A Progressive Health Care Solution

In one of my earlier posts, I said that I hoped President Obama would be progressive. I further tried to offer a definition of progressive, to be contrasted with liberal and conservative. That didn’t go over too well. I’m trying again, this time by using the concrete example of health care. How would a progressive go about health care reform? This is the question that I answer in Demockracy’s first-ever podcast – take a listen:

Progressivism and Health Care

Checking out of Camp G

I was pleased with Obama’s move to shut down Guatanamo Prison. It’s not that I think everyone there is innocent, but the idea of holding prisoners indefinitely without charging them is everything America shouldn’t be. Communist Russia used to do that. A man/woman should always have their day in court. There’s risk that the guilty will go free, but what does it say about us when we don’t believe our own justice system is better than a dictatorship style management of “detainees.”

Gonzales Alive and Well, But Needs a Nose Job

Scott South is a satirical writer who will be contributing regular works to Demockracy’s commentary section.

As I explored my first piece for Demockracy, many thoughts occurred to me. First, I thought that Dubya is too much of an abomination for me to even think of writing about him any more. I’ve had a bellyful of him, and good riddance. Cheney—maybe later. But who can I laugh at right now?

As I gaze wistfully into my recollections of the Bush era, the eight years of Letterman’s Great Moments in Presidential Speeches, a tear stings my left eye and a sob escapes my lips as I rue the passing of the good old days. Never again will there be so many unscrupulous people who are so stupid and so satisfying to make fun of in print. So who—I thought today while rolling my blank sheet into the clackety old Remington (yeah, right)—is left to excoriate? The horror…the horror.

But wait. Not so fast. Whatever happened to Gonzales? Just when he had become the finest court fool since Spiro Agnew—good for at least a half-dozen scathing columns—he disappeared into oblivion. Fortunately, the other day I discovered some surveys in a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnalls’ porch that reveal a new craze seizing the nation: imagining Alberto Gonzales in all kinds of unlikely scenarios, all of them outside the government.

“And the more bizarre the job, the better,” one respondent said. “He belongs anywhere except the damned government.”

Here are the top five jobs or scenarios the American people find most suitable for Gonzales:

1. New host of The Apprentice

A half-dozen apprentices sit at a conference table with Gonzales at the head.

“You’re fired!” he shouts, tossing his hair.

“Sir,” says a dorky-looking 23-year-old man, “you said I’m superlative in every dimension of business performance. I—I just don’t understand how you can do this to me. It’s not fair. These other people here are all losers. I’m the only one who can generate three spreadsheets on two printers in under a minute and work 120 hours a week.”

“You also believe in counterproductive things like fairness, merit and justice.” Gonzales chops his arm down to the table like a guillotine blade. “You’re fired!”

“What about me?” says a bimbo.

“You’re fired! And you, you’re fired too.”

“Wha–?”

“You’re fired!”

2. Unemployed Pinocchio

Gonzales wanders about Capitol Hill unemployed, sporting a nose two feet long and growing, due to extensive alleged lying to Congress. Senator Ted Kennedy happens by.

“Hey bread-stick face,” he shouts, “what happened, forgot where you live? Or just following your nose to the nearest liars’ convention?”

“Senator, I don’t recall.”

“Yeah? You’d better start recalling, you homeless a**wipe, or you’ll be sucking up storm-drain water through that schnozzola like an elephant, just to survive.”

“Oh yeah? That’s what you think! En garde!” Gonzales lunges and pokes the Senator in the eye with his nose. “Take that!”

“OW! You disingenuous sack of ****!”

Gonzales, enraged by the impudence, sticks the Senator in both eyes repeatedly like a woodpecker. “Take that, Camelot man! And that!”

“Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Oh yeah? Why, you…”

3. Fatwah-issuing mullah in Saudi Arabia

“Your sweet-smelling Holiness,” says a subordinate sheikh, “You cannot issue any more fatwahs on how we must constrict our lives. Everything’s already forbidden. What else can you forbid? Who else can you prosecute?”

“Silence! A thousand curses upon your mustache! There is always room for another fatwah. Besides, some of them are a call to action, not forbidding something.”

“Forgive me, your Perfumed Magnificence. Might I suggest—“

“You dare to suggest? May your mother’s camel develop epilepsy! You are not even to think. Only mullahs are allowed to think. Can’t you see I’m trying to think of ways to oppress our population? Now be gone, inferior being.”

4. Senior partner in a law firm

“Counselor,” an associate says to Gonzales, “You took this case two months ago and you haven’t read the briefs, and you haven’t even spoken to our client? That’s preposterous! Do you realize the constitutional ramifications if we lose this trial?”

“Denny Crane.”

“Huh?”

“Denny Crane, from Boston Legal. That’s me. Who cares about the facts of this stupid case? All I have to do is show up and the prosecution will be so intimidated they’ll wither in their seats. And, might I add, you’ve got great boobs for a midget.”

“Why, you filthy old man, if you weren’t such a pathetic airhead with Alzheimer’s I’d bring you up on charges of sexual harassment, you perv.”

“Denny Crane.”

5. Captain of the Star Ship Enterprise

“Spock—what are all those Federation Star Ships doing out there? I…want…answers…Mr. Spock.”

“It appears, from recent communications, that they are here to assist us in our mission to penetrate Romulan coordinates in order to locate the missing Star Ship Constitution, Captain.”

“Ohuru, please instruct the other Star Ships to leave. This is my turf, damn it.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

“Al, have you gone mad?” the doctor says.

