They just keep coming back

Warning: This post contains links that are potentially triggering to victims of sexual violence.

Via Iraq Today, I came across this article, which reports that Iraqi women have reported been sexually harassed and assault by KBR employees.

An Iraqi woman, who worked as a cleaning lady, told British diplomats that the head of KBR had asked her to stay the night and promised to double her wage in return.

Her refusal resulted in a pay cut and she was later dismissed.

Two Iraqi cooks, who confirmed the woman's claims to Foreign Office staff, also lost their jobs shortly afterwards, the Times reported.

They had worked in the canteen and said that KBR managers groped Iraqi staff regularly and paid or rewarded them for sex.

And where have we heard of KBR before? Oh yes, that's right: Jamie Leigh Jones. As I wrote back in December, Jones was an employee of KBR stationed in Iraq who states she was raped by her coworkers and then held in a storage unit by KBR (who also misplaced her rape kit and told she could either staying in Iraq or lose her job).

After reading the article about the Iraqi women who are accusing KRB employees of sexual harassment, I googled "Jamie Leigh Jones" looking for an update and I found this youtube video of Jones testifying before the House Judiciary Committee.



In her testimony Jones states that the man who made her a drink the night she was raped told her "Don't worry; I save all my ruffies for Dubai." Jones says she took that to be a joke and felt safe with her coworkers thinking "they were all on the same team."

Now there is a whole lot tangled up in that "joke" and Jones apparent feelings of being part of a team. Over at Racialicious, Latoya Peterson looks closely at the term "oppression Olympics" and uses Andrea Smith's excellent essay Heteropatricharchy and The Three Pillars of White Supremacy to unpack the concept. In the essay Smith writes, that the Three Pillars of White Supremacy "framework does not assume that racism and white supremacy is enacted in a singular fashion; rather white supremacy is constituted by separate and distinct, but still interrelated, logics. Envision three pillars, one labeled Slavery/Capitalism, another Genocide/Capitalism, and the last one as Orientalism/War, as well as arrows connecting each of the pillars together. "

The whole essay (and Peterson's post as well as the comments) is definitely worth a close read. For the purpose of examining Jones' attacker's (or attacker's accomplice's?) joke, however, I am particularly interested in this point that Smith makes in the essay.

What keeps us trapped in our particular pillars of white supremacy is that we are seduced with the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars. For example, all non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous land. All non-Black peoples are promised if they comply, they will not be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And Black, Native, Latino, and Asian peoples are promised they will economically and politically advance if they join U.S. wars to spread "democracy."

Though this part of Smith's essay is focusing on examining the barriers to making strategic alliances between people of color and Jones is not a person of color, I don't think it's too much of a stretch here to use the above quote to examine why Jones felt "safe and part of a team" after her coworkers made a "joke" that implied that date rape drugs were being saved for Arabic women. In my opinion, the joke made Jones feel like "one of the guys." Before her rape, she is not an other, but part of team; she has "the prospect of being able to participate in the other pillars."

(Please note: I am in no way blaming Jones for being raped and then held hostage by KBR. I just wanted to examine a complicated aspect of her testimony. Being reassured by a racist joke does not equal deserves to be raped.)

Where else have I heard of KBR? Ah yes, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Klein, writing about the aftermath of Katrina, reports

Within weeks, the Gulf Coast became a domestic laboratory for the same kind of government-run-by-contractors that had been pioneered in Iraq. The companies that snatched up the biggest contracts were the familiar Baghdad gang: Halliburton's KBR unit [Sidenote: KBR is not longer part of Halliburton] had $60 million dollar gig to reconstruct military bases along the coast.

