The Social Report

The Unhappiness of Jack Bauer

2007-11-28T11:37:00.000-05:00

Not long ago “Hustle,” a BBC television series, was taken to task by a reviewer in the New York Times. She faulted it for presenting a fantastic image of contemporary London. It was too affluent to be believable, she thought, in light of British “decline.” Obviously she hasn't been to London lately. But quite apart from the question of empirical accuracy, the British have always trafficked in fantasies of affluence, just as much as Americans – perhaps even more than Americans, certainly differently than Americans. Crime and espionage movies and television are cases in point. Compare James Bond or John Steed and Emma Peel (of “The Avengers”) with Jack Bauer (of “24”). Bond wanted to save the free world, but only on the condition that he have a very good time while doing it. Steed's and Peel's Champagne hours made it clear that the idea was not merely to safeguard the West, but to do so with downright witty aplomb. To “defend” Britain while losing the ability to do what made life worth living would be the ultimate defeat, and for the British the good life is inseparable from class, style, and plain fun. Bauer, in contrast, is an utter mess. Has he even once made a witty (or even flirtatious) comment? Has he smiled, other than sadistically? The only women he telephones are his daughter and various computer operators at CTU. For him, the pursuit of justice and rightness and goodness is so consuming as to leave not one of the 24 hours in the day available for pleasure. Bauer is an icon of what the American Empire has come to: it’s just no damn fun anymore. It's all work, dangerous work, all the time, 24/7.

Who cares about politics?

2007-11-26T20:23:00.000-05:00

Last month, the New York Times published an article on the presidential candidates' clothing – not what they're wearing (although that's been analyzed too) but what they're selling. Mostly, candidates sell themselves, but they're also selling T-shirts, hats, bumper stickers and buttons. Conversely, they're buying ad space: all over American's bumpers and bodies. The Times article was specifically about whose cars and chests they're targeting: Obama's pink baseball tees are a clear pitch to young women, while the target audience of Clinton's "Wellesley Women for Hillary" lapel pins is obvious (what's not so obvious to me is who's wearing lapels at a women's college.) I'm all for catering to outside-the-mainstream constituencies if it will make our government more representative. But what's missing here is any substantive appeal to these voters, implying that their allegiance can be bought by pink baby doll tees. Where are the articles on how Clinton's health care policy will affect young women or Obama's plans to improve education?

It doesn't matter if the President of The United States of America has good taste or good hair. It doesn't matter if the president is black or white or a woman. What matters is whether, by the next election, America will be stronger, wealthier, more respected, safer, healthier and happier. The candidates all know this, the people at the New York Times certainly know this, and I think most of America, if they bothered to ask themselves, would realize they know this too. But it doesn't make for great reading, and you can't run photos of pink T-shirts alongside it. It's more fun to criticize a candidate for yesterday's slip of the tongue. Comparing candidates' war chests is like a game. Analyzing the colors of their ties and suits makes for aesthetically appealing news reports. Taking 7-second sound bytes out of context provides instant gratification. It's all a lot sexier than reading and listening carefully to their plans and positions.

And so voters wind up reading and watching coverage of politics instead of government until they can't distinguish between the two anymore. And then we end up with articles like this one in the Times, reporting on what amounts to meta-politics that in the end really shouldn't matter at all.

But in the short-run, and perhaps to the detriment of our country, it does matter. The candidates, all of whom probably genuinely believe that they would be the best president for America, are willing to pander to voters' shallow sides in order to get elected. They know it's not really about the merchandise, but they also know that it won't matter if they campaigned "ethically" if they don't get elected. Isn't it better to sell out first and change the world later than do neither?

That's a question for another time. For now try this experiment: visit your favorite candidate's website and try and determine where he or she stands on "the issues." For an added challenge, try and find a position on issues that aren't high-profile partisan ones (a.k.a. gay marriage, Iraq, immigration, etc.) Try and find a vision for the future of America. If I could find one candidate who gave me that information before asking for my (monetary) support, he or she might actually stand a chance of earning my vote. As it stands, I remain "undecided."

Blackwater Blues: Vigilantes in Iraq

2007-10-30T18:48:00.000-04:00

The use by Coalition forces in Iraq of what essentially amount to irregular forces (contract companies, outsourcing agencies) adds a further dimension to an already spiralling conflict. In Iraq, citizens face the prospect of kidnap and lightning massacres. They face the prospect of searches by nervous, semi-literate Coalition forces all too eager to impress with their furniture destroying skills. Or they may well be killed by jerky, trigger-happy irregular forces that work for private contract companies. Outsourced sentinels who work for such companies as Blackwater USA have taken it upon themselves to add to the daily complement of casualties, of which seventeen were added to in September.

Recent developments have not taken the case much further. A spokesman for Blackwater has made the predictable claim about this incident in Nisour Square: they were shot at. In a war zone, it may not be unusual to be shot at, but the employees of Blackwater are happy to derive profits from Iraq as if it were Las Vegas, a roulette wheel without lethal consequences.

They should know better. Blackwater has a history: four of their number were ambushed and killed by insurgents in Fallujah in March 2004. Families of the deceased subsequently filed wrongful death suits against the company for unnecessarily endangering them.

But Mammon is God on Blackwater’s book balances, and the accountant remains American power. This may change in time, when that power is exercised more responsibly. This is not set to happen soon. A soil that allows such buccaneering as that of Halliburton to thrive in is a putrescent one in need of good aeration.

Perhaps it's a sign of imperial overstretch: from the metropole, commanders now seek, not regulars to kill or die for them, but auxiliaries whose loyalty extends as far as their pay cheque. Blackwater is, in fact, responsible for guarding American diplomats. They wear the uniform of modern condotierri; they menace the local populace with their ‘protective’ services. They may be nationals of the country in question (U.S., Britain, Australia), and they kill with the know-how gathered from the services of those respective forces. Blackwater tends to have an appetite for former navy SEALs and the Rangers.

These mercenaries turn the spotlight back on the rules of engagement. The law of war, already eviscerated under the aegis of the ‘war on terror’, offers few clear answers. Should we feel pity if a number of Blackwater be taken by insurgents or any member of the local resistance forces, held hostage and killed?

The scenes of torment beamed around the world of foreign nationals who fall into hands of the lucrative kidnapping (and beheading) industry tug the heartstrings. The case of aid-workers and doctors, maybe; the case of mercenaries and contract workers who tend to be better at firing a gun in anger than building a bridge may be different. A contract with Blackwater means far less than an oath to Hippocrates.

When the U.S. Justice Department looked at the law on ‘irregular’ combatants (a record noted in Karen Greenberg’s and Joshua Dratel’s The Torture Papers), their conclusion was that the Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives fell into a chasm, a legal purgatory. It was for the president to decide the status of these combatants, and given Bush’s elevated understanding of linguistics, it was a tall order. Loopholes abounded in customary international law and the Geneva Conventions: the combatants were not uniformed (read the views of Deputy Assistant Attorney-General John Yoo and R. J. Delahunty, memorandum dated January 9, 2002), and they were not in the employ of a stable centralised authority, a recognisable government.

Yoo and Delahunty might as well have been describing Iraq. Awash with anarchical elements that are establishing a murderous equilibrium, Blackwater now looks as respectable as any other foreign fighter keen to stake a claim at martyrdom in Iraq. But their employees ought to take more precautions: violence, claimed Herodotus, is the driving force of history. It takes little to imagine what form that will take.

Bush and Brown: Revising the Anglo-American Relationship

2007-09-04T19:15:00.000-04:00

The American-British relationship is a contingency. Despite appearances of being firm, it is subject to revaluation and remodelling. The new British Prime Minister is no exception to this. Your allies once burned the Library of Congress (perhaps with sufficient cause), and used American power as a shield to consolidate an empire. The Anglophones may be, as Winston Churchill suggested in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples bound by the same language and cultural ties. But this is hardly an insurance against disagreements.

A historical précis may be useful. Rudyard Kipling famously extolled a white man’s burden he hoped Americans would share; Theodore Roosevelt found much in common with the empire-building Cecil Rhodes, sharing a common dislike for the darker races. But another, somewhat more bristling side of the relationship was never far away. Historian Edward P. Crapol on economic nationalism (see his America for Americans) suggests the innate hostility that existed in parts of the United States towards Britain just as empire builder as Rhodes was waxing lyrical about it. (This imperialist junkie did allow 32 places for American recipients of the scholarship that bears his name.) Economics played a hand, as it would during the interwar years: the fear that Britain was exerting a threatening influence over the range cattle industry and other fields of foreign capital investment.

The populist movements which yielded rich electoral rewards for that grand populist William Jennings Bryan were largely inspired by antipathies towards Britain. It was all and good that Americans and Brits were proud, sterling whites with a penchant for civilising, but that was not always enough. Other works, John E. Moser’s being prominent amongst them, move the debate forward, seeing the British in the interwar years as a lion whose tail was twisted.

A joust conducted through the mail on December 1919 between a certain Dwight M. Lowrey and Senator William E. Borah of Idaho, implacable opponent of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations, sheds light on what would become common themes in forthcoming global struggles. Lowrey, in responding to Borah’s oration that month attacking the League, found various references in the Senator’s speech to British colonial rule discomforting. “India and Egypt under British control, and to Ireland, an inseparable part of the great Commonwealth of Great Britain and Ireland, awake doleful memories of old High Tariff harangues, German propaganda, and Sinn Fein [sic] delirious and seditious extravagances.”

Lowrey, wearing ideological goggles with a clear imperial tinting, argued that, “The spirit of the British Empire is freedom, not mastery.” The task of finding “A modern instance of spoliation under the Union Jack” would be “difficult”, and it was a task he did not endure for long. Borah, on the other hand, was happy to undertake it: “India sweltering in ignorance and burdened with inhuman taxes after more than 100 years of dominant rule; Egypt trapped and robbed of her birthright; Ireland with 700 years of sacrifice for independence.” Such language ignored the values of English thrift and administrative skill. Indian oppression was not quite right, argued Lowrey: the English were simply prudent to re-enforce existing hierarchies in the name or order. One form of social class stratified consciousness is just as any other, or so Lowrey would have us believe. The battle continues to rage today.

Recent directions seem to point to a revision of this relationship between America and Albion. The new staffers in Downing Street suggest a vigorous spring-clean of tried truths: going it alone, or with a few Anglo-centric partners in international relations, may not only be dim, but destructive. International Development Secretary David Alexander snorted against “unilateralism”, preferring “new alliances, based on common values.” (For the speech go to: http://www.dfid.gov.uk/news/files/Speeches/council-foreign-relations.asp). On Radio 5 Live (13 July 2007), he stubbornly insisted that, “We will not allow people to separate us from the United States of America in dealing with the common challenges that we face around the world.” Britain will be both with the Americans, and with the others, a testy balance to say the least.

On Iraq, the tensions are mounting. 5,500 British soldiers looks somewhat less impressive than 45,000, but the reduction has been taking place for months. The aim is ultimately something the Americans will have to yield to: the transfer of full sovereignty to the Iraqis. The American Right (or at least sections of it) are sniffing out for signs of a betrayal. American military officials speculate on British failure in Basra, a convenient distraction from the clay-footed imperialism that operates in other parts of the country. General Jack Keane has been labouring in the frontlines against his British counterparts: British policy in Basra has bred, he told the Daily Telegraph (24 August), nothing less than “gangland warfare”.

There is much to be said on how the British might affect the policy in Iraq, though holding up in Basra and hoping for the best is hardly a sound advertisement for success. George Michael’s animated antics in Shoot the Dog featuring a canine Blair fetching the White Lawn Frisbee thrown by an intellectually challenged Bush may not be applicable to Brown. He has already eschewed Bush-nosing with care. Withdrawing now will leave the American-led forces in the lurch, despite the diminishing returns of the British garrison. If they do, Britain will have entered another phase in its long-term association with Washington.

Bye bye, Alberto Gonzalez

2007-08-27T11:56:00.000-04:00

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez will resign after much controversy which has plagued his tenure. Gonzalez has been dragged through the mud repeatedly by Democrats and civil liberties groups. His departure is no surprise.

What we all may have forgotten is that Alberto Gonzalez was the first Hispanic/Latino Attorney General. That is a tremendous accomplish. Partisan politics aside, he should be a hero to the Hispanic community. He may have been overly conservative or perhaps too easily swayed by Karl Rove, but he did serve this nation during a very difficult time for the Bush Administration and should be a hero to many Hispanic youth.

Drawing a line between respecting a man for his accomplishments and despising him for his horrible indiscretions is difficult. Hopefully history will not through the baby out with the bath water. Gonzalez made mistakes and he is a member of an Administration that does not have a lustrous track record, but he is still a success story. Civil rights and liberties have not been an area of success for the Bush Administration. It should come as no suprise that Alberto Gonzalez was not eagerly protecting rights. We knew he would not. Through all of this though, he has lived the American Dream.

I am offended by his judgment, a damaged Department of Justice, and the Bush Administration, but I respect a man who has given Hispanics a goal. Much like L. Douglas Wilder and Elizabeth Dole blazed trails, so too has Alberto Gonzales. We ought to pull the pearl out of this ugly mollusk of a story and embrace what we can. Condemnation and unfettered disgust does not good policy make, nor does idle ranting spark change

hannah.arendt@MySpace.com

2007-08-26T16:39:00.000-04:00

As everyone knows, MySpace.com is a web-based communications network featuring software tools that enable its members to create “profiles” of themselves, that is, public personae, not only in the form of verbal information but also by means of a variety of expressive media such as digital images, video, and music. Indeed, the sheer act of presenting (or representing) oneself is a central activity of MySpace members. In addition to profiling themselves, however, members may also attract other members, who become their “friends,” and contact friends already in their network. Contact takes the form of posting commentary and testimonia on profiles (which are retained or deleted at the profiler’s discretion), which may then be commented on in turn by the profiler or others. The effect is to bring into being a “community” – if that is the right term – that is powerfully centered on individuals and their performance, through the expressive media available to them, of their own personalities. There is nothing necessarily “confessional” about this, though the occasional confession may take place. The atmosphere is more akin to the theatrical: what matters are the style, the stance, the intensity, and attraction of the personalities who appear to one another. Because the performances of their identities are “witnessed,” albeit virtually, by others, the question of who one is has as much to do with the opinions of others as with the raw data of one’s own profile. Seeing and being seen, in other words, or what the social interaction design theorist Adrian Chan characterizes as “presence” – presence constituted through the participation of witnesses who form judgments and comment on what they see – is what matters.

What sort of a “space” is MySpace, then? Some have pointed out that it is not a public space, because the kind of talk that goes on in it is anything but rational deliberation aimed at reaching a consensus on a matter of common concern. (When I asked my 16-year-old daughter whether anyone on MySpace discussed politics, she looked at me in silence but with an expression of grave concern for my mental well-being.) But this is to invoke an overly narrow conception of public space and its value.

For a more expansive perspective, we can turn to the insights of Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, the point of establishing a public space is to enable the experience of freedom and the appearance of individual distinction. Freedom ¬– that is, spontaneous, creative, unscripted activity in speech or deed – is possible to the extent that purely instrumental enterprises, activities that are valuable and meaningful only because they contribute to the achievement of a pre-established goal, are excluded. That exclusion is in large part what constitutes a public space. The participants in a public space come together for the sheer intrinsic pleasure of interacting with one another – seeing and being seen. Since nobody is in charge, there are neither leaders nor followers, but only peers who are at the same time actors and who might, if they are sufficiently impressive, become leaders of a sort and for a time. What matters here is the quality of an actor’s performance, above all his performance of his identity. That, of course, is a matter of taste, an aesthetic judgment, and Arendt insisted that the kind of commentary appropriate to what goes on in public is closer to literary criticism – how does this or that strike us, what does it mean? – than to the application of universal principles in accordance with the rules of rational argumentation.

To a great extent, this is the world of MySpace. Undoubtedly, there are many members who are more concerned with blending in than standing out, and so have little interest in what Arendt characterized as the “fiercely agonal spirit” that dominated what was for her the exemplary public space of the ancient Athenian polis. Nevertheless, agonism is very much on offer in the drive towards self-display, to distinguish oneself from others, to be noticed, to attract an audience, and to do so, again, in freedom – in a non-regulated environment where the only authority is that constituted momentarily by the expressed judgments of witnesses, such that whatever consensus might temporarily be achieved could be undermined at any time by the introduction of a fresh point of view.

As the digital communications theorist Danah Boyd has pointed out, it is no accident that it is young people, primarily teenagers, who have flocked to MySpace. Of course, they call what they do there “hanging out” and being “cool,” not the enactment of freedom. But perhaps they should. Their lives are, after all, profoundly characterized by the two elements that Arendt found most inimical to freedom: subjection to an external, undebatable goal, and regulation by means of rulership and rules. From school to home, this picture changes very little for today’s teenagers, for whom the steady parental and political drumbeat to organize their entire lives according to the imperative of enhancing their future marketability must be very close to unbearable.

Readers of Arendt, however, will no doubt be thinking at this point that Arendt herself was adamant that children must be protected from the potential calamities of the public sphere and its freedom. The public sphere is, she pointed out, essentially anarchic, because no one can predict or control the consequences of what is said and done there. Who one is as a public figure depends on reputation, and a reputation can go overnight from good to bad. Adults can decide to take on the risks of appearing in public, but children need a stabler, safer, more predictable world.

If it were only a matter of reputation, we might be inclined to regard Arendt’s views on children as merely quaint. Today’s teenagers cannot avoid an education in freedom – that is, in imagination and spontaneity – for nothing less will equip them with the spiritual resources to find meaning in a cold and lonely society (certainly not Creationism or Intelligent Design). But as the news media and politicians have lately insisted, there are other dangers that come along with the freedom of expression and communication provided by sites like MySpace – though it is also clear that these dangers have been hysterically exaggerated. Education, awareness, and forms of accountability are clearly in order. But it would be a travesty if, in the name of safety and security, measures were taken to suppress the very features by means of which MySpace shelters freedom for self-assertion and self-development for a generation badly in need of it.

LA on my mind

2007-08-16T17:12:00.000-04:00

Louisiana has been through a lot in the last couple of years. There have been scandals of government abuse regarding FEMA money and shoddy disaster relief efforts across the board. The New Orleans Saints had a heroic season where they all but pulled out a miracle that the city so desperately needed.

Alarming still is the rate at which Cajun/Creole culture is disappearing in the lower part of the state. I mean to say that the state is actually disappearing. Over the years, the Mississippi River that has showered the delta with new sediment has been so diverted as to prevent the natural replenishment of this coastal environment. More wetlands are being lost every year than most people would even fathom. The numbers are staggering indeed, but it's not numbers that matter. It's people and living things.

Destroying an ecosystem is tantamount to murder. Sure development must occur and the re-routing of the Mississippi River has had advantages, but the failure to manage environmental concerns while watching development take place is shameful. We ought to think about the unintended consequences of our attempts to change the natural course of things.

As the bayous are vanishing, so too are the shrimpers, artisans, oil workers, and others who make up the distinct cultural phenomenon of bayou existence. We're not only losing land, but we're also losing people as land washes away into the ocean and young generations move north.

Louisiana brings together an interesting array of questions that touch upon development needs, ecosystem management, tourism policy, and cultural appreciation. The issues at play are too complex to discuss in any one place and have been the subject of many books and articles. I hope that Louisiana and its bayous are on the minds of all United States citizens as we think about our policy priorities.

Are we even talking about the same Massachussetts?

2007-08-16T11:56:00.001-04:00

Michael Tanner of CATO is waxing smug because the Massachusetts plan for universal health care is facing some trouble as deadlines approach. The uninsured in Massachusetts have four months to buy insurance, or they'll face a tax penalty. But as things stand now, "of 170,000 people who are uninsured but have incomes too high for subsidies, only 17,500 have complied with the mandate so far." Tanner claims that CATO called this one in the air - the mandate was unenforceable and they knew it. To bolster the tanks "I-told-you-so" cred, he directs us to his earlier writing on the subject, noting,

"Someone should have pointed out that the Massachusetts mandate is probably unenforceable and almost certainly not going to achieve universal coverage. Oh, that’s right, we did."

Funny thing is, his earlier piece says absolutely nothing about enforceability. In fact, the extensive hand-wringing over allegedly severe restrictions on consumer and employer choice seem to belabor the worry that the Bay State Politburo might enforce it's social experiment all too well (ominous music, lightning).

Interestingly enough, the criticisms that CATO did make turn out to be pretty far off the mark when we consider what's actually going on in Massachusetts.

Criticism 1: " The individual mandate opens the door to widespread regulation of the health care industry and political interference in personal health care decisions."

Now I could always be wrong, but I am almost positive that was the point of passing a regulation on the health care industry. Y'know? So, conceded, I guess.

Criticism 2: " The act's subsidies are poorly targeted and overly generous."

Actually, no. The MSNBC article that Tanner links to (see "trouble", above) reports:

About 160,000 uninsured people in the state have incomes that are too high to qualify for subsidized health insurance — but too low to afford the lowest-cost unsubsidized plans.

The Massachusetts plan is fading in the stretch because the subsidies aren't extended generously enough. For too many people, the mandate has become a choice between paying insurance premiums or paying for their housing or groceries. It takes a willful ignorance of reality to make Tanner's claim. I don't know how to make this any clearer: people are not refusing to enroll because the market is over-regulated. They are refusing to enroll because the current market is cost prohibitive for the working poor of Massachusetts.

Criticism 3: "The Massachusetts Health Care Connector, which restructures the individual and small business insurance markets, is a form of managed competition that has the potential to severely limit consumer choice."

Again, point ceded. Consumer choice does get sidelined by a mandate to purchase insurance. But does this have anything to do with the failure of each Massachusetts citizen to enroll? The market restructuring should be a boon to providers - faced with the threat of fines (a clumsy method of implementation in my opinion), employers and individual buyers have an extra incentive to spend money on premiums that they might have chosen to hold onto before.

Criticism 4: "The act imposes new burdens on business and creates a host of new government bureaucracies to manage the health care system."

I did read a piece talking about some delays in processing caused by a deluge of applicants as the deadline nears... somehow I doubt that's what Tanner was getting at. If you read the MSNBC article, some small business owners are miffed at having to take on the costs of insurance. One restaurateur is perfectly livid. But no examples are given of any businesses actually tipping into bankruptcy from the requirement, while we know that hundreds of thousands of Americans declare bankruptcy annually from insurmountable medical fees. That observed, I'll ad that I'm currently working for a restaurateur who gets ticked when I remind him that he has to pay me the minimum wage. So my sympathies for small businesses are diluted. Small -time capitalists do have a lot of troubles to face, but the idea that they are totally incapable of cutting profits to care for their employees is a myth.

In any event, taking all four criticisms into account reveals that contrary to the CATO blog's current swagger, Tanner's actual predictions are either ideologically driven truisms that are immaterial to the current dilemma faced by Massachusetts - or - in one case, an ideologically driven policy criticism that succeeds in nailing the exact opposite of what is actually going on.

I'll note in closing that I am not a devotee of Plan Massachusetts. I do not think it goes far enough. And I think it leaves an awful lot of power and economic privilege to insurance companies, most egregious being the lack of a cap on annual medical expenses as a proportion of income. Not to mention, every one of the issues at hand - from burdening businesses to non-compliance due to a cost-prohibitive market - are issues that would not exist in a nationalized system funded by a progressive tax scheme. In theory, I'm open to alternatives to a system like Canada's, but I'm seeing few practical reasons to maintain that position as of late. But I'll stick to my guns: I just want to see every person have access to affordable health care. So ideological implications aside, I do hope the Massachusetts plan succeeds. Let the CATO crowd preemptively notch their belts based on who-knows-which facts - the reality based community will keep watching and hope for the best.

