“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”—19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, signed August 26, 1920

My college women’s history course was taught by a brand-new instructor, eager and idealistic and ambitious, who piled us down with tons of intensive reading and writing and discussion (to the dismay of certain disinterested students who thought “women’s history” would be the light history-credit alternative to Origins of Asian Civilization). We studied, of course, first-wave feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought for the right to vote and drafted a constitutional amendment in the 1870s. Neither woman lived to see the amendment signed into law on August 26, 1920, but you have to think they whooped it up in their graves.

In celebration of Women’s Equality Day and the 91st anniversary of our right to vote, Ms. Magazine announces that modern-day feminists have launched HERvotes, a campaign to preserve the top 10 historic advances for women that are at risk of being overturned or weakened by conservative policy-makers—key advances like Roe v. Wade, Title IX, and the Violence against Women Act. Even voting rights are threatened. And Erina Davidson in Bust Magazine (August 26, 2011) reminds us that true equality, at the ground level, means respect and inclusivity for all kinds of women:

While we’ve won quite a few battles and planted many flags over the years, the women of 2011 have a long list to tackle. Women still earn only 78 cents on the dollar compared to men more than 47 years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act. Justice continues to go unserved for the victims of sexual assault. Sex workers face the struggle of being denied basic human and labor rights. Victim-blaming and slut-shaming are rampant in today’s dialogue. And women are criticizing other women for partaking in activities that were once deemed ‘unfeminist’ and ‘housewife-like’. (If she loves nothing more than making delicious pumpkin bread, then let her bake, for pete’s sake!)

Whether you’re a cupcake-baking porn lover, a Summer’s-Eve-hating urban farmer, a mom working a part-time job, or an avid activist waiting for the day that women can bring their girlfriends home without being shunned by family, we’re all fighting our own battles every day. And we’re fighting them for each other.

Source: Ms. Magazine, Bust Magazine 

Image by ginnerobot , licensed under Creative Commons. 

 

“It transcends religion, culture, and geography. A Muslim Arab Bashar al-Assad is just as likely to follow it as a Christian African Robert Mugabe or a Buddhist East Asian Than Shwe.” So begins Jim Sciutto’s description of what he calls the Police State Playbook in an essay in World Affairs. The script, Sciutto explains, is predictable whenever a dictator feels power slipping away but desperately tries to cling to it.

Since covering the “Saffron Revolution” in Myanmar in 2007, Scuitto has noticed the same tactics used again and again, no matter the part of the world or race or religion of those in power. Tactics like restricting internet use, blaming foreigners, and violently breaking up protests with paid thugs are implemented no matter where you are. “I sometimes smile at the sheer lack of creativity.” Scuitto writes. “How could these very powerful dictators be so obvious?”

Though the actions of these regimes are nothing to actually smile about, Scuitto points to a trend that does give cause for (guarded) optimism:

The Police State Playbook does not perhaps carry the biblical authority that it once did. In the information age, “big lies” are easier to debunk….

Watching the Arab Spring, I have sometimes thought that a People Power Playbook is being written too, as demonstrators have blended peaceful protest with new technology to write their own, powerful treatise.

Read more of the basic lessons of the Police State Playbook, including “Conspiracy Theories Always Work” and “Weakness Is Death.”

Source: World Affairs 

Image by invisible consequential, licensed under Creative Commons.  

Doctors cut off newborn boys’ foreskins less and less these days. Once upon a time, more parents than not chose to have their sons circumcised; today, the U.S. circumcision rate is just 30 percent. The practice is so out of favor that San Francisco has been discussing banning circumcision outright.

An activist group collected enough signatures to get a male genital mutilation bill listed on the city’s November ballot, although a judge recently ordered the bill off the ballot, citing the illegality of voters regulating medical procedures. The proposed ban would have turned snipping foreskins into a misdemeanor and subjected MDs who perform the act to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.

