Month: March 2012

Every few weeks now we seem to get an update in the mainstream media about the assault against women’s health taking place in state legislatures now Republican-dominated because Democrats forgot to vote in 2010.

For example, today’s round-up of state cuts to birth control funding by Reuters titled “States slash birth control subsidies as federal debate rages” presents a sorrowful litany of states curtailing or ending funds for birth control for low-income women and teenagers in Montana, New, Jersey, new Hampshire and Texas. Meanwhile Wisconsin, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana and Texas, again, have moved to block Planned Parenthood from receiving funds for family planning because PP performs abortions.  We’re talking about more than 300,000 people, primarily poor women and teenagers, who have lost their free or affordable birth control or could lose it within weeks in Texas alone.

These legislators are crazy if they think that the affected women will stop having sex because they can’t afford birth control.  No, what will happen is that more women will get abortions, more women will have pregnancies that tax their health or lead to life-threatening conditions and more unwanted children will be born, some of whom will have physical or mental disabilities.  And the health care bill in these states will mushroom.

I have a question for the pious and frugal legislators ramming through these new laws that are so destructive to women.

What I would like to know is why all these pious and frugal state legislators are so eager to take birth control away from women, but haven’t said anything about the fact that millions of men get health insurance coverage for erectile dysfunction drugs, such as Viagra, Cialis and Levitra?

Rush Limbaugh is not the only one to wonder why society has to pay for women so they can engage in sexual relations, but none of these arbiters of public morality complain that they are paying so that millions of men across the country can be made physically able for coitus.   What equivalent term for “slut” and “prostitute” that Rush would use for the unmarried Viagra users.

Whatever cost argument you make against covering birth control is much more appropriately made against ED drugs.  By paying for women’s birth control, we lower healthcare costs, because we reduce unplanned pregnancies and their complications. Paying for ED drugs achieves absolutely no savings in future costs, and so increases the cost of health insurance.

I’m not as sure about the religious argument.  It is not natural to use man-made technology either to prevent conception or to enable erection, and that would seem to make both against Catholic doctrine.  On the other hand, birth control prevents pregnancies, whereas Viagra and Cialis enable it.  And there is that old religious concept of raising the dead…

Of course the freedom of religion issue would only activate for ED pills if the Vatican came out against their use.

Seriously, it is grossly unfair for right-wingers to go after birth control and not ED drugs.  My own view would be to cover the birth control for cost and public health reasons, but not to cover the ED pills because the ED pills raise healthcare costs and address no public health problem.  Sex is, after all, an optional activity for men and women. Just not for the human species.

 

 

Yesterday was one of the more bizarre news days in a long time, mainly because two of the most widely-disseminated news stories revolved around right-wing propagandists, Rush Limbaugh and Andrew Breitbart.

Note, we’re not talking about two right-wing ideas, nor about two right-wing legislative initiatives, nor about two right-wing candidates.  No, the two in question are media personalities (I will refrain from using the word journalist to describe either), both known for their scurrilous tricks and for being among the most important mass media innovators in recent decades.

Let’s start with Rush, who really stepped into a deep pile this time.  Yesterday Limbaugh suffered a crescendo of condemnation by Democrats, including President Obama, and non-partisan civic leaders for his repeated rants against a law school student whose sin was to appear in front of a hearing that Nancy Pelosi held on the so-called Obama rule mandating healthcare insurance coverage of contraception for women.  FYI, Pelosi held the hearing only because the original Republican hearing on the topic did not invite a single woman to testify!

As Rush has continued his assault, even Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, the Republican Party’s leading panderers to the social issues right-wing, have stepped back from the rudeness of Rush’s comments.

One interesting phenomena that occurs when news stories grow over time, is that the key information is quickly boiled down to its essentials.  In the case of Limbaugh’s invective against an innocent woman who dared to express the will of the most Americans, every story now cites one already notorious quote: “What does it say about the college coed … who goes before acongressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex…It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex.”

