A recent class I taught left me with residues of discontent. What I was not able to resolve, to my own satisfaction, at least, was how to reconcile modern science—especially physics—with the root mystery of life: how life originates, how human consciousness can arise from “meat” or neurons in the brain, how, or if, meaning arises at all. To hear many physicists talk about it, it’s all very straightforward. Everything proceeds by inexorable laws of motion, gravity, quantum mechanics, and mathematics. Particles appear out of something (or nothing) called quantum foam, or quantum jitters, or simply empty space, and once they appear, the whole shebang moves in quite orderly and predictable ways to clouds of expanding gas, galaxies, suns, planets, and, over billions of years, cells, multicellulars, and us.
Of course not everyone is buying this determinism, and increasingly some scientists—mostly in the biological sciences—are raising objections. Stuart Kauffman, for example, wrote a book recently called Reinventing the Sacred. Appearing at lots of conferences to present his theory, Kauffman suggests that, though no creator God is needed, humans may need to attribute the mystery of being to something like a god, so why not name the immense “creativity” in the universe “God.” But it’s not just a renaming that Kauffman is after; it’s proving that the reductionism of physics—that all proceeds deterministically according to physical laws—simply can no longer be sustained. His reasons are complex, and I’ll cite some below, but basically what he says is that in order for a physical law to be applicable, one needs to know the state of the space in which it applies. Once life enters the picture, however, and even well before, the space is simply not predictable. Especially in biology is this true. Evolution proceeds by mutation and natural selection, yes; but the space or niche that any organism will be selected to fill can never be known ahead of time. Therefore, no law can predict what will be created (or selected to fill a niche that is unknowable beforehand). Equally important, life and matter seem to organize themselves in unpredictable ways, in Kauffman’s view, by something he calls “autocatalysis”:
…the basis of life…rests in some way on catalysis, the speeding up of chemical reactions by enzymes. My second intuition is that life is based on some form of autocatalysis, in which the molecules in a set catalyze one another’s formation. (p. 55).
Kauffman then cites experiments by Gunter von Kiedrowski where DNA strands with 6 nucleotides (a hexamer) were able to bind with a DNA strand with 3 nucleotides (a trimer), to make the first “reproducing molecular system.” That is, the hexamer proved to be autocatalytic: “it builds a second copy of itself by ‘ligating’ the two trimers into a new hexamer.” Further experiments showed that this same “self-organization” could be achieved by peptide fragments, each fragment catalyzing the other in a kind of feedback loop.
What interests me is that other scientists have focused on this same idea of self-organization or emergence to rethink how life works. Kauffman, for example, says flat out that “consciousness is emergent” and that not just conscious humans but a huge portion of living beings are “agents.” This means that they act in a purposeful way (not as deterministic automatons), and that those scientifically-forbidden concepts of value and meaning spring naturally from this. As Kauffman says: “you and I are agents; we act on our own behalf; we do things. In physics, there are only happenings, not doings” (p. 4). Other scientists, like Nobel chemist Ilya Prigogine, have also contested the alleged “passivity” of matter by pointing out how molecules, such as those in chemical suspensions, or, on a larger scale, in whirlpools, can organize themselves. As explained by Brian Swimme,
Prigogine’s experiments demonstrated that under certain conditions, chemicals could organize themselves into complex patterns requiring the coordination of trillions of molecules. And they did this with no instructions. No humans organized them. Nor did they have a genetic blueprint that guided their actions. Instead, their own intrinsic self-organizing dynamics directed these complex interactions. (Swimme, Journey of the Universe, p. 106).
The late Francisco Varela took this idea of self-organization or emergence up to cell formation. Varela coined the term “autopoesis,” or self-creation. The term referred specifically to how, evolutionarily, groups of molecules were somehow able to bootstrap themselves into making a boundary, a membrane, that created a primary cell (i.e., by holding all together, the boundary literally creates the cell,):
This is a logical bootstrap, a loop: a network produces entities that create a boundary, which constrains the network that produced the boundary. This bootstrap is precisely what’s unique about cells. A self-distinguishing entity exists when the bootstrap is completed. This entity has produced its own boundary. (Swimme, p. 49)
Here is where it gets fascinating for me, for I begin to think of the self-referential implications in all of this. In a way, it almost defies our imaginations. Something creates that which is still “itself” but which changes the very nature of what it is. Our consciousness—or rather our self-consciousness—is like that. We see ourselves being ourselves. We are not only conscious—which is magical enough (especially if we take neuroscientists at their word that the brain, “meat”, somehow creates an immaterial entity like the mind)—but we are conscious of being conscious. It gets a bit dizzying, especially when, as in meditation, one is advised to focus on that which is the observer of, say, one’s thoughts. Who is that observer? Is it (he? she?), too, created by the “meat” of neurons? Very hard to say. What seems clear to me is that we are here in the realm of the emergent “self-organization” that seems to run through virtually all creation.
There was a Pulitzer-prize winning book written around 1979 by Douglas Hofstadter called Godel, Escher, Bach. Hofstadter’s reason for putting these three geniuses together had to do with the link between them, the link of self-reference. Bach’s fugues, Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and Escher’s prints all referred, each in their own ways, to the idea of self-reference. Escher’s prints provide the most graphic way to think of this: in one iconic drawing, the hands of the artist are depicted in a way that makes it seem that each drawn hand is drawing the other hand, drawing the drawing itself. It is a logical impossibility, but we know instantly what it means. We have a sense of its “rightness,” somehow. The same goes for Bach’s fugues and the Godel theorem—the latter deriving its logic from the fact that one can never see (or mathematically represent) a whole situation. The see-er can never include his seeing in what he sees, and thus never takes in the whole. And yet, there are these representations.
My own take on this comes from an Italian folk tale collected by Italo Calvino in his classic Italian Folktales (1956). In Giovannin Senza Paura (Little John without fear), the main character has a reputation for being fearless. But one day, he goes into battle with a fearsome adversary, who cuts off our hero’s head. Calmly, Giovannin stoops and puts his head back on, confident of continuing the battle. But alas, he puts his head on backwards, looks at his backside, and dies of fright. What is it that frightens the fearless one to death? It is not explained, but we can guess it’s something like ‘the sight which is not to be seen.’ The sight of oneself whole, perhaps. The sight of the whole. And it reminds us of other sights, in mythology, that are not permitted to humans, and thereby to what we’ve been discussing:
Tiresias sees snakes copulating (or Athena naked) and, transformed into a woman for 7 years, is then asked by Hera to judge who gets the greater pleasure in sex, man or woman. Tiresias claims it is woman, and Hera strikes him blind. He has seen what is not to be seen (so he becomes a blind ‘seer’). Similarly, Actaeon sees the Goddess Artemis naked, whereupon she turns him into a stag, to then be devoured by his own hounds who do not recognize him. All these tales—and there are many more—refer to the idea of humans seeing what is prohibited—seeing into the mystery. Notably, the seeing is always the normal kind of seeing, sensory seeing, seeing from a specific, objectifying point of view. I have written about this in my Mal Occhio book, but here the question becomes, ‘what is that which cannot be seen by the naked eye?’ by the normal human, rational, objectifying eye? From a Godelian point of view, completeness, perhaps, or wholeness. We cannot reduce the whole to a consistent formula. In many evil eye traditions, that which is at risk of harm from eyes is any hint of perfection. Perfection, including the fundamental mysteries of nature, cannot be seen. Thoreau referred to this in one of his Notebooks: he wrote something like, ‘Man cannot afford to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye.’ In other words, there is something inherently forbidden or un-seeable (it may be that physicists have already reached this level, for none has ever seen a quark or a “string” and no one ever will apparently—photons of light interfere with entities this small), and it clusters around ideas of wholeness, perfection, the mystery of life self-organizing, perhaps, improbably bootstrapping itself from one level of organization to another, as in consciousness.
And yet we know it. Bach knew it. Escher knew it. And I think this knowing is symbolized by the ancient symbol of the ouroboros: the snake eating its own tail. This is an ancient symbol of deep mystery: a creature nourishing itself on itself. Eating not another, but itself in an act of incomprehensible self-creation (and self-sacrifice), of leaping improbably to another level. And depicted not as acquisitive or destructive, but as a self-renewing, infinite circle. In a way, we do this daily. For if we are all constructed of the same basic ingredients, which we are—all living cells being constructed on the same basic plan of the same basic elements, so we are related to every one of the bacteria whose numbers and creativity overwhelm our imaginations—then each time we eat a frog or a pig or a chicken or a fish or any vegetable or grain, we are eating ourselves. We are the ouroboros. We are the mystery whose most recent bootstrap miracle is consciousness.
And given that we do not know, cannot know what might be the next phase space for the next emergence, it may be that bootstrapping ourselves to another more global form of consciousness is right around the corner. I am comforted by that. Because if we are ever to get out of the current mess our celebrated, rational brains have got us into, it will have to be via a leap to something more, a more inclusive, less intrusive level of seeing and knowing and, most of all, accepting that from which we have come, that which we truly are.
Perhaps the words of another cell biologist, Ursula Goodenough, provide a fitting end here, for Goodenough also places emergence at the center of her meditations on what she calls The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford U Press: 1998). And that she, too, makes use of the “snake eating its tail” metaphor here strikes me as, well, uncanny:
For me, the existence of all this complexity and awareness and intent and beauty, and my ability to apprehend it, serves as the ultimate meaning and the ultimate value. The continuation of life reaches around, grabs its own tail, and forms a sacred circle that requires no further justification, no Creator, no superordinate meaning of meaning, no purpose other than that the continuation continue until the sun collapses or the final meteor collides.
Lawrence DiStasi
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Big Brother Wants More
There is a proposed law being discussed in Congress right now that aims to expand the reach of spying on United States citizens within the country. The law is abbreviated as CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, HR 3523. First, it’s important to note the newspeak, making this law sound as if it’s protecting the patriotic sharing of intelligence by our loyal corporations. It’s anything but. What it’s really about is facilitating and legalizing the access by spy agencies like the NSA—which already has access to all your emails, phone calls, cell calls—to all this and more. To do this, the law will provide protection to U.S. companies so that, doing their patriotic duty, they can voluntarily provide information to the government about any ‘suspect’ (and suspicion is in the mind of the beholder) activities that come through their web sites or communications lines. The bill, not incidentally, is authored by ex-FBI agent and now Chair of the House Intelligence Committtee, Michigan Republican Mike Rogers. This is the guy who said in a public interview that he thought anyone (Bradley Manning specifically, who considered his leaks to Wikileaks to be the exposure of war crimes) who revealed classified information ought to be charged with treason—the penalty for which is death.
According to Michelle Richardson, an ACLU attorney interviewed on this morning’s Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org ), the proposed law creates an exception to all existing privacy laws (requiring such outdated niceties as warrants or subpoenas), by providing protection to companies like ATT or Google that wish to “share” their information with Federal spies. Most major internet companies support the law, and for good reason: in the event that these companies do share private information, they are completely protected from future lawsuits and actions by those exposed, including protection from FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests in the future. In other words, if a person wants to bring action for violation of privacy, he is shit out of luck: even if he could bring a suit, none of the evidence will be available! The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF.org) also notes that the law includes a truncated 2-year statute of limitations—clearly not enough time to even discover you’ve been spied on, much less gather data and bring any action whatever.
The law is expected to pass the House—it’s full of Republican dinosaurs who love giving the Feds more power when it’s repressive power that puts people in jail, rather than helping them with food or health care. It may have more trouble in the Senate, now controlled by the Democrats, and with President Obama, who has promised to veto the bill if it comes to him in its present form. However, the Pres has reneged on such promises before, so one can’t place much hope in that.
Perhaps the best thing to do is listen to some of the guests Democracy Now has been featuring in the past week. William Binney, for example, worked for 40 years at the NSA until, shortly after 9/11, he was so appalled by the amount of illegal surveillance the NSA was doing—he cited the figure 20 trillion! transactions the NSA has assembled on U.S. citizens, which doesn’t even include internet searches or bank transactions—that he resigned in October of 2001. When he became a whistleblower, he was attacked by the FBI, his home was raided (while he was in the shower), a gun was pointed to his head and he was interrogated right there. His colleague, Thomas Drake, was formally charged with violating the Espionage Act for talking to a reporter about his concerns with the NSA spying practices. This type of intimidation against whistleblowers has taken an alarming upturn in the Obama administration, and shows no sign of letting up (five prosecutions so far, described by Gabriel Schoenfeld as “the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history;” cited in “The Secret Sharer,” by Jane Mayer, New Yorker, May 23, 2011). Democracy Now also interviewed Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher for the Tor Project (torproject.org), working to provide software that offers a way to browse the net anonymously. This has earned him all kinds of harassment, to the point where he never, he says, communicates by phone or internet in the United States since he knows that all such communications are monitored. He has also been detained at a dozen or so airports:
I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall. ... Another one held my wrists. ... They implied that if I didn't make a deal with them, that I'd be sexually assaulted in prison. ... They took my cellphones, they took my laptop. They wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq War, the Afghan War, what I thought politically. (Amy Goodman, “The NSA Is Watcing You,” Truthdig, April 26, 2012)
Welcome to the Brave New World of America’s surveillance society. How did that song go:
“Every move you make; every step you take; I’ll be watching you…”
Long story short: Don’t waste time folks. Don’t let CISPA pass unnoticed. Don’t think it’s only those who “have something to hide” who have to worry. As David Cole observed several years ago when commenting about the wartime violations imposed on enemy aliens: once the government gets away with violating the rights of those without citizenship, it’s never long before they can, and will violate the rights of citizens as well. Once the information is collected—Binney says he is sure the NSA already has copies of every email sent in the U.S., gleaned from interception points in most big cities—it will sooner or later be used. Go to www.eff.org and sign the petition. Call your senators. Raise hell. Liberties, once taken, rarely return.
Lawrence DiStasi
According to Michelle Richardson, an ACLU attorney interviewed on this morning’s Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org
The law is expected to pass the House—it’s full of Republican dinosaurs who love giving the Feds more power when it’s repressive power that puts people in jail, rather than helping them with food or health care. It may have more trouble in the Senate, now controlled by the Democrats, and with President Obama, who has promised to veto the bill if it comes to him in its present form. However, the Pres has reneged on such promises before, so one can’t place much hope in that.
Perhaps the best thing to do is listen to some of the guests Democracy Now has been featuring in the past week. William Binney, for example, worked for 40 years at the NSA until, shortly after 9/11, he was so appalled by the amount of illegal surveillance the NSA was doing—he cited the figure 20 trillion! transactions the NSA has assembled on U.S. citizens, which doesn’t even include internet searches or bank transactions—that he resigned in October of 2001. When he became a whistleblower, he was attacked by the FBI, his home was raided (while he was in the shower), a gun was pointed to his head and he was interrogated right there. His colleague, Thomas Drake, was formally charged with violating the Espionage Act for talking to a reporter about his concerns with the NSA spying practices. This type of intimidation against whistleblowers has taken an alarming upturn in the Obama administration, and shows no sign of letting up (five prosecutions so far, described by Gabriel Schoenfeld as “the most draconian crackdown on leaks in our history;” cited in “The Secret Sharer,” by Jane Mayer, New Yorker, May 23, 2011). Democracy Now also interviewed Jacob Appelbaum, a computer security researcher for the Tor Project (torproject.org), working to provide software that offers a way to browse the net anonymously. This has earned him all kinds of harassment, to the point where he never, he says, communicates by phone or internet in the United States since he knows that all such communications are monitored. He has also been detained at a dozen or so airports:
I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall. ... Another one held my wrists. ... They implied that if I didn't make a deal with them, that I'd be sexually assaulted in prison. ... They took my cellphones, they took my laptop. They wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq War, the Afghan War, what I thought politically. (Amy Goodman, “The NSA Is Watcing You,” Truthdig, April 26, 2012)
Welcome to the Brave New World of America’s surveillance society. How did that song go:
“Every move you make; every step you take; I’ll be watching you…”
Long story short: Don’t waste time folks. Don’t let CISPA pass unnoticed. Don’t think it’s only those who “have something to hide” who have to worry. As David Cole observed several years ago when commenting about the wartime violations imposed on enemy aliens: once the government gets away with violating the rights of those without citizenship, it’s never long before they can, and will violate the rights of citizens as well. Once the information is collected—Binney says he is sure the NSA already has copies of every email sent in the U.S., gleaned from interception points in most big cities—it will sooner or later be used. Go to www.eff.org
Lawrence DiStasi
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Cheney and the Undead
No. This blog is not about zombies—though in one sense it could be. It’s about the way the recent heart transplant for our beloved former VP, Dick Cheney, was trumpeted all over the world, first as a miracle of life-saving American medicine, then as a tribute to the great VP managing to survive five heart attacks and what appeared to be imminent death. But thanks to a heart transplant—the word evokes images of gardening, where we buy packets of baby plants to transplant lovingly in our backyard patch—our snarling VP has survived to hunt another day. Hosanna. Just by the way, Cheney has also thanked the donor from whom he received his heart, that donor being an unknown unperson, of course.
