Frogs and Ravens

The Problem of Assuming All Americans Are Middle Class

...with a sprinkling of the rich on top.

Reading some of the discussions about Social Security and Medicare and other forms of assistance, it occurs to me that we're seeing one of the dangerous side effects of the rhetorical reliance on invocations of "middle-class Americans."

That is, our national mental landscape now consists of rich people and middle-class people, with a few vague others in the background - voices that we never hear, lives we never see, unless we are among them. Given that, it's hard to advocate for programs that address actual poverty and want, since that's outside the experience of the groups who are not struggling in those ways.

A very simple example: the number of times I've had to explain to family and friends why obtaining medical care is not a simple and straightforward thing for us. And those explanations still are met with bafflement: you're sick, why wouldn't you see a doctor? You have insurance; of course it will cover what you need. The idea that insurance doesn't cover everything, or that you can't easily afford the costs of what it doesn't cover (let alone understanding that the cost of self-insuring is itself quite expensive) is so foreign to their own experience that any explanations to the contrary don't register. It's worse than speaking a foreign language; it's speaking apparent nonsense.

And I can't think the national reluctance to acknowledge the existence of actual people dealing with the challenges of poverty - as opposed to stereotyped caricatures of "the poor" - helps with this.

Dots

Some dots to connect:

• Attempts to impose restrictions on voters (such as voter ID laws) are on the rise.
• Redistricting has increased the number of "safe" districts, meaning that more races are uncontested, and more candidates feel safe taking extreme positions.
• Voting machines remain hackable, and pressure for quick results over accurate results means that the demand for computerized voting systems will continue.
• Voter apathy (in no small part due to the above situations) means that political decisions are increasingly made by smaller and smaller groups of people, and those groups are more likely to hold extreme views (as a fervency of belief is part of what encourages people to go to the polls) (which reinforces the trends in the second point).
• The Citizens United case doubled down on the concept of corporate "personhood," so that it is possible for corporations to buy campaigns and political representatives.  Witness the current Republican primary, the way the current administration treated BP with kid gloves after the oil spill, the way that "too big to fail" is now a valid approach to doing business, and so on.
• The media is also increasingly dominated by pro-corporation thinking, and the majority of its pundits, newscasters, and the like reinforce that thinking rather than bite the hand that feeds them.
• The mainstream media has fallen into the habit of he said/she said journalism, and prefers stories that fall into existing narratives and which require little training (or funding) to produce.  There is also a preference for profit over fact-finding (again, the latter costs money and requires trained reporters).  As a result, stories that entertain and stories which reinforce common wisdom and the spoonfed narratives of the powerful predominate.  At their worst, you get the trifecta, as when Sarah Palin was covered as a political candidate (thus as "serious news"), as an authentic "real American" (reinforcing tropes about who Americans are, that is, white, conservative, small town or rural, gun-loving, religious, etc.), and as a hot babe (thus as telegenic celebrity).
• Groups like ALEC and the Koch brothers are emerging as sources of coordinated political action and funding, and consistently they favor legislation that reduces individual civil liberties and undermines social networks and protective regulation while strengthening the powers of politicians and corporations.
• Prisons are increasingly privatized, turning the justice system into a for-profit enterprise.
• Privatization of public goods, such as roads, libraries, and schools decreases public input into the management of said entities, replaces public good with profit as the primary goal, and makes it easier to paint the government as restrictive and expensive rather than as the provider of useful services.
• Related to this, the insistence that public schools teach primarily "to the test" encourages passive, black-and-white thinking among students, rather than an ability to engage critically with complex situations and problems.  (Case in point: global climate change.)
• As college education is increasingly priced out of reach due to the reduction of state and federal funding, and the expansion of administrative staff and salaries, higher education is less prepared to provide a corrective to what happens in the lower grades; at the same time it is less able to cover more complex issues in deeper detail.  Simultaneously, those rising tuition rates leave new graduates deep in debt and thus vulnerable to economic coercion on the part of employers.  The emphasis on liberal arts education at the expense of vocational education (like plumbing or carpentry) also reduces the options for students who are more manually oriented.  (Many of them will either end up going in debt for educations that are not functional as job-producing credentials, or taking other options such as military service.)
• Police around the country are gaining increased access to military-grade hardware and training in its use; such equipment not only increases police lethality, it also makes it easier to surveil populations without their knowledge or consent, and the laws governing such technology (such as drones, cameras, and tasers) lag far behind their use.
• The rhetoric of terrorism has enabled the government (at state and federal levels) to expand its powers of surveillance, arrest, and detainment, while at the same time decreasing transparency and promoting an attitude of passive acceptance to increasing intrusions on privacy, on the part of the general public.
