Knowledge of the neighborhood, and of the culture and dynamics of New York City itself, is badly missing from this “debate.” Most of the opposition never frequents these parts of Lower Manhattan; they come from other places, often hundreds of miles away or farther, to protest.

I know that New Yorkers do view the 16 acre (65,000 m2) superblock where the World Trade Center buildings stood as hallowed ground. New Yorkers have been very offended by the petty squabbles between The Port Authority, WTC lease-holder Larry Silverstein and various insurers that delayed any work on rebuilding until April 27, 2006. The planned permanent memorial and visitor center isn’t completed despite promises it would be. The September 11 Families’ Association has often decried the crass commercial activity surrounding the site, with illegal vendors yelling to sell tourists tacky Chinese-made 9/11 memorabilia like Twin Towers snowglobes and bad commemorative booklets with inaccurate Engrish text and pirated photographs, for absurdly high prices. See Hawking History and Cutting Corners for details about the situation.
The fact that the site has shameless vendors hawking tasteless souvenirs but not the promised memorial is a festering wound for a lot of New Yorkers. THAT offends us living in Lower Manhattan, not an Islamic YMCA that might be built two full blocks north (conservatives respond: you’re not offended by this in your neighborhood! we’ll be offended x1000 FOR YOU!)
Insensitive out-of-towners asking everybody on the bus “how do I get to Ground Zero?!” like it’s just another tourist attraction and go to buy those tacky knickknacks is pretty offensive though, and many of us connect those clueless tourists with the clueless out-of-towners (who often take after the willful ignorance satirized here in The Onion) pouring into the city to protest in a neighborhood they’ve never frequented and don’t remotely understand. A recent Marist poll confirms what I’m saying, only 31% of Manhattan residents say the Cordoba House offends them, whereas opposition goes up the further away from the area they poll (53% against if you count all five boroughs, 68% if you ask people in all 50 states). Misunderstanding the situation and hating this is “roughly proportional to distance” from it (from a great Hendrik Hertzberg op-ed).

Yes, the actual World Trade Center site (can we stop calling it Ground Zero, a misused term from douchebag news anchors, please???) is hallowed ground, but the surrounding area? Those surrounding blocks are no different than the rest of this Lower Manhattan neighborhood. It’s a place constantly changing, lots of run down buildings waiting for redevelopment beside gleaming corporate towers, Wall Street titans, tons of office space, churches, mosques, old stores, tacky souvenirs, “adult entertainment,” and more, as market forces (self-interest, competition and supply and demand: AKA the invisible hand of the market) continually puts businesses and other facilities in the city, and because it’s NYC, everything is right next to everything (placed to serve the concentrated demand in such a tight, concentrated space of real estate). That’s right, the blocks surrounding the WTC have STRIP CLUBS, Burger Kings, everything–NOT “hallowed ground.”

What is already here

This is closer to the World Trade Center site than the Park51 project

Very much non-hallowed ground, an Off-Track Betting joint also on Park Place, even closer to the World Trade Center site than the Park51 project

I heard a host on NPR asking an outspoken opponent of Park51 what about the (actually a mosque) mosques also near the WTC, and he said “well, that preexisted 9/11 so they’re grandfathered in” but there should be no FURTHER mosques constructed in the area. When told that the Park51 project is modeled after the 92nd St Y, and is, by no definition (in Islam nor in the dictionary) “a mosque,” this guy brushed it off, disbelieving. What would he have said if told of the strippers, gambling and other low-brow establishments even closer to the WTC site? “How dare you say strip clubs aren’t sacred ground!!!”?? It’s like the opponents of this REALLY BELIEVE that this project (construction not slated to begin until 2015 or later) will be some huge domed mosque with minarets towering over “Ground Zero” and the muezzin’s call to prayer echoing off rubble and skeleton fragments as Taliban wield rifle butts to corral women in burqas. Nothing but fiction!!! It seems NOTHING can penetrate this fictitious narrative that the Right clings to, NOTHING. The machine (political/media machines) must have an enemy. The beast must be fed red meat to survive. The age-old bread and circus to distract the masses. The machine is all that matters–founding principles, the Constitution, even the physical safety of a religious minority BE DAMNED!

And it’s primarily fueled by lies and distortions ginned up by the shameless, ratings whores in cable news.

Is this crap driven by the media? Yes, yes! A thousand times yes!

Violence is escalating now. A Bangladeshi cab driver was asked if he was Muslim and then brutally stabbed in midtown. Five teens were arrested in Waterport, upstate NY for firing at a mosque and disrupting a religious service. This has grown and grown beyond just a media distraction to threaten the peace and stability of our country, as well as our Constitutional principles and national soul.

Is religious freedom and the right of private property trumped by angry mobs ginned up by hate and fear? Are we at war with Islam itself and reject anything related to Islam on U.S. soil? (anti-Islam forces are battling Muslims trying to build on their own private property in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Tennessee, Kentucky, Florida, California…and arsonists attacked the construction in Tennessee.) Are we already at war with 1.5 BILLION believers? if so, time for a draft. What are we at war with? How can we win over Iraq and Afghanistan, which hinges on “hearts and minds,” if we paint all Muslims as terrorists hell-bent on destruction? IT’S DECISION TIME!

Amid all this turmoil, the mainstream media wall-to-wall hate speech, countrymen set against each other, friends de-friending each other on facebook, what should those of us who want a teaching moment about religious liberty, private property and anti-violence DO?

I made the video blog below, my response to the right-wing talking heads on your TVs and internets about this project, really a Y to be built in a disused Burlington Coat Factory IN MY NEIGHBORHOOD! SuperAleja edited in captions for the Nick impaired.

My main points: the Burlington Coat Factory isn’t hallowed ground. Park51 is not a mosque and it is not at “Ground Zero,” and Islam is not evil.

Warning: the clips of right-wing talking heads spewing hate speech I use may be offensive and difficult to watch. Dick Morris paints all Muslims as radical enemies and says “all the other (mosques)” are “command centers for terrorism,” Newt Gingrich calls the people behind the Park51 project “radical Islamists” and compares the building to “a Nazi sign in front of the Holocaust museum” and self-described Christian conservatives are shown burning the Koran. I cringe seeing these clips, but we must recognize the bigotry in this country in order to squelch it and lower the heat of this issue.

Transcript of the video blog:

Hello, this is Nick Dupree for nickscrusade.org. And because I live only 4 or 5 blocks from this proposed Islamic community Center that has consumed all of American politics, I thought I should comment.

[O'Reilly clip]

All the arguments against this thing rely on the idea that Islam is somehow related to 9/11. And it would be like putting a statue of Hitler next to a Holocaust memorial; it would be like building a Robert Oppenheim school of nuclear science at Hiroshima. All these arguments are pure crap. Islam has nothing to do with 9/11, any more than Christianity has to do with the KKK. By the same logic, we couldn’t build a church near Atlanta’s Millennium Park because of the Christian extremists who bombed it. Or they say, it’s “hallowed ground”.

Oh no, you must not build on this hallowed ground! Okay, come on. It’s two blocks, two full city blocks, away from the World Trade Center. City blocks in New York City are huge, and there’s an entire culture in each city block different from the other ones. The city blocks around the World Trade Center already have everything–there’s already mosques, there are churches, there are strip clubs, there’s adult bookstores, there’s everything already in the surrounding blocks. And the place that they want to put this thing, is in a disused Burlington Coat Factory, for pete’s sake.

[Burlington Coat Factory commercial]
[NYC landmark commission unanimously ruling that there's no reason to make the old Burlington Coat Factory an untouchable city landmark]

Come on! Stop telling me that the Burlington freaking Coat Factory is hallowed ground! It’s not on the site of the World Trade Center, and, it’s not a mosque, it’s an old Burlington Coat Factory. It’s going to be a community center like a YMCA, you know, with a gym, and a swimming pool, a culinary school, a food court, classrooms….. only a tiny part of it is going to be for prayer. And what’s so wrong about prayer? Don’t we have freedom of prayer, freedom of religion, and our very Constitution?

It’s not a mosque, there’s no minarets towering over the city. There’s no muezzin calling for prayer. It’s a crap argument. It shouldn’t even be a story, it’s a YMCA, for all intents and purposes. And they have the freedom to build what they want on their own property. It’s property rights, and a municipal land-use issue. It should be decided by those in the neighborhood, like myself.
Not the worst bigots in the country from a crazy church that wants to burn the Koran. [local Jacksonville news clip about this church's "Burn A Koran" day]
Pat Robertson [clip of Robertson talking about "Cordoba mosque" (sic) on the 700 Club]
Dick Morris, [clip of O'Reilly interviewing Morris]
Newt Gingrich, [clip of Gingrich spewing hate speech on the Fox News morning show]
should these bigots decide what goes in my neighborhood, or should I decide it? Really it’s a no-brainer. Angry bigots, thousands of miles away, should not be deciding this. I, and the rest of the neighborhood, should decide it. There’s nothing dangerous, there’s nothing sinister, about the people that are behind this project, who are moderates. And they’re being painted, along with the entire religion of Islam, as evil. If we’re going to paint an entire religion of a billion and a half people with the same brush, then why would they make peace with us, why would anything change? So, the hate that we’re hearing all over the media… friends de-friending each other on Facebook over this, it really needs to stop. It’s a YMCA. Please, let the neighborhood decide this.

Please spread this blog post and video. Truth, justice and the American way will only exist to the extent we make it exist.

Nick

PS
This is the 1337th post on nickscrusade.org. 1337!!!

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I wish Congress would have put protecting the most disabled Americans ahead of uninsured able-bodied people, but they didn’t. For Congress, people like me are invisible.

The states slashing Medicaid the deepest (the Southern states) are the ones that will see the most new Medicaid eligibles thanks to “Health Care Reform.”

PERFECT
FISCAL
STORM

That means life for people with disabilities in the South is about to get even worse. Good thing I fled Alabama.

Medicaid, especially in the South, is increasingly in tatters. State Medicaid programs were slashed to the bone in the 90s thanks to “the Republican Revolution” and now there’s no fat left to trim, so they’re taking chainsaws to muscle and bone.

In the Wall Street Journal, it discusses a woman who’s had to sit in her own waste all day thanks to state budget cuts. I suppose the state hoped her bed sores and inevitable sepsis take her quickly, otherwise Medicaid will be on the hook for expensive hospital stays that would dwarf the cost of just leaving her f#$%ing home care uncut in the first place. I’ve seen this happen over and over again to people I fight for. It’s left me scarred to depths few of you could ever understand.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal piece, by Clare Ansberry.

FLORENCE, S.C—Tandem forces of shrinking state budgets and rising health-care costs have collided and struck a small brick ranch house in this rural town, home to Barbara Hickey.

Born with cerebral palsy, Ms. Hickey, now 67 years old, is confined to a motorized wheelchair. She lives alone and relies on certified nurse’s assistants to get her in and out of bed, bathed, clothed and fed.

In December, she received a letter from the South Carolina Department of Special Needs and Disabilities, saying her weekly 50 hours of personal-care help was being cut to 28 hours. That meant Ms. Hickey would get help for two hours in the morning and two hours at night. If she needed to use the bathroom in between, she would sit in a soiled diaper.

After several days of reduced care, the local office of the South Carolina Legal Services appealed the cuts on behalf of Ms. Hickey. Her hours have been restored pending the appeal.

Home health care—funded largely by Medicaid—generally costs less money than institutionalizing developmentally disabled people like Ms. Hickey. But the political reality is that it’s easier to cut back home services than to close a 24-hour facility, which can leave people with nowhere to go. Thus, some of the biggest cuts around the country are happening in the basic services that help the disabled cope at home.

South Carolina says it has little choice but to cut funding for Medicaid. It faced a $563 million deficit for the current fiscal year, and like other states must have a balanced budget. Medicaid, the joint federal-state health-insurance program for the poor and disabled, already consumes about 20% of its $5 billion budget and is one of its fastest growing costs.

The health-care program is on course to consume 40% of the budget of South Carolina in five years, and leaves little for anything else, says Gov. Mark Sanford. “It could force legislators to either cut further into bone in the areas of education, law enforcement and economic development, or raise taxes. Neither option is palatable.”