No, but seriously, what is your proposal for health insurance?

2007-08-14T07:51:00.000-04:00

It's way past official Giuliani simply does not care about health reform. Because anyone who understood the magnitude of the health care disparities in this country would not seriously believe that a plan like this could make a significant impact on the number of uninsured Americans. Then again, it is not designed to - the plan "does not even cite universal coverage as a goal." Giuiliani's plan strikes out right there and not just in the opinion of raving Leftist ol' me, but in the opinion of all 69% of Americans who agreed in November of 2006 that the government has a responsibility to guarantee coverage for everyone. Yet another example of how far out of the mainstream so-called-moderate Republicans truly are when it comes to social policy. And tactically speaking, If Giuliani manages to wrest the Republican nomination away from Romney, any Democrat who runs against him should be making health care the strongest part of their campaign.

That crucial flaw bracketed momentarily, Giuliani's plan does not aspire to alter the current market-based system much at all. It comes down to a Health Insurance Credit and a tax deduction for low income families. Both of those proposals, fortunately, would alleviate some of the tremendous burden that poor Americans face when purchasing health care - although we have to hope that Giuliani is more generous with the eligibility on those than he was with, say, welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing and essentially every major social service offered in NYC under his mayorship.

All the same, what Giuliani is offering fails on two critical counts - highlighted by Matt Miller's recent piece in Time. First, for whatever aid it provides them with, Giuliani's plan still holds out that " individuals' buying their own solo health insurance can be the answer to the problem of the uninsured." Without any new mandates, health insurance companies are still free to reject clients with a history of illness (and these are the men and women who need insurance most) or to cheat their poorest customers out of any real coverage by offering plans with low premiums but through-the-roof deductibles that render the plan useless. Secondly, Giuiliani does not "support limiting a family's annual exposure to medical costs to some reasonable percentage of its income." In fact,

Giuliani actually boasts of an approach certain to hurt people. His health-care tax deduction, he gushed in Iowa recently, "allows you to go out and buy cheaper and cheaper policies [because] you can have higher and higher deductibles." When Americans earning $25,000 a year get sick and end up paying $10,000 or more in hospital charges, their "affordable" insurance courtesy of Giuliani will become a ticket to bankruptcy.

Avoiding political hyperbole is nice, but any critical analysis of what America's Mayor has put on the table for health care reform makes it clear: Giuliani does not care about poor and sick Americans.

Death in Detention

2007-08-13T14:54:00.000-04:00

Via Kaiser Network:

A 23-year-old HIV-positive person, Victor Arrelano, recently died while in custody at an immigration detention center in San Pedro, Calif., the Los Angeles Times reports. Arrelano's family plans to file a wrongful death suit against the U.S. government that claims Arrelano was denied vital medical treatment while in custody. According to the Times, the case highlights an "inadequate, even dangerous, medical system for the nearly 30,000 undocumented immigrants in custody nationwide."

Attorneys for Arrelano's family say that while in custody, Arrelano's condition deteriorated to the point that fellow detainees urged staff to provide medical care. Roman Silberfeld, the family's attorney, said that 70 detainees signed a petition urging that Arrelano receive medical attention. When Arrelano's condition became critical, he was transferred to a San Pedro hospital and died several days later, according to the Times. Lorri Jean -- chief executive of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, which provided treatment to Arrelano two years ago -- said she has "no doubt" Arrelano died because he was "denied the medications that [he] needed to stay alive." Jean said that she and her staff on Monday will discuss Arrelano's death and their concerns about treatment at the detention center with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), the Times reports.

Immigration and health services officials on Friday defended the quality of medical care provided at dozens of facilities nationwide. They would not discuss individual cases because of privacy concerns, the Times reports.

This should come as shocking news to anyone who reads it. There is no standard by which human rights are judged in which it is acceptable to deny a detainee - someone who is quite obviously incapable of accessing their own medical care - needed assistance. Of course, I doubt an unadulterated sentiment of outrage or even sympathy for the victim will be demonstrated by Americans, since the victim, being an HIV positive man and an illegal immigrant, happens to be in not one but two categories of people who are vilified, feared and marginalized by conservative Americans.

Whether or not this country is ready to take up responsibilities to its immigrant populations, there should be absolutely no question that when we detain someone we become accountable for their health care. Only the most extreme of nativists would propose the death penalty for violating immigration laws. And yet that is essentially what Arrelano received.

Apparently the safety net is only catching men

2007-08-12T15:48:00.000-04:00

A recently released report by Academy of American Actuaries finds that more elderly women (40%) than men (28%) depend on Social Security to survive their retired years. They are also receiving smaller payments than men due to a variety of gender differences in American work culture. The end result is dismal though - the Social Security disparity is just one more factor contributing to high rates of poverty amongst senior women.

The causes are legion and not all of them reflect poorly on America's gender divide. For example the fact that women tend to live longer after their retirement should come as a welcome sign of progress in women's health care. Yet this seemingly benign fact means women get hit twice in the income department: they have to depend on payments longer, and they are more likely than men to spend some of their retired years single.

Some of the factors are more troubling - women still aren't reporting as much earned income as men. That should be a surprise to no one. That women are still taking a great deal of temporary leave from the workplace is not inherently unsettling, but it should raise questions about why men are still not doing their share of child-rearing, and why there is not some formula to reward mothers for their work when it comes to claiming social security.

And really, that point - revising the formula - is the most salient priority to be gleaned from the report, which in itself simply reflects a great deal of what we already know about gender and work in America. I think advocates for work parity will be unsurprised by just about every factor highlighted in this article, and they will appropriately continue to fight for reform. What the report should tell the people working to dispense Social Security payments is that a gender-blind formula like the one we have know is simply inadequate. If women are inordinately performing the uncompensated labor of child-care and are still facing discrimination in salaries, then a formula for Social Security payouts ought to be cognizant of that fact. The American workplace is still not a place where women are equal to men. Until it is, our social services will only consign more elderly American women to poverty if they insist on conflating gender equity with gender neutrality.

Sick and tired of racism?

2007-08-10T14:33:00.000-04:00

Two studies, both concerning Asian Americans, found evidence of a causal connection between discrimination and depreciated health. The first study examined experiences with discrimination amongst Korean immigrants to the United States and measured those findings against the mental health quality of the subjects. "Researchers found that both overt and subtle discrimination seemed to influence participants' mental health. Overt discrimination was associated with the erosion of positive mood, while subtle racism was associated with symptoms of depression, possibly because more subtle forms of discrimination create 'ambiguities in terms of social identity.'" A second study looked at the impact of discrimination on chronic illness. They observed associations between discrimination and various respiratory, cardiovascular and pain-causing conditions, concluding:"that the everyday perceived discrimination minorities experience could cause stress that can lead to chronic illnesses."

Studies like these have a lot of interesting implications. They illustrate the extent to which cumulative disadvantages still track to characteristics like race not simply because of class conditions, as some materially inclined post-racists may conjuncture. but as a tangible result of discrimination that is currently happening. They also raise a tough moral dilemma for proponents of a health system like the one in the status quo (though I will admit now they do not go far enough to establish the moral necessity of a completely socialized health system).

If we take up the meritocratic position held by many (though certainly not all) opponents of socialized medicine which states that people's capacity to afford health care should, and more or less does, track to decisions about work, education and life-path that people have freely made themselves the status quo would be easier to accept. As one anonymous interlocutor put it in an online forum, claims that the 40 million or so uninsured Americans represent a failure of distributive justice suffer from "a lack of true knowledge as to why those "40 million" are uninsured (here's a hint - a significant number choose to be that way for a variety of reasons beyond "I can't afford insurance") and we start getting down to the real issues at hand." Following this argument to it's conclusion, the quality and cost of a person's health care, and indeed whether a person has any at all, is just if it indexes to that persons choice. So if I choose to remain unemployed or to become obese then I deserve whatever hardships come my way in the market-based health system. Bracketing the (numerous) complications that employment, obesity and the like raise in terms of cumulative disadvantage, we will take that idealized, rationalist approach and put to it the question of race.

A Korean American who either (1) suffered from a mental health disorder as a result of discrimination or (2) suffered from a chronic illness as a result of stress caused by discrimination would face considerable difficulty in paying for health care. At best, our hypothetical Korean would pay much higher premiums and/or deductible and face still higher expenses in treatment. At worst, she or he might be totally unable to find a provider, as many people with chronic and mental illnesses are.

Now, in this person's case there is absolutely no sense in which she or he could be said to have "earned" discrimination, even indirectly by putting oneself in a risky position. Yet she or he may well be priced out of insurance simply as a result of a prejudiced society. Why should our Korean have to face inordinately high costs of health care - or worse, go without any - simply because living as a Korean in a racist white society is difficult?

The moral dilemma illustrated by these studies, put simply, is that there are systematic inequalities in the allocation of health burdens in our society, which impose costs on the people burdened with them that are, as Rawls would have said, arbitrary from a moral point of view. Yet we ask that those people face the costs with whatever resources they can cobble together (forgetting for now that their capacity to do so will be inhibited by their health conditions ). Why shouldn't all members of a society marked by inequality that is arbitrary (morally) and systematic (distributively) have some obligation to contribute to offset those disadvantages?

Giving Good Face: What Jeremy Bentham and Facebook Have in Common

2007-08-10T09:28:00.000-04:00

All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy.
--Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, 1977

A message popped up in September 9 last year for those lucky enough to see it. It was scripted by a self-made millionaire (or billionaire?), one of those flip-flop wearing college drop-outs Marc Zuckerman:

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles.

It was also an apology. He had failed to explain the new features of his networking system to subscribers. He was merely ‘trying to provide [them] with a stream of information about your social world.’ What were these features? The ‘Media-Feed’; the ‘News-Feed’. We could effectively chart the everyday lives of fellow human beings on the network. One could see, in chronological fashion, instant updates across the entire network one was a member of. You could see when a new ‘friend’ was added, what time it took place, which date it occurred on.

Then there is the ‘poke’ facility. It is one Zuckerman has been kind enough to offer his users. In most cultures, it is an affront. There is a sexual sting in the statement. My personal space is violated; my dignity is affronted by the conceit of familiarity: do you really think you know me? My virtual space, however, is another matter. My comfort zone is global (at least across networks). Anyone who is part of this system can see me; can ‘poke’ me.

The Facebook facility keeps company with other public forums where information about individuals is shared. Myspace and Xanga – programs which espionage agencies would have saved millions had they pioneered them during the 19th and 20th centuries – jostle on the cyberspace platform for paramountcy. Users of the facility have complained (some did even before the Zuckerman statement): Facebook displays too little, cordoning off access to certain members; or, Facebook has become too informative.

This year, Facebook became saviour – survivors of the Virginia Tech massacre ‘facebooked’ (a now common and obscene verb) fellow students telling them they were ‘OK’. ‘Facebook saved me’ became a catch-cry. It is a matter of time before Facebook messages appear in lieu of flowers at a funeral.

Three decades ago, Big Brother was the enemy. Now, with the proclaimed defeat of ‘totalitarian’ communism, the surveillance culture has moved into private life with our consent. The spawn of Solzhenitsyn’s Grand Strategist or Orwell’s Big Brother are dead; we have nothing to fear. Our quibble is which surveillance feature we want. Big Brother is an invitee – and not merely in the capsule of human drudgery and slime called ‘the Big Brother house’. On the contrary, we like surveillance – take the British as an example. We like accountability, so we like people watched. We are watched to protect us from our more sinister motives.

So, employers now look at Facebook. They even issue advertisements on it. They hire and in some cases fire on the basis of a Facebook profile. Universities scan the profiles of their students.
Facebook, Zuckerman assures us, issues its own privacy controls. We have choices as to what to put on our profile. Apparently, the democratic preserve is maintained: we can choose, so we are free. It is the classic American exposition of the human condition of freedom: ‘As long as you can vote, we are free’. ‘As long as you can decide what to disclose, you are free.’ ‘I am free because I can adopt the Fifth Amendment.’ ‘I am free to profile myself on Facebook.’ We do not have to let our political views be known; we do not have to disclose our political interests, but it is advisable to do so. We do not need to know if we like men or women, but of course, we want to.

Facebook has ushered in a revolution, and a failed one at that. It is much like the panopticon – ‘all-seeing’, that surveillance device the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham pioneered in the nineteenth century for penal reform. Zuckerman shares more with Bentham than he realises: a desire to improve the quotient of pleasure in society; a desire to maximise the network for the common good. As Bentham commences his study on penal reform, he calls his device the panopticon ‘or the inspection house’.

In 1975, Michel Foucault added his gloss to Bentham’s Panopticon Notes. For Foucault, the major effect of the Panopticon is: ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.’ The prison inmate ‘is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.’

There are subtle differences. Members of the networks have become inspectors, just as they have become prisoners. People do ‘communicate’ with each other. It is a brilliant seduction: to give the means of surveillance to everybody in order to legitimise it. We see but we are also seen (at stages). We relinquish ourselves to others, but have the luxury of indulging in everyone else’s surrender of secrecy.

Perhaps it is time to return to personals that do not reek of voyeuristic profiling and ‘pokes’. Consult the London Review of Books instead: ‘I celebrated by fortieth birthday last week by cataloguing my collection of bird feeders. Next year, I’m hoping for sexual intercourse. And a cake.’

This article first appeared on Counterpunch, August 7, 2007.

The Visible Vote

2007-08-09T21:02:00.001-04:00

I'm going to live-blog the Visible Vote forum that LOGO and HRC are hosting. All of the Democratic candidates - excepting Biden and Dodd - will be appearing to discuss issues of concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies. I've also submitted some questions, mainly at the intersection of health policy and LGBT rights. But my guess is they're a bit on the wonkish side for a general debate.

The hosts: Journalist Jonathan Capehart, singer Melissa Etheridge, and HRC President Joe Solmonese. You can stream the debate live here.

Obama is up first.

9:06 PM - Obama draws an analogy between the outsider status he has often confronted due to his racial and ethnic heritage and the marginality faced by LGBT people. He argues strongly from anti-discrimination/civil rights framework for civil unions that are legally equivalent to marriage. He wants to leave marriage up to individual religious denominations. One of the panelists presses this - what about civil marriage?

9:08 PM - Obama just concern trolled the gays. He said they should choose their battles, and maybe the lack of access to civil marriage isn't the one they should focus on. He also said that whether or not civil marriage was available to same-sex couples was mostly a semantic issue. That does not sit well here. He actually comes of as dismissive and patronizing.

9:15 PM- One of the hosts, Mr. Capehart, raises the issue of homophobia in the black community. Barack responds that he has previously addressed to black audiences the impediment that homophobia has raised in adequately responding to the crisis of AIDS amongst black Americans. He also laments the use of homophobia to fragment progressive alliances between blacks and LGBT people. He is very good on this issue. His answer is very thoughtful and considered. I believe him when he says he will advocate for LGBT people not solely when he's on the burner before America's wealthiest gay rights group.

9:22 PM - Edwards steps up to the plate. I've previously blogged (quite unfavorably) on his discursive representation of LGBT people in public debates. Let's see how he does tonight.

9:24 PM - Melissa Etheridge has a great moment where she touches on the solidarity she feels with Elizabeth Edwards in their mutual struggle with cancer. She pivots from there to the incredible privilege she and Edwards share in being able to afford their expensive treatments. She asks if Edwards understands that the health care crisis hits LGBT people especially hard given that they cannot depend on employers and spouses to provide health care for them like most Americans.

Edwards answer is okay, but not impressive. He plugs his universal health care plan. Then he discusses his empathy for the large portion of LGBT people who are homeless as a result of discrimination. He does touch on an actual answer - between his stances on civil unions and his universal health care plan he'd see the problem addressed. He doesn't seem to have much to say about LGBT health at all, and is instead trying to soundbite on as many issues as possible.

9:29 PM - Edwards states, albeit equivocally, that he would support education about sexuality in public schools that emphasizes the naturalness of homosexuality and the need for tolerance. He comes across as empathetic, but admits he hasn't thought through the specific policy issues involved. It shows.

9:31 PM - Why, oh why, has Edwards spent the past three minutes talking about Anne Coulter?

9:33 PM - Edwards takes the first transgender specific question of the night - how would he react to the knowledge that one of his staffer was trans-identified and planning to transition? Edwards replies that he would be tolerant and as supportive as he could be (fair enough), and expresses his support for a transgender inclusive federal ENDA. This is his strongest answer yet.

9:35 PM - Edwards is finally taking on the marraige question. He says that he cannot impose religious views, that he believes in equality to his core and that he can understand why anything short of full equality before the law will be seen as a sleight to the LGBT community. But he doesn't give a direct justification for his policy. So he is asked for one, in a question that strongly indicts his "I'm on a journey" crap. His answer... is that Don't Ask Don't Tell ought to be repealed. Very disappointing.

9:41 PM - Kucinich takes the stage to the warmest welcome of the night. Right away Capehart points out that Kucinich seems to stand with the LGBT community on every issue. He then asks Kucinich why he stands in such a minority amongst candidates in his support for same-sex marriage. His response, simply, is that he stands for true equality. Capehart takes this and runs - is Kucinich saying that Obama and Edwards, who speak for equality as well, have jettisonned the LGBT community for political reasons. Kucinich takes the high-road and doesn't endorse Capehart's theory, but he gives a great answer on the role the federal government can play as an agent for social change.

9:47 PM - Kucinich is still getting a lot of flattery. The moderator calls him "evolved." Kucinich accepts the compliment. He says his role is to help all Americans "evolve" with him. He also emphasizes that his path is easy - he just has to listen to LGBT people and then act. They are the ones who have to struggle courageously with discrimination. How can he not help them? Kucinich understands solidarity, I'll say that.

9:49 PM - Are you serious? I guess this can't be a cakewalk the whole time, so Etheridge (after endorsing Kucinich's candidacy to his face) throws him a question on medicinal marijuana, citing the pain caused by AIDS and cancer in the gay and lesbian communities. Kucinich says - yes. He does not waffle. Just, yes - as a matter of compassion our approach to marijuana should be informed primarily by health policy not criminal justice. He also plugs his health care plan: the only universal single payer health care plan proposed by a candidate, the only one that is not-for -profit. Nice, but he sure swallowed a heck of a soundbite on the pot question.

9:52 PM - The panelists seem to concede that Kucinich can't win this as much as they'd like him to. They ask if he is electable. Kucinich is giving a terrific answer. He replies that middle America does believe in tolerance and equality. He'd like to lead that America, but at the same time his candidacy is not just about representation - it's also about transformation. He is trying to transform and persuade even as he positions himself for the White House.

9:54 PM - Now Kucinich gets the wonkiest question of the night: will he make HIV/AIDS prevention funding part of Ryan White? For those not in the know, Ryan White Care Act is the source of most federal funding to care for people living with HIV/AIDS but does not cover preventative care. Kucinich says he would advocate for that. Succinct, but he doesn't seem prepared to talk in detail about Ryan White, so he just talks about health care generally for awhile. Not a stellar answer.

9:59 PM - Kucinich's closing remarks are very eloquent. He talks about love and his wife, transformation and equality. I'd like to point out that Kucinich is the candidate who has talked least about "tolerance." He never uses the word. He talks about equality a lot, love almost as much and occasionally uses the word justice. But he is not talking about tolerance. It does not seem rehearsed, he just seems to be past that point. I'm consistently impressed by this man, and tonight is no exception.

10:05 PM - Now Gravel is on. He gets a question about how, as a member of his generation, he talks about his support for LGBT rights generally and same-sex marriage specifically. He answers that most of his generation is wrong, and in time the issue will not be one.
Gravel blames demagogues for dividing America on marriage equality. He thinks most Americans, if they followed their sense of fairness, would support marriage.

10:08 PM - Interesting and ballsy: Gravel calls out LGBT voters for supporting people like Clinton and Obama when candidates like himself and Kucinich are doing the hard work on LGBT issues. Point taken, sir.

10:10 PM - Capehart turns the blade at Gravel: Why aren't you as popular as Clinton and Obama with LGBT voters? Gravel seems to backtrack and acknowledge that there is a political liability that he does take on by supporting LGBT equality. And he says he does not want the support of Democrats who are not willing to take on that liability as a show of solidarity.

10:13 PM - Gravel has talked a lot about politics and public opinion. This is working against him because he isn't getting to talk much about the range of issues that Edwards and Obama did. He comes off as committed, but not particularly informed.

10:14 PM - Gravel is talking about nuclear testing in the Pacific? He's also kind of being a dick to Joe Solmonese, but that's probably okay since no LGBT activist worth their rainbow stripes actually likes the HRC.

10:17 PM - So now Gravel is giving a great schpeel on the prison system, the war on drugs and de-criminalization. It's decent enough... but unfortunately the question was about HIV/AIDS in the inner cities. Not particularly convincing.

10:19 PM - Now it's Richardson's turn.

10:22 PM - Richardson's "concern troll" is a lot more convincing than Obama's. He talks about using winnable battles against hate crimes, against No Child Left Behind (which he points out hurts good sexuality education and anti-bullying work). But he emphasizes using these battles to build the community of allies concerned with LGBT support and to transform public consciousness. He sounds like a realist, where Obama and Edwards just sounded evasive.

10:25 PM - Richardson apologizes the "miracon" gaffe, and minimizes. He wants to talk about his record, which is impressive (pioneering support for transgender rights, working against hate crimes, and moving aggressively for domestic partnerships and against DOMA). He is tremendously focused on talking about (1) what political goals are achievable for LGBT issues, (2) what his political record is and (3) how the community can move forward.

10:28 PM - Now Richardson takes a hypothetical: if you could sign a marriage act into law, would you? This is a great question because it challenges Richardson's position, which is the "achievable" bit keeping his own stances out of the picture. He dodges a lot, before finally saying that he isn't "there yet." Saw that coming. I think Richardson still comes off great. He admits that he isn't there, but neither are most Americans. And he seems to have really thought about how he will transform American politics for LGBT people. He has a plan.

10:31 PM - Interesting. Richardson says at first that homosexuality is a choice. Then he waffles. But his answer, that he continues forward with, is that categories don't matter. LGBT people are people, and whether they have chosen, been acculturated, or been born a certain way then they should not give up their rights. I agree. But I also agree with Etheridge's answer that it is alienating for LGBT people to be told that they have chosen their identity when their personal narrative reads otherwise. When pressed, Richardson makes it clear that he is about politics, not identity. He can't say what homosexuality is like, or what being transgender is like - but he can offer political protection. This is actually where I stand as well. There is no need to define identity to make a political coalition. I respect a man who demures from doing so, especially when he has the humility not to define the identities of others.

10:36 PM - And here comes Clinton, closing out the show.

10:38 PM - Mr. Solmonese asks why Clinton has never introduced legislation against Don't Ask Don't Tell, being a vocal advocate against it for so long and given her place on the Senate committee working on military issues. She basically answers that the political climate is wrong and we need an executive branch that will accommodate the change (or at least not veto the bill).

10:42 PM - Clinton isn't against same-sex marriage, she's just really for civil unions. Ick. She says equality matters, and civil unions can provide full equality. She wants states to make decisions. But she is personally against same-sex marriage. Her position is much like Edwards and Obama's: she doesn't have a plan to provide justice for LGBT people, but she sees the country moving in that direction and will not obstruct that movement. But she is herself unwilling to take the position (and political risk herself).

10:45 PM - Clinton says the states are better battlegrounds for LGBT people than the federal governments. I'd agree if so many states hadn't explicitly repudiated that hypothesis with bblatantly discriminatory statutes last November.

