---

Bitter Patriarchy

=By= Michael Parenti

For many poor women, welfare and family assistance was their primary means of escaping abusive mates. Such programs provided support for them and their children. Cutbacks in welfare have now caused a dramatic drop in the number who dare attempt to flee hurtful relationships. Low paying jobs, chronic unemployment, and poverty in general have left many impoverished women with few survival resources.

In desperate attempts at finding means of support and escaping their batterers, some women turn to drug dealing–which, in turn, helps explain the sharp increase in the female prison population. In recent years, the number of women in prison has climbed to over 200,000 with African-American women being hardest hit by the lock-’em-up craze.

Incarcerated women endure poor medical care, sexual harassment, forced strip searches, beatings, and repeated rape by male guards. The United States is one of the few countries that allow unaccompanied male staff to supervise female prisoners.

What kind of women end up in prison? Mostly young single mothers with few job skills, many having left home early because of sexual or physical abuse, many with a drug or alcohol addiction to ease the pain of their lives. Almost all have been living in or near poverty. Most of them are convicted of prostitution, shoplifting, petty drug dealing, or passing bad checks to feed themselves and their children.

It should come as no surprise that none of them are big-time narcotics traffickers, gangsters, crooked contractors, or financial embezzlers. The latter seldom see the inside of a penitentiary.

Few imprisoned women have committed an act of violence, though many have been victims of violence in their lives. Many are charged as accessories to crimes committed by boyfriends or ex-boyfriends who implicate them in order to get lighter sentences for themselves. Some women have been given life in prison without parole for conspiracy to distribute drugs, even though they played only tangential roles to the men involved.

Heavy sentences are also inflicted upon those who resort to self-defense. Often a woman’s choice is twenty years in prison for injuring or killing her domestic abuser or getting beaten to death herself. This war against women is part of the “war against crime.” We are supposed to feel more secure thanks to all these heartless measures.

 

---

Michael Parenti’s most recent book is Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies. Read other articles by Michael, or visit Michael’s website.

---

 

=by= Iris Vander Pluym
perrystreetpalace.com

That god, tho.
SPOTTER: STEVEN JONAS

A longtime Loyal Reader™ sent us an image of yesterday’s New York Daily News cover, which we found quite interesting.

The Daily News, if you are blissfully unacquainted, is a New York metro-area tabloid that could perhaps best be described as the unholy offspring of the city’s two other daily rags, the execrable New York Times and Rupert Murdoch’s bird cage liner The New York Post. Its editorial slant is yawningly predictable and pro-status quo; its coverage of the pope’s recent visit, for example, fawning. In a word: conservative. That is why it is extraordinary to see this headline in giant screaming letters: “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS.” The “this” refers to the latest shoot-’em-up that as of this writing has left 14 dead in San Bernardino.

I don’t know about you, but I read that as a scathing rebuke of some god or other (it’s not entirely clear to me which one). To add insult to injury, the cover features tweets from four prominent Republicans posturing about prayer—their single, inept and reflexive response to such tragedies—and highlights the fact that these very “cowards” are among the only few people on Earth in a position to actually do something about US gun violence. Then, as a final insult to Zeus (or whoever), prayers to the deity in question are openly derided by the Daily News as “meaningless platitudes.”

BOOM.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his is fantastic news, obviously: I think it’s fair to surmise that the paper’s editors have been reading my blog and finally taking the importance of god mockery to heart, if I do say so myself.

Anyway, speaking of shitty gods and shitty people, it will come as no shock to readers that the recent Planned Parenthood terrorist—who I will not name here because seriously, fuck him—is a conservative Christian, a violent, abusive, controlling, misogynist, rapist, stalker and wife batterer, with a looooong history of shitweaselry. It’s all good though, because his god totally forgives him for anything and everything he does, no matter how evil. One of his three ex-wives said in court papers, “He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases.” Christ, what an asshole. By which of course I mean the god Christ is a fucking asshole. This is the kind of shit he is only too happy to forgive:

• Planned Parenthood shooter douche made advances to a mall employee who repeatedly rebuffed him—quite justifiably, as it turns out:

[He] reportedly began to harass the woman on and off the clock. He followed her to her home and on Nov. 29, 1992, he reportedly ambushed her as she attempted to take out the trash.

“The suspect then allegedly put a knife to the victim’s neck and forced her back inside her residence,” said a police report about the incident. “The suspect then allegedly forced the victim down into the couch, struck her in the mouth with his fist, and then sexually assaulted her.”

The assault continued with [the conservative Christian] dragging the woman into a bedroom and continuing to rape her there.

His second wife, to whom he was married at the time of the rape, described the Christ-forgiven rapist in divorce filings as “controlling, abusive and serially unfaithful.” She said he “routinely gambled away the family’s money [but] was ever reluctant to provide for his wife and children financially.”

Hot-tempered and unstable, he “erupts into fury in a matter of seconds,” said [the evangelical Christian’s] second wife Barbara Mescher to attorneys. In her time with [the devout follower], she testified, she continually “lived in fear and dread of his emotional and physical abuse.”

Also:

“[The white male] has a history of arrests in South Carolina out of Colleton and Beaufort counties, records show,” said the Post and Courier‘s Glenn Smith and Melissa Boughton. “A background search completed by The Post and Courier found that [the conservative man] was arrested in 2003 on a cruelty to animals charge but was found not guilty in 2004. He was charged under the state’s Peeping Tom law in 2002 but that charge, too, was later dismissed, according to a background search.”

• A different ex-wife “called police in 1997 after a beating from [the forgiven Christian], but like the Charleston rape victim, she ultimately declined to press charges.”

Hey, if the god of the bible forgives him, why even bother to prosecute amirite?

Now okay, I admit it, here is where I get a little…confused. A timely report on a survey just issued by a Christian organization reveals that Jeezus followers have the most abortions, by far:

Surely this Jeezus can forgive them too, and presumably doesn’t need the likes of this asshole shooting at police and executing strangers on his behalf? Wow, theology is hard!

But if you take nothing else away from this little rant, take this: forgiveness is overrated. And so are gods.

---

The Palace hereby extends a royal welcome to all of its new readers at the New York Daily News editorial board! Watch and learn, editors. Watch and learn.

Have a nice day.

---

First filed by Iris Vander Pluym | December 3, 2015 at 5:16 pm | URL: http://wp.me/p14ovc-3lB

---

 

Note to Commenters
Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: editor@greanvillepost.com

We apologize for this inconvenience. 

Nauseated by the
vile corporate media?
Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL-QUOTES BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS.