A, you're an Amazon?

I've never been much one for on-line shopping, so I don't know much about the workings of Amazon.com But a little while back there was a little brouhaha over sales rankings for feminist and gay books disappearing from the site--something that could hurt the sales and popularity of these books. I discovered this all via a fascinating post over on Viva la Feminista.

Apparently, Amazon.com has a policy that it doesn't show sales rankings for "adult" titles. Over the Easter weekend, the sales rankings for large numbers of feminist and gay books--but not for "soft-core" hetero porn--started to disappear. As one might have hoped, a virtual volcano of online protest erupted, mostly on Twitter. (Twitter is another one of those phenomena that I haven't spent time on and don't know much about.) Shortly thereafter, Amazon.com announced that the whole thing was just a "glitch."

Calls for a boycott of Amazon seem to be continuing, according to Deanna Zandt, who wrote the Women's Media Center post that Veronica at Viva La Feminista picked up on.

But Veronica takes the analysis further:

I've seen many a feminist blog and website that has an Amazon bookstore widget. Huh? Really?

Perhaps they missed the story of how the beloved Amazon feminist bookstore tried to sue Amazon.com for stealing their name? They settled out of court, but obviously the fact that a feminist bookstore had their name for 30 years meant nothing. Oh...and Amazon.com actually asked the owners whether they were lesbians during the pre-trial depositions? I admit that I'm practically ancient when it comes to online wars. And that I had forgotten this detail until I reread this article, but I've tried to limit my Amazon.com purchases since the throw down with the bookstore. I'm sure that I knew that tidbit back then, but just remembered "Try not to use them!"

Okay, I'm certainly not in the business of telling anyone where to shop. Really. But I think Veronica is making the point that Amazon.com is a typical large corporation interested in doing whatever it can to make the most money possible. If promoting feminist and gay literature is profitable for them, they'll do it. If suppressing free speech is profitable for them, they'll do that, too. If stepping on the oldest independent feminist bookstore  in North America is good for their bottom line, they'll do it. That's what giant corporations do. There's no reason to be surprised by Amazon.com's bad behavior.

If you'd like an independent alternative, you might try the IndieBound web site.

Trying to put a stop to legalized torture

I've been somewhat hesitant to support the prosecution of Bush administration officials and government operatives for ordering and carrying out the torture of suspected terrorists. Sure, Bush and his minions were pretty bad, assaulting civil liberties and maliciously meddling in the affairs of other countries. But that's what the US government usually does, under Democratic presidents as well as Republicans. I don't want to support the polite fiction that the US usually acts for good in the world, and that W. was some kind of abberration.

On the other hand, over at happening-here? (one of my favorite blogs, by the way),  janinsanfran argues persuausively that if we don't prosecute the misdeeds of Bush admininistration officials, we are helping to condone this behavior by officials in future administrations. She points out that Richard Nixon's pardon by Gerald Ford set the stage for much of the evil done by the George W. Bush administration:

So what happened? Nixon, personally, aged out of most action, rather bitterly. But the thugs (yes, they are thugs) who learned executive abuse of the power under his administration came right back.

Donald Rumsfeld: functionary under Nixon; White House chief of staff, then Secretary of Defense under Ford; diplomatic envoy for Reagan, including taking the old boy's greetings to Saddam Hussein during the Iraqi dictator's war on Iran; Secretary of Defense under Bush II, architect of the Iraq war, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Dick Cheney: assistant to Rumsfeld in the Ford White House, then Chief of Staff; a Congressman under Reagan working for such causes as blocking sanctions on South African apartheid; Secretary of Defense under Bush I; exponent of the monarchical executive; finally a Veep who claimed to be a previously unheard of fourth branch of government.

Those two old wannabe dictators aren't likely to be back -- it's their intellectual heirs who must face legal jeopardy if Obama's verbal repudiation of torture is to amount to anything. Addington, Feith, Bybee, Bradbury, and Yoo, minimally, need to explain to a court their conspiracy to violate American and international law. If they are allowed to waltz off to live on right wing welfare (and a federal judge's salary in the case of Bybee), Obama hasn't restored the rule of law. He's just postponed the country's next leap into the abyss.

 The whole post is well worth reading. See also this post on the possibility that the CIA might "go rogue" in response to Obama's release of the the torture memos, and this post about Senator Joe Lieberman's response to the situation.

If you want to read the torture memos for yourself, and sign an ACLU petition calling for the appointment of a special prosecutor, you can do so here.

Pooling our resources...

I've just finished my first adventure using craigslist.

Out in my backyard, I had this old-above ground pool that was there when I moved in:

I'm not really much of a swimmer, and I have plenty of other things at my house to repair, renovate, and maintain. Really. My friends told me, "The frame of the pool is the thing that is most expensive and difficult to get. Someone is going to want that." But no one I knew actually did want it, except for one woman who didn't have a back yard big enough to put it in.

"Put it on craigslist,"everyone said. So finally, I did, thinking no one really would be interested. Thinking that if worse came to worst, it wouldn't be that difficult to take it apart and haul it out to the curb for the next Big Trash Day.

Well, it worked! I got more emails than I could possibly answer, inquiring about the pool. I picked one email that seemed to have really good energy, and gave the folks a call. Friday night they came out to take a look at it, and Saturday evening when I got home from work, it was gone.

 
A nice family is going to have a nice pool, and I have that thing out of my back yard, so I can concentrate on my next project, constructing a French drain to protect the foundation of the house.

What's a lesbian civil libertarian to think?

Okay. It's my gut feeling that outing people is kind of rude and uncalled for. But is it a criminal offense? And how far should an institution go in trying to catch someone who does this?

If accurate, this story, courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is truly bizarre.

On Friday, EFF and the law firm of Fish and Richardson filed an emergency motion to quash and for the return of seized property on behalf of a Boston College computer science student whose computers, cell phone, and other property were seized as part of an investigation into who sent an e-mail to a school mailing list identifying another student as gay. The problem? Not only is there no indication that any crime was committed, the investigating officer argued that the computer expertise of the student itself supported a finding of probable cause to seize the student's property.

According to another EFF report:

Some of the supposedly suspicious activities listed in support of the search warrant application include: the student being seen with "unknown laptop computers," which he "says" he was fixing for other students; the student uses multiple names to log on to his computer; and the student uses two different operating systems, including one that is not the "regular B.C. operating system" but instead has "a black screen with white font which he uses prompt commands on."

I wondered if there was an "opposing point of view," and did a quick web search on "boston college gay email investigation". Every reference to the story that I found seemed to be computer tech web sites that were repeating the EFF angle. Another quick search of mainstream news organizations found no reference to the story. I posted a request for information on the Boston College web site, and held this post for a few days to see if they responded. They didn't.

It sounds to me as if Boston College has gone way overboard in trying to punish the student they think was responsible. And the idea that using a command prompt is suspicious behavior would be funny, if it weren't so frightening. (Just as an aside, here, you don't need to use Linux to get a command prompt. Your Windows machine has one if you just look under "Accessories.") But maybe the story is more complicated than EFF is letting on. EFF seemed to gloss over the nature of the email in question. Was it ugly, vulgar, threatening?

Ironically, Boston College, an institution run by the Jesuits, is no haven for gay rights. At one time, it seems to have made a list of the nation's most homophobic campuses, although another article in the Boston Phoenix suggests that this reputation is not entirely deserved.

Radical feminists may remember Boston College as the one-time employer of philosopher Mary Daly. In 1999, Daly left Boston College after settling a lawsuit before it went to trial. Daly had sued BC for violating her tenure and free-speech rights, after the institution tried to force her to admit men to her regular classes.

Women in Dominican Republic fight anti-choice constitutional amendment

Inter Press Service has all of the details.

