The plan crash outside Buffalo was a disturbing horror story.Sitting at home in your living room watching TV - any evening, in fact - you could find yourself under tons of metal pour in through the roof. You could be a cinder before you could move.
Listening to the neighbors’ accounts of the fire that glowed above the treetops, though, it sounded to me like another fire over 20 years ago, one that never made the news.
Perkin’s Alley was an old dirt road down by the railroad between my house, growing up, and the broom handle factory in Corinth, Mississippi.The dirt road and the old shacks there were obscured from view by rows of trees on either side.The story was the shacks had been built for the workers who built the railroad and then abandoned years ago.Squatters lived there now. I used to see them moving around the neighborhood picking poke sallet, a sort of wild greens that nobody ate who could afford to grow or buy food.
There was a bridge over a creek that ran beside the railroad track, where we could duck in and hide from the police late at night when we were up to our mischief, and watch the cop cars roar past on the proper paved roads, one, then another, and another, and get in a good laugh with every one.
One night in the wee hours I was upstairs in our bathroom-sized “TV room” watching our little portable black and white when I noticed a bright orange glow above the treetops.I had been out wandering around at night enough to know the normal glow of the streetlights was cotton candy pink, not like this.I watched this strange orange glow a while and decided to go check it out, just a whim.
I had walked no more than a block when I saw a little knot of people in the street about a block away staring in the direction of the glow.I still couldn’t see what they were looking at for the trees.As I got closer I could see that they had very serious expressions, the kind people find themselves with when they witness a horror they know is part of life, the part of life it’s best not to talk about.It’s not exactly sad.They almost looked sick to their stomachs, not exactly helpless, more like nothing could be done and yet they weren’t sure what to do with themselves.
It was a fire.A solid block of brilliant fire so hot that anyone who tried to approach it got no closer than maybe 50 yards. It was impossible to even see what was burning.But it was Perkin’s Alley.Nobody said a word.There were no firetrucks.Ever.
The next day, and every day for a week, I combed the local newspaper for a story.In this paper a few stolen trash cans made headlines.But there was never one word about the biggest fire I had ever seen.My best friend the Mayor’s boy said the sheriff had set the fire.Apparently he gave the residents “five minutes to pack yer shit and get out” in the middle of the night.Then he lit it up, himself a fire from the sky.And Perkin’s Alley vanished overnight into a sort of no-man’s land between the railroad right-of-way and the broom handle factory.With poke sallet now as big as trees.
OK, here's a question I've asked before, but I have to ask again: if the Republicans are going to vote against the "stimulus" plan anyway, why compromise?
Is this just another case of the Democrats being Democrats? In other words, when the Republicans get into office they set right to work f#$%^ing stuff up: no to the Kyoto Accords, repeal the ergonomics standard, cut taxes for the rich, cut services for the poor, and on and on.
But when the Democrats get into office, well, all of a sudden we have to talk about those campaign promises, let's have a focus group, let's be bipartisan, compromise, blah, blah, blah.
Well, screw that! Tax the rich! Tax the hell out of them! Today! Take the money and provide free health care for everybody! Today! Build free libraries and schools and decent housing for people who need it, not more prisons! Buy up the produce from small farmers and hand it out to families who need food. Put people back to work with federally funded projects, projects that build stuff we need like light rail commuter trains, and schools and stuff, not bombers and big new six-lane highways, or prisons. Hire new teachers - you want to revolutionize education, someone once said, put one more teacher in every classroom in America! Pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and everywhere else TODAY! Close Guantanamo Base TODAY!
Why are we screwing around with the Republicans and a bunch of Blue-Dog Democrats? If the Democrats aren't going to do the job, we may have to find somebody else who will!
Even though US labor secretary may not be the most powerful position these days, in that whoever fills it may have trouble affecting many workers' lives very much, the fight over Hilda Solis may be shaping up as Round One in the fight over the long-overdue Employee Free Choice Act.
