Wednesday, June 11, 2008

“Omigod, Mom; I just voted for the first woman president!”


Voting on Identity: Time for A Change

My daughter is 27, married, a career woman and a political activist. On the day of the Massachusetts primaries, I got an early morning call. She was on the other end, sobbing­; it took me a moment to figure out who it was. All my mom-emergency alerts went off and I was suddenly completely awake.
“What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“Omigod, Mom; I just voted for the first woman president!” Sigh... relief.

Lost amidst the reports of the extraordinary rise of Senator Barack Obama is the way women, both young and old, have come out for Senator Hillary Clinton. I have been to a couple of rallies here in the Northeast and I have seen women there in numbers I have never seen since the Equal Rights Amendment campaign. Yes, Obama is drawing an extraordinary number of people but this is also a historic race for women.

Is it a clash of identity politics? The Black Man vs. the Middle Aged White Woman?

Many voters decry the focus on gender or race. The campaigns should be based on issues; it’s a form of racism, they say, to vote for Obama because he is a black man, or sexism if one votes for Clinton.

That’s one way to look at it, but as a Latina who has watched generations of white men making all the decisions, I’m ready for a change because politicians do bring their genders and their races to the legislative table. We should not be lulled unto thinking that white men have anyone else's interests in mind.

Who can doubt that Hillary Clinton will have fresh perspectives and ideas about issues that are invisible to the generations of men who preceded her? Women are disproportionately affected by the issues of poverty, Medicare and Social Security. Yes, everybody should have Social Security but women outlive men by a considerable number of years. Women, more than men, nurse elderly husbands and then are left alone. There are many true horror stories about elderly women eating canned cat food or living in impoverished conditions after their husbands’ deaths.

I remember lobbying the California legislature for disadvantaged women and their children. We had a very tough time getting a bill passed that mandated pursuit of “deadbeat dads.” We were perplexed by this difficulty until someone explained that there were many divorced men in the legislature who would never agree to it. Even in that setting, the Old Boys stuck together.

Senator Clinton has already demonstrated her command of the issues pertaining to medical insurance. President Clinton would finally resolve that problem. Then she’d need to help another group of women disproportionately affected because of their gender: single mothers with dependent children. President Bill Clinton made a muck of welfare; she can set right what he compromised on. And that’s just to start with. It makes perfect sense to me that women,­ knowing the impact of one’s gender on the issues, would choose her to lead the nation.

Senator Obama’s presence in the White House would also make a huge difference. There is no question that recent administrations have had a devastating effect on African Americans. Take, for instance, the Civil Rights Commission. In the last eight years, it has quietly shifted its focus from racial and sex-based discrimination to cases of discrimination on the basis of religion. You can always count on George W. Bush to neutralize or pervert a government agency that was actually doing good for the people of this country.

According to Diverse Issues in Higher Education, 9.7% of all black men are unemployed. The rate of unemployment overall is 4.5%. There are three times as many black men languishing in prisons than there are in our nation’s colleges; 40 % of our 2 million prison inmates are black. What kind of sense does it make for the government to spend more to incarcerate than to invest in education and job training? But have our traditional leaders paid any attention to the impact of these things on the black community? No, they just keep appropriating money for prisons and mandatory sentencing laws, spending money on the “War on Drugs” instead of going to the root of the problem.

Some 5.4% of Latinos are unemployed; 19% of the prison population is Latino. Una quinta, ­one-fifth: that is a heavy price to pay. Latinos have the lowest rate of high school graduation and the highest rate of teen pregnancy; more than 3 out of 5 Latina girls become pregnant before age 20. Those traditional politicians in Washington have not paid any attention to this problem except to condemn them and move on.

So, as a Latino, who should one choose? I am drawn to Hillary Clinton because her life has been spent trying to fix the problems related to women and poverty and because she has a history of working with Latinos. Barack Obama does not have the history of working for women or Latinos but if he gets the nomination, I will vote for him because even though he does not have a demonstrated history of attention to our issues, he will bring a fresh set of eyes to Washington and a demonstrated capacity for empathy and conciliation.

