There Is No There in Electoral Politics

by Mona Shaw

"If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." 

-Emma Goldman

I was a junior in high school when our gym teacher decided to teach us how to play golf.  She had acquired an afternoon pass at the local country club where we took turns using a bag of borrowed clubs.  Learning to play golf is not only learning the rules or developing the skills to play the game, it requires significant knowledge about the equipment (putters, drivers, woods and irons, etc.) as well the courses where it is played.  One can feel quite clever learning and retaining this information then impressing others with all one knows about the game.

It’s a lot like electoral politics.  It’s a good game in theory, and offers a fair amount of intellectual gratification to know a lot about it; but at the end of the day, if you don’t have the money for the clubs and the green fees, you don’t get to play.

In the spring of 2008,  I immersed myself in a social justice experiment that allowed me to analyze the value of electoral politics in creating positive change.  I'd pretty much lost confidence in the process.  It wasn't that I found no hope for change within electoral politics.  It was that I believed there to be less hope for change to be found at a ballot box than, say, investing the same effort into collecting troll dolls or wishing on a star.

Truth and democracy in Johnson County, Iowa, are like they are any place else.  You cannot have a functional democracy without the truth.  Unfortunately, in electoral politics Truth is always the first player kicked off the team.  The fact that candidates lie, are groomed to lie, and are rejected if they're not willing to lie, spin, hedge, obfuscate, or otherwise deny the truth is so accepted that we now choose candidates based as much on the hope they are lying as on the hope they are not.  If I had a dollar for each time I've heard someone defend a candidate's questionable position by saying "Well she/he has to say that to get elected," I could probably afford to buy my very own candidate. 

And, the problem with elected officials is that they never stop being candidates.  Every remark, gesture, and action is carefully calculated according to how well it will translate into campaign contributions and reelection returns at the ballot box.  A candidate's "electability" holds far higher currency than a candidate's character.

The day politics became a career is the day even hope for a functional democracy died.  On that day serving the people took second place to keeping the job.  And when this happened we began to hold political office and office holders in higher esteem than the People.  Our heart is where our treasure is.  And treasuring the "job" spawned other treasures or "jobs."  From pollsters to pundits to campaign managers to lobbyists to corporate CEOs, new treasures took so much from us that there was no heart left for the People.

The toxic waste brewed by reverence for the "job" has seeped into and hijacked the conscience of the culture-at-large.  It has poisoned our souls to the degree that we will spill our last cup of decency before we will sacrifice a drop of sycophancy on the job.  We have become so morally frail with this sickness that we will allow not only the children of others but our own children to be murdered in a war that we know to be hideously immoral before we will risk our jobs by publicly offending the powers that allow this to happen.

It is frequently suggested (or at least hoped) that an antidote to the corruption in national politics is deeper participation in local politics.  In local politics the stakes are not so high, nor as wickedly entrenched.  On the local level you're dealing with people you know rather than personally-detached corporate interests, depraved lobbyists, and the other shepherds of career politicians who prize their own jobs most of all.

The connection between local and global politics is an inescapable reality.  As Tip O'Neill's father once advised, "all politics is local," (even though this advice was driven by a desire to win the "job").  Even if local politics holds no answers, it is an elementary template that instructs where we go wrong. 

I chose to study this template by running for the office of County Auditor in Johnson County, Iowa. I had witnessed first-hand (while an account clerk in the Johnson County Auditor's Office from 2004-06) how the incumbent auditor had brutally and routinely abused his staff, willfully violated their negotiated labor contract and federal laws, and systematically discriminated against women and people of color.  The Auditor's abuse and the suffering it caused wasn't the worst case of human suffering in the world or even the County.  Then again, choosing the suffering one will address on the basis of it being the "worst" suffering is a snare that can restrain us from addressing any suffering at all. Plus, this was suffering wrought within County government itself, and if the public officials of the County couldn't practice the principles they espoused within their own ranks, how could they be trusted to engender these for citizens-at-large?

While confronting human suffering within the electoral political process seemed functionally inadequate for, if not contrary to, expressing my personalist philosophy, I couldn't knowledgeably state there was no redress for suffering in the process unless I sincerely tried it. 

In theory it should have been an easy fix.  And, if the incumbent had been a Republican, I wager it would have been.  Johnson County is renowned as the most "progressive" county in Iowa by far.  Organized labor, civil rights advocacy, and progressive politics reputedly rule the political scene to the degree that detractors and fans alike refer to it as the "People's Republic of Johnson County."  People in Johnson County, after all, were up-in-arms when former Congressman Jim Leach insensitively used mock Native American headdresses as campaign paraphernalia, and they put a stop to it. 

However, in this case, the incumbent was a Democrat who self-identified as a "liberal progressive."  He was a donor to most women's and human rights causes, made appearances at their public functions, served on area human rights committees, and was one of the first public officials to grace the stage at Iowa City's annual Gay Pride Festival.  And, ironically, he had even hosted an international meeting on torture.

Even so, in his official role, he fell far short of "walking the walk."  Still, it seemed reasonable to assume that all that was required was documentation or "proof" that a public official, regardless of partisanship, had committed outrageous violations of labor laws and human rights principles in order for a public official to be held accountable and then required to change or leave.  Initially, I naively believed that once proof was provided that labor leaders, women's, civil rights, peace and justice activists, and “progress-ive” public officials would insist on the same.

I had towers of documentation compiled over a two-year span.  My greatest barrier had not been establishing the veracity of this "proof," but finding anyone willing to look at it.  I was repeatedly advised by public leaders or justice advocates that before the matter could be considered that all the existing resources for addressing these grievances must first be exhausted.  I took this advice and exhausted every available resource at least once and most more than twice. 

A factor that worked against my credibility was despite years of abuse and discrimination, not a single employee had filed an employee grievance.  If it were true, they would have, right? While several had complained confidentially to Human Resources as well as staff in the County Attorney's office, they were too afraid of retaliation to confront the Auditor formally or directly.  Human Resources would tell us that since these employees would not formally and directly complain, the hands of the County Attorney's Office and H.R.'s were tied from doing anything about it. 