All this talk of criminalizing circumcision dismisses its very real health benefits, argues pediatrician Edgar Schoen in The Bay Citizen. For many medical professionals, the infections and diseases that can plague those with intact foreskins make circumcision the most sound decision. Eliminating this tricky fold of skin results in “tenfold protection against severe infant kidney infections [and] lifetime prevention of foreskin infections [and] retraction problems,” Schoen explains. “Penile cancer is found almost exclusively in uncircumcised men and cervical cancer is more common in women with uncircumcised partners.” A foreskin also makes men more vulnerable to HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

On the other side of the blade stand activists such as Lloyd Schofield, who led the campaign to ban circumcision within San Francisco city limits, as well as ordinary parents who choose not the circumcise their kids for a variety of compelling reasons, such as: It’s natural to keep your child’s penis intact. The surgery itself can be botched. Sexual sensation is increased because penile nerves are preserved. Some argue that health problems can largely be kept at bay with adequate cleansing, which is accessible to most middle-class Americans.

Schofield is considering an appeal of the judge’s ruling. Ultimately, though, with good reasons for and against, circumcision belongs squarely in the “choice” category. As Dr. Emily Blake says to The Jewish Daily Forward:

It is anathema to me that a city as open as San Francisco would begin to discriminate and limit options for anybody. If the person who started the movement wanted to initiate discussion or a thoughtful engagement, that would be wonderful. But an outright ban is just an infringement on everybody’s rights.

Source: The Bay Citizen, The Jewish Daily Forward 

Image by Franco Folini , licensed under Creative Commons. 

My master’s degree is worth less than my husband’s bachelor’s degree, according to a survey report by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. Of course, I don’t need the survey to tell me, since I know it from our paychecks, wherein I earn 79 cents for every dollar he earns. Hey, I must be doing something right: That’s one generous penny more than the national average.

Yes, the most recent census reveals that women workers are still paid a scant 78 cents on the dollar earned by men. If I wanted to make as much money as my husband, the Georgetown report says, I would need to earn a PhD. “All told,” writes Kristina Chew on Care2, “over their lifetimes, women with the same educational achievements as men earn about a quarter less than their male counterparts.”

Naysayers argue that these statistics are skewed by women with advanced degrees who exit the workforce for years to be stay-at-home moms. But the survey accounts for the time-off disparity, and the report makes clear that its numbers are actually a conservative estimate of the gender wage gap, concluding, “The findings are stark: Women earn less at all degree levels, even when they work as much as men.”

Solutions, anyone? Mine is to move salaries out of the realm of used car haggling and into that of a modern and healthy transparent business model, wherein each employee’s wages are listed in the employee handbook for all to see and shared with new hires during the interview process. Just one dreamy step toward equal pay for equal work.

Source: Care2 

Image by j.o.h.n. walker , licensed under Creative Commons.

This article originally appeared at Marin Independent Journal .

***

The negative trends in the nation's capital are mostly due to extreme GOP ideologues in Congress. But they've been enabled by too many Democrats who keep giving ground while Republican leaders refuse to give an inch.

Many a political truth can be spoken in jest, and that was the case with a mock news item that appeared in The Onion last week.

“A day after signing legislation that raised the government debt ceiling and authorized steep budget cuts,” the satirical magazine reported, “President Obama thanked Democrats as well as Democrats for their willingness to make tough, but necessary, concessions during negotiations.” 

The Onion went on: “Obama added that while it may look ugly at times, politics is about Democrats giving up what they want, as well as Democrats giving up what they want, until an agreement can ultimately be reached.” 

Compromise is one thing, but capitulation is another — especially when core principles of decency and fairness are at stake.

We must stand our ground on behalf of seniors, children, the disabled and other vulnerable Americans. All the rhetoric about “shared sacrifice” rings hollow when the vast majority of us are being sacrificed to the financial benefit of big banks and large corporations.

There are plenty of sensible and effective ways to reduce the deficit—including a transaction tax on Wall Street, closure of tax loopholes for big companies, an end to the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy and a major reduction in the military budget.

Instead, the bipartisan dealmakers in Washington are slashing the safety net that's essential for vast numbers of Americans.

One of the most dangerous aspects of the recent budget deal is that it explicitly sets the stage for future actions to undermine Medicare. This scenario strikes at the heart of precious values. I'm committed to defending Social Security and Medicare on the campaign trail and as a member of Congress.

I fully agree with Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey's explanation for why she voted against the new budget deal.

Woolsey pointed out that the deal “puts virtually the entire burden on working families and the middle class while asking nothing from billionaires, millionaires and companies that send jobs overseas.” 