10:47 PM - Next to Kucinich, Hilary is doing the best job of answering the questions she is asked. But her discussions is kind of wonky, she talks a lot about the powers that be - not the powers the she will use and the moves she'd like to make for LGBT people. She also isn't talking much about her record, other than emphasizing her record with HRC (oh boy). She is coming off as a political advisor and something of a political historian even. In apologizing for the conditions facing LGBT people now she gives phenomenally informed answers on why their legal position is the way it is. But she seems lacking on vision, on a gameplan, and on a record. She understands the political waters, but doesn't know where she wants to swim.

10:50 PM - Clinton says she wants to reverse the "mean-spirited assault" political assault on LGBT people. Other than that, she doesn't seem to have much to offer.

Commentary: I loved the format. Very intimate, like a conversation. Questioners could follow-up easily, and answers were lengthier. The answers were even more substantive, where the candidates wanted them to be. I applaud the planners for that. I really feel like I know where each candidate stands.

Kucinich was clearly the star of the evening. Richardson would be my second - he isn't on my page on all the issues, but I know exactly what he'd do for me as a gay citizen were he to sit in the White House. Obama performed well when talking about race, AIDS and progressive coalitions. But his answers on marriage were nearly offensive. Gravel was alternatively solid and way off topic. Clinton just didn't seem to have much to say other than that she wanted to support LGBT people but needed to change the political climate to do that effectively. Edwards was awful.

There's an exit poll on the LOGO site seeing how people felt. I'd expect to see it swing a bit now that the debate has ended. But here's the breakdown:

Question: Who's your candidate?

1. Barack Obama (37%) - My 2nd choice candidate, 3rd best performance tonight
2. Dennis Kucinich (24%) - My 1st choice candidate, 1st best performance tonight
3. Hilary Clinton (19%) - My 4th choice candidate, 5th best performance tonight
4. John Edwards (9%) - My 5th choice candidate, worst performance tonight
5. Bill Richardson (5%) - My 3rd choice candidate, 2nd best performance tonight
6. Mike Gravel (4%) - My 6th choice candidate, 4th best performance tonight

Question: What's your issue:

1. LGBT Rights (40%) - my 2nd choice out of the poll
2. Health Care (31%) - my 1st choice out of the poll (and 1st overall in this election)
3. Gay Marriage (29%) - my 3rd choice out of the poll (and important overall, though I'd be hard pressed to rank it precisely)

Invisible and barely getting by

2007-08-09T10:52:00.001-04:00

The rhetorical weight swung hardest in debates over socialized medicine is the ghastly number of Americans - over 40 million - who live without health insurance. Overlooked too frequently are the stories of Americans who can afford health insurance, but not comprehensive health insurance, who spend their entire lives fighting with their providers over plans, omissions, coverage gaps and reimbursements. They often find that themselves uncovered and unable to pay for crucial medical treatment and preventative care. What I found most powerful about Moore's SiCKO was not it's celebration of nationalized systems in Canada and Europe, but the haunting portraits of insured Americans for whom the system does not work.

Take for example, childhood immunizations. New reports indicate that children who are underinsured (as opposed to fully insured or uninsured) are the least likely to get vaccinations on time and at affordable rates. Working class families are left to choose: pay thousands for the injections, or let their kids go without critical preventative medicine. For families with good plans, the costs are covered - but many providers simply don't cover the vaccinations. And for those without any insurance, there's Medicaid and the FQHC system. As with so many other places in the American class system, its those who barely get by who feel the squeeze.

All the same, libertarians like John Stossel lambaste the type of government guidelines for providers that would close these coverage gaps:

Does it never occur to the progressives that the legislature's intrusion into private contracts is one reason health care and health insurance are expensive now? The average annual health-insurance premium for a family in Wisconsin is $4,462 partly because Wisconsin imposes 29 mandates on health insurers: Every policy must cover chiropractors, dentists, genetic testing, etc.

Absent those "intrusions", however, the full cost of health care is passed on to the people who are not able to pay, but who all the same are not the listless hordes of welfare-state-dependents that libertarians like to deride (a blogger at KXMC seems convinced that anyone who can't afford to pay for every health expenditure is a "lay-about").

Free marketeers and fiscal conservatives don't like to discuss the working poor because they defy easy stereotyping: they don't have much money but are demonstrably hard working; they pay taxes but still need state assistance. They make visible the long spectrum between dependency and autonomy that rabid individualists can't seem to grasp as the fundamental quality of social life.

Welfare gets the NCLB treatment

2007-08-09T08:51:00.000-04:00

Conservatives are finally learning how to use the welfare state. The first hint of a revelation came from their masterful coup under the guise of "welfare reform," where House Republicans led the charge in delivering work-or-starve ultimatums to thousands. Welfare-to-work programs showed that state assistance does not have to be used solely as a social support system - it can also be a powerful disciplinary apparatus, by which incentives and punishments are leveraged on the poor until they function at the desired level of productivity. The autonomy of the poor may diminish as they are forced to accept the first job they come across - fair compensation and capacity for family care be dammed - but that is the nature of a system that prioritizes economic efficiency over social freedom.

The federal government is still uninterested in the no-win scenarios that the unemployed poor often find themselves in. Where states do not meet strict quotas for welfare roll trims, they get hurt. Take Indiana for example:

The federal government is warning Indiana it faces a $10 million penalty for not moving enough welfare recipients into jobs and off of public rolls in 2005.

...

That office's director, Sidonie Squier, says Indiana fell short of its target for the rate of welfare households participating in job training. The target was 33.4%, but the rate was only 30.9%.

The penalty would mean the loss of approximately 5% of the state's federal block grant for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The grant pays for financial aid, job training, child care, child abuse prevention and other programs targeting Indiana's needy.

The last paragraph is definitely the kicker. We've learned that the Bush administration does not mind punishing poor students by removing what funding they do receive. And now Indiana will face a shortage of funds to pay for, among other things, job training because it has not trained enough people for jobs.

Rather than recognizing structural challenges and re-evaluating policies, the Bush administration rules with rigid mandates. And instead of providing services to the neediest parts of the country, they compound existing problems with harsh reprisals. It's a reinvention of the welfare state, not as a human service but as a more powerful tool to force compliance with an agenda that is at least as anti-poor as it is anti-poverty.

Love thy Neighbor

2007-08-08T21:55:00.000-04:00

On the front page of Monday’s New York Times was an article on an abomination of a law strengthening the government’s eavesdropping abilities. Whatever your opinion on FISA and secret surveillance, there’s one part of the article that should infuriate everyone reading it. It should, but I’m sure it doesn’t; in fact, it’s even presented (by the very liberal Times) as a justification for the new legislation:

But he stressed that the objective of the new law is to give the government greater flexibility in focusing on foreign suspects overseas, not to go after Americans.
“It’s foreign, that’s the point,” Mr. Fratto said. “What you want to make sure is that you are getting the foreign target.”

Or, in the law’s own words, the National Security Agency no longer needs a warrant to perform electronic “surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States.”

White House spokesman Tony Fratto and the press are reassuring us with the information that it’s not us, it’s them. They’re trying to convince you that you have nothing to worry about, because you’re not the target of the wiretapping. Well I have news for you: if you’re not worried, you should be. Forget that the target only has to be “reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States,” (reasonable belief means many things to many people.) Forget that this is just another step expanding a surveillance net that will inevitably include you if it gets much bigger. Those are both great reasons to be worried – basically, the law does have the potential to hurt you and your fellow Americans. But if that’s why you’re worried, you’re missing my point. Like I said, you should also be very, very worried about the “it’s ok, it’s directed at foreigners” comment.

Or attitude, rather. America has been swept by a wave of patriotic xenophobia. Maybe it started after 9/11, with messages like “you’re either with us or against us” and propaganda like the USA PATRIOT Act. It progressed, and after a time it became acceptable to declare not-Americans enemy combatants and lock them up indefinitely. And now we think it’s ok to eavesdrop on anyone outside our sanctimonious borders.

We’re becoming ever more self-centered, selfish and intolerant. And we justify it by convincing ourselves that the rest of the world is full of evildoers out to get us. We have to look out for ourselves, because we’re in grave danger. (That’s what the terrorism alert level is there to remind us of.) Our fear of foreigners turns into hatred of foreigners, and with that we justify increasingly selfish actions.

The so-called “intelligence” legislation provides us with yet another example of this trend. The offending bill was passed on a Saturday by a house of representatives scrambling to get it signed into law before the August recess. Why? Not because everyone agreed it’s a great law and we need it. As a matter of fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had every ability to put off the vote until the fall or just let the bill die, said the legislation “does violence to the Constitution of the United States.” And yet she, and the other democrats opposed to the measure, allowed it to pass anyway. The general (and horribly logical) consensus on why this happened is that the Democrats were afraid of appearing weak on national security. I’ve never seen American fear and selfishness play out more clearly. The representatives are selfish – they want to be re-elected. So they pass this god-awful legislation to appease Americans who are scared and selfish (they want to protect themselves at the expense of the rest of the world.)

In defense of the little people, the behavior of our congressional representatives may be more selfish than the average American’s. That doesn’t mean they’re not serving for the good of their country, though. Allow me to explain: it takes a lot of effort to earn a position of power like a congressional seat. It also takes a lot of self-confidence. You have to convince a lot of people that they should vote for you. You have to convince them you’re the best. Self-centeredness is even embedded in the altruistic goal of serving for the good of the country. Only someone who believes they can do the job best will believe that. So yes, I think our representatives are significantly more self-centered than the average American.

So our representatives are working in their own self-interest and we’re selfishly sacrificing the rest of the world to protect ourselves. But at least we’re communally selfish, worried about our interests as a country, right? Wrong. Even ordinary Americans are individually selfish. For example: a bridge collapsed in Minnesota. It was a horrible tragedy. And now we are all very concerned that the bridges we drive over every day are going to collapse too. Basically, we’re worried it’s going to happen to us. It happened to some other innocent Americans who didn’t do anything wrong. And we all think, it could have been me…

But we’re not so worried about the people dying in flooding in India or famines in Africa, or, to get back on topic, about the Iranian and British civilians being secretly eavesdropped on. Because it isn’t happening to us.

Here’s a news flash, to everyone who thinks it’s ok, because it’s targeted against foreigners: it’s not us and them. It’s one world, to quote the Olympic slogan. And it’s a small world after all, to quote Disney. Technology is shrinking the world even more every day, and it’s becoming ever more dangerous for us to consider all non-Americans enemies. They’re not – they’re our neighbors.

Indulge my idealistic notions for a moment. Forget that America, as the number one superpower, should care about the rest of the world. Forget that our government of the people and for the people should care about those people, rather than its own political future. Even if you forget that, don’t you think you should care about your neighbor?

Give the kids the money

2007-08-08T21:51:00.001-04:00

Most Americans realize that our public school system is in miserable health. The debate is over whether and how our schools can be brought back from the precipice of ruin. Some hold out hope that we can jolt the system back to life with some competition from voucher programs -call that the defibrillator: no big rescue attempted, but maybe worth a shot before one shuffles off the ol' mortal coil. In that analogy, a solution involving a more robust income tax would be the equivalent of, I dunno, stem cell research: probably the best chance at reversing the real damage, but the very notion seems to offend conservatives to the core. Basically, convincing Americans that the public school system needs reform is easy. Now get them to admit they might need to cowboy up for the bill, and watch the room clear out.

Stories like this give me some encouragement:

A small group of pupils from the Students for an Equitable Education, a new youth organization working to change Illinois' school funding system, joined the "Riding for Reform" bus tour. Pupils went to the state's capital to rally for change in education funding.

...

To hear these pupils' cries, Blagojevich sat down with SEE to discuss alternative routes to cover the costs of public school education. SEE members said they would like to see the state look at increasing income taxes instead of relying heavily on property taxes.

If this were to happen, SEE members said school districts wouldn't be defined by the wealth of the communities they serve. Instead, they said, pupils across the state could receive a fair and equal public education.
The call for more money to balance out the rich and poor school districts is a common one. Illinois has a relatively low income tax, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. As a consequence, the state's share of funding kindergarten through 12th-grade public education is 37 percent, ranking it 48th in the nation. Illinois property taxes, on the other hand, are significantly greater than in other states.

Illinois' scheme-as-described is pretty common, and it's too bad. America's poorest communities should not be anchored to it's poorest schools, nor should the least wealthy members of our society be footing high-proportion property taxes just so their kids can get an education that at least approximates what their wealthier counterparts can comfortably afford. And within those parameters there does not seem to be an alternative to redistributive taxation. But as these cool kids point out, an alternative is not needed. We know what will work. So why aren't we doing it?

By the by, I muddled through Illinois' mess of a public school system until I was 8. So, y'know, represent or whatever. I never thought too highly of my schools there, until I moved to Texas, where I learned that the good folks in the Land of Lincoln were amateurs when it came to devastating poor schools.

Barry Bonds hits history

2007-08-08T09:47:00.000-04:00

There are many hard-hitting news stories to talk about virtually everyday. I'll offer that there is not one as hard-hitting as Barry Bonds passing Hank Aaron's record for home runs in a career. Bonds is the greatest player of all time and not to sound too much like the Washington Post's Mike Wilbon, but give the guy a break.

I don't know what Bonds used or didn't use during his 20 year career. I know that with the vigilant eye of Major League Baseball cast on him, he has not used in the last three years. Wilbon is correct in pointing out that we are missing a historic season as we bash the greatest basher.

The Bonds story is a story of commercialization, race, and the social science of sport. This is not simply a series of events to be relegated to the annals of baseball. Bud Selig, the Commissioner has insulted Bonds and baseball fans across the country by his unprofessional attitude. He is a disgrace to the game and is doing a dis-service to a sport that has brought many people in this country together.

Bonds should be commended for his success. This is a historic event and we ought not to allow race and petty jealousy dictate the way we support our nation's very best.

There is a symposium at the West Virginia University College of Law (excuse the shameless plug, but I have to give WVU props) discussing just these issues. Reversing Field: Examining COmmercialization, Labor & Race in 21st Centurt Sports Law will take place on October 4-5, 2007 in Morgantown, West Virginia. This event is sponsored by the WVU College of Law, WVU Office of the President, WVU School of Physical Education, and the American Constitution Society. My mentor, Professor andre douglas pond cummings is chairing the symposium which is drawing some of the biggest names from the world of sports management, sports representation, academia, and major leage sports. Please visit Reversing Field for more information.

Sharing the burdens

2007-08-06T13:31:00.000-04:00

Child Care Tax Credit programs like the one being expanded by Bloomberg and Spitzer in New York City are just one of many examples of how entrenched the mentality of non-cooperation is in our country's political climate. I would absolutely rather have these programs than not have any public support available for Child Care. But like so much of our social service system, they recognize the need for assistance in fulfilling social roles as a deviation from the 'norm' of functional citizenship. This statement typifies the mentality:

"Access to quality childcare in New York City has become cost prohibitive for
far too many families," said Governor Spitzer. "The Child Care Tax Credit will
support struggling low-income families who are currently forced to trade off
child care costs against other important priorities such as the chance to work,
put food on the table and pay health care costs. At the same time, this law
addresses the needs of young children in these families by helping them gain
access to the quality care and early learning needed to succeed. "

What is objectionable in this is mainfestly not that it offers support to poor families. But I do find it troubling that the program only applies to poor families. Difficult decisions in balancing work and home lives affect all families. Certainly, their stakes are much higher for the poorest people in this country. But recognizing that raising the next generation is a crucially important endeavor to be taken up by asociety rather than by isolated units defined by their position in the housing market, we ought to be willing to extend the structures of social report to all caregivers. The status quo stigamtizes social assistance by associating it with a failure to meet responsibilites. That a caregiver has to turn to child care services is supposed to signify an inability to do the work that a responsible family unit could manage on its own. Programs like these show that we may be willing to forgive these breaches of social obligation when there is a good "excuse" - like poverty - but the general expectation is that most people can and should be doing this work on their own.

In Why Social Justice Matters Brian Barry extends a similar argument to disability payments. These allowances are made in recognition of the difficulties faced by people who must take on the challenges of social life despite mental or physical handicaps. That a person with an extraordinarily high income might still be better off in most ways than an "able" person of a lower class is immaterial. People should not be penalized for morally arbitrary qualities, society should support the offsetting of any hindrances to full participation. Any recognition of the relativele privileges of the upper-class disabled person would, in a just society, be recognized through her or his participation in a progressive tax regime, not by ommitting her or him from an important social service. I think the same should be true of child care credits. Having a child may not be morally arbitrary in the same way that being born with or later acquiring a disability is. But having children does hinder autonomy in career-paths, political participation and other time-intesive arenas of human life. And whether they are partnered or not, women invariably end up doing most of the work of childcare. A great and overlooked source of de facto sex discrimination is the expectation that when a family must make sacrifices in personal freedom and lifestyle to do the work of child raising, those sacrifices tend to be asked of women, who have been socialized to accept those burdens. The more socialized child care becomes, the more it would be possible - whether by taxation or other means - to demand that men carry a proportionate amount of child care's burden.

In any event, the credit should recognize the value and difficulty of the work being done not the relative capacity of the person to perform the task. This frame certainly takes amore cooperative tact to family life than most Americans are willing to recognize, and indeed to morality generally by moving towards a system in which the only obligations which we can confer upon others are those which we are willing toadopt mutually. The family has, in many respects, come to be portrayed as a self-sustaining social atom. There are so many romanticized depictions of families struggling through adversity that we tend to expect that a dedicated and loving family can do just that, regardless of the support structures in place. In the end its a fiction as deceptive and politically specious as the "by-the-bootstraps" blustering of social conservatives. Our policies should not be in the business of reinforcing fiction, rather they should be carefully designed to reflect the day to day struggles of people working hard across the country to provide care where it is needed.

A quick question

2007-08-04T08:52:00.000-04:00

Are there any sane people who think that bombing the holiest site of the Islamic faith would actually deter Muslim extremists from attacking the United States? Although you have to love the idea of deciding who you will attack in retaliation before you even know who has attacked you, or hell, that you'll be attacked. It's so very... PNAC.

Equally amusing is the fact that people who promote this ideas probably consider themselves realists. But anyone with a firm basis in this reality knows that getting the US defense establishment to consider military action against Saudi Arabia would be about as likely as convincing the same folks we should stop sending bombs to Israel.

The New Workout Plan

2007-08-03T20:52:00.000-04:00

NPR did a piece last week on the new communication strategy in Iraq (listen here). The U.S military is attempting a Madison Avenue approach, attempting to sell the U.S. occupation as a good thing in the way you would persuade someone to buy Pepsi. The exact tactics are unclear but there is an idea of a new communication strategy. Communication is presented as a new solution but the new solution is full of problems. One problem is the individual person’s inability to be neutral. The second problem is that the new strategy is based on old communication models.

Eric Dezenhall is astute in the NPR piece because he point out the problem with the “evangelical view” of communication. Communication is context-specific, meaning it enters into an existing psychological and cultural framework. Dezenhall points out that a completely neutral audience never exists in advertising. In the case of Iraq, there are a lot of upset people. The marketing strategy, in his estimation, is likely to fail because it is unable to understand the hostility of the Iraqi audience to messages from the U.S. government.

It is unlikely that the military will adapt to a new plan, leadning to the second problem. The military believes a message can be spread through force alone. If a message is repeated loudly and more frequently, then the military believes it will get through. The “Transmission Model” is flawed because it treats communication like a series of mortars. A communicator in any context is simply not able to launch an idea into an enemy territory and hope it does damage. Related to the first problem, the military is not only a believer in a failing plan but a group unable to change plans.

The Consortium for Strategic Communication (FULL DISCLOSURE: I am/was a member of this group) released a report claiming a new communication model was needed for the war on terrorism. The Pragmatic Complexity Model allows for greater adaptation to a specific context but has some disadvantages in presentation. The concept of “failure as the norm” is realistic but unpalatable. Planning small carries fewer political advantages than planning big. It is a tougher model but a new plan for the future. I ask the readers to listen and read, giving some feedback on the best course of action.

Does the New York Times have a hidden agenda? (Or is this just a really big issue?)

2007-08-02T18:48:00.001-04:00

The News and Opinion departments at the Times are wholly separate entities. And although trustworthiness is a scare commodity these days, the Times is on my personal list of trusted news sources, so I believe their claim. Which is why today’s paper made me think hard as I flipped back and forth between the front page, the Op-Ed page, and the business section. Below the fold on the front page (where news of ongoing international crimes against humanity belongs,) an article about the Zimbabwean dictator’s efforts to make food more affordable in that country, a brilliant plan that has resulted in severe economic depression, widespread poverty and malnutrition as producers stop making goods they are forced to sell below cost. It reminded me of this article from Tuesday’s Times also about African governments fiddling with the economy, although the famines involved in this one were of a slightly more innocent nature. Rather than a despotic African leader misguidedly immobilizing business and starving his people, in this case the Kenyan government was attempting to protect their own agricultural industry, demanding that the U.S. purchase corn locally to provide to Kenyans working on an American-financed irrigation project. The U.S. couldn’t comply, whether they would have liked to or not, because our food aid program stipulates that American farmers must provide the food supplied. The losers in all this are the Kenyans, who wound up not receiving any corn. And of course the winners in the food aid scheme are the American farmers.

Just a few pages after the photos of empty Zimbabwean grocery store shelves I found Nick Kristof’s column criticizing “the inanity of our farm policy.” His main argument is that his readers (and the rest of the country) shouldn’t be paying him (and hundreds of other rural landowners, dead and alive) not to grow food. I would go so far as to call that policy something worse than inane.

The next page in the paper (for those of us who don’t get the Metro section) is the front page of the business section. And this, page C1, is when I began to wonder if the Times was trying to tell me something. Front and center, a story about New Zealand dairy farmers entitled “Surviving Without Subsidies.” Yes, it was rough when the subsides were first eliminated, back in 1984, the article read, but now the farmers are doing better than ever, producing products the market wants to buy. It was like I was being hit over the head: farm subsidies are bad (whack.) Farm subsidies are bad (whack.) Farm subsidies are bad (whack.)

And yet, less than a week ago, the House of Representatives, in all their partisan political wisdom, passed a farm bill maintaining these ludicrous agribusiness subsidies. Does Nancy Pelosi need to be whacked over the head while someone informs her that farm subsides are bad for American consumers and taxpayers, not to mention poor African farmers? The sad fact of the matter is that her previous comments would imply she’s aware of all three side effects. She’s also, no doubt, aware that corn prices have been pushed sky-high by ethanol R&D. Yet corn remains among the products most heavily subsidized by the new bill, along with other row crops like wheat. In fact, their historically privileged position is the explanation for that broad orange base of the familiar food pyramid. Although if you’ve been paying attention to the government’s nutritional advice recently (and maybe you shouldn’t be, last I read they were advising obese Americans to buy dogs) they’ve reformed their pyramid in the post-low-carb era, and the orange band is now somewhat more reasonable. It’s still larger than any of the others, but smaller than the green (vegetables) and red (fruit) combines. In another nod to nutrition, Friday's farm bill did include some new subsidies for vegetable and fruit growers. It also lowered the eligibility level for subsidies from annual incomes of less than $2.5 million to $1 million. But as the New York Times editorialized, “reducing an outrageous cap to a lower outrageous cap is not exactly our idea of reform.” And although I don’t want to sound like a cheerleader for the Times, I have to say, it’s not mine either.

Bush Threatens to Veto The Best Thing to Happen to Young People in Years

2007-07-31T22:38:00.000-04:00

Anya Kamenetz is a writer whose work I've been reading a lot of recently, and she definitely deserves our attention. Kamenetz, at just 26, has made herself a spokesperson for the new generation of college students and graduates, most of whom come out of college with the heavy burdens of student loan debt, credit card debt, low-paying jobs, high rent, poor (or no) health insurance benefits, and are struggling to survive.

This is becoming an increasingly important issue in light of the recent scandals dealing with student loan providers, and the bills that Congress has been considering to limit the rights of loan providers and make college more affordable for students.

