Oklahomans unite against War on Women at 4/28 rally

This afternoon I took a brief break from the end-of-semester madness to enjoy an hour or so of sanity at the Oklahoma Unite Against the War on Women rally at the state capitol. This was part of a nationwide day of events in support of women's liberation from an increasingly obnoxious right-wing backlash against our well-being and freedom.

I estimated that about 300 people, mostly women but some men, attended the event in front of the capitol's north steps.

When pregnancy begins

Hat tip to Planned Parenthood of Oklahoma for a link to this informative post about how pregnancy happens and how the extreme right intentional distorts this information to limit women's reproductive freedom.

Correction--down to the wire April 26

I mistakenly posted that yesterday was the last day that the Oklahoma House could hear SB 1433, the bill that would declare fertilized eggs to be persons. (Once upon a time we had a "personhood bill" for adult women. It was called the Equal Rights Amendment, and unfortunately it didn't pass, in Oklahoma or the nation.) I finally made it down to the capitol last night after an emergency tweet asked for supporters when Rep. Reynolds attempted an obscure parliamentary maneuver to bring SB 1433 to a vote. It failed! Things are looking good for the bill to finally go down today, but the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice--which has played such a crucial role in stopping this monstrosity--is still calling for supporters to join the Pink Wave at the Capitol today. You can follow how things are going on Twitter, or you can even listen to the Oklahoma House live.

Down to the wire on April 25th

The anti-choice backers of Oklahoma Senate Bill 1433 were angered by the reported death of the bill that would declare that a fertilized human egg is a person with all of the rights thereof. Yesterday, the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice and others worked to stop the consideration of SB1433 and reported that the bill was still dead, replaced by a non-binding resolution that was passed by the OK House. Today is the last day for bills that originated in the Senate to be heard on the House floor. Anti-choice activists were not appeased by the passage of the non-binding resolution, and according to newsok.com, pressure is growing on lawmakers to hear SB 1433 while they still can.(Hat tip to Oklahomans Against the Personhood Act for the link.)

The daring pro-choice Pinkwave is still making its presence felt in the House. I tried to join them on my way to work, only to discover that the House is in recess until 1:45 today. You should join them if you can, or consider calling your representative.

Finally, good news from the OK Legislature

The Tulsa World reported this morning that SB 1433, the so-called "personhood bill" will not get a vote in the Oklahoma House. House Speaker Kris Steele described this decision as representing the collective will of the Republican caucus. The extreme right-wing Rep. Randy Terrill said it was "stunning and unbelievable" that the bill wouldn't come up for a vote. Whatever. The bill would have declared that from the moment a human egg was fertilized, it had all the rights and privileges of a person. (Unlike the adult female human who carried it.)

Kudos to the Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice for its hard work in stopping this nonsense.

Who wants an Oklahoma income tax cut?

On Wednesday, the Oklahoma Senate passed a bill to cut the state's income tax to a top rate of 4.9 percent. While this might sound appealing on the surface, it would result in cutting important public services--like healthcare and education. And to get to this lower top rate, deductions and credits for ordinary working people would have to be sacrificed, meaning that rich people would pay lower taxes and poor people would pay higher taxes. Vital public services have already been cut drastically in the wake of the Great Recession.

The Oklahoma Policy Institute has been doing a lot of work on analyzing this issue, and they have a page of links devoted to information about this important topic. This morning, a post on OPI's OKPolicy Blog shows that most of the support comes not from Oklahomans--even business groups are wary of it--but from outside pressure groups. Among these groups (no surprise) is the notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):

So where is it coming from? It’s no coincidence that very similar efforts to eliminate the income tax are popping up in Kansas and Missouri. All three campaigns rely heavily on a report by Arthur Laffer, a former Reagan advisor who has dedicated his career to restricting taxes in numerous states. Governor Fallin mentioned Laffer’s numbers in this year’s state of the state speech, though she cited them as coming from Americans for Prosperity, a national lobbying group founded by David and Charles Koch. Most recently, Governor Fallin wrote the introduction for a report by Laffer and others at the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) that ranks states based on how closely they follow ALEC’s economic policy agenda. It’s clear that these national groups have the governor’s ear.

Does housework count as real work?

Some time in the foreseeable past, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney described his wife, Ann, as his primary advisor on women's issues. His wife told him that women didn't care about feminism, they cared about the economy.

Democratic campaign consultant called Hilary Rosen set off a kerfuffle when she said that Ann Romney knew nothing about economics because she hadn't worked a day in her life. Staying home to raise five sons counted as working, Ann Romney said. This ignited a silly media row that I did my best to ignore. However, a couple of interesting items showed up on the Web as a result of this silly row.

