BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
By Mark Karlin
Last week, Senator Al Franken proposed an amendment that would prohibit the Pentagon from contracting with firms that force women employees to agree not to sue companies if they are raped as a result of their employment.
"Kind of a slam dunk," Jon Stewart noted in another of his devastating commentaries on October 14.
The amendment resulted from a Halliburton/KBR employee who was gang raped and temporarily imprisoned by fellow employees in Iraq and then went public. Halliburton/KBR had a no-sue-if-raped clause in her contract.
So, as Stewart caustically noted, 30 Republican Senators -- 30 -- voted in favor of denying recourse to rape victims in order to protect corporate America.
It, simply put, is beyond belief in a civilized society that 30 Senators -- all Republicans -- voted in favor of rape, gang rape, in the precipitating case that caused Franken to try and end governmental sanctioning of this outrage.
As Stewart, once again, did the work that corporate media should be doing, he showed the hypocrisy of the Republican Senators, many of them who just the week before went on a successful partisan rampage to revoke government funding of ACORN, an organization that had been entrapped by a right wing wannabe pimp, but did not have any employees raped on the job.
As far as the Franken amendment is concerned for the 30 Republican Senators, the interests of corporate America superceded the rights of a woman not to be raped.
That is unspeakably horrifying, and yet the mainstream media was more absorbed with right wing attacks on Obama -- and with its own celebrity status -- than to highlight that 30 United States Senators sanctioned U.S. tax dollars going to companies that are not accountable for rape and force employees to agree not to hold them accountable.
There was gobs of coverage about ACORN, about which its only fault seems to be a couple of employees got taken in by a RWNJ attack dog -- and that it angers Republicans because it empowers poor people.
But when it comes to protecting women from rape, the corporate mainstream media didn't even blink when 30 Republican Senators voted in favor of sexual violation instead of holding companies to the most basic standard of civilized decency and prevention of a heinous crime.
That's 30 Republican Senators who voted for gang rape.
The Franken amendment passed because every Democrat voted for it and a few Republicans who haven't yet descended into Dante's Inferno.
But don't ever forget that 30 GOP Senators voted for rape and even gave floor speeches "defending" their vote.
It's beyond disgraceful. It's 30 U.S. Senators who are accessories to a brutal crime.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
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