Contraception and Scare Power

In what was called an “accommodation” Obama made it clear in a February 10 press conference that all women would have access to free contraceptives but offered through their insurance companies and not through the institutions that employ them which may be affiliated with the Catholic Church that opposes contraception. It would be a shame if this explanation is interpreted as Obama on the defensive, having stepped back from “making a mistake.” 

Defensiveness in this case is entirely inappropriate. It is no shame to work to expand the availability of contraception. On the contrary it’s a goal to be proud of. An Institute of Medicine report recommended a major expansion of birth control services to women. Women with unintended pregnancies account for almost half of pregnancies in the U.S., and those women are more likely to smoke, consume alcohol, be depressed and experience domestic violence. The IOM also said that expanding birth control services to women will cut down on the number of abortions and make women healthier. To be for contraception is to be pro life. 

There was an outcry from the Catholic hierarchy against Obama’s plan to make cost-free contraception available to all.  If contraception is good for women and children there ought to be an outcry from the other side, those who want to attack global poverty, decrease infant and maternal mortality, and strengthen families and women’s self determination.  

Jill Warren, executive director, Methodist Federation for Social Action said it best, when interviewed on the PBS Newshour February 9: ”Contraception, controlling whether you can plan your family, whether you can space your children, whether you want to have children, is a basic health issue. It’s a biological fact that women can be impregnated, and against our will, I might add. So it absolutely is a health issue…for me, the policy is just good public policy for the common good.” Warren also said “barriers to education, barriers to the work force all center around whether you can control your own reproductive health.”  In other words working against the availability of contraception is also an issue of discrimination.

The original Obama plan was not a violation of religious liberty.   No one was being urged, let alone compelled, to violate their beliefs and purchase contraceptives.  On the contrary, it is the (heavily government subsidized) private sector religious institutions that seek to impose their will. When the Catholic hierarchy talks about the suppression of religious liberty it is talking about institutions, not individuals, claiming that their religious freedom is being violated (is this like the personhood of corporations as funders?). 

These institutions are powerful. The fifth national survey of American Catholics appeared in National Catholic Reporter on October 28, 2011; a major finding was that Catholics of all generations, and both sexes, have consistently said in five surveys during the past 25 years that they do not see the bishops as the proper locus of moral authority on the matter of the use of contraception.  Rather they believe that their conscience should be the proper locus.  Only 11% look to the bishops.  One Catholic theologian Daniel Mcguire cautions however not to underestimate that 11%: “the bishops have a terrific amount of scare power for politicians.” They have found an issue for their battle in Obama’s birth control decision. Non-Catholics are being told to stay away from the issue. Michael Sean Winters, also in National Catholic Reporter (NYT, 2/10/12), said, “no matter what people think about contraception, that’s an internal Catholic debate. Catholics do not like interlopers.”

To say that non-Catholics should leave the issue alone is not an acceptable position. The Catholic Church cannot arrogate to itself the right to decide this issue “internally” while in the meantime urging on politicians to come down hard on the anti-contraception side. The community as a whole (America) should not facilitate a particular hierarchy imposing its views, even on its own members, especially when those views offend the moral convictions of large numbers of other Americans.

 

What was the Gingrich Wave in South Carolina?

Media coverage of the South Carolina primary made it seem as if we were all ringside at a boxing match. What passed for reporting on “substance” was how much money was getting thrown in the ring. It’s impossible to get out of the box of media coverage. Gingrich’s aggressive slapping down of John King’s legitimate question about his second wife’s “open Marriage” interview and the resulting storm of applause seemed to do the trick for undecided voters. Gingrich identified himself with President Andrew Jackson, as a man who knew that what you do with your enemies: “you kill them.” The candidate said that he didn’t just want to bloody Obama’s nose, “I want to knock him out.” (Note: We guess Gingrich was speaking figuratively. The athletic Obama clearly wouldn’t have much trouble taking care of Gingrich.)

All primary reports commented on the Republicans’ deep dislike for Obama (why we are never told) and the desire for someone to “fight” him, no holds barred. That seemed to translate for many into an actual qualification for the presidency. “You have to be tenacious… and be very aggressive to get things done as president and I think he showed all of that,” one primary voter was quoted as saying (WP,1/22).

