Tuesday, November 20, 2012 4:40:05 AM
Is Rush Limbaugh’s Country Gone?
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
November 18, 2012, 11:14 pm
The morning after the re-election of President Obama, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/11/07/in_a_nation_of_children_santa_claus_wins ]:
I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.
The conservative talk show host, who had been an upbeat, if initially doubtful, Romney supporter throughout the campaign, was on a post-election downer:
In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision of traditional America. In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren’t doing enough to help those who aren’t. And that resonated.
Limbaugh echoed a Republican theme that was voiced before [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video ] and after the election: Barack Obama has unleashed a coalition of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them” — as Mitt Romney put it in his notorious commentary on the 47 percent.
You can find this message almost everywhere on the right side of the spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, for example, annually calculates an “Index of Dependence on Government [ http://blog.heritage.org/2012/09/18/index-of-dependence-on-government-jumps-for-the-fourth-year-in-a-row/ ],” which grows every year:
Today, more people than ever before depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States reached another milestone in 2010: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes. It is the conjunction of these two trends—higher spending on dependence-creating programs, and an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers who pay for these programs—that concerns those interested in the fate of the American form of government.
William Bennett [ http://washingtonspeakers.com/speakers/speaker.cfm?SpeakerId=2372 ], conservative stalwart, television commentator and secretary of education under President Reagan, complained on the CNN Web site [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/opinion/bennett-gop-election/index.html ] that Democrats have been successful in setting
the parameters and focus of the national and political dialogue as predominantly about gender, race, ethnicity and class. This is the paradigm, the template through which many Americans, probably a majority, more or less view the world, our country, and the election. It is a divisive strategy and Democrats have targeted and exploited those divides. How else can we explain that more young people now favor socialism to capitalism?
In fact, the 2011 Pew Research Center poll [ http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/12-28-11-2/ ] Bennett cites demonstrates that in many respects conservatives are right to be worried:
Not only does a plurality (49-43) of young people hold a favorable view of socialism — and, by a tiny margin (47-46), a negative view of capitalism — so do liberal Democrats, who view socialism positively by a solid 59-33; and African Americans, 55-36. Hispanics are modestly opposed, 49-44, to socialism, but they hold decisively negative attitudes toward capitalism, 55-32.
Much of the focus in the media in recent years has been on the growing hard-line stance of the Republican Party. At the same time, there are significant developments taking place as a new left alliance forms to underpin the Democratic Party. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira originally described this alliance in 2002 as the emerging Democratic majority [ http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Emerging_Democratic_Majority.html?id=ItAOKZs4PqIC ] in a pioneering book of the same name. More recently, the pollster Stan Greenberg and a group of liberal activists have described it as the “rising American electorate [ http://books.google.com/books?id=JXBLnaty1ugC&pg=PT64&lpg=PT64&dq=edsall+and+%22rising+american+electorate%22&source=bl&ots=q9fKLXvPbP&sig=ujzdVfvylNezUrQR9Iy9dHPAUsw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Q-6lUObQFK650AG6x4HIDw&sqi=2&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBQ ].”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has devoted much of her work to analyzing the changing shape of the liberal and conservative coalitions, said in an e-mail that the rising American electorate
will have profound implications because the R.A.E. has a very different approach to the role for government, very different views on race and tolerance, different views on gender roles, and very different views on economic opportunity and security. These are some of the biggest divides in our culture.
Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal-left Campaign for America’s Future, put it more bluntly in a blog post [ http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012114507/triumph-middle-class-populism ]:
In our Gilded Age of extreme inequality, with a middle class that increasingly understands the rules are rigged against them, this was the first election in what is likely to be an era of growing class warfare.
Two post-election polls – one released Nov. 14 by the Democracy Corps [ http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/the-role-of-the-rising-american-electorate-in-the-2012-election/ ] (founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville), the other released Nov. 16 by the Public Religion Research Institute [ http://publicreligion.org/research/2012/11/american-values-post-election-survey-2012/ ] – reveal the decisively liberal views of the core constituencies within the rising American electorate and its support for government activism, especially measures to help the disadvantaged.
The findings from the P.R.R.I. survey are very illuminating:
* When voters were asked whether cutting taxes or investing in education and infrastructure is the better policy to promote economic growth, the constituencies of the new liberal electorate consistently chose education and infrastructure by margins ranging from 2-1 to 3-2 — African Americans by 62-33, Hispanics by 61-37, never-married men by 56-38, never-married women by 64-30, voters under 30 by 63-34, and those with post-graduate education by 60-33.
Conservative constituencies generally chose lowering taxes by strong margins — whites by 52-42, married men by 59-34, married women by 51-44, all men by 52-41; older voters between the ages of 50 and 65 by 54-42.
* The constituencies that make up the rising American electorate are firmly in favor of government action to reduce the gap between rich and poor, by 85-15 among blacks, 74-26 for Hispanics; 70-30 never-married men; 83-15 never-married women; and 76-24 among voters under 30. Conservative groups range from lukewarm to opposed: 53-47 for men; 53-47 among voters 50-65; 46-54 among married men; 52-47 among all whites.
* One of the clearest divides between the rising American electorate and the rest of the country is in responses to the statement “Government is providing too many social services that should be left to religious groups and private charities. Black disagree 67-32; Hispanics disagree 57-40; never-married women 70-27; never-married men, 59-41; young voters, 66-34; and post-grad, 65-34. Conversely, whites agree with the statement 54-45; married men agree, 60-39; married women, 55-44; all men, 55-43.
The Democracy Corps survey specifically broke out the collective views of the liberal alliance and contrasted them with the views of those on the right. Some findings:
* By a margin of 60-13, voters on the left side of the spectrum favor raising taxes on incomes above $1 million, while voters outside of the left are much less supportive, 39-25. In the case of raising the minimum wage, the left backs a hike by an overwhelming 64-6 margin, while those on the right are far less supportive, 32-18. The rising American electorate backs raising the minimum wage by 64-6, while the people outside it back a hike by just 32-18. The left coalition supports a carbon tax or fee by 43-14 while right-leaning voters are opposed, 37-24.
Policies supported by the rising American electorate — which closely overlaps with the Obama coalition — provoke intense opposition from the right. In the aftermath of the election, Romney blamed his defeat [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/romney-blames-loss-on-obamas-gifts-to-minorities-and-young-voters/ ] on the “gifts” Obama handed out to “the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”
In fact, the rising American electorate represents a direct threat to the striking array of government benefits for the affluent that the conservative movement has won over the past 40 years. These include the reduction of the top income tax rate [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/Content/PDF/toprate_historical.pdf ] from 50 percent in 1986 to 35 percent; the 15 percent tax rate [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=161 ] on dividend and capital gains income, which was 39.9 percent in 1977; the lowering of the top estate tax rate from 70 percent in 1981, with just $175,000 exempted from taxation, to a top rate of 35 percent this year [ http://wills.about.com/od/understandingestatetaxes/a/estatetaxchart.htm ] with $5.1 million exempted from taxation.
At the same time, the Pew survey cited above shows the high levels of skepticism and hostility toward capitalism on the part of the emerging Democratic majority. Insofar as the liberal coalition succeeds in electing senators and representatives who share those views, the business community will have increasing difficulty in winning approval of its deregulated market and free trade agenda.
As Obama negotiates with Republican House and Senate leaders to prevent a dive over the “fiscal cliff,” he will be under strong pressure from his reinvigorated liberal supporters to take a tough stand in support of tax hikes on the well-to-do and to more firmly limit spending cuts.
“Looking ahead to their post-election agenda, this is not a group looking for ‘austerity,’ ” the Democracy Corps wrote [ http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/the-role-of-the-rising-american-electorate-in-the-2012-election/ ] in a report accompanying its post-election survey. “Indeed, their issues are explicitly progressive and investment-oriented,” in terms of human capital. The report went on:
The rising American electorate’s most important priority for the president and the Congress is “investing in education,” followed by “protecting Social Security and Medicare.”
In effect, the 21st century version of class conflict sets the stage for an exceptionally bitter face-off between the left and the right in Congress. The national government is facing the prospect of forced austerity [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3844 ], weighing such zero-sum choices as raising capital gains taxes or cutting food stamps, slashing defense spending or restricting unemployment benefits, establishing a 15 cents-a-gallon gasoline tax or pushing citizens off the Medicaid rolls [ http://www.thepoliticalguide.com/Issues/Simpson-Bowles/ ], pushing central bank policy favorable to the financial services industry [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/ ] or curtailing Medicare eligibility.
In broader terms, the political confrontation pits taxpayers, who now form the core of the center-right coalition, against tax consumers who form the core of the center-left. According to the Tax Policy Center, 46.4 percent of all tax filers had no federal income tax liability in 2011 (although most people pay a combination [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=3054 ] of state, sales, excise, property and other levies).There are clear exceptions to this dichotomy, as many Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries (tax recipients) vote Republican, and many college-educated upper-income citizens of all races and ethnicities (tax payers) vote Democratic. Nonetheless, the overarching division remains, and the battle lines are drawn over how to distribute the costs of the looming fiscal crisis [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578107280483982220.html ]. The outcome of this policy fight will determine whether Limbaugh is correct to fear that his side has “lost the country.”
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.
*
This is the last column in the 2012 edition of Campaign Stops. We began on a Sunday a year before the election with a piece by Thomas B. Edsall on how politics look when governments don’t have enough money. We end today with another piece by Mr. Edsall on the rising American electorate that returned President Obama to the White House.
In between we have published hundreds of pieces — by feminist political scientists, conservative historians, demographically oriented statisticians, political theorists, religious thinkers and many others, including one every week by the Op-Ed columnists Charles M. Blow and Ross Douthat. Mr. Blow and Mr. Douthat will continue to write their print columns on the weekend and to be a major presence online during the week. Tom Edsall will remain with The Times as a weekly online columnist after he takes a well-deserved rest (his contributions to Campaign Stops totaled almost 100,000 words).
Campaign Stops also published more than 95,000 comments from its passionate readers, some of whom could be columnists themselves — a huge benefit of the kind of open format that the web provides. We’ll be back in November 2015, ready to debate the issues that have driven American political history since the beginning, but we are also eager to find out what fresh developments we’ll be talking about that we can’t anticipate now.
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/is-rush-limbaughs-country-gone/ [with comments]
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Robertson: "Miserable" Atheists Trying to "Steal" Christmas
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-miserable-atheists-trying-steal-christmas
Pat Robertson says atheists are "miserable so they want you to be miserable" by trying "to steal your holiday away from you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxj1NJ8nh-8
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Santa Monica Nativity Scenes At Palisades Park Will Be No More, Rules Federal Judge
A Los Angeles federal judge has denied a Christian group's bid for an injunction to force suburban Santa Monica to reopen spaces in a city park to private displays, including Christmas Nativity scenes.
By GILLIAN FLACCUS
11/19/12 10:01 PM ET EST
LOS ANGELES — There's no room for the baby Jesus, the manger or the wise men this Christmas in a Santa Monica park following a judge's ruling Monday against churches that tried to keep a 60-year Nativity tradition alive after atheists stole the show with anti-God messages.
U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins rejected a motion from the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee to allow the religious display this season while their lawsuit plays out against the city.
Collins said the city was within its constitutional right to eliminate the exemption that had allowed the Nativity at the oceanfront Palisades Park because the change affected all comers – from Christians to Jews to atheists – and provided other avenues for public religious speech.
The coalition of churches that had put on the life-sized, 14-booth Nativity display for decades argued the city banned it rather than referee a religious dispute that began three years ago when atheists first set up their anti-God message alongside the Christmas diorama.
The judge, however, said Santa Monica proved that it banned the displays not to squash religious speech but because they were becoming a drain on city resources, destroying the turf and obstructing ocean views. Churches can set up unattended displays at 12 other parks in the city with a permit and can leaflet, carol and otherwise present the Christmas story in Palisades Park when it is open, she said.
"I think all of the evidence that is admissible about the aesthetic impacts and administrative burden shows that this was a very reasonable alternative for the city to go this way – and it had nothing to do with content," she said during a hearing in federal court in Los Angeles.
William Becker, the attorney for the Christian group, said he expects the case will be dismissed at a hearing on Dec. 3 based on Monday's proceedings and plans to appeal.
"The atheists won and they will always win unless we get courts to understand how the game is played and this is a game that was played very successfully and they knew it," Becker said, comparing the city to Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who authorized Jesus' crucifixion.
The trouble in Santa Monica began in 2009, when atheist Damon Vix applied for and was granted a booth in Palisades Park alongside the story of Jesus Christ's birth.
Vix hung a simple sign that quoted Thomas Jefferson: "Religions are all alike -- founded on fables and mythologies." The other side read "Happy Solstice." He repeated the display the following year but then upped the stakes significantly.
In 2011, Vix recruited 10 others to inundate the city with applications for tongue-in-cheek displays such as an homage to the "Pastafarian religion," which would include an artistic representation of the great Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The secular coalition won 18 of 21 spaces. Two others went to the traditional Christmas displays and one to a Hanukkah display.
The atheists used half their spaces, displaying signs such as one that showed pictures of Poseidon, Jesus, Santa Claus and the devil and said: "37 million Americans know myths when they see them. What myths do you see?"
Most of the signs were vandalized and in the ensuing uproar, the city effectively ended a tradition that began in 1953 and earned Santa Monica one of its nicknames, the City of the Christmas Story.
"The birth of Jesus Christ is the linchpin of Western civilization, our calendar derives from it, but now somehow it's just not right to have a classic depiction of this event in a Nativity scene in a city park," said Hunter Jameson, head of the Nativity committee.
In court Monday, Deputy City Attorney Yibin Shen said the ban had been under consideration for years and was ultimately motivated by the cost to the city after the number of applicants spiked in recent years.
The department in charge of running the lottery for booth spaces doubled its staff and spent 245 hours annually running the system and reviewing applications, he said.
"This is a 20-year decision in the making," he said.
For his part, Vix said he was pleased with Monday's ruling, but was also saddened by the anger being directed against atheists since he hung his first anti-God sign in 2009.
"So many people don't understand atheists," he said. "If you read the signs we put up, one said, `Love is all around you.' That's really a better understanding of who most atheists are."
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
*
Santa Monica Navity Scene & Atheist Displays [slideshow; a few follow]
All photos courtesy of Atheists United [ http://atheistsunited.org/ ]
*
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/santa-monica-nativity-display_n_2160326.html [with comments]
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Big Banks vs. Elizabeth Warren: It's On (Again!)
