News
Skip Gates on Race, Class & the Criminal Justice System
Published July 21, 2009 @ 06:52PM PT
"this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system..."
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
If you haven't heard, one of the most prominent scholars in the world, Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr. of Harvard, listed as one of the 25 most influential Americans in 1997 by Time, was arrested on the porch of his Harvard Square home last week for alleged disorderly conduct. Returning home after a trip overseas to find his front door jammed, he and his Moroccan cab driver were attempting to open it when his neighbor, a white woman employed by Harvard, called the cops over 2 suspicious black men at the house down the street.
Did I mention Gates is black? Anyway, the cop who showed up to investigate pretty much hassled Gates in his own home, which ticked Gates off, who hassled him right back. As Gates followed the cop outside to get his identification, the cop arrested him before a crowd of passersby and other cops and wrote up a report justifying his decision in light of Gates's apparently alarming, "loud and tumultuous" behavior.
Did I mention Gates is about 60, walks with a cane, and is around 5 ft 7? Ferocious!
Gorilla Marketing: Framing Poverty
Published July 21, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
As I was writing my brilliantly titled blog post this morning about California's budget cuts, :), I kept thinking about this report I heard on WBUR this morning concerning Mass. Governor Deval Patrick's proposed budget cuts and the impact on the state's zoos. The story ruefully points to the "benefit" of having two newspapers in Boston (for how much longer, one wonders) and how their warring coverage of the threatened euthanizing of zoo animals due to budget reducations distracted us from the direct human impact of those cuts.
"All the while this Animal House drama played out, other victims of the governor’s budget vetoes – from senior care to education to services for children and families – were virtually ignored.
Which brings us to the third eternal truth of budget-cut coverage: It’s a zero-sum game. Every photo of Little Joe displaces an image of elderly hardship or shuttered libraries.
That’s guerrilla warfare of an entirely different kind."
Pun intended! Chortle, chortle.
But in all seriousness, I get that reduction in amenities like zoos, libraries, music classes, etc. have a detrimental impact on our quality of life and human development. But, I'd argue, so does leaving our elderly to ration their meds or to let kids' asthma go untreated or to relinquish teens to idle, hot summer afternoons with little to do. I was one who fell prey to the zoo story (heh). I pay a remarkable little amount of attention to local politics given I was raised in this state and have been back for 5 years now, but I went so far as to post the zoo story on facebook, chuckling at the idea of the zoo admin holding the legislature hostage with threats of dead animals and weeping children. (The zoos' cuts were restored.)
I'm not sure what lesson to take here: reporter John Carroll's original point that kids and animals are winning causes every time, or the uglier, flip side of that that hearing about poor grandma eating her cat food or freezing to death in the winter makes us so uncomfortable that we'd rather just not hear about it. Why is that? I get our easy moralizing about poor mothers, given we're a society that believes we have the right to legislate reproductive behavior. But why don't we feel a similar level of protectiveness for our elders as we do for kids? Am I way off here? Social Security is fairly sacrosanct; so maybe I'm wrong.
But there's no denying that people are much more jazzed about their pets or zoo charges than they are their most vulnerable neighbors.
R.I.P. Frank McCourt
Published July 20, 2009 @ 05:16AM PT
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."
Frank McCourt wrote this in the second paragraph of his award-winning bestselling memoir, Angela's Ashes - a chronicle of his impoverished childhood in Limerick, Ireland. McCourt died this weekend from cancer; he was 78.
I read Angela's Ashes and loved it. I was in my 20s, living comfortably in NYC, pursuing a Master's degree and after that, working full-time. Life was good and plentiful.
But there was something about Angela's Ashes, cultural, I suppose, to which I could strongly relate, and my mom felt the same. It was odd, we thought, how much a story about extreme poverty in Ireland in the 1930s and 1940s could resonate with our own Irish-Catholic experiences in Boston.
Such poverty, or even a slightly less desperate, modern American version, I'd barely felt it growing up, but seen my cousins struggle with it in Boston, and knew my parents had experienced it as well. Again, not to the depths that McCourt described, but the alcoholism; the cold, condemning shoulder of the Church even as it fed and clothed families; the concept of living "on the dole" as my father still quips today whenever my material needs become parasitic - all of these I know from experience or family history, passed down through the generations. And of course, what continues through my generation: tough exteriors and a distrust of emotionalism, the joking and heckling to get through tough times.