Is there something we should be seeing beyond “I like the aggressive guy on reality TV who is willing to eat live snakes to kill off a rival?” For voters who want to knock Obama out, aggressiveness is an obvious qualification, but what about the 63 percent who listed the economy as its top issue? Are they thinking their candidate is going to “aggressively” tell CEOs he has just released them from taxes and regulatory burdens and now they must create jobs in the US?!

In their rage-filled heart of hearts, Republicans do seem passionately convinced that if freed from taxes and regulatory restraints the rich will create jobs in the US, so that prosperity tickles down from the 1 percent to the rest. Not likely. Recent Commerce Department data show that “as a whole US multinational firms reduced their workforce here by 2.9 million between 1999 and 2009,” while at the same time they added 2.4 million jobs overseas.

Many Republican voters say the size of the deficit is a big issue for them. Reducing the deficit is indeed important. Reducing healthcare costs is important to that end. Just rolling back the Bush tax cuts would help reduce the deficit and also free up money for government to spend on education and infrastructure, bolstering the economy and creating new jobs and new revenue to further reduce the deficit. However, the Republican voters don’t want government doing anything, so it is unclear where they see economic improvement coming from and how that translates into their voter preferences.

This suggests we should look to some deeper underlying reason for voter rage. Gingrich’s hugely applauded racist comments were in no sense “thinly veiled.” It is tempting to say that hatred of the “Other” was the unifying factor for the Gingrich voters. Perhaps, though, the unifying factor is broader. The hollowing out of the American middle class is an enormous change in America. It is creating fear and a deep sense of insecurity. Obama’s promise was change. The voter may be demanding, paradoxically, that their leaders fix our economic problems with a return to the status quo and not with “change.” They feel the status quo is what has been taken away from them. They wrongly blame Obama and will back anyone who can take him out.

 

“PLEDGING” REPUBLICANS

The Iowa caucus drama is likely hook press and media on their overload of horse race politics adrenalin. What excitement! Eight point spread for first place! Election night commentators were in a wonderful mood. It was all so entertaining.

The horse race political framework will continue to be hard wired in everything we see or read. Any discussion of the substance of issues will have to be relevant to that process framework. It goes without saying that analysis of the ideology that justifies journalists’ substance free coverage will be very rare. Among the rare exceptions, Eric Alterman has denounced false objectivity driven by false ideology of “balanced” reporting and equivalence of extremes, in what Paul Krugman has called “post–truth politics” and Katrina vanden Heuvel has listed as one of the three issues that could determine the outcome of the elections (WP, 1/3).

In addition, the mantra that Democrat extremes balances Republican extremes can’t be open for debate because just describing the positions on each of the supposedly “balanced” Republican and Democrat “extremes” gives the game away. One side wants to get rid of Social Security, abolish the Federal Reserve and Environmental Protection Agency, and bomb Iran and the other side – hold on! – wants to let tax rates return to pre Bush 43 levels?

Just how extreme the Republican positions are is not just an entertainment question. The genuinely extreme positions of the Republicans are important and consequential, especially when coupled with “pledges”. This policy wonk was unaware of the Republican “pledge” to appoint only anti-abortion officials to key health and justice agencies until I found it buried in a long unreadable side-by-side comparison of the positions of the “Iowa Seven” in a December 31 article in the New York Times (New Years Eve! Just the time to curl up and – finally – get briefed up on the issues!). You might think that the word “pledge” would ring a bell in some editor’s brain. Republicans signing on to the Grover Norquist no tax hike “pledge” almost – again – brought the US government to a halt in December. Republicans have proved they will stick with their pledges through whatever battering of storms of fact, reality and national interest. No reason to think the appointments pledge would be different.

Two of the top three Iowa caucus winners, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul, have signed the appointments “pledge”, leaving Mitt Romney out in the cold liberal never, never land. Whatever their chances of making it to the White House many of their pledging persuasion will certainly be in Congress. It is worth spelling out exactly what this pledge means in terms of American democracy and values.