“I have a mission and I don’t want a lot of bleeding-heart Star Ship captains cluttering it up. Ohuru, tell them I’ll fire all fazers on them if they don’t go away. Bones, I see you glaring at me. Tell me I’m not right, Bones.”

“Dammit, Al, I’m a doctor, not a corrupt bureaucrat!”

“All right, the Federation Star Ships are gone. Scotty, increase warp speed and divert auxiliary power to the main shields. We’re going in.”

“She can’t take much more of this, Captain! We’re doing warrup eight as it is!”

Afghanistan: An Inaugural Gift

So now that we have a new President, what to get him for an inauguration present? How about an antiwar movement? Specifically an anti-Afghanistan War movement. Some may consider it in poor taste to immediately set about opposing Barack Obama’s Afghan policy before it’s had a chance to “work.” But some ideas don’t deserve a chance to work, and adding an additional 30,000 American troops to the 32,000 currently in Afghanistan is one of them.

You might think it should be easy enough to develop a movement against a war that has been going on for over seven years, but for almost all this time the nation has considered the Afghanistan War with little more than averted vision. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, retaliatory US military action was widely viewed as inevitable. The only question was what the target would be. If a country is bombed by military aircraft, you look for their country of origin; if it is attacked by highjacked airliners, things are not so simple. But when Afghanistan was chosen, the prospect of the demise of its Taliban government alleviated at least some of the misgivings of those who considered invading an entire country an inappropriate response to the actions of nineteen hijackers. Already notorious in the west for blowing up its giant ancient Buddha statues, its treatment of women was so primitive that George Bush could be viewed as a feminist crusader for launching an attack against it.

However, before there was much time to actually consider what was going on in Afghanistan, came the buildup to Iraq invasion the following year. Ever since then, Afghanistan has largely been lost in the glare. This has been an extraordinary lapse of attention, even for a country that seems to have come to accept military conflict as the norm. However, even Afghanistan War’s early opponents resigned themselves to devoting their complete energies to opposing the larger and more outrageous Iraq War with the hope for a day when they could return to actively organizing against what had now become America’s second war.

That day has probably arrived, not with the hoped for clarity of an actual end of the Iraq War, but with the vaguer prospect of an end coming in the next couple of years. But of course, the people who plan these wars don’t exactly keep the convenience of potential antiwar movements in mind, and a murky set of circumstances is what we’ve now got.

Whether antiwar interests like it or not, between the perception of Obama as an antiwar candidate (whether deserved or not) and the Iraqi troop withdrawal agreement negotiated by the outgoing administration, the public is likely to give President Obama a pass on Iraq for at least the next year. Therefore, even though Afghanistan may still not feel like the correct priority for American antiwar interests, circumstances seem to dictate that it may become just that. For one thing, the leeway the new President will enjoy regarding Iraq will not extend to the Afghanistan War, which he has embraced as a “good war,” unlike that “dumb” one in Iraq. In fact, with the talk of the surge, there even seems to be a reasonable chance that Afghanistan will one day be remembered more as Obama’s war than as Bush’s.

There are some Obama supporters whom I have talked with recently who do not think that he really meant much, if anything, of what he said about Afghanistan during the campaign.  Rather, it was the sort of thing that he felt that he had to say in order to get elected. This theory assumes that you can’t seriously aspire to the White House without supporting at least one military action. However it seems least equally plausible that his stance reflects a genuine belief that the Democrats will be able to get the Afghanistan War “right” by being smarter about it, much as “the best and the brightest” of the Kennedy Administration once figured that they could fix Eisenhower’s Vietnam problem for us.

Building broad support for getting out of Afghanistan will likely not be easy in the short run. The upcoming escalation will probably produce some military successes that will foster illusions about finally “turning a corner” there. There will likely be lots of tough talk about eliminating the Afghan opium trade, closing the border with Pakistan, and perhaps even extending the war to that country (something that candidate Obama indirectly advocated during the primary season). The new Administration will inevitably benefit from the perception of bringing new vision to the conflict, even if it has done no such thing. However, if and when this war moves from the periphery and the nation begins to focus more attentively, opposition will inevitably deepen.

In order for such opposition to mount, the first uncomfortable fact that America needs to confront is that the Karzai government that the US and NATO forces are committed to defending would not exist without the foreign invasion. Its legitimacy is based on the force of arms–foreign arms. Unpleasant as the prospect of another Taliban government may be, can we assume that it is a less legitimate option from an Afghani point of view? In addition, the other portion of Washington’s rationale, that we have engaged in seven years of war in the unsuccessful pursuit of one man, Osama bin Laden, becomes somewhat pale in the light of the fact that the US rejected out of hand the Taliban’s offer to turn him over to another Muslim country for trial if he were found.

Even more urgently, Americans will need to wake up to the fact that a “war on terror” is a slogan – like a “war on crime,” not a military operation like the invasion of Normandy. The American public is capable enough of sympathizing with the suffering peoples of the world, the population of Darfur for instance. However, unfortunately that empathetic capability often vanishes when the cause of the suffering is the US itself. Can we Americans really imagine ourselves accepting a situation like that of Afghanistan today where a foreign power (namely us) will bomb the occasional wedding, say, “Oops, our bad,” and continue right along because mistakes happen in even in the best intentioned of wars? The day our country actually comes to grips with what it means to be on the receiving end of our misconceived “war on terror” will be the day its support crumbles.

