“If you put it up to the vote of the people, we’d have slavery again.” —Jesse Ventura on CNN, 11/3/2009
I don’t much care for Ventura, but he has a point here. Most civil rights protections in the states have been expanded via case law, not by the ballot box. In fact, I think the whole concept of civil rights is at odds with voting on them. The idea is to protect minorities from majorities. When we say something is a civil right, we take an abstraction of principles that we mostly all agree on and then apply them to the specific. Most Americans think freedom of religion is a pretty good idea, so that must also apply to Mormons and Muslims and Pagans. Our agreed-upon principles lead us to protect actions and people who would not necessarily receive such protections if things were put up for a vote.
Interracial marriage became legal with the court case Loving v Virginia, decided by the Supreme Court. This decision was not popular, but it wasn’t unpopular enough to amend the Constitution over. If it had been put up for a vote even five years after it became law, it would not have passed. Honestly, I would be worried about what people would vote on this even now. In that decision, the court found that marriage was a fundamental right, something I think we all agree upon. And we’re all supposed to be equal under the law. And there’s not a compelling state interest to keep people of different races from marrying. Therefore, it must be allowed.
The SCOTUS needs to rule on gay marriage. This is not a battle that’s going to be won by voting. It needs to be a combination of activism and case law. That winning combination is what desegregated buses and then later protected our speech. March and sue!
Eventually, gay rights will be a settled question, but right now, it’s still legal to discriminate in several states and on a federal level. We don’t have ENDA (nor have we been added to the Civil Right Act, which would give us full protections. Even after we have ENDA, we won’t be done.). We can’t serve openly in the military. Hate crime legislation is less than a month old. It’s not surprising that people feel comfortable discriminating against us in the ballot box, when they’re fully allowed to in other contexts. Indeed, these other contexts are somewhat more vital for many LGBT people. I’m certainly in favor of Same Sex Marriage, but even more, I’m in favor of not being fired from a job for being trans.
I think there’s more resources going towards marriage right now, and that might be because people who have enough resources to pay for political campaigns are not worried about losing their jobs. There are people who are still in the closet at work, who are afraid to come out or to transition. If they get fired for being LGBT, they have no recourse and they can kiss their health insurance goodbye. A legally recognized marriage is not the top agenda for people in that situation and I don’t know if it should be top agenda for the LGBT community in general. Let’s pass the gender-inclusive ENDA, make it clear that discrimination being wrong is a matter of law and then sue for marriage. Or hell, let’s sue to get rid of having legal sexes at all, then we’ll get marriage by default.
Tag: politics
Who’s Streets?
I found a call for recordings for a politically themed musical thing, which always makes me happy because this sort of thing motivates me a lot. It’s got an item for consideration, “How do we view the fact that our instruments for organising sounds are linked to instruments designed to control? Is there a relationship between organising and controlling?” (the whole thing is at http://www.sonoscop.net/pop-up/convzepp09ENG.html)
So I was thinking I could use some recordings I made of people chanting at the G20 protests in London and then juxtapose that with recordings of military chants that I could steal from YouTube.
And I am astounded, perplexed and unnerved that pretty much, crowds watching troop drills sound exactly like crowds at protests with chanting. I would not be able to listen to a recording and know if I’m watching an implicitly normative crowd cheering for marching at a football game or a bunch of leftists out to reclaim the streets. (I mean, the words are different, but playing recordings for a non-english speaking audience looses that signifier.)
This is kind of worrying because it suggests that there’s not so much difference between how these positions are articulated or perhaps even between the positions themselves as they manifest in a public space.
Which manifestations are empowering and which are alarming would only seem to have to do with whether your own advantage is the one being promoted. Of course, I think there’s more to it than that. Are we supporting the rights of people who already have power or people who do not? But this suggests that both positions might fill the same needs for observers and participants. And somehow that’s disturbing me. Maybe people are more empowered by being reactionary. How can we reach out to them in that case?
Speaking of protests, there’s one today about biofuels and I don’t know whether or not I want to go. Burning acres of rainforest to grow soybeans for fuel has a worse carbon footprint than burning a whole lot of petrol. Is there a role for non-waste oil biodiesel in a green, sustainable model for fuel? I don’t know. I really believed in biodiesel.