The state already is making painful cuts elsewhere. The state’s Department of Juvenile Justice has closed five group homes and cut 25 after-school programs. There are 1,000 fewer public-education teachers this school year than last.

Across the country, budget-strapped states are focusing on Medicaid. Created in 1965, it is now a $379 billion program, including state and federal funds. State spending grew an average 7.9% in fiscal 2009 as the economic crisis hit and more people signed up for Medicaid.

It was the highest growth rate since the last downturn six years ago. Spending is expected to keep growing at that pace for the next decade because of rising costs and growing enrollment.

But states don’t have much flexibility when it comes to what they can and can’t cut inside Medicaid. Although it is a state-managed system, the federal government pays a percentage of each state’s total costs and makes many of the Medicaid rules. Under federal Medicaid law, states must offer inpatient and outpatient hospital care, X-rays and lab services. They also have to cover nursing-home services and meet certain standards, such as staffing ratios.

There are further constraints this year. States can’t reduce Medicaid eligibility this year because of a condition attached to federal stimulus money, and under health-care reform, they can’t eliminate existing programs.

States also run up against other laws when they make deep cuts. Lawsuits have been filed in South Carolina, Florida, Connecticut, Virginia, Mississippi and New York, claiming Medicaid cuts make it impossible for those with disabilities to live at home and that it violates the Americans with Disabilities Act.
(I know the lawyers behind this class action. I say RIGHT ON!!!!)

Logically, states would cut the most expensive, least efficient services and keep the most cost-effective. But because of mandates and the need to save money quickly, that isn’t as easy as it sounds.

For example, home care—because relatives often provide some of the care—is generally cheaper than housing people with developmental disabilities in institutional facilities. In 1993, the average Medicaid cost for each person with disabilities was $48,500. At the end of 2008, the latest figures available, it cost an average $55,000. Adjusted for inflation, that actually represents a 23% decrease, largely as a result of more services being shifted away from costly institutions to the home, says Charlie Lakin, director of a University of Minnesota program that tracks services for the developmentally disabled.

But many in-home services, though critical to those receiving them, are optional. Furthermore, there aren’t many minimum standards set for in-home services, so it’s easier to cut them without violating funding requirements. There are fewer immediate consequences for the state when it cuts those services because families won’t generally abandon disabled relatives and leave states on the hook for housing.

Cutting home care could ultimately prove penny-wise and pound-foolish, however. It could push more people into institutions or large group homes because that is where services are guaranteed, even though institutional care is more expensive.

…

The department’s fiscal problems have been exacerbated by past spending decisions. A special state audit released in December 2008 showed that the department hadn’t provided many new services for which it had received funding and, as a result, it couldn’t recoup millions in federal matching Medicaid dollars. For example, the state spent less than $700,000 of $10 million allocated to serve autistic children, which resulted in the loss of $13.6 million in federal matching money. The state said it couldn’t ramp up the program fast enough because it couldn’t find qualified service providers. After the audit, the executive director of the department and four of the department’s seven commissioners resigned. The department has since implemented most of the recommendations made by the Legislative Audit Council.
(This same thing nearly happened with the NHTD –Nursing Home Transition & Diversion– waiver here in New York: the bureaucracy imposed on providers was SO ridiculous than very few participated, and the rules were so cumbersome for patients that, in the program’s first two years, only one patient downstate–me–transitioned home from a facility!)

Recent state cuts have targeted developmentally disabled people living at home. In December, families were told that some of their in-home support was being cut by as much as half.

Brian Phillips, a 37-year-old with cerebral palsy, was told that he was losing half of his personal-care hours. He can work a TV with a remote control but can’t dress or feed himself, or get in and out of his bed or wheelchair.

He lives alone with his father, James, 70. The elder Mr. Phillips, who has had open heart surgery and whose heart functions at only 26% of its capacity, cannot lift Brian on his own. He appealed the cuts and the hours were restored pending his appeal.

“These are cuts no one wants to make. They are very difficult for agencies to implement and they are very upsetting and very, very difficult for our families,” says Lois Park Mole, spokesperson for the state Department of Disabilities and Special Needs.

People will generally do what they must to keep their disabled family member at home regardless of the cuts. At some point, however, even the most dedicated may not be able to continue, especially as their own health deteriorates.

…

In Aiken County, Board of Disabilities Executive Director Ralph Courtney says waiting lists for services are growing. There are more than 5,000 on waiting lists for various services, from residential programs to in-home programs.

“We want to give families hope to keep their family unit together, but in reality there is very little we can put in place to assist them,” says Mr. Courtney.

In-home support is cheaper, he says, than the alternative: group homes and larger residential programs that need to be maintained and staffed 24 hours a day. “But you can’t put people out on the street,” he says. “You can cut in-home support.”

Even though Ms. Hickey lives alone and needs help with nearly every aspect of daily living, it cost less to have her live in a house with 50 hours of personal care help than in a nursing home. Institutional care in South Carolina costs about $100,000 per person a year, compared to $39,000 for home and community services, according to the University of Minnesota research.

Read the entire article here: Disabled Face Hard Choices as States Slash Medicaid

How does littering the entire country with families destroyed by Medicaid cuts, jive with HEALTH CARE REFORM?

Honestly, I have gotten so many hate messages over the years, I’m now convinced that the Americans will continue to react with cold indifference, or, worse, celebration–”good riddance! No one is gonna force me to pay for you useless leeches!”–as Medicaid policy continues to cull out people with disabilities like me, UNABATED.

And you wonder why I’m so angry that I’d consider reconstructing the U.S. entirely? It’s because my every day experience involves the above Kafkaesque Medicaid policies harming me or the people I care about!

Nick

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They aren’t going well. I followed the health care reform debate with a magnifying glass throughout, and came away deeply disgusted in both the final product and the process that made that sausage.

We desperately needed SERIOUS reform to the United States’ health care non-”system”; we’re in the richest country on Earth, but among OECD nations, our health care is at the back of the pack. No country with our level of wealth has our level of dysfunction in basic health care.

Instead of “the change we need,” what we got when Congress was done kowtowing to big insurance donors and passed the damn thing, was incremental change to half the health care industry (the private insurance market) while leaving the half the government actually runs, Medicaid and Medicare, nearly untouched. The goal of the Obama reforms is to give more Americans access to the health insurance market, more people buying insurance, with subsidies to help the poor afford private insurance. The health insurance industry stands to rake in BILLIONS! I was devastated with disappointment.

Meanwhile, the frenzy on the right wing about this bill (which was nearly a straight copy and paste of the 1993 Republican health care bill (full text of that bill, see for yourself) taking us to “socialism” are patently absurd! I’m like “really? The first thing communists do when they take over a country is enact tepid, insurer-friendly reforms that set up a free market exchange so more people can buy insurance plans? Seriously?” A volcano of right-wing rage exploded, including dozens of death threats and some vandalism across the country. How can anyone take the Tea Partiers and Glenn Beck seriously that health care reform is anything but weak-kneed incrementalism?

The Tea Party is more disconnected from reality than any political movement I’ve ever seen, and yet, they seem to be the only major grassroots force out there and their impact is unavoidable. They’re protesting more private insurance as socialism, railing against the lowest income taxes since the 1920s as communist tyranny (simultaneously, the largely graying group opposes changes in entitlements–”get the government out of my Medicare”) and now that they’re doing the one thing that Republican politicians really care about, picking off incumbents, you’re going to see the GOP tilt even more toward the radical fringe (a terrifying prospect).

Real sign, real Tea Partiers. Medicare is a government-run program.

Since the Tea Party guys’ claims have little relationship to reality, and none of them took to the streets when George W. Bush took us from record surpluses to record deficits, centralized power and forever gutted the Bill of Rights in the name of the War on Terra, the Tea Party has to be about something else. You never see the huge, angry backlash and anti-government “patriots” in funny hats and militia terrorists like McVeigh come out of the woodwork when THEIR party is in power! I’m guessing the root of the dispute here is the right-wing’s belief that government shouldn’t have the right to interfere in the market AT ALL, and add in some good ol’ American racial panic when the multicultural Democratic party took over from the virtually whites-only Republicans. Expect another McVeigh-style attack before Obama leaves office (there have already been several shooting rampages, including one targeting religious liberals at a Unitarian church, one targeting policemen for “gonna take our guns,” and one by a long-time rightist fringer targeting Jews at the National Holocaust Museum in DC).

All that furor against the health care reform bill, while, of course, from the disability rights perspective, Obama’s reforms don’t go nearly far enough, because they only make meaningful changes in private insurance, not Medicaid and Medicare, which most of us with disabilities rely on for our care.

Medicaid and Medicare are BADLY broken and rapidly going bankrupt, but aside from expanding eligibility so that more people will be crowding already scant Medicaid resources, nearly NO changes are being made there. The home care reforms I’ve devoted a decade to are not in the bill; America’s long-term care programs remain frozen in 1965, with government continually making expensive, antiquated segregation in nursing homes THE ONLY OPTION for the disabled, including children and young adults. The horribly dysfunctional patchwork of Medicaid waivers that I rail against? Despite years of demands for change from many quarters, including the National Governors Association, those injustices will remain firmly intact, untouched by “comprehensive health care reform.” People like me will continue struggling to wring bad care from what’s left of Medicare and Medicaid; our lot will not improve at all after “Health Care Reform” takes effect. I am fighting this battle every day, and the problems with hospitals closing due to inadequate payments from Medicaid, not being able to find doctors who still take Medicaid patients, and more, just continue to escalate for me.
Meanwhile, the insular Washington leadership is curiously detached and unaware of what’s happening to their own Medicaid and Medicare programs right under their noses. President Obama made me sick when, during the health care reform “summit,” Congressman Peter Roskam (R – Illinois’ 6th district) asked him, “how can we expand Medicaid when in some counties, NO doctors that take Medicaid are left standing?” and the gist of Obama’s response was “my word, what is this that you speak of my good fellow? if this is so, we can look at raising reimbursement rates!” Everyone knows that they’ll never hike Medicaid funding, and that’s why so many in Congress sought special provisions in the bill (e.g. “The Cornhusker Kickback”) for the feds to cover their states’ new unfunded mandates to expand eligibility to millions of additional people. These expansions are not going to go well, particularly in poorer states, especially since the “kickbacks” to soften the fiscal blow were all removed from the bill with reconciliation.

The failure to even attempt changing the glaring problems with Medicaid and Medicare has left me more jaded and frustrated than ever, to the point [b]I can no longer call myself a Democrat[/b]. Especially since I know that Congress exhausted itself scraping through this tinkering with private insurance, and most likely won’t have the political will or sense of urgency to revisit health care issues for another 10, 20 years. I hate being stuck with our dysfunctional Medicaid system but that’s what people with disabilities are, stuck.

While some pundits hailed the passage of health care as a colossal foreign policy victory, proving America can tackle huge issues, marking our “comeback” as problem-solver on the world stage, I see the opposite. I see a government that lacks the dynamic, bold decision-making capability that these ultra-competitive times demand, a Congress that always cops out or kicks the can down the road in the face of huge problems. I see an America so paralyzed by corruption and red tape that we’ll never catch up with competitors (people in India have already stuck a fork in the U.S., considering the Chinese their only real rival for economic dominance at this point).
Referring to China, I’ve often heard President Obama use the rallying cry, “why can’t we be the world leader in technology again?! Why can’t we have the fastest trains in the world?” Well Mr. President, I would answer him, we will never build trains and train tracks faster than China, because we have so much “environmental impact study” and “archeological impact study” red tape, followed by years of hearing lawsuits from anyone who doesn’t like the project, that it takes an average of 10 years to get any major transportation project off the ground, much less completed. China, meanwhile, simply makes a decision on future train projects, then enforces it by any means necessary. How can we compete with that given our bureaucracy?

While those panicked about executive power right now can take a sigh of relief, because presently it seems Obama can’t even take a $#!T without 60 votes from the Senate, I worry that, before long, fierce foreign competition, falling standards of living, plus a completely paralyzed Congress will lead the American people to demand a dictatorship. Another sudden economic crash, or, G-d forbid, successful terrorist attacks (by Islamist nutbags or another McVeigh) and I fear that the Republic will gasp its last gasp.