I not only filed the first employee grievance against the Auditor.  I filed eight.  It was more than a little dispiriting to witness a "feminist" assistant county attorney (another Democrat who would later be elected County Attorney) help the auditor identify "technicalities" (typos on filing dates, etc.) in order to dismiss two of these grievances to avoid their hearing.  I was told this was personally painful for her since she knew he was "guilty as sin," but that she was just "doing her job."  Only one grievance was denied, and one was upheld. The others were resolved because the Auditor's violation of the contract was so flagrant that he capitulated to negotiated remedies again to avoid the finding a formal hearing would obviously bring.  (A formal grievance requires that the employee stipulate a remedy. If the employer agrees to the remedy, the grievance is considered resolved. And, while I was the first employee to file a grievance in the Auditor's Office, the trail was blazed, and I was not the last.)

After awhile my Union representative would essentially tell me "You've become almost frighteningly good arguing and winning these grievances.  You'll no doubt keep winning most of them.  But my time is being swallowed up by this, and there is nothing in the grievance process that can make a public official stop violating the law or even our contract.  He can keep violating both.  You can keep grieving it.  But we can't stop him from doing it again.  Eventually he'll find some way to fire you that will stick, and you'll be stopped anyway.  My best advice to you is to let this go and find another job."  Legal violations by public officials, I was told, are a matter for the State Attorney General to address not the Union or the County.

So, I faxed an outline of my documentation to the State Attorney General (a Democrat) and asked to meet with a member of his staff.  My fax was likely still in the printer when I received an email from the Attorney General, himself, declining to meet with me and stating that my concerns belonged in the jurisdiction of federal agencies or with the Iowa City Human Rights Commission.  My reply email asking if I could meet just once with someone from his office was ignored.  A former deputy in the Auditor's office would tell me later that as soon as my fax had appeared, the Attorney General's Office phoned the Auditor and reassured him nothing would be done with my complaint.

I took the Attorney General's advice and filed a complaint with the Iowa City Human Rights Commission.  Without explanation (or even telling me), the Iowa City office, rather than review it themselves, forwarded the 34-page complaint along with several hundred pages of grievance settlements and other documentation to the State Human Rights Commission in Des Moines.  Without a single follow-up question or any manner of meeting or conversation with the Commission, after several months and after failing to meet its own required deadline, I received notification that the Commission was "administratively closing" the complaint without an investigation because the information provided was insufficient to proceed.  The notice was clear that the Commission was NOT stating that discrimination and retaliation had NOT occurred, but only that they were choosing not to investigate it.  No response was given to my concern of a possible conflict of interest in the Des Moines office given that the chair of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission is one of the Johnson County Auditor's closest friends.  Even though I had proven that this same friend at the onset of my first employee grievance had, at the Auditor's bidding and with ethical violations of his own, solicited others to bully me into dropping it.  The Commission, however, did give me about the only thing it ever gives women who claim discrimination that right to sue on my own.

I had retained an attorney with borrowed money and was ready to proceed until I realized two things. 

First, it's simply wrong when Civil Rights protections only work (as is usually the case) if the victim has the personal cash to enforce them. 

Second, I didn’t want money.  I wanted justice.  I wanted the abuse to stop.  And there was way through the court system that this could be made to happen.  Holding an elected official accountable for violating the law is not a winnable option.  Even if I persevered through the two or so years it would likely take to bring my case to court, and even if judge and jury agreed I'd proven my case, the most I could win were the actual damages the discrimination had cost me.  Moreover, if the County chose to "settle" by offering a cash payout close to these damages without admitting guilt, I could be forced to accept the settlement.  I didn't want money.  I wanted justice.  I wanted to end discrimination against women and employee abuse in the Auditor's Office.  And, there was nothing provided in the Federal Civil Rights Act, the Code of Iowa or any of our courts that could keep a public official from doing it again.  And again.

I hauled my full basket of "exhausted resources" back to those I'd first approached.  "Well, of course," they said rolling their eyes as if this information were as common as prayer on Election Day, "the only way to hold a public official accountable for labor or civil rights violations is to get them voted out of office."  And, so, when no one else would do so, I filed to run against the Auditor.

Support I'd received up to that point was wildly enthusiastic compared to the support I received in the Campaign and led to a rehash of partisan centralism that was itchingly petty and mostly too dull and repetitive to report.  The first response came after I announced my candidacy on a Johnson County Democrats for America email list I'd belonged to for years.  This list was created to support candidates who championed progressive causes outside the comfort level of the Democratic Party mainstream.  The moderator (a former candidate for chair of the Johnson County Democratic Party) responded to my announcement by kicking me off the list because he considered accusing the Auditor of sex discrimination to be a personal attack.

"Just because something is true doesn’t mean you have to say it," he wrote.

Not once did anyone tell me in public or in private that they didn't believe the accusations I'd made.  Not once.  Direct responses to my candidacy were actually scarce and basically fell into four groups.

● Those who supported me publicly.  All six of them.

● Those who would vote for me privately, but not say so publicly.  "I'm voting for you, and I admire you, but I can't afford to risk my job, career promotion, tenure promotion, donor base, client base, re-election campaign, merchandising campaign, political career, professional career, academic grade, University Athletic Club status, dating pool, etc., etc., by being publicly associated with you.

● Those who believed the Auditor was guilty but refused to vote for or endorse me because they disapproved of what I'd done or not done about it.

● Those who believed the Auditor was guilty but felt partisan loyalty required supporting him anyway.

   All but the first group were lying, if not to me then to someone else.  The same way rust is the glue that holds an old jalopy together, lying is the mortar between the decaying bricks of electoral politics.  Without lies, the whole machine falls apart. 