The fight between the financial industry and Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren heats up again over her possible nomination to the Senate banking committee.
Nov. 19, 2012
Not even two weeks have passed since Democrat Elizabeth Warren rode a wave of grassroots support to victory in the US Senate race in Massachusetts [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/elizabeth-warren-scott-brown-massachusetts ], ousting Republican incumbent Scott Brown. Senator-elect Warren has not yet hired her staff. She has not yet moved into her Senate office. But the banking industry is already taking aim at her, scurrying to curb her future clout on Capitol Hill.
Lobbyists and trade groups for Wall Street and other major banking players are pressuring lawmakers to deny Warren a seat on the powerful Senate banking committee. With the impending departures of Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Democrats have two spots to fill on the committee before the 113th Congress gavels in next year. Warren has yet said whether she wants to serve on the committee. But she would be a natural: She's a bankruptcy law expert, she served as Congress' lead watchdog overseeing the $700 billion bank bailout [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/bank-buster-elizabeth-warren ] from 2008 to 2010, and she conceived of and helped launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
But the big banks are not fans of Warren, and their representatives in Washington have her in their crosshairs. Aides to two senators on the banking committee tell Mother Jones the industry has already moved to block Warren from joining the committee, which is charged with drafting legislation regulating much of the financial industry. "Downtown"—shorthand for Washington's lobbying corridor—"has been going nuts" to keep her off the committee, another Senate aide says.
[...]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/elizabeth-warren-senate-banking-committee [with comments]
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The Twinkie Manifesto
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 18, 2012
The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.
Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.
Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. Remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, charged with producing a plan to curb deficits, nonetheless somehow ended up listing “lower tax rates” as a “guiding principle.”
Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.
Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders.
Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live [ http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/06/classic-top-500-executives/ ],” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat.
The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters.
Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right?
Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America.
Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973.
Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing.
There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.
Along the way, however, we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/krugman-the-twinkie-manifesto.html [with comments]
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GOProud, Gay Republican Group, Offers Twinkies For Donations As Potential Snack Shortage Looms
11/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/gay-republican-group-goproud-twinkies-for-donations_n_2160131.html [with comments]
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Organized Labor's Newest Heroes: Strippers
Charlie Riedel/AP Images
Exotic dancers are fighting back against unfair wages, and last week they had a landmark victory.
By Melissa Gira Grant
Nov 19 2012, 3:54 PM ET
The words "labor dispute" make a lot of people imagine big men on a picket line. This, despite the fact that the high-profile workers' struggles of the past year happened in jobs dominated by women stuck with low wages and little respect: from domestic workers securing benefits in New York state, to Chicago's teachers' strikes, to this week's Black Friday actions organized across the country against Wal-Mart. There's another group of women we should add to this list, women who have been continually fighting for their rights at work, who are met with disbelief and retaliation when they stand up, and smirking headlines and punny scorn even when they win.
Last week, strippers employed by the Spearmint Rhino chain won an unprecedented $13 million settlement [ http://www.vcstar.com/news/2012/nov/13/spearmint-rhino-exotic-dancers-settle-suit-for/ ] in Federal court, the result of a class action suit to restore back wages and contest their status as independent contractors of the clubs. Deciding in the dancers' favor is U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips, best known for ruling "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" unconstitutional in 2010. It's one of the largest financial settlements awarded to dancers at a major chain in the United States—with 20 locations worldwide, and though Spearmint Rhino would not release this information, it's fair to estimate with several hundred if not several thousand dancers working in their clubs in the United States. In sex workers' ongoing fight for the same rights on the job that any worker should expect, will the dancers' case be a tipping point in the strip club business? "Spearmint Rhino is a big brand." says Bubbles Burbujas, a stripper and one of the co-founders of the popular sex work blog Tits and Sass [ http://titsandsass.com/ ]. "There's no way this won't have an effect."
It's definitely a big win for the 14 dancers named in the suit, but also for dancers in California. Judge Phillips ruled that within 30 days Spearmint Rhino must stop charging dancers what are known as "stage fees" for the right to work. Phillips also ruled that the chain is required to grant all dancers in their clubs employee status within six months, ending the illegal practice of classifying dancers as independent contractors while also placing workplace demands on them that far exceed that legal status. By managing dancers like employees but putting them on the books as independent contractors, club owners get out of paying dancers the benefits they're legally entitled to, which could include worker's compensation, unemployment, and health insurance if they qualify. Owners and management alike tell dancers they're independent, but they still exercise control over dancers on the job, routinely using the kinds of restrictive rules on breaks and conduct you've come to expect of Wal-Mart, not the mythically "anything goes" world of sex work.
"This is a great result," says attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who who specializes in tipped employees and independent contractor misclassification cases, and has represented dancers in class action law suits in several states. "It will put a lot of money in the pockets of women in this industry, but it will also send a clear message to clubs across this country that they should not misclassify dancers as independent contractors. When they look at these numbers in these lawsuits, they realize it's not worth it."
Dancers have brought suit after suit over illegal tip-sharing and misclassification as independent contractors for over 15 years now, starting with a string of high profile settlements in California in the late 1990's, leading to the founding of the Exotic Dancers' Alliance. (Disclosure: I'm not only a writer, but I was also a member of the Exotic Dancers Union, SEIU Local 790, from 2003 to 2006. "No justice, no piece.") At the same time, corporate chains like Spearmint Rhino, Deja Vu, and others have been buying up or pricing out the smaller clubs that tended towards giving dancers more control at work. The corporate consolidation of strip clubs is not that different than what's hit small businesses all over the country, only almost no one stood up to chase the Hustler Club out of town on a workers'-rights platform.
Unfortunately, when dancers win settlements for back wages, if the suits don't make it to trial, they have limited effect to set precedent and make sustained change the business. Hima B., a former dancer and the director of License to Pimp, a documentary about strippers and labor conditions, reported that clubs just institute new policies to illegally take dancers' tips [ http://titsandsass.com/license-to-pimp-a-conversation-with-filmmaker-hima-b-draft/ ], like several clubs in San Francisco using "piece rate" systems and quotas, where dancers must perform a set number of lap dances each shift, giving the house a percentage of each dance.
In response to a class action suit against a neighboring strip club in Montana, said Bubbles Burbujas, the club where she works started giving dancers paychecks—but management still illegally retained a portion of dancers' tips. Dancers in this club who were earning the same per shift before the lawsuits were also now going home with less. Before the move to the paycheck system, dancers paid a $25 stage fee per shift, as well as tips to bouncers and the DJ, "but we kept the rest of our dance money," she explained. "Now you hand over $70 of the first $100 you make, and you get a minimum wage paycheck, where you get back 30 percent or 40 percent of that."
"These are problems where there is no good legal recourse for dancers," said Burbujas. "You can sue to get wages and health benefits, but look at the way wage employees are already treated in this country—it's not very good. It's not like you're going to be treated any better."
As its currently organized, stripping is service work—and not unlike most service work in the United States, it's a field dominated by women who have to fight to be treated fairly. Even in a strip club where she was getting a pay check, Mariko Passion, a former dancer and current escort and artist, said, "I was still being charged $80 every day to work there, not including my tip-out," additional fees to be paid to DJ's and other club service staff. Dancers' tips can vary widely, depending on factors as unpredictable as customer whims and volume, to banal concerns like rain and football. On a shift where you pull in eight $20 dances (that's $160 before tip-out, for your back of the cocktail napkin math), an $80 "stage fee" per shift means you just gave half your earnings to your bosses. You might feel differently if you get twenty dances or a big tipper, but the stakes are the same every shift, and they're rigged to maximize club profits. "But restaurants can try to do exactly the same thing with your tips," says Passion, who brought her own individual suit over illegal tip sharing and won against three California clubs. "It's not just a strip club thing. It's a capitalist thing."
Lawsuits like these are one of the more powerful tools dancers have to recover stolen earnings, and they represent just one possible step towards the kind of collective organizing that could ensure dancers' rights for the long-term. If you can imagine and appreciate the obstacles workers at megachains [ http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/6615/wal-mart_faces_a_new_round_of_historic_strikes..._but_why_now/ ] face in fighting for fair wages, now imagine what the strip club picket line looks like. The small pool of dancers who will risk their jobs over workplace organizing is further limited by what dancers can risk outing themselves to their friends, family and others as sex workers in the process. The price of speaking out isn't just the "whore stigma" that all sex workers face; it could also mean discrimination at dancers' other jobs or future jobs (thanks, Google), or could provide a bogus rationale for a dancer to lose custody of her children to a former partner or the state. It could even put dancers on the vice unit's radar, depending where they work and how aggressive anti-prostitution policing is in their community.
"In any employment case, it takes a very strong employee to challenge them for doing something illegal," said Liss-Riordan, "but in the strip club industry it's particularly difficult for women to step forward. For those cases that resolve successfully, it's a real tribute to women who are able to battle it out and fight for their rights."
In most cases, at the first sign of dancers getting organized, a club will just make working there impossible for them. When Rachel Aimee and other dancers at a New York club raised objections to a new stage fee levied against them, the owners banned them from selling lap dances, "thus taking away our primary means of making money," writes Aimee at In These Times [ http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13089/in_search_of_stripper_solidarity/ ]. "A few weeks later, the owner fired me and another dancer, whom he took to be the instigators, and re-introduced the house fee."
Legally speaking, it's retaliation, sure—but who is going to enforce the National Labor Relations Act at the tip rail? (And if you do know who, spread the word. So far only one union represents a strip club in the United States.)
Dancers may dispute how to get the strip clubs to give them their fair share of their earnings, but their fight for control over their working conditions is the point—not to abolish the industry, as some women's right activists want to do. Dancers aren't taking the potential risks associated with outing themselves to file lawsuits or to organize necessarily because they want to defend stripping as an institution; they're defending, as many women have and many more must, their right to earn a good living.
Rachel Aimee is no longer a dancer, but she's still organizing, with the grassroots group We Are Dancers. "We're trying to raise awareness among dancers of their legal rights," Aimee told me, "so that dancers can make up their own minds whether and how they want to take action against their clubs." With current and former dancers, they're developing an educational website and "know your rights" booklets [ http://www.indiegogo.com/wearedancers ], translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian to distribute in clubs across New York City.
No matter how dancers decide to defend their labor rights, knowing that other dancers have each other's back is the bottom line. "A lot of people who had gone through this treatment at work had made me think that was unique to stripping," said Mariko Passion, "but it's not. It's everywhere. But we're somehow supposed to feel more violated when it's stripping? Even more than if you're cleaning toilets? I wish we could encourage more women to fight back."
Melissa Gira Grant writes on sex, politics, and technology. She is a contributor to TheNation.com, Wired.com, and Glamour. Her essays have been included in the annual anthology Best Sex Writing. She writes regularly for postwhoreamerica.com [ http://postwhoreamerica.com/ ].
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/organized-labors-newest-heroes-strippers/265376/ [with comments]
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Savita's Death Was Not an Isolated Incident
By Cecile Richards
President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund
Posted: 11/19/2012 5:19 pm
By now news of Savita Halappanavar's senseless death has traveled around the world, drawing attention [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/14/ireland-abortion-scrutiny-death ] to Ireland's near-total ban on abortion and the horrific consequences of such policies. This is not a stand-alone case. Every 90 seconds a woman dies from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, totaling more than 350,000 deaths worldwide each year. Nearly all of these deaths occur in developing countries, where access to modern medical care is scarce.
What makes Savita's story so shocking is that she died in a modern hospital in a developed European country. We health advocates spend a lot of time and energy fighting for the kind of access Savita (almost) had. Hers was a planned pregnancy. She herself was a medical professional, a dentist, who recognized the warning signs of pregnancy complications. When she felt severe pains, she and her husband didn't have to travel far to reach a clean, modern hospital where her health problems were quickly diagnosed. And when she learned that she was miscarrying and that her life was in danger, she asked her doctor about her options and requested that her pregnancy be ended before it killed her.
Lack of access to medical care did not kill Savita -- politics did.
The slow and painful death Ireland's abortion ban forced Savita to endure, and forced her husband to witness, brings to mind another tragic story. Earlier this year, doctors in the Dominican Republic refused [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/18/world/americas/dominican-republic-abortion/index.html ] chemotherapy to a 16-year-old cancer patient because she was pregnant.
Think this couldn't happen in the United States? Think again.
In Nebraska, Danielle Deaver experienced complications in the 22nd week of her pregnancy. Her water broke and doctors informed her that there was not enough amniotic fluid for her daughter to survive. Devastated, Danielle wanted to end the pregnancy, but her state's ban on safe and legal abortion after 20 weeks gestation prevented [ http://www.womenarewatching.org/article/life-just-isnt-black-and-white-danielle-deavers-story-about-how-the-20-week-abortion-ban-became-her- ] her from doing so. Instead, Danielle was forced to continue her pregnancy and deliver a baby that died moments after birth [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NneTbcCad9k (next below, as embedded)].
Savita and Danielle represent some of the most extreme outcomes of harmful policies, but by no means the full extent. Women across the country and around the world suffer in myriad ways because of politics that deny women the ability to make their own health care decisions.
They face challenges ranging from mental anguish after becoming pregnant from a sexual assault, to the judgment and shame created by bad policies, to the health consequences of complicated pregnancies, both intended and unintended.
The best way to honor the life and courage of Savita and women like her is to make sure no woman dies again in these circumstances. We need to ensure that laws and policies give women the ability to make decisions about whether to end a pregnancy, choose adoption, or raise a child.
It's time we let politicians know that we will no longer allow politics to interfere with women's health. We have enough work ensuring that women and families can access quality medical care. Let's leave the personal decisions up to them and their doctors.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cecile-richards/savitas-death-was-not-an_b_2161151.html [with comments]
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Reproductive Crisis? Do Not Proceed to a Catholic Hospital
By Angela Bonavoglia
Posted: 06/ 7/10 07:55 PM ET
So many things are galling about Phoenix Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted's excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride, a member of St. Joseph's Hospital Ethics Committee, for approving the termination of the life-threatening, 11-week-old pregnancy of a 27-year-old mother of four that it's hard to know where to begin. But surely one of the most urgent issues this case raises is the danger faced by any woman who sets foot in a Catholic hospital in the midst of a reproductive crisis.