The only real solutions are solutions as big as the problems, pushed through by reform groups that aren’t just as dysfunctional as the institutions they’re fighting.

Big Solution #1: Ban campaign contributions (bribing) to public officials, as this has limited access to the halls of power ONLY to moneyed interests, as well as fostering a culture where those who spend more time working for the people than working on fundraising are immediately replaced by candidates with backing from deep-pockets, leaving only self-interested scoundrels remaining. Free speech must be immutable, overturn all McCain-Feingold restrictions on when and where and how candidates can advertise and get their message out, independent expenditures by corporations, unions, advocacy groups and private citizens are unfettered, you can say whatever you want, whenever you want with your free speech, because that’s what the 1st Amendment guarantees–you’re just not allowed to bribe public officials with campaign contributions and rig the system. Campaigns will be publicly financed like in Canada, the UK, and most of Europe. Speech is speech. MONEY IS NOT SPEECH!

Big Solution #2: Breaking the Duopoly is crucial, but WILL NOT happen without a change in the Constitution to allow Proportional Representation via STV (“Instant Runoff Voting,” AKA Single Transferable Vote, as is done in Australia, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland) to bring more parties into Congress. Allowing more parties will enable more principled views to be expressed (because, for example, if you want less intrusive government and less taxation, you won’t have to vote Republican for the tax cuts and get warrantless surveillance, anti-gay crap and anti-immigration laws too as part of the package, instead, you can vote for a party that closely matches your views). More parties also mean regional parties representing genuine regional people’s interests get into the mix. And parties would have to work together to coalesce into viable majority coalitions, and would have to curb the extremist nonsense to keep their coalitions together. Overall, Proportional Representation allows for a much, much healthier democracy, whereas currently we have the opposite of healthy democracy, the Duopoly nearly always wins 100% control of the House and Senate with the support of as little as 20-25% of eligible voters, at the cost of all other parties and their viewpoints.

Big Solution #3: This is my most radical view, but failing Solution #2, maybe we could be far more functional as a people and be much better represented, plus have no more imperialist ventures sapping our wealth, if we were to make a new version of the old Articles of Confederation for the new Information Age that separates the country into 6 or so federated regional powers (see: superstates) to avert any FURTHER deadlock, dysfunction, or civil war (each new state under parts of the current Constitution they elect to have, but empowered to each craft very different rules, based on their shared culture, for how society should work). I’m talking about ending the United States as we know it, replacing it with a federation of nearly autonomous federated republics named “the United Federation of America” (UFA! UFA! UFA!) Each federated republic would choose their own military spending and so on. Think of The Federation (United Federation of Planets) in Star Trek! That’s the type of idea I’m batting around here.

Click to enlarge the map!! In this vision of the future, South Carolina even secedes from the Southern Republic, because, hey, they've wanted to secede since birth.

I’m going even farther than “states’ rights.” I’m altering how the country operates–root and stem overhaul–by almost completely eliminating federal centralization as we know it. Why go this far? Because the paralysis of government has become so bad over the past 30 years that we have to consider crazy, radical ideas we would have shunned in disgust before.
Southern culture should never block Northeasterners’ ambitions for reform in New York where I live now, and visa versa. I moved to NY in large part to escape Alabama’s far-right public policy that was blocking my advancement, but while it’s better here, those policies (tax cuts causing huge deficits, social service cuts, the corporatist approach that keeps the institutional bias in Medicaid alive) FOLLOWED ME to New York because they’re federal policies too. And I believe the policies that affect me would be very different if only a Northeastern bloc could decide their own policies, vs. a national consensus accommodating Southern, Western, everyone’s views being forced on the Northeastern states. National compromises should no more be forced on the Northeastern states than on the Southern states (with some exceptions: states can’t disregard the certain parts of the current Constitution, like reinstating slavery or segregation).

This won’t happen any time soon (there is no public support for it) but maybe we’d all be better off if it did…

I just know that the only real solutions here are solutions as big as the problems. Without trying at least one of these big solutions, get ready to shout “HAIL CAESAR” and go full Banana Republic, while China becomes undisputed world hegemon.

Nick

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In Scrooge McDuck’s first **named** appearance in a cartoon (his first actual appearance was in Spirit of ‘43) he teaches Huey, Dewey and Louie about the economy, from the origins of the types of the currency to taxes to inflation, budgeting and investing.

It’s good stuff. Great primer on finance for all ages.

Available in HD.

(I notice in 1967, Scrooge’s budgeting pie didn’t include health care… hmmmm.)

Nick

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I couldn’t think of a better candidate for Surgeon General than Dr. Benjamin, and I was surprised and pleased that someone from my old hometown that I am familiar with hit the big-time!

President Obama announces Regina Benjamin as his nominee for Surgeon General

Dr. Benjamin works in a clinic in Bayou La Batre just south of Mobile, Alabama (where I’m from). As far as I know, she’s the first Surgeon General to come directly from the trenches caring for the poor, not a hot-shot surgeon who never sees the outside of a hospital, a public health administrator, or a leading health care CEO well-known among country club political donors. ALL Surgeons General should be from the hands-on world, with experience with the hard realities of getting appropriate health care for America’s poor majority.

No one knows these tough realities better than Regina Benjamin, who is one of the only doctors in the small shrimping town of Bayou la Batre along the Gulf of Mexico, where old French Catholic and old Anglo Catholic families have fished and shrimped for centuries, and South Vietnamese (Catholic) shrimpers fled as war refugees after the Vietnam war ended. Bayou la Batre attracted many Vietnamese families because it’s one of the only rural shoreside shrimping villages in America similar to theirs back home, where they can live in a similar environment and work with fishing nets in the ways their families have for millennia, no need to re-train for a new job. The Vietnamese shrimpers and fishermen have increasingly edged the old shrimping families out of the business with their willingness to live on their boats all season, and a seemingly infinite capacity for thrift, bartering fish for gasoline to run their boats and other clever ways of lowering costs. I once knew an ex-army medic and LPN who’s a direct descendant of Joesph Bosarge, the French-born guy who founded Bayou la Batre with a land grant from Spain in 1786, and he told me a lot about the area. I’ve visited Bayou la Batre a few times. I’ve also talked to several Vietnamese kids about it (some of them I went to high school with; despite being poor they were always #1 in the year-end academic rankings, way ahead of me, though I was high up there). My point is, I know exactly where Regina Benjamin is coming from, and it ain’t the same board rooms and government offices where they found most of the previous Surgeons General. She runs a free clinic, and treats poor whites, poor blacks and poor Asians (often by having one of the English-speaking schoolkids translateinterpret her medical instructions into Vietnamese). Like an early 20th century country doctor, Dr. Benjamin does house calls, and accepts whatever patients can pay, even if they can’t, or even if all they can do is barter her part of their catch. This is a doctor who has risen to the top not through the usual cutthroat tactics, not through being the best at what everyone else is doing, but by charting a different path, advocating for and caring for the most needy, showing us what the focus of the medical world should be, public service.

I first became familiar with Regina Benjamin when I was fighting my famous two-year campaign to get Alabama Medicaid to stop stripping home care coverage for people like me just because we turn 21 (full story here). Local WPMI TV news interviewed her about my fight (as she then was director-designate of the Alabama State Medical Association) and she made supportive comments and said of course Alabama Medicaid should cover those who really need it, and that they’re obviously overlooking some gaps.

Regina Benjamin advocating for Nick's Crusade, August 2001

I don’t know of any other doctor who would stick her neck out for justice for kids she’s never met. Dr. Benjamin is a special person, exactly the kind of person who should be put in a powerful position to affect change. This nomination is one thing President Obama is doing RIGHT.

Bayou la Batre is one of the few remaining Catholic fishing communities that still does the annual Blessing of the Fleet in hopes of a bountiful catch that year. Dr. Benjamin is Catholic also, and likely has strong moral convictions that have led her to devote her career to the poor. Her clinic, along with all of Bayou la Batre and much of Mobile (including our backyard), was wrecked by Hurricane Katrina. She rebuilt the clinic, only for it to burn to the ground the night before its grand reopening. Then she rebuilt again. Like a heroine in a Biblical fable or something, each crushing tragedy made her stronger, gained her more support and attention, only pushed her higher. She was awarded the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by Pope Benedict XVI for exceptional service to the people of her diocese.

Incredibly, now Dr. Benjamin has the far-right fringe calling her “baby killer” because she’s never taken a hard-line against abortion (which is understandable from a doctor in an impoverished community that sees too many rapes and pregnancies endangering the mother). Even dumber, people are attacking her for her weight! These critics have probably never been to the Deep South; she is svelte by Alabama standards! And they’re also clueless about the expectations black men have for the women in their community re: size (maybe I should do a post about the differences in cultural expectations).

Anyhow, the haters need to get a grip. This nomination is going to sail through faster than a shrimp boat in a hurricane!

Regina Benjamin is probably Obama’s best nomination yet.

Nick

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The Pharaoh is now drafting his plan to reform America’s insane health care system, but has said that long-term care, which Medicaid is the number one provider of, will not be reformed in this package. How can they reform health care without addressing long-term care, one of the biggest expenses straining state budgets and bankrupting American families? It is bizarre that legislators and voters could ever see this as a separate issue, when it is one of the worst examples of how badly the system is broken. Institutions cost the most of any long-term care option, but are enshrined in law as mandatory, while home care services, the least expensive option, are slashed to the bone by states because they are “optional.” States are still forcing people with disabilities into institutions, the most costly option, because of the antiquated and discriminatory institutional bias in federal Medicaid law that both parties continue to choose to ignore.

The Democrats created the institutional bias when they drafted Medicaid law 44 years ago. Now, amidst their push to overhaul the system, they are ignoring calls from activists to rectify this injustice. On Tuesday, ADAPT activists, after months of letters and phone calls did not produce results, visited 25 Democratic offices around the country to demand that meetings be scheduled to hear their concerns, and that the Democrats apologize for 44 years of unjust policies that have stolen billions from taxpayers and stolen millions of productive lives from their communities. Here is a video clip of activists visiting Senator Baucus’ office in Missoula, MT and stating their case. Other activists were camped out at the DNC headquarters in Washington DC, keeping vigil until their demands are finally heard. 44 years is enough of this injustice; it’s time to change.

IT’S TIME.

We all owe ADAPT our support. They are putting themselves on the line, facing arrest, threats, getting carried out of the DNC by police, their accessible portable toilet was confiscated, but they’re still speaking up when no one else will, for those in nursing homes that are not being heard. Pharaoh, LET MY PEOPLE GO!

Go Down Moses – Louis Armstrong

Nick

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Just as in Kyrgyzstan’s revolution, in Iran, mostly young people, tired of decades of authoritarian rule, took to the streets en masse to overturn a fraudulent election that had ratified the rule of a dictator. In Kyrgyzstan, the protests were so loud, the people so united, that old Soviet boss Askar Akayev saw his power base erode to the point that continuing in office was too risky and untenable; protesters seized the presidential offices, and he ended up escaping to Russia. In Iran, this didn’t happen; the regime didn’t budge. Why? Because the entrenched support base loyal to the regime, especially the Sepah (Revolutionary Guards) and the Basij, wouldn’t allow it.

A photo of Basij volunteers drilling in their drill uniforms. (Credit: Vahid Salemi / AP)

Who are the Basijis? The best way for an American to understand them is as a combination of the Boy Scouts, the revolutionary Minutemen, the Taliban and the legend of the Persian Hashshashins (Assassins) who would take themselves out with their foes. The Basijis are a volunteer militia operated as an auxiliary of the Sepah, and take orders directly from Sepah commanders and the Supreme Leader, not the president. The Basijis are mostly religious youth, and they are charged with protecting the regime, along with Shia Islam and its people’s “virtues.” To show their Islamic virtue they may work in mosques, help elderly people cross the street, give gasoline to people stranded in their cars on the side of the road, or, on the other side of the coin, intimidate and assault Iranians dressed in “immoral” attire, and haul suspected dissidents into the nearest police station. The Basij responds to threats to the regime within and without; they played a key role in the Iran-Iraq war, with mass “human wave” martyr attacks by teenage Basijis to clear minefields and terrify Saddam’s troops, and they have often crushed Iranians citizens’ demonstrations, most notably during the uprising that followed the June 12 rigged election of this year, and the student protests of July ‘99.