And that’s where things start to smell fishy. Cheney’s heart transplant, were he not on the government dole, would have cost him about $1 million. This is according to Dick Teresi, who’s written a book called The Undead (Pantheon: 2012) about precisely this transplant industry. And it is an industry—a $20 billion-a-year business at last count. Transplant surgeons make on average $400,000 a year, while procurement alone, for a heart like Cheney’s, runs about $150,000. Then all the immunosuppressant drugs for all the 30,000 or so yearly transplants come to another $1 billion a year; and the donors? the ones whose hearts and lungs and livers and kidneys and eyes and bone marrow make all these thousands of miracles possible? They get nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero. Because it’s against the law to pay them. Or even know who they were.
It’s worse than that, though--something I personally found out the hard way. Several years ago, my ex-wife was stricken with a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, which flooded her brain with blood, essentially knocking it out of commission. She was rushed to the nearby hospital and put on a ventilator and heart stimulants—life support basically—while we, her family, waited to see if a miracle might save her. It didn’t look good: though appearing to be asleep, she was nonreponsive. Still, my son was flying in from Chicago and we hoped she would survive until he could see her. That’s when the OPO ladies entered. OPO stands for Organ Procurement Organization. Until then, few of us had thought of it other than as a check-off box on a driver’s license. But suddenly these two ladies appeared and began talking to my daughter and me about organ donation. We knew my ex-wife had expressed interest in this on her will, so we were receptive—until one of the ladies mentioned “brain death.” It was the first we’d heard of this and it shocked us, me especially, since I’d had occasion to research the term due to a comp class I was teaching. The term stems from the Harvard Commission of 1968, which, with the advent of transplants, felt a need to find a new definition of death (beyond the stoppage of heartbeat and breathing) that would clarify when a patient might be a donor. As they said in their opening statement: “Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.” They, and a subsequent committee, came up with the term “brain dead” to signify a person whose brain no longer maintained normal consciousness, sensory responses, motor activity, and in some cases breathing and heartbeat. Such a person could be considered, for all practical purposes (i.e. the “harvesting” of organs) dead. In our case, it was now clear that the hospital, or someone, was now considering my ex-wife brain-dead. The problem was, no one had informed us, the ones most interested in such a decision. Long story short, we exploded, roughly dismissed the OPO people, then unloaded on the surgeon who came out to explain—he was clearly worried that a breach of ethics (calling the OPO before doing the required tests to confirm brain death) had occurred.
As it turned out—though after reading Teresi’s book, I am no longer sure—my ex-wife settled things on her own. Her heart stopped and she was unable to be revived. Nor was the OPO able to “harvest” her organs. And here was the lesson we got: in order to “harvest” a “brain dead” person’s organs, that person must be kept alive or semi-alive (the language here becomes bizarre, oxymoronic). Such a person is referred to in the industry as a BHC, a “beating-heart-cadaver.” The organs, to be harvestable, must be kept irrigated by blood and oxygen; hence, the need to keep donors on ventilators and heart stimulating drugs not only up to, but including organ removal. As Teresi points out in his book, the patient who is a prospective donor gets the best medical treatment of his or her “life.” This “preharvest” treatment was being done to my ex-wife—until, that is, the possibility of organ donation had been dashed by our reaction.
Though I wrote a long essay on this (see “Ladies in Black” on my website, www.lawrencedistasi.com ) I really didn’t know the half of it. Teresi, however, has done the research, and what he has found, and what you don’t know about organ donation, can literally fill a book. Most important is the basic fact: the designation of death itself. Though the Harvard Committee, and virtually all neurosurgeons, transplant surgeons, and the people who work for OPOs will insist that the “brain dead person”—one who exhibits no reactions—is really dead, too much contrary research indicates that such a verdict rests on shaky ground. That’s because the basic test for brain death is what Teresi terms flash-splash-gasp: a flashlight is shined in the patient’s eyes to see if there’s a reaction, ice water is poured into the ears (a responsive person will shudder), and the ventilator is disconnected for a time (a normal person will attempt to gasp for air). In states like New Jersey, all these tests must be repeated twice, usually six hours apart, with two different doctors administering the tests. If the patient passes (or fails; again the language gets tricky), then brain death is confirmed. Significantly, no EEG (electroencephalograph), to test for brain wave activity, especially in the cortex, is required. That means, as Teresi humorously puts it (his sense of humor in some ways makes a grim book palatable), that a patient “could have been calculating the cross section of the bottom quark using Heisenberg’s matrices, and no amount of ice water squirted into her ear would have detected it.” In short, the standard brain-death tests focus on the activities of the brain stem (which controls basic functions), not the cortex itself.
Can someone who is comatose still have cortical activity? Here Teresi narrates some cases of coma, locked-in syndrome and persistent vegetative state (PVS), and what he finds is startling. In one famous case from Belgium, Rom Houben had been apparently comatose for 5 years after a car accident. But then an fMRI showed that he had significant brain activity, so much so that he soon learned to imagine playing tennis, and by using that as a “yes” response, was able to answer questions about himself and his family with 100% accuracy. Clearly, while apparently ‘brain dead’ (at least insofar as his brain stem functions), Houben was alive and very conscious. Teresi comments: “The netherwolds of coma reveal our profound ignorance about what the mind is and what constitutes consciousness…it may even be possible to have consciousness without a working brain” (197). When we consider that the verdict “brain dead” focuses specifically on consciousness as the sine qua non of being alive, we see that this is no idle debate. It is also quite relevant to some of the more horrifying information Teresi provides—i.e. that so-called brain dead patients have been recorded as having reacted to the initial surgery that takes their organs. Dr. Andrew Shewmon of UCLA takes very seriously these “stress responses” exhibited by patients when transplant surgeons cut into their bodies to remove organs. One observer, Kathleen Stein wrote an article in Omni magazine (“Last Rights,” Sept. 1987) in which she saw a donor’s heartbeat accelerate from 100 to 200 beats per minute with the beginning of the “harvest” procedure—at which point the alarmed surgeons shocked it back to normalcy. Teresi comments that anesthesiologists “are beginning to wonder about those racing heartbeats and other suspicious symptoms exhibited by donors. What does a “pretty dead” patient experience during a three- to five-hour harvest sans anesthetic?” (150) One hardly wants to know.
Teresi’s information on NDEs (near-death experiences) only adds to the puzzle (i.e. what is “alive” and what is “dead”? what is “conscious” and what is not, and is it solely located in the brain?) One case in particular is stunning (remembering always that the NDE is by nature anecdotal): a woman Teresi calls ‘Pam’ (a pseudonym) had an operation to remove a brain aneurysm which required that she be frozen (to 60 degrees F), her brain emptied of blood, and her heart stopped for 60 minutes—minimal blood flow being maintained by a bypass machine. Pam had a lengthy and detailed near-death experience whereby her ‘consciousness’ left her body and observed the entire operation from above—all details being precise and true to what was done to her body. She also says she saw the usual white light, and met relatives who nourished her and convinced her she had to go back to her body. The point of these experiences (of 334 patients with cardiac arrest Dr. Pim van Lommel found that 44 or 18% had NDEs) is not to affirm or deny life after death but just to ask the key question here: if Pam’s heart was stopped and her brain was emptied of blood for at least 5 minutes, just what was having the experience she remembered so vividly?
The answer any individual comes to is critical, not simply because it’s interesting philosophically, but because life-and-death decisions are being made every day in negligence, or ignorance of the answer. The heart Dick Cheney got came from someone—and he was probably young, with a good chance of having been treated in an inner-city hospital where, as Dr. Abraham Verghese wrote in Cutting for Stone, transplant teams from wealthy hospitals helicopter in to ‘harvest’ organs—someone whose life was judged to be over by doctors doing routine, and, possibly perfunctory tests. As I wrote nearly a decade ago in “Ladies in Black,” the least Americans can do is to become informed about what such procedures involve, what “brain death” means, and whether they are comfortable with doctors (as many as 65% being unfamiliar with precisely the tests needed to confirm brain death) deciding who is dead and who isn’t. Beyond that, Americans should know that the incentives to reaching a “brain-dead” conclusion are pretty strong—given the need for organs, and given the amount of money involved in the entire industry.
In the end, the basic conflict comes down to a basic one: on the one side, the transplant industry insisting, with Dr. Fred Plum (the neurologist who coined the term “persistent vegetative state”), that “The brain is the person, the evolved person, not the machine person. Consciousness is the ultimate.”(271) And on the other, increasing numbers of observers who, like Dr. Candace Pert (the neuroscientist who discovered opiate receptors), conclude that “Consciousness is a property of the entire body.”(272) That is, life, consciousness, personhood cannot be limited to the brain alone. To conclude that it is, and to, on the basis of that conclusion, urge more and more people to commit to procedures they are kept ignorant of, is to reduce humans and their death, like so much else in our culture, to commodities for harvest. It is the final indignity.
Lawrence DiStasi
And that’s where things start to smell fishy. Cheney’s heart transplant, were he not on the government dole, would have cost him about $1 million. This is according to Dick Teresi, who’s written a book called The Undead (Pantheon: 2012) about precisely this transplant industry. And it is an industry—a $20 billion-a-year business at last count. Transplant surgeons make on average $400,000 a year, while procurement alone, for a heart like Cheney’s, runs about $150,000. Then all the immunosuppressant drugs for all the 30,000 or so yearly transplants come to another $1 billion a year; and the donors? the ones whose hearts and lungs and livers and kidneys and eyes and bone marrow make all these thousands of miracles possible? They get nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero. Because it’s against the law to pay them. Or even know who they were.
It’s worse than that, though--something I personally found out the hard way. Several years ago, my ex-wife was stricken with a ruptured cerebral aneurysm, which flooded her brain with blood, essentially knocking it out of commission. She was rushed to the nearby hospital and put on a ventilator and heart stimulants—life support basically—while we, her family, waited to see if a miracle might save her. It didn’t look good: though appearing to be asleep, she was nonreponsive. Still, my son was flying in from Chicago and we hoped she would survive until he could see her. That’s when the OPO ladies entered. OPO stands for Organ Procurement Organization. Until then, few of us had thought of it other than as a check-off box on a driver’s license. But suddenly these two ladies appeared and began talking to my daughter and me about organ donation. We knew my ex-wife had expressed interest in this on her will, so we were receptive—until one of the ladies mentioned “brain death.” It was the first we’d heard of this and it shocked us, me especially, since I’d had occasion to research the term due to a comp class I was teaching. The term stems from the Harvard Commission of 1968, which, with the advent of transplants, felt a need to find a new definition of death (beyond the stoppage of heartbeat and breathing) that would clarify when a patient might be a donor. As they said in their opening statement: “Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.” They, and a subsequent committee, came up with the term “brain dead” to signify a person whose brain no longer maintained normal consciousness, sensory responses, motor activity, and in some cases breathing and heartbeat. Such a person could be considered, for all practical purposes (i.e. the “harvesting” of organs) dead. In our case, it was now clear that the hospital, or someone, was now considering my ex-wife brain-dead. The problem was, no one had informed us, the ones most interested in such a decision. Long story short, we exploded, roughly dismissed the OPO people, then unloaded on the surgeon who came out to explain—he was clearly worried that a breach of ethics (calling the OPO before doing the required tests to confirm brain death) had occurred.
As it turned out—though after reading Teresi’s book, I am no longer sure—my ex-wife settled things on her own. Her heart stopped and she was unable to be revived. Nor was the OPO able to “harvest” her organs. And here was the lesson we got: in order to “harvest” a “brain dead” person’s organs, that person must be kept alive or semi-alive (the language here becomes bizarre, oxymoronic). Such a person is referred to in the industry as a BHC, a “beating-heart-cadaver.” The organs, to be harvestable, must be kept irrigated by blood and oxygen; hence, the need to keep donors on ventilators and heart stimulating drugs not only up to, but including organ removal. As Teresi points out in his book, the patient who is a prospective donor gets the best medical treatment of his or her “life.” This “preharvest” treatment was being done to my ex-wife—until, that is, the possibility of organ donation had been dashed by our reaction.
Though I wrote a long essay on this (see “Ladies in Black” on my website, www.lawrencedistasi.com
Can someone who is comatose still have cortical activity? Here Teresi narrates some cases of coma, locked-in syndrome and persistent vegetative state (PVS), and what he finds is startling. In one famous case from Belgium, Rom Houben had been apparently comatose for 5 years after a car accident. But then an fMRI showed that he had significant brain activity, so much so that he soon learned to imagine playing tennis, and by using that as a “yes” response, was able to answer questions about himself and his family with 100% accuracy. Clearly, while apparently ‘brain dead’ (at least insofar as his brain stem functions), Houben was alive and very conscious. Teresi comments: “The netherwolds of coma reveal our profound ignorance about what the mind is and what constitutes consciousness…it may even be possible to have consciousness without a working brain” (197). When we consider that the verdict “brain dead” focuses specifically on consciousness as the sine qua non of being alive, we see that this is no idle debate. It is also quite relevant to some of the more horrifying information Teresi provides—i.e. that so-called brain dead patients have been recorded as having reacted to the initial surgery that takes their organs. Dr. Andrew Shewmon of UCLA takes very seriously these “stress responses” exhibited by patients when transplant surgeons cut into their bodies to remove organs. One observer, Kathleen Stein wrote an article in Omni magazine (“Last Rights,” Sept. 1987) in which she saw a donor’s heartbeat accelerate from 100 to 200 beats per minute with the beginning of the “harvest” procedure—at which point the alarmed surgeons shocked it back to normalcy. Teresi comments that anesthesiologists “are beginning to wonder about those racing heartbeats and other suspicious symptoms exhibited by donors. What does a “pretty dead” patient experience during a three- to five-hour harvest sans anesthetic?” (150) One hardly wants to know.
Teresi’s information on NDEs (near-death experiences) only adds to the puzzle (i.e. what is “alive” and what is “dead”? what is “conscious” and what is not, and is it solely located in the brain?) One case in particular is stunning (remembering always that the NDE is by nature anecdotal): a woman Teresi calls ‘Pam’ (a pseudonym) had an operation to remove a brain aneurysm which required that she be frozen (to 60 degrees F), her brain emptied of blood, and her heart stopped for 60 minutes—minimal blood flow being maintained by a bypass machine. Pam had a lengthy and detailed near-death experience whereby her ‘consciousness’ left her body and observed the entire operation from above—all details being precise and true to what was done to her body. She also says she saw the usual white light, and met relatives who nourished her and convinced her she had to go back to her body. The point of these experiences (of 334 patients with cardiac arrest Dr. Pim van Lommel found that 44 or 18% had NDEs) is not to affirm or deny life after death but just to ask the key question here: if Pam’s heart was stopped and her brain was emptied of blood for at least 5 minutes, just what was having the experience she remembered so vividly?
The answer any individual comes to is critical, not simply because it’s interesting philosophically, but because life-and-death decisions are being made every day in negligence, or ignorance of the answer. The heart Dick Cheney got came from someone—and he was probably young, with a good chance of having been treated in an inner-city hospital where, as Dr. Abraham Verghese wrote in Cutting for Stone, transplant teams from wealthy hospitals helicopter in to ‘harvest’ organs—someone whose life was judged to be over by doctors doing routine, and, possibly perfunctory tests. As I wrote nearly a decade ago in “Ladies in Black,” the least Americans can do is to become informed about what such procedures involve, what “brain death” means, and whether they are comfortable with doctors (as many as 65% being unfamiliar with precisely the tests needed to confirm brain death) deciding who is dead and who isn’t. Beyond that, Americans should know that the incentives to reaching a “brain-dead” conclusion are pretty strong—given the need for organs, and given the amount of money involved in the entire industry.