One such item was Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne's commentary. I think he's supposed to be a liberal. I found his post on the Truthdig Web site. Mr. Dionne basically agrees with the Romneys when he says

For millions of American moms and dads, debates about “feminism” or “social conservatism” are irrelevant. It’s about money.

He goes on to chastise Republicans and conservatives for undermining the economic foundation of most families that would allow one parent to choose to stay home.

This points to a contradiction that few conservatives want to confront. When trying to win votes from religious and social traditionalists, conservatives speak as if they want to restore what they see as the glory days of the 1950s family. But they are reluctant to acknowledge that it was the high wages of (often unionized) workers that underwrote these arrangements.

Yet on the right, economic conservatism almost always trumps social conservatism, and market imperatives almost always get priority over family imperatives. As a result, the United States has the weakest family-leave laws in the industrialized world. We have done far less than other well-off countries to accommodate the difficult work-family dilemmas that most moms and dads deal with in the new economy.

There's much in that second quote to agree with, but I'm left with the strong impression that Dionne considers women's freedom and women's lives irrelevant, unless these are considered as part of a family economy that affects men.

A much more interesting conversation about the topic of women and housework took place on Democracy Now!, where host Amy Goodman interviewed long-time activist and theorist Selma James. Back in 1952, James wrote a brilliant pamphlet called "A Woman's Place," and now James has published a book called Sex, Race, and Class, a collection of her essays.

James argues that the work of stay-at-home mothers is crucial to the operation of capitalism, because mothers reproduce labor. The housewife becomes the servant of the working husband, who relates to her in the same way the capitalist relates to him. That is, he pays her just enough to live on, while capturing goods and services with a value far beyond that.

Selma James says it better than I do. Here is the interview as it aired on Democracy Now! on April 16:



On the Democracy Now! Web site, you can view a longer version of the interview, complete with written transcript.

Right here in Central Park

Peak Oil Hausfrau has a post about a great project that goes on right in my neighborhood.

My kind of tea party

Saturday night, after the poetry reading at Herland, I headed over to the Blue Door to the fundraiser for the Voices of Oklahoma community radio station. I regretted missing the opener by Miss Brown to You, but loved the show by Emma's Revolution. One of their funniest numbers was a send-up of the Tea Party Movement called "Taxed Enough Already." Below you can watch the version that's out on YouTube:



It would be interesting to ponder the complexities of a duo named in honor of the anarchist Emma Goldman producing a defense of government. But I'll leave that conversation aside in favor of noting the appropriateness of "Taxed Enough Already" as an anthem to opponents of the Buffett Rule that is coming up for a vote in the US Senate today.

Occupying patriarchy

Lucinda Marshall is always wonderful. You can read her latest post either at Feminist Peace Network or at Occupy Patriarchy.

It is not sufficient to say that we have to come together as the 99% against the 1%. The needs of the 99% are not homogenous and it is not acceptable to say that it is divisive when we point this out.

While the Occupy movement has been developing, the war on women has become a nightmare of hateful, ignorant, daily attacks on women’s human rights. It is urgent that this be stopped and presents an opportunity for the Occupy movement as a whole to stand up for women’s lives and say that this war must stop. On April 28th there will be rallies in all 50 states and in Washington, DC calling for an end to the war on women.

Thank you, Lucinda. In Oklahoma City, we will have a march at the state capital starting at noon on April 28. I will be there. What about you?

Oklahoma not the only anti-woman state

The woman governor of Arizona (!) has signed into law one of the most extreme anti-choice laws in the US.

Some complexities of the Trayvon Martin case

Sean Thomas-Breitfeld over at colorlines.com has written a really good analysis of some of the complexities involved in the Florida shooting of African American teen Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood watch volunteer whose ethnicity has become a source of controversy in the case. Here's a brief sample:

George Zimmerman’s unconscious biases and his racial identity did not cause Trayvon Martin’s death. The gun he carried while volunteering his time as a neighborhood watch captain is what made the difference between a misunderstanding leading to insults and hurt feelings, and the death of an unarmed black teenager who was walking home from the store. But rather than talk about the laws in play in this case, we get mired in a debate over the motivation of individual actors.

The new black/brown terms of this case were a convenient distraction for conservatives (particularly the National Rifle Association) who would rather we not focus on how Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law fosters a vigilante mentality. The leaking of details about how Trayvon Martin was a normal (rather than perfect) teenager helped the Sanford Police shift the focus away from how their inaction the night of Trayvon’s death and showed a too-familiar disregard for the well-being of black men.