Labor secretary also can do some good, as recent appointees have proven in reverse, i.e. they proved how much evil a labor secretary can do, so in theory a good labor secretary could do some good if only by reversing what her predecessors had done.
But the symbolism attached to the Solis fight is significant. If in fact Republicans are blocking her appointment in part because of her support for the Employee Free Choice Act and unions, then we might as well face this animus now. Overcoming the anti-Solis club - in the Senate, where the Employee Free Choice Act also faces its toughest battle - will begin to build the right kind of momentum.
So I'm selling my old clunker, right? Kid emails me, says he wants it. He's 16, looking for a job, lives with mom, who's a single mom with three kids. Mom works at the prison about an hour away, which is where he lives. Can I "deliver" the car?
Well, this is not the most convenient. I work two jobs, and take care of my boys in the afternoon while their mom is at work. But he really wants the car, so I figure out how I can get AAA to tow it to him. I had some other offers, but I thought it meant more to the kid.
Only I can't find the title. I look and I look and I still can't find it. The kid's calling me 2-3 times a day, and I've told him, but he still wants it badly, so I call the truck and it's away. Then I go down to the DMV, staring at my feet, to apply for a replacement title. Sixty-five bucks, it is. The helpful worker at the DMV says that since the car is over 10 years old, I can sign it over to the kid - with these two forms - and he can take it to his DMV with the $65 and buy his registration and plates at the same time, instead of waiting 2 months. The new title will go straight to the kid. Cool! I can cancel the insurance and get about $30 back!
So here I go.
Turns out the kid still has to pay $65 for a new title, and he hasn't got it. And, they say, I have to keep insurance on it until it's out of my name! But, but ... $160 just to sell the car? It's only worth $200! So how do you sell a car like this? Still runs, but not worth much. With the plates and all the kid will have to come up with $140 - with my $65 that puts the total fees we pay collectively over the value of the damn car!
It actually makes more financial sense to just scrap the car. Maybe that's what they want: toss out those old junkers and buy the newer ones. How nice. You can't get a car loan to buy and old car, either, even if you have the credit rating. It's the age of the car. It's bad enough the parts are built to wear out ...
And why is the fee the same for an old clunker and a brand new sportscar anyway? Another instance of the poor paying proportionately more than the rich. Even the license plates and insurance, which are at least graduated according to the worth of the car, are a negligible expense for the rich and a hardship for the poor.
(The legally required car insurance is itself mostly a racket, I'd argue. The supposed rationale is that the insurance companies levelize the risk: everybody pays in and only a smaller number of people get paid, so it evens out. But if your insurance has to pay, even if the "accident wasn't your fault," your rates go up. And your rates are higher if you're young - even with a spotless record - and likewise higher if you live in a neighborhood considered to be crime-ridden, i.e. poor.)
OK, it's my fault I lost the title. But why should I pay for another one that I'm never going to see? They're only producing one, and they're mailing it to him! I paid for a title when I bought the car, paid for another one when we moved to this flatter-than-flat state - now they need their poor subjects to buy two more?
I did eventually find the title - in the garage under my boys' hospital records, after digging through boxes full of mouse nests - so I could mail it to the kid, lend him the $65, get the damn car out of my name, and cancel that insurance. The car needs some work, which I had told the kid before he bought it, but he tells me that prison employees like his mom get their cars worked on virtually for free by the prisoners. There's a helluva story in itself. What a way to run an economy.
Bob gets it right again. Apologizing to Iran for overthrowing their democratically elected government in 1953, for one thing, sets a wholly different tone in diplomacy. Why is it so easy for al-Qaida and others of that vein to recruit the psychologically starved of the world to blow up the symbols of world domination and everybody who gets in the way? The question answers itself in a sense. We also constantly feed them material. We need to knock it off, and what better place to start? Besides, it's the right thing to do.
Sound lighter-than-air? The follow-up is the all-important step two. The military-resource-sucking complex continues to reap the rewards of playing World Bully Number One, established and sustained in the role by the same ruthless global strategy network that overthrew Mosadeqq in Iran, and likewise Allende in Chile, Aristide in Haiti (twice), et al.