As for John McCain, he may be better than his GOP comrades on immigration but otherwise, he might as well live on a different planet.

http://miapogeo.com/main/content/view/205/778/
published on MiApogeo.com, June 2008

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Prime time to witness culture of waste

Prime time to witness culture of waste

TO STUDENTS, teachers and parents, during late May and early June everything shifts: Students’ school year ends; teachers limp across the finish line feeling lucky if they don’t teach in a year-round school, and parents arrange summer vacations, day camps, over-night camps, or other forms of keeping the kids occupied and safe.

But for sidewalk collectors, June is prime time, especially if you live in a city where there is an Ivy League college. I live just a mile from Brown University. Over the years I have collected all sorts of valuable objects left for the trash collectors: Two mini-refrigerators; an ice-cream maker; at least two televisions; a brand-new recliner; books; chairs; software; handmade crochet afghan blankets; tables; desks; bookcases; you name it, I’ve found it. And I wasn’t looking very hard: I was just driving by and they caught my eye.

It is a feature of our consumerist culture that today’s college students equip their dorm rooms with more furniture than our parents owned when they married: two sets of refrigerators, stereo equipment, televisions, microwave ovens, computers with all their peripherals are squeezed into a space that was designed to hold two beds and two desks. All that stuff has to be moved in and arranged more precisely than a Rubik’s Cube. Then it has to be moved out at the end of the school year, lining the pockets of the owners of public storage facilities.

When a student graduates, what happens to all that stuff? Some of it is kept by the students; some is passed on to other students or to younger siblings. But some it, worth too little to cart home or to save, ends up at a thrift shop, on the curb or ultimately, in the landfills. In such poor countries as Brazil and Guatemala, people have fashioned makeshift shacks and actually live at the trash dumps, carefully combing through all of their wealthier neighbors’ garbage, culling recyclables to be sold and salvaging things they can keep or sell, and eating the food that looks like it is still edible.

It is not only people in poor countries who eat out of garbage dumpsters. Some years ago, when I worked as a coordinator of homeless services in West Hollywood, I had the revolting duty of asking the owners of the local market to refrain from pouring chlorine bleach on the food they threw in the dumpsters: The supermarket managers were concerned about being sued if someone got sick from eating from the dumpster. The homeless were hungry: Cheese that had just passed the “sell by” date was still good to eat as far as they were concerned.

Driving around the East Side, seeing all the discarded, usable objects, I reckon that I am helping reduce my carbon footprint by rescuing an object and putting it to good use. How will our lives change when the petroleum-based plastic that so many of our things are made of becomes prohibitively expensive? Will we turn back to wood-based objects even as our rain forests disappear to accommodate growing populations who want the land to farm? Will we finally learn to live simply? Will the dorm room of 2020 be as spare as that of a student in the 1950s? Will the academic gowns that once kept students warm and now have only ceremonial use once again become the fashion rage as heating classrooms becomes too costly? We will see.

Rosa Maria Pegueros ( pegueros@uri.edu) is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode Island.



published in
THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
Contributors
1:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, June 10, 2008

A Republican with A Conscience—What A Concept!

So Scott McClellan has a conscience. What a concept—a member of the take-no-prisoners-Republican party has a conscience. It would be refreshing if it wasn’t so pathetic.

McClellan is a Texan. He knew George W. Bush. I don’t buy that “out of the loop,” “I was a poor innocent,” pap. That’s as believable as George Bush, Sr.’s claim he was out of the loop on Iran-Contra, or Ronald Reagan playing dumb on the same scandal.

Why do the majority of the American people believe these scoundrels? Or if they don’t, why do they let them get away with it? Why was getting to the “truth” so important to the GOP when the priapic Bill Clinton engaged in an assignation with an intern that resulted in no harm to anyone else, while Bush’s lies which have brought about the deaths of over 4000 American troops, not to mention thousands of Iraqis, have been unquestioned? Where has their pursuit of truth been?