In the end, the basic conflict comes down to a basic one: on the one side, the transplant industry insisting, with Dr. Fred Plum (the neurologist who coined the term “persistent vegetative state”), that “The brain is the person, the evolved person, not the machine person. Consciousness is the ultimate.”(271) And on the other, increasing numbers of observers who, like Dr. Candace Pert (the neuroscientist who discovered opiate receptors), conclude that “Consciousness is a property of the entire body.”(272) That is, life, consciousness, personhood cannot be limited to the brain alone. To conclude that it is, and to, on the basis of that conclusion, urge more and more people to commit to procedures they are kept ignorant of, is to reduce humans and their death, like so much else in our culture, to commodities for harvest. It is the final indignity.
Lawrence DiStasi
Saturday, April 14, 2012
Creating a Permanent Underclass
Life isn’t sunny without money
Body and soul separate too soon
We’ve learned there is no Easter Bunny
You must work hard and cannot swoon
Yet, to inherit the earth, you must first die
So test your freedoms as you fly
You have so little choice
And so I say: Rejoice
Especially you women
Take the day off to go swimmin’
As the GOP commits to fight for freedom, you may begin to ask for whom? Surely, there is no freedom for women to control their own bodies as now a couple dozen “conservative” states are enacting laws that mandate that women asking for an abortion undergo a forced sonogram as a way to shame them. Even if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, this denial of 4th amendment rights will be done by state functionaries with the cost to be borne by the woman despite the fact that she gets no medical benefit from the intrusion. Wisconsin, that last year slashed the rights of unions to negotiate, has also declared that women have no right to equal pay for equal work with the bill just signed by Scott Walker. That puts a consistent and official face on Republican policy no matter their utterings.
Several states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors are moving rapidly to tear rights away from women. While the given rationale is to enhance Christian morality, the consistent outcome is to reduce the power of women in our democratic society. Recent presidential candidate Rick Santorum, or “Sanitarium” as some of his Southern supporters call him, has said that he wants to “throw up” when he hears JFK talk about separation of Church and State. He sees this as a rejection of the concept of getting our basic rights from God. There is an almost delicious irony that it is exactly his theme that rights given by states can be taken by states that is being executed by right wing state governments across this great republic. No serious voter would have imagined that law settled in the1950s that guaranteed women the right to contraceptives would be threatened in 2012. Surely nobody imagined that the democratic process of voting for representatives would be shelved in favor of autocratic rule by unelected petty/party czars as now in Michigan. Of all the threats to democracy, I cannot imagine one worse than that now thriving in Michigan. In that state, controlled by an ultra-conservative majority, the governor has absolute authority to disenfranchise legally elected representatives and replace them with highly paid czars who report only to the governor and not to the people. Governor Snyder has, in fact, appointed single authorities to replace the governments of Benton Harbor, Flint, Highland Park, Ecorse, Pontiac and Hamtramck as well as several school districts. In other words, the governor has the power to void the elections of any Michigan political entity and supplant the elected with his appointment. If that sounds totalitarian, and it does, it has been executed in a totalitarian manner as well by violation of the Michigan rule that laws not specifically endorsed by 2/3 of the state legislature cannot be immediately put into effect. The second aberration has been fulfilled in the state legislature where the majority has not allowed a count to prove/disprove that 2/3 voted to support “immediate effect.” No Democrats have voted to support the aberration and video shows Democrats trying to get that count and being rejected by the Majority Speaker. It is a putsch in America.
Surely, Michigan is not the first state to experience money issues or even to have elected politicians who cannot immediately solve a financial crisis. In other states, a receiver has been appointed, often by a court, to guide elected politicians and even manage money. I have known where a receiver was required to sign city checks over a given amount, say $5,000. This is the very first time that I have known of a complete takeover by a governor with the abrogation of duly elected officials. Further, the local czars appointed by Governor Snyder can dispose of city property by selling it to friends or otherwise deprive the city of property/revenue without review. Those are dictatorial powers, not compatible with democracy. Another unique aspect of this dictatorship is that only minority cities and towns were grabbed. This alone poses a threat of creating a permanent underclass of minorities in Michigan. Women have long been subject to deprivation by systems that pay men more for equal work and by systems that block access to women’s healthcare such as that offered by Planned Parenthood. Mittens Romney, when asked by a woman how she could get healthcare if Planned Parenthood were eliminated callously remarked that she “was free to seek the healthcare anywhere,” as if she had the money to do so. Please tell me how a woman who is so resource poor that she depends upon Planned Parenthood for her healthcare can possibly shop for healthcare. This is an insidious sentence to permanent poverty because the woman will be denied healthcare and accelerated in her cycle of poverty. Contraceptives may be available for women with money to pay for them, but poor women simply are not able. The poverty cycle gets boosted by unwanted pregnancies. Women susceptible to complicated gynecological issues need special and expensive contraceptives. Otherwise, they are unable to get meaningful and fairly compensated work. So we have a concentrated effort by the right wing that now controls the GOP to worsen the status quo for women and minorities. Combine this with a tax code that favors the wealthy and demands no sacrifice from them and we begin to see the concrete harden for an ever more permanent underclass.
Historically, we once saw men and women, especially women, lift themselves by their bootstraps with two major components being available to them. We actually had 1) a safety net in healthcare and aid for food subsistence as well as 2) an affordable secondary education system. By using the circular argument that women have no right to equal pay (Wisconsin, 2012 despite Lilly Ledbetter Act) because they may have to leave the workplace due to unwanted pregnancies or health issues and then denying women cheap healthcare and contraception, we have denied them equal access to the workplace. Policies that support outrageously high secondary education costs, seal off the last remaining exit from poverty. So the cycle of the illogical is completed. Women are not entitled to equal pay for equal work because they may not become qualified in the workplace, and our policies will ensure that the women cannot become qualified. While some may see a religious message in all that, I see an economic message. Across this nation, women are being told that the Viagra so needed to enable men to get them pregnant is economically justified, but contraception is not economically justified. Everybody knows that preventive healthcare is about 90% cheaper than emergency room visits or pregnancies. Is the motive for this policy religion or economics? Have women become too competitive for us men in the workplace? Women and minorities suffered most from the 2007 recession. Is it best to write them off as a permanent underclass? When we do hire them (women and minorities), we can pay them less, thus achieving greater competitive power and allowing even higher profits for the real people: “Corporations are people, my friend.” (Mitt Romney, August 11, 2011, Iowa State Fair).
As we continue to lower the cost of labor and compete for the lowest available markets, we need fewer educated people and can return to the good old days of Charles Dickens. The wealthy will protect us and our children by putting us all to work for less. “God Bless us, every one.”
We have an election coming and we need to see what has happened to our nation through the current redistribution of wealth from the have littles to the have lots through corporate welfare/socialism and tax systems that reward wealth (Romney pays less that 15%?) We must take on that mission with as much determination as we have to stop the reverse. Real tax rates are the lowest they have been in more than 50 years and wealth inequity charts demonstrate that we are out of balance. Did we learn that trickle down does not work? The Bush tax cuts have been operating for more than 10 years. Has that helped anybody in the middle or lower classes climb the economic ladder?
Summer will soon be upon us. It is nearly time to go swimming, but keep your eyes peeled for the sharks out there. They will have a feeding frenzy at election time. The chum is in the water.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
14 April 2012
Body and soul separate too soon
We’ve learned there is no Easter Bunny
You must work hard and cannot swoon
Yet, to inherit the earth, you must first die
So test your freedoms as you fly
You have so little choice
And so I say: Rejoice
Especially you women
Take the day off to go swimmin’
As the GOP commits to fight for freedom, you may begin to ask for whom? Surely, there is no freedom for women to control their own bodies as now a couple dozen “conservative” states are enacting laws that mandate that women asking for an abortion undergo a forced sonogram as a way to shame them. Even if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest, this denial of 4th amendment rights will be done by state functionaries with the cost to be borne by the woman despite the fact that she gets no medical benefit from the intrusion. Wisconsin, that last year slashed the rights of unions to negotiate, has also declared that women have no right to equal pay for equal work with the bill just signed by Scott Walker. That puts a consistent and official face on Republican policy no matter their utterings.
Several states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors are moving rapidly to tear rights away from women. While the given rationale is to enhance Christian morality, the consistent outcome is to reduce the power of women in our democratic society. Recent presidential candidate Rick Santorum, or “Sanitarium” as some of his Southern supporters call him, has said that he wants to “throw up” when he hears JFK talk about separation of Church and State. He sees this as a rejection of the concept of getting our basic rights from God. There is an almost delicious irony that it is exactly his theme that rights given by states can be taken by states that is being executed by right wing state governments across this great republic. No serious voter would have imagined that law settled in the1950s that guaranteed women the right to contraceptives would be threatened in 2012. Surely nobody imagined that the democratic process of voting for representatives would be shelved in favor of autocratic rule by unelected petty/party czars as now in Michigan. Of all the threats to democracy, I cannot imagine one worse than that now thriving in Michigan. In that state, controlled by an ultra-conservative majority, the governor has absolute authority to disenfranchise legally elected representatives and replace them with highly paid czars who report only to the governor and not to the people. Governor Snyder has, in fact, appointed single authorities to replace the governments of Benton Harbor, Flint, Highland Park, Ecorse, Pontiac and Hamtramck as well as several school districts. In other words, the governor has the power to void the elections of any Michigan political entity and supplant the elected with his appointment. If that sounds totalitarian, and it does, it has been executed in a totalitarian manner as well by violation of the Michigan rule that laws not specifically endorsed by 2/3 of the state legislature cannot be immediately put into effect. The second aberration has been fulfilled in the state legislature where the majority has not allowed a count to prove/disprove that 2/3 voted to support “immediate effect.” No Democrats have voted to support the aberration and video shows Democrats trying to get that count and being rejected by the Majority Speaker. It is a putsch in America.
Surely, Michigan is not the first state to experience money issues or even to have elected politicians who cannot immediately solve a financial crisis. In other states, a receiver has been appointed, often by a court, to guide elected politicians and even manage money. I have known where a receiver was required to sign city checks over a given amount, say $5,000. This is the very first time that I have known of a complete takeover by a governor with the abrogation of duly elected officials. Further, the local czars appointed by Governor Snyder can dispose of city property by selling it to friends or otherwise deprive the city of property/revenue without review. Those are dictatorial powers, not compatible with democracy. Another unique aspect of this dictatorship is that only minority cities and towns were grabbed. This alone poses a threat of creating a permanent underclass of minorities in Michigan. Women have long been subject to deprivation by systems that pay men more for equal work and by systems that block access to women’s healthcare such as that offered by Planned Parenthood. Mittens Romney, when asked by a woman how she could get healthcare if Planned Parenthood were eliminated callously remarked that she “was free to seek the healthcare anywhere,” as if she had the money to do so. Please tell me how a woman who is so resource poor that she depends upon Planned Parenthood for her healthcare can possibly shop for healthcare. This is an insidious sentence to permanent poverty because the woman will be denied healthcare and accelerated in her cycle of poverty. Contraceptives may be available for women with money to pay for them, but poor women simply are not able. The poverty cycle gets boosted by unwanted pregnancies. Women susceptible to complicated gynecological issues need special and expensive contraceptives. Otherwise, they are unable to get meaningful and fairly compensated work. So we have a concentrated effort by the right wing that now controls the GOP to worsen the status quo for women and minorities. Combine this with a tax code that favors the wealthy and demands no sacrifice from them and we begin to see the concrete harden for an ever more permanent underclass.
Historically, we once saw men and women, especially women, lift themselves by their bootstraps with two major components being available to them. We actually had 1) a safety net in healthcare and aid for food subsistence as well as 2) an affordable secondary education system. By using the circular argument that women have no right to equal pay (Wisconsin, 2012 despite Lilly Ledbetter Act) because they may have to leave the workplace due to unwanted pregnancies or health issues and then denying women cheap healthcare and contraception, we have denied them equal access to the workplace. Policies that support outrageously high secondary education costs, seal off the last remaining exit from poverty. So the cycle of the illogical is completed. Women are not entitled to equal pay for equal work because they may not become qualified in the workplace, and our policies will ensure that the women cannot become qualified. While some may see a religious message in all that, I see an economic message. Across this nation, women are being told that the Viagra so needed to enable men to get them pregnant is economically justified, but contraception is not economically justified. Everybody knows that preventive healthcare is about 90% cheaper than emergency room visits or pregnancies. Is the motive for this policy religion or economics? Have women become too competitive for us men in the workplace? Women and minorities suffered most from the 2007 recession. Is it best to write them off as a permanent underclass? When we do hire them (women and minorities), we can pay them less, thus achieving greater competitive power and allowing even higher profits for the real people: “Corporations are people, my friend.” (Mitt Romney, August 11, 2011, Iowa State Fair).
As we continue to lower the cost of labor and compete for the lowest available markets, we need fewer educated people and can return to the good old days of Charles Dickens. The wealthy will protect us and our children by putting us all to work for less. “God Bless us, every one.”
We have an election coming and we need to see what has happened to our nation through the current redistribution of wealth from the have littles to the have lots through corporate welfare/socialism and tax systems that reward wealth (Romney pays less that 15%?) We must take on that mission with as much determination as we have to stop the reverse. Real tax rates are the lowest they have been in more than 50 years and wealth inequity charts demonstrate that we are out of balance. Did we learn that trickle down does not work? The Bush tax cuts have been operating for more than 10 years. Has that helped anybody in the middle or lower classes climb the economic ladder?
Summer will soon be upon us. It is nearly time to go swimming, but keep your eyes peeled for the sharks out there. They will have a feeding frenzy at election time. The chum is in the water.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
14 April 2012
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Lobbyists, Guns and Money by Paul Krugman Mar. 25, 2012, NY Times
Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.
Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.
What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.
Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.
What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.
And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.
But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.
And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game. Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future.
Did I mention that ALEC has played a key role in promoting bills that make it hard for the poor and ethnic minorities to vote?
Yet that’s not all; you have to think about the interests of the penal-industrial complex — prison operators, bail-bond companies and more. (The American Bail Coalition has publicly described ALEC as its “life preserver.”) This complex has a financial stake in anything that sends more people into the courts and the prisons, whether it’s exaggerated fear of racial minorities or Arizona’s draconian immigration law, a law that followed an ALEC template almost verbatim.
Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.
Now, ALEC isn’t single-handedly responsible for the corporatization of our political life; its influence is as much a symptom as a cause. But shining a light on ALEC and its supporters — a roster that includes many companies, from AT&T and Coca-Cola to UPS, that have so far managed to avoid being publicly associated with the hard-right agenda — is one good way to highlight what’s going on. And that kind of knowledge is what we need to start taking our country back.
Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.
What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.
Many ALEC-drafted bills pursue standard conservative goals: union-busting, undermining environmental protection, tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. ALEC seems, however, to have a special interest in privatization — that is, on turning the provision of public services, from schools to prisons, over to for-profit corporations. And some of the most prominent beneficiaries of privatization, such as the online education company K12 Inc. and the prison operator Corrections Corporation of America, are, not surprisingly, very much involved with the organization.
What this tells us, in turn, is that ALEC’s claim to stand for limited government and free markets is deeply misleading. To a large extent the organization seeks not limited government but privatized government, in which corporations get their profits from taxpayer dollars, dollars steered their way by friendly politicians. In short, ALEC isn’t so much about promoting free markets as it is about expanding crony capitalism.
And in case you were wondering, no, the kind of privatization ALEC promotes isn’t in the public interest; instead of success stories, what we’re getting is a series of scandals. Private charter schools, for example, appear to deliver a lot of profits but little in the way of educational achievement.
But where does the encouragement of vigilante (in)justice fit into this picture? In part it’s the same old story — the long-standing exploitation of public fears, especially those associated with racial tension, to promote a pro-corporate, pro-wealthy agenda. It’s neither an accident nor a surprise that the National Rifle Association and ALEC have been close allies all along.
And ALEC, even more than other movement-conservative organizations, is clearly playing a long game. Its legislative templates aren’t just about generating immediate benefits to the organization’s corporate sponsors; they’re about creating a political climate that will favor even more corporation-friendly legislation in the future.
Did I mention that ALEC has played a key role in promoting bills that make it hard for the poor and ethnic minorities to vote?
Yet that’s not all; you have to think about the interests of the penal-industrial complex — prison operators, bail-bond companies and more. (The American Bail Coalition has publicly described ALEC as its “life preserver.”) This complex has a financial stake in anything that sends more people into the courts and the prisons, whether it’s exaggerated fear of racial minorities or Arizona’s draconian immigration law, a law that followed an ALEC template almost verbatim.
Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.