Just to recap, late last year a critically-ill pregnant woman was brought into St. Joseph's suffering from pulmonary hypertension. Her pregnancy posed such a burden to her heart and lungs that carrying it to term almost certainly would have killed her. Sister Margaret approved the decision of the physicians, the patient, and her family to terminate the pregnancy.
When Olmsted learned that this procedure had taken place, all hell broke loose. Without a scintilla of empathy or sympathy for the dying woman and her family, Olmsted said [ http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2010/05/14/20100514stjoseph0515bishop.html ]: "The direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral, no matter the circumstances." Since the abortion was not "indirect" (i.e., the byproduct of another procedure necessary to save the mother's life, such as removing a cancerous uterus), the correct moral action, according to Olmsted and the Phoenix diocese [dead link ( http://www.catholicsun.org/2010/phxdio-stjoes/Q-AND-A-ST-JOSEPH-HOSPITAL-FINAL.pdf ); see/covered by link above; later related at http://www.catholicsun.org/2011/01/20/media-obligated-to-provide-community-with-truth-justice-in-reporting/ ], was this: Let the mother and the fetus die.
We do not know how often such decisions come up in Catholic hospitals. Nor do we know if any go the other way -- that is, the beliefs of the Olmsteds of the Church prevail and discharge is followed by a funeral. What we do know is that Catholic hospitals, charged with abiding by the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services [ http://www.usccb.org/about/doctrine/ethical-and-religious-directives/ ], pose a real danger to women's health and lives.
"One of the most troubling areas is in the treatment of reproductive emergencies," says Lois Uttley, director of the MergerWatch Project [ http://www.mergerwatch.org/ ], which works with communities facing Catholic-non-Catholic hospital mergers to preserve reproductive health services. A miscarriage in progress is an example of the emergencies Uttley is referencing. When it happens so early in pregnancy that the fetus cannot survive, the pregnancy has to be terminated quickly. Unfortunately, explains Uttley, in some Catholic hospitals, this isn't what happens; the fetal heartbeat has to stop before doctors can do the procedure.
The disturbing findings of a report published in late 2008 in the American Journal of Public Health [ http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2007.126730 ] bear this out. The researchers set out to explore the impact of residency abortion training on the medical practices of a sample of ob-gyns. In the course of conducting their interviews, they got an unexpected glimpse into the conflicts posed by the Directives for physicians attempting to manage miscarriages.
One doctor working at a Catholic hospital reported receiving a woman whose pregnancy "was very early, 14 weeks," with "a hand sticking out of the cervix," indicating that "clearly the membranes had ruptured and she was trying to deliver." Because there was still a fetal heart rate, the ethics committee refused to approve the abortion; they sent the woman to another institution 90 miles away.
Another doctor, at an academic medical center, reported that a Catholic-owned hospital called to ask her to accept a pregnant miscarrying patient who was already septic and hemorrhaging. She urged them to do the uterine aspiration themselves, but they refused. That doctor accepted the patient and did the procedure, but saw this case as a form of "patient dumping." She reported the hospital for an Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act violation.
Obviously and fundamentally, the question is this: Why does a woman lying at death's door have to worry about whether a procedure that will save her life violates the so-called "ethical" Directives of a religion she doesn't belong to or long ago abandoned, Directives that treat women as disposable delivery systems for new humans, while flying in the face of standard, approved medical practice?
One answer is that the original conscience clauses, approved by Congress after the passage of Roe v. Wade, have been bastardized. They now apply not only to people -- physicians and nurses who oppose abortion -- but to institutions whose "consciences" trump not only the patient's own conscience, but also violate her right to informed consent and to medically indicated care.
We need more research into how often and in what ways physicians compromise patient care as a result of the Catholic Directives. But for now, the experience of the nameless, faceless, pregnant woman who Bishop Olmstead would have sentenced to death (rather than having her live "the rest of her existence having had her child killed," which is how the diocesan statement put it) is a cautionary tale.
Unless you are a deeply devoted Catholic and want your local bishop to make your most intimate medical decisions, when the ambulance pulls up, be ready. Have your own ethical and moral directive saying: Do Not Take Me to a Catholic Hospital. If for no other reason than this: there may not be a Sister Margaret in the house.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-bonavoglia/reproductive-crisis-do-no_b_602086.html [with comments]
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Treatment Denied
Photo of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix by Serwaa Adu-Tutu.
May 9, 2011 by Molly M. Ginty
Kathleen Prieskorn gasped in shock as her medical nightmare began. Still reeling from the heartbreak of an earlier miscarriage, Prieskorn was three months pregnant and working as a waitress when she felt a twinge, felt a trickle down her leg and realized she was miscarrying again.
She rushed to her doctor’s office, “where I learned my amniotic sac had torn,” says Prieskorn, who lives with her husband in Manchester, N.H. “But the nearest hospital had recently merged with a Catholic hospital—and because my doctor could still detect a fetal heartbeat, he wasn’t allowed to give me a uterine evacuation that would help me complete my miscarriage.”
To get treatment, Prieskorn, who has no car, had to instead travel 80 miles to the nearest hospital that would perform the procedure—expensive to do in an ambulance, because she had no health insurance. Her doctor handed her $400 of his own cash and she bundled into the back of a cab.
“During that trip, which seemed endless, I was not only devastated, but terrified,” Prieskorn remembers. “I knew that if there were complications I could lose my uterus—and maybe even my life.”
Ordeals like the one Prieskorn suffered are not isolated incidents: They could happen to a woman of any income level, religion or state now that Catholic institutions have become the largest not-for-profit source of health-care in the U.S., treating 1 in 6 hospital patients. And that’s because Catholic hospitals are required to adhere to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services—archconservative restrictions issued by the 258-member U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Because of the directives, doctors and nurses at Catholic-affiliated facilities are not allowed to perform procedures that the Catholic Church deems “intrinsically immoral, such as abortion and direct sterilization.” Those medical personnel also cannot give rape survivors drugs to prevent pregnancy unless there is “no evidence that conception has already occurred.” The only birth control they can dispense is advice about “natural family planning”— laborious daily charting of a woman’s basal temperature and cervical mucus in order to abstain from sex when she is ovulating—which only 0.1 percent of women use.
The Catholic directives involve not just abortion and birth control but ectopic pregnancies, embryonic stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, sterilizations and more. “The problem with [the directives],” says Susan Berke Fogel, an attorney at the National Health Law Program in Los Angeles, “is about substandard care becoming rampant in the U.S., threatening women’s health and women’s lives.”
Catastrophe was only narrowly averted in 2009 when a 27-year-old, 11-weeks-pregnant patient in Arizona staggered into the emergency room of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix with such severe pulmonary hypertension that her doctors determined she would die without an immediate abortion. The ethics committee voted to break hospital policy and advise the woman of her option of a lifesaving abortion. The woman chose to have doctors terminate the pregnancy.
But when the bishop overseeing the Phoenix diocese heard about this, he declared that St. Joseph’s could no longer be a Catholic institution unless it agreed to follow Catholic “moral teachings.” The Bishop forbade Catholic Mass in the hospital’s chapel and excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride—the only nun on the ethics committee.
The Phoenix story drew national outrage, but lesser-known cases of religious doctrine affecting medical care are rampant. In Oregon, a bishop threw out a medical-center director from his diocese for refusing to stop sterilizing patients. In Arizona, a couple raced to a Catholic hospital ER after the wife miscarried one of a pair of fetuses, only to be sent to a secular facility after doctors determined that the twin fetus was still alive—though not viable. And in New York, doctors at a Catholic institution neglected to terminate an ectopic pregnancy (in which the fertilized egg begins to develop outside the uterus) even though the embryo could not possibly survive and the patient faced a potentially fatal rupture of her fallopian tube.
How did we get to the point where 258 right-wing bishops—all (supposedly) celibate male clerics—are prohibiting doctors from practicing medicine and denying women essential reproductive care? The debacle starts with anti-choice legislation. The U.S. Congress started to pass “conscience clauses” pushed by the Roman Catholic Church and anti-abortion forces in the immediate wake of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973. Today, these laws apply not only to physicians and nurses who oppose abortion, but to entire institutions whose “consciences” allow them to withhold medically indicated care.
Even as recently as 2008, the George W. Bush administration issued sweeping regulations to give health-care workers the right to refuse to take part in any procedure that “violates” their religious beliefs. The Obama administration moved to reverse this policy in February (making it explicit that contraception is not covered by conscience provisions), but 47 states and the District of Columbia now allow individuals or entities to refuse women reproductive health services, information or referrals.
You don’t have to be a Catholic to end up at a Catholic hospital that refuses you lifesaving care. A Catholic facility might be the only one in your area, and when you expect treatment you may get dogma instead.“Religion in America should mean that the church runs the church,” says Barry Lynn, the executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It shouldn’t mean the bishops are running your reproductive life.”
Excerpted from the Spring 2011 issue of Ms.
Copyright © 2012 Ms.
http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/05/09/treatment-denied/ [with comments]
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I got duped by Glenn Beck!
(Credit: AP/David Karp)
The pundit bought the creative rights to the dystopian novel I edited, transforming it into right-wing propaganda
By Sarah Cypher
Monday, Nov 19, 2012 02:57 PM CST
Two weeks ago I discovered, to my surprise, that I had line-edited an early draft of Glenn Beck’s new novel, “Agenda 21 [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1476716692 ].” Glenn Beck! At the time I was working on it, the manuscript belonged to its actual author, a woman named Harriet Parke, who lives a few minutes from my aunt. But a year and a few lawyers later, Glenn Beck purchased the right to call himself its creator, and Ms. Parke agreed to be presented as a ghostwriter.
I would be proud to have my name in the acknowledgments of Ms. Parke’s novel. But given that it is printed inside a book bearing Glenn Beck’s name, the work I did is now deeply at odds with who I am as an editor. “Agenda 21? is going out into the world on Tuesday, Nov. 20, as something decidedly different from the novel I edited. Yes, the story is the same. So are the concepts, the characters and the writing. But the name in the byline — that changes the book’s intent. It changes everything.
If you’re not an urban planner, here’s a crash course on the novel’s eponymous United Nations Agenda 21. It’s a 40-chapter behemoth written in 1993. It lays out non-binding guidelines for promoting economic growth, environmental protection and social equality. Basically, it is a recipe for living within our means today, so that we do not pass along to our children a degraded economy, environment and society. It addresses topics as various as toxic waste, biotechnology, conservation and green transportation, all with the goal of helping poor countries develop economies — in large part, by encouraging wealthy countries to dial back in sensible ways on their consumption of resources.
Today, city and regional planners support the concepts that underpin Agenda 21 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21 ], because they translate the big picture to local efforts to save people time and money. In other words, think globally, act regionally. After all, the planning profession is about supporting a community’s efforts to collaboratively make the best of change — such as whether your community is growing or shrinking, or becoming more rural, suburban or urban. Change is inevitable: Brookings reports that “our population exceeded 300 million in 2006, and we are on track to hit 350 million in the next 15 years.” And that “America will probably be older, more diverse, more urban — and less equal” than we are today.
Planners help communities find common-sense, constructive ways of using limited resources wisely. It looks for ways to make transportation inexpensive, keep energy plentiful, and help towns and cities avoid the kind of bad economic decisions that lead to eyesores like, say, a half-deserted strip mall anchored to an abandoned Wal-Mart. Thanks to zoning, for instance, which was created in the 1920s to protect property values, no one can come in and inappropriately construct a landfill or a steel mill next to your house.
Glenn Beck and fellow pundits hate Agenda 21 [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/06/17/beck-conspiracy-theory-uns-agenda-21-will-resul/180690 ], however, because they interpret a few lines from chapter four out of context. Their scare tactic is to say it’s the narrow end of a wedge that will insert global UN authority over American towns and cities, allow the government to confiscate private land, reallocate resources by force, and evict people from their single-family homes. Never mind that the law of the land begins with the United States Constitution [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause ] and that our relationship with the UN can hardly be described as lockstep [ http://www.globalgovernancewatch.org/spotlight_on_sovereignty/withholding-un-payments-why-does-the-us-do-it ]. Moreover, the United States has no land use laws at the federal level, whatsoever. All land use decision-making authority in the United States lies with the states, who delegate authority to local governments. Relatively speaking, the United States has some of the strictest protections for private property in the world.
Agenda 21 is simply a non-binding, unenforceable menu of guidelines that exists to help any town or city that signs on to it. But when removed from all sensible context and cast forward into a dystopian future, Agenda 21 becomes the novel “Agenda 21,” which tells the story of a post-American settlement where people are forced to ride bikes and walk on treadmills to generate electricity, told whom to marry, raised in communal kibbutz-like nurseries, and forced to swear allegiance to a scary green one-world socialist entity.
My job is to edit stories, not the author’s sensibility. Sometimes I edit a manuscript whose politics or sense of the human condition doesn’t agree with my own. That was the case with Ms. Parke’s draft of “Agenda 21,” which contains a caricature of some things I find highly inoffensive, such as bicycles and feeding squirrels. I am OK with that, personally and professionally, because novels are meant to be read as fiction, as a form of complex entertainment. There is joy, too, in discovering and thinking about the ideas that underpin the plot. And besides, if everybody agreed, we’d live in a dully conformist world indeed. Think of something like Orwell’s London in “1984 [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/014118776X ],” which contains a vision of socialism whose simplified specter still haunts berserk right-wing pundits like … well, like Glenn Beck.
Furthermore — and I must speculate here — the novel’s actual author, a retired nurse in western Pennsylvania, has gained income and national recognition for years of hard work. I can’t argue with that, either. We writers all want that. The only interesting thing here is that it comes with the sacrifice of her authorship: Her name appears as a “ghostwriter” in small letters on the cover. But she conceived of and wrote the book herself, and I respect the humility it must take to partially efface one’s name from one’s own work. In an ideal world, all writers would write anonymously.
If the book had been published under Ms. Parke’s name alone, it would remain an entertaining dystopian novel. The writing is capable, the story compelling, and most of its values are to be respected — family, localness, and a good education in history (Beck [ http://www.examiner.com/article/glenn-beck-claims-slavery-was-not-really-bad-until-government-got-involved ], and his publishing house [ http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/10/david-barton-christopher-columbus-and-the-potential-costs-of-myth-making/ ], ought to take note [ http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/11/30/becks-historical-confusions/ ] of that, by the way). It would be marketed and sold to readers of speculative fiction, which are typically a brainy crowd. Maybe some among them would hold it up as a negative vision of a radical environmental agenda run amok, albeit in a world without Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart — in fact, one without any wealthy corporations at all, who historically pitch their vast financial resources against environmental regulations.
