Empress Sungold’s Plan for Economic Recovery: An Open Letter to the Supercommittee

My Republican senator, Rob Portman, is soliciting public input for the congressional supercommittee in charge of cutting the federal budget and (mostly likely) ripping our economy to shreds in the process. Channeling Don Quixote, I wrote him to say what I’d do if Empress Sungold were put in charge. It’s more wonky  - and more earnest – than is typical for Kittywampus. If you get through it without snoozing, I’m interested in what you would do as a member of the supercommittee. (If you’re an Ohio resident, you can give Senator Portman a piece of your mind, too.)

Here’s Empress Sungold’s plan (edited to add a few links):

In a word: Jobs. Reviving our economy and stimulating employment has to come before austerity.

Our economy is still stagnating. Unemployment remains very high, both in Ohio and nationally. It would be a dire mistake to introduce spending cuts right now. In the short run, we need revenue increases. Please listen to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates when they say that the very rich must pony up; they’re right! There is no excuse for tax breaks for corporate jets when Medicaid and school funding are being cut.

In addition to closing loopholes and raising taxes on those who make at least a half-million per year, we need targeted stimulus. There’s much still to be done for our conventional infrastracture (just check out the potholes here in Athens sometime). We also need a massive forward-looking investment in non-conventional infrastructure, including renewable energy. We already have great solar and wind companies right here in Ohio, but the sector needs to be vastly scaled up, with your S. 1000 being a good start, but only a start. We need investments in our schools. We need to fully fund Medicaid, Head Start, and women’s health services such as Planned Parenthood, because an emerging generation of sickly and ignorant Americans will not be able to build a strong country – and because short-term cuts too often lead to greater expenses in the long run, when diseases are diagnosed and treated only at a later stage. These are just a few of the areas where investing in our country through a second stimulus program will both address structural weaknesses in our economy and society, and put people back to work.

We need to bring unemployment down not only because it’s right and humane, but also because our economy requires a kick-start. As Henry Ford knew way back in the early 1900s, workers are also consumers who will drive demand. Without a rise in consumer demand our economy is doomed to years more of stagnation.

To address the crisis that brought down our economy in the first place and prevent a reprise of it, we need more stringent controls on Wall Street. Unbelievably, the big firms are more deeply invested in derivatives now than they were in 2008! At the same time, we need relief for homeowners facing foreclosure, helping them refinance their mortgages and possibly also write off part of the mortgage in cases where they’re underwater. This, too, would enable consumers to spend, helping stimulate a recovery, while also reducing the burden of toxic securities on the banks.

Plans should be made to control the deficit over the long-term, with deficit reduction taking a backseat to recharging our economy. An aggressive short-term policy of austerity would kill any chance at recovery; this is basic macroeconomics.

Deficit reduction must be done through a combination of revenue increases and selective cuts. Revenue should come primarily through raising taxes on the rich (as described above) and through the increased tax receipts that will come with people being back to work. The current payroll tax cuts should be maintained past January for their stimulatory effect; once the economy is growing again, the regular rates should be reinstated, and the ceiling above which income is exempt from FICA should be raised, perhaps to $150,000.

The main area where we can cut without harming our citizens is military spending. No country in the world spends anywhere near what we do on “defense,” which has become a code word for empire. We need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. We need to scrutinize which military expenditures really help keep us safe within our borders, and which ones predominantly allow us to project our power.

Thanks for listening to my ideas, Senator Portman! I wish you luck with your difficult task.

 

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Democracy Aflame

Monday afternoon, while driving along U.S. Highway 50 in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, my family and I came upon two blazes consuming a steep hillside. The second fire was so hot, and so close to the road, we could feel the ovens of Satan through the car doors, from the far side of a divided highway.

The next day, I happened to bump into a couple of forest service firefighters at a community event, and they confirmed that these were not planned burns. They don’t know how the conflagrations started, but they got the flames under control before the fire could endanger the town of Placerville.

Evidently, a firebug is afoot.

The same ethos – a spirit of wanton, senseless, indiscriminate destruction – animates our Tea Party leaders. That rhetoric about financial “terrorism” and “hostage-taking”? It’s spot-on, and I hope Joe Biden won’t have to apologize abjectly for it. After all, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder had no trouble calling his seizure of local democracy “financial martial law.”

These guys know what they’re doing. The Tea Partiers and their enablers, both Repub and Dem, are simply following Grover Norquist’s blueprint for “shrinking government” until it’s small enough to “drown it in a bathtub.” They’re now backed by a burgeoning number of voter-suppression bills and anti-union legislation at the state level, intended to neuter the remaining sectors of the electorate still capable of kicking up a stink about Citizens United and the wholesale selling-out of democracy to the best-paid lobbyists and think tanks.

For now a global financial meltdown has been averted, but for how long? And at what cost? Even as Congress voted to back the economy away from the edge of a cliff, it was pushing democracy straight into the canyon. Into the flames.

The Tea Partiers just learned what many parents eventually learn through painful trial-and-error. If you give in to a child when she tantrums, screams, and threatens to throw all of her toys at you, you’ve got a problem. The child learns: Heh. The more bratty I act, the more my parents will cave! Note, in this scenario, the Tea Partiers are not the adults.

Most of us don’t become sociopaths. Most parents learn to set reasonable boundaries with reasonable consistency, most of the time. Most kids learn to play nicely with others.

A few kids don’t learn. They grow up to be firebugs. Or Tea Partiers. Or maybe both?

Barack Obama and the Democratic caucuses did exactly what a smart parent would avoid. They caved into bullying. They failed to set boundaries (the time for which would’ve been last fall, when the Bush tax cuts were on the table). They followed the recipe for creating a juvenile delinquent with “materials easily available at home.”

With this shit-sandwich – nay, “Satan sandwich” – of a debt ceiling agreement, we’ve averted a global meltdown in the finance markets. We’ve kept consumer interest rates at a reasonable level – for now, at least. We’ve also shot the recovery in the gut (hey, that terrorism metaphor is handy!) and ensured that job growth will be anemic or negative over the next few years. (The debt-ceiling’s terrible effects on the recovery – and on jobs, in particular – would belong in a separate post wherein I sing the praises of Keynesianism. Just go read Robert Reich, ‘kay? It’ll hurt less. And then watch this:)

But the economic impact of the deal, ugly though it be, is far from the worst of its repercussions. On a fundamental level, we have abandoned representative democracy. We’re left with a terrible spoof of Orwell in which all congresscritters may vote, but some congresscritters’ votes count more than others.

We’re also at the mercy of sociopathic brats. The next time the Repubs want to enforce their will, they need only promise economic Armageddon (or threaten Medicare’s very existence, or strangle the ongoing operations of the Federal Aviation Administration, which they’re doing right now as I write this). Yes, the Tea Partiers may – may – be voted out in the next electoral cycle, but since they don’t want to build or grow anything, they merely need to destroy. They can break an awful lot before they’re through. (Planned Parenthood, anyone? Which – perhaps not coincidentally – was firebombed this week at a Texas clinic that doesn’t even perform abortions?)

The Tea Partiers have learned that hostage-taking pays. Financial terrorism pays. They’ve made themselves over into unstoppable veto actors. The only question is: who – apart from the FAA – will be their next hostage?

Or as Robert Kuttner puts it (with metaphors only slightly less jumbled than my own):

Let us face the momentous truth: The United States has been rendered ungovernable except on the extortionate terms of the far-right.

(His whole piece is terrific.)

Ironically, the necessary advice du jour comes from Ronald Reagan – an ex-prez much disposed to driving up the debt: “Never negotiate with terrorists.” Despite his adulation of Reagan, Obama did just that. Now we’ve got government-by-terrorist-fiat.

Burn, baby, burn.

The financial terrorists have won.

 

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Let’s Party Like It’s 1995!

As of this writing, our so-called leaders are still engaged in budget brinksmanship. Alternet called it correctly: This is the Republicans applying shock doctrine. They are doing their damnedest to break democracy. They’re such patriots that they’re willing to delay paychecks reaching our already-underpaid rank-and-file troops.

The Tea Partiers, in particular, are willing to hold our government hostage to their unhinged plan to defund Planned Parenthood.

For the Tea Party, this seems to be a win-win. If they get to defund Planned Parenthood, they’ll have achieved an unimaginable victory in their war against women’s bodies, which otherwise the Senate would block. If they get to shut down the government, then it’s party time. Woo hoo! We’re gonna party like it’s 1995!