Now, ALEC isn’t single-handedly responsible for the corporatization of our political life; its influence is as much a symptom as a cause. But shining a light on ALEC and its supporters — a roster that includes many companies, from AT&T and Coca-Cola to UPS, that have so far managed to avoid being publicly associated with the hard-right agenda — is one good way to highlight what’s going on. And that kind of knowledge is what we need to start taking our country back.
Killers
I have written before about the propensity of Americans to shoot first and ask questions later; specifically, what D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, wrote a century ago, while analyzing Fenimore Cooper’s frontier heroes:
…you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
However hyperbolic you might think this, the events of the past weeks offer little comfort and less repudiation. To begin with, we have the grisly murders in Afghanistan: on March 11, according to military authorities, staff sergeant Robert Bales stalked through two villages in Kandahar province and massacred 16 residents, including 9 children. So far, no one knows why he did it; he reportedly came back to his base and admitted that he had “taken out some military-aged males,” grunt-speak for ‘insurgents.’ Only later was it discovered that the “take-out” included mostly unarmed, defenseless women and children. Only later, too, was the “lone veteran” who snapped after his 4th deployment and financial troubles at home (Bales apparently owes over a million dollars due to a fraud he committed in his pre-military investment business), turned into the reigning theory. ‘These guys are overstressed,’ is the idea; ‘this guy has suffered traumatic head injuries and probably PTSD and god knows what else.’ And so Robert Bales gets whisked out of Afghanistan and then to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to be interrogated and psychoanalyzed and eventually tried for his crime. And while American pundits far and wide prognosticate about whether the psychological screening techniques for returning veterans are adequate, Americans in general accept the standard story of yet another really nice neighborhood boy just going berserk for unaccountable reasons, except perhaps the stress placed on poor servicemen sent back repeatedly to our neverending theater of war.
The people of Afghanistan, of course, are not so quick to absolve or explain Bales. In fact, most think he did not, could not have acted alone. Recent reports from journalists on site have found that the massacre actually took place a mere three days after an American tank on patrol in the village of Mokhoyan was destroyed (presumably by an IED). Moreover, several villagers and headmen have concurred in their report to the AP that shortly after the bombing, US and Afghan troops returned to the village, turned the residents out and lined them up against a wall, and warned them that they (the villagers) would pay dearly for this. According to villager Ahmad Shah Khan,
"It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid. Then a NATO soldier said through his translator that even our children will pay for this. Now they have done it and taken their revenge."
Ghulam Rasool, a tribal elder from the Panjwai district of Kandahar province, concurred:
"The Americans told the villagers, 'A bomb exploded on our vehicle. ... We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people.’ These are the reasons why we say they took their revenge by killing women and children in the villages."
U.S. media accounts, however, continue to portray the incident as just another case of a “lone nut” going berserk, probably after drinking too much. Hope lies in this portrayal: perhaps a more precise psychological test can identify such “nuts” a bit sooner (it is worth nothing that the current “tests” for psychological fitness are multiple-choice written tests, with no face-to-face interview with a therapist). Then, to invade another country that has not attacked us, we will send only stable young men, well-adjusted soldiers who can kill in a more reasonable, humane, and justifiable manner.
“Justifiable” is the rationale for the Trayvon Martin murder as well. Martin, a 17-year-old black youth, was returning to his father’s house in a Sanford, Florida suburb on the night of February 26, after going to a convenience store for a drink and a bag of Skittles. George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood protector, spotted Martin from his SUV and found him ‘suspicious’. Leaving his car to follow Martin on foot, Zimmerman called 911 and offered the reasons for his suspicion: the alleged intruder was wearing a hoodie, he had his hand tucked into his waist, he was wandering about on a rainy night—and he was a black male. Though the 911 dispatcher told him not to follow Martin, Zimmerman stalked him anyway, lamenting that “these assholes, they always get away.” This time, however, the “asshole” didn’t get away. In the confrontation that followed—police say a voice heard on the 911 tape is Zimmerman calling for help; Martin’s parents say it is their son’s voice calling for help—Zimmerman shot and killed the boy, who (and how often must we hear this?) turned out to be unarmed. Trayvon Martin’s family has also produced evidence from another phone call that night, from a 16-year-old girl to her friend Trayvon, in which she advises him to run, but in which he insists he ‘won’t run but just walk away fast.’ The phone conversation also indicates that the girl heard Trayvon say 'Why are you following me?' and the other voice say, 'What are you doing around here?'
More than three weeks later, the killer, Zimmerman, has still not been charged with any crime. Apparently, the Sanford FL police, with hardly any investigation (they did test the dead person, Trayvon Martin, for drugs or alcohol, but not the killer, Zimmerman!), concluded it was a case of “self-defense.” This is due to Florida’s (and 17 other states’) ‘Stand your ground’ statute, passed into law in 2005 after fierce lobbying by the National Rifle Association. Such statutes add fuel to the so-called “Castle Laws” whereby a person has an unlimited right to defend his home, allegedly his castle, against intruders, up to and including the use of deadly force—which just wasn’t enough for Florida, the NRA and America’s gun-lovers. So the ‘stand your ground’ statute was enacted by the enlightened Florida legislature and signed by then-governor Jeb Bush. The statute allows the use of deadly force anywhere, at any time, whenever someone feels a threat. In short, in ‘stand your ground’ states, the (gun-toting) citizen who feels threatened is under no obligation to ascertain whether the threat is real or imaginary, no obligation to retreat (as previous law required) into his/her castle, but can “stand his ground” no matter where the threat occurs, and shoot to kill. According to a 2007 AP report reprinted on MSNBC’s website,
the new laws create an automatic presumption that a person is justified in using deadly force to ward off an attacker in just about any public place.
The same report quotes Ashley Varner, a spokeswoman for the NRA, regarding the laws:
“We believe that self-defense is an innate human right and the law should never put the innocent victim of a crime in a position of having to second-guess themselves.”
Well, shit, who could ever argue with that? Apparently not even the U.S. Department of Justice, which, according to the most recent reports, is having second thoughts about interfering with local law authorities in the Trayvon Martin case. That’s because proving that George Zimmerman actually targeted Martin because of his race; or that Zimmerman's goal was to prevent Martin from using public streets, would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Though Zimmerman identified Martin as ‘suspicious’ and ‘black’ in the same breath, that alone would not automatically prove racial profiling. Moreover, though the place where Martin was walking was a public street, it was also within a gated community.
Still, there may be hope that, if the phone call from Martin’s girlfriend holds up as evidence, it might suggest clearly that Zimmerman, contrary to his account and the police report that he was being attacked, was actually the aggressor.
As to the larger issue, the hope seems dimmer. What can possibly be the remedy for legally allowing a self-appointed vigilante (and this nation is teeming with them) to shoot someone for “walking while black?” What can ameliorate a situation in which difference—in dress, in skin color, in the timing of an evening walk—is automatically perceived as threatening, and in which feeling threatened automatically justifies killing someone? And beyond that, what is ever going to change an entire country’s conviction that the way to settle disputes, be they neighborly or international, is to shoot first and ask questions later? Especially when the unarmed victim (including nine children) is a different color or a different race or a different religion or a different culture? Because that’s really what this is about. The lives of some people matter; the lives of those who are black or ‘ragheads’ or ‘slants’ or ‘A-rabs’ do not. They can be exterminated upon the slightest provocation, and sometimes with no provocation at all. That is really what the NRA stands for: the right to hunt and shoot that which is different, be it a game animal, a foreigner, or a dark infringer of white, American space. It is a sickness with deep roots in our culture and history, one which, even a hundred years after D.H. Lawrence pointed it out, shows little signs of melting.
Lawrence DiStasi
…you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
However hyperbolic you might think this, the events of the past weeks offer little comfort and less repudiation. To begin with, we have the grisly murders in Afghanistan: on March 11, according to military authorities, staff sergeant Robert Bales stalked through two villages in Kandahar province and massacred 16 residents, including 9 children. So far, no one knows why he did it; he reportedly came back to his base and admitted that he had “taken out some military-aged males,” grunt-speak for ‘insurgents.’ Only later was it discovered that the “take-out” included mostly unarmed, defenseless women and children. Only later, too, was the “lone veteran” who snapped after his 4th deployment and financial troubles at home (Bales apparently owes over a million dollars due to a fraud he committed in his pre-military investment business), turned into the reigning theory. ‘These guys are overstressed,’ is the idea; ‘this guy has suffered traumatic head injuries and probably PTSD and god knows what else.’ And so Robert Bales gets whisked out of Afghanistan and then to the military prison at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas to be interrogated and psychoanalyzed and eventually tried for his crime. And while American pundits far and wide prognosticate about whether the psychological screening techniques for returning veterans are adequate, Americans in general accept the standard story of yet another really nice neighborhood boy just going berserk for unaccountable reasons, except perhaps the stress placed on poor servicemen sent back repeatedly to our neverending theater of war.
The people of Afghanistan, of course, are not so quick to absolve or explain Bales. In fact, most think he did not, could not have acted alone. Recent reports from journalists on site have found that the massacre actually took place a mere three days after an American tank on patrol in the village of Mokhoyan was destroyed (presumably by an IED). Moreover, several villagers and headmen have concurred in their report to the AP that shortly after the bombing, US and Afghan troops returned to the village, turned the residents out and lined them up against a wall, and warned them that they (the villagers) would pay dearly for this. According to villager Ahmad Shah Khan,
"It looked like they were going to shoot us, and I was very afraid. Then a NATO soldier said through his translator that even our children will pay for this. Now they have done it and taken their revenge."
Ghulam Rasool, a tribal elder from the Panjwai district of Kandahar province, concurred:
"The Americans told the villagers, 'A bomb exploded on our vehicle. ... We will get revenge for this incident by killing at least 20 of your people.’ These are the reasons why we say they took their revenge by killing women and children in the villages."
U.S. media accounts, however, continue to portray the incident as just another case of a “lone nut” going berserk, probably after drinking too much. Hope lies in this portrayal: perhaps a more precise psychological test can identify such “nuts” a bit sooner (it is worth nothing that the current “tests” for psychological fitness are multiple-choice written tests, with no face-to-face interview with a therapist). Then, to invade another country that has not attacked us, we will send only stable young men, well-adjusted soldiers who can kill in a more reasonable, humane, and justifiable manner.
“Justifiable” is the rationale for the Trayvon Martin murder as well. Martin, a 17-year-old black youth, was returning to his father’s house in a Sanford, Florida suburb on the night of February 26, after going to a convenience store for a drink and a bag of Skittles. George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood protector, spotted Martin from his SUV and found him ‘suspicious’. Leaving his car to follow Martin on foot, Zimmerman called 911 and offered the reasons for his suspicion: the alleged intruder was wearing a hoodie, he had his hand tucked into his waist, he was wandering about on a rainy night—and he was a black male. Though the 911 dispatcher told him not to follow Martin, Zimmerman stalked him anyway, lamenting that “these assholes, they always get away.” This time, however, the “asshole” didn’t get away. In the confrontation that followed—police say a voice heard on the 911 tape is Zimmerman calling for help; Martin’s parents say it is their son’s voice calling for help—Zimmerman shot and killed the boy, who (and how often must we hear this?) turned out to be unarmed. Trayvon Martin’s family has also produced evidence from another phone call that night, from a 16-year-old girl to her friend Trayvon, in which she advises him to run, but in which he insists he ‘won’t run but just walk away fast.’ The phone conversation also indicates that the girl heard Trayvon say 'Why are you following me?' and the other voice say, 'What are you doing around here?'
More than three weeks later, the killer, Zimmerman, has still not been charged with any crime. Apparently, the Sanford FL police, with hardly any investigation (they did test the dead person, Trayvon Martin, for drugs or alcohol, but not the killer, Zimmerman!), concluded it was a case of “self-defense.” This is due to Florida’s (and 17 other states’) ‘Stand your ground’ statute, passed into law in 2005 after fierce lobbying by the National Rifle Association. Such statutes add fuel to the so-called “Castle Laws” whereby a person has an unlimited right to defend his home, allegedly his castle, against intruders, up to and including the use of deadly force—which just wasn’t enough for Florida, the NRA and America’s gun-lovers. So the ‘stand your ground’ statute was enacted by the enlightened Florida legislature and signed by then-governor Jeb Bush. The statute allows the use of deadly force anywhere, at any time, whenever someone feels a threat. In short, in ‘stand your ground’ states, the (gun-toting) citizen who feels threatened is under no obligation to ascertain whether the threat is real or imaginary, no obligation to retreat (as previous law required) into his/her castle, but can “stand his ground” no matter where the threat occurs, and shoot to kill. According to a 2007 AP report reprinted on MSNBC’s website,
the new laws create an automatic presumption that a person is justified in using deadly force to ward off an attacker in just about any public place.
The same report quotes Ashley Varner, a spokeswoman for the NRA, regarding the laws:
“We believe that self-defense is an innate human right and the law should never put the innocent victim of a crime in a position of having to second-guess themselves.”
Well, shit, who could ever argue with that? Apparently not even the U.S. Department of Justice, which, according to the most recent reports, is having second thoughts about interfering with local law authorities in the Trayvon Martin case. That’s because proving that George Zimmerman actually targeted Martin because of his race; or that Zimmerman's goal was to prevent Martin from using public streets, would be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Though Zimmerman identified Martin as ‘suspicious’ and ‘black’ in the same breath, that alone would not automatically prove racial profiling. Moreover, though the place where Martin was walking was a public street, it was also within a gated community.
Still, there may be hope that, if the phone call from Martin’s girlfriend holds up as evidence, it might suggest clearly that Zimmerman, contrary to his account and the police report that he was being attacked, was actually the aggressor.
As to the larger issue, the hope seems dimmer. What can possibly be the remedy for legally allowing a self-appointed vigilante (and this nation is teeming with them) to shoot someone for “walking while black?” What can ameliorate a situation in which difference—in dress, in skin color, in the timing of an evening walk—is automatically perceived as threatening, and in which feeling threatened automatically justifies killing someone? And beyond that, what is ever going to change an entire country’s conviction that the way to settle disputes, be they neighborly or international, is to shoot first and ask questions later? Especially when the unarmed victim (including nine children) is a different color or a different race or a different religion or a different culture? Because that’s really what this is about. The lives of some people matter; the lives of those who are black or ‘ragheads’ or ‘slants’ or ‘A-rabs’ do not. They can be exterminated upon the slightest provocation, and sometimes with no provocation at all. That is really what the NRA stands for: the right to hunt and shoot that which is different, be it a game animal, a foreigner, or a dark infringer of white, American space. It is a sickness with deep roots in our culture and history, one which, even a hundred years after D.H. Lawrence pointed it out, shows little signs of melting.
Lawrence DiStasi
Sunday, March 04, 2012
Barefoot and Pregnant
What do we hope for our progeny
In a time of growing misogyny
When women are seen as the enemy
Who must not be allowed to be free
And the state must control their reactions
Through clergy and conservative factions
So the greater half is reduced
And occasionally seduced
For cheap labor and motherly chores
To be labeled as sluts and whores
Turn off the time machine. Here we are back in the 1950s and going hell bent for leather for 1919. Let us remove all the restrictions on the corporations that got us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and start controlling women instead. It is a trade-off. The purveyors of “small government” suddenly want to bring back the nostalgia of a never-to-return agrarian society where women did chores and had babies and did not vote. In 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Now, the Commonwealth of Virginia is actively preventing women from exercising the right to privacy of her own bodies by imposing an invasive and medically unnecessary procedure of enduring a uterine ultrasound examination. Worse, the procedure is mandated by the state and the woman cannot opt out for any reason, religious or otherwise. While the forced procedure is conducted, the woman may or may not view the images produced by the state and for the state. That is her choice. Would you prefer to call it a Nanny state or Fascist state? That is your choice.
Meanwhile the GOP applauds itself for fighting for freedom. They champion freedom: freedom from health care, freedom from the safety net, freedom from fair taxation, freedom from the 4th Amendment. You know, freedom. We can hide those freedoms under the rock of religious freedom if anybody objects. There is still more delicious irony in this attack on women. The same bishops of the Catholic Church that used to talk fervently about each of us forming a good conscience before making big decisions has joined the parade of nannies to “guide” our women based on their collective clerical conscience. These bishops are so perceptive that they know what evil lurks in the hearts of women although they were absolutely blind to the actual sexual abuse that occurred in its ranks pledged to celibacy. You should be amazed. Pope Pius XII, hardly a wild-eyed liberal, approved the use of hormonal treatment for women (Enovid, then) to avoid or eliminate dangerous conditions such as excessive bleeding or ovarian cyst formation in 1958, the year he died from complications related to hiccups. Now the American bishops have eschewed the Pope’s advice and decided that women are too irresponsible to use medical advice to form a good conscience and prevent harm to their own bodies. Incidentally, about 60% of prescriptions for the “pill” are for reasons other than birth control, but the bishops and the GOP are not about to listen to some evil physician or, worse, a woman and, God forbid, a female physician.
