The trouble with Obama's tax deal

The controversy has been bubbling for several days over President Obama's tax cut deal with Congressional Republicans.

As the Los Angeles Times puts it, this deal would "extend the Bush-era tax cuts for all taxpayers, keep jobless benefits flowing for 13 months and continue a series of tax breaks for the middle class." It would also include "a GOP-backed proposal to revamp the estate tax and lower Social Security payroll taxes by 2 percentage points to put more money into workers' pockets."

Listening to Obama defend this deal, I was impressed by his sincerity. I think the man really thinks he would be putting the economy and ordinary working people in danger if he fights the Republicans instead of compromising. But I think he's wrong.

For one thing, as Chuck Collins points out over at AlterNet, this deal tends to further concentrate wealth in the hands of the very richest US citizens, while taking money away from ordinary citizens. For another thing, as The Other 98% point out, we as a nation have a lot better uses for $700 billion than extending a tax break to the very wealthiest citizens. On top of all that, this "compromise" is bad politics for the president. Paul Krugman argues persuasively that this deal makes Obama's re-election in 2012 less likely.

Worst of all, as Dean Baker points out, the temporary two percent cut in Social Security included in the package could actually open the way to a right-wing attack on Social Security:

Democratic officeholders have had difficulty standing behind tax increases for the very richest people in the country. It is difficult to imagine them sticking their necks out for tax increases that will hit low and middle-income workers. In other words, it is very plausible that in the 2012 election, Democrats will feel the need to take the Republican pledge that they will never raise taxes. This means that the reduction in Social Security taxes may not be for just two years, it may be for the indefinite future.

In principle there is nothing wrong with financing a portion of Social Security benefits with money from general revenue. This was in fact the original intention of President Roosevelt when he designed the program. However, the fact is that the program has always been financed exclusively by the Social Security tax that is taken from workers’ wages. This makes the tax regressive, but it has the advantage that workers can quite legitimately say that they have paid for their benefits. This will be to some extent less true if a portion of the funding comes from general revenue rather than payroll taxes. In short, getting funding from general revenue opens a new line of attack on the program.

For all of these reasons, I hope that House Democrats are successful in their attempt to keep this plan from passing without serious renegotiation.

Happy Birthday, Pauli Murray

In her philosophical autobiography, Outercourse, Mary Daly makes several references to the civil rights activist, lawyer, and professor Pauli Murray, who was also one of the first women in the US ordained as an Episcopal priest. Murray was a fascinating and inspiring woman who maintained a lifelong commitment to the cause of universal human rights. You can start to find out more about her by visiting the Pauli Murray Project, and by reading her Wikipedia biography.

November 21st was the 100th anniversary of Pauli Murray's birth.

Honoring women's peace camps on Armistice Day

Today, on Armistice Day, I would like to honor the work of activists in women's peace camps who have struggled to end war as a way of solving disputes. A few of those camps included

• Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp
• Seneca Falls Women's Peace Camp
• Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp

And here is a link to the Greenham Common Peace Camp Songbooks site.
Enjoy!

If you're wondering what I'm doing this month...

...Joey Rodman has described it exquisitely over at Red Dirt Chronicles. Doesn't that sound like fun? If you'd like to write your own novel this month, you can sign up at the NaNoWriMo web site.

Jari Askins may have lost my vote...

...with this statement made during a recent debate:

"I am an Oklahoma Democrat. Oklahoma Democrats are conservative. We are not extreme," Askins said to open the hourlong debate at the University of Central Oklahoma. "I am a pro-life, pro-gun, pro-education, pro-business, protect-our-borders Democrat."

I am a Democrat of a different sort. I am a pro-choice, pro-worker Democrat, in favor of sensible and humane immigration reform. Askins seems to imply that Democrats such as myself are extreme, or even non-existent. If she is going to try steal votes from Mary Fallin by using rhetoric similar to Fallin's, maybe she doesn't want my vote. I am going to vote on Tuesday, but I am sorely tempted to abstain on the governor's race.

Why might the right wing prevail in mid-term elections?

Truthdig has posted one answer by commentator Chris Hedges:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

Human rights are indivisible

My life has become very busy and full. One of the things that has kept me from making regular posts on this blog has been a women's studies class I've been taking at the University of Oklahoma, WS 3220, US Women's Movements. We've just finished our study of the first wave of the US women's movement, up to the time that women won the vote in 1920.

One of the saddest features of this history--and one of the elements that has much applicability to social struggles today--is the way that the rich white men with the most power are able to set everyone else at each other's throats, women, people of color, workers, and so forth.

In an effort to protect the safety of freed slaves after the Civil War, was it justifiable for human rights advocates to push for African American men to get the vote, while leaving out all women? In the early 20th century, was it okay for white woman suffragists to tolerate discrimination against African American voters to win the support of the racist South?

Martha Gruening said no.

A Google search doesn't reveal much information about who she was. There doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia profile. There is a link to a New York Times article about her arrest in 1910 for inciting women workers to strike in Philadelphia. There is a brief biographical essay here. She was a lawyer and human rights activist who seems to have been a written brief articles for The Nation.

In September 1912, she also published this eloquent essay in The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP. If I'd been alive in 1912, I hope I would have had the sense to write something like this. Here is an excerpt:

If such incidents have been less frequent in recent years it is not because the profound and close connection between the Negro and women movements no longer exists. The parallel between their respective situations is as clear to-day as it was in 1848, but it is too frequently ignored by the reformers on both sides. Both have made some progress toward complete emancipation, the gains of women in the direction of enfranchisement being seemingly the more lasting. Both, however, are still very largely disfranchised, and subject to those peculiar educational, legal and economic discriminations that are the natural results of disfranchisement. And finally, both are being brought with every onward step nearer to the identical temptation -- to sacrifice the principle of true democracy to the winning of a single skirmish. So when one sees a national body of suffragists refusing to pass a universal suffrage resolution, one is compelled to wonder at the logic of those who, knowing so well what disfranchisement means, would allow it to be inflicted on others. "Let us not confuse the issue," these suffragists plead, some in good faith. Yet the confusion, if any, exists only in their minds. Here are not two distinct issues at stake, but merely the vital principle of democracy. Others insist that the granting of the ballot to women must precede all other reforms because "women have waited long enough" and recall the fact that women were forced to stand aside and see Negro men enfranchised at the close of the Civil War. This is undoubtedly true and was quite justly a source of bitter disappointment to the suffrage leaders of that day -a disappointment we should not underestimate -- but merely to reverse the principles in an unjust occurrence is not to work justice. It is strange to see so many suffragists who point with pride to the action of Garrison in withdrawing from the anti-slavery convention, blind to the larger significance of that action. Stranger still to see them following, not Garrison's lead, but that of the convention in their attitude toward colored people, and forgetting that no cause is great to the exclusion of every other. This Robert Purvis, a noted colored leader, understood, as is shown by his noble reply to the suffragists' appeal: "I cannot agree that this or any hour is specially the Negro's. I am an anti-slavery man. With what grace could I ask the women of this country to labor for my enfranchisement and at the same time be unwilling to put forth a hand to remove the tyranny in some respects greater to which they are exposed?" This is what all suffragists must understand, whatever their sex or color -- that all the disfranchised of the earth have a common cause.

Do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.

Anna Julia Cooper

Today I was sitting on my front porch, enjoying my morning cup of tea and re-reading Eleanor Flexner's history of the first wave of the US women's movement, when the mail carrier walked up my street and handed me an envelope. The envelope contained the delightful surprise of a charming birthday card from friend. (I'm not sure why I was surprised by receiving a birthday card, given that it's about to be my birthday, but I was.) Even more delightful than the card was the stamp on the envelope. It bore the name and picture of Anna Julia Cooper.