So, when an Iowa state senator told an employee in the Auditor's Office, "Don't worry, we're making sure you won't lose Tom."  The employee wasn't sure if the senator was really that oblivious about their working conditions or shooting a veiled threat toward anyone else who might think to complain about it.  In either event, they knew compassion for them was not the senator's priority.

Democratic Party leadership was as irritated as an infected mosquito bite at a flea family reunion to be forced to determine: how to discredit someone who'd exposed one of their own and simultaneously not risk appearing to condone the malpractice I'd exposed.  As one labor leader put it, "Mona couldn't care less if this damages the Party's image or threatens the fragile complexities of political relationships that it's taken us years to cultivate."

The first tact was to simply ignore or attempt to quash these allegations from public view. 

The local press, paranoid about unlikely law suits, wouldn't even print the allegations in quotes.  Party-loyal forum moderators limited the questions to issues that didn't consider them.  They did not hide their disapproval when I squeezed as many as I could into 30-second intervals anyway. 

The second tact was whispering wrinkled-nose insults that were as amusing as hurtful and that came back to me quickly.

"She's not a team player." (How would they know?  We've never played on the same team.)

"If the choice is between a communist and a drunk (alluding to the Auditor's DUIs and driving employees while drunk), you pick the drunk."  (It's not just that I'm not a Communist but, given the notorious Vodka consumption by leaders of the former Soviet Union, can such a distinction even be made?)

"If she's elected, she'll use that office to end the war in Iraq."  (Well, only if that’s possible.)

The most peculiar criticism was that I'd disqualified myself by being too personal.  A party official attempted to explain this to me by pointing out that I couldn't be objective because I had been personally victimized by the Auditor.  When I asked him if he might then publicly take up the matter, he explained, although he believed it to be true, he wasn't qualified because he had not personally witnessed the abuse himself.  When I asked him who then was qualified to take the problem to the public he said, "That's a good question."

I might have taken the critique of being too personal as a compliment, had I been able to increase any palpable effect of personalism within party ranks.  I'd documented that the lives of at least eight women and an African American man had their lives thrown into upheaval from fleeing the Auditor's mistreatment and discrimination, and one woman had even won workman's compensation based on her claim that her health had been damaged to the point she couldn't work because of the Auditor's abuse.  Despite the fact that I knew these cases to be the tip of the iceberg, not one single person in a position to do something about the abuses ever came to me expressing personal interest, let alone compassion, for these workers.

Not a single feminist, peace and justice, or labor group or leader came forward to stand up for these workers.  In fact, holding more regard for loyalty to power than confronting the abuse of power, a number even publicly endorsed the Auditor.  At least two of these leaders privately acknowledged they knew he was guilty.  (The fact that I was the only candidate on the Johnson County Democratic Primary 2006 ballot who was not a white, heterosexual man, by itself, tells a story.)

In any event—to them all—the fact that I had publicly said that the Auditor had done these things was more interesting, controversial and disturbing than the possibility, let alone the fact, that the Auditor had done them.

It's a wrenching thing to discover that the worker and human rights protections we've worked so hard to win are worthless to those who need them most.  It's sobering to realize that all I've accomplished after a lifetime of human rights advocacy is that I've helped a handful of already over-privileged people get better jobs.

By the time Election Day arrived, I would have been stunned to win fifty votes.  Not only shunned by the party in power, I'd run a provocatively unconventional campaign.  I'd taken no campaign contributions, printed no buttons or yards signs, mailed no campaign leaflets, held no fund-raisers, ran no newspaper or radio ads, nor reeled in one "big name" endorsement.  I put up a web-site and sent out a broadcast email to about 700 people pointing them to it, attended two public candidate forums, and simply told the truth. 

I also refused to tout my "professional" accomplishments because it's supposed to be true that any common citizen with obvious intelligence, talent, and conviction should be as eligible to serve in public office as those with credentials only available to the economically privileged.  In this context, I surfaced as the only candidate who took my candidacy seriously. The rest were in it for the stunt of proving their electability and scoring the job.

It is necessary to reveal, and for honest justice seekers to realize, that, even on the local level, electoral politics does not make good use of our time.  It isn't that you can't help people unless you win.  It's that you can't help people if you do.  The beast is all belly and devours all heart. Wherever there is heart for healing human suffering lies, however harsh or not harsh that suffering may be, heart is not there.  We need to stop looking there.  We cannot make change in a temple controlled by the money-lenders and other masters of evil.

Even though I lost the election, I received far more than fifty votes. I received 31% of them.  I collected nearly the percentage received by Ed Fallon (a self-identified "progressive" U.S. congressional candidate for Iowa's third district) who went into debt for his race, and as much as a previous candidate who'd challenged the Auditor; both had run full-blown campaigns with "power-house" endorsements and had played by party rules.  I received 60% of the vote in some low-income precincts.  Not surprisingly, I lost by the highest margins in precincts where mostly affluent, "liberal" Democrats reside.

Hope for humanity lies with that 31 percent, those who see through the lies and are ready to act to end suffering if someone just shows a way.  When we treasure them, rather than the electoral political machine where moths corrupt and thieves steal, we treasure justice.

The call for justice isn't for those who have to be talked into it but for those who can't be talked out of it.  Change isn’t wrought by holding a high-minded opinion or spending five minutes in a voting booth.  Change is measured by the amount of personal sacrifice and human equity we’re willing to put on the line.

Evil isn’t wrought by systems, including electoral politics; it’s wrought by people who have constructed systems to make it easier to commit evil.

Change will not come from coddling or compromising with the masters of war, torture, suffering, and evil.  It will come as we, more and more, take the evidence of the suffering they are causing to their doorstep, call them to repentance, and then refuse to leave until their hearts are touched enough that they emerge from their temples and join us in making that change.

 

Journal of Work Experiences in the Johnson County Auditor's Office

 

Group Grievance

This grievance was filed by three employees against a supervisor who was following Auditor Slockett's specific directives.