A lot can happen in 16 years of politics. Since Newt Gingrich threw his slimy wrench into the works, we’ve had presidential blowjobs, welfare reform, the rise (and now fall?) of the DOMA, hanging chads, Enron and Bernie Madoff, 9/11 and the security state, at least three U.S. wars (that we know of), torture and secret prisons, an economic meltdown, election of our first black president, the rise Mama Grizzlies, pistols at Tea Parties, the attempted assassination of a congresswoman, and gallons of Boehnerian tears. Oh, and a substantial portion of the present electorate was still in the Blues Clues or Britney Spears demographic in 1995, and they have no memory of Newt’s machinations.

Even Newt’s own memory seems to have blurred. In the late ’90s, the conventional wisdom held that the shutdown hurt the Republicans, making them look like the extremists they were (and are), and paving the way for Bill Clinton’s re-election. Back then, the Newtster concurred with with this view. By now, though, he’s hyping the shutdown threat as a positive, viable tactic for his comrades.

The Tea Partiers are practically drooling over the prospect of a shutdown. What more dramatic way to demonstrate their small-government cred to the voters back home? What better way for Rep. Mike Pence to show that women’s bodies are expendable that he really, really hates abortion? Sure, some of us will see it as childish and irresponsible to practice blackmail and hold women’s health hostage. We are the same people who already found the “me-first, me-second, and me-third” attitude of the Tea Party childish and irresponsible. (Not to mention cruel.) We are the same people who know that the Planned Parenthood funding in question cannot legally be used to subsidize abortions.

For Tea Party supporters, though, a shutdown is red meat.

As I write this, the talking heads on MSNBC are discussing whether John Boehner can deliver on a potential compromise deal that may have been hammered out behind closed doors this evening. My take on it: I don’t think he can. As right-wing as Boehner is himself, his Tea Party colleagues are neck deep in anti-government, anti-woman ideology. They see this as a matter of principle. They perceive, again, a win-win.

So I fully expect a shutdown. My hope is that the party will end as it did in 1995: with a lose-lose for the Republicans, who will look petty and extreme. (Which is, of course, exactly what they are.) In any event, the Democrats have already made such deep concessions that no one will be dancing. The compromise already reported includes the $33 billion in domestic spending cuts that Republicans have demanded.

What do y’all think? Will the shutdown happen tomorrow? Will it be deferred ’til later? Or will Captain Boehner deliver?

And is there any hope that Obama would veto a package that included the demolition of Planned Parenthood and/or the full $33 billion in cuts? Remember: The 1995/96 shutdowns only occurred after President Bill Clinton vetoed the heaping pile of a budget that the Republican Congress sent him. Obama frequently tries to frame himself as Reagan’s successor, but it’s Clinton who learned from Reagan not to negotiate with hostage-takers.

Update, 4/8/11, 12:15 p.m.: Maddow had a great segment on the potential shutdown tonight, arguing that unlike the mid-1990s, there’s no high-profile Republican to take the heat, as Newt did in 1995/96. I am now feeling like the game may be lose/lose, after all.

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You Thought Wisconsin Was Hosed? Take a Look at Ohio

First things first: If you’re local to SE Ohio and already know why you should contact Jimmy Stewart today and give him an earload on why SB 5 is bad for Ohio, why here’s his phone number! (614) 466-8076 – and email! SD20@senate.state.oh.us – I’m sure he’ll delight in hearing from you. [Update, 2/21/11, 9:50 a.m.: Stewart's office is closed for President's Day - gah! My plan is to leave a voicemail and send an email today, then follow up with a call early tomorrow.]

If you don’t know why SB 5 is evil, or why you should mix a call to Jimmy with your morning Joe, or what sort of earload you might deliver … well, read on, preferably with said Joe in hand.

We here in Ohio do not have a governor who has been parodied as a Mike Myers character – yet.

We don’t have 70,000 protesters as Madison did on Saturday – yet.

But we do have a fugly bill, S.B. 5, that makes Wisconsin’s anti-union agitators look like they’re playing bumper cars while we’re up against John Kasich’s Monster Bus Madness. Where Wisconsin’s legislation (as far as I understand) preserves the facade of collective bargaining, Kasich is going to kill collective bargaining dead for state employees. Be alert for the speeding gubernatorial bus at the end of this otherwise turgid passage! (It’s underlined, so you’ve got no excuse to miss it.)

Here’s the relevant legalese:

Sec. 4117.03. (A) Public employees have the right to:

(1) Form, join, assist, or participate in, or refrain from forming, joining, assisting, or participating in, except as otherwise provided in Chapter 4117. of the Revised Code, any employee organization of their own choosing;

(2) Engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid and protection;

(3) Representation by an employee organization;

(4) Bargain collectively with their public employers to determine wages, hours, terms and other conditions of employment and the continuation, modification, or deletion of an existing provision of a collective bargaining agreement, and enter into collective bargaining agreements;

(5) Present grievances and have them adjusted, without the intervention of the bargaining representative, as long as the adjustment is not inconsistent with the terms of the collective bargaining agreement then in effect and as long as the bargaining representatives have the opportunity to be present at the adjustment.

(B) Persons on active duty or acting in any capacity as members of the organized militia do not have collective bargaining rights. Employees of the state, of any agency, authority, commission, or board of the state, or of any state institution of higher education do not have collective bargaining rights. The state, any agency, authority, commission, or board of the state, or a state institution of higher education shall not bargain collectively with its employees.

At first glance this passage seems incoherent. There’s a lot of lahdeedah about procedures for collective bargaining, only to have it become red asphalt in the final scene! (Eerrrrrrrg. That’s me. Run over. Damn, that bus was big.) The apparent contradiction melts away when one realizes that local public employees are in a different category from those of us who work for the state. The local folks – including teachers – won’t be sitting pretty, either, but in principle they retain access to collective bargaining; it just won’t help them much, thanks to a set of arcane new rules in the spirit of Wisconsin’s. (Progress Ohio lists local public employees’ proposed tribulations.)

Unlike Wisconsin, Ohio is not exempting police and firefighters, and this may cost the Repubs dearly. Several Republican senators have already balked at this, realizing who lines their pockets. Other State Senators, such as Jimmy Stewart from my neck of the woods, realize that anti-union votes won’t go down well in dying coal country, where unions once secured not just a decent living but also self-respect and community. (See Friday’s Dispatch article for a list of wafflers, and contact them if you can! Or better yet, check out Plunderbund, which dishes up the list of fence-sitters with verve, style, and snark.)

The Ohio bill also tries to out-badass its neighbor to the north by hiking health insurance premiums more steeply. Again, the legalese from SB 5:

Sec. 124.82.

(F) A state employee who receives insurance under this section shall pay at least twenty per cent of the cost of the premium assessed for any insurance policy issued pursuant to this section that covers health, medical, hospital, or surgical benefits.

Wisconsin public employees, by contrast, will be forced to pay at minimum 12.6% of their healthcare coverage. We already pay around 10% – not counting deductibles and other tricks for evading the current cap.

I realize that there’s enormous populist anger at the thought that any public employee would receive benefits while many private employees are completely shorn of them. The solution, though, isn’t to hollow out state employees’ benefits. By that logic, we’d all soon be earning minimum wage. The strategy has got to be expanding collective bargaining and revitalizing unions to ensure that all employees receive decent pay and benefits. (A single-payer healthcare system would, of course, solve half of these problems. A girl can dream.)

There’s also populist resentment of public employees getting paid more generously than those in the private sector. Professor Rudy Fichtenbaum, labor economist at Wright State, just decimated this preconception in his testimony before the Ohio Senate, opposing SB 5. Basically, Fichtenbaum notes that state employees have amassed a whole lot more education and training than their private-sector counterparts. Controlling for education, studies find that public employees actually earn less than those counterparts. Seriously, if you have even a passing interest, read Dr. Fichtenbaum’s testimony, which is lucid and very, very persuasive.

It is those “coddled” public sector employees who teach our children, or our neighbor’s children. It is they who determine whether Ohio will nurture innovators and informed, critical citizens, or whether we will have to try to compete with Sri Lanka – on their terms. (I’m still trying to figure out who’s coddled, by the way: those who stay up emailing students from 9:30 to 11:30 and then write about politics until after midnight, perhaps?)

What’s at stake here is nothing less than my adopted state’s economic future. As long as the marginal tax rates for rich Ohioans remain unchanged, we have no moral right to fatally undermine unions, pull the plug on the middle classes, and sell our children’s education to the lowest bidder.

Which brings us full circle. If you’re moved to contact Jimmy Stewart, please do it today (Monday) as the vote will likely take place on  Tuesday. He’s no doubt waiting for your calls. (614) 466-8076 or SD20@senate.state.oh.us. Sen. Stewart is also Majority Floor Leader, the #3 position in the Senate, so folks outside of his home base (the 20th district) might feel free to contact him, as well.