I did not recall ever having heard of Anna Julia Cooper, although Flexner mentions her briefly in Century of Struggle. According to her Wikipedia biography, she was obviously a remarkable woman. She was a born a slave in North Carolina in 1858, and received her early education at a school founded by the Episcopalians to train teachers to work with former slaves. The school had a "Ladies Course," and "the administration actively discouraged women from pursuing higher-level courses. Cooper fought for her right to take courses, such as Greek, which were reserved for men, by demonstrating her scholastic ability."

She worked many years as a teacher and principal at the M Street High School in Washington, DC, and during that time published an influential book called A Voice from the South: By a Woman from the South. At the age of 56 in 1914, she began working on her doctorate at Columbia University, but had to interrupt her education the following year when her brother died, leaving behind five children whom Cooper adopted. She finally finished her doctorate at the University of Paris-Sorbonne in 1925, at the age of 67. She lived to the age of 105.

 In 1893, Cooper addressed the World's Congress of Representative Women at the Chicago World's Fair. Blackpast.org has posted the speech she gave on that occasion to a mostly white audience. Her words have particular poignancy, because the white-dominate women's suffrage movement, once a radical egalitarian movement, had become conservative and segregated. Here is just a small part of this eloquent speech:

Now, I think if I could crystallize the sentiment of my constituency, and deliver it as a message to this congress of women, it would be something like this: Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain be broken, the chain is broken. A bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier an its weakest element. Least of all can woman's cause afford to decry the weak. We want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this Congress, demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity. The colored woman feels that woman's cause is one and universal; and that not till the image of God, whether in parian or ebony, is sacred and inviolable; not till race, color, sex, and condition are seen as the accidents, and not the substance of life; not till the universal title of humanity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is conceded to be inalienable to all; not till then is woman's lesson taught and woman's cause won—not the white woman's, nor the black woman's, not the red woman's, but the cause of every man and of every woman who has writhed silently under a mighty wrong. Woman's wrongs are thus indissolubly linked with undefended woe, and the acquirement of her "rights" will mean the final triumph of all right over might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason, and justice, and love in the government of the nations of earth.

This is supposed to be a controversy?

Christine O'Donnell, an insurgent Republican candidate who reached out to Tea Party activists, has won the G.O.P. nomination for a US Senate seat in Delaware.

Last night, at a dinner for a friend's birthday, I saw a segment about O'Donnell on CNN (television is ubiquitous in restaurants these days). I couldn't make out what all the fuss was about, but whatever it was, it was seriously weakening her campaign. Had she supported some kind of right-wing hate group? Cheated on her taxes? Engaged in stock market fraud?

Um, no. A little poking around on the Web today established that she admitted to spending a little bit of time practicing Wicca.

I am baffled and amazed that supposedly progressive people are taking the opportunity to -- dare I say "crucify"? -- the candidate for her religious experimentation. Is the candidate otherwise beyond criticism? Is her association with the far-right Concerned Women for America unworthy of comment? Can't she be challenged on policy issues?

Okay, I'll quit asking rhetorical questions now. But I will recommend you read a little post by Wes Isley, who has some really good things to say. For instance:

While O'Donnell's revelation may embarrass her staunchly conservative followers and fill her detractors with glee, there is more going on here. Check out the comments on pagan blogs like The Wild Hunt or Pantheon, and there's obviously more at stake than just O'Donnell's political future. Practicing Wiccans and other pagans--a group I loosely lump myself into--are upset at how their faith is once again being portrayed in the media. Ask yourself: Do you ever hear of anyone "dabbling" in Episcopalianism? Any Jewish "dabbler" stories out there? But whenever someone shows an interest in an alternative spiritual path, it's considered "dabbling," which carries dismissive connotations. But those who try out various Christian or other mainstream faiths are "soul searching."

Also implied in O'Donnell's statements about her brief Wiccan past and the media's treatment of those comments is the opinion that anyone who would practice witchcraft or something like it is simply too silly to be in public office. Someone might want to tell Dan Halloran, a pagan who represents New York City's 19th district. From my own perspective, Wiccan and pagan beliefs are only silly to those who don't know what they're talking about, which appears to be the case with O'Donnell herself. She may have, indeed, been hanging out with some "questionable people," and they may have told her they were witches and worshipped Satan, but her passing experience resembles nothing of what I know about Wicca. A friend of mine from high school is today a practicing witch, and I had the honor of conducting her wedding in 2009--no blood or Satan in sight.

And if pagans aren't considered "silly," then we're "dangerous" or "Satanic." But these weapons are used against other faiths as well. Currently, Muslims are everyone's favorite bogeyman. And don't forget the questions former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney faced about his own Mormon faith when he ran for President in 2008.

Hear, hear. Those of us who want to criticize the Republicans for their religious zealotry, who say that religious freedom is a value that we affirm, would do well to practice what we preach.

What is so bad about socialism?

The most recent issue of the Oklahoma Gazette has an interesting article about the Oklahoma Sponsoring Committee.

According to the OSC web site, this is a coalition of religious congregations that strives "To work with other institutions, including public schools and civic groups, to learn to use the democratic process effectively so that families can have a voice in what happens to their neighborhoods, schools and the greater community."

The Gazette article explores the controversy that has developed around the group. Although the OSC appears to be a coalition of both conservative and progressive religious groups, they are being accused of being socialists. This accusation seems to be based largely on their affiliation with the Industrial Areas Foundation. According to the Gazette, the "the OSC contracted with the Industrial Areas Foundation last year for training and technical assistance."

The OSC itself takes great pains to disassociate itself from socialism. In a section addressing "common questions" on their web site, they say:

Are you Marxist, Communist or for Socialism?

The answer on all accounts is again "No". We're actually the opposite in that we believe in empowering the individual citizen and decentralizing power and that a free market economy is the best environment to cultivate the strong family values our faith tradtions teach us.

Many people confuse advocating for the common good with socialism.  Social justice does not mean socialism.  For a more elaborate explanation, click here. If you ask someone who is calling the organization communist or socialist to define what they mean, chances are they won’t even know. The practice of calling people communists or socialists when they don’t fall in line with your ideology is called “red baiting”.

So what is socialism, anyway? According to Wikipedia, "Socialism is an economic and political theory advocating public or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.^[1][2][3]" To me, this sounds like a point of view that a reasonable person should be able to propose without being accused of having horn, cloven feet, or elaborate plans to enslave the entire population.

Other reasonable people might believe that capitalism is a better way to organize economic life. According to Wikipedia, "Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit; supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are determined mainly by private decisions in the free market, rather than by the state through central economic planning; Profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses."

Some supporters of capitalism seem to believe that any time that government places any limits on what people are permitted to do with their private property, the very next step is going to be socialism. Placing any limits on what capitalists are allowed to do is exactly the same thing as endorsing the worst excesses of the old Soviet Union.

A reasonable person might note that capitalism without rules results in serious abuses of power, and in results that are catastrophic for society as a whole. Like, say that pesky oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Or the mess on Wall Street that helped to plunge us into the current Great Recession.

I would like to see us all move beyond red-baiting into a rational discussion of the relative merits of capitalism and socialism. In real life, what actually exists seems to be a variety of mixed economies. Do capitalists have the unlimited right to do whatever is most profitable to them in the short term? Is all public involvement in economic regulation a bad thing?

It's time to start discussing and stop name-calling.

Fire and Rain

In the morning, I wake up in my little house and switch on the radio, and then I usually fall back to sleep for a while. I hear little bits of things and remember them. Lately, I have been hearing about floods in Pakistan and wildfires in Russia, and I've started thinking the obvious question--are these things related to climate change?