“I think there’s something about the Irish experience — that we had to have a sense of humor or die,” Mr. McCourt once told an interviewer. “That’s what kept us going — a sense of absurdity, rather than humor.
Yep. Rest in Peace, Frank, and may you have them in empathetic stitches wherever you're headed.
More on McCourt here, here, and here.
(Photo of Frank McCourt by David Shankbone)
Privatizing Welfare
Published July 17, 2009 @ 12:30PM PT
Or so Schwarzenegger proposes (I swear, this guy'll do anything to keep himself in the PiA headlines!):
A proposal that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been pushing in closed-door budget talks would tie the state, with little oversight or review, into a multibillion-dollar computer system likely to be run by the private sector to enroll low-income Californians in welfare, food stamp and healthcare programs.
The concern laid out in the bulk of the article is the Governator's attempt in times of crisis to ram through a pet project that has not been fully vetted. The Administration makes the usual argument that cost savings lie ahead in a centralized system. Critics point to the disastrous results from other states' attempts to privatize and centralize public assistance admin. And as you might imagine, these enormously expensive investments in system-wide changes can be difficult to undo.
In principle, I am generally supportive of centralized systems, but they present their own set of problems as they tend not to acknowledge or be able to respond to the specifics of certain populations, regions, etc. (A national federal poverty line that doesn't reflect regional costs of living is a good example.) Of greater concern to me here is the privatization piece. Privatization also has its place, but there's a few too many big stories of awarding funds to private contractors on the assumption that they can run programs and services more effectively than the government only to have them completely botch the job. I find this is particularly likely when for-profit contractors enter the sensitive or "niche" space like working with people suffering from economic hardship.
This strikes me as a pursuit on purely ideological grounds - or to benefit cronies. Forgive me for not finding these answers before pontificating, but what exactly are Schwarzenegger's reasons for wanting to privatize public assistance? Beyond the speculative cost savings? What's the problem with the decentralized, county-based system? Are so many recipients so frequently moving around the state that too much data is getting lost in the system? What successes of the existing system would he seek to preserve? How much disruption in service could recipients feasibly expect?
These are just a few of endless questions we should be asking about this dubious proposal. With California, the drama just does not end. And the poorest among us are paying the price.
On Health Care: The Wal-Mart Effect in Washington
Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
As Change.org's own Tim Foley reported a week or so ago, Wal-Mart has recently come out (in a letter to President Obama co-signed by the Center for American Progress and Service Employees International Union) in support of an employer mandate that would require most businesses to provide health care coverage to all of their employees.
This change of heart by the mega-corporation--whose dismal labor practices have been well-documented over the past decade--has been called a major political turning point in the nation's current health care reform debate, and could push the country towards more "universal" coverage for all its residents.
However, since reading about this corporate "coming to God" moment, I can't stop asking myself two important questions: why and at what cost has Wal-Mart chosen to support health care reform?
Expect More Katrina Scale Displacement
Published July 15, 2009 @ 05:20AM PT
This is what we get when we attempt to shrink government so much we could drown it in a bathtub (filled with gin, preferably): California issuing IOUs in the face of a 60% budget shortfall, or, 100,000 people left stranded in New Orleans to drown amidst toppled levees.
It's definitely too soon after the disastrous 8 last years of government (and their Reaganite prelude) to think we'd have tidily and efficiently expanded government services to weather us through moments of severe crisis. But after the travesty that was our response to Hurricane Katrina, we hear now that we haven't even managed to improve in one very specific area after four stark years of opportunity to do so: providing housing after severe disasters.
According to the Dept. of Homeland Security Inspector General last week:
The Lived Experience of the "Wise Latina"
Published July 14, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
...Is apparently scaring the hell out of some people.
I'm so over the dog-and-pony show that is Judge Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings. As you probably heard, barring a "meltdown," she'll be confirmed. Good, so can we move on already?
Apparently not, as every hour on the hour NPR reminds me that we should all be hyperventilating and unpacking her "wise Latina" remark. Still.
Sigh.
By now, Sotomayor (for the countless time, probably) has clarified her remarks while also trying to make clear that we are all bound by our lived experiences. Justice Ginsberg does the same in an excellent interview over the dearth of women on the Court. And Jamelle at PostBourgie nails the bias involved here...heck, I'm just going to cut and paste practically the entire thing:
