Blamelessness

Acts of Gord -- floods, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, ice storms -- devastate everything and everyone in their path. Acts of humans like war, train derailments, oil rig blowouts, and pipeline failures likewise do not discriminate in their victims.

We consider these victims to be blameless and deserving of all our help and compassion. (Well, except maybe when victims do not share our skin colour, religion, etc. Then we might come around to [minimal] help and [grudging] compassion if the scale of the disaster is massive enough.)

Right now the fire in Fort McMurray is gripping Canada. As it should. More than 80,000 people are homeless, their homes, possessions, jobs, schools, communities wiped out.

The response has been huge.

The media can't get enough of stories about formerly or currently afflicted groups like Syrian war refugees, blown-up towns, and First Nations stepping up to help.

The national self-congratulation has been huge also.

I was thinking of all those homeless people. And then of homelessness (2013 report) in general.

It is estimated that on any given night, there are 30,000 homeless people in Canada, 200,000 at some point over the year. No, most of them probably weren't suddenly and dramatically driven from their nice suburban homes. For the majority, their situations are the result of dozens of small individual earthquakes of the personal, emotional, medical, financial sort. Some of their situations are the result of larger, systemic ice storms like the residential school system, the utter failure of the mental health system, war, racism, patriarchy . . .

So. I tweeted.

Not meaning any disrespect, but events like #ymmfire make me wonder what Canadians could do to tackle all the homelessness/poverty.

— Fern Hill (@fernhilldammit) May 5, 2016

@GameIndie_1 Um. Compassion?

— Fern Hill (@fernhilldammit) May 5, 2016

More people responded with variants of this observation.

@fernhilldammit Nothing. Because we blame the homeless and impoverished. Fires could happen to any of us. But not poverty. Oh no. PFFT.

— Luna (@Heading_West) May 5, 2016

A vivid example is presented daily by Mark Cherrington, a youth worker in, coincidentally, Edmonton. He tweets about his efforts to help homeless, poor, abused youth and his battles with an incredibly stingy, uncaring bureaucracy.

Supporting a young mom of 3X children fighting a slum landlord. No smoke detectors, mold, unusable toilet. She is going to take him to court

— Mark Cherrington (@MarkCherrington) May 2, 2016

Rushing across the city to some road on the outskirts. A girl has been tossed out of a car like some fast food wrapper. Make her safe.

— Mark Cherrington (@MarkCherrington) April 27, 2016

These are kids doing the best they can with shitty situations, running afoul of petty laws, trying to stay in school, looking after children of their own.

But we won't care for them properly because they are not blameless. Somehow they are the authors of their fate and so not "deserving" of our attention.

In short, fuck 'em.

You'd think homelessness on the scale of the current disaster in Fort Mac would get us thinking about homelessness and inadequate housing in general.

Yeah, right.

Fetus Fetishists Enabled Gosnell

Kermit Gosnell's trial for murder has begun and the fetus fetishists are fapping themselves into a frenzy. As we pointed out here, he will be The Poster Boy for Evul Abortionists forever, or until another one comes along.

Also in that post, we pointed squarely at the fetus fetishists themselves for creating the stigma, harassment, and onerous and pointless regulations that allow such monsters to operate and, indeed, flourish in poor neighbourhoods.

But this little morsel is delicious. It seems the clinic harassers did NOT target Gosnell.

One former patient at the clinic told a state Senate committee that women in her neighborhood knew Gosnell offered the cheapest abortions available. Another Gosnell patient told the Associated Press that she had intended to go to a Planned Parenthood clinic but was scared away by antiabortion protesters. An acquaintance suggested Gosnell's clinic, where protesters - ironically - were not an issue.

Suburban church ladies and gents didn't feel comfy in the 'hood?

And now for some SHOCKING news. Bill O'Reilly, loudest enabler and cheerleader for the assassination of Dr George Tiller, is making shit up about the case.

Really, O'Reilly, the facts are bad enough. But liars gotta lie, I guess.

And I'll note again for our dim Canadian fetus fetishists -- this would not happen in a civilized society that treated abortion as a private medical procedure. You know, like Canada.