In Washington, job one should be creating jobs. And that won't happen by continuing to give tax cuts to the wealthy while imposing benefit cuts on the rest of us.

Corporations are sitting on huge quantities of cash. But rather than expanding the workforce, they're hoarding the money—and stretching workers in the name of “productivity”—while often posting record profits.

Three years ago I wrote a column opposing the Wall Street bank bailout then being debated in Congress. Unfortunately, my concerns were borne out by later events.

Banks took the bailout money and largely used it to buy other banks—instead of making loans to small businesses and helping homeowners keep their homes.

With the new budget deal, Congress again acted in the financial interests of the rich instead of the vast majority of us.

With chronic unemployment at historic highs and personal savings in the tank, fewer and fewer Americans have the buying power that can pull the economy out of its deep ravine.

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the vital lessons of the New Deal. Many millions of good jobs must be created—and that will require well-funded federal jobs programs on a large scale.

Trickle-down economics, relying on the tender mercies of powerful corporations, won't get it done.

Norman Solomon of Inverness Park was co-chair of the Commission on a Green New Deal for the North Bay. He is a Democratic Party candidate for Congress. For more information, go to www.SolomonForCongress.com.

Source: Marin Independent Journal  

 

 

It’s been a tough year for progressive causes. Whether it’s the unprecedented attack on workers and organized labor or the insistence of making those least responsible for the country’s financial woes—the poor and middle class—the ones affected most by policies meant to address them. That doesn’t mean that all of 2011 has been lost to extremely conservative policies, though. Always looking for the silver lining, YES! Magazine and the Progressive States Network have a list of 13 progressive pieces of legislation that advanced in 2011.

In every region of the nation, in red states and blue states alike, momentum increased behind a variety of common-sense, positive, pragmatic measures in the states that contrast sharply with the extreme and unpopular priorities of the right. Even as moderate and progressive lawmakers found themselves forced to play defense against an unprecedented assault on the middle class in many states, they still were able to advance measures to rebuild their state economies, protect the middle class, and build healthier and stronger communities.

Among these measures are Illinois’ SB 2505, which offers a responsible way to come up with needed revenue, and considerations by many states to set up partnership banks—similar to the Bank of North Dakota—that would take money out of Wall Street banks and use it to grow local economies.

Source: YES! Magazine, Progressive States Network 

Image by Whirling Phoenix, licensed under Creative Commons.  

This post originally appeared at TomDispatch and is excerpted here by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.  

***

I completed the manuscript for Nickel and Dimed in a time of seemingly boundless prosperity. Technology innovators and venture capitalists were acquiring sudden fortunes, buying up McMansions like the ones I had cleaned in Maine and much larger. Even secretaries in some hi-tech firms were striking it rich with their stock options. There was loose talk about a permanent conquest of the business cycle, and a sassy new spirit infecting American capitalism. In San Francisco, a billboard for an e-trading firm proclaimed, “Make love not war,” and then -- down at the bottom -- “Screw it, just make money.”

When Nickel and Dimed was published in May 2001, cracks were appearing in the dot-com bubble and the stock market had begun to falter, but the book still evidently came as a surprise, even a revelation, to many. Again and again, in that first year or two after publication, people came up to me and opened with the words, “I never thought...” or “I hadn’t realized...”

To my own amazement, Nickel and Dimed quickly ascended to the bestseller list and began winning awards. Criticisms, too, have accumulated over the years. But for the most part, the book has been far better received than I could have imagined it would be, with an impact extending well into the more comfortable classes. A Florida woman wrote to tell me that, before reading it, she’d always been annoyed at the poor for what she saw as their self-inflicted obesity. Now she understood that a healthy diet wasn’t always an option.  And if I had a quarter for every person who’s told me he or she now tipped more generously, I would be able to start my own foundation.

Even more gratifying to me, the book has been widely read among low-wage workers. In the last few years, hundreds of people have written to tell me their stories: the mother of a newborn infant whose electricity had just been turned off, the woman who had just been given a diagnosis of cancer and has no health insurance, the newly homeless man who writes from a library computer.

At the time I wrote Nickel and Dimed, I wasn’t sure how many people it directly applied to -- only that the official definition of poverty was way off the mark, since it defined an individual earning $7 an hour, as I did on average, as well out of poverty. But three months after the book was published, the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., issued a report entitled “Hardships in America: The Real Story of Working Families,” which found an astounding 29% of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty, meaning that they earned less than a barebones budget covering housing, child care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes -- though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies in the early 2000s came up with similar figures.

