Women Born Transsexual

From Common Dreams:  http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/23-0

by Ellen Brown
Published on Monday, June 23, 2014 by Common Dreams

“Finance is the new form of warfare – without the expense of a military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign resources, real estate, public and privatized infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership. Who needs an army when you can obtain the usual objective (monetary wealth and asset appropriation) simply by financial means?”                                                                                     — Dr. Michael Hudson, Counterpunch, October 2010

When the US Federal Reserve bought an 80% stake in American International Group (AIG) in September 2008, the unprecedented $85 billion outlay was justified as necessary to bail out the world’s largest insurance company. Today, however, central banks are on a global corporate buying spree not to bail out bankrupt corporations but simply as an investment, to compensate for the loss of bond income due to record-low interest rates. Indeed, central banks have become some of the world’s largest stock investors.

Central banks have the power to create national currencies with accounting entries, and they are traditionally very secretive. We are not allowed to peer into their books. It took a major lawsuit by Reuters and a congressional investigation to get the Fed to reveal the $16-plus trillion in loans it made to bail out giant banks and corporations after 2008.

What is to stop a foreign bank from simply printing its own currency and trading it on the currency market for dollars, to be invested in the US stock market or US real estate market?  What is to stop central banks from printing up money competitively, in a mad rush to own the world’s largest companies?

Apparently not much. Central banks are for the most part unregulated, even by their own governments. As the Federal Reserve observes on its website:

[The Fed] is considered an independent central bank because its monetary policy decisions do not have to be approved by the President or anyone else in the executive or legislative branches of government, it does not receive funding appropriated by the Congress, and the terms of the members of the Board of Governors span multiple presidential and congressional terms.

As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan quipped, “Quite frankly it does not matter who is president as far as the Fed is concerned. There are no other agencies that can overrule the action we take.”

Continue reading at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/23-0 http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/06/23-0

From The Guardian UK:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/anti-feminist-women-hobby-lobby-decision-great

How do you make sense of women who think the Hobby Lobby decision is ‘great’, college rape is ‘inflated’ and pay gaps don’t exist? Just don’t let ’em stop you

Jessica Valenti
theguardian.com, Monday 7 July 2014

Every so often, one woman engages with me on Twitter who is against women’s suffrage. That’s right – she believes women shouldn’t have the right to vote. I always hoped it was a fake account, but no – this anti-suffrage enthusiast runs a blog where she writes about religion alongside recipes. It seems the only thing we have in common is a love of beets.

When men are against feminism, it’s frustrating, if ultimately predictable – groups with power have always been loathe to give it up. But when women come out against gender justice, it feels worse: no matter how fringe, the rise of the anti-feminist woman is not just baffling but a betrayal.

Obviously “women” aren’t a monolith, and neither are the issues that they care about or believe in. But anti-feminist organizing is based on a deep hypocrisy and selfishness – an ideology built to assure conservative women that as long as they are doing just fine, other women will make due. And they’re putting up roadblocks to progress right in the middle of a renewed feminist awakening, with retrograde sexism that’s ultimately not too different than that of their male counterparts.

Last week, for example, the US supreme court’s Hobby Lobby decision left most women’s groups livid. Terry O’Neill, president of the National Organization for Women, called it “a shocking disregard for women’s health and lives.” The co-president of the National Women’s Law Center, Marcia Greenberger, said the ruling gave companies “a license to harm their female employees in the name of religion.”

But the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) – a conservative women’s group with at least a quarter-million dollars in financial ties to Rush Limbaugh – called the decision “undoubtedly good news”. The group’s director of cultural programs, Charlotte Hays, told a crowd outside the court, “This is a great day,” and called the ruling a victory “for anyone who believes in freedom of conscience.” This from the same woman who has written that women shouldn’t be astronauts and that rape culture on college campuses is all “inflated numbers” and “hysteria”.

This latest crop of female anti-feminists – powerful, Washington-based organizations like IWF and Concerned Women for America – want to repeal the Violence Against Women Act and argue that pay inequity doesn’t exist. These organizations, along with a handful of popular writers and authors, want to convince women that it’s men who are the underserved sex. They want to convince you that inequality is just a trade-off.

And as much as feminists are accused of obsessing over women’s sexuality – as if by putting so much effort into abortion and birth control, we’re reducing women’s issues to those below the belt – it is the well-funded, poorly researched anti-feminists who can’t seem to get their minds off sex.

The Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, for example, had a campaign to “bring back the hope chest”, and published a short booklet for college women called Sense and Sexuality, which doles out advice – in pink cursive writing – like this: “The rectum is an exit, not an entrance.” (As you can imagine, neither of these campaigns went viral.)

Continue reading at:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/07/anti-feminist-women-hobby-lobby-decision-great