PSA: USians in Canada! Uncle Sam Wants Your Dough! - UPDATED

I wish I'd paid more attention to this back in June. I heard about it tonight on CBC radio and freaked.

A tax crackdown by the United States has sent more than one million Americans and green-card holders living in Canada scrambling to figure out how to comply.

The move is part of a push by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to make sure U.S. taxpayers are paying what they owe on foreign accounts. Unlike most countries, the U.S. requires its citizens to file annual tax returns based on their worldwide income, regardless of where they live.

I've filed taxes in the US only during the couple of years I lived there. I was under the very common mistaken impression that Canada and the US had some kinda reciprocal deal, shuffling tax dough back and forth.

Well, they may well do, but I've missed filing more than 30 years.

Then, next problemo, new crackdown. The US considers my savings 'offshore accounts' on the order of Bernie Madoff's Cayman Islands holdings (if he has any).

Starting in 2013, the IRS will require financial institutions outside the United States to disclose all accounts held by current and former U.S. citizens and green-card holders. They will likely have to file years of U.S. tax returns and detailed annual account disclosure.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said Friday that Canada is not a tax haven and that the U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act will place an onerous burden on Canadian financial institutions.

“Unfortunately, U.S. tax law does little to distinguish between U.S. citizens living on sandy beaches in Caribbean tax havens and those living in a relatively high-tax country like Canada,” said Warren Dueck, a certified public accountant and chartered accountant with W.L. Dueck & Co. in Richmond, B.C.

The IRS has issued a limited amnesty for U.S. citizens, residents and green-card holders to report their foreign bank accounts. Under the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative, which ends on Aug. 31, penalties are reduced to a range of zero to 25 per cent of the balance of all non-U.S. financial accounts and assets in 2010.

So. I've gotta figure out what to do and do it in the next two weeks or face losing one-quarter of my life savings.

I guess I'll be eating cat food a little earlier than I expected.

For the masochists among you, here's the IRS Tax Guide for US Citizens and Resident Aliens Abroad.

UPDATE: I consulted with an expert in USian tax madness. Things are not so dire. First, because I'm a nice Canadian -- not a Bay Street fraudster or drug lord -- the penalty would be only 5% if I get in under the amnesty. Plus accountant fees. Situations will vary, so people should consult their own tax expert to decide what to do. Consult cost $100 and was well worth it.

Poverty, Rape, and Abortion

The US Third Wave Foundation (TWF), which among other activities helps fund abortions for women unable to afford them, has released a report on the circumstances of the 505 women they helped in 2010 (bold mine).

Key findings:
• 85 percent of pledges went to fund second-trimester abortions, 10 percent first-trimester, 5 percent third-trimester
• 83 percent of pledges were given to people of color, compared with 80 percent in 2009 and 68 percent in 2008 and 2007
• 16 percent of pledges funded abortions for women impregnated because of rape (10 percent of those pledge recipients were impregnated because of incest)
• 48 percent of pledge recipients under 14 said their pregnancies were a result of rape
• Of 148 pledges made to minors, 64 percent were required to obtain consent from their parents due to state laws, 47 percent of pledge recipients had their parents notified because of parental notification laws
• Of all the minors who received money for abortion, 13 appealed to a judge to override parental consent/notification laws, what’s known as judicial bypass
• 17 percent of pledge recipients were homeless, compared with 10 percent in 2009 and 6.5 percent in 2008. Of these pledge recipients who were homeless at the time of their procedure, 58 percent had children and 15 percent were homeless due to domestic violence
• 49 percent of women who received pledge money were already mothers, but the majority had no “involvement” of a partner
• 15 percent of pledge recipients said they had a partner involved; of those, 57 percent said they were experiencing physical violence from their partner
• Low or no-income pledge recipients lacked Medicaid mostly due to homelessness or illegal residency, long waiting periods, or because the state dropped coverage once the person turned 18
• Thus, in 2010, only 6 out of 505 pledges were made to people who were employed full-time, and 19 out of 505 were made to people who had part- time employment.

(Note that these dismal figures pre-date the orgy of new laws on mandatory wait times and other run-arounds, including defunding all reproductive health care for poor people.)

