Women Speak out Against Pahlin

Just got this E-mail beginning to be circulated by women for women on Sarah Pahlin. I personally agree with this one; hence, I'm helping spread the word.

Subject: Fwd: WOMEN SPEAK OUT

Just in from a friend. Within this message is an invitation to make
your own personal statement and send it along to
womensaynopalin@gmail.com
Lend your voice, if you wish.

*Friends, compatriots, fellow-lamenters,

We are writing to you because of the fury and dread we have felt
since the announcement of Sarah Palin as the Vice-Presidential
candidate for the Republican Party. We believe that this terrible
decision has surpassed mere partisanship, and that it is a dangerous
farce in the part of a pandering and rudderless Presidential
candidate that has a real possibility of becoming fact.


Perhaps like us, as American women, you share the fear of
what Ms. Palin and her professed beliefs and proven record could lead
to for ourselves and for our present or future daughters. To date, she
is against sex education, birth control, the pro-choice platform,
environmental protection, alternative energy development, freedom
of speech (as mayor she wanted to ban books and attempted to fire
the librarian who stood against her), gun control, the separation of church
and state, and polar bears. To say nothing of her complete lack of real
preparation to become the second-most-powerful person on the planet.

We want to clarify that we are not against Sarah Palin as a woman, a
mother, or, for that matter, a parent of a pregnant teenager, but
solely as a rash, incompetent, and all together devastating choice for
Vice President. Ms. Palin's political views are in every way a slap in
the face to the accomplishments that our mothers and grandmothers and
great-grandmothers so fiercely fought for, and that we've so
demonstrably benefited from.

First and foremost, Ms. Palin does not represent us. She does
not demonstrate or uphold our interests as American women. It is
presumed that the inclusion of a woman on the Republican ticket could
win over women voters. We want to disagree, publicly.

Therefore, we invite you to reply here with
a short, succinct message about why you, as a woman living in this
country, do not support this candidate as second-in-command for our
nation.
Please include your name (last initial is fine), age, and place of residence.

We will post your responses on a blog called "Women Against Sarah Palin,"
which we intend to publicize as widely as possible. Please send us your
reply at your earliest convenience the greater the volume of responses
we receive, the stronger our message will be.

Thank you for your time and action.

VIVA!

Sincerely,

Quinn Latimer and Lyra Kilston
New York, NY
womensaynopalin@gmail.com

**PLEASE FORWARD WIDELY! If you send this to your women friends and
acquaintances, you could be blessed with a country that takes your
concerns
seriously. Stranger things have happened.
Type rest of the post here

Notes from the Front Lines

I received this e-mail in my inbox this morning from Boone area protesters at the RNC:

greetings. i'm sorry i haven't sent out an update, but it has been hard
to take one minute to rest or send emails. the actions have gone well,
and we have certainly achieved some of our goals -- most especially
movement building!

the police violence is unprecedented. starhawk says she has never seen
this level of violence perpetrated on innocent nonviolent protesters --
even seattle. we have witnessed beatings, tasings, pepperspray,
concussion grenades; we were teargassed on monday.

our boone six are safe, but we had two of our larger group snatched from us
in the march on tues, and jason was tasered with 3 protrusion guns & 4
handheld tasers. he was beaten by at least 8 riot cops and has multiple
lacerations to head, face, torso & a black eye. he is still pulling
copper out of his hip & was given alcohol wipes & antibiotic cream. his
partner ryanna was released last night, but he is still inside. they
picked up another 90 people last night. they are denying phone calls,
macing, tazing, beating these kids in custody. lots of folks being
charged with felony conspiracy charges.

i want to write a personal appeal to you for the younger boone group of
folks who will be heading home today. we have witnessed some incredibly
brutal attacks on our friends, including deborah (she is safe & with us,
but badly bruised). these four folks (along with thousands of others!!!)
have had one of the most radicalizing experiences a young person can have
in this country.

emma, ally, nate & will are leaving today, and should be home tomorrow
night. they are going to need major support -- we're all doing well, but
we are all very tweaked & edgy -- lots of tears & many emotions.