CommonDreams.org has picked up a post from Reuters that tries to answer that question. According to this article, you can't really take any individual weather-related catastrophe and blame it on climate change. But the general increase in weather-related disasters probably is a result.

Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs "shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist."

The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless.

"Global warming is one reason" for the rare spate of recent weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

He pointed to the heat wave and related forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China and downpours in countries including Germany and Poland. "We have four such extremes in the last few weeks. This is very seldom," he said.

According to JOTMAN, the Russian wildfires are doing more than spreading deadly levels of carbon monoxide:

As if things in Russia were not looking sufficiently apocalyptic already, with 100-degree temperatures and noxious fumes rolling in from burning peat bogs and forests, there is growing alarm here that fires in regions coated with fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 24 years ago could now be emitting plumes of radioactive smoke.

The Russian situation is serious enough, according to the New York Times, that it might force the Russian government to develop more aggressive policies to moderate climate change.

Recent comments made by Russian President Dmitry Medvedev link climate change and the wildfires, stoking speculation about what Russia may bring to the table in the next round of international climate talks. But once the wildfires' smoke clears, they may not amount to much, according to Alexey Kokorin, the Moscow-based climate negotiator for the World Wildlife Fund.

Medvedev said in a public speech last week, "Unfortunately, what is happening now in our central regions is evidence of this global climate change, because we have never in our history faced such weather conditions," according to a published transcript of the speech. "This means that we need to change the way we work, and change the methods that we used in the past," he said.

In another speech, Medvedev said these events must act as a "wake-up call" for heads of state and social organizations, "in order to take a more energetic approach to countering the global changes to the climate," as reported by TIME.

"These are not brave statements for European leaders or Obama, but for a Russian president, it's a new statement," said WWF's Kokorin. Even last year, Medvedev's speeches on climate change were more about helping other continents like Europe and Asia without really focusing on the negative and severe impacts for Russia itself, he said.

Meanwhile, environmental writer Bill McKibben discusses the need for a strong grassroots movement to force the US government to take responsible action:

Those demonstrations were just a start (one we should have made long ago). We're following up in October -- on 10-10-10 -- with a Global Work Party. All around the country and the world people will be putting up solar panels and digging community gardens and laying out bike paths. Not because we can stop climate change one bike path at a time, but because we need to make a sharp political point to our leaders: we're getting to work, what about you?

We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together. This movement is starting to emerge on many fronts. In September, for instance, opponents of mountaintop removal are converging on DC to demand an end to the coal trade. That same month, Tim DeChristopher goes on trial in Salt Lake City for monkey-wrenching oil and gas auctions by submitting phony bids.  (Naomi Klein and Terry Tempest Williams have called for folks to gather at the courthouse.)

AFL-CIO president speaks on economic revitalization

Here's an interesting post from the AFL-CIO NOW BLOG, reporting union president Richard Trumka's speech at Netroots Nation.

I particularly liked this paragraph:

(J)ust as corporations have taken advantage of immigrants, they have skirted, exploited and violated labor laws that empower workers to form a union and bargain for a better life. The good jobs of the past were good jobs because workers organized and fought for fair wages and benefits. Without labor law reform corporations will continue to take advantage of workers and no matter how much we invest in our economy, how much we increase our productivity, our wages will remain stagnant and we will continue to fall behind.

And I agree with Trumka's conclusion about the need for cooperation between union activists and other progressive movements. Workers' rights are human rights.

This is just wrong

I do not think that it is cute or amusing that there is a National Parks Edition of Monopoly. Somehow, this game seems ironically appropriate, given the privatization of almost everything since the Reagan years. But what happened to the idea of public land for the public good, and not for private profit?

Go ahead. Call me a socialist. See if I care.

Greek tragedy

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning and listen to public radio, I hear the announcers talking about the debt crisis in Greece. They always talk as if this crisis was created by Greece having too many expensive social programs that help ordinary people.

CommonDreams.org has posted a piece by Walden Bello of Foreign Policy in Focus that offers a different perspective:

Although the welfare-state narrative contains some nuggets of truth, it is fundamentally flawed. The Greek crisis essentially stems from the same frenzied drive of finance capital to draw profits from the massive indiscriminate extension of credit that led to the implosion of Wall Street. The Greek crisis falls into the pattern traced by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly: Periods of frenzied speculative lending are inexorably followed by government or sovereign debt defaults, or near defaults. Like the Third World debt crisis of the early 1980s and the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the so-called sovereign debt problem of countries like Greece, Europe, Spain, and Portugal is principally a supply-driven crisis, not a demand-driven one.

In their drive to raise more and more profits from lending, Europe's banks poured an estimated $2.5 trillion into what are now the most troubled European economies: Ireland, Greece, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain. German and French banks hold 70 percent of Greece's $400 billion debt. German banks were great buyers of toxic subprime assets from U.S. financial institutions, and they applied the same lack of discrimination to buying Greek government bonds. For their part French banks, according to the Bank of International Settlements, increased their lending to Greece by 23 percent, to Spain by 11 percent, and to Portugal by 26 percent.

The frenzied Greek credit scene featured not only European financial actors. Wall Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs showed Greek financial authorities how financial instruments known as derivatives could be used to make large chunks of Greek debt "disappear," thus making the national accounts look good to bankers eager to lend more. Then the very same agency turned around and, engaging in derivatives trading known as "credit default swaps," bet on the possibility that Greece would default, raising the country's cost of borrowing from the banks but making a tidy profit for itself.

If ever there was a crisis created by global finance, Greece is suffering from it right now.

Entering the Fourth Spiral Galaxy

I have been thinking about hope and hopelessness. I have been thinking about individuality and community versus individualism and conformity. I have been thinking about the possibility of social and political transformation versus the possibility of annihilation of truth, beauty, freedom, and the entire planet. And sometime soon -- I hope -- I will write a long blog post about all of this. If you know me, you know that I generally come down on the side of hope. Because I think hope is what is necessary if we are going to have any chance of things turning out right. I don't know if we can transform the world, but if we give in to hopelessness, it's not going to happen.

My current reading material seems connected to this topic. I have been reading Outercourse, the intellectual biography of the late radical feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly. One of the characteristics of Daly's work is her ability to feel and express the full horror of the way the world is -- at least in the foreground -- with a joyous connection to a different Background reality and the hope that the Earth can be saved.

In that spirit, here is a quote from Daly's "Prelude to the Fourth Spiral Galaxy" from Outercourse.

If I were not home already, I could not have arrived.

But there was such an urgency to arrive! I had to get here even to begin. And it is absolutely necessary that I begin, and that I begin again. Because I know more Now. Not enough, but more.

My Cronies and I--Who are we? A ragged remnant, maybe. But also the Conjurers of a different Course. Staggering on the edge of a doomed world, we soar in our souls...sometimes, even often. Basking in Be-Dazzling Light, we ponder the holes out there as they grow, leaking in the sun's kiss of death, the kiss of our Elemental Sister, who, like our sisters here, has been turned against us.

Shed tears no more...or tears galore. But summon the guts to keep going. My mantra for Outercourse: "Keep going, Mary. Go!" Because they want me to stop. The undead vampire men, the bio-robots gone berserk, the leaders. They want us to stop because they are winding down.

Keep going. Not really because they want me to stop, want us to stop. But because I am surging with Life. Because, you see, I have arrived here, Now, and I can begin. Because I was born for this Time, and I am strong.

Daly was known more as a theorist than as an activist. But if you visit MaryDaly.net, which formerly explored Daly's work, what has been left behind in her memory is a link to this activist web site, The World Can't Wait! It is a fitting tribute, indeed.