I’d like to spend a few moments analyzing a second quote that was prevalent in Thursday’s first round of stories, but dropped from most of the stories that appeared on Friday, after media interest mushroomed.  I’m selecting this quote because it exemplifies Rush Limbaugh’s specious rhetoric throughout the years:

“Can you imagine if you’re her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope.”

We begin our analysis with “”She’s having so much sex, she can’t afford the birth control…” Behind this statement is a false assumption—that the more sex a woman has, the higher the dosage of her birth control or the more diaphragms she has to buy.  When we’re talking about women’s birth control, it will almost certainly cost the same amount no matter how few or how many times the woman has sex (except for the emergency Plan B, which no one wants to make the centerpiece of regular birth control).

From this lie, Rush draws a false conclusion: “Can you imagine if you’re her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be?” We all know that Rush means that the parents should be very upset that their daughter is “having so much sex…” I can, however, readily prove that most parents don’t care about the amount of sex their adult daughters have by running a little thought experiment (and I’m using heterosexual examples, just to keep it simple and focused on what Rush was talking about): How would most parents react to learning that a single 30-year-old daughter had sex:  a) 500 times a year with one man; b) five times a year, once each with five different men;  c) once a year but with two men at one time. I don’t think we need a survey to conclude that for most parents, a long-term strong relationship is better than five one-night stands or one three-way.  Rush’s emphasis on the amount of sex someone has is once again misleading.

Finally, Rush, like everyone else on the right, conveniently forgets that when we cover birth control for women, no one pays for it, because the entity that pays for the insurance policy, be in the government, employer or individual, ends up with lower healthcare costs because birth control is so much less expensive than an unwanted pregnancy.

Within this nasty rant are all of Limbaugh’s propaganda tricks: hiding an outright lie by focusing on the implications if it were true; conflation of facts or situations, which means giving equal weight to two things that are not equal or comparable; exaggeration; concealment of outright lies in entertaining quips and fantasies (e.g., “Botox-filled” and the image of a “co-ed gone wild”). What has made Limbaugh so effective for so many years is that he combines all of these propaganda tricks into one run-on sentence, which he follows with yet another and then another in a headlong rush of conjecture and deception.

Some advertisers have already pulled their ads from Limbaugh’s radio show and others are threatening to do the same.  They have good reason. Not only were Limbaugh’s remarks rude and inappropriate, they go against the holy of holies, the American marketplace, which consists of American consumers. Two-thirds of all Americans believe that healthcare insurance should pay for women’s birth control, while 99 % of all adult Americans and 98% of all adult Catholics have used birth control. Advertisers have noticed.

Let’s hope that the outcry continues to grow and leads to the cancellation of the Limbaugh show.

We turn now to the other right-wing mass media propagandist, Andrew Brietbart, who made news by dying suddenly at the age of 43.  While I wish no man death or illness, I am delighted we won’t be hearing from Brietbart anymore, for he was surely one of the most deceptive mass media manipulators of the current era.

Breitbart worked at The Drudge Report, the first and most well-known of the rumor mills that spewed out unsubstantiated accusations and assertions, primarily against Democratic candidates.  Sometimes the Drudge Report turned out to be true, but often not.  It didn’t matter to the mainstream news media, whose ethical standards prevented them from reporting directly the rumors that Drudge would routinely publish, but did not prevent them from reporting what Drudge said. Thus a new propaganda device emerged: it doesn’t have to be true, as long as we quote the Drudge Report or some other unscrupulous source.

Breitbart graduated to blogging and was instrumental in disseminating the photos of Representative Andrew Weiner’s wiener that led that weenie to resign. Breitbart’s blog also was the first to run the videotape of the sting-cum-scam in which two young right-wingers visited ACORN offices pretending to be a prostitute and pimp. He was probably best known, however, for editing down the remarks of an African-American civil servant to make her sound as if she were a racist.  The propaganda technique in question, taking a statement out of context, was a favorite of the Nazis and Stalinists. The kind of editing he did is akin to an athlete taking performance enhancing drugs. For this offense, he should have been ostracized permanently by the mainstream news media for reasons of credibility.