It is not at all surprising that 85% of procedures were carried out in the second trimester, as opposed to abortions in the general population, more than 90% of which are done in the first trimester.

D'uh. If you got the dough, you go get it done as quickly as you can. If you don't have the dough, you're scrambling, eventually, if you're lucky, winding up with emergency funding from one of the National Network of Abortion Funds. But there's going to be delay, often a significant delay.

The rape stats, though, are surprising.

So, what percentage of rapes result in pregnancy? It's devilishly difficult to find out.

Here's one range:

Some statistics report that conception as a result of rape occurs in less than one percent of cases, while other studies indicate higher figures such as 4.7%. Rape-related Pregnancy may be more widespread than we know - many women are understandably reluctant to talk about it. Common contexts for conception in rape are war and domestic violence settings.

Here's Wiki:

The rate varies between settings and depends particularly on the extent to which non-barrier contraceptives are being used. A study of adolescents in Ethiopia found that among those who reported being raped, 17% became pregnant after the rape, a figure which is similar to the 15–18% reported by rape crisis centres in Mexico.

A longitudinal study in the United States of over 4000 women followed for 3 years found that the national rape related pregnancy rate was 5.0% per rape among victims aged 12–45 years, producing over 32 000 pregnancies nationally among women from rape each year. [1996]

It's perhaps not that surprising then, that poor USian women have rape-related pregnancy rates comparable to developing world rates.

But if you listen to fetus fetishists, there's no need to make a rape exemption to an abortion ban, because pregnancy hardly EVEH results from it.

Using some very dubious methods and very old stats, this Xianist comes up with the figure of 0.1-0.2% of rape-related pregnancies.

So, hey, we don't need no steenkin' exemption for rape. What's a few forced pregnancies in Gord's greater scheme of things?

Then, there's the fetus fetishist fall-back argument, as argued by SUZIE ALLCAPS recently. To wit, some rape victims choose to carry the rapist's sperm to term. (I got involved in the comments there and the phrase 'sperm to term' earned me an outraged spanking from one of her minions. Expect to see it a lot here. *evulsmiley*)

Lady Janus and I commented: 'Cool. That's what feminists mean by choice. It was her choice to make.'

SUZIE ALLCAPS countered with: 'It PROVES that the claim that ALL rape-related pregnancy results in INEVITABLE trauma is false'.

LJ et moi: Um. No. One person's decision doesn't PROVE anything. And besides, who ever claimed that all rape-related pregnancy created inevitable trauma?

ALLCAPS: Pro-aborts claim it is automatically traumatic and therefore there must be a rape exemption.

LJ et moi: No. Pregnancy resulting from rape certainly causes trauma in some women and that's why abortion must be an option.

Well, as usual, the discussion got all stupid after that. OK, it was stupid to begin with. . .

Going back to TWF's findings -- the quick rise in the number of homeless women is depressing, isn't it?

In related news, a preliminary report out today shows that USian births are down for third year in a row. The article speculates that 'the economy may be a factor'.

D'uh. Ya think?

But now with all the new abortion run-arounds and funding barriers -- not to mention MASSIVE cuts to basic contraception services -- YIIPPEE! The US birth rate will no doubt be on the rise again.

Among poor, raped, abused, homeless, racialized women. Isn't that grand news?

"... not a class story. It’s a crime story."

Greed. It's the underpinning of that oft-quoted christian aphorism "The poor will always be with us". The consequence of letting the greedy run roughshod and unchecked is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - and recently, in increasing numbers.

Matt Taibi has written an impassioned response to a NYT Op-Ed by David Brooks who defended wealthy bankers and, by implication the MASSIVE scams they engineered. Taibi expertly fillets tedious and disingenuous arguments that rationalize and justify the bottomless greed of financial manipulators.