The College Cost Reduction Act of 2007 (HR 2669) has just been pass in the House, and the Higher Education Access Act of 2007 (S 1762) has just been passed in the Senate. Both of these bills, once combined through conference committee and sent to President Bush for signing, will crack down on subsidies to private loan companies and give debt-laden students a crucial break that they need in order to secure stable jobs, pay off their debts, and put their costly 4-year degrees to use.

So what does our president do? Promise to veto it, of course.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said the House bill "is a big victory for students and families across America who face rising college costs. The time to put the needs of students ahead of the profits of the banks is long overdue. I look forward to passage of similar legislation in the Senate this month." [The Senate did pass similar legislation days after he made that statement].

President Bush, however, has already threatened to veto any college cost legislation that comes his way. A White House statement said: "This costly proposal only benefits students once they leave school, when they can already take advantage of flexible repayment options available under current law and reduce the effective interest rate they pay through the existing tax deduction for student loan interest."

Considering that today's college students are the future of this nation, Bush needs to pay more attention to legislation that affects them. People under 30 - Gen Y - are saddled with debt, are facing the threat of social security running out by the time they retire, and will face tax increases in order to finance Iraq war, yet Bush wants to veto legislation that would financially help the people that are the future of this nation. Everyone deserves a good education in today's competitive society, and America's young people need the financial break this legislation will provide. Let's hope our president comes to his senses and reconsiders this legislation.

Is Richistan seceding?

2007-07-30T12:21:00.001-04:00

"Richistan" has all the trappings of a new blogging buzzword. It's snarky, a bit cloying, contrived and unabashedly neologistic. Like many bits of the blogger lexicon, "Richistan" is the title of a book. It's a dependable marketing strategy because as any circulation of the word is free press for the book. And, there it is - blogging, though vaunted as an alternative to the mainstream media, is structured at the very level of vocabulary by the big publishing houses and the corporate media that does much of the pushing in the market. But this article isn't about "Richistan" the newly minted catchphrase. It's about Richistan the place.

The use of a geographic metaphor is apt. In summarizing the lifestyles of the multi-millionaire second estate documented in Robert Frank's book, Paul Harris of the Observer writes:

a huge bubble of multi- millionaires lives almost in a parallel world of private education, private health care and gated mansions. They have their own schools and banks. They even travel apart - creating a booming industry of private jets and yachts.

And I would ad to that that they work separate jobs and tend to socialize with people of similar income. The wealthiest members of our society, for large portions of their lives, occupy spacially distinct social compartments that serve to reinforce class separation by ensuring that the rich and poor have few avenues by which to bond. Suburban secessionists pull their families and funds away from flagging inner cities and class apartheid is normalized through educational districting and zoning laws. We can all probably think of a few places - restaurants, schools, neighborhoods - that we think of being predominantly used by (or available only to) people of a certain class.

If we compared the schedules of rich, poor and middle-class in the US, we'd certainly find spacial differentials along the lines of: hours spent inside a social service, hours spent at a public health centers, number of trips to restaurants and grocery stores (and which ones?), and certainly many others.

And this leads to a question that has always puzzled me - why aren't social conservatives more concerned about class issues? I don't accept the answer that most conservatives, or even a substantial of conservatives, just "don't believe" in what they say. But once we grant the reality of their convictions one would have to note that the emerging American caste system leaves few avenues for social participation for the poor, and almost no avenues for cross-class mingling. Anyone who takes a serious concern to the moral character of the country should be wondering how we can expect to find common values amongst people who never eat together, work together or live together. People whose radically different experiences and day-to-day schedules leave them with few shared frames of reference, figures of speech or experientially tested principles - the very informal social cues, lore and vernacular from which more cognizable political and moral values emerge.

Throughout this piece I've compared the US class structure to apartheid, secessionism and the caste system. Some would object that these are too extreme, but I invite them to reflect on the specific manner in which those divisive classificatory sociopolitical practices impede conversation, and even mutual comprehensibility, between citizens. The idea that equal opportunity could ever be enough to hold a society so stratified together seems naive when consider the profound impacts of spatial separation on less tangible social codes. The separatist leanings of "Richistan" further demonstrates the impossibility of reconciling unity with inequality.

You Tube You Can’t: The Failure of a Medium

2007-07-27T13:33:00.000-04:00

You Tube is democracy on the cheap, with all its anti-elitist pretensions. The world’s intellectual elite took one look at it, and probably had an apoplectic fit. But so did the politicians – initially suspicious by its all-too-democratic overtones. Dross and drivel mark its promotions, but perhaps that’s the point. Keep the public happy, a chattering channel that enables this amorphous creature to vent opinion and bile.

Then came along CNN, that Centre for Neutered News. It has happily taken a medium that was theoretically for the public, to promote its name. Politicians have hopped on board. Here was a chance for collaboration: a ‘debate’ by U.S. presidential candidates might be jointly had. Members of the public would film clips and post them to a panel to be forwarded to the aspirants. Evidently, the public is not allowed to run the show with its own amusements. That would be akin to allowing the spillage of Onan’s seed, with all the self-pleasuring that supposes, before an ever watchful priest.

The Democrats came first, courting You Tube and CNN at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C. on July 23. MSNBC called it a ‘provocative, video-driven debate’. One wonders what they were looking at. The same sad themes were hammered home with all the custom-made drudgery that modern politics spouts. Suddenly, You Tube was not simply about idiotic dogs dazzled by hoses or sizzling rip-offs from pay-television networks. We just had to let the politicians in on the game.

We could gauge that the most interesting videos were mere fizzle to the censors of the neutered news brigade. A video, featuring a bespectacled individual, asks the candidates what they can do about a voting public (at least in California) where 88 percent believe its governor Arnold Schwarzeneger to be a cyborg. Such is the state of ‘reality’ in the CNN sieve that such a statistic, far from being a worry, was just ‘fact’. Supposedly in a state once run by a man Gore Vidal considered a ‘triumph of the embalmer’s art’ (Reagan), one might understand.

As for the video, it could not be put to the candidates, for all its merry reflections. All is serious and monochromatic in the get-real world of CNN and Capitol Hill.

The questions got dimmer as the You Tube sessions heated up – or rather petered out, a bland rehashing of mantra and Democratic neuroses. Obama had to justify whether he was ‘black’ enough, at least for those voters who probably still think he is either Osama or white. Given that CNN has spelling difficulties with the name Obama, this might have provided the viewer with some comic relief.

Hillary Clinton had to justify why she was not simply some other de-sexualised woman with the erogenous zones of a mannequin. ‘I am woman enough,’ and all that that entails. Senator John Edwards refused to accept the vote of anybody who would otherwise not vote for either a black man or a woman (sexual or de-sexualised), then rallied behind a more sophisticated façade to steal his own march. To paraphrase his efforts of the deep thinker tormented by the age’s moral messages, he was wrestling with the idea of a civil partnership. Predictably, two men in the sack struck him as irksome, though is wife apparently does not object.

Technology cuts both ways: the radio, George Orwell reminds us, did nothing to help democracy and everything to build the bunkers of totalitarian states. There is a fine line between a medium that emancipates and the Ministry of Truth. The point here is that You Tube, now in the lecherous arms of the political elite, will see battle again done for the ‘grass roots’ with political tofts and populists.

Once such media becomes the standard practice of viewers, it is inevitable that private and public interests will muscle in. Politicians, and Ted Turner, have now worked out that they must do battle through another medium rich with propaganda. The Republicans are following suit. You Tube is simply becoming another idiot box, and one that is no longer ours.

This piece was first published in Counterpunch, July 24, 2007.

Ethanol and Iowans

2007-07-27T10:14:00.000-04:00

I recently made a trip to Iowa where I learned about ethanol. Corn and soybeans abound in North East Iowa, where you're more likely to 90-degree-turn your way for hours through farm land then you are to see a stop light. I already new ethanol was important and with rising fuel prices and a depleted supply of fuel there was more love for ethanol than I every really understood.

Ethanol has brought many benefits to agricultural producers in Iowa. Counties are now building economic development strategies around attracting new ethanol plants. Farm land has become more and more expensive as the demand for ethanol soars.

This can be great for some and not so great for many more. Family farms are being replaced by the Monsantos and ADMs of the world. This is not news for most folks who have at least had passing aquitance with the notion of corporate farming. These corporations are heavily involved in ethanol production as well. I saw a 200-car ethanol freight trail rolling down a track just south of Cedar Rapids--the ADM logo affized to every tanker car.

As land prices increase, starting a farm is a difficult if not impossible dream. Farming is expensive and much of that expense is the land. As prices rise, Iowa is facing a "farmer drain" much like many areas without institutions of higher learning or large corporate presences claim to be battling a "brain drain." Young farmers are moving on to school, manufacturing jobs, and other positions that do not require the tremendous outlay of funds.

Is this bad? Yes and no. To think about the agricultural United States slipping away into an antiquated oblivion is surely a tragic thought. Development is good, economic development specifically. Iowa is not the richest state in the U.S. and without ethanol's rise, I wonder how many more families would slip below the poverty line. The landscape is surely changing, but it seems that even though a very central tenant of American identity is fading, economic development is bringing new opportunities and breathing new life into a struggling segment of the population.

Farms will always exit in the United States and Iowa will always farm corn. It runs in the blood. I'm not sure how long ethanol will stay around, but for now King Ethanol rules the land.

We'll have to see where ethanol takes the country and what ethanol does in the long run for Iowa's farmers.

Costs of living

2007-07-25T10:37:00.000-04:00

Much political rhetoric on poverty invokes the "vulnerability" of the poor. It's an appropriate term, I think. It does not hold that the poor are helpless or that they are necessarily victims. Neither does it deem poverty a source of shame. What it does emphasize is the capacity of the poor to become victims. The support structures that middle-class Americans enjoy and take for granted cannot be depended upon by those who live on so little. Simple things like health care or a well-funded school that can be so crucial in preventing something like childhood asthma or being held back a year in school from developing into a life-long impediment to success. And I think that, as those examples illustrate, no one is truly more vulnerable than children living in poverty.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation - which takes it's mission to be "helping vulnerable kids & families to succeed" has released it's KIDS COUNT report on children living in poverty. The extensive research reveals a lot of heartbreaking information about the inequalities that are weighing down so many lives.

Local newspapers from Indiana to Michigan are already running stories on the plight of poor children in their states. Perhaps this information will act as a corrective to the apathy with which poverty is treated in so many states. My home state of Texas ranks worst in the nation for children living without health insurance - 1 in 5 children under the age of 18 are not covered for health insurance at any point during the year. What makes that figure all the more troubling is that I know how stricken by inequality Texas is. We have wealthy metropolitan suburbs, communities soaked in oil money. And we have cities, especially along the border where stable jobs and decent pay are too hard to come by. Where people still can't expect to take home more than six dollars for an hour's labor. We have rural areas, where agriculture has been sidetracked to agribusiness and tiny underfunded schools have to service two or three counties worth of impoverished kids. These are the places I lived in and traveled through before leaving to college. And I know that in these places it would be met as a welcome improvement if 1 in 5 kids could be insured.

Growing up my sister had a lot of trouble with allergies. She was sick a lot. In the worst patch, which lasted about two years, she missed so many days that we had to petition the school to let her pass. But she got a lot better after that because we did have a good insurance plan from my Dad's government job, and we could take her to a specialist. She also had a speech impediment but there was a teacher at the magnet school who counseled here through that. She's fine now. You would never know she had those problems. For a family without the support that we had, her health problem could have become more serious. She could have been held back and given up on by the education system. She could have had to deal with the consequences of her speech problem for her whole life - stigmatized in classrooms and in interviews for jobs, But we had the material support we needed and now she is going to graduate in the top of her class and go to college next year.

I haven't been back to Texas in awhile. I now reside in Minnesota most of the year. Coincidentally, Minnesota consistently ranks lowest on all the indicators of child poverty. By and large our children are insured, our families make enough money to get by. I've come to like a lot about Minnesota. I even think about living there after I finish school. The people are more tolerant than in Texas, and yes, more liberal. Minneapolis-St. Paul have everything I would want from a city. And even the winters aren't so bad when you've got the right people to share them with.

But as I start to seriously think about what I am going to do with my life, part of me feels that I need to return to Texas. To organize those communities that are so neglected, and so vulnerable, and fight for justice. For a more egalitarian Texas. It wouldn't be easy - not in terms of politics, and not in terms of lifestyle. But how can I turn my back on my home? What am I doing organizing for homeless people and immigrants in Northfield when there are even more poor immigrants and people without homes back in my hometown who don't have a couple thousand idealistic college students willing to go to bat for them? The Texas Republicans won't help them. The Texas Democrats won't fight for them. And our President thinks programs like S-CHIP are irresponsible - as though there could be anything more irresponsible than allowing children to grow up without food and medicine and a decent place to learn. It might take a whole life to just lay the groundwork for a progressive movement in Texas. But if no one is willing to do that work, then there really is no hope. I got out of Texas because I was one of the lucky ones who was never made vulnerable by inequality. That's why, when I'm done with school, I'm going to be able to live wherever I want. Do something I love. That's why I'm even in school right now. And so maybe the only right thing to do is to go back.

Surprise: military culture of abuse

2007-07-24T11:12:00.000-04:00

Aimee Allison's truly disturbing post at Alternet reveals yet another facet of the culture of abuse that permeates our military - yet is so often downplayed in order to valorize and glamorize the image of the soldier. This time, the victims are women. And they are being abused before they even put on their uniform.

Recently, the Marine Corps announced a court settlement in a suit brought by two Ukiah, Calif., teenage girls who were raped by recruiters during a 2004 military-sponsored event.
The recruiters, Sgts. Joseph Dunzweiler and Brian Fukushima, were court-martialed and demoted but nevertheless acquitted of serious wrongdoing.
...
An Associated Press investigation revealed that in 2005 one in 200 frontline recruiters were punished for harassment and abuse. The Army alone had 722 recruiters accused of rape and sexual misconduct in the last decade and called for a recruitment stand down day in 2005. After widespread reports of rape, unwarranted jail threats, cheating drug tests and falsifying documents, thousands of recruiters were ordered to attend ethics training.

So what do we do about abusive recruiters? Oh, right, we let them into our schools.

Recruiters have unprecedented access to girls (and boys) thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act which demands that public schools turn over student contact data to military recruiters so they can "work their market." In addition, the majority of school districts in the country have relaxed rules that allow recruiters to come and go at will. As a result, more young people have personal and sustained contact with recruiters.

I've long supported the anti-recruitment movement, simply on the grounds that I do not think recruiters should be allowed to prey on the most disadvantaged youth at a time in their life - the end of high school - where their future first begins to look unstable. But there is absolutely zero reason to allow a military culture which turns a blind eye to abuse - from Abu Grahib to the 33% of all military women who will be raped by fellow soldiers - cannot be tolerated in our schools any longer.

Obama's populism: pro-black, pro-union - Anti-Hilary?

2007-07-22T10:18:00.000-04:00

Matt Stoller of OpenLeft recently made some insightful comments on the shift towards populism in Barack Obama's political rhetoric. He pulls some telling bits from Obama's discussion of health care:

On health insurance, for example, Obama repeated his pledge to sign a universal health care bill by the end of his first term, saying, "I shouldn't have better health insurance than you since you're paying the bill for my health insurance."

This is very different than the call for universal health care in January. Today, he's directly blaming the lobbyists and industries. In January, he was blaming cynicism and unnamed skeptics.

"And when some try to propose something bold, the interests groups and the partisans treat it like a sporting event, with each side keeping score of who's up and who's down, using fear and divisiveness and other cheap tricks to win their argument, even if we lose our solution in the process."

It's a good piece. And I had come to a similar conclusion about Obama's new populist posture having read of Obama's recent pro-labor stances.

"I stood on the picket line and marched with workers at the Congress Hotel in Chicago last week," Obama said. "I had marched with them four years earlier and I told them when I left that if they were still fighting four years from now, I'd be back on that picket line as president of the United States and we'll get the Congress Hotel organized."

I definitely respect Obama's conviction. I think that, when/if I raise children, they will know never to cross a picket line from about the same age they know never to steal or start fights. But I have to wonder about how much of this new populism is coming from a more strategic place of interest.

It's no secret that there is something of a divide between the Democratic establishment and the Democratic activists. The former tends to include people with high-school educations, organized labor, working-class folks, etc. The activist wing tends to skew to college students and people with graduate degrees. Right now, as the insurgent candidate, Obama is wildly popular with the activists. He has made himself into a phenomenon largely by ingratiating himself to the intellectual vanguard of the party, due in no small part to his own unabashed intellectualism. But what has made him a phenomenon outside the activist community is that he expertly combines his intellectual posture with soaring rhetoric and a workmanlike affability.

Nonetheless, Obama's deficit in support relative to Clinton and Gore shows that the Democratic establishment, including the parties more populist elements, have yet to be entirely sold on his candidacy. So while I do not doubt the sincerity of Obama's anti-special interest, pro-union politics, I also think it's clear that he needs to emphasize those aspects of his campaign if he is to make any inroads with Hilary's base.

If anything about Obama has been made clear in this campaign, it's that Obama is a fast learner. Mary Mitchell recently compared his underwhelming performance at Howard, where Clinton nailed the most crucial issues affecting black Americans at the expense of a wavering Obama, to his comfortable position as an "in-your-face" black populist before the NAACP.

"The massacre that happened at Virginia Tech was a terrible tragedy, and we were grief-stricken and shocked," Obama said. "But in this year alone in Chicago, we have had 34 Chicago Public School students gunned down, and for the most part there has been silence. We have to make sure that we change our politics so that we care just as much about those 34 kids in Chicago as we do about those kids at Virginia Tech."
Accused by critics of being too "skittish" to address black issues head on, Obama's spirited responses seemed crafted to put those critics to rest.

The pressures of political candidacy in a divided party are legion. Obama is learning to walk the wire between being too black for white voters and note black enough for black voters. Ann at Feministing has noted that Hilary faces similarly perplexing demands from feminist voters. Balancing populism with intellectualism is just one more act that Democratic candidates are expected to perform. While clearly not as linked to identity politics as the concerns of race and gender currently confronting the two front-runners, there is a sense in which candidates, owing to their elite credentials, are expected to prove their populist credentials without resulting to furious Lou-Dobbs-style pulpit-pounding.

As of now, I'm actually glad to see Obama take some more aggressive stands, whether or not it's emergent from some calculated anti-Hilary politicking. A passionate candidate who wants to unite everyone is great, and easy to get behind. But the same passionate candidate who is willing to call the anti-working class, anti-black and anti-democratic interests of the American establishment to the mat is all the more inspiring. Obama's had the insurgent's crown for awhile now - it's high time he's begun to do some in-surging.

Tourture banned... again?

2007-07-22T09:45:00.000-04:00

Not that we torture anyway, but we do occasionally lapse into the cruel, inhuman and degrading business. So, George W. Bush has signed an executive order disavowing that too. And this time, he didn't even gut it with a defiant signing statement!

Call me cynical, but I'm not convinced this will do much, especially given the total lack of oversight within the detainee system and the continued assertions by military leaders that there are only aberrant torturers and not a culture which facilitates torture. And the White House is still playing coy. They "declined to say" whether the CIA currently manages a detention and interrogation program. Transparency is clearly not winning any battles here.

I was also struck by the stated intentions of the order:

Mr Hayden said the executive order gave CIA officers "the assurance that they may conduct their essential work in keeping with the laws of the United States".
Military lawyers say the main point of the orders is to offer protection to CIA officers who might get sued in US courts if they were deemed to have abused prisoners.

Those thoughtful military lawyers, always with their hearts in the right place.

Speaking freely

2007-07-19T21:09:00.000-04:00

The Gauntlet reports that Canada's universities are not taking warmly to the idea of a boycott on Israeli's academic institutions. It's increasingly rare that I find myself in Israel's corner, but I have to think that Canadians are making the right decision here by rejecting an unfair and ineffective policy. One of the professors quoted correctly points out that such a policy presumes an intellectual consensus (perhaps even homogeneity) amongst all of the implicated communities at the university calling the boycott as well as the universities being targeted. I agree, and I'd add that trying to isolate Israeli thinkers is not the way to cultivate a critical consciousness for Palestinian justice amongst academics or students. Israel, like the United States, finds many of its most prominent Leftists and critics in the ivory tower - making it into an ivory Bastille just doesn't seem promising. All this concerns the potential utility of Israel's students and academics to anti-militarist, Pro-Palestinian consciousness, so I'll note for the sake of clarity that even an Israeli academia that loyally supported the IDF and showed no sign of altering its perspective would not be deserving of a boycott.

One argument made in this controversy does strike me as disingenuous, though, and that is the move to contrast "boycott" with "academic freedom", as in this sentence:

"Universities, idealistically, are supposed to be politically free," said Stortz. "The university is all about freedom of thought and activity. It is designed to create ideas, research them, and deconstruct them for critical discussion, and therefore, must take a fairly non-political posture to try and understand ideas intellectually."

I take issue to this line of argument not because I disagree that a boycott would strike a blow to the exchange of ideas that is crucial to intellectual development. It most certainly would be. But I do not think we should be fooled into thinking that not engaging in such a boycott in anyway leaves us with a politically neutral forum for discussion, or that the ideal of the "politically free" university is anything but that.

Universities, like all other forums of discourse, are inevitably pervaded by power. At my school, brining in a pro-Palestinian feminist activist to speak about her work required that a student coalition of activists (of which I was a part) to put forward the funds and, more importantly, to name ourselves as her host. No department (like Political Science) or student-service institution (like Multicultural Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Center) on campus was willing to risk the political liability of affiliating with her. Even those that were sympathetic to her work and excited about the prospect of her visit simply did not want to face the backlash of defying the considerable pro-Israel consensus amongst faculty, administrators and trustees. Certainly no one was being boycotted, but political power was still brought to bear on the exchange of ideas. To introduce something like an academic boycott would not impose power on what once was a power-neutral territory, it would merely reform the existing networks of power.

This is the same argument I make in reply to conservatives who believe that "political correctness" will compromise the political neutrality of campus speech. Campus speech is manifestly not politically neutral even absent a speech code or an anti-harassment policy. True such a policy might shift some power in the direction of, for example, queer students. But in discursive climate of the American university, there is nothing that I, as a gay student, can say to a straight interlocutor that has the psychological or social capacity to induce shame, self-doubt, or marginality based on her or his sexual orientation. But my straight interlocutor wield precisely that power, and can unleash it by using homophobic stereotypes or epithets. Similarly, there are a variety of speech situations in which my race, gender, ability status and national origin grant me a considerable amount of power. The subject position of an interlocutor and their relative power in a conversation depends upon their place in structures of privilege that accrue on all types of social axes. To the extent that the array of policies lumped under the banner of "political correctness" by conservative critics can help to reverse asymmetries of power (or at least blunt their capacity to induce harm) I support them.

Similarly, I might support reform policies that could dampen the ability of powerful campus figures to exert influence over the type of political activity that students engage in. But the boycott of Israeli universities would do no such thing.

Are Republicans MORE likely to support a single-payer healthcare system? No, but maybe they should be.

2007-07-19T18:14:00.000-04:00

Much of the controversy surrounding filmmaker Michael Moore’s lambasting of the American healthcare system in his recent documentary SiCKO has revolved around his analysis of healthcare costs in America as compared to costs in other Western countries. Moore and CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently debated some numbers on Larry King Live after Gupta suggested that some of the information presented in the film was misleading and even flat-out inaccurate. Regardless of whether or not Moore fudged some data in the film, his fundamental critique of our healthcare system cannot be disputed. Americans pay much more for healthcare than citizens of other nations while receiving lower quality care. The single-payer, government financed healthcare in these nations provides a high-level of care without wasting money on administrative overhead and without generating nauseatingly enormous profits in the private sector. Gupta and Moore’s data on healthcare costs may have been conflicting, but both sets of data reveal this truth.

