One of the more watched ballot initiative this week was the Mississippi Personhood initiative that would have granted full human civil rights to a fertilized human egg. Almost half of the voters were for this measure. Here's the CBS report, but you can find it everywhere this week.
Basically, it would have outlawed most birth control and, of course, abortions.
The issue as I see it is the tension between the rights of a host and a guest. Should an unexpected guest be permitted to stay as long as they feel necessary, no matter how the host feels? What if the guest makes unreasonable demands, such as requiring up to half of your assets and most of your attention while living there? Note that the laws are set up to require you to support the guest for an additional 24 times as long as she stayed after she decides to move out.
At the root of this ballot initiative really was the need to make sure that Republicans get out to vote. It is a pity that the Democrats cannot figure out how to seed a ballot with an issue that will fire up their base in this manner. What about resurrecting the Equal Rights Ammendment?
Bill Moyers recently gave the keynote speech at Public Citizen's 40th anniversary Gala. In addition to the video of that speech, I have transcribed various excerpts from his excellent speech. During his speech, he made it quite clear that he fully understands the concerns of the occupy Wall Street protesters.
Except for the bracketed material each of the following is a quote by Bill Moyers at the Public Citizen 40th Anniversary Gala:
While it's important to cover the news, it's more important to uncover the news. One of my mentors at the University of Texas told our class that "news" is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity. And when a student asked the journalist and historian Richard Reeves for his definition of real news, he answered, "The news you and I need to keep our freedoms."
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[We now have what historian Lawrence Goodwin has described as] "a mass resignation of people who believe the dogma of democracy at a superficial level, but who no longer believe it privately."
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We have a decline of individual self-respect on the part of millions of people.
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We hold elections knowing that they are unlikely to produce the policies favored by a majority of Americans.
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The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly feared as an unseemly veneration of wealth are now openly enforced, and the common denominator a public office, including for our judges, is a common deference to cash.
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Barack Obama criticizes bankers as fat cats and then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 per person. And that's the norm. They get away with it.
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Let's name it for what it is: Democratic deviancy, defined downward.
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Politics today is little more than money laundering in the trafficking of power and policy.
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Why are the occupiers there? They are occupying Wall Street because Wall Street has occupied America
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Citizens United: Rarely have so few imposed such damage on so many.
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[At the 12 minute mark of the video, Moyers discusses corporate personhood and the laws damaging public welfare resulting therefrom]
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The Roberts Court has picked up the mantle: Money first, the public second, if at all.
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[At the 14 minute mark: the damage done by Citizens United]
Glenn Greenwald recently appeared on Dylan Ratigan's television show to discuss his new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Greenwald argued that many of our leaders don't even pretend anymore that we should aspire to fairness. Here's the thought process underlying these claims we so often hear from those who oppose the Occupy movement: "Inequality will be deserved and legitimate because were all playing on an equal playing field." According to Greenwald, the reason for so much citizen anger (tea party and occupy protesters) is a growing perception that this inequality
is not the byproduct of fair and reasonable and well-deserved accomplishments but the byproduct of cheating, of a tilted playing field, that the winners exempt themselves from the rules to which the rest of us are bound. Typically, it is the law that constrains the most powerful from abusing their power. When law ceases to apply to them, as it has, the only solution that citizens have is to go outside of the system of law and begin to demand that change. That is why so many citizens are taking to the streets and protesting and realizing that working within the system is no longer a viable course of action.
How can this energy be harnessed, for instance through the Occupy movement?
The status quo--the failure to accommodate or to adhere to rules for anyone outside of this 99% is itself extremely volatile and itself extremely dangerous and destructive in that a course of action where citizens do go out on the streets in the United States has become a more attractive and really the only alternative for effectuating the kind of change that people thought that the 2008 campaign would bring.
In this TED video, researcher Richard Wilkinson discusses real work data based levels of income disparity one finds in "rich developed-market democracies." As you can see (at 4:11 of the video), nations with low amounts of GNP don't tend to exhibit aberrant levels of health and social problems. On the other hand, countries that exhibit substantial amount of income disparity (3:44) exhibit high levels of health and social problems.
GNP per capita is thus a poor measure of a country's well-being. Further, we should be alarmed at high levels of income disparity. The same relationship (5:01) is apparent when one compares GNP to the UNICEF scale of child well-being. "The national well-being of our societies is not dependent any longer on national income and economic growth." The same tests were run on the 50 states of the U.S. with the same results.
What else suffers along with high income disparity? Trust (5:45), involvement in community life (6:00), mental illness (6:50), violence, percentage of the population in prison (7:40), the percentage of dropouts in high school (8:16), social mobility (poor parents having children who end up poor) (8:24), drug abuse, life expectancy, obesity, math and literacy scores and many other problems (9:10).
Wilkinson sums it up by saying that the countries that do worse---those that have higher social dysfunction--tend to be more economically unequal.
How do the various low income disparity nations and states attain their earning levels? Sweden does it by heavily taxing the rich. Japan has more comparable wages to begin with. Wilkinson's numbers show, however, that it doesn't much matter how you get your equality as long as you get there somehow. He adds that it's not only the poor that are affected by income disparity (12:20). Additional statistics show that the wealthy significantly benefit from general equality, not just the poor.
What is the proximate mechanism for all of these startling numbers. Wilkinson points to the following consequences of inequality:
More superiority and inferiority;
More status competition and consumerism;
More status insecurity;
More worry about how we are seen and judged;
More "social evaluation anxiety" (threats to self-esteem & social status, fear of negative judgments).
Wilkinson offers an unsurprising solution to countries and states with high levels of social dysfunction: Even out the income, either by offering more opportunities to folks at the lower end of the scale or by taxing the high earners (16:17). The bottom line is that we can improve a country's overall well-being by reducing economic inequality.
I am not at all surprised by Wilkinson's findings. It combines many ideas that I've previously discussed. No, GNP (and GDP) is a terrible measure of well-being (and see here) and people are deeply compelled to display their self-worth through material acquisitions. And all of this would seem to be exacerbated to the extent that TV and magazines pump images of the haves (and their expensive toys) into the homes and lives of the have-nots, causing all kinds of frustrations and degradations of self-worth among the have-nots. That was my suspicion prior to viewing Wilkinson's video and now all of this and many other measures of social dysfunction are backed up by Wilkinson's real-life numbers.
Two years ago, I was excited to see Barack Obama elected President because I had listened closely to his campaign speeches and I assumed that I would now have a meaningful voice in how my government was being run. I assumed that we would see an immediate decrease to America’s warmongering, domestic spying and fossil-fuel dependence, for example. Since that election, though, I’ve witnessed Mr. Obama cave-in to right wing demands on numerous major issues. I’ve seen Wall Street “reform” that allows bigger “banks” than ever. I’ve seen health care “reform” that shoved single payer under the table and consisted of a sell-out to for-profit monopolistic insurers, without any meaningful price controls. Government spying and secrecy are more prevalent than ever. I’ve seen big business spend more money more flagrantly than ever to purchase politicians, including Barack Obama.
As all of this has transpired, I keep being reminded of George Carlin’s words, (at the two-minute mark) that there is a “big club . . . and ain’t in it. . . . You and I are not in the big club."
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