There are legitimate questions to raise about how gated communities—as modern-day, segregated enclaves—foster a racialized paranoia that George Zimmerman was caught up in. There’s a real discussion to have about the many ways that structural racism and criminal justice collide and conspire to rob Trayvon Martin of fair and just protection by the police. We must not lose sight of the structural factors at work in situations like this one.

There's much more to this eloquent post, and it's well worth reading the whole thing.

Unique Kenyan village empowers women

Hannah Rubenstein of Inter Press Service has written a fascinating article about a woman-only village in Kenya:

Umoja’s history began in 1990, when a collective of 15 Samburu women, who called themselves the Umoja Uaso Women's Group, began selling beadwork and other goods to raise money for themselves and their families. As the group began to grow financially lucrative, they found themselves facing increasing harassment by men in their communities who felt that economic growth was not appropriate for the women, who traditionally play a subordinate role.

In response, the women, led by matriarch Rebecca Lolosoli, decided to break away and begin their own village, in order to ensure security and cooperation for themselves out of the reach of those who sought to undermine them.

Today, Umoja is home to 48 women who have come from all over the country. Their stories vary – some were young girls fleeing forced marriages to old men, others were raped or sexually abused, and several were widows who were shunned by their communities. Moreover, several women residing in the village are Turkana, taking refuge from the tribal violence currently raging in the central region of Isiolo.

Only women are permitted to sleep in the village. An exception is made for men who were raised there. Many women who live in Umoja plan to marry eventually, and conduct courtships outside the village--on their own terms.

Gender nonconformity lives

This post by Dorothee Benz at thenation.com is well worth reading.

Adrienne Rich dead

Adrienne Rich died a couple of days ago, at the age of eighty, due to complications of rheumatoid arthritis. Why did I think that she was going to live forever? Death is part of life, but the death of someone wonderful always seems to come too soon.The Advocate notes that she had been with her partner Michelle Cliff (a notable feminist writer in her own right) since 1976.

Adrienne Rich was that rare poet who made an impact both in the mainstream world of arts and poetry and among radical lesbian feminists. She had an obituary in The New York Times and John Nichols wrote an analysis of her life and work for thenation.com. My favorite was this remembrance by a woman whose life her work had touched.

For myself, I will always remember Adrienne Rich as someone who pushed the feminist movement to be its best self, who pushed women with privilege to challenge their own racism, classism, antisemitism. Rich was a leader in the best sense--someone who inspired all of us to find and express our own ideas and ideals. She had a broad understanding of feminism as a movement that challenges all forms of oppression.

I will miss her.

Three views on Trayvon Martin

Trayvon Martin is the African American teenager who was shot to death by Sanford, Florida neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman in late February. This tragedy took place in a social context in which young black men are considered dangerous criminals because they are black males.

Here are three posts about this story that I have found to be useful and informative:

1. Pamela Merritt, who writes the blog Angry Black Bitch,  points out that if Trayvon Martin did the things George Zimmerman accused him of, Martin was "standing his ground" and should be considered the innocent party.
2. Judd Legum at Think Progress provides a point-by-point summary of the case.
3. In an interview on Fox News, posted at MEDIAite, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson denounces the so-called "New Black Panthers" for offering a "dead or alive" reward for Zimmerman's apprehension. For me, the most interesting and significant part of this interview was Jackson's prediction that this case could provide an inspiration to the civil rights movement equivalent to that provided by the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. This offers hope that this tragedy will ultimately fuel the cause of justice.

It's not about epistemology

You may wonder, gentle reader, what the heck is "epistemology," besides a funny looking big word that is fun to say in order to impress your friends? It is, very simply, that part of philosophy that is devoted to studying what we know and how we know that what we know is true.

This is a very important question. I think I know all kinds of things--that all people should have equal rights and power, that climate change is a serious problem and needs to be stopped, that US military intervention always makes things worse rather than better. There are large numbers of people who think I am exactly wrong about all of those things. How do I know that I am right and they are wrong?

Yes, that's an important question, but as you read in the title of the post, this is not about epistemology, so we'll take that question up at another time.

This post is actually about the Affordable Health Care Act, which has made its way to the Supreme Court. Right-wing opponents of the law have challenged its constitutionality, saying that the federal government doesn't have the right to require citizens to purchase health insurance. Liberal supporters of the law say that it provides a huge step forward in making health care available to all citizens.

As for myself, I just don't know. I expect that the law is constitutional, but I don't think it fixes what's broken about the US health care system. The US health care system is designed to allow private companies to make enormous profits by providing services that cost lots of money but may (or may not) improve anyone's health. Despite its name, I'm not sure the health care act will really make health care more affordable.