But mostly, we’d just read it for the story. That’s how I read it one year ago, and I enjoyed it. But why publish the novel under Beck’s name? What would the book have lost if his publishing company, Mercury Ink, had simply let Ms. Parke call the novel her own? The answer, I think, is that it needs Beck’s franchise in order to succeed in a purpose beyond entertainment.
Publishing “Agenda 21? under Glenn Beck’s name transforms it, at least temporarily. Glenn Beck is more than just the nice guy whose publishing house is bringing Ms. Parke’s work to a national audience. He’s also a professional ideologue whose establishment confers the full force of its intellectually and morally irresponsible franchise [ http://www.worldmag.com/2012/08/doubting_thomas ] on a novel that distorts the truth about Agenda 21, which is doing good work in the world. Glenn Beck is not writing as an artist, bound by the conventions of his art, plying his craft on the willing human imagination. Hell, he’s not writing at all. He is a brand, with a budget, and with an agenda of his own. Ultimately, by assigning his brand to the novel “Agenda 21,” Beck turns a form of entertainment into a political lie, a tool for politicizing people.
On its own, ”Agenda 21? should not work this way: just like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/038549081X ]” does not drive women to the polls to keep religion out of politics, nor “The Hunger Games [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0545425115 ]” motivate us to stop seeing war as a form of entertainment, nor “One Hundred Years of Solitude [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/006112009X ]” give a corporation pause before plundering resources from poorer countries. If people show up en masse to vote for or against these things, it is not because spokespeople from NARAL or the NEA or the Union of Concerned Scientists pushed these novels on national TV; it’s because people are responding to something provable and real right now.
The novel “Agenda 21? was inspired by Beck’s entreaty to his viewers to “do your own research [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Oevj6XokVw (next below)].”
If, like me, you feel concerned about the inevitable population growth, decreased availability of clean water and resources, aging national infrastructure, and upward-trending global temperatures, you might take heart to know that city and regional planners are numerous, bright, well-educated people who devote their careers to finding ways to helping the rest of us enjoy a long-term high standard of living. Or, you can empower obstructionists who make the panicked hoarding of fuel and canned goods seem like the only long-term planning that matters.
There is a precedent for successful social fiction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” focused public sentiment against slavery because its unstinting realism humanized a gross injustice that was already tinder in the national furnace. For the same reason, Upton Sinclair’s ”The Jungle” spurred labor reforms [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle#Public_and_federal_response ], though arguably it could have been more successful, sooner, if it hadn’t slathered so much socialist propaganda onto a realistic portrayal of factory life.
Usually, though, preachy fiction is a brittle failure. I think of an interesting but flimsy environmental novel like Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael,” whose political message overtakes the story. Gore Vidal’s fiction suffers for the same reason. I do respect the writer who champions the underdog — the working poor, the immigrant, the father of hungry children, the ambitious teen who is under-served by an opportunist or parochial education system. Less so, the writer whose vision empowers an avaricious establishment, or obstructs meaningful adaptation to our changing environment. Yet when I suspend my disbelief to read speculative fiction, finding myself preached to at all is an annoying betrayal.
Where that creative betrayal becomes shrill, however, is in the mouth of an ideologue. As a genre, speculative fiction keeps one eye on politics, but its goal is not to preach. It’s to make up an entertaining version of reality — an augmentation of social truth, which is not the truth itself. A novel’s vision can scare us, inspire us, affirm our emotions, and articulate our fears. It shouldn’t, however, serve as a primary political agenda any more than Paul Ryan should be waving ”Atlas Shrugged” around on the House floor. In the same way, “Agenda 21? is being delivered as propaganda, and by buying the right to call himself its author, Glenn Beck is diminishing a work of fiction to nothing more than a cheap appeal directed at people who will believe anything.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/19/i_got_duped_by_glenn_beck/ [with comments]
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Dan Lungren, Drug Warrior, Loses Bid For Reelection
By Radley Balko
Posted: 11/19/2012 3:37 pm EST Updated: 11/20/2012 2:26 am EST
It seems appropriate that the career politician Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) would be defeated [ http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22006209/physician-ousts-gop-rep-dan-lungren-calif ] in the same election in which voters in his own state reined in the infamous "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, and in which voters in Washington and Colorado historically voted [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/07/news/economy/marijuana-legalization-washington-colorado/index.html ] to legalize marijuana. Over the course of his career, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more dedicated drug warrior or a politician more committed to alleged tough-on-crime policies than Lungren.
First elected to Congress in 1978 at the age of 32, Lungren rose in stature with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and quickly became a darling of the tough-on-crime crowd and the rising moral majority movement. No new anti-drug law was too tough for the young congressman. In 1984, he was a sponsor of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, at the time one of the most sweeping pieces of anti-crime legislation in U.S. history. The bill gave prosecutors the power to appeal sentences (previously, only defendants could do that) and eliminated the right to bail for people accused of certain drug crimes, according to Smoke and Mirrors [ http://www.amazon.com/Smoke-Mirrors-Drugs-Politics-Failure/dp/0316084468 ], a book by journalist Dan Baum. Lungren had already worked to make increasingly less serious crimes subject to increasingly longer sentences, and he ended a federal policy of allowing young, first-time drug offenders to clear their records after they had served their sentences and if they committed no future crimes, Baum wrote.
But the most odious part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act -- and the part that, over the years, Lungren has taken most pride in -- gave the government broad new asset forfeiture powers. Civil asset forfeiture gives the government the ability to seize property connected to certain crimes under civil law, instead of criminal law. Because the law is civil, the government's burden of proof is lower, and police and prosecutors only need to show probable cause that what they've seized is connected to drug activity. The burden then switches to the property owner to show he obtained the property or earned the cash legitimately. The owner never needs to be charged with a crime -- indeed, in most cases they aren't [ http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket ].
Lungren did not respond to a request to comment for this article.
The 1984 bill included a provision allowing police departments and prosecutors' offices to keep the proceeds from these forfeitures, creating an enormous incentive for them to "find" connections that may not have existed. The bill also allowed local police to call the DEA with information after finding certain property. The DEA would take a cut of the bounty, and then give the rest back to the local police agency. The policy allowed police departments to get around the laws some states had passed to make forfeiture proceedings fairer. Additionally, the 1984 bill allowed the government to seize a drug suspect's assets before filing charges, leaving suspects with no money to hire legal representation. (Property owners had no right to a court-appointed attorney in civil forfeiture cases.)
Two years later, NBA prospect Len Bias died of a drug overdose. Washington slipped into a feverish drug-war mania, and few politicians were more hysterical than Lungren. In Smoke and Mirrors, Baum writes that Lungren wanted to make it illegal for anyone to accept money from a drug dealer. "Make it illegal for a dry cleaner or a grocery store to take money from a drug dealer, [Lungren] argued, and if they do, seize the business. Put the merchant in jail." Referring to the death of Bias, Lungren implored, "We have been far too lenient," according to Baum.
Upon reading an article in Discovery magazine about "designer drugs," Lungren wanted to ban any "substance which has a stimulant, depresant, or hallucinogenic effect on the central nervous system," Baum wrote. "That would include coffee, alcohol, and a long list of legal pharmaceuticals." Not to mention nicotine.
In 1991, Lungren was elected attorney general of California. He would hold that office for the next eight years. During his time as the state's chief law enforcement officer, Lungren supported and lobbied for "Megan's Law," the genesis of the idea of the sex offender registry, along with the "Three Strikes" law that California voters narrowed earlier this month. He sponsored a law allowing minors as young as 14 who are accused of murder to be tried as adults [ http://articles.latimes.com/1993-01-15/news/mn-1448_1_attorney-general ]. He also led a national effort to limit lawsuits filed by prisoners, which produced the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996. While purported to prevent prisoners from suing because they want better desserts or more television, Human Rights Watch has since found [ http://www.hrw.org/reports/2009/06/16/no-equal-justice-0 ] that the law has made it more difficult for prisoners to sue to stop sexual abuse, poor medical care, prolonged use of solitary confinement, and other non-trivial abuses.
About a year into Lungren's first term as attorney general, a team of 31 police officers from five local, state, and federal police agencies raided the home of Malibu, Calif., millionaire Donald Scott. They claimed to have been looking for a massive marijuana operation. Scott, in fact, was opposed to illicit drugs. But the officers did wake Scott and his fiance. When Scott heard her scream at the sight of armed men in their home, he grabbed his gun to confront them. A deputy then shot Scott dead.
Though he was the attorney general at the time, Lungren was never much interested in getting to the bottom of why an enormous raid team from multiple police agencies could have been so wrong about Donald Scott. They thought they'd find 4,000 plants. They found none. Lungren also did not show much concern over the fact that a California police officer had killed an innocent man.
Fortunately, Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury was concerned about both. He launched an investigation, and in 1993 punished a damning report, strongly suggesting that the L.A. County Sheriff's Department conducted a sloppy investigation that ended with an unnecessarily violent raid because they were interested in obtaining Scott's large property through asset forfeiture laws. Those would be the same laws Lungren helped pass when he was in Congress. Lungren dismissed [ http://articles.latimes.com/1993-11-23/local/me-59888_1_state-attorney-general ] Bradbury's report as "inappropriate and gratuitous."
Throughout the 1990s, California police departments would conduct an increasing number of drug raids, in some cases motivated by the lucre of asset forfeiture -- including the fatal 1999 El Monte raid on Mario Paz, and a 1992 DEA raid on the San Diego-area home of Donald Carlson, in which Carlson was shot four times and spent six weeks in intensive care. He too was innocent.
Even Lungren's fellow conservatives have recognized the abuses wrought by asset forfeiture over the years, including columnist/pundit George Will [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-government-is-the-looter/2012/05/18/gIQAUIKVZU_story.html ] (recently), and the late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) [ http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/pr-ma-hy.html ], who in 2000 led an effort to reform the law Lungren worked so hard to pass.
Lungren also vigorously opposed Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in California. After it passed, Lungren did the best he could to undermine voter intent, including taking the position [ http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/11/04/18326380.php ] that California law enforcement officers could arrest citizens for breaking federal law -- an odd assertion from an alleged believer in federalism. When Garry Trudeau mocked Lungren's opposition to Prop 215 in his "Doonesbury" comic strip, Lungren launched a surreal campaign [ http://articles.latimes.com/1996-10-02/news/mn-49651_1_dan-lungren ] against "Zonker" -- a fictional comic strip character -- that included a press conference and letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times.
Lungren has often cited his Catholic faith as the reason for his career-long opposition to abortion. But Lungren has also been a strong advocate for the death penalty, a position that puts him at odds with his church. Lungren has boasted about his efforts [ http://www.calvoter.org/archive/94general/cand/att/lung/bio.html ] to ensure California's first execution in more than 20 years shortly after he became attorney general. He also spent considerable time in that position and then again after he was reelected to Congress attempting to limit the number of appeals permitted to death row inmates. In 2006, Lungren sponsored a bill [ http://m.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/1490 ] that would strip federal courts of the power to review habeas corpus petitions in state death penalty cases. By then, DNA testing and journalists in Chicago and elsewhere had already exonerated a number of inmates who had previously been slated for execution, many only after federal courts intervened.
Lungren wasn't alone, of course. And he did support the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which lessened (but didn't eliminate) the discrepancy in penalties between crack and powder cocaine. But when a politician leaves office after a long career, there's often a tendency to issue platitudes about his devotion to public service, regardless of the actual consequences the policies he supported may have had. Dan Lungren did a lot of damage -- to the criminal justice system, and to the people wrongly or unnecessarily swept into it. A lifetime of public service doesn't change that.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/dan-lungren-drug-warrior-reelection_n_2159755.html [with comments]
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By THOMAS B. EDSALL
November 18, 2012, 11:14 pm
The morning after the re-election of President Obama, Rush Limbaugh told his listeners [ http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2012/11/07/in_a_nation_of_children_santa_claus_wins ]:
I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country. I don’t know how else you look at this.
The conservative talk show host, who had been an upbeat, if initially doubtful, Romney supporter throughout the campaign, was on a post-election downer:
In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins? And say what you want, but Romney did offer a vision of traditional America. In his way, he put forth a great vision of traditional America, and it was rejected. It was rejected in favor of a guy who thinks that those who are working aren’t doing enough to help those who aren’t. And that resonated.
Limbaugh echoed a Republican theme that was voiced before [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/09/full-transcript-mitt-romney-secret-video ] and after the election: Barack Obama has unleashed a coalition of Americans “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them” — as Mitt Romney put it in his notorious commentary on the 47 percent.
You can find this message almost everywhere on the right side of the spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, for example, annually calculates an “Index of Dependence on Government [ http://blog.heritage.org/2012/09/18/index-of-dependence-on-government-jumps-for-the-fourth-year-in-a-row/ ],” which grows every year:
Today, more people than ever before depend on the federal government for housing, food, income, student aid, or other assistance once considered to be the responsibility of individuals, families, neighborhoods, churches, and other civil society institutions. The United States reached another milestone in 2010: For the first time in history, half the population pays no federal income taxes. It is the conjunction of these two trends—higher spending on dependence-creating programs, and an ever-shrinking number of taxpayers who pay for these programs—that concerns those interested in the fate of the American form of government.
William Bennett [ http://washingtonspeakers.com/speakers/speaker.cfm?SpeakerId=2372 ], conservative stalwart, television commentator and secretary of education under President Reagan, complained on the CNN Web site [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/14/opinion/bennett-gop-election/index.html ] that Democrats have been successful in setting
the parameters and focus of the national and political dialogue as predominantly about gender, race, ethnicity and class. This is the paradigm, the template through which many Americans, probably a majority, more or less view the world, our country, and the election. It is a divisive strategy and Democrats have targeted and exploited those divides. How else can we explain that more young people now favor socialism to capitalism?
In fact, the 2011 Pew Research Center poll [ http://www.people-press.org/2011/12/28/little-change-in-publics-response-to-capitalism-socialism/12-28-11-2/ ] Bennett cites demonstrates that in many respects conservatives are right to be worried:
Not only does a plurality (49-43) of young people hold a favorable view of socialism — and, by a tiny margin (47-46), a negative view of capitalism — so do liberal Democrats, who view socialism positively by a solid 59-33; and African Americans, 55-36. Hispanics are modestly opposed, 49-44, to socialism, but they hold decisively negative attitudes toward capitalism, 55-32.