Write your congress person
The public option is a compromise, and not a very good one. But access to health care is a moral issue and we have to do whatever we can to make sure that everybody has access. We can pass a compromise now and fix the rest of it later.
Howard Dean has a list of how everybody in congress has indicated they’re going to vote on health reform. The number of people who “don’t know” if they support a public option is high enough to swing it either way.
Feinstein is on the list of “don’t know”s, so I used her web form to send her a letter.
Dear Honorable Senator Feinstein,
I would like to encourage you to support a public option for health care reform. Any bill which does not include this option is not real reform. I voted for Obama partly because of his promises on this issue.
I vote absentee in California, but I’m studying overseas in England. The NHS is a fantastic system and we would be doing well to recreate it in the states. A public option is a compromise and not the best one. Failure to support even that is not just a political failure, it’s a moral failure. I’m sure that I don’t need to remind you of the alarmingly high number of uninsured children in California. They are counting on you to support a real reform, with at least a public option.
Thank you for your time,
C. Hutchins
It’s probably also worthwhile to write congress people who support it and thank them.
Rationing Health Care
As you know, I’m an American living in the UK and I’ve had a few health issues and have dealt with the NHS some. But I want to talk about how my mom got sick a few years ago.
She had been having a few problems and went to her GP for help, but the GP didn’t correctly figure out what the problem was. A week or so later, when she was suddenly partly paralyzed, my dad took her to the hospital, where first they thought she had a stroke and later they diagnosed her with a brain tumor. There was a national holiday, which delayed things for a bit, and then she had emergency brain surgery.
After the surgery, she needed to talk to some specialists about followup care and so had to wait to get on their calendars, despite needing care fairly immediately. They were on summer holidays. It took so long to see them that time was running out to actually start treatment.
Everything I’ve described so far could have happened in any first world country. The next part of it is uniquely American.
If you have a brain tumor, there is a very typical path through treating it. First surgery, then radiation + chemotherapy. Almost everyone does those things. But when it came time to start radiation, my mom’s insurance said no. That would not have happened under the NHS. The NHS would have covered it and she would have been able to start radiation within a reasonable time frame. Instead, my dad had to have a lawyer write a letter to the insurance company. While at the same time trying to cope with his wife having terrible cancer. So he approached Stanford Hospital to see if he could just pay cash. They said no. That also would not have happened in the UK. If my mom had been in the UK, she might have lived longer than the few weeks it took her to die, after she finally started radiation too late.
When I hear of people talking about how having national health in the states would cause delays in treatment or rationing of care, I wonder what planet they’re on. I’ve read that insurance companies spend 30% of their budget looking for ways to say no. In the UK, the NHS just follows standard treatment models. The doctor prescribes a treatment and the patient gets it. There is not an accountant involved in this process.
I have waited to see specialists in England. Sometimes months. But my issues are not life threatening. And I can see a GP usually the next day. In the US, I’ve been told I had to wait several weeks for a normal checkup. When I tried to get a gyno exam, the waiting list for that was six months. For a normal checkup. The NHS is faster and more efficient.
And, in the UK, if I decided for some reason that I wanted to see a private doctor or I wanted a prescription that they weren’t too keen to pay for (like the topical form of testosterone, for example) or I just thought it would be faster to go private, I could do that. Unlike my dad and Stanford Hospital, which only knew how to deal with insurance companies.
The US has the most expensive health care in the world. Per person, we pay more than anybody else in the world for our health system, which ranks at the very bottom of the first world. We pay twice as much as the NHS costs and we’re not getting better treatment, we’re getting worse.
So if the proposal for health reform in the States was to put in an American NHS, I say go for it. They’ve done fine by me and most everyone I know here. People in the UK don’t need to declare bankruptcy to pay medical bills. They’re astounded that we do. It’s responsible for half of all bankruptcies in the US. Here, like none. When people are hit by a car or something, they’re worried about getting better and getting back to work to pay their regular bills, not how they’re going to pay their medical bills. And we’re already paying twice as much as Brits for our system.
But just about everybody I know in the states has had some sort of issue with medical bills or insurance or something. Paying well over a hundred dollars just for a normal doctor visit or having to wait forever or being declined. Can we all take a moment and share those stories. Because the “rationing” fears I’m hearing from the states seem to be describing the present, not some dystopian future.
The NHS exists to keep people healthy. Private companies exist to turn a short term profit. Which do you think sounds more trustworthy?