Hopefully the friends of Obama who think his heart really isn’t in the escalation of the fight in Afghanistan will realize that they can do him no greater favor than helping to deliver a groundswell of opposition to being there. After all, friends don’t let friends fight dumb wars. And if they’re right, if he’s really serious about wanting to “forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan” as he said in his inaugural address, even he will ultimately thank us.

It may take a while to catch on, we should start practicing the words now: “Afghanistan–out now!”

Two Days > Eight Years?

I’m feeling pretty good right now.

Yesterday, on his first full day in office, President Obama issued three memoranda to executive departments reinforcing his commitment to open government and accountability. For one, he directed departments to comply with the Freedom of Information Act and err on the side of disclosing information rather than hiding it. In 2001, former Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered executive departments to comply with FOIA requests only after exhausting all avenues to prevent disclosure of information. He even emphasized that potential embarrassment or liability is not a good reason to withhold information requested under FOIA. That’s tremendous!

Obama’s memoranda also gives the National Archives the authority to declassify whatever presidential records it sees fit, a stark reversal from an administration that had fought tooth and nail to keep everything it did secret. The potential exists for massive declassification of Bush administration records that are being kept secret for no other reason that it might be embarrassing or might disclose political favors.

That’s really terrible, in case you were wondering. The Bush administration’s default position was secrecy over disclosure, which only served to emphasize Bush’s greater message: the U.S. government works for we the representatives first, then for you the people. Obama’s philosophy is exactly the opposite: he has said several times that he and the rest of our representatives are public servants first, and everything they do should be in that vein of serving the public.

It should go without saying that our government is accountable to us, but it’s been a long time since that’s been true. We have been told that we have no right to know what our representatives are doing, and in some cases, we have been told it is unpatriotic to question the things our government does. Thank you, Obama, for bringing us back to normal.

And then this morning, as promised, Obama signed an executive order calling for the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison within a year. The fate of the 200-some prisoners left there has yet to be decided: prosecutions under the Military Commissions Act have been suspended for 120 days, pending a review of each prisoner’s case. Guantánamo is littered with people who did nothing more than be in the wrong place at the wrong time, including people who were minors when they were arrested in 2001.

But there’s more! Obama signed another order directing the C.I.A. to use only the interrogation techniques specified in the Army Field Manual, a policy that has been in the works for two years, but was ignored by the Bush administration in a signing statement.

Things are looking good for America. After eight long years, it’s refreshing to see accountability, transparency, and the due process of law finally take precedence over narrow political interest.

Climate Change: Penguins, Polar Bears & People

The western Antarctic Peninsula, that limp arm jutting out of Antarctica towards the similarly limp arm of South America’s Patagonian tip at Tierra del Fuego, is warming faster than any place on Earth. Wintertime temperatures have risen a staggering nine degrees Fahrenheit in 50 years. The polar seas off the peninsula, similarly, have risen nine degrees in just 13 years, defying expectations.

On Penguin Island, researchers with Lindblad Expeditions have recorded a 75 percent plummet in the number of Adélie penguins since 1980. Across the island, where normally 600 southern giant petrels can be found, now only 75 have been seen nesting.

It is the North Pole, not the South Pole, that has received the bulk of climate change reporting in the past two years, making Mother Jones recent coverage all the more interesting. The polar bear, as identifiable with the Arctic as Santa Claus, was reported to be dying out, evermore stranded on ice floes that have taken it to the endangered species list. Once a fantasy, the Northwest Passage is becoming a new reality, and Canada and Russia are investing billions building ports in their once-godforsaken northern reaches, ready to take advantage of new shipping routes.

Oil, the ultimate cause of this melting ice, has apparently found its own solution to the rising trend of pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the Strait of Malacca: Skip the pirates, sink the icebergs and burn a path through a newly watery ocean. Adding insult to injury, new oil was discovered under areas once covered by sea ice.

The South Pole, on the other hand, gets a lot less press coverage. While the potential for exploitation and one-day settlement may exist on Antarctica, economic interests are not as obvious as with the better-known Arctic. The land remains far away and mysterious, a two-mile high continent of ice larger than Europe that receives less precipitation than any place on Earth.

University of Chicago climate theoretician Ray Pierrehumbert worries that the most devastating impact of climate change could be on natural ecosystems that have little direct dietary or monetary value to humans, much like these petrels and penguins. He doesn’t believe the impact on natural ecosystems has gotten enough traction in the press. “The systems that are hardest hit by climate change are natural systems,” Pierrehumbert says. “We just don’t have a good track record of even helping salmon survive dams. That’s a much easier technological problem than helping polar bears survive the loss of sea ice. My question is, how much do people care about animals?”

These poor penguins, while appearing cute and cuddly and cartoon-friendly, live in an obviously endangered ecosystem. Several species could be going the way of the great auk, and the flightless birds are declining faster than Pittsburgh, the shrinking steel city that has made them its mascot.

MEDIA GETTING BETTER

Pierrehumbert does take heart in the public reaction to the bleaching of the coral reefs and the listing of the polar bear under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

Additionally, he and other experts and media figures agree that journalistic coverage of climate change is better than it once was. “Ten years ago, the main fault was that the media would always try to balance any opinion by one scientist with some opinion by someone else,” says Pierrehumbert, who believes the mass media are doing a better job of respecting serious science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Science is just not open to debate like more familiar topics for journalists, such as politics, which require a sense of balancing two sides in the name of objectivity. “There may be 99 people who say ‘A,’ and may have very good reasons for saying ‘A’ is the right thing, and if you only quote one person who says ‘B,’ you don’t get the idea of the actual weight of the evidence,” he says.