The founder of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini founded the Basij (pronounced BAH-siege) when he became leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. It was a shrewd move. Khomeini knew that he would always have a lot of enthusiastic extreme-fundamentalist young men on his hands, and it’s smarter to protect your Right flank, honor them and harness their energy to protect the regime, than it is to let them fester ignored until they become something that could overthrow him. In Persian, the Basij (literally, “Mobilization”) are also called Basij-e Mostaz’afin, “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” and there is a clear “class warfare” element to them. The Basijis are mostly poor, young, and fundamentalist, and they are often pitted against the mostly secular, modernizing upper class. President Ahmadinejad was a Basij, with the Basij culture and chip on the shoulder, and he framed the rich elite as decadent, corrupt, and “oppressing” the hard-working, pious, rural poor.

Ahmadinejad and fellow Basij veterans, in ceremonial uniform

For Iran’s rulers, this has them sitting pretty: in addition to having the judiciary, military and local officials firmly behind them, they can rally a religious proletariat to the defense of Islamic government whenever needed, with angry young Basijis as the head of the spear. Despite dissent from other Ayatollahs (Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, Ayatollah Mohajerani, Ayatollah Rafsanjani), the government’s lessened legitimacy and growing feeling in Iran’s cities that the current regime’s enforcers (Sepah, Basij, local police) are no better than the Shah’s brutal secret police (the SAVAK) that they united against in 1979, this regime is deeply entrenched, and the Persian people* will likely be watched over by Ayatollah Khomeini’s evil glare everywhere for years to come.

For more information on the Basij:
The New Yorker: Jon Lee Anderson: Understanding The Basij

Basij Violence In The News:
LA Times: Tehran’s streets erupt after a key cleric speaks

From The Miami Herald, a cartoon showing "New Boss, Same As The Old Boss," the Islamic Republic attacking their own people just as the Shah did

Contrasting brave Iranians willing to protest despite very real risk to life and limb with couch potato Americans doing little for their freedom, I feel like I’m in a nation of proles. Like Iranians, we Americans used to be a proud and revolutionary people. I hope that isn’t completely dead.

Nick

*For the uninitiated, Iranians are sometimes still referred to as “Persians,” and their country was called “Persia” by outsiders from the 5th century BC up until 1935, when Reza Shah Pahlavi issued a decree requesting everyone use Iran, meaning “the land of Aryans,” which Iranians had been calling their country since about 1000 BC. For more information, see Iran Naming Convention. Iranians are an Aryan/Indo-European people, and in physical appearance, look little different from the related Caucasians in the nearby Caucasus region. They are white people. Too many Americans lump Iraq and Iran together and say “bomb all them A-rabs,” which couldn’t be more wrong. Iranians are not Arabs, have a proud history and culture totally distinct from Arabs, speak a language (with grammar similar to many contemporary European languages) unintelligible to those who only understand Arabic, and Iranians’ bitter rivalry and wars with the proto-Arab and Arab peoples of the Fertile Crescent span back to the first written records of the region recorded by Sumerians. Saddam Hussein was infamous for his hate of Persians.

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“you keep on tellin’ me
‘baby I love ya,’
but MARRIAGE
just ain’t your game

You tell me I can have anything I want
but whhhyy can’t I have your name?

LYIN’
BACKSLIDIN’

callin’ each other brother
with your hand in his pocket
hypocrisy! yeah“

–Millie Jackson, singing her song “Hypocrisy” on Soul Train to promote her “It Hurts So Good” album, 1973.

Gov. Mark Sanford admitted last week that he "created a fiction" about where he was. He was actually in Argentina committing adultery

Cartoon by Rex Babin, Sacramento Bee, June 26, 2009

This is the same Mark Sanford that, when asked about philandering Republican Congressman Bob Livingston (who resigned when his extramarital affair was exposed right before officially taking over for philandering Republican Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House), said “I’m sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out the president lied under oath, [Livingston's] situation was not under oath. But the bottom line is, he still lied. He lied under a different oath and that is the oath to his wife. So it has got to be taken very seriously.” (video proof)

Mark Sanford built his career on his moral rigidity and finger-pointing at those who weren’t as “upright” as him. Anyone who stepped outside the box became fodder for Sanford’s sanctimonious grandstanding. Especially gays. Sanford is one of the gay-hatingest politicians in America. One of his primary campaign platforms was how urgent it is to “defend marriage” against the gay threat. Were you “defending marriage” when you repeatedly begged your wife for permission to cheat, governor? (she refused to condone such behavior). Why is it that the “red states” most eager to “defend marriage” make up eight of the 10 states with the highest divorce rates? (according to the Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract)

Cartoon by Dwane Powell, Raleigh News and Observer

Democrats cheat just as much as Republicans, but they don’t campaign for office with Bible-beating messages attacking those less righteous than them. That Bible they are waving actually contains many more condemnations of adultery than condemnations of homosexuality, which, if you listen to some conservatives, sounds like the ONLY thing the Bible talks about. The sages understood how destructive adultery is to families and communities. Unfortunately, politicians don’t.

These are men who love themselves deeply, need to be recognized and relish approval. These are men who adore getting praise and who often are surrounded by swarms of sycophants. These are men who, in some cases, need to exercise power and sometimes can become drunk from it. These are men who think the rules don’t apply to them and who think they’re untouchable.

Source: AP: Analysis: Why do politicians cheat?

There’s a culture of infidelity in every state capitol. I saw it in the Senate offices in Montgomery, AL; with the way Senators’ secretaries look at their Senators and how they interact like spouses, you’d have to be really oblivious to not notice what’s going on. State legislatures take some of the most arrogant and entitled men in a state, and, for half a year, assemble them in the capital city, far away from their wives. With scumbags like politicians, some infidelity is inevitable in that situation.

Next time a politician is presenting himself as moral arbiter, remember all of this.

Nick

Related Bloggery

Field Negro: The “hiking” excuse.

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My history professor friend Bridgett and I discussed this on her blog post about Kramer, “Same-sex sexuality in 17th century British North America,” and she explains that real historians can’t “out” people from the past as gay without definitive, absolute proof, or they’ll be filleted by critics, discredited and risk their careers.   Not a problem for Kramer, as he has no historian cred to risk.

To me, his biggest fallacy is that simply because no wives were available for many Jamestown colonists, they would “turn to each other.” It’s not something you can CHOOSE like that, and he of all people should know that. I could no more choose attraction to males amid a girl-shortage than Kramer could choose attraction to women.

Does anyone really believe that whenever there’s a scarcity of women in a society, large amounts of men will “turn to each other?” This made me turn my thoughts to China. Recently, a gay family member told me because of the lack of females in China and the fact that, mathematically, tens of millions of men will never be able to find women to marry (true) that millions will turn to gay sex. I don’t think that’s what will happen — it’s not A CHOICE!

Numerous articles about the gender imbalance in China (caused by abortions of potential girls and infanticide after birth) have been written. I recommend:

• New York Times: Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million

• NBC: China Begins to Face Sex-Ratio Imbalance

• Washington Post: ‘Bare Branches’ and Danger in Asia

In this Washington Post op-ed, Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. Den Boer, the authors of “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population,” wrote:

The old saying goes, “When you pick up one end of a stick, you also pick up the other.” When a society prefers sons to daughters to the extent found in parts of contemporary Asia, it not only will have fewer daughters, but it also will create a subclass of young men who are apt to have difficulty finding wives and beginning their own families. Because son preference has been a significant phenomenon in Asia for centuries, the Chinese actually have a term for such young men. They are called guang gun-er or “bare branches,” because they are branches of the family tree that will never bear fruit. The girls who should have grown up to be their wives were disposed of instead.

We have already seen in China the resurrection of evils such as the kidnapping and selling of women to provide brides for those who can pay the fee. Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages — money, skills, education — will marry, but men without such advantages — poor, unskilled, illiterate — will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population.

Should the leaders of these nations be worried? The answer is yes. Throughout history, bare branches in East and South Asia have played a role in aggravating societal instability, violent crime and gang formation.

Though the existence of sizable numbers of bare branches is not a necessary condition for instability — the sex ratios of Rwanda in 1994 were normal, for example — it plays a significant role in the amplification of levels of instability and threat.

Consider the fact that in the mid-1800s, a predominantly bare-branch rebel group in the north of China called the Nien, in combination with rebel groups farther south, openly attacked imperial troops and forts, taking control of territory inhabited by 6 million Chinese citizens before it was quashed by the government years later.

More recently, Indian scholars have noted a very strong relationship between sex ratios and violent crime rates in Indian states, which persists even after controlling for a variety of other possible variables. And worldwide, more violent crime is committed by unmarried young adult men than by married young adult men.

According to sociologists, young adult men with no stake in society — of the lowest socioeconomic classes and with little chance of forming families of their own — are much more prone to attempt to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior in a strategy of coalitional aggression with other bare branches.

Historically, governments facing a growing population of bare branches find themselves caught in a dilemma. They must decrease the threat to society posed by these young men but at the same time may find the cost of doing so is heavy. Increased authoritarianism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smuggling and so forth can be one result.

At some point, governments consider how they can export their problem, either by encouraging emigration of young adult men or harnessing their energies in martial adventures abroad. There are very few good options for governments that find that their greatest threat emanates not from an external source but from an internal one.

Years ago I saw Hudson and Den Boer’s book discussed on CNN, and in that segment, they argued that the explosive growth of Islamic conquests…

This map shows the expansion of the Islamic Caliphate. In dark red, is territory conquered by Mohammed himself (from 622-632 he consolidated all of the Arabian Peninsula), in pink are the territories conquered in 632-661 by the "Patriarchal Caliphate" (all of the Levant, Egypt, present-day Libya, Iraq, Iran and present-day Georgia in the South Caucasus) and, in beige, the lands taken during the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750; much of Central Asia, including Samerkand, present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and all of the Maqreb of West Africa and Spain).

…in the 7th and 8th centuries wasn’t just “to spread the faith by the sword,” but, because the prevalence of polygamy on the Arabian Peninsula made it impossible for large numbers of angry young fundamentalist males with swords to ever find wives. Large groups of them invaded Egypt, Persia, etc., where the population of widowed women had just grown considerably from the war. Hudson and Den Boer suggested a similar phenomenon may happen in China.

We are already seeing the consequences of gender imbalance in China that Hudson and Den Boer’s research predicts: increased sex trafficking, prostitution becoming more widespread and more lucrative. Will we see China invading neighboring countries as well?

What do you think? Please comment below.

Nick

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Director of HIV/AIDS Policy and a senior disability advisor on the Domestic Policy Council, Jeff Crowley, speaks at a Candidates' Form at the George Mason Center for Health Policy Research and Ethics

Jeff Crowley from the president’s Domestic Policy Council met with the board of the NDRN (National Disability Rights Network, formerly NAPAS¹) this week and a summary of how Crowley conveyed the administration’s views on the Community Choice Act was leaked to several listserves online. The disability community deserves to know what the thinking inside their government really is, so I am publicizing this text:

Jeff Crowley from President Obama’s Domestic Policy Council came to our NDRN Board meeting this week. I am certain many people on this list know him but this is the first time I’ve seen him. Here is a summary of what he said and how he said it.

He certainly confirmed that it is the administration’s intent to offer the initial health care proposal without including long term care.

He went on the express his regret at the outcome of the ADAPT action two weeks ago. He described himself as having “worked with ADAPT in the past” and certainly assumed no sense of apology or responsibility for the arrests or the dismissive comments of his colleague, just “live with it.”

In a very guarded and cautious way he expressed the desire to deal with long term care in the second session of this Congress. He described CCA as ‘one way to deal with it.’ But he also said there were other ways. As I said I never saw him before and maybe he’s always this taciturn. But his comments about CCA were lukewarm at best.

Several times he cautioned against ‘high expectations’ and was >generally very flat and careful in his delivery.

Others have more experience and insight in this but my impression was that if we are to succeed with CCA the thrust is going to come from Congress and that the administration is being very cautious.

For what it’s worth …

1. The National Association of Protection and Advocacy Systems (NAPAS). .I won the “2003 Advocacy Award” from NAPAS and traveled to Washington, DC to receive the award and deliver an acceptance speech.