Need a job?

This morning I heard about a great new website on the public radio program The Takeaway. Here's a bit of an audio transcript:

It’s perhaps the most common complaint levied against illegal immigrants – they are stealing American jobs and bringing down the economy. Now, the United Farm Workers of America is teaming up with "The Colbert Report" to offer farm worker jobs to any American who wants to take them. The organization is encouraging any unemployed Americans, Washington pundits and anti-immigrant activists to sign up for the Take Our Jobs campaign. They say that if you’re okay with long days under the hot sun, small paychecks, no overtime or workers compensation, they will happily train and set up Americans with farm jobs.

You can listen to the story here, and here's a link to the takeourjobs.org web site, which is sponsored by the United Farm Workers.

Obesity and hunger

I found this fascinating and thought-provoking post on AlterNet. Blogger melissamcewan writes that a major cause of childhood obesity in the US is hunger and malnutrition. Poor hungry people eat cheap food that has lots of calories, but little nutrition.

In 2005, 12% of USians, 35 million people, were unable to put food on their tables for at least part of the year, and 11 million of them reported going hungry at times. It’s only gotten worse, as joblessness has become more widespread and unemployment benefits run out. Access to nutrient-rich food is a class issue even in the best of times, and these are not the best of times.

What happens when the rich get richer

To the three people or so who read this blog, I regret that it has been so long since I've posted. I've been really busy rewriting one of my novels. And other stuff has been happening in my life. Posting may be infrequent here for a while.

Here's an interesting article by Robert Reich over at The Nation. Reich argues that the main cause of the Great Recession wasn't the unregulated mess on Wall Street. It was the fact that a very small percentage of the population has monopolized a huge percentage of economic resources.

Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928—with 23.5 percent of the total.

Each of America's two biggest economic crashes occurred in the year immediately following these twin peaks—in 1929 and 2008. This is no mere coincidence. When most of the gains from economic growth go to a small sliver of Americans at the top, the rest don't have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing. America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class can boost its purchasing power is to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect.

Reich thinks that we as a nation will find a way to change this, because we can't survive if we don't:

None of us can thrive in a nation divided between a small number of people receiving an ever larger share of the nation's income and wealth, and everyone else receiving a declining share. The lopsidedness not only diminishes economic growth but also tears at the social fabric of our society. The most fortunate among us who have reached the pinnacles of economic power and success depend on a stable economic and political system. That stability rests on the public's trust that the system operates in the interest of us all. Any loss of such trust threatens the well-being of everyone. We will choose reform, I believe, because we are a sensible nation, and reform is the only sensible option we have.

I hope he's right.

An incurable optimist

I think I have become one of those annoying people who always manages to see the bright side of things. It seems to me that as wages rise for Chinese workers, and as petroleum prices increase, the cost of goods made in China is bound to increase. If it is relatively more expensive to manufacture goods in China for the US market, maybe that could lead to the revitalization of US manufacturing. Furthermore, as Chinese workers rebel against intolerable working conditions, the chances of all workers to organize for better pay and conditions improve.

Be/Leave it or not

This week's report from the National Partnership for Women and Families makes note of Lisa Miller's Newsweek opinion piece on The Catholic Church's Attack on American Nuns. At a time when abortion rights are increasingly under attack, the Catholic Church has excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride for her part in approving a first-trimester abortion at a Phoenix hospital for a woman who was critically ill and needed the procedure to save her life. Says Miller:

This decisive action against one nun in one ethically murky case comes as an “apostolic visitation,” or investigation, of all of America’s 60,000 religious sisters is underway. Its purpose is unclear, though the man who ordered it, Cardinal Franc Rode, is well known for his views about “irregularities” in post–Vatican II religious life. “You could say,” he told a radio interviewer last year, that the investigation “involves a certain secular mentality that has spread in these religious families, and perhaps also a certain feminist spirit.” Anxious observers and commentators worry that, as a result of the inquiry, nuns will be forced to take steps backward—into the head coverings and habits, for example, that were made optional after the Second Vatican Council in 1965. They worry further that sisters who have worked more or less independently for decades will have their independence curtailed: the church has been known to remove teachers from their posts, for example, for teaching an insufficiently orthodox theology. With dioceses still hurting for cash due to settlements from the sex-abuse crisis, they worry that with the number of sisters dwindling in the West, real estate that has belonged to a religious community for generations will be sold or reappropriated by the diocese. At a time when the male leadership can be blamed for leading the church to a state of crisis—a time when the voices of women are needed more than ever—even the modest roles accorded to female clerics have come under attack. The specific reasons for the investigation are unclear (or, more probably, not public), but the suspicion, clearly, can be put in the crassest terms: too many American nuns have gone off the reservation.

How could this not remind me of radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly? She first worked within the Catholic Church to reform its patriarchal ideology, and was nearly fired from her teaching job at Boston University as a result. This experience, and her exposure to currents of radical feminism, inspired her to reject the Catholic Church, and all forms of patriarchal religion.

Sarah Nicholson, in a tribute to Daly published shortly after Daly's death at the beginning of this year, describes this strategy:

The Journey has been described as a “central axis” of Daly’s philosophy (Campbell 2000, 174). In ‘Women’s Be-Dazzling Journey’ the call is for women to awaken from their stuckness in patriarchal space. It is the patriarchal threshold of gender roles and rules that she must cross and her journey is an ongoing process of questioning this conventional cultural space in which she finds herself (Campbell 2000, 166). This enquiry and her bold response enables her ‘Be/Leaving’, her increasing realisation and her ‘Be-coming’; all of which deepens her ability to participate in “ever Unfolding Be-ing” (Daly 1992, 3).

Carol J. Adams describes Daly's brief-but-cogent analysis of the specific issue of abortion:

Mary knew the art of discourse. She would begin an article with a statement like “I don’t need to tell you that one hundred percent of the priests and bishops who oppose abortion are men and one hundred percent of the people getting abortions are women.” And so she did tell us, and we still need to be reminded of that.

I agree with Lisa Miller that the Catholic Church is stupid to try to subject its nuns to stricter control at a time when the credibility of its all-male hierarchy is increasingly under attack. But I hope this may prove the occasion for many, many sisters to Be/Leave.

Happy birthday, Ms. Marilyn

I heard on the radio this morning that today is Marilyn Monroe's birthday. Which reminded me of Judy Grahn's poem about Marilyn Monroe, which is one of my favorite poems. I found the full text of this poem on a blog called virgotext.

Here's a sample:

the reporters are furious
they are asking me questions
what right does a woman have to Marilyn Monroe’s body?
and what am I doing for lunch?
ha ha they think I mean to eat you
their teeth are lurid and they want to pose me
leaning on the shovel, nude
don’t squint
but when one of the reporters comes too close
I beat him
bust his camera with your long smooth thigh
and with your lovely knuckle bone
I break his eye

It's a lovely poem and not very long. Why not read the whole thing?

Oooh. And here's a video.

EPA may prohibit BP from receiving government contracts

The non-profit investigative journalism news site ProPublica reports that the Environmental Protection Agency might bar BP from doing business with the federal government, based on its long history of ignoring environmental and safety regulations.

Over the past 10 years, BP has paid tens of millions of dollars in fines and been implicated in four separate instances of criminal misconduct that could have prompted this far more serious action. Until now, the company's executives and their lawyers have fended off such a penalty by promising that BP would change its ways.
That strategy may no longer work.
Days ago, in an unannounced move, the EPA suspended negotiations with the petroleum giant over whether it would be barred from federal contracts because of the environmental crimes it committed before the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Officials said they are putting the talks on hold until they learn more about the British company's responsibility for the plume of oil that is spreading across the Gulf.