The situation is analogous, as some very smart friends were recently saying, to the excellent reasoning for reparations to African and Native Americans - and, I'd argue, to much of the poor white population. In other words a certain group of people, in the case of the rich in the US a specific class made up of interconnected families, inherits certain "privilege" - wealth, property, influence, acceptance, trust, respect - that each individual is not required to earn as others are. A word from a person's father, who may serve on a board or contribute to a charity, or the mere knowledge of that father's position, may land a young person a job, qualify an individual for a loan, get a group of young boys off a potentially disastrous criminal charge, etc. Born with a silver ladle in your cake hole? You may not even have to pay the "inheritance tax" on that table tool if enough Congressmen understand what it's like to start out life with ... a helluva lot.
"Politics of resentment"? What's the problem with friends and family helping out? We like sharing, don't we? Sure, but (a) what these people are sharing isn't theirs - they stole it, or somebody did and slipped it to them; and (b) they're not just sharing, with their tiny inbred group; they're keeping it from everyone else - i.e. the original owners.
Land fenced in and stolen from European peasants, who were then forced to work for the thieving class and barred by law from earning a living wage; land and resources stolen from the Arawak, the Croatoan, the Powhatan, the Wicocomico, the Massachusetts, the Muskogee, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, et al., every single treaty broken; labor stolen from generations of enslaved Africans, and their descendants born in a strange land; a third of Mexico stolen; the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, the whole Central American "backyard" put under the bootheel; then the Middle East; and on and on - this is the source of the wealth we argue over "spreading around" as if it fell like mannah from heaven, materialized out of nothing to shower a chosen people favored by a righteous god and not seized in successive waves of mortal violence and brutal tyranny.
That is why radicals like us talk about reparations instead of charity. It has nothing to do with utopian societies that have all things in common, or whatever. It is an out-and-out debt, a longstanding one. And it needs to be repaid.
OK, I admit it. I am more satisfied making $8.50 an hour, and even happy making $10 an hour, because my feet remember so well making $3.25. I gladly sit in front of a computer for $350 a month, or stock produce or run a cash register for $300 a month, because it seems like only yesterday I was toting a claw bar down a dry, dusty railroad track - pines in the distance wavering in the 110F heat - through Sharp's Bottom, a snake pit punctuated by coyotes and pistols just far enough from the paper mill that the acid rain that hung around the smoke stacks didn't take the skin off unless you had to service that part of the track ... for $4 an hour.
So after Reagan and Bush, and Clinton, and then another Bush - meaner, nastier - yeah, I'm positively goo-goo over some of Obama's doings. Like today: anybody who wants bailout money from here on in, he says, pays no more than $500,000. See, I just got no problem at all with that. In fact I'll take half. Easy. And I'll throw in a bonus even though nobody has asked: if I manage to screw up the business, any business, let alone the world economy, even a fraction as monumentally as my predecessor(s) ... hell, I'll give back half of the salary I did keep.
I'm actually pretty confident that bonus would never be implemented. But that's beside the point: how come nobody's asking?
But even if they were, seriously, would it be enough? Do we really believe the executive's out-frigging-rageous pay grades are the biggest kink in our collective hose? It's so micro.
Sure, it's longterm stupid to pay people a commission to dismantle our economic base one factory at a time - that is, assuming a perspective of "promoting the general welfare," which I don't - but the hole we're dug into is way too deep for a long, sloping incline out. We've got to get macro on their asses.
How about, just for starters, something like:You want bailout money? Stop spending it busting unions and conspiring to block the Employee Free Choice Act. Stop dodging OSHA regs, the EPA, overtime protections and discrimination cases with merit. You want the money? Settle those legitimate lawsuits, fix that pollution problem, and pay your damn workers what they've earned. And by the way, federal inspectors get unfettered access to every square inch of your operations - including offshore subsidiaries - and 24-7 access to all the books (both sets). Congress calls you up and says, How'd you spend the money? and you say, Dunno, and if I did, wouldn't sing - and you can just whip out that big, fat corporate checkbook and pay it all back - at about 15% APR.