Andrew Revkin of The New York Times notes that more than ever before, scientists have immediate access to the general public, managing Web sites such as realclimate.org, climatepolicy.org, and climateethics.org to set everything straight. But certain challenges remain.

Julia Whitty of Mother Jones states: “We know that since 2000 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased 35 percent faster than expected, despite the pledges of 180 nations to rein them in. We’re aware that polar seas are defying the laws of expectation, warming, in places, a staggering 9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1995, opening the door for non-native plants and animals to cross the polar thresholds and claim new waters for themselves. We get that all this bodes poorly for penguins and humans alike.

Don’t we?”

GET THERE WHILE YOU CAN

Not that the Antarctic is suffering from any lack of interest among the tourist crowd. Whether directed by the wiles of computer animation in March of the Penguins, too much expendable cash, or sincere concern for this last, vanishing frontier, tourism to the uninhabited continent is at an all-time high. Making Julia Whitty’s coverage in Mother Jones all the more interesting, she reports that the tourists are starting to get in the way of the ornithologists trying to chart the continent’s birds while the penguins are still there.

The public still gets too much of the story and the science wrong and there is disagreement both on which direction the media should take or whether the media is the place where change can be directed at all.

Pierrehumbert says he spoke to Revkin about what makes a climate change story worthy of The New York Times, and they both agreed that the public only had so much interest in hearing the same story about, say, a certain species headed for extinction because of man-caused global warming. “There are only so many things that are really new. The problem is not primarily that the news media is not telling the new stuff; it’s that people don’t understand the old stuff. It’s not the job of the news media to tell people about the old stuff. You have to have enough hooks in the news to tell people that this is still an issue,” the scientist notes.

Anthony Perl, a Canadian urban studies professor, used an ironic metaphor to describe the public’s ignorance of climate change science, citing shallow reporting by the media. “I think that only the tip of the iceberg is being fully discussed in the mainstream media, and all this stuff below the water line is somehow unclear,” Perl said. “Until science is clear, the story is not ‘ready.’ And I’m afraid the media has bought into it. By its nature, science is a question of uncertainty.”

In Perl’s search for a solution to the North American energy and climate crisis, he wrote a book advocating a radical departure from the gasoline-powered private automobile and the jet plane to a transportation system based on electrical mass transit: buses, mass transit light rail and high-speed intercity trains, much like in Europe or Japan.

Perl said some scientific studies have shown airplanes may cause many times more damage from carbon emissions pollution than previously thought because jets send their emissions directly into the high atmosphere while they’re in flight. He said such emissions have two to eight times the impact of ground-level engines. But the science is not universally accepted and goes against the official word of the airline industry, leaving the media skittish. “It’s a big piece of news that routinely gets ignored,” Perl said.

Max Boykoff, however, an Oxford University research fellow, warns in Nature that climate change must be reported more carefully to help distinguish widespread scientific agreement from legitimately contentious issues. “To the extent that mass media fuse all climate-related issues into a gestalt as ‘the climate change debate,’ the public is poorly served. It contributes to continued illusory and counterproductive debates within the public and policy communities.”

SORTING THE DUBIOUS FROM TRUE PERIL

Pierrehumbert says it is hard for the media and the public to grasp the epoch time scale of climate changes, compared to the relatively short-term effects and recovery from traditional man-made environmental degradation. “It’s not like other air pollution problems where if you fix it, the thing turns normal in a couple of years. Every time we ratchet up the CO2 level, you’re committing the earth to climate change at that level for a 1000 years, and some aspects of it actually last for more than a 1000 years and you just can’t ratchet it back.”

There is little doubt in the scientific community that the steady rise in CO2 levels are courtesy of human activity, namely, fossil fuel combustion. The impact of this warming is much more debatable. Will icebergs sail across an underwater Florida? Pierrehumbert said that is dubious. But how high will the oceans rise? What just will the climate of the next hundred years look like?

“We have turned our atmosphere into an artifact. With the atmosphere now composed of so many greenhouse gases, we don’t know what the future holds,” said Scott Stine, a geoscientist at California State University, East Bay, who studies climate through the ancient lake beds of the Great Basin.

“Scientists see persistent disputes as the normal stuttering journey toward improved understanding of how the world works. But many fear that the herky-jerky trajectory is distracting the public from the undisputed basics and blocking change,” wrote Revkin.

A blissfully ignorant public could not be called out anymore than by Whitty’s piece on the Antarctic pleasure-seekers aboard her lady the National Geographic Explorer.

A vocal contingent of confused ignoramuses and global warming denialists were aboard this tourist ship, as Whitty recalled, able to see with their own eyes drastic changes to the Antarctic landscape from just 20 years ago and still peering over the bow in disbelief about “this global warming business.” “The two groups manage to exhibit all five stages of climate-change denial: There’s nothing happening; we don’t know why it’s happening; climate change is natural; climate change is not bad; climate change can’t be stopped. The true believers discover each other mostly through shared incredulous silence.”

GORE: CARBON-FREE BY 2018

Al Gore himself believes political will could be built to move to a carbon-free electricity system in 10 years, the same amount of time it took for man to reach the moon after a similar, seemingly radical call by President Kennedy at the dawn of the 1960s.