Oh, and if you can make it to Columbus, Ohio, on Tuesday afternoon (Feb. 22), there will be a massive rally starting at 1. Word is that SB 5 will come up for a vote that day. I’ll be in my classroom, preparing the rising generation to compete with Sri Lanka, but I am thrilled to hear that some students and  colleagues will make the trip. Wish I could join them!

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Defunding Title X: What Goes Around, Comes Around

This week I’m reading Michelle Goldberg’s masterful The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World with one of my classes. In it, Goldberg traces the history of foreign aid for women’s health – especially reproductive health – from its Cold War, Rockefeller/Ford/Guttmacher beginnings to the present era.

In 2011, well into the second decade after the UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, you’d think we’d be well along the path blazed there: foregrounding women’s need for education and autonomy. Nuh-unh!! Instead, the proponents of women’s reproductive autonomy in developing nations and the Global South face constant friction and opposition from groups funded by the Radical Christian Right in the U.S. This trajectory toward radical rightwing interference is lucidly, chillingly described in Goldberg’s book. It’s as though women’s bodies became a proxy war for the tensions over reproductive rights and justice back here in the U.S.

And now, with the House of Representatives today voting to defund Title X funding, that proxy war has come home. For details, see excellent recaps by Lindsay Beyerstein and Jill Filipovic. The legislation wouldn’t affect abortions – except to inflate their numbers by making birth control less accessible to poor women and young women. No, the target here is broader. It’s a war against all women, but especially those who are poor.

When I was young and underinsured, I too turned to Planned Parenthood, and I’m forever grateful for their services. Some women are transiently poor, like I was. Many struggle with poverty throughout their childbearing years. All of us deserve affordable access to basic services like a Pap test.

I believe this even though – or especially because! – I had a few dodgy Pap test results in my early twenties. Those diagnoses of “cervical dysplasia” scared me. Cone biopsies were threatened. The cellular abnormalities resolved on their own, as HPV usually does. Had I progressed toward cervical cancer, Planned Parenthood might well have saved my life.

All women deserve preventive care, and that includes the prevention of pregnancy. This is sooo not rocket science.

Odds are good that the Senate won’t stand for the House’s crap. Still, I’m appalled that a majority in the House signed onto it. While some members may try to hide behind a figleaf of fiscal responsibility, that’s balderdash, as Amanda Marcotte argues:

Of course, rhetoric that attacks federal funding for contraception as a state-subsidy for promiscuity obscures the fact that continuing Title X is one of the more fiscally sound things the government can do: Research from the Guttmacher Institute demonstrates that every dollar spent on family planning saves the government four dollars down the road.

(Read her whole piece – it’s excellent.)

No, this is strictly culture war ammo, just as the Mexico City rule and all the other right-wing meddling into brown and black women’s bodies has to do with ideology and misogyny – not fiscal soundness.

This is merely the continuation of funding politics imposed on the “Third World” – now aimed at women that Chandra Mohanty once called the “Third World” in the United States. This is the redirection of contempt for brown and black women’s bodies to those women living within U.S. borders. Women like me – white, securely middle-class, employed, insured, and slouching toward the end of my reproductive years – will be just fine. It’s poor women of color who will suffer. College students who can’t tell their conservative parents that they’re on the pill. Appalachian women lacking any form of health insurance.

Senate? The ball’s in your court. Please show us that you consider women human beings whose health is as important as men’s – who should have a chance to participate fully in society – and who should not be written off if they lack racial or class privilege.

In the clip below, Michelle Goldberg suggests that the U.S. culture wars have affected women outside the U.S. more profoundly than women here at home. Up until now, she’s been right. As to the future? Well, that might just be up to the Senate.

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Dear Catfood Commission …

I understand you’ve proposed a laundry list of ways to save money and balance the budget. I agree that reining in the deficit is crucial in the long run. In the short run, it’s pure nitwittery. We’re still in a recession. Cutting domestic spending takes money out of the economy. It’s the opposite of a stimulus. Any counter-stimulus will dig our economy into a hole so deep, we’re liable to come out in China (but hey, they already own us).

Slashing people’s Social Security payments? Crappy idea. As a group, retirees aren’t saving on a massive scale. They’ll spend that money and goose the economy.

Cutting federal discretionary spending? Meredith Bagby at HuffPo counts some of the reasons only a numbskull would see this as solution.

It’s very easy to slash the domestic discretionary budget. It’s been done for decades by both parties, and there really isn’t anything left to squeeze out of it. Simpson-Bowles proposes cutting the federal workforce by 10% and freezing employees’ salaries for three years. This accepts on faith the conservative assumption that the government is doing something now that it shouldn’t be doing. But what, exactly? Prosecuting criminals? Funding medical research? Building levees, tunnels, and bridges? (All of the above?)

(More here.)

And that’s not all.  Federal grants for low income college students. Federal grants for middle-income college students. Investments in alternative energy sources. Funding for studies on surviving the future oil shocks. Training for Arabic language specialists so we don’t misunderstand the Arab world even worse than we do now. Full funding for Head Start. Movement toward a true single-payer health system. Oh, and those research docs need more public funding, not less. (For all I criticize medicine, ultimately I hang a lot of hope on it.)

Pie in the sky, you say? Well, yes, when you take a look at the fresh herd of congresscritters. (Or is the correct term not a herd but – as for crows – a murder?)

But just take a peek at this pie (chart), via sexgenderbody’s Tumblr:

This is not the U.S. budget. This chart compares military expenditures among different countries. Somehow France, say, manages to provide excellent social services without bankrupting itself on military spending.

Conventional wisdom says we need to maintain our current military spending to stay safe. But honestly? Such astronomical expenditures are only needed to preserve an empire, not to assure our safety. Sometime during the past 60 years, “national security” morphed into “imperial security.” That’s why “homeland security was coined: because “national security” no longer denoted the actual need of the U.S.-American people to be safe.

In a post-9/11 world, spending almost as much as all other countries combined on defense is not making us safer. We are only adding to the misery of Afghans and Pakistanis. Meanwhile, we live in perpetual insecurity and fear, which is only amplified, ironically, by the statements and policies issuing from the Department of Homeland Security.

So, dear Catfood Commission, how ’bout we hive off a tenth of our military spending? Maybe even a twentieth, over the next decade or two? As a future grandmother of America, I object to eating catfood. If I’m lucky enough in my dotage to have an actual cat or two, I would not want to whisk the kibble out from under their whiskers.

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Signs and Symptoms of the Corporatizing University

Trickle, trickle, dribble, drip. One day in October, I was talking with a student after class when we heard the unmistakeable sounds of water. A few steps down the hall, we heard the gush that could only be a broken pipe. Our admin argued successfully with the facilities folks who wanted to put in a work order (!!) but even with their prompt response, the torrent took out a bunch of ceiling tiles while my student and I watched in horrified fascination. It took a month for those tiles to be replaced. The whole ceiling still looks stained and provisional.

Meanwhile, administrators prioritize student retention and recruitment over all other goals. The result? Money is found for lavish student activity centers and gyms while faculty are laid off and classroom facilities turn into scenes from Brazil (the movie, not the country).

The corporatization of the university is so far advanced that it’s probably unstoppable, but that doesn’t mean I have to shut up about it. Two little examples from beyond my campus:

Exhibit 1: I just went to check the links in my winter syllabus. I always include a couple of links to guides on nonsexist language usage. When I clicked on the one from the University of Minnesota, the old link redirected me – to a page on how to present a unified brand image for the university! It looks like this:

Lovely, but where are the women? Previously, there were university-wide guidelines for avoiding sexist expressions. Now, the university merely refers us to the Chicago Manual for guidance in all matters of style unrelated to its brand. Nowhere could I find the old guidelines (though a few individual departments offer brief tips on nonsexist usage in student papers). It’s all about the brand. None of this has any bearing on the university’s Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, which is outstanding; I’m betting no one consulted them.

At least Keene State College still maintains an excellent guide to nonsexist language.

Exhibit 2: Clarissa’s Blog reports that upper-level administrators at Clarissa’s public university in Illinois are drafting a dress code for its employees. Here’s the proposed language:

32.7 DRESS AND PERSONAL APPEARANCE. All University employees are expected to portray a professional image to students, parents, and the community at large. An employee’s dress and appearance shall be neat and clean. At a minimum, the standard office dress code shall be defined as business casual. Apparel needs to be free of slogans or advertisements. In addition, apparel shall not be of an indecent, suggestive, provocative, obscene, or defamatory nature. If applicable, employees are encouraged to wear their university logo shirts. The University may direct an employee to leave work and/or change clothes if he/she is are found in violation of this provision.