SANTO DOMINGO, Apr 23 (IPS) - A truck full of female police officers, dressed in black riot protection gear, pulled up in front of the General Assembly building here to confront and control the crowd of women who had gathered on Tuesday to protest a "right to life" amendment to the Dominican constitution.

Earth Day in Oklahoma

Thanks to the Oklahoma Democratic Party for links to Oklahoma Sustainability Network and Oklahoma Earth Day Resources.

Yes, again.

Feministing reports that there has been a second case of an 11-year-old boy committing suicide because of anti-gay bullying.

Saberi update

Inter Press Service has this update on the situation of jailed Iranian-American journalist Roxana Saberi, who also reported for IPS, along with other news organizations such as National Public Radio and the BBC.

Racism conference rescued by final declaration

Inter Press Service has this useful analysis of the recent UN Racism Conference.

off our backs alive, kicking

Or at least that's what they say on their web site.

The link above is not a permanent link, but here is what the oob site is reporting as of this writing:

Our newly reorganized, re-energized gathering of enthusiastic, talented and committed radical feminist women is dedicated to oob's continuation as the beacon and source of feminist journalism and activism it has been since 1970. We plan to survive and thrive! Look for our next issue to hit your libraries, bookstores and mailboxes in mid June 2009!

This is very good news. Founded in 1970, off our backs is the oldest surviving feminist periodical in the US. You may remember that last fall, oob was in such difficult financial shape that they suspended their print edition and took time to re-group. But now the print edition of off our backs is back, and they've also started a blog as well.

Congratulations, sisters.

Oklahoma by the Numbers

The Oklahoma Policy Institute has just released their April edition of Numbers You Need. Here's the short version:

Oklahoma unemployment rose steeply in February to 5.5 percent--the highest rate here since 2003, but still well below the national average. Inflation rose slightly. Growth in personal income in the final quarter of 2008 was anemic, but nationwide, personal income declined. The number of Oklahomans taking part in the program formerly known as food stamps grew for the tenth straight month. High energy prices have had a noticeable effect on the state's production of natural gas and oil. Finally, "State revenue collections continued their downward spiral in March."

Iranian-American journalist jailed as spy by Iran

Roxana Saberi has reported for such news organizations as the BBC, National Public Radio, and Fox News. She was originally arrested for buying alcohol, later charged with working as a journalist without a valid press card, and finally charged with espionage.

BBC NEWS has the details.

Astro-turf tea parties

When logged out of my Hotmail account last evening, I found the following link on the msn.com web site:

Anti-tax 'tea parties' vent anger across U.S. - Life- msnbc.com

These are supposed to represent grass-roots opposition to President Obama's economic policies. We are told that these policies oppress US taxpayers by taking away their hard-earned money, while leaving a legacy of debt to younger generations. Even msnbc.com, however, acknowleged that the rallies were promoted by a conservative think tank called FreedomWorks.

This post on the progressive web site AlterNet tells a slightly different story:

(A)s with so much on the right, these apparent displays of populist rage are not what they will seem.

Six weeks ago, two of us (Mark Ames and Yasha Levine) published an investigation exposing the nascent "Tea Party" protest movement for what it really is: a carefully planned AstroTurf (or "fake grassroots") lobby campaign hatched and orchestrated by the conservative advocacy organization FreedomWorks. Within days, pieces of the scam had crumbled, exposing a small group of right-wing think tanks and shady nonprofits at its core.

The whole AlterNet post is well worth reading.

Massachusetts pre-teen driven to suidice by anti-gay taunting

Truthdig has the story. It's heartbreaking.

Trouble in Thailand once again

AlterNet picked up this interesting analysis from New American Media.

What, me worry?

If you're inclined to worry, you could find a few reasons to worry on CommonDreams.org:

First, you could read that the Targeted Killing of Women's Rights Activist Shocks Afghans.

Then, you could read about the possible collapse of Pakistan within six months time, the threat of an Israeli attack on Iran, or the serious risk that President Obama's Wall Street bailout is not only pandering to the rich and greedy, but also likely to fail.

Or, you might find yourself troubled that the US Treasury Department has directed General Motors to prepare a bankruptcy filing.

But apparently, the Mid America CropLife Association (read, lobbying group for agribusiness) thinks that we are facing a more serious threat than all of these. MACA appears to be worried that Michelle Obama's organic White House garden fails to "recognize the role conventional agriculture plays in the US."

I think any further comment from me would be entirely superfluous.

Another point of view on Somali pirates

AlterNet has cross-posted this article from the British newspaper The Independent, reporting that while many Somali pirates are indeed thugs, others are trying to prevent things like illegal fishing and the dumping of nuclear waste.

The Independent also reports that US snipers have killed three pirates who were holding a US sea captain hostage. The crew of the Maersk Alabama had repelled a pirate attack, but the retreating pirates had taken Captain Richard Phillips, who had offered himself as a hostage. Also, Somali insurgents fired mortars in the direction of US Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ) as he was leaving from a visit to that troubled nation. Payne, who has been in the House since 1988, chairs the Congressional Black Caucus and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health.

Bad Bush policies continued, part two

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in an important warrantless wiretapping case pending in federal district court in northern California, the Obama DOJ's New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush's.

The case is called Jewel v. ISA. In this case EFF is suing government agencies, including the National Security Agency, on behalf of AT& T customers to stop what it calls "the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records."

EFF blogger Tim Jones reports that in a recent motion to dismiss the case, the Obama administration made two troubling arguments:

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue "would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security." As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

It's an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration "invoked a legal tool known as the 'state secrets' privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court." He was right then, and we're dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.

Sad as that is, it's the Department Of Justice's second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

For myself, recently I've been searching for a new Internet service provider. I've been using dial-up, and at my house it's about half as fast as it used to be at my apartment. I've been considering going with AT&T, but now I think I won't.

Associated Press reports Midwest City blaze started intentionally

The report is here.

Bad news from California

Longstanding Oakland, Calif., Women's Clinic Closes After Lack of Medicaid Reimbursements, according to the Daily Women's Health Policy Report.

Bad Bush policies continued, part one

According to the Daily Women's Health Policy Report:

President Obama filled the remaining seats on the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships this week, appointing an antiabortion-rights Pentecostal bishop among his last nine selections to complete the 25-person panel, the AP/Chicago Tribune reports. Bishop Charles Blake is a presiding bishop of the Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal church with about six million members. At a Democratic National Convention interfaith service, Blake called on Obama to adopt policies to reduce the need for abortion and criticized those who show "disregard for the lives of the unborn." The White House has asked the council to address four priorities, which include economic recovery, reducing the need for abortion, "encouraging responsible fatherhood" and improving interfaith relations, according to the AP/Tribune.

Let's start out with the whole idea of "faith-based initiatives," which Obama decided to continue and expand. Regardless of what safeguards are supposedly in place to protect the separation of church and state, I'm not sure it's a great idea for religious organizations to receive federal money. Religious groups that want to engage in charitable work are already able to collect money tax free to use on those projects. Why should they also be also awarded taxpayer money to fund their programs?

I'm even less sure that it's a good idea for there to be a special federal office devoted to encouraging the charitable projects of religious groups. And what does it mean for the government to try to improve interfaith relations? This sounds a lot like government meddling in religion, which is at least as bad as religious groups meddling in government. It also sounds like the government trying to say, we don't care which religion you practice, as long as you practice some religion. The whole thing makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

And then there is the question of who President Obama has decided to appoint to the advisory panel. As Ann at Feministing points out, "he's stacking the panel with anti-choice men."

So maybe the more things "change," the more things stay the same?

Holy smokes!

When I walked outside briefly tonight while I was at work, I felt the wind gusting and smelled the smell of smoke in the air. It was enough to make a person uneasy. Later, I took a break, and back in the break room the local news people on the television were reporting fires, fires, and more fires. After work, I came down to Sauced to have some pizza and look at the Internet.

