Month: March 2012

Birth control mean higher wages for women

by digby

Hmmm. Younger women not getting pregnant enhances their chances of having a successful career and making more money. Whodda thunk?

While women still earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make in the United States, the gender wage gap has closed significantly over the past several decades. Now, for the first time ever, a new study has connected the narrowing of that pay gap to increased access to birth control pills.

The University of Michigan study, which analyzed the careers of 4,300 women, shows that the earlier a woman can start taking birth control pills, the more likely she is to earn higher wages later in life.
[…]
“As the pill provided younger women the expectation of greater control over childbearing, women invested more in their human capital and careers,” said Bailey. “Most affected were women with some college, who benefited from these investments through remarkable wage gains over their lifetimes.”

Since members of virtually all species will have sex in any case, birth control allows women to plan their lives beyond their fecundity. It doesn’t make sense to be educated, to travel to try out new jobs or start a business if your plans can be derailed at any moment by the very likely result of pregnancy and the raising of infants and small children. Women simply cannot have equal access to everything the world has to offer if they cannot control their reproduction.

Birth control doesn’t just allow women to make more money, although it does. It allows them to make choices about their lives and fulfill their dreams. It allows them to be fully human. And that’s really the problem isn’t it?

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Solaris – The Definitive Edition

by tristero

I wish I could recommend Solaris – The Definitive Edition for science fiction fans… but that would be to artificially limit its audience. In this translation – which, because of rights issues, is only available as an audiobook or an ebook – Solaris is revealed as a work of literature, one that has more in common with Moby Dick (a comparison Lem himself makes) than with other sci-fi/fantasy/horror novels. For example, Lem is clearly influenced by the work of horror writer HP Lovecraft, but he is a much more versatile and profound writer. The Ocean descriptions were obviously intended as Lovecraftian parodies, but what Lem wrote is so exquisitely beautiful, bizarre, and horrific – all at the same time – that it transcends its source.

For fans of the original US edition – which was an English translation of a French translation of the original Polish – you will be in for a pleasant shock. Based on my skimming of it, the Solaris most Americans know truly was as bad a hatchet job as Lem always claimed it was.

After I finished listening to the novel, I rewatched Tarkovsky’s Solaris and – Dennis Hartley will kill me for saying this – was very disappointed. It is an interesting film (and the music is fantastic), but Tarkovsky has different concerns – a human love story, the return of the prodigal son – while the novel is far more original and much stranger. It’s about the incomprehensibility of the trans-human and how attempts to understand not only lead to failure and even catastrophe, but ultimately end up showing us merely our own reflection. Moby-Dick indeed! Tarkovsky’s film relegates this extraordinary conception to mere backdrop and focuses on just part of the story, an entirely human, and reasonably predictable, drama – “Love in Space” as Lem cynically calls both Tarkovsky’s and Soderbergh’s films.

Is Solaris – the novel- a masterpiece? I don’t want to scare you off, so let’s just say that if not, it’s awfully close. Please don’t miss it.

The Not-So-New Breed of Conservative

by David Atkins

Remember how the Tea Party was supposed to be different from your run-of-the-mill socially conservative, Bible-thumping crew? Remember how it presented a different, more rugged spirit of classic conservatism?

Yeah, me neither:

A lot of Republicans on the national stage would rather not rehash the battle over Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown Law student who galvanized the left last month when she was attacked by Rush Limbaugh after arguing in favor of contraception coverage.

Not so here outside the Supreme Court, where the justices heard the first day of arguments over health care reform. Fluke was a central topic among the several dozen tea party protesters who gathered outside the court Monday. As a much larger crowd of organized pro-reform activists from labor and other Dem-friendly groups marched in support of the law, one tea partier yelled, “Real women pay for their own birth control!” — a clear reference to Fluke and the fight over contraception access she embodies.

Others were more direct. One protester carried a sign that said, “Sandra Fluke I don’t want to pay for your birth control,” which drew criticism from the pro-reform crowd. “Do you agree with what Rush Limbaugh said?” A pro-reform demonstrator yelled into a small group of tea partiers gathered around the sign.

“Do *you* hold the liberal media to the same standard?” A tea partier shot back. A short, heated argument ensued.