Former Secretary of Defense William Cohen in a recent talk at the WNDC sees the “fusion of religion and politics” as a problem. He urges citizens to “put the spotlight” on problems. Nothing could spotlight the problem of the fusion of religion and politics more than the religion driven qualification for public service and government employment that the Paul/Santorum pledge would institute. Who would play the non-democratically elected role of Norquist, passing perhaps on the sincerity of the applicants’ pledge? Would nameless religious fundamentalists behind non-accountable high spending PACs get another hold on wielding power in a grievously weakened American democracy? The framers of our constitution would be shocked. If only one set of religious beliefs qualifies you for government service and excludes others, then Americans are not “free and equal”.

This is an interesting subject. Our journalists may be too giddy with the fun of Iowa political entertainment to tell us anything about it.

 

Koreans’ Tears

It is a frightening to see pictures of the North Korean masses weeping in public displays of grief over the death of their dear dictator. Reports have noted that extreme expressions of grief are part of Confucian tradition in both North and South Korea, but only in the North is the leader of state considered to be every individual’s father and only in the North does state coercion lie behind everything that happens, even when individuals are sincere in their grief. In North Korea the political culture creates the individual’s psychology.

A South Korean academic, who was my then colleague at the National Endowment for Democracy, said to me there was nothing particularly supportive of democracy in Confucianism but that South Koreans were devoted to their right to vote anyway. That does not seem likely to happen any time soon in North Korea given the overwhelming culture of the cult of personality.

Looking at Iraq’s future Thomas Friedman in the NYT (12/21) wished for Iraq that it would hold together “as an imperfect corrupt democracy” until the real agent of change, the new generation, comes along in “nine months and 21 years”. Friedman is being the optimist here, forgetting that that new generation will have been raised by parents whose culture was shaped by dictatorship and war, with the individual Iraqi’s need to feel secure driving them into sectarian identities. Democracy may take much longer. A vicious military dictatorship in Greece collapsed in 1974. 37 years later Michael Lewis in “Boomerang” describes the “real Greek structure” as “everyman for himself”, with every member of Parliament demonstrably corrupt, making any kind of civic life impossible. Lewis says the Greeks want to recreate a civic life but with the total absence of faith in one another self-reinforcing he doubts they can.

One thing is sure. Taking democratic transitions step by step isn’t the answer. It isn’t a democratic transition if the military has carved out a position beyond the law and elected Parliaments to call the shots, as they are trying to do in Egypt. The only way to start embedding a democratic culture is to start with establishing democratic institutions and hoping that national pride and identity in these institutions will create a new way of seeing yourself and your community. What counts is not whether Egyptians are ready for democracy but whether they will have a shot at getting there. Alas, the military and radical Islam aren’t the only obstacles. Pride in your democratic institutions isn’t going to work to create a democratic culture if your democracy is corrupt. Would that Greece were the only example of corrupt democracies! A leading expert on democracy once said the Kingdom of Tonga was the only example of a benevolent dictatorship – and that was before they held fully democratic elections in 2010. So we have no choice but to stiffen our political will and try.

 

Linking the Joe Paterno and Herman Cain Scandals

— Elizabeth Spiro Clark
November 21, 2011

Much of the undertone of commentary on Penn State coach Joe Paterno’s ouster was to “balance” the good he had done with his failure to protect young boys from his deputy Jerry Sandusky’s alleged longstanding sexual predation record. There is a “higher good” to consider in this case, it was said. The higher good was defined as all the contributions his winning football team, the Nittany Lions, and his personal financial endowments contributed to Penn State’s bottom line and reputation.

“Joe is a devout Catholic. He’s a beautiful person. He’s a wonderful coach,” a fellow coach Vince McAneney was quoted as saying (see Joe Nocera oped, NYT, 11/11). McAneney seemed to be making the statement that “devout” Catholics are not immoral. It is presumptuous, no doubt, to claim to have the measure of an individual morally and spiritually. However, it is not presumptuous to make a judgment on what the “higher good” in this case is. The higher good was protecting those boys. Joe Paterno would have almost certainly gotten no public credit for following this higher good. There would have been no statue built of Joe Paterno for protecting those kids. He might even have been excoriated for betraying his team and his university.