Much of the focus in the media in recent years has been on the growing hard-line stance of the Republican Party. At the same time, there are significant developments taking place as a new left alliance forms to underpin the Democratic Party. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira originally described this alliance in 2002 as the emerging Democratic majority [ http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Emerging_Democratic_Majority.html?id=ItAOKZs4PqIC ] in a pioneering book of the same name. More recently, the pollster Stan Greenberg and a group of liberal activists have described it as the “rising American electorate [ http://books.google.com/books?id=JXBLnaty1ugC&pg=PT64&lpg=PT64&dq=edsall+and+%22rising+american+electorate%22&source=bl&ots=q9fKLXvPbP&sig=ujzdVfvylNezUrQR9Iy9dHPAUsw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Q-6lUObQFK650AG6x4HIDw&sqi=2&ved=0CEgQ6AEwBQ ].”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has devoted much of her work to analyzing the changing shape of the liberal and conservative coalitions, said in an e-mail that the rising American electorate
will have profound implications because the R.A.E. has a very different approach to the role for government, very different views on race and tolerance, different views on gender roles, and very different views on economic opportunity and security. These are some of the biggest divides in our culture.
Robert Borosage, co-director of the liberal-left Campaign for America’s Future, put it more bluntly in a blog post [ http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012114507/triumph-middle-class-populism ]:
In our Gilded Age of extreme inequality, with a middle class that increasingly understands the rules are rigged against them, this was the first election in what is likely to be an era of growing class warfare.
Two post-election polls – one released Nov. 14 by the Democracy Corps [ http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/the-role-of-the-rising-american-electorate-in-the-2012-election/ ] (founded by Stan Greenberg and James Carville), the other released Nov. 16 by the Public Religion Research Institute [ http://publicreligion.org/research/2012/11/american-values-post-election-survey-2012/ ] – reveal the decisively liberal views of the core constituencies within the rising American electorate and its support for government activism, especially measures to help the disadvantaged.
The findings from the P.R.R.I. survey are very illuminating:
* When voters were asked whether cutting taxes or investing in education and infrastructure is the better policy to promote economic growth, the constituencies of the new liberal electorate consistently chose education and infrastructure by margins ranging from 2-1 to 3-2 — African Americans by 62-33, Hispanics by 61-37, never-married men by 56-38, never-married women by 64-30, voters under 30 by 63-34, and those with post-graduate education by 60-33.
Conservative constituencies generally chose lowering taxes by strong margins — whites by 52-42, married men by 59-34, married women by 51-44, all men by 52-41; older voters between the ages of 50 and 65 by 54-42.
* The constituencies that make up the rising American electorate are firmly in favor of government action to reduce the gap between rich and poor, by 85-15 among blacks, 74-26 for Hispanics; 70-30 never-married men; 83-15 never-married women; and 76-24 among voters under 30. Conservative groups range from lukewarm to opposed: 53-47 for men; 53-47 among voters 50-65; 46-54 among married men; 52-47 among all whites.
* One of the clearest divides between the rising American electorate and the rest of the country is in responses to the statement “Government is providing too many social services that should be left to religious groups and private charities. Black disagree 67-32; Hispanics disagree 57-40; never-married women 70-27; never-married men, 59-41; young voters, 66-34; and post-grad, 65-34. Conversely, whites agree with the statement 54-45; married men agree, 60-39; married women, 55-44; all men, 55-43.
The Democracy Corps survey specifically broke out the collective views of the liberal alliance and contrasted them with the views of those on the right. Some findings:
* By a margin of 60-13, voters on the left side of the spectrum favor raising taxes on incomes above $1 million, while voters outside of the left are much less supportive, 39-25. In the case of raising the minimum wage, the left backs a hike by an overwhelming 64-6 margin, while those on the right are far less supportive, 32-18. The rising American electorate backs raising the minimum wage by 64-6, while the people outside it back a hike by just 32-18. The left coalition supports a carbon tax or fee by 43-14 while right-leaning voters are opposed, 37-24.
Policies supported by the rising American electorate — which closely overlaps with the Obama coalition — provoke intense opposition from the right. In the aftermath of the election, Romney blamed his defeat [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/romney-blames-loss-on-obamas-gifts-to-minorities-and-young-voters/ ] on the “gifts” Obama handed out to “the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”
In fact, the rising American electorate represents a direct threat to the striking array of government benefits for the affluent that the conservative movement has won over the past 40 years. These include the reduction of the top income tax rate [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/Content/PDF/toprate_historical.pdf ] from 50 percent in 1986 to 35 percent; the 15 percent tax rate [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=161 ] on dividend and capital gains income, which was 39.9 percent in 1977; the lowering of the top estate tax rate from 70 percent in 1981, with just $175,000 exempted from taxation, to a top rate of 35 percent this year [ http://wills.about.com/od/understandingestatetaxes/a/estatetaxchart.htm ] with $5.1 million exempted from taxation.
At the same time, the Pew survey cited above shows the high levels of skepticism and hostility toward capitalism on the part of the emerging Democratic majority. Insofar as the liberal coalition succeeds in electing senators and representatives who share those views, the business community will have increasing difficulty in winning approval of its deregulated market and free trade agenda.
As Obama negotiates with Republican House and Senate leaders to prevent a dive over the “fiscal cliff,” he will be under strong pressure from his reinvigorated liberal supporters to take a tough stand in support of tax hikes on the well-to-do and to more firmly limit spending cuts.
“Looking ahead to their post-election agenda, this is not a group looking for ‘austerity,’ ” the Democracy Corps wrote [ http://www.democracycorps.com/National-Surveys/the-role-of-the-rising-american-electorate-in-the-2012-election/ ] in a report accompanying its post-election survey. “Indeed, their issues are explicitly progressive and investment-oriented,” in terms of human capital. The report went on:
The rising American electorate’s most important priority for the president and the Congress is “investing in education,” followed by “protecting Social Security and Medicare.”
In effect, the 21st century version of class conflict sets the stage for an exceptionally bitter face-off between the left and the right in Congress. The national government is facing the prospect of forced austerity [ http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3844 ], weighing such zero-sum choices as raising capital gains taxes or cutting food stamps, slashing defense spending or restricting unemployment benefits, establishing a 15 cents-a-gallon gasoline tax or pushing citizens off the Medicaid rolls [ http://www.thepoliticalguide.com/Issues/Simpson-Bowles/ ], pushing central bank policy favorable to the financial services industry [ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/05/the-quiet-coup/307364/ ] or curtailing Medicare eligibility.
In broader terms, the political confrontation pits taxpayers, who now form the core of the center-right coalition, against tax consumers who form the core of the center-left. According to the Tax Policy Center, 46.4 percent of all tax filers had no federal income tax liability in 2011 (although most people pay a combination [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=3054 ] of state, sales, excise, property and other levies).There are clear exceptions to this dichotomy, as many Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries (tax recipients) vote Republican, and many college-educated upper-income citizens of all races and ethnicities (tax payers) vote Democratic. Nonetheless, the overarching division remains, and the battle lines are drawn over how to distribute the costs of the looming fiscal crisis [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324439804578107280483982220.html ]. The outcome of this policy fight will determine whether Limbaugh is correct to fear that his side has “lost the country.”
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this year.
*
This is the last column in the 2012 edition of Campaign Stops. We began on a Sunday a year before the election with a piece by Thomas B. Edsall on how politics look when governments don’t have enough money. We end today with another piece by Mr. Edsall on the rising American electorate that returned President Obama to the White House.
In between we have published hundreds of pieces — by feminist political scientists, conservative historians, demographically oriented statisticians, political theorists, religious thinkers and many others, including one every week by the Op-Ed columnists Charles M. Blow and Ross Douthat. Mr. Blow and Mr. Douthat will continue to write their print columns on the weekend and to be a major presence online during the week. Tom Edsall will remain with The Times as a weekly online columnist after he takes a well-deserved rest (his contributions to Campaign Stops totaled almost 100,000 words).
Campaign Stops also published more than 95,000 comments from its passionate readers, some of whom could be columnists themselves — a huge benefit of the kind of open format that the web provides. We’ll be back in November 2015, ready to debate the issues that have driven American political history since the beginning, but we are also eager to find out what fresh developments we’ll be talking about that we can’t anticipate now.
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/is-rush-limbaughs-country-gone/ [with comments]
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Robertson: "Miserable" Atheists Trying to "Steal" Christmas
Published on Nov 19, 2012 by RWWBlog
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-miserable-atheists-trying-steal-christmas
Pat Robertson says atheists are "miserable so they want you to be miserable" by trying "to steal your holiday away from you"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxj1NJ8nh-8
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Santa Monica Nativity Scenes At Palisades Park Will Be No More, Rules Federal Judge
A Los Angeles federal judge has denied a Christian group's bid for an injunction to force suburban Santa Monica to reopen spaces in a city park to private displays, including Christmas Nativity scenes.
By GILLIAN FLACCUS
11/19/12 10:01 PM ET EST
LOS ANGELES — There's no room for the baby Jesus, the manger or the wise men this Christmas in a Santa Monica park following a judge's ruling Monday against churches that tried to keep a 60-year Nativity tradition alive after atheists stole the show with anti-God messages.
U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins rejected a motion from the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee to allow the religious display this season while their lawsuit plays out against the city.
Collins said the city was within its constitutional right to eliminate the exemption that had allowed the Nativity at the oceanfront Palisades Park because the change affected all comers – from Christians to Jews to atheists – and provided other avenues for public religious speech.
The coalition of churches that had put on the life-sized, 14-booth Nativity display for decades argued the city banned it rather than referee a religious dispute that began three years ago when atheists first set up their anti-God message alongside the Christmas diorama.
The judge, however, said Santa Monica proved that it banned the displays not to squash religious speech but because they were becoming a drain on city resources, destroying the turf and obstructing ocean views. Churches can set up unattended displays at 12 other parks in the city with a permit and can leaflet, carol and otherwise present the Christmas story in Palisades Park when it is open, she said.
"I think all of the evidence that is admissible about the aesthetic impacts and administrative burden shows that this was a very reasonable alternative for the city to go this way – and it had nothing to do with content," she said during a hearing in federal court in Los Angeles.
William Becker, the attorney for the Christian group, said he expects the case will be dismissed at a hearing on Dec. 3 based on Monday's proceedings and plans to appeal.
"The atheists won and they will always win unless we get courts to understand how the game is played and this is a game that was played very successfully and they knew it," Becker said, comparing the city to Pontius Pilate, the Roman official who authorized Jesus' crucifixion.
The trouble in Santa Monica began in 2009, when atheist Damon Vix applied for and was granted a booth in Palisades Park alongside the story of Jesus Christ's birth.
Vix hung a simple sign that quoted Thomas Jefferson: "Religions are all alike -- founded on fables and mythologies." The other side read "Happy Solstice." He repeated the display the following year but then upped the stakes significantly.
In 2011, Vix recruited 10 others to inundate the city with applications for tongue-in-cheek displays such as an homage to the "Pastafarian religion," which would include an artistic representation of the great Flying Spaghetti Monster.
The secular coalition won 18 of 21 spaces. Two others went to the traditional Christmas displays and one to a Hanukkah display.
The atheists used half their spaces, displaying signs such as one that showed pictures of Poseidon, Jesus, Santa Claus and the devil and said: "37 million Americans know myths when they see them. What myths do you see?"
Most of the signs were vandalized and in the ensuing uproar, the city effectively ended a tradition that began in 1953 and earned Santa Monica one of its nicknames, the City of the Christmas Story.
"The birth of Jesus Christ is the linchpin of Western civilization, our calendar derives from it, but now somehow it's just not right to have a classic depiction of this event in a Nativity scene in a city park," said Hunter Jameson, head of the Nativity committee.
In court Monday, Deputy City Attorney Yibin Shen said the ban had been under consideration for years and was ultimately motivated by the cost to the city after the number of applicants spiked in recent years.
The department in charge of running the lottery for booth spaces doubled its staff and spent 245 hours annually running the system and reviewing applications, he said.
"This is a 20-year decision in the making," he said.
For his part, Vix said he was pleased with Monday's ruling, but was also saddened by the anger being directed against atheists since he hung his first anti-God sign in 2009.
"So many people don't understand atheists," he said. "If you read the signs we put up, one said, `Love is all around you.' That's really a better understanding of who most atheists are."
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press
*
Santa Monica Navity Scene & Atheist Displays [slideshow; a few follow]
All photos courtesy of Atheists United [ http://atheistsunited.org/ ]
*
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/santa-monica-nativity-display_n_2160326.html [with comments]
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Big Banks vs. Elizabeth Warren: It's On (Again!)
The fight between the financial industry and Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren heats up again over her possible nomination to the Senate banking committee.
Nov. 19, 2012
Not even two weeks have passed since Democrat Elizabeth Warren rode a wave of grassroots support to victory in the US Senate race in Massachusetts [ http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/11/elizabeth-warren-scott-brown-massachusetts ], ousting Republican incumbent Scott Brown. Senator-elect Warren has not yet hired her staff. She has not yet moved into her Senate office. But the banking industry is already taking aim at her, scurrying to curb her future clout on Capitol Hill.
Lobbyists and trade groups for Wall Street and other major banking players are pressuring lawmakers to deny Warren a seat on the powerful Senate banking committee. With the impending departures of Sens. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) and Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii), Democrats have two spots to fill on the committee before the 113th Congress gavels in next year. Warren has yet said whether she wants to serve on the committee. But she would be a natural: She's a bankruptcy law expert, she served as Congress' lead watchdog overseeing the $700 billion bank bailout [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/11/bank-buster-elizabeth-warren ] from 2008 to 2010, and she conceived of and helped launch the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).
But the big banks are not fans of Warren, and their representatives in Washington have her in their crosshairs. Aides to two senators on the banking committee tell Mother Jones the industry has already moved to block Warren from joining the committee, which is charged with drafting legislation regulating much of the financial industry. "Downtown"—shorthand for Washington's lobbying corridor—"has been going nuts" to keep her off the committee, another Senate aide says.
[...]