please be sensitive to their needs to be heard, to be loved on, to be fed
yummy food, whatever you can do for them that is low stress & loving!! we
are definitely going to have some emotional trauma to deal with. they are
all doing well in general, but just lots of ups & downs & shaky energy.
i'm
trying not to cry writing this -- and it's not working -- i can't even
begin to tell you how horrible the police violence is here and then in
turn how concerned i am that these four folks get the support they may not
realize they are going to need. please call them, check in, anything you
can do that is supportive.

deborah & i will head back as soon as we can. we'll need your support
too, but for now, let's focus on helping these four young folks feel safe
& supported.

thank you so much for all you do in the world.

biglove. elizabeth


p.s.
we will definitely want to organize an event where we can show images &
tell these stories. if anyone wants to help us start thinking about when
that might be able to happen in the next two weeks or so, that would be so
helpful.

here are numbers you can call if you would be willing.
St Paul Mayor Chris Coleman: 651.266.8510 Ramsey County Sheriff Bob
Fletcher: 651.266.9333 Ramsey County Chief Judge Gearin: 651.266.8266
Head of Ramsey County Jail: 651.266.9350

here is footage of our friend jason's arrest -- he is in pink shirt -- he
helped us put the roof on our house -- he is my beloved; keep him in your
thoughts.
http://www.startribune.com/video/27795154.html?elr=KArks5PhDcU9PhDcUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU

http://www.kare11.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=523539&catid=14

http://www.startribune.com/photos/?c=y&img=4protest090308.jpg

if you have money to share, we are still in desperate need of more
resources to get these folks out safely & get them the medical care they
need. if you want to contribute, you can send to my p.o. box or find
coldsnap legal online. thank you.

More trouble at the RNC

Police Arrest Four Journalist on Rioting Charges

Police Raid and Detainment of I-Witness Journalists 083008

Losing two of the five first amendment rights: Free Press, right to gather in public place

Why Wright makes me Proud

I've finally gotten a chance to confront Obama's Wright problem full on and finally understand where Wright is coming from, what he stands for, and why he pisses people off. And I am proud to consider him an ideological ally on two basic grounds: black liberation is absolutely necessary in Wright's form and the perspective he bears on foreign policy cuts through the conservative's naive and selfish self-righteousness to find America's place in the world, not outside or above it.

To sum his ideology up in a sentence: he's a black liberationist preacher which automatically means: liberal, identity politicist, direct descendant and next generation of civil rights. The civil rights movement didn't die in 1968. Some of it went crazy with back to Africa or black separatist sentiments which often took the scars of discrimination to the point of self-exemption (I'm thinking of Farrakhan). The civil rights movement translated ideologically into liberationism, identity politics, diversity politics, etc. On the ground, it held firm in churches, community service organizations, and political advocacy. Jeremiah Wright is a key exemplar of what the civil rights movement has become today.

I stand behind the black liberation movement as a wholesome way to achieve black self-determination, pride, and solidarity without the elitist, exceptionalist, and/or confrontationality of other black power ideologies. The first key tenant, a black-centric point of view whereby events are interpreted through the lens of discrimination towards racialized people, especially blacks, not only subverts the contemporary dynamics of racial subordination, but also helps put a sense of self-worth into focus. Such a point of view doesn't say, "I am black and I get special treatment because you discriminate against me." Rather, it says, "I am black and am just as valuable a person as anyone else. I'm going to respect myself and demand the respect of others that I give to them." The second tenant facing and overcoming racial discrimination too is still necessary and relevant. Discrimination has become diluted since the civil rights era. But it is still salient and saturated, imposed through expectations, intuitions, and embittering realities. There must be a standing up and accounting for discrimination and its effects within and outside of the black community and American society as a whole. Black liberation is the black community standing up to face the effects of discrimination within itself and confronting the larger society with everyone's role in perpetuating and enforcing oppression. The key values underlying this are humanistic: that everyone has value deserving of a sacred human dignity that cannot be taken away. Social justice with this humanism means imposing obligations on the privileged to repay the debts of oppression without demoting the privileged to the level of animals - to acknowledge the crime without bestializing the criminal, something American culture has yet to accomplish.