Clarissa dishes out the snark that this proposal so richly deserves:

Will I be required to bring dry-cleaning receipts to prove that I clean my clothes on a regular basis? Do I need witnesses to testify that I do my laundry often enough to satisfy these losers? And who will teach my classes if I’m ordered to leave for “violating the provision”? The administrators? That, surely, be fun to observe. Maybe now, whenever I’m too lazy to prepare a class, I should just show up dressed “obscenely” and be sent home to rest.

Oh, and she says it reminds her of the bad old days back in the USSR.

The very idea of a dress code is to turn professors from idiosyncratic, original – if slightly frumpy – people into corporate drones. Clothes may not make the man (or the woman), but I sure think more clearly in comfortable shoes. It’s an interesting contradiction too, to say “apparel needs to be free of slogans or advertisements” but also “employees are encouraged to wear their university logo shirts.” University branding, anyone? If my uni comes up with a dunderheaded policy like this, I think I’ll need to buy some of those sweatpants with the university’s initials appliqued onto each butt cheek, just to test whether “indecency” or “suggestiveness” trumps the tomcat-like urge to mark everything with the university’s branding.

I have to wonder if the broader intent of such silly proposals is to be a diversionary tactic: Keep the professoriate busy with idiotic dress-code proposals and perhaps they won’t notice that their compensation is being slashed while their workloads balloon. Certainly my institution’s top honchos are very adept at forming unwieldly committees that either 1) lack meaningful faculty representation (if its task is important), or 2) keep scores of instructors tied up in busy work, often for a year or two, only to discard or disregard the committee’s product or recommendations.

These diversionary tactics are one way to suppress dissent against the advancing corporatization of higher ed, in which students are seen as customers and instructors are inconvenient expenses, useful only in generating “weighted student credit hours,” which is a measure of tuition income. It’s also a means of distracting professors from the way in which the casualization of academic labor – its delegation to people like me with no possibility of tenure, significantly lower wages, and a high chance of being unemployed next year – is undermining the ability of the entire professoriate to do its best work. Instructors who are busy fighting silly battles over basic dignity in working conditions have less time to refine their teaching and pursue their research. And those who are squeezed for time are more likely to seek individual, dog-eat-dog solutions to their own precarious situation, rather than investing in solidarity with other instructors and staff.

I’m off to a meeting now, myself, but this one is for union rabble-rousing. Professors do not have collective bargaining at my school. Now that incoming Governor Kasich is threatening to run over us with his “bus,” we’re going to need it.

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The Contagion of Poverty (or, Why Wine Is Safer than Water Tonight)

Americans who oppose “big government” usually oppose “handouts” to the poor. But here’s the thing: You may be comfortable. You may think you have all you need. And yet, if there’s poverty anywhere in your vicinity, you will not be immune to its pernicious effects.

This came home to me again – twice -  in the past week. My adopted hometown, Athens, Ohio, is a lovely, liberal little college town tucked into the Appalachian foothills. The town itself looks reasonably prosperous, but it’s encircled the remains of a region that mined its coal and then hit an economic dead end. Some of the folks with no money and no future live right outside the edge of town in abject poverty, as I saw while canvassing for Obama in 2008. Within the city limits, the tax base isn’t so flush, either, since the 20,000 students and the university are essentially parasites on the permanent residents (whom they vastly outnumber). Just over half of Athens residents live below the poverty line, and not all of them are students.

Today’s instance of poverty splash-over: BOIL ORDER! Thanks to our weak tax base, the town’s infrastructure is crumbling. The water system is decrepit. Boil orders are issued as routinely as parking tickets. If you Google “boil order,” your second hit will be “City of Athens Boil Order Instructions.” Only the University of Missouri Extension Service outranks us. Sure, Boston had a boil order affecting 2 million people this spring, but Athens beats Boston on the Google! Boston! And its two million (2,000,000!!!!) water customers! If Boston can’t touch us, our title as the reigning champions of boil orders is virtually untouchable. (Yes, I realize most of the world should be under a boil order. Only my First-World privilege leads me to believe my family and I have a right to safe water from the tap. I’m not quite sure that Athens is located entirely in the First World.)

Today’s boil order alert went out via email at 3:30. (Email notification is still a novel service, implemented by our new-ish progressive city leadership.) I last checked my email at 3:25 before I picked up the kids. So I didn’t see it until 8:30, by which time we’d all swilled a glass or two of water and I’d washed our dinner veggies in it. Usually, boil orders affects other neighborhoods. Today, of all days, it hit my own.

So far no one is ill, and I think we’ll probably be fine. I suspect that the boil order is due to a hydrant that I saw spewing water this noon. (Hence the “splash-over” metaphor.) The likelihood of serious contamination is low. Still, I’m irked that we have to deal with the hassle until tomorrow evening. I’m uneasy as we wait and wonder if we’ll all come down with Athensitis indigestion.

Second case in point: the impact of poverty on local schools. I’ve written repeatedly about how often our kids miss school because there’s no money to clear the hilly county roads. (The city is rich in comparison to the county.) Now we’re seeing a decline in the elementary schools, which is having a ripple effect throughout the district.

At our back-to-school potluck, I learned that our little neighborhood school (let’s call it “International Elementary”) has 50% more kindergartners than in the past few years. At the last minute, they had to hire another teacher and carve out another classroom (which involved displacing disabled services to the poorest of our district’s five elementaries). There simply weren’t any open classrooms. Baby boom, you say? Unh-uh. They were all intradistrict transfers, most of them fleeing the second poorest elementary, whose test scores recently tanked. (You can see the data yourself at Greatschools.org under the listings for the “Athens, OH” district – and you can check out your own area schools as well.) I don’t know why their scores tumbled, though I’m loathe to blame the teachers. Much more likely, poor kids are suffering from hunger, which is rampant in our region, and can’t learn. Or their families are unable to be supportive because they received a crappy education, themselves. I’m guessing it’s the more affluent parents who are moving their kids, while the poorest children are staying put.

So the poverty in the county isn’t just hurting the two most vulnerable schools. It’s now spilling over into our excellent little school. I completely sympathize with the parents who are moving their sprouts; even it I didn’t, NCLB apparently gives them the legal right to switch out of a faltering school. In their place, I’d be attracted by International’s strong test scores and relatively diverse student body – which drew us to this neighborhood.

International Elementary will be fine for this year. But what about next year, when we’ll presumably need another first-grade room, too, and the years thereafter? What if we’ll permanently have three classrooms per grade instead of just two? The school is already in cramped quarters. The counselor and psychologist (who rotate through the district) share space with a skeleton in a closet. (Literally.) And you can’t extend the existing building. There’s just no space. I suppose you could just get rid of the playground … but even then, who’s going to fund the construction? The alternative – classes of 30 or more children – would just gut International’s strength, small classes with great teachers.

My point here isn’t just about “me me me,” though it sure feels good to vent. The larger point is that poverty can’t be contained. It spreads like a contagion – like a “miasma,” as nineteenth-century doctors would have said – and it ultimately affects us all.

So never mind altruism. It’s in everyone’s self-interest to ensure that the most vulnerable members of society have enough.

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Salmonella Culprit DeCoster: His Morality Is a Big Goose Egg

By now, you may have heard that the source of the recent salmonella outbreak is a single egg baron in Iowa, Austin “Jack” DeCoster. What you might not have heard: He’s just as reckless with his human employees as with his hens.

At Grist, Tom Philpott reports that in 2002, five undocumented female migrant workers brought criminal charges alleging that they had been raped by supervisors while at work. In a subsequent EEOC lawsuit, DeCoster settled for $1.5 million dollars. He has also been fined for housing immigrant workers in deplorable rat-infested conditions , for having employees handle dead animals and manure with their bare hands, and for repeated water-safety violations (some stemming from his hog farms). Philpott concludes:

The outrage here is not that Wright County Eggs has released nearly half a billion tainted eggs into the market, exposing untold numbers of people to sickness. DeCoster’s record of abuse — of people and the environment — has taught anyone who’s paying attention to expect such things from his operations.

The outrage is that regulatory authorities at both the state and national levels have allowed him to continue hiring workers and producing food as violations piled up.

(Read the rest here.)

Yes. But the problem isn’t just Jack DeCoster, even if the current outbreak is traceable entirely to his operations. It also goes beyond our lax regulations and their even laxer enforcement. The issue goes to the core of how we eat: our dependence on large-scale farming.

