Today, I have about 30 minutes to put something profitable up.  I don’t think a treatise on religion, independence, or HOW (in particular) the U.S. Government is presently squandering taxpayer funding. 

Let’s keep it simpler, and understand some principles that are NOT (and INTENTIONALLY not) often taught — or emphasized — in the sinkhole/jobs bank that is the U.S. Public Education system.

First of all, get that “pie in the sky” (and getting a piece of it) out of your head, and begin to understand that “money” is a created being, and like water, has a life cycle.  It FLOWS. 

Evaporation, condensation (form of clouds) and precipitation back to the ocean, rivers flow into the ocean, and more evaporation etc.  (For now, let’s not look at the BP oil contribution to that process). ….

After a year of free time (no contact with my kids, right?  Lots of thinking time as I no longer have a car, and waiting for buses isn’t exactly “down” time for problemsolving….), I’ve come to accept the income tax system as a form of water. The Federal idea (at least being promoted to the general populace) is that the big PIE in the SKY (ever seen a pie chart?  scroll down on my last post for one)….  will precipitate blessings onto us, which is one reason we should keep the system going.  Find the right “nonprofit” or “agency” to “serve” you, and your family will be OK.

I “bought” this too for a while, until I looked closer.

Not described is the “glass umbrella” which spreads them, and this “glass umbrella” effectively clouds the truths about where those funds go and how they are used.   

Compound Interest …
The 8th Wonder!

 http://www.greekshares.com/8th.php

Overall, the power of compounding can make assets grow much faster.

Money goes to Money …

Certainly!

Because compound interest is a really marvellous invention. – Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) called it the 8th Wonder – It can work for you, or against you. When you invest it works for you. When you borrow it works against you!

You can become financially secure by winning the lottery. The surer way is to save money, invest it and …

Let it compound!

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This all sounds very nice. . . . .  Now let’s talk about global debt and how it works AGAINST those who pay taxes.  And how the US Currency is itself a compounding debt program.  And how the Global, Export-based economy affects 3rd world self-sufficiency by articifially supporting / deleting support from regimes according to their compliance with this scheme.

I determined to educate myself on this simply by watching how first individual abuse (in the marriage) utilized this principal from the START — control cash flow of your woman (and impregnate her, making it harder to leave) and control her access to GET to work, regularly.  EVERYTHING goes through you, and is interpreted through you back to the world, as the head of the household.  Failure to do this well is failing to “be a man.” 

This lesson is so drilled into us we don’t even realize it, and I believe accounts for the hierarchical society we live in.  For an example of the “missing woman”, a recent comment on my blog came from two (male) authors describing their families. 

One of them named his two sons (and their school background and professions), described his HOUSE, where he lived with his (unnamed, nondescript) “wife and daughter.”  For some reason, the comment was on my post about “Waterboarding” and I believe I addressed some of this (or at least investigated his site) as an in-line edit to that comment.

That is, however, nothing, compared to our Congressmen these days, who like to meet without women present and discuss us, and the major crisis in the world and families because fathers are absent.  Naturally, women are not informed in a very timely fashion about these things (though they are posted) and our input is not part of the testimony. 

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I have been re-reading a book written in the 1980s (I have lots of books around, it’s a habit, eclectic reading….) “A Fate Worse than Debt:  The world financial crisis and the poor.”  It makes sense to me, and describes (PRE-VAWA, PRE-NFI) the MATH behind Third World Starvation.  At only 300 pages, I recommend reading.  Among other things (again, think, 1980s) it details how spiraling debt payments, basically from South to North, can trash a country.  Zaire in particular, being supported by the US is notably corrupt.

When we understand the basic principle of “COLONIZATION” (which I have been gradually raising in posts here) and how it relates to the United States even existing, and put this together with the concept that ANY colonist is NOT going to want its colonies self-sufficient, or fully-aware of their worth as laborers to their owners, we are getting closer to reality.

The other two areas that need understanding, I am sure, is that PRINCIPLES have to make SENSE or you have MYTHOLOGY.  The Mythology that corporate or powerful elitist legislators, judges, governors or governments are going to fix what’s going on at street level is I believe a myth.  Rather, the assets flow from the poorest to the increasingly centralized “Fed” conglomorate (Legislative, Executive and Judiciary increasingly blurred) and then delegate to middlemen (nonprofit grants recipients, agencies) and so forth to handle the masses. 

Constant destabilization always enriches those pulling the strings.  Changing this requires intelligent NONcompliance, NONviolent if possible, and like those who signed the US Declaration of Independence, some are going to be hurt, or financially devastated, possibly die, and voices silenced.

Then again, that’s ALREADY happening.  So let’s educate ourselves on these topics, OK?

The United States $$ is NOT “bona fide” money (it’s not backed by real gold or real assets) and it’s being purchased BY the U.S. (that means “US,” except those who can beat the tax system, as the wealthy usually can) and “we” are in perpetual compounding interest debt to the Federal Reserve Board.  Things have not ALWAYS been this way, a lot happened in the 1900s! 

I’m surprised to find this not as common knowledge as I thought.  I’ve known it for a few decades, but when it really hit home was when DV eradicated my right to employment as I knew it, and leaving DV (that’s “domestic violence”) clearly upset an entrenched family, religious and social economic system.  I didn’t have a man in the home, and it did NOT matter if the children were doing well, we were prospering, (and he had regular contact with them), my independence threatened the system, apparently..  I was shocked.  So I started a fact-hunt through the system, backed by personal acquaintance with a lot of it.  Because life is never a guarantee (especially in these situations), I blog for a trail of bread crumbs, and for my daughters, should they run across it later in life, as I have been prevented from giving them (almost anything!) in the past several years.

http://www.tni.org/

This paste is the biography of Susan George, clearly of some privilege and wealth, but I believe her books are passing on her understanding to another generation.  Below that, I contrast with the bio of Erin Pizzey, also raised in wealth and privilege (that doesn’t mean necessarily without abuse…), who is the heroine of the father’s rights movement, because she turned.

SUSAN GEORGE (June 29, 1934-) Social scientist; activist; writer

When the political scientist Susan George accepted an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, in Madrid, Spain, on April 25, 2007, she was characteristically forthright about her disdain for the political establishment, saying, as quoted on the Transnational Institute (TNI) Web site, “I believe that the forces of wealth, power and control are invariably at the root of any problem of social and political economy. The job of the responsible social scientist is first to uncover these forces, second to write about them clearly, without jargon, in order to give ordinary people the right tools for action; and finally–recognising that scholarly neutrality is an illusion–to take an advocacy position in favour of the disadvantaged, the underdogs, the victims of injustice. This is what I think the tools of scholarship are for and this is how I have tried in my own work to use them.”