 

 

American Healthcare: American Genocide

November, 2009


"But he isn't wearing anything."
From The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen

"Perception is reality. It doesn't matter what the facts are. We don't have time for the facts. We're going to do it the way people think it's best to do it."

My boss wasn't kidding. I had just presented him the research I had prepared that proved a plan he wanted me to implement would cost the department more not save funds as he had previously announced to his faculty. He was up for faculty review. The "plan" was popular among the faculty. If he implemented it, he would be viewed as responsive to their ideas. Educating them would be time-consuming, confusing, and might be misunderstood. I complied with his directive, of course, because, I, too, wanted to keep my job. The facts bore out. The plan cost more money, but rather than concede the plan was the problem, we invented another excuse for the outcome and then spent even more funds addressing the "problem" we had invented.

The term "genocide" did not exist before 1944. It is a very specific term, coined by the U.N. and refers to violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group. Human rights, as laid out in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concern the rights of individuals.

On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention establishes "genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:

“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:’
“(a) Killing members of the group;
“(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;’
“(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;’
“(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;’
“(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

It is important to note in this definition (see letter "c") that negligence that leads to loss of life qualifies as genocide, as well as direct slaughter.

There is a related term of relevance, namely "Crime against Humanity." A Crime against Humanity consists of certain acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, in pursuit of a state or organizational objective.

Still, there is often scholarly quibbling about whether it is one or the other when massive death in a specific population is driven more by political expediency than by hatred of the group. The number of deaths to qualify as genocide is also a quibble, but generally a million deaths hit the mark. Deaths due to lack of access to healthcare will reach that mark, if we start counting them this year, by about 2015.

Some historians maintain it is still genocide if a group is targeted out of political ambition rather than a constructed hatred of the group or a comprehensive intent to eliminate all members of the targeted group. E.g. the actions of Joseph Stalin leading to the deaths of about seven million Ukrainians is considered genocide by some scholars and not by others. In 1932-33 the former leader of the Soviet Union caused a famine in the Ukraine because the people there were seeking independence.

The difference of opinion also persists when considering the slower elimination of about fifty million Native Americans following the European invasion of North America in the fifteenth century, since the objective wasn't necessarily to kill all native people but to occupy and appropriate their land.
Even more controversial has been the claim the U.S. response to AIDS/HIV in the 1980s was genocide. Proponents of defining it as genocide point to the fact that more than 20,000 gay men had died before there was any state response to the epidemic and that a response only was triggered when a significant number of members of the dominant culture (heterosexual people) were infected by the virus. In fact, religious leaders like Jerry Falwell fiercely resisted any response to the epidemic calling it "God's way of weeding his garden." And, while Falwell's comment seems more outrageous today, at that time it was considered a simple difference of opinion to which Falwell was entitled.

The change in how remarks like this are viewed is relevant toward how genocide is defined. That is, massive loss of life among a targeted group is more apt to be deemed genocide years, if not centuries, after the incident even though it was not at the time.

In any case, the primary prerequisite test to qualify as genocide must include evidence that "dehumanization" of the targeted group has taken place. To begin the claim of genocide it must be established there have methodical and intentional schemes to cast members of the targeted group as less human or less worthy of survival than members of the dominant culture.

A case can be made—and likely will be made at some point in the future—that the contemporary practice of healthcare in the United States, if allowed to persist unstopped, is genocide. As many as 100,000 people die annually because they cannot afford healthcare. About half die because they do not have health insurance, and the other half die because their health insurance provider will not pay for the care they need to survive. The apartheid of healthcare access in America is glaringly obvious. The healthcare one receives in the U.S. depends on the healthcare one can afford. The wealthy have no fear whatsoever that they will receive the best health available. The targeted group includes those who cannot afford the healthcare they need to survive. Comprised primarily of the working poor, the size of the targeted group is increasingly exponentially and proportionately to the greed and political ambition of those who benefit from health insurance company profits.

These deaths are not caused by a lack of fiscal or natural resources. Everyone in the nation could have access to healthcare for less cost to taxpayers if corporate profit was eliminated from the equation, and few knowledgeable people deny this. These deaths persist because corporations wield more national power than those whose lives are lost.

None of the incarnations of legislation seriously considered by the 111th Congress ever intended to stop a significant portion, let alone all, of these deaths, even though it was entirely within the scope and resources of Congress to do so. Indeed those lives that will still be sacrificed to the god of profiteering were never acknowledged nor mourned nor even given a moment of silence when Nancy Pelosi cheered at the passage HR3962 even though she knew this legislation would effectively still allow many to die.

Even though legislation had been introduced and reintroduced since 2003 (HR676) that would have covered everyone by eliminating insurance profiteering, this legislation was not only not taken up, it was blocked from even mere discussion by the Speaker of the House and the White House at every turn. Even the president said at one point, regarding healthcare reform summits, "Everything is on the table. Well, everything but HR676."

"Why was HR676 blacked out?" This is a salient question and adds evidence that allowing thousands to die was an intentional act by the State. Undoubtedly the motivation by the State and the Health Insurance Industry which essentially owns and controls the State, was to avoid what they knew would be a public outcry for HR676 if the public learned the bill's merits.
Merely asking this question, however, not only pricked the ire of the State, a.k.a, the corporate control to which it yielded, but also vexed those whom one might assume would have been natural allies.

Healthcare forums sponsored by "progressive" Democrats didn’t merely exclude HR676 from their line-up. Across the country, they banned and even had arrested activists who tried to expose the cover-up.

"We're all for HR676," progressive Democrats sometimes claimed, "but there's not the political will to pass it now."

When pressed, some, like Iowa State Senator Jack Hatch, admitted at an Iowa healthcare forum last March (at which the keynote speaker was Blue Cross Blue Shield representative and Republican former Iowa Governor Robert Ray) that "political will" was not lack of public support, which by most polls was overwhelming for such a bill. "Political will" was the lack of support of healthcare corporations who bankrolled too many Democratic election bids .

