Category Archives: Law and Order

International Day for Elimination of Violence against Women and Girls—November 25

Posted on by
Reply

When the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in his message for the International Day for Elimination of Violence against Women and Children ( November 25) that “every 11 minutes , a woman or girl is killed by an intimate partner or family member”, many people were shocked. This however is an often quoted fact when violence again women is discussed at world level, as also the fact that in the age group over 15 nearly a third of women suffer serious acts of violence including sexual violence. To this should be added abuse and sexual violence suffered by children which can leave a very lasting adverse impact. In the USA, where more reliable data is collected, nearly 40% girl children suffer from abuse and nearly 25% from sexual abuse.

While identifying causes of this violence, some are related to the traditional attitudes of gender inequality and discrimination as well as related attitudes of  dominance over them by males. However what is important is that while high levels of violence of women have been recorded in several traditional societies, these have also been recorded in highly modern and ‘liberated’ societies where women have won significant rights of equal opportunities in many walks of life. Why do high levels of violence against women continue in such societies?

This is because the basic urge or the root cause of various kinds of violence at various levels comes from the basic instinct of dominance. Why is there class violence or caste violence? It is because of the urge of dominance. Why is there inter-faith violence? It is because of dominance. Why are there wars and civil wars? Again because of the urge of dominance of one over the other. Similarly gender violence is rooted in the urge for maintaining dominance, but one difference is that here it is more likely for violence to take place within close relationships. Several societies which try to introduce more equality for women at apparent levels but do not try to check the basic problem of relations of dominance because to do so would involve deep commitment to justice and equality for which the leadership is not prepared. Hence when outward level equality appears but deeper level dominance instincts remain, this continues to be reflected in high levels of gender-violence which inevitable involves high levels of violence in close relationships.

This is why this writer has persistently argued for years that all peace efforts should be closely related and supportive at various levels, and in this context the peace efforts and anti-war efforts, the inter-faith harmony efforts, the social and economic justice efforts and gender-equality and justice efforts are closely related. Without such a comprehensive mobilization, it becomes difficult for various social movements to achieve significant and desirable gains in isolation. In this context the high levels of gender violence even in the middle of surface-level efforts for equality can be understood.

Please click the following link it is 4th article.

Patriarchy 

Theranos Verdict: it is fine to lie to customers but not to investors.

Posted on by
Reply

The verdict on Theranos founder and former CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who was tried for fraud in a U.S. court, was guilty. Theranos was a company set up by Holmes and her former partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani and had promised to revolutionize blood testing. Their advanced biotech equipment—they claimed—would provide results for a whole battery of tests with just a few drops of blood. In its heyday, Theranos was worth more than $9 billion, and Elizabeth Holmes was looked at as “the next Steve Jobs.” She was also the face that launched $724 million in stock sales to private equity firms and venture capitalists. Holmes figured in Time’s 2015 list of the 100 most influential people of the year and was feted by Wall Street as the “world’s youngest self-made female billionaire.”

The evidence presented during the trial showed that Theranos technology did not work, and Holmes, while fully aware of it, knowingly falsified the results and forged reports. These “doctored reports” showed that major pharmaceutical companies endorsed her products, and even the U.S. military was using Theranos equipment in the field.

Holmes got major names in the industry to invest almost a billion dollars in Theranos. The investors included the Walton family, who owns Walmart; Rupert Murdoch, the major media mogul; the family of Betsy DeVos, who was the former secretary of education under the Trump administration; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle; and many other people with deep pockets. Meanwhile, Theranos’ board of directors also had dazzling names including former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and former U.S. secretaries of defense James Mattis and William Perry.

The people who invested in Theranos and sat on its board are a reflection of today’s stock market: it is dominated by trillions of dollars of private wealth, estimated by the Economist in 2018 to be in the range of $9 trillion.

Please click the following Link to read the full article.

by Prabir Purkayastha

Tip Of The Inequality Iceberg, The College Admission Scandal.

Posted on by
Reply

Shared by

Syed Ehtesham

The children of working stiffs learned a brutal lesson this week as federal prosecutors criminally charged rich people with buying admission to elite universities for their less-than-stellar children.

The lesson is that no matter how hard you work, no matter how smart or talented you are, a dumb, lazy rich kid is going to beat you.

It’s crucial that everyone who is not a wealthy movie star, hedge fund executive, or corporate CEO—that is, 99 percent of all Americans—sees this college admissions scandal for what it really is: a microcosm of the larger, corrupt system that works against working people, squashing their chances for advancement.