Virginia is not alone in condemning/assigning women to be members of the permanent underclass. Other states are rushing to enact anti-contraception laws and some are defining personhood as beginning at the moment of conception or even before a zygote is implanted in the womb. Paragons of high virtue such as Rush Limbaugh with 4 marriages and no children are calling women sluts and prostitutes for using contraceptives regardless of their personal conditions or medical reasons. No, this could not be political, could it? Nobody would viciously insult women and castigate them for exercising what used to be rights. It also appears that Rush and others attacking women have no clue how reproduction works on the biological level. Rush speaks of using ”more and more pills” to have all the sex these women want. Of course, I will give Rush some slack since he has had no children and yet is stuck on Viagra and Oxycontin. Some may say addicted. He may not understand the process at all. One pill per day is not enough for Rush, so he must think that it is not enough for women, either.
Politically, it seems that this urgent and violent obsession with women exercising their rights is a losing proposition that cannot endear women to either the ultraconservative clergy or the ultraconservative party. Think again. If legislatures such as Virginia and other GOP controlled bodies can put rules in place that place the state in charge of each woman’s body, what difference will a woman make in her own decisions. What women think will not matter. They are irrelevant.
As I ponder the potential reasons for this abusive and regressive policy, I arrive at only a couple of reasons. The reasons reverberate in both the GOP and the bishop’s council. The first and most trivial reason is that the Tea Party has assumed control of the Republican Party and that Tea Party tail is wagging the GOP dog. Boehner has shown fear of the Tea Party and has only talked about the economy while everything done in the House of Representatives from HR 1 on has been aimed at promoting a conservative cultural agenda. Conservative bishops who have done nothing to promote the Church or build its membership are pleased that attention is being directed at the “sinfulness” of others rather than their own. What need have we for forming our own consciences when we know that women are using contraception…98% of Catholic women are using it? And Pius XII be damned, we know better than to allow women to make decisions on their health. We even know that more abortions will result from this demand for purity, but what of it, if we achieve our lofty goal of appearing to prevent
contraception?
Women, including non-Catholics such as Ms. Sandra Fluke, would abuse access to health care for their personal pleasure. And there should be no restrictions to Viagra or vasectomies because that is different and does not affect the true cause of the problem; the women themselves. The second and more substantive reason is that women have begun to strive for equality in everything including equal pay for equal work. Wisconsin has prohibited equal pay for women with Governor Scott Walker proudly leading that charge. This may seem insidious, but think of the effect. By pushing women to a permanent lower economic status, they will become more dependent on men and less likely to gain economic power. They can safely go back to the kitchen and nursery where they belong and two income families will have a lower profile thus returning us all to the glories of the farm. It is politically ingenious and bishops will love it. Everything will finally be back in its proper place. Yes, women may have less money for frivolous things like shoes, but they won’t need them as long as they are pregnant and in the kitchen where they belong. Oh, by the way, America will be more competitive for it with lower wages and no uppity women using their consciences. The American dream can be created by Rush Limbaugh, at least 4 presidential candidates, myriad bishops, the entire business world and nearly everybody except women. It is ironic that Protestants were included in the Church prohibition thus illustrating that by claiming religious freedom, a Catholic University imposed its views on women of a different persuasion. Is that not the basis of the claim by bishops that their religious rights were being curtailed? “It is against our principles as Catholics?” Really? Is not establishment of religion a specific prohibition of the First Amendment? Adult Protestant women students must accept the tenets of Catholicism to receive health care? Obama quickly placed the responsibility on health insurance companies. That not only gave a fig leaf to the Catholic Church, but it complied with the First Amendment. It also permitted women to exercise their consciences. Still the bishops complained. “Separation of Church and State” is denounced by Santorum, but that is what has kept us from fighting a “Christian Taliban” at home.
Conservatives still have to work on repealing the 19th Amendment. Zealots might find ways to nullify it. Fortunately, women represent more than half of all voters. They provided 53% of voters in 2008. It may be that women vote their consciences. That seems to be a refreshing possibility.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
06 March 2012
In a time of growing misogyny
When women are seen as the enemy
Who must not be allowed to be free
And the state must control their reactions
Through clergy and conservative factions
So the greater half is reduced
And occasionally seduced
For cheap labor and motherly chores
To be labeled as sluts and whores
Turn off the time machine. Here we are back in the 1950s and going hell bent for leather for 1919. Let us remove all the restrictions on the corporations that got us into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and start controlling women instead. It is a trade-off. The purveyors of “small government” suddenly want to bring back the nostalgia of a never-to-return agrarian society where women did chores and had babies and did not vote. In 1920, the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Now, the Commonwealth of Virginia is actively preventing women from exercising the right to privacy of her own bodies by imposing an invasive and medically unnecessary procedure of enduring a uterine ultrasound examination. Worse, the procedure is mandated by the state and the woman cannot opt out for any reason, religious or otherwise. While the forced procedure is conducted, the woman may or may not view the images produced by the state and for the state. That is her choice. Would you prefer to call it a Nanny state or Fascist state? That is your choice.
Meanwhile the GOP applauds itself for fighting for freedom. They champion freedom: freedom from health care, freedom from the safety net, freedom from fair taxation, freedom from the 4th Amendment. You know, freedom. We can hide those freedoms under the rock of religious freedom if anybody objects. There is still more delicious irony in this attack on women. The same bishops of the Catholic Church that used to talk fervently about each of us forming a good conscience before making big decisions has joined the parade of nannies to “guide” our women based on their collective clerical conscience. These bishops are so perceptive that they know what evil lurks in the hearts of women although they were absolutely blind to the actual sexual abuse that occurred in its ranks pledged to celibacy. You should be amazed. Pope Pius XII, hardly a wild-eyed liberal, approved the use of hormonal treatment for women (Enovid, then) to avoid or eliminate dangerous conditions such as excessive bleeding or ovarian cyst formation in 1958, the year he died from complications related to hiccups. Now the American bishops have eschewed the Pope’s advice and decided that women are too irresponsible to use medical advice to form a good conscience and prevent harm to their own bodies. Incidentally, about 60% of prescriptions for the “pill” are for reasons other than birth control, but the bishops and the GOP are not about to listen to some evil physician or, worse, a woman and, God forbid, a female physician.
Virginia is not alone in condemning/assigning women to be members of the permanent underclass. Other states are rushing to enact anti-contraception laws and some are defining personhood as beginning at the moment of conception or even before a zygote is implanted in the womb. Paragons of high virtue such as Rush Limbaugh with 4 marriages and no children are calling women sluts and prostitutes for using contraceptives regardless of their personal conditions or medical reasons. No, this could not be political, could it? Nobody would viciously insult women and castigate them for exercising what used to be rights. It also appears that Rush and others attacking women have no clue how reproduction works on the biological level. Rush speaks of using ”more and more pills” to have all the sex these women want. Of course, I will give Rush some slack since he has had no children and yet is stuck on Viagra and Oxycontin. Some may say addicted. He may not understand the process at all. One pill per day is not enough for Rush, so he must think that it is not enough for women, either.
Politically, it seems that this urgent and violent obsession with women exercising their rights is a losing proposition that cannot endear women to either the ultraconservative clergy or the ultraconservative party. Think again. If legislatures such as Virginia and other GOP controlled bodies can put rules in place that place the state in charge of each woman’s body, what difference will a woman make in her own decisions. What women think will not matter. They are irrelevant.
As I ponder the potential reasons for this abusive and regressive policy, I arrive at only a couple of reasons. The reasons reverberate in both the GOP and the bishop’s council. The first and most trivial reason is that the Tea Party has assumed control of the Republican Party and that Tea Party tail is wagging the GOP dog. Boehner has shown fear of the Tea Party and has only talked about the economy while everything done in the House of Representatives from HR 1 on has been aimed at promoting a conservative cultural agenda. Conservative bishops who have done nothing to promote the Church or build its membership are pleased that attention is being directed at the “sinfulness” of others rather than their own. What need have we for forming our own consciences when we know that women are using contraception…98% of Catholic women are using it? And Pius XII be damned, we know better than to allow women to make decisions on their health. We even know that more abortions will result from this demand for purity, but what of it, if we achieve our lofty goal of appearing to prevent
contraception?
Women, including non-Catholics such as Ms. Sandra Fluke, would abuse access to health care for their personal pleasure. And there should be no restrictions to Viagra or vasectomies because that is different and does not affect the true cause of the problem; the women themselves. The second and more substantive reason is that women have begun to strive for equality in everything including equal pay for equal work. Wisconsin has prohibited equal pay for women with Governor Scott Walker proudly leading that charge. This may seem insidious, but think of the effect. By pushing women to a permanent lower economic status, they will become more dependent on men and less likely to gain economic power. They can safely go back to the kitchen and nursery where they belong and two income families will have a lower profile thus returning us all to the glories of the farm. It is politically ingenious and bishops will love it. Everything will finally be back in its proper place. Yes, women may have less money for frivolous things like shoes, but they won’t need them as long as they are pregnant and in the kitchen where they belong. Oh, by the way, America will be more competitive for it with lower wages and no uppity women using their consciences. The American dream can be created by Rush Limbaugh, at least 4 presidential candidates, myriad bishops, the entire business world and nearly everybody except women. It is ironic that Protestants were included in the Church prohibition thus illustrating that by claiming religious freedom, a Catholic University imposed its views on women of a different persuasion. Is that not the basis of the claim by bishops that their religious rights were being curtailed? “It is against our principles as Catholics?” Really? Is not establishment of religion a specific prohibition of the First Amendment? Adult Protestant women students must accept the tenets of Catholicism to receive health care? Obama quickly placed the responsibility on health insurance companies. That not only gave a fig leaf to the Catholic Church, but it complied with the First Amendment. It also permitted women to exercise their consciences. Still the bishops complained. “Separation of Church and State” is denounced by Santorum, but that is what has kept us from fighting a “Christian Taliban” at home.
Conservatives still have to work on repealing the 19th Amendment. Zealots might find ways to nullify it. Fortunately, women represent more than half of all voters. They provided 53% of voters in 2008. It may be that women vote their consciences. That seems to be a refreshing possibility.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
06 March 2012
Thursday, February 09, 2012
The Human Side of Enterprise: Redux
Back in the time of Dickens
Slim were the pickins
As enterprise owners
Enforced a servitude
Without benefit or bonus
For the emerging multitude
By trimming the wages
For workers in cages
While claiming piety
So that they held the wealth
And much better health
And we had anxiety
Back in 1960, there was a brash business professor at MIT who looked at the world of work and saw something fundamentally wrong with the assumptions often made by those in power as managers and owners of enterprise in the developed world. Douglas McGregor wrote The Human Side of Enterprise mostly as a cautionary tale of motivation gone wrong. He postulated that the assumptions made by those leaders in business (or politics or the military) were critical in enabling the motivation of the followers and workers. Essentially, he said that if you make “Theory X Assumptions” about workers; that they are lazy and untrustworthy and must be coerced or coopted into working, then motivation is largely extrinsic and fleeting at best. By demonstrating a lack of trust in workers, the leader risks failure and potentially increasing costs for doing business. On the other hand, if the leader adopts “Theory Y Assumptions” that work is as natural as play and that people can enjoy their work and can be trusted to complete tasks and be productive, then motivation becomes more intrinsic and less monitoring and enforcement is required. Trust is exhibited in specific ways, including how rewards are applied and how decisions are made. A manager who appears to be playing favorites erodes motivation and a manager who constantly monitors employees and demonstrates distrust destroys motivation.
Fast-forward to the 1990s and the ability of mega-firms to create and destroy organizations without input from employees and you have the perfect brew for anxiety. Romney and Bain Equity, through its equity management have repeatedly entered organizations and stripped assets including pension funds and have cut jobs or shipped jobs overseas as the employees were merely onlookers to the process. Protective unions were long gone and even management was helpless in the downsizing and seizure of assets. Clearly, the first casualty of the process was trust, but close behind that injury was the generation of anxiety in workers losing, not only their jobs, but their dignity, self worth and optimism for life. Men or women responsible for providing nourishment and shelter for their families were then subject to the whims of an arbitrary system where they were made to feel bad by applying for unemployment compensation or even food stamps. Remember that the cause of their predicament is not of their doing, but imposed by a legal form of enterprise that immediately sets up winners and losers and creates stress and pain in powerless workers.
Picture the typical layoff. “This is nothing personal. You have been a good and loyal employee, but because of circumstances beyond my control, we have to let you go.” Immediately, there is nothing more personal. Your hopes, dreams, your way of living and concept of self are smashed and your very life is threatened by a legal but destructive ploy over which you had no control. Many of us have had this experience, and frequently, it was due to mismanagement by senior executives who gambled with your security and future and lost. I recall heading the training department for a bank that suddenly decided to enter international lending. They threw out all the safeguards of domestic lending and opened an office in London that quickly lent money to international shipping. Worse, they lent money for oil tankers. Still worse, all the tankers were from one country, Greece. Soon, the oil market collapsed and my employer was stuck with a bunch of tankers sitting in the port of Athens. I got the “nothing personal” speech along with my entire department and my bank was purchased by a bigger bank that soon met the same fate for similar mismanagement. I am certain that bank conveyed the same “nothing personal” speech.
Have we changed materially since the days of Dickens? No, not really, but the methods have morphed and the stakes have become higher since people believed the rhetoric about becoming participants in this ownership society and invested in homes when prices were high and banking treachery was higher. So now, being laid off also means losing your home instead of being kicked out by your landlord. If you call that progress, you have a high threshold for pain. Bain or its counterpart just ate your lunch by confiscating your pension, but it was nothing personal, thank god. You are reduced to standing in line to get unemployment compensation and soon you are further embarrassed to show your food stamp card at the supermarket. In a few states, you also have to pee in a bottle to prove that you are not on drugs before you qualify for food stamps because you are getting “government” money (much like the conservative politicians on the government payroll except for the peeing in a bottle part). So far, only 2% of these recipients have tested positive for drugs while 9% of the general population tests positive for drugs, yet the assumption continues that people are lazy and that they WANT to get food stamps to avoid work. Could things be any worse? Of course, you could have the House of Representatives cut off your unemployment compensation. Once again, conservatives there are claiming that paying unemployment compensation will be a disincentive for you to find work. I guess that they assume that you enjoy peeing in a bottle and living on the street, losing your pension and begging for food. How could I have missed the joi di vivre?
Simply listen to the conservative candidates in debates and speeches and you will discover that “people on welfare WANT to be there.” “They DON’T want to work.” The assumptions are both incorrect and dehumanizing. How humiliating it must be to lose your job because Romney crushed your company and grabbed your pension and then you have to apply for food stamps. Gingrich follows with his invective that blacks especially should learn to be school janitors so that we can bust unions and hire kids “who don’t have good role models.” Unfortunately, many black kids live in homes or on the street where their parents have to work two and more part time jobs without healthcare simply to buy food and shelter. Rick Santorum specifically mentioned blacks receiving welfare and then denied it despite the clear video where he pronounced it for perpetuity. Their assumptions drive their heartless and brainless policies. Fundamental assumption: The poor are causing the problems in our society.