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But overall she’s a moderate “pragmatist,” in the Obama mold.

Sonia Sotomayor LOLz

The Far-Right Crazy Land Place: As I reported yesterday, Glenn Beck suggested that empathy is bad and can lead to Naziism, so Obama’s “empathetic” judicial nominees should be rejected.  Sean Hannity called  her a “radical.” Rush Limbaugh compared her to David Duke.   Some are concerned how “platos de arroz, gandoles y perni,” her Puerto Rican foods, will affect her judging, and Jeffrey Rosen in The New Republic allowed an anonymous source to attack Sotomayor as “not that smart” (because, obviously, doofuses can graduate summa cum laude from Princeton).

The corpse-esque visage of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell takes the podium (alongside Sen. Ensign and Sen. Cornyn) to demand that Supreme Court appointees only show empathy for state authorities and multinational corporations

With the public opinion of Sotomayor high (polls show 45% of likely voters saying the Senate should confirm her, and only 29% who say they should not) this process will be more about trying the Republicans than her. How badly will they shoot themselves in the foot?

Bush holding his phone upside-down, and the caption "You're Doing It Wrong"

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Glenn Beck is stupid.

Several weeks ago, I slapped down an idiotic routine from Beck, and now, he’s at it again.

This time, he’s making outrageous comments and going completely off the rails about new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

The rallying cry of the Republicans against Obama’s nominations has been “EMPATHY IS BAD!!!”   This from the same group that spent the last three decades beating us over the head with their holy book that commands love and empathy.  They don’t want empathetic judges! They want automatons that will apply the LETTER OF THE LAW without “gay” things like “feelings” or “considering the situation.” And if you break away from this particular party line, you’re THE ENEMY, on par with Hitler.

Beck cites Hitler example to state that “empathy leads you to very bad decisions”

Right, Glenn, when I think of empathy, the first person that comes to mind is HITLER.

Glenn suggests that Hitler’s extermination program to cull people with disabilities (he calls it out by name, Action T-4) was borne of empathy, and thus no judge with empathy should be on the bench.

Hitler’s euthanasia program had nothing to do with “mercy” or “ending suffering,” and everything to do with their sicko “racial hygiene” policies to achieve a “pure” master race.  The notion that the Nazis were “empathetic”–does he think there’s something warm and fuzzy about old Adolf?–puts Mr. Beck decidedly aboard the Crazy Train.

Beck has focused his show lately on beating the drum against empathy.  In a very unfortunate move, he mocked people wanting diversity in our system, joking, “we need a blind, deaf, handicapped Asian woman!” for the Supreme Court (source). He just has to continue his tradition of mocking disability.

And he really misunderstood the Hebrew Bible.  He tried to make a point, and really failed. Dude, you’re doing it wrong.

YES, King Shlomo was empathetic! Because he knew that by pretending to expose the baby to danger, the real mother would reveal herself, and the dispute would be settled. Come on. Someone who recovered from alcoholism through Mormonism should know a lot more about the Bible than that.

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PaulCanning forwards an urgent request from IRAQI LGBT:

IRAQI LGBT started to establish a network of safe houses inside Iraq in March 2006.

As of today, we have only one safe house, we had to consider closing down three of them in the last couple of months, because we are unable to keep paying the rent and other expenses.

The members of our group inside Iraq urgently need funds to open at least five safe houses. These funds will allow us to keep the five safe houses running, and provide safety, shelter, food and many other needs for our LGBT friends inside Iraq. Any funds we receive that go beyond what we need for these five safe houses could be used to open more safe houses in the near future. We desperately need to add more because we have so many urgent cases in other cities. We receive requests for shelter every day, but we are not able to help yet.

Source: http://paulcanning.blogspot.com/2009/05/support-safe-houses-project-for-lgbt.html

In recent months, Iraq’s mullahs have directed a vicious purge of gay Iraqis. Evidently, the Sadrist movement (who have plenty of supporters within the current regime) and the Iraqi government reached an agreement, and if gays aren’t simply shot by militiamen, they are jailed, executed, or tortured to death by the authorities. Many have died via extrajudicial execution, while others were officially imprisoned and executed by hanging. Still others (about 200 in Baghdad) are on death row awaiting hanging.

Activists will protest for the human rights of LGBT Iraqis Sunday outside President Obama’s home in Chicago, and implore him to act.

This year in Chicago, the Gay Liberation Network (GLN) is organizing the city’s IDAHO event as a protest against the Obama administration’s continuing silence about rampant anti-gay violence in U.S.-occupied Iraq. The protest will take place at 2 PM, Sunday, May 17th outside of the Obamas’ Chicago residence at the corner of Hyde Park Boulevard (5100 S.) and Greenwood (1100 E.).

Over the past month, several news outlets have reported an escalating, officially sanctioned campaign to torture and execute gays in Iraq, promoted both by Shi’ite clerics and by the Shi’ite-dominated government which is closely allied with the United States.

As the New York Times reported April 7, “In the past two months, the bodies of as many as 25 boys and men suspected of being gay have turned up in the huge [Baghdad] Shiite enclave of Sadr City, the police and friends of the dead say. Most have been shot, some multiple times. Several have been found with the word ‘pervert’ in Arabic on notes attached to their bodies, the police said.” And as the Huffington Post reported May 3rd, “According to Iraqis and human rights workers interviewed for this post, some sort of understanding was reached between the Iraqi government and the Mahdi Army to ‘cleanse’ Iraq of homosexuals.”

Tortures committed reportedly include gluing the anuses of gay men shut, and then force-feeding them diarrhea-inducing medications which cause agonizing pain followed by death.

Back in 2005, the country’s leading Shi’ite cleric said that gays and lesbians should be “punished, in fact, killed” and that “the people should be killed in the worst, most severe way of killing.” After some protests this language was removed from the cleric’s website, and the anti-gay campaign appeared to subside.

However, over the past month, the campaign in Iraq to murder gays has ramped up again as “Sadr City’s Muslim clerics have reportedly urged the faithful to destroy homosexuality in Iraqi society and police have undertaken an effort to arrest and jail gay men,” said United Press International.

Source: LGBT asylum news: Chicago protest about anti-gay pogram in Iraq

Nick’s Crusade, strongly believing that disability rights activists shouldn’t be stuck in their traditional “silos,” but should be supporting the inalienable human rights of all people, endorses this protest Sunday. Obama should take heed, and, if he can’t pull strings in Baghdad, at the very least he could grant asylum in the U.S. to those who are now hiding in fear.

I don’t have any money (I know; I’m a charitable case myself) but if I did, helping LGBT Iraqis who’re running for their lives is a very worthy cause.    For more information, see the IRAQI LGBT blog.

Regardless of your opinions on the gay issue, if you have friends and family that are gay (I do) and wouldn’t want them killed, you should pay attention to the persecution of gays around the world, and raise awareness.

Nick

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It’s a work in progress, so please comment and suggest changes or additions.

Nick’s Crusade Statement of Inalienable Rights

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Marion Barry, who won a City Council seat after he lost the the Mayor’s office amid a drug scandal, was the only councilman to cast a “no” vote.

He warned of an African-American uprising.

“All hell is going to break lose,” Barry said while speaking to reporters. “We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this.”

Source

I’m totally cool with free speech opposing these policies (“I don’t agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”) and peaceful protests should always be protected.  But threatening insurrection really goes beyond acceptable, and begins to cross over into dark and violent territory.

This made me realize something. This is the same violent homophobia we’ve seen from African countries and some Afro-Caribbean nations like Jamaica.  For people of African descent of such disparate locations, backgrounds and situations to respond so similarly to gays, this stuff must be embedded deeply in Africans’ cultural DNA, their collective memory.

Did you know that 38 African countries (a supermajority) have laws banning homosexuality?  Four of those (Mauritania, northern Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia, all Islamic states) impose the death penalty on anyone found to be gay, while the rest sentence gays to pay fines, go to prison or labor camps, sometimes for over a decade.¹

West Africa

When the Episcopal Church USA ordained an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire, it effectively shattered the Anglican Communion, with most African churches breaking away, and some dioceses in the US joining the African provinces.²    The Anglican Church of Nigeria, the worldwide Communion’s second-most populous province, issued a particularly pointed statement in 2006, affirming their “commitment to the total rejection of the evil of homosexuality which is a perversion of human dignity and encourages the [Nigerian] National Assembly to ratify the Bill prohibiting the legality of homosexuality.”

Early this month in Senegal, Muslims exhumed the body of a man rumored to be gay from an Islamic cemetery.  His family reburied him, only to find his corpse again dug up and dumped in front of their home the next day.  His family has now interred him in a hidden grave.

Jamaica, mostly populated by ex-slaves (forcibly) brought over from Senegal and Nigeria by the way, is widely seen by human rights activists as the most homophobic place on Earth.  Their current ruling party rose to power in 2001 with a campaign theme song about murdering gay men, after beginning a rumor that the incumbent Prime Minister was gay.   Popular music in Jamaica is obsessed with anti-gay lyrics

Per Jamaican law, convinced homosexuals face up to 10 years in prison.  But the police also love extrajudicial punishment of gays, and often beat them in public, in concert with vigilantes or on their own.  Angry neighborhood mobs routinely assault and/or chase gays out of town, forcing them to abandon their homes and belongings.

One man described how six men from a “garrison community” (poor, inner-city communities controlled by either of Jamaica’s two main political parties) blocked a road to beat a local gay man:
“The crowd stood around watching, chanting “battyman, battyman, battyman” before gathering around him as he lay on the sidewalk. The crowd beat, punched and kicked him. They threw water from the gutter and garbage on him, all the while shouting “battyman, battyman.” Then they dragged him down the road for half a kilometre. They shouted “battyman fi’ dead.” As I stood across the street I realised there was nothing I could do to help him. Some mothers were actually in tears at what they were witnessing but there was nothing that they could do either. . The crowd was saying “Give him to us! Let us kill him! He’s a battyman!”

The story is typical. Once a person’s sexuality becomes known to family or community, they are at risk. Amnesty International has interviewed many people who have been forced to leave their areas after being publicly vilified, threatened or attacked on suspicion of being gay. They face homelessness, isolation or worse.

Source: Amnesty International media release: Battybwoys affi dead (“Faggots have to die”): Action against Homophobia in Jamaica, 17 May 04

Amnesty also gave an example of a recent incident reported in a national newspaper, where a father encouraged a mob to beat up his son, who he suspected was gay, while he looked on smiling.³

What’s up with all the anti-gay hate from people of African  ancestry?   Obviously there are plenty of Africans friendly to gays (I get that no ethnicity is monolithic), but I can’t ignore the prevalence of a virulent, violent homophobia among African-descended communities that exceeds anything I’ve seen elsewhere.  You just don’t see this level of violence and hate against gays this often in Europe or East Asia.

Why is this the case?   What’s the origin of these attitudes?  These feelings have to come from somewhere.

Is it due to the influence of Islamic norms on West Africa for over a millennium?

Is it part of pre-Biblical African culture?

What is it?  (please chime in in the comment section if you have a theory)

My take:

One of the aides here from Jamaica recently told me, “men not supposed to cry.”

My theory is that, perhaps, when places experience severe poverty and day-to-day material insecurity, it shifts the culture to demand more manliness, the images of self-reliance and security.  There is no room for men who don’t project that image, who look or act outside the most uber-masculine traits.

It’s like what Judith Warner wrote when discussing homophobia in America’s schools:

It’s weird, isn’t it, that in an age in which the definition of acceptable girlhood has expanded, so that desirable femininity now encompasses school success and athleticism, the bounds of boyhood have remained so tightly constrained? And so staunchly defended: Boys avail themselves most frequently of epithets like “fag” to “police” one another’s behavior and bring it back to being sufficiently masculine when someone steps out of line, Barbara J. Risman, a sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, found while conducting extensive interviews in a southeastern urban middle school in 2003 and 2004. “Boys were showing each other they were tough. They were afraid to do anything that might be called girlie,” she told me this week. “It was just like what I would have found if I had done this research 50 years ago. They were frozen in time.”