Or, as U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said at an AARP healthcare forum in late summer, "Just because most Americans want something doesn't mean Congress will do it."

Partisan loyalty took precedence over human life. And many political progressive groups whose prestige and/or paychecks required party loyalty capitulated. Groups like Move-On.Org, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and HCAN's Iowa affiliate Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN) advocated any legislation that Nancy Pelosi said to support.

For example despite the fact that ICAN had distributed petitions since March for a "Public Option" that would give Americans the ability to drop their private insurance if they so chose, their party loyalty did not waver when they issued invitations to two events with the purpose of thanking U.S. Congressman Leonard Boswell for voting for HR 3962. They did this even though HR 3962 didn't merely fall short but was completely contrary to what they had promised the thousands who signed their petitions that legislation they supported would include.

HR 3962, in fact, rendered Americans with not more, but less choice, than they'd had before. Rather than being able to drop expensive private health insurance for a "public option," Americans would now be required by law to keep paying those premiums. Further, those who had opted to stay uninsured rather than pay high private insurance premiums would now be forced by law to buy private insurance whether they wanted to or not. "Affordability" would no longer be determined by the budgetary needs of families but by the State with the determination heavily administered by private health insurance companies. Additionally, rather than helping "all," the bill's authors admitted HR 3962 would still leave twenty million people without access to healthcare, an estimate it is reasonable to believe will be far less than reality. (The Senate bill is even worse and will not—because it cannot—improve this.)

When this betrayal was pointed out, ICAN conceded in an email that, "While we may wish that the house bill provided even more relief, it currently includes provisions that will make real improvements in the lives of Americans that may compare with the passage of Medicare and Social Security."

How the word "may" was intended in this statement is hard to know. Suffice it to say that ICAN did not, because it could not, specify what these "real improvements" were. Certainly the faulty analogy made between HR 3962 and the Medicare and Social Security quickly falls apart under even superficial scrutiny, if for no other reason than that neither of the latter two acts required Americans to enroll in either program, let alone forced them to be consumers of any private industry. What was clearer in this statement was the implication that to "wish" for something more, i.e. to save those lives that would be lost under this legislation, was idealist and even frivolous, like wanting more frosting on an already delicious cake.

When all else failed, Democrats pulled out their most tired clichés and canards. Phrases like "politics is the art of compromise" and "crafting legislation is like watching sausage made" were regurgitated ad nauseum as if they had justifiable meaning. "Incremental change" morphed into an ethic that was held higher than committing what could be morally if not legally described as the negligent homicide of thousands. The problem is that genocide and crimes against humanity can't be stopped with incremental change. How do we decide who still dies?

Perhaps the most cynical scam pulled on the American public was that there ever was a real struggle for the passage of HR3962. The evidence for this was apparent from the beginning when Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) were named chairs of the Finance Committee forums on healthcare reform. Both are among the top-three Senate recipients of campaign contributions from health insurance companies. The obvious conflict of interest in this was not particularly challenged by many "progressives" who remained inclined to give the new administration "a chance." Consequently the bulk of the legislation crafted in the House and the Senate was written by health insurance industry staff, making sure every provision ultimately included a strong financial benefit for the companies they represented. The predestined and accomplished goal was anything that happened was to be a windfall for the insurance companies.

Meanwhile a faux public battle was waged with a handful of "tea-baggers" (the instigating ones likely hired by private insurance) and given ridiculously overblown coverage by national news media that was undoubtedly capitulating to the millions it received from the health insurance industry in advertising revenues. (Not coincidentally, the hundreds to thousands who demonstrated and rallied for HR676—including the more than 200 who were arrested at these actions—were never given a moment of air-time by national media.) Concurrently, Organizing for America (OFA), Obama's grass roots group, staged events to "stand up to big insurance" by supporting the Obama Plan, while behind the scenes the White House was arm-twisting reluctant legislators to give-in to health insurance company demands. What was portrayed as a "win-lose" struggle for the American People was never more than a win-win game for private insurance, with insurance company executives chortling all the way to the bank, knowing they would make out like the bandits they are either way. In the end House Representatives mostly voted according to their roles in this theatrical performance. It should not be considered a coincidence that the outcome that most financially benefitted private insurance was the one that won.

Another pocket of resistance to exposing all of this came from anarchists and even a few Catholic Workers who worried, among other worries, that HR 676 gave too much power to the State. Even though HR 676 significantly diminished State power over access to healthcare (in that the only State involvement was to appropriate funds to pay medical bills) compared to the current practice and that both had far less State intrusion than the legislation the 111th Congress advanced, they balked at being perceived to support any legislation offered by the State. The suggestion that U.S. healthcare practices were inextricably tied to war (because war funding and healthcare corporations are themselves inextricable) was met with particular skepticism, as if how people were killed and where they were killed for corporate profit made them any less dead. These concerns remain inchoate and beg further discussion and questions. How can one call for Congress to use war spending for healthcare and resist legislation that does that? Can anarchists sometimes step aside from fundamentalist ideology when a State act saves life and liberty—such as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Martin Luther King-driven Civil Rights Act, or the enfranchisement of women?

Still, the influence of Catholic Workers was ubiquitous in the resistance to Congressional lies regarding healthcare reform. Nearly every organized action included a current or former Catholic Worker. The first resistance action before a health insurance company was organized by the Des Moines Catholic Worker community and led to the arrest of nine at Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield in Des Moines. Hundreds followed their lead and 183 were arrested at sit-ins at other insurance companies throughout the nation. Those arrested included Sam Pullen, a member of the Center for the Working Poor Catholic Worker community in Los Angeles. Sam's witness included refusing bail, remaining in jail, and a hunger strike to draw attention to those who suffer and die because they are denied healthcare.