Throughout her career, George has been a strident antiwar activist as well as a powerful voice against acts of corporate greed. At a time when women were not often allowed places of power in any organizational hierarchy, George established herself as a leader in the antihunger movement and legitimized her scholarship in the eyes of skeptics by obtaining an advanced degree from the Sorbonne as well as a doctorate from the University of Paris, in her adopted country of France. The author of 10 books, including How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger, Ill Fares the Land, and The Debt Boomerang, George is regarded as a preeminent political and economic thinker and activist for human rights.

George was born Susan Vance Akers on June 29, 1934 in Akron, Ohio. She was the only child of Edith and Walter Akers, Episcopalians whose families had been in America for many generations; George’s ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in 1632. George’s father was an insurance broker, and her mother was a homemaker and a member of the Junior League.

Though born during the Great Depression, George was raised in a privileged environment; she had a nursemaid and took dance classes, music lessons, and, at a YMCA, swimming lessons. After attending a public, co-educational primary school, she went on to enroll at all-girls private preparatory academy. She told Current Biography that single-sex schooling “made me not a feminist. It was normal that women do whatever anybody did. Women were the sports experts. Women were the brains. You weren’t in competition with men. You weren’t expected to shut up–on the contrary! Even in my era, I never felt that I was particularly put down as a woman ever.” George’s father encouraged all her interests, including those outside the realm of traditional femininity, such as science and baseball. When Walter Akers went to serve in World War II, his daughter assisted in planting a victory garden.

As a young student, George was a voracious reader and always ranked first in her class. Around the age of 12, she began to develop a strong passion for the culture, language, and people of France. As a teenager she chose to attend Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, specifically in order to participate in the junior-year-abroad program in France. In Paris during the 1954-55 academic year, she took courses at Sciences Po, a school specializing in social sciences. During that time, at the age of 20, she met a successful French lawyer, Charles-Henry George. In 1956, after obtaining her B.A. degree in government studies and French, she married George, 12 years her senior; she made France her permanent residence that year, but she did not obtain French citizenship until 1994. She told Current Biography that in her early years in France she felt homesick “for my women friends, probably, but not for America, per se. I’d made my choice.” The couple soon started a family. Once her three children were in school full-time, George attended the Sorbonne, obtaining the French equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1967.

George became a political activist in response to France’s war in Algeria and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. She told Current Biography, “Vietnam broke my loyal little still-American heart. The atrocities, the [U.S.] government’s lies, the betrayal of the country’s ideals, all this cried out for justice.” In 1967 George joined the Paris-American Committee to Stop War. In 1969 she became the assistant to the director of a nongovernmental organization (NGO), the American Centre for Students and Artists, for which she frequently organized antiwar events. (Her activities did not escape the attention of the FBI or the CIA; years later, taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act, she discovered hundreds of pages of information about herself that had been obtained through surveillance.)

George told Current Biography that the Vietnam War “was this sort of gateway to understanding what America could be, which is to say something quite negative, which I had not understood at all when I lived there. I had accepted the usual propaganda.” In 1971 she began working with the Front Solidarite Indochine, a group that organized antiwar lectures and protests in France. Her participation in their activities forced her to overcome her fear of public speaking. She also began volunteering as a translator for American, Cambodian, and Laotian antiwar activists. When the Paris-American Committee to Stop War was forcibly dismantled by the French government (which, according to George, acted at the request of the U.S. government), George collaborated with the directors of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., to form a new NGO devoted to social justice–the Transnational Institute, which opened its doors in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1973. George remains a fellow at TNI and also serves as its board chair.

After the Chilean president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in September 1973, George helped Chilean political refugees to settle in France. In 1974 she enrolled in a doctoral program in political science at the School of Higher Social Science Studies at the University of Paris, completing her degree in 1978 and receiving highest honors. Meanwhile, in 1974 she traveled to the World Food Conference in Rome, Italy, where she was enraged by the corporate agribusiness representatives who dominated the proceedings. The World Food Conference was organized by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an agency designed to lead international efforts against famine and malnutrition; the two largest delegations at the conference were those of the United States and the agriculture industry. George felt that the FAO gave too much power to transnational agribusiness corporations. She told Current Biography, “This event was a turning point for me. . . . I was incensed at the level of official cant and the politics played with millions of hungry people’s lives.” She added that at the conference, “no one who counted took the real reasons for hunger–power and control in the wrong hands–into account.”

In 1976 Penguin published George’s first book, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger. According to the Web site of the Transnational Institute, “Hunger is not a scourge but a scandal. This is the premise of Susan George’s classic study of world hunger. Contrary to popular opinion, malnutrition and starvation are not the result of over-population, of poor climate or lack of cultivatable land. The reason why hunger exists on such a vast scale is because world food supplies are controlled by the rich and powerful for the wealthy consumer. . . . Working with local elites, protected by the powerful West, the United States paves the way and is gradually imposing its control over the whole planet. . . . The book’s relevance, its ability to shock and its power to enrage have in no measure [diminished].” George told Current Biography that the book “launched” her when she was 42. “Everyone has the right to one enormous stroke of luck in life and this was mine. I’ve never looked back.” How the Other Half Dies was a critical and financial success. William Diebold Jr. wrote for Foreign Affairs (January 1978) that the book was “a lively analysis. . . . The prescription is for change.”

Thirty years after the book was published, George remained deeply concerned with issues of famine and food distribution. She attended the Table of Free Voices conference, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2006 and organized by Dropping Knowledge, a German nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of international dialogue, art, and culture; as quoted on the TNI Web site, she said at the conference, “We . . . produce enough food for everyone, but most of this production is in places where people are not going hungry; and where people are going hungry, very often their farmers have been ruined by cheap imports coming from the rich countries. This has happened massively in Mexico. So, there are many more poor Mexicans than there were and many have lost their farms and these people cannot compete. Thai rice farmers have lost their land; Filipino rice farmers have lost their land.”

George published her 1978 doctoral dissertation, Les Strateges de la faim (Strategists of Hunger), in Switzerland in 1982. In the following year she published Food for Beginners, illustrated by Nigel Paige. She played an active role in organizing the World Food Assembly, a meeting held in Rome, Italy, in 1984 for the purpose of fighting famine and seeking social justice and composed of representatives of nongovernmental organizations from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. George’s book A Fate Worse than Debt appeared in 1987. In her address to the executive committee of the World Alliance of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 19, 1999, George said about her reasons for writing the book, “We identified the fact that debt [owed to wealthy lending nations by poor countries] was the biggest new contributing factor to world hunger. That is why, having worked on world hunger and with a lot of NGOs, I got involved in studying debt. I tried to make a clear explanation of how it was contributing to economic injustice, and the very real effects on human beings: hunger, misery, a much worse life for women in particular, increased crime, riots, conflict, ecological destruction. Debt was involved in all of these issues.” In “Rethinking Debt,” a paper presented at the nongovernmental organization (NGO) conference North-South Roundtable on Moving Africa into the 21st Century, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in October 1995, George wrote, “Debt lies at the nexus of a strategic, worldwide reconfiguration of power. . . . It has accelerated transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich both within and between countries. . . . It has downgraded and diminished the importance of the State and the ability of governments to govern; as well as the overall influence and negotiating capacity of the ‘third world.’ . . . The creditors may not be open to moral arguments, but if Africans speak with one voice, they may, perhaps, convince them that their interest lies in severing the debt noose.” At the time of the book’s publication, as George told the executive committee of the World Alliance of the YMCA, further explaining her impetus for writing it, “there were . . . a good many campaigns and lots of NGOs . . . interested in this issue, but it was clear that we weren’t getting any involvement from the top people, from either governments, or the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”