This extends seamlessly to Wright's foreign policy and the policy of all good liberals - to respect all people and humanistically stop and correct oppressions, privileging, and exceptionalism. The history of US foreign policy is rife with exceptionalism, caretaking, and neocolonialism and Wright is correct to note that this has made us a focus of hatred and vengeance among those we've dominated. We continue to support one of the largest state sponsors of terrorism (Saudi Arabia), imposed a program knowing that it would kill millions of the most vulnerable (the Oil-for-Food program), reject any international legal responsibility, and promote economic growth with callous disregard for labor or environmental welfare. This isn't the Bush Doctrine on foreign policy. This is the American Doctrine since World War II. Kennedy and Johnson orchestrated Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs, Nixon invaded most of South America, Clinton implemented Oil-for-Food, Bush holds thousands of prisoners of war without trial or a plan for release. What do we expect the world to think of us? American has been hawkish and neoliberal in foreign policy since the end of isolationism and it's about time we joined the rest of the civilized world with a liberal foreign policy. We must allow ourselves to be held legally responsible and answerable to the rest of the world by disbanding the security counsel, allowing all of our international operatives to be triable at the Hague, to be sanctioned by the UN for violating international law. What kind of proponents of democracy and humanitarianism can we be if our every action is based on the ability to veto the democratic vote of our fellow nations, to not be beholden to the law that we helped write and hold everyone else responsible for, if we refuse to engage in any discussion with those who have extremely varying views of the world, if we feel we can do whatever we want as a country in the world. We are not the most democratic country in the world. We are its biggest hypocrites. We must commit to a sustainable development plan for the second and third worlds. We must accept environmental responsibility and sign Kyoto. We must break the exclusionary, agenda-setting practices of the G8. This is a liberal foreign policy.

Before I sign off though, I would like to make one strong caution to Wright and those like him attacking Hilary Clinton for her privilege. The last thing we need to come out of this primary contest is a split between women and African Americans ala "we've suffered more" claims. No, Clinton has never been called a "N*****." But, she has, like every other woman, been afraid to walk alone at night, had her feelings trivialized, been judged as too cold and controlling for a woman, etc. The matrices of oppression have not disappeared and they are still very much caught up in one another (infantilizing, compartmentalizing, animalizing, etc.). We cannot create a political split between oppressed groups in this country without confounding the whole liberation movement!

Survey Frustration

Alright, so I've been working with these two data sets from two surveys for about a year and a half now, pulling many, often strange correlations out of them with fairly consistent success. They've been good to me. Recently though, I decided to return to the data for multivariate analysis (looking for relationships between three or more variables) to strengthen the research for submission to a journal and have just been frustrated by inconsistencies between the two surveys.

The Surveys: With the exception of a couple questions added and a few questions reworded, the surveys are textually the same. The big difference is that the first survey group was a sample of students at a community service event while the second was via the internet, advertised on my university's homepage (of sorts). Overall, there were some demographic differences. I got a larger proportion of male respondents at the service event than the general survey (not surprising since I'm studying why men don't volunteer). Of course, the service event survey had a higher number of hours volunteering in college and the previous semester as well. However, I'm not blind to the influence of gender and previous hours because I'm studying exactly those.

Key Differences: Among all of the analyses I'm doing, the most recent and most important are also the most inconsistent. I get one thing for one survey at a certain amount of hours and another thing for the other survey at a different amount of hours. Let me be more specific.

1. In the general survey, women are significantly more likely to do more service if they've already done a lot of service while men don't change. There's no such effect in the service event survey.

2. Organizational Influences: In both surveys, organizational affiliation significantly impacted the likelihood to volunteer in the future. But which organizations and how were completely different. In the Service Event Survey, clubs, greek organizations, and university organizations all had a significant impact on the likelihood to volunteer in the future (clubs and uni orgs positive, greeks negative). Organizational affiliation also significantly impacted women but not men. In the general survey, only community volunteering agencies had a significant general effect. By gender, women in CVAs were more likely to volunteer than those who were not, while they were also significantly more likely to volunteer if they had logged a lot of hours in the last semester and were associated with clubs or religious organizations.

3. Motivations: women with little volunteering experience cite resume building/networking motivations in the service event survey. Men cite the same with mid-range volunteer experience and little recent volunteer experience in the general survey.

