The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (46 page)

Vermont has become an incubator for innovative public policy. Canada’s single-payer health care system started as an experiment in one province, Saskatchewan. It was pushed through in the early 1960s by Saskatchewan’s premier, Tommy Douglas, considered by many to be the greatest Canadian. It was so successful, it was rapidly adopted by all of Canada. (Douglas is the grandfather of actor Kiefer Sutherland.) Perhaps Vermont’s health care law will start a similar, national transformation.

The anthropologist Margaret Mead famously said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Just replace “group” with “state,” and you’ve got Vermont.

March 3, 2010

Domestic Violence: A Pre-Existing Condition?

March is Women’s History Month, recognizing women’s central role in society. Unfortunately, violence against women is epidemic in the United States and around the world.

Domestic violence is on the minds of many now, as reports published by the
New York Times
implicate New York Gov. David Paterson in an alleged attempt to influence a domestic violence case against one of his top aides. The
Times
reports, based in part on unnamed sources, say that the Paterson aide, David W. Johnson, attacked his girlfriend on Halloween night, October 31, 2009, “choking her, smashing her into a mirrored dresser and preventing her from calling for help.” New York state police from the governor’s personal protection detail contacted the victim, despite having no jurisdiction. Then the governor himself intervened, the
Times
alleges, asking two aides to contact the victim and to arrange a phone call between him and the victim. The call occurred on February 7 of this year, the night before the victim was to appear in court to request an order of protection from Johnson. She did not appear in court, and the case was dismissed. After the exposé, the governor ended his bid for election and suspended Johnson without pay.

Denise O’Donnell, Paterson’s deputy secretary for public safety and commissioner of the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, resigned last week, saying, “The behavior alleged here is the antithesis of what many of us have spent our entire careers working to build—a legal system that protects victims of domestic violence and brings offenders to justice.” The National Organization for Women, a longtime ally of Paterson, has called on him to resign.

The Paterson scandal follows that of New York state Sen. Hiram Monserrate, who was charged with assaulting a female companion with the jagged edge of a broken glass in December 2008. She later altered her story to conform to Monserrate’s version of events, but the weakened criminal case proceeded against him, without her cooperation, and he was found guilty of misdemeanor assault. He was expelled from the New York Senate last month.

These high-profile cases are sadly symptomatic of a massive problem. The Family Violence Prevention Fund offers this chilling summary of domestic violence in the U.S.: One in four women report violence at the hands of a current or former spouse or boyfriend at some point in their lives; three women per day are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends; women suffer 2 million injuries from intimate-partner violence each year; and there were 248,300 rapes / sexual assaults in 2007, more than 500 per day, up from 190,600 in 2005.

President Barack Obama has reaffirmed October as National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and stressed the link between the economy and domestic violence: “In the best of economic times, victims worry about finding a job and housing, and providing for their children; these problems only intensify during periods of financial stress.” Sen. Harry Reid said about domestic abuse last week: “It has gotten out of hand. Why? Men don’t have jobs. Women don’t have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time. Men, when they’re out of work, tend to become abusive. Our domestic crisis shelters in Nevada are jammed. It’s the way it is all over the country.” Given the severity of the problem of domestic violence, and its likely exacerbation by the economic crisis, it is hard to believe that so-called health insurance companies actually label a woman’s victimization by domestic violence as a “pre-existing condition.” The term has long been used by health insurance corporations to deny coverage to applicants or, perhaps worse, to retroactively deny coverage to people who suffered from a condition before they were insured.

At Obama’s bipartisan health care summit last week, New York Rep. Louise Slaughter pointed out, “Eight states in this country right now have declared that domestic violence is a pre-existing condition, on the grounds, I assume, that if you’ve been unlucky enough to get yourself beaten up once, you might go round and do it again.”

March 8 is recognized by the United Nations and many countries around the world (but not the U.S.) as International Women’s Day. March is Women’s History Month. Thousands of events are being held around the world to honor women. Let’s start here in the U.S. by making violence against women history.

November 4, 2010

Rich Media, Poor Democracy

As the 2010 elections come to a close, the biggest winner of all remains undeclared: the broadcasters. The biggest loser: democracy. These were the most expensive midterm elections in U.S. history, costing close to $4 billion, $3 billion of which went to advertising. What if ad time were free? We hear no debate about this, because the media corporations are making such a killing by selling campaign ads. Yet the broadcasters are using public airwaves.

I am reminded of the 1999 book by media scholar Robert McChesney,
Rich Media, Poor Democracy
. In it, he writes, “Broadcasters have little incentive to cover candidates, because it is in their interest to force them to publicize their campaigns.”

The Wesleyan Media Project, at Wesleyan University, tracks political advertising. Following the recent Supreme Court ruling, Citizens United v. FEC, the project notes, “The airwaves are being saturated with more House and Senate advertising, up 20 percent and 79 percent respectively in total airings.” Evan Tracey, the founder and president of Campaign Media Analysis Group, predicted in
USA Today
in July, “There is going to be more money than there is airtime to buy.” John Nichols of
The Nation
commented that in the genteel, earlier days of television political advertising, the broadcasters would never juxtapose an ad for a candidate with an ad opposed to that candidate. But they are running out of broadcast real estate. Welcome to the brave, new world of the multi-billion-dollar campaigns.