Seattle Tea Party Patriot Kelli Carrender told me Fluke is a natural part of the debate as the HCR battle moves to the Court.

“She made herself relevant,” Carrender said. “She’s asking for free birth control.”

New conservatives, meet the old conservatives. Just as misogynistic, but now with tri-corner hats.

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Common sense from Massachusetts

by digby

This seems so obvious to me that I can’t even imagine why we have to litigate it, but we do:

For the past six months, the bishops have complained very publicly that the administration is anti-Catholic and biased against religious groups because it refused to renew a contract with the group to provide services to victims of human trafficking. The bishops had been administering virtually all the federal money allocated for such services, about $3 million a year, doling it out to subcontractors who served victims all over the country. The USCCB had prohibited the contractors from using the federal funds to pay for staff time to counsel victims on contraception or abortion, or to refer them for such services. (Federal money can’t be used to pay for abortions except in the most extreme instances, but it can pay for contraception.)

In 2009, the ACLU sued HHS, arguing that such rules violated constitutional prohibitions on mixing church and state. Last fall, while the case was still pending, the Obama administration decided not to renew the bishops’ contract, largely because the bishops refused to provide those key reproductive health services that are frequently needed by victims of trafficking. The decision set off a firestorm in Congress, where House Republicans accused the administration of bid-rigging and violating the bishops’ religious freedom during a marathon oversight hearing in December.

But on Friday, a federal judge in Massachusetts essentially validated the Obama administration’s position, ruling in favor of the ACLU in the lawsuit over the contract. Even though the bishops no longer have the contract, they had joined with the ACLU in asking the judge to rule in the case to settle the constitutional issues. US District Judge Richard Stearns explained why the bishops were in the wrong. He wrote:

To insist that the government respect the separation of church and state is not to discriminate against religion; indeed, it promotes a respect for religion by refusing to single out any creed for official favor at the expense of all others….This case is about the limits of the government’s ability to delegate to a religious institution the right to use taxpayer money to impose its beliefs on others (who may or may not share them).

Stearns also cited an earlier Supreme Court ruling that found that the Framers “did not set up a system of government in which important, discretionary governmental powers would be delegated to or shared with religious institutions.” The judge’s ruling is potentially a big one: It calls into question the entire basis of the federal faith-based contracting initiative, implemented by George W. Bush, which gave tremendous power to groups like USCCB over taxpayer dollars. Stearns found, in fact, that it was USCCB that was making the decisions about how the federal anti-trafficking law should be administered—a job that properly rests with the government, not the church.

The church, unsurprisingly, is upset, believing as they do that taxpayers should pay for services which the church should be allowed to administer according to their religious beliefs. How they logically arrived at the conclusion that this is an exercise of religious liberty, I don’t know. They don’t pay taxes and they get taxpayer money from people of all faiths, but somehow it’s a violation of the establishment clause to ask them to adhere to the government’s regulations and the law of the land if they don’t agree with them.

I’ve always thought these “faith-based” programs had the potential to cause this sort of problem and they have. The social conservatives want to take my money and your money and use it to proselytize for their religions. Nice for them, not so nice for us — unless we happen to be members of that particular church.

There’s a big reason why the constitution has the establishment clause in the First Amendment. It’s a fundamental principle and anytime you have the government start doling out money to churches, it corrupts that principle. In America, Churches are supposed to operate in an entirely separate sphere from the government. They are given a huge dispensation by not being required to pay taxes to support the work the government does — and the corollary is that taxes should not be used to pay for the work that churches do. Period.

(And I won’t even go into the cruelty of church that would withhold this sort of information from human trafficking victims.)