Later Klein describes some of KBR's (or their subcontractor's) practices,

According to one study "a quarter of the workers rebuilding the city were immigrants lacking papers, almost all of them Hispanic, making far less money than legal workers." In Mississippi, a class-action lawsuit forced several companies to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in back wages to immigrant workers. Some were not paid at all. On one Halliburton/KBR job site, undocumented immigrant workers reported being waken in the middle of the night by their employer (a subcontractor), who allegedly told them that immigration agents were on their way. Most workers fled to avoid arrest; after all they could end up in one of the new immigration prisons that Halliburton/KBR had been contracted to build for the federal government.

Hello, Slavery/Capitalism from Smith's analysis.

Maybe KBR should change it's slogan: All Three Pillars of White Supremacy for the Price of One!

Housing is a Human Right

In her book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein includes a chapter about New Orleans. After examining the mismanagement of disaster relief work, that the government outsourced to private contractors (using tax payers' money, if that's not clear), Klein writes

"The attacks on the disadvantaged, carried out in the name of reconstruction and relief, did not stop there. In order to offset the tens of billions going to to private companies in contracts and tax breaks, in November 2005 the Republican-controlled Congress announced that it needed to cut $40 billion from the federal budget. Among the programs that were slashed were student loans, Medicaid and food stamps. In other words, the poorest cities in the country subsidized the contractor bonanza twice---first when Katrina relief morphed into unregulated corporate handouts, providing neither decent jobs nor functional public services, and second when the few programs that directly assisted the unemployed and working poor nationwide were gutted to pay those bloated bills."

She goes on to write about the lack of progress in New Orleans, two years after Katrina hit. She writes,

"The vast majority of publicly owned housing projects stood boarded up and empty, with five thousand units slotted for the demolition by the federal housing authority...New Orleans' powerful tourism lobby had been eyeing the house projects, several of them on prime land close to the French Quarter.
Endesha Juakali helped set up a protest camp outside on of the boarded-up projects, St. Bernard Public Housing, explaining, 'they've had an agenda for St. Bernard for a long time, but as long as people lived here, they couldn't do it. So they used the disaster as a way of cleansing the neighborhood when the neighborhood is weakest...This is a great location for bigger houses and condos. The only problem is you got all these poor black people sitting on it!'"

As I read Klein's chapter on New Orleans, I was reminded of something that I had read on La Chola's blog before I went on vacation for the holidays. She has several posts on the Public Housing advocates protesting the New Orleans City Council meeting convened to approve the "untimely demolition of the 4 largest housing developments during an unprecedented housing crisis in this city." (Quote on her blog came from here.) I urge you to watch the video in her post Public Housing Advocates Attacked part 4 (which is linked above) as well as check out the link to the video of the protesting outside of the court house.

Think New Orleans provides a round-up of some links to blogs covering the controversy here.

The Coalition to Stop Demolition (I may have the name wrong, it may be called Defend New Orleans Public Housing) provides a Fact v. Myths page and a Demolition Fact Sheet. The home page provides regular updates of the Coalition's work.

In its latest update, the coalition writes,

"The City Council approved demolition plans for the four major housing developments in late December. Hundreds of people were locked out of the meeting. About a dozen people were arrested for loudly demanding that the council let people in to the empty seats. Police used pepper spray and tasered several protestors. The Council urged HUD to develop one for one replacement of affordable housing and asked for quarterly reports.

The Mayor of New Orleans has promised that there will be no demolition at Lafitte or St. Bernard until HUD shows a full-funded plan for one for one replacement of affordable housing. He announced he would allow demolition to begin at B.W. Cooper and C.J. Peete as soon as he was provided with a Memorandum of Understanding between the HUD and the residents.

Demolition on St. Bernard and Lafitte has not started. Demolition has started on C.J. Peete and B.W. Cooper"

Please check out their calls to action here. Their call for action includes urging U.S. Senate Committee on Banking Housing and Urban Affairs to finishing deliberating on Senate Bill 1668: Gulf Coast Housing Recovery Act of 2007. The bill has to get through the committee before it can be voted on in Congress (and many bills never make it out of the various committees, so it's important to let them know which ones are a priority!). This form will allow you to contact the committee with a statement in support of SB 1668.