Tax policies are the most interesting. “Everybody should pay some taxes.” Now that sounds fair, doesn’t it? Except for the fact that even the poorest pay local taxes although they may not pay federal income taxes because they have no income. Sure, Mittens Romney pays taxes like a good boy, and although it is less than 15%, it is all legal, right? While true, it is also true that Bain and other equity and investment companies lobbied Congress directly and forcefully to qualify dividend income and “carried interest” income at lower rates than any worker on a paycheck. Romney helped write the law. Mittens was also able to contribute a $100 Million gift to his sons in one year without the usual tax. In fact, he paid no tax on that gift. Now this may have been some sort of special trust arrangement, but limitations exist for each of us who may not have a crew of attorneys and accountants. Recently, we were restricted to $11,000 and, since 2011, that has been raised to $1 Million annually in gifts. I guess Mittens could not wait a hundred years and surely, he could not afford the taxes. Every proposed tax scheme of conservative candidates will increase the taxes paid by lower and middle class citizens and reduce the taxes of the highest economic class. The rationale for trickledown has not changed, but neither has the reality. The “job creators” need the tax breaks to create jobs so that others can pay taxes. We have enjoyed ten years of the lowest tax rates for “job creators” in over 50 years and they have created no jobs, but continue to amass wealth so they can continue to influence tax legislation. Do you feel the trickledown? Maybe you spilled something from that bottle you had to pee in.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
10 February 2012
Slim were the pickins
As enterprise owners
Enforced a servitude
Without benefit or bonus
For the emerging multitude
By trimming the wages
For workers in cages
While claiming piety
So that they held the wealth
And much better health
And we had anxiety
Back in 1960, there was a brash business professor at MIT who looked at the world of work and saw something fundamentally wrong with the assumptions often made by those in power as managers and owners of enterprise in the developed world. Douglas McGregor wrote The Human Side of Enterprise mostly as a cautionary tale of motivation gone wrong. He postulated that the assumptions made by those leaders in business (or politics or the military) were critical in enabling the motivation of the followers and workers. Essentially, he said that if you make “Theory X Assumptions” about workers; that they are lazy and untrustworthy and must be coerced or coopted into working, then motivation is largely extrinsic and fleeting at best. By demonstrating a lack of trust in workers, the leader risks failure and potentially increasing costs for doing business. On the other hand, if the leader adopts “Theory Y Assumptions” that work is as natural as play and that people can enjoy their work and can be trusted to complete tasks and be productive, then motivation becomes more intrinsic and less monitoring and enforcement is required. Trust is exhibited in specific ways, including how rewards are applied and how decisions are made. A manager who appears to be playing favorites erodes motivation and a manager who constantly monitors employees and demonstrates distrust destroys motivation.
Fast-forward to the 1990s and the ability of mega-firms to create and destroy organizations without input from employees and you have the perfect brew for anxiety. Romney and Bain Equity, through its equity management have repeatedly entered organizations and stripped assets including pension funds and have cut jobs or shipped jobs overseas as the employees were merely onlookers to the process. Protective unions were long gone and even management was helpless in the downsizing and seizure of assets. Clearly, the first casualty of the process was trust, but close behind that injury was the generation of anxiety in workers losing, not only their jobs, but their dignity, self worth and optimism for life. Men or women responsible for providing nourishment and shelter for their families were then subject to the whims of an arbitrary system where they were made to feel bad by applying for unemployment compensation or even food stamps. Remember that the cause of their predicament is not of their doing, but imposed by a legal form of enterprise that immediately sets up winners and losers and creates stress and pain in powerless workers.
Picture the typical layoff. “This is nothing personal. You have been a good and loyal employee, but because of circumstances beyond my control, we have to let you go.” Immediately, there is nothing more personal. Your hopes, dreams, your way of living and concept of self are smashed and your very life is threatened by a legal but destructive ploy over which you had no control. Many of us have had this experience, and frequently, it was due to mismanagement by senior executives who gambled with your security and future and lost. I recall heading the training department for a bank that suddenly decided to enter international lending. They threw out all the safeguards of domestic lending and opened an office in London that quickly lent money to international shipping. Worse, they lent money for oil tankers. Still worse, all the tankers were from one country, Greece. Soon, the oil market collapsed and my employer was stuck with a bunch of tankers sitting in the port of Athens. I got the “nothing personal” speech along with my entire department and my bank was purchased by a bigger bank that soon met the same fate for similar mismanagement. I am certain that bank conveyed the same “nothing personal” speech.
Have we changed materially since the days of Dickens? No, not really, but the methods have morphed and the stakes have become higher since people believed the rhetoric about becoming participants in this ownership society and invested in homes when prices were high and banking treachery was higher. So now, being laid off also means losing your home instead of being kicked out by your landlord. If you call that progress, you have a high threshold for pain. Bain or its counterpart just ate your lunch by confiscating your pension, but it was nothing personal, thank god. You are reduced to standing in line to get unemployment compensation and soon you are further embarrassed to show your food stamp card at the supermarket. In a few states, you also have to pee in a bottle to prove that you are not on drugs before you qualify for food stamps because you are getting “government” money (much like the conservative politicians on the government payroll except for the peeing in a bottle part). So far, only 2% of these recipients have tested positive for drugs while 9% of the general population tests positive for drugs, yet the assumption continues that people are lazy and that they WANT to get food stamps to avoid work. Could things be any worse? Of course, you could have the House of Representatives cut off your unemployment compensation. Once again, conservatives there are claiming that paying unemployment compensation will be a disincentive for you to find work. I guess that they assume that you enjoy peeing in a bottle and living on the street, losing your pension and begging for food. How could I have missed the joi di vivre?
Simply listen to the conservative candidates in debates and speeches and you will discover that “people on welfare WANT to be there.” “They DON’T want to work.” The assumptions are both incorrect and dehumanizing. How humiliating it must be to lose your job because Romney crushed your company and grabbed your pension and then you have to apply for food stamps. Gingrich follows with his invective that blacks especially should learn to be school janitors so that we can bust unions and hire kids “who don’t have good role models.” Unfortunately, many black kids live in homes or on the street where their parents have to work two and more part time jobs without healthcare simply to buy food and shelter. Rick Santorum specifically mentioned blacks receiving welfare and then denied it despite the clear video where he pronounced it for perpetuity. Their assumptions drive their heartless and brainless policies. Fundamental assumption: The poor are causing the problems in our society.
Tax policies are the most interesting. “Everybody should pay some taxes.” Now that sounds fair, doesn’t it? Except for the fact that even the poorest pay local taxes although they may not pay federal income taxes because they have no income. Sure, Mittens Romney pays taxes like a good boy, and although it is less than 15%, it is all legal, right? While true, it is also true that Bain and other equity and investment companies lobbied Congress directly and forcefully to qualify dividend income and “carried interest” income at lower rates than any worker on a paycheck. Romney helped write the law. Mittens was also able to contribute a $100 Million gift to his sons in one year without the usual tax. In fact, he paid no tax on that gift. Now this may have been some sort of special trust arrangement, but limitations exist for each of us who may not have a crew of attorneys and accountants. Recently, we were restricted to $11,000 and, since 2011, that has been raised to $1 Million annually in gifts. I guess Mittens could not wait a hundred years and surely, he could not afford the taxes. Every proposed tax scheme of conservative candidates will increase the taxes paid by lower and middle class citizens and reduce the taxes of the highest economic class. The rationale for trickledown has not changed, but neither has the reality. The “job creators” need the tax breaks to create jobs so that others can pay taxes. We have enjoyed ten years of the lowest tax rates for “job creators” in over 50 years and they have created no jobs, but continue to amass wealth so they can continue to influence tax legislation. Do you feel the trickledown? Maybe you spilled something from that bottle you had to pee in.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
10 February 2012
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
Free-Market Medicine—A Personal Account
When I recently went to Alta Bates hospital for surgery, I discovered that legal procedures take precedence over medical ones. I had to sign intimidating statements about financial counseling, indemnity, patient responsibilities, consent to treatment, use of electronic technologies, and the like.
One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is hereby authorized to use his/her discretion in disposing of any member, organ, or other tissue removed from my person during the procedure.” Any member? Any organ?
The next day I returned for the actual operation. While playing Frank Sinatra recordings, the surgeon went to work cutting open several layers of my abdomen in order to secure my intestines with a permanent mesh implant. Afterward I spent two hours in the recovery room. “I feel like I’ve been in a knife fight,” I told one nurse. “It’s called surgery,” she explained.
Then, while still pumped up with anesthetics and medications, I was rolled out into the street. The street? Yes, some few hours after surgery they send you home. In countries that have socialized medicine (there I said it), a van might be waiting with trained personnel to help you to your abode.
Not so in free-market America. Your presurgery agreement specifies in boldface that you must have “a responsible adult acquaintance” (as opposed to an irresponsible teenage stranger) take you home in a private vehicle. I kept thinking, what happens to those unfortunates who have no one to bundle them away? Do they languish endlessly in the hospital driveway until the nasty weather finishes them off?
You are not allowed to call a taxi. Were a taxi driver to cause you any harm, you could hold the hospital legally responsible. Again it’s a matter of liability and lawyers, not health and doctors.
One of the two friends who helped me up the steps to my house then went off to Walgreen’s to buy the powerful antibiotics I had to take every four hours for two days. I dislike how antibiotics destroy the “good bacteria” that our bodies produce, and how they help create dangerous strains of super-resistant bacteria. I kept thinking of a recent finding: excessive reliance on medical drugs kills more Americans than all illegal narcotics combined.
So why did I have to take antibiotics? Because, as everyone kept telling me, hospitals are seriously unsafe places overrun with Staph infections and other super bugs. It’s a matter of self-protection.
Two days after surgery I noticed a dark red discoloration on my lower abdomen indicating internal bleeding. I was supposed to get a follow-up call from a nurse who would check on how I was doing. But the call might never come because the staff was planning a walkout. “We have no contract,” one of them had told me when I was in the recovery room. So now the nurses are on strike---and I’m left on my own to divine what my internal bleeding is all about. What fun.
Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. A nurse did call me despite the walkout. Yes, she said, it was internal bleeding, but it was to be expected. My surgeon called later in the day to confirm this opinion. Death was not yet knocking.
A few days later, there were massive nurses strikes on both coasts. Among other things, the nurses were complaining about “being disrespected by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” (New York Times, 16 December 2011). One cold-blooded management negotiator was quoted as saying, “We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you” (ibid.).
As for the doctors, both my surgeon and my general practitioner (GP) are among the victims, not the perpetrators, of today’s corporate medical system. My GP explained that it is an endless fight to get insurance companies to pay for services they supposedly cover. Feeling less like a doctor and more like a bill collector, my GP found he could no longer engage in endless telephone struggles with insurance companies.
There are 1,500 medical insurance companies in America, all madly dedicated to maximizing profits by increasing premiums and withholding payments. The medical industry in toto is the nation’s largest and most profitable business, with an annual health bill of about $1 trillion.
Along with the giant insurance and giant pharmaceutical companies, the greatest profiteers are the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), notorious for charging steep monthly payments while underpaying their staffs and requiring their doctors to spend less time with each patient, sometimes even withholding necessary treatment.
I am without private insurance. And my Medicare goes just so far. Like many other doctors, my GP no longer accepts Medicare. For a number of years now, Medicare payments to physicians have remained relatively unchanged while costs of running a practice (staff, office space, insurance) have steadily increased. So now my GP’s patients have to pay in full upon every visit—which is not always easy to do.
Our health system mirrors our class system. At the base of the pyramid are the very poor. Many of them suffer through long hours in emergency rooms only to be turned away with a useless or harmful prescription. No wonder “the United States has the worst record among industrialized nations in treating preventable deaths” (Healthcare-NOW! 1 December 2011).
Too often the very poor get no care at all. They simply die of whatever illness assails them because they cannot afford treatment. An acquaintance of mine told me how her mother died of AIDS because she could not afford the medications that might have kept her alive.
In Houston I once got talking with a limousine driver, a young African-American man, who remarked that both his parents had died of cancer without ever receiving any treatment. “They just died,” he said with a pain in his voice that I can still hear.
Living just above the poor in the class pyramid are the embattled middle class. They watch medical coverage disappear while paying out costly amounts to the profit-driven insurance companies. I was able to get surgery at Alta Bates only because I am old enough to have Medicare and have enough disposable income to meet the co-payment.
For my out-patient operation, the hospital charged Medicare $19,466. Of this, Medicare paid $2,527. And I was billed $644. The hospital then writes off the unpaid balance thus saving considerable sums in taxes (amounting to an indirect subsidy from the rest of us taxpayers). Had I no Medicare coverage, I would have had to pay the entire $19,466.
I was informed by the hospital that the $19,466 charge covers only hospital costs for equipment, technicians, supplies, and room. So besides the $644, I will have to pay for any pathologists, surgical assistants, and anesthesiologists who performed additional services. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.
How much does my surgeon earn? Not much at all. He gets about $400 to $500 for everything, including my pre-op and post-op visits and the surgery itself, an exacting undertaking that requires skills of the highest sort. He also has to maintain insurance, an office, an assistant, and an increasing load of paperwork.
My surgeon pointed out to me, “If you ask people how much I make on an operation like yours, they will say $4000 to $5000, and be wrong by a factor of ten.” He noted that in a recent speech President Obama criticized a surgeon for charging $30,000 to replace a knee cap. “The surgeon gets a minute fraction of that amount,” my doctor pointed out.
To make matters worse, there is talk about cutting Medicare payments to physicians by 27 percent. If this happens, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find a surgeon who will take Medicare. Still worse, the private insurance companies will join in squeezing the physicians for still more profits.
I was able to meet my payment ($644) not only because my operation was heavily subsidized by Medicare but because it was a one-day “ambulatory surgery.” I don’t know how I would fare if I had to undergo prolonged and extremely costly treatment.
So much for life in the middle class. At the very top of the class pyramid are the 1%, those who don’t have to worry about any of this, the superrich who have money enough for all kinds of state-of-the-art treatments at the very finest therapeutic centers around the world, complete with luxury suites with gourmet menus.
Among the medically privileged are members of Congress and the U.S. president. They pay nothing. They are treated at top-grade facilities. They enjoy, how shall we put it, socialized medicine. No conservative lawmakers have held fast to their free-market principles by refusing to accept this publicly funded, medical treatment.
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, cheerfully announced that medical care is not a human right; it should be “market determined just like food and shelter.” Nobody has a higher opinion of John Mackey than I, and I think he is a greed-driven, union-busting bloodsucker. Nevertheless I will give him credit for candidly admitting his dedication to a dehumanized profit pathology.
The U.S. medical system costs many times more than what is spent in socialized systems, but it delivers much less in the way of quality care and cure. That’s the way it is intended to be. The goal of any free-market service---be it utilities, housing, transportation, education, or health care---is not to maximize performance but to maximize profits often at the expense of performance.
If profits are high, then the system is working just fine---for the 1%. But for us 99%, the profit lust is itself the heart of the problem.
Michael Parenti
© Michael Parenti, 2011
--------------
Michael Parenti’s recent books include: The Face of Imperialism (2011); God and His Demons ( 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2004). For further information, visit: www.MichaelParenti.org .
One of these documents committed me to the following: “The hospital pathologist is hereby authorized to use his/her discretion in disposing of any member, organ, or other tissue removed from my person during the procedure.” Any member? Any organ?
The next day I returned for the actual operation. While playing Frank Sinatra recordings, the surgeon went to work cutting open several layers of my abdomen in order to secure my intestines with a permanent mesh implant. Afterward I spent two hours in the recovery room. “I feel like I’ve been in a knife fight,” I told one nurse. “It’s called surgery,” she explained.
Then, while still pumped up with anesthetics and medications, I was rolled out into the street. The street? Yes, some few hours after surgery they send you home. In countries that have socialized medicine (there I said it), a van might be waiting with trained personnel to help you to your abode.
Not so in free-market America. Your presurgery agreement specifies in boldface that you must have “a responsible adult acquaintance” (as opposed to an irresponsible teenage stranger) take you home in a private vehicle. I kept thinking, what happens to those unfortunates who have no one to bundle them away? Do they languish endlessly in the hospital driveway until the nasty weather finishes them off?
You are not allowed to call a taxi. Were a taxi driver to cause you any harm, you could hold the hospital legally responsible. Again it’s a matter of liability and lawyers, not health and doctors.
One of the two friends who helped me up the steps to my house then went off to Walgreen’s to buy the powerful antibiotics I had to take every four hours for two days. I dislike how antibiotics destroy the “good bacteria” that our bodies produce, and how they help create dangerous strains of super-resistant bacteria. I kept thinking of a recent finding: excessive reliance on medical drugs kills more Americans than all illegal narcotics combined.
So why did I have to take antibiotics? Because, as everyone kept telling me, hospitals are seriously unsafe places overrun with Staph infections and other super bugs. It’s a matter of self-protection.
Two days after surgery I noticed a dark red discoloration on my lower abdomen indicating internal bleeding. I was supposed to get a follow-up call from a nurse who would check on how I was doing. But the call might never come because the staff was planning a walkout. “We have no contract,” one of them had told me when I was in the recovery room. So now the nurses are on strike---and I’m left on my own to divine what my internal bleeding is all about. What fun.
Fortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. A nurse did call me despite the walkout. Yes, she said, it was internal bleeding, but it was to be expected. My surgeon called later in the day to confirm this opinion. Death was not yet knocking.
A few days later, there were massive nurses strikes on both coasts. Among other things, the nurses were complaining about “being disrespected by a corporate hospital culture that demands sacrifices from patients and those who provide their care, but pays executives millions of dollars.” (New York Times, 16 December 2011). One cold-blooded management negotiator was quoted as saying, “We have the money. We just don’t have the will to give it to you” (ibid.).
As for the doctors, both my surgeon and my general practitioner (GP) are among the victims, not the perpetrators, of today’s corporate medical system. My GP explained that it is an endless fight to get insurance companies to pay for services they supposedly cover. Feeling less like a doctor and more like a bill collector, my GP found he could no longer engage in endless telephone struggles with insurance companies.
There are 1,500 medical insurance companies in America, all madly dedicated to maximizing profits by increasing premiums and withholding payments. The medical industry in toto is the nation’s largest and most profitable business, with an annual health bill of about $1 trillion.
Along with the giant insurance and giant pharmaceutical companies, the greatest profiteers are the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs), notorious for charging steep monthly payments while underpaying their staffs and requiring their doctors to spend less time with each patient, sometimes even withholding necessary treatment.
I am without private insurance. And my Medicare goes just so far. Like many other doctors, my GP no longer accepts Medicare. For a number of years now, Medicare payments to physicians have remained relatively unchanged while costs of running a practice (staff, office space, insurance) have steadily increased. So now my GP’s patients have to pay in full upon every visit—which is not always easy to do.
Our health system mirrors our class system. At the base of the pyramid are the very poor. Many of them suffer through long hours in emergency rooms only to be turned away with a useless or harmful prescription. No wonder “the United States has the worst record among industrialized nations in treating preventable deaths” (Healthcare-NOW! 1 December 2011).
Too often the very poor get no care at all. They simply die of whatever illness assails them because they cannot afford treatment. An acquaintance of mine told me how her mother died of AIDS because she could not afford the medications that might have kept her alive.
In Houston I once got talking with a limousine driver, a young African-American man, who remarked that both his parents had died of cancer without ever receiving any treatment. “They just died,” he said with a pain in his voice that I can still hear.
Living just above the poor in the class pyramid are the embattled middle class. They watch medical coverage disappear while paying out costly amounts to the profit-driven insurance companies. I was able to get surgery at Alta Bates only because I am old enough to have Medicare and have enough disposable income to meet the co-payment.
For my out-patient operation, the hospital charged Medicare $19,466. Of this, Medicare paid $2,527. And I was billed $644. The hospital then writes off the unpaid balance thus saving considerable sums in taxes (amounting to an indirect subsidy from the rest of us taxpayers). Had I no Medicare coverage, I would have had to pay the entire $19,466.
I was informed by the hospital that the $19,466 charge covers only hospital costs for equipment, technicians, supplies, and room. So besides the $644, I will have to pay for any pathologists, surgical assistants, and anesthesiologists who performed additional services. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.
How much does my surgeon earn? Not much at all. He gets about $400 to $500 for everything, including my pre-op and post-op visits and the surgery itself, an exacting undertaking that requires skills of the highest sort. He also has to maintain insurance, an office, an assistant, and an increasing load of paperwork.
My surgeon pointed out to me, “If you ask people how much I make on an operation like yours, they will say $4000 to $5000, and be wrong by a factor of ten.” He noted that in a recent speech President Obama criticized a surgeon for charging $30,000 to replace a knee cap. “The surgeon gets a minute fraction of that amount,” my doctor pointed out.
To make matters worse, there is talk about cutting Medicare payments to physicians by 27 percent. If this happens, it is going to be increasingly difficult to find a surgeon who will take Medicare. Still worse, the private insurance companies will join in squeezing the physicians for still more profits.
I was able to meet my payment ($644) not only because my operation was heavily subsidized by Medicare but because it was a one-day “ambulatory surgery.” I don’t know how I would fare if I had to undergo prolonged and extremely costly treatment.
So much for life in the middle class. At the very top of the class pyramid are the 1%, those who don’t have to worry about any of this, the superrich who have money enough for all kinds of state-of-the-art treatments at the very finest therapeutic centers around the world, complete with luxury suites with gourmet menus.
Among the medically privileged are members of Congress and the U.S. president. They pay nothing. They are treated at top-grade facilities. They enjoy, how shall we put it, socialized medicine. No conservative lawmakers have held fast to their free-market principles by refusing to accept this publicly funded, medical treatment.
John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, cheerfully announced that medical care is not a human right; it should be “market determined just like food and shelter.” Nobody has a higher opinion of John Mackey than I, and I think he is a greed-driven, union-busting bloodsucker. Nevertheless I will give him credit for candidly admitting his dedication to a dehumanized profit pathology.
The U.S. medical system costs many times more than what is spent in socialized systems, but it delivers much less in the way of quality care and cure. That’s the way it is intended to be. The goal of any free-market service---be it utilities, housing, transportation, education, or health care---is not to maximize performance but to maximize profits often at the expense of performance.
If profits are high, then the system is working just fine---for the 1%. But for us 99%, the profit lust is itself the heart of the problem.
Michael Parenti
© Michael Parenti, 2011
--------------
Michael Parenti’s recent books include: The Face of Imperialism (2011); God and His Demons ( 2010); Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2004). For further information, visit: www.MichaelParenti.org
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Bain: Crony and Phony Capitalism
In the world according to Romney
In this land of milk and honey
Selective memory is best
When belief is put to the test
Though now Mitt’s berated
For saying it’s jobs he created
When in fact he destroyed them
And pensions were crème de la crème
Still, he denounced us as envious
And not himself as devious
All the recent political theater of the Republican primary season makes Broadway and Hollywood seem real. One must suspend disbelief in order to endure a single debate and watch them each push and shove to enter and exit stage far right. Finally, on last Sunday’s performance, “Bain” and “Romney” were used to form a sentence. Romney has touted his extraordinary ability and experience in creating jobs. Let us look at that startling claim to see where it could possibly have arisen. His competitors questioned Mitt’s boast and yet it has been the lynch pin of his campaign. What happens when a company like Bain enters the door of a struggling corporation? It depends. If you are speaking about Bain Venture Capital, then Bain might provide money to expand business or encourage new sector entry or growth. On the other hand, if it is Bain Capital Private Equity at the door, look for a leveraged buyout by a known raider. Also look for the dark side of capitalism where employees are merely pawns that might be fired to enrich Bain. Bain will acquire and then disassemble the company and sell the pieces. It will also examine those assets for potential changes. Normally, a pension fund is a liability in accounting terms since that money is owed employees at some future date. Private equity firms don’t view pensions that way. Those firms, or vulture capitalists, as Rick Perry called them, see pension funds as assets to be saved from the clutches of employees and used for Bain’s profits. That is what happened when Bain bought GST Steel in Kansas City. Bain took much of the pension money for its profit and then the government agency Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation had to bail out the pension fund at the expense of American taxpayers. This should not be used as a boast, but a source of shame for Bain and Romney. Is it capitalism to push liabilities to the government or is it greed and corporate socialism?
The current Romney charge that criticisms of his profiteering are “envy” and not righteous indignation pours salt in the wound that he created. It actually condemns criticism and makes it appear that anybody noting the pain he has caused in thousands of families is due to envy of the people so affected and not to Romney’s unique ethics. In effect, he is also claiming that criticism of his ethics is a criticism of capitalism itself. It is not. It is a criticism of Phony Capitalism that pretends to be taking risks to generate profits, but instead is transferring risks to workers and to the government. It is also heartless because those were real people whom he fired and they supported real families living real lives of suffering and pain that Romney has never experienced. His attempt to express identification with people getting pink slips by saying that he feared a pink slip in his life is an creepy joke given that he has never had to fear any economic threat. Let me cite a few examples.
GST Steel eventually lost all 750 jobs in Kansas City and in no small part because Bain and Romney saddled CST with debt and Bain and Romney essentially confiscated $44 Million from the CST pension fund that later had to be made up by taxpayers through the US government Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). That is a federal bailout going into profits for Bain and the loss of jobs for the steelworkers. Think about it. While corporations normally regard pension funds as liabilities that must be funded, Romney’s Bain saw pension funds as an asset. In accounting, they are on opposite sides of the ledger. In reality, not all the money Romney took was returned by PBGC, so workers each lost about $400/month in their eventual pension benefits. No wonder Romney likes firing people. It means money in his pockets. Romney boasted of creating 100,000 jobs, (80% through Staples), although Bain has never verified that number. He speaks of net/net meaning that all losses have been subtracted from spinoff jobs “created.” Hmm. Romney neglects to mention that the 750 jobs at GST Steel resulted in a cascade of lost jobs at the energy companies and the supply companies that did business with GST. Look closely. Bain and Romney issued bonds after purchasing GST (changing the name from Armco). While making improvements, they also took $36 Million as a dividend to Bain. That is the nature of private equity. Private equity does not create jobs. It creates profit unrelated to jobs. Venture capital is completely different. It may actually create jobs. The jobs lost at GST, were lost by Bain Capital Private Equity, the vulture side of Bain. To show you the balance of business, only about 2.3% of Bain’s business is done by Bain Venture Capital. In other words, vulture capital does over 97% of the business for Bain. Romney has not differentiated between the two nor has he indicated the huge imbalance toward vulture capitalism. Additionally, Bain took its profits directly while socializing losses (as in socialism) by increasing local taxes, increasing borrowing costs for others and using the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to pay greatly reduced pensions to fired workers Was it legal? Yes. Was it ethical? Hmm. Did it create jobs? Probably not here in the USA.
Without going through all the details, Bain essentially did the same maneuver on Ampad by going in and charging Ampad for consulting and having them purchase lots of other office supply companies. In 1992 Bain bought Ampad for $5 Million. In 1993, Ampad had debt of $11 Million. By 1999, Ampad was in debt by $400 Million. Highly leveraged? Worse, Ampad was paying Bain high management fees along the way. Hundreds of employees were laid off and Ampad was put into competition with Staples for the same market while having less purchasing power. Who bankrolled Staples? Why it was Bain, of course. Conflict of interest you say? Not exactly, if your sole interest is making money, there can be no conflict of interest. Are not layoffs and bankruptcy problems? Not for Bain. Bain sold stock and the nearly 400 layoffs were simply a cost of bad management for which Bain was highly rewarded with a profit of over $100 Million. Jobs were outsourced and Bain made money without creating a US job.
Taxes? The Congress in its wisdom taxes profits from raiding companies like Bain Capital Private Equity at 15% not the 35% that you might assume. You may be wondering why “Mittens” has not divulged his tax returns despite calls to do so. He has compared his situation to that of the late Ted Kennedy who had his money in a blind trust meaning that if he divulged his tax return, he would have to reinvest his money in order to avoid interest conflicts in his Senate decisions. Mittens holds no government position so that, even if he had a blind trust then there would be no conflict of interest. How dare you ask? Besides, what if he paid no taxes? That is none of your business.
Now we hear cries from Senator McCain and others that attacking Mittens Romney is directly attacking our fundamental capitalist economic system. I don’t think so. Even the idea that Romney was picking winners and losers while having taxpayers pick up the tab flies against the advertised strength of capitalism of being rewarded for risk without government. Romney has scalded Obama for bailing out GM and Chrysler and yet jobs were saved and workers shared in the process of reducing demands to ensure survival instead of another bankruptcy. He has yet to take responsibility for his heartless creating of weak companies and then devouring the highly leveraged carcasses he created. Employees had no role except as victims. Crony Corporate Socialism as practiced by Romney and Bain should not be confused with Capitalism. Mussolini would love Romney for his corporatism, but we must call it what it is and it does not create jobs. It is essentially high finance with other people’s money. Remember Wall Street that was too big to fail but was bailed out by GW Bush? Conservatism or Corporatism?
Mittens says that any criticism is Romney Envy? No, he really does not get it. Maybe people felt fear or even hate, but envy? Maybe people envied their outsourced jobs? Governor Romney paid corporations incentives for moving to Massachusetts at the expense of taxpayers and the losing states. Mittens needs to level with us and admit that he created lots of profit for himself and Bain, but please, spare us the phony economics lesson on jobs. Just think of this on a national scale. Ouch.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
13 January 2012
In this land of milk and honey
Selective memory is best
When belief is put to the test
Though now Mitt’s berated
For saying it’s jobs he created
When in fact he destroyed them
And pensions were crème de la crème
Still, he denounced us as envious
And not himself as devious
All the recent political theater of the Republican primary season makes Broadway and Hollywood seem real. One must suspend disbelief in order to endure a single debate and watch them each push and shove to enter and exit stage far right. Finally, on last Sunday’s performance, “Bain” and “Romney” were used to form a sentence. Romney has touted his extraordinary ability and experience in creating jobs. Let us look at that startling claim to see where it could possibly have arisen. His competitors questioned Mitt’s boast and yet it has been the lynch pin of his campaign. What happens when a company like Bain enters the door of a struggling corporation? It depends. If you are speaking about Bain Venture Capital, then Bain might provide money to expand business or encourage new sector entry or growth. On the other hand, if it is Bain Capital Private Equity at the door, look for a leveraged buyout by a known raider. Also look for the dark side of capitalism where employees are merely pawns that might be fired to enrich Bain. Bain will acquire and then disassemble the company and sell the pieces. It will also examine those assets for potential changes. Normally, a pension fund is a liability in accounting terms since that money is owed employees at some future date. Private equity firms don’t view pensions that way. Those firms, or vulture capitalists, as Rick Perry called them, see pension funds as assets to be saved from the clutches of employees and used for Bain’s profits. That is what happened when Bain bought GST Steel in Kansas City. Bain took much of the pension money for its profit and then the government agency Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation had to bail out the pension fund at the expense of American taxpayers. This should not be used as a boast, but a source of shame for Bain and Romney. Is it capitalism to push liabilities to the government or is it greed and corporate socialism?
The current Romney charge that criticisms of his profiteering are “envy” and not righteous indignation pours salt in the wound that he created. It actually condemns criticism and makes it appear that anybody noting the pain he has caused in thousands of families is due to envy of the people so affected and not to Romney’s unique ethics. In effect, he is also claiming that criticism of his ethics is a criticism of capitalism itself. It is not. It is a criticism of Phony Capitalism that pretends to be taking risks to generate profits, but instead is transferring risks to workers and to the government. It is also heartless because those were real people whom he fired and they supported real families living real lives of suffering and pain that Romney has never experienced. His attempt to express identification with people getting pink slips by saying that he feared a pink slip in his life is an creepy joke given that he has never had to fear any economic threat. Let me cite a few examples.
GST Steel eventually lost all 750 jobs in Kansas City and in no small part because Bain and Romney saddled CST with debt and Bain and Romney essentially confiscated $44 Million from the CST pension fund that later had to be made up by taxpayers through the US government Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). That is a federal bailout going into profits for Bain and the loss of jobs for the steelworkers. Think about it. While corporations normally regard pension funds as liabilities that must be funded, Romney’s Bain saw pension funds as an asset. In accounting, they are on opposite sides of the ledger. In reality, not all the money Romney took was returned by PBGC, so workers each lost about $400/month in their eventual pension benefits. No wonder Romney likes firing people. It means money in his pockets. Romney boasted of creating 100,000 jobs, (80% through Staples), although Bain has never verified that number. He speaks of net/net meaning that all losses have been subtracted from spinoff jobs “created.” Hmm. Romney neglects to mention that the 750 jobs at GST Steel resulted in a cascade of lost jobs at the energy companies and the supply companies that did business with GST. Look closely. Bain and Romney issued bonds after purchasing GST (changing the name from Armco). While making improvements, they also took $36 Million as a dividend to Bain. That is the nature of private equity. Private equity does not create jobs. It creates profit unrelated to jobs. Venture capital is completely different. It may actually create jobs. The jobs lost at GST, were lost by Bain Capital Private Equity, the vulture side of Bain. To show you the balance of business, only about 2.3% of Bain’s business is done by Bain Venture Capital. In other words, vulture capital does over 97% of the business for Bain. Romney has not differentiated between the two nor has he indicated the huge imbalance toward vulture capitalism. Additionally, Bain took its profits directly while socializing losses (as in socialism) by increasing local taxes, increasing borrowing costs for others and using the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to pay greatly reduced pensions to fired workers Was it legal? Yes. Was it ethical? Hmm. Did it create jobs? Probably not here in the USA.