The Associated Press reported that Dozens of homes burn as fires scorch Texas, Okla. I also found that the Muskogee Phoenix had reported this afternoon that I-35 was closed in north central Oklahoma because of the fires. Scary stuff. I wish there was something useful I could say. It's enough to make a person hope for rain, snow, and unseasonably cold temperatures.

Speaking Frankly

(Part I of a sporadic series on what economics is all about. I think this is what I would call economic philosophy, which sounds intimidating, but if we look at it in small chunks, I'm hoping it won't be.)

I want to start examining some economic concepts. When I listen to economic news on the radio, the reporters and commentators seem to take some things for granted that I would like to challenge.

President Obama's budget is criticized by Republicans and some Democrats because it would increase the size of the deficit. Republicans also complain that it would also increase the size of government. "Blue Dog" Democrats say that most of the president's program would be worthwhile, but we can't afford them.

Meanwhile, the conservative governments of France and Germany say that they don't want to add any more economic stimulus programs in their countries because such spending might touch off inflation.

But are deficits and inflation necessarily bad things? Economist Ellen Frank says they aren't.

Frank is the author is The Raw Deal: How Myths About the Deficit, Inflation, and Wealth Impoverish America. This book was published by Beacon Press in 2004, and is available through the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System. The call number is 330.973 F8283r.

Starting on page 192 of The Raw Deal, Frank has a useful summary of the economic convential wisdom that has taken hold over the past 30 years. She notes that this is called supply-side economics by the people who favor it, and market fundamentalism by the people who oppose it.

This belief system calls for government economic policy to work toward balanced budgets, low inflation, and very low taxes on accumulated wealth or high incomes. It also calls for very low expenditures on government programs that provide services to ordinary people--services like health care, pensions, child welfare, or education.

Market fundamentalists insist that the government shouldn't help out its citizens or take care of the economy. They say that rich people will make productive investments that create jobs and make a better life for everyone, If allowed to make and keep as much money as possible. Under this belief system, it's just not possible that the unregulated free market would fail to provide fair access to jobs and resources.

Writing in 2004, Frank had seen the collapse of the dot com bubble on Wall Street, but not the collapse of the housing bubble and the mess that followed from it. But she accurately identified many of the pitfalls of supply-side economics, and the core fallacy that holds it together. That fallacy is that what is good for the economic elite is good for the rest of us and for society as a whole. The myth is that everyone can be rich.

"Financial wealth"--abstract entries in checkbooks and computer data banks--gets confused with the real economy. The real economy, Frank points out at the beginning of the book, is made up of actual goods and services--things like automobiles, haircuts, knee-replacement surgeries. Money is just a tool that helps these things get moved around. As Frank says on page 8:

Simple arithmetic dictates that the average standard of living in a society cannot grow faster than that society's output. Therefore, no one person's share can grow by more than the average unless somebody, somewhere, gets stuck with a smaller slice of the economic pie. If the economy grows at, say, 4 percent per year, then there will be only 4 percent more stuff--cars, bread, haircuts, housing--to go around. Some people, through luck or clever financial trnasactions, might manage to increase their own incomes by more than 4 percent. but when a lucky few investment specialists of CEOs realize tremendous gains, it stands to reason that others somewhere down the line either suffer losses or receive less than a full share of the economy's growth.

Throughout her book, Frank analyzes how the principles of supply-side economics are designed to allow rentiers to monopolize the products of the real economy at the expense of the rest of us. Rentiers are those elite few "individuals and institutions with substantial accumulated wealth who live on the interest income generated by financial assets--banks, financial firms, and their wealthy clients."

We're told that inflation and deficit spending are bad, and they are, for rentiers. For the rest of us, it's different.

For instance:

Debts of the federal government differ entirely from personal debts; they do not need to be repaid, are not claims on the income of ordinary families, and will not plague future generations. While it is true, in a vague and general sense, that "we" owe this money, it is also true, as any introductory economics textbook will explain, that we owe it mostly to ourselves.

These days "we" seem to owe quite a bit to the Chinese as well, and I'm not sure how this affects the equation. My hunch is that economic conservatives tend to exaggerate whatever this effect might be. At any rate, conservatives tend to ignore deficits when they are brought about by tax cuts for the wealthy or by expenditures on wars (which, coincidentally, tend to enrich private contractors in which they hold an ownership interest.) These same conservatives complain about deficits when they are caused by government expenditures that create demand in the real economy and benefit ordinary people.

The situation with inflation is similar. A moderate amount of inflation actually benefits ordinary people:

Evidence abounds that countries willing to tolerate moderate inflation are able to sustain higher rates of job growth for longer periods of time. A study by economists at the World Bank found that inflation rates of up to 20 percent annually are correlated, throughout the world, with higher rates of economic growth.

Frank notes that the only significant effect of inflation alone (not falling income or standards of living that might occur with or without inflation). "(I)nflation erodes the value of money over time." That hurts the extremely wealthy who depend on their accumulated income rather than on money earned by working for a living.

We live in interesting times. On the one hand, the Obama administration has promised real change from the exploitation and greed that reached its peak during the eight years of the second Bush administration. We do see many programs that promise to rebuild the real economy and help ordinary people.

On the other hand, Obama seems to accept much of the economic orthodoxy that culminated in the current worldwide economic depression. We need to seriously rethink that orthodoxy, and The Raw Deal is a very good place to start.

Foreign Policy in Focus: London summit has "disastrous results"

Yesterday, I linked to a Foreign Policy in Focus analysis by Walden Bello of the issues facing the G-20 summit. Here's a link to FPIF's analysis of the summit's results.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist..

John Feffer at Foreign Policy in Focus asks, What's Up with North Korea? and comes up with some sensible answers.

Foreign Policy In Focus | U-20: Will the Global Economy Resurface?

Walden Bello at Foreign Policy in Focus has a useful analysis of the issues facing the recent summit of the G-20 nations in London.

Bello says that the International Monetary Fund has been discredited, and the summit decision to grant the IMF a trillion dollars to stimulate the economies of developing nations is exactly the wrong move. Instead, Bello says:

First of all, since legitimacy is a very scarce commodity at this point, the UN secretary general and the UN General Assembly — rather than the G20 — should convoke a special session to design the new global multilateral order. A Commission of Experts on Reforms to the International Monetary and Financial System, set up by the president of the General Assembly and headed by Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz, has already done the preparatory policy work for such a meeting. The meeting would be an inclusive process like the Bretton Woods Conference, and like Bretton Woods, it should be a working session lasting several weeks. One of the key outcomes might be the setting up of a representative forum such as the "Global Coordination Council" suggested by the Stiglitz Commission that would broadly coordinate global economic and financial reform.

Second, to immediately assist countries to deal with the crisis, the debts of developing countries to Northern institutions should be cancelled. Most of these debts, as the Jubilee movement reminds us, were contracted under onerous conditions and have already been paid many times over. Debt cancellation or a debt moratorium will allow developing countries access to greater resources and will have a greater stimulus effect than money channeled through the IMF.

Third, regional structures to deal with financial issues, including development finance, should be the centerpiece of the new architecture of new global governance, not another financial system where the countries of the North dominate centralized institutions like the IMF and monopolize resources and power. In East Asia, the "ASEAN Plus Three" Grouping, or "Chiang Mai Initiative," is a promising development that needs to be expanded, although it also needs to be made more accountable to the peoples of the region. In Latin America, several promising regional initiatives are already in progress, like the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas and the Bank of the South. Any new global order must have socially accountable regional institutions as its pillars.

The entire post isn't terribly long and is well worth reading.

The poem about the clog in the drain pipe under my house, under my kitchen sink.