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Ricky’s nose is growing before our very eyes

Mad Men: the monumental revolution

by digby

I was late to the Mad Men phenomenon and haven’t yet completely caught up so I missed last night’s season premier on purpose. But even without seeing it — maybe because I’m still watching the earlier seasons, I relate very much to what Amanda Marcotte observes in this piece for the American Prospect:

Feminist viewers take delight in watching Peggy and some of the other female characters endure and overcome sexist treatment in no small part because we don’t have to put up with that kind of overt misogyny anymore. We cringe when a male character tells Joan to her face that he thinks of her as a “madam from a Shanghai whorehouse” who is “walking around like you’re trying to get raped.” Then we get to revel when Peggy stands up to the offender, and feel gratitude for the real life women like her that gave name to sexual harassment and shifted the power balance so men couldn’t just say things like that anymore. We weep for Peggy’s loss in having to give birth and give a baby up for adoption in a pre-Roe era, but feel better knowing that sort of thing can’t happen to us anymore. We pity Betty for feeling trapped in her marriage because she’s had a series of pregnancies she couldn’t effectively prevent while knowing that bright young college women like her now have the pill.

Or, at least, it seemed that simple a year and a half ago, when Mad Men aired the final episode of season four. In the extended break caused by budget negotiations, the real world outside of fictionalized 1960s New York changed rapidly when it came to women’s rights. The last episode, “Tomorrowland”, aired in October 2010. Since then, we’ve seen a midterm election sweep Republicans into power in both Congress and across state governments, and their number one priority has been to return us to the social structures oppressing Joan, Betty, and Peggy. We’ve seen unprecedented attacks on abortion rights, some of which would, if successful, make abortion harder and more dangerous to get than it was in the 60s. Republicans have declared war on hormonal birth control, even trying to make it legal for your employer to fire you for using it as contraception. Even on Mad Men, Peggy was able to get a birth control prescription with only a lecture from the doctor, but not from her employer. While Rush Limbaugh doesn’t have the rhetorical chops to call a woman a Shanghai madam, it turns out that he does know his way around the word “slut” pretty well, and has widespread social support for using it to describe the 99 percent of American women who have used birth control.

This morning at the Supreme Court this was among the messages:

So, I’ve been watching the show unfold as this latest assault on women’s freedom has gotten up to speed and I’ve had the feeling Amanda describes all the way along — a growing feeling of dread.

And anyway, for me, that show doesn’t feel like ancient history. After all, those women were my mother and her friends. It’s the world in which I grew up, where women were very much a part of everything, but in a secondary position and most definitely not in charge, at least in any overt way. (Women made things happen through artful manipulation while always, always, ensuring that the man’s superior position wasn’t threatened.)

Most interestingly, Man Men shows the same strange relationship with sex that I’m seeing re-emerge now — a constant undercurrent of sexual energy everywhere, but a mixed message so dissonant (saying that women had to be sexy but pure) that everybody seemed nearly dizzy with it. I’ve always thought of my parents boozy parties as the “ring-a-ding-ding” years: “did you see Harold making a pass at Martha in the kitchen? She’s such a tease …”

By the time I was an adult, I’d read “Our Bodies Ourselves” and “The Joy of Sex” and had participated in any number of youthful events where everyone was half naked and nobody shaved anything and it was all very, very different. The change seemed to be total and it felt to me as if it was a sociological earthquake so monumental that the world could never possibly go back to the way it had been for women in my mother’s time.

And I assumed that for most of my adult life. It’s only been in recent years, as I’ve gotten that weird sense of time you get as you age where you realize that everything you thought was permanent isn’t permanent at all and that reality itself is elastic and ephemeral, that I understood how very possible it is that this time I’ve lived could turn out to be an historical anomaly. The sociological changes I witnessed, particularly the changes for women, were revolutionary on a scale I hadn’t understood. And those sorts of revolutions rarely happen without backlash and at least some periods of backsliding.

It could happen. Mad Men wasn’t that long ago in the great scheme of things.

And look how young these people are. Revolutions can go the other way too:

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Wearing Out of the Green

by David Atkins

The Times has a depressing human interest story out of Ireland:

As an emblem of the modern Irish condition, Frank Buckley is almost too apt. Dead broke, he lives in a house made of money.

Euros here, euros there. Euros in the fireplace. Euros on the floor, on the chairs, in the windows. Worthless euros, taken out of circulation and shredded by Ireland’s Central Bank, forming the interior walls of an apartment that Mr. Buckley does not own in a building left vacant by the country’s economic ruin.