At his untimely death, it doesn’t surprise me that the right wing has praised Breitbart as a sainted figure. It also makes sense that the mainstream media is treating him even-handedly, since they depended on him for so many stories, if very little real news.

But like Limbaugh, Breitbart will likely go down as a villain in the history of propaganda and the mass media.  They both have routinely lied and distorted, and they debased the quality of news coverage in the United States.  Even though the mainstream news media has often glorified their shenanigans, historians will eventually get it right.

Now for a semi- errata: Over the past few days, I have exchanged a number of tweets from a JD or JohnJosephTexas.  JD is defending Professor J. Rufus Fears, the subject of my blog of February 28, against my assertion that Fears was not a historian.  JD found a history book that Fears wrote 30 years ago that is out of print and says that there are others.  JD also claims that while at Indiana University, Fears taught in the history department.  Rather than get into an extended argument about a trivial point, let me yield to this extent: While I believe that the best way to describe Fears is as a history teacher, I will grant that he is a historian who specializes in teaching not research. What remains is my view of the history that Fears teaches, as reflected in the topics of his course on 36 dates that changed the world: It is old-fashioned and centered on the actions of Christian men in Europe and the United States.

Most people who have been reading the progressive or the mainstream news media know that the last 30 years have seen the United States become a less equitable society, with fewer people in the middle class and more people who are poor and near poor. By income, assets or any other measure, the top 1% now control much more of the wealth of the country than they did in 1979.

In my view, that net transfer of wealth took place in three ways:

• Tax rates were lowered and the tax system made less progressive, which means the difference in the tax rate paid by the wealthy and the poor narrowed.
• Government programs transferred less money to the poor and middle class.
• Less income went to the wages of the non-owners, non-executives and non-professionals and more went to high earners and to corporate profit.

It has long been a mantra of the left, including myself, that making taxes more progressive is one of the best ways to reduce income and wealth inequality. When I spoke with Professor William Domhoff of “Who Rules America?” fame in Santa Cruz this past January, he began to make the case that maybe we shouldn’t harp so much on tax progressivity.

Earlier this week Professor Domhoff sent me a link to an article at the blog of Professor Lane Kenworthy, Professor of Sociology and Political Science at the University of Arizona in which Professor Kenworthy analyzes how different industrialized countries reduce income inequality. He uses existing statistics, but looks at them in an innovative way.

It turns out that no other country reduces income inequality through a progressive tax system except the United States, the nation that does the worse job of reducing the inequalities of wealth that the free market seems to generate naturally. 

Professor Kenworthy writes that “the chief contribution of taxes to inequality reduction is indirect. Taxes provide the money to fund the transfers that reduce inequality.” He finds that “it is the quantity of the tax rather than its progressivity that matters most.”

Professor Kenworthy reaches the conclusion that we should consider a national consumption tax with all the proceeds earmarked for programs that help the poor and middle class. Kenworthy suggests a 5% tax with funds used for universal healthcare, universal preschool and/or high quality child care. Everyone pays the same rate on a consumption tax, which people and businesses pay when they purchase goods and services, so it is regressive. 

I think the idea of any tax that has all funds earmarked to improving our tattered social service net is a great idea, and certainly worth very serious consideration when we are talking about reforming the tax system. But I warn progressives interested in getting behind this idea not to sever the link between the tax and the earmark to social service programs. If that link is severed, the right-wing will jump on the tax part and then use it to pay down the debt or cut other taxes on the wealthy.

Moreover, I was wondering if perhaps there were a more direct way to transfer wealth, and that’s to implement policies that equalize income, such as:

• Raise the federal minimum wage
• End state “right to work” laws and other anti-union laws
• End privatization of government services, such as prisons, charter schools and military supply line support, since this privatization typically leads to lower salaries for most of the employees of the privatized operation.

No matter how we prioritize the progressive economic agenda, Professor Kenworthy has thought outside the box and uncovered an important idea—that tax progressivity is not important and therefore can be a bargaining chip with the right.