Herman Cain represents money and power too. On the same day the Philadelphia Inquirer was drenched in the Penn State scandal a column on Herman Cain’s presidential campaign was a riff on the odd fact that Cain seemed to be running for money not office. His TV ads in the Florida straw poll didn’t ask for campaign organizing help or outline policy positions but instead plugged sales of his book: “Consider giving a loved one a copy of “This is Herman Cain”, he tells his audience.

For Cain public service just doesn’t fit into his ideas of what has value: money and power – masculine power. You don’t question powerful men for hitting on women, especially if the women are needy, want a job, for instance. Cain trashed his one named sexual harassment accuser because she had filed for bankruptcy. His women accusers aren’t rich and famous. They are disposable, targets of contempt. They are women that dare to get in the way of powerful men.

The abused boys at Penn State – a much worse corruption of power – were treated as if they were disposable too. As one abused boy was alleged to have said of Sandusky “you just can’t tell him no”. He was strong. He did what he wanted.

Another story of “disposable” people is the shocking story of how the richest and most powerful man of them all – Apple’s Steve Jobs – tolerated terrible conditions in the factories of his subsidiary, Foxcom, in China. According to a report in the Guardian this past spring workers were driven to suicide, nets placed under dormitory windows to prevent “jumpers”. Workers were asked to sign a statement promising not to kill themselves and pledging to “treasure their lives”. But I digress.

There is the strong whiff of the wolf pack here, marauding for food and sex, and, in the case of humans, money. The culture of the locker room is the culture of physical power and in the case of the winning team, money. The passionate identity and investment of Americans in their sports teams can truly be called tribal.

This is the culture of the Republican presidential candidates who blame the lower 99% for not having the power to get enough stuff for themselves. Remember that Bush 43 owned a baseball team and ran his campaigns and his foreign policy like sports competitions. When Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell says his only goal is beating Obama he might as well be a Penn State rioter. The only thing to value is crushing the other side. It was nauseating but not surprising to hear Republican audiences applauding at Gov Perry’s record number of executions or pollsters finding 67% percent of Republicans support torture. It doesn’t matter if you are successful (Bush 43 was not) as long as you swear fealty to the culture of aggression. It’s manly to eat pizza and French fries and not “submit” like a weak woman to federal government regulations on school lunches. Strength is rejecting a tomato sauce that can be called a vegetable serving.

 

AMERICA’S “DIMINISHED POWER”: TO DO WHAT?

It is hard to open a newspaper with out seeing the phrase “America’s Waning Influence” or “America’s Diminished Power”, both used in a November 2 NYT “White House Memo.” These stories all beg the question “diminished power to do what?” We should rather ask whether the power and influence were used successfully? In the presumable heyday of American superpowerdom, post collapse of the Soviet Union, we invaded Iraq. Is that an action we are somehow supposed to be regretful we can’t keep on doing? At a major US Institute of Peace conference on Israel-Palestinian peace, speaker after speaker noted that US influence in the region had plummeted. The two main reasons given were the war in Iraq and US responsibility for the financial collapse of 2008. Those were events that happened under the Administration of Bush 43.

The decisions made by the men around Bush 43 flowed from their own background in the US military and defense establishments. This was the world they knew. “Diplomacy was not their strong suit” as the chronicler of the Bush war cabinet, James Mann, details in his 2004 “Rise of the Vulcans.” Their only strategy post 9/11 was to doubledown on American military power; taking actions with the explicit purpose of making US purposes unchallengeable. But they were challenged. The Europeans didn’t go along with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. There was no NATO, let alone UN support. There was active French opposition to the invasion. Remember patriotic Americans renaming French fries “Freedom Fries”?

Why, when Iraq wasn’t successful and we didn’t get our way, is it Obama’s presidency that is considered weak and diminished? Why isn’t it “Bush’s war” and “Bush’s financial collapse” that is blamed for the diminution of American power? The answer is that Cheney and the militarists made America weaker, but we have so absorbed the principle that American strength equals being able to coerce through military means that we have to define even a failed Administration operating under that principle as strong. The idea that a strong America means one that can force others to do what we want, paradoxically means such an Administration cannot be criticized as weak, as responsible for loss of American power and influence, even if in fact it was responsible for that loss of power. Success doesn’t matter. It’s whether you get success through coercion.