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/elizabeth-warren-senate-banking-committee [with comments]
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The Twinkie Manifesto
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: November 18, 2012
The Twinkie, it turns out, was introduced way back in 1930. In our memories, however, the iconic snack will forever be identified with the 1950s, when Hostess popularized the brand by sponsoring “The Howdy Doody Show.” And the demise of Hostess has unleashed a wave of baby boomer nostalgia for a seemingly more innocent time.
Needless to say, it wasn’t really innocent. But the ’50s — the Twinkie Era — do offer lessons that remain relevant in the 21st century. Above all, the success of the postwar American economy demonstrates that, contrary to today’s conservative orthodoxy, you can have prosperity without demeaning workers and coddling the rich.
Consider the question of tax rates on the wealthy. The modern American right, and much of the alleged center, is obsessed with the notion that low tax rates at the top are essential to growth. Remember that Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, charged with producing a plan to curb deficits, nonetheless somehow ended up listing “lower tax rates” as a “guiding principle.”
Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.
Nor were high taxes the only burden wealthy businessmen had to bear. They also faced a labor force with a degree of bargaining power hard to imagine today. In 1955 roughly a third of American workers were union members. In the biggest companies, management and labor bargained as equals, so much so that it was common to talk about corporations serving an array of “stakeholders” as opposed to merely serving stockholders.
Squeezed between high taxes and empowered workers, executives were relatively impoverished by the standards of either earlier or later generations. In 1955 Fortune magazine published an essay, “How top executives live [ http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/05/06/classic-top-500-executives/ ],” which emphasized how modest their lifestyles had become compared with days of yore. The vast mansions, armies of servants, and huge yachts of the 1920s were no more; by 1955 the typical executive, Fortune claimed, lived in a smallish suburban house, relied on part-time help and skippered his own relatively small boat.
The data confirm Fortune’s impressions. Between the 1920s and the 1950s real incomes for the richest Americans fell sharply, not just compared with the middle class but in absolute terms. According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters.
Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right?
Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand. Well, the collapsing, moocher-infested nation she portrayed in “Atlas Shrugged,” published in 1957, was basically Dwight Eisenhower’s America.
Strange to say, however, the oppressed executives Fortune portrayed in 1955 didn’t go Galt and deprive the nation of their talents. On the contrary, if Fortune is to be believed, they were working harder than ever. And the high-tax, strong-union decades after World War II were in fact marked by spectacular, widely shared economic growth: nothing before or since has matched the doubling of median family income between 1947 and 1973.
Which brings us back to the nostalgia thing.
There are, let’s face it, some people in our political life who pine for the days when minorities and women knew their place, gays stayed firmly in the closet and congressmen asked, “Are you now or have you ever been?” The rest of us, however, are very glad those days are gone. We are, morally, a much better nation than we were. Oh, and the food has improved a lot, too.
Along the way, however, we’ve forgotten something important — namely, that economic justice and economic growth aren’t incompatible. America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share; it gave workers the power to bargain for decent wages and benefits; yet contrary to right-wing propaganda then and now, it prospered. And we can do that again.
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/opinion/krugman-the-twinkie-manifesto.html [with comments]
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GOProud, Gay Republican Group, Offers Twinkies For Donations As Potential Snack Shortage Looms
11/19/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/gay-republican-group-goproud-twinkies-for-donations_n_2160131.html [with comments]
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Organized Labor's Newest Heroes: Strippers
Charlie Riedel/AP Images
Exotic dancers are fighting back against unfair wages, and last week they had a landmark victory.
By Melissa Gira Grant
Nov 19 2012, 3:54 PM ET
The words "labor dispute" make a lot of people imagine big men on a picket line. This, despite the fact that the high-profile workers' struggles of the past year happened in jobs dominated by women stuck with low wages and little respect: from domestic workers securing benefits in New York state, to Chicago's teachers' strikes, to this week's Black Friday actions organized across the country against Wal-Mart. There's another group of women we should add to this list, women who have been continually fighting for their rights at work, who are met with disbelief and retaliation when they stand up, and smirking headlines and punny scorn even when they win.
Last week, strippers employed by the Spearmint Rhino chain won an unprecedented $13 million settlement [ http://www.vcstar.com/news/2012/nov/13/spearmint-rhino-exotic-dancers-settle-suit-for/ ] in Federal court, the result of a class action suit to restore back wages and contest their status as independent contractors of the clubs. Deciding in the dancers' favor is U.S. District Court Judge Virginia Phillips, best known for ruling "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" unconstitutional in 2010. It's one of the largest financial settlements awarded to dancers at a major chain in the United States—with 20 locations worldwide, and though Spearmint Rhino would not release this information, it's fair to estimate with several hundred if not several thousand dancers working in their clubs in the United States. In sex workers' ongoing fight for the same rights on the job that any worker should expect, will the dancers' case be a tipping point in the strip club business? "Spearmint Rhino is a big brand." says Bubbles Burbujas, a stripper and one of the co-founders of the popular sex work blog Tits and Sass [ http://titsandsass.com/ ]. "There's no way this won't have an effect."
It's definitely a big win for the 14 dancers named in the suit, but also for dancers in California. Judge Phillips ruled that within 30 days Spearmint Rhino must stop charging dancers what are known as "stage fees" for the right to work. Phillips also ruled that the chain is required to grant all dancers in their clubs employee status within six months, ending the illegal practice of classifying dancers as independent contractors while also placing workplace demands on them that far exceed that legal status. By managing dancers like employees but putting them on the books as independent contractors, club owners get out of paying dancers the benefits they're legally entitled to, which could include worker's compensation, unemployment, and health insurance if they qualify. Owners and management alike tell dancers they're independent, but they still exercise control over dancers on the job, routinely using the kinds of restrictive rules on breaks and conduct you've come to expect of Wal-Mart, not the mythically "anything goes" world of sex work.
"This is a great result," says attorney Shannon Liss-Riordan, who who specializes in tipped employees and independent contractor misclassification cases, and has represented dancers in class action law suits in several states. "It will put a lot of money in the pockets of women in this industry, but it will also send a clear message to clubs across this country that they should not misclassify dancers as independent contractors. When they look at these numbers in these lawsuits, they realize it's not worth it."
Dancers have brought suit after suit over illegal tip-sharing and misclassification as independent contractors for over 15 years now, starting with a string of high profile settlements in California in the late 1990's, leading to the founding of the Exotic Dancers' Alliance. (Disclosure: I'm not only a writer, but I was also a member of the Exotic Dancers Union, SEIU Local 790, from 2003 to 2006. "No justice, no piece.") At the same time, corporate chains like Spearmint Rhino, Deja Vu, and others have been buying up or pricing out the smaller clubs that tended towards giving dancers more control at work. The corporate consolidation of strip clubs is not that different than what's hit small businesses all over the country, only almost no one stood up to chase the Hustler Club out of town on a workers'-rights platform.
Unfortunately, when dancers win settlements for back wages, if the suits don't make it to trial, they have limited effect to set precedent and make sustained change the business. Hima B., a former dancer and the director of License to Pimp, a documentary about strippers and labor conditions, reported that clubs just institute new policies to illegally take dancers' tips [ http://titsandsass.com/license-to-pimp-a-conversation-with-filmmaker-hima-b-draft/ ], like several clubs in San Francisco using "piece rate" systems and quotas, where dancers must perform a set number of lap dances each shift, giving the house a percentage of each dance.
In response to a class action suit against a neighboring strip club in Montana, said Bubbles Burbujas, the club where she works started giving dancers paychecks—but management still illegally retained a portion of dancers' tips. Dancers in this club who were earning the same per shift before the lawsuits were also now going home with less. Before the move to the paycheck system, dancers paid a $25 stage fee per shift, as well as tips to bouncers and the DJ, "but we kept the rest of our dance money," she explained. "Now you hand over $70 of the first $100 you make, and you get a minimum wage paycheck, where you get back 30 percent or 40 percent of that."
"These are problems where there is no good legal recourse for dancers," said Burbujas. "You can sue to get wages and health benefits, but look at the way wage employees are already treated in this country—it's not very good. It's not like you're going to be treated any better."
As its currently organized, stripping is service work—and not unlike most service work in the United States, it's a field dominated by women who have to fight to be treated fairly. Even in a strip club where she was getting a pay check, Mariko Passion, a former dancer and current escort and artist, said, "I was still being charged $80 every day to work there, not including my tip-out," additional fees to be paid to DJ's and other club service staff. Dancers' tips can vary widely, depending on factors as unpredictable as customer whims and volume, to banal concerns like rain and football. On a shift where you pull in eight $20 dances (that's $160 before tip-out, for your back of the cocktail napkin math), an $80 "stage fee" per shift means you just gave half your earnings to your bosses. You might feel differently if you get twenty dances or a big tipper, but the stakes are the same every shift, and they're rigged to maximize club profits. "But restaurants can try to do exactly the same thing with your tips," says Passion, who brought her own individual suit over illegal tip sharing and won against three California clubs. "It's not just a strip club thing. It's a capitalist thing."
Lawsuits like these are one of the more powerful tools dancers have to recover stolen earnings, and they represent just one possible step towards the kind of collective organizing that could ensure dancers' rights for the long-term. If you can imagine and appreciate the obstacles workers at megachains [ http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/6615/wal-mart_faces_a_new_round_of_historic_strikes..._but_why_now/ ] face in fighting for fair wages, now imagine what the strip club picket line looks like. The small pool of dancers who will risk their jobs over workplace organizing is further limited by what dancers can risk outing themselves to their friends, family and others as sex workers in the process. The price of speaking out isn't just the "whore stigma" that all sex workers face; it could also mean discrimination at dancers' other jobs or future jobs (thanks, Google), or could provide a bogus rationale for a dancer to lose custody of her children to a former partner or the state. It could even put dancers on the vice unit's radar, depending where they work and how aggressive anti-prostitution policing is in their community.
"In any employment case, it takes a very strong employee to challenge them for doing something illegal," said Liss-Riordan, "but in the strip club industry it's particularly difficult for women to step forward. For those cases that resolve successfully, it's a real tribute to women who are able to battle it out and fight for their rights."
In most cases, at the first sign of dancers getting organized, a club will just make working there impossible for them. When Rachel Aimee and other dancers at a New York club raised objections to a new stage fee levied against them, the owners banned them from selling lap dances, "thus taking away our primary means of making money," writes Aimee at In These Times [ http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13089/in_search_of_stripper_solidarity/ ]. "A few weeks later, the owner fired me and another dancer, whom he took to be the instigators, and re-introduced the house fee."
Legally speaking, it's retaliation, sure—but who is going to enforce the National Labor Relations Act at the tip rail? (And if you do know who, spread the word. So far only one union represents a strip club in the United States.)
Dancers may dispute how to get the strip clubs to give them their fair share of their earnings, but their fight for control over their working conditions is the point—not to abolish the industry, as some women's right activists want to do. Dancers aren't taking the potential risks associated with outing themselves to file lawsuits or to organize necessarily because they want to defend stripping as an institution; they're defending, as many women have and many more must, their right to earn a good living.
Rachel Aimee is no longer a dancer, but she's still organizing, with the grassroots group We Are Dancers. "We're trying to raise awareness among dancers of their legal rights," Aimee told me, "so that dancers can make up their own minds whether and how they want to take action against their clubs." With current and former dancers, they're developing an educational website and "know your rights" booklets [ http://www.indiegogo.com/wearedancers ], translated into Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian to distribute in clubs across New York City.
No matter how dancers decide to defend their labor rights, knowing that other dancers have each other's back is the bottom line. "A lot of people who had gone through this treatment at work had made me think that was unique to stripping," said Mariko Passion, "but it's not. It's everywhere. But we're somehow supposed to feel more violated when it's stripping? Even more than if you're cleaning toilets? I wish we could encourage more women to fight back."
Melissa Gira Grant writes on sex, politics, and technology. She is a contributor to TheNation.com, Wired.com, and Glamour. Her essays have been included in the annual anthology Best Sex Writing. She writes regularly for postwhoreamerica.com [ http://postwhoreamerica.com/ ].
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group
http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/organized-labors-newest-heroes-strippers/265376/ [with comments]
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Savita's Death Was Not an Isolated Incident
By Cecile Richards
President of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund
Posted: 11/19/2012 5:19 pm
By now news of Savita Halappanavar's senseless death has traveled around the world, drawing attention [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/14/ireland-abortion-scrutiny-death ] to Ireland's near-total ban on abortion and the horrific consequences of such policies. This is not a stand-alone case. Every 90 seconds a woman dies from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth, totaling more than 350,000 deaths worldwide each year. Nearly all of these deaths occur in developing countries, where access to modern medical care is scarce.
What makes Savita's story so shocking is that she died in a modern hospital in a developed European country. We health advocates spend a lot of time and energy fighting for the kind of access Savita (almost) had. Hers was a planned pregnancy. She herself was a medical professional, a dentist, who recognized the warning signs of pregnancy complications. When she felt severe pains, she and her husband didn't have to travel far to reach a clean, modern hospital where her health problems were quickly diagnosed. And when she learned that she was miscarrying and that her life was in danger, she asked her doctor about her options and requested that her pregnancy be ended before it killed her.
Lack of access to medical care did not kill Savita -- politics did.
The slow and painful death Ireland's abortion ban forced Savita to endure, and forced her husband to witness, brings to mind another tragic story. Earlier this year, doctors in the Dominican Republic refused [ http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/18/world/americas/dominican-republic-abortion/index.html ] chemotherapy to a 16-year-old cancer patient because she was pregnant.
Think this couldn't happen in the United States? Think again.
In Nebraska, Danielle Deaver experienced complications in the 22nd week of her pregnancy. Her water broke and doctors informed her that there was not enough amniotic fluid for her daughter to survive. Devastated, Danielle wanted to end the pregnancy, but her state's ban on safe and legal abortion after 20 weeks gestation prevented [ http://www.womenarewatching.org/article/life-just-isnt-black-and-white-danielle-deavers-story-about-how-the-20-week-abortion-ban-became-her- ] her from doing so. Instead, Danielle was forced to continue her pregnancy and deliver a baby that died moments after birth [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NneTbcCad9k (next below, as embedded)].
Danielle, the young woman in the Dominican Republic and Savita show us what happens when politicians get between women and their doctors. Right now in Ohio, legislators are considering a bill that would impose similar restrictions on women in Ohio as those currently faced by women in Ireland. It would ban safe and legal abortion very early in pregnancy -- even before some women know they are pregnant.