As I noted when swine flu first emerged, factory farming is a public health threat on a number of levels, including the breeding of novel viruses and bacteria. In addition, such farms routinely use antibiotics to control the diseases that inevitably erupt when you concentrate thousands or hundreds of thousands (!!) of animals. This is creating a perfect chance for bacteria to mutate into drug-resistant forms. It’s undermining our ability to effectively treat human diseases. And while some industrial farming operations may treat their workers well, DeCoster is not alone in exploiting them.

The overall problem is that industrial agriculture is geared to making profits, first and foremost – and the quest for profit-maximization has eclipsed human values. This has happened in many industries, of course, but it can be deadly in agriculture because of its direct impact on our food supply and public health.

DeCoster exemplifies sheer callousness to the human and animal wreckage he and his ilk have fostered.

• The hens crowded together, suffering from mutual aggression and sitting in their own feces.
• Their chicks, sickened with salmonella, who brought the infection to another industrial egg operation.
• The undocumented women whose bodily integrity was violated by supervisors who exploited a lawless atmosphere.
• All the other workers living and working in filth.
• And now the rest of us, who could be infected by a simple sunny-side up egg.

Thorough cooking kills salmonella, as Salon’s Francis Lam reminds us. From my own experience, I know that’s not quite enough. The cook who handled the raw eggs needs to wash her or his hands very thoroughly. The worst “tummy flu” I’ve had hit me after I’d boiled a bunch of eggs for dyeing at Easter and, distracted by a house full of company, hadn’t paid much heed to hand-washing. I was the only person who got sick, but I was down for a week, so immobilized that a girlfriend had to drop by to check on me and deliver ginger ale. I’m sure it was salmonella, caught from the shells. I can be glad I was young and healthy when it hit. And yes, those eggs came from factory farms (albeit in Germany, so they were subject to some regulation).

These days, I buy Kroger’s organic free-range eggs when I don’t have a local source. When my friends’ chickens are laying, I don’t have to buy eggs at all (and they just gave me three this evening – yippee!). There’s never a perfect guarantee of safe food, but our odds improve dramatically when we don’t rely on industrial mass production. And when we eat an egg from happy hens, we can be pretty confident that no humans have been treated cruelly, either.

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Teaching Ayn Rand in the Cradle?

Why let an ideology or worldview compete on its own merits when you can spread it as propaganda to tender young minds? Better yet, how ’bout paying to download it into young brains? That’s what’s happening with Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, which – as best I understand it – is a mishmash of “reason,” capitalism, untrammeled competition, and unenlightened self-interest.

I first got wind of this earlier in the week, but feared things had gotten even further out of hand today, when Jill at Feministe quoted from this post by Eric Hague at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:

I’d like to start by saying that I don’t get into belligerent shouting matches at the playground very often. The Tot Lot, by its very nature, can be an extremely volatile place—a veritable powder keg of different and sometimes contradictory parenting styles—and this fact alone is usually enough to keep everyone, parents and tots alike, acting as courteous and deferential as possible. The argument we had earlier today didn’t need to happen, and I want you to know, above all else, that I’m deeply sorry that things got so wildly, publicly out of hand.

Now let me explain why your son was wrong.

When little Aiden toddled up our daughter Johanna and asked to play with her Elmo ball, he was, admittedly, very sweet and polite. I think his exact words were, “Have a ball, peas [sic]?” And I’m sure you were very proud of him for using his manners.

To be sure, I was equally proud when Johanna yelled, “No! Looter!” right in his looter face, and then only marginally less proud when she sort of shoved him.

The thing is, in this family we take the philosophies of Ayn Rand seriously. We conspicuously reward ourselves for our own hard work, we never give to charity, and we only pay our taxes very, very begrudgingly.

Since the day Johanna was born, we’ve worked to indoctrinate her into the truth of Objectivism. Every night we read to her from the illustrated, unabridged edition of Atlas Shrugged—glossing over all the hardcore sex parts, mind you, but dwelling pretty thoroughly on the stuff about being proud of what you’ve earned and not letting James Taggart-types bring you down. For a long time we were convinced that our efforts to free her mind were for naught, but recently, as we’ve started socializing her a little bit, we’ve been delighted to find that she is completely antipathetic to the concept of sharing. As parents, we couldn’t have asked for a better daughter.

That’s why, when Johanna then began berating your son, accusing him of trying to coerce from her a moral sanction of his theft of the fruit of her labor, in as many words, I kind of egged her on. Even when Aiden started crying.

You see, that Elmo ball was Johanna’s reward for consistently using the potty this past week. She wasn’t given the ball simply because she’d demonstrated an exceptional need for it—she earned it. And from the way Aiden’s pants sagged as he tried in vain to run away from our daughter, it was clear that he wasn’t anywhere close to deserving that kind of remuneration. By so much as allowing Johanna to share her toy with him, we’d be undermining her appreciation of one of life’s most important lessons: You should never feel guilty about your abilities. Including your ability to repeatedly peg a fellow toddler with your Elmo ball as he sobs for mercy.

Look, imagine what would happen if we were to enact some sort of potty training Equalization of Opportunity Act in which we regularized the distribution all of Johanna’s and Aiden’s potty chart stickers. Suddenly it would seem as if Aiden had earned the right to wear big-boy underpants, and within minutes you’d have a Taggart Tunnel-esque catastrophe on your hands, if you follow me.

Johanna shouldn’t be burdened with supplying playthings for every bed-wetting moocher she happens to meet. If you saw Johanna, her knees buckling, her arms trembling but still trying to hold aloft the collective weight of an entire Tot Lot’s worth of Elmo balls with the last of her strength, what would you tell her to do?

To shrug. Just like we’ve instructed her to do if Child Protective Services or some other agent of the People’s State of America ever asks her about what we’re teaching her.

(Read the rest here.)

Unlike Jill, I quoted nearly the whole thing so that you’d have a fighting chance to realize that this is, indeed, satire. Myself, I first thought it was “by real,” as my Tiger says – maybe because the default framing of anything on a major feminist blog is “outrage” rather than “funny”? But this piece is, in fact, very, very funny. Anything that evokes Elmo in the same breath as Ayn Rand and throws in a poop joke or two has great comedic potential.

But now that we’ve had our LOLs, here’s true and rather sinister side of this story. The Ayn Rand Institute is indeed out to capture the minds of young ‘uns, starting with college students. And this is no spoof.

The latest issue of Academe (the journal published by the American Association of University Professors) includes two articles detailing how the Ayn Rand Institute is channeling funds through the charitable offshoot of a major bank, BB&T (which I confess I’d never heard of until now):

Stipulations range from the seemingly benign—funding for faculty and student research and support for a speaker series on capitalism, leadership retreats, and the establishment of Ayn Rand reading rooms—to the sharply contentious. At Western Carolina University, for example—as at UNC–Charlotte—in addition to the creation of new courses involving required reading of Rand, the original 2008 agreement included a condition that faculty members who teach the new course on capitalism “shall work closely with the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) and have a reasonable understanding and positive attitude towards Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism.” In this and other agreements, the BB&T Foundation’s close ties to the Ayn Rand Institute, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Irvine, California, are evident. The institute’s stated mission is to work “to introduce young people to Ayn Rand’s novels, to support scholarship and research based on her ideas, and to promote the principles of reason, rational self-interest, individual rights, and laissez-faire capitalism to the widest possible audience.”

(Read the whole article by Gary H. Jones here, plus a case study by Richie Zweigenhaft on how this all shook out at Guilford College in North Carolina.)

I find this absolutely chilling. Imagine if a donor said I had to teach David Irving, the infamous Holocaust denier, in my Nazi Germany course. Or if I were required to teach Phyllis Schlafly in my Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies! I do mention them both – but certainly not with “a positive attitude.”

The corporatization of the university has advanced so far that this new incursion on academic freedom isn’t entirely surprising. It is, however, breaking new ground. And why am I not surprised that it’s spearheaded by precisely a movement whose “philosophy” (if it deserves to be dignified as such) meshes neatly with that of a corporatized university, where units are pitted against each other according to shady metrics, and where pillars of a liberal education such as Classics face possible extinction because they don’t generate enough revenue?

The irony, of course, is that if Ayn Rand’s acolytes really believed in the free market, and if her ideas were truly so stinkin’ brilliant, there’d be no need for such shenanigans. Rand’s ideas would succeed on the open market. Full stop. No donations required.

So, no, Rand’s not being taught in nursery school – yet. I have to wonder, though, if the ARI is only waiting on the release of a pop-up book version of Atlas Shrugged .

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The Shifting Sands of Radicalism

Digby posted this quotation under the heading “Crazy Left Wing Hippie,” along with a challenge to guess who said it:

Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires,and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.