In 1990 George published Ill Fares the Land. From that year until 1995, she served on the board of the environmental conservation group Greenpeace International and of Greenpeace France. She particularly admired the organization’s ability to mobilize its many regional branches to focus on protesting one major issue at a time. In an interview with Caspar Henderson for the Web site OpenDemocracy.org (October 13, 2004), George said, “Greenpeace was quite successful with such campaigns. All its offices across the world would suspend their particular activities and join together.”

The Debt Boomerang, George’s 1992 volume, continued her analysis of the inequalities between the wealthier nations of the Northern Hemisphere and the poorer countries of the Southern Hemisphere. She told the executive committee of the World Alliance of the YMCA that she wrote the book “with the idea that if the suffering in the South was not enough to move the powers, perhaps it would help if it was explained that the debt was not just a problem for the South, but that in fact it was a boomerang and it was coming back and affecting the rich countries in a great many ways.” In Faith and Credit: the World Bank’s Secular Empire (1994), which she wrote with the anthropologist Fabrizio Sabelli, George expounded her beliefs regarding the negative impact of the World Bank on the worldwide poverty and hunger crisis. The World Bank, founded in July 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, consists of five organizations responsible for providing funds and advice to countries in order to promote economic development and eliminate poverty. Supporters of the organization argue that the World Bank conducts ethical and transparent business with countries in need of help. Critics, including George, contend that the World Bank is a corrupt institution that provides insufficient assistance to poorer countries. According to the Bretton Woods Project Web site, “With the World Bank, there are concerns about the types of development projects funded . . . Many infrastructural projects financed by the World Bank Group have social and environmental implications for the populations in the affected areas and criticism has centred around the ethical issues of funding such projects. For example, World Bank-funded construction of hydroelectric dams in various countries have resulted in the displacement of indigenous peoples of the area. There are also concerns that the World Bank working in partnership with the private sector may undermine the role of the state as the primary provider of essential goods and services, such as healthcare and education, resulting in the shortfall of such services in countries badly in need of them.” George said at the Table of Free Voices conference, “Our wealth does not depend on the Third World being poor, but we have organized everything in the North so that the Third World does remain poor. If the Third World were less poor, we would be selling them more, and we would in fact be richer.”

La Suisse aux encheres (whose title translates roughly as “Switzerland Auctioned Off”), another collaboration with Sabelli, appeared in Switzerland in 1997. Two years later George published The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the 21st Century. The book is a fictional report issued by a group of imaginary pro-capitalist, pro-globalization experts who raise the question of how to preserve capitalism forever. George explained at the Table of Free Voices conference that the book contains a scenario in which “I imagine that there is a report to be directed to Master of the Universe types who are asking pretty much that kind of question. How can we continue with this economic system without having total collapse? What must we do to make this continue to work? And the answer which is given unfortunately by this group of experts which I have invented . . . is, well, you cannot do it with eight billion people on earth as there are going to be in 2020. That’s tomorrow in historical terms. So, the long emergency has already started. And, if we try to manage the world as we are doing now with eight billion people on earth, everything is going to collapse.”

From 1999 to 2006 George served as vice president of the Association for Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens (ATTAC France). During that period she also participated in the Helsinki Process, which she described to Current Biography as “a group established by the governments of Finland and Tanzania, with many other governments now acting as ‘Friends’ of the Process, trying to deal with the problems of globalization.” She grew increasingly critical of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the weeks before its 1999 meeting in Seattle, Washington. The World Trade Organization is responsible for negotiating and implementing new international trade agreements as well as enforcing member countries’ adherence to those agreements. Its governing body, the Ministerial Conference, meets every two years. The WTO’s advocates argue that the organization is an important intermediary between countries and is a positive force for financial growth in all nations. Detractors such as George argue that the WTO is biased in favor of wealthy countries and multinational corporations and that it harms smaller, less powerful countries. Critics see the WTO as a major force for globalization, the process by which corporations are allowed increasing flexibility with regard to global expansion as well as financial, environmental, and labor practices. The Seattle meeting of the Ministerial Conference of the WTO was disrupted by mass protests on the part of antiglobalization groups. George wrote for the London Guardian (November 24, 1999), “Without warning, the WTO has created an international court of ‘justice’ that is making law and establishing case law in which existing national laws are all ‘barriers’ to trade, and is sweeping aside all environmental, social or public health concerns.” George wrote for Le Monde diplomatique (January 2000), “The civic movement’s success in Seattle is a mystery only to those who had no part in it. . . . Trade must have no place in areas such as health, education and culture in the broadest sense of the term.” George published Remettre l’OMC a sa Place (Put the WTO in Its Place) in 2001 and, the next year, Pour ou Contre la Mondialisation Liberale, consisting of a debate with Martin Wolf of the Financial Times.

Offering a critical take on George’s work, Mark O’Brien wrote for International Socialism (Spring 2000), “The weakness of George’s analysis of the economic roots of the crisis of world capitalism leads directly to an uncertainty as to who her audience actually is. Often her writings read as an appeal to opinion formers and practitioners within government or development circles. . . . Her proposals border on an almost utopian belief in the humanitarian good sense of some elements within capitalist governments. . . . There is no sense in George’s writings of the revolutionary potential of the working classes of the Third World and of the West.”

George’s book Another World Is Possible If . . . came out in 2004. She told Henderson, “This is at the heart of my book’s argument–that Europeans must lead the world. My experience is that there are many people outside the movement who sense that there are a lot of things wrong with the world, but who are hesitant or unclear about what they are able to do. Here, my central argument is that, faced with an America that is going to be immovable . . . Europe has to lead the change. . . . So my plea to Europeans is to recognize who they are, what their achievements have been for the interests of the poor and working people over the last hundred years and say that a welfare model is possible for the entire world–and that it’s up to us in Europe to make that happen.”

In 2004 George half-heartedly supported the candidacy of U.S. senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, for president. While she had canvassed for Kerry in Pennsylvania, she wrote for OpenDemocracy.org (November 3, 2004), “we all thought [Kerry] had a very good chance, even though everyone admitted it was hard to get really enthusiastic about him. . . . The man isn’t the most charismatic ever to walk the earth. But at least he’s not a proto-fascist or a go-it-aloner, and that’s what we seem–apart from a last-minute miracle–to be stuck with now. With four years clear ahead of him and no re-election to worry about, I fear Bush and the ghastly neo-con/neo-liberals around him will now go on the rampage. They can continue with impunity their attacks on the Constitution and on hard-won freedoms; while profound economic inequalities and religious obscurantism spread throughout the country.”