The big question, 10 years later, is whether things have improved or worsened for those in the bottom third of the income distribution, the people who clean hotel rooms, work in warehouses, wash dishes in restaurants, care for the very young and very old, and keep the shelves stocked in our stores. The short answer is that things have gotten much worse, especially since the economic downturn that began in 2008.

Post-Meltdown Poverty 

When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book -- the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans -- you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful.

In 2000, I had been able to walk into a number of jobs pretty much off the street. Less than a decade later, many of these jobs had disappeared and there was stiff competition for those that remained. It would have been impossible to repeat my Nickel and Dimed “experiment,” had I had been so inclined, because I would probably never have found a job.

For the last couple of years, I have attempted to find out what was happening to the working poor in a declining economy -- this time using conventional reporting techniques like interviewing. I started with my own extended family, which includes plenty of people without jobs or health insurance, and moved on to trying to track down a couple of the people I had met while working on Nickel and Dimed.

This wasn’t easy, because most of the addresses and phone numbers I had taken away with me had proved to be inoperative within a few months, probably due to moves and suspensions of telephone service. I had kept in touch with “Melissa” over the years, who was still working at Wal-Mart, where her wages had risen from $7 to $10 an hour, but in the meantime her husband had lost his job. “Caroline,” now in her 50s and partly disabled by diabetes and heart disease, had left her deadbeat husband and was subsisting on occasional cleaning and catering jobs. Neither seemed unduly afflicted by the recession, but only because they had already been living in what amounts to a permanent economic depression.

Media attention has focused, understandably enough, on the “nouveau poor” -- formerly middle and even upper-middle class people who lost their jobs, their homes, and/or their investments in the financial crisis of 2008 and the economic downturn that followed it, but the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s.

In 2008 and 2009, for example, blue-collar unemployment was increasing three times as fast as white-collar unemployment, and African American and Latino workers were three times as likely to be unemployed as white workers. Low-wage blue-collar workers, like the people I worked with in this book, were especially hard hit for the simple reason that they had so few assets and savings to fall back on as jobs disappeared.

How have the already-poor attempted to cope with their worsening economic situation? One obvious way is to cut back on health care. The New York Times reported in 2009 that one-third of Americans could no longer afford to comply with their prescriptions and that there had been a sizable drop in the use of medical care. Others, including members of my extended family, have given up their health insurance.

Food is another expenditure that has proved vulnerable to hard times, with the rural poor turning increasingly to “food auctions,” which offer items that may be past their sell-by dates. And for those who like their meat fresh, there’s the option of urban hunting. In Racine, Wisconsin, a 51-year-old laid-off mechanic told me he was supplementing his diet by “shooting squirrels and rabbits and eating them stewed, baked, and grilled.” In Detroit, where the wildlife population has mounted as the human population ebbs, a retired truck driver was doing a brisk business in raccoon carcasses, which he recommends marinating with vinegar and spices.

The most common coping strategy, though, is simply to increase the number of paying people per square foot of dwelling space -- by doubling up or renting to couch-surfers.

It’s hard to get firm numbers on overcrowding, because no one likes to acknowledge it to census-takers, journalists, or anyone else who might be remotely connected to the authorities.

In Los Angeles, housing expert Peter Dreier says that “peoplewho’ve lost their jobs, or at least their second jobs, cope bydoubling or tripling up in overcrowded apartments, or bypaying 50 or 60 or even 70 percent of their incomes in rent.”According to a community organizer in Alexandria, Virginia,the standard apartment in a complex occupied largely by daylaborers has two bedrooms, each containing an entirefamily of up to five people, plus an additional person layingclaim to the couch.

No one could call suicide a “coping strategy,” but it is one way some people have responded to job loss and debt. There are no national statistics linking suicide to economic hard times, but the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline reported more than a four-fold increase in call volume between 2007 and 2009, and regions with particularly high unemployment, like Elkhart, Indiana, have seen troubling spikes in their suicide rates. Foreclosure is often the trigger for suicide -- or, worse, murder-suicides that destroy entire families.