Their efforts were not completely in vain and pushed two amendments toward consideration that would have at least ameliorated the viciousness of HR 3962. One, an amendment put forward by Anthony Weiner of New York replaced the entire bill with a single-payer provision. While certainly doomed to fail, the amendment would have at least identified with some surety which House Representatives really did support HR 676 and which did not. This "is you is or is you ain't my baby" hope was stripped by none other than President Obama himself, who personally strong-armed Weiner into dropping the amendment late on the night before the vote.


Capitalism is most insidiously evil when it commodifies and restricts access to resources human beings need in order to survive. Accomplishing this first requires diminishing and dehumanizing those who will not or cannot comply. Human beings are reduced to their value as consumers, financial contributors or investors. Human beings that cannot provide capital gain—the poor and unemployed or under-employed or those who decline to be cannon fodder in wars for profit—are not worth saving. They are in fact a barrier to profit growth, and so, the dominant culture or the culture that dominates, (the wealthy, corporate owners and shareholders) inflict conditions that allow them to die. Rather than shown compassion, the dead and suffering are blamed for conditions over which they have no power and are shamed as irresponsible, lazy, or unpatriotic.
Perception is not reality. Reality is reality. Pretending something is other than it is doesn’t position us to change what it is. Still when the word “genocide” is used in connection with healthcare, some take umbrage, as if somehow suggesting an atrocity in these intentional deaths somehow diminishes lives lost in other atrocities.

It may be this umbrage that is the best evidence for such consideration. It is the lack of intense populist outrage that proves our collective acceptance of the dehumanization of those who will die. The seamless accomplishment of this by itself stands as justification for investigating healthcare practice in the U.S. as pending genocide. History has certainly and repeatedly shown powers and populace choosing to ignore or minimize infamous acts of genocide at their nascence. And history, has shamed us later when we knew the massive body count could have been much less if we’d not called early critics “reactionary” or “extremist.” It only gets serious when it’s our child, parent, spouse, or friend.

This column is a prologue begging for such consideration. Perhaps this time we can interrupt the mounting body count before such an ascription is undeniable. The longer we delay this rather than demand an end to our ghoulish national practice in healthcare, an ever-increasing share of us will be added to the targeted group of disposable humanity.

The Empire does not need a wardrobe adjustment. The Empire is naked and naked with the shame of this inhumanity to man. Those of us who care must, at the very least, call it what it is.

Sunshine Is Often a Choice

by Mona Shaw

We starve, look at one another, short of breath

Walking proudly in our winter coats

Wearing smells from laboratories

Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy.

Forty years ago this past spring, I was on a planning committee with my best friends Tom, Michael, and Stephen to take our college freshman theater class to see Hair in Chicago.  We had just organized an anti-war demonstration triggered by Nixon's bombing escalation in Cambodia. 

Tom had been released from the V.A. hospital, after being gravely wounded as a Marine in Vietnam.  His right forearm still had a huge purple gash, and his right hand was still paralyzed from shrapnel.  He was uncommonly handsome and exuded confidence and charisma, except for those times when he dove and then trembled under a table or bench when a car back-fired or fireworks sounded and sucked him back into a jungle in Southeast Asia.

"There's got to be a better way," he whispered to a room one night, while fiddling with the fringe on my handmade patchwork poncho.

The quickening intimacy between us surprised everyone, including me.  The white-trash girl from the poorest neighborhood and the golden boy from one of the most affluent neighbors in town would not have sat at the same lunch table in high school.  But our amalgamation made perfect sense to him, and he demanded it.  I felt his constant stares soon after his arrival at junior college.  He wouldn't have been at this school had he not "patriotically" chosen to enlist in the Marines despite his parents' protestation.  He was biding time until he transferred to Lawrence the following fall.  I avoided him and scurried away each time he tried to speak with me.  I'd been burned enough as some rich kid's do-gooder project; he could adopt someone else.  Oh, yes he affected me, terrified me really.  I didn't admit this then, but I feared that allowing him close would leave too huge a mark, and I didn't want it.  One day in class his eyes burned holes into my belly as I gave an interpretive reading from Nevil Shute's On the Beach.  I had to sprint from class that day to keep him at bay.  However, he found me at a party that night and begged me to go outside and talk for just five minutes.

"I only came here to see you," he said, "I need you."

"What for?"  I answered feeling swallowed by his intensity.

"You have to help me end the war," he answered patently.

"Really?" I said sarcastically, "Vietnam or the war on the poor or the war on Black folk or just any ole war that might come along?"

"They're all the same war," he said. "and you know it."

The only response I could give, of course, was "Okay." 

Hair was more than a musical.  It was a movement.  The lyrics and melodies reflected the hopes and fears of all the years.  I have yet to witness anyone after listening to it who remained unaffected. Things were changing.  Everyone felt it, and Hair told us what was changing, and that the change was good.  It was a movement and Michael and Stephen joined us.  Grandma Cory would often say then, "The four of you are something."

I've been an activist now for almost 50 years, beginning on a strike picket line at the factory where my mother worked when I was ten.  I spend some of my sabbatical reflecting on this and all the "movements" since in which I have taken part.  Had I known back then, that things would not been become better decades later, but much, much worse.  I think my heart may have been too shattered, as they say, to keep on keeping on.

As it is, my heart is shattered plenty, and I mourn with every pore despite the unparalleled joy I paradoxically know through my two-year-old granddaughter Wrigley.  Tom died 38 years ago now, Michael 14, Stephen 7; and Grandma Cory 24.  I don't see evidence that we accomplished much.  So, when I take Wrigley for a walk to St. Vinnie's thrift shop, and I see a woman there wearing a faded t-shirt that reads, "Jesus died for our sins," I want to take her in my arms and weep.