George published Nou, Peuples d’Europe (We, the Peoples of Europe) in 2005. She received an honorary doctorate in civil law from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in January 2007, and in March of that year, the International Studies Association presented her with its first award for Outstanding Public Scholar at its congress in Chicago, Illinois. Also in 2007 she received an honorary doctorate in political science and sociology from the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, in Madrid. As of May 2007 George had written and was awaiting the publication of “Culture in Chains: How the Religious and Secular Right Captured America.” Publishers in Spain, Brazil, and France swiftly acquired the book. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, four Scandinavian languages, Estonian, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, and Thai.

In 2002 George’s husband, Charles-Henry George, died at their country home in France. She has three adult children–Valerie, Michel, and Stephanie–and is a grandmother. George told Current Biography, “Either we achieve together a new level of human emancipation, and do so in a way that preserves the earth, or we shall leave behind us the worst future for our children that capitalism and nature can deal them. No one knows in which direction the balance will tip nor does anyone know which actions, which writings, which alliances may achieve the critical mass that leads us one way or another, backwards or forwards. I am acutely conscious of the precariousness of our moment and my four much-loved grandchildren give me added resolve to address it.”

Suggested Reading: (London) Guardian (on-line) Nov. 24, 1999; OpenDemocracy.org; Transnational Institute Wet site

Selected Books: How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger, 1976; Les Strateges de la Faim, 1982; Food for Beginners, 1983; A Fate Worse than Debt, 1987; Ill Fares the Land, 1990; The Debt Boomerang, 1992; Faith and Credit: the World Bank’s Secular Empire, 1994; La Suisse aux Encheres, 1997; The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the 21st Century, 1999; Remettre l’OMC a sa, 2001; Another World Is Possible If . . ., 2004; Nou, Peuples d’Europe, 2005

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From Current Biography (2007), © The H. W. Wilson Company, Volume 68 Number 7, July 2007, pp. 34-40.

Erin Pizzey — Founder of Modern Women’s Shelter Movement

SUSAN GEORGE (June 29, 1934-) Social scientist; activist; writerWhen the political scientist Susan George accepted an honorary doctorate from the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, in Madrid, Spain, on April 25, 2007, she was characteristically forthright about her disdain for the political establishment, saying, as quoted on the Transnational Institute (TNI) Web site, “I believe that the forces of wealth, power and control are invariably at the root of any problem of social and political economy. The job of the responsible social scientist is first to uncover these forces, second to write about them clearly, without jargon, in order to give ordinary people the right tools for action; and finally–recognising that scholarly neutrality is an illusion–to take an advocacy position in favour of the disadvantaged, the underdogs, the victims of injustice. This is what I think the tools of scholarship are for and this is how I have tried in my own work to use them.”

Throughout her career, George has been a strident antiwar activist as well as a powerful voice against acts of corporate greed. At a time when women were not often allowed places of power in any organizational hierarchy, George established herself as a leader in the antihunger movement and legitimized her scholarship in the eyes of skeptics by obtaining an advanced degree from the Sorbonne as well as a doctorate from the University of Paris, in her adopted country of France. The author of 10 books, including How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger, Ill Fares the Land, and The Debt Boomerang, George is regarded as a preeminent political and economic thinker and activist for human rights.

George was born Susan Vance Akers on June 29, 1934 in Akron, Ohio. She was the only child of Edith and Walter Akers, Episcopalians whose families had been in America for many generations; George’s ancestors arrived in Massachusetts in 1632. George’s father was an insurance broker, and her mother was a homemaker and a member of the Junior League.

Though born during the Great Depression, George was raised in a privileged environment; she had a nursemaid and took dance classes, music lessons, and, at a YMCA, swimming lessons. After attending a public, co-educational primary school, she went on to enroll at all-girls private preparatory academy. She told Current Biography that single-sex schooling “made me not a feminist. It was normal that women do whatever anybody did. Women were the sports experts. Women were the brains. You weren’t in competition with men. You weren’t expected to shut up–on the contrary! Even in my era, I never felt that I was particularly put down as a woman ever.” George’s father encouraged all her interests, including those outside the realm of traditional femininity, such as science and baseball. When Walter Akers went to serve in World War II, his daughter assisted in planting a victory garden.

As a young student, George was a voracious reader and always ranked first in her class. Around the age of 12, she began to develop a strong passion for the culture, language, and people of France. As a teenager she chose to attend Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, specifically in order to participate in the junior-year-abroad program in France. In Paris during the 1954-55 academic year, she took courses at Sciences Po, a school specializing in social sciences. During that time, at the age of 20, she met a successful French lawyer, Charles-Henry George. In 1956, after obtaining her B.A. degree in government studies and French, she married George, 12 years her senior; she made France her permanent residence that year, but she did not obtain French citizenship until 1994. She told Current Biography that in her early years in France she felt homesick “for my women friends, probably, but not for America, per se. I’d made my choice.” The couple soon started a family. Once her three children were in school full-time, George attended the Sorbonne, obtaining the French equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1967.

George became a political activist in response to France’s war in Algeria and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. She told Current Biography, “Vietnam broke my loyal little still-American heart. The atrocities, the [U.S.] government’s lies, the betrayal of the country’s ideals, all this cried out for justice.” In 1967 George joined the Paris-American Committee to Stop War. In 1969 she became the assistant to the director of a nongovernmental organization (NGO), the American Centre for Students and Artists, for which she frequently organized antiwar events. (Her activities did not escape the attention of the FBI or the CIA; years later, taking advantage of the Freedom of Information Act, she discovered hundreds of pages of information about herself that had been obtained through surveillance.)

George told Current Biography that the Vietnam War “was this sort of gateway to understanding what America could be, which is to say something quite negative, which I had not understood at all when I lived there. I had accepted the usual propaganda.” In 1971 she began working with the Front Solidarite Indochine, a group that organized antiwar lectures and protests in France. Her participation in their activities forced her to overcome her fear of public speaking. She also began volunteering as a translator for American, Cambodian, and Laotian antiwar activists. When the Paris-American Committee to Stop War was forcibly dismantled by the French government (which, according to George, acted at the request of the U.S. government), George collaborated with the directors of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., to form a new NGO devoted to social justice–the Transnational Institute, which opened its doors in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1973. George remains a fellow at TNI and also serves as its board chair.