ProPublica also has an interesting FAQ that discusses issues such as how much oil has spilled and why the spill hasn't been stopped.

This is what smaller government looks like

AngryBlackBitch has written the blog post I wanted to write about the continuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Any frequent reader of this blog couldn't help picking up my ambivalent attitude toward government. But it seems infinitely ironic that the same conservatives who have worked for a generation to give corporations the power to operate without the most minimal restraints, the same conservatives who have done everything they could to downsize government regulation, these same conservatives now criticize the federal government for not doing more to stop this environmental disaster.This is the government they asked for, but conservatives don't want to take credit for the consequences of their actions.

Here's how Angry Black Bitch puts it:

BP is arrogant because they can be…they aren’t taking responsibility because they don’t have to…they lack a sense of urgency because they know that their proposals to fix this shit might not work and there aren’t consequences for that, other than our anger…and the worse thing about all that is that BP is a monster the lack of regulations created.

The federal government doesn’t have the answers because they don’t have to…they’ve been reformed to do just what they are doing – spin in circles while waiting for private business to solve problems.

This is small government, rampant free enterprise and lax regulations in practice…economic theory playing out in a real life scenario for all the world to see.

The entire post is well worth reading.

Reason, intuition, emotion, and two of my favorite philosophers

I've been talking with friends about the relationship between (among?) reason, intuition, and emotion. Some friends seem to think that reason should be used to guide and restrain the unruly impulses of emotion, which can otherwise get is into such big trouble. Other friends argue that clear intuition, properly understood, is the best guide to action. I think it all goes together, reason, emotion, and intuition, and they all affect and correct each other. My friends are tolerant and open-minded people, but they seem to think that this is a rather unusual idea. As much as I would like to believe that I am the creative genius that has discovered this innovative way of looking at the world, it just ain't so. It is something that many radical feminists and lesbian feminists have been saying for years. This discussion inspired me to look up what two of my favorite philosophers have to say about the subject.

First, here is a passage from Mary Daly's autobiography, Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage. Starting on page 74, she describes her struggle with the concepts of reason and intuition when writing her dissertation for her doctoral dissertation in philosophy:

The point is that although I cherished this intuition, and could see no use in philosophizing without it, perhaps even in living without it, I wanted a clear defense of intellectual rigor/vigor. This insistence on having it all--intuition and arduous reasoning that is rooted in intuition--was of deep importance to me. I loved both modes of knowing, which I recognized as essential to each other. Sickened by the downgrading and caricaturing of intuition and the relegation of this pathetically reduced "talent" to women--which of course also implied the safeguarding of "reason" as the prerogative of males--I was struggling to Name this game which had been played by academics for centuries. It was indeed one of the masters' major mind fucks of the millennia.

That is one of my favorite things about feminist thinking, this wild insistence on having it all, on not having ourselves cut up into little pieces that get labeled "masculine" or "feminine." Another example of this wild insistence comes from radical lesbian Sarah Hoagland, whose 1988 book Lesbian Ethics has been one of the major influences on my own thinking. Hoagland has a long and interesting chapter on "Integrating Reason and Emotions," which I haven't the time to re-read at the moment. I'll content myself with quoting most of her first paragraph, found on page 157:

I want to discuss the split between reasoning and emotions, and the subsequent belief that one must control the other, which informs traditional anglo-european philosophy from ancient greece to the present and which we as lesbians perpetuate in our interactions. I want to suggest that accepting the split keeps alive the idea of power as control and keeps our selves fragmented and isolated. My overall argument is that our moral agency is encouraged by integrating and so politicizing reasoning and emotions within the community, for this is how we get back in touch with the energy that moves us, energy which is deadened when we separate reasoning and emotions.

Here is to unfucking all of our our minds and putting our reason, emotion, and intuition back together.

On President Obama's Supreme Court nomination

President Obama has nominated Solicitor General and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan to fill the Supreme Court seat that will soon be vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens.

The National Organization for Women gave cautious support to the nomination:

"While we are pleased to see the second woman in a row nominated to the court, gender alone is not enough," said [NOW President Terry] O'Neill. "Justice Stevens was a clear champion of social justice, who will leave behind a proud liberal legacy. We are eager to learn that Elena Kagan, too, will stand for equality and fairness across the board."

Encouragingly, Kagan has expressed clear opposition to the discriminatory Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that has forced out thousands of lesbian and gay service members from the military. However, having never served as a judge herself, it is unclear where Kagan stands on most of NOW's key issues.

Elizabeth Nowicki at Feminist Law Professors points out that as dean of Harvard Law School, Kagen hired mostly white men:

CNN.com had an interesting article (here) about Kagan and women who pull the ladder up after themselves.  The article’s author made a good point about the fact that, although Elena Kagan, Obama’s nomination to the Supreme Court, is a woman, she is a woman whose record at Harvard Law School might suggest to some observers that she does not value diversity or promote other women.  For example, the article’s author notes that, under Kagan’s leadership, Harvard Law School made 29 faculty hires consisting of 28 white faculty members and only five women.  (This despite the fact that law school graduates have been more than 40% female for quite some time.)

Katherine Franke at the Gender and Sexuality Law Blog notes that Kagen is best known for her ability to bring peace between warring factions of white men at Harvard Law School, and that she is a safe, non-ideological choice for the court. She clearly not as liberal as John Paul Stevens, and not as liberal as other candidates whose names have been mentioned in the news. Furthermore:
There is something to watch out for, however, in the confirmation of Elena Kagan, about which I have already blogged: Queer-baiting.  Despite White House insistence to the contrary, rumors still circulate broadly that Kagan is a lesbian.  The same kind of insinuation surrounded David Souter’s nomination to the Court as would have Janet Napolitano’s or other “single women.”

To this end, surely much will be made of Kagan’s handling of the “Solomon Amendment” issue and litigation while she was Dean, largely in an effort to identify her with lesbian and gay rights issues.

The Solomon Amendment is a federal law that allows the Secretary of Defense to deny federal grants to institutions of higher education if they prohibit or prevent ROTC or military recruitment on campus.  Many law schools have sought to prohibit the JAG Corps from on-campus recruiting of law students because of its official policy of hiring only heterosexual or celibate applicants.  Kagan was one of the deans who supported a lawsuit challenging the military’s hiring policies in FAIR v Rumsfeld, and was one of 40 Harvard Law School professors who signed a friend-of-the-court brief written by Walter Dellinger supporting the FAIR plaintiffs.

Franke notes that right-wing blogs have started claiming that Kagen is a lesbian. The White House says she isn't, and "has been treating it like some kind of a scandal that she might be so accused." Franke already views the Kagen nomination as a setback for progressives, and thinks it could also be "a setback for supporters of lgbt rights." She says that the president has been "sucker punched" by the homophobic right. I think that what she means is that they've gotten him to talk as if being a lesbian is a bad thing.

Who was that masked animal?

I have always liked raccoons. I have fond memories of looking out of my bedroom window at my mother's house in Philadelphia on a cold winter night to find a raccoon snuggled up to the other side of the window, soaking up the heat. I also remember waking once in the middle of the night by the horrid noise of three raccoons fighting over some chicken bones out on the roof. My mother always put such things in a tightly sealed glass jar before she threw them away, but I suppose the neighbors weren't so careful.