On the flip side of the coin, also paradoxically, the great foreign policy successes of the Obama Administration can’t be defined as strength. America’s Secretary of State in Libya used brilliant diplomacy, usually behind the scenes, coupled with multilateral and limited military action, but don’t call it success, even if the outcome benefited America, because we shared responsibility with others, using a minimum of coercive power. It would have been a success only if we proclaimed we did it under a strategic “vision” of demonstrating American dominance, bringing us back to another plummet of US influence for the next US Institute of Peace conference.
– Elizabeth Spiro Clark
November 7, 2011

 

Withdrawal from Iraq: Watch Out for Partisan Revisionism.

After eight and a half years of war in Iraq, President Obama has announced that our military will be out of Iraq by Dec 31, except for security forces guarding our diplomats, and the possibility of a yet-to-be-negotiated deployment of trainers for the Iraqi security forces. The US is leaving the field with zero clarity about why we were there, or what we accomplished, and for that reason the main message of Iraq may be lost. That message is that Iraq was a mistake.

In the State Department I once worked for a Republican appointee, Robert Kimmitt who was Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs in the George H.W. Bush Administration during the Gulf war. Behind his desk he had an artillery shell from the war in Vietnam, where he had served on active duty. I can’t quote him, but clearly he did not think Vietnam was a mistake. War was noble. Victory was possible.

We may never know what the real reasons for Iraq invasion were, certainly not the manufactured Weapons of Mass Destruction (to be fair, Saddam would have liked to have been manufacturing them) or setting Iraq as a beacon of democracy in the Middle East. At least three months before the invasion the press virtually shut down talking about the war. The military had determined the US must invade by March before the weather got too hot. This tends to support the idea that the most likely reason for the war was a Cheney-led drive to prove that the US was the single power hegemon that could do as it wished and, quite explicitly in the case of Iraq, cheaply. Iraq was a test.

With this murky history, Republicans will hardly have to make an effort to blame Obama for anything that goes wrong, there will be such a large grab bag of unprovables. The Washington Post editorial October 23 started in on manufacturing the framework by highlighting “risks” of Obama’s decision. “Iran will be handed a crucial strategic advantage.” “A potentially invaluable U.S. alliance with an emerging Iraqi democracy will wither.” Almost anything that moves in the region could be used to “prove” those two points.

However, cheer up. For one, Iraq isn’t lost; it will be an oil rich country struggling with sectarian and regional splits within recognizably democratic institutions. It’s neighbor Iran will be the country that is weak and isolated from the international community. Second, the ignorance of the Republican base may save Obama from a “who lost Iraq” charge. Obama’s record in killing al Qaida leaders will block the charge that he is “weak”. And for the rest, the Republicans, and the country more generally have lost interest.

 

“The American Spring”

“American Spring”

Some demonstrators camping out in Wall Street and in other US cities protesting corporate power say they are taking inspiration from the “Arab Spring”. Except for the sleeping bags and volunteer caterers, it doesn’t seem obvious that the comparison holds. In Egypt the protest movement was bringing down a long standing political dictatorship risking death, prison and torture. At it’s most trivial, the Wall Street demonstrators when asked what they intended to do could say, “hand out chalk to write grafitti on walls”. But that is not the end of the story. Both the American and Arab springs want to have a system where the real power holders are held accountable.

Hosni Mubarak was Egypt’s supreme power. He is now in the dock. Egypt had the skeleton of democratic institutions. It held rigged elections. It looks like there will be flesh on upcoming elections, where the voters’ ballots will count.

In the US, protestors are not after the military or executive branch dictators. They are after corporate power for using its resources to subvert democratic accountability. In Egypt, political institutions were not responsive to the needs and aspirations of the people. This might seem to be analogous to protestors’ view of the situation in the US, where money trumps the express preferences of the people. After all, poll after poll shows the American public in favor of increasing taxes on the wealthiest. Why aren’t their taxes increased?

To answer that question, it isn’t enough to say that corporate money is responsible. Polls reflect the general public’s preferences. However, only 41.6% of the eligible voters voted in the 2010 elections (a record for mid term elections). If election day was a day off from work in the US, as it is in a number of European countries, perhaps elections would play their role in holding power accountable, as more citizens exercise their rights.