The Swine Flu / The Economy
What’s your take on the media? Pick one.
The swine flu:
- is a distraction from the failures of capitalism – which are solvable with collective action.
- we’re all jonesing for the apocalypse.
- the inevitable consequences of farming and/or slaughtering animals – which also accounts for diseases like the bird flu and HIV.
- I caught the sniffles at the last tea-bagging rally I went to. Should I be worried?
Speaking of tea-bagging rallies, a commenter on my previous post suggested that it would be a waste of effort to try to connect with the people at these things because of massive disagreement on issues. I think that the masses on the left and the right actually have quite a bit of populist rage in common: why are my taxes going to bankers?! What differs is largely our answers to that question and out ideas how to fix it. There are those who will be swayed by a fascist argument. Many of those people, though, are not stupid, just misinformed. The fascist argument is the only one that they’ve heard.
Some of the people at the tea rallies have a hard time giving coherent answers to journalists’ questions. Similarly, many people at the G20 rallies also had trouble formulating a coherent answer. Part of the reason for this is because the frames and assumptions for the questions are trying to obscure rather than enlighten. They’re asking the wrong questions. Here’s the answer to the right question: We on the left and the right are all similarly angry that people with too much power and no accountability decided to use all of our resources and wealth as play money in a giant game and now we’re facing artificial shortages and the folks that caused all this get to keep all the money they stole.
When the economy gets fucked, we’re in a precarious situation not just economically, but also due to the danger of fascism. If we want to feel superior to people being recruited to fascism, we’re doomed. That’s not a reasonable strategy. People will be radicalized by the economy. There will be a surge of power on the very far right. Lefty smugness is enabling to fascists. If we want to limit this, we need to be talking to people about why our solutions are going to be better for them.
Anti-capitalists are actually correct, which ought to be a serious advantage. But our smugness is dressed up classism and we need to get over it or we’ve got no answers, just more status-quo.
Teabagging
The image that pops into your head on my post title up there says a lot about where you fall on the political spectrum in the US. For those of you thinking about unsanitary practices, there was recently some discontent about taxes in the US, as there often is. And long ago, there was the Boston Tea Party, where angry revolutionaries threw cases of tea off of a boat rather than have anybody pay taxes on them. Somebody more recently was inspired by this story and organized a protest where people would throw tea into a body of water. And since loose leaf tea is uncommon, or, at the very least, more expensive than Lipton, tea bags were littered into a water way. This seemed like an idea worth copying on other places and somebody gave it the name “teabagging.” Somebody wholesome gave it that name.
These unfortunately-named parties were not originally organized by the Republican party, but they seized on it. Now if you want to see somebody holding up a sign calling Obama a Nazi, a Muslim, s Socialist or the Anti-Christ, well, here’s the venue for you. It’s too easy for us urban elites to mock these parties. They share a name with a sex act. They attract spectacularly misinformed people, some of whom are clearly racist. But I think it’s an error to dismiss them out of hand.
How many of you, when writing you check for the last tax day, thought of some of it going to a $5 million AIG bonus? Or some kind of bank or financial institution. Admit it, you felt even less good about mailing in your check than usual. What’s the point, they’re just going to give it to a hedge fund, right? This annoyance you feel could be rage. Maybe it should be rage. Houses sit empty while homelessness grows and we give our tax money to bankers!
If you ask any of the folks at these tea-tossing rallies what they think the word “socialism” means, they will start talking to you about giving away money to banks. If you say, “what if we spent it on healthcare for everybody instead?” most of them would think that was a good idea. These folks actually want a mixed-socialist economy, they just don’t know it’s called that. Thanks to Fox News Newspeak, they use all the wrong words for things. There is no word in their heads for what they want, so they express their extreme discontent and social and economic insecurity by symbolic protest (and misuse of another, less innocent term).
People are becoming radicalized by the economy and they could go either way. Obviously, I would prefer it if the left won, and so would most of the people throwing Lipton around. There used to be a quite popular flyer that listed all the stuff you could buy for the cost of a single stealth bomber. Hundreds of schools, hospitals, etc. Well, what could you buy for trillions of dollars? How many YEARS of universal healthcare? How many bridges could be rebuilt, giving people jobs and making roads safer? You see where I’m going, but instead of just listing the object that would be there at the end, also mention the means. Workers build those projects. Workers like the folks at the rallies.