Savita and Danielle represent some of the most extreme outcomes of harmful policies, but by no means the full extent. Women across the country and around the world suffer in myriad ways because of politics that deny women the ability to make their own health care decisions.
They face challenges ranging from mental anguish after becoming pregnant from a sexual assault, to the judgment and shame created by bad policies, to the health consequences of complicated pregnancies, both intended and unintended.
The best way to honor the life and courage of Savita and women like her is to make sure no woman dies again in these circumstances. We need to ensure that laws and policies give women the ability to make decisions about whether to end a pregnancy, choose adoption, or raise a child.
It's time we let politicians know that we will no longer allow politics to interfere with women's health. We have enough work ensuring that women and families can access quality medical care. Let's leave the personal decisions up to them and their doctors.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cecile-richards/savitas-death-was-not-an_b_2161151.html [with comments]
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Reproductive Crisis? Do Not Proceed to a Catholic Hospital
By Angela Bonavoglia
Posted: 06/ 7/10 07:55 PM ET
So many things are galling about Phoenix Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted's excommunication of Sister Margaret McBride, a member of St. Joseph's Hospital Ethics Committee, for approving the termination of the life-threatening, 11-week-old pregnancy of a 27-year-old mother of four that it's hard to know where to begin. But surely one of the most urgent issues this case raises is the danger faced by any woman who sets foot in a Catholic hospital in the midst of a reproductive crisis.
Just to recap, late last year a critically-ill pregnant woman was brought into St. Joseph's suffering from pulmonary hypertension. Her pregnancy posed such a burden to her heart and lungs that carrying it to term almost certainly would have killed her. Sister Margaret approved the decision of the physicians, the patient, and her family to terminate the pregnancy.
When Olmsted learned that this procedure had taken place, all hell broke loose. Without a scintilla of empathy or sympathy for the dying woman and her family, Olmsted said [ http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2010/05/14/20100514stjoseph0515bishop.html ]: "The direct killing of an unborn child is always immoral, no matter the circumstances." Since the abortion was not "indirect" (i.e., the byproduct of another procedure necessary to save the mother's life, such as removing a cancerous uterus), the correct moral action, according to Olmsted and the Phoenix diocese [dead link ( http://www.catholicsun.org/2010/phxdio-stjoes/Q-AND-A-ST-JOSEPH-HOSPITAL-FINAL.pdf ); see/covered by link above; later related at http://www.catholicsun.org/2011/01/20/media-obligated-to-provide-community-with-truth-justice-in-reporting/ ], was this: Let the mother and the fetus die.
We do not know how often such decisions come up in Catholic hospitals. Nor do we know if any go the other way -- that is, the beliefs of the Olmsteds of the Church prevail and discharge is followed by a funeral. What we do know is that Catholic hospitals, charged with abiding by the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services [ http://www.usccb.org/about/doctrine/ethical-and-religious-directives/ ], pose a real danger to women's health and lives.
"One of the most troubling areas is in the treatment of reproductive emergencies," says Lois Uttley, director of the MergerWatch Project [ http://www.mergerwatch.org/ ], which works with communities facing Catholic-non-Catholic hospital mergers to preserve reproductive health services. A miscarriage in progress is an example of the emergencies Uttley is referencing. When it happens so early in pregnancy that the fetus cannot survive, the pregnancy has to be terminated quickly. Unfortunately, explains Uttley, in some Catholic hospitals, this isn't what happens; the fetal heartbeat has to stop before doctors can do the procedure.
The disturbing findings of a report published in late 2008 in the American Journal of Public Health [ http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2007.126730 ] bear this out. The researchers set out to explore the impact of residency abortion training on the medical practices of a sample of ob-gyns. In the course of conducting their interviews, they got an unexpected glimpse into the conflicts posed by the Directives for physicians attempting to manage miscarriages.
One doctor working at a Catholic hospital reported receiving a woman whose pregnancy "was very early, 14 weeks," with "a hand sticking out of the cervix," indicating that "clearly the membranes had ruptured and she was trying to deliver." Because there was still a fetal heart rate, the ethics committee refused to approve the abortion; they sent the woman to another institution 90 miles away.
Another doctor, at an academic medical center, reported that a Catholic-owned hospital called to ask her to accept a pregnant miscarrying patient who was already septic and hemorrhaging. She urged them to do the uterine aspiration themselves, but they refused. That doctor accepted the patient and did the procedure, but saw this case as a form of "patient dumping." She reported the hospital for an Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act violation.
Obviously and fundamentally, the question is this: Why does a woman lying at death's door have to worry about whether a procedure that will save her life violates the so-called "ethical" Directives of a religion she doesn't belong to or long ago abandoned, Directives that treat women as disposable delivery systems for new humans, while flying in the face of standard, approved medical practice?
One answer is that the original conscience clauses, approved by Congress after the passage of Roe v. Wade, have been bastardized. They now apply not only to people -- physicians and nurses who oppose abortion -- but to institutions whose "consciences" trump not only the patient's own conscience, but also violate her right to informed consent and to medically indicated care.
We need more research into how often and in what ways physicians compromise patient care as a result of the Catholic Directives. But for now, the experience of the nameless, faceless, pregnant woman who Bishop Olmstead would have sentenced to death (rather than having her live "the rest of her existence having had her child killed," which is how the diocesan statement put it) is a cautionary tale.
Unless you are a deeply devoted Catholic and want your local bishop to make your most intimate medical decisions, when the ambulance pulls up, be ready. Have your own ethical and moral directive saying: Do Not Take Me to a Catholic Hospital. If for no other reason than this: there may not be a Sister Margaret in the house.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angela-bonavoglia/reproductive-crisis-do-no_b_602086.html [with comments]
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Treatment Denied
Photo of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix by Serwaa Adu-Tutu.
May 9, 2011 by Molly M. Ginty
Kathleen Prieskorn gasped in shock as her medical nightmare began. Still reeling from the heartbreak of an earlier miscarriage, Prieskorn was three months pregnant and working as a waitress when she felt a twinge, felt a trickle down her leg and realized she was miscarrying again.
She rushed to her doctor’s office, “where I learned my amniotic sac had torn,” says Prieskorn, who lives with her husband in Manchester, N.H. “But the nearest hospital had recently merged with a Catholic hospital—and because my doctor could still detect a fetal heartbeat, he wasn’t allowed to give me a uterine evacuation that would help me complete my miscarriage.”
To get treatment, Prieskorn, who has no car, had to instead travel 80 miles to the nearest hospital that would perform the procedure—expensive to do in an ambulance, because she had no health insurance. Her doctor handed her $400 of his own cash and she bundled into the back of a cab.
“During that trip, which seemed endless, I was not only devastated, but terrified,” Prieskorn remembers. “I knew that if there were complications I could lose my uterus—and maybe even my life.”
Ordeals like the one Prieskorn suffered are not isolated incidents: They could happen to a woman of any income level, religion or state now that Catholic institutions have become the largest not-for-profit source of health-care in the U.S., treating 1 in 6 hospital patients. And that’s because Catholic hospitals are required to adhere to the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services—archconservative restrictions issued by the 258-member U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Because of the directives, doctors and nurses at Catholic-affiliated facilities are not allowed to perform procedures that the Catholic Church deems “intrinsically immoral, such as abortion and direct sterilization.” Those medical personnel also cannot give rape survivors drugs to prevent pregnancy unless there is “no evidence that conception has already occurred.” The only birth control they can dispense is advice about “natural family planning”— laborious daily charting of a woman’s basal temperature and cervical mucus in order to abstain from sex when she is ovulating—which only 0.1 percent of women use.
The Catholic directives involve not just abortion and birth control but ectopic pregnancies, embryonic stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, sterilizations and more. “The problem with [the directives],” says Susan Berke Fogel, an attorney at the National Health Law Program in Los Angeles, “is about substandard care becoming rampant in the U.S., threatening women’s health and women’s lives.”
Catastrophe was only narrowly averted in 2009 when a 27-year-old, 11-weeks-pregnant patient in Arizona staggered into the emergency room of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix with such severe pulmonary hypertension that her doctors determined she would die without an immediate abortion. The ethics committee voted to break hospital policy and advise the woman of her option of a lifesaving abortion. The woman chose to have doctors terminate the pregnancy.
But when the bishop overseeing the Phoenix diocese heard about this, he declared that St. Joseph’s could no longer be a Catholic institution unless it agreed to follow Catholic “moral teachings.” The Bishop forbade Catholic Mass in the hospital’s chapel and excommunicated Sister Margaret McBride—the only nun on the ethics committee.
The Phoenix story drew national outrage, but lesser-known cases of religious doctrine affecting medical care are rampant. In Oregon, a bishop threw out a medical-center director from his diocese for refusing to stop sterilizing patients. In Arizona, a couple raced to a Catholic hospital ER after the wife miscarried one of a pair of fetuses, only to be sent to a secular facility after doctors determined that the twin fetus was still alive—though not viable. And in New York, doctors at a Catholic institution neglected to terminate an ectopic pregnancy (in which the fertilized egg begins to develop outside the uterus) even though the embryo could not possibly survive and the patient faced a potentially fatal rupture of her fallopian tube.
How did we get to the point where 258 right-wing bishops—all (supposedly) celibate male clerics—are prohibiting doctors from practicing medicine and denying women essential reproductive care? The debacle starts with anti-choice legislation. The U.S. Congress started to pass “conscience clauses” pushed by the Roman Catholic Church and anti-abortion forces in the immediate wake of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973. Today, these laws apply not only to physicians and nurses who oppose abortion, but to entire institutions whose “consciences” allow them to withhold medically indicated care.
Even as recently as 2008, the George W. Bush administration issued sweeping regulations to give health-care workers the right to refuse to take part in any procedure that “violates” their religious beliefs. The Obama administration moved to reverse this policy in February (making it explicit that contraception is not covered by conscience provisions), but 47 states and the District of Columbia now allow individuals or entities to refuse women reproductive health services, information or referrals.
You don’t have to be a Catholic to end up at a Catholic hospital that refuses you lifesaving care. A Catholic facility might be the only one in your area, and when you expect treatment you may get dogma instead.“Religion in America should mean that the church runs the church,” says Barry Lynn, the executive director of Washington, D.C.-based Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “It shouldn’t mean the bishops are running your reproductive life.”
Excerpted from the Spring 2011 issue of Ms.
Copyright © 2012 Ms.
http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2011/05/09/treatment-denied/ [with comments]
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I got duped by Glenn Beck!
(Credit: AP/David Karp)
The pundit bought the creative rights to the dystopian novel I edited, transforming it into right-wing propaganda
By Sarah Cypher
Monday, Nov 19, 2012 02:57 PM CST
Two weeks ago I discovered, to my surprise, that I had line-edited an early draft of Glenn Beck’s new novel, “Agenda 21 [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/1476716692 ].” Glenn Beck! At the time I was working on it, the manuscript belonged to its actual author, a woman named Harriet Parke, who lives a few minutes from my aunt. But a year and a few lawyers later, Glenn Beck purchased the right to call himself its creator, and Ms. Parke agreed to be presented as a ghostwriter.
I would be proud to have my name in the acknowledgments of Ms. Parke’s novel. But given that it is printed inside a book bearing Glenn Beck’s name, the work I did is now deeply at odds with who I am as an editor. “Agenda 21? is going out into the world on Tuesday, Nov. 20, as something decidedly different from the novel I edited. Yes, the story is the same. So are the concepts, the characters and the writing. But the name in the byline — that changes the book’s intent. It changes everything.
If you’re not an urban planner, here’s a crash course on the novel’s eponymous United Nations Agenda 21. It’s a 40-chapter behemoth written in 1993. It lays out non-binding guidelines for promoting economic growth, environmental protection and social equality. Basically, it is a recipe for living within our means today, so that we do not pass along to our children a degraded economy, environment and society. It addresses topics as various as toxic waste, biotechnology, conservation and green transportation, all with the goal of helping poor countries develop economies — in large part, by encouraging wealthy countries to dial back in sensible ways on their consumption of resources.
Today, city and regional planners support the concepts that underpin Agenda 21 [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21 ], because they translate the big picture to local efforts to save people time and money. In other words, think globally, act regionally. After all, the planning profession is about supporting a community’s efforts to collaboratively make the best of change — such as whether your community is growing or shrinking, or becoming more rural, suburban or urban. Change is inevitable: Brookings reports that “our population exceeded 300 million in 2006, and we are on track to hit 350 million in the next 15 years.” And that “America will probably be older, more diverse, more urban — and less equal” than we are today.
Planners help communities find common-sense, constructive ways of using limited resources wisely. It looks for ways to make transportation inexpensive, keep energy plentiful, and help towns and cities avoid the kind of bad economic decisions that lead to eyesores like, say, a half-deserted strip mall anchored to an abandoned Wal-Mart. Thanks to zoning, for instance, which was created in the 1920s to protect property values, no one can come in and inappropriately construct a landfill or a steel mill next to your house.
Glenn Beck and fellow pundits hate Agenda 21 [ http://mediamatters.org/research/2011/06/17/beck-conspiracy-theory-uns-agenda-21-will-resul/180690 ], however, because they interpret a few lines from chapter four out of context. Their scare tactic is to say it’s the narrow end of a wedge that will insert global UN authority over American towns and cities, allow the government to confiscate private land, reallocate resources by force, and evict people from their single-family homes. Never mind that the law of the land begins with the United States Constitution [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supremacy_Clause ] and that our relationship with the UN can hardly be described as lockstep [ http://www.globalgovernancewatch.org/spotlight_on_sovereignty/withholding-un-payments-why-does-the-us-do-it ]. Moreover, the United States has no land use laws at the federal level, whatsoever. All land use decision-making authority in the United States lies with the states, who delegate authority to local governments. Relatively speaking, the United States has some of the strictest protections for private property in the world.
Agenda 21 is simply a non-binding, unenforceable menu of guidelines that exists to help any town or city that signs on to it. But when removed from all sensible context and cast forward into a dystopian future, Agenda 21 becomes the novel “Agenda 21,” which tells the story of a post-American settlement where people are forced to ride bikes and walk on treadmills to generate electricity, told whom to marry, raised in communal kibbutz-like nurseries, and forced to swear allegiance to a scary green one-world socialist entity.