Moore goes on to suggest that the major barrier to implementing a single-payer system is the size of the healthcare lobby in Washington. Politicians, including presidential hopeful Senator Hillary Clinton, the leader of the failed 1993 effort to implement sweeping healthcare reform, depend on the support and financial backing of the healthcare industry. It’s not surprising that she and the other “first-tier” presidential candidates are not advocating a single-payer system. Insurance companies would have no role in a single-payer system and, to protect their livelihoods, are throwing money—the real thing that wins elections in the U.S.—at all the major candidates. Even if they were not so dependent on the industry for campaign dollars, the candidates would likely still balk at promoting a single-payer system for fear of the ruinous “socialist” label that would come along with it.

For obvious reasons, Republicans, typically the pro-business party in our two-party system, are overwhelmingly opposed to a single-payer system. But if they were to take a step back for a moment and consider the impact of lower-quality care on the American workforce, they might become the stronger advocate for single-payer. One of the most cited reasons for their support (albeit, sometimes lackluster and/or misguided support) of public education is that it pays of financially in the long-term. Educated people accomplish more and are more productive than uneducated people. Famed economist Adam Smith, hero of the Reagan administration when it sought smaller government, even posited the benefit public education provides to the economy. Taking this sentiment to the next step, wouldn’t better healthcare lead to higher worker productivity? In the long run, wouldn’t a healthier, more productive workforce lead to a healthier and more stable economy? Moreover, if a single-payer system lead to lower healthcare costs overall, wouldn’t new investments stemming from those healthcare savings grow the economy?

I think the answer to these questions is yes. Perhaps a single-payer system would be pro-business in the long-term. Unfortunately for us, politics in this country is rarely concerned with the long-term. As Niccolo Machiavelli realized a half-millennium ago, the most important goal of those in power is to do whatever it takes to stay in power. No serious presidential candidate will support a single-payer system until that breaking point when support from the for-profit healthcare industry does not translate into enough campaign cash to buyout the votes of an American electorate too fed-up with our increasingly dreary system of healthcare. I’m not going to get my hopes up, but maybe SiCKO will get a rise out of us.

Stop me if you've heard this one before

2007-07-19T17:03:00.000-04:00

In preparation for my upcoming trip to Croatia, I've been reading up some regional history. This passage comes from Ann Lane's Yugoslavia: When Ideals Collide.

The dissolution of Yugoslavia was the response of a fractured community with little experience of the practice of pluralist politics to the rapid imposition of western democratic practices of government and the pressures on the economy and society arising from globalisation.

I'm trying to think of major policy decisions made in the intervening decade where this lesson might have been crucially relevant but overlooked. Maybe by people who later claimed there was no way of knowing the mess their decision would've created, that all the intelligence pointed their way?

But, damnedest thing, I'm drawing a blank. Why do they even make us study history?

Least surprising news story ever

2007-07-18T18:14:00.000-04:00

The Justice Policy Institute has published the results of a study on approaches to gang violence. Their conclusion: social justice is more important than criminal justice in de-escalating the levels of violence in American communities. What a shocker. The Star summarizes the findings:

More police, more prisons and more punitive measures aren't the answer to reducing gang activity, concludes a new U.S. study that experts here say underscores the need for Canada to reject that approach in favour of investing in jobs, schools and programs for disenfranchised youth.

Mass arrests, tougher prison sentences, increased surveillance and staggeringly huge gang databases typify the enforcement approach relied upon to respond to gang violence. These methods are rooted in rational choice theories which hold that if only law enforcers can make the penalties and risks of gang activity sufficiently scary in comparison to the perceived benefits, youth will stop joining gangs. There's a major problem with this trend, and it's that the decision to join a gang is hardly the result of cost-benefit analysis.

While a small proportion of youth will join a gang for protection or excitement, the vast majority report more subtle push factors that incline them to participate. Most youth join because they become connected to gangs through their family members or peer groups. The less connected the youth are to mainstream social institutions such as schools, workplaces and families, the more likely they are to join. This list of risk factors for gang membership shows that academic failure, unemployment, and family break-down consistently make the list across a wide range of studies. Drug use is also a major risk factor, as drug-using peer groups tend to overlap with gang-participating peer groups.

The solution is manifestly not imprisonment. While in jail, about 60% of inmates lose their jobs, another 40% lose touch with their families. Gangs, unlike employers, students, and mothers, are a presence in juvenile incarceration facilities. With their social networks and career prospects damaged by imprisonment, released youth are very likely to be pulled into gang activity once again. This also suggests that imprisoning drug-using youth is a poor approach (and an unfair one, since affluent white kids get an inordinate amount of the court-assigned rehab stints, while working-class minorities see much more of the prison time). More than often, as David Schraub recently noted, prison stints for minor drug offenders only produce especially hardened criminals who will only return to incarceration.

What is needed are better crisis intervention programs for at-risk youth, to connect youth on the edge to positive peer groups and proper educational facilities. Too often though, these development programs are alienating to urban and working-class youth, as they essentially try to integrate those youth into middle-class white peer groups. They also tend to emphasize the criminality and deviance of the community the youth came from (and was heading to), rather than emphasizing the institutional conditions producing these outcomes. A corrective to this would be development programs that are designed for minority and poor youth with a social justice approach to development that emphasize social awareness as well as self awareness in decision-making.

And of course, as the Justice Institute finds, there's no reason we should be worried only once we've identified youth as being at-risk. Stronger schools in low-income communities that try to tackle the cumulative developmental disadvantages of growing up poor (which range from poor nutrition to under-stimulation as a result of parents working long hours), employers that offer reasonable income and hours to poor adolescents, and reforms in both work and welfare that allow parents to spend more time with their children would all go along way to limiting the pull of gangs in low-income communities.

How might we pay for all that? Well, a strong progressive income tax has never hurt anyone. And de-criminalizing marijuana use would free up millions of dollars from enforcement and imprisonment expenditures. In these instances, we almost have the choice to look at a kid and decide if we're going to pay for his classroom or his jail cell.

In the mean time,trying to punish violence after-the-fact with harsh penalties is a no-win strategy. And there is no apparent gain to suppression tactics that use heavy surveillance and intimidation tactics, save to give poor children the experience of living in a police state. A more promising tact is to seek out the sources of violence and marginalization in American life that push so many youth into criminal circles. The war on crime and drugs has only produced what philosopher Brian Barry calls a Black Gulag, a vast and costly system of incarcerated black men as a result of unfair policing and sentencing, not to mention a flagging, underfunded system. of social programs - and which, as the ultimate insult, seems to have failed to significantly reduce crime rates in urban communities. The JPI report reveals disturbing but unsurprising parallels in the fruitless punitive-militarist approaches to gang activity that are too frequently adopted by law enforces. The police war on gangs appears, so far, to have been nothing more than a war on America's poorest youth.

Why do we blog?

2007-07-17T14:15:00.000-04:00

I'd be interested in hearing from both my writers and everyone else reading our humble blog. Why do we blog? What effects will blogs have on the coming presidential election? How do we assess the validity of a blog verses the validity of a letter to the editor?

What makes blogging appealing?

These questions surround the very essence of blogging. Blogging is the fastest growing media form according to a recent report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism. Does this mean newspapers will vanish? magazines?

If you have an opinion on the art of blogging and it's impact on mass media, I'd love to hear it.

Ellison on trial

2007-07-17T11:07:00.000-04:00

Keith Ellison (D-MN), for not the fist time, is the scourge of the conservative blogosphere. That's a title that is quite difficult to hold for any extended period of time, so props to him for even intermittently triumphing over such bogeymen as trans people who want to pee in our bathrooms, reds who want Castro to be America's health provider, and the always-popular Hilary Clinton, who, even while on hiatus from doing something that conservatives will find scandalous (read: anything), can at least be counted on to be Hilary Clinton. Which, for many bloggers, is enough.

But Ellison has incensed everyone from the reliably hateful JawaReport (Ellison is inexplicably asked to answer for the actions of a Muslim cleric who supported Hitler in WWII), to the predictably insane Michelle Malkin (who is still to convinced that Ellison is out to impose sharia law despite his having civil libertarian credentials that look especially convincing next to her own fascist bluster), and even harsh criticisms from conservative commentators who teeter precipitously on the edge of the mainstream at Power Line and Fox News. Ladies and gentleman, we may have the makings of a genuine controversy.The reason: KEITH ELLISON COMPARED GEORGE BUSH TO HITLER.

Kind of.

Ellison actually compared 9/11 to the burning of the Reichstag.

"It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that," Mr Ellison said. "After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

Which, if we limit the analogy to just what Ellison said, is not particularly extreme. And why shouldn't we? The purpose of an analogy, after all, is not to say that two things are homologous (the same), but, of course, analogous (that they bear comparison in at least one attribute). Keith Ellison is saying that 9/11 was a national tragedy which was quickly politicized and resulted in the extension of executive power to a level that would be easily abused and incredibly difficult to check. Yes, this means the analogy set Bush opposite Hitler, insofar as both were the recipient of enlarged, and subsequently misused, executive power. Given the Bush administrations use of torture, warrant-less wire-tapping, and continued invocation of executive privilege to dodge oversight, that comparison is not particularly extreme. Certainly, Ellison could have avoided the controversy altogether had he picked any other example of a leader who exploited nationalism and fear after a major tragedy to increase his power. Personally, I would have come out of left-field by dropping in an Emperor Palpatine reference (with the separatist menace to the Republic replacing 9/11 as the rhetorical cudgel). But I see nothing particularly offensive about the comparison Ellison chose to make. Politically unwise, perhaps, but not historically inaccurate or arguably unethical.

The reactions of conservatives are hard to understand.

Mark Drake, of the Republican party in Minnesota, said: "To compare the democratically elected leader of the United States of America to Hitler is an absolute moral outrage which trivialises the horrors of Nazi Germany."

Hitler too, was democratically elected. And it would be a moral outrage to say, for example, that United States use of violence in the war on terror surpasses or rivals the brutality of the Nazi regime. But that is not what Ellison said, nor is it implied by his comment. Ultimately, Ellison is making the oft-heard point that Bush, like so many ascendant authoritarians, is a masterful manipulator of fear. Research in political psychology bears this critique out. The linked study shows that reminders of death and terrorism don't substantially increase a subject's propensity to support George W. Bush. But when one group was made to reflect on the process of dying and death, while the other focused on less weighty concerns, it was found the first group was significantly more likely to support Bush. Sustaining support for his own counter-terrorism policies depends on Bush's ability to cultivate the fear of death amongst citizens. The political weaponization of fear has always been a reliable tool in the arsenal of despots. Fear silences dissent and breeds mistrust - both of which have been linked to stronger support for conservative policies.

The conservative blogopshere is certainly aware of this fact. Their menace-of-the-week approach to politics seeks to do at the grassroots what Bush does from the bully pulpit - to make American suspicious of their neighbors, mistrustful of immigrants, skeptical of the motives of reformers and leaders of communities unlike their own. Their spin on the Ellison story is a calculated move within that game. Their insistence on associating Ellison with terrorists, oppressive regimes culminating with some phantasmic clutch for the heart and soul of Middle America is demagoguery at its worst.

One commenter on Malkin's blog shouts down a level-headed defense of Ellison with this:

Why do I have the feeling that MikeB can’t wait to don the burqua and pay the jizya as a good, subservient dhimmi? (You do realize that your beloved 9/10-era Bill of Rights won’t be observed under the coming Sharia-based regime, don’t you?)

It’s amusing (in a sad and terrifying way) how hand-wringing useful idiots like you can’t stand the idea that you aren’t extending undeserved rights to forces who solely seek your conversion, subjugation or death. I’m sure the jihadis lay awake at night worrying about your rights as well.

A climate in which such a threat is even passingly entertained as probable has clearly collapsed into its own rhetorical constructs, utterly separated from reality by fear. But the real shockers is the bitter conclusion of the second paragraph. "Don't worry about their rights, they aren't worried about yours." The corrosive effects of fear on human solidarity could not be demonstrated more clearly.

Public Service and Heterocitizenship

2007-07-16T18:32:00.000-04:00

Via Pinknews, It would appear that the White House has decided to change its issue on the grave security threat posed by gay, lesbian and bisexuals working in sensitive public service positions. Turns out if your a would-be-White-House staffer whose been a bit too indiscreet about the ol' lavender streak, you might be denied security clearance.

The 1997 regulation which stated that, "sexual orientation may not be used as a basis for denying clearance," has been modified to read: "security clearances cannot be denied solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the individual."

And there you have it. Sexual orientation may now be part of the argument for denying someone clearance. Which is irrefutably brilliant, since typical bases for denying security clearance, such as adult extramarital sexual relationships, don't already stack the deck against gays, lesbians and bisexuals as is, on account of the you wont let us get married thing. Good thing there are special rules to accommodate flamobyant, sex-crazed homos, as long as they behave themselves:

New regulations distributed in December also said that if sexual behaviour is "strictly private, consensual and discreet," it could reduce security concerns.

I love/am-tremendously-disturbed-by the casual insertion of “consensual” between “private” and “discreet”, as though not-being-a-rapist were just another matter of sexual propriety.

And on that note, clearly, homosexual relationships need to be private and discreet, whereas straight people should have giant expensive ceremonies to which every single person they've ever known is invited. This is nothing more than the common injunction for gays, lesbians and bisexuals to “cover.” You know- “I'm not a homophobe, but do they have to flaunt it by holding hands in public?” People with stigmatized identities are expected to downplay their identities in public, otherwise they may face reprisal, both formal (no security clearance) and informal (taunting, appalled reactions, physical violence).

It's a kind of socio-cultural Don't Ask, Don't Tell: we're willing to tolerate your difference, so long as you play along by making that difference as imperceptible as possible. This prevents gays, lesbians and bisexuals from doing many of the things that heterosexuals can do without thinking. Under DADT, straight soldiers don't have to worry about the consequences of carrying a picture of their lover, or speaking publicly about the gal/guy waiting for them back home. Likewise, in offices where non-discrimination policies protect only straight people, it is acceptable to wear your wedding band and keep family photos on the desk, but not to have a picture of your partner. That's disruptive, distracting, unprofessional, and totally queer.

And now, gays, lesbians and bisexuals who's career plans might lead toward Pennsylvania Avenue should think twice about these heterosexual luxuries: public dates, taking your partner to work events, surviving a less-than-clean break-up. Etc.

But don't worry. This is not a move toward discrimination.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's Republican staff director, Bill Duhnke, said that the regulations have the same effect, although they approach the issue in slightly different way.

See? They're the same, but slightly different! I feel so much better now.

Gay rights activists say that sexuality will be given increased attention and unnecessarily lead to subsequent discrimination by intolerant employers.

It could also result in blackmail of homosexuals who choose not to disclose their sexuality.

Aw, dammit.

But none of this is surprising. The Lavender Scare has held Washington in it's grip for some time. David Johnson's book, The Lavender Scare, points out that during the McCarthy Era, more federal employees lost their job for their sexual orientation (or blackmail surrounding their perceived sexual orientation) than for demonstrated Communist sympathies. In an interview, Johnson explained the significant overlap in homophobia and anti-Communist paranoia:

Both groups were perceived as hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. Both groups were thought to recruit to their ranks the psychologically weak or disturbed. And both groups were considered immoral and godless.

An interesting bit. Certainly, the association of God and Country did nothing to help homosexuals who are still on the outs with many religious leaders. But I think the first two sentences hit on the more profound sense in which citizenship is constructed as heterosexual by playing to exclusionary conceptions of public life that far predate the Red Scare and, in fact, preoccupied the likes of John Jay and Thomas Jefferson.

The first, I think, gets at the notion that homosexuals, as a marginalized population, owe their loyalties to – gasp – something other than the Red, White and Blue. Just as recent immigrants have typically been suspected (in nearly any context) of being fifth columnists for the capitalists/communists/terrorists, there seems to be a suspicion that the loyalty of homosexuals would be compromised by their implication in any non-mainstream culture. The stereotype that gays, lesbians and bisexuals are “sex-driven” only plays into this fear. After all, how can we trust them to prioritize the public good over the good of the communities that allow them to indulge their sexual deviancies?

This idea, that bodily passion would inhibit public spiritedness is an exclusionary trope that, as I indicated earlier, goes back to the days of Jefferson. Many of the founding fathers agreed that women and natives could not participate in democracy because they were to given to the passions of the body and blood. Public-spiritedness meant that one needed to objectively transcend their own passions and apply the objective force of reason to problems.

Iris Marion Young astutely grasped the extent to which this mindset still pervades the speech-culture of Western democracies. We are skeptical of emotive speakers, people who cry, use lofty rhetoric, get angry, tell too many stories, make grand gestures, and so forth. Public speech, like public-mindedness, is supposed to be rational, clam, dispassionate, impartial, and calculated. Surprise, surprise – that just happens to be the way that middle-and-upper-class white men are trained to speak. The practicing of political rhetoric in which emotion, greeting, and narrative were regular features, Young argues, would expose the whole game. We'd have to admit that even when we spoke objectively, we were coming from a contingent position just as much as the people who integrated their subjectivity into their speech. But then the claims of the majority to represent a "common good" would have to be shown for what they were: demands issued from a specific socio-political position, a good that would privilege some at the expense of others. The incisiveness of Young's commentary is that she traces the lingering effects of this sexism on discourse, which seeks to preserve the Enlightenment myth of universal reason and public good - and of course the effect of discursive standard on sexism.

When high-modernists express fear that anecdotes and impassioned rhetoric will undo the deliberative system, they in fact worry that the very political bond will be corrupted. Interestingly, when women were derided for there lack of rationality and impartiality, there was no mention of the fact that men might have their neutrality compromised if they were forced to engage and repress their bodily desires while interacting with women. In the tradition of great female temptresses going back to Eve, it is women who would lead men from the path of virtue by corrupting the objectivity of the proceedings. For this reason, maintenance of the halls of government as homosocial space was a priority.

And of course, nothing jeopardizes a homosocial space like a homosexual! The idea that homosexuals would occupy public roles threatens to make the public-political bond between men indistinguishable from the private-sexual bond between men. The Enlightenment virtue of fraternity is that all men are concerned for each others interests, but the high-rationality of the Enlightenment depends on the disavowal of pre-modern romanticism. We are interested as thinkers and mutual practitioners of reason, not as feelers or lovers. The corruption of the homosocial by the homosexual is seen, at least implicitly, as a threat to the very virtues that enable citizenship. How ironic that the democratic legacy had its origins in pederastic Athens. Whereas Athenians integrated the homosocial and the homosexual, the new conception of the homosocial does not allow for that.

But not everywhere are the two separated today. In discussing the spectrum of homosocial-to-heterosexual that defines female life, Eve Sedgwick notes that the political site of female homosociality is feminism – women deliberating amongst women for the interests of women. The homosexual end of the spectrum is lesbianism, women loving women. The fact that there are feminist lesbians does not appear to be problematic for either group.Yet the same does not (or is not though to) apply to men:

When Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms get down to serious logrolling on "family policy", they are men promoting men's interests... Is their bond in any way congruent with the bond of a loving gay male couple? Reagan and Helms would say no--disgustedly. Most gay couples would say no--disgustedly. But why not? Doesn't the continuum between "men-loving-men" and "men-promoting-the-interests-of-men" have the same intuitive force that it has for women?

Perhaps it has to do with Heidi Hartmann's definition of patriarchy as: “relations between men... [which] create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women.” The sexualization of the homosocial bond not only threatens the civic enterprise, but comprises the locus of patriarchal force. Patriarchal solidarity (fraternity) cannot maintain the veneer of rational objectivity unless the possibility of male sexual desire for men is repressed. Hence the need to exclude homosexuals from citizenship.

The debate over Don't Ask Don't Tell displays this notion at its clearest. The military is another homosocial site of public service. The argument, made implicitly and explicitly by conservatives, is that gay men and lesbians cannot serve in the military because they will be too focused on (actual or prospective) sexual relationships with other service members to effectively fulfill their duties. This of course, displays the curious one-sided-ness of the colonial men who feared the effects of feminine passion on their discourse, but did not suspects any ill-effects emergent from their own sexual desire. Is there not, perhaps, a fear on the behalf of all who tout the military as a symbol of traditional masculinity that the ostensibly straight servicemen will have their capacities compromised by desire for their openly homosexual colleagues? Like so much homophobia, could the necessity of abjecting the queer other be emergent from an inability to confront the latent homosexuality of the self?

Repressing the feminine and homosexual to protect the ostensible masculine homosociality of public life is significant: if we were all forced to confront the contingent and self-situated nature of or public convictions, the facade of enlightenment rationality would fall away, revealing the domination of partial interests that is so much of public policy. Just as the feminine figure threatens male discourse by confronting men with the extent to which subjective experience as opposed to objective reason informs their political positions, the figure of the homosexual raises doubt on the purity of the public bond, exposing it to be as subject to the same rule of contingent desire as personal (and indeed, sexual) life – removing the rhetorical cloak of universal fraternity and solidarity from a set of relations that is in fact driven by lust and power. The loyalty of homosexuals is suspect, as Johnson showed, because of their ties to a particular community – by disavowing similar contingent bonds, the dominant majority can naturalize their loyalties to their community of interest and argue that all who do not recognize the legitimacy of those established interests are simply part of a subversive and unpatriotic agenda. It is, after all, the contingent privilege of powerful people that permits them to serve the institutions of the status quo, not any superior quality of character.

Against this, I would call for a queer citizenship, that in integrating the homosexual with the homosocial highlights the queerness of the public sphere – the role of contingency and power in shaping the public bond. Queer citizenship would acknowledge the partiality of public relationships, exposing the self-selected exclusions and arbitrary inclusions that inform the extension of solidarity. Queer citizenship would also acknowledge the scattered loyalties that emerge from a life of intersecting and plural identities, calling into question the alleged purity of expressing loyalty to the needs of the dominant majority. I think that this model could prove not only a viable corrective to the mainstream political understanding of citizen relations and public service, but also to the current problematics of the mainstream LGBT movement.

The push for marriage for example, seeks to integrate, unproblematically, LGBT people into the fabric of American society. It demands equal citizenship, without interrogating the exclusive construction of citizenship. A distressful example of this blind spot is the budding relationship between anti-DADT activists and militarist Democrats. The bill currently proposed to overturn DADT is the Military Readiness Enhancement Act. As one might imagine from the title, the arguments surrounding the bill take up not the injustice of discrimination but the inefficiency of discrimination in maintaining the military power of the United States. Here, equal citizenship is uncritical citizenship. It cannot and should not be an ethically neutral proposal to “enhance” the US military given its current and historical exercises in imperialist brutality. Too willing to prove that they can be objective, loyal public servants just as straight people can, gays, lesbians and bisexuals are uncritically buying into the militarist project.

A more fruitful alliance would be the one budding between immigrant activists and LGBT activists problematizing the unjust border policies of the United States. The economic status, marital status, political activities, and national origin of potential immigrants are all analyzed at the border, in a system that effectively discriminates against poor people, queers, radicals and people from countries that have “excessive” rates of immigration or are, for whatever reason, no longer desired. Here, the ideal US citizen is typified and constructed as middle-class, hard-working, politically moderate and white. For even as non-white immigrants enter the country, the balance is maintained so that the relative population of Latin@s, blacks, Asians, and others to whites remains “acceptable.”