This is a poem that includes a hacksaw.
Every poem should include a hacksaw.
I suppose you shouldn't get a clog out of your drain with a hacksaw,
but it was my drain pipe, and my hacksaw, and darn it, it worked.

Here is how I found out about the clog in my drain pipe.
It started when I was crawling under the house
with the engineer who is advising me about how to fix my foundation.
If you haven't guessed, this is what they call a fixer house, and
I thought I had fixed the plumbing well enough to last
until I fix the foundation, but I thought wrong.
Because there, down in the crawl space under the kitchen sink,
there was wet clay,
and a tiny puddle against the concrete wall.

And I wanted to believe the engineer
when he said it probably wasn't anything.
But a person has to check.
So once the engineer was gone, I stayed in my coveralls,
and turned on the kitchen sink,
and crawled underneath the house again.
I  crawled back toward the kitchen sink, and I could hear water flow,
and there, right under my kitchen sink,
I discovered the fountain of youth,
water flowing up
and out
from an un-plugged clean-out opening in the drain.

I can see this poem so clearly in my head,
the white pipe, and the fountain,
the slurping sound the water made as it fell,
and then there is the whole mechanistic troubleshooting process that went through my head,
which led me inexorably to the conclusion that the drain must be clogged,
and I can still feel the poem in the memory of my elbows, covered in gray cotton twill,
digging themselves into the hard clay as my eyes watched the water fall.
I wish I could write the poem so that you could see it, so that you could ride with me
over 23rd Avenue to the hardware store, and home again,

It is poetry to climb under a house on your elbows and knees,
there is poetry in exploring with a springy metal plumber's snake,
there is poetry in the reckless recognition that it is my hacksaw
and my drain pipe,
and I can damn well use the one to take the other apart,
and glue everything back together again. I can only
hope

it's a poem, because there's no way this is a coherent story,
but plumbing is never a coherent story, if you ask me,
plumbing is the best kind of incoherent poetry, just me and the
hacksaw and the snake under the house, and a screwdriver to
disassemble the clamp where the plastic drain pipe
joined the old cast iron,
poetry is that wet smell when I found the clog,
the slippery, gooey mess that came out on my fingers,
purple primer works better than purple prose,
in my humble opinion,
poetry is the swish of purple primer and the smell of glue
when I take my handiwork and put it back together.

Poetry is mud and the scrape on my finger from the time
I slipped with the hacksaw.
Poetry is a story I am only just learning how to tell.

It's National Poetry Month...

...and you can find all the details at Poets.org.

Here in Oklahoma City, there will be a special event to celebrate National Poetry Month on April 25 at the Ralph Ellison Library. There are activities all day, and the featured speaker will be poet Deborah Hunter.

Tuesday night at the spoken word event at Galileo, someone talked about writing a poem a day this month. I think I'll try to do that. If I wrote 30 poems this month, I might start to feel like a poet, again. So, I'm doing a few other things, but hey, how much time could it take?

Remembering Patsy Mink

Women's Media Center has an interesting post by Emily Wilson on Kimberlee Bassford's new documentary film on Patsy Mink, scheduled to air on PBS in May.

A New Way Forward

One of the most vexing things about the Obama Administration is its perplexing generosity with Wall Street and the banking industry. We've already thrown billions of dollars of bailout money at the greedy incompetents running the financial industry, and they still can't see their way clear to make credit available to individuals and businesses. Defenders of the bailout say that the giant banks are too big to be allowed to fail, and that if they go under, they'll take the whole economy with them. Meanwhile, economists such as Paul Krugman argue that this type of bailout can't and won't work.

Thanks to janinsanfran and William Greider, I discovered the website of a group of activists who are mad as hell and not going to put up with nonsense any more. According to A New Way Forward, "If it's too big to fail, it's too big to exist." They insist that "We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy."

At 2 p.m. EDT, (this would be 1 p.m. Central time), A New Way Forward is sponsoring demonstrations nationwide to support their program to nationalize, reorganize, and decentralize the banks. There may even be a demonstration here in OKC, although as of this writing, only two people have committed to attend it.

In my rush to finish this post before the library closes, I'm probably oversimplifying what A New Way Forward is all about. For more information, you can visit their blog. They also offer an online discussion forum.

Why, indeed?

Over at thenation.com, John Nichols asks why Auto Gets Tough Love, While Wall Street Feels the Love.

Nichols wants to know:

How come, if the auto industry must feel the pain, the speculators on Wall Street and the CEOs of the big banks and insurance companies only feel the love of the TARP program?

Why is it, as the Politico headline on Monday evening suggested, "Carrots for banks, sticks for autos"?

Why is it that Michigan Congressman Thaddeus McCotter, the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, sounds so logical when he asks, "When will the Wall Street CEOs receiving TARP funds summon the honor to resign? Will this White House ever bother to raise the issue?"

And why does McCotter's answer to his question about the White House getting as tough with Wall Street as it has with Detroit--"I doubt it"--sound so achingly accurate?

All good questions.

Alternatives to the private bicycle

Thanks to my friends Ginger and Terri for this link to something called B-cycle.

This seems to be the high-tech version of something I remember seeing back in Moscow, Idaho, when I lived there during the very early 1980s--shared bicycles. Back in Moscow, these were old beater bikes, spray-painted orange and left at public bike racks. You could borrow one, bicycle around on it to your heart's content, then leave it at another bike rack. I'm not sure how successful this venture was. The bikes were supposed to be too ugly to steal, but I'm sure a few of them got stolen. I don't know who was in charge of maintenance, and since you didn't have to pay to use the bike, there wasn't a maintenance fund. Besides that, although Moscow had a fairly small population and not a huge amount of traffic, it was very hilly and not much fine to ride around on a single-speed bike. I can't be sure of this, but if I went back to Moscow, Idaho today, I bet that all of the public bikes would be gone.

B-cycle, on the other hand appears to be a co-operative venture of the advertising agency Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, the bicycle manufacturer Trek and the health insurance company Humana. I found this by doing a little googling, and reading a post on the Inspired Economist. It seems to be presented as an effort of these companies to combat environmental degradation and improve public health. The idea is that riders can check out these simple single-speed bikes at numerous convenient public locations, then return them to the same or a different B-cycle rack.

It's not a free service. Riders pay for the use of the bikes with a credit card or a B-cycle account. I haven't seen the business model for B-cycle. I'm not sure what the use of the machines costs--the B-knowledge link on the B-cycle site offers to answer the question "What does it cost?", but the answer is, "Rates will be coming soon." so, on the one hand, this public rent-a-bike system offers the advantage that the bicycles can be tracked, and there is income to use for maintenance of the machines. Is the hope of the sponsors that the fees for the bikes will also generate a profit? Or is the project meant as a form a community service (as well as public relations for its sponsors)?

Let's see what else I can find...

April Streeter on the Huffington Post thinks it's a great idea, but doesn't offer a lot more details. Writing on the New York Times Green, Inc. blog, Azadeh Ensha says that a B-cycle membership is slated to cost $50/year. Each bike reportedly costs $2500-$3000.

Ensha notes that other bike-sharing programs worldwide have had mixed success, but that the president of B-cycle is optimistic that the company can succeed:

“We’ve done a lot of research on both successful and unsuccessful bike-sharing programs — about 100 throughout the world,” says Nate Kvamme, the president of B-cycle and a former director at Humana’s Innovation Center. Mr. Kvamme says his bike-sharing program boasts some distinct advantages over earlier comers — including fourth-generation bicycles that will track and measure usage, and a business plan that relies on integration with local businesses.

Meanwhile, according to the Cafe Evoke's A Thought Over Coffee blog, Oklahoma City is second in the nation in people who have voted on B-cycle's Who Wants It More? page to bring B-cycle to our city.