Brooks here is trying to say that by criticizing, say, Goldman Sachs for mass thievery — criticizing a bank for selling billions of dollars worth of worthless subprime mortgage-backed securities mismarked as investment grade deals, for getting the taxpayer to pay them 100 cents on the dollar for their billions in crap investments with AIG, for forcing hundreds of millions of people to pay inflated gas and food prices when they manipulated the commodities market and helped push oil to a preposterous $149 a barrel, and for paying massive bonuses after receiving billions upon billions in public support even beyond the TARP — that in criticizing the bank for doing these things, people like me are primarily interested in being divisive and “organizing hatreds.” [...]

What’s so ironic about this is that Brooks, in arguing against class warfare, and trying to present himself as someone who is above making class distinctions, is making an argument based entirely on the notion that there is an lower class and an upper class and that the one should go easy on the other because the best hope for collective prosperity is the rich creating wealth for all. This is the same Randian bullshit that we’ve been hearing from people like Brooks for ages and its entire premise is really revolting and insulting — this idea that the way society works is that the productive “rich” feed the needy “poor”, and that any attempt by the latter to punish the former for “excesses” might inspire Atlas to Shrug his way out of town and leave the helpless poor on their own to starve.

That’s basically Brooks’s entire argument here. Yes, the rich and powerful do rig the game in their own favor, and yes, they are guilty of “excesses” — but fucking deal with it, if you want to eat.

Taibbi also identifies an implicit bias in commercially oriented media:

The propagandistic argument [Brooks] makes about the dangers of “populism” is spelled out here as clearly as you’ll ever see it expressed in print, and this exact thing is a key reason why so much of the corruption that went on on Wall Street in the past few decades was allowed to spread unchecked.

That’s because this argument is tacitly accepted by almost everyone in our business, and most particularly is internalized in the thinking of most newspaper editors and TV news producers, who over time develop an ingrained habitual fear of publishing material that seems hysterical or angry.

This certainly has an effect on the content of news reporting, but perhaps even more importantly, it impacts the tone of news coverage, where outrages are covered without outrage, and stories that are not particularly “balanced” in reality — stories that for instance are quite plainly about one group of people screwing another group of people — become transformed into cool, “objective” news stories in which both the plainly bogus version of events and the real and infuriating version are given equal weight.

There's another aspect to the media coverage of the bankers' debauchery that has bothered me. Throughout it all, most if not all the engineers of these fraudulent investments remained anonymous and faceless. Understand this - the Wall Street financiers who masterminded the complicated schemes that left hundreds of thousands of US citizens bankrupt and homeless won't be held accountable for their crimes. They have walked away from the carnage with fat bonuses in their pockets.

Not so Bernard Madoff. He has become the scapegoat for Greed, diverting attention away from the blue-bloods and their wannabees at the top of the food chain.

There's a wide vein of anti-semitism in our North-American societies; exploiting the case of Bernard Madoff to draw attention away from the structural causes of the financial collapse is so very convenient. And so repulsive to many Jews, given that the majority of Madoff's clients/victims were members of, or connected to the social and cultural networks that he navigated.

Unfortunately the institutional champions of judaism are too busy attacking the critics of Israel to note a most insidious and repugnant populist display of anti-semitism shrieking at them in headlines, news items and prurient stories on TV, publications and the Internet during the last year.

Madoff has become the new Shylock. Is this happenstance? I don't think so. This is judeophobic opportunism, in my humble opinion. But don't expect rightwing socons David Frum or Mark Steyn to point this out. They know how their bread is buttered - and they like it that way.

The Great American Nightmare.

It's the subsistence level conditions of millions of US citizens who are unemployed and cannot find jobs, surviving on food stamps.

About six million Americans receiving food stamps report they have no other income, according to an analysis of state data collected by The New York Times. In declarations that states verify and the federal government audits, they described themselves as unemployed and receiving no cash aid — no welfare, no unemployment insurance, and no pensions, child support or disability pay. [...]

Members of this straitened group range from displaced strivers to weathered men who sleep in shelters and barter cigarettes. Some draw on savings or sporadic under-the-table jobs. Some move in with relatives. Some get noncash help, like subsidized apartments. While some go without cash incomes only briefly before securing jobs or aid, others rely on food stamps alone for many months.

The surge in this precarious way of life has been so swift that few policy makers have noticed. But it attests to the growing role of food stamps within the safety net. One in eight Americans now receives food stamps, including one in four children.