Pascoe spent 18 months embedded in a Northern California working-class high school, in a community where factory jobs had gone south after the signing of Nafta, and where men who’d once enjoyed solid union salaries were now cobbling together lesser-paid employment at big-box stores. “These kids experience a loss of masculine privilege on a day-to-day level,” she said. “While they didn’t necessarily ever experience the concrete privilege their fathers and grandfathers experienced, they have the sense that to be a man means something and is incredibly important. These boys don’t know how to be that something. Their pathway to masculinity is unclear. To not be a man is to not be fully human and that’s terrifying.”

Source: “Dude, You’ve Got Problems” at Judith Warner’s NYTimes.com blog

These phenomena are in overdrive in societies that have experienced extremely impoverished, subsistence lifestyles since time immemorial.  The undercurrent in society becomes that “if men aren’t men (in a certain way), we’ll lose everything.”  Hopelessness and lack of opportunity for advancement just magnifies this.   And then when  you add the layer that, in the culture, men can’t gain honor and esteem from battle anymore, and few from riches, so the way they get honor and esteem increasingly focuses on how many women they can get; and that means even less room for gays.

That’s my theory anyway.  What’s yours?

It’d be great if everyone in the world could heed these true words from Barack Obama, given at Martin Luther King’s church in Atlanta for MLK Day ‘08: “if we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll acknowledge that our own community has not always been true to King’s vision of a beloved community. We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them….Unity is the great need of the hour – the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it’s the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.   I’m not talking about a budget deficit. I’m not talking about a trade deficit. I’m not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans. I’m talking about a moral deficit. I’m talking about an empathy deficit. I’m taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

Barack Obama speaking at MLK's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, for MLK Day '08

Nick

Footnotes

1. Source: Wikipedia: LGBT Rights in Africa
2. Source: Wikipedia; Anglican Realignment
3. Source: Wikipedia: LGBT Rights in Jamaica:: Violence Against Homosexuals

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Transcription (as captioned in the video):

Hello, this is Nick Dupree for the for the Nick’s Crusade blog. This is my fourth video blog, and today is the 252nd day that I’ve been in an institution because I can’t get access to community services. And it seems that the Obama administration is not going to help us fix this problem — the problem of the institutional bias, where if you need services, they’re not readily available in the community so, so many people end up in expensive institutions, and it’s a lot worse for them, lowers their quality of life, and ends up costing exponentially more. I know in Alabama, it costs a quarter of a million dollars to keep someone in an institution, and it cost $70,000 to give them 24/7 home care. It’s a very stupid financial decision that the government keeps making, and despite all the activism and the years of court decisions that are on our side, we’re still not getting change we can believe in, as Obama says.

It’s even more disturbing, because during the campaign, Obama promised us that he would support the Community Choice Act, which would let people have a choice to live in the community, versus being forced to go into a nursing home, as that’s all the government will pay for.

He promised he’d support the Community Choice Act during the campaign, but yesterday we discovered that the Community Choice Act has been removed from the White House website. The White House website had the Community Choice Act featured on their Disability web page, and now it’s gone. They erased us. They erased what we really needed, and that’s despicable. And now, they’re going forward with health reform initiatives, without addressing long-term care. They’re going to reform health care without addressing one of the largest expenses of health care, which is long-term care. They say “we don’t have time”. With this kind of expense, how can we afford to wait? How can we afford, morally, to segregate part of our population, and keep them trapped in nursing homes with no choice? It’s not moral.

I advise you to go to the website of the President’s health reform initiative, HealthReform.gov. There’s no mention of long-term care, not a word whatsoever. There’s no mention of nursing homes, there’s no mention of home care, and there’s definitely no mention of the Community Choice Act. Go to HealthReform.gov and see for yourself. We’re not included, and our segregation is continuing unabated. Nobody notices us. That’s something that really has to change.

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There’s a dark part of America’s past (and present) that few are aware of: government taking children from their families and placing them in institutions.

It usually goes like this: doctors and social workers identify a disabled child, and advise the parents to send the child to an institution to get “the best of care,” from “the experts” and “be with kids like them.” Sometimes they’d recommend parents “move on with your lives.” In some cases, most of them decades ago, children were made wards of the state and whisked away from their families, for “their own good.” We’re talking about young kids here, 5-10 years old, many of which had mild disabilities, perhaps CP, MR or autism, not needing intensive supports at all.

That’s where the ablism comes in. Just because these children are different, or need some help, they’re assumed to need locking up in institutions. The doctors and social workers aren’t aware that “the experts” they’re letting raise these kids are the nurses and aides most likely to resent disability and the needs it involves (more work for them) and most likely to brutally restrict and control kids (to avert any possibility of trouble or more work for them). That means the kids will be horribly stunted: boys will never able to touch a girl’s hair, girls never able to “play doctor” with the boy across the street, and no one able to sneak an extra cookie (each meal is strictly controlled). And if they find a way to do these anyway, their reaching of these developmental milestones will be demonized; they’ll learn to hate their humanity, hate the needs and trouble their disabilities cause the staff.  They grow up in what’s essentially a special type of prison, where the natural experimentation crucial for human growth is banned. Not only are they segregated physically, they’re segregated from normal human contact, from basic experiences, from growth, from life.  While I wasn’t raised in an institution, I was exposed to this mentality, plenty. Special ed aides would grab my manual wheelchair and pull against me spinning the wheels, to prevent me from straying from them (and interacting with other children) during recess, to ensure my “safety.”

••••

Each afternoon, at the city rehab hospital I live in, a yellow school bus pulls up out front. The bus is dropping off the institutionalized children who live here. You can’t help but wonder, “what will these children grow up to become?”  In my experience, from meeting those who moved to the community after the local institution (or “developmental center”) closed following the landmark 30-year-long Wyatt v. Stickney desegregation lawsuit, is that you can take the person out of the institution, but you can’t take the institution out of the person; their mind will, to an extent, forever be institutionalized.  They will never question authority figures, or take actions without the consent of an authority figure.  Some who got out are leading successful lives, with jobs and many things they could’ve never had in an institution (a great argument why more deinstitutionalization needs to happen NOW) but decades of success were robbed from them.  Their development was stunted, their independence has been stripped, and their mild mental differences became serious impairments, now requiring aides (they should maybe rename “developmental centers” “regression centers.”) It’s how they were trained, to be dependent.

America has set up this enormous infrastructure of segregation for people with disabilities, and it’s wrong. Why do we do this? It’s rooted in outdated, ablist ideas.  Institutionalization began in earnest in the 19th century, and picked up and expanded widely with the technology of the 20th century.  It was based on the false notions of that era, like the need to isolate the disabled in institutions far from the community in order to keep contagions at bay, put the vulnerable under care of “experts,” and the theory that “they’ll be happier around their own kind.”  The deeply-ingrained concept that “you’re different, therefore you should be segregated” is the pinnacle of bigoted ablist thinking, and it’s the underpinning of all this stuff.  And even with all these theories disproven, too many old institutions remain, sustained by inertia, special interest groups, and the lack of community-based alternatives.

It’s hard for me to blame the parents for consenting to send their kids to this fate when there are few, if any, community-based options to turn to. With little support, and confusion about what to do, it’s not surprising widespread institutionalization has happened. The state forces parents into a grim Faustian Bargain of necessity, something way too close to The Kinder Transport for America, forced to choose between sending children away, or leave them to some uncertain, horrible fate trying to raise them with no supports, no safety net.

Some families are now trying to find children lost to the gulags decades ago.

People magazine: Kevin Hopkins holds a photo of his lost sister

From People magazine:

(Newstands only; article not available on the magazine’s website.)

Families across the country are searching for loved ones with disabilities who were sent away to institutions years ago, often without warning or explanation.

Kevin Hopkins, 53, of Springfield, Virginia, is seeking his stepsister Janet, who was sent to an institution 42 years ago. “She was my best friend,” he said. “I just wish I could know where she was and see her again.”

Shawna Gagnon, 49, of Montgomery, Alabama said her sister Zena (Xena) was taken to a California hospital 43 years ago “where people hollered and were tied to the beds.”

Filmmaker Jeff Daly, creator of the documentary “Where’s Molly?”, has been working to find family links for the estimated 250,000 Americans who live in group homes or state institutions with no family contacts. He and the nonprofit ArcLink have built a relative search database that has already fostered more than 100 reunions.

Source: PatriciaEBauer.com: The Endlless Search

More institutions are closing under mounting allegations of human rights violations, but we need the community resources to make these outdated ablist models obsolete forever.  It’s obvious that the best environment for children is a natural family setting, but too many families are STILL forced to choose institutions, especially in the South (like my old home state of Alabama) where there are few community-based options to turn to.  The best thing for the child, would be to fund attendants from the community to assist the family in caring for the child in the home.  But home and community-based services (HCBS) are purely optional for state Medicaid agencies, not a mandated service under Medicaid law.  Meanwhile, it’s mandatory to fund the huge institutions that cost much more (often double or triple the expense) and (almost inevitably) neglect, set back and stifle human growth and potential.  The harsh inhumanity involved, demands change.  We are complicit in our government’s policies, and must demand better.  It’s time for the Community Choice Act, which would make providing home care mandatory for Medicaid too, and give people a real choice.  LET MY PEOPLE GO!!!

"LET MY PEOPLE GO!!" on silk, from jewishbazaar.com

A CCA Banner, from Mark Boatman's Blog

An ADAPT activist holds an "Our Homes NOT Nursing Homes" sign, at the "DUH City" Action, September 2008

Nick

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The answer is this: I don’t know how to consistently write things that AREN’T about injustice. I’m driven to right the wrongs around the world, like the fire drives a locomotive. I’m, at my core, an activist for social justice; and I run a blog about fighting injustice. Injustice is depressing.

And I don’t think we should look away from injustice. It’s wrong to turn your back on others’ pain.

Obama was right when he said:

Obama warned against what he called the dangers of silence, saying that every day, somewhere in the world people must resist the urge to turn away from scenes of horror, hate, injustice and intolerance.

All people, he said, must “fight the impulse to turn the channel” from distressing TV images of suffering, the sort of inhumanity known not only in the time of Nazi Germany, but more recently in Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Darfur.

Obama declared that people cannot wrap themselves “in the false comfort that others’ sufferings are not our own.” The president also called for people to “make a habit of empathy, to recognize ourselves in each other.”

Source: AP: Obama: World’s people must resist hatred, racism

“But Nick, my life is happy. Why bring myself down with all the pain and injustice in the world?”

The fallacy behind this is the assumption that you’re somehow separate from the young refugee in Sri Lanka or the Janjaweed rapists in Darfur or the unethical investment bankers on Wall Street or the hungry children of unemployed single mothers in Ohio. We are connected to everyone, we share common ancestors, one people, united, part of one universal force.

Those protesting injustice GET IT.

We are ONE. As John Donne put it:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Meditation 17, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

"it tolls for thee...."

Nick

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from the NY Daily News: graffiti on the walls boarding up St. John's Hospital

New York City’s hospitals, already strained and overcrowded, are experiencing a spree of closings, felled by the economic crisis. St. John’s Queens Hospital and Mary Immaculate Hospital have gone bankrupt and boarded up the entrances.  This leaves Queens-dwellers with few options, and those few options in an awful overcrowding situation.

“It’s a real failure of government to set priorities and manage them properly,” Gioia said. “They throw up their hands when the money runs out and say, ‘What can we do?’ That’s not good enough.”

Mayor Bloomberg called the closures “sad” and said the city has to do more with less in these tough economic times.

“Having said that, there is no reason for us to … walk away from our basic functions of government,” he said, adding that the Fire Department will dispatch more ambulances in Queens and for other hospitals to fill the void.

Carlos Quiles, a nurse who lost his job at St. John’s, said the next best option for care in Queens is Elmhurst Hospital Center, which is already filled to capacity.

“I can’t understand the wisdom behind closing the hospitals,” he said. “The politicians clearly have no understanding of the ramifications.”

Source: NY Daily News: Councilman Eric Gioia rips hospital closings in Queens

That nurse is right, the politicians don’t get it. They’re not envisioning the overcrowding and wait times this will cause. I’ve never heard of a hospital here that isn’t packed, we’re already seeing ER wait times in excess of 8 hours in some of the city-run hospitals, and you suddenly remove nearly a thousand beds from the equation?? That’s really not gonna be pretty.