After the Chilean president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup in September 1973, George helped Chilean political refugees to settle in France. In 1974 she enrolled in a doctoral program in political science at the School of Higher Social Science Studies at the University of Paris, completing her degree in 1978 and receiving highest honors. Meanwhile, in 1974 she traveled to the World Food Conference in Rome, Italy, where she was enraged by the corporate agribusiness representatives who dominated the proceedings. The World Food Conference was organized by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), an agency designed to lead international efforts against famine and malnutrition; the two largest delegations at the conference were those of the United States and the agriculture industry. George felt that the FAO gave too much power to transnational agribusiness corporations. She told Current Biography, “This event was a turning point for me. . . . I was incensed at the level of official cant and the politics played with millions of hungry people’s lives.” She added that at the conference, “no one who counted took the real reasons for hunger–power and control in the wrong hands–into account.”

In 1976 Penguin published George’s first book, How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger. According to the Web site of the Transnational Institute, “Hunger is not a scourge but a scandal. This is the premise of Susan George’s classic study of world hunger. Contrary to popular opinion, malnutrition and starvation are not the result of over-population, of poor climate or lack of cultivatable land. The reason why hunger exists on such a vast scale is because world food supplies are controlled by the rich and powerful for the wealthy consumer. . . . Working with local elites, protected by the powerful West, the United States paves the way and is gradually imposing its control over the whole planet. . . . The book’s relevance, its ability to shock and its power to enrage have in no measure [diminished].” George told Current Biography that the book “launched” her when she was 42. “Everyone has the right to one enormous stroke of luck in life and this was mine. I’ve never looked back.” How the Other Half Dies was a critical and financial success. William Diebold Jr. wrote for Foreign Affairs (January 1978) that the book was “a lively analysis. . . . The prescription is for change.”

Thirty years after the book was published, George remained deeply concerned with issues of famine and food distribution. She attended the Table of Free Voices conference, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2006 and organized by Dropping Knowledge, a German nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of international dialogue, art, and culture; as quoted on the TNI Web site, she said at the conference, “We . . . produce enough food for everyone, but most of this production is in places where people are not going hungry; and where people are going hungry, very often their farmers have been ruined by cheap imports coming from the rich countries. This has happened massively in Mexico. So, there are many more poor Mexicans than there were and many have lost their farms and these people cannot compete. Thai rice farmers have lost their land; Filipino rice farmers have lost their land.”

George published her 1978 doctoral dissertation, Les Strateges de la faim (Strategists of Hunger), in Switzerland in 1982. In the following year she published Food for Beginners, illustrated by Nigel Paige. She played an active role in organizing the World Food Assembly, a meeting held in Rome, Italy, in 1984 for the purpose of fighting famine and seeking social justice and composed of representatives of nongovernmental organizations from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. George’s book A Fate Worse than Debt appeared in 1987. In her address to the executive committee of the World Alliance of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 19, 1999, George said about her reasons for writing the book, “We identified the fact that debt [owed to wealthy lending nations by poor countries] was the biggest new contributing factor to world hunger. That is why, having worked on world hunger and with a lot of NGOs, I got involved in studying debt. I tried to make a clear explanation of how it was contributing to economic injustice, and the very real effects on human beings: hunger, misery, a much worse life for women in particular, increased crime, riots, conflict, ecological destruction. Debt was involved in all of these issues.” In “Rethinking Debt,” a paper presented at the nongovernmental organization (NGO) conference North-South Roundtable on Moving Africa into the 21st Century, held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in October 1995, George wrote, “Debt lies at the nexus of a strategic, worldwide reconfiguration of power. . . . It has accelerated transfers of wealth from the poor to the rich both within and between countries. . . . It has downgraded and diminished the importance of the State and the ability of governments to govern; as well as the overall influence and negotiating capacity of the ‘third world.’ . . . The creditors may not be open to moral arguments, but if Africans speak with one voice, they may, perhaps, convince them that their interest lies in severing the debt noose.” At the time of the book’s publication, as George told the executive committee of the World Alliance of the YMCA, further explaining her impetus for writing it, “there were . . . a good many campaigns and lots of NGOs . . . interested in this issue, but it was clear that we weren’t getting any involvement from the top people, from either governments, or the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.”

In 1990 George published Ill Fares the Land. From that year until 1995, she served on the board of the environmental conservation group Greenpeace International and of Greenpeace France. She particularly admired the organization’s ability to mobilize its many regional branches to focus on protesting one major issue at a time. In an interview with Caspar Henderson for the Web site OpenDemocracy.org (October 13, 2004), George said, “Greenpeace was quite successful with such campaigns. All its offices across the world would suspend their particular activities and join together.”

The Debt Boomerang, George’s 1992 volume, continued her analysis of the inequalities between the wealthier nations of the Northern Hemisphere and the poorer countries of the Southern Hemisphere. She told the executive committee of the World Alliance of the YMCA that she wrote the book “with the idea that if the suffering in the South was not enough to move the powers, perhaps it would help if it was explained that the debt was not just a problem for the South, but that in fact it was a boomerang and it was coming back and affecting the rich countries in a great many ways.” In Faith and Credit: the World Bank’s Secular Empire (1994), which she wrote with the anthropologist Fabrizio Sabelli, George expounded her beliefs regarding the negative impact of the World Bank on the worldwide poverty and hunger crisis. The World Bank, founded in July 1944 at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, consists of five organizations responsible for providing funds and advice to countries in order to promote economic development and eliminate poverty. Supporters of the organization argue that the World Bank conducts ethical and transparent business with countries in need of help. Critics, including George, contend that the World Bank is a corrupt institution that provides insufficient assistance to poorer countries. According to the Bretton Woods Project Web site, “With the World Bank, there are concerns about the types of development projects funded . . . Many infrastructural projects financed by the World Bank Group have social and environmental implications for the populations in the affected areas and criticism has centred around the ethical issues of funding such projects. For example, World Bank-funded construction of hydroelectric dams in various countries have resulted in the displacement of indigenous peoples of the area. There are also concerns that the World Bank working in partnership with the private sector may undermine the role of the state as the primary provider of essential goods and services, such as healthcare and education, resulting in the shortfall of such services in countries badly in need of them.” George said at the Table of Free Voices conference, “Our wealth does not depend on the Third World being poor, but we have organized everything in the North so that the Third World does remain poor. If the Third World were less poor, we would be selling them more, and we would in fact be richer.”

La Suisse aux encheres (whose title translates roughly as “Switzerland Auctioned Off”), another collaboration with Sabelli, appeared in Switzerland in 1997. Two years later George published The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the 21st Century. The book is a fictional report issued by a group of imaginary pro-capitalist, pro-globalization experts who raise the question of how to preserve capitalism forever. George explained at the Table of Free Voices conference that the book contains a scenario in which “I imagine that there is a report to be directed to Master of the Universe types who are asking pretty much that kind of question. How can we continue with this economic system without having total collapse? What must we do to make this continue to work? And the answer which is given unfortunately by this group of experts which I have invented . . . is, well, you cannot do it with eight billion people on earth as there are going to be in 2020. That’s tomorrow in historical terms. So, the long emergency has already started. And, if we try to manage the world as we are doing now with eight billion people on earth, everything is going to collapse.”