Still want it? I got some ideas for a "Social Monetary Fund" to talk to you about. There's a certain flexibility we expect from you, too. No, I don't mean logistics or whatever you call outsourcing these days. I mean you need to be about developing technology that will re-tool for new trends in the economy, and new priorities for energy and social margins, not just for the latest model of the miracle of built-in obsolescence you sold us last year. We - it is we who will have to demand it - want to see swords beat into plowshares, just about literally: military capital converted for local and global standards of living. And so on.
Is Obama the savior who'll bring us all that? It's the wrong question. The real question is what are we going too do to get started in that direction?
By now it’s clear to most people who pay attention to those things that Obama’s cabinet leans more to the dark side. Hillary Clinton as Head Hawk is certainly one of its lowest ebbs, though hopefully at least it keeps her out of Obama's electoral hair for a few years. Summers over Stiglitz, well, what can we say? Even the one real bright spot – Hilda Solis for Labor Secretary – is sort of a candle under a bush, if she gets through, as Robert Reich and Richard Trumka have made clear: Who gives a flying frak at a rolling doughnut about Labor Secretary? What can she do anymore in that office?
But - ‘things’ have been looking up this week. Obama says new federal contractors now have to first offer work to the employees currently doing the work before bringing in replacements. They can stop running anti-union campaigns on the federal tab, too. They may also have to start doing their work under Project Labor Agreements (PLA), one of those things they don’t teach us about in civics class, or in the media, because it’s too cool.
And when Obama signed his first ever bill into law, for pure symbolic value and for real, it was a good one: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, another of those little things a Dem can do that actually make a measurable difference in real people’s everyday lives. (It’s an example of what my good friend in Mississippi John Conlon was talking about when he used to say the Democrats, for all their obnoxious shortcomings, actually spend more time talking about things that help poor people than all the leftist parties in America!)
It’s also an excellent example of what to do when the courts stand in the way of justice (pun intended), like declaring corporations to be people, etc.
Not that most workers will be able to access these Ledbetter benefits any more than OSHA rights or most of the other rights we supposedly have, unless they have a good union to fight for them – which brings us to my second hobby horse for today…
First, I have to say, you gotta hate the name: Task Force on Middle Class Working Families, but not for all the reasons some of my comrades on the Left will hate. (I think names like the “Working Families Party” and so on are not the heterosexist exclusion that some of my friends in the gay rights movement argue. I know for a firsthand fact, for example, that the founders of the WFP had this in mind: a family can include anybody, and talking about working families instead of just workers broadens the scope to childcare, education, etc.)
But this bizarre faith of almost all Americans that “I am middle class” is a dangerous lie. Denial, as they say, is not just a river in Egypt. There is a class war raging in this country and so far it’s pretty lopsided: the rich are screwing the bejeezus out of the poor and working classes, every year wringing a new drop out of our hapless asses. And it does none of us any good to pretend that we’re “middle class,” like Jews in Nazi Germany calling ourselves “apolitical” or “patriotic” – it just misses the point.
Anyway. The proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and in the pocketbook, the doctor’s office, the classroom, you know… And all that remains to be seen. And it’s not a particularly hopeful sign that Biden is at the helm of this thing – with Summers in there, too.
But the impetus came from Change To Win, that ‘long’ lost twin of the AFL-CIO, which is a hopeful. Could we actually have a prez who listens to organized labor and other social justice groups? Could it be?
“I don’t see organized labor as part of the problem,” the man says. “To me, it’s part of the solution.”
OK, that would have sounded lukewarm just a couple decades ago. Now we can watch with glee as the Rush Limbaughs and Walmart CEOs get all apoplectic.