“There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenges of a present danger,” Gore wrote in a recent issue of Mother Jones. Such a call to action is possible, Gore wrote, and carbon levels can be returned to the “magical” threshold of 350 CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere, as addressed in a separate essay in the magazine. (The atmosphere historically contains 275 CO2 parts per million, and now is up to 385 parts per million and climbing.)

The Europeans have been taking these issues seriously for a decade, and in 2008, both major American political parties put up candidates who promised to address the issue seriously. The victor, Barack Obama, has vowed to make the issue integral to the nation’s economic recovery. As the Earth’s climate worsens for mankind and other species, the American public must follow their lead in recognizing the problem.

But obviously, difficulties remain and an unscientific debate has been allowed to go on for too long. The media are less at fault for this misinformation than they once were. But steps should be taken, whenever new science is released, to gently and firmly repeat the basic premise behind this global warming business: Humans, by burning massive amounts of carbon fuels, have released gases that warm the earth, setting off climatic changes with potentially devastating consequences we are only beginning to understand.

As Charles Darwin said, offering similar advice in regards to that other supposedly debatable scientific theory, evolution: “[T]hus only can the load of prejudice by which this subject is overwhelmed be removed.”

Women and the Obama Administration

The election of Barack Obama has signaled a potential turning point for the people of the United States. Millions have been inspired by Obama’s hopeful message of change, and for the first time ever, a man of color occupies the nation’s top position. Many Americans of all classes and creeds, to say nothing of race, are looking forward in hope for an improved economy, an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a more respectable reputation abroad. With all this talk of change, however, more attention needs to be paid to the concerns of women in the United States. With so many competing pressures at home and abroad, many women’s groups and feminists fear that gender equality will not be a priority of the Obama administration. This essay intends to explore three imminent problems American women face today: pay inequity, lack of representation in leadership positions, and limitations on the right to choice. Congress and past presidents have given some attention to these matters in the past; however much work awaits us if there is to be significant improvement in these areas. Under the new Obama administration, there may never be a better time to make such progress.

While the women’s movement is not as active as it was during its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, women have by no means achieved an equal status to men. One of the most frustrating problems facing women today is unequal pay. Although employers are barred from discrimination based on gender, and equal pay has been on the books since 1963, women still on average make 77 cents for the man’s dollar. Race and class intersect with gender to structurally disadvantage poor women of color the most. While some middle-class white women can almost touch the glass ceiling, far too many working-class women with darker skin tend to scrub the floors below. There are numerous reasons for women’s lower wages, including but not limited to: the fact that discrimination is extremely difficult to prove in court, the devaluation of women’s work, inadequate family leave policies, and ideals of masculinity/femininity that prevent women from occupying the “top” positions. Solutions to the problem must be multifaceted and should address inequalities that occur at different stages of life. For example, girls need encouragement to develop their interests in traditionally “masculine” enterprises like math and science, and women who become mothers should be entitled to a reasonable amount of paid leave.

Currently, The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) only grants twelve unpaid weeks to employees who wish to care for a family member, although some employers may choose to offer more time off and pay for it. While the FMLA represents some progress in addressing women and family’s needs, the law is embarrassingly stingy compared to the more generous policies of other western countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, women are entitled to 26 weeks of paid maternity leave. Also, paternity leave should be encouraged. Providing leave to only mothers reinforces the idea that women are and should be the primary caregivers to all children. If we strive to make care giving an equally shared responsibility in order to open up opportunities to women, then men should also be incorporated into such leave policies. Clearly, U.S. family leave policy is severely out of touch and inadequate to meet the real needs of working women and families. Family leave policies are generally very politically popular, and there is real opportunity for significant bills to be passed in this area over next four years under President Obama.

In addition to pay equity issues, women are also severely underrepresented in public service. At the date of this writing, women hold a mere 16% of congressional seats and governed only 8 states. In most other forms of political participation, women are equal or almost equal to men, and in some cases even surpass their male counterparts (e.g., women tend to vote at higher rates compared to men). However, when it comes to the most powerful and prestigious positions in our society, such as elected officials, the number of women is dismally low. Spectators have attributed the low number of women in office to a plethora of reasons, including the political opportunity structure, gender discrimination, and the fact that women simply do not run at the same rates as men. However, childcare responsibilities may represent the primary reason why women dangle at the bottom of the political rope. Women are more likely than men to begin their political career later in life after their children are grown. Thus, politically minded women usually lack time (and energy) to gain the requisite experience needed for higher offices. However, with the election of a black president, along with Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s historic bids, women may have more of a chance than ever to break the glass ceiling of politics. At the very least, the 2008 elections taught young girls that the President doesn’t always have to be white and male. The President can be black or possibly female. Aside from providing excellent role models, the Obama administration should encourage women to run for office by providing extra support for mothers. As with pay equity issues, paid family leave is essential and a compensation program for elder care-givers (the large majority who are women) might be considered. In addition, because the seeds of Senators and Presidents are first planted at the grassroots level, Obama’s famous technological grassroots organizing techniques could be expanded to help recruit women candidates to run at all levels, including for offices such as in the city council and the state legislator. Many groups, such as Emily’s List, already have the infrastructure in which to invest new techniques. With any luck, such a program would help breed tomorrow’s female Senators, Governors, and even Presidents.