“Torture and Abuse of Needy Families” 

We do of course have a collective way of ameliorating the hardships of individuals and families -- a government safety net that is meant to save the poor from spiraling down all the way to destitution. But its response to the economic emergency of the last few years has been spotty at best. The food stamp program has responded to the crisis fairly well, to the point where it now reaches about 37 million people, up about 30% from pre-recession levels. But welfare -- the traditional last resort for the down-and-out until it was “reformed” in 1996 -- only expanded by about 6% in the first two years of the recession.

The difference between the two programs? There is a right to food stamps. You go to the office and, if you meet the statutory definition of need, they help you. For welfare, the street-level bureaucrats can, pretty much at their own discretion, just say no.

Take the case of Kristen and Joe Parente, Delaware residents who had always imagined that people turned to the government for help only if “they didn’t want to work.” Their troubles began well before the recession, when Joe, a fourth-generation pipe-fitter, sustained a back injury that left him unfit for even light lifting. He fell into a profound depression for several months, then rallied to ace a state-sponsored retraining course in computer repairs -- only to find that those skills are no longer in demand. The obvious fallback was disability benefits, but -- catch-22 -- when Joe applied he was told he could not qualify without presenting a recent MRI scan. This would cost $800 to $900, which the Parentes do not have; nor has Joe, unlike the rest of the family, been able to qualify for Medicaid.

When they married as teenagers, the plan had been for Kristen to stay home with the children. But with Joe out of action and three children to support by the middle of this decade, Kristen went out and got waitressing jobs, ending up, in 2008, in a “pretty fancy place on the water.” Then the recession struck and she was laid off.

Kristen is bright, pretty, and to judge from her command of her own small kitchen, probably capable of holding down a dozen tables with precision and grace. In the past she’d always been able to land a new job within days; now there was nothing. Like 44% of laid-off people at the time, she failed to meet the fiendishly complex and sometimes arbitrary eligibility requirements for unemployment benefits. Their car started falling apart.

So the Parentes turned to what remains of welfare -- TANF, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. TANF does not offer straightforward cash support like Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which it replaced in 1996. It’s an income supplementation program for working parents, and it was based on the sunny assumption that there would always be plenty of jobs for those enterprising enough to get them.

After Kristen applied, nothing happened for six weeks -- no money, no phone calls returned. At school, the Parentes’ seven-year-old’s class was asked to write out what wish they would present to a genie, should a genie appear. Brianna’s wish was for her mother to find a job because there was nothing to eat in the house, an aspiration that her teacher deemed too disturbing to be posted on the wall with the other children’s requests.

When the Parentes finally got into “the system” and began receiving food stamps and some cash assistance, they discovered why some recipients have taken to calling TANF “Torture and Abuse of Needy Families.” From the start, the TANF experience was “humiliating,” Kristen says. The caseworkers “treat you like a bum. They act like every dollar you get is coming out of their own paychecks.”

The Parentes discovered that they were each expected to apply for 40 jobs a week, although their car was on its last legs and no money was offered for gas, tolls, or babysitting. In addition, Kristen had to drive 35 miles a day to attend “job readiness” classes offered by a private company called Arbor, which, she says, were “frankly a joke.”

Nationally, according to Kaaryn Gustafson of the University of Connecticut Law School, “applying for welfare is a lot like being booked by the police.”  There may be a mug shot, fingerprinting, and lengthy interrogations as to one’s children’s true paternity. The ostensible goal is to prevent welfare fraud, but the psychological impact is to turn poverty itself into a kind of crime.

How the Safety Net Became a Dragnet 

The most shocking thing I learned from my research on the fate of the working poor in the recession was the extent to which poverty has indeed been criminalized in America.

Perhaps the constant suspicions of drug use and theft that I encountered in low-wage workplaces should have alerted me to the fact that, when you leave the relative safety of the middle class, you might as well have given up your citizenship and taken residence in a hostile nation.

Most cities, for example, have ordinances designed to drive the destitute off the streets by outlawing such necessary activities of daily life as sitting, loitering, sleeping, or lying down. Urban officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about such laws: “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a St. Petersburg, Florida, city attorney stated in June 2009, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges...”

In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually intensified as the weakened economy generates ever more poverty. So concludes a recent study from the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness, which finds that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with the harassment of the poor for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering, or carrying an open container.