Robert Reich has written a blog post that expresses very well my reasons for ambivalence about the ACA. (You may recall that Reich served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. Reich is now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.)As Reich writes:

The dilemma at the heart of the new law is that it continues to depend on private health insurers, who have to make a profit or at least pay all their costs including marketing and advertising.

Yet the only way private insurers can afford to cover everyone with pre-existing health problems, as the new law requires, is to have every American buy health insurance – including young and healthier people who are unlikely to rack up large healthcare costs.

This dilemma is the product of political compromise. You’ll remember the Administration couldn’t get the votes for a single-payer system such as Medicare for all. It hardly tried. Not a single Republican would even agree to a bill giving Americans the option of buying into it.

But don’t expect the Supreme Court to address this dilemma. It lies buried under an avalanche of constitutional argument.

Now Republicans are using this compromise in order to whip up resentment from far-right Tea Party supporters who don't want the government to tell them what to buy. Some of this resentment probably comes from people who, even with subsidies, cannot afford to buy health insurance or pay a fine for not having it.

It seems like a lose-lose situation. If the Affordable Health Care Act is struck down by the Supreme Court, we are left with the same broken system, with all of its skyrocketing costs and inadequate coverage. Plus, it's a big defeat for the whole idea of universal health care. If the ACA is upheld, more people have some kind of coverage, but most of the problems of the existing system are left in place.

Reich, however, sees a silver lining in the possible overturn of the ACA. He argues that no one objects to mandatory participation in Medicare by people over 65, because this is a government program that works well and is universally popular.

So why not Medicare for all?

Because Republicans have mastered the art of political jujitsu. Their strategy has been to demonize government and seek to privatize everything that might otherwise be a public program financed by tax dollars (see Paul Ryan’s plan for turning Medicare into vouchers). Then they go to court and argue that any mandatory purchase is unconstitutional because it exceeds the government’s authority.

Obama and the Democrats should do the reverse. If the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate in the new health law, private insurers will swarm Capitol Hill demanding that the law be amended to remove the requirement that they cover people with pre-existing conditions.

When this happens, Obama and the Democrats should say they’re willing to remove that requirement – but only if Medicare is available to all, financed by payroll taxes.

If they did this the public will be behind them — as will the Supreme Court.

I would like to believe that Reich is right.

I have only one minor quibble about what he has to say.

The court debate started off with an argument about whether this is the right time to hear this case. This was a procedural issue based on an interpretation of an 1867 law that says that you can't file a legal challenge to a tax until you've had to pay that tax. People who don't buy health insurance won't need to pay a penalty for several years. The Supreme Court spent the whole first day of argument considering whether the 1867 law applies to this case.

Reich describes this argument thusly:

Not surprisingly, today’s debut Supreme Court argument over the so-called “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy health insurance revolved around epistemological niceties such as the meaning of a “tax,” and the question of whether the issue is ripe for review.

Um, no. This procedural argument had nothing at all to do with epistemology, it had to do with the way the word "tax" is defined. Maybe Reich meant to use the word "etymological," which has to do with tracing the history of words.

If we had an epistemological discussion about the ACA, we would be discussing whether we have any reliable way of predicting exactly what its effects are going to be. This is not a "nicety," but a very substantial problem. Even big words have meanings, and you can't just throw them around at random to prove how smart you are.

And when do women get to be persons?

I have been too immersed in my schoolwork to give more than passing attention to the daily news. This is not entirely a bad thing. I really don't think it is necessary for me to keep track of every time some wingnut patriarch celebrity or right-wing Republican legislator says something truly stupid about a woman, women, or women's rights. Such nincompoopery has been so widespread for so long that it is hardly worthy of notice, and frankly, some of the nincompoops seem to thrive on the attention, any kind of attention. It's probably a good thing that my attention has been focused on Information and Communications Technology and Management of Information and Knowledge organizations instead.

I do regret that I can't keep up with the anti-woman shenanigans of the 2012 Oklahoma Legislature. This is not merely some kooky talk radio show that a person can turn off. These people are passing actual laws, and one of the laws that they seem poised to pass is called The Personhood Act, which would declare a fertilized egg to be a human being, with all of the rights and privileges of any other citizen or resident of Oklahoma.

I've found what looks like a pretty good explanation of the situation on a blog called God Discussion, including the text of the bill that's making it's way through the Oklahoma Senate. God Discussion reports that House already passed a similar bill on Tuesday.  As other commentators have noted, this is a law that would ban many forms of contraception. The creative and courageous Oklahoma Coalition for Reproductive Justice held a "Barefoot and Pregnant" rally at the state capitol in Oklahoma City, and is leading the campaign against the Senate bill (and against a possible ballot measure that would add this type of language to the Oklahoma Constitution). OCRJ also provided this link to help you take action to defend women's control over our own bodies and our own lives.