These are just a few of the inconsistencies that I'm not sure how to explain. There's something about the groups; whether their environment or some unknown selectivity. I can generalize some explanations, but it's just not clear.

California Allows Gay "Marriage"

I caught the NY Times' Alert on California's supreme court ruling that "marriage" cannot be defined as between merely a man and a woman. The text of the ruling (175 pages) is a bit of a morass and the key statements are on pages 10-12 (final majority rationale), 122-127 (Concurring Opinion), and 154-161 (dissenting opinion). Overall, this story is a bit overblown because California already provides all the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples without the title "marriage." However, it does rely on the weak idea that the government has no interest in preserving a legally ineffective code and/or a harmful code. I argue that the stronger defense is that the government has an interest in eliminating unjust discrimination in its legal code when the law is otherwise non-discriminatory.

Question of Law: The central question is whether the state has an interest in maintaining the titles "domestic partnership" and "marriage" in light of the fact that they are legally coextensive (having the same rights and obligations).

Majority Opinion: The state has no compelling interest in maintaining "marriage" as merely between a man and a woman for four reasons. First, excluding homosexuals from "marriage" does not protect their rights and obligations and will not change the rights and obligations of those who are marriage. I think this is a weak reason because, in reverse, there is no a priori serious interest in removing the domestic partner/marriage distinction for the same reason that both have the same rights and obligations. The other three reasons are where the crucial issues lie.

What's in a Name?: The court argues that separating "domestic partnership" and "marriage" is a separation by name only in the eyes of the legal code. In California, this is absolutely true given their Domestic Partnership Act. In effect however, such a conceptual distinction will, the majority argues, harm homosexuals and their children by maintaining a state-endorsed doubt, otherness, and second-class status on homosexual families. I completely agree with the spirit of this given how tumultuous the fight over homosexual marriage has been. Indeed, the resistance to homosexual marriage is based on a sense of exceptionalness and sanctification of heterosexual relationships that set them beyond what a homosexual relationship can ever be. The question then is whether this differentiation really gives the government an interest in preserving or removing the domestic partnership/marriage distinction.

Public Opinion and State Interests: Public sentiment is a crucial component of legal reasoning when the question at hand deals with social acceptability. In cases surrounding the death penalty and cruel and unusual punishment, there have been a number of arguments surrounding whether or not punishments are morally tasteful in the contemporary culture. Some have argued that we will become more and more humane as we "civilize" pointing to the disuse of drawing and quartering, the electric chair, and torturing. In such cases, the courts should reflect public sentiment in their ruling where constitutional law is too vague or precedent has been based on such sentiment. This reading implies that the domestic partner/marriage distinction should be maintained until American becomes more understanding and accepting of homosexual relationships. On the other hand, in the case of segregation, the courts had to contradict public opinion in the face of blatant constitutional violations. The courts had to lead society rather than vice versa. This reading implies that if the DP/M distinction leads to constitutional violations, then it must be corrected. Let's look at these and see which is the case and what it means for the homosexual marriage debate.

Conundrum in Opinion and Judicial Activism: Public sentiment was not cited as a precedent in either majority or dissenting opinion. The constitution is vague about separate but equal statuses, with the Brown v. Board decision giving us some keys to the logic behind such decisions. At present, whether there are significant illegal discriminations against domestic partners despite their legal status or because of it, is unknown to me. Legal ambiguity gives us reason to look to public opinion. However, public opinion indicates discrimination. So, we're at a crossroads in legal argumentation: the state has an interest in following public opinion given the law's ambiguity but such an opinion is clearly discriminatory. The majority opinion says that such a status will cast doubt on the dignity of such relationships and impose a second-class status on homosexual relationships, giving the state no interest in preserving the DP/M distinction. However, this is a matter of public sentiment that cannot in itself be directly influenced by eliminating the DP/M distinction. Thus, as I stated earlier, the state can have no interest in either maintaining or repealing marriage as only heterosexual. I directly disagree with the majority opinion in this.