"Yes, sure, but don't you get it?" I want to say. "People die for our sins every second.  It's more common than summer mosquitoes.  Millions upon millions—in war, lack of healthcare, AIDS/HIV, dying, dying, dying from all manner of greed and corruption.  Do you understand this government funding we bicker about is a paper fantasy?   And not just people, we're killing all the animals in Ecuador, the Gulf, the North Pole.  We could change this.  We could, but we're broke, financially and spiritually.  We're more Orwellian than Orwell: lying is truth, cowardice is prudence, media manipulation is called information.  Selfishness and avoiding pain/compassion are called emotional stability.  We don't just engage in denial; we're wed to it in our pretense that it's not as bad as we know it is.  I'm ready, like Dostoevsky, to give up and just write for no one who will ever read it about our inevitable demise."

I don't tell her this.  Instead Wrigley and I stroll to Dingman House. In the front hallway; Wrigley notices a poster on the ceiling for the first time.

"What's that?" she asks me.

"Honey, that's a photo of Earth."

"It's so beautiful!" she exclaims in yet untarnished wonder.

How can I not yearn for a better world for her?  Love still can trump the deepest despair.  Later, in my prayers, the paraphrased words of the martyr Harvey Milk stitch to my soul, my sin and salvation.

"If you want a world where people care about others, then care about others, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world where people put their body on the line for justice, then put your body on the line for justice, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world where we love our enemies, then love your enemies, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world with forgiveness, then forgive and you will live in that world.  If you want a world that is gentle and kind, then be gentle and kind and you will live in that world."

"Somewhere, inside something,

there is still a rush of Greatness….

Let the sun shine in."

Heterosexism as a Metaphor for Capitalism

 “In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”

-Bertrand Russell

It is never just one thing, is it?  You decide to clean a room, and you need to empty the vacuum.  The vacuum filter is broken, and you leave to buy another, but the car is low on gas.  Because the car is low on gas, you have to find your new debit card, and the PIN doesn't work, so you have to phone the bank, which means you have to dig through a cluttered drawer for the secret answer to your security question that you now can't remember. When you finally return to the room with the new filter, someone has borrowed the vacuum.  By the time you find the vacuum, there is no longer time that day to clean the room.  However, while you were at the store, the clerk tells you a neat little trick about vacuuming pet hair that makes the job go much faster when you are able to tackle it. And, the cluttered drawer search has unearthed a document you thought you'd lost.

It's a lot like that to struggle for peace and justice.  No task within this effort ever involves just one thing. Even our interruptions are interrupted, only to be interrupted by yet more interruptions.  And, because of this, it becomes not concentrated effort toward our goals or objectives, but interruption that comprises the bulk of our quotidian lives.

This uncontrollable and unavoidable phenomenon flies in the face of the cultural paradigm that tells us that the accomplishment of goals requires singular focus.  This is not true.  Accomplishing goals requires us to widen our lens and include more in our vision. A goal is not abandoned because we have been able to incorporate the interruptions and employed them toward a fuller result.

When I first learned that Pope Benedict had compared same-sex relationships unfavorably with killing the rainforests, it was a draining interruption, but I was inclined to brush it aside.  Not because I didn't find the comment painfully ignorant and cruel.  I did.  Nor, was I reluctant because I was afraid of some possible disapproval or fallout from even members of my own movement if I publicly challenged it.  I wasn't.  Homophobia and heterosexism have already taken from me lives far more precious than such a confrontation had the potential to levy.

 While I may be wrong, I assumed the Pope wasn't much interested in my opinion of his opinion.  I wanted to focus on something else, I was in the crux of trying to hone a metaphor, obvious and accessible enough, that it might persuade more people to consider, if not agree, that capitalism (the admiration of wealth) hurts us.  I have become convinced that our collective unwillingness to deeply explore this consideration is the root of all war and human suffering, and that human suffering will not only persist but worsen until we do.

It was implicit or inferred permission, too facilely given, for ignoring this that led me to reconsider.  Remarks that were intended to support and comfort were instead demoralizing and discomfiting.

"This isn't a 'peace' topic."

"The issue is too divisive."

"People aren't ready to hear this yet."'

"This could derail the good we're trying to do."

"We don't have time for this right now."

The "least of these" is not usually identified by conscious selection but are a revelation by default.  The "least of these" are the oppressed among us we are least inclined to help.  The "least of these" are the lepers, the "unclean" we will not touch.  They are those we ask to hide themselves.  They are those of whom we will not even speak.  Or, if we speak of them, we do so in hushed tones and whispers, looking around to see who might be listening.  When we make excuses for not unabashedly prioritizing a stand against the discrimination and persecution of LGBT people, the Catholic Worker Movement—if not the entirety of Christendom—positions lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as the least of these.

Unfortunately, the pain wrought by persecution is not ameliorated because the persecutor didn't know any better.  The statement "I wasn't raised that way," or "We all used think that way," may be explanations, but they aren't exoneration.  It's one thing to disagree with Wittgenstein's assertion that the avatar (teacher) must come from the affected class.  It is another to pretend we value the wisdom and witness of the oppressed more (or at least as much) as those with status and privilege when we're not willing to act as if we do.

This pattern of reluctance to reconsider our evaluation of human life worth cherishing (or the relative importance of people in our lives) draws a template of humanity's rejection of itself. By noticing this, I discovered that heterosexism was a neat metaphor outlining the functional or dysfunctional operatives of capitalism.

Like the Sword of Damocles, the only conclusion greed can reach swings wider and lower toward our necks, but, we risk it rather than walk away from the chance at wealth beneath the blade.

Any human construction (such as capitalism and heterosexism) that requires us to sacrifice our children to it rather than encourage our children to struggle against it is an agent of homicide that has tricked us into fearing the loss of property, public favor, and status more than we fear losing those we love.

The same way parents will turn away from a gay son or a lesbian daughter, we will watch sons and daughters sent to wars based on lies and greed and do little to stop it.  The same way we dismissed the nearly 100,000 deaths in the 1980s caused in this nation by homophobia (AIDS, gay-bashings, and executions), we allow 20,000 each year to die from lack of health care.  The same way we give money to the United Way, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, churches, and other entities that have blatantly homophobic policies, we keep cutting checks to a Health Insurance Industry that thrives in proportion to how much healthcare it denies not how much it provides.