But this: “You cannot have a strong middle class without a strong labor union.” Now that’s pretty damn good – apart from that weirdness about the “middle class” again. As propaganda, it works, though. I wouldn’t go as far as Harold Meyerson in the TAPPED blog:
“But for a few stray remarks from Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, that’s the strongest endorsement of the case for unions that an American president has ever made.”
I mean, really. Take a whiff: getting the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) kicking and screaming through Congress and around a snotty-hostile Supreme Court that killed FDR’s first attempts on the grounds of so-called “property rights” (well, whoop-de-do, as my grandmother would say), hey, that has to count for a lot. Now, it’s true that FDR was under a lot of pressure to do something Keynesian – and fast – and I’m not one to say vespers at the altar of the NLRA. It’s flaws are legion. Buttload legion. Starting with: agricultural employees, some of whom are now partly as a result of NLRA exclusions reduced to modern-day slavery, as well as domestic workers (ditto) got nada. In the cold. To the wolves.
Still, the proof of the NLRA pudding for just about forty years was nothing to sneeze at. Unions exploded. That includes existing unions increasing in size, faster than the union leaderships actually wanted (because it made their memberships harder to control) as well as new unions popping up like mushrooms all over the country. What this meant where the rubber hits the pavement Meyerson puts down crystal clear:
It was “the only time in American history that median household income increased at the identical level that productivity increased […], when both rates increased by 104 percent.” And on that note, and most importantly, union leaders seem to be feeling a bit warmer and less fuzzy about the Obama phenom’s enthusiasm for the Employee Free Choice Act. Rahm Emmanuel had been giving off some noxious gas about the Employee Free Choice Act, which is long overdue by a couple decades. That’s about how long ago the NLRA stopped doing its job. And it’s been doing its job less and less every year. Too quote one of mine and my kids’ recent fave movies: “We’ve lost engine one! And engine two is no longer on fire!”
The Employee Free Choice Act has big holes, too. Ag workers, domestic folks, S.O.L. But the Employee Free Choice Act fixes the biggest engine-failure of the NLRA: the fact that American workers today, almost alone in the industrialized world, can face a brutal gauntlet of tyrannical ruthlessness in-between signing cards saying they want a union and the actual NLRB-supervised election.
The Employee Free Choice Act eliminates that anti-worker “waiting period”: workers want a union, 50% + 1 sign a card saying so, they have a union, period. It’s simple, it’s civilized, democratic, it’s the right of free association, and that’s exactly why Walmart and Bank of America don’t want it. That’s why they’re prepared to fight what the New York Times called “Armageddon” to block it. They, and the media (which is also “they” because it’s big business, too), know what they’ve been keeping most of us from learning: most Americans consistently tell pollsters that they would join a union if they could, and the only thing keeping them from it is the NLRA’s waiting period, that and the multi-billion-dollar union-busting industry that makes a damn good living in houses-they-don’t-even-know-how-many with their kids in big-name private schools taking advantage of that hole.
The trouble in passing the Employee Free Choice Act is not, strictly speaking, the prez, of course. The bill passed the House already, but couldn’t get past the Senate Republican filibuster in the old Congress. That’s why 60 is the magic number for labor, to defeat a filibuster in the Senate. With Al Franken in the Senate, maybe this time it can happen. But some of the Democrats are unreliable on this one, so Obama’s use of the bully pulpit – and other White House arm-twisting – may be crucial. So this is a good sign.
We have a lot of fires to put out, not all of them Bush-fires, and then probably many lifetimes of work to do after that to even approach justice for the downtrodden of the world. But with stuff like this coming out of Washington, after so many years of bitter hopelessness, it’s hard not to dream about those golden years that didn’t seem all that golden at the time, between 1948 and 1973.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Sometimes even the local news really IS news - just not in the way that they mean for it to be.