Not so long ago, the US Supreme Court decided that corporations are persons. The Oklahoma Legislature wants to declare that fertilized eggs are persons. I would like to know when women get our chance to be persons, too.

The apprentice librarian shows off to her technology class

This was one of my contributions to a discussion of our favorite information technology hardware:

I couldn’t resist posting a picture of a computer hardware project I did back in 1996 that I was terrifically proud of. This is a working computer on the outside of a trash can. After painting the trash can a beautiful sparkly shade of motherboard green, I mounted the motherboard, adaptor boards, hard drive and floppy drive, and power supply on the outside of the can. The monitor, keyboard, and printer were free-standing, but were plugged into the motherboard.

This system was a PC-XT clone with a 8088 processor operating at 4.77 megahertz. It had 640k of random access memory, and most likely a Seagate ST225 20 megabyte hard drive, along with a 360 KB floppy drive that used 5 ¼ inch disks. There was also a 2400 b.p.s. “internal” modem. All or most of this hardware was about 10 years old and quite obsolete when I got my hands on it. However, back in Eugene, Oregon, where I put this contraption together as an entry in the Mayor’s Art Show, a system with this configuration could be connected to the Internet via Eugene Freenet. This system was fully operational, and at one time or another I powered it up and used it to check my e-mail. At the time I took the picture, some friends were keeping it at their house for me, and they took advantage of the fact that it was also a fully operational trash can.

Sadly, I had to recycle this hardware before I left Oregon for Oklahoma. But the picture still serves as a reminder that one day in the near future, your bright, shiny, new cutting-edge piece of IT hardware will be trash.

Working computer on the outside of a trash can

The apprentice librarian struggles with her management class

Some parts of library school are going to be a struggle for me. My required class in "management of knowledge organizations" (or something like that) is a good example. The self-introduction I wrote for this online class explains why:

Hello, everyone. I’m hoping we have a great semester together, and I’m looking forward to what I know will be an interesting class. I think it will be a tough class for me (I’ll explain why in a little bit), but I know it will be interesting.

About me: I was born in Philadelphia, and have lived in Idaho, Oregon, and for the past 10 years, Oklahoma. I got my bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the University of Idaho in 1979. People often want to know what a person can do with a philosophy degree. I’ve done lots of things. I’ve fought forest fires, worked in a bookstore, and been a busperson in a public market. For eleven years I was a custodian for the City of Eugene in Oregon. (About half of that time I worked at the Eugene Public Library.) Since moving to Oklahoma City, I’ve worked as a stock clerk at PetSmart and as a production worker and custormer service associate at FedEx Office. Most recently, I’m a public computer specialist at the Midwest City Public Library.

You will notice that I’ve never been a manager, but I think I’ve learned a few practical lessons about management in the course of working these and other jobs. Management, planning. organization, and leadership are activities that are done by ordinary people all the time, every day. The success of any organization depends not only on the hard work of its ordinary workers, but also on their intelligence and their own ability to plan and organize their work. If ordinary workers did nothing beyond what their managers directly tell them to do, everything would fall apart. In other words, every worker is a knowledge worker.

When I worked for PetSmart and for FedEx, I experienced a great deal of mismanagement perpetrated by people on upper corporate levels who seemed to have read a lot of management textbooks, but who had no clue about the conditions that ordinary workers actually faced. Either that, or corporate management was deliberately manipulative, dishonest, and oppressive. The goal seemed to be to suck every last drop of blood out of the workers, while paying us as little as possible. “Customer service” wasn’t about helping people, it was about sucking up to customers to manipulate them into spending money they couldn’t afford for things they didn’t need.

I apologize for ranting, but I wanted to explain why I approach the subject matter of this course with a great deal of caution. I have worked for large and small businesses, and I have worked for several levels of government. Over the past twenty years or so, it has become a fad to say that we should run government more like a business. This is the approach that seems to be taken by the authors of the textbooks for this class. My experience tells me this is a very bad idea, and even in its most humane and enlightened forms, it’s downright undemocratic. I think there is something obscene about reducing citizens to “customers” and “marketing” our services to them. That is not what libraries are all about. Libraries are about recognizing that ordinary people possess extraordinary capabilities, including the capability of being fully informed citizens who are the ultimate bosses of every public enterprise. That is why I want to be a librarian.

So, I think I’m going to struggle a lot with this course, but as you can see I am very interested in it. I appreciate all the hard work and good planning that Dr. Kim has put into this class, and I look forward to our discussions and projects.