We want to end senseless death and suffering, but we're willing to pay more to perpetuate it than we're willing to pay to stop it.  Some, but very few, are brave enough to pull a few branches off this evil tree; even fewer are willing to go after its roots.  This apportionment of our resources not only exposes our accepted national routine of serving mammon more than good, it begs a question.

Why are we faithful to those constructions that lead us to do less good rather more?  Why do we continue to cooperate with systems that compel us reject one another rather than love one another?  Why won't we pull the roots?

When Jesus said, "The love of money is the root of all evil," he may have meant that the love of money is the root of all evil.  It is pathological denial to think we can compromise our morality for the acquisition of money without loving money.  Heterosexism is primarily driven by fear of being associated with a lower social caste.  Capitalism, on the other hand, is even less kind.  It not only encourages the love of money (or caste superiority), it requires it.  By these prerequisites capitalism isn’t merely vulnerable to evil, but is the root (cause) of all contemporary evil.  A less hubristic, Bill Clinton might have said, "It's not the economy; it's the economic system, stupid."

It is an insidious evil that has convinced us that we are dependent on it for survival, when it is the thing that threatens human survival.  It is a sadistic stimulus that will sentence a poor woman who has cheated the system out of $100 in food stamps to more years in prison than a rich man who has stolen billions and has a $100,000 toilet.  It is insanity that prizes the risk of the coal mine owner who only risks money, more than the risk of coal mine worker who risks his life in that mine.

The domination of heterosexism and capitalism requires we accept (or least cooperate with) three compelling lies.

Property is more important than people.

It is blasphemy of the human spirit or the potential for anything sacred to propagandize that people are more inclined to work for property than for the good of others.  History has proven we do our best work when we are motivated by love and the satisfaction of accomplishment rather than material gain.  Jonas Salk didn't invent the Polio vaccine for the cash.  Martin Luther King, Jr., didn't spend a night in the Birmingham jail because he was auditioning for the million dollar Nobel Prize.  When it's only for money, we do only enough to get the money.  When we’re motivated by love, we give as much as we can give.

We know who or what we love by how we calculate the return on our investment.  Love is measured by how much we’re willing to give regardless of what we get in return.  Contempt is propagated by wanting as much as we can get for giving as little as possible.

It is epidemic social insanity when one will not risk one’s job or social status to save a life, but will take one’s own life after  losing a job and its status.  Human suffering will not end by learning ways for ourselves and others to acquire more, but by striving together to teach each other how to be content with less.

Some people are more worthy than others.

Heterosexism, like all, human oppression, sprouts in the roots of human greed and grows into a clinging vine of superiority.   Both heterosexism and capitalism are constructed to rationalize why some things in life should be denied to others. 

Sacrificing human beings  to protect property is exercised not so much by witting acts, but by blind acceptance of a scale of human worthiness.  Every construction that justifies one human being having a better quality of life than another is an indirect, if not direct, act of violence.

The American Dream is a human nightmare.  This “dream” of success determined by material gain is the most powerful provocateur of human isolation. The fact that few routinely socialize with those outside their economic class proves we view our monetary income as the best informant of whether we have “things in common” with each other.

Capitalism and heterosexism disparage mutual human regard simply on the basis of being human because they need cultural hierarchy and the admiration of wealth and exceptional favor in order to grow wealth for wealth’s sake.  Oppression controls the privileged with the threat of  the same treatment given to the underclass unless the privileged do not shun them from their intimate or private lives.  (E.g. “If you don’t mistreat them, we’ll mistreat YOU.”)

We size each other and ourselves according to a silly nightmare of meaningless criteria—the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the china we set on our tables—whether we fall in love with someone of the same or the opposite sex. We awaken from the nightmare by daring to reconsider, by daring to question our paradigms of human worthiness.  (E.g. “How can Italian china make me feel more sophisticated?”)

Silence will protect us.

This delusion emerges as the most dangerous to the human condition and our survival.  Silence is the best guarantor of maintaining the status quo. The idea that if we “keep our heads down” and everything will be okay can never come true because it is not based on anything true.

 The lies and corruption recently revealed in the financial crisis have shown us this.  When we spin, as shrewd or talented,  the ability to lie convincingly, we exaggerate fear and mistrust and ultimately collapse into the complete disintegration of  human character.

Why do we teach children that it’s impolite to talk about sex, politics, and religion, when sex, politics, and religion frame every reality?  If  being polite is an act of mutual consideration, why isn’t it impolite to not discuss these things?

Heterosexism clearly demands silence and often shames LGBT people for openly identifying themselves—”Why do they have to talk about it?”

Tragically the damage done by this worsens as acceptance of LGBT people improves.  Twenty years ago to expect silence was to be normative in an environment of silence. Today it is a proactive choice that requires a lot more malice and cruelty. Yet those influences remain not only powerful, but dominant.

To disclose or discuss one’s economic class if one is working class or poor in “mixed company”  is met with no less social derision.  Common accusations of “victim-hood” for such disclosure are most ironic, because it is, in fact, a capitulation to “victim-hood” to keep quiet about it.

While we all may be “equal” in the eyes of God, the realities of the privileged and the oppressed are very different.  Silence or pretending things are the same—may make the privileged feel more comfortable—but it does not and will not make them the same.

Our lives together are superficial and phony until we talk openly about these differences and decide together what to do about them.

It is also wrong-headed to think that the affluent or those who enjoy any form of societal privilege necessarily have less character than those with less privilege.  They do not.  Greed/generosity, honesty/duplicity, kindness/cruelty are truly equal-opportunity phenomena and present among us all.

Still, the time has come for us to sit together at the human table and  talk about how  privilege affects us individually and collectively.   Now more than ever, we particularly need to talk about capital or money—what we think about it, what we do about it, and what it does to us.  To study war-no-more is to intentionally study humanomics, a system that puts people before profits.

Our species and our planet will not survive if we don’t.