Finally, many women also lack control over their own bodies. Reproductive rights and freedom have slowly but steadily been eroded over the years, and Roe v. Wade may hang by a thread. There are a plethora of restrictions on access to abortion in some areas of the country, and the women who often are the least likely to be able to access abortion services are poor women and women of color. In general, poor women are more likely than affluent women to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, either because of indigency or the lack of reproductive providers in their area. Poor women are also more likely than affluent women to have abortions later in their pregnancies, which increases the likelihood of complications and health risks. In the area of abortion rights, President Obama may have the power through appointment to help shape broader access to abortion in the coming decades. He can appoint strong pro-choice justices to the Supreme and federal courts and put pressure on certain states to provide more funding to indigent women who want or need abortions. Obama may also consider becoming a champion for policies that may prevent unwanted pregnancies from occurring in the first place. Such policies would promote comprehensive sexual education for all public school children, which stresses protection and accountability. Abstinence-only education in schools has been shown to be inadequate and ineffective in preventing premarital sex. Such policies would also make contraceptives more widely available to at-risk children. Also, in order to prevent abortions, women need to be able to freely choose to become mothers or not. Without adequate public assistance, childcare subsidies, and paid family leave, many women feel forced by their economic situation to terminate a pregnancy rather than live in poverty. We have to remember that reproductive freedom is not only about the right to abortion, but also about providing women with the means, resources, and opportunities to choose whether to raise a child.

This essay points to three major issues that affect women’s lives–pay inequity, lack of representation in the political world, and restrictions on reproductive freedom. Although women’s issues may not be perceived as important as they once were, the urgency of problems that afflict women in 2009 is just as strong as it was several decades ago. While the substance of each issue discussed is different, the roots of these problems are similar. Women are still the primary caregivers to children and elder parents, despite the fact that both men and women have increasingly expressed agreement with egalitarian ideas about sharing domestic responsibility. To compound the problem, women are not allotted enough reproductive liberty to freely choose motherhood and are not allotted political liberty to be represented by their peers. Additionally, the problems discussed are not discrete, independent issues, but rather are very much interrelated to one other. More women in public office are likely to encourage more family-friendly policy, and attention to reproductive freedom may increase. More reproductive freedom is likely to allow women to take advantage of the same opportunities as men, including moving up in the working and political world. These problems and their solutions thus cannot be addressed individually in a vacuum, but must be addressed together as part of a comprehensive plan to elevate the status of women.

The inequalities women face in the United States are symptomatic of an unequal democracy. If women do not possess as much power, influence, and control over their own lives as men do, then we cannot say that “we the people” rule our country. Obama’s election inspired a hope for a more egalitarian society in which freedom and prosperity could flourish. In order to accomplish this utopian vision, attention needs to be paid to what Simone de Beauvoir termed the “second sex.” Women’s needs should be taken into account, not only to raise the status of women, but also to create a society of true equals. I have hope that the next four years can begin to lead us in that very direction.

The Legends Win in the End

On a rainy Saturday afternoon this past November, San Francisco said its final goodbye to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Or at least it said goodbye to the one veteran of the brigade who could make it – the hundred-year-old Hilda Roberts, one of about sixty American women who served the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Apparently, a couple of other vets had planned on being there but the weather kept them away, and there’s not a large pool to draw on – only about twenty-two or twenty-four of the veterans are thought to still be alive.

The San Francisco event was a commemoration of a much larger leave taking that took place seventy years earlier, almost to the day. For that farewell, remembered in Spain as the Despedida, the crowd numbered in the tens of thousands, as Spaniards filled the streets of Barcelona for a last look at the departing International Brigades, the 35,000 or so volunteers from 53 countries who had come to defend the Spanish Republic from General Francisco Franco’s military uprising two years earlier. Among the departing were about 2,800 Americans – less about 800 who died in Spain – who subsequently became known as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

At the time, Spain seemed a microcosm of all the world’s conflicting ideas on one peninsula in Europe. Within five years after the 1931 fall of the monarchy that ruled it almost continuously for centuries, Spain’s disparate points of view had crystallized into two opposing coalitions: The Popular Front of Socialists, Communists, and left-wing Republicans; and the National Front of Christian Democrats, fascists, and monarchists. Five months after the Popular Front’s electoral victory, the two sides would become transformed into the warring Republicans and Nationalists when army officers in the Spanish colony of Morocco began the uprising that would end democracy in the country for nearly four decades.

It is hard to convey today what Spain meant to the world in those days, but perhaps the title of Andre Malraux’s novel about the Civil War does it best: It is called Man’s Hope. And the fact the events, while certainly not clearly recalled or understood, have never entirely receded from popular memory came to the fore in the most recent presidential election when both Barack Obama and John McCain claimed Republican sympathizer Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as one of their favorite books.