The report lists America’s ten “meanest” cities -- the largest of which include Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Orlando -- but new contestants are springing up every day. In Colorado, Grand Junction’s city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.

That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekeley at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C. -- the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972.

He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until December 2008, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs, or cuss in front of ladies, did indeed have one -- for “criminal trespassing,” as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail.

“Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Szekeley. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless?”

The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, leading to the arrests of several middle-aged white vegans.

One anti-sharing law was just overturned in Orlando, but the war on illicit generosity continues. Orlando is appealing the decision, and Middletown, Connecticut, is in the midst of a crackdown. More recently, Gainesville, Florida, began enforcing a rule limiting the number of meals that soup kitchens may serve to 130 people in one day, and Phoenix, Arizona, has been using zoning laws to stop a local church from serving breakfast to homeless people.

For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization, and one is debt. Anyone can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t pay fines for things like expired inspection stickers may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.

More commonly, the path to prison begins when one of your creditors has a court summons issued for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another, such as that your address has changed and you never received it. Okay, now you’re in “contempt of the court.”

Or suppose you miss a payment and your car insurance lapses, and then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight (about $130 for the bulb alone). Now, depending on the state, you may have your car impounded and/or face a steep fine -- again, exposing you to a possible court summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” says Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”

The second -- and by far the most reliable -- way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor succumbs to racial profiling, but whole communities are effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor. Flick a cigarette and you’re “littering”; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect. And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”

In what has become a familiar pattern, the government defunds services that might help the poor while ramping uplaw enforcement.  Shut down public housing, then make it acrime to be homeless. Generate no public-sector jobs, thenpenalize people for falling into debt. The experience of thepoor, and especially poor people of color, comes to resemblethat of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administeredelectric shocks. And if you should try to escape thisnightmare reality into a brief, drug-induced high, it’s “gotcha”all over again, because that of course is illegal too.

One result isour staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world.  Today, exactly the same number of Americans -- 2.3 million -- reside in prison as in public housing. And what public housingremains has become ever more prison-like, with randompolice sweeps and, in a growing number of cities, proposeddrug tests for residents. The safety net, or what remains of it,has been transformed into a dragnet.

It is not clear whether economic hard times will finally force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment. With even the official level of poverty increasing -- to over 14% in 2010 -- some states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty, using alternative sentencing methods, shortening probation, and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missing court appointments. But others, diabolically enough, are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes,” but charging prisoners for their room and board, guaranteeing they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.

So what is the solution to the poverty of so many of America’s working people? Ten years ago, when Nickel and Dimed first came out, I often responded with the standard liberal wish list -- a higher minimum wage, universal health care, affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation, and all the other things we, uniquely among the developed nations, have neglected to do.

Today, the answer seems both more modest and more challenging: if we want to reduce poverty, we have to stop doing the things that make people poor and keep them that way. Stop underpaying people for the jobs they do. Stop treating working people as potential criminals and let them have the right to organize for better wages and working conditions.

Stop the institutional harassment of those who turn to the government for help or find themselves destitute in the streets. Maybe, as so many Americans seem to believe today, we can’t afford the kinds of public programs that would genuinely alleviate poverty -- though I would argue otherwise. But at least we should decide, as a bare minimum principle, to stop kicking people when they’re down.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of a number of books, most recently Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. This essay is a shortened version of a new afterword to her bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, just released by Picador Books. 

Excerpted from Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, 10th Anniversary Edition, published August 2nd by Picador USA. New afterword © 2011 by Barbara Ehrenreich. Excerpted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved. 

Source: TomDispatch 

I’m a recent bride. That means in the midst of our discussions of tulle, tuxes, and possible rainouts a couple of months ago, my fiancé and I applied for our marriage license, which required that we solemnly swear, under penalty of perjury, “that one of the applicants is a man and the other is a woman.” Ugh. Signing that application is an unpleasant step for those of us who strongly feel marriage is the right of everyone, gay or straight. And while the “one man, one woman” oath outright prohibits gay marriage, it can cause a tricky mess for transgender people who have had their sex changed.