In Manhattan, Cabrini Medical Center had to close. There’s been lots of talk about that here in the hospital I live in, because we’ve taken in some of Cabrini’s refugee respiratory therapists. The gossip now is about which hospital is next in line at the guillotine (some say Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn won’t make it) and whether any of the doctors and nurses in my home hospital will be safe. “I don’t know if we’re safe,” my doctor said, sighing.

Nick

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Cartoon by John Darkow, The Columbia Daily Tribune, Missouri

Americans are fed up with banks double dipping off them, pulling down billions in bailouts from taxpayers, while also squeezing us with increased fees and interest.

The backlash is now being expressed in Congress:

BAILED OUT BANKS

U.S. banks that issue credit cards have received more than $120 billion in taxpayer funds since October, money the government has asked them to use to expand lending.

But with U.S. credit card defaults at record highs, lenders are trying to protect themselves by tightening credit limits and closing accounts, actions that have infuriated lawmakers and consumers, and even triggered an inquiry by the New York state attorney general.

U.S. lawmakers also angry that the same banks, such as Bank of America, Citi and Chase, with big credit card operations, charge excessive interest rates and fees while getting bailouts from taxpayers who use the cards.

Source: Reuters: U.S. lawmakers consider credit card reform proposals.

How far should Congress go?

Nick

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I don’t consider most of the right-wing criticism of Obama to be very valid, but I do have my list of beefs with Obama, like the lame inaction over Darfur, ignoring the previous administration’s illegal acts, denying due process to prisoners, and more.  I’m also deeply skeptical of Obama’s Afghanistan plan (as I discussed here).

But something else disturbs me that is rarely mentioned: the problem of too many cooks.  Obama is adding a “czar” for every occasion, and new offices for many of the czars.  It’s making an already overly complex and large bureaucracy even moreso, and leaving the system even more byzantine for successor governments.

byzantine

adjective

…

3.
highly complex or intricate and occasionally devious; “the Byzantine tax structure”; “Byzantine methods for holding on to his chairmanship”; “convoluted legal language”; “convoluted reasoning”; “the plot was too involved”; “a knotty problem”; “got his way by labyrinthine maneuvering”; “Oh, what a tangled web we weave”- Sir Walter Scott; “tortuous legal procedures”; “tortuous negotiations lasting for months”

From: byzantine – dictionary.com.

Ridiculous bureaucracy, of which I am an (all too familiar) opponent, is dubbed “byzantine” because of what happened to the Byzantine Empire, with its enormous and complicated legal codes only understood by a cadre of royal bureaucrats.  When the law is only understood by the few, that breeds corruption.  When government is too huge and complex to be easily accessed by the public, it, paradoxically, reduces government’s functioning and power.  The Byzantine Empire, actually a great milestone in cultural and administrative achievement, collapsed when it became too weakened by its own complexity and corruption to resist invaders (though there’s a lot more to it).

I don’t want the U.S. government to be “byzantine.”  Clinton tried fixing some of this with his “Reinventing Government” initiative (he usually gets no cred for this). They really did reduce some government forms from 30+ pages to 1 page, disbanded Reagan’s personal furniture maker and bought from Office Depot instead, and “cut the fat” from a lot of departments. They didn’t make much headway on consolidating and downsizing agencies like they wanted to, because of fierce resistance from bureaucrats prepared to defend their jobs Thermopylae-style, and they were occupied by other things (subpoenas for the White House xmas card list, etc.)  I would like to see “Reinventing Government” on steroids…radically streamlining federal agencies and attacking waste.  I want Obama to use an iron fist to override administrators defending their sacred bureaucratic turf, and radically consolidate our insanely duplicative, bloated bureaucracy. Dept. of Treasury and Dept. of Commerce should be one agency, for example. The Dept. of Homeland Security (Bush’s massive expansion of government) should be abolished and whatever is actually useful within it would be consolidated into the FBI and other existing agencies.

But streamlining is not the direction Obama’s going in.  Instead, we’ve got the newly created Office of Health Reform headed by Health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle, Urban affairs czar Adolfo Carrion Jr., Economics czar Paul A. Volcker, Regulatory czar Cass R. Sunstein, Climate Change czar Carol Browner, Border czar Alan Bersin, and more.  And, of course, a government performance czar (Jeffrey Zients) to help manage all the czar (“czar of czars!”)

Aside from the fact that a parade of “czars” in the White House may make the vehemently anti-monarchist Founding Fathers rise from their graves in a rage, triggering the much anticipated zombie apocalypse, there are serious concerns that “czars” greatly reduce transparency and consolidate power in the White House.

Zombie Jefferson will be the first to go on a rampage, devouring the brains of the innocent

Cabinet officers are subject to Senate confirmation and oversight; czars are not.  Czars are hired directly by the president (“serve at the pleasure of the president,” always an odd, dirty-sounding phrase) and can refuse to provide documents or public testimony based on “executive privilege.”  Senator Robert Byrd raised his objections in a letter to Obama.  Czars “inhibit openness and transparency, and reduce accountability,” Byrd said.  “The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the constitutional system of checks and balances.”

My biggest concern is what this monster turns into 10-20 years down the line.

Known for their intellect and experience, these appointees could become rivals or advocates of competing ideas that could hinder White House operations if not skillfully coordinated.

Administration officials will have to “watch and see when it starts to become dysfunctional,” said Stephen Hess, a Brookings Institution scholar who has held several top government jobs going back to 1959. “It’s a very high risk because you’re adding without subtracting.”

When naming Volcker to his team, Obama could have scrapped either Romer’s or Summers’ agency, and divided the advisory duties between two groups, Hess said. “Instead, he adds a third.”

Paul Light, a specialist on government organization at New York University, said, “They’re kind of addicted to czars right now. I think they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

Obama obviously disagrees. He has signaled plans to name Bronx politician Adolfo Carrion Jr. to a new White House post coordinating urban housing and education policies. And he has named Nancy Killefer to the new job of “chief performance officer,” which oversees many agencies.

He is hardly the first president to have a close aide coordinating several agencies. For years, a White House-based national security adviser has tried to put together information from the military, State Department and intelligence agencies.

But Obama’s creation of new policy czars and special envoys is pushing White House centralization to new levels.

Some government veterans say the strategy can help a president shape policy with minimum interference from Cabinet agencies. Under the right circumstances, a White House czar “can cut through some of the interagency disagreements that slow down and clog the policymaking process,” said Bill Galston, a University of Maryland professor and former Clinton White House aide.

But the system can be cumbersome, rife with jealousies and hampered by conflicting efforts and messages, Galston said. To make it work, he said, Obama “will have to be a way-above-average president,” which he has the “intellect and temperament” to be.

Source: AP: Obama’s White House: Big posts, overlapping tasks

Obama likely has above-average skills.  But what about his successors?  What will America become?

Nick

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Cartoon by R.J. Matson

How is Obama’s Afghanistan plan supposed to work, when similar plans were EPIC FAIL for the Soviets, British, Alexander the Great and others?

Former CIA Mideast operative Robert Baer (played by George Clooney in Syriana) writes in TIME Magazine:

The Pashtun are a big, sprawling, insulated tribal people. There are some 40 million of them, but no one knows for sure because the central governments in Kabul and Islamabad have never felt safe enough to take a proper census. The Taliban are overwhelmingly Pashtun. The Pashtun have never had their own country, but they share a common language and identity.

And most importantly, they’re willing to shed their blood for each other. The Pashtun have a long history of uniting to face a common, external threat. They held up Alexander the Great for years — if for no other reason than pure belligerence. Something like that seems to be happening today. In February, the Taliban organizations in Pakistan and Afghanistan agreed to put aside their differences, and combine forces to fight NATO in Afghanistan. What incited the alliance was the Obama Administration’s plans to send an additional 17,000 troops.

Baer believes the only way that we can glean a modicum of success from this nearly eight-year, open-ended war, is if we focus on the foreign al-Qaida elements, root them out, come to an accommodation with the Taliban/Pashtun tribes, and exit the region as soon as possible.

The British learned the hard way, after three unsuccessful wars in “Pashtunistan” (one campaign was chronicled in great detail by a young Winston Churchill), that accommodation with the Pashtun tribes (also called Pathans or Pukhtoons by the Brits) is the only option. The British eventually cut a deal with the Pashtuns to leave them alone, and, in exchange, the tribes would protect British India from northern invaders. Even after the western provinces of British India became Pakistan in 1947, the Pakistanis continued the arrangement to leave the Pashtuns their autonomy.

I feel the president, as well as the voting public, are woefully uninformed about the enemies we’re facing. Alexander the Great couldn’t conquer Afghanistan. The British, much more adept imperialists than we are (they make the neo-con attempts at empire look positively milquetoast) could never pacify the region, even given extraordinary brutality. The Soviets, who had the might of modern military technology (tanks, an air force, helicopters, missiles, etc.) on their side, and often resorted to “scorched earth” tactics, nonetheless suffered a complete defeat in Afghanistan. The Russians are chuckling at us now as we follow in their footsteps and sink into the quagmire.

No nation-state has ever controlled the Pashtun tribes. The Pashtun are the largest tribal society still intact today, and will follow their traditional network of clan leaders, local headmen and tribal elders, not a parliament or president. For rural Pashtuns, decrees from leaders hundreds of miles away aren’t relevant compared to the decisions of the local jirga. And nothing will trump Pashtunwali, the ancient code of honor Pashtuns live by; the reason they’ve never given up bin Laden is that they can’t break the rule to protect guests seeking asylum (just as Lot protected visiting angels from a mob), no matter the rewards offered to do so. Another part of Pashtunwali: balad, or revenge. Pashtuns must exact revenge for any insult for 1000 years, on the offender or his nearest male relative, until a resolution is reached.

Too many Americans JUST DON’T GET what we’re up against. The chances that the U.S. will fare better than the British did are slim and none. We need education, education, education. Unless the West gets wise about other peoples and their histories, we’ll continue to fail.

Vizzini's wisdom: "never get involved in a land war in Asia!"

“NEVER GET INVOLVED IN A LAND WAR IN ASIA!”

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But this quote from TIME Magazine proves to me, it’s NOT a choice:

I don’t care about the militias anymore because they’re going to kill me anyway — today, tomorrow or the day after.
– SA’AD, a gay man in Sadr City, Iraq, on a spate of murders that has targeted the city’s gays; 25 people have been killed during the past two months.

If gayness were a choice, there’d be no gays left in Iraq–the executions of 400 gay Iraqis (and 4,000 gay Iranians) would’ve forced everyone into strict heterosexuality. Instead, gays are still gay, and some are moving from safehouse to safehouse, dodging religious militias and the police.

It’s not a choice. People are able to do almost anything to survive (even eat their friends) but they can’t change who they are. Even when death squads are knocking on the door.

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Since I’ll soon be living near the WTC site, I felt obligated to blog about this.  Personally, I don’t really care what they name it (“a rose by any other name…”) but I am interested in the outcry the change has precipitated, and am curious about the whole thing.

View of the new WTC from across the Hudson river

Rendering of what the new WTC will look like, 2005 redesign

Why did they dump the name “Freedom Tower?”

Here’s my theory: the World Trade Center authorities just announced their first lease (to a group other than the U.S. government). They are selling two floors to the Chinese, to create a Chinese business center.  Problem: no Chinese businessmen could find “Freedom Tower,” because “freedom” is one of the blocked terms on Chinese search engines (if you blog that word in China, it’ll be erased, or “harmonized” by state censors).  In order for it to sell space to Chinese tenants, the building had to have a new name.  That’s what I think happened.

Nick

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Most recently, in response to an International Criminal Court (ICC) warrant for his arrest on war crimes charges, Bashir ejected all the aid workers from Sudan so that the remaining refugees are left without food or water and will die.

This weekend, the Arab League rewarded Bashir with the red carpet treatment at their summit in Qatar and a public hug and kiss session. They also drafted a resolution rejecting the ICC warrant for his arrest and continue to protect this wanted criminal.

Sudanese President Bashir Laughing It Up At The Arab League Summit

Bashir Laughing It Up At The Arab League Summit

It’s unbelievable that a war criminal of this magnitude would be so embraced by his Arab neighbors, and allowed to happily jet outside his country unfettered. Ugh! Arab League, you have forever lost credibility in my eyes.