There have been efforts in the past to regulate the airwaves to better serve the public during elections. The most ambitious in recent years was what became known as McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform. During the debate on that landmark legislation, the problem of exorbitant television advertising rates was brought up, by Democrats and Republicans alike. Nevada Sen. John Ensign, a Republican, lamented: “The broadcasters used to dread campaigns because that was the time of year they made the least amount of money because of this lowest unit rate. Now it is one of their favorite times of the year because it is actually one of their highest profit-margin times of the year.” Ultimately, to get the bill passed, the public airtime provisions were dropped.

The Citizens United ruling effectively neutralizes McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform. One can only imagine what the cost of the 2012 presidential election will be. Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., lost his re-election bid to the largely self-financed multimillionaire Ron Johnson. The
Wall Street Journal
editorial page celebrated Feingold’s expected loss. The
Journal
is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which also owns the Fox television network and which gave close to $2 million to Republican campaign efforts.

“The elections have become a commodity, a profit center for these radio and TV stations,” Ralph Nader, consumer advocate and former presidential candidate, told me on Election Day. He went on: “The public airwaves, as we know, belong to the people, and they’re the landlords, and the radio and TV stations are the licensees. They’re the tenants, so to speak. They pay no money to the FCC for their annual license. And therefore, it’s really quite persuasive, were we to have a public policy to condition modestly the license to this enormously lucrative control of the public airwaves twenty-four hours a day by these TV and radio stations and say, as part of the reciprocity for controlling this commons, so to speak, you have to allow a certain amount of time, free time, on radio and TV for ballot-qualified candidates.”

The place where we should debate this is in the major media, where most Americans get their news. But the television and radio broadcasters have a profound conflict of interest. Their profits take precedence over our democratic process. You very likely won’t hear this discussed on the Sunday-morning talk shows.

March 9, 2011

Don’t Ice Out Public Media

The aspen grove on Kebler Pass in Colorado is one of the largest organisms in the world. Thousands of aspen share the same, interconnected root system. Last weekend, I snowmobiled over the pass, 10,000 feet above sea level, between the towns of Paonia and Crested Butte. I was racing through Colorado to help community radio stations raise funds, squeezing in nine benefits in two days. The program director of public radio station KVNF in Paonia dropped us at the trailhead, where the program director of KBUT public radio in Crested Butte and a crew of station DJs picked us up on snowmobiles to whisk us thirty miles over the pass.

Now that the Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives, one of their first acts was to “zero out” current funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Furthermore, Rep. Doug Lamborn from Colorado Springs has offered a bill to permanently strip CPB funding. Lamborn told NPR, “We live in a day of 150 cable channels—99 percent of Americans own a TV, we get Internet on our cell phones, we are in a day and age when we no longer need to subsidize broadcasting.”

But public broadcasting was established precisely because of the dangers of the commercial media. When we are discussing war, we need a media not brought to us by weapons manufacturers. When discussing health care reform, we need a media not sponsored by insurance companies or Big Pharma.

In Senate testimony last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton fiercely criticized the commercial media, saying: “We are in an information war, and we are losing that war. . . . Viewership of Al-Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news.” Clinton was asking for more funding for the overseas propaganda organs of the U.S. government, like Voice of America, Radio Marti, and the Arabic-language TV channel that is produced in Virginia for broadcast to the Middle East, Al-Hurra. That arm of the State Department is slated to receive $769 million, almost twice the funding of the CPB. The U.S. military’s media operation has an annual budget exceeding $150 million and distributes entertainment programming to overseas bases, and propagandistic content on its full-time U.S. television platform, the Pentagon Channel.

While Clinton’s description of the failed U.S. commercial media is correct, her prescription is all wrong. We need more genuine news and less propaganda. Media studies professor Robert McChesney echoed that, telling me: “The smart thing to do is to take most of that $750 million, add it onto what’s being spent currently in the United States, and create a really dynamic, strong, competitive public and community broadcasting system that treats the U.S. government the same way it treats other governments, the same standard of journalism, then broadcast that to the world, make that fully accessible to the world. And I think that would show the United States at its very best.”

In rural Colorado, as in rural regions across the country, and on Native American reservations, public radio stations rely on CPB grants for anywhere from 25 percent to 50 percent of their operating budgets. At the standing-room-only benefit in Paonia, KVNF General Manager Sally Kane explained the crisis: “The Communications Act of 1934 set aside a small spectrum of the airwaves to serve the public interest and to be free of commercial influence. . . . Once again, it’s cutting services to those who need it most, while protecting those groups who can afford a posse of lobbyists to defend their interests. I refuse to imagine my region without my community radio station.”

The response was the same, from Idaho Springs to Carbondale, Paonia via snowmobile to Crested Butte, then over Monarch Pass to Salida (at the western edge of Lamborn’s district), to Telluride, then Rico, and on to Durango. In the packed town halls, auditoriums and theaters, the passion among the local residents for their stations demonstrates that, like the aspen groves of the Rocky Mountains, these small stations are resilient, strong, and deeply rooted in their communities. Their funding is an investment that should be preserved.

Luminaries

June 13, 2012

John Lewis: Across That Bridge, Again

As the election season heats up, an increasing number of states are working to limit the number of people who are allowed to vote. Already we have a shamefully low percentage of those eligible to vote actually participating. Florida, a key swing state, is preparing for the Republican National Convention, five days of pomp promoted as a celebration of democracy. While throwing this party, Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott, along with his secretary of state, Ken Detzner, are systematically throwing people off the voter rolls, based on flawed, outdated Florida state databases.