• Legislation aimed at restricting access to abortion has led to increased government interference in women's exercise of bodily autonomy, and increased expectations that members of the medical profession function as punitive arms of the government, and because this legislation is enacted piecemeal state by state, there is no national conversation about what is a de facto overturning of Roe v. Wade.
• Legislation aimed at reducing companies' responsibility to include contraception in their insurance policies reinforces the message of women's unreliability and second-class citizenship, frames religious freedom in terms of the restrictive beliefs of a few religious groups, privileges corporate decisions (also framed as "religious freedom") over individual religious beliefs, and continues the trend of declining employer-provided health care insurance.
• Responses to the above legislation are used to reinforce a message of "I got mine, why should I pay for yours" (as through Limbaugh's castigating of Fluke as a "slut") and are consistently and erroneously framed as a "taxpayer" concern; this both reinforces the selfish message just mentioned, and reinforces the idea that taxes should not be used to pay for social services, whether those take the form of welfare for the poor, or mass programs such as single-payer health insurance programs.
• Other responses to the above legislation take the form of mocking the logic of those laws by proposing that similar invasions of privacy be applied to male bodies as well as female.  While this satirical approach is understandable (given the media's unwillingness to cover complex issues unless they can be reduced to an entertaining soundbite) it reinforces the idea that legislative interference in medical decisions and patients' exercise of their right to bodily autonomy is okay (if it is applied "fairly" to both genders). 
• Rape culture reinforces the idea that consent is not something we should be concerned about; hence it is possible for legislators to opine that a coerced ultrasound (transvaginal or not) is okay since a woman who is pregnant has already "had something up there," implying that consent is meaningless, or that one instance of consent should be construed as global consent in perpetuity.
• Laws such as Florida's Stand Your Ground law reward vigilanteeism and the murder of people who happen to be non-white, while reinforcing the notion that the Second Amendment right to bear arms is more important than laws governing personal safety. 
• Media narratives about "lone" gunmen, who are "crazy," and viewed as surprises or exceptions, reinforce a world view in which violence (especially violence against women, people of color, and abortion providers) is viewed as a random, freak occurrence, rather than part of a larger system of beliefs about the nature of power and dominance.  As a "bonus" the mentally ill are further marginalized and stigmatized by such narratives.
• Such narratives about the mentally ill also are wielded against those who speak out against the system (OWS for example is marginalized both as being a bunch of "lazy, dirty hippies" and as consisting of large numbers of homeless people, which is shorthand often for "crazy people") and to minimize the real and serious danger posed by people with money and power who espouse extreme views (e.g. Santorum is often framed as "crazy" in order to justify not taking him seriously).
• Continuing high unemployment is used to enable further incursions against individual privacy, as when people on unemployment are asked to take drug tests, or when job applicants are asked to turn over their email and social media passwords and user names to potential employers.  Some incursions are even sanctioned by legislation linking contraception to employment, as in the Arizona legislation making it legal for employers to question their employees about birth control use and to fire them on the basis of what they discover.
• The minimum wage is lagging, often severely, behind the cost of living in every state of the union.  This comes at a time when the costs of housing are rising, the costs of health insurance (let alone uninsured costs) are rising, and when unemployment in general is rampant.  This leaves the population vulnerable to exploitation by unethical employers, and too stressed by the demands of subsistence to educate themselves about the issues, let alone mount an effective response to them.
• Global climate change is imposing severe stresses on an already stressed system, from increasing forest fires, an earlier (and more northerly) tornado season, droughts in our food-producing regions, immigration fueled by environmental devastation and economic downturns elsewhere, increasing demands on our fossil fuel reserves for cooling and heating during seasons of extreme temperatures (high and low).
  
  I think that's enough for now.  Are you starting to see a picture emerge?

This Could Be Permanent If We Don't Act

via www.digitaltrends.com

 

(Yes, my blog's been quiescent; that is, however, a different state than permanently shut down. More on the legislation in question at the link, above.)

Beyond Hope, Revisited

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.

In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good thing.

via www.orionmagazine.org

 

I've linked to Derrick Jensen's "Beyond Hope" before.  This summer, and particularly this month, I've been watching people lashing out in fear and anger on all sorts of progressive sites, and I can't help but see echoes in events like the London riots.  It's been painful to watch, and, when I've joined the conversation, it's been painful to participate. 

I think people are desperate, and afraid, and it's becoming slowly more obvious to even the most oblivious of us that we are in a world of hurt.  That much is clear, but what is far from clear is what is to be done about it.  It's that frightened uncertainty that I think is fueling the savagery I've been seeing in comments; what we are seeing is not a just a community in crisis, but a community confronting the bitter fact that the crisis was precipitated by the very systems that were supposed to protect us in such moments.  Some people are clinging frantically to the idea that if we all wish hard enough, if we pay enough attention, the system will work the way it is supposed to - for example, that if we continue to vote thoughtfully, and write letters to our representatives to tell them what we think and feel, the right people and the right actions will emerge from the chaos to fix things.