Resisting these selection policies would be more politically radical than demanding equal citizenship because it would problematize the very construction of citizenship rather than silently integrating. It would be a step towards true democracy because it would allow a chance to build coalitions of abjected identities who could extend their claim to participate against the hegemony of the ideal citizenship. By explicitly operating at the ground of designation between citizen and non-citizen, the movement could explode the binary, calling into question the extent to which all citizens deviate from the naturalized model of the ideal citizen. Such a movement could stake the claim of all to be citizens and highlight the failure of any to be citizens. The result would be a society in which the category of citizen could be mobilized for political demand while deconstructed to call attention to political exclusion. The total erasure of the bond between identity and citizenship may be the ultimate expression of the radical democratic potential of identity politics.

I will be personally responsible for ensuring that Giuliani never comes close to the White House

2007-07-15T19:22:00.000-04:00

I'm currently reading Why Social Justice Matters by Brian Barry. So far,my verdict is that the book is inessential from a theoretical standpoint, but certainly informative as it marshals a staggering amount of empirical data to depict the damage of cumulative disadvantages on individual life-chances and the structural maintenance of gross inequality in the US and UK. But this post is just meant to share a choice passage on Giuliani, which comes up in the context of comparing a couple different models of social policy.

Giuliani embraced the ethic of the Work and Personal Responsibility Reconciliation Act with such fervor that he actually instructed city employees not to welfare recipients that they were also eligible for food stamps.

ARE YOU KIDDING?

That line actually almost made me throw up. The media depicts Giuliani as “Rudy!”, this big-hearted grinning guy who was “America's mayor”. And in reality, he is exactly the type of person who will jeopardize the ability of his own citizens to feed themselves and their families, just so he can shave some money off the food stamp budget and score whatever political points come from reducing the number of people on food stamps. Which to be honest, I didn't even fathom was a type of person so much as an utterly disturbing caricature of a person that might be a villain in a Dickens novel.

Only slightly less terrifying is Giuliani's approach to helping homeless people:

His first homeless service commissioner, Joan Malin (who resigned in 1996),

recalled that in 1995 the Mayor had determined to shrink the soaring shelter population the way Richard J. Schwartz, his senior policy adviser, was shrinking the welfare rolls: tighten eligibility rules, deter applicants at the front door, and eject those who failed to meet work requirements. ... 'What Richard's done in the welfare system is what you need to be doing' , She was told by Giuliani. 'It became his mantra.'

To back up this policy, he 'reduced subsidized housing placements from the shelters to a 10-year-low, and let the pipe-line of city-owned apartments dry up'.

Unfortunately, Giuliani's theory that the homeless were responsible for their own plight did not seem to be borne out by reality. 'By February of 2001, the number of people lodging nightly in the shelter system equaled the 1980s peak of 28,737...

In the end, it turns out that the simple-minded explanation of homelessness – that it is due to lack of affordable housing – was right all along. 'A New York University Study that followed homeless families in 1988 and a random group on public assistance who had not been homeless found that only one factor – subsidized housing - determined whether a family in either group was stably housed five years later'.

Surprise, surprise.

My earliest memories of politics are from the Clinton years, New Democrats who climbed on-board the conservative rallying cry of “personal responsibility”. And since then, I've had six years of W., a man who finds it endearing, not unsettling, when a woman has to work three jobs to support her family. This whole idea that social policy should chiefly entail preaching to underprivileged women and men about their bad life choices while we cut off their support systems is absurd, but the political mainstream seems content with the “condescend-and-let'em-fend” approach. Sure, people make choices. But those choices are undeniably constrained by systems of which individuals have no control. Hell, the consistent ability of privileged employers and wealthy tax-payers to control the domestic policy agenda suggests that even an organized coalitions of individuals have few chances when it comes to, say, creating a market for affordable housing. So exactly how can one feel justified in demanding that a family demonstrate more personal responsibility for their position in the market we do have? And what about the responsibility of the privileged to ensure a minimally decent standard of living for our neighbors? It's a unique kind of cruelty that blames the homeless – perhaps America's most stigmatized and excluded sub-class – for their plight.

But leaving the esoteric mattes on hold, I think even Americans of a less determinist bent than I would find Giuliani's approach unacceptable. And yet the “values voters” of our country could care less about how many families he's sent to the streets, so long as he'll come around on sending women to jail for having abortions. He may have been America's mayor, but if he becomes America's president, I'm going to grad school in Canada.

Good (but not great) news for trans people

2007-07-15T13:24:00.000-04:00

Jamie Tyroler has a great column up at CAMP situating the AMA's newly minted non-discrimination policy within debates over transgender equality and universal healthcare. Medical discrimination is an issue that transgender people have struggled with for too long, and in a way that no other group in the United States has. Tyroler's article relates a disturbing and personal example:

A few years ago, a transgender friend of mine tried committing suicide by swallowing a large amount of over-the-counter medication. She walked to a local emergency room where the doctor on duty ordered her to leave and not to return. The doctor told her that this hospital would never treat someone like her. Fortunately, she survived her suicide attempt. Unfortunately though, walking home in a very fragile state, she was raped.

A post at MySoCalledGayLife reminds us of another tragedy:

In 1999, Robert Eads, a female-to-male transsexual, died of ovarian cancer after multiple doctors refused to treat him. His case was documented in the 2001 documentary, Southern Comfort.

All around the country, people have been dying simply because the ethical commitment that doctors have made to respond to those in need seems to be outweighed by their irrepressible disgust for those who do not, and indeed, can not, live within the confines of the binary equation of sex and gender. This is not an issue that requires a PhD in Gender Studies to grasp. There is little that deconstruction can offer in comprehending the great pain and misery that medical discrimination deals. It is an issue as simple as whether or not we will heal the sick and tend to the suffering, regardless of how they relate to the loaded vocabularies of "man" and "woman".

Thankfully, the AMA gets it right. In fact, they nail it. From employment, to insurance, to treatment, the AMA will now forbid discrimination based on gender identity. Many trans people who have labored to find help from our nation's doctors will rest easier with the burden of medical discrimination lifted from them.

But there is still much to be done on the front of transgender health. Transgender cultural competency needs to be a priority in medical training. No one should have to feel like alien or unsafe when they go to visit the doctor. Insurance providers should research the actual (not hypothetical, stereotypical, or downright mythological) costs and benefits of sexual reassignment so that their trans clients can receive fair quotes - rather than being unfairly gouged, or as is usually the case, completely denied coverage. Surveys and studies need to identify trans subjects so that a profile of the health needs of the trans community can emerge. If we do not effectively and preemptively concern ourselves with the health needs of American minority populations and prioritize a strong response to disparities in health care and research, then we will continue to watch each underserved population die in unnecessarily high numbers. It doesn't seem like a hard choice.

But the Christian right is ful of surprises. Led by Tom Coburn and the AFA, they're already lining up against such efforts. They would rather see tax cuts than an increase of spending for the CDC. And they are especially incensed that the CDC has made strides to include trans people, MSM, WSW, sex workers and drug users into the fold of people whose health will be addressed. Forget that we know little about most of these groups except for the simple fact that they appear to be at elevated risks for a variety of illnesses. Apparently, the price of deviance is not only shame, but marginalization, destitution, sickness and death. The AFA even offers a direct action meme, which lures in fundies with the "outrageous" claim that the CDC has used their money for an event focusing on trans people! The horrors!

And so now, the bizarre alliance between "family values" voters and free market capitalists has one of the largest Christian organizations lobbying the President to spend less on health care. The followers of a Christ who not only healed lepers and the blind, but counseled and comforted prostitutes, criminals and adulterers, cannot bear the idea of spending their money to assist the ill and at-risk who must exist on the fringes of the social mainstream because of absurd norms of propriety and sexual conservativism. Irony does not do the situation justice. It is merely a disgrace.

We Don't Bowl Together

2007-07-14T15:51:00.000-04:00

Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, began research on diversity nearly six years ago. He announced some initial findings in 2001 but the announcement was mostly ignored. This year, his findings on diversity were partially delivered in a lecture republished in Scandinavian Political Studies (full text available here), a rather small journal. The findings were, to say the least, controversial. Conventional thinking about diversity in the United States could have been wrong for several years.

The basics of the finding were simple but shocking. Diversity, defined here as heterogeneous ethnicity, had some surprising findings. Putnam claimed immigration-fueled diversity enhanced creativity, rapid economic growth in the developed world, and mild economic improvements in the developing world. Despite these positives, Putnam claimed diversity hurts the development of strong social networks or “social capital.” Diverse societies had less social capital in the short-term but diversity enhanced a society as individuals create new identities in the long-term.

The layperson tends to base diversity on “contact theory,” the idea of setting up encounters between different people would improve inter-group trust. Empirical data disagrees with this theory and supports “conflict theory.” Identity markers tend to change our attitudes about different people, particularly our out-group attitudes. The most dramatic example is the Stanford Prison Experiment (detailed in The Lucifer Effect, the most chilling book of the year). The Stanford Prison Experiment used mostly people of the same race and degenerated into severe mistrust and eventual abuse at the hands of “normal kids.” Heterogeneity creates more negative out-group attitudes but that was only part of the story, particularly if a researcher looks at race.

Ethnically heterogeneous communities are more likely to default on loans, allow infrastructure deterioration, raise fewer voluntary donations, invest in fewer public goods, and distrust others socially. People in heterogeneous communities are less likely to practice reciprocity in contrived situations like “the prisoner’s dilemma” or bona fide situations like carpooling. The lack of social trust and reciprocity in heterogeneous societies goes beyond distrust of others but heterogeneous societies also foster distrust in the in-group dynamics. In sum, heterogeneity lowers trust in the short-term.
Putnam found distrust cut across virtually all meaningful barriers and discovered few statistically significant factors that influenced the data. Large cities are no more trusting than small towns, the old and young are about the same, women and men are equally trusting, and red states are the same as blue states. Poverty causes some differences in the expression of trust but the level of trust but the level of trust was not different. Studies of government resources like parks or libraries as a factor, the “potholes-to-playgrounds ratio,” finds more of these resources in heterogeneous communities and government negligence is eliminated as a statistically significant factor. Conservatives are more likely to distrust than liberals but the level of distrust was still significant among liberals. The difference between liberals and conservatives may be due to self-reporting issues with liberals less likely to admit distrust of other ethnic groups.

The result of distrust in Putnam’s view was not conflict but withdrawal from community life. Putnam called this “constrict theory” but cutely described it as “turtling.” People tend to avoid social life, engage in fewer civic organizations, and feel more helpless in their community. “Race wars” were improbable in the study but declining social capital motivated de facto segregation. The helpless and isolation people felt could be solved by one thing; moving. Oddly enough, previous research demonstrated phenomena like “white flight” began with people claiming to be the most trusting of other races.

Is diversity all bad? Putnam’s slow release of the findings (he claims the rest of the findings will be published later) was believed to conceal the hidden agenda of protecting diversity programs. Some conservative critics of the diversity movement have claim this as evidence against the dogmatism of diversity. The problem with the political views of diversity is the demand that diversity programs be weighed as good or bad. The study demonstrates that diversity costs social capital and, like all capital exchanges, we should evaluate the benefits against the cost. Conservative objections to diversity ignore the benefits (and due to immigration, inevitability) of diversity. Liberals may need to concede diversity’s inherent value as higher than other costs. Instead of a good/bad problem, the better question is; “Is diversity worth the cost?”

The university is the hardest place to crack because universities are financially committed to diversity. Many public schools foster programs, offices, and employees to teach and protect diversity. These programs are based on the debunked contact theory and have little incentive (or legal leeway) to change. Years of legal wrangling to prevent discrimination has resulted in some progress but also a great deal of backlash. Even left wing people have pointed out that universities could learn from Putnam’s shining example; the U.S. Army.

World War II vets were an exception to the contact hypothesis, with mixed units having more positive feelings about desegregating the army than all-white units. The rule returned with high rates of inter-racial fragging in Vietnam. In the 30-years since, members of the military tend to have more heterogeneous friends than civilians. Putnam is unable to explain the change but believes this institution could indicate a direction for the rest of us. He claims military folks have a sense of shared identity that extends beyond race. It is one theory and requires greater study.

One possible solution for the university is “school spirit,” a new identity that people could use above race. School spirit could enhance the conflict theory between schools but could improve the climate on individual campuses. Studies have shown that people are more likely to donate money to a university if they felt “connected” while at school. The problem with this theory is that schools already spend a lot of time and money raising school spirit and the method of connection. Events like pep rallies, football games, and spirit weeks are expensive to promote and hold. Schools that want to increase diversity may need to weigh the costs of promoting school spirit.

Despite conservative comments, Putnam’s study doesn’t call for the elimination of programs like women’s studies or African-American studies. These programs may facilitate turtling but it’s unclear if these programs cause turtling. People without these programs tend to feel threatened, enhancing backlash and apathy toward the results of conflict like discrimination. Diversity is valuable but we may need a different approach to discrimination than contact theory.

If the Senate can accept other religions, can all Americans do it?

2007-07-14T12:35:00.000-04:00

On Friday, for the first time in its 218-year history, the United States Senate invited a Hindu cleric to lead the Senate in its usual opening prayer - and this time, all 100 Senate members followed Mr. Rajan Zed in saying a simple Hindu prayer, despite the arrival of protesters who opposed Zed's presence.

The full text of the prayer was released by the Congressional Record, and seems fairly nondenominational to me. The following words seem to me as though they could be a prayer applying to any faith:
Let us pray. We meditate on the transcendental Glory of the Deity Supreme, who is inside the heart of the Earth, inside the life of the sky, and inside the soul of the Heaven. May He stimulate and illuminate our minds.

Lead us from the unreal to the real, from darkness to light, and from death to immortality. May we be protected together. May we be nourished together. May we work together with great vigor. May our study be enlightening. May no obstacle arise between us.

May the Senators strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world, performing their duties with the welfare of others always in mind, because by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. May they work carefully and wisely, guided by compassion and without thought for themselves.

United your resolve, united your hearts, may your spirits be as one, that you may long dwell in unity and concord.

Peace, peace, peace be unto all. Lord, we ask You to comfort the family of former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson. Amen.
All was not well, however: conservative Christian groups were in uproar; some even came to the Senate to protest. Reverend Flip Benham, head of the group Operation Save America, released a press release about the incident, saying that the Senate "was violated by a false Hindu god. The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers. Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ!"

Three protesters tried to shout down Zed as he led the prayer, yelling things like "This is an abomination!" and "We are Christians and patriots!" All three were arrested and charged with disrupting Congress. But it is very disheartening to see the degree of intolerance that some people in America have towards others, despite all the progress we thought we had made.

Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, summed it up best. He said that the protest "shows the intolerance of many religious right activists. They say they want more religion in the public square, but it's clear they mean only their religion."

To me, this whole incident seems to beg the question: is prayer appropriate in the Senate anymore? The Senate has been opening each morning for 218 years with a prayer. But in today's increasingly diverse and secular society, this may have become an outdated custom that needs to be changed. America may have been built by a group of people who happened to be Christians, but today, we are not a Christian nation; we are a secular nation that is supposed to be welcoming and tolerant of all faiths. If we truly want separation of church and state, doing away with prayers in Congress altogether would be the right move; however, welcoming in a clergyman of another faith - if only for a day - is at least a good step in the direction of religious tolerance. Will we see a Muslim cleric next? I can only imagine the protests against that would be much worse, sadly...

Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), himself a Mormon, should be applauded for inviting Zed to the Senate. He defended his decision after the protesters had been removed, saying: "If people have any misunderstanding about Indians and Hindus," Reid said, "all they have to do is think of Gandhi," a man "who gave his life for peace. I think it speaks well of our country that someone representing the faith of about a billion people comes here and can speak in communication with our heavenly Father regarding peace."

It is a big step for the US Senate to invite a clergyman of another faith, a faith that is foreign to most Americans, into their chambers and allow him to lead them in prayer. It is one way in which the Senate has actually been able to stand as a shining example to the rest of America, at a time when Congress's approval ratings are low. If the Senate can be this tolerant and accepting of other faiths, is the rest of America not far behind? I hope so.

WAY awesome Bangladeshi kids (OR: Community Power and the Domestic Sphere, if that's more your style)

2007-07-14T09:17:00.000-04:00

Utterly swamped with work over the past couple days, I hate that I left whatever readership the fledgling blog (can I call it a blogling?) has acquired at this point on a bit of a hiatus. But someone's got to make sure that crazy people don't become the Surgeon General. All the worse, I left y'all on a down note with the post on domestic violence. But fear not, I'm back and I have good news.

In an incontrovertible display of badassery, local Bangladeshi children intervened to stop one of their classmates from being forced into marriage by her father.

Classmates of a 13-year-old Bangladeshi school girl due to enter a forced marriage have united to stop the ceremony going ahead, police say.
Around 50 pupils in the town of Satkhira took to the streets to demand that Habiba Sultana's wedding be called off, they say.
Pupils even submitted a petition to police urging them to take action.

Apparently, the police actually acted on the demands of the children. After summoning the father and ordering him to cancel the marriage, they forced him to sign a bond in which he agreed not to wed his daughter while she was still a child. Child marriages are illegal in Bangladesh.

Though I certainly don't want to be read as saying that arranged marriages are morally equivalent to domestic abuse, I think there are grounds for comparison between what went right in this instance and what so frequently goes wrong in addressing domestic violence through the courts in the United States (see the post below for more on that).

In both instances, a powerful male is enabled by familial power dynamics to exert nearly uninterrupted power within the home. The article about Sultana notes that she did not resist the marriage herself because she was too afraid. Fear of violent reprisal from the abuser is a frequently cited reason for not resisting domestic violence - and a good one: women who attempt to fight with or flee from their abuser are more likely to be seriously injured or killed.

What makes all the difference in countering male power in the domestic sphere is the existence of a community power structure that women and children can access. The United States' divorce and custody courts, as the past article showed, are all too frequently not part of such a power structure. When they decide not to investigate claims of abuse, they cut off women and children from the possibility of intervention and leave the abusers power unchallenged. What went right in Bangladesh was that the police were willing to do just the opposite (although under considerable pressure - 50 of anyone at your local police station, even 13-year-old children would be difficult to ignore). But that also goes to show the importance of informal community power dynamics in protecting victims of mistreatment within the home. Because Sultana could relay her fear about her father and the marriage to her classmates, they could intervene on her behalf. Ultimately, what made the community power structure a benefit to Sultana, rather than the hindrance that community and state power structures so frequently are, is that there was synergy between Sultana's immediate social network and the state agency, which made the police susceptible to the demands of the community.

I think the moral of this story may well be the (not terribly surprising) revelation that democratic community power structures can alleviate domestic violence by permitting women and children to seek interventions which balance out the inegalitarian power relationships of the domestic sphere. Letting bureaucrats and judges make top-down decisions without any accountability simply doesn't give women and children the stake in the system that they need. So democratization all the way down, all around. (Though all said I'm not entirely thrilled by imagining a world where you can get your abuse claims promptly investigated but only provided you can marshal a batallion of angry women to kick ass at the courthouse). So that's the moral if your a theory hack anyway. A less academic lesson is simply that those kids are made of 100% awesome, and its always uplifting to see young people organizing to give power to the powerless. I hope their parents are proud.

Defending What's Theirs: Men, Control, and Custody

2007-07-11T11:12:00.000-04:00

Marrie Tessler, of Woman's eNews, has written a piece on the legal obstacles that keep children in the custody of abusive parents. It reads like an article pulled from any newswire, dryly relating the research on each side of the issue, but the unadorned prose still packs an immense emotional wallop derived entirely from the unsettling facts.

It opens with this claim: "Research indicates that abusers seek sole custody more often than nonviolent parents, and they succeed about 70 percent of the time."

At first I was shocked. But there is really nothing surprising about that sentence. The psychological research that has been done one abusers makes one thing clear - control is at the center of the abusive mentality. The two most common types of abusers are "cyclically emotional volatile perpetrators" and "over-controlled perpetrators." The latter group seeks to maintain control in the family, and utilizes psychological abuse more often than physical violence. The former develop emotional dependency on their victim, but (possibly as a reaction to an actual or perceived inability to maintain attachment) experience intense feelings of shame, fear, abandonment and anger toward the victim which are dispelled through acts of violent aggression. These are the abusers most likely to display contrition between violent episodes. They are also the most likely to commit violence of escalating severity with each cycle.

The possessive, controlling and emotionally dependent nature of the abuser would explain the increased likelihood to fight for sole custody of the child. And the abusers often win, because courts are unwilling to spend the time or money to investigate claims of abuse:

"It's very common for people to make recommendations in child protective cases and child custody litigation without ever looking at clinical evidence of child abuse, spouse abuse or trauma," says Robert A. Geffner, who directs the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma in San Diego's Alliant International University.

It is disturbing how little voice women and children have in our judicial system when the demands of expediency in resolution issued by men suing for sole custody can convince a judge to ignore the likely fact they will be sentencing a child to spend the remainder of her or his youth in the care of a pathological abuser. The need to standardize judicial procedures for investigating abuse claims is apparent. But as the article points out, moves by "fathers' rights" activists oppose much of the legal work being done in that area, claiming that it unfairly puts fathers on the defensive when claims of abuse surface. Even when children themselves are willing to testify - often an excruciating experience that entails reliving the shame, degradation and physical pain of abuse - some are discredited based on the APA-rejected theory of "parental alienation syndrome", which holds that mothers brainwash their children to testify against their fathers.

This bizarre rhetoric underlies the proprietary lens through which many men view family: as an acquired signifier of social status or achievement, which he has a right to maintain control of once he has labored to build or earn it, as though familial bonds were governed by some twisted Lockean scheme of patriarchal acquisition. The data on abusers points toward such a mindset. Consider the psychological profiles, in which men feel embarrassed or hurt at their lack of attachment to their family. Whether or not this is consciously viewed as an injustice akin to theft of property, the violent response suggests an active desire to reassert the level of attachment that the male perceives to be proper. That men who control more of a family's income than their spouse are more likely to commit violence verifies that the concepts of ownership, input, desert and power have places in the psychology of abusers, as does the fact that men who are dissatisfied with their perceived power in relationships are more likely to commit abuse. The overlapping issues of economic power, emotional dependency, attachment and control that underly abusive relationships suggest that patriarchal conceptions of property and family are perfectly relevant to the intractable problem of domestic violence.

Moreover, the intervention of "fathers' rights" activists reminds us of a crucial fact that can never be understated in discussing abuse: most abusers are men. One commenter on Alternet accuses the article of spreading "the same old anti-father lies that we've been hearing for years", and angrily objects that "the abusers are not only men." And the second part, at least, is true. Domestic abuse is a crucial issue no matter who commits it. But a well-regulated and consistent process for investigating abuse would not do anything to hurt men, and would, in fact only help men who were living with abusive women.

Meanwhile, the reverse-victimization rhetoric employed by many men obscures the facts that violence is overwhelmingly committed by men against women and children, and that women are more likely to be economically dependent on the male abuser and thus less able to flee with their child. The response of men to the domestic violence that their gender overwhelmingly commits cannot be defensiveness, nor can it be to make clutches for legal power to silence the claims of women and children. It seems ridiculous to state that rule bluntly, but when men respond to the violence that results from their desire for familial control by reasserting their desire for legal control, I feel that it has to be said.

Via Alternet.

AgriAmericanism: Deconstructing Development

2007-07-10T18:22:00.000-04:00

Nezua's post at Feministe is an exemplary exercise in bandito fusion philosophy, splicing proletariat outrage with dead-eyed analysis of the interlocking systems and mindsets that keep the machine running. As he lays out his wrath on the McDonald's-industrial complex he spares no cog its comeuppance, checking off each complicit part like a name on a hit-list: the corporations that peddle biased consumption manuals to public schools in lieu of textbooks, the policy-makers who won't shell out enough for said schools to afford anything else, the culture of competition that crowns greed, the government that subsidizes corporate obesity-mills and watches the health system sink, and the bloody carnivorism of the meat industry (in case you haven't been paying attention – meat is still murder).