So we're watching the local news the other night - purely by accident, mind you - and one of the top stories is about how, in the midst of a recession and everybody losing their jobs, there are plenty of jobs out there if you know where to look, emphasis on jobs that 'do not require years of education'. Some employers, apparently, are desperate for workers! Three examples were mentioned: the police (a spokesman for the Police Dept at one of the smaller towns out in the county told the reporter: in these hard economic times, we can expect greater demands on the police!!! I'm not even making this up.), plumbers (the local plumbers union hasn't taken applications for two years), and Manpower Inc!
Besides the idiotic propaganda of this 'news' story - there are plenty of jobs if you're smart and not too picky - it was basically an ad for intensified exploitation. (Manpower, like most temp agencies does it directly: they simply keep a big chunk of your wage as a sort of 'finder's fee'.) Of course on another level, it is relatively practical advice: these are the employers who are hiring in your area (sort of).
The big economic news is ignored, of course: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2009/01/27/bank-of-america-hosted-an_ n_161248.html. The big bailout recipients have gone back to living large and busting unions. What will Congress do? What will we expect them to do?
Some of my radical friends – friends I agree with the vast majority of the time – say individual presidents make no difference, the Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same, or they make no difference to real people’s lives, or to the poor and downtrodden of the world they are equally bad.Obama’s reversal of the so-called “Mexico City policy” denying federal funding to international groups that provide abortion or other family planning services proves this is a hasty swipe.Put this move in the “Real Differences” column.
It’s not as groundbreaking as closing GuantanamoBay prison or cancelling waterboarding. As the article says, Reagan perpetrated this crime against the global poor, Clinton reversed it, Bush II reinstated it. But Obama is steadily moving down a “give-a-damn” agenda (his “AfPak” policy notwithstanding).
Is it enough?‘Course not!Cancelling the sadistic Mexico City Policy is just a start.Liberal defenses of “choice” often ignore economic and social reality, but that does not imply “un-legalizing” abortion from a supposedly humanitarian perspective, as one Libertarian Party candidate I know recently argued:
“I find Obama to be quite consistent in his policy. He supports the killing of innocents both at home and abroad, both with his warfare and with his ‘welfare’. One can't say that Obama is incoherent as an international minister of death.”
“Abortion is the most explicit expression of racism and class warfare in our contemporary world. It is the most dastardly and cowardly of all human rights violations, since it violates the most fundamental Natural Right, the Right to Life, and it attacks the Unborn, who are completely helpless.
“The operative social purpose of abortion is to rid the society of ‘human weeds’. The founders of Planned Parenthood identified as the poor and the Negro as undesirables who should not be allowed to reproduce.Have you read Margaret Sanger's writings? Have you read about her ‘Negro Project’?
Now, obviously I know this guy, and I do appreciate his concern, as always, for the downtrodden, but I'm afraid it's misapplied here. Many people I agree with on most issues would dismiss his and others' anti-abortion views as another example of their religious blinders; I don't. My guess is that he is both as sincere and as misguided and the many good humanitarians who supported, e.g. the US attacks in Kosovo (to save the ethnic Albanians from Serbian aggression) or the US conquest of the Philippines (to save the locals from Spanish tyranny, etc.) or the British conquest of India (to rid the Indians of superstition and slavery, etc.).
OK, so it’s not like his whole outburst makes sense.Words like “Unborn” I list with “Undead” as quirky cultural artifacts that don’t really help anybody figure out anything rationally.And the ethical question of abortion rights has next to nothing to do with Margaret Sanger's infamous Social Darwinism (which is anyway not exactly the Nazismthat some ideologues paint it as), any more than this guy’s own Christian views are questionable in light of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the European 'civilizing' campaigns that masscred millions of indigenous people on one continent after another, or the many other Christian atrocities against the poor and downtrodden of the world.
(There are other good reasons to question Christianity, as in, it’s own teachings.)