The "Great American Nightmare" is found in the pig-headed ignorance and vile malevolence of rightwing politicians like Congressman John Linder, a Republican and member of the House panel on welfare policy.

“We’re at risk of creating an entire class of people, a subset of people, just comfortable getting by living off the government.” Mr. Linder added: “You don’t improve the economy by paying people to sit around and not work. You improve the economy by lowering taxes” so small businesses will create more jobs.

What small businesses? Those left struggling in the current US economy aren't the ones who would benefit from lowered taxes. The beneficiaries might be Big Businesses who have registered lobbyists living in Washington DC, ensuring that donations to current elected officials' P.A.C.s get them what they want. Meanwhile, the companies that once provided the US working class with employment opportunities have moved their jobs off-shore to places like China and south-east Asia so they can maintain their profit margins.

The Duh Report: Who's Sicker?

Today, Dammit Janet! launches the first in an intermittent series we're calling 'The Duh Reports'.

Via the CBC, news of a report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information:

Poorest Canadians more likely to enter hospital: report

Poorer Canadians are more likely to enter hospital for health problems such as child asthma, mental illness and diabetes, including potentially preventable conditions, according to a report released Monday.

. . .

The gaps are important partly because it is often costlier to the public-health system to treat people in hospital than in the community.

. . .

For example, after factoring out age in all cases:

* Children from low socio-economic groups had 56 per cent higher hospitalization rates for asthma than children from high socio-economic groups (233 per 100,000 people in the low group compared with 149 per 100,000 in the high group).
* People from lower-income groups were 2.4 times more likely to be hospitalized for diabetes than those in wealthiest group (102 per 100,000 in the low socio-economic group compared with 43 per 100,000 in the high socio-economic group).
* Among people with mental illness, hospitalization rates were 2.3 times higher for those in the low-socioeconomic group compared with the high group (596 per 100,000 people compared with 256 per 100,000).

. . .

Neudorf was joined by colleagues from other Canadian cities on Monday at the Chronic Disease Prevention Alliance of Canada's national conference in Ottawa. The alliance's members called on governments to recognize the problems and search for solutions that not only improve medical care but also combat poverty and reduce social and economic inequality.

Programs such as low-cost daycare and subsidized social housing help lift people into the labour force and out of poverty, with a ripple effect of improving health, said Dr. Richard Lessard, director of public health for the city of Montreal.

Gee, just because some people are spending way too much dough on housing, not eating well, forgoing prescriptions, dental care, and fitness-club memberships, working -- often at shitty, unsafe jobs -- all hours gord gives them, and living in crappy, dangerous neighbourhoods, they are hospitalized more often than better-off folk?

Who woulda thunk?

One Woman a Minute

Pregnancy kills one woman per minute. Unsafe abortion kills one woman every eight minutes. Reproductive Health Reality Check says:

. . .every minute, a woman still dies as a result of pregnancy or childbirth. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths occur in developing countries (primarily in Africa and Asia), and the vast majority of them are preventable. . . .

One in eight of those women dying every minute as a result of pregnancy and childbirth are women dying from unsafe abortions, after all--totaling 68,000 women every year, a figure that hasn't changed in nearly two decades. Nearly half of these deaths occur in Africa, where abortion is largely illegal, and rarely available even under circumstances where it is legal.

We decided to have a look at current news stories from Africa.

First, there's this from Uganda.

Over 1,000 Ugandan women die every year as a result of unsafe abortions and an additional 68,000 suffer serious health complications, according to a recently released report from the Ministry of Health.

"As many as 1,200 unsafe abortions result in death each year. Nearly a quarter (23%) of all abortions result in serious complications," says the report Road map for accelerating the reduction of maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity in Uganda. . . .

Because abortion is illegal in Uganda, and because of the widespread social stigma attached to the practice, many women who experience complications are not seeking or receiving any help. "Roughly one in five of the estimated 297,000 women who have an abortion each year - a total of 65,000 women - suffer complications that require medical care but do not get treatment in a medical facility," says the report.

Now, let's have a look at Nigeria: