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How America's Retirement Crisis Is Crushing the Hopes of a Generation of Young People

Joshua Holland, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:25:00 -0700

We shouldn't just worry about older workers; their kids are hurting too.

The crucially important but largely missing context of today's debate over so-called “entitlement reform” (read: slashing Social Security benefits and shifting more healthcare costs onto seniors) is that we stand at the early stages of what's shaping up to be a massively painful retirement crisis.

And while there has been a longterm project among granny-bashing “entitlement reformers” to fuel a sort of intergenerational class warfare by accusing "greedy geezers" of hurting young people's prospects, the reality is that this growing retirement crisis is hurting not only older workers and retirees, but also the newest entrants into the workforce, a generation of young Americans whose prospects are far bleaker than those enjoyed by their parents.

If you're nearing retirement age – or have a parent or grandparent nearing retirement age – you're no doubt aware of how 40 years of stagnant middle-class wages and the disastrous shift from traditional pensions to 401(k)-type plans has made a dignified retirement all but impossible for all but the very well-to-do. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of private sector workers responsible for their own retirement savings increased nearly four-fold between 1980 and 2008 (PDF).

This trend has been an integral part of what Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker called the “great risk-shift,” in which the burden of paying for education, healthcare and retirement has been increasingly shifted from corporations and the government onto the backs of individuals and families. This graphic from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities tells the tale:

Wall Street, and its allies in Washington, swore that this transition to private accounts would harness the awesome power of the market to make us all wealthy in our golden years. In Forbes, Edward Seidle writes, “as a former mutual fund legal counsel, when I recall some of the outrageous sales materials the industry came up with to peddle funds to workers, particularly in the 1980s, it’s almost laughable—if the results weren’t so tragic.”

There was the “Dial Your Own Return” cardboard wheel of fortune that showed investors which mutual funds they should select for any given level of return. Looking for 12%? Load up on our government plus or option income funds! It was that easy to get the level of income needed in retirement, investors were told.

Like so many promises of the vaunted “new economy” popularized by Ronald Reagan and supported by both parties since, this was a scam with disastrous consequences. According to Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor of economics at the New School for Social Research, “seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts.” She adds: “The specter of downward mobility in retirement is a looming reality for both middle- and higher-income workers. Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.”

Today, two-thirds of retirees rely on Social Security for more than half of their retirement income, and for more than a third, those benefits make up at least 90 percent of their income. The average benefit in 2012 was just $14,760, and while talk of decreasing the cost-of-living adjustment has been all the rage in Washington, the reality, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is that the cost of living for seniors has increased faster than Social Security benefits, meaning that their real value has been falling even as people increasingly rely on them to get by.

How does this hurt younger workers? As it becomes more and more difficult to retire after busting one's ass in the American workforce for 40 years, an increasing number of older people have no choice but to remain in the workforce. Some work part-time; because of age discrimination, others take whatever jobs they can get, even if they're wildly overqualified. According to the Social Security Administration, “the labor force participation rates of men and women aged 62–79 have notably increased since the mid-1990s.”

Consider two pictures that are worth a thousand words; they show the share of the younger and older populations in the workforce, beginning about a decade after the transition to worker-owned retirement accounts began in earnest. As you can see, regardless of the ups and downs of the business cycle, the trend has been more workers aged 55 and over in the workforce and fewer working people under the age of 25 (The decline in labor force participation for 20- to 24-year-olds also correlates with an increasing share of young people getting a bachelor's degree, so this isn't a trend that can be attributed to a single cause.)

This shows the participation rate for workers over 55 (note that this can't be explained by more women entering the workforce; that shift was already largely baked into the cake by the time these data begin):

And this shows the participation rate for those aged 20 to 24:

Today, the unemployment rate stands at 7.5 percent, but almost 23 percent of 18- and 19 year-olds and more than 13 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds who want to work can't land a job. (The unemployment rate for those aged 55 and up is 5.5 percent.)

Again, this is the context that's largely missing from our endless debates about fiscal policy. It points to a rather obvious conclusion: we should be increasing Social Security benefits, decreasing the out-of-pocket healthcare costs seniors have to shoulder, and lowering the minimum age for retirement. In short, we should be focusing on policies that make it possible for older workers who have put in their time to kick back and let some younger workers find jobs. It wouldn't be a magic bullet for young people; it wouldn't deflate the student debt bubble or address our crushing level of income inequality, but it would be a darn good start.

Last month, the New America Foundation's Michael Lind, Joshua Freedman and Steven Hill offered a proposal that would go a long way toward achieving that goal. They envisioned an expanded Social Security program supplemented by a flat benefit that isn't tied to earnings or funded through payroll taxes, and argued that shifting a greater share of the costs of retirement onto Social Security would make tax-subsidized employer plans less crucial to Americans' retirement security. University of Texas economist James Galbraith has similarly argued for lowering the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare, at least until the employment picture improves.

But aren't these programs already costing too much? And aren't we already taxed to death, as the Tea Partiers claim? No: that's ideologically informed mythology. Prior to the Wall Street crash, we had the fourth lowest tax burden in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). And while the average “replacement rate” for public pensions – the share of a workers' income covered by retirement benefits – is 57 percent, we cover just 39 percent, on average, in the United States (XLS). Americans have some of the stingiest retirement benefits in the developed world.

As for the politics, it almost goes without saying that at a time when it requires 60 votes in the Senate to name a post office after a war hero -- and when the House has essentially given up on legislating in the public interest – policies that help real people suffering real pain in this economy are nonstarters.

But one can be certain it won't remain that way. Because we're just at the beginning of this crisis, and with each cohort of Americans reaching retirement age, fewer will have pensions and more will have experienced the great middle-class squeeze than the cohort before it. So it will get worse before it gets better, but eventually our elites will have no choice but to finally recognize the severity of the crisis their neoliberal clap-trap has created.

Biblical Medicine? How Religious Corporations Are Gobbling Up Healthcare Facilities

Valerie Tarico, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:15:00 -0700

Catholic hospitals and healthcare corporations are becoming “health care ministries.”

When it comes to matters of individual conscience, Washington State voters have a don’t-mess-with-us attitude that makes Texans look like cattle—and it goes way back.

In 2012 Washington voters flexed their muscle by legalizing recreational marijuana use and marriage for same-sex couples. In 2008, death with dignity passed some counties by as much as 75 percent. In 2006, Washington lawmakers outlawed discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In 1991 a citizen initiative established that “every individual has the fundamental right to choose or refuse birth control” and “every woman has the fundamental right to choose or refuse abortion.” It also guaranteed an absolute right to privacy around mental health and reproductive issues for teens aged 13 and up. Washington state’s constitution includes an Equal Rights Amendment and (from the get-go) a stronger wall of separation between church and state than the U.S. Constitution.

In other words, west of Moscow, Idaho, and north of Portland, any bishops who want to control what they think of as their sacramental turf --birth, coming of age, sex, marriage, trippy transcendent experiences, and death—haven’t got a chance in hell at the ballot box. Washington even has extended statutes of limitations on child sex abuse—something Archbishop Timothy Dolan successfully fended off in New York and Pennsylvania. The Archdiocese of Spokane declared bankruptcy.

But the Vatican hasn’t survived for 1,500 years by being stupid. And as my devout family members like to say, “Where God closes a door, he opens a window.” The window the bishops found open in Washington takes the form of independent hospitals with financial problems.

Thanks to changes in healthcare delivery, more and more independent hospitals are being forced to merge with large healthcare corporations. The pressures include expensive equipment, complex electronic record keeping technologies, and an Obamacare-driven push for greater administrative efficiency. Rather like mom-and-pop hardware stores that survived by becoming Ace franchisees with standardized, streamlined supply and distribution systems, independent health facilities are surviving through acquisitions and mergers with other hospitals and healthcare corporations.

Of the largest healthcare corporations in the country, five of six are administered by the Catholic Church including the famously conservative Catholic Health Initiatives which operates the Franciscan brand and has $15 billion in assets. By the end of 2013, if all proposed mergers go through, 45 percent of Washington hospital beds will be religiously affiliated. In 10 counties, 100 percent of hospital facilities will be accountable to religious corporations, which are rapidly buying up outpatient clinics, laboratories and physician practices as well.

In the words of the U.S. Conference of Bishops, Catholic hospitals and healthcare corporations are “healthcare ministries” and “opportunities:”

New partnerships can be viewed as opportunities for Catholic healthcare institutions and services to witness to their religious and ethical commitments and so influence the healing profession. . . .For example, new partnerships can help to implement the Church’s social teaching.

Here is the diabolical stroke of genius. In any merger between a secular and Catholic care system, fiscal health comes with a poison pill. One condition of the merger is that the whole system becomes subject to a set of theological agreements call the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” or ERDs. Rather than care being dictated by medical science and patient preference, a set of religious doctrines place restrictions on what treatment options can be offered to (or even discussed with) patients.

Under these agreements, the patient-doctor relationship becomes a patient-doctor-church relationship: “The Church’s moral teaching on healthcare nurtures a truly interpersonal professional-patient relationship. This professional-patient relationship is never separated, then, from the Catholic identity of the healthcare institution.” Furthermore providers who work in these systems are required to sign binding contractual agreements to adhere to the religious directives, whether or not they are Catholic: “Catholic healthcare services must adopt these Directives as policy, require adherence to them within the institution as a condition for medical privileges and employment, and provide appropriate instruction regarding the Directives . . . .”

The ERDs in full are readily available to public, but here are some key samples and implications:

Fertility Treatment: “Reproductive technologies that substitute for the marriage act are not consistent with human dignity.” This provision excludes in vitro fertilization and related treatments. It especially affects same-sex couples, who may rely on surrogacy or insemination for childbearing, but it also affects the 10 percent of American couples who have fertility problems.

Contraception: “Catholic health institutions may not promote or condone contraceptive practices.” . . . “Direct sterilization of either men or women, whether permanent or temporary, is not permitted in a Catholic health care institution.” While we don’t typically associate contraception with hospitals, state-of-the-art long acting methods like IUD’s increasingly are provided at the time of delivery, because postpartum insertion improves health outcomes. Under ERD guidelines, a woman who delivers a baby at a Catholic hospital and wants an IUD or to have her tubes tied has to have a second, separate procedure at a secular facility—if she can find one.

Abnormal Pregnancies: “In case of extrauterine pregnancy, no intervention is morally licit which constitutes a direct abortion.” Catholic practice encourages the removal of the entire fallopian tube to end an ectopic pregnancy, rather than the standard practice which simply ablates the developing fetus. That is because the standard treatment is considered abortion, while in the invasive and fertility-destroying surgery, death of the embryo is simply a side effect. More broadly, Catholic “ethics” forbid abortion even to save the life of a mother carrying a nonviable fetus. The battle to save a young woman named Beatriz in El Salvador exemplifies this very situation.

Advance Directives: “A Catholic health care institution . . . will not honor an advance directive that is contrary to Catholic teaching.” Where patient directives and bishop directives conflict, the directives of the bishops take precedence regardless of a patient’s own religious or conscience obligations.

DNR: “The free and informed judgment made by a competent adult patient concerning the use or withdrawal of life-sustaining procedures should always be respected and normally complied with, unless it is contrary to Catholic moral teaching.” Since this battle heated up, stories are emerging in which Catholic hospitals have force-fed incapacitated patients whose advance directives specifically forbid this.

Death with Dignity: “Catholic healthcare institutions may never condone or participate in [Death With Dignity] in any way.” Physicians are prohibited even from discussing options that exist in other institutions or making referrals.

To many non-Catholics, the most shocking statement in the ERDs is the suggested alternative to death with dignity: “Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering."Redemptive suffering is a theological notion that derives from the crucifixion story—the idea that the blood sacrifice of a perfect being could redeem harm done. (Theories about how this works have varied over the course of Christian history.) By extension, suffering itself has redemptive value, which is why Mother Teresa’s order, for example, practiced self-flagellation and glorified suffering of the poor, ill and dying.

Given the clash between Washington State’s independence streak and the top-down approach of the Catholic bishops, Washington citizens are pushing back. After Catholic Peace Health got an exclusive contract near her home in the San Juan Islands, advocate Monica Harrington created a website, Catholicwatch.org to complement the efforts of the national Merger Watch. Merger Watch has been fighting the religious takeover of secular systems across the country for over a decade, and sometimes winning, but describes a recent surge that overwhelms their resources. The ACLU of Washington is ramping up and aggregating funds to fight for a state-wide solution, the first in the country, and is soliciting stories (confidentiality protected) from patients and providers anywhere in the U.S. who have experienced religious interference in medical decisions.

Even so, on May 20, the Seattle Times announced an affiliation agreement between the University of Washington system and Peace Health. Even within Catholic-controlled hospitals, less than five percent of revenues come from the Catholic Church. Most are tax payer funds in the form of Medicaid, Medicare and capital grants for public services—and insurance reimbursement. So, the thought of the bishops influencing a public owned and funded institution adds insult to injury. In response, Columnist Danny Westneat, of the Times, framed a pointed question. “Most of us aren’t Catholic, so I’m guessing we’d never go along with letting the creeds of that one faith run something as universal as education [even if ‘the Catholics have a good record of running quality schools’]. So why are we allowing it with healthcare?”

Why indeed.

Big Backlash in Bangladesh: Workers Escalate Demands for Better Working Conditions

Jodie Gummow, AlterNet — Sat, 25 May 2013 16:17:00 -0700

The future of Bangladesh lies in the power of international cooperation and the implementation of concrete political measures to end unfair labor practices.

Violence has erupted in Bangladesh, following the world’s worst garment industry disaster last month, as thousands of workers gathered in the country’s capital on Monday demanding better pay conditions. Police charged batons and fired rubber bullets and tear gas as angry protesters demonstrated outside the capital’s main factory district, blocking the main highway in the Ashulia industrial area, home to the world’s largest manufacturing factories such as Walmart.

Up to 20,000 people took part in the protests, with more than 50 people injured by police intervention. Ashulia chief police Badrul Alam defended the action, arguing that workers had attacked police, throwing stones and striking police vehicles.

"They were demanding higher wages. We fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse them after they became violent and occupied a road," he told the AFP.

The demonstration is part of a rising string of protests over the past month. Since the April tragedy, a million people have signed petitions calling on global corporations like Gap and Walmart to end unsafe labor practices in Bangladesh, with hundreds protesting at stores across the country.

Members from United Students Against Sweatshops and Jobs with Justice were arrested at demonstrations at the Gap shareholder meeting in San Francisco where they were calling upon the company to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh aimed at improving worker safety conditions.

The Gap and Walmart, two of the major producers in Bangladesh, have resisted signing any agreement that is legally enforceable to date. Instead, Walmart said last week that it will conduct its own investigations into its supplier factories. This is a questionable move that raises much concern particularly in light of yesterday’s Reuters report that a Bangladesh factory where Walmart inspectors spotted cracks in the wall this month, is still making Wrangler shirts for the world’s largest apparel maker, US-based VF Corp.

The incident highlights an increasing need for policy makers to step in and harden their stance on international manufacturing practices. Moreover, there is a lack of government accountability and impetus to act to respond to tragedies despite their continual occurrence.

According to Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Fashion, increasing wages and conditions for workers would not only improve labor conditions in developing countries like Bangladesh, but also allow the United States an opportunity to once again compete in the garment industry.

Over the last 20 years, the amount of clothing imports into the US has risen exponentially with the US now only making about two per cent of its clothing domestically, Cline states. Not only does this feed the exploitation of cheap labor in countries like Bangladesh, but it also impacts upon the US job market.

Without the political will to promote fair-priced labor conditions in the US and implement laws aimed at protecting workers from unfair buying practices, workers at both ends of the spectrum continue to suffer.

While media coverage of the April disaster undoubtedly placed Bangladesh and its contentious labor practices under scrutiny, the tragedy was not the first of its kind; over 1,800 workers have been killed in factory fires and building collapses in Bangladesh since 2005. Despite such figures, it is now considered the second largest clothing manufacturer in the world with 80% of its annual exports deriving from a $20 billion industry.

Furthermore, with a population of approximately 150 million people living in a radius the size of Iowa state, the country is one of the most densely populated on the globe. While this has contributed to many of its social and economic problems, Bangladesh continues to remain economically resilient.

Historically, the Bengal delta operated as a thriving, commercial trading route in the early 20th century, connecting India, China and Southeast Asia and expanding trade between the Middle East, East Africa and Europe. However, following Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan after the Liberation War in 1971, the country lost access to its much-needed capital and suffered from extreme economic loss and poverty.

In an effort to rebuild, it began focusing on the ready-made garment sector by adopting export-orientated industrialization methods, denationalizing the public sector and shifting its socialist policies toward private sector participation and foreign investments.

In 1974, the Multi-Fiber Arrangement in the North American market began regulating the international garment trade industry, imposing quotas on exports from developing countries within Asia. Subsequently, foreign entrepreneurs went in search for countries that could become “quota-free” manufacturing locations.

Bangladesh, as a developing nation, benefited substantially from the Arrangement in that no restrictions on imports were imposed on those countries considered the poorest. This led to the emergence of the “export-oriented garment industry” in Bangladesh, which turned the country into one of the world’s leading export sectors.

Over the next 25 years, the garment industry in Bangladesh contributed to a major reduction in poverty and boosted employment by five percent a year from 1995-2005. Unfortunately, this economic success could not be reconciled with the increasingly poor labor conditions and low wages, which followed.

In response to the media exposure of a number of worldwide sweatshop scandals within the garment industry involving companies such as Walmart and Nike, US President Bill Clinton established the Apparel Industry Partnership (AIP) in the mid ‘90s, joining forces with retailers and labor unions, with a view to eliminating sweatshops and improving labor conditions for workers worldwide.

The AIP also established the 1999 Fair Labor Association, which aimed to promote corporate culpability and facilitate inspections of unfair labor practices both domestically and internationally. However, as the garment supply chains moved further away from the United States to places such China and Asia, it became increasingly more difficult to monitor internal labor practices and conditions in factories abroad.

As a result, the 2000s were fraught with continuous workers rights violations, government intimidation and violence in Bangladesh. After a series of demonstrations and intense pressure from workers to improve work safeguards, the Bangladeshi government finally introduced laws allowing for the establishment of a workers association in 2006. However, such progression took a back seat when the government imposed a state of emergency in 2007 and banned union activities for the entire year.

In response, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) filed a petition in 2007 with US Trade Representative resulting in the removal of the state of emergency status in Bangladesh 2008. However, in 2009, workers rights violations continued prompting further review by the AFL-CIO.

Today, there are approximately 5000 garment factories in Bangladesh with 3.6 million garment workers, paid around $38 per month. While there has been an increase in worker elections supporting the formation of unions, dialogue between associations and employers remains sluggish.

Moreover, 80% of garment workers in the industry are women and are subject not only to inhumane work conditions, such as long work hours, unbearable working temperatures, lack of bathroom facilities and sexual harassment, but their voices are disregarded on the mere basis of their sex.

According to Human Rights Watch, the human rights situation in Bangladesh deteriorated significantly in 2012 with labor groups in the country such as the Bangladesh Centre for Worker Solidarity continuing to face criminal charges -- some as serious as the death penalty -- as well as numerous restrictions on funding for their activism.

Last week, the Bangladesh Cabinet agreed to allow the country’s garment workers to form unions without having to obtain consent from factory owners. In addition, a board has been set up to review the minimum wage for garment workers within three months.

Whether or not the government will follow through on these promises remains uncertain, but in the interim global companies can at least react by complying with international recognized standards and fair-labor agreements such as signing the Accord.

Of cours, even a legally binding agreement signed by Western conglomerates has the potential to be ineffective in the face of homegrown corruption, particularly by local governments in Bangladesh which have continuously averted from rules and regulations.

The question of the validity of any agreement also remains fallible, with enforcement still proving to be the greatest hurdle and anti-union companies like Walmart and the Gap still refusing to get on board.

Without the backbone of the major stakeholders, the immediate plight of the Bangladeshis will not change. With that in mind, the April 24 tragedy provides an opportunity for political reform. The future of Bangladesh lies in the power of international cooperation and the implementation of concrete political measures to end unfair labor practices and help the country emerge into the developed world.

How's Obamacare Turning Out? Great If You Live in a Blue State, and 'Screw You' If You Have a Republican Governor

Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet — Sat, 25 May 2013 12:18:00 -0700

Coverage for uninsured is cheaper than expected for millions, but red-state residents in poverty are facing pain.

Obamacare implementation is becoming the latest dividing line between blue- and red-state America, with Democrat-led states making progress to expand healthcare to the uninsured and the poor—and Republican-led states saying "screw you" to millions of their most vulnerable and needy residents.

The latest sign of the Republican Party’s increasingly secessionist tendencies comes as Obamacare passed a major milestone in California, which late last week announced lower-than-expected healthcare premiums for its 5.3 million uninsured, less than many small businesses now pay in group plans.

“Covered California’s Silver Plan… offers premiums that can be 29 percent lower than comparable plans provided on today’s small group market,” the state’s new insurance exchange announced Thursday, referring to the least-expensive option of four state-administered plans and posting this price comparison chart.

In contrast, the refusal by red-state America to create these health exchanges, which would be more local control—a supposed Republican value—and to accept federal funds to expand state-run Medicaid programs for the poor, means that about half the states are turning their backs on their residents, especially millions of the poorest people.

The federal government plans to step in later this summer and offer uninsured people in recalcitrant red states the option of buying plans via federally run heath care exchanges. But the poorest people can’t afford that, meaning the refusal to expand Medicaid programs will leave them in the cold. They will see ads selling new federal healthcare options that will be unaffordable for them.

TheNew York Times reports that local healthcare advocates in red states are predicting a backlash once Obamacare is rolled out and the poor realize that they cannot take advantage of it because Republicans are blocking it. However, that does not change the bottom line in state-run Medicaid programs: the GOP is again penalizing the poor.

Progress in Blue States

Meanwhile, in blue states, there have been surprising developments in the cost of Obamacare for those people who currently are uninsured. There, the bottom line is insurance premiums are hundreds of dollars a month lower than what employers are now paying for their workers under existing group plans.

California, with 5.3 million uninsured adults, is the biggest state to release cost estimates for Obamacare. Its lower-than-expected estimates are in line with announcements in Washington, Oregon, Maryland and Vermont. The actual prices will be known after insurers file rate documents in coming weeks.

These estimates are a bright spot in what’s otherwise been a season of dire and all-too-partisan predictions about Obamacare implementation. Even without the political smears, there still are plenty of unknowns about the law, including in the blue states where it is on track. The biggest concern is how will it affect current healthcare costs across the economic spectrum, as the law is designed to cost less for people and small businesses via tax credits to offset its expense. This chart shows how it is expected to affect various age and income groups.

Unlike the red-state retreat from taking responsibility for its residents, California has taken an aggressive approach to building benefit plans. Its new insurance exchange told insurers what coverage their plans had to include, prompting some of the largest national health insurance companies to skip the Obamacare rollout. However, enough firms are participating to offer real options.

As important, California is one of 15 states where its insurance regulators cannot reject premium increases. That means the companies can jack up prices with impunity, even if the public protests. “As important as this progress [on cost estimates] is, there’s still more work to be done,” said Dave Jones, California Insurance Commissioner. “I remain very concerned that there is no legal authority to reject unreasonable and excessive rate hikes.”

Red State Realities

The exchanges are one of two major pathways to expanding coverage. The other is via state-run Medicaid programs, which is health care for the poorest. TheNew York Times reports that Republican governors have not set up exchanges—and federal officials have yet to fill that void, even though the law says that they will. Those states also rejected expanding Medicaid to “millions of poor people,” even as the law offers nearly full federal subsidies for the first half-dozen years.

“That benefit is not just to individuals but to local economies,” said Alwyn Cassil, spokeswoman for the Washington-based Center For Studying Health System Change. “The hospitals are very angry with those folks.”

Beyond Republican Party propaganda spreading outright lies about Obamacare, there are other real implementation issues. They concern the progress of states setting up the exchanges and then how the feds will step in when states fail to act. California’s exchange told the insurers what benefits to include in its plans, but the feds might not go that far and just bundle pre-existing health plans for individuals. That may result in fewer benefits offered.

How small businesses will react is another variable. Small businesses under 50 employees are eligible for tax credits. Business with more than 50 employees that don’t offer workers healthcare can face big fines. How that will alter hiring decisions is an open question, promoting much fear-based coverage in the business press.

There are also questions about which employee groups may not be helped, notably trade unions whose members work for different employers and currently have health coverage under older federal programs. Those unions are hoping upcoming federal regulations will address their concerns.

Getting accurate answers to these questions is difficult, Cassil said, because the most vociferous critics and boosters are invested in the law’s success or failure. “It’s very difficult to find people who don’t have a dog in this fight,” she said.

Take outgoing Montana Democratic Sen. Max Baucus, who, along with Ted Kennedy oversaw its drafting in the Senate. Baucus has been quoted as saying Obamacare implementation is a “trainwreck.” However, he was responsible for many of the legal ambiguities that have created today’s implementation challenges. The law’s drafting did not follow the usual practice of going through a House-Senate conference committee to find and fix technical problems. In effect, it was published without being edited.

It’s important to assess Obamcare by stepping back from today’s politics. Broadly speaking, the law has three waves of reform and we are now approaching the start of the second wave. The first wave allowed adult children to stay on their parents’ policies until they were 26 and got rid of annual coverage caps. Those were popular policies, touted by Obama and helping his re-election in 2012.

The second wave is creating state insurance-buying exchanges that will offer policies to uninsured individuals and small businesses. Another piece is offering poor people care by expanding coverage under state-run Medicaid. The third wave is making changes in how Medicare, the federal program for the elderly, pays doctors. There are pilot programs to encourage teams of doctors, not specialist after specialist, to treat patients and be paid for the results—not cutting checks for every test.

Rightwing critics as recently as Thursday were issuing reports slamming Obama for missing key deadlines with writing the federal regulations that states have to follow—including how the feds will step in where states have not created their own insurance exchanges. Some of those delays have come because the GOP-controlled House has delayed funding, and because reactionary GOP governors like Texas’ Rick Perry, also have not cooperated.

If you examine the report’s fine print, such as this one on federal regulations, you find that the criticisms are aimed at public health initiatives long opposed by corporate America, such as better nutrition labeling. There also are reports by legitimate non-partisan groups that offer other glimpses of how Obamacare is likely to shape healthcare services beyond the cost issues.

Most intriguing—and possibly controversial—is this one from the Center for Studying Health System Change that suggests that Americans increasingly will be seeing more of nurse practitioners and less of doctors, at least at the start of a physician’s visit. That’s because the addition of millions of new patients will put more pressure on doctors’ flexibility to spend time with patients. There is not an increase in the number of available doctors, whereas the ranks of patients will swell.

18 Year-Old Facing Felony Charges for Same-Sex Relationship with 14 Year-Old Refuses Plea Deal, Heads to Court

Katie McDonough, Salon — Sat, 25 May 2013 17:42:00 -0700

Critics charge anti-gay bias is fueling the charges.

Kaitlyn Hunt, the 18-year-old high school senior facing felony charges over a same-sex relationship with a 14-year-old freshman classmate, has refused a plea deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest for two years. Hunt’s parents, citing that the relationship was consensual, had requested Florida prosecutors reduce the charges to a misdemeanor, but their request was denied by the state.

Hunt’s lawyer Julia Graves explained the decision to go to court in a statement: “This is a situation of two teenagers who happen to be of the same sex involved in a relationship. If this case involved a boy and girl, there would be no media attention to this case … If this incident occurred 108 days earlier when she was 17, we wouldn’t even be here.”

The case has generated considerable public attention, with many advocates arguing that anti-gay bias is fueling the charges. On Friday, Slate’s Emily Bazelon acknowledged why the parents of a 14-year-old would be wary of an 18-year-old partner while also recognizing the apparent role of homophobia in the case. She went on to note how Hunt’s ordeal raises additional legal and ethical questions about defining consent between high school students and the selective enforcement of statutory rape statutes more broadly:

Compare Hunt to Genarlow Wilson, convicted at 17 of child molestation for having oral sex with a 15-year-old girl at a New Year’s party. Or consider the case of Marcus Dwayne Dixon, prosecuted when he was an 18-year-old high school football star for raping a 15-year-old girl who said he’d forced her to lose her virginity. The jury found Dixon not guilty of rape, but convicted him of statutory rape: The girl was underage, and she and Dixon had sex. Both Wilson and Dixon got mandatory 10-year sentences, and each served two years before the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the punishment as “grossly disproportionate” to the crime.

Does it matter that Wilson and Dixon are black? That the girl in Dixon’s case was white? That after their convictions, the Georgia legislature made consensual sex between teenagers a misdemeanor? My point is that it’s so hard to know which older teenagers are predatory and which are in love, or at least fond of each other, with younger teenagers who love or like them back. Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents are understandably complaining about selective prosecution. They are absolutely right that most of the time no one calls the cops when a high school senior has sex with a freshman. But if the uneven enforcement of statutory rape laws is a problem, then it’s also a problem for the rare boy who gets caught in a prosecutor’s web.

6 Key Facts That Have Been Lost in the IRS Scandal

Justin Elliott, Kim Barker, ProPublica — Sat, 25 May 2013 11:17:00 -0700

Dark money groups continue to warp politics and get tax exemptions without having to name their donors.

This originally appeared on ProPublica.

In the furious fallout from the revelation that the IRS flagged applications from conservative nonprofits for extra review because of their political activity, some points about the big picture -- and big donors -- have fallen through the cracks.

Consider this our Top 6 list of need-to-know facts on social welfare nonprofits, also known as dark money groups because they don’t have to disclose their donors. The groups poured more than $256 million into the 2012 federal elections.

1. Social welfare nonprofits are supposed to have social welfare, and not politics, as their “primary” purpose.

A century ago, Congress created a tax exemption for social welfare nonprofits. The statute defining the groups says they are supposed to be “operated exclusively for the promotion of social welfare.” But in 1959, the regulators interpreted the “exclusively” part of the statute to mean groups had to be “primarily” engaged in enhancing social welfare. This later opened the door to political spending.

So what does “primarily” mean? It’s not clear. The IRS has said it uses a “facts and circumstances” test to say whether a group mostly works to benefit the community or not. In short: If a group walks and talks like a social welfare nonprofit, then it’s a social welfare nonprofit.

This deliberate vagueness has led some groups to say that “primarily” simply means they must spend 51 percent of their money on a social welfare idea -- say, on something as vague as “education,” which could also include issue ads criticizing certain politicians. And then, the reasoning goes, a group can spend as much as 49 percent of its expenditures on ads directly advocating the election or defeat of a candidate for office.

Nowhere in tax regulations or rulings does it mention 49 percent, though. Some nonprofit lawyers have argued that the IRS should set hard limits for social welfare nonprofits -- setting out, for instance, that they cannot spend more than 20 percent of their money on election ads or even limiting spending to a fixed amount, like no more than $250,000.

So far, the IRS has avoided clarifying any limits.

2. Donors to social welfare nonprofits are anonymous for a reason.

Unlike donors who give directly to politicians or even to super PACs, donors who give to social welfare nonprofits can stay secret. In large part, this is because of an attempt by Alabama to force the NAACP, then a social welfare nonprofit, to disclose its donors in the 1950s. In 1958, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP, saying that public identification of its members made them at risk of reprisal and threats.

The ACLU, which is itself a social welfare nonprofit, has long made similar arguments. So has Karl Rove, the GOP strategist and brains behind Crossroads GPS, which has spent more money on elections than any other social welfare nonprofit. In early April 2012, Rove invoked the NAACP in defending his organization against attempts to reveal donors.

The Federal Election Commission could in theory push for some disclosure from social welfare nonprofits -- for their election ads, at least. But the FEC has been paralyzed by a 3-3 partisan split, and its interpretations of older court decisions have given nonprofits wiggle room to avoid saying who donated money, as long as a donation wasn’t specifically made for a political ad.

New rulings indicate that higher courts, including the Supreme Court, favor disclosure for political ads, and states are also stepping into the fray. During the 2012 elections, courts in two states -- Montana and Idaho -- ruled that two nonprofits engaged in state campaigns needed to disclose donors.

But sometimes, when nonprofits funnel donations, the answers raise more questions. It’s the Russian nesting doll phenomenon. Last election, for instance, California’s election agency pushed for an Arizona social welfare nonprofit to disclose donors for $11 million spent on two California ballot initiatives. The answer? Another social welfare nonprofit, which in turn got the money from a trade association, which also doesn’t have to reveal its donors.

3. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision meant that corporations could pay for political ads, anonymously, using social welfare nonprofits.

In January 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions could spend money directly on election ads. A later court decision made possible super PACs, the political committees that can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money from donors, as long as they don’t coordinate with candidates and as long as they report their donors and spending.

Initially, campaign finance watchdogs believed corporations would give directly to super PACs. And in some cases, that happened. But not as much as anyone thought, and maybe for a reason: Disclosure isn’t necessarily good for business. Target famously faced a consumer and shareholder backlash after it gave money in 2010 to a group backing a Minnesota candidate who opposed gay rights.

Many watchdogs now believe that large public corporations are giving money to support candidates through social welfare nonprofits and trade associations, partly to avoid disclosure. Although the tax-exempt groups were allowed to spend money on election ads before Citizens United, their spending skyrocketed in 2010 and again in 2012.

A New York Times article based on rare cases in which donors have been disclosed, sometimes accidentally, explored the issue of corporations giving to these groups last year. Insurance giant Aetna, for example, accidentally revealed it gave $3 million in 2011 to the American Action Network, a social welfare group founded by former Sen. Norm Coleman, a Republican, that runs election ads.

Groups that favor more disclosure have so far failed to force action by the FEC, the IRS, or Congress, although some corporations have voluntarily reported their political spending. Advocates have now turned to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is studying a proposal to require public companies to disclose political contributions.

The idea is already facing strong opposition from House Republicans.

4. Social welfare nonprofits do not actually have to apply to the IRS for recognition as tax-exempt organizations.

With all the furor over applications being flagged from conservative groups -- particularly groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot” or “9/12” in their names -- it’s worth remembering that a social welfare nonprofit doesn’t even have to apply to the IRS in the first place.

Unlike charities, which are supposed to apply for recognition, social welfare nonprofits can simply incorporate and start raising and spending money, without ever applying to the IRS.

The agency’s nonprofit wing is mainly concerned about ferreting out bad charities, which are the biggest chunk of nonprofits and the biggest source of potential revenue. After all, the IRS’s main job is to collect revenue. Charities allow donors to deduct donations, while social welfare nonprofits don’t.

Most major social welfare nonprofits do apply, because being recognized is seen as insurance against later determination by the IRS that the group should have registered as a political committee and may face back taxes and disclosure of donors. A recognition letter is also essential to raise money from certain donors -- like, say, corporations.

But some of the new groups haven’t applied.

The first time the IRS hears about these social welfare nonprofits is often when they file their first annual tax return, not due until sometimes more than a year after they’ve formed.

In many cases, the first time the IRS hears about these groups is a full year after an election.

5. Most of the money spent on elections by social welfare nonprofits supports Republicans.

Of the more than $256 million spent by social welfare nonprofits on ads in the 2012 elections, at least 80 percent came from conservative groups, according to FEC figures tallied by the Center for Responsive Politics.

None came from the Tea Party groups with applications flagged by the IRS. Instead, a few big conservative groups were largely responsible.

Crossroads GPS, which this week said it believes it is among the conservative groups "targeted" by the IRS, spent more than $70 million in federal races in 2012. Americans for Prosperity, the social welfare nonprofit launched by the conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, spent more than $36 million. American Future Fund spent more than $25 million. Americans for Tax Reform spent almost $16 million. American Action Network spent almost $12 million.

Besides Crossroads GPS, each of those groups has applied to the IRS and been recognized as tax-exempt. (You can look at their applications here.)

All of those groups spent more than the largest liberal social welfare nonprofit, the League of Conservation Voters, which spent about $11 million on 2012 federal races. The next biggest group, Patriot Majority USA, spent more than $7 million. Planned Parenthood spent $6.5 million. VoteVets.org spent more than $3 million.

None of those figures include the tens of millions of dollars spent by groups on certain ads that run months before an election that are not reported to the FEC.

6. Some social welfare groups promised in their applications, under penalty of perjury, that they wouldn’t get involved in elections. Then they did just that.

Much of the attention when it comes to Tea Party nonprofits has focused on their applications and how the IRS determines whether a group qualifies for social welfare status.

As part of our reporting on dark money in 2012, ProPublica looked at more than 100 applications for IRS recognition. One thing we noted again and again: Groups sometimes tell the IRS that they are not going to spend money on elections, receive IRS recognition, and then turn around and spend money on elections

The application to be recognized as a social welfare nonprofit, known as a 1024 Form, explicitly asks a group whether it has spent or plans to spend “any money attempting to influence the selection, nomination, election, or appointment of any person to any Federal, state, or local public office or to an office in a political organization.”

The American Future Fund, a conservative nonprofit that would go on to spend millions of dollars on campaign ads, checked “No”in answer to that question in 2008. The very same day the group submitted its application, it uploaded this ad to its YouTube account:

Even before mailing its application to the IRS saying it would not spend money on elections in 2010, the Alliance for America’s Future was running TV ads supporting Republican candidates for governor in Nevada and Florida. It also had given $133,000 to two political committees directed by Mary Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president.

Another example of this is the Government Integrity Fund, a conservative nonprofit that ran ads in last year’s U.S. Senate race in Ohio. Its application was approved after it told the IRS that it would not spend money on politics. The group went on to do just that.

For more on the IRS and nonprofits active in politics, read our story on how the IRS's nonprofit division got so dysfunctional, Kim Barker's investigation, "How nonprofits spend millions on elections and call it public welfare" and our Q&A on dark money.

Reefer Madness Started in Mexico

Isaac Campos, University of North Carolina Press — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:10:00 -0700

Spanish paranoia and propaganda about indigenous toking gave birth to Mexico’s drug wars.

The following excerpt from Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs, by Isaac Campos. It is a summary the author's thesis at the University of Cincinnati, first printed as the introduction toHome Grown. (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012).

The Conventional Wisdom is that marijuana prohibition was first imposed early in the 20th century by sheriffs in southwestern states seeking to increase their power over Mexican immigrants who had brought the herb from south of the border, where smoking it was part of the culture, no big deal. Then, the Conventional Wisdom continues, Hearst newspapers and Harry Anslinger’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics concocted and publicized stories of marijuana use causing violence and insanity, which led to Congress imposing a federal ban in 1937.

Around the year 1530, a conquistador named Pedro Quadrado left his small village near Seville and traveled to the New World. After actively participating in the ongoing conquest of Mexico, Quadrado received a coveted encomienda, or royal tribute and labor grant, to undertake the cultivation of cannabis there. He thus became the first person to cultivate this species in the Americas.

That, anyway, is what he himself claimed, and probably with justification, for it was not until June 1545 that the Spanish Crown first ordered its subjects to sow cannabis in the New World.

For the Spanish, cannabis was first and foremost a fiber plant. They called it cáñamo.Tall, green, and gangly, of round seeds and “abominable smell,” this was an extraordinarily common cultivar whose strong fibers, or hemp, made clothing, rope, and the broad and sturdy sails that powered the greatest sea-borne empire the world had ever known. Thus began the long journey of cannabis through Mexican history, one that would eventually see its meaning and identity radically transformed.

The first signs of that transformation appeared in the 1770s. By then, cannabis had found its way into local medical-religious practice, and its seeds and leaves were sold by herb dealers under the namepipiltzintzintlis, or “the most noble princes.”

Though still cherished by Spanish officials as an industrial fiber, there were growing rumors that, for Indians, it also facilitated visions, communion with the devil, and sometimes madness. Prohibitionist edicts briefly raised the profile of these noble princes, but the name pipiltzintzintlis would soon fade into obscurity, as would (temporarily) the drug use of cannabis in Mexico.

A new generation of nationalist botanists would rediscover cannabis drugs during the 1850s. These men become interested in cataloging Mexico’s “indigenous” natural wonders, and in the process they noted that “certain Mexicans” had begun smoking the stuff. The word pipiltzintzintlis was no longer in use, but two other local designations, both of which helped to reinforce the plant’s apparent indigeneity, had emerged: rosa maría and mariguana.

The former would also soon disappear, leaving the wordmariguana, or marihuana—or as it is now spelled in English, “marijuana”—to conquer the lexica of most of the Western Hemisphere.

Though these nationalist botanists saw potential value in this “local” drug plant, their writings would soon be overwhelmed by the view that this was a quintessentially indigenous “narcotic” causing madness, violence, and mayhem. In 1886, for example, a Mexican medical student delivered a thesis in the field of legal medicine on marijuana and the insanity defense, concluding that “the criminal responsibility of an individual in a state of acute marijuana intoxication should be exactly the same as that of the maniac,” namely none.

By 1898, Mexico City’s leading daily could claim that “for years the press has described horrifying crimes, criminal eccentricities and suicides, which place before the court of public opinion individuals whose type oscillates between furious madmen and criminals worthy of being placed before the firing squad, and one after another case demonstrates that the murderer, the rapist, the insubordinate, the presumed suicide, and the scandalous acted under the influence of marihuana.”

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of newspaper stories described marijuana’s effects in similar fashion.

Descriptions like this one of marijuana’s effects not only were standard during the late 19th and early 20th centuries but also went virtually unchallenged. As I demonstrate in chapter four, a close analysis of more than 400 Mexican newspaper articles —drawn from over a dozen publications, both liberal and conservative, and all describing the effects of marijuana— reveals that not a single article questioned this basic stereotype.

Given that these papers were published in an environment of significant media competition and that they routinely lambasted each other for untruths and sensationalism, this unblemished record is quite extraordinary. Furthermore, there is evidence that lower-class Mexicans, most of whom were illiterate, were equally convinced of marijuana’s frightening effects. As one commentator revealed in 1908: “The horror that this plant inspires has reached such an extreme that when the common people . . . see even just a single plant, they feel as if in the presence of a demonic spirit. Women and children run frightened and they make the sign of the cross simply upon hearing its name.”

In 1920, after labeling marijuana a threat to “degenerate the race,” Mexican sanitary authorities banned the drug nationwide, 17 years prior to similar legislation in the United States.

Originally an industrial fiber symbolizing European imperial expansion, cannabis had been transformed by the dawn of the twentieth century into a quintessentially indigenous, and putatively dangerous, Mexican drug plant. Thus, in 1920, after labeling marijuana a threat to “degenerate the race,” Mexican sanitary authorities banned the drug nationwide, 17 years prior to similar legislation in the United States.

For those readers familiar with the existing historical and social scientific scholarship on drugs in North America, much of this may come as a surprise. The War on Drugs is routinely described as “America’s War on Drugs” and the drug problem as an “American disease,” where “America” means the United States and the rest of the Americas have been cajoled or forced into cooperating.

Global drug prohibition has recently been portrayed as a kind of “informal American cultural colonization,” while Latin America has been identified as a place where, prior to U.S. involvement, substances like marijuana and peyote were an accepted part of “Indian and Latin American culture.”

The problem is not that historians have looked deeply at the origins of drug prohibition in Latin America and gotten it all wrong. The problem is that historians simply have not looked deeply at the origins of drug prohibition in Latin America.

Not a single monograph exists, for example, on the birth of these policies in Mexico. This is a remarkable fact given the tremendous political, social, and economic costs that the War on Drugs have produced in that country over the last century. Drug prohibition is the sine qua non of the War on Drugs. Without prohibition, there is no black market, and without a black market, there are no “narcotraffickers” to demonize, no illicit drug users to incarcerate, and no national security threat to declare.

Scholars who date the War on Drugs to Richard Nixon’s formal declaration of that “war” in 1971, or to the Reagan-era militarization of the conflict, are missing the forest for the trees.

That is why scholars who date the War on Drugs to Richard Nixon’s formal declaration of that “war” in 1971, or to the Reagan-era militarization of the conflict, are missing the forest for the trees. Nixon merely intensified an antidrug crusade that formally began at the federal level in the United States (and Mexico) in the early 20th century.

Certainly that “war” became more militarized in the late 1980s, but neither was this completely new. Mexico’s military, for example, had been eradicating drugs intended for the U.S. market since the late 1930s. In sum, the origins of the War on Drugs lie in the legal and ideological roots of prohibition. With respect to marijuana in North America, those origins have their deepest roots in Mexico.

Marijuana also provides a simply fascinating case study for U.S.-based historians interested in the ideological foundations of drug prohibition. It is a substance whose inclusion among “Schedule 1” drugs in the United States is often cited as a fanatical excess of extremist drug warriors, an unscientific designation proving that politics, not rationality, drives the War on Drugs. It is a compelling argument. After all, there is not a single death on record that can be attributed to overindulgence in marijuana, while serious research has long demonstrated that alcohol and tobacco are generally more habit-forming and unhealthy for their users than is cannabis.

Yet despite today’s typical view of marijuana as a “soft” drug in comparison to, say, the opiates and cocaine, Mexicans of a century ago believed it to be perhaps the “hardest” drug of them all, one that triggered sudden paroxysms of delirious violence. Could marijuana really have produced these effects?

And, whatever the answer, what was it about the historical circumstances of the day that made such descriptions so eminently believable? How is it possible that not a single newspaper or scientific source seriously challenged their veracity?

Finally, how did the radical transformation of cannabis’s meaning occur in Mexico between the sixteenth and twentieth century? Where in the plant’s long journey through Mexican history did these changes occur?

These are the questions around which this book is organized. By answering them, I hope to better explain marijuana’s prohibition in Mexico, itself a key to understanding the origins of the War on Drugs in that country and, to a certain extent, in North America as a whole.

Ultimately, the evidence will demonstrate that marijuana prohibition can only be described as a kind of “informal American cultural colonization” if one takes the radical step of considering Mexico as worthy of the “America” label as its powerful neighbor, for in this case the influence mostly flowed northward. Marijuana’s prohibition in Mexico was, in short, home grown.

Reprinted with permission from University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012.

Penis Cakes, Penis Straws ... Penis Piñatas? Why the Modern Bachelorette Party Is Filled With Male Genitalia

Madeline Grimes , Bitch Magazine — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:37:00 -0700

The penis-prop industry is a relatively new addition to the bachelorette party. Why is it there?

The following article first appeared in Bitch Magazine.

A few weeks ago, I attended a friend’s bachelorette party. In the days preceding, my kitchen morphed into a workshop dedicated to constructing penis-shaped objects to eat and to hit. Resting atop my kitchen table like a prize pig at a state fair was a large pink papier-mâché penis piñata stuffed with condoms, chocolates, and individually wrapped packets of lube. Meanwhile, a large, thickly frosted phallic cake occupied the lower half of my refrigerator.

It wasn’t until later (one slice of penis cake down, and the remnants of a bashed piñata safely deposited in the garbage can) that I realized how odd it is that the modern bachelorette party—by and large, a gender-segregated event—is festooned with facsimiles of male genitalia. It seems there is an entire industry devoted to shoving genitals—penis whistles, penis pasta, penis straws, and of course, penis cake—into a bride’s face. (Vagina whistles, pasta, piñatas, and cakes are hard to come by.) Ask anyone to spot the bridal party at a crowded bar, and he or she will inevitably point to the group of women sucking on penis-shaped lollipops (“cocksuckers,” get it?) and ordering rounds of Sex on the Beach (it’s sex—on a beach!). The use of gag gifts at bachelorette parties has become so ingrained in our culture that to have a party that does not in some way feature phallic objects is almost blasphemous.

But the penis-prop industry is a relatively new addition to bachelorette parties, events originally intended to give the bride an opportunity to participate in prewedding festivities and express her sexual freedom. Early bachelorette parties emerged sometime during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and were loosely modeled after the bachelor party. These male-oriented celebrations have roots that stretch much deeper than that of the bachelorette party. They began in the fifth century BC, when Spartan soldiers held a dinner for the groom and a toast to his honor. Over time, the parties grew more rowdy, and the celebratory activities were perceived as more lewd and sexual in nature. Emily Post’s Wedding Etiquette describes the bachelor party as “a sodden good-bye to old bachelor days, an event where the groom and his ushers share an evening of abandonment a night or two before the wedding that usually includes a great deal of drinking.”

Later, pop culture lauded the bachelor party as a night of pure debauchery before the heavy cuffs of marriage end a groom’s days of sexual freedom. Bachelor Party (1984) was the first film to focus on the exploits of the eponymous event, with Tom Hanks starring as the perennial party-animal-turned-fiancé. His friends, incredulous at his interest in settling down, throw him a wild party complete with a donkey snorting cocaine, an orgy, and his fiancée eventually questioning his fidelity. (The bride and her friends also hit the town in retaliation for the bachelor party’s perceived debauchery. It is, however, never explicitly called a “bachelorette party.”)

Then there’s arguably the most famous film in the bachelors-gone-wild genre, 2009’s The Hangover, in which four friends head to Vegas for a night of revelry before the wedding. In the course of the evening, they lose the groom, collect a baby, engage in infidelity (a member of the wedding party drunkenly marries a stripper), and steal a tiger from Mike Tyson. The message of these films is that the bachelor party is simply a glorification of men behaving badly.

Prior to the 1960s, women didn’t celebrate the “end” of their sexual freedom in ritualized parties like men because it was believed that women weren’t actually giving anything up in marriage. Women were not expected to feel sad about their impending nuptials, nor were they expected to lament the end of their single days in drunken bacchanalia—marriage was the aspirational end point. Bachelorette parties emerged only when attitudes about sexuality and marital roles shifted; specifically, when the brides-to-be were no longer assumed to be virgins on their wedding night.

Instead of bachelorette parties, brides were given showers in which they were given gifts—usually housewares and cooking utensils—to prepare them for married life. The shower remains a pillar of prewedding ritual (according to TheKnot.com and WeddingChannel.com’s 2012 Real Weddings Study, 83 percent of brides have showers) and a time in which married women pass on advice and secrets to successful marriage. Many bridal-shower themes focus on the traditional domestic role of women, such as cooking or garden parties. These parties are ruled by etiquette, and they tend to romanticize marriage as the pinnacle of a woman’s aspirations. Jaclyn Geller, author of the 2001 book Here Comes the Bride, points out that “as opposed to the raunchy bachelor party, the female shower is mawkishly sentimental and marriage oriented.” Though once it may have served to socialize the young bride to sex through advice and gifts of racy lingerie, the shower was rarely overtly sexual in nature.

Early bachelorette parties typically followed the more formal bridal shower, and included guests outside of wedding attendants, but there is little research on them detailing what actually took place. Beth Montemurro, a sociologist who studies bridal events, suggests that early parties sought to provide “the bride with an unforgettable last weekend where she would be able to realize the magnitude of the transition from single to married.”

According to Montemurro, through the 1980s bachelorette parties did not explicitly mimic bachelor parties in their perceived sexual deviance. Instead, they were events that sought to reaffirm friendship before marriage without the formality of other prewedding rituals. In other words, the bachelorette party was more about celebrating friendship in a relaxed setting than participating in debauched or sexualized antics.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that the bachelorette party was even given a name, and the late ’90s before it was widely discussed in media (including women’s and bridal magazines) or studied in academia. (Cosmo’s first article about bachelorette parties appeared in 1998 and suggested that activities should be tailored to the bride’s tastes, even if “you know your pal secretly wants to rub oil on the gun of a scantily clad ‘police officer.’”) The 1980s brought a subtle shift in tone to the parties—they were usually planned in advance and began to shadow the male version in activity. The first newspaper article to explain what a bachelorette party entailed appeared in 1988, and in it the male author, Richard Roeper (yes, of Ebert & Roeper fame) exclaims conspiratorially, “Guys, you’re not going to like this, but my research indicates that on the Bawdy Meter, the typical bachelorette party easily tops its male counterpart.”

This shift marked the end of the staid bachelorette soiree, one in which friendship above all else was celebrated, and the beginning of the move toward a manufactured mimicry of the male version. Geller maintains that the bachelorette party is “a gesture of retaliation rather than a real sensual adventure…[answering] an imagined insult, responding to the bachelor party’s text (lewd sexuality) rather than its subtext (lamenting lost friendship).”

Several factors contributed to the rise of the penis-centric modern bachelorette party. Montemurro notes that “throughout the late 1990s and into the first few years of the 21st century, there was a boom in print media coverage of bachelorette parties, reflecting the increase in the popularity of the parties themselves.” Descriptions of rowdy women commandeering bars and salivating over the chiseled pectorals of male strippers became salacious fodder for women’s and wedding magazines. Additionally, women began taking bachelorette activities outside of private homes and into the public sphere. Bars, clubs, and restaurants became popular venues for bachelorette festivities, and because women were celebrating in public, it was easy to witness (and comment on) their rowdy behavior.

According to the 2012 Real Weddings Survey, 77 percent of brides have a bachelorette party. Activities are designed to pantomime naughtiness without creeping past the boundaries of acceptable behavior. After all, a penis straw is too quirky to be salacious, right? But bawdy bachelorette culture is a manufactured construct that grew from the hushed urgings of big business. Between 1990 and 2002, the average cost of a wedding grew by almost 50 percent. There are nearly 2.1 million new marriages each year, and in 2012 couples spent an average of $28,427 on their wedding and the flurry of ritualized events that precede it. From the engagement party and bridal shower to the rehearsal dinner and bachelor and bachelorette parties, getting married is more expensive than ever. Weddings and prewedding rituals have become lavish affairs that barely resemble past traditions. In her 2007 book One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding, Rebecca Mead points out that in the first decade of 2000, bridal magazines conveyed the message that a wedding is “a consumer rite of passage, in which the taking up of a new role in life is given material substance through the acquisition of products and services for both the wedding itself and for the marriage that is to follow.”

The bachelorette party has become its own consumer rite of passage, and as the parties gained popularity, new rituals were introduced. Embarrassing the bride became a central focus, with bachelorettes instructed to wear fancy sashes, veils, or hats to distinguish them from their friends, and it’s customary to shove various symbols of genitalia into their blushing faces. An article on TheKnot.com lists the seven “must-have” party props for modern bachelorettes. The author advises women to “add a hint of hooker to the bachelorette’s outfit to make her feel dangerous, daring, and fabulously embarrassed,” and to “make a beeline for the penis sipper (a.k.a. ‘dickie sippie’) and straws…these two items make the most sense, provide a constant laugh, and allow everyone to get in on the phallic fun.”

The forced use of phallic symbols at bachelorette parties suggests that the role of women in heterosexual marriages is simply to penis-please and that an evening of female bonding must include a reminder of the men they’re leaving at home. During the bride’s last night to express her sexuality, she is instead encouraged to worship and covet cutesy symbols of the penis. It’s unlikely that a woman would be seen carrying around a penis straw at a Sunday luncheon, but within the confines of the prescribed hypersexual bachelorette party it seems only normal.

The use of penis props also mocks the supposed sexual purity of a bride (after all, she’ll likely be wearing white on her wedding day to symbolize her virginity) by insinuating that she’ll be horrified or embarrassed by all the cocks around her. These props are emblematic of the contradictory roles the bride is forced to play: Within hours of the bachelorette party ending, she’ll morph from bawdy bachelorette to blushing, virginal bride.

The rise of queer marriage has already shifted the conversation about the sacred institution, and it will no doubt shift the traditions surrounding it as well. Steven Petrow, author of Steven Petrow’s Complete Gay & Lesbian Manners, notes that same-sex couples are creating their own wedding rituals, ones that often leave gender-essentialist rituals by the wayside. These changing traditions will inevitably trickle down into prewedding events, either queering bachelor and bachelorette parties or perhaps speeding toward the end of such festivities entirely.

The business of being a bride-to-be mandates a wild party, contrived sexual deviance (within the boundaries of acceptable behavior), and a set of rituals that have strayed far from their original intent. Though bachelorette festivities still celebrate female friendships, the ritual of bonding is often overshadowed by the manufactured naughtiness of the penis-prop culture. I wonder how bachelorette parties will change in coming years as they become institutionalized rituals of weddings. I wonder if the traditions created by queer marriages will usher in a new era of celebratory activities. And I can only hope that when it comes time for my own bachelorette party, it’s devoid of penis propaganda.

How You Can Help Create a Better Farm Bill

Ocean Robbins, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:22:00 -0700

We know that Congress isn't always a champion of the public interest -- but here's an opportunity to see that they do things right.

Have you noticed that when it comes to food policy, the U.S. Congress isn't always an unflinching champion of the public interest?

Today, you have an opportunity to do something about that.

Sen. Barbara Boxer has introduced an amendment to the 2013 farm bill that would, for the first time ever, demonstrate Senate support for labeling of foods with genetically engineered (GE) ingredients. More than 90 percent of the American public supports labeling of GE foods. Might it be time for the U.S. Congress to respond to the demands of the American people?

You can send a message now by clicking here, telling your senators that you stand with Senator Boxer's amendment, and you hope they will, too

And there's more you can do.

Every five years, the U.S. Congress allocates nearly a trillion dollars in food stamp (SNAP) spending and agribusiness subsidies through the massive "Farm Bill."

Today, you have an opportunity to impact where all that money goes.

Do you want to stop your tax dollars from subsidizing factory farms and genetically engineered high fructose corn syrup? Do you want to see local, organic farmers and natural foods have a fighting chance in the marketplace?

The U.S. Senate is debating amendments to the draft Farm Bill this week. It's a complicated and bureaucratic process, and predictably, all of the lobbyists for Monsanto and big agribusiness are out in full force.

But if you are from the United States, there is one simple action you can take today, that will have a big impact.

Call your senator's office. Tell them that you are a constituent and you want them to support amendments that are currently up for discussion in the U.S. Senate.

You might get them to support the Shaheen-Toomey payment limit amendment #926 that would place long-overdue limits of $50,000 on crop insurance premium subsidies for America's wealthiest large-scale farmers. Or ask them to support the Coburn-Durbin amendment #953 that would reduce crop insurance premium subsidies for farmers with incomes over $750,000/year.

Why support these amendments? At a time of record farm incomes and stark fiscal realities, now is the time to ask the wealthiest farmers to pay a little more of their fair share of the costs of doing business.

Find your senator's name and number here. Or if you already know their name, you can just call them at the Capitol switchboard: (202) 224-3121. A switchboard operator will connect you directly with the Senate office you request.

There's a lot more at stake in the Farm Bill, including support for organic agriculture, investments in local and sustainable food systems, critical conservation efforts that help farmers protect our air, soil, and water, and dozens of other amendments. If you want to take further action, go to National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition's continually updated "take action" page and sign up for action alerts, by clicking here.

The impact of the choices made in Washington this week will have profound impact on millions of lives.

They say that all that it takes for the forces of evil to triumph, is for the forces of good to do nothing. If you want to be a force for good in the world of food policy, this is a great time to take action.

This story first appeared on the Huffington Post.

Ocean Robbins serves as adjunct professor at Chapman University and as CEO and co-host (with best-selling author John Robbins) of the 100,000+ member Food Revolution Network. Find out more and sign up for free here.

How Corporations Are Subverting Attempts to Rein in Their Power

Thomas Mc Donagh, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 10:07:00 -0700

Citizens have won important policy victories only to be undermined by the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts.

In 2009, when the government of El Salvador refused to issue an environmental permit to a Canadian mining corporation, community activists in Las Cabañas rejoiced. For years they had been fighting a pitched battle against the efforts of the company, Pacific Rim, to mine for gold in their region - plans that included the dumping of toxic arsenic in their rivers. It was not a campaign without risk. Four Salvadoran anti-mining activists have been assassinated in the course of their courageous efforts. That victory, however, may well prove to carry a high cost for the people of El Salvador. In a legal assault filed in a World Bank trade court, Pacific Rim is now demanding $315 million in compensation payments from the Salvadoran government, an amount equal to one third of the country’s annual education budget.

That is just one example among many where citizens have fought for and won an important policy victory only to find that victory undermined by corporations using the growing web of international investment rules and arbitration courts. There are many others. Public health campaigners in Uruguay won a huge victory in 2010 when the national government passed new health laws to discourage tobacco consumption. Even though those new laws (including aggressive new warnings on cigarette packages) directly mirrored the guidelines of the World Health Organization, the U.S. corporate tobacco giant Philip Morris retaliated with a $2 billion legal action against the government.

Nowhere is this muscle-flexing by multinational corporations a greater threat than on issues related to sustainable development. The result is a little known but enormous legal obstacle planted directly in the policy path toward a sustainable future. The Democracy Center has just documented that threat in an important new report released this week: Unfair, Unsustainable and Under the Radar: How Corporations Use Global Investment Rules to Undermine a Sustainable Future.

For many this system of corporate-driven investment rules and “dispute resolution” burst into public view a decade ago when Bechtel, the San Francisco-based engineering conglomerate, sued the people of Bolivia for $50 million following the now-famous Cochabamba Water Revolt, after investing just $1 million in the country. A global citizen campaign aimed at the corporation ultimately forced Bechtel to drop that case for a token payment of 30 cents. Yet in the years since, the pile of corporate cases has only grown ever higher.

Another typical current case features dangerous exposure to lead in Peru. When the national government there revoked the operating license for a smelter plant in La Oroyo (operated by Doe Run Peru) in July 2010, the health of the local population and the surrounding environment got some badly needed respite. The village, located high in the Peruvian Andes, has been declared one of the most polluted sites on earth, and in 2007 99% of the children under seven in the neighborhood closest to the town’s smelter had dangerously high levels of lead in their blood. The government deemed that Doe Run Peru’s failure to meet environmental cleanup commitments at the site constituted a breach of the country’s environmental legal standards. However Doe Run’s parent company, the Renco group, has other ideas. The corporation, owned by US billionaire Ira Rennert, has hit back with an $800 million damages claim, enough money to pay the yearly salaries of almost 15,000 Peruvian school teachers (or nearly 6,000 Peruvian health workers).

The world today is covered by an expanding web of over three thousand bilateral and multilateral trade and investment agreements. These agreements grant rights to corporations and allow them to sue governments for policy initiatives that they claim interfere with their profits. The resulting legal cases, despite their far-reaching local consequences, are settled far away and behind closed doors by a small group of unaccountable private lawyers in international dispute arbitration tribunals. Flying in the face of democratic principles and judicial independence, these tribunals operate with little or no public scrutiny and where the communities directly affected are denied a voice.

The number of these investment cases has exploded in recent years, with 2012 breaking all records. By far the most popular tribunal system used by global corporations is the World Banks’ infamous International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICISID). Corporations can use this and other tribunal systems to demand hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation from governments – not just for what they have actually invested in a country, but also vast amounts more for the profits they expected to earn into the future. The lawyers at these tribunals move seamlessly from the role of ‘independent’ arbiter to that of corporate attorney. Some have strong ties to multinational corporations and serious questions have been raised about their independence in an unaccountable system in which they have such a huge vested interest. Although previously used as a court of last resort by aggrieved investors, these tribunals have become the weapon of choice for corporations in their attempts to clear the path for profiting at the expense of public health and the environment.

The proliferation of these investor-state cases has three major impacts. First, in cases where the corporations win (as they often do) the result is a massive transfer of scarce public resources to wealthy private corporations. Second, even if governments are successful in mounting a legal defense, doing that comes at a cost of potentially millions of dollars in legal fees paid to one of the handful of high-priced law firms that specialise in such cases. Third, the net impact is a dangerous chilling effect on the willingness of policy makers to implement policies in the public interest for fear of costly international arbitration cases.

The international investment rules/tribunals system has been used to attack anti-nuclear efforts in Germany, public control of water in Argentina and Bolivia, anti-mining efforts across a host of nations, and today has new targets in its sights.

One new likely battleground is citizen and community efforts against oil and gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’. The proposed investment chapter of the Canada-EU free trade agreement, if approved, may give corporations the legal fire-power to challenge government regulation of this highly controversial practice. Efforts to curb the dumping of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere are also at risk. The South Korean government has shelved a plan to introduce a low-carbon incentive system for the auto industry because of fears that the law would breach a provision in the US-South Korea free trade agreement. If the government were to move ahead with the measure it would risk landing itself before theseinternational trade and investment courts.

Today, just as communities in El Salvador and Peru have taken up the battle to protect their natural resources, a whole global movement is emerging to rethink the relationship between economic development and social and environmental well-being, and is pushing governments to take policy action in that urgent direction. This important shift, however, is in direct conflict with the interests of transnational corporations hard-wired to maximize short-term profit and pass on the environmental and social costs of their operations to others. The Democracy Center’s report puts a spotlight on how global corporations are using the investment rules system to undermine the policies essential to sustainable development and the democratic process essential to such policies.

Long an obscure interest of trade and investment lawyers, the system of international investment rules and tribunals has remained off the radar for most of the groups and communities that it affects. This is slowly beginning to change. As the number of controversial cases rises, the injustice of the current system is becoming increasingly clear.

Much as the deregulation of financial markets encouraged by the banking sector helped lead to economic collapse, the system of international investment rules works pushed by multinational corporations is leading us toward environmental collapse. As we hurtle towards a number of ominous tipping points in terms of many of the earth’s natural systems, there has never been a more urgent time for activists, academics, development workers and others to understand the legal and political barriers that block us from changing course. This de facto privatized justice system for big business is a massive such barrier that urgently needs to be brought down.

How Did Major Hedge Fund Earn 30% Returns for 20 Years Straight? Lots of Cheating

Les Leopold, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 13:40:00 -0700

There are 8,000 hedge funds, and they are up to their eyeballs in unethical behavior.

How would you like to invest $10,000 and watch it grow over 20 years into $1,461,920? Well that's what happened at the giant hedge fund, SAC Capital Advisors, which made a 30% return for 20 years in a row.

How is it possible to make such profitable investments again and again and again? The U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, Preet Bharara, believes he has the answer: SAC is cheating ... again and again and again. In fact, Bharara suggests that hedge funds that engage in insider trading may be rotten to the core:

"Given the scope of the allegations to date, we are not talking simply about the occasional corrupt individual; we are talking about something verging on a corrupt business model, for the defendants seem to have taken the concept of social networking and turned it into a criminal enterprise. " [refers to a 2011 hedge fund indictment, not the current case against SAC.]

To date, nine current and former SAC employees face insider trading criminal charges stemming from their work at the firm. Four have pled guilty and two are still fighting their indictments. Now the head of SAC, multi-billionaire Stephen A. Cohen (note the initials), will be subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. The federal strategy may be to indict the entire hedge fund and shut it down, according to the New York Times.

We do not know as yet to what degree SAC relied on illegally obtained information (or other illicit activities) to amass its extraordinary profits. But we do know this: hedge funds don't like to gamble. Rather they want to make their billions by betting on sure things. In researching my book, How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour, it became clear that that the hedge fund industry as a whole is up to its eyeballs in a series of unethical maneuvers that sometimes are legal, sometimes are borderline and often are outright criminal.

But aren't there many (some?) honest and ethical people working in America's 8,000 hedge funds?

Maybe so, but the overwhelming culture within hedge funds makes cheating a way of life, according to Lynn Stout of UCLA Law School. In her article, "How Hedge Funds Create Criminals," Stout claims that hedge funds flash three critical signals that promote unethical behavior:

Signal 1: Authority Doesn’t Care about Ethics. Since the days of Stanley Milgram’s notorious electric shock experiments, science has shown that people do what they are instructed to do. Hedge-fund traders are routinely instructed by their managers and investors to focus on maximizing portfolio returns. Thus, it should come as no surprise that not all hedge-fund traders put obeying federal securities laws at the top of their to-do lists.

Signal 2: Other Traders Aren’t Acting Ethically. Behavioral experiments also routinely find that people are most likely to “follow their conscience” when they think others are also acting prosocially. Yet in the hedge-fund environment, traders are more likely to brag about their superior results than [about] their willingness to sacrifice those results to preserve their ethics.

Signal 3: Unethical Behavior Isn’t Harmful. Finally, experiments show that people act less selfishly when they understand how their selfishness harms others. This poses special problems for enforcing laws against insider trading, which is often perceived as a “victimless” crime that may even contribute to social welfare by producing more accurate market prices. Of course, insider trading isn’t really victimless: for every trader who reaps a gain using insider information, some investor on the other side of the trade must lose. But because the losing investor is distant and anonymous, it’s easy to mistakenly feel that insider trading isn’t really doing harm.

Brilliant Criminals?

The more we dig into what hedge funds actually do, the more we find that insider-trading is just one of many unethical strategies used to rig bets. Their goal always is to find a sure thing. And the only sure way to secure such infallible investments is to cheat.

At the height of the housing bubble, large banks colluded with hedge funds to sell mortgage-related securities that were designed to fail so that the hedge funds could collect insurance on that failure. (This is exactly like building a home that will burn down in three months so that you, the seller and builder, can collect the insurance.)

High frequency hedge funds set up their super-computers next to the stock exchanges so they get the information a few nanoseconds before the rest of us. This allows them to deploy automated systems to front-run our trades. Between the time you press your E-trade button and the time the trade actually goes through, a high-frequency trader is buying what you want and selling it back to you for a few pennies more. By systematically fleecing stock-market participants, high-frequency traders extract $5 to $20 billion a year from the rest of us.

Jim Cramer (host of CNBC's "Mad Money") admits to planting false stories with his media colleagues while he was running a successful hedge fund. Through manipulating the media, Cramer was able to move stocks in the direction he wanted in order to cash in. In a startling kiss-and-tell online interview he admits that the hedge fund game consists of one lie after the other. Furthermore, he says that if you're not willing to lie, cheat and violate the law, "maybe you shouldn't be in the game."

To provide even more incentive for hedge fund managers to cheat their way to riches, the federal tax code rewards them with a special tax loophole called "carried interest." As a result, billionaire hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us, and neither political party has the nerve to remedy this blatant injustice.

Let us now praise famous hedge funds?

Because so few of us know these stories, and because so few of us feel comfortable wading into the muck of high finance, hedge fund moguls preen about the universe bestowing a small part of their ill-gotten gains upon institutions that can help them enhance their reputations. Central Park and the New York Public Library are receiving $100 million each from prominent hedge fund managers seeking to polish their images. Colleges want hedge fund managers on their boards and in charge of their endowments. Non-profits, even progressive ones, kiss up to them, hoping to score big donations. Pension funds scramble to invest in hedge funds, looking to secure a share of the booty.

But very few have the nerve to ask where hedge fund riches really come from. If you're receiving such largess, you don't want to know if the money is tainted. Better to pretend that these guys are just brilliant investors with the uncanny gift for making 30 percent a year, year after year after year.

All of us should be grateful that our Wall Street-riddled government still has honest prosecutors like Preet Bharara who are not afraid to ferret out the cheats and put them away. So far his Manhattan office has secured 81 indictments against hedge fund managers and traders, 74 of whom have either have pled guilty or have been convicted.

Only another 10,000 or so to go.

The Latest Cannabis Discoveries That the Federal Government Doesn’t Want You to Know About

Paul Armentano, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:22:00 -0700

Federal lawmakers and the White House continue to willfully ignore science in regards to the cannabis plant.

Despite issuing a highly publicized memorandum in 2009 stating, "Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration," it remains clear that federal lawmakers and the White House continue to willfully ignore science in regards to the cannabis plant and the federal policies which condemn it to the same prohibitive legal status as heroin. In fact, in 2011 the Obama administration went so far as to reject an administrative petition that called for hearings to reevaluate pot’s safety and efficacy, pronouncing in the Federal Register, “Marijuana does not have a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States or a currently accepted medical use with severe restrictions. At this time, the known risks of marijuana use have not been shown to be outweighed by specific benefits in well-controlled clinical trials that scientifically evaluate safety and efficacy.” (The Administration’s flat-Earth position was upheld in January by a three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.)

Nevertheless, scientific evaluations of cannabis and the health of its consumers have never been more prevalent. Studies are now published almost daily rebuking the federal government’s allegations that the marijuana plant is a highly dangerous substance lacking any therapeutic utility. Yet, virtually all of these studies – and, more importantly, their implications for public policy – continue to be ignored by lawmakers. Here are just a few examples of the latest cannabis science that your federal government doesn’t want you to know about.

Frequent cannabis smokers possess no greater lung cancer risk than do either occasional pot smokers or non-smokers

Subjects who regularly inhale cannabis smoke do not possess an increased risk of lung cancer compared to those who either consume it occasionally or not at all, according to data presented in April at the annual meeting of the American Academy for Cancer Research.

Investigators from the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed data from six case-control studies, conducted between 1999 and 2012, involving over 5,000 subjects (2,159 cases and 2,985 controls) from around the world.

They reported, “Our pooled results showed no significant association between the intensity, duration, or cumulative consumption of cannabis smoke and the risk of lung cancer overall or in never smokers.”

Previous case-control studies have also failed to find an association between cannabis smoking and head and neck cancers or cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract.

Nevertheless, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration continues to maintain, “Marijuana smokers increase their risk of cancer of the head, neck, lungs and respiratory track.”

Consistent use of cannabis associated is associated with reduced risk factors for Type 2 diabetes

Will the pot plant one day play a role in staving the ongoing epidemic of Type 2 diabetes? Emerging science indicates that it just might.

According to trial data published this month in the American Journal of Medicine, subjects who regularly consume cannabis possess favorable indices related to diabetic control compared to occasional consumers or non-consumers.

Investigators at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre in Boston, assessed self-report data from some 5,000 adult onset diabetics patients regarding whether they smoked or had ever smoked marijuana. Researchers reported that those who were current, regular marijuana smokers possessed 16 percent lower fasting insulin levels and reduced insulin resistance compared to those who had never used pot. By contrast, non-users possessed larger waistlines and lower levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL or ‘good’) cholesterol – both of which are risk factors for type 2 diabetes.

Similar benefits were reported in occasional cannabis consumers, though these changes were less pronounced, “suggesting that the impact of marijuana use on insulin and insulin resistance exists during periods of recent use,” researchers reported.

The recent findings are supportive of the findings of 2012 study by a team of UCLA researchers, published in the British Medical Journal, which reported that adults with a history of marijuana use had a lower prevalence of type 2 diabetes and possess a lower risk of contracting the disease than did those with no history of cannabis consumption, even after researchers adjusted for social variables (ethnicity, level of physical activity, etc.) Concluded the study, “[This] analysis of adults aged 20-59 years … showed that participants who used marijuana had a lower prevalence of DM (Diabetes Mellitus) and lower odds of DM relative to non-marijuana users.”

Diabetes is the third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.

Inhaling cannabis dramatically mitigates symptoms of Crohn’sdisease

Smoking cannabis twice daily significantly reduces symptoms of Crohn’s disease, a type of inflammatory bowel disorder that is estimated to impact about half a million Americans. So say the results of the first-ever placebo-controlled trial assessing the use of cannabis for Crohn’s – published online this month in the scientific journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.

Researchers at the Meir Medical Center, Department of Gastroenterology and Hepatology in Israel assessed the safety and efficacy of inhaled cannabis versus placebo in 21 subjects with Crohn’s disease who were nonresponsive to conventional treatment regimens. Eleven participants smoked standardized cannabis cigarettes containing 23 percent THC and 0.5 percent cannabidiol – a nonpsychotropic cannabinoid known to possess anti-inflammatory properties -- twice daily over a period of eight weeks. The other ten subjects smoked placebo cigarettes containing no active cannabinoids.

Investigators reported, “Our data show that 8-weeks treatment with THC-rich cannabis, but not placebo, was associated with a significant decrease of 100 points in CDAI (Crohn’s Disease and activity index) scores.” Five of the eleven patients in the study group reported achieving disease remission (defined as a reduction in patient’s CDAI score by more than 150 points). Participants who smoked marijuana reported decreased pain, improved appetite, and better sleep compared to control subjects. Researchers reported that “no significant side effects” were associated with cannabis inhalation.

The clinical results substantiate decades of anecdotal reports from Crohn’s patients, some one-half of which acknowledge having used cannabis to mitigate symptoms of the disease.

Marijuana-like substances halt HIV infection in white blood cells

The administration of THC has been associated with decreased mortality and ameliorated disease progression in monkeys with simian immunodeficiency virus, a primate model of HIV disease. So could cannabinoids produce similar outcomes in humans? The findings of a newly published preclinical trial indicate that the answer may be ‘yes’ and they reveal the substance’s likely mechanism of action in combating the disease.

Writing in the May edition of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, investigators at the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia reported that the administration of cannabinoid agonists limits HIV infection in macrophages (white blood cells that aid in the body's immune response). Researchers assessed the impact of three commercially available synthetic cannabis agonists (non-organic compounds that act on the same endogenous receptor sites as do plant cannabinoids) on HIV-infected macrophage cells. Following administration, researchers sampled the cells periodically to measure the activity of an enzyme called reverse transcriptase, which is essential for HIV replication. By day 7, investigators reported that the administration of all three compounds was associated with a significant decrease in HIV replication.

“The results suggest that selective CB2 (cannabinoid 2 receptor) agonists could potentially be used in tandem with existing antiretroviral drugs, opening the door to the generation of new drug therapies for HIV/AIDS,” researchers summarized in a Temple University news release. “The data also support the idea that the human immune system could be leveraged to fight HIV infection."

Cannabinoids offer a likely treatment therapy for PTSD

Post-traumatic stress syndrome is estimated to impact some eight millions American annually and effective treatments for the condition are few and far between. Yet just published research in the May issue of the journal Molecular Psychiatry indicates that cannabinoids hold the potential to successfully treat the condition.

Researchers at the New York School of Medicine reported that subjects diagnosed with PTSD possess elevated quantities of endogenous cannabinoid receptors in regions of the brain associated with fear and anxiety. In addition, authors also reported that these subjects suffer from the decreased production of anandamide, an endogenous cannabinoid neurotransmitter, resulting in an imbalanced endocannibinoid system. (The endogenous cannabinoid receptor system is a regulatory system that is present in living organisms for the purpose of promoting homeostasis).

Authors speculated that increasing the body’s production of cannabinoids would likely restore the body’s natural brain chemistry and psychological balance. They affirmed, “[Our] findings substantiate, at least in part, emerging evidence that … plant-derived cannabinoids such as marijuana may possess some benefits in individuals with PTSD by helping relieve haunting nightmares and other symptoms of PTSD.”

The researchers concluded: “The data reported herein are the first of which we are aware of to demonstrate the critical role of CB1 (cannabinoid) receptors and endocannabinoids in the etiology of PTSD in humans. As such, they provide a foundation upon which to develop and validate informative biomarkers of PTSD vulnerability, as well as to guide the rational development of the next generation of evidence-based treatments for PTSD.”

But don’t expect federal officials to help move this process forward. In 2011 federal administrators blocked investigators at the University of Arizona at Phoenix from conducting an FDA-approved, placebo-controlled clinical trial to evaluate the use of cannabis in 50 patients with PTSD.

Scientific integrity? Not when it comes to marijuana. Not by a long shot.

10 Crazy Things the Right Did This Week

ThinkProgress — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:13:00 -0700

It's been another week of the insane, inane, and outright offensive.

It's been another week of the insane, inane, and outright offensive. Here's your top ten:

Pennsylvania governor can't find any Latinos to work for him. Gov. Tom Corbett (R-PA) told a Spanish-language newspaper this week that he didn't have any Latinos working for him. There are approximately 18,000 Latinos just in the Harrisburg, PA area alone.
Pennsylvania governor remembers single Latino who works for him. A day after saying he didn't have any Latinos working for him, Corbett suddenly remembered a single Latino appointee working in his administration.
Conservatives freak out over Boy Scouts decision to admit gays. Here'sthe ten best conservative freak-outs over the group's decision to admit gay scouts while maintaining a ban on gay leaders.
Tea Party congressman mansplains his anti-abortion views. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), speaking at a hearing about an unconstitutional ban on abortion after 20 weeks that House Republicans are championing, told a witness that she should've been forced to wait and give birth rather than have an abortion even though her fetus had no brain function.
Top Republican called Obama's national security speech "a victory for terrorists." The comments were made by Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. Chambliss defeated a decorated, triple amputee veteran in 2002 by running an ad juxtaposing his opponent with images of Osama bin Laden.
Texas GOP continued its obsession with limiting women's rights. The Texas GOP introduced another 24 anti-abortion bills this year, but thankfullynone of them advanced.
This man could be the next Lieutenant Governor of Virginia. Virginia Republicans nominated an extremely anti-gay, anti-abortion minister who has a long history of making insensitive and inflammatory comments. Here's his20 craziest tweets.
RNC chair melts down. In an effort to attack the president, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus threw out attacks so over the top that the Morning Joe crew called him out.
GOP senator says implementing Obamacare is just like an illegal coverup. Because of her efforts to implement Obamcare, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) likened Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to convicted criminal Oliver North.
GOP senator defends Apple's efforts to avoid billions of dollars in U.S. taxes. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), in a move reminiscent of Rep. Joe Barton's infamous apology to BP in the wake of its disastrous oil spill, apologized to top Apple officials for being called in front of the Senate to explain how they use complex structures and gimmicks to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Progressive Activism Is Bubbling Up Across the Country -- Here's What's Happening That the Corporate Media Can't Be Bothered to Report

Kevin Zeese, Margaret Flowers, AlterNet — Thu, 23 May 2013 15:12:00 -0700

Guantanamo to shrink, drone rules enacted. Huge Monsanto demonstrations in the works, and a lot more.

This was a week that exemplified the historic moment in which we live. We will look back at these times and see the seeds of a national revolt against concentrated wealth that puts profits ahead of people and the planet.

Mike Lux, who authored a history of the movements of the 1960s, wrote this week that when he researched his book he “was struck by the fact that so many big things happened so close together.” Comparing that moment to today he writes, “We are living in such a moment in history right now, that organizers and activists are sparking off each other and inspiring each other, that there is something building out there that will bring bigger change down the road.”

That is how we felt as we watched and participated in this week’s unfolding. We began the week prepared to focus our attention on the amazing teacher, student and community actions that were occurring in defense of schools. In Philadelphia, there was a giant walk-out of schools last Friday as students demanded their schools remain open and be adequately funded. The photos of young people fighting for the basic necessity of education were an inspiration.

That was followed by three days of protests in Chicago that were equally inspiring, students organized and communities came together to fight for education. Though corporate-mayor Rahm Emanuel’s carefully selected board voted to close 50 elementary schools and one high school (while the city funds the building of a new basketball stadium), the Chicago activists say they are not done. They are just getting started. It is that kind of persistence that wins transformation. These school battles are part of a national plan to replace community schools with corporatized charter schools. The battles of Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities are all of our battles.

Then there were the college students, who inspired us with their bravery especially because they were not fighting for themselves but for the students who come after them. At Cooper Union, students are in their second week of occupying the school president’s office. As the sit-in grew to more than 100, they garnered increasing community support. The school is about to begin to charge tuition, ending the nearly two century mission of its founder for free higher education. The students protesting will get free tuition; they are protesting for the students who follow. While they are sitting in, they are painting the president’s offices black and will continue to do so until he resigns his $750,000 a year job. Thousands have signed a “no confidence” petition against the president and board chairman.

We believe that a country that really believed in its youth and was building for its future would provide free post-high school education, college or vocational school, to young adults rather than leaving them crippled by massive debt.

As the week went on, more Americans stood up and showed their power. On Monday, people who have lost their homes to foreclosure or are threatened with foreclosure, along with their allies, began an occupation of the Department of Justice. Some of them joined us first as guests on our radio show on We Act Radio. Afterwards, we went to Freedom Plaza where they rallied. The coalition was a great mix of people of different ages, races and regions who were angry, organized and prepared. They marched down Pennsylvania Ave. to the Department of Justice to demand that Attorney General Eric Holder prosecute the bankers who collapsed the economy and stole their homes.

They blocked the doors at the Department of Justice and put up tents emblazoned with “Foreclose on Banks Not on People,” put up a home with “Bank Foreclosed” over it and blocked the streets with orange mesh saying “Foreclosure and Eviction Free Zone.” As evening came, they moved their tents onto DOJ property, brought in a big couch and prepared to stay the night – and some did. By the third day of protests, they moved to Covington and Burling, the corporate law firm that spawned Eric Holder and where the DOJ official in charge of prosecuting the banks, Lenny Breuer, who did not prosecute a single big bank now gets a $4 million annual salary. In Congress the DOJ could not justify their claim that prosecuting the big banks would hurt the economy.

The Home Defenders League/Occupy Our Homes actions broke through in the media as you can see at the end of this photo essay. We particularly enjoyed the coverage in Forbes – someone claiming to be Jamie Dimon was arrested in DC – reporting on protesters who gave the name of banksters when they were arrested. The police responded aggressively, which often attracts media coverage, including the tasering non-violent protesters. And, we were pleased to see local groups, like Occupy Colorado, highlighting the efforts of their colleagues who came to DC.

But, action in the nation’s capital did not end there. There was also a massive walkout of food service workers across the city. The strike began at the building named for the famed union-destroying president, the Ronald Reagan Building, and then moved on, with a particular focus on Obama – the largest employer of low-wage workers. Obama could end poverty federal wages with a stroke of the pen. Will he?

DC is the sixth city to see low-wage workers striking, New York, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, came before the Capital. Communities have stood with the workers when employers threatened their jobs and people now need to do the same for the DC workers who are being threatened with job loss, please take action to support them. And, coming up is the Wal-Mart workers’ “Ride for Respect” to the annual shareholders meeting on June 7 which emulates the Freedom Riders.

Actions are happening throughout the country. In Illinois, so far two people have been arrested at a sit-in in the capitol building to support a ban hydro-fracking. And, the reaction to the call for a fearless summer by front-line environmental groups has been very strong. They are working together to plan major actions throughout the summer escalating resistance against extreme energy extraction. Pressure is building in the environmental movement which now recognizes Obama is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Groups like 350.org that avoided protesting Obama, are now protesting his “grass roots” group, Organizing for America.

And, more is coming. At the end of the week people who have been marching to Washington, DC from Philadelphia as part of “Operation Green Jobs” will arrive to protest at the corporate bully of the capital – the US Chamber of Commerce – uniting the masses in opposition to the corporate lobbyists. Their long walk to DC echoes a walk last week by people from Baltimore seeking jobs and justice.

This Saturday will be the worldwide March Against Monsanto in 41 countries and nearly 300 cities. We published an article in Truthout that explains why we should all protest Monsanto on May 25. This is a great example of non-hierarchical organizing as this protest was called by young grass roots activists and supported by Occupy Monsanto.

One of the things that let us know the popular revolt is more powerful than we realize is the reaction of the power structure. The Center for Media and Democracy issued a report this week that examined thousands of pages of documents which showed how the national security apparatus against terrorism combined with corporate America to attack the occupy movement. And, in Chicago one of the undercover police involved in the NATO 5 case, is still spying, now on students and teachers protesting school closures. If they did not fear the people, would the power structure be behaving this way?

But, when you read reports about police acting in this undemocratic way, don’t forget that many of them do not like doing what they are ordered to do and that pulling them to join the popular revolt is part of our job. A mass movement needs people from the power structure to join it in order to achieve success. We highlight one this week, Officer Pedro Serrano of New York who took the great personal risk of taping his superiors as part of an effort to end the racist ‘stop and frisk’ program of the NYPD.

And, it is great to see people planning ahead. We got notice this week from activists in Maine planning for an October Drone Walk. The anti-drone movement and Guantanamo protests have had very positive effects. This week, President Obama had to admit that he killed four Americans with drones, mostly by accident – even though the DoD claims drones are accurate. Also this week, activists filed a war crimes complaint against Obama, Brennan and other officials seeking their prosecution. And Thursday, Obama was forced to make a public speech at the National Defense University about both the drone program and Guantanamo Bay Prison. Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, interrupted the speech several times such that the President had to acknowledge her and she asked powerful questions as she was escorted out by security. [See video and transcript.] Guantanamo activists responded to the president saying “no more excuses” and vowed to keep the pressure on!

So, just as author Mike Lux saw in the 60s, there is a lot going on, lots of issues coming to a head at the same time and people taking action to confront them. How do we get to the next phase of popular resistance?

Long time writer on movements and transformational change, Sam Smith, the editor of Progressive Review wrote “The Great American Repair Manual in 1997,” we reprinted a portion of it this week: A Movement Manual. The essence: movements are “propelled by large numbers of highly autonomous small groups linked not by a bureaucracy or a master organization but by the mutuality of their thought, their faith and their determination.” He recommends: organize from the bottom up, create a subculture, create symbols, develop an agenda and make the movement’s values clear. He also recommends becoming what you want to be – become an existentialist – writing “existence precedes essence. We are what we do.” As far as building community power, we recommend this video from “The Democracy School” on how to use local governance to challenge corporate power.”

Do not despair when the media says there is no popular resistance. We have been covering the actions of the movement with weekly reports since 2011 and even before the occupy movement began, we saw Americans beginning to stand up. We knew it was the right time for occupy and we now see it is the right time for a mass popular resistance. We will be announcing a new project in mid-June to help bring the movement to a new level. Sign up here to hear about it and how you can help. To create the transformative change we want to see, we need people to get involved.

We agree with Mike Lux who writes: “just as it took several years for the seeds planted in those 18 months in the early '60s to take root and begin to bring about the changes of the years to come in terms of civil rights, women's rights, and the environment, it will take several years for the seeds being planted now to fully take root. But I believe more and more that it will happen.”

The government responds with police force and ignores the demands of the people. Super majorities of Americans agree with the views of the popular resistance, even if they are not yet acting. This is a recipe for a mass eruption of movement activity. We are in the midst of the pre-history of historic transformational change: a transformation, which will end the power of money to ensure that the people and planet come before profits.

(For a listing of upcoming protests see last week’s newsletter.)

This article is produced in partnership with AlterNet and is based on a weekly newsletter for October2011/Occupy Washington, DC. To sign up for the free newsletter, click here. If you have actions you want to promote or report on write us at info@october2011.org.

Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD co-host Clearing the FOG on We Act Radio 1480 AM Washington, DC, co-direct Its Our Economy and are organizers of the Occupation of Washington, DC. Read other articles by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers.

Punishing Students For Not Making Eye Contact? How Charter Schools' Prejudiced Policies Undermine Equality

Kristin Rawls, AlterNet — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:24:00 -0700

Charter schools are failing children of color and students with disabilities even as their supporters advocate using civil rights rhetoric.

This article is the first of a two-part series examining who is being left behind in the wake of charter school proliferation and the complicated web of profiteering that is driving the movement. Part I details many of the ways in which charter schools fail poor children, children of color and students with disabilities even as charter school supportersappropriatecivil rights rhetoric. Part II will focus on the big business of charter schools.

On the heels of news that Philadelphia will be closing 23 schools for the 2013-2014 academic year, Chicago has made an even more startling announcement: Chicago Public Schools has proposed closing 54 schools for the next academic year. The idea is to replace them with charter schools, an initiative that Democratic Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has supported enthusiastically.

Enthusiasm for charter schools primarily comes from them being hailed as a panacea that could solve longstanding disparities in education quality, and possibly even turn around longstanding divides like racial disparity and economic inequality.

Without irony, the charter school movement has adopted the banner of the civil rights movement to create an aura of moral authority. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan praised pro-charter propaganda film Waiting for Superman for ushering in a “Rosa Parks moment.” And a Goldman Sachs banker famously called charter schools the “civil rights struggle of my generation.”

Ultimately, however, not only do charter schools fail children of color and students with disabilities, they often actively work against them as they try to transform students into what they imagine is the status quo. From outrageous fees to strict disciplinary codes, charter schools continuously work to target students they don't want.

Charter Schools Not a Clear Success Story

There is little evidence that charter schools are the silver bullet touted by supporters, let alone a beacon of racial empowerment. Though charter school research is new and fairly underdeveloped, the one large-scale study to date, a 2009 project conducted by Stanford’s conservative, pro-charter Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that a majority of charters do not outperform public schools, with more than a third actually doing worse.

Another study came out just last week helmed by the nonprofit Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, which works to address the ways social and economic inequality can affect education and academic performance. It studied the effects of school closure and charter school proliferation on three cities: Chicago, Washington DC and New York. It found that the triumphalism of the charter movement was entirely unfounded, and that the quality of education for the most vulnerable children became worse in the wake of closings and charter school growth.

How Charters Discriminate Against Disable Students

Beyond test scores as measures of achievement, there are other ways in which charter schools may be undermining equality of opportunity. Because they are, technically speaking, public entities that receive federal funding, charter schools are bound by all federal civil rights legislation prohibiting schools to discriminate on the basis of disability, race and/or socioeconomic status. State and local bodies that govern charters are tasked with guarding against discrimination.

But the truth is that charter schools may be discriminating. A June 2012 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that during the 2009-2010 academic year, about 11 percent of traditional public school students were identified as disabled. In charter schools, that number dropped to 8 percent. Plus, the study noted, “[The] proportion of charter schools that enrolled high percentages of students with disabilities was lower overall. Specifically, students with disabilities represented 8 to 12 percent of all students at 23 percent of charter schools compared to 34 percent of traditional public schools.”

The 2012 study suggests that there is not yet enough information to determine that this is happening because charter schools discriminate in a systematic way. Still, it details multiple anecdotal accounts that suggest a more systematic rooting out in the admissions process. For example, it names P.B., et al v. Pastorek, a complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and other advocacy organizations in 2010. According to the SPLC, “Students with disabilities were denied access to New Orleans public schools and often pushed into schools unable to provide them with the educational services they deserved under federal law.” The complaint cited “violations in more than 30 New Orleans schools -- including charter schools and schools operated by the state’s [post-Katrina] Recovery School District.”

Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, which is also helping with the case, notes that, “[An] estimated 4,500 students with disabilities are denied equal access to educational opportunities, routinely pushed out of school, and subject to discrimination on the basis of their disabilities” every year. Since the Recovery School District began governing New Orleans education policy after Katrina, the Committee alleges, the city has failed to provide equal educational opportunities to disabled students, neglected the mandated “child find” policy to identify and serve disabled students, denied disabled students “a free appropriate education” and “unlawfully disciplined and excluded [disabled students] from educational programs.”

The changes since the crossover from traditional public schools were swift, but the complaint has been pending in federal court for more than two years now.

Though the GAO study encourages more systematic research, it does identify some causal factors that may be leading to discrimination. One is the reliance of charter schools on fundraising from private institutions. Charter school administrators told the GAO they simply did not have sufficient resources to provide the mandated disability services, particularly when it came to meeting the individual needs of students. Schools also noted that they were ill-equipped to serve students with the most severe cognitive disabilities.

The report concluded that, “[S]ome charter schools may be discouraging students with disabilities from enrolling and denying admission to students with more severe disabilities because services are too costly.” This is their excuse, but it bears repeating that this hasn’t been researched or verified. Further, charter schools have much more autonomy when it comes to the distribution of funds than other public schools. It’s not clear whether lack of funding is the real cause for discrimination—or simply unwillingness to enroll students with learning disabilities who may reduce a school’s average test scores.

How Charters Discriminate Based on Race and Class

In addition to complaints of disability discrimination, there is evidence that charter schools are doing a poor job of achieving racial equality or helping poor students. The new study by Broader, Bolder Approach to Education found that districts in the three cities that aggressively closed schools and opened charter schools to replace them increased race- and class-based achievement gaps, even as pro-charter reformers continued to cast themselves as contemporary civil rights activists.

This is perhaps nowhere more pronounced than in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), where African-American students comprise 41.6 percent of the student population, followed by Latino students at 44.1 percent and white students at 8.8 percent. CPS students are also overwhelmingly poor. Eighty-four percent of the district’s students – that’s 338,000 children – qualify for free and reduced lunch, so it’s difficult to untangle class and race here. The bottom line is that the system is not succeeding by any civil rights-era ideals.

Gary Moriello, who retired from CPS in 2007, worked as an educator for 37 years, first as a teacher and then as an elementary school principal. He tells AlterNet, “Charter schools tend to siphon off the children they want from traditional public schools.” And it’s clear who they don’t want, he says: “Special-education students, English-as-a-second-language students, students with various behavioral issues. It makes their jobs easier.”

CTU researcher Sarah Hainds says Chicago charter schools have built-in disciplinary systems that facilitate discrimination against poor children. Charter schools in Chicago follow strict codes of conduct similar to military school styles of discipline. Hainds says this is a frequently cited draw for many parents who are nervous about gang fights and shootings in their neighborhood schools.

In Chicago charter schools, strict disciplinary codes are one way charter schools can target and remove students they don’t want. In 2012, three public education advocacy organizations, Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) and the Advancement Project, teamed up to research and report on the effects of the demerits system. One of the most egregious groups, a charter authorization organization called Noble, earned $200,000 a year in net profits simply from enforcing its severe discipline code, in which each minor infraction costs $5.

Noble requires that children sit up straight and maintain eye contact with the teacher when addressed. Briefly averting eyes? That’s a demerit. Students can earn demerits for speaking faltering English or speaking in black or Southern dialect, as they are required to “articulate in standard English” at all times. New English learners are not exempt from this policy. The study found that families were being charged for “any infraction on a list of prohibited conduct…that pretty much describes the full gamut of teenage behavior including such minor issues as having a shirt button unbuttoned or being seen with a bag of chips or sharpie.” Twelve demerits means children must take a discipline class that costs an extra $140. At more than 12 infractions? That’s two discipline courses at $280. Noble’s schools “will not waive these fees, even for low-income families, and about 90 percent of Noble students are low-income.”

Hainds says, “Some children’s families can’t afford to pay for the demerits, and they get kicked out of the charter schools. When fees reach $280 or so, that’s just too much for many families.” Rules are so strict that it’s nearly impossible to avoid demerits, and the demerit system has become a way of rooting out the poorest students.

Plus, the rigid disciplinary system gives new meaning to the phrase, “school-to-prison pipeline.” Chicago Public School parent Mikki Kendall, whose eighth-grade son currently attends a Hyde Park school marked for closure, tells AlterNet she would sooner homeschool than send her child to a charter school. She notes that the extreme military-style discipline fosters a system in which “children are treated like criminals.” Indeed, the dangers of what Kendall aptly calls the “militarization of the ‘hood,” including the policing of inner city schools,are well-documented as bad for children. Yet the harsh discipline goes unchecked.

Some of the marginalization may even happen by default. Both Hainds and Kendall point out that children who attend the charters already have some advantages over many of their peers. Hainds explains:

They are kids whose parents went online, filled out the application, completed all the steps of the application process and made all the formal agreements to enroll their children. A child with a single mother who works multiple jobs to care for multiple children—that is not the child walking in the door of a charter school.

And even though decades of U.S. educational history have borne out the truism that separate cannot be equal, Department of Education data shows that charter schools have some of the most race- and class-based segregation in the country.

Charter Schools Take Schools from Parents and Children

In addition to the ways in which charter schools fail vulnerable children who enroll or try to enroll in them, their very existence almost always comes at a cost to existing traditional schools and the students who attend them. School closings are one manifestation of this cost that policymakers rarely discuss. Hainds tells AlterNet that Chicago’s community schools have deep roots in the often tight-knit communities they serve: "At school closing hearings, people constantly say that it’s as if CPS is erasing their history. There are schools where three generations of family members have attended. There’s a ton of pride, even if a school has low test scores and discipline issues, it’s still the center of their community. CPS has closed schools that are named after important African Americans—again, it’s like CPS is erasing history."

Then there is the psychological impact of being uprooted. Hainds notes that students “feel that CPS has given up on them—that instead of helping their schools, CPS just shuffles them somewhere else.” While CPS is promising to do better for next year, it misplaced and failed to assign at least 250 students to new schools last year. Hainds adds, “CPS even acknowledges that it can’t force parents to send their kids to the designated schools, which actually means that it does not know where all 30,000 kids will enroll next year.” She notes that this upheaval has historically caused a decline in academic performance.

Safety is also an important issue. Kendall explains that many students attend her son’s Hyde Park school because their own neighborhoods are unsafe. Many schools that will serve as alternatives are located in less safe neighborhoods. Neighborhood children, meanwhile, may be asked to walk an additional eight blocks to school through or to areas that put them at greater risk. Hainds shares these concerns, noting that many schools are located in areas with heavy gang area, and “surrounded by foreclosed homes, busy streets [and] viaducts.” She says security will be heightened, but says this is no solution because it only “criminalizes the children.”

On top of everything else, closing and charter proliferation can disempower parents. First, Hainds notes, longer walking distances may prevent many parents from being more involved in their children’s education simply because they have neither a car nor a bus route that goes the distance.

Kendall notes that parents are finding it very difficult to access reliable information about the school closings. Sometimes they are told that registration is too low, sometimes that their schools are under-performing. Privatization via charter schools means that schools are less accountable to the public, including parents. She points out that parents have little recourse to combat disciplinary overreach, which further marginalizes parents.

Ultimately, Kendall fears, school closings, displacement and charter proliferation are creating a “lost generation of kids.” She says, “I can get my kids through with homeschooling if I have to,” but asks, “What happens to kids who don’t have parents with the education or resources to do this?” For people who appropriate civil rights rhetoric with such abandon, corporate school reformers in Chicago appear almost shockingly unconcerned with this question.

Helen Gym, a parent, activist and former teacher—now with Parents United for Public Education and online education resource the Notebook—tells AlterNet:

I see schools as an intrinsic part of communities, particularly marginalized communities, where people are fighting to make voices heard. We have to realize this is not about education. It’s about recognizing that our public schools are the largest, most stable, and most passionate defenders of equity, access, and aspirational hope in this country. In every other sector of this nation, those things are under attack. This is about the evolution of our country, and it is inextricably linked to issues of race, class politics, equity and justice—all longtime, core struggles for people. If we understand that, it makes the path forward a little clearer…There has been incredible pushback in Philadelphia. No matter what happens, the record will show that there were many people who united and stood against the closings. It’s not just about how politicians vote — it’s about who we are as communities and a society, and who showed up when we needed to fight.

So if evidence increasingly mounts showing that school closings and charter proliferation, the question becomes, “Why do we keep closing schools and building new charters in the first place?” The short answer: Profit.

It’s clear that parent advocates like Kendall and Gym, public intellectuals like Ravitch and many more will continue fighting to stop the march toward endless school closure and mass charter school proliferation. But the grassroots movements fighting these trends are in for quite the battle, especially when it comes to wealth and government influence — things their opponents have in abundance.

Is the Idea of an Intelligent Self-Help Book a Paradox?

Lisa Levy, Los Angeles Review of Books — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:49:00 -0700

Popular self-help book series from the 'School of Life' lacks depth and purpose.

This article first appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Is the very idea of an intelligent self-help book a paradox? It is certainly trying to serve two demanding masters: philosophical speculation and practical action. After all, readers don’t pick up self-help books just to ruminate on life’s dilemmas, but to be guided to solutions. The new series of self-help books published by the London-based School of Life, co-founded by the Swiss-born popular philosopher Alain de Botton, echoes the school’s lofty approach to problems, claiming to be “intelligent, rigorous, well-written new guides to everyday living.” Yet to peruse the School of Life’s calendar of classes is to fall into a vortex of jargon pitched somewhere between the banal banter of daytime talk shows and the schedule for a nightmarish New Age retreat: “How to Have Better Conversations,” “How to Realise Your Potential,” “Developing a Compassionate Mind: One Day Intensive,” “Philosophy Slam,” “Learning How to Say No,” “Getting Better at Online Dating,” “Resilience: One Day Workshop.” Before long, I was ready to sign up for “How to Stay Calm.”

De Botton himself is a divisive, if not easily dismissed, public intellectual. The author of bestselling books about many of the broad topics the School of Life curriculum covers — love, work, religion, happiness, and philosophy itself — de Botton is often accused of being a purveyor of Philosophy Lite (see, for example, Victoria Beale’s January 3, 2013, attack on him in The New Republic, “How to Be a Pseudo-Intellectual”). His works are securely aimed at the insecure middlebrow reader, the kind of person who knows that Proust can change her life but maybe would rather read about how Proust can change her life than slog through seven life-changing volumes. Indeed, there is something ersatz, if not quite fraudulent, about de Botton’s entire intellectual enterprise: he often seems like a grad student who shows up to seminar having done just enough of the reading to participate by jumping on other people’s comments, but who never makes an original observation of his own. He is constantly quoting and alluding to great figures — Jane Austen, John Stuart Mill, Stendhal, and Freud, among others, all get name-dropped in his self-help book, How To Think More About Sex (about which more below) — but he tends to meander and summarize after a quotation rather than using it to drive his own argument forward.

De Botton has, however, up until recently, been a great champion of philosophy as a way to work through life’s conundrums. His The Consolations of Philosophy (2000) is a charming and, in its own way, useful book that dissects the lives and ideas of major philosophers like Socrates and Nietzsche and applies them to everyday problems like “unpopularity” and “difficulties.” De Botton claims in Consolations that it is possible to “take on a task at once both profound and laughable: to become wise through philosophy.” In this he has positioned himself in a long line of thinkers about the care and maintenance of the self, such that the editing and writing of “intelligent self-help books” would not seem like such a stretch.

Yet the real issue with de Botton’s new book, and the others in the How To series, is not simply a lack of depth but one of purpose: they are certainly shallow in their philosophy, but they are not particularly useful either. The books are combination platters of soft science, anecdotal case studies (some real, some fictional), and exercises or suggestions about steps the reader could take to further his or her goal. Along with de Botton’s volume purporting to inspire more (but not deeper, note) thought about sex, the School of Life series includes How to Stay Sane, by Philippa Perry; How to Change the World, by John-Paul Flintoff; and How to Find Fulfilling Work, by Roman Krznaric. Krznaric’s volume is by far the most successful, perhaps because he is the only one of the authors who does not seem embarrassed by either his topic or the means of treating it. Perry, a psychotherapist, and Flintoff, a journalist, retain a tone like they should be doing their work by more highfalutin means. And de Botton’s book makes an enraging little study (all the books clock in at around 200 pages) of contemporary assumptions about sex, marriage, and relationships, regarded strictly from the point of view of a bored, married, middle-aged man who maybe dabbles in philosophy and fancies himself an intellectual. It’s like being hit on by a paunchy, balding European guy at an office party who tries to seduce you with, well, quotes from Jane Austen and Stendhal, and empty proclamations about the place of sex, marriage, and relationships in contemporary society.

The title of de Botton’s book, How to Think More About Sex, is actually a misnomer, or at least misleading, for he in fact advocates against thinking more about sex, at least if “more” here means “differently” or “better.” He certainly does not want anyone to interrogate the assumptions mainstream society currently holds about courtship and marriage (what a queer theorist might designate as “heteronormative practices”). He never explores any type of relationship outside of monogamous heterosexuality; even the idea of a marriage without children or with, say, a stay-at-home father and working mother seems to be outside of his imaginative purview.

So he’s not exactly Michel Foucault, but there is a historical dimension to de Botton’s thinking about sex. Sometime around the advent of space shuttles and bikinis, he states, “[s]ex came to be perceived as a […] pastime, a little like tennis — something that everyone should have as often as possible in order to relieve the stresses of modern life.” To do this, he cautions, is to take sex much too lightly, as

sex has a recurring tendency to wreak havoc across our lives: it leads us to destroy our relationships, threatens our productivity and compels us to stay up too late in nightclubs talking to people whom we don’t like but whose exposed midriffs we nevertheless strongly wish to touch.

It is an “inherently weird […] anarchic and reckless power,” with which the best we can hope for is “a respectful accommodation.” Given how frightened de Botton seems to be of sex, is it any wonder that his book utterly lacks imagination and a sense of curiosity?

This might in fact be the most boring book ever written about sex. In his (fictional) case studies, de Botton presents us with several boring couples in compromising positions: there is, for example, the “couple in a cafe on a Saturday night at eleven o’clock in a large city, eating ice cream after seeing a film together.” De Botton narrates their entire sexual encounter, with odd asides about their personal histories interrupting the action: “Soon enough he was dreaming of orgies and anal sex, obsessing about obtaining hardcore pornography and fantasizing about tying up and defiling his maths teacher. How could he still be a nice person?” As for the intercourse, it is utterly unerotic: “In a world in which fake enthusiasms are rife […] the wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.” Even the couple’s fetishes are dull: his is for “black, sensible loafers (of the sort often associated with librarians and schoolgirls, and in this instance manufactured by the Italian company Marni)”; hers is for men’s watches, like her father’s.

When de Botton finally gets the couple off, so to speak, he provides a profoundly unsexy definition of sexiness: “The more closely we analyze what we consider ‘sexy,’ the more clearly we will understand that eroticism is the feeling of excitement we experience at finding another human being who shares our values and our sense of the meaning of existence.” There are, of course, other kinds of eroticism, other ways to reach orgasm, not dreamt of in de Botton’s philosophy, but he confidently brands these “empty.” Thus, everything from masturbation (since it is performed alone) to bestiality (since it is nonconsensual) is considered a “betrayal of what sex should really be about”: a procreative couple in love sharing their values and their sense of the meaning of existence.

The only two real positions (no pun intended) that de Botton takes are an anti-pornography stance and a pro-adultery one. Neither, however, are at all radical, and both have a whiff of an acutely masculine frustration. How To Think More About Sex uses another fictional couple, the long-married and long-suffering Daisy and Jim, to illustrate these arguments. The story is timeworn: between work (though it is unclear whether Daisy works outside of the house), children, aging, and dwindling desire, Daisy and Jim’s sex life has all but disappeared. So Jim turns to the evils lurking in the family computer, which de Botton writes about with appalled strenuousness:

[P]erhaps as many as two hundred million man-hours annually that might have otherwise been devoted to starting companies, raising children, curing cancer, writing masterpieces or sorting out the attic, are instead spent ogling the mesmerizing pages of sites such as www.hotincest.comand www.spanksgalore.com.

In the name of productivity, then, de Botton advocates censorship of the internet, as “the entire internet is […] pornographic, a deliverer of constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs.” In the absence of government intervention, though, how can we resist the evils of the internet? Pray. Yes, really: de Botton suggests that religion, not philosophy, might provide guidelines to help individuals keep themselves in line. “A portion of our libido,” de Botton writes, “has to be forced underground for our own good; repression is not just for Catholics, Muslims and the Victorians, but for all of us and for eternity.” He urges readers to fall into line: “We cannot allow our sexual urges to express themselves without limit, online or otherwise; left to run free, they destroy us.” This interest in religion is not new: de Botton’s last book was Religion for Atheists. But the idea that it can solve problems instead of philosophy is a betrayal of de Botton’s earlier work. Apparently, rigorous thought is powerless against the seductions of the internet.

To proceed straight from this pious suggestion to one that long-term fidelity to a single partner might not work out after all would be galling in a writer who cared less about being provocative and more about being consistent, but coherency is not de Botton’s bag. He returns to poor frustrated Jim, sending him on a business trip where he runs into a comely young graphic designer, Rachel, who has done some freelance work for him. A glass of wine, a room at the Holiday Inn, and Jim and Rachel are off to the races.

There is, according to de Botton, nothing the matter with a little extramarital sex, as long as everyone is agreed that the bond between the partners is primary. “That a couple should be willing to watch their lives go by from within the cage of marriage, without acting on outside sexual impulses,” he writes, “is a miracle of civilization and kindness for which they ought both to feel grateful on a daily basis.” The “cage of marriage”? Eek. If you want to kill your libido and quash a budding relationship in one fell swoop, I have the perfect how-to book for you.

***

The School of Life books by de Botton’s epigones are also pretty dreadful. Substituting Philippa Perry’s How To Stay Sane for the rigors of psychotherapy is like insisting that running for the bus rather than going to the gym is sufficient exercise. “Exercise,” indeed, is a loaded word in Perry’s book, as she provides “exercises” for the reader to do in order to put her ideas into practice; these mostly involve lots of making lists and charts. The exercises are designed to increase self-awareness, help deepen relationships, and relieve stress, all elements in keeping life in perspective and thus remaining sane. Yet the most striking element of Perry’s text is her reluctance to be writing it at all: “This is a ‘how-to’ book and at this point I wish it was not, because as soon as we start to legislate relationships, we are already in danger of getting it wrong.” This is, hands down, the most honest moment in the book. Perry is the most hamstrung of these writers by the self-help form; her frustration bleeds through every page. After de Botton, it is a relief to read someone less pedantic and more pragmatic, but Perry’s reluctance to take a position on anything other than breathing and journaling makes her book utterly useless.

Equally maddening is John-Paul Flintoff’s How To Change the World, which offers a great deal of commonsensical advice about what could vaguely be called “making a difference.” Offering such pearls as “the personal is political” and “do what feels good,” the only engaging part of Flintoff’s book are the case studies he offers. Yet many of those have a familiar ring: all the usual world-changing suspects appear, from Gandhi to Rosa Parks to Mother Theresa to Martin Luther King Jr. Flintoff does cite a few lesser known figures, such as Richard Reynolds, who started a “guerrilla gardening” movement in London, and lawyer and environmentalist Polly Higgens, who is working to make “ecocide” (the destruction of ecosystems) a crime. Flintoff provides advice on how to change the world in small ways like reaching out to neighbors, volunteering, giving to charity, or just helping a friend. Overall, though, there is little here that a person with average intelligence could not figure out on her own with good intentions and a couple of Google searches.

After all of these failures, it’s a minor miracle that Roman Krznaric’s How to Find Fulfilling Work works as well as it does. Krznaric accomplishes what the other books do not by harmonizing a philosophical point of view with practical advice. The basic elements here are the same as in the other School of Life books: exercises, case studies, a pinch of philosophy. Yet Krznaric combines them in such a way that the reader is likely to actually feel both challenged and helped by his advice, perhaps because work is a topic you can be both philosophical and practical about without being overwrought. He focuses the book around two questions: first, what are the central elements of a rewarding career; and second, “how do we go about changing career and making the best possible decisions along the way?” It is in answering the second question that Krznaric’s book is most impressive. He notes that most people get bogged down in thinking about what kind of career might suit them, while the best way to figure out what job might be best for you is to try out as many things as possible. Most of his exercises are centered around figuring out how to take this approach which he calls “job dating”: whether it is confronting your fears about job change or writing a “personal job advertisement” which lists your skills and interests but does not mention any particular job you might be suited for. Krznaric then suggests emailing your advertisement to 10 friends in disparate jobs and asking them what you might try to do next. This is a book which is both clever and prescriptive without being preachy: it makes you think about work in a new way, as well as offering real exercises and solutions for people who are looking for more fulfilling work.

In The Consolations of Philosophy, de Botton writes, “It would scarcely be acceptable […] to ask in the course of an ordinary conversation what our society holds to be the purpose of work.” This is one of his throwaway lines, but a telling one: why couldn’t you ask such a question? What is so potentially frightening or offensive about where such a conversation might lead? In thinking back to the ludicrous list of School of Life classes, one could argue that the school — a word which, etymologically, refers to leisure time — is turning what are fundamentally leisure activities into work. Conversation, dating, thinking, feeling, and, alas, philosophy, which is supposed to be the pure love of wisdom, are all made into chores under the school’s rubric. The books the school has produced also turn philosophy into work, without much reward for our efforts: de Botton’s book on sex is too prudish and pedantic; Perry’s on sanity, too soft; and Flintoff’s on changing the world, too pedestrian. Given some of the most interesting topics there are, these writers flinch rather than engage.

5 Unintended Consequences of America's War on Pubic Hair

April De Costa, AlterNet — Wed, 22 May 2013 07:55:00 -0700

As more and more women (and men) are expected to get rid of their pubic hair, it's time to look at some of the negative effects.

America's merciless war on pubic hair continues, with hair removal -- a trim or totally bald -- growing in popularity across gender and age groups, especially among the young: a recent study by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University found that the younger the woman the more likely she was to wax or shave all of her pubic hair. Meanwhile, alarmed health providers and researchers have launched a counter-offensive, publicizing the wide variety of nasty health effects. Here are 5 unintended consequences of our battle against pubes.

1)The Spread of STI’s:The universe has decided humans need more ways to exchange diseases during sex.Earlier this year,a French médecin observed a surge of pube-less patients bespotted with the Molluscum contagiousm virus (MVC). The dermatologist concluded the MCV was spread amongst people who had shorn their pubic hair with razors carrying the virus (from a different part of their body), and/or bumped hairless uglies with MCV carriers. “Long ago, surgeons figured out that shaving a body part prior to surgery actually increased rather than decreased surgical site infections”, wrote Emily Gibson M.D.

Skin, especially the soft epidermis of your nether regions, is made vulnerable when hair is yanked out, or burned, slashed, or pruned off. “When that irritation is combined with the warm moist environment of the genitals, it becomes a happy culture media for some of the nastiest of bacterial pathogens, namely group A streptococcus, staphylococcus aureus and its recently mutated cousin methicillin resistant staph aureus (MRSA)”, as well as herpes.

2) Injuries:Recently, thejournal Urology reportedthat pubic hair removal injuries increased fivefold between 2002 and 2010! A bit of unsolicited advice- when wielding blades around your genitals avoid going all Edward Scissorhands on yourself; 83% of those wounds were suffered from shaving (and only 56.7% of those reported injuries came from ladies). The study cites lacerations as the most common injury, with rashes coming in second. The report also describes “... the use of the shaving cream lid to control bleeding from a vaginal cut, self-circumcision with scissors, slip and fall on a razor with external genital injury, use of a razor to incise genital lesions, razor handle assault by another person, ritualistic genital cutting, and shaving skin over a spider bite” as some of the anomalous injuries sustained from hacking at the hedges. The study advises self-groomers “don’t shave while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.” Where’s the fun in that? Booooo. Also, do not shave and drive. Like this Floridian (of course) woman.

Severe infections have been hospitalizing the hairless as well: after two separate incidents of women being rushed to the ER due to infections from their Brazilian waxes, the state of New Jersey considered banning the service in 2009. A diabetic woman in Australia nearly died from the life threatening bacterial infection incurred by her Brazilian wax.

3) The expense: In its comprehensive piece about the fiscal cost of being a lady with lady problems and lady expenses, Jezebel wrote that waxes are a conservative $35 (plus tip). I found they were typically between $45-$65, or more. For those that prefer to mow their labia lawn the old fashioned way, $15.95 a month is the estimated cost of shaving supplies, in addition to “soothing gels” and ingrown hair/razor burns solutions. Don’t worry dudes! When enjoying your Dr. Pepper Ten or sipping on Pepsi Max, you too can spend your money on genital vanity. Brands once solely associated with women’s grooming have created products for men. “Who wears short shorts?” You do, bro. Salons are eager to manicure your manhood, offering services like Bliss Spa’s “the Ultimate He-Wax” (!) for a mere $125 (for the record, I think it’s masochistic to seek a brazilian wax from a place called “Bliss”).

4) The Message: 30% of the women wounded in the aforementioned Urology report were under the age of 18. Apparently, for teen girls to appear more grownup, they must look more...preadolescent. What messages are we subliminally sending girls as this body modification becomes normative? Will they develop body-hairexia to round out the rich catalog of pervasive body image and gender issues that dictate “femininity” in pop culture (like talented, well-respected, renaissance woman Kim Kardashian who has demurely purred that she is completely hairless)? Anyone who hasn’t completely blocked out the emotional scars from that hormonal hellscape known as adolescence remembers that being perceived as “abnormal” is the social kiss of death. Will peer pressure teach girls that their vaginas are naturally ugly if follicle-y dense? Girls as youngas EIGHT YEARS OLD are getting waxed, and last July one salon ran a deal offering 50% off the first wax for any girl 15 years old or under! “Celebrate freedom and independence all July”, the advertisement demanded. From what, the nascent stages of puberty? HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA! Your middle schoolers can now get their pubes ripped out, suck it Red Coats! Lastly, let’s not forget that the appeal of the bare vagine (in America at least) was its aesthetic emulation of pornography.

5) Depriving yourself of pubes deprives you of their Darwinian advantage: Hey, guess what?! Your bush is not vestigial! It has several functions, should you let it be. Pubes are “pheronmone diffusers”- they “trap” pheromones and help you get laid. High five! And once you and your partner begin your motion in the ocean, the hair acts as a soft buffer to keep you from rubbing each others skin off. As mentioned previously, your private hair also protects your genitals from viruses and dirt and all the other the scary business of the outside world.

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