I am feeling a bit smug because I guessed it correctly in one.

Also, I loved that last line: “Their number is negligible and they are stupid.” Too bad only the second assertion still holds true.

I’m curious what y’all come up with, so please drop your best (or worst!) guess in comments.

The correct answer is here (also via Digby).

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Financial Reform: How We Got in this Pickle

I’m still waiting for someone to help me understand what the financial reform package will and won’t do. (So far, I suspect that my understanding is vague partly because the reforms themselves are vague; on German TV, I heard them described as more of a framework than a set of concrete reforms.) Until the lights breaks upon me, here are the two most helpful explanations I’ve heard of how we landed in our current financial pickle.

The first comes via Sir Charles of Cogitamus. It’s Marxist flavored, which is no surprise, since it’s a presentation by noted Marxian scholar David Harvey. But it’s not dogmatic. Harvey begins by laying out a lot of the competing theories and acknowledging that all hold some truth. If you’ve got a smidgen of Economics 101 background, it should make sense to you, whether or not you agree with Harvey’s conclusion that it’s time to opt out of capitalism.

(Here’s the clip if you can’t see it.)

The second cogent explanation aired on This American Life, “The Giant Pool of Money.” It predates the actual global market meltdown, but it does a brilliant job of connecting the American mortgage crisis to the crisis on Wall Street and the financial markets. So go here and listen: The Giant Pool of Money. The reporters on this story, Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Adam Davidson followed up after the mega-meltdown with Another Frightening Show About the Economy. Note that both of these shows aired in fall 2008 (early September and then early October). They still provide a beautifully lucid explanation of whodunit – and how.

If someone enlightens me equally on the financial regulatory reforms, I’ll be sure to share.

(Kitteh in a pickle from ICHC?)

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Running Hot and Cold on AC

Scene 1: I spend most of the year freezing. I’m usually the first person to complain about air conditioning running too cold. I can hardly function in an office that’s cooled to 60 F, as our university consistently does to the Women’s and Gender Studies offices. I don’t think well when I’m cold, and (rather inconveniently), thinking is in my job description. We’ve taken to running space heaters when it gets really bad, since the university seems incapable of fixing its HVAC system.

At the same time, the university regularly sends out emails exhorting us to save energy.

Scene 2: The university also has trouble keeping its AC system working, period. Way back in April, we had our first heat wave, which provoked one of my students to complain to the school newspaper:

I began my day in Porter Hall at 9 a.m., measuring a comfortable 72 degrees. I had class from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. in Clippinger measuring 83 degrees, and immediately following a different room in Clip from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. measuring 85 degrees. Thinking that the worst of my overly warm classes were over and that the last would surely be comfortable, I entered Bentley and climbed to the second floor to find a room that was 98 degrees.

As our professor teased that class would end if she passed out, and I watched the sweat of my neighbor form a puddle on our desk, I found that what little focus I had for history was quickly diminishing in the unbearable heat. I began to wonder instead how, even in light of necessary budget cuts, Ohio University could think that students could actively learn in such an uncomfortable environment. Having soaked through my shirt I found myself racing outside to “cool down” in the 80 degree weather outside after class (well cool down in the sense that at least there was moving air).

(Read the rest here.)

Yep, I was that professor in the 98-degree room. And no, I didn’t pass out, but my students weren’t the only ones who struggled to stay focused.

Scene 3: The temperature in Berlin is 99F, as I write this. No one has AC in their homes. Not even all movie theaters have it. Lots of people don’t even own fans, and in fact, many Germans believe that any moving air constitutes a draft. When the city gets this hot, the apartment houses stay cool for a day or two, but then the cement and stone start to heat up, and they retain the heat instead. We’ve been opening windows whenever it’s cooler outside, closing them when it’s not, pulling drapes, and running fans. It’s not enough to live with any comfort. Last night the low was in the upper ’70s. Tonight we’ll be sleeping in a sauna. Or not sleeping, more likely.

All of which made me keenly interested in Salon’s interview with Stan Cox, who urges us to radically shut off our AC. (Amanda Marcotte has some very reasonable commentary on it at Pandagon.) I agree that we overdo it like crazy – do restaurants really need to be cooled to 65 or below? – but he underestimates the health impact where there’s no AC in a heat wave:

But I think we need to look at it is as a fail-safe mechanism and recognize that a lot of the health problems that we need A.C. to solve, it may have contributed to in the first place. We need to look at the conditions under which people die in heat waves, the harsh life conditions that they’re enduring more generally. That’s the real root of the problem.

(The rest is here.)

No. It’s not just a matter of harsh life conditions, though poverty, old age, and isolation are huge risk factors for dying in a heat wave. There’s no mystery to it. But if there’s nowhere cool to escape, people will die. In Europe’s 2006 heat wave, at least 20 died in Germany and at least 40 in France, even though both are wealthy countries with excellent social welfare safety nets. These are preventable deaths.

Basically, our systems are poorly designed, with too much cooling delivered to lots of places, and none to others. My university offers some prime examples of this. Here’s another. My sister- and brother-in-law traveled from Frankfurt to Berlin on Friday in a train where the AC failed. The windows are hermetically sealed because it’s a high-speed train whose name, ironically, is abbreviated “ICE.” Yesterday, three similar trains had to be evacuated after their AC failed. (Sorry, the linked article is in German.) It seems the system is not designed to function in high temperatures! On one of the ICE trains, 27 teenagers on a school trip collapsed from the heat, and some required IV infusions right on the platform once they were evacuated. The desperate mother of a young boy tried to break a window with an emergency hammer. Temperatures topped 120 F.

So yes, by all means, let’s talk about AC. But I agree with Amanda that urging people to go cold turkey – as Cox does – vastly oversimplifies the matter. Complex societies cannot simply ditch AC, unless we abandon any notion of productivity and give up travel by mass conveyance. (I’ve recently been on an airplane and a city bus whose temperatures rivaled those of the ICE trains.) In other words, late capitalism depends on AC, and unless you think we can topple capitalism, we’re not likely to abolish AC. Nor should we, because it really does save people’s lives in a heat wave. But we can and should discuss where it’s used profligately and stupidly. We should think about where we really need it, and where it’s optional. We can adopt other strategies, like using a whole-house fan at night, running ceiling fans, or (in dry climates) installing a swamp cooler. We can drop dress codes that require pants and ties in July. Why not wear shorts to the office?

Oh, and when it’s really hot, we might be wise not to cuddle up to our laptops. I’m off to grab a cold drink and a good old-fashioned, paper-based book.

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The Perils of Abby Sunderland: The Problem Isn’t Lax Parenting, It’s the Romance of Risk

I’m glad Abby Sunderland has been found, adrift but safe in the Indian Ocean. As a parent and a sister, I empathized with her family and worried that they’d never see her again.

I will admit that I also had a moment or two of wondering: “What were they thinking? How could her parents let her sail around the world?”

Then again, just a few days ago I watched my little Tiger dangle from the monkey bars where he broke his humerus last winter. I felt my stomach clench and tumble. I checked my overprotectiveness. I cheered him as he swung from one end to the other. I imagine Abby’s parents went through something similar in deciding to let their beloved daughter try to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world – with, however, one difference. They had pretty good reason to assume Abby was up to the challenge. The Tiger, by contrast, has a very dicey record on the monkey bars.

That’s why I have to agree with Hugo Schwyzer’s thoughtful post on how not all 16-year-olds are equally mature, and how Abby’s parents likely made a reasonable decision based on her capabilities. I especially appreciate his point that 18 is not a magic age of reason, nor does it revolutionize the way parents see their babies:

On the one hand, I can’t imagine being comfortable sending my own child off around the world on a sailboat by herself. But if I’m honest, I know full well that protectiveness won’t vanish when my Heloise [Hugo's baby daughter] turns 18; I’d worry just as much if she were 18 as if she were a few months younger. Lines of demarcation don’t have much effect on the heart.

(Rest the rest here – it’s all very thoughtful.)

But here’s where I part ways with Hugo, and with the other commentary I’ve read: I don’t think parenting is the real issue here. Yes, American culture is riven with divides between parents like me who let our ten-year-olds bike to the local libarary, and those who think this is lunacy; parents who let their four-year-olds wander the neighborhood, and parents like me who worry that such small persons will be crushed under a car.

The issue in Abby Sunderland’s situation is, rather, this: Why does anyone feel compelled to set records at the cost of life and limb? Why do so many people still feel called to climb Everest, despite the fact that not only they but their local sherpas may well expire before they reach the peak? (This happened again just recently to a British climber, though he did get to the top first. Cold comfort, I say.)