From 1999 to 2006 George served as vice president of the Association for Taxation of Financial Transactions to Aid Citizens (ATTAC France). During that period she also participated in the Helsinki Process, which she described to Current Biography as “a group established by the governments of Finland and Tanzania, with many other governments now acting as ‘Friends’ of the Process, trying to deal with the problems of globalization.” She grew increasingly critical of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in the weeks before its 1999 meeting in Seattle, Washington. The World Trade Organization is responsible for negotiating and implementing new international trade agreements as well as enforcing member countries’ adherence to those agreements. Its governing body, the Ministerial Conference, meets every two years. The WTO’s advocates argue that the organization is an important intermediary between countries and is a positive force for financial growth in all nations. Detractors such as George argue that the WTO is biased in favor of wealthy countries and multinational corporations and that it harms smaller, less powerful countries. Critics see the WTO as a major force for globalization, the process by which corporations are allowed increasing flexibility with regard to global expansion as well as financial, environmental, and labor practices. The Seattle meeting of the Ministerial Conference of the WTO was disrupted by mass protests on the part of antiglobalization groups. George wrote for the London Guardian (November 24, 1999), “Without warning, the WTO has created an international court of ‘justice’ that is making law and establishing case law in which existing national laws are all ‘barriers’ to trade, and is sweeping aside all environmental, social or public health concerns.” George wrote for Le Monde diplomatique (January 2000), “The civic movement’s success in Seattle is a mystery only to those who had no part in it. . . . Trade must have no place in areas such as health, education and culture in the broadest sense of the term.” George published Remettre l’OMC a sa Place (Put the WTO in Its Place) in 2001 and, the next year, Pour ou Contre la Mondialisation Liberale, consisting of a debate with Martin Wolf of the Financial Times.

Offering a critical take on George’s work, Mark O’Brien wrote for International Socialism (Spring 2000), “The weakness of George’s analysis of the economic roots of the crisis of world capitalism leads directly to an uncertainty as to who her audience actually is. Often her writings read as an appeal to opinion formers and practitioners within government or development circles. . . . Her proposals border on an almost utopian belief in the humanitarian good sense of some elements within capitalist governments. . . . There is no sense in George’s writings of the revolutionary potential of the working classes of the Third World and of the West.”

George’s book Another World Is Possible If . . . came out in 2004. She told Henderson, “This is at the heart of my book’s argument–that Europeans must lead the world. My experience is that there are many people outside the movement who sense that there are a lot of things wrong with the world, but who are hesitant or unclear about what they are able to do. Here, my central argument is that, faced with an America that is going to be immovable . . . Europe has to lead the change. . . . So my plea to Europeans is to recognize who they are, what their achievements have been for the interests of the poor and working people over the last hundred years and say that a welfare model is possible for the entire world–and that it’s up to us in Europe to make that happen.”

In 2004 George half-heartedly supported the candidacy of U.S. senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, for president. While she had canvassed for Kerry in Pennsylvania, she wrote for OpenDemocracy.org (November 3, 2004), “we all thought [Kerry] had a very good chance, even though everyone admitted it was hard to get really enthusiastic about him. . . . The man isn’t the most charismatic ever to walk the earth. But at least he’s not a proto-fascist or a go-it-aloner, and that’s what we seem–apart from a last-minute miracle–to be stuck with now. With four years clear ahead of him and no re-election to worry about, I fear Bush and the ghastly neo-con/neo-liberals around him will now go on the rampage. They can continue with impunity their attacks on the Constitution and on hard-won freedoms; while profound economic inequalities and religious obscurantism spread throughout the country.”

George published Nou, Peuples d’Europe (We, the Peoples of Europe) in 2005. She received an honorary doctorate in civil law from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in January 2007, and in March of that year, the International Studies Association presented her with its first award for Outstanding Public Scholar at its congress in Chicago, Illinois. Also in 2007 she received an honorary doctorate in political science and sociology from the Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia, in Madrid. As of May 2007 George had written and was awaiting the publication of “Culture in Chains: How the Religious and Secular Right Captured America.” Publishers in Spain, Brazil, and France swiftly acquired the book. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, four Scandinavian languages, Estonian, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, and Thai.

In 2002 George’s husband, Charles-Henry George, died at their country home in France. She has three adult children–Valerie, Michel, and Stephanie–and is a grandmother. George told Current Biography, “Either we achieve together a new level of human emancipation, and do so in a way that preserves the earth, or we shall leave behind us the worst future for our children that capitalism and nature can deal them. No one knows in which direction the balance will tip nor does anyone know which actions, which writings, which alliances may achieve the critical mass that leads us one way or another, backwards or forwards. I am acutely conscious of the precariousness of our moment and my four much-loved grandchildren give me added resolve to address it.”

Suggested Reading: (London) Guardian (on-line) Nov. 24, 1999; OpenDemocracy.org; Transnational Institute Wet site

Selected Books: How the Other Half Dies: The Real Reasons for World Hunger, 1976; Les Strateges de la Faim, 1982; Food for Beginners, 1983; A Fate Worse than Debt, 1987; Ill Fares the Land, 1990; The Debt Boomerang, 1992; Faith and Credit: the World Bank’s Secular Empire, 1994; La Suisse aux Encheres, 1997; The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the 21st Century, 1999; Remettre l’OMC a sa, 2001; Another World Is Possible If . . ., 2004; Nou, Peuples d’Europe, 2005

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From Current Biography (2007), © The H. W. Wilson Company, Volume 68 Number 7, July 2007, pp. 34-40.

And now here is “Erin Pizzey”, I believe this summary also around 1982:

Erin Pizzey — Founder of Modern Women’s Shelter Movement

Some bio background (from this site):

ABOUT ERIN PIZZEY

Erin Patria Pizzey, nee Carney. da Cyril Carney MBE Diplomatic Service (d 1980)m. Ruth Patricia Last. b. 19 Feb. 1939. Educ. Leweston Manor, Sherbourne Dorest; m 1961 9m dis 1979) 1.Amos b1976, d.cleo b. 1961. 7 adopted sons, grandchildren, Keita Craig b. 21 Apr 1977 Amber Craig b 24 Jan. 1979. Dymitri Scott b 24 Jan. 1990.

Career: International author USA Harper Collins. Translation rights to: Japan, Russia, Greece, Brazil, Poland, Latvia, Israel, Italy, Hungary, Turkey. All English speaking countries. Published poet and playwright. International founder of refuges for battered women and children working in the field of Domestic Violence.

Awards: International Order of volunteers For Peace, Diploma Of Honour (Italy) 1981. Nancy Astor Award for Journalism 1983. World congress of Victimology (San Francisco) 1987. St. Valentino Palm d’Oro International Award for Literature, Italy, February 14th 1994.