Like many cute and appealing beings, raccoons are capable of causing great inconvenience to others. I've always known this. Besides raiding garbage cans, they are susceptible to a number of diseases -- although apparently, most of those diseases are rarely transmitted to humans. What I didn't know until just today -- when a friend was dealing with the aftermath of the situation -- is that raccoons are habitual attic invaders. According to www.raccoonatticguide.com:

THE MAJORITY OF THE TIME, A RACCOON IN AN ATTIC IS A FEMALE WITH YOUNG – Yes, the majority of the time, about 80% of cases of any raccoon in an attic, there’s a litter of 3-5 baby raccoon pups. The most common reason for a raccoon to enter an attic and choose to live there is the case of a female who needs a safe place to give birth and raise its babies. The mother raccoon usually gives birth shortly after moving into the attic, within 1-2 weeks, and then spends about 10 weeks nursing the baby raccoons. She is very active during this time, often leaving the attic during the daytime to gather additional food. Then at 10 weeks, she starts to take the young out at night to forage.

Removing these animals can be difficult and complicated, even for a professional wildlife trapping specialist:

As stated, the vast majority of the time, the raccoon in the attic is a mother with babies. You don’t trap the mother and leave the babies up there to cry for two weeks, die, and cause a big odor. First, you go into the attic and find the babies! That’s right, you explore the whole attic and remove the young by hand. Be careful, there’s a protective and ferocious mother raccoon nearby! Actually, I’ve removed hundreds of raccoon litters in my lifetime, and I’ve never been attacked. But there have been some close calls, so do so at your own risk. It might be a good idea to wait until the mother isn’t nearby the litter before removing them. Of course, when in an attic, be mindful to walk only on the wooden beams, or you’ll fall through the ceiling. And be careful not to get insulation on your skin. I wear a HEPA filter mask to avoid breathing in airborne dust particles. And I wear thick gloves, particularly when handling wildlife, even baby raccoons, which are usually gentle, but can bite and claw. I put them in a pillowcase, and bring them out of the attic. They can often be very hard to find. The mother raccoon stashes them in a safe place, often down at the very tight edge of the attic, down in the soffit, or down a wall. I usually find myself climbing through very tight quarters to find the young. It can be hard to do, but a 75-year-old woman I know, a wildlife rehabber, has done it, so I guess it’s possible for anyone!

Interesting, isn't it, how this guy assumes that if a 75-year-old-woman can do it, anyone can do it. Other than that, he seems to know what he's talking about. (I'm assuming he's a guy, because his picture is on his home page, decked out in his respirator, with a big old raccoon in his grasp.) He notes, for instance that "Animals that live in houses also sometimes die in houses, and the odor of a dead raccoon is incredible." From my experience this afternoon, I can attest that he is absolutely right about that.

On the other hand, while human beings have great difficulty in keeping raccoons under control, there is at least one cat in the world who has no difficulty keeping the upper paw:

Forty years ago

May 5, 2010: Forty years ago today, I was 13 years old, and I was in the ninth grade at the Julia Reynolds Masterman Laboratory and Demonstration School in Philadelphia. I was a strange, intense young person, trying to figure out how to adapt to my maturing female body in a world in which it felt that a woman could not be an independent human being. It was becoming clear that despite my hopes and my tomboyish behavior, I could not become a man, and I could not bear the thought of being a woman.

Unlike most of my classmates -- who held regular protests in support of ending the Vietnam War, I thought that the United States government was defending democracy and freedom in South Vietnam. I was the only person in the school assembly who would stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the national anthem. This was my first effort at political activism. From where I stand today, the position I took was dead wrong. But I respect the 13-year-old who was willing to defy her peers to do what she thought was right.

Forty years ago this morning, I woke up to the radio news that National Guardsmen had shot and killed demonstrating college students at Kent State University the day before. I had never heard of Kent State University, and at first I thought they said it was Penn State University. At first, I was horrified. But the radio made it sound as if the soldiers had been frightened of the student protesters and were only defending themselves. I believed that explanation, although forty years later, it sounds ridiculous. To believe otherwise, I would have to believe that my government was engaged in repressing freedom rather than defending it.

This is a complicated story that I don't have room to tell in a blog post, but eventually, I worked my way around to an understanding that my government does exactly that. That it most often works to defend oppression -- patriarchy, racism, unlimited bloodthirsty capitalism -- rather than freedom. I stand against everything that the "tea party" movement stands for -- but I have the uncomfortable awareness that I don't trust my government any more than the tea-partiers do.

Less than two weeks after the shootings at Kent State, city and state police in Jackson, Miss. killed two students and wounded 12. At the time, these murders received less attention than those at Kent State, because the victims at Jackson State were black instead of white.

So here I am, 40 years later, a radical feminist, caught somewhere between socialism and left-wing anarchism, still not knowing how to help to create the egalitarian society that I insist on believing is possible. One thing that started me down this road was coming to understand that my government had lied to me about why we were fighting in Vietnam. I believed my government, and I supported my government when everyone around me said it was doing wrong, and then it turned out that my government was lying to me. I think that would be enough to make a radical out of almost anyone. But the other thing that started me on the path to being who I am now was that one day that spring, on a bulletin board in the halls of Masterman, I discovered a mimeographed flyer about women's liberation. From which I derived the outrageous idea that I could be a woman and a human being at the same time. I haven't been the same ever since.

Have a great day, y'all, and happy Cinco de Mayo.

Will the financial reform bill really work?

I have been so busy rewriting my circus novel that I haven't had much time to attend to current events. So I was happy to see this op-ed piece on t r u t h o u t by economist Dean Baker discussing the financial reform bills currently being considered by Congress. Dean Baker, incidentally, is one of my favorite economists. You can see a selection of his work at the home page of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

I have received several emails from barackobama.com, urging me to tell my Republican senators to support this reform effort. My question has been will this reform actually do any good?

According to Dean Baker, the answer is a big maybe.He says that the bills passed by the House and approved by the Senate Banking Committee would help prevent some of the worst abuses that we've seen over the past decade -- but that neither bill will prevent future economic crises. Furthermore, the recent reappointment of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke "told future regulators that the failure to crack down on recklessness in the financial sector carries no consequence."

Baker identifies three possible additions to the Senate Bill that could help weaken the power of the financial services industry so that future crises would be less likely. First is an amendment proposed by Senators Brown and Kaufman which would put a size limit on banks. If banks are kept at a reasonable size, then they won't be "too big to fail" -- and thus the pressure for future bailouts would be much less. Second, an amendment by Senators Merkley and Levin that would prevent banks that are covered by federal deposit insurance from trading in the stock market. This amendment would restore some of the protections of the old Glass-Steagall Act. This would stop banks from "speculating in financial markets with the money guaranteed by the government." Finally, Baker says, the Senate will wrangle over the issue of how to regulate derivatives trading.

The bill that was voted out of the Agriculture Committee would prohibit commercial banks from being directly involved as brokers in derivative trading. The rationale is that this trading creates large risks and potential conflicts of interest. This would mean a major departure from current practice, since the six major banks currently control the overwhelming majority of derivative trading. If they had to spin off their derivative business, it would lead to a very different structure in the financial industry.

Without those three changes, Baker says, financial reform legislation will not make much difference in the way the financial services industry does business.

Not that they are likely to listen, but when I write to senators Inhofe and Coburn, I will ask them to support a bill that limits the size of banks, and prevents federally insured banks from trading on the stock market or speculating in derivatives.

A rambling rant about reaching con-census

Today on my way to the Red Cup, I saw a federal census taker walking up my street. I shook her hand and thanked her for her service to our country. I'm as much of an anarchist as the next person, but in the face of all the tea-party protests, I find myself getting downright sentimental about the federal government. At least in theory, the federal government belongs to all of us, male and female, black and white, rich, poor, capitalist and worker. At least in theory, the government could be wrested away from the control of big business and forced to serve the interests of ordinary people. At least in theory, we could make our government take its troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan and Okinawa and Kazakhstan and set it to fixing roads and repairing schools and creating an environmentally sustainable economic base. The tea party folks, in theory they are in favor of freedom, too, but their waving of guns and their hurling of threats and insults at people who disagree with them, well, it sure looks like their real goal is to keep the same rich white guys in charge. So I shook the hand of the census taker, and smiled at her, and engaged her in a brief conversation as a way of taking one small stand in favor of peace and civility.