I'm not sure what I think. B-cycle sounds like an intriguing idea, but I tend to be wary of corporations bearing gifts. For myself, I like the OKC Infoshop, where they have a free bicycle recyclery. Anyone out there have any different opinions?

An answer to the deficit hawks

Dean Baker compares Budget Deficits and Blow Up Dolls.

In the movie Lars and the Real Girl, the main character imagines that a female blow-up doll is his fiancé. To humor Lars, his brother and sister-in-law go along with the charade. Over the course of the movie, more people are drawn into the circle, until eventually the whole town is treating Bianca the blow-up doll as one of its leading citizens.

This seems to pretty well describe the debate over the budget deficit, except it's not clear that many people realize it's a charade. The main story is that Lars' budget hawk counterparts are upset that the deficits projected for 2013 or 2019 are too large. They want President Obama to commit to spending cuts and/or tax increases in order to bring these deficits to levels they consider acceptable.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

Supporting President Obama's budget

I wish I had more time to research this, but Congress seems to be ready to vote on President Obama's budget next week.

On economic matters, Obama seems to have an odd sort of split personality. On the one hand, his plans to bail out financial institutions will give away billions of dollars to the irresponsible tycoons who screwed everything up so badly--while proposing a cure for their bad behavior that may be worse than the disease. On the other hand his fiscal year 2010 budget seems to be a genuinely progressive document that would make badly needed investments in health care, clean energy, education, and infrastructure.

If you would like to support the president's budget, there are several ways to do so. The Campaign for America's Future has an online form you can use to contact your senators and congressperson. (They also have a set of talking points that you can use to make an argument in support of the budget.) Or, you can go to barackobama.com to sign a pledge to support the budget. On this site, you can also click a button that will tell you where to call your representatives. Sure, here in Oklahoma we live in the reddest of the red states, and it's easy to feel that there is no point in contacting our representatives to tell them how we feel. On the other hand, they need to know that not all of their constituents are right-wing conservatives.

Predictably, Republicans and some Democrats have attacked President Obama's budget on the grounds that it would massively increase the federal deficit and make the federal government larger. My best understanding is that these are really bad arguments, as economist Ellen Frank point would point out. (The link above is to an online interview with her. Her book, The Raw Deal, is available throught the Oklahoma County Metropolitan Library System.)

To oversimplify, Frank argues that policies that keep deficits, inflation and government small tend to benefit a very small group of owners of capital and disadvantage ordinary working people and society as a whole. I think that we as a nation need to debate the conventional wisdom that says that big government and big deficits are automatically bad, and I'm frustrated that this debate seems to be largely ignored. In the future, I hope to be able to return to this discussion. I suppose I'm as skeptical of big government as the next person, but sometimes government intervention is necessary to control capitalism gone amok.

Hillary Clinton is right

So reports Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.

It’s an indictment of our fact-averse political culture that a statement of the blindingly obvious could sound so revolutionary. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters on her plane Wednesday as she flew to Mexico for an official visit. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border ... causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians.”

You can see the rest of Robinson's thought-provoking analysis at Truthdig.

Senate bill to benefit subprime borrowers offers most aid to women

According to Women's eNews, "Women are almost twice as likely as men to hold subprime mortgages. That means the ability of many to hang on to their homes could be tied up with Senate action--expected this month--on a bill to reduce mortgage payments."

They have the details here.

Friday cat blogging on Saturday

See Spot.

See Spot run.

On guard against Gardasil

Gardasil is a vaccine against human papilloma virus. HPV can cause genital warts, cervical cancer, and a variety of other diseases, including penile and anal cancer.

Gardasil is marketed by the pharmaceutical giant Merck, and costs about $500 for the three shots necessary to establish immunity. A couple of years ago Merck sponsored a legislative campaign to make Gardasil one of the vaccinations girls would have to receive in order to attend school. This campaign proved controversial, and only Virginia and the District of Columbia passed this legislation. Now, Merck is pushing to have boys and men vaccinated with Gardasil.

The National Partnership for Women and Families discusses this situation in its Daily Women's Health Policy Report issued yesterday. This report is based on an article in that day's edition of the Washington Post.

According to the Post:

When a vaccine designed to protect girls against a sexually transmitted virus arrived three years ago, the debate centered on one question: Would the shots make young girls more likely to have sex?

Now the vaccine's maker is trying to get approval to sell the vaccine for boys, and the debate is focusing on something else entirely: Is it worth the money, and is it safe and effective enough?

Like most generalizations, this one has some exceptions. For instance back during the summer of 2007, I found this post over on AlterNet. It's the first part of a four-part series on the politics and PR of cervical cancer by Judith Siers-Poisson.

Siers-Poisson writes:

Given the anxiety of most people about cancer and the number of people infected with HPV, it is not surprising that what is touted as the first vaccine against cancer has been largely greeted with acclaim. But despite having been affected personally, I became concerned by the headlong rush to not only approve the vaccine, but to mandate it for middle-school aged girls. It is also worrisome that a vaccine may give a false sense of security, which could lead to a decline in the very reliable and proven diagnostic tools available, including Pap tests. Decisions affecting millions of young women should not be made lightly, and certainly not without examining the marketing, PR, and profit motives of a corporation like Merck.

Apparently, HPV is incredibly common, so common that more than half of all sexually active people acquire it at some point. By age 50, 80 percent or more of all women will have become infected with genital HPV. But most people fight off the infection on their own. There are more than 30 strains of HPV, a few of which cause cancer. Merck claims that its vaccine protects against the strains that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers and 90 percent of genital warts.

Siers-Poisson argues that the most effective preventative measure against cervical cancer is a regular Pap smear. Unfortunately, poor women, women of color, and women in non-industrialized countries often lack access to regular medical care, including Pap tests. Furthermore, cervical cancer causes far fewer deaths than do heart disease and breast cancer. While not minimizing the threat of cervical cancer, Siers-Poisson wonders if Gardasil is vastly more important to the health of Merck than it is to the health of women.

Meanwhile, let's go back to the Washington Post. The Post article raises the question of whether it might be sexist to consider cost-effectiveness in the case of Gardasil:

"The cost-effectiveness studies are really important, but I don't think they should be the sole driver of public health policy," said Gregory D. Zimet, a professor of pediatrics and psychology at Indiana University. "This is a vaccine that principally benefits women's health. I wonder if it was the reverse, and there was a vaccine for women that helped prevent prostate cancer in men, this would be as much of an issue."

For me, the real question is, are we protecting the health of patients, or are we protecting the health of giant corporations? We're often told that universal health care is unaffordable. But it's not always true that the most expensive treatment is the one that is most effective. If we can find a way to spend our health care dollars in the most cost-effective way, maybe we could afford health care for everyone. If that requires more government intervention in the free market, that's really not such a bad thing.

More on Paul Krugman

Just the other day, I linked to some opinions by Paul Krugman about the Obama administration's plan for bailing out banks and unfreezing credit markets. He was against it. On the other hand, Krugman thinks Obama's budget is very good. For instance:

The budget will, among other things, come as a huge relief to Democrats who were starting to feel a bit of postpartisan depression. The stimulus bill that Congress passed may have been too weak and too focused on tax cuts. The administration’s refusal to get tough on the banks may be deeply disappointing. But fears that Mr. Obama would sacrifice progressive priorities in his budget plans, and satisfy himself with fiddling around the edges of the tax system, have now been banished.
For this budget allocates $634 billion over the next decade for health reform. That’s not enough to pay for universal coverage, but it’s an impressive start. And Mr. Obama plans to pay for health reform, not just with higher taxes on the affluent, but by putting a halt to the creeping privatization of Medicare, eliminating overpayments to insurance companies.