Mr. Buckley, 50, calls the apartment — built from thousands of bricks of shredded, decommissioned cash (each brick contains, roughly, what used to be 50,000 euros) — the Billion Euro House. He reckons that about 1.4 billion euros actually went into it, but the joke, of course, is that it is worth simultaneously so much and so little.

“Everything is centered on the euro, but euros are only pieces of paper,” he said. “It’s what people do with the euros, the value we put on them, that changes their meaning.”

If there is any doubt about Mr. Buckley’s meaning, it dissipates as soon as you enter the apartment, on the ground floor of an empty building in a neighborhood ridden with them. A large gravestone announces that Irish sovereignty died in 2010, the year that the government accepted an international bailout so larded with onerous conditions that the Irish will be paying for it for years to come.

If there’s an example par excellence of the myopic greed and stupidity of the Very Serious Economic Class, Ireland is it. Its low taxes and financial deregulation (it was once called the “Wild West of European Finance”) earned it the praise of the Very Serious People, and won the Irish economy the moniker Celtic Tiger.

Then when that same house-of-cards economy predictably skidded to a halt, Ireland dutifully followed the lead of the Very Serious Economic Class, accepting strict austerity measures for their people in exchange for a bailout of their rotten zombie banks. Again, predictably, the Irish economy is still tanking.

Very Serious Economists should be asked time and time again: what happened to the Celtic Tiger? Why did it falter? And why isn’t it recovering after austerity measures? Wasn’t deregulation and austerity supposed to solve all of these economic problems?

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Here’s something you don’t see every day — a long TV discussion of the great taboo: atheism. But Chris Hayes went there this morning. And it was fascinating:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Waiting for the test results

by digby

Gosh, this is awfully helpful:

It will be an amazing irony if the ACA ends up being the logic behind privatizing Medicare. And McCaskill isn’t alone in this analysis by any means. Here’s Ezra yesterday:

Republicans’ long-term interests are probably best served by Democratic success. If the Affordable Care Act is repealed by the next president or rejected by the Supreme Court, Democrats will probably retrench, pursuing a strategy to expand Medicare and Medicaid on the way toward a single-payer system. That approach has, for them, two advantages that will loom quite large after the experience of the Affordable Care Act: It can be passed with 51 votes in the Senate through the budget reconciliation process, and it’s indisputably constitutional.

Conversely, if the Affordable Care Act not only survives but also succeeds, then Republicans have a good chance of exporting its private-insurers-and-exchanges model to Medicare and Medicaid, which would entrench the private health-insurance system in America.

That’s not the strategy Republicans are pursuing. Instead, they’re stuck fighting a war against a plan that they helped to conceive and, on a philosophical level, still believe in. No one has been more confounded by this turn of events than Alice Rivlin, the former White House budget director who supports the Affordable Care Act and helped Ryan design an early version of his Medicare premium-support proposal.

“I could never understand why Ryan didn’t support the exchanges in the Affordable Care Act,” Rivlin says. “In fact, I think he does, and he just doesn’t want to say so.”

Actually that’s a very foolish assumption. What Ryan supports is an unregulated, private insurance market in which the old, the sick and the poor would buy sub-standard coverage because that’s all they will be able to afford. And if they can’t afford any at all, or are too expensive to cover, the insurance companies and the health care providers will be allowed to turn those irresponsible looters and moochers out into the street. As Ron Paul famously said about a sick, uninsured citizen,“What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself. That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…”

That’s what the Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan believes too. But until he can achieve total freedom for John Galt, he’ll be glad to use Obamacare to degrade and destroy the guaranteed old age health care we currently have, however he can. And the good news is that Democrats are apparently going to help him.

Ezra’s analysis yesterday was a dispassionate look at the political strategies of both Parties to explain where this argument would logically lead. And the upshot is that the GOP would be smart to get onboard with Obamacare if they want to destroy Medicare because otherwise the crazy liberals will somehow ram through single payer. (Why he thinks that’s going to happen, I don’t know. The last I heard from all the Very Serious People was that the ACA was the last chance for health care reform for a generation.) This is an expansion of an earlier post in which he argued that privatizing Medicare and medicaid along the lines of Obamacare is a win-win for everyone:

If Republicans can make their peace with the Affordable Care Act and help figure out how to make the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges work to control costs and improve quality, it’d be natural to eventually migrate Medicaid and Medicare into the system. Liberals would like that because it’d mean better care for Medicaid beneficiaries and less fragmentation in the health-care system. Conservatives would like it because it’d break the two largest single-payer health-care systems in America and turn their beneficiaries into consumers. But the implementation and success of the Affordable Care Act is a necessary precondition to any compromise of this sort. You can’t transform Medicaid and Medicare until you’ve proven that what you’re transforming them into is better. Only the Affordable Care Act has the potential to do that.