Here’s the breakdown: In most states, your post-surgery gender determines who you can marry—so if a man transitions to a woman, she can use a court order to have her sex changed to female on her driver’s license and legally marry a man. In a tiny minority of states, the courts refuse to acknowledge the new gender, leaving the transitioned person in a strange no-heterosexual-marriage-allowed-for-you limbo. In one very special state (Texas), the governor (Rick Perry) has bungled the issue in a Republican debacle (wherein he accidentally signed a bill in 2009 okaying a transitioned person to marry their opposite-sex partner) and is now supporting efforts to strip away this right (which would nullify the transgender marriages that have taken place during the past two years). As the Huffington Post (4/25/11) puts it:

Gov. Rick Perry’s spokesman Mark Miner said the governor never intended to allow transgendered people to get married. He said the three-word sex change provision was sneaked through on a larger piece of legislation Perry signed.

It’s a rough world we live in where a leader can openly say, I never intended to allow you this basic human right—and now I’m trying to take it back. The rescinded rights would have real effects on Texas widow Nikki Araguz, who was born male and had her gender reassigned through surgery; she married her volunteer firefighter husband in the two-year window unwittingly opened by Governor Perry and is now battling for the right to his estate.

Which brings us back to the same-sex marriage debate and the dire need for legal recognition of life partnership, no matter who is signing the marriage license.

Source: Huffington Post, Miller-McCune 

Image by virtualphotographystudio, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Anyone who has ever had the yearning to vote for an alternative, independent, and progressive third party candidate only to cave in the voting booth and vote Democrat—haunted by voices saying, “You’d be throwing your vote away”—must surely be asking these days, “What if?” After seeing what just a few elected officials can do to the whole political process, each and every one of them has to be saying, “If only we’d voted with our hearts.” After all, as Kevin Drum points out at Mother Jones, “So who was driving the absolutist view in Congress over the past few months? If it was the no-compromise wing of the tea party, that's less than 10% of the country.”

Less than ten percent. No doubt, at some point in the last few decades all those people wishing they could break out of the tired two-party system and vote for a truly progressive-minded candidate could have reached a number in Congress that could rival the number of Tea Partiers taking the country hostage now. What then? What would this country look like had we known that so few could do so much? We’ll never know.

Still, if we must try and find a silver lining in this nobody-wins model of government, maybe it’s this: It turns out we might not being throwing our vote away if we vote more progressively than we previously thought possible. Or, at the very least, form a political base with some teeth, able to make Democrats believe they may be ousted for a more progressive candidate if they continue to woo the Almighty Independent Vote in lieu of actual liberal ideals. This is the conclusion behind recent articles in Dissent and Change-Links.

In “Stopping Obama’s Next Betrayal” Mark Engler has little time for debating whether or not Obama is a true liberal or a centrist. Such discussions don’t “lead very far in terms of suggesting a political response,” Engler writes. Obama is what he is and, no matter what else you say about his administration, it will listen to opposing sides. The problem, according to Engler, is that progressive movements aren’t doing their part in making the president or Congress work for them.

Obama is willing to compromise and cave because progressive movements are not strong enough to enforce discipline among politicians. Nor are they strong enough to consistently outweigh corporate influences within the Democratic Party….

Until a vocal, dedicated, progressive grassroots, taking a page from the Tea Party, can show that it’s far more effective to reposition the center of the debate than it is to forever triangulate in hopes of appealing to “independents,“ Democratic politicians will continue to do the latter.

Similarly Shamus Cooke, in “The Rich are Destroying the Economy,” calls for a strong, organized movement to make politicians respond to progressive ideals, though he is suspect of Democrats being willing or able to rise to the task:

Organized labor needs to bring masses of people in the street all over the country in order to get attention and pressure the government to respond to these demands. And it can succeed, especially if it organizes a serious, protracted campaign and especially if this campaign does not get funneled into supporting Democratic candidates, the surest way to kill campaign momentum.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka recently spoke in favor of a strong, independent labor movement. This is the direction it must take, rather than relying on the Democrats. The labor movement must get its act together, unite to put up a fight and demand specific policies that can concretely address the crisis faced by millions of working people.

So, the silver lining is that maybe we aren’t really stuck with a two-party system. Maybe we wouldn’t be throwing our votes away if we voted the way we actually wanted to vote. At the very least, we’re (oddly) reminded by the Tea Party of what Margaret Mead said about a small group of committed citizens changing the world. (Though she did also use the word “thoughtful.”) That said, if there’s gridlock now in DC, can you imagine what it would be like if the left side of the aisle was actually full of progressive politicians bent on staying true to their ideals instead of caving for the “betterment” of the country?