Protestors should look to solutions that are right under their noses. For example, at the same time they work to expose corporate misuse of power, they should work to stop efforts in a growing number of states to suppress voter turnout in the 2012 elections. We don’t have to rebuild democratic institutions from scratch, just repair them.
— Elizabeth Spiro Clark

 

Women, Jobs and the Republican Drive to Cut Back Government

The Republican idea that cutting government at all levels and reducing taxes on business will free capitalism to work its mythical magic and create jobs, is also a back door to cutting back the empowerment of women. In the present political climate, who is even talking about the Lilly Ledbetter Act to ensure equal pay for equal work? Who in federal, state and local governments Republicans are working to emasculate is going to enforce it?

The New York Times published September 15 the results of a study that finds that government contracting out its services to the private sector is more expensive than performing the services with government employees. Although not a part of any study I am aware of it, is obvious that privatizing public sector jobs also would reduce pressure on fair employment practices and the availability of jobs for women.

When I lived in Norway in the early nineties, my colleague’s wife delivered triplets, one of whom had Downs Syndrome. They were visited almost immediately by a social worker whose responsibility was to work with health problems in the area where they lived. Even though they were not Norwegian they continued to enjoy valuable and intensive help. These health and welfare offices and departments were disproportionately staffed by women. This was directly connected with the fact that a very significant portion of Norwegian members of Parliament had had backgrounds in public service. While the US Congress is dominated by male lawyers, Norway’s Parliament had then almost 50% women, many with experience in the public welfare sector. Norway’s funding priorities reflected this gender composition.

If the Republicans succeed in reducing government it will reduce American democracy – the less government, the smaller the area for democratic accountability and the less pressure to build a fair and compassionate society. When we look at the impact various plans for job creation will have it is important to link the opportunities for women with the Republican drive to reduce public sector employment.
— Elizabeth Spiro Clark

 

Hurricane Irene, Small Government and Building a Passive Population

Eric Cantor’s message on Hurricane Irene is basically “no helping hurricane victims without cutting some other federal expenditure that might help the poor”. To translate: America doesn’t exist as a community whose members feel obligations towards each other. Outrage is the appropriate reaction to Cantor. However, looking past the outrage there is much material to draw from the Hurricane Irene case to push back hard against the Republican small government crusade, according to some polls the one policy area where they have public support.

For Republicans, aside from the dictates of religious ideology, nothing but economic incentives count. The system punishes when people don’t buy your products or your stocks. That is the only idea of “accountability”. Where does this dogma leave customers of the private company, Connecticut Light and Power, or United Illuminating, when over 600,000 of them are left without power in the wake of Hurricane Irene. One town’s mayor was quoted as saying ”we did our job” and were now just waiting to CP&L crews to arrive to advise them where the live wires were. Widespread complaints about slow response from these private companies and lack of information finally produced liaison officials, called revealingly “account executives”. One such liaison in Stonington was a lawyer from CL&P’s parent company NorthEast Utilities (United Illuminating has a parent company also, UIL Holdings).

No wonder US Representative Joe Courtney is pressing for federal assistance. The federal government is a democratic institution structured for accountability to citizens. Is there a North East government to hold NorthEast Utilities accountable?

In San Bruno, California eight people died when a natural gas pipe line ruptured. It turned out the company Pacific Gas and Electric had installed a defective pipeline in 1956. A National Transportation Safety Board issued a report August 30 on the incident, blaming it on poor planning, resulting in the inability to realize that a pipe had ruptured. Crucial work to close the ruptured value was left to an off-duty mechanic who was “self-dispatched”. The California Public Utilities Commission was criticized for lax oversight and “trusting the company.”

Since the Republican drive for smaller government would, if successful, lead to fewer public boards, weak or strong, overseeing the private companies providing public services, why isn’t it fair to see the small government crusade as a way to let corporations do a better job ripping us off? Americans need to reverse the Republican mantra of “good private institutions, bad public institutions.”

If you are a citizen without the power to stop buying the product (power, light and natural gas) and no say on what the provider of the public service does, then you are put in a passive position. At some point democratic institutions are incompatible with a passive citizenry.