The question of abortion as racism, or class oppression, I take more seriously. It is true, for starters, that abortion has been visited on the poor and people of color in this country and elsewhere as a form of violence. We can go further: forced abortions and forced sterilizations have been practiced as genocide for generations at least. Less overt public welfare policies have targetted oppressed groups in many ways from the days of workhouses.And, yes, this has continued up to and including reproductive policies, some of which my fellow NOW organizers and I encountered in Mississippi in the 1990s: the locally administered Medicaid program would pay for poor women to have subdermal contraceptive Norplant insertions BUT NOT pay to have them removed, regardless of the woman's wishes or even of the side-effects or allergic reactions, which were not uncommon.
It may surprise some honest abortion-foes to learn that NOW fought against such policies as hard as we fought for clinic access. Our reasoning is relevant. NOW and other wrongly described "pro-abortion" groups currently working in the US support a basic principle that clears away the bullshit in one swat: the individual liberty, autonomy, freedom, of a woman as well as a man to decide what happens to her physically, sexually, and in particular reproductively – getting or staying pregnant, or not. As such it is the most fundamental libertarian political right.
Critics of the "pro-choice" movement rightly point out that decisions about reproduction, often difficult enough in themselves, do not happen in an economic vacuum - and so are not truly "free" choices. Women and their families or support networks (spouses, partners, siblings, parents, close friends) often have to make tough decisions based on economic realities not of their own choosing.
Nowadays there are convincing statistical arguments that women overall have very nearly caught up with men in terms of earning power, and the biggest difference that lingers is that when women hit their child-bearing years they fall behind and usually never catch up. Of course some men encounter the same problem – me – but overall it is women.
For these and many other reasons (oppressive parents, drug-use, birth defects) abortion is not always a "free" choice any more than a large family has been a real choice for billions of women for thousands of years – women often have children or have abortions in part because their choices are severely constrained. This is a bad plan for the human race.
It’s because the choice is not “free” that publicly-funded childcare, maternity and paternity leave and other employment considerations, free access to birth control and family planning services, rational sex education, and free abortion on demand are and must all be part of a comprehensive program of human rights that includes women as valued equal members of society and not second-class citizens.
It’s part of why I believe the values of libertarianism require the values of socialism, to be logically and humanly consistent. It’s why abortion opponents who want to say they support women's rights and oppose racism and oppression must pick and choose which freedoms they support, which pieces of the overall reality they bring into their argument. And it's why liberals who want to support “choice” are not always allies in the struggle for women's rights, but their programs do sometimes coincide – like this time.
Obama's move against the vicious "Mexico City" policy is progress, toward allowing poor women and families in communities – their livelihoods often wrecked by US policies – to at least make the best decisions they can in that disaster. The Reagan-Bush-Bush “Mexico City” policy limited the options of the global poor, often our own victims, and that’s oppression on top of oppression.Lifting that ban is at least mild relief. It isn't enough, but it is a step in the right direction.
And even the most superficial overview of Burris's past seems to suggest that his current level of opportunism - and apparent blythe empty-headedness - is par for the course, e.g.:
Can Burris really be that stupid - or disingenuous? Can that be the reason a Blagojevich appointment suits him so readily?
Don't these clowns realize the damage they're doing to Illinois - currently mired in debt, schools in desperate need, etc. - and to the rest of the country, which really could stand to judge its first black president on his own merits? Isn't there enough to worry about there that's real?
Are we really going to have to start the Obama Administration arguing over non-issues like, "Obama's just a sneaky Chicago politician like that Blago and Burris..." or allegedly "lynching" a stooge like Burris (according to Bobby Rush)?
Or distracted from the substance of our real, widespread needs by what my friend John Conlon at the University of Mississippi calls 'courageous ignorance' - like (as someone shouted at last month's antiwar demo here in Champaign-Urbana) "He [Obama] is a Muslim! [as if that were a problem, but of course he isn't] Oh, yeah? Then why'd he change his name to a Muslim name? [cue the sound of truck engine zooming away]" - or better yet, "Good luck with the Magic Negro" ...
Don't we have enough problems to try to sort out, you know, with economic depression looming and huge tracts of the planet drowning in blood? ... for example?
