Browsing PBH By Articles

Being A Woman In Pakistan

The Article: To Be a Woman in Pakistan: Six Stories of Abuse, Shame, and Survival by Zara Jamal in The Atlantic.

The Text: According to a 2011 poll of experts by the Thomson Reuters Foundation Poll, Pakistan is the third most dangerous country for women in the world. It cited the more than 1,000 women and girls murdered in “honor killings” every year and reported that 90 percent of Pakistani women suffer from domestic violence.

Westerners usually associate the plight of Pakistani women with religious oppression, but the reality is far more complicated. A certain mentality is deeply ingrained in strictly patriarchal societies like Pakistan. Poor and uneducated women must struggle daily for basic rights, recognition, and respect. They must live in a culture that defines them by the male figures in their lives, even though these women are often the breadwinners for their families.

Quietly, slowly, in piecemeal legal reforms, female empowerment is coming in Pakistan. You meet inspiring women daily here. Sympathetic employers sometimes give protection and assistance, as do other women who’ve fared better. NGOs and charitable organizations try to help empower women, but not all women take advantage of these resources. They fear their husbands, attracting unwanted attention, somehow hurting the honor of their families, or, often, they simply do not know that help exists. With female literacy at 36%, many women are too uneducated to know their rights.

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Is Democracy An Illusion?

The Article: What if democracy is just an illusion? by John Stoehr in Al-Jazeera.

The Text: Karl Marx never visited the United States, but he nevertheless understood the country, because he understood capitalism. As you know, there’s no American ideology that’s mightier than capitalism. Equality, justice and the rule of law are nice and all, but money talks.

In their 1846 book The German Ideology, Marx and co-author Frederick Engels took a look at human history and made a plain but controversial observation. In any given historical period, the ideas that people generally think are the best and most important ideas are usually the ideas of the people in charge. If you have a lot of money and own a lot of property, then you have the power to propagandise your worldview and you have incentive to avoid appearing as if you’re propagandising your worldview. Or, as Marx and Engels would put it: The ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class.

The ideas of the one per cent become the dominant ideas because the one per cent convinces the 99 per cent that its ideas are the only rational and universally valid ideas. Consider free-market capitalism. The idea says that growth provides prosperity to all, that government governs best when it governs least, so there’s no need to discuss the redistribution of wealth. That’s neoliberalism and that idea has been the only acceptable economic policy since the Clinton era. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was its greatest champion. After the collapse of the housing market, he said he was dead wrong. Even so, the idea remains dominant. Why? Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but the ruling class happens to make a lot of money from a free market.

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The Problems Of Capitalism And Elections In France

The Article: Elections, anti-capitalism and class struggle in France by John Mullen on En Passant.

The Text: Sarkozy: the end of the bling-bling President?

The Presidential race is on in France as all the candidates have now declared. On 22 April the first round of voting will choose two candidates for the run-off two weeks later. Nicolas Sarkozy, ruling President and the right wing’s young and sharp man of action, looks to be under severe pressure. He has been able to update the style of French conservative leaders, previously more characterised by slow-speaking patrician tones. Even if he shocked many with his childish outbursts (“Sod off, you shit”, he famously answered a heckler on a factory visit), he managed for a while to unite conservative opinion behind him.

He has also carried off several significant victories for the employers’ class. He pushed through a major pension “reform” (despite millions of people on one-day strikes) meaning that we all have to work longer, for less. He has reduced taxes on the rich, cut jobs in public services, encouraged police racism and clamped down on refugees and other immigrants. He has also been able to “reform” universities, putting in place the first steps towards autonomous institutions, with funding and teaching priorities tailored much more closely to the needs of big business.

Left activists, quite correctly, concentrate on the latest attacks by the government and employers on the living standards and public services of ordinary people. But if you take a step back, it is clear that working class resilience has meant that the ruling class in France has not been able to take neoliberal attacks anywhere near as far as in many other countries in Europe. Just to take a couple of examples: poverty among senior citizens is running at twice the level in the UK as it is in France; French railways are still nationalised; and university fees, over £7,000 in the UK, are around £200 in France. In quite a number of areas, France is where Britain was before the worst of the neoliberal attacks. An average full time employee works three hours a week less in France than in the UK. Schools in poorer areas still get smaller class sizes and a little more funding.

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The Creepy Ways Obama And Romney Are Getting To Know You

The Article: The Creepiness Factor: How Obama and Romney Are Getting to Know You by Terrence McCoy in The Atlantic.

The Text: On a clear day in February 2001, a trim mid-career political analyst named Matthew Dowd landed in Washington, D.C., from Austin, Tex., and hurried into the White House for a meeting with Karl Rove. Inside a manila folder, he carried a sparsely-populated bar graph. The few numbers it had hit Rove like a bomb.

“Really?” Rove asked, snatching the document and glancing back at Dowd. “Man, this is a fundamental change.”

The truly independent voting bloc, Dowd’s data showed, had dissolved from one-fourth of the electorate in 1984 to just 7 percent. That meant the years of work leading up to the 2000 campaign and hundreds of millions of campaign dollars during it had focused on just 7 percent of voters — fewer than 8 million people. Everything next time, Dowd told Rove in his second-floor office, would have to be different. Forget independents. Find the Republicans hidden among the Democrats. What Dowd wanted, he would say years later, was “Moneyball for politics.”

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A Turning Point For Venezuela

The Article: Venezuela’s turning point by Samuel Moncada in The Guardian.

The Text: Ten years ago Latin American history reached a turning point. In Venezuela, a US-backed military coup against the elected government of Hugo Chávez was stopped dead in its tracks after just a few days. It marked a clear break from the coups and subsequent dictatorships installed to defend economic elites that had cast a long shadow across Latin America. (Indeed, Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile shows what could have happened in Venezuela.) A tide of progressive governments across the continent followed.

Over the three days of the coup many were killed. Like many others, I had a friend shot dead by coup police. Casualties and human rights abuses were widespread and all democratic institutions annulled. Having appeared on national TV the day before to warn that a coup was coming, I was concerned I’d be arrested. I was lucky. The others dragged away from my apartment block were not.

The seizure of power united much of the old order – big business, media moguls, landowners, the church hierarchy – with the US. They opposed reforms giving the government a greater share of the nation’s oil wealth. But against these powerful forces stood millions of long-excluded Venezuelans. They rose up, took over the city centres and surrounded army bases demanding the return of their elected president. In defeating the coup, they began a new chapter in Venezuelan history.

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