It seems to me that I remember Krugman from back during the Clinton administration as a neo-liberal economist who very much promoted the mainstream line on globalization. Maybe Krugman has changed over the past eight years. Maybe I have changed and lost my radical edge. Or maybe Krugman just looks good in comparison to right-wing economic orthodoxy.

Whatever it is, I find that these days I look forward to reading Krugman's opinions, and often find them useful and informative. Oddly enough, moderately progressive economists such as Krugman seem to be somewhat out of favor in the Obama White House. See this post on Alas, a blog for the details. It includes an embedded link to a very funny music video.

US Jews support strong US leadership for two-state solution in Middle East...

...according to a new poll of American Jews' views on Israel and the Middle East released by the progressive Jewish organization J Street.

According to an email message announcing the poll:

• American Jews remain remarkably supportive of assertive American efforts to achieve Middle East peace. The poll finds an extraordinarily strong base of 69 percent of American Jews firmly supporting active American engagement in bringing about Middle East peace, even if it means publicly disagreeing with or exerting pressure on both Arabs and Israelis, compared to 66 percent eight months ago;
• 69 percent also support the U.S. working with a unified Hamas-Fatah Palestinian Authority government to achieve a peace agreement with Israel, even when informed that the U.S. does not recognize Hamas due to its status as a terrorist organization and its refusal to recognize Israel. Interestingly, a March poll conducted by the Truman Institute at Hebrew University reported that 69 percent of Israelis also think Israel should negotiate with a joint Hamas-Fatah government;
• By 76-24 percent, American Jews support a two-state, final status deal between Israel and the Palestinians along the lines of the agreement nearly reached eight years ago during the Camp David and Taba talks;

Webcam shows eagle nest near Stillwater

Follow this link to see live views of a bald eagle nest, as well as information about eagles. It's pretty cool.

This isn't change. This is large amounts of our money, and our President seems to want to throw it away.

Common Dreams has this disconcerting view by Paul Krugman of the Obama administration's plan to unfreeze US capital markets.

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn't actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won't be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

Krugman is basing his analysis on this New York Times article. The article not only gives details of the three-part administration plan to get credit flowing again, but explains what the source of the problem is:

Risk-taking institutional investors, like hedge funds and private equity funds, have refused to pay more than about 30 cents on the dollar for many bundles of mortgages, even if most of the borrowers are still current. But banks holding those mortgages, not wanting to book huge losses on their holdings, have often refused to sell for less than 60 cents on the dollar.

The result has been a paralyzing impasse. Banks, unwilling to sell their loans at fire-sale prices, have had less capital available to make new loans. Mortgage investors, unable to leverage their investments with borrowed money, have been unwilling to pay more than fire-sale prices.

To break that impasse, the government’s crucial subsidy is meant to provide investors with the kind of low-cost financing that has been utterly unavailable in today’s credit markets.

In an update posted on his blog, Krugman gives a further explanation of his opposition to the Obama plan:

So now we have a bank crisis. Is it the result of fundamentally bad investment, or is it because of a self-fulfilling panic?

If you think it’s just a panic, then the government can pull a magic trick: by stepping in to buy the assets banks are selling, it can make banks look solvent again, and end the run. Yippee! And sometimes that really does work.

But if you think that the banks really, really have made lousy investments, this won’t work at all; it will simply be a waste of taxpayer money. To keep the banks operating, you need to provide a real backstop — you need to guarantee their debts, and seize ownership of those banks that don’t have enough assets to cover their debts; that’s the Swedish solution, it’s what we eventually did with our own S&Ls.

Now, early on in this crisis, it was possible to argue that it was mainly a panic. But at this point, that’s an indefensible position. Banks and other highly leveraged institutions collectively made a huge bet that the normal rules for house prices and sustainable levels of consumer debt no longer applied; they were wrong. Time for a Swedish solution.

Krugman argues, cogently I think, that if this plan fails, as it is likely to do, the Obama administration won't have the political capital to try a plan that might actually work.

In addition, I would argue that the failure of this Wall Street bailout would undermine efforts by the president to gain support for his ambitious budget.

Numbers show OK economic woes continue

According to the Oklahoma Policy Institute, the state's seasonally adjusted unemployment level rose to 5.0 percent in January (up from 4.6 percent in December). Building permits for the last quarter of 2008 declined 44 percent from the same period a year previously. And the state government's revenue collections dropped sharply for the second straight month.

For more information, you can view the March edition of OPI's Numbers You Need.

New Afghan women's party to compete at polls...

...and Inter Press Service has this interview with party leader Fatima Nazari.

Among other things, Nazari says:

The two main problems we face are the lack of a funds and the prevalence of Mujahedeen. Most of the time, (the mujahedeen) suffocate our voices. They don’t give us a chance to talk, and whenever they speak, the parliamentary authorities allow it. The parliament never listens to our suggestions. I’ve always been intimidated by the jihadi leaders in our parliament. Once, for example, (Haji Mohammed) Mohaqeq and (Abdul Rab Rasul) Sayaff (two notorious mujahedeen warlords turned parliamentarians) wanted to speak about some issue, and they were allowed to speak three times. But we never got a chance to speak.

Unfortunately, the U.S. has focused a lot attention and support on these mujahedeen warlords. They should listen more to the people, not to a bunch of former warlords. People don’t want to see these jihadi leaders in power. When the U.S. invaded, people were hoping to be released from the grip of these jihadis. But it never happened.

Oh, come on, now

Here's a news article that popped up on msn.com when I signed out of my Hotmail account:

Obama 'stunned' by millions in AIG bonuses - White House- msnbc.com

Sure, the behavior of the executives at American International Group was repulsive, but is anyone really surprised?

Here's hoping that the outrage leads to some actual regulation of the financial industry.

No joke.

So I was hanging out in a local coffee shop the other night when I overheard some young folks telling Helen Keller jokes. You know me. I felt impelled to deliver a political lecture. But before I delivered the lecture, I needed to check my facts. So I looked up Helen Keller on Wikipedia.

It didn't surprise me to learn that Keller was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor's degree. And I thought I already knew that "Keller was well traveled and was outspoken in her opposition to war. She campaigned for women's suffrage, workers' rights, and socialism, as well as many other progressive causes." That was exactly the piece of information that I was looking for.

But then I read further. We've all heard the story about how Anne Sullivan taught Keller to understand the concept of language. But before there was Anne Sullivan, there was Martha Washington (and we're not talking about the first First Lady) :

Helen Keller was not born blind and deaf; it was not until she was nineteen months old that she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain," which could possibly have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. At that time, her only communication partner was Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who was able to create a sign language with her; by the age of seven, she had over sixty home signs to communicate with her family. According to Soviet blind-deaf psychologist A. Meshcheryakov, Martha's friendship and teaching was crucial for Helen's later developments.

By Keller's own account, she was downright mean to the companion to whom she owed so much:

In those days a little coloured girl, Martha Washington, the child of our cook, and Belle, an old setter, and a great hunter in her day, were my constant companions. Martha Washington understood my signs, and I seldom had any difficulty in makingher do just as I wished. It pleased me to domineer over her, and she generally submitted to my tyranny rather than risk a hand-to-hand encounter. I was strong, active, indifferent to consequences. I knew my own mind well enough and always had my own way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it.

I did some web searching to find out more about little Martha Washington, and didn't find much beyond Keller's description and the mention in Wikipedia. I did, however, find a long essay about Keller in the Journal of Southern History. In this essay, Kim E. Neilson explores "The Southern Ties of Helen Keller." What emerges is a complicated and interesting portrait of a Keller's position as a disabled southern white woman from a powerful Confederate family who often challenged "southern gender and racial traditions."

Neilson notes that as a child, "Keller maintained her tyranny (over Martha Washington) with the threat of personal violence, but that aggression was simply a part of and enabled by the much larger racial realities of post-Redemption Alabama." Her northern tutor Anne Sullivan exposed Helen Keller to ideals of racial equality. Keller's education at Radcliffe College further radicalized her. Sometimes she took bold stands against racism. Sometimes, giving way to family pressure, she backed away from those bold stands.