This system is the reason that rich people and corporations got massive tax breaks last year while the 99 percent got paltry ones. It is the reason the federal minimum wage and the overtime threshold are stuck at poverty levels. It is the reason labor unions have dwindled over the past four decades.

This system is the reason we cannot have nice things. Despite all that land-of-equal-opportunity crap, the rich ensure that only they can have nice things, starting with what they can buy legally and illegally for their children and rising through what they can buy legally and illegally from politicians who make the rules that withdraw money from the pockets of working people and deposit it into the bulging bank accounts of the fabulously rich.

When the mastermind of the elite university admissions scheme, William Singer, pleaded guilty this week, he exposed the launching pad available to the well-heeled to guarantee that their children will be well-heeled. Even after the wealthy pay for their heirs to attend prohibitively expensive private preparatory academies, their grades, test scores and extracurricular activities may not add up to enough to gain them entrance to Ivy League universities, from which a degree virtually assures an overpaid position on Wall Street, and with it, another generation of wealth accumulation.

Singer admitted he developed a work-around for the wealthy. The indictment revealed that, through Singer, parents handed between $15,000 and $75,000 to college entrance exam administrators to fabricate top-notch test scores for low-achieving offspring.

That lower amount—$15,000—paid by the rich to pad SAT and ACT scores is a good example. It’s a figure of trifling import to a one-percenter. It is, however, the entire year’s earnings of a parent working full-time at the federal $7.25 minimum wage. That parent may have a child who received a perfect SAT score—without cheating—who has earned straight As, even in advanced placement classes, who excelled in soccer and served as class president. But that child of a minimum-wage worker won’t get into Harvard because the rich kid took his place with falsified test scores and faked athletic achievements.

And the rich kid and his parents have the means to ensure that members of the next generation of the family have the same opportunity to cheat their way to the top and remain there. They have the money to buy just the right politicians, something that the perverse Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court facilitated. The right-wing court ruled that rich people and corporations could give unlimited money to elect politicians of their choice.

For further reading click bellow.

Download View

Tip Of The Inequality Iceberg-College Admission Scandal

Posted on by
Reply

Shared By

Syed Ehtesham.

The children of working stiffs learned a brutal lesson this week as federal prosecutors criminally charged rich people with buying admission to elite universities for their less-than-stellar children.

The lesson is that no matter how hard you work, no matter how smart or talented you are, a dumb, lazy rich kid is going to beat you.

It’s crucial that everyone who is not a wealthy movie star, hedge fund executive, or corporate CEO—that is, 99 percent of all Americans—sees this college admissions scandal for what it really is: a microcosm of the larger, corrupt system that works against working people, squashing their chances for advancement.

This system is the reason that rich people and corporations got massive tax breaks last year while the 99 percent got paltry ones. It is the reason the federal minimum wage and the overtime threshold are stuck at poverty levels. It is the reason labor unions have dwindled over the past four decades.

This system is the reason we cannot have nice things. Despite all that land-of-equal-opportunity crap, the rich ensure that only they can have nice things, starting with what they can buy legally and illegally for their children and rising through what they can buy legally and illegally from politicians who make the rules that withdraw money from the pockets of working people and deposit it into the bulging bank accounts of the fabulously rich.

When the mastermind of the elite university admissions scheme, William Singer, pleaded guilty this week, he exposed the launching pad available to the well-heeled to guarantee that their children will be well-heeled. Even after the wealthy pay for their heirs to attend prohibitively expensive private preparatory academies, their grades, test scores and extracurricular activities may not add up to enough to gain them entrance to Ivy League universities, from which a degree virtually assures an overpaid position on Wall Street, and with it, another generation of wealth accumulation.

Singer admitted he developed a work-around for the wealthy. The indictment revealed that, through Singer, parents handed between $15,000 and $75,000 to college entrance exam administrators to fabricate top-notch test scores for low-achieving offspring.

That lower amount—$15,000—paid by the rich to pad SAT and ACT scores is a good example. It’s a figure of trifling import to a one-percenter. It is, however, the entire year’s earnings of a parent working full-time at the federal $7.25 minimum wage. That parent may have a child who received a perfect SAT score—without cheating—who has earned straight As, even in advanced placement classes, who excelled in soccer and served as class president. But that child of a minimum-wage worker won’t get into Harvard because the rich kid took his place with falsified test scores and faked athletic achievements.

And the rich kid and his parents have the means to ensure that members of the next generation of the family have the same opportunity to cheat their way to the top and remain there. They have the money to buy just the right politicians, something that the perverse Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court facilitated. The right-wing court ruled that rich people and corporations could give unlimited money to elect politicians of their choice.

For further reading please click bellow.

Download  |  View