And yet for all of the indubitably righteous fire he spits, Nezua still lets agribusiness off easy. The crooks he's out to expose are not just profiting from the deaths of American animals (non-human and otherwise), but also from the starvation of the world's poor. The very lexicon of economic development is an arsenal of loaded words, all triggers squeezed tightly by the white-collar kings of multinational capitalism. Think about the measures of economic development used by the World Bank, the IMF. They ask us to observe GNPs per capita, population stability, labor force structures, urbanization, consumption per capita, infrastructure – rhetorically constructing a metric of evaluation where the amount of money generated, or in the best cases, how it is made and distributed, is all we need to know to see if a country is “growing”.

But what about hunger? Is it possible we have built systems, repeatedly cited studies, that claim to measure material progress without even ensuring that the basic material necessities are accessible? Most frequently, GNP per capita is the end of the discussion. The UN's Human Development Index at least factors in life expectancy, which would result in some indirect acknowledgment that malnourishment and starvation are not signs of a healthy economy. Even the most progressive measures of development tend to include “caloric intake” only at the end of a long list of social conditions. But caloric intake doesn't venture to ask what is being eaten – how many billions are malnourished even as their country “develops”? In India, the middle class was growing and multinational fast food providers were making a killing – all evidenced by the blossoming fast food industry, which was growing at a voracious annual rate of 40% as 2005 approached. Yet through those trends over 25% of India's population was malnourished. That number had remained disturbingly consistent throughout the past decade.

Even when some of that developing dough does trickle down to the pockets of the poor, malnourishment isn't staved off. In much of the global South, fruits, vegetables and other sources of vital nutrients are luxury items for the wealthy. This is because the agribusinesses that buy up huge proportions of the arable land in the developing world export their products to the lucrative markets in developed nations, leaving only enough behind for choice consumers to bid for. During the Irish Potato Famine, Ireland was still sending wheat and grain to England. During the 1984 famine, Ethiopia was shipping green beans to Great Britain. The structures of colonial domination have ossified, not withered, under globalization, their durability a distressing testament to the uninterrupted history of exploitation that is still being written.

The huge amount of food, and especially meat, that Americans eat takes a toll on the world, just like our European compatriots in neo-colonialism. Foreign agribusinesses make a convincing investment for the developing world – they need the big ticket revenue to pay back their debts. And oftentimes, their unwanted competition is impossible to eschew: there are political and economic costs for the opponents of neo-liberalism's fetish for open borders. Large scale production sees agribusinesses purchasing arable land in hectares, out of the hands of local farmers who could grow vital crops to feed their countrymen. Instead, the vast majority of the land is used to grow feed for short-lived livestock headed for American slaughterhouses. Agribiz giants like Monsanto and Cargill claim to be bringing business opportunities to farmers in the developing world. But if the political economy of agriculture is such that there is no market for affordable, nutritious food in the workers' country, then the scant wages handed down to them are even less likely to add up to proper food on the dinner table. The dominance of feed production in Third World agriculture is a deathtrap, solidifying the structures of starvation so that the ever-increasing First World demands for dairy, poultry, eggs, and meat can be satisfied. Monsanto made billions marketing fodder plants to poor farmers in the developing world. How many mouths did they feed?

The economic discourse on food politics still favors overlooking the factors that matter. Monsanto expects accolades for decrying the fall in global food production (despite their careful cultivation of the feed market's eclipse of the food market), proposing to export its bio-foods as a solution. But what good does food production do if the food must be exported immediately? If too few farmers own land independently of agribusiness, how can they hope to take advantage of miracle crops? The solution to starvation is not to make a global underclass of poor who barely subsist on FrankenFoods meant to obscure the inhuman results of multinational exploitation. The solution is to empower local farmers to produce the food their malnourished nations need. Protecting local agriculture from multinational meddling is crucial, as is encouraging governments to prioritize measures like decreases in starvation and malnourishment over GNP. Such a solution would only be feasible if the giant debts that much of the developing world labors under are lifted.

Forget Fast Food Nation. This is Fast Food Empire, agri-imperialism with millions of casualties. The equitable participation of people in their own economies, and the equitable distribution of goods by those economies cannot be achieved in the developing world so long as our machinations for McWorld domination continue to take economic self-determination off the table. The political process must be part of this battleground, the opposition to NAFTA, CAFTA, the WTO, and the maintenance of debt must grow into alliance that will not indulge at the expense of the world's starving poor. But in influencing corporate politics our wallets are our ballots. We must change our habits of consumption, refusing to patronize fast-food, rejecting the meat industry – hitting agri-business where it hurts. And we must rework the lexical Orwellianism of development rhetoric: record “development” and stagnant rates of malnourishment should never be coexistent, as they were so recently in India and are in so many countries. We must demand a humanitarian development of discourse that takes the material improvement of lives and the fostering of human capacities and freedoms as its central task. The economic engines of the developing world can longer be fetishized at the expense of those they serve.

Talk About Talk

2007-07-09T21:40:00.000-04:00

A new study from the University of Arizona, published in every newspaper and wire service, claims men and women talk the same amount. Reports and headlines everywhere claim that the “chatty wife and taciturn man” myth was dead like Apollo pulling the sun across the sky. The study finds “no significant statistical difference between men and women” but found a large gap between the most chatty and least chatty.

Deborah Tannen, claiming the new study lacks qualitative analysis of contexts, could help explain the results. Differences in the communication between men could help explain the similar quantitative results with different qualities. Men tend to use communication as status-holding, independence asserting, and competitive behavior. Women use communication to gain support, intimacy, and consensus. The basic analogy is the difference between war and negotiation. The latter seems to require more communication but war requires propaganda, counter-propaganda, strategizing, campaigning, orders, and false transmissions in addition to diplomatic and political communication. High competition requires each person to communicate in order to jockey for status. The context, for both men and women, is important in the study of communication and that should be the focus of the story.

While the study makes an interesting piece of information in attempting to understand men and women, we should consider a few caveats. First, the lab setting is placed as an objection. The samples were taken in different years, with different subjects, and with one sample coming from Mexico. Results from each sample were similar across time and space. Laboratory measures may affect some participants but the lab setting will not affect participants in the same way. Finding a repeated pattern across samples tends to indicate the lab setting was not a factor in this study.

Second, we should consider the previous studies. A study based on self-report will have problems in reporting. People often adjust their responses to fit a perception of themselves or to project an image to the researcher. Some people may alter a self-report to seem “normal” while others might change the data to seem “special.” If all the readers in blog-land want to find contrary studies, be sure to check if the method is self-report rather than recordings. Researchers can make errors but the tapes rarely lie.

The most important caveat is the age of the subjects. This study used college students and that is the most interesting piece of data. Pronouncements that women talk more than men might be premature because the age of participants is fairly uniform. Empirically, the study proves college-aged men talk the same as college-aged women. This study, like most studies released by colleges, tends to have limited research dealing with people outside of the university. Odds are good that many of these students were undergraduate volunteers looking for extra credit in a communication class, the most common subject we gather at Arizona State University for communication studies.

This new could indicate many things rather than disproving conventional wisdom. First, this could indicate behavior among college students as opposed to the general population. A college male could have a different view of communication than a male outside of college. The number of men currently enrolled in college against the general population is a rather small number. Second, we should consider the status of college men. If men tend to view society as a competition, college-men are engaged in a high-competition environment, battling for jobs, sexual partners, grades, and other things. College environments, for all the talk of the democratic classroom, encourage competition and this would allow males to perform highly. By contrast, women in this environment may be more reticent than their counterparts outside of college. Women tend to talk less than men at the workplace, something Tannen believes comes from the desire for women to avoid open opposition. Third, we could see this as a generational shift. The quiet man is slowly being replaced by the communicative man. The future professional woman might learn the power of withholding information.

A man talking the same amount as women has little political advantage for anyone when discussed in quantitative terms. The content of communication is more compelling than the number of words discussed. The new study confirmed one stereotype; men talked more about things and women talked more about people. We should be careful about the findings of a study. The study might be intact and valid but the implications will be up for grabs. Implications, in Aristotle’s terms, are the artistic additions to the inartistic proof of statistical data. The study may be dialectic but the news reporting is rhetoric and we should not confuse the counterparts.

This Ain't Your Parents' Student Movement

2007-07-09T16:44:00.000-04:00

I just found out about a seemingly-awesome evening class on student activism to be hosted tonight by the Institute for Policy Studies' SALSA program for organizers. I don't think I have time tonight, but I'll certainly keep my eyes (and schedule, inasmuch as I can) for upcoming events and courses. Invigorating student movements is certainly a project I sympathize with, if only because I see it as a crucial part of the success of so many other social justice projects. And part of my motivation is, admittedly, a little cross-generational peer pressure. Every so often I hear today's youth movements compared (unfavorably) to the heroic rebels who marched against imperialism in the era of Vietnam. Where are our marches? Where's our rage? Our unity? Our impatience for peace? Speaking as a proud student activist at the Brown of the Midwest, whose academic adviser spent the sixties at Berkeley, I've often wished that my fellow classmates would put down their books and beer cans long enough to make some noise with me.

But thinking a little harder, its pretty difficult for me to feel bad about my generation. We're politically progressive and almost casually multicultural. This isn't to say that injustice and difference are behind us, just that we're dealing with them head on. In my opinion, the politics of student activism have changed.

One major shift has been the emergence of identity politics. Many powerful and effective student groups have taken to advocating against material and cultural inequalities as they effect specific sub-sections of the population. Queer students organize against discrimination, black students for inner-city revitalization, Latinas and Latinos for immigration reform, women for reproductive freedom, and multicultural alliances of many types for the acknowledgment and reversal of the institutionalized privilege enjoyed by wealthy white heterosexual men. There are also environmentalists, students concerned with local poverty and homelessness, students fighting for humanitarianism in Darfur. These movements are certainly large, but don't have the built-in constituency of identitarian movements. With so many options, students are presented with a hyper-market of causes to choose from, reflecting the consumption patterns we learned from Ebay, shopping malls, and Amazon.com.

I am skeptical of my activist elders who advise modern student activists to turn away from identity politics and produce a truly united front. Typically, people who take this tact tend to tout a "real issue", and state that the solution to "real issue" will bring with it the answer to all of the (ostensibly, comparatively minor) issues that distract us from the "real issue". For some, the "real issue" is class, for others, the war. I refuse to believe that there is any comprehensible way to compare the saliency of a foreign genocide, an institutionally racist legal and economic system, and a broken and often inhumane immigration policy. I do believe that the perceived saliency of each issue is inseparable from a given activists experience, privilege and identity, and would be very skeptical of, say, a white environmentalist telling black students to ignore inner-city poverty and focus on the "real issue" of global warming. Which is not to say that calls for united action must come from people blind to institutional inequalities. No less a champion of human dignity against institutions that rob poor people and minorities of life-chances than Jonathan Kozol once expressed his frustration with the "intellectual promiscuity of the Left", which he saw as frustrating the idealistic energies of activist youth.

I do think that those who ask us to depart from identity politics as though it were easy (or even possible) forget that student anti-war activism in the days of Vietnam was a form of identity politics for many. Students and young people were the one's being asked to risk their lives for America's quixotic venture. And they responded together, "Hell no, we won't go!" They saw their own faces on the bodies of young men and women returning lifeless to American shores. In short, they knew that the looming threat of Vietnam was most acute for them, that of all Americans they would disproportionately bear the cost.

Examples of broad-based, mass-mobilization student movements can still be found today. Very recently, student activists in Chile have marched against the General Law of Education, a policy that, in its current incarnation, provides public funds for exclusive schools with selection processes that are not transparent. Student activists have called this a publicly-funded private school system, one which guarantees that asks for public money to provide an education for the most privileged Chileans, while leaving many (predominantly poor and minority students) out. Here the student movement is clearly centered around an issue that effects students-qua-students, or at least young-people-qua-young-people, much in the way that Vietnam did.

So should student activists rally around student issues in the United States? Perhaps. There have been successful organizing efforts at Carleton to restore need-blind admissions in the interest of a more class-egalitarian admissions process. Such movements show, at the very least, students privileged enough to be at school with consciousness enough to challenge the structures that they are, in many cases, benefiting from. I would not be disappointed to see (or hesitant to join in) a concerted push for strong affirmative action policies. But affirmative action is still incredibly divisive. Overwhelmingly popular with people of color (70% of blacks favor it, 63% of Hispanics) but supported by a minority of whites (49%), the issue would not have universal appeal. The relative homogeneity of Vietnam-era campuses may have facilitated mobilization that students did not have the experience in coalition-building to address, but any student pushing for a broad-based movement today must have the ability to address student difference as well as wax eloquent about student unity.

In the end, I would hesitate to say students are apathetic merely because they don't protest as loud as frequently as their heritage might suggest they should. Today's students activists work internships, network online, distribute their own media through Web 2.0. They attend conferences with like-minded students. They lobby, door-knock, fund raise, and organize events for others to do the same. They educate, by blogging and mailing and postering. For many students, activism is a full-time commitment. Rather than making history with marches, they dedicate themselves to long campaigns of education, research, constituency-building, and concerted political pressure. In these types of campaigns, mass mobilization is but one weapon in the arsenal, a sometimes-snack for the media when the movement needs exposure (or for the activists themselves when they need a big event to generate energy within). It is too their credit that they do not fetishize the unruly, sign-waving mass of demonstrators, but instead pursue innovative ways of making change.

This might sound too optimistic, so I'll note in closing that I'm not perfectly content with the state of student activism. I would like to see more unity between student activists, but I don't think that end is reached by finding a code-issue or getting a whole lot of people to show up at a single event. What I would like to see, in terms of unity, is the solidarity of students willing to appreciate and contribute to the struggles of others. Networks between anti-war students, anti-racists, anti-capitalists, anti-sexists, and all others working against the varied forms of domination that define the social field would have rich benefits for the strategies and souls of young organizers. But this must be done within a context that respects the heterogeneity of student causes, not within a context in which students see the struggles of others as obstacles to be overcome in achieving their own critical revolutionary mass. Today's student movement is decentralized but increasingly networked, intellectually heterogeneous but observing a progressive consensus. At its best it promises to produce a conscious class of people across disciplines and professions animated by a love of justice, thousands of covert agents working diligently against structures that perpetuate human misery and inequality, integrated throughout the social fabric rather than acting as separatist evangelists for a distinctive counterculture. If their potential can be actualized they will promise something truly revolutionary: to bring social justice into the mainstream.

Struggling to Be Part of the Story

2007-07-08T08:50:00.000-04:00

This thoroughly researched but ultimately unrevealing resource from the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force probably won't make any waves in the debate over same-sex marriage. If anything it is a testament to the fact that political deliberation over the topic really has stalled out. In rating the crop of 2008 Presidential hopefuls on a handful of crucial LGBT issues, the conclusions of the Task Force are nowhere near groundbreaking. Kucinich emerges as the clear champion for LGBT people. He and Gravel are the only candidates to support same-sex marriage, but Gravel is ambiguous in his support for transgender inclusive hate-crime laws, adoption by same-sex couples, and robust HIV/AIDS policies. Other than that the Democrats nail each issue with the conspicuous exception of full same-sex marriage rights, and the Republicans are categorically miserable on all counts. There is no way to equivocate when a genuine bipartisan consensus emerges: the political mainstream, left and right, is opposed to same-sex marriage. A whole six senators openly support same-sex marriage, a number that belies the growing support for marriage equality amongst voting Americans.

The opponents of same-sex marriage have been successful in large because they have managed to frame the controversy as a "moral issue" - the type of issue that centers around beliefs, beliefs which cannot be authoritatively challenged or established. LGBT activists and their allies obviously see the issue as one of discrimination and social policy. But the language of inequality rarely makes it into mainstream discussions of same-sex marriage, even in the apologia of lefty candidates.

For example, John Edwards on same-sex marriage. He has described it as "the single hardest issue" and the site of many "personal struggles." He has told audiences that supporting same-sex marriage would be a "jump" for him, but that, ultimately, he is "not there yet." Obama's stance is similar. He writes in The Audacity of Hope that,"It is my obligation, not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided."

Consciously or not, Edwards and Obama play directly into the interpretation that sees same-sex marriage as nothing more than a "cultural" or "moral" question, akin to asking whether an explicit piece of art is lewdly pornographic or genuinely expressive. And in this sense, their framing of the debate is oddly similar to that of the religious right - the issues is another battle in a culture war, in which the real questions are not about people or policy, but about what culture we will produce, consume, and tolerate. Their meditations on the issue make the straight-speaker the primary subject of the political narrative on same-sex marriage. Rather than telling a story about people who suffer indignity, social marginalization, and deprivation of economic privileges that are often crucial to the functioning of family life, the Democratic front-runners are making the moral odyssey of the oppressor the center of the debate.

This is surely a trend to be resisted. The debate over same-sex marriage should not be about the soul-searching of privileged heterosexuals, and whether or not they have strength of introspection to extend equality to same-sex couples. The narratives of queer women and men struggling for equality should be inescapable when the issue of same-sex marriage is raised. Thats why projects like 10Couple s are so important. They show same-sex couples of varying positions in structures of racial and class privilege, all living lives that are somehow marred by exclusion. These types of narratives are hard to shrug off. Oregon's Supreme Court decisions show the exact types of legal contortions that must be conceded in order to make a case that discrimination in the arena of marriage is constitutionally acceptable - and even then, the Court was not convinced that barring same-sex marriages constituted effective or humane social policy.

People like Obama and Edwards who take themselves to be allies of the queer community should be pressing the conservative opponents of marriage equality as hard as queer activists are pressing the courts. But beyond merely disappointing LGBT constituents with soft stances, they themselves engage in an unacceptable kind of oppression, akin to cultural imperialism, when they monopolize the policy debates with their own stories and leave no space for narrative representation of the oppressed. bell hooks has observed similar trends in feminist conceptions of solidarity. White and middle class women, she argues, claim sisterhood with women of color and working-class women. But those privileged women continue to control the movement, to focus on their own goals and narratives. At best, acknowledgment of privilege comes as an intense catharsis - but even then, the focus is on the emotional experience of the privileged, not on a substantive political challenge on behalf of the underprivileged.

True allies do not behave in such a manner. Real solidarity entails a willingness to make political action for the oppressed the priority in a movement, even taking actions that don't seem comprehensible from within one's own narrative because they are the only way to genuinely treat the claims flowing from the narrative of the Other. Genuine solidarity is much like an ethic of service, a commitment to do for the oppressed what they cannot do for themselves. It is not about understanding the narrative of the other 100% - such a total comprehension of the subject position of one differently situated in structures of privilege. When we occupy the position of privilege within a movement, we should see the ultimate test of our solidarity in our willingness to act for the oppressed on the basis of precisely those things which our privilege prevents us from grasping entirely.

Or to phrase it in the language of organizing - Rule number one of being an ally should be: Check your privilege at the door. The system is built for you, and takes the validation of your experience as given. This is a movement to challenge that system. As a result, this movement is not about you. It is about justice for the oppressed, and the stories of their oppression should never have to compete with the history of your alliance for centrality.

I phrase the rule thusly speaking to the heterosexual allies of the LGBT movement. When I theorize as a feminist, an anti-imperialist, or an anti-racist, the lesson is mine to learn as well. To serve in solidarity is the price of privilege.

Where Do Arab Americans Fit In?

2007-07-07T15:04:00.000-04:00

Jack Shaheen, a renowned scholar and retired professor from Southern Illinois University, has recently become famous for his book and subsequent documentary, entitled "Reel Bad Arabs." Both highlight the ways in which Hollywood and American media have long presented stereotypical views of Arabs. while it is true that Hollywood villifies Arabs to a much greater extent than any other minority group, Shaheen's work brings much-needed attention to the underlying issue: how do Arab-Americans fit into American society, especially in the post-9/11 era?

While we have seen a dramatic increase in negativity towards Arabs in American since 9/11, this is not, by any stretch of the mind, a new phenomenon. In his book entitled "The Arabs," veteran journalist David Lamb tries to understand the Arab people and make sense of where Arab-American relations went wrong. He explores specific decisions in history that have had a much more significant consequences than our leaders at the time could have ever predicted.

For instance, he elaborates on how President Roosevelt, after World War Two, promised that he would not make any decisions on the critical Palestinian issue without consulting King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, of Saudi Arabia. However, this promise was quickly forgotten as Roosevelt's motives changed. "The irony," Lamb says, "of the uneasy course that Arab-American relations have taken is that the Arabs were America's first real friends in the vast Islamic world." And it is a friendship that dates back to the end of the American Revolution, yet somehow disintegrated in the twentieth century. When Roosevelt died and Harry S. Truman succeeded him, he was asked to follow through with the American commitment to consult Saudi Arabia before deciding what to do with Palestine. His response? "I am sorry, gentlemen, but I have to account to hundreds of thousands of people who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents." American foreign policy has long ignored the interests of Arabs, and thereby increased tensions and misunderstandings between Arabs and America -- and worsened the situation of Arabs in America.

But Truman's statement may be inaccurate; Arab-American immigrants have desperately sought to assimilate. Many Arab immigrants in the twentieth century "anglicized" their names in immigration; many were Christian, and could easily fit in and celebrate the same holidays as everyone else in America; and most importantly, they were white, or at last considered white by the US census, so in the immigration and assimilation a part of their heritage was lost and today it is not always easy to differentiate Arab-Americans from the rest. However, according to No Snow Here, "Several decades later, a new wave of immigrants arrived, “fresh off the boat” with funny names and different religions. Assimilation was not as easy for this wave of immigrants, nor was it necessarily desirable or vital to survival."

And yet, they are still here, and often overlooked, simply because America just can't figure them out. They follow a different, foreign religion that most of America doesn't agree with and doesn't understand, they pray on Fridays, their women cover their heads, and many of them are terrorists--right? Think of every instance in which you've seen Arabs in the media. They're either a) terrorists, such as in one episode of 24, b) portrayed in a very exoticized manner that caters to American stereotypes what what the Arab world must be like (think Aladdin) or c)they're on the news everyday for a new suicide bombing somewhere in the world.

Like many minority groups that have come to America, Arab Americans are misunderstood, they're highly critical of American government and how our policies have affected their homelands, and they aren't always ready or willing to assimilate. Arab Americans have been villified, stereotyped, and been treated worse than any other minority group in America. A report from the US Commission on Civil Rights details how innocent Arab Americans have been subject to racial profiling, extensive searches at airports, and employment discrimination. Under the Federal Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Arab Americans have been detained and sometimes deported by the American government without knowing the charges or evidence against them, and have been denied their right to due process of law. When will it end? And what does it take to put a stop to this?

Ideology or VIsion?

2007-07-07T14:33:00.000-04:00

Barack Obama's plan for American foreign policy, laid out in the pages of Foreign Affairs, has certainly earned its share of earnest affirmations. I find this unsurprising, as it is bursting with the megawatt dosages of forward-looking intellect that have made Obama's campaign into the political event of our time. But the piece has also earned it's first big-name detractor – communitarian sociologist Amitai Etzioni has taken Obama to task on the virtual pages of the Huffington Post. Etzioni finds Obama's offerings insubstantial:

Obama's favorite term, repeated ad nauseum, ad infinitum, is vision. What we need, the Senator writes, is "vision." We need a "visionary leadership" and "a new vision of leadership." This is, of course, all too true but also tells us very little as to which vision of foreign policy this new leader would ask us to follow.

Where Obama's broader strokes appear vacuous to Etizioni, he is also underwhelmed by the specific topics Obama tackles in the lengthy article, dismissing each of Obama's concerns as betraying a “random shopping list approach” to foreign policy. Indeed, Etizioni isn't looking for “lofty goals” or “wonkish specs”, rather he would like to see Obama articulate a “worldview”. Goals and specs out, worldviews in. Now who's being vacuous?

