of what many are seemingly beginning to accept: given the global proliferation of nuclear arsenal, our president might even lead us into World War III. Friends semi-guiltily report that they need to check out for a few days. My Facebook feed, previously inundated with news analysis of the Trump regime’s ghastly new endeavors, is returning to its previous inculcation of fuzzy animal videos and vacation snapshots. Many on the left are worn out; of course, this is what the new administration is counting on.
Continue to counterpunch.org article: http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/04/26/women-on-the-move-can-three-women-and-a-truck-quell-the-tide-of-sexual-violence-and-domestic-abuse/