Non fiction: Scream quietly or the Neighbours will Hear, edited by Alison Forbes Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1974 (first book in the world on wife battering – out of print (the Edmonton Public Main Library has a listing) Infernal Child – a memoir – out of print Slut’s Cookbook Erin Pizzey Collects Prone to Violence  – working with violent women, out of print for a long time — now back in print (an on-line version is available too)

Fiction: The Watershed, London : H. Hamilton, 1983 In the Shadow of the Castle, London : Hamilton, 1984 Morningstar, London [England] : Harper Collins, 1992 The Pleasure Palace First Lady The Consul General’s Daughter, London : Collins, 1988 The Snow Leopard Of Shanghai Other Lovers, London : Collins, 1991 Swimming with Dolphins, London [England] : Harper Collins, 1993 For The Love Of A Stranger Kisses, London [England] : Harper Collins Publishers, 1995    Described by Erin Pizzey as being her most anti-feminist book    Reviews and Ordering The wicked World of Women, London [England] : Harper Collins Publishers, c1996. The Fame Game (in progress) Hugs and Kisses (in progress)

Short Stories: The Man In The Blue Van The Frangipani Tree Addictions Dancing Sand

Contributed to The New Statesman, The Sunday Times, Cosmopolitan. Contributed to journals and newspapers internationally and completed two world tours lecturing on domestic violence and helping to set up refuges. Invited by the German Government to Berlin to speak and to show my film ‘SCREAM QUIETLY OR THE NEIGHBOURS WILL HEAR.’ 1977 Lunch of honour on Capitol Hill sponsored by Congresswoman Lindy Boggs and Congressman Newton-Steer. 1978 invited by Mental Health Association of New Zealand to give lecture tour. 1979 invited by US Government and sponsored by The Salvation Army to do a second lecture tour of 21 cities. 1979 film SCREAM QUIETLY OR THE NEIGHBOURS WILL HEAR aired twice nationally on PBS in America. 1982 asked to be resident expert on family Violence show on ‘Phil Donahue.’ 1884 gave evidence in San Antonio, Texas to President Reagan’s Attorney General’s Task Force on Family Violence. Guest of honour in Rome of a conference of women International Supreme Court Judges, 1994.

 

The article in question: 

“Planned Destruction of the Family”

  by ERIN PIZZEY

Just recently a ‘battered woman,’ for that is how she saw herself, came to me for help.  Her lover, who lived apart from her and her children, had beaten her up badly and she was forced to go to the hospital. He then took her back to her own house and stayed with her in order to look after her while her wounds healed.

‘You are not a battered woman,’ I said with a sigh. I define a battered woman as a woman who is a genuine victim of her partner’s violence. ‘You are a violence-prone woman, a victim of your own need for violence.’ 

This comment indicates a need to read some Phyllis Chesler and a lack of understanding of HOW women possibly GOT to these stages.  Also a serious failure to analyze some of the major religions.

I sighed because those two sentences uttered twenty-five years ago in my early work at Chiswick caused me to be hated and despised.  I became the nation’s conscience. 

That statement is megalomania.  No one person represents a nation, except perhaps (figuratively) in England, the Queen…

I dared to say publicly that women can be as violent as men and that women were a great deal more psychologically violent than men.  In this woman’s case we have a great deal of work to do and he needs to find himself a good therapist.

In 1971, inspired by the promise of women journalists and other media-manipulators, I decided to join the newly founded Women’s Movement. ‘Sisterhood is powerful’ they chanted. ‘Sisters unite, no more competing, women helping women.’ 

Susan George’s book on Debt (above), cites on p. 113 (my version), in Zaire, a group of 400 women VILLAGERS confronting TWO ARMY ROAD BLOCKS on the way to the closest market. 

“Thus a group of 5400 women villages simultaneously confronted the two army road blocks on the way to the closest market.  The ‘taxes’ they were obliged to pay the officers were depriving them of any gains they might make from selling their crops.  The soldiers weren’t prepared ot take on such a united group.  Their captain accused the local parish of subversion, bu tthe people stuck together and the road blocks were finally removed.”

Also (the preceding sentences”  re:  Solidarity:  “People in Zaire are taxed every time they turna round — but most of them have no idea which taxes are legal and which aren’t.  {{See IRWIN SCHIFF for the UNITED STATES.  Our LABOR if we are workers is our “business.”  AND, the legal status of the income tax per se is shaky….}} 

Thus a

 

It all sounded too good to be true.  My first meeting filled me with doubts.  It was held in a very middle-class home in Chiswick and I gazed at the Mao posters on the wall of the drawing-room.  When asked why I was there by the hostess, I replied that my husband was a television reporter and was very rarely home and I felt lonely and isolated with my two children.  ‘Your problem is not your isolation but your husband.  He oppresses you and he is a capitalist.’  I pointed out that she too had a mortgage so she therefore was a capitalist, and far from oppressing me my husband was baby-sitting so that I could attend this meeting.  Her husband was out at a Union meeting organizing the Brentford Biscuit factory with the help of his degree in Political Science, to prepare for the forthcoming revolution.

What the woman didn’t know, was that I was the daughter of a diplomat.  I was born in China, and traveled the world with my father.  I also-worked in the Foreign Office and was well aware of the atrocities both in Russia and in China.  Then over cups of tea, we were assured that women were a minority group.  I pointed out that women made up fifty-two per cent of the world’s population. 

Like I said, half the world’s population and mother to the other half.  Treat us with respect!  What proportion of the world’s FOOD do we grow, and WORK do we do, and in return for which % of wages?  This woman’s perspective on the “we” is not a “we,” socially!

 

 I was given Mao’s little red book and SHREW magazine.  I took it home and was horrified at the hatred it spewed against men.

I decided that this organization needed looking at.  With both children in school and time on my hands I went to work for The Women’s Liberation Workshop in Shaftsbury Avenue.  I witnessed the women working there tearing open letters and pocketing the three pounds ten shillings that desperate women were sending in to join the movement.  I tried to answer as many of the letters as I could. Some of that money went into buying explosives.

Terrorists in the Women’s Movement blew up the BBC van outside the Miss World Contest and the top off the Post office tower.  I called in the police.  All this rubbish and rhetoric was to culminate in the up-rising of the ‘working classes’ and the death of Capitalism and the destruction of all men. Needless to say there were virtually no working class women in this movement.  Most of the revolution was fought around middle class dinner tables in grisly Islington.

By now I was very firmly ‘the enemy.’  Men, at this point, took the whole movement as a joke but it was no joke, as many homeless men deprived of their children will tell you.  Savaged by feminist lawyers and therapists, men have routinely been deprived of their homes, their children and their incomes.

I knew that I wanted to fulfill my original dream.  Women working with women in co-operation with men.  The idea that we should work with men was anathema to these women.  The Women’s Movement was dominated by the Radical Separatist Movement.  They not only hated men but heterosexual women as well.  I saw through their very hidden agenda.  I stood on platforms saying that if I had to pay three pounds ten shillings, meet in cells and call my friends comrade, then they were asking me to join the Communist Party, which was fine, but don’t lie.  Don’t collect money under false pretenses.  I had plenty of good Communist friends, I wanted a movement that truly represented women.  Not tired hacked-to-death male politics.