I understand the impulse to explore and discover. In junior high, I dreamed of being an astronaut. That dream died forever in 1986 along with the passengers of the Challenger. But I can see why scientists still go to wild places. I have a friend who travels to Antarctica to research low-temperature life forms, and I completely understand why she does it, even though such expeditions always involve modest risk.

What I don’t understand is the desire to set records – to push one’s body beyond its healthy boundaries – to embrace risk just for its own sake. Sailing solo around the globe makes as much sense to me as playing chicken with a train, or drag racing on the freeway.

But drag racing and playing chicken are the desperate sports of poor kids. Setting records is the province of the privileged. The assumption is that no effort will be spared in trying to save you if your boat runs awry.

I’m not saying that Abby Sunderland should have been left to drift endlessly on the open seas. Of course not. I am truly glad and relieved she was found.

And yet. Every time an extreme athlete runs into trouble, massive resources are deployed to rescue him or her. Clueless skiers go into the Sierra backcountry and get stranded in a blizzard. Mountain climbers underestimate the danger of avalanche. Solo pilots fly into oblivion. The “resources” deployed aren’t just financial; human beings often risk their own necks in hopes of saving a life.

Just to underscore how much this is a function of privilege: In the last several days, tens of thousands of children have died of preventable disease: malnutrition, dysentery, malaria, typhus, etc. ad nauseam. How many could be saved with the money spent on rescuing people (children and adults) who – from a place of tremendous economic privilege – challenge themselves to break records, or simply assume that they will be “safe” in the wild because their lives have always been safe? Again, I’m not saying in any way that Abby should have been abandoned. Not at all. Only that we should question this cultural impulse to take risks and set records just because.

Once upon a time, parts of the globe were untouched by human exploration. Perhaps the urge to explore was extraordinarily adaptive a few million years ago – even a century ago. Today? We’d be wise to ask when exploration and adventure truly serve human knowledge, and when they’re only yoked to ego.

And I’m not saying this only because I’m so cautious, I only ever climbed one tree in my childhood. Perhaps that makes me an unreliable narrator – or just a chicken. Still, I think the larger point about risk and privilege is still valid.

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There’s Nothing Funny about Dying Seabirds …

… Or about any other aspect of the BP oiltastrophy, from the eleven men who died to the thousands whose lives are wrecked.

I haven’t written about it because all I’ve got is a rant and a howl. The administration has bungled the response. If you’re inclined to defend Obama, you might first pay a visit to Erniebufflo’s post detailing the how, when, when, and who of said bungling. I agree with every conclusion she draws, including making BP pay in financial and criminal terms, and passing a comprehensive energy/climate bill that would start weaning us off our oil addiction.

So yeah, there’s nothing to laugh at. And yet, sometimes humor and satire offer the fiercest critiques. You might, for instance, find it enlightening to see what happens when BP spills coffee:

(Go here if you aren’t yet feeling nervous about your coffee. Via Lindsey Beyerstein at Big Think.)

If you’re musically inclined, the Raging Grannies might be more your thing.

(Go here if you can’t see the Grannies. Via Skippy the Bush Kangaroo.)

I want to be a Raging Granny when I grow up. Srsly.

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Socialist Caturday

When I lived in Berlin, May 1 always spurred the Autonomen (anarchists) to riot. They were dumb as dirt in their tactics. Their goals were clear as mud. And yet, I miss May 1 being a day of protest. Some of my colleagues spent today handing out flyers protesting the university’s bassackwards priorities. (Money for coaches, yes! Money for faculty? Nah, let’s cut ‘em, they’re overpaid anyway!) Me, I was embroiled in domestic responsibilities and got no farther than the post office.

But since the hardy-ever-right wing sees even lazy-ass me as a socialist, here’s a nice clip on the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin, 1919. It wasn’t on May Day and the German Communists were tactically and strategically not much better than the Autonomen. But Billy Bragg (who wasn’t on the spot, either) gives a surprisingly rousing rendition of “The Internationale.”

(Go here if you can’t see the clip.)

Of course, since this May Day also falls on a caturday, I’m obliged to say something about cats and politics. Cats are passionate socialists – with respect to humans, who are required to share everything with their kittehs. For themselves, they’re radical libertarians anarchists. Sort of like this:

Capitalist kitteh from I Can Haz Cheezburger?

Happy May Day, everyone!

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Sue Lowden? Meet My Grandpa, the Chicken Doctor

So Sue Lowden – the Republican challenger to Harry Reid – is waxing nostalgic for the days when we could barter for health care, instead of having to mess with all that expensive, bureaucratic health insurance. Here’s the money quote (or the bartered-chicken quote?) at Big Think:

“You know, before we all started having health care,” she recently said in an interview, “in the olden days our grandparents, they would bring a chicken to the doctor, they would say I’ll paint your house. I mean, that’s the old days of what people would do to get health care with your doctors. Doctors are very sympathetic people. I’m not backing down from that system.”

Badtux suggests paying Lowden in chickens, should she become the next senator from Nevada. What an excellent idea! She can run her budget like my paternal grandfather did.

My grandpa was one of those country doctors who did accept payment in kind. Born in 1879, he earned his M.D. from the University of Nebraska in 1907, one of a graduating class of 18 (including one woman). He wound up practicing in North Dakota – whether for humanitarian reasons or due to a love affair gone bad, we’ll likely never know – in a poor part of the state populated mostly by German-Russians. These folks were originally from southwest Germany, where inheritance patterns split landholdings into ever smaller, less sustainable parcels. They migrated to the Crimea in search of an easier life, and thence to North Dakota. I know, I know – they must have had a very flexible notion of the “easy life.”

Once tucked into their large but chilly homesteads, the German-Russians stayed. Where else would they go? They were still poor, for the most part. And they continued to catch smallpox, measles, cancer, and the occasional pregnancy.

My grandpa was the doctor for much of south-central North Dakota. There were a few midwives in the area, too, but over time he attended more of the births.

And yes, sometimes his patients paid him in chickens. My mom describes him thus:

He had a gruff exterior and a very soft heart. I know that the people in Streeter idolized him (some may have feared him a little), and nearly everyone could tell of a time that he came to their farm in the middle of the night and dstayed until the patient was out of danger and usually refused to take any payment, especially if they were poor.

There were days when a chicken was more than a family could spare.

At the end of his life, the town’s very modest public park was devoted to his memory. I like knowing it’s there, even if the play equipment is decrepit. I never knew him; he died in 1961, two years before I was born. It’s a lovely testimonial to his putting patients above profits, which really does seem quaint and almost saintly in the new millennium.

But here’s the trick. My grandpa could afford to work for chickens – or eggs – or even a big old goose egg only because he also had patients who paid him! What’s more, he had much more substantial savings than his neighbors, having invested in Standard Oil around 1900. He and my grandma lived modestly, despite her pretensions to being the town’s aristocracy. (Well, the town was small enough that she sort of was the queen bee.)

My grandma fought with my grandpa over his generosity. He saw the grinding need up close. She saw it at a remove, and only through the lens of a trying to maintain a reasonably bourgeois household on the prairie. They fought bitterly anyway, and the chickens (and all the other bartered goods) became just one more bone of contention.

My grandpa did quite a lot of good, I believe. But it was no way to run a practice, and even less so today, when new doctors may start out burdened with six-figure debts. It also was no way to nurture a marriage. The whole thing was unsustainable, even then. Add in an MRI and a CT and an angiogram … and my grandpa could never have worked for free.

I suspect, though, that he would have been fascinated by the new technologies. He was smart and curious – qualities solely need in the practice of medicine as well as in the debates over its reform.

Frankly, though? As much as I like chickens, I don’t see much of a place for them in Washington. We’re gonna need tougher critters than chickens to fix our broken health system. Unless, perhaps, they’re as fierce as this guy looks – yet not bird-brained.

“Black Rock chicken” from flickr user Todd434, used under a Creative Commons license.

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Economic History Fit for Teabaggers

Every so often, history serves up an analogy that’s misleading, highly distracting, and only indirectly relevant.

Oops. That’s not what David Leonhardt wrote at the New York Times. Here’s what he actually said:

Every so often, history serves up an analogy that’s uncomfortable, a little distracting and yet still very relevant.

In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

It’s true that government spending works to kick-start an economy. But you don’t have to resort to the Nazis to make this argument! Later in the post, Leonhardt acknowledges that Franklin D. Roosevelt also implemented stimulus programs, though later in the decade and more cautiously, thus with less stunning success.

So why, then, frame Obama’s advocacy of stimulus (as the article goes on to do) with the Nazi example? Did it not occur to Leonhardt that this article plays right into the teabaggers’ framing? Obama = socialist = Nazi!