Why "Marriage" Should be Open in CA: Where discrimination prevails in public sentiment, the law does have an interest in sanitizing itself from injustice. In the case of the judicial branch, courts have a prerogative to eliminate unjust discrimination to the extent that it does not conflict the legislatively dictated constitution and/or law. In CA, the legislature has created perfectly equal but separate classes based on an unjust popular sentiment discriminating homosexual from heterosexual couples. I say unjust because of the lack of significant empirical evidence for separating heterosexual from homosexual relationships under the law beyond public sentiment itself. As the opinion claims, there is no difference in how heterosexual and homosexual couples execute the rights and responsibilities that constitute the classification of a married couple. The judiciary does have an interest in eliminating the DP/M distinction where both are substantively the same in order to relinquish the discriminatory and defamatory nature of the distinction. In a state which legally equalizes groups in all but name, there is an imperative to unify the nomenclature if it is based on discrimination. This is not true in the case of protected group status where groups are not equal in society and extra measures must be taken to ensure and protect equality. While homosexuals deserve protected group status, such laws have not been applied to marriage as far as I know.

A Research Area

Here is one issue that has been brewing in my mind as subject of future study. As some of you know, I'm switching over to sociology - specifically organizational, economic, and political sociology - and these questions come from there. Though, as you will see, the philosopher in me is not gone.

There is a practice among (some?) large corporations to cut wages and benefits through what I'm going to initially call wage-adjustment lag. Primarily, this lag process confounds the typical pay raise system which increases a worker's wage the longer they work and the more responsibilities they take over. Empirically, there are a number of forms of development lag that I've come across so far.

1. Innovative Distribution: The first is exemplified by the writers' strike which exposed a key residuals issue in the new media economy. The question is whether/how much writers should receive in residuals for profit made on their programs via the internet, cell phones, and other new media. In general, this is an issue of extending traditional/legitimate/expected forms of compensation (residuals) to new commercial practices. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) directly represent the producers who don't want bigger budgets, since they are responsible for maintaining the bottom line. Some form of compensation was offered in recent negotiations. Wikipedia cites the writers' demand at 2.5% of producer's gross revenue while the studio's proposed a structure similar to DVD residuals (at $.02/DVD now). As it seems now, the writers will get some residuals from the new media economy. HOWEVER, the fact that they were not receiving anything before demonstrates that this lag occurs and that it may take unionization to fix it. Innovative distribution capitalizes on new channels to profit from old commodities. In this case, wage-adjustment lag is created when those who are normally paid per item sold are being paid less or nothing for new kinds of sales.

2. Atomized contracting: The second wage-adjustment lag has to do with temporary or project-based contracts. These contracts define the worker's benefits, responsibilities, deadlines, and such over the course of a single project or period. The lag comes in when these contracts end. This example comes from a retired employee of a major cell phone company who worked on a traditional life-time schema which incorporates pay raises, long-term benefits, and retirement planning. In the last years of his employment, many of the new hires were signed on using these project-based contracts. According to him, once the contracts expired (2-5 years), workers could sign another with the same conditions (pay, benefits, responsibilities) adjusted to the project. Typically, these new contacts did not generate the same pay-raise scheme as the life-time schema. What we have here is a lag which challenges one justification for pay raises - that one is more valuable to the company the longer one is employed there.

3. General Issue: The self-interest-based logic of profit-sharing which defines more formalized American business generates the Marxist analysis of class conflict: those with control over the means of production will marginalize the payout they give to the workers using those means to generate profitable commodities. Marx's Capital offers case studies and in-depth analysis of numerous techniques through which producers short-change workers. Wage-adjustment lag can be added to the list. In the first case, unionization is operating to thwart the leverage of controlling the means of production. It can do this because it represents a necessary component of the industry and utilizes an industry-wide contract. In the second case, there is no union and seemingly no way for these workers (computer programmers) to ensure better wages beyond being a labor market. In both cases, it does not seem that those who control the means of production have any interest in ensuring better compensation for their workers. In neither case do the controllers seek to maintain the interests of those they control.

4. Three important questions for contemporary sociology come out of this. First, how new, prevalent, and costly are wage-adjustment lags to worker income? Second, what justifications/accounts underly this play of demands that fly in the face of traditional wage adjustment (psychological/cultural Marxist angle)? Third, what does this say in general about contemporary capitalism and the possibilities for businesses in internalizing beneficence?