The financial sector is fucked to be sure, but we didn’t get out of the Great Depression by giving money to banks, we got out of it through a massive government spending program. Rather than a devastating war, we could rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. Giving these folks the security and employment they need is also the key to fixing the economy. But this plan does not widen the gap between rich and poor, so it’s not on the agenda and it won’t be until protests force it to be. This could be the germ of change. Stop snickering and start a conversation!
Riots
The year that I lived in Paris, a thousand cars were set ablaze in a single weekend. The cops there had chased a couple of youth, who hid in an electrical substation and got electrocuted and died. The people in the poor suburbs of Paris had enough of police harassment, and so there were riots. Cars were mostly burned out in the suburbs, but some were also set aflame in the area around my flat and, I think, on my street, although it’s possible that the broken glass and scorch marks I saw were unrelated.
Shortly after that died down, an unpopular change to employment law passed. It changed the terms of contracts that could be given to people in their early 20s. There were large marches and people at the end of these marches tended to break windows and cause a mess. Then was the Mohammed cartoon in the Danish newspaper, which, as you may recall, was reprinted in France Soir and caused further unrest.
By the end of the year, French folks were getting kind of concerned about the level of unrest. But not so concerned that they didn’t go ahead and elect Sarkozy, who helped spawn the initial batch of riots.
So I’m a little blasé about riots now. They happen. They’re a way that a minority signals that it’s really really pissed off with the way things are going politically. They’re a protest turned destructive. They happen. And sometimes it’s a good thing that they do happen.
Stonewall, which many regard to be the foundational moment in the modern queer rights movement, was a riot. People fought with the police. They broke stuff. They broke stuff that didn’t belong to either them or the police and just happened to be there. For two nights, they rioted and broke stuff. They weren’t going to take it anymore. The police had been attacking them for years and they were finally fighting back.
If you look not just at the latest BART police shooting, but also at incarceration rates in California, it’s clear that poor and POC communities are under attack by the police. And when people feel rage at that, when they feel anger, when they take destructive mob action in spontaneous response, it’s just as justified now as it ever has been for anyone. Oppression is not quiet or polite and it’s end isn’t either.
However, the news media would do well to learn, that attacking a car is not “violent.” Shooting an unarmed man in the back while he lies face down, surrounded by cops is violent. Breaking a car? Not so much.
Why we lost on Prop 8
The SF Chronicle wrote a bit about campaign strategy:
That allowed Prop. 8 opponents, worried that many voters were not enamored with the idea of same-sex marriage, to run a TV campaign that almost never mentioned gays or lesbians or showed them in an ad. Instead, the ads charged that Prop. 8 supporters wanted to take away rights from a single, unnamed group of people, which just wasn’t fair.
If we’re not even willing to name ourselves as citizens, why on earth would anybody want to support us? If we’re ashamed of being LGBT, then why are our rights valuable? If this strategy NEVER WORKS, why do the mainstream campaigns keep using it?!
If we want rights, then we have to be gay and proud, not weirdly lurking and hiding. Same sex couples deserve the right to marry! Stand up and say it!
In other news, holy cow, Obama won. oh my god.
Write Letters
Dear Senator Feinstein,
I am writing to ask that congress investigate whether the president has violated Posse Comitatus. I’ve just read, in the Army Times, that an infantry brigade has been deployed domestically on a permanent mission. This would seem to be in direct violation of H.R. 4986, Section 1068, signed into law on 28 January 2008, which restored the Posse Comitatus to it’s original wording. I believe strongly that the army should not be used domestically and that the president should obey the law. I hope that congress will take action on this issue.
The Army Times article is here: http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/
Thank you for your time,
Céleste Hutchins
Posse Comitatus was a law passed in 1878 which prohibited using the Army for domestic law enforcement. There’s a lot of reasons that this is a good idea. Police Officers, for all their short comings, are employed by the area that they police and are subject to review by several layers of government. The National Guard is under the control of the governor of their home state and generally only deployed in emergencies. They are under review by the national government in addition to the state government. And really, they only ever should be mobilized during emergencies.