Without going through all the details, Bain essentially did the same maneuver on Ampad by going in and charging Ampad for consulting and having them purchase lots of other office supply companies. In 1992 Bain bought Ampad for $5 Million. In 1993, Ampad had debt of $11 Million. By 1999, Ampad was in debt by $400 Million. Highly leveraged? Worse, Ampad was paying Bain high management fees along the way. Hundreds of employees were laid off and Ampad was put into competition with Staples for the same market while having less purchasing power. Who bankrolled Staples? Why it was Bain, of course. Conflict of interest you say? Not exactly, if your sole interest is making money, there can be no conflict of interest. Are not layoffs and bankruptcy problems? Not for Bain. Bain sold stock and the nearly 400 layoffs were simply a cost of bad management for which Bain was highly rewarded with a profit of over $100 Million. Jobs were outsourced and Bain made money without creating a US job.
Taxes? The Congress in its wisdom taxes profits from raiding companies like Bain Capital Private Equity at 15% not the 35% that you might assume. You may be wondering why “Mittens” has not divulged his tax returns despite calls to do so. He has compared his situation to that of the late Ted Kennedy who had his money in a blind trust meaning that if he divulged his tax return, he would have to reinvest his money in order to avoid interest conflicts in his Senate decisions. Mittens holds no government position so that, even if he had a blind trust then there would be no conflict of interest. How dare you ask? Besides, what if he paid no taxes? That is none of your business.
Now we hear cries from Senator McCain and others that attacking Mittens Romney is directly attacking our fundamental capitalist economic system. I don’t think so. Even the idea that Romney was picking winners and losers while having taxpayers pick up the tab flies against the advertised strength of capitalism of being rewarded for risk without government. Romney has scalded Obama for bailing out GM and Chrysler and yet jobs were saved and workers shared in the process of reducing demands to ensure survival instead of another bankruptcy. He has yet to take responsibility for his heartless creating of weak companies and then devouring the highly leveraged carcasses he created. Employees had no role except as victims. Crony Corporate Socialism as practiced by Romney and Bain should not be confused with Capitalism. Mussolini would love Romney for his corporatism, but we must call it what it is and it does not create jobs. It is essentially high finance with other people’s money. Remember Wall Street that was too big to fail but was bailed out by GW Bush? Conservatism or Corporatism?
Mittens says that any criticism is Romney Envy? No, he really does not get it. Maybe people felt fear or even hate, but envy? Maybe people envied their outsourced jobs? Governor Romney paid corporations incentives for moving to Massachusetts at the expense of taxpayers and the losing states. Mittens needs to level with us and admit that he created lots of profit for himself and Bain, but please, spare us the phony economics lesson on jobs. Just think of this on a national scale. Ouch.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
13 January 2012
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
The Non-religious Vote
Americans who are not religious are rarely referred to as voters who have a specific political leaning, or vote as a block. Perhaps this is in part a media slant that perpetuates the myths that non-religious Americans are an insignificant factor or have no specific political viewpoint.
The number of Americans identifying themselves as atheist or agnostic rose from under 2 million in 2001 to 3.8 million in 2008. However, as large as that group is there is a much larger group that are simply not religious. According to a recent American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) “ “…18% (about 40 million Americans) do not profess a belief in a God.”
Regardless of political party some sort of profession of a religious faith is almost mandatory to get elected in America today. We have finally reached the point in our society where being a woman or black is only a slight disadvantage. Being gay or a Muslim is a bigger hurdle to overcome but being openly not religious today in America makes it really hard to get elected even though the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that there should be no religious test for elected office.
While it is common knowledge that black Christians are heavily Democratic and white Evangelicals are heavily Republican most people don’t know where most non-Christian beliefs fall in the political spectrum.
According to the 2008 PEW Foundation statistical survey their poll was:
Group Republican lean Republican Independent lean Demo Democrat
National 26 10 10 15 32
Evangelical 38 12 9 10 24
Black Church 7 3 6 12 66
Orthodox 27 8 8 18 32
Catholics 23 10 10 15 33
Mormons 52 13 8 7 15
Jews 17 6 8 18 47
Muslims 7 4 10 26 37
Buddhists 10 8 9 30 37
Hindus 6 7 13 22 41
Unaffiated 13 10 15 24 31
Other faiths 7 6 15 29 37
Those who are not affiliated with any religious belief are Democrat or tend toward Democrat by 55% to 23% margin, even though this is a group that Democrats largely ignore. Also, the non-religious, at 15%, have the highest percentage of independent voters of any group. So, there is a large group that could be swayed to vote more Democrat with a little effort.
What surprised me about this survey was how Republican Mormons are. Perhaps this is because of the historical view of the federal government being an intrusive force in their close-knit society. They are much more Republican than Evangelicals. In fact, 34% of Evangelicals tend to be Democrats. I knew black Christians and Jews have traditionally been Democrats, but Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus all lean Democratic by over 60%. It should be no surprise that only 11% of Muslims are Republican considering how often they are demonized by Republicans.
I think that non-religious is a more accurate term than non-believer because the non-religious have their beliefs too. Humanists, Unitarians, Pantheists and for the most part Buddhists certainly have beliefs, but they aren’t religious beliefs. Their beliefs are rooted in philosophy, ethics, human experience and values.
One reason the non-religious are as high as 23% Republican is that many Libertarians are atheists. Ayn Rand was an atheist and many have bought into her whole philosophy. This group is in sharp disagreement with the Humanists and Unitarians who tend to be very liberal and tolerant of other viewpoints and beliefs. A large percentage of Americans for Separation of Church and State are non-religious liberals who believe strongly in maintaining the wall of separation of church and state and that their should be freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
In the PEW survey Hindus and Jews had the highest percentage of college graduates and advanced degrees. I don’t know the statistics but I do know from personal experience in both Humanist and Unitarian groups that most of the people I have known are college graduates. Other beliefs that the PEW survey shows to divide along religious and political lines are a belief in evolution and global warming. In fact, 81% of Buddhists believe in evolution while only 77% of unaffiliated accept evolution although if you only surveyed atheists and agnostics I’m sure the figure would be higher.
What can Democrats learn from this? The most obvious thing, right at the top of the chart, is nationally we have a lot more people who prefer the values the Democrats stand for but its harder to motivate these people to get out and vote in their self interest. Another thing these figures bare out is that just by being inclusive and standing up for the 99% we are attracting a solid majority of non-Christians as well as liberal Christians without even making a concerted effort to win them over. By simply recognizing that non-religious Americans should be treated just like other Americans Democrats will be taking the moral high ground and I believe will benefit politically in the long run.
Dave Silva
The number of Americans identifying themselves as atheist or agnostic rose from under 2 million in 2001 to 3.8 million in 2008. However, as large as that group is there is a much larger group that are simply not religious. According to a recent American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) “ “…18% (about 40 million Americans) do not profess a belief in a God.”
Regardless of political party some sort of profession of a religious faith is almost mandatory to get elected in America today. We have finally reached the point in our society where being a woman or black is only a slight disadvantage. Being gay or a Muslim is a bigger hurdle to overcome but being openly not religious today in America makes it really hard to get elected even though the Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution that there should be no religious test for elected office.
While it is common knowledge that black Christians are heavily Democratic and white Evangelicals are heavily Republican most people don’t know where most non-Christian beliefs fall in the political spectrum.
According to the 2008 PEW Foundation statistical survey their poll was:
Group Republican lean Republican Independent lean Demo Democrat
National 26 10 10 15 32
Evangelical 38 12 9 10 24
Black Church 7 3 6 12 66
Orthodox 27 8 8 18 32
Catholics 23 10 10 15 33
Mormons 52 13 8 7 15
Jews 17 6 8 18 47
Muslims 7 4 10 26 37
Buddhists 10 8 9 30 37
Hindus 6 7 13 22 41
Unaffiated 13 10 15 24 31
Other faiths 7 6 15 29 37
Those who are not affiliated with any religious belief are Democrat or tend toward Democrat by 55% to 23% margin, even though this is a group that Democrats largely ignore. Also, the non-religious, at 15%, have the highest percentage of independent voters of any group. So, there is a large group that could be swayed to vote more Democrat with a little effort.
What surprised me about this survey was how Republican Mormons are. Perhaps this is because of the historical view of the federal government being an intrusive force in their close-knit society. They are much more Republican than Evangelicals. In fact, 34% of Evangelicals tend to be Democrats. I knew black Christians and Jews have traditionally been Democrats, but Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus all lean Democratic by over 60%. It should be no surprise that only 11% of Muslims are Republican considering how often they are demonized by Republicans.
I think that non-religious is a more accurate term than non-believer because the non-religious have their beliefs too. Humanists, Unitarians, Pantheists and for the most part Buddhists certainly have beliefs, but they aren’t religious beliefs. Their beliefs are rooted in philosophy, ethics, human experience and values.
One reason the non-religious are as high as 23% Republican is that many Libertarians are atheists. Ayn Rand was an atheist and many have bought into her whole philosophy. This group is in sharp disagreement with the Humanists and Unitarians who tend to be very liberal and tolerant of other viewpoints and beliefs. A large percentage of Americans for Separation of Church and State are non-religious liberals who believe strongly in maintaining the wall of separation of church and state and that their should be freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
In the PEW survey Hindus and Jews had the highest percentage of college graduates and advanced degrees. I don’t know the statistics but I do know from personal experience in both Humanist and Unitarian groups that most of the people I have known are college graduates. Other beliefs that the PEW survey shows to divide along religious and political lines are a belief in evolution and global warming. In fact, 81% of Buddhists believe in evolution while only 77% of unaffiliated accept evolution although if you only surveyed atheists and agnostics I’m sure the figure would be higher.
What can Democrats learn from this? The most obvious thing, right at the top of the chart, is nationally we have a lot more people who prefer the values the Democrats stand for but its harder to motivate these people to get out and vote in their self interest. Another thing these figures bare out is that just by being inclusive and standing up for the 99% we are attracting a solid majority of non-Christians as well as liberal Christians without even making a concerted effort to win them over. By simply recognizing that non-religious Americans should be treated just like other Americans Democrats will be taking the moral high ground and I believe will benefit politically in the long run.
Dave Silva
Monsanto's Saintly CEO
Here’s a little addendum to the last post on Monsanto. The CEO of Monsanto is a Brit or a Scot named Hugh Grant; he’s also Chairman and President of what, to hear him tell it, is a corporation modeled on the work of Mother Theresa. That’s if you can ignore the “compensation” he gets for all his good works, including, in 2009, a salary of $10.8 million, and, in 2011, his sale of 150,620 shares of his corporation’s stock at $75 a share, amounting to another $11,296,500 (yes, Monsanto’s stock has done well in recent years, with annual average earnings growth of 19.2% over the last 10 years.) Of course, the business pundits don’t feel any need to ignore the compensation: indeed, they seem to take it as indicative of Grant’s prowess, with Barron’s putting him on its annual “most respected CEO” list in 2009, and Chief Executive Magazine naming him its "CEO of the Year" in 2010.
Grant himself seems to agree. In a speech featured on the Monsanto.com website, he spoke, believe it or not, to the 2010 Business Social Responsibility Conference in New York. He started by raising the specter of population growth—“Between the time you got up this morning and the time you’ll go to bed, there will be 210,000 new people on the plant. By 2050, that’s three new Chinas.” Here, according to Grant, is where Monsanto, the alleged champion of “how to do more with less,” comes in as saviour. For Grant, that’s developing new, more efficient agricultural products, specifically a more “water-efficient Maize” that can transform the low-efficiency African farmer (corn farms yielding only 20 bushels/acre there) into an operator more akin to his high-tech American counterpart (160 bushels per acre). Grant cited a recent trip he made to Malawi, where one Monsanto project giving villagers American hybrid seed produced so much corn the ecstatic villagers had to use the local schoolhouse to store the bumper crop. For Grant, this pointed to two things: first, new partnerships to produce, store and sell the new bumper crops, and second “the promise in a seed, giving people tools we’ve had for 70 years.” Perfect language for the conference Grant was addressing, the BSR being, according to the article, the “largest and most highly-regarded conference in corporate responsibility.”
Just gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it? Seeing Monsanto and its CEO being so socially responsible, so concerned about the poor wogs in Africa, about sustainable agriculture for the newly-starving masses? But wait. What about the great GMO products, the ‘frankenfoods’ Monsanto has pioneered? What about the gathering evidence that the application of increasing quantities of glyphosate to Roundup Ready seeds are undermining the most productive agricultural acreage in the world (the American Midwest) with their deleterious effects on microorganisms upon which all life depends? What about the evidence that crops grown in such conditions and fed to livestock are turning the stomachs of the ruminants into breeding grounds for god-knows-what monstrous organisms? What about Monsanto’s lawsuits against small organic farmers whose fields have been contaminated with GMO seeds—which Monsanto terms an unlicensed use of its patented products? What about Monsanto’s corruption of the USDA, the FDA, the EPA to not only accept this genetic tinkering but to try to force it on farmers worldwide? What about the fact that higher food yields inevitably lead to benighted optimism and increasing populations that soon outstrip the new capacity? Grant mentions none of this. Nor, apparently, does the Business for Social Responsibility Conference, nor Barron’s nor Chief Executive. All simply keep on keeping on with “newspeak”—criminality dressed up in the language of empathy and social responsibility that we’ve come to expect. Forget shame. Forget the truth. All is hype and advertising and the most voracious wolves still, after all these years, safe in their sheep’s clothing, still able to persuade the majority of the sheep that steely fur is wool, that rapacious eyes are loving, that razor teeth are not for slashing and tearing but only for nuzzling.
And the lambs, ah, the lambs are silent.
Lawrence DiStasi
Grant himself seems to agree. In a speech featured on the Monsanto.com website, he spoke, believe it or not, to the 2010 Business Social Responsibility Conference in New York. He started by raising the specter of population growth—“Between the time you got up this morning and the time you’ll go to bed, there will be 210,000 new people on the plant. By 2050, that’s three new Chinas.” Here, according to Grant, is where Monsanto, the alleged champion of “how to do more with less,” comes in as saviour. For Grant, that’s developing new, more efficient agricultural products, specifically a more “water-efficient Maize” that can transform the low-efficiency African farmer (corn farms yielding only 20 bushels/acre there) into an operator more akin to his high-tech American counterpart (160 bushels per acre). Grant cited a recent trip he made to Malawi, where one Monsanto project giving villagers American hybrid seed produced so much corn the ecstatic villagers had to use the local schoolhouse to store the bumper crop. For Grant, this pointed to two things: first, new partnerships to produce, store and sell the new bumper crops, and second “the promise in a seed, giving people tools we’ve had for 70 years.” Perfect language for the conference Grant was addressing, the BSR being, according to the article, the “largest and most highly-regarded conference in corporate responsibility.”
Just gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling, doesn’t it? Seeing Monsanto and its CEO being so socially responsible, so concerned about the poor wogs in Africa, about sustainable agriculture for the newly-starving masses? But wait. What about the great GMO products, the ‘frankenfoods’ Monsanto has pioneered? What about the gathering evidence that the application of increasing quantities of glyphosate to Roundup Ready seeds are undermining the most productive agricultural acreage in the world (the American Midwest) with their deleterious effects on microorganisms upon which all life depends? What about the evidence that crops grown in such conditions and fed to livestock are turning the stomachs of the ruminants into breeding grounds for god-knows-what monstrous organisms? What about Monsanto’s lawsuits against small organic farmers whose fields have been contaminated with GMO seeds—which Monsanto terms an unlicensed use of its patented products? What about Monsanto’s corruption of the USDA, the FDA, the EPA to not only accept this genetic tinkering but to try to force it on farmers worldwide? What about the fact that higher food yields inevitably lead to benighted optimism and increasing populations that soon outstrip the new capacity? Grant mentions none of this. Nor, apparently, does the Business for Social Responsibility Conference, nor Barron’s nor Chief Executive. All simply keep on keeping on with “newspeak”—criminality dressed up in the language of empathy and social responsibility that we’ve come to expect. Forget shame. Forget the truth. All is hype and advertising and the most voracious wolves still, after all these years, safe in their sheep’s clothing, still able to persuade the majority of the sheep that steely fur is wool, that rapacious eyes are loving, that razor teeth are not for slashing and tearing but only for nuzzling.
And the lambs, ah, the lambs are silent.
Lawrence DiStasi
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