The precise thrust of Etzioni's critique is hard to discern. But reading his brief piece leaves the impression that what Etizioni wants from Obama is an ideology. He looks favorably upon the neo-conservative movement, for instrumentalizing democracy in the provision of security, and even upon neo-liberalism, for taking economic development as the central component of a secure geopolitical sphere. But Obama's vision of leadership gets written off by Etizioni as lacking in "substantive vision" because it does not ask that America orient itself to the world in the name of any single principle. Instead he looks backward, to what he sees as the proudest moments in American foreign policy under the leadership of Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy. Then, from that footing, he moves to discuss the issues he sees as critical in our time.

Perhaps I am too eager to stake Obama as a philosophical compatriot, but his politics seems to be animated by a non-ideological pragmatism that I can only endorse. He tackles each vital issue – global warming, the war on terror, the proliferation of democratic societies, the struggle with poverty – with justice and freedom in mind, but refuses to marry himself to a single conceptual cure-all. Contrary to the bizarre optimism of the world's Fukuyamas and Friedmans, history has not ended and the world is not flat. The political, military and economic hegemony of the United States, whether set to baptize an Iraqi democracy with bunker bombs or simply to ensure that CAFTA allows our multinationals the cheap labor-force they demand, has only made incremental inroads against totalitarianism and poverty. And in so many places, our ideological commitments have blinded us to the misery that unfolds as a direct result of our foreign policies.

As for vision, Etzioni may disagree but I think a worldveiw is precisely what is at stake when a leader like Obama addresses the injustices of the status quo. Obama's vivid oratory (or in this case, prose) is not mere rhetoric. If, as constructivists say, international anarchy is what states make of it, than political hesitance and moral recidivism need not be the logical consequences of an American foreign policy and geopolitical context fraught with injustice and danger. Obama's calls to optimism, vigilance and leadership that take justice and democracy seriously are themselves moves to construct an international politics in which Americans can acknowledge that up to this point we have failed, and failed greatly, but may still hold out hope that our actions can give rise to greater things. Obama's vision is one to guide America between apathy and despair, between belligerent pride and defeated cynicism. It is a rich vision, and it would be a grave mistake to demand ideology in its place.

No Asylum

2007-07-06T21:51:00.000-04:00

Though the sentiment most associated with Guantanamo is certainly outrage, readers of Kafka can only greet the reports from the world-infamous prison with grim familiarity. The intractable tangle of bureaucratic language and legal jargon that has confounded what progress the executive is willing to attempt – trials canceled because what we once thought were “illegal enemy combatants”, already a dubious conceptual category, have not proven to be discernibly “illegal” but merely “enemy combatants” of a more vanilla variety – recall the unnavigable bureaucracy of the The Castle, while Josef K could only take Jose Padilla as kin.

But long before Guantanamo became the symbol par excellence of America's institutional nightmares and grotesque easiness with egregious human rights abuses, Kafkaesque tales of absurdity and horror could be heard. Or at least they should have been.

Imagine a prisoner. He is in solitary confinement, spending twenty-three hours a day in utter isolation. Typically unsupervised, he babbles to himself, pound the walls with his fists and head. He may come to occupy an entirely hallucinated world. Or he may attempt suicide. He may succeed. If he even consciously committed a crime, his memory of the event may have deteriorated alongside his other capacities. You wouldn't find this man in Cuba. You would find him in New York City. And not just in the past six years, when Guantanamo's dark odyssey unfolded, but at virtually any point in the past three decades.

Solitary Housing Units (SHUs) are the places that too many prisoners call home. They are not easy for anyone to withstand. But for the mentally ill, they are sites of unparalleled suffering. The Department of Justice concedes that 16% of America's inmate population suffers from a diagnosable mental illness. The American Psychological Association and Human Rights Watch estimate that the number is closer to 1 in 5. Depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and many other acute mental illnesses impact over some 300,000 inmates. For some, mental illness motivated their crime. For others mental illness emerged after imprisonment. But either way, the likelihood that mentally ill prisoners will end up in SHUs is extreme. As Jamie Fellner of Human Rights Watch explains:

They end up in segregation because their illness makes them less able than other prisoners to cope with prison life. They are more likely to be victimized and more likely to be injured in a fight. They are more likely to break the rules. They are more likely to behave in ways that annoy, disgust and even enrage security staff who have scant training in how to recognize, much less cope with, symptoms of mental illness.

Not only are they more likely to end up in SHUs, but solitary confinement is uniquely hellish for inmates suffering from mental illnesses because it virtually guarantees that their condition will deteriorate as their needs go unaddressed. Fellner continues:

The very architecture of SHU facilities, as well as SHU rules, keep them from receiving group therapy, up therapy, individual therapy, daily living skill training, educational and vocational programs, structured and unstructured group recreation and other activities that can play a crucial role in restoring or improving mental health—or at the very least in preventing further deterioration in the patient’s psychiatric condition.

Fortunately, the State of New York has taken action to close this disturbing chapter in the history of America's prison system. S333, once signed by Governor Spitzer, will amend New York's correction and mental hygiene laws so that inmates suffering from mental illnesses will not be eligible for placement in SHUs. All inmates being considered for SHU placement must first be screened by a board of professionals prior to transference. Those found to be suffering from mental illnesses will be placed into special treatment programs where supervision and close treatment are mandated by law. A simple attentiveness has saved hundreds of women and men from a hellish existence, and it is possible that more states will take thus cue from New York. It is certainly welcome news. But it is also a relatively minor step in correcting the sprawling system of bureaucratic shortcomings, institutional failures, and social aporiae that have brought about the system in which the inhumanities described above can occur.

America's health and human services system, sprawling beast that it is, has utterly failed the mentally ill of this country. The web of failed and flagging programs that has produced the deplorable status quo is so complex and mutually reinforcing that it is difficult to even begin the discussion. But one thing is certain: responding to the crisis of mental health care in this country will be impossible within an individualist paradigm. Reinvigorated communities and an ethic of care must have a part in the process – easy enough to theorize, but wickedly difficult to implement since the communities and caregivers in most need of solutions already have their resources stretched thin.

Americans, committed to an ideology where “equal opportunity” is seen as the upper limit on egalitarian obligations tend to downplay inequalities in outcome. And the mantra of “individual responsibility”has dealt plenty of harm to the robust redistributive and welfare-provision policies that would actually be needed to redress the dire inequalities of wealth and assets that cut across America's socio-political landscape.

The dire implications for the mentally ill are made clear in this eye-opening report on mental health care in low income communities. Medicaid and Medicare programs that can't reimburse hospitals enough to even keep sufficient numbers of psychiatrists on the payroll make affordable mental health service hard to find. For uninsured Americans, or for Americans whose providers don't practice parity for mental health, mental health problems may go untreated until a serious lapse lands the sufferer in jail or in an emergency department (ED). Of course, EDs themselves, especially those serving low-income communities where huge numbers of people are on Medicaid or totally uninsured (and on avearage 20% of all mentally ill people are uninsured), have to cut back on which services they can provide and frequently send mental health patients away without treatment, as their emergencies are often easier to ignore than those suffering a physical emergency. Inadequate Social Security payouts are a problem, too. Currently, SSI payments average $632 a month. But a modest, single-bedroom apartment in the United States averages $715 a month. People dependent on SSI for income simply can't compete in the current housing climate. And, of course, many of America's mentally ill, unable to find consistent work, are in precisely that position. So they end up untreated on the streets, often facing prison as the ultimate destination. With all of these support networks – Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, public hospitals – failing, is it any wonder the prison system has emerged as the de facto “solution” to the problem of mental illness – a solution that looks increasingly like reinstitutionalization?

Some necessary solutions are clear: Medicaid and Medicare must receive more funding, SSI payouts must increase, housing prices may need to be capped or controlled, and government-paid health care (that includes parity for mental health care), needs to become a reality. The government should provide people who cannot afford a place to live and the mental health care they need with the income and assets necessary for survival.

But a more fundamental shift is also necessary. It is interesting to observe the drastic differences in treatment between the developmentally disabled and mentally retarded on one hand, and those suffering from psychological illness on the other. Americans, defying the typical individualist ethos of self-reliance, have by and large stepped up to the plate to provide for the former group (Vladeck, 2005). Many of the coverage caps in Medicare/Medicaid programs have been addressed, and political advocacy has been more effective on their behalf. It seems that Americans can comprehend permanent disability, but the idea that a person may experience episodic mental illness that requires extending the offer of assistance throughout a lifetime, to be taken as needed, strikes many as a blank check for welfare. People must either announce “dependency” (perhaps the most loaded word in the wide lexicon of social policy) or strike out on their own. Gray areas need not apply.

Feminist critics like Iris Marion Young have long pointed out the obvious problem with this ideological construct: most everyone falls somewhere in the middle of the autonomous/dependent spectrum. Those of us who can find all of the care we need within the private sphere – through family or friends – are fortunate, but atypically privileged. Again, it is the most vulnerable, those for whom everyday support structures are inadequate or absent, whose cases force us to reexamine our public policy. But in any event, we should not make the error of believing that it is only those people who are dependent while the rest of us live autonomous lives. The binary cannot stand, and social services ought to be implemented with the diversity of cases in mind. The goal of social policy should be the creation of communities of mutual aid which respond to the emergent needs and crises of members, but perhaps more importantly, support and care for members in affirmative ways that make crisis intervention less and less necessary.

At the level of policy, this might look something like a flexible fund, perhaps created at federal or state-wide levels so that patterns of inequality would not leave the most vulnerable communities with the least funding, that could be applied to support EDs, aid needy people in finding housing, or pay for routine psychological wellness exams for all who consented to them. These types of solutions would encourage communities to come together and analyze their needs, rather than suffering under larger bureaucracies whose shortcomings only become clear in the wake of failure. A community-oriented approach would also empower the mentally ill to participate in and with community aid projects, rather than facing strictly medical/institutional solutions that dehumanize on the basis of condition.

In short, a socialism that is truly “social” will emphasize community and communication as means of empowering and nurturing the most vulnerable segments of society, rather than expecting the kind of harrowing systems that have been producing incomprehensible no-exit nightmares since Kafka's day to do the work of justice. Nowhere is the need for such a revolution in thinking more apparent than in the crisis facing the mentally ill today. With their fate so firmly in the hands of ailing bureaucracies, the mentally ill in America are often the hapless playthings of a system that is dully malevolent in its neglect. Where the status quo produces Kafkaesque vertigo, it is incumbent on all who see the social bond as a site of obligation to respond with care.

Family Jewels and Harlot’s Ghost

2007-07-06T05:12:00.000-04:00

States are dark, ominous creations. ‘A state,’ says Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”’ Thus, from this glacial physiognomy come crimes and abuses.

Nietzsche does, however, ignore the human operatives behind the state. The state is, after all, an enlarged version of the human self. The intelligence service is one of these manifestations. We have intelligence services to police us against our indiscretions, our disloyal tendencies. They also, so we are told, protect us against nefarious outsiders. These protectors may be flesh and blood zealots, or introspective moralists, deskwork operatives of raw ‘intelligence’ or ‘espionage’ agents in the field. They fall in love, they believe, they deceive, they betray. Some see all of this as, in the words of the Central Intelligence Agency motto, ‘working for the nation’. Some do so with enthusiasm beyond the call of office, authorising transactions that go beyond their scope. Others take the opposite view: they bat for the other side when the stakes become too high.

The CIA is no different, born in the tumultuous sea of an America newly ascendant after the Second World War. Moral categories are simple: the CIA comes across as brute torturer. Its exploits reveal an archive of victims, the corpses of history strewn over several continents. Its apologists, on the other hand, see a moral imperative: to kill in the name of promoting the faith; to torture in the name of protecting the people. Unsurprisingly, W. F. Buckley, both as messianic conservative and former CIA man, promotes the latter view. He even claims that he wrote novels in order to ‘demonstrate that we are the good guys and they’re the bad guys.’

Buckley’s infantile adoration for the agency he promoted and loved is one side of the grim story; a blanket condemnation of the agency on the other hand, would serve little purpose. The CIA is no more a violator of laws than the policy makers who gave them the green light to do so. They do kill in your name, Mr. President. Or so the story goes. Contain the Soviet Union, and so it did. Overthrow governments, and so it did. Norman Mailer, never a fan of American institutions, found room to see into a heart of an institution half-noble and half-savage. Harlot’s Ghost (1991) uses a huge scale plot to chart the rise and fall of lives with the agency. The CIA, in short, is merely the sum of its human components.

What are we to then make of the recent round of declassification from that fallen agency of men and women? They are named the ‘Family Jewels’, the bitter fruit of James Schlesinger’s efforts in 1973 to identify activities of the agency that contravened the provisions of the National Security Act. Director Schlesinger was fully aware that his murderous, adolescent employees might still be living in 1973. As he wrote in a memorandum on the jewels, ‘through their knowledge of the activity [they] represent a potential threat or embarrassment to the Agency.’ (16 May 1973)

The report reveals ‘transgressions’. Declassify or be damned, suggests its current Director, General Michael V. Hayden. To not do so encourages speculation, such as the European Parliament’s report of 1,245 CIA flights over Europe, many seen as a case of ‘extraordinary rendition’ dealing with terrorist suspects. But that, counters Hayden, was a half-truth: the sin was limited to 100 suspects since the attacks of September 2001.

Espionage becomes a habit, itself a machine work of half-truths. Conspiracies, suspicions, are its by-products. In a field where trust must be won in order to be destroyed, illegality is hardly a far step away. The CIA remains mired in a profession that simultaneously protects and corrupts. Hardly surprising is its inability to distinguish between a project involving the assassination of a communist leader and the use of the underworld to do so. It is perhaps expecting too much of it to document activities that ‘conflict with the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947’ precisely because its modus operandi is extra-legal to begin with.

Results? Assassination, surveillance, abduction. It surveyed newspaper men involved in ‘leaks’ to public sources; it detained a KGB defector in a manner that reminds one of Gitmo-styled luxury – ‘with nothing but a cot in it for this period [between August 13, 1965 and October 27, 1967].’

Most prominently, it sought to assassinate Fidel Castro with the help of America’s underworld. CIA operative Richard Bissell is unabashed in seeking the means to facilitate a ‘gangster-type action.’ Then director of the agency, Allen W. Dulles, ‘was briefed and gave his approval.’ Colourful characters are farmed for the operation. Johnny Roselli in Las Vegas, a ‘syndicate’ member involved with Cuban ‘gambling interests’ is retained.

Others on this list were the Premier of the Republic of Congo, Patrice Lumumba and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic. Both were successful efforts, though the CIA could hardly claim credit for the former, keen as the Belgians were in getting there first. Again, Bissell leaves his marks on such operations like bad cologne.

But such operations are childish – the CIA comes across as ineffectual, incompetent. Methods such as poisoning are recommended – no firearms, suggests Sam Gold (documented as ‘the successor of Al Capone’), one who ‘knew the Cuban crowd’. Gold’s recommendations were unsurprising, given that he was none other than the mafia strongman Momo Salvatore Giancaca.

Bureaucratic stasis seems rife in this agency, though no more than any other organisation narcotised on half-truths: ignorance of various organisational duties reigned under Director Richard Helms. In a memorandum by James A. Wilderotter, Associate Deputy Attorney General (January 3, 1975), Helm’s successor Colby makes observations on certain ‘legal’ matters. Helms was the ‘hub’ of an organisation where ‘compartmentalized units constitution the “spokes”.’ Thus, one “spoke” would not know what the others were doing.

The result was fracture and eventually, implosion. As far as the Castro programme was concerned, members of the agency began to deceive colleagues and other members of government. Only Dulles and a handful knew about the Castro operation. In 1972, the CIA would lend operatives E. Howard Hunt and James McCord to the ignominious task of the Watergate break-in. But again, the CIA was merely the projection of a paranoid administration, a gun for hire that was turned on its owners.

And so, we are left pondering as we wade through these documents whether the current CIA director Hayden is correct to assume that such documents ‘do provide a glimpse of a very different era and a very different agency.’ An era where terrorism promises to strike at any given opportunity would suggest that things are hardly different. Given the Bush Administration’s penchant for being economical, even inventive, with evidence on a state’s threat to global security, Hayden has already been proven wrong.

No Bloodlet For Bartlett

2007-07-01T01:49:00.000-04:00

Dan Bartlett, communications director for the White House, will be departing soon. He claims to be leaving to “spend more time with his family.” In Washington-speak, this can mean “I love my kids a lot,” or “I didn’t bury the bodies deep enough.” Bartlett has been a loyal friend to President Bush, shaping messages back in Texas in 1993 and following the team to the White House. He was close with President Bush and people claim he helped soften President Bush, particularly against the combative influence of Karl Rove. Bartlett downplays the role he brought in balancing advisors, and may be a minor figure in the mythology of the Bush White House. Even in his departure, Bartlett’s influence is unclear to outsiders.

Bartlett claimed in a GQ interview that the early George W. Bush was a pretty “raw.” Raw Bush made a few appearances during the 2000 campaign, calling a New York Times reporter a “major-league asshole” while simultaneously campaigning to raise the discourse in Washington. He attempted to link Saddam with Al-Qaeda in a 2004 debate. In 2006, President Bush approached German Chancellor Angela Merkel from behind and shook her with a vigor not seen used on a German Chancellor since 1933. Bush continued his streak with Europe, winking at the Queen of England in 2007. When asked directly if the 1993 Bush looked presidential, Bartlett said “No. N-O. And [President Bush] would probably agree with that.” I wonder what 1993 Raw Bush would have done with the Queen of England…

Communication surrounding the Iraq War also has some Bartlett fingerprints. Bartlett admits being part of the decision to embed reporters with troops. Embedded media was the greatest issue of the relationship between the Fourth Estate and the military. Placing reporters in danger stopped the discussion of a war’s merits and forced reporters to discuss everything in terms of action. A reporter riding in a Humvee had no perspective on the geopolitical movements because, as was said in Black Hawk Down, “when those bullets start coming at you, politics fly out the window.” Reporters, in the age of YouTube and military blogs, remain relevant with embedding. As the military actively shuts down the voices of soldiers, embedded reporters could become the major source for information on the war front. Bartlett, among others, has limited our access to information about the war in the early days.

Embedding, while stifiling debate, may still serve a noble purpose. An all-volunteer force grants most our generation the luxury of freedom from participating in war. Day-to-day danger is personal and visceral, easily closer to reality than the newsreels set to patriotic music. Edward R. Murrow was famous for being part of the action and inserting himself into the story, enhancing coverage of the war and giving a human dimension to horror. There is no piece of war reporting that matches Murrow but the embedded reporter has more access to the front than Murrow did during the war. Perhaps the public should blame the quality of reporters rather than the policy of embedding. Collaboration between media and government is a difficult issue for everyone but was successfully implemented by Bartlett and he has no regrets over that issue.

The one regret Bartlett has about the war, and his entire term, was the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Bartlett splits the blame with others, including former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, but believes that was a mistake. He says the phrase was never in the speech but he didn’t control the banner. He pawns mistakes of other members of the administration (Bartlett is responsible for all the communication that comes out of the White House, not just President Bush) on the difficulty of working with the staffs of other people. Dan Bartlett was to communication what some conservatives were to government. Conservatives that rail against government power and intrusion feel a bit of cognitive dissonance when forced to intervene in the lives of citizens. A White House with such a hostile relationship to the press and with so many stubborn staffers create a quagmire for communication. This White House is infamous for stonewalling the press, slight-of-word tricks with the public, and debate through force with each other. Bartlett was present for so much communication in the White House and appeared to do so little that I wonder if the better analogy is “Bartlett is to communication what Alberto Gonzalez is to law.”

Critical theory sucks life from pop culture classes - Opinion

2007-06-28T10:20:00.000-04:00

Critical theory sucks life from pop culture classes - Opinion

Bush’s Un-American Jeremiad

2007-06-26T15:49:00.000-04:00

America is a rhetorical republic. Our people are united not by ethnicity, institutions, territory, nor even, as is becoming evident, language, but rather by narrative – specifically, epic narrative; more specifically, Biblical epic; and more specifically still, America identifies itself nationally in terms of the grand Biblical epic of Exodus. To be sure, others have appealed to Exodus – the Voortrekkers of 19th century South Africa and the civil rights marchers of 20th century America are two neatly opposed instances – but no other great nation has modeled itself on the migration led by Moses from Egyptian servitude across the desert to the Promised Land.

If Exodus tells us who we are in general terms, the Jeremiad reminds us of certain particulars. It seeks to make us aware, and even establish as the central theme of the story, that the journey is dangerous, and that we will prevail under such harsh conditions only through absolute unity and individual self-sacrifice. It reassures us that our ideals are high – that God is on our side – but also warns that any loss of faith in them – any doubt that reliance on God alone is enough to ensure our delivery to Canaan – will be severely punished. Indeed, the journey to freedom is a test of our basic beliefs, and we will be singled out for extraordinary punishment if we waver from them. Special care must therefore be taken to identify, castigate, and ostracize backsliders and others who are less than unreservedly enthusiastic about the mission.

President George W. Bush and his administration have followed this narrative closely. September 11th threatened a new form of Egyptian servitude, and a trek into the desert (Afghanistan, then Iraq) was duly instigated to protect our freedom. Indeed, Bush turned out to mimic Moses in a great many details. Like Moses, Bush is prickly, defensive, and a poor speaker. Though Moses had only one brother, Aaron, to correct his garbled speech, Bush relies on a whole band of brothers – and a sister, if one adds Condoleezza Rice to Donald H. Rumsfeld, Richard V. Cheney, and Colin Powell. Moses gave his people the Ten Commandments, and Bush saw to it that the Patriot Act was brought down to Americans from the Hill, if not the Mountain. In tune with the Jeremiad, he regularly warns of the hazards that threaten and the monsters that lurk, and even supplemented his sermons with the more user-friendly color-coded Threat Level System of Homeland Security, which gets turned up or down in accordance with the administration’s desire for unity and discipline (as I write, the level is yellow, for “elevated,” like one’s blood pressure). He loves nothing more than to mean-spiritedly hector those with the temerity to express skepticism about the wisdom of his adventure.

But in Bush’s case, there is more to all this than mere analogy. Scholars such as Sacvan Bercovitch and Perry Miller have pointed out the way in which the Puritan Jeremiad was transformed and secularized as a central public mode of political address in America. Faith in God became fidelity to America's founding principles, and criticism took the form of attributing the nation's ills to a failure to live up to our political ideals coupled with a call to renew our commitment to them. With Bush, however, secularization doesn’t enter in. Literally like Moses, not just metaphorically, Bush hears God instructing him on policy and leadership, to the apparent awe and delight of his constituents. Bush literally believes that he has been called by God to lead his people through the wilderness to the land of milk and honey, though in this version Bush marches the faithful back to the Holy Lands for the migration to end all migrations, the “end-time” of Armageddon.

The Jeremiad provides one explanation for Bush’s inability to express disappointment with the way things are turning out in Iraq. According to the Exodus-Jeremiad logic, the worse one’s suffering in the desert, the more certain one can be of God’s interest in one’s project. The hardships are provided by God expressly to test the missionaries’ faith in Him. An easy victory, in fact, would have been a disturbing indication that God was not really interested in Bush’s war. From the point of view of Bush’s fundamentalism, his horrendous record of defeat in Iraq not only offers welcome opportunities to demonstrate his and his people’s faith in their God in the face of powerful evidence that He has in fact abandoned them, but also provides confirmation that what Bush takes to be God’s voice is indeed His.

The policy implication is that nothing is going to convince Bush to change course. In his heart of hearts, he truly believes: the worse, the better.