The early collective meetings and conferences involved hundreds of women, mostly middle-class women bored with their life-styles and they were terrifying.  Anyone brought up in a girls’ boarding school as I was, knows how violent and manipulative women can be.  The bullying in the collectives was unabated.  No lipstick, no high heels, no deodorant, I broke all the rules.  ‘Why do you wear men’s suits and ties,’ I asked. ‘if you so hate men?’  Silly question I suppose.  ‘We are wearing the symbol of our oppression,’ was the humorless reply.

By now I realized through reading the Women’s Movement literature that those thousands of women working in all caring fields, the journalists, the television makers, were determined to destroy family life in England. [See Communist Manifesto —WHS]  ‘Make the personal political,’ was one of their many banners.  So thousands of violent and very disturbed women attacked normal happily married women and our traditional way of life. Secret meetings were held (everything was done in secret) and I received a letter ‘…..and the collective decided that until the whole matter is sorted out, and you have given a statement of this position to a woman-lawyer, or someone in the N.C.C.L., you should no longer work in the office or attend meetings of any of the collectives.’

Profoundly depressed by my experiences in the movement, I went off to do what I always believed would liberate women.  A place to gather and to work together in co-operation with men.

Soon beaten and battered women with their children were coming to me for help.  There was no literature on battered women, so I wrote ‘Scream Quietly Or The Neighbors Will Hear.’  I was immediately in trouble because the book was not ‘politically correct,’ it discussed family violence and I refused to let the Managing Director politicize my book.  By now I was giving the figure of 62 women out of the first hundred women who came to the refuge were as violent or more violent than the men they left.  Also many were prostitutes taking refuge from their violent pimps.  This infuriated the Women’s Movement.  I knew that as soon as I attracted publicity and funding, the Women’s Movement which by now attracted neither, would be beating on my door.  When I called a small conference to help other groups get started, several hundred women with feminists and radical separatist feminists invaded my conference.  They started their usual bogus rubbish trying to appeal to my mothers, making much use of the phrase ‘working classes.’  My mothers were not impressed.  One of my closest friends at Chiswick said ‘there isn’t a working class woman amongst you.’  Another slightly bolder yelled ‘go home and get your dildoes.’  We left them to battle it out by themselves.  They then formed The National Women’s Aid Federation.

This delighted my many enemies at The Home Office and The Department Of Social Security.  My chief enemy at my first meeting was a member of the sisterhood.  ‘How will you pay for your refuge?’ she sniffed.  ‘I shall pray,’ I said.  I did all the time and it was our prayers that sustained Chiswick for all those years.  The Federation used all their contacts in the media (many of them were journalists) to rubbish me and my work. By now I was writing at home at night.  They came to interview me about my books but the books were never discussed, only how fat I was or how belligerent I was.

I recently asked The Home Office for their latest report and I was not surprised to see that my name and ‘Scream Quietly,’ the first book in the world on wife battering was missing. I knew from other writers that editors in the publishing world of London were themselves radical feminists and it was their habit to dictate their themes to desperate writers, who were then coerced into writing the editor’s book, knowing that should they disobey, they would not be published.  My brother Danny always wrote what he was told to write.  He complained down the telephone to me and finally, just before he died, he said bitterly ‘I have no contracts and no film deals in sight.’  He rewrote the four hundred page synopsis for his book four times to suit his agent and his publishers.

Throughout all the fighting I kept preaching that family life was and always will be the foundation of any civilization.  Destroy the family and you destroy the country.  I warned that of the violent women with their children coming to me, virtually none used contraception.  My mothers had an average of 5.1 children, meanwhile non-violent families had a 2.5 average.  I wrote reports, I drafted memos, all to no avail.  Nobody wanted to hear what I had to say.  In the back of ‘Scream Quietly’ I listed all the agencies that had failed my families.  I wrote that I was not seeing social workers, I was seeing political activists with social work degrees.  The same went for teachers, and probation officers, editors of books and magazines.  Like a giant cancer this movement dug its crabs legs into anywhere they could wield their power.

Many women, assisted by weak men, sought to destroy me and my work and I knew that finally having fought court cases that involved disobeying judge’s orders to save children’s lives, I knew I would be ousted from my own refuge.  A few men bravely tried to make their voices heard, realizing the dangers.  They too were excoriated by both men and women.  Businessmen in the media, managing directors of publishing houses, never understood that their editors were lying to them.  Playing the numbers game.  ‘Who do you think you are?’ screamed one feminist editor.  ‘I must be somebody,’ I replied.  ‘After all I’m in Debrett’s and Who’s Who.  You’re nobody in publishing.’ Another said…’Why can’t you write the sort of books you know I like, Erin…… books about women loving women?’  ‘I can’t,’ I replied.  ‘I’m a heterosexual writer and all my books celebrate family life.’

Because men looked upon the refuge movement as a ‘woman’s issue’, newspapers sent women journalists to attack me.  I addressed a conference of radical feminists and asked them why, when I respected their right to practice their politics and define their own sexuality they denied me my rights to my heterosexuality, my right to live and work to preserve family life and to enjoy being at home with my family.  That I think being a mother and a grandmother has given me more joy than any other achievement.  I was screamed down and met with utter hostility.

When I published ‘Prone to Violence‘, a book about my work with violent women and the children in the refuge, I was picketed by hundreds of banner-waving women.  ‘All men are bastards!’ read some of the banners.  ‘All men are rapists!’ shrieked another.  ‘If those banners said Jews or black people, you would have arrested those women,’ I told the policeman who had come to say that I had to have a police escort all around England for the book tour.

In due course, I lost the refuge but a carefully orchestrated campaigning the press never allowed the people of England to know that I was pushed into exile.  The newspapers made much of my defection and I was helpless.  My crime was to fight for family life and values.  A few months ago The Sunday Times sent a reporter to find out why I was waitressing in a bar in exchange for food. ‘There seems to have been a conspiracy,’ the reporter wrote.  I knew that remainder notices would soon be forthcoming and now my back list is remaindered. Thank goodness my books are selling all over the world including sales to Russia.  I own nothing but my four dogs and my cat and I work internationally for peace in the family.

______________________

I’m not interested in this or other hearsay attempts to characterize wholesale groups of society, but rather in establishing a POSITIVE CASH FLOW so I may cease from being subject to abuse, extortion, dependency (which is a form of slavery) and return to contributing to the world I inhabit, in my strong areas.  Perhaps this will be to call us to communally get some education on basic finances, which can be self-taught and practiced.  To do this, we DO need to know about global finances, at least some basics, foundations, and our current currency. 

He/she is less important when food is an issue!

And safety.