Besides which, I thought the census taker might be headed up to my place to ask me some questions, and I knew I'd be absent when she got there. So I thought I'd save her the trouble of having to come back again. You see, I filled in my census form and mailed it back, but I didn't fill it out the way the nice folks at the Commerce Department hoped that I would. I just couldn't wrap my head around some of the questions.

First off, why on Earth did they have to ask whether I was male or female. As I explained to the census taker, I'm old school, I came up with the women's liberation movement, and I can't stand it after all these years that the first question we still ask about anyone is, "Is it a boy or a girl?"

I was also going to explain that I'd done my best to get around the race question, too. The tea partiers are getting awfully riled up about the fact of our having an African American president. The tea partiers are even more riled up about the fact that large numbers of Latino people are making the United States their home. One big reason for this is that the tea partiers are all too aware that someday soon, people of  European extraction -- "white" people -- will no longer make up a majority of the US population. Maybe keeping track of racial demographics is just inflaming the situation? "Whiteness" is such an artificial and arbitrary thing. The world would be better off without it. As a person who happens to be of northern European extraction, white privilege is part of my life, and I need to acknowledge that and take responsibility for it. But when it came to the census, being an undefined beige person just seemed more responsible. When it came to the race question, I checked the box marked "other," and filled in "human." It's an idea I got by listening to the radio.

But I didn't get that far, because the census taker had her own remarks about the questions we are expected to answer. If you have children, you are supposed to say whether they are biological or adopted children. The census taker didn't like this. She told, "According to the law, they're both the same, and in your heart, they're both the same, but according to the census, you're supposed to say which is which." She happened to have adopted some children, and she didn't like this approach. "I have to ask some stupid questions," she said with a smile, but it's my job." She and I agreed that sometimes all of us is required to do stupid things because it's our job.

Then she checked her list, and said that I was not on her list of houses to visit. Apparently, the fact that I had filled out the form, however imperfectly, is all the Census Bureau cared about. So I bid the census taker a fond adieu and continued on my way to breakfast.

Arizona immigration law

Greg Guma has a thoughtful analysis at CommonDreams.org.

Inquiring minds want to know

Feminist Law Professors asks the question, "What is women's clothing?"

Then and now: the failures of US imperialism

Historian Alfred McCoy has written a fascinating comparison of the situation in Vietnam in 1963 and the situation in Afghanistan today, with additional information about US support for dictators in Iran, Cuba, and Nicaragua. I found it courtesy of t r u t h o u t. I'm quoting McCoy's conclusion below.

In this new landscape of sovereign states that emerged after World War II, Washington has had to pursue a contradictory policy as it dealt with the leaders of nominally independent nations that were also deeply dependent on foreign economic and military aid. After identifying its own prestige with these fragile regimes, Washington usually tries to coax, chide, or threaten its allies into embracing what it considers needed reforms. Even when this counsel fails and prudence might dictate the start of a staged withdrawal, as in Saigon in 1963 and Kabul today, American envoys simply cannot let go of their unrepentant, resentful allies, as the long slide into disaster gains momentum.

With few choices between diplomatic niceties and a destabilizing coup, Washington invariably ends up defaulting to an inflexible foreign policy at the edge of paralysis that often ends with the collapse of our authoritarian allies, whether Diem in Saigon, the Shah in Tehran, or on some dismal day yet to come, Hamid Karzai in Kabul. To avoid this impending debacle, our only realistic option in Afghanistan today may well be the one we wish we had taken in Saigon back in August 1963 -- a staged withdrawal of U.S. forces.

Federal district judge overturns gene patents

Usually the news I hear on the radio causes me to grumble and even to swear, but the other morning I heard a news item that caused me to cheer out loud and startle my cat.

On March 29, federal Judge Robert Sweet of the Southern District of New York invalidated a patent held by Myriad Genetics on two genes related to breast and ovarian cancer. If this ruling survives the inevitable court challenges, it could undermine the whole idea of patenting human genes. Incurable optimist that I am, I can even hope that it could undermine the patenting of living organisms as well.

Worth considering

Over at thenation.com, Katha Pollit argues that the flexibility of prochoice feminist leaders allowed the president's healthcare bill to pass, and that in return, there ought to be a Payback for Prochoicers.

Equinox

It is the first day of Spring, and in my little neighborhood in northwest Oklahoma City, there are several inches of snow on the ground. Snow covers large parts of the state of Oklahoma. But I am fairly confident that hell has not frozen over. Therefore, there is no way that my Congressional representative, right-wing Republican Mary Fallin, will vote for the health care bill when it comes before the House of Representatives some time tomorrow. Therefore, I can safely ignore the pleas that have been flooding my email inbox, urging me to call her and ask her to vote for the bill.

As I've noted recently, my overwhelming reaction to the current health care bill is ambivalence. I hope that in 20 years, we will all look back and see this bill as a historic first step toward achieving meaningful health care for all. I fear that we will look back at this as the moment when a Democratic president and Congress sacrificed the well-being of ordinary people in order to serve the interests of insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and for-profit health-care providers.

Regardless of my hopes and fears, despite the united opposition of Republican lawmakers, it now appears that the bill is almost sure to pass. You can see this from several recent posts on Talking Points Memo. The Democrats have abandoned a controversial parliamentary maneuver and now the House Will Hold Straight Up or Down Vote on Senate Health Care Bill. Progressive skeptics are now falling in line to vote for the bill. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is refusing to allow anti-choice zealot Bart Stupak the opportunity to amend the Senate bill, which is slightly less destructive to women's reproductive freedom than the version originally passed by the House. It may not be a done deal. It will be a close vote that could still go the other way. But even the racist and anti-gay ugliness perpetrated today by "Tea Party" protesters at the Capitol suggests a desperate last-ditch effort to stop the inevitable.

So it's Spring, y'all. There was so much snow that the local protest that had been scheduled to mark the seventh anniversary of the Iraq War had to be canceled. It may be rescheduled, and other protests took place nationwide. Tomorrow, immigration rights activists will march on Washington, DC to demand reform of our nation's unjust immigration laws. Activists continue working for single-payer health care. And frankly, my friends, I don't believe there is a hell.And I still believe that if we work really hard, we can make this world better without waiting for torment or paradise in some world to come. I hope you are having a lovely Equinox. As for myself, I am going to go for a walk in the snow.

Seven years is too much

There will be a peace rally in OKC on Saturday to protest continued US military interference in Iraq.

There's still hope for the public option...

...according to this post on t r u t h o u t:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists that the public option is dead, but progressive organizations are mounting an aggressive campaign to resurrect it as Democratic lawmakers gear up to pass a final health care bill this week via a budgetary process known as reconciliation.

Democracy for America, Credo Action, and the Progressive Campaign Change Committee (PCCC) raised $75,000 for a 60-second spot that will air on MSNBC, CNN and a local station in Pelosi's home district of San Francisco. The ad challenges assertions she made last week that the public option does not have enough support from Democratic lawmakers in the Senate to be included as one of the amendments in the reconciliation bill.

On the Web site whipcongress.com, the groups, in supporting calculations that the measure has enough votes to pass the Senate, list the names of Democratic senators who have either signed a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid supporting the public option, or have made statements saying they would back it or would "likely" cast an "aye" vote if it were introduced as part of the final package of legislative fixes.