Here's what's terrifying:  they won't.  We can't count on the people in power to do the right thing any more, no matter how you define power - we've been betrayed by politicians, by corporations, by the media, and all of them have worked in collaboration (some deliberately, some simply by dint of taking the easier path) to remove themselves from accountability.

Here's what's terrifying:  we're going to have to fix this ourselves.  Moreover, we're going to have to do that in the face of the same structures that put those who work against us in power, and we're going to have to do that knowing that those on the top of the heap will resist - some passively, by being dead weight resistant to change, some actively by denouncing efforts to create a more humane world as impractical, and some still further by not only declaring such actions as impractical but illegal and traitorous.

I don't want this, and I don't think any of my friends want this.  We're being dragged kicking and screaming to this conclusion, because any normal person wants to live in a society that works, that doesn't require vast efforts of its citizens to survive and look out for each other.  Facing the fact that we don't live in such a society is terrifying, and it's far easier to argue over minutiae and wishful thinking, because most of us barely have the energy or time or money to run our daily lives, let alone start a revolution.

I don't know what the answer is, or what's going to happen.  All I know is that people are worried and afraid and they have no good outlets for those emotions, no good way to find and obtain relief.  And that scares me.

Are We Irrelevant?

Have the American people outlived their usefulness to the rich minority in the United States? A number of trends suggest that the answer may be yes.

via www.salon.com

 

Reading the article linked above, it's striking to me the parallels with our political situation. Between the two major parties, they've shut the door to any alternative parties, or at least made it very hard for them to get in.

In the state where I live, for example, any party who wants to be on the ballot has to jump through a bunch of pretty onerous hoops... unless they've been on the ballot for several elections running. So, of course that means the two major parties are automatically on the ballot, while any other party has to spend extra effort and money meeting the entry requirements. Add in the costs of buying visibility, and challenging incumbents, and it gets worse.  Then, if the challenger is also running on a platform challenging corporate power... what we end up with is two major parties who have a large inflow of money and many structural advantages facing smaller parties with minimal inflow and many structural disadvantages that require money to overcome.  I trust you can do the math there.

Spin

These are the races I'm voting on, with my choices bolded:

Libertarian vs. Republican incumbent vs. Tea Party vs. Anti-immigrant write-in vs. pro-life, anti-tax, pro-drilling, conservative Democrat - none of the above

Democrat vs. Libertarian vs. Republican

Democrat vs. Libertarian vs. Republican incumbent

Democrat vs. Republican

Democrat vs. Tea-Party Libertarian vs. Republican incumbent

Libertarian vs. Republican incumbent

Democrat incumbent vs. Republican

Democrat vs. Republican incumbent

Libertarian vs. Republican incumbent

Democrat vs. Republican incumbent

Democrat vs. Libertarian vs. Republican incumbent

Libertarian vs. Republican incumbent

Independent vs. Republican

 

How I want to vote:  Green, Green, Green, Green, Green, Green, Green, Green, Green, Green, Green, Green.

How the outcome will be spun, regardless of whether my votes match the final winners: "Victory for Republicans, victory against incumbents, Obama and the Democrats lose.  Oh, and third parties can't win."

There's only ONE candidate in that whole roster that I feel good about voting for, and I am betting that the Tea Party will not succeed in spoiling the Republican enough to let that Democrat win.

Also?  Of those 33 candidates, only 3 are people of color, and only 4 are women.  None are women of color.

Some choice.  Some "representative" democracy.

Compensation

Watching the news about the Gulf oozing out, day after day, knowing that as a driver living in this modern industrial economy I am complicit in the effects, I have decided to do something.

I've seen calls for boycotting BP, and while I understand the impulse, I have been unable to understand exactly how that would work.  Yes, it would show displeasure, but it wouldn't solve the problem.  It would reduce money in BP's profit sheet, but it makes astonishing amounts on a global scale, and right now it needs that money to pay out fines and help fix the situation.  It would hurt local stations, which are already struggling; eventually, yes, they will need to find new ways of making a living, but right now seems ill-timed for that hardship.  Plus, if I don't buy from BP, I must still buy from some other petrochemical giant who is just as complicit as BP in this world of exploitation and regulations-dodging. 

Like many people, "choosing" to go without petroleum in the form of an automobile fuel source isn't a practical option for me; I do avoid driving for the most part, but sometimes it can't be helped.  And it doesn't even touch on the myriad of ways that I consume, indirectly, petroleum products such as plastics, energy, etc.