Just a few years ago, the Bay Area Veterans, while few in number themselves, were holding annual reunion events at the Oakland Hilton or the Kaiser Center that drew crowds in the high hundreds. Speakers like Ariel Dorfman and Molly Ivins talked of the relevance the Spanish war to the events of the day, and the whole audience joined members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe in singing “Viva la Quince Brigada!” and the other songs of the Spanish Republic. But seventy years is a mighty long time to keep an organization going when there’s no source of new members. A recent obituary for Jack Shafran noted that the 91 year old was “one of the youngest volunteers in the Lincoln Brigade.” So the decision was made to dissolve the Veterans, either upon the death of two of the group’s remaining activists, Moses Fishman and Abraham Sorodin or on the seventieth anniversary of the Despedida, whichever came first. The organization’s work would be continued by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

By the time of the San Francisco event, both of those veterans had in fact died, so there no longer was an organization known as the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The singing would be thin on the choruses of the old songs at the final event, and the 150 seat Delancey Street Theater was less than half full for a showing of a British newsreel on the Despedida apparently never before seen in the US. On the screen, Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, better known as La Pasionaria (or “the passion flower”), delivered her famous send off speech to thousands of the then young volunteers. As a rule, Ibárruri’s speeches included the Republican cry, “No pasaran!” – they shall not pass. But there were no such illusions on that day in Barcelona. Franco’s Nationalists had indeed passed and the Internationals were being sent home because the cause was lost. Instead, Ibárruri told them, “Sois la leyenda.” You are legend. And legends they would be, for the rest of their days. People used to cite the phrase “May you live in interesting times” as an ancient Chinese curse. It seems, however, that this widely cited bit of eastern wisdom may have originated in the east coast of the United States, for it appears to be neither ancient nor Chinese. In fact, the earliest date anyone can find evidence of its use is 1936, the year the Spanish Civil War began. And maybe that’s about right because the veterans of that war embodied this apparently modern curse as well as anyone ever has.

When the western democracies refused to aid Spain’s fight against the military uprising, the Internationals came without sanction of their governments. (The only significant foreign assistance the Republic received came from the Stalin-era Soviet Union.) Afterwards, some volunteers, like the Italians and the Germans who constituted the largest bloc, couldn’t go home. In Spain, they had fought against their own governments because, unlike France, the United Kingdom, or the United States, Mussolini and Hitler’s governments had not hesitated to assist their ally Franco – and take the opportunity to hone their military operations for the larger conflict on the horizon. Others like the Americans were able to return home but were now considered suspect as the times got ever more “interesting.” It seems they had been “premature anti-fascists.” They were anti-Hitler before being anti-Hitler was cool.

The interesting times continued. When US Attorney General Thomas Clark decided to warn the nation about the subversive organizations in its midst on 1947, he did so by releasing a list in alphabetical order, starting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. And since a good number of the volunteers had, in fact been Communist Party members, they faced “are you now, or have you ever been” questioning for decades.

By the Vietnam War era, the Spanish Civil War was a largely forgotten event in the US. Most of the participants in the big antiwar demonstrations of the day would likely not have noticed the group of old men and a few women, marching behind a Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade banner. But they were always there, probably the most antiwar group of veterans you were ever going to meet. And an activist core continued on, and on, and on. When the Reagan Administration subverted the Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the Lincolns were well past the age of volunteering to fight the Contras, so they sent an ambulance down instead.

In her speech on that long ago afternoon in Barcelona, La Pasionaria went on to exhort the 13,000 Internationals who were there, “When the olive tree of peace puts forth its leaves entwined with the laurels of the Spanish Republic’s victory, come back.” Considering the Republic’s desperate military position at the time, this seemed like so much bravado. And, at the time, it was. But not in the long run. As the viewers of Saturday Night Live would be reminded week after week, in 1975 General Francisco Franco finally died. And more importantly, with him died his dictatorship. Two years later, La Pasionaria, returned form exile, was elected to represent Asturias in the first post-Franco government.

Still, Spain was reluctant to revisit its Civil War in those first post-Franco years, and it would be nearly another two decades before the volunteer veterans were invited back. But in November 1996, sixty years after the war’s start and three years after Ibárruri herself had died, 400 of them returned to finally see the olive trees of peace and receive a hero’s welcome at the “Homenaje,” the homecoming. Twelve years later, a mere twenty-three of them were on hand for the seventieth anniversary Despedida commemoration in Spain, their numbers having plunged worldwide just as they have in the Bay Area.

But things have continued to change in Spain, and the reluctance to confront the crimes of the Franco has declined with the passing of those personally involved. A recently passed law mandates the removal of symbols of the Franco era from various public buildings and funds the unearthing of Civil War-era mass graves. And it begins the real Homenaje: As of the end of 2008, all descendants of those Spaniards forced to leave the country from the beginning of the war through 1975 will be allowed to claim the Spanish citizenship denied them by Francisco Franco’s war and dictatorship. And although most did not live to see it and had to content themselves with being legends in their own time, this is the final victory of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Inaguration Unplugged

This toon was inspired by the battle of religious ideals over who was going to do what at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Pictured are homophobic Pastor Rick Warren, who will be giving the inaugural invocation, and gay Bishop Gene Robinson, who will be giving the opening prayer at the We Are One Event, which will kick off the inauguration week activities. In my opinion, I’d rather see religion left out of the whole thing.  It makes about as much sense to me as inviting astrologers to the event (Nancy Reagan’s preferences aside). US citizens didn’t vote Obama for President for his religious beliefs, or at least I hope not. They voted for him because he’s a smart guy who has nowhere to go but up considering the US economy and other problems left behind by the previous administration.

The Hidden Sides of the Israel-Gaza Conflict

Since December 27, the Israeli military has been attacking the Gaza Strip in a large scale fashion, determined to break Hamas and end the showering of rockets into southern Israel. Thirteen Israelis have died and over 1,300 Palestinians have been killed. Observers have accused Israel of creating a humanitarian crisis out of the already precarious living environment in Gaza. Hopefully,the recent cease-fires will bring the violence to an end.