This is why I’m afraid to say that #IlikeObamacare. Ezra’s arguing that if Obamacare works great everyone will want to extend it to Medicare. My feeling is that in this political environment it’s far more likely that everyone will just extend Obamacare to Medicare, regardless of whether it works well. Indeed, if it doesn’t work well, it may even make it more likely. After all, if the costs come down because the Medicaid expansion is whittled away, I could quite easily see Democrats strutting around and counting that as a great success. (At least that’s what they usually do when they agree to massive, painful spending cuts.)

Sorry — I don’t trust anyone on this issue. If Obamacare is upheld and gets implemented and it eventually results in universal, affordable health care in this country I will consider it a success. Until then, I don’t even want to hear a whisper about rolling the sickest and most vulnerable members of the population — the elderly — into it. I just have a sneaking suspicion that Paul Ryan isn’t quite as dumb about this as everyone seems to think he is.

Update: Howie writes:

Blue America has endorsed two doctors running for the House, Lee Rogers (CA) and David Gill (IL)– and neither is ecstatic about Obamacare, although they both think it’s a step in the right direction. Here’s Lee Rogers, who’s running against anti-healthcare fanatic Buck McKeon in a newly redrawn swing district that covers Simi Valley, Santa Clarita, Porter Ranch and the Antelope Valley northeast of Los Angeles:

It’s understandable why congressional leaders wanted to reform our health care system after President Obama took office. But the Affordable Care Act is far from an ideal system like a single payer plan or “Medicare-for-all,” as some have put it. Certainly there are good parts of Obamacare, like forcing insurance companies to spend 85 cents of every dollar on actual health care, eliminating pre-existing conditions as a determinant for coverage, and allowing adult children to stay on their parent’s insurance until age 26.

But there are sections that are not good for patients or providers. Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) will function like HMOs for Medicare patients, potentially limiting access to providers and services. The Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) is an executive branch appointed group that will legislate reimbursement rates for Medicare, but to be overruled, it will take a 3/5th majority of Congress. While pre-existing conditions can’t be used to deny you coverage, there are no caps on what insurance companies can charge you. So you could be effectively priced out of the market. Overall, Obamacare was a step in the right direction, but there are many areas that need to be refined and reformed until we have a law that promotes affordable, quality care. We still have a long way to go and that’s why we need elected officials who understand the system of health delivery to help shape the future of health care.

Dr. David Gill won his primary in Illinois Tuesday and we just moved him over to the mail Blue America page today. He’s a longtime single payer advocate and last night he explained his feelings about the Affordable Care Act:

“The ACA was but a first little baby step toward meaningful health care financing reform here in America. There are some good provisions within the bill, but it leaves intact the basic paradigm of reliance on a private health insurance industry whose primary goal is the maximizing of profit.

“What we must do, instead, is to expand and improve Medicare. Uncle Sam runs Medicare at an overhead of 2-4%, while the private health insurance companies run up overhead and profit-taking of 10 times that amount. Uncle Sam is not in the Medicare business to make money, which is the fundamental difference between Medicare and the private carriers.

“We currently throw away up to 40% of our “health care” budget– nearly $1 trillion per year– on a health insurance industry whose primary goal is not the well-being of people. We can do so much better. It is a moral failure to stand by while an American citizen dies every 12 minutes just because they lack health insurance– we are a better people than that. We will be far healthier and far wealthier as well, when we finally abandon the private health insurance industry and put in place a single-payer system.”

Dr. Gill and Dr. Rogers both know how to make meaningful healthcare reform work for their patients and for the system. Blue America is backing them both for winnable congressional seats. And now they’re both on the same page.

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Arizona sanity?