So my response is this:

For every tankful of gas I purchase, I will donate an equivalent or greater amount to an organization working on the clean-up, or promoting alternative energy, or encouraging us to wean ourselves off of petroleum, or which encourages public transit.  I think of it as a tax on my use of petroleum as a driver, and if I had more money I'd consider adding my other uses to the calculation. 

If this idea appeals to you, I encourage you to spread the word around.

No Hope or Change for the Environment

But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives.  And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.  It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development. It means continued investment in advanced biofuels and clean coal technologies. And, yes, it means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.

So this is one of the things that Obama said in his State of the Union address the other night.  I've been trying to find some comment on this passage among the progressive and green blogs I frequent, and have been disturbed to read nary a peep on this.  (If anyone has a link to such a blog commenting on this, please post it in the comments.)

People like to talk about Obama as a visionary, as someone who wants to change the way we do things in this country.  I point them to this.

This is not visionary.  This is not change.  This is more of the unsustainable growth-at-any-cost nonsense that caused the very problems he alludes to when he mentions the climate bill. 

At a time where he touts fiscal conservation, where he advocates spending freezes on social programs (but not on war, oh, no, never that!) and talks about how awful it is to saddle our children with debt and a giant deficit... he says nothing about the environmental costs of our "profitable" attitudes toward energy production, and energy consumption, nor the effects of those things on future generations.

How about a freeze on fossil fuel use?  How about exploring new ways to reduce our energy consumption and to increase efficiency?  How about building a new generation of buildings that don't require so much fuel to heat and which can contribute positively to the energy grid through rooftop solar?  How about investing in waste reduction, and in educating people on the real world costs of mindless consumption?

Oh, yeah, right.  If we don't consume consume consume the nation dies.

There are reasons that this passage got thunderous applause and cheers from both sides of the aisle.  Those are the reasons why we are in trouble, and will fail to do what needs to be done.  They are in part the reasons why corporations have won the right to participate in our political process, part of the reason why political rhetoric is always about getting more for less, rather than learning to live with less so we can have more.

Obama may be many things, but when it comes to energy and the environment, he is neither Hope nor Change, but rather a smiling version of Business As Usual, Full Speed Ahead.

Conflation

People.

It's not "health care reform," however much the folks in Congress and the White House and in the media want us to believe it.

It's health insurance reform, and there's not really all that much reform involved.

Just as "global warming" was used by climate change deniers who pointed to extreme winters as a way to discredit calls for action, "health care reform" is being used to obscure the fact that these bills are not about providing health care, but about enabling - or mandating! - access to insurance. 

They are not the same thing, and it irritates me that they keep being conflated - deliberately, I suspect. 

In any case, this conflation is part of the larger system of problems that keep affordable, universally available health care out of our reach.  It tells us that not only is health insurance an essential part of the system, it is synonymous with medical care itself.  This is dangerous; let's not let this conflation go unchallenged.

Public Option Number Crunching

Today I received an email from one of my Senators telling me that he was not going to support the public option because the deficit was too large and spending money on health insurance reform was not as good a use of funds as directing money towards job creation.

This idea that health insurance is too expensive in a time of deficit is one that's popular among conservative politicians and pundits, so it's worth breaking this out.

This is 1.3 trillion dollars:

$1,300,000,000,000 

This is the high estimate of the cost of providing a public option for ten years.

$909,917,000,000 and rising.

This is the ongoing cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, from 2001 onward.

This is 1903.1 billion dollars:

$1,903,100,000,000

This is the estimated cost of Bush's tax cuts from the years 2001-2010.

This is 41.5 billion dollars.

$41,500,000,000

This is the estimated cost of Bush's tax cuts for 2010 alone.

If we look at only one year of expenses, this is what we see:

Wars + ten years of tax cuts = $2,813,017,000,000 = $2.8 trillion dollars.

Cost of funding a public option for ten years = $1.3 trillion dollars.

Moreover, here is the deficit as of today:  $11,797,976,820,226, or $11.7 trillion dollars.

If we take the public option total across ten years, and divide it by ten, we get $0.13 trillion dollars a year.

So, enacting the public option would require expenditures equal to about 1.11% of the overall deficit for one year.

Yes, you read that correctly - that is equivalent to one point one one percent of the deficit.

Moreover, that is just for the public option, which is not the most cost-effective approach.

One report noted in 2005 that if we adopted a national single-payer plan,

This fiscal analysis of the impact of four scenarios for health care reform found that the single payer model would reduce costs by over $1.1 trillion over the next decade while providing comprehensive benefits to all Americans.

Tell me again about how health insurance reform is too expensive to fund?