While the narrative may have some basic facts right, the mainstream media in the US has largely reduced the conflict to too simple a narrative – “Israel’s attack into Gaza is one of self-defense against a Hamas government bent on its destruction. Regrettably, many civilians have died.” Even conceding the excessive scale of its attack on Gaza, Israel is ultimately presented as a victim of terrorism with a right to self-defense. Hamas is presented as an illegitimate government (though democratically elected, “who still refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist’ we are always reminded) and an irrationally violent terrorist organization.

While there may be some elements of truth in this narrative, it is far from the complete picture.  Some observers have noted that not much attention has been paid to anything besides this simplistic narrative. But the simple Israel-victim-Hamas-terrorist narrative ultimately fails to answer many broader political questions about the conflict in a satisfying way. Why would Hamas been firing rockets at Israel now? Why would Israel respond with the large-scale force that it did? Why would the US step back and allow the violence to proceed? Why would other actors – Egypt, Iran, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon – behave the way they have?

While there are clearly legitimate and clear-cut concerns over sovereignty and security on both sides of this conflict, the motivations and actions of all actors are muddied by the conflict’s political context. The political motivations and factors that may be playing a significant part in driving the conflict have been largely overlooked. Here I begin to explore how certain political concerns may be influencing what has been happening in Gaza.

Israel–Yes, Israel– justifiably wanted to defend itself by stopping Hamas rocket fire. But, with Israel’s apparent victory in this conflict, it has become clear that a significant reason for its excessive assault was to exorcize the failure of 2006’s war with Hezbollah. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert – stepping down as PM this year – may have wanted to depart with a success under his belt after 2006’s debacle. His Kadima Party, facing a February election, had to show its toughness against attacks on Israel and its ability to protect Israel and take the battle to its enemies. It was also Kadima’s Ariel Sharon that unilaterally withdrew Israeli forces from Gaza in 2005. Perhaps Kadima felt responsible for curbing Hamas’ current aggression. It remains to be seen if the Israeli public’s overwhelming support for Olmert’s attack on Hamas will translate into success at the polls for Kadima’s Tzipi Livni. During the conflict, there was considerable debate within the Israeli government about how to pursue the war on Hamas, and Kadima would not be the only party to gain by pushing the war. Labor Party head and Defense Minister Ehud Barack is a contender for PM in the upcoming election as is Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu. The main political debate in Israel surrounding the conflict has been how hawkish is hawkish enough. The effect of the war on the election looms large.

Hamas – One part of the reason for Hamas’ improper rocket attacks that we hear little about is the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The blockade has effectively amounted to a siege, intended to make life for residents in Gaza extremely hard. By all accounts, this crowded sliver of land has been on the verge of a humanitarian crisis for some time. With the end of a six-month ceasefire in November, Israel began attacks on tunnels in Gaza and denied Hamas’ demand that the blockade be lifted.  While none of this justifies rocket attacks, this series of events helps to explain what led Hamas to begin sending rockets into Israel again. In addition, the on-going fight for Palestine between Hamas and Fatah offers a possible political motivation for Hamas’ attacks. Palestinians have rallied behind Hamas during the conflict, threatening Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah government in the West Bank. This was likely an intentional move by Hamas, to undermine Fatah, often seen as too accommodating to Israel and the US. During the conflict, Fatah has not allowed open protests against Israel for example. The sympathy and pride Palestinians have felt for Hamas during this conflict could tip the scales in Hamas’ favor in the next West Bank election. One also wonders if the timing of the conflict might be an early test of President Obama by both Israel and Hamas. With hostilities barely over when Obama takes office, his pushing a lasting US-sponsored peace deal is highly unlikely. Perhaps this was a calculation by Hamas – who appears unwilling to agree to any two-state solution – and Israel too – who may see current circumstances unfavorable to its interests.

United States – George W. Bush’s lame-duck administration has had little reason to stick its neck out for either side in Gaza. Its support for Israel has been implicit, though not unconditional while it has also, surprisingly, supported UN demands for a ceasefire. What concerns me more is the silence from president-elect Obama. He has shied away from making statements about the situation in Gaza, arguing that there is only one President at a time. But, that same argument has not stopped him from speaking at length about the country’s economic woes. If Obama is avoiding making statements about Gaza, it suggests two things to me. First, he probably does not see a US role in solving the problem in Gaza as a priority for his administration at this time. This is understandable – there are numerous, bigger problems facing the US, and the UN and countries like Egypt have been ably handling the negotiating of the recent ceasefire. I sense that Obama has made the political calculation that the US need not be heavily invested in the Gaza solution for now. The more troubling implication of his silence is that he would not act much differently than Bush has. By his silence, Obama seems to be painting himself into a corner and agreeing with Bush’s policy – essentially ratifying what will be all but a done deal by the time he takes office. As a candidate, Obama courted AIPAC and returned from a trip to Israel with a great deal of sympathy for its situation. He has vowed to continue the “special relationship” between the two countries and probably doesn’t want to make Israel – or the rest of the world – nervous about his intentions toward the region during his administration.

And this is just the beginning. There are undoubtedly other political calculations that have been influencing the conflict, and other players are significant here too – the EU, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and especially Iran and Egypt. They will be crucial to securing any lasting peace and resolution to this specific conflict and to the Israel-Palestine conflict in general. Yet, all parties bring their own agendas and complexities to the table. We can all hope that peace will one day reign in Israel and Palestine, but it will not be simple, and it will not be possible by looking at the situation simplistically. We will need to see and understand the hidden facets to the region’s challenges and act accordingly.

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