Leonhardt doesn’t get his history quite right, either. While it’s absolutely true that the Nazis banned trade unions, organizing workers instead in the much more employer-friendly German Worker’s Front, that doesn’t negate the real benefits workers enjoyed as the economy bounced back. In 1932, six million Germans were out of work. The resurgent economy – together with the pressure and incentives drawing women out of the workforce – put many working-class men back on the job. Unemployment dropped, and Germans of all classes were able to purchase consumer goods.

Also, the folks subjected to slave labor? They weren’t, by and large, the same people who’d been unemployed in the early thirties. While some were German Jews, the majority of those enslaved were not German citizens.

I’m not arguing that history never holds lessons for the present. It would behoove us, though, to understand what actually happened in the past before we start mining it for analogies.

Perhaps the most important thing one can learn from studying history is that context is crucially important. Apparently the teabaggers equating Obama with Hitler aren’t sharp enough to grasp that. But Leonhardt writes for the Times. What’s his excuse?

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Radical Compassion and the HCR Victory

I’m sitting in front of my TV, like so many of you, watching the post-HCR vote speechifying. I’m grinning like a fool, tearfully.

James Clyburn just said that Nancy Pelosi got it done through tenacity and compassion. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I think that this combination – which I’ll call radical compassion – is precisely what we need to move forward, and not just in the healthcare arena.

(And speaking of hope: My miniature iris is up, too.)

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A “Pro-Life” Rejoinder to Stupak’s Stupidity

As more wobbly Dem congresscritters commit to supporting the health care package, I’m guardedly hopeful that Bart Stupak is about to consign himself to the dustbin of history.

Nonetheless.

I’ve got two “pro-life” reasons why wafflers like my own congresscritter, Charlie Wilson, need to vote yes and put themselves on the right side of history.

First, a study came out this week in the New England Journal of Medicine that demolished fears that universal coverage – even if paired with liberal access to abortion through insurance – will drive up the abortion rate. Dr. Patrick Whelan found that in Massachusetts, abortion actually declined after coverage was expanded to virtually all residents:

The national health care reform legislation that was recently passed by the Senate has been modeled, in many respects, on the Massachusetts reform law; both lack the “public option” that was included in the House bill, which was the focus of the Stupak–Pitts Amendment prohibiting federal subsidies for health plans that would pay for abortion. Therefore, I hypothesized that the early experience in Massachusetts might serve as a good model in which to examine whether a substantial expansion in health care coverage might result in an increased number of abortions.

The relevant part of the Massachusetts program is Commonwealth Care, which provides subsidized insurance to the self-employed, small businesses, and unemployed individuals with incomes below 300% of the federal poverty level. This quasi-public agency began coordinating care through five private participating health plans effective January 1, 2007. I sought to determine whether this increased availability of care has led to an increase in the number of abortions performed in Massachusetts.

The number of abortions in Massachusetts in 2006, the year before the new law was implemented, was 24,245, including 4024 among teenagers. I obtained data from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health for each of the two subsequent years. Some 158,000 people were enrolled in Commonwealth Care plans during the first year. The Urban Institute estimated that between the fall of 2006 and the fall of 2008, the proportion of adults with incomes below 300% of the poverty line who were uninsured fell from 24% to 8%; 63% of all newly insured adults were in either Commonwealth Care or the state Medicaid program.

In 2007, the first year of Commonwealth Care, the number of abortions fell to 24,128, and in 2008, it fell to 23,883 — a decline of 1.5% from the 2006 level (see graph). The number of abortions among teenagers in 2008 fell to 3726, a 7.4% decline from 2006. These decreases occurred during a period of rising birth rates, from 55.6 per 1000 women 15 to 44 years of age to 56.9 per 1000 in 2006 and 57.2 per 1000 in 2007 (the latest year for which data are available from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health), and an increase in overall population (in 2008, the Massachusetts population surpassed 6.5 million for the first time, and it was nearly 6.6 million in 2009, according to the Census Bureau). The abortion rate thus declined from 3.8 per 1000 population in 2006 to 3.6 per 1000 in 2008. Overall, since 2000, the number of abortions in Massachusetts has dropped by 12% (from 27,180 to 23,883) and by nearly 36% since 1991.² The Massachusetts abortion rate has similarly dropped by a third, from 30 per 1000 women 15 to 44 years of age in 1991 to about 20 per 1000 in 2005, with most of the decrease occurring during the late 1990s.³

(I excerpted the main findings, but the whole article, including its graphics, is free and easily comprehensible to non-specialist readers.)

Or, to put it briefly, abortions declined both in absolute numbers and on a per-capita basis. The drop was steeper for teenagers.

Now, it’s possible that Massachusetts is simply mirroring national trends, where abortions have slowly declined in reason years (with, however, an upward blip nationally in 2006). But at the very least, it seems reasonable to conclude that in the biggest, best real-life laboratory we’ve got, access to abortion – which was a covered service for Medicaid recipients and the next-lowest income tier covered by Commonwealth care – did nothing to increase the number of abortions performed.

Whelan doesn’t speculate what other factors might be depressing the abortion rate, but I can think of two. First, there may be fewer unplanned pregnancies if Commonwealth Care is delivering family planning services and contraception to the neediest residents. Second, a woman confronting an unplanned pregnancy may be more likely to keep it if she knows she can count on good medical care for her child and herself. I don’t know enough about the details of the Massachusetts system to know if it really does provide decent reproductive health care, but this seems like a reasonable conjecture.

What would happen if we expanded the Massachusetts experiment nationwide? Well, the likelihood of an upward trend in abortions might be even slighter in more conservative states, where cultural attitudes discourage abortion. Those women might also be less likely to avail themselves of contraceptive services, so they’d benefit less from access to it. On balance, my gut feeling is that red states would continue to have more unplanned babies and shotgun weddings than blue states like Massachusetts, but their abortion rates will remain about the same. That’s just my instinct, and I could be wrong, but if Massachusetts women didn’t start aborting by the millions, do we seriously think the gals in Utah will?

The second “pro-life” argument I’d like our congresscritters to hear relates to our shameful maternal and infant mortality rates. Our ostensibly pro-life politicians are utterly silent on those two interlinked scandals. They shouldn’t be.

This week, Amnesty International released a lengthy, serious, well-documented study on maternal health in the U.S. (Go here for the link to the full, free report in pdf format.) At Mom’s Tinfoil Hat, Hilary writes:

It’s often asserted, including in this report, that infant and maternity mortality are key indicators in the health and social justice of a country.

I’d add that they ought to be key indicators for the seriousness of grandstanding “pro-life” politicians.

Take, for instance, the ranking of states according to maternal deaths. Maine comes out on top, with just 1.2 mothers dying per 100,000 live births. Vermont is second, at 2.6. You might object that these are small states with small populations, and that the number of women dying there is so small that figures may be deceptive. Could be. But then check out Massachusetts in third place with 2.7. Hmm, we’re starting to see a regional trend.

The District of Columbia rules the hall of shame with 34.9 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births, worse than Costa Rica. Georgia is second-worst with 20.5. (Figures are from pp. 104-5 of Amnesty’s report, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA.)

As Amnesty notes on its webpage:

During 2004 and 2005, more than 68,000 women nearly died in childbirth in the USA. Each year, 1.7 million women suffer a complication that has an adverse effect on their health.

This is not just a public health emergency – it is a human rights crisis. Women in the USA face a range of obstacles in obtaining the services they need. The health care system suffers from multiple failures: discrimination; financial, bureaucratic and language barriers to care; lack of information about maternal care and family planning options; lack of active participation in care decisions; inadequate staffing and quality protocols; and a lack of accountability and oversight.

So why should Stupak care? After all, these are just a bunch of women – disproportionately poor women of color – who should’ve kept their legs shut, right, according to Stupakian logic? In his view, aren’t these just throw-away mothers?

Well, when mothers die, babies sometimes die with them. Hemorrhage, eclampsia, embolism – all can endanger the infant as well as the mother.

While babies can’t yet talk, I don’t think it’s a big leap to say that most prefer not to be half-orphaned at birth.

Most significantly for Stupak and his allies, however, is that obstetric care benefits babies and mothers alike. Where mothers survive, infants are more likely to survive and thrive. That’s true here in the U.S. as well as globally. We do worse than Cuba when it comes to keeping newborns alive.

And guess what? Health care reform has the potential for helping mothers and (potential) babies get the care they need.

So I’ll be waiting to hear from Stupak and the bishops on how, exactly, killing health care reform will help preserve mothers and babies – and how, precisely, they can call the resulting deaths and complications “pro-life.”

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