Police Officers, ideally, are trained in doing police work. Recently, they’ve been toying with becoming a military force, but their job is supposed to be public safety, which means that they use force only as a last resort and use non-lethal force whenever possible. The army’s job is to kill people. They are trained to be an occupying force. In the army, to “pacify” a situation means to kill everybody who is upset about it. People who have been doing a lot of killing overseas are not really the best folks to do police work at home or anywhere. Furthermore, the army’s chain of command goes up to the Commander in Chief. George Bush. They are loyal to the president.
Deploying the Army domestically is a violation of an important law. This is a blatantly illegal act. Their mission is contrary to our democracy. Action must be taken.
Nationalize, Not Bailout
With 700 billion dollars at hand at any time, Wall Street’s party isn’t over, it’s just getting started.
There’s a plan afoot to take our tax dollars and give them away to huge companies that have made poor choices. We buy off their bad assets, sell them at a huge loss and then sit around waiting for them to have more bad assets. It’s a $700 BILLION pool of money, that never goes dry. We can’t have national health care, because that’s too expensive, but any hedge fund in trouble can have cash when they need it.
We infuse huge amounts of tax dollars, what will turn out out be trillions, over time, and in the end, have nothing. The uber-rich, however, have a huge safety net. They can make no wrong choice. If they bet on prices going up, and they go up, big win for them. If they bet on prices going up, and they go down, our taxes make up the difference. It’s a hell of a party when you don’t have to pay for it.
The idea is that some businesses are too big to fail and too important to our economy and therefore, it’s in our shared, public interest to help them out. And this could well be true. Large banks are an essential part of any modern, market economy and having tax payer backup for them is an important tool. But if we’re paying for them, we should own them. Companies that are so important to our well-being that they need public support, should belong to the public. If they’re central to the government’s mission, they should be part of the government. If we pay when they lose, we should profit when they profit. Things like health insurance, banks, and public utilities are too important to be run like a card game. If we need them, then the people in charge should be answerable to the public who relies on them, not on shareholders who place bets as if it’s poker.
Companies that are not vital to our interests, but so big that they can’t fail are too big. Break them up! Don’t just hand over our money. This is class warfare. they want to squeeze every drop of cash out of the middle class and the poor and use it to buy themselves third, fourth and fifth houses, while leaving the federal government to foreclose on our sole homes. Don’t forget that these “bad assets” are our homes! Professional bankers and mortgage brokers advised private individuals to take poor risks. These professionals committed fraud. They lied to us. They lied to their superiors, who were only too happy to look the other way. A whole lot of deception went into this mess. Nobody in the banking industry was shocked when their loans starting going bad. They knew they had been making bad loans. They also knew they still got to keep the huge bonuses that they paid themselves. And they knew they could count on tax payers to bail them out. The same tax payers who are now also facing foreclosure and are suffering generally under the credit crunch.
The people who made this mess should be the ones to pay for it. The rich made money off of this. Tax them! They can spare it. Tax the war profiteering corporations who have been making billions off of our tax dollars by not rebuilding Iraq. Tax the oil companies. Tax the profiteers!
I think safety nets are an entirely reasonable part of an economy. But they should be there for people who need them. If I get sick and get laid off, I lose my house. If we can afford to help out robber barons, we can certainly afford to help out people who are having a rough time. How many people could get healthcare for $700 billion? How many kids could go to college? How many unemployed people could have an extra month of breathing room while they look for a job in a crap economy?
We’re in the credit crunch because of fraud, certainly. But we’re also here because of deregulation. Regulations are there to prevent things like this. They need to be re-instated. Our houses, our jobs, our economy are not playthings for speculation. Banks and insurance companies need to be kept separate. Our currency is not a toy for speculators. Our manufacturing sector hasn’t gone offshore because of the magical free hand of the marketplace, it’s gone offshore because of changes in tax laws. We have the power to control how we allocate our money, who gets and how resources are managed. We could re-instate the tariffs that used to protect our manufacturing sector and thus create jobs and reduce the carbon footprint of global shipping. We could start enforcing the laws that are supposed to protect unions and make safer, better workplaces. We could stop government outsourcing, so that people who provide public services are loyal to the public and when disaster strikes, we’re not at the mercy of private firms, Blackwater and mercenaries. The government could actually govern! It could provide services. It could stabilize the economy. It could use our resources to help us, not the rich friends of corrupt officials. Things do not have to be like this.
The bailout is the wrong answer. If we have to save a company, we should own it. Nationalize, not bailout!