Nick

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Here’s my take:

A big part of this whole Wall Street collapse are something called “adjustable-rate mortgages” (ARMs).  Especially problematic are ARMs that “balloon” in cost two or three years down the line.  These mortgage companies sold this crap using the first few years’ “teaser rates” of 1% or 2% interest to lure in lots of new customers, many of whom didn’t read the fine print and didn’t see the 10% (or higher) price hike coming.  When so many borrowers couldn’t pay the ballooning interest, the house of cards fell down, taking the financial sector (and the world economy) down with it.

Yesterday I saw someone ask, “since interest rates have been low, why would anyone sell ARMs instead of fixed-rate mortgages?”  The answer has to do with projected revenues.  That is, these companies sold lots of “balloon” ARMs (mortgages that increase years later) so that they could bundle them into securities, go to Wall Street and brag about their securities’ “projected revenue,” which is a big part of what determines prices.
“Look!  In ‘09, earnings on our securities will TRIPLE!!  BUY BUY BUY!!!”

A Dilbert cartoon from Dilbert.com

Selling “balloon ARMs” was motivated by greed, and the market’s insatiable appetite for these mortgage-backed securities after Greenspan lowered interest during the post-9/11 slump, and thus the return on safe Treasury Bills, to 2%.  An unintended consequence of that was that it drove investors to desperately seek out another safe investment (with better return than 2%).  Pension funds, 401k managers, mutual funds, banking chains, investment banks and even New York City’s MTA, FLOCKED to mortgage-backed securities.  Moody’s rated them AAA!!  STRONG BUY!!  And hey, if something goes wrong, the losses were insured with credit default swaps from AIG!!   Why worry?  BUY BUY BUY!  Sell even more mortgages and create more and more and more securities to sell!  People made a fortune doing this.

Problem is, the “adjusted” rates led to THIS, too many mortgages defaulting.

Around 24% of subprime ARMs were delinquent in 2006… it’s likely much worse now.  The securities held up by these mortgages collapsed, becoming the “toxic assets” that are now all over the news and causing the economy to tank.   EPIC FAIL.

Yes, the Treasury Department is going to help finance the purchase of these worthless assets (congratulations, American taxpayer!)  The plan is to pull them off Corporate America’s balance sheets to try and keep the financial sector afloat.

But I think we’ve let the greedy elite build this particular Tower of Babel so high (a lot like Yertle the Turtle) that it crashing down is completely unavoidable, and we’re essentially screwed, no matter what the government does or doesn’t do.

What goes up, must come down.

Nick

Later this week in the “Nick’s Crusade” blog: federal regulators missed an awful lot of chicanery; what happened?

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But what have you observed first hand? Is it bad where you are? How do you think the economic crisis will effect you? How do you think it will effect people with disabilities?  Will we be the first thrown under the bus, as was proposed in California?

Here’s what I’ve observed first-hand. In New York, one of the pillars of our economy is the financial sector, and it has collapsed.  The crisis has forced the state to cut services. A lot of people are upset about the state and city budget cuts; a protest at city hall 25,000-people-strong definitely made my girlfriend’s travel more interesting. At the hospital I currently live in, they are clamping down on expenses to ride out the cuts.  For fiscal year 08-09 there is a hiring freeze (which means when my favorite person on staff moved to Canada, they can’t replace her), they made it harder to get overtime, supply orders have been scaled back, the employee uniform stipend was cut to nearly nothing, and their customary free Thanksgiving turkeys were canceled (the latter two don’t bother me, as they never would’ve existed in Alabama anyway).  My doctor thinks that the South Campus ultimately won’t survive.  And the doctors and nurses are buzzing about the startling hospital closures in Queens and wondering who’s next.

Granted, I’ve not seen outside the hospital walls (and I’m eager to check out the city and report back) but so far, what I’ve seen first hand hasn’t been that bad.   Not compared to the effect of the devastating cuts that I saw first-hand in Alabama in the late ’90s and early ’00s, that actually caused deaths (when the economy was booming and services should have been increasing).   Is it bad where you are?

As odd as this sounds, I think there are possible upsides to global economic collapse.

The Upsides

With Wall Street cratering, many in the finance and related industries have left the city for higher ground, leading to an unprecedented situation: for once in Manhattan, apartment vacancies are up and rents are down.

Shopping habits have definitely shifted, the era of wanton excess being cool (that should’ve never happened) is finally behind us, and more businesses, desperate for customers, have stopped treating us like crap.  Nothing is devoid of upsides.

What have you witnessed first hand?

Nick

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It’s way past time for this legislation.

Medicaid was passed in 1965, when medical technology was not advanced enough to allow severely disabled people to live at home, so institutionalization, the most costly, elaborate and inconvenient option, is the easiest to get in Medicaid law. The best, newer services (home care) are a long road to get to, whereas they’ll happily give you an express ticket to the most difficult, costliest, dinosaur services (institutionalization). Hospitals and nursing homes strip control from the patient and give it to doctors and professionals “who know best.” If you’re lucky, your institution will be like this, and just be a big inconvenience, but if you’re unlucky, it’ll be like this, and you’ll end up beaten or dead.

Institutions are a failed, outdated model, relevant only in few, narrow situations, and have only remained dominant in the law from bureaucratic inertia (a force stronger than gravity) and corporations greasing Congressmen’s palms. That’s not a good reason to lock millions in The Matrix, preventing them from experiencing real life. It’s way past time to open up the playing field to home care. The CCA does that.

Everyone who cares about human rights should support the CCA. Blog it. Tell your friends. And especially your Congressman.

Nick

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When NBC News abruptly announced that Barack Obama had become the 44th President of the United States, I was watching with my girlfriend. We were yelling with joy. I yelled “VIRGINIA IS BLUE!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE IT! VIRGINIA!! IS! BLUUUUE!!!!!!”

Outside the hospital room door, we could hear the staff shouting in happiness and surprise (one of the very Christian nurse’s aides voted and fasted and prayed to Jesus for this win).

It was an incredible moment of spontaneous elation like I’ve never experienced. Me and my soulmate sharing the excitement of sudden new hope our lives and the lives of all Americans could actually improve was one of the happiest times of my life. I’ll never forget it.

And wow, the tally is amazing…
349 electoral vote OBAMA LANDSLIDE! (and climbing)

This wasn’t remotely close. This is an electoral blowout.

Obama became the first Democrat to win Virginia in 44 years. A black man won the Virginia of Loving v. Virginia infamy. Even my grandfather in Virginia Beach voted Obama.

also
RECORD-SHATTERING YOUTH TURNOUT!!

And, our first post-boomer, post-culture war president.

UNPRECEDENTED CLEAN SWEEP of the midwest.

Obama won Ohio and Indiana …he won Florida and handily flipped (over 60%) several Bush counties in Central FL.
Obama won North Carolina, Virginia, the heart of the Confederacy.

This is a HISTORIC NATIONAL REALIGNMENT.

I’m so lucky and happy I witnessed this moment.

I’m so glad we finally have a president who isn’t openly resented by minorities and the poor (e.g. me).

I’m so glad we have a city-oriented president (this is our first president basing himself directly from a big city since Kennedy in 1960). More and more people live in cities, and our public policy should shift accordingly (more light-rail funding pls, kthx).

And most of all, I’m so glad we finally have a president who is free of the unAmerican can’t do attitude that has metastasized over the past eight years.

Improve health care? Sorry. Can’t do.
Modernize our crumbling infrastructure? Sorry. Can’t do.
Fund research breakthroughs? Sorry. Can’t do.
Finish a war in a shorter time than WWII? Sorry. Can’t do.
Encourage alternative energy sources? Can’t do (unless it’s inefficient corn ethanol, cynically subsidized to placate Iowa caucus interests).
Build an effective levee system? Sorry. Can’t do.

We’re the people who put a man on the moon; we can do anything. Surely we can nation-build in our own country.

Now it can be:
Make health care suck less – YES WE CAN.
End a costly Iraq occupation – YES WE CAN.
Overhaul our infrastructure – YES WE CAN.
Produce green technology and invest in alternative energy – YES WE CAN.
Create lots of good jobs rebuilding infrastructure and making green technology – YES WE CAN.
Shore up some levees – YES WE CAN.

“Anything is possible” – Barack Obama

In 77 days, the Obama Administration begins, and the hard work of making possibilities into realities begins anew.
It won’t be easy to say the least. It will take a LOT of work to get anything good out of this corrupt Congress. But for the first time in my adult life I have hope some good changes can be accomplished.

Let’s get started.

Nick

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Last week I mailed in my absentee ballot and voted for Barack Obama for president.

Why?

Here’s why:

While it’s always a bit difficult for me to vote for one of the two dominant parties (whose incompetence, lack of principle or outright corruption got us in this mess in the first place) I just can’t support any of our current third-party options. All the third-party candidates I’ve seen so far are scumbags, crackpots or extremists on the Lunatic Fringe who I don’t want near the White House, because most of their ideas are incredibly dangerous to the general welfare.

Instead of third-parties, I strongly support this concept: we sane, common sense people must HIJACK both parties and rebuild the system.

Rebuild the system!! Our infrastructure is shamefully decrepit. If you look at infrastructure and train stations in Germany and compare to ones here, you may mistakenly think the Germans won WWII. The people are willing to pay to modernize this country. Americans want to nation-build, but we don’t want to nation-build in Iraq on the other side of the globe anymore, we want to nation-build IN AMERICA. How about giving all the poor people a job rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure? I’ve met very few Americans who want a handout. Most want a good job where they can actually contribute. Let’s create jobs repairing it, and building the transportation network of the future (MagLev anyone?)

Rebuild the system!! For example, a good way to fix the health care crisis would be for a strong supporter of consumer choice and a dogged opponent of profiteering middle-men to take over at Department of HHS and spearhead a total redesign of the system with COMMON SENSE reforms.

Can Obama hijack the party and get stuff done? I’ll be pressuring him as much as I can to start. Amputating both the Clinton and Bush platforms from our politics is a very important first step, and I will give no quarter until I see a full exorcism of those dangerous old ideas.

I’m afraid of old, failed policies hanging around and sapping our country’s strength further. Pro-war “conservatives” do not support the amount of sacrifice required to make their foreign policy plans financially feasible (instead they fight tooth and nail against paying the tab they ran up) which will doom this country to insolvency. They want a grandiose foreign policy, but don’t want to pay for it.

Wars are very expensive, always have been, and always will be. War debt has driven numerous nations to economic collapse (ask the Russians about the Soviet-Afghan war). Read David McCullough’s books on early U.S. history, they make it clear how serious war debt can be. After the Revolutionary War, the United States government had to seize people’s houses to pay off the war debt, which led to armed revolt in Massachusetts. I wish pro-war advocates realized just how financially untenable their “two land wars in Asia plus no paying the tab” policies are. This can ruin your child’s quality of life, they’ll be the ones forced to pay up. Eventually. you’ve got to pay the piper.

My biggest problem with John McCain the neo-cons isn’t that their “Team America: World Police”-style foreign policy is immoral and doomed to failure (though this is close second).
My biggest problem is that they won’t pay for it, and I’m very worried that in 5, 10, 15 years when we must choose either to gut Medicare and Medicaid or not make good on our interest payments to China and risk an international incident, America’s (and my) quality of life will be ruined. It’s WRONG, deeply unfair to put your fellow Americans in that position. I don’t want to be punished for policies I hate and never supported (of course, upcoming administrations will be blamed because the Republicans wouldn’t pay the piper, and that’s unfair too).

Check out this great case study of the Missouri battleground in TIME Magazine. It seems the heartland is hurting, and hurting badly economically, and for pretty much everyone interviewed for this story, that’s meant a tidal wave of emotion against the Republican brand, and support for Obama (even among former Bush voters). After reading articles like this one, you can almost feel a 1932-style landslide afoot.

But this election is just the beginning of the battle. It will take extraordinary pressure, people DEMANDING real change, for any meaningful reforms to get past Congress, and it will be especially difficult with the next president hemmed in by events, but it can happen. I believe.

But Americans can’t just poke a voting booth, then go back to loafing on the couch and expect the government to fix itself. It won’t work that way.

Nick

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