Irrationality and transcendence

Happy Pi Day, which celebrates and promotes understanding of the number that represents the relationship between a circle's circumference and its diameter. If you take the circumference of any circle and divide it by its diameter, pi is the number you will get for an answer. The number is 3.14159, and so forth, out into infinity, without a pattern ever repeating itself.

The title of this blog post comes from the information in the Wikipedia entry for pi, that pi is a number that is both irrational and transcendent. Which somehow seems like an exceedingly lovely concept. Wikipedia also has an entry on the Pi Day celebration.

You can see pi calculated to one million digits by following this link.

Wishing I could have Granny D over for coffee

This past week, I've been down in my back, and have spent quite a bit of time in bed, lying flat on the aforementioned back, listening to the radio. That was how I learned about the death, earlier this week, of grassroots political activist Granny D at age 100.

Doris Haddock career as a liberal political activist dated as far back as 1960, when she and her husband campaigned against hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. In 2004, at the age of 94, she challenged incumbent Republican Judd Gregg for one of New Hampshire's US Senate seats. That campaign was documented the film Run Granny Run.

She first gained national attention in 1999-2000, when, at the age of 90, she walked across the United States to dramatize the need for campaign finance reform. According to her blog, maintained by admirers, Granny D continued her fight for campaign finance reform when she was honored with a 100th birthday party by the governor of New Hampshire:

People have been asking me how I feel about the recent decision by the Supreme Court to strike down some of the campaign finance reforms that I walked for and have been working on for a dozen or so years.

When I was a young woman, my husband and I were having dinner at the Dundee home of a friend, Max Foster, when a young couple rushed through the door breathless to say that they had accidentally burned down Max’s guest cabin, down by the river.

Max stood up from his meal. He set his napkin down. He smiled at the young couple and he said,

“Thank goodness. You have done me a great favor, and you don’t even know it. We have been wanting to completely redo that old place, and now it will be a clean start. It will be better than ever the next time you come to stay.”

Well, I guess the Supreme Court has burned down our little house, but, truth be told, it was pretty drafty anyway. We had not really solved the problem of too much money in politics. Not hardly. And now we have an opportunity to start clean and build a system of reforms that really will do the trick.

I have been thinking of Granny D today as the Coffee Party sponsors over 400 gatherings across the United States with the goal of countering the right-wing shenanigans of the right-wing Tea Party movement. The Tea Party folks promote their agenda under the guise of liberating us from interference from an overbearing government. The Coffee Party responds that

We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.

That is a noble goal, and exploring the Coffee Party site, it seems that they are dedicated to the grassroots democratic activism -- in the spirit of Granny D -- that might make that goal a reality. But I am also reminded of the many times that the US government has acted as a force for oppression in the world.Radical feminists and leftist activists have often have argued that this is not an accident. Ambivalence seems to be my overriding mood this week. I find the Coffee Party appealing, but wonder if it will end up legitimizing US government policies that I personally find very disturbing.

 Too bad it's too late for me to invite Granny D to talk it all out with me over a cup of coffee.

Majority leader will use reconcilliation to pass health bill

t r u t h o u t has this report about Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to use the budget reconcilliation process to pass a health care bill through the Senate. This process allows the Democrats to pass a bill with a 51-vote majority, rather than needing to garner 60 votes to overcome a threatened Republican filibuster. Is this good news or bad news? Commentator Robert Kuttner points out that as long as we have a for-profit healthcare system, costs are likely to continue spiraling out of control, and substantial numbers of people will lack useful coverage. I find myself deeply ambivalent over the question of whether President Obama's bill is better than nothing. It doesn't seem to be clear at this point whether the Senate will even pass a bill with any form of public option. It is oddly comforrting, in the grip of this ambivalence, that my opinions on this subject will have no effect whatsoever on the far-right congressional delegation of my home state, Oklahoma.

There is one thing that I am quite clear about. The various young male progressives out on the 'net who call for the Democrats to "grow a pair of balls" and pass meaningful health care reform are voicing a hope that is patently stupid  The possession of testicles does not qualify someone to help make wise and courageous public policy. We have a genteel sufficiency of testicles in Congress already, thank you very much.

I'm not buying it.

I'm not posting very much lately because I'm in the middle of rewriting a novel. And posts may be less frequent over the indefinite future because I've canceled my at-home Internet access and landline phone. The phone and the Internet were very nice luxuries, but Cox Communications seemed to keeping finding inventive new ways to raise their prices. I did the arithmetic and figured out that they are getting about $700/year of my hard-earned money.

Cox would give me better rates on phone and Internet if I would get cable t.v. from them. But I don't want or need television, and my total cost would go up substantially. Other utilities -- the ones that are real necessities in an urban environment, like gas and electricity -- have also been going up. So I decided that I could get by with my little by-the-minute cell phone and the free Internet that is available at the public library and local coffeehouses. A side benefit of this is that I will be able to use the Internet more mindfully for the things that are really important to me, and not as a mindless time-waster when I am tired or bored.

My own situation reminded me of a story I heard on The Takeaway a few weeks ago. According to this public radio newscast, "The Obama administration has made universal access to broadband Internet a top priority, but a new FCC study says that access or no access, 31 percent of Americans can't afford the cost." As difficult economic times continue, with many people continuing to lose their jobs and fall behind on their mortgage payments, I would think that the percentage of people unable to afford home Internet service will only increase.

Given that times are difficult and most people would have less money to spend, it would seem odd that Cox would keep raising its prices. The laws of supply and demand would seem to work against this. If people have less money to spend, demand for things like high-speed Internet access ought to fall, and if demand falls, prices ought to fall as well. Maybe the marketing geniuses at Cox have decided that people are looking for ways to spend less money on entertainment outside the home, and will pay more money for Internet and cable t.v.

Free-market fundamentalists would say that capitalists make profits by offering customers superior goods and services, and that prices go up when demand for these services increases.But it is my observation and experience is that real world corporations do their very best to ignore the supposed laws of supply and demand. When demand is stagnant or falling, they try to make up for loss of revenue by raising prices. Whether this works well for the corporations, whether they increase their revenue more than enough to make up for a resulting loss of business, is something that I don't know. But it's pretty clear to me that it doesn't work well for the rest of us.

Obama's OSHA wants to track musuloskeletal disorder

Anyone who has ever suffered a repetitive motion injury at work will probably be interested in this post at t r u t h o u t.

A complicated tea party

This post from The Hutchinson Political Report is the best analysis I've seen of the right-wing "tea party" movement.

Revolutionary crocuses

Alice Walker has her revolutionary petunias, but if I were a poet, I would write about crocuses. How they bloom where they're not planted. How it matters not how desolate the winter, how wracked with war or fraught with flood, here comes Candlemas and there are the crocuses, shoving up through the mud, pushing out through the snow. I half think they could crack concrete if they had a mind to. I saw one growing once where an old slab had been demolished after maybe 40 years.The flower is fragile. A hard rain will melt it in an instant. But the bulb beneath is tough, and next year she will pour forth her delicate color again.

You might imprison her in your garden, but once she's lost the blossom that you captured her for, she will grow her leaves green and fat for her own pleasure and nourishment. Starting alone, she multiplies and spreads far beyond your established borders. She knows when to hide, when to go underground, and when to rise up singing, by the dozen, by the thousand, for she is related to everything and understands all. She may be crushed by the heel of the mighty, but understand, the flame of a million blooming crocuses will transform the landscape forever.

A careful reader of this poem will notice that it refers to crocuses blooming at Candlemas, about a month earlier than they bloom in Oklahoma. That's because I wrote this poem years ago in Western Oregon.