Some have said that McClellan is to be lauded for showing some human conscience, even at this late date; he could have made much more money on the lecture circuit than publishing a book. Obviously, now he can publish a book, clear his reputation especially since, prompted by a petition drive on Moveon.org he is now giving part of the proceeds to the families of those killed in Iraq, AND still grow rich from a tour on the lecture circuit. His former friends are expressing outrage over his betrayal of their administration but none of them are screaming about the betrayal of the American people.

George W. Bush frightened me long before he set foot in the White House; long before, in fact, he ran for the White House. When he cheerily stated he never lost any sleep over the people he sent to be executed, his lack of doubt was alarming. Scarier than his vaunted clean conscience was his plain inhumanity. What if he’d made a mistake? What if one over-zealous prosecutor pushed too far; what if one hanging-judge was too willing to disregard exculpatory evidence? Who cares? So what if Texas has become the charnel house of the United States and of the industrialized world? He looked tough and that was all that mattered.

When 9-11 changed the course of American history, his demeanor set all my alarms ringing. He likes this, I thought to myself; now he has the perfect excuse to impose his agenda on this country. He has surrounded himself with the conniving Cheney and a collection of sycophants while punishing anyone who opposed him. Bush has a mean streak that will not stop at mere denunciation. Given W’s nasty habit of destroying those who cross him—just ask Valerie Plame—McClellan should watch his back.

Who can forget the debate when he was asked to name a mistake he might have made and could not think of a single one? Or his obfuscation of his so-called military service? Or his lies about his drunk-driving arrests, and cocaine use before he became president? Now we’re told that he privately weeps over the Americans killed in Iraq. Give me a break! How stupid do they think we are?

Much has been made of Bush and Cheney’s determination to restore powers to the president that had been lost since Nixon’s failure. But no one party keeps the presidency forever: The GOP must know that eventually a Democratic president will come to power and all those imperial powers will then be at the fingertips of that Democrat, unless there is something off-stage that we do not see. Will they steal yet another election? Will the elderly McCain run with a stealth neo-con; somehow beat the Democrat, and then be disposed of, replaced by his uber-conservative running mate?

Am I paranoid? After almost eight years of lies, theft, graft, subterfuge and chicanery, you would have to be Candide not to look over your shoulder and feel the hot breath of the GOP’s menacing presence on your neck. The American people have reason to be alarmed, alert, and even paranoid but they are so easily distracted by all the garbage floating on the airwaves that we could end up with a so-called maverick who swears never to surrender in Iraq as president.

Why do people consider McCain a maverick? Isn’t “conservative maverick” an oxymoron? The dictionary tells us that the original Maverick was Samuel A. Maverick, an American pioneer who died in 1870 and refused to brand his cattle. In every way that matters, McCain is a true-blue Republican. In most cases where he has broken with the party, including his criticism of Bush’s tax cuts, he has backpedaled: Now he says that he’ll support them. Yet people call him a maverick because he has occasionally crossed party lines. .

In less politically-charged times in our history, senators and representatives routinely crossed the aisle to join with the other party to pass legislation. Ted Kennedy has even joined with George Bush on an educational bill and has worked with many Republicans on any number of issues. Is Kennedy too liberal to be thought a maverick? Or is the Republican range of movement so minuscule that when it occurs, it is thought to be a great aberration: One thing is sure; since George W. Bush came to Washington claiming to be a “uniter,” the functioning of representative democracy has been undermined by his actual “my way or the highway” tactics, for which the prodigal McClellan was a spokesman.

Americans have to take responsibility for the future of our country and the planet. That means reading and thinking, and acting, not just swallowing whole the rhetoric of the presidential campaigns. Words have meanings; politicians have histories. Change, real change, is uncomfortable. America is no longer young but neither is it mature politically. It is too late for feckless youth. This time, we must make real change and that means recognizing the consequences of our history, of our irresponsibility, and of our lazy acceptance of the lies fed to us by politicians.