My job is to edit stories, not the author’s sensibility. Sometimes I edit a manuscript whose politics or sense of the human condition doesn’t agree with my own. That was the case with Ms. Parke’s draft of “Agenda 21,” which contains a caricature of some things I find highly inoffensive, such as bicycles and feeding squirrels. I am OK with that, personally and professionally, because novels are meant to be read as fiction, as a form of complex entertainment. There is joy, too, in discovering and thinking about the ideas that underpin the plot. And besides, if everybody agreed, we’d live in a dully conformist world indeed. Think of something like Orwell’s London in “1984 [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/014118776X ],” which contains a vision of socialism whose simplified specter still haunts berserk right-wing pundits like … well, like Glenn Beck.
Furthermore — and I must speculate here — the novel’s actual author, a retired nurse in western Pennsylvania, has gained income and national recognition for years of hard work. I can’t argue with that, either. We writers all want that. The only interesting thing here is that it comes with the sacrifice of her authorship: Her name appears as a “ghostwriter” in small letters on the cover. But she conceived of and wrote the book herself, and I respect the humility it must take to partially efface one’s name from one’s own work. In an ideal world, all writers would write anonymously.
If the book had been published under Ms. Parke’s name alone, it would remain an entertaining dystopian novel. The writing is capable, the story compelling, and most of its values are to be respected — family, localness, and a good education in history (Beck [ http://www.examiner.com/article/glenn-beck-claims-slavery-was-not-really-bad-until-government-got-involved ], and his publishing house [ http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2012/10/david-barton-christopher-columbus-and-the-potential-costs-of-myth-making/ ], ought to take note [ http://scienceblogs.com/dispatches/2009/11/30/becks-historical-confusions/ ] of that, by the way). It would be marketed and sold to readers of speculative fiction, which are typically a brainy crowd. Maybe some among them would hold it up as a negative vision of a radical environmental agenda run amok, albeit in a world without Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart — in fact, one without any wealthy corporations at all, who historically pitch their vast financial resources against environmental regulations.
But mostly, we’d just read it for the story. That’s how I read it one year ago, and I enjoyed it. But why publish the novel under Beck’s name? What would the book have lost if his publishing company, Mercury Ink, had simply let Ms. Parke call the novel her own? The answer, I think, is that it needs Beck’s franchise in order to succeed in a purpose beyond entertainment.
Publishing “Agenda 21? under Glenn Beck’s name transforms it, at least temporarily. Glenn Beck is more than just the nice guy whose publishing house is bringing Ms. Parke’s work to a national audience. He’s also a professional ideologue whose establishment confers the full force of its intellectually and morally irresponsible franchise [ http://www.worldmag.com/2012/08/doubting_thomas ] on a novel that distorts the truth about Agenda 21, which is doing good work in the world. Glenn Beck is not writing as an artist, bound by the conventions of his art, plying his craft on the willing human imagination. Hell, he’s not writing at all. He is a brand, with a budget, and with an agenda of his own. Ultimately, by assigning his brand to the novel “Agenda 21,” Beck turns a form of entertainment into a political lie, a tool for politicizing people.
On its own, ”Agenda 21? should not work this way: just like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/038549081X ]” does not drive women to the polls to keep religion out of politics, nor “The Hunger Games [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/0545425115 ]” motivate us to stop seeing war as a form of entertainment, nor “One Hundred Years of Solitude [ http://www.amazon.com/dp/006112009X ]” give a corporation pause before plundering resources from poorer countries. If people show up en masse to vote for or against these things, it is not because spokespeople from NARAL or the NEA or the Union of Concerned Scientists pushed these novels on national TV; it’s because people are responding to something provable and real right now.
The novel “Agenda 21? was inspired by Beck’s entreaty to his viewers to “do your own research [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Oevj6XokVw (next below)].”
Well, fine — if you read a single paragraph of a 40-chapter political tract, you can spin it all kinds of ways and call it “research.” Beck does as much on his show [ http://ossfoundation.us/projects/environment/global-warming/myths/glenn-beck ], and I worry that Beck’s many readers will get the wrong idea about the UN Agenda 21. In principle, it is an important part of city and regional planners’ work, which involves making sure that people can access things they need: food, education, doctors’ offices, stores. It’s about making sure those things are even there when you need them. It’s about helping people enjoy freedom and mobility, even if they are too poor or too old or too young to have a car. Or just don’t want one. It’s about the preservation of localness and sense of place instead of generic-ization, and about maintaining a familiar, comfortable way of life as our population expands from 300 million to over 400 million in my lifetime.
If, like me, you feel concerned about the inevitable population growth, decreased availability of clean water and resources, aging national infrastructure, and upward-trending global temperatures, you might take heart to know that city and regional planners are numerous, bright, well-educated people who devote their careers to finding ways to helping the rest of us enjoy a long-term high standard of living. Or, you can empower obstructionists who make the panicked hoarding of fuel and canned goods seem like the only long-term planning that matters.
There is a precedent for successful social fiction. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” focused public sentiment against slavery because its unstinting realism humanized a gross injustice that was already tinder in the national furnace. For the same reason, Upton Sinclair’s ”The Jungle” spurred labor reforms [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle#Public_and_federal_response ], though arguably it could have been more successful, sooner, if it hadn’t slathered so much socialist propaganda onto a realistic portrayal of factory life.
Usually, though, preachy fiction is a brittle failure. I think of an interesting but flimsy environmental novel like Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael,” whose political message overtakes the story. Gore Vidal’s fiction suffers for the same reason. I do respect the writer who champions the underdog — the working poor, the immigrant, the father of hungry children, the ambitious teen who is under-served by an opportunist or parochial education system. Less so, the writer whose vision empowers an avaricious establishment, or obstructs meaningful adaptation to our changing environment. Yet when I suspend my disbelief to read speculative fiction, finding myself preached to at all is an annoying betrayal.
Where that creative betrayal becomes shrill, however, is in the mouth of an ideologue. As a genre, speculative fiction keeps one eye on politics, but its goal is not to preach. It’s to make up an entertaining version of reality — an augmentation of social truth, which is not the truth itself. A novel’s vision can scare us, inspire us, affirm our emotions, and articulate our fears. It shouldn’t, however, serve as a primary political agenda any more than Paul Ryan should be waving ”Atlas Shrugged” around on the House floor. In the same way, “Agenda 21? is being delivered as propaganda, and by buying the right to call himself its author, Glenn Beck is diminishing a work of fiction to nothing more than a cheap appeal directed at people who will believe anything.
Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/19/i_got_duped_by_glenn_beck/ [with comments]
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Dan Lungren, Drug Warrior, Loses Bid For Reelection
By Radley Balko
Posted: 11/19/2012 3:37 pm EST Updated: 11/20/2012 2:26 am EST
It seems appropriate that the career politician Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) would be defeated [ http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_22006209/physician-ousts-gop-rep-dan-lungren-calif ] in the same election in which voters in his own state reined in the infamous "Three Strikes and You're Out" law, and in which voters in Washington and Colorado historically voted [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/11/07/news/economy/marijuana-legalization-washington-colorado/index.html ] to legalize marijuana. Over the course of his career, you'd be hard-pressed to find a more dedicated drug warrior or a politician more committed to alleged tough-on-crime policies than Lungren.
First elected to Congress in 1978 at the age of 32, Lungren rose in stature with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and quickly became a darling of the tough-on-crime crowd and the rising moral majority movement. No new anti-drug law was too tough for the young congressman. In 1984, he was a sponsor of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, at the time one of the most sweeping pieces of anti-crime legislation in U.S. history. The bill gave prosecutors the power to appeal sentences (previously, only defendants could do that) and eliminated the right to bail for people accused of certain drug crimes, according to Smoke and Mirrors [ http://www.amazon.com/Smoke-Mirrors-Drugs-Politics-Failure/dp/0316084468 ], a book by journalist Dan Baum. Lungren had already worked to make increasingly less serious crimes subject to increasingly longer sentences, and he ended a federal policy of allowing young, first-time drug offenders to clear their records after they had served their sentences and if they committed no future crimes, Baum wrote.
But the most odious part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act -- and the part that, over the years, Lungren has taken most pride in -- gave the government broad new asset forfeiture powers. Civil asset forfeiture gives the government the ability to seize property connected to certain crimes under civil law, instead of criminal law. Because the law is civil, the government's burden of proof is lower, and police and prosecutors only need to show probable cause that what they've seized is connected to drug activity. The burden then switches to the property owner to show he obtained the property or earned the cash legitimately. The owner never needs to be charged with a crime -- indeed, in most cases they aren't [ http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/26/the-forfeiture-racket ].
Lungren did not respond to a request to comment for this article.
The 1984 bill included a provision allowing police departments and prosecutors' offices to keep the proceeds from these forfeitures, creating an enormous incentive for them to "find" connections that may not have existed. The bill also allowed local police to call the DEA with information after finding certain property. The DEA would take a cut of the bounty, and then give the rest back to the local police agency. The policy allowed police departments to get around the laws some states had passed to make forfeiture proceedings fairer. Additionally, the 1984 bill allowed the government to seize a drug suspect's assets before filing charges, leaving suspects with no money to hire legal representation. (Property owners had no right to a court-appointed attorney in civil forfeiture cases.)
Two years later, NBA prospect Len Bias died of a drug overdose. Washington slipped into a feverish drug-war mania, and few politicians were more hysterical than Lungren. In Smoke and Mirrors, Baum writes that Lungren wanted to make it illegal for anyone to accept money from a drug dealer. "Make it illegal for a dry cleaner or a grocery store to take money from a drug dealer, [Lungren] argued, and if they do, seize the business. Put the merchant in jail." Referring to the death of Bias, Lungren implored, "We have been far too lenient," according to Baum.
Upon reading an article in Discovery magazine about "designer drugs," Lungren wanted to ban any "substance which has a stimulant, depresant, or hallucinogenic effect on the central nervous system," Baum wrote. "That would include coffee, alcohol, and a long list of legal pharmaceuticals." Not to mention nicotine.
In 1991, Lungren was elected attorney general of California. He would hold that office for the next eight years. During his time as the state's chief law enforcement officer, Lungren supported and lobbied for "Megan's Law," the genesis of the idea of the sex offender registry, along with the "Three Strikes" law that California voters narrowed earlier this month. He sponsored a law allowing minors as young as 14 who are accused of murder to be tried as adults [ http://articles.latimes.com/1993-01-15/news/mn-1448_1_attorney-general ]. He also led a national effort to limit lawsuits filed by prisoners, which produced the federal Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1996. While purported to prevent prisoners from suing because they want better desserts or more television, Human Rights Watch has since found [ http://www.hrw.org/reports/2009/06/16/no-equal-justice-0 ] that the law has made it more difficult for prisoners to sue to stop sexual abuse, poor medical care, prolonged use of solitary confinement, and other non-trivial abuses.
About a year into Lungren's first term as attorney general, a team of 31 police officers from five local, state, and federal police agencies raided the home of Malibu, Calif., millionaire Donald Scott. They claimed to have been looking for a massive marijuana operation. Scott, in fact, was opposed to illicit drugs. But the officers did wake Scott and his fiance. When Scott heard her scream at the sight of armed men in their home, he grabbed his gun to confront them. A deputy then shot Scott dead.
Though he was the attorney general at the time, Lungren was never much interested in getting to the bottom of why an enormous raid team from multiple police agencies could have been so wrong about Donald Scott. They thought they'd find 4,000 plants. They found none. Lungren also did not show much concern over the fact that a California police officer had killed an innocent man.
Fortunately, Ventura County District Attorney Michael Bradbury was concerned about both. He launched an investigation, and in 1993 punished a damning report, strongly suggesting that the L.A. County Sheriff's Department conducted a sloppy investigation that ended with an unnecessarily violent raid because they were interested in obtaining Scott's large property through asset forfeiture laws. Those would be the same laws Lungren helped pass when he was in Congress. Lungren dismissed [ http://articles.latimes.com/1993-11-23/local/me-59888_1_state-attorney-general ] Bradbury's report as "inappropriate and gratuitous."
Throughout the 1990s, California police departments would conduct an increasing number of drug raids, in some cases motivated by the lucre of asset forfeiture -- including the fatal 1999 El Monte raid on Mario Paz, and a 1992 DEA raid on the San Diego-area home of Donald Carlson, in which Carlson was shot four times and spent six weeks in intensive care. He too was innocent.
Even Lungren's fellow conservatives have recognized the abuses wrought by asset forfeiture over the years, including columnist/pundit George Will [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-government-is-the-looter/2012/05/18/gIQAUIKVZU_story.html ] (recently), and the late Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) [ http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/pr-ma-hy.html ], who in 2000 led an effort to reform the law Lungren worked so hard to pass.
Lungren also vigorously opposed Proposition 215, the 1996 ballot initiative that legalized medical marijuana in California. After it passed, Lungren did the best he could to undermine voter intent, including taking the position [ http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/11/04/18326380.php ] that California law enforcement officers could arrest citizens for breaking federal law -- an odd assertion from an alleged believer in federalism. When Garry Trudeau mocked Lungren's opposition to Prop 215 in his "Doonesbury" comic strip, Lungren launched a surreal campaign [ http://articles.latimes.com/1996-10-02/news/mn-49651_1_dan-lungren ] against "Zonker" -- a fictional comic strip character -- that included a press conference and letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times.
Lungren has often cited his Catholic faith as the reason for his career-long opposition to abortion. But Lungren has also been a strong advocate for the death penalty, a position that puts him at odds with his church. Lungren has boasted about his efforts [ http://www.calvoter.org/archive/94general/cand/att/lung/bio.html ] to ensure California's first execution in more than 20 years shortly after he became attorney general. He also spent considerable time in that position and then again after he was reelected to Congress attempting to limit the number of appeals permitted to death row inmates. In 2006, Lungren sponsored a bill [ http://m.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/1490 ] that would strip federal courts of the power to review habeas corpus petitions in state death penalty cases. By then, DNA testing and journalists in Chicago and elsewhere had already exonerated a number of inmates who had previously been slated for execution, many only after federal courts intervened.
Lungren wasn't alone, of course. And he did support the 2010 Fair Sentencing Act, which lessened (but didn't eliminate) the discrepancy in penalties between crack and powder cocaine. But when a politician leaves office after a long career, there's often a tendency to issue platitudes about his devotion to public service, regardless of the actual consequences the policies he supported may have had. Dan Lungren did a lot of damage -- to the criminal justice system, and to the people wrongly or unnecessarily swept into it. A lifetime of public service doesn't change that.
Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/19/dan-lungren-drug-warrior-reelection_n_2159755.html [with comments]
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