In her brilliance, in her struggle to live as a whole person in a world that wanted to patronize and control her as a disabled person and a woman, in her bravery as a human rights activist, and yes, in her failures to live up to her own ideals, I find the real complicated Helen Keller more inspired than the cardboard heroine and butt of stupid jokes that is sometimes presented to us. Helen Keller gives me hope that I myself, sometimes brave, sometimes brilliant, sometimes failing to live up to my own ideals, can also contribute to creating a free and equal world

The difference between privilege and power

I've been thinking about the connections between different forms of oppression. I've been thinking about the ways that patriarchs keep power by setting oppressed groups against each other. I've been thinking about the commonplace accusation that feminism is a white phenomenon, that feminism, almost by definition, is racist. This is something I've been struggling to write about for years, and nothing that I write about it ever satisfies me. I think this is something that I will have to write about in small pieces, rather than all at once.

Here's a small piece of the puzzle.

Sexism and racism are both part of the structure of of society in the United States and around the world. These structures help to create individual attitudes, but are made up of much more. There is nothing about adopting feminist ideals that makes sure that feminists won't have racist attitudes--or sexist attitudes, for that fact. It also seems true that movements to free oppressed people are often dominated by people within the group who have the most privilege. I don't think it's true that feminism is merely a creation of white, economically privileged women. I think that idea is insulting to millions of women of color and working class women who have made up the grassroots of feminism. Nevertheless, economically privileged white women are the ones with access to the most resources to shape public understanding of the movement and influence government actions.

The fact that women and other people have a difficult time living up to their ideals is sad and painful. But what I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the concept that focusing on women and trying to eradicate patriarchy somehow, by definition, means supporting racism or other forms of oppression.

"For the Love of Separatism," by Anna Lee, was something that helped me organize my thoughts on this issue. Years ago I read this essay that I'm linking to in the magazine Lesbian Ethics. A while back I found it electronically on the wonderful web site Feminist Reprise.

Anna Lee offers the perspective that white women promote racism not by focusing on other women, but by making alliances with white men. Here is one example she gives:

The original radical analysis of rape by organizers of rape crisis centers was replaced (often along with the original organizers) with organizers’ acceptance even desire for police participation in preventing the crime of rape. Rape crisis center organizers eagerly sought police involvement even though police had never demonstrated a concern with or success in finding the male rapists of black women. The police, however, have shown a willingness to rape black women.(6) In fact, white feminists’ analysis of rape discounted the experiences of black women. The police have also shown a very successful record of protecting white men from facing the penalties for their rapist acts, while, as I commented earlier, black males are disproportionately targeted to pay the penalty for the crime of rape. Who benefitted from police involvement with rape crisis centers? Not black women. Not black men. But white males did benefit. While white feminists’ agenda may not have been articulated, their desire to bond with white males was not unnoticed.

Anna Lee continues to offer a thought-provoking analysis of why white feminists and lesbians seek out connection with and approval from white males:

What all of us, especially white lesbians, must be clear about is the difference between power and revokable privilege. Power-over is the necessary resources to decide what the outcome of a situation will be. Revokable privilege is the ability to carry out someone else’s decisions and their agenda. Privilege can be wielded as long as someone else’s decisions and agenda are followed. White women have revokable privilege. When they serve white male interests, resources are made available to them. When they do not, the availability of resources decreases. When battered women’s shelters hire out-lesbians or make services available to lesbians who have been battered, funding from city, county, state or national government is canceled. It is important to males that women be patched up and returned to them. It is not important to them that lesbians be patched up and returned to a lesbian battering situation.

White lesbians or feminists may, in fact, know that the availability of resources is dependent upon making the male givers of the resources comfortable, or they may not want to examine the gift horses’ mouths too closely. When certain actions result in predictable, consistent outcomes then the actions not the rhetoric must be examined. I’m still waiting for white lesbians to question their bond with white men and what that bond means to creating a diverse lesbian community. The bond between white lesbians and men is currently a stumbling block to the creation of meaningful race and class diversity.

This is one of those times when I don't seem to have a useful concluding sentence. I guess I'm just looking for the next piece of the puzzle.

Guess what?

Right-wing Republicans are bellyaching that if the Employee Free Choice Act passes, "union thugs" will interfere with the right for workers to choose not to join a union.

But the Center for Economic Policy Research has a new report that demonstrates that if you try to help form a union in your workplace, your employer is likely to try to fire your ass.

I am shocked. Truly shocked. Maybe the Employee Free Choice Act really is necessary to protect the right to form unions?

Does new White House council have real power to help women?

According to Voice of America, President Obama signed an executive order last week establishing the White House Council on Women and Girls.

A statement from the White House says the council will work on improving women's economic security, evaluating and developing public policy that is family-friendly, finding new ways to prevent violence against women, and improving women's health care.

Mr. Obama noted that while women and girls make up half the nation's population, women make up only 17 percent of the members of the U.S. Congress and three percent of the heads of the top 500 corporations in the United States.

Feministe and Feministing both have commentary on this (and both have embedded YouTube videos of the president's speech announcing the council), and both blogs seem to think this panel offers real hope of improving the position of women in the US. On the other hand, Linda Lowen at about.com suggests that this might be a public relations move with very little real substance. Using a post on politico.com as her source, she notes that the council has no full-time staff and no set meeting schedule.

Oklahoma state government not immune to economic woes

This update from the Oklahoma Policy Institute has the details.

Big Google is watching you...but you can opt out of their tracking program

Electronic Frontier Foundation has the details.

Meanwhile, EFF offers a link to a post on slight paranoia that asks if "tracking data from videos embedded into the White House Web site end up in Google's targeted advertising database?"

Both posts are well worth reading.

How women got the vote in Oklahoma

In a recent post, I noted that Oklahoma voters passed an amendment in November 1918 granting women the right to vote in this state. You might well wonder, how did women in a conservative state like Oklahoma win the suffrage before passage of the federal amendment?

Oklahoma's history is more complicated than you might imagine, but that's a story for another time. For the moment, suffice it to say, an account of the Oklahoma suffrage campaign can be found in Eleanor Flexner's Century of Struggle:The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States. This campaign took place in the context of the difficult final campaign to win the vote for US women, which finally gained victory on August 26, 1920.

According to Flexner, after suffering through "the doldrums" during the years 1896-1910, the movement to gain the vote for US women gained new life in the second decade of the 20th century. The old National American Woman Suffrage Association had stagnated, limited, in part by the refusal of the (white) members of its southern affiliates to support a federal amendment because that would interfere with "states rights."

The upstart Congressional Union, led by Alice Paul, began a militant campaign of demonstrating and lobbying for a federal suffrage amendment. This spurred NAWSA, now under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, into new effectiveness. Catt developed a "winning plan" that involved working for both the federal amendment and state amendments.

In the November 1918 elections, NAWSA targeted four anti-suffrage US Senators for defeat, and managed to remove Republican Weeks of Massachusetts and Democrat Saulsbury of Delaware. Flexner writes that  this election also "saw four state suffrage referenda come up, of which threee were victorious, South Dakota, Michigan, and Oklahoma, while the fourth, Louisiana, lost by only a few thousand votes, a showing of some consequence in a southern state."

Flexner describes what happened in Oklahoma on pages 305-306 of Century of Struggle.