Source: Dissent, Change-Link, Mother Jones 

Image by Image Editor, licensed under Creative Commons. 

 

Andy Serwer has some bad news for Barack Obama supporters out there: The economy’s not going to heal enough in the next year for him to ride a wave of recovery back into the White House the way Ronald Reagan did in 1984. “Reagan won re-election in a landslide, telling voters that it was ‘morning in America,’” Sewer writes at The American Prospect. “Unfortunately for President Barack Obama, the American economy has been stuck at midnight for years.”

Many factors are at play here. The recession was worse than predicted, so the economic stimulus didn’t do enough, and now we have a Congress that is doing absolutely nothing about the jobs crisis in the country, but are instead bickering about things that for previous presidents went unquestioned. Serwer points out that many of the cuts in the debt ceiling deal will come down the road and will therefore not affect the Obama reelection campaign, but the deal, according to economist Chad Stone, “is a modest hit to GDP in an economy that’s already facing substantial headwinds,” and therefore is certainly not going to help matters.

Barring a surprise uptick in the economy in the final months leading up to the 2012 election, the outlook, in Serwer’s view, looks pretty grim for the Obama camp:

Even assuming Republican intransigence and obstruction have given Obama the most challenging political landscape ever for a Democratic president, what matters is whether voters feel like he did what he was elected to do: Bring the American economy back from the brink.

Though I, like many out there, am not so keen on many of the decisions Obama has made in office, I can’t imagine some of the alternatives. Honestly, Serwer’s bleak article scares the hell out of me.

Source: The American Prospect 

Image by Mike Licht, licensed under Creative Commons 

In an essay disguised as a long-form book review, writer Mark Schmitt delivers a decidedly progressive but even-handed evaluation of the current administration that culminates with a refreshingly pragmatic take on President Obama’s pragmatic political philosophy.

Published in the July-August issue of Boston Review, “All About Obama: A President Without an Ideology” should be required reading for progressives who, in the midst of an intensely polarized period of American history, initially mischaracterized the Democratic nominee as a rabble-rousing leftist, and have since compounded the mistake by labeling him as a weak-kneed sellout. Schmitt’s analysis should also be assigned to the president’s apologists, who too quickly dismiss or ignore his failings—the most egregious and disappointing being the continuation of the Bush administration’s abuse of civil liberties, foreign and domestic.

Schmitt first establishes that, thanks to a series of bureaucratic reforms, such as the strengthening of the Environmental Protection Agency, and social progress, including the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Obama will doubtless receive a kinder historical treatment than either Clinton or Carter. But his lasting legacy will be no more transformational, especially if health care reform fails to survive the shifting political winds, which is not just possible, but increasingly probable. After all, Obama is ultimately a mainstream politician, or, as pseudo-revolutionaries like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann like to say, a Washington insider.

While this analysis is beautifully written and expertly argued, it is not unfamiliar. What’s refreshing is that Schmitt doesn’t single out the administration for scorn. In fact, in many ways, despite the somewhat misleading tone of the headline, the essay comes to the president’s defense, in no small part because of the political, economic, and legislative barriers he inherited—including a friendly Congress that became decidedly uncooperative and impotent in a matter of months. Without letting Obama off the hook, the author holds a number of actors accountable, including the right-wing and mainstream media (often one and the same), and those citizens who voted for the Illinois senator and then assumed their work here was done.

As Schmitt reminds us, and as Utne Reader discussed prior to the 2008 elections, the president is not a superhero. He cannot single-handedly break the chains of reality or behave radically without expecting a radical response from an enemy. He must have a fan base capable of delivering tough criticism, but willing to do a lot of legwork and heavy lifting long after the polls have closed and the nasty, grinding task of governing in a representative democracy begins.

“Obama, therefore, has the challenge of building a more coherent ideological vision (as he did in his April 13 speech on the budget), or resorting to small-p pragmatism, just trying to get reelected and get some things done,” Schmitt concludes. “If he is to take the first path, though, it falls on liberals to help build the pyramid of ideas and organizations on which he and future presidents can stand. It can’t be all about him.”

Source: Boston Review