The difficulties encountered by the suffragists in Oklahoma referendum probably represented the worst in unprincipled opposition in any suffrage campaign. There were innumerable special local problems, not the least of  which was a complete breakdown of the state suffrage organization after the campaign was underway. This was particularly serious because the Oklahoma state constitution required that the number of votes in favor of an amendment must exceed the total, not only of the negative votes, but also of  those ballots not marked either for  or against. The Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of the State Elections Board left no stone unturned to defeat the suffrage amendment. They even went to such lengths as printing only half as many ballots on the amendment as regular ballots and withholding them altogether from soldiers voting in the army camps in the state. The National kept two of its best  organizers,  the Shuler mother-and-daughter  team, in Oklahoma for months and spent more money on the campaign--nearly $20,000--than in any other state. Flagrant efforts were made after election day to count out what was clearly a suffrage victory, and the last National organizer did not leave Oklahoma until December 3, one month later, when the Governor finally surrendered to the facts of life and proclaimed the measure passed.

As her source for this information, Flexner cites  pages 529-535 of the History of Woman Suffrage.

I've quoted from the "enlarged edition" of Century of Struggle published in 1996 by Harvard University's Belknap Press. Ellen Fitzpatrick is listed as co-author of this edition. Having read an earlier edition of the work, it appears to me that Fitzpatrick's contribution to this volume consisted mostly of writing a foreward and afterword, which do provide interesting information about Eleanor Flexner, the creation of the book, and the relationship of the first wave of US women's rights activism to the contemporary feminist movement.

When I get around to starting a garden, I think I'd like to try this...

Someone in my neighborhood recently mentioned to me that there exists Oklavore, a local blog about eating locally. Not only does it exist, it had this cool recent article about no-dig gardening.

While any form of gardening involves a certain amount of manual labor (which is part of its charm), no-dig gardening does eliminate one time-consuming and difficult garden task. Plus, it seems to require very little water, a definite plus in a dry climate like ours.

It's a charming post, well worth reading. Check it out.

Moving forward

Today is International Women's Day, and also, in most of the United States, the beginning of Daylight Savings Time. Did you remember to set your clock forward an hour?

Here's a fun fact for today. Did you know that Oklahoma was one of the states that granted the vote to women before the passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution?

According to the Oklahoma Historical Society's online Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, activism to gain votes for women began in Oklahoma Territory as early as 1890, when the Women's Christian Temperance Union organized in the territory. Prohibitionists believed they needed the vote in order to be effective in their work. By 1893, women in the territory had gained only the right to vote in school elections. By 1895, the WCTU had allied with the National American Woman Suffrage Association to further their struggle for the vote.

Suffragists from Oklahoma and Indian territories met in 1904 at Oklahoma City and established the Woman Suffrage Association of Oklahoma and Indian Territory. With Kate H. Biggers as president, the joint association adopted a pro-statehood resolution declaring that no law should be enacted "restricting the right of suffrage on account of sex, race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Despite a well-organized suffrage campaign the 1906 Oklahoma Constitutional Convention denied the vote to women. Not surprisingly, this convention also passed a number of restrictions on the rights of African Americans. Nevertheless,

As a favorable climate toward enfranchisement increased nationwide during World War I, Oklahoma suffragists, led by Pres. Adelia C. Stephens, lobbied the legislature in 1917, which submitted the matter as a constitutional amendment to be decided at the next general election. A splinter group of the national suffrage movement, the Congressional Union or National Woman's Party, was also active. In 1916 they sent Iris Calderhead of St. Mary's, Kansas, to Oklahoma to enlist support. Unlike the NAWSA, this organization was restricted to female membership and took a more militant and radical strategy. The Suffragist, the Union Party's official organ, encouraged women to paste literature on farmers' wagons, picket and parade, and shout from boxes at county fairs, picnics, and tent meetings. The most vocal of the local officers was Secretary Kate Stafford, who was unable to assume her duties until she had served thirty days in a Washington, D.C., jail for picketing the White House.

On November 5, 1918, Oklahoma voters approved State Question 97, which extended suffrage to women (emphasis added). A ratification committee, chaired by Katherine Pierce of Oklahoma City, helped ensure passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the state legislature. When Oklahoma ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on February 28, 1920, the Oklahoma Woman's Suffrage Association disbanded and the state's League of Women Voters formed.

Oh, Jesus

ECHIDNE OF THE SNAKES reports that a Catholic archbishop in Brazil announced that everyone will be excommunicated who helped a nine-year old survivor of incestuous rape get an abortion. Not only was the pregnancy the result of rape, but it also endangered the life of the girl, who weighs only 80 pounds.

The Catholic Church is apparently unable to tell the difference between being "pro life" and being pro-patriarchy.

Heaven help us all.

An alternative proposal

Today the California Supreme Court heard arguments in a case brought by gay marriage advocates to overturn last November's Proposition 8. Plaintiffs in the case, including lesbian comedian Robin Tyler, argue that marriage is a basic civil right and that voters don't have the power to overturn the basic rights of minority groups.

There's an interesting discussion of the court proceedings over on Pam's House Blend. Consensus seems to be that the court will uphold the ban on gay marriages, while declaring that the gay marriages that took place before Prop. 8 passed will still be valid. But one possible outcome seems to be that the court will simply discontinue marriage in California and offer all couples the option of domestic partnership.

I've gotta say, that sounds interesting. If you believe in the separation of church and state, or in women's equality, marriage is a terribly troublesome institution.

Why not leave marriage to the church, and allow the state to offer domestic partnership instead? Why not work to provide universal health care and universal secure retirement to everyone, regardless of whether they're in a particular type of relationship?

Just a thought...

Everything or the kitchen sink

There have been a lot of things I would like to blog about. I would like to blog about President Obama's new budget. I would like to blog about how different forms of oppression interact with each other, which seems to me like one of the most important ways to celebrate Women's History Month. What I did instead this past  weekend was to re-do the plumbing underneath my kitchen sink to prevent a replay of the amazing exploding plumbing episode.

I did go ahead and get the specialized tool for PEX pipe. I  ended up getting the tool for the cinch-type connector, even though I'd read that they were inferior to the crimp type.  My biggest reason for doing this is that by using the crimp type of connector, I could get one tool that would fasten fittings for all sizes of pipe up to one inch in diameter, rather than having to buy a different tool if I needed to connect a different size of PEX pipe. Trust me, buying one tool is expensive enough, even though I violated my principles and bought it at a home improvement chain store. I found that the system was fairly easy to use, but it does require care and a little bit of practice to get the hang of.

Meanwhile, I  found two fascinating books about plumbing through the Metropolitan Library System. One is Remodel Plumbing by  Rex Cauldwell (published 2005 by Taunton Press, shelf number 696.1 C372r). Cauldwell explains why compression fittings (particularly the metal kind) are so fussy:

In metal compression fittings, leaks are normally caused by the tightening nut being a little too big (due to manufacturer tolerances) for the brass ferrule sleeve. As the nut tightens down on the body, instead of  the ferrule evenly compressing around the pipe to make a good seal, one side of the ferrule slips up on the pipe (and the other slips down) resulting in an uneven seal...Metal compression fittings also have a habit of leaking hours or days later.

So, I'm a terribly inexperienced amateur plumber, but it's a relief to find out that it's not just me.

The other great plumbing book I found was the second edition of The Plumber's Troubleshooting Guide by R. Dodge Woodson. (A  2009 McGraw-Hill book with the shelf number 696.1 W898p2.) Most of  it didn't apply directly to the situation I was dealing with, but it did teach me one nifty trick.  A good way to check for leaks around a bit of plumbing is to touch it with a piece of dry toilet paper. Even a small leak will make the toilet paper wet.

Besides  the plumbing adventure, I spent a happy hour or two climbing around underneath the house examining it so I can figure out what I need to know in order to get my house leveled. It seems that the foundation of my house is a mess, but it's kind of an interesting mess. I'll  keep you posted.

It starts today

One of the helpful staff members at the Red Cup just reminded me that today marks the start of National Women's History Month.