Laurie Essig

Time to reform higher ed

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A major victory was scored for economic justice and just plain old common sense this week when Congress finally put an end to the biggest rip off of college students ever seen: the Student Loan Industry.  As we all know by now,  Sallie Mae and Fannie Mae were not helping students as much as burdening them with high-interest student loans, paying financial aid offices to misdirect students to these "products" rather than lower-interest federally funded programs, and then shoving money into Republican lawmakers pockets so that no reform would pass. Thankfully, Democrats and principled Republicans who actually believe in the market, not the market pumped full of taxpayer dollars, got together and passed reform with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.  According to an article by Alexander Zaitchik,

This means an end to nearly four decades of corporate welfare for the government-created -- but now fully privatized -- icon of the industry, Sallie Mae. The savings to be had from terminating this subsidy -- estimated at between $60 and $70 billion over the next decade -- will go toward shoring up the Pell Grant program (which helps low-income Americans attend college), health care programs and deficit reduction. Where the Department of Ed has long paid private loan companies like Sallie Mae and Citigroup to issue and manage government-backed student loans, the department will now make all federal loans directly, without the help of a middleman, through its own Direct Loan program.

This is a major victory for the Dems and the Obama administration and they should be talking about it as much as possible.  If heath care reform left most of us with a sense of the blahs, the reform of the for-profit higher education industry should have us dancing in the streets. At the core of any democracy must be an educated and critical citizenry, something that higher education can create.  More importantly, at the core of any democracy must be the possibility of "making it," of actually moving up through economic and social hierarchies as the result of hard work and stamina.  For decades higher education provided a way for Americans to do that.  But for the past 25 years, with students from the middle and working classes graduating with tens of thousands (often hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt, higher education has become a form of indentured servitude- indentured to debt service with no chance of getting ahead.  Worse, half of all student loan borrowers don't graduate- so now they have debt and no diploma. This will now end, partly.  The government, at least, has set the stage for real educational reform.  Now universities must do the rest and if they don't, the federal government must look into regulating university salary scales in the same way it must look into Wall Street pay packages that are subsidized with our tax dollars. The ugly truth of higher ed under the Neoliberal economy is that it has become "for profit" with an elite tier of over paid "executives" (presidents, vice presidents, provosts and deans), a few "superstar" faculty who are sought after with salary packages that are far too high for the good they produce, a dwindling core of middle management (tenure-track professors) and a growing number of day laborers (adjunct professors with no job security and usually no benefits who work for a fraction of the pay that tenure track faculty work for). The people who benefited from the Neoliberal university were few and at the very top.  The rest of us, including students, suffered the most as the point of higher education became not "education" but the "experience."  Universities invested in things like "climbing walls" and perfectly manicured lawns, penthouse apartments in major cities for their presidents and upper management, and far too many "support staff" who do things like hold students hands when they're stressed about exams. It's time for higher ed to get back to basics.  Education requires students and professors and reasonably equipped classrooms, dorm rooms, dining halls, basic support staff and medical services.  We do not need upper management making half a million dollars a year or a quarter of a million dollars a year or whatever ridiculous salaries they make.  We do not need superstar academics who make similar amounts.  Students want a good education from professors who care about them, not people who are in the news.  Professors want a livable wage and job security and benefits. It's time for some real soul searching in academe.  If those among us making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year aren't ready to self-regulate themselves, then it's time for faculty and students and even Congress to band together and  throw the bums out.

Should merry (ultra right) pranksters go to jail?

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Remember James O'Keefe, III, the ultra-right "merry prankster" who dressed as a "pimp" and brought along a friend to be his "ho" and went into an Acorn office and asked for help starting a brothel? Ah, the most fun I've ever had writing on True/Slant was calling O'Keefe's piece "fantasy" not "news."  Calling him the "Borat of the Right," I pointed out that Mr. O'Keefe's video of Acorn employees supposedly supporting prostitution rings was no more "true" than a Sacha Baron Cohen piece. Sadly, most of the media and nearly all our national politicians saw Mr. O'Keefe's highly-edited clip of Acorn employees trying to respond to his "pimp and ho" routine as an actual indictment of the organization. The website Big Government, who gave Mr. O'Keefe support and a national platform for his "reporting," linked my piece so that I received a lot of hate mail and more than a few death threats.  Less amusing  were the people who called my employer and insisted I be fired. Now Mr. O'Keefe is in deep doo doo and I find myself both wanting to defend his right to be a pain in the ass that is power AND thinking he needs to learn the difference between a prank and journalism. It seems that O'Keefe and a merry band of pranksters went to New Orleans and dressed up like telephone repairman to get "gottcha" footage of Senator Mary Landrieu's staff.

Mr. O’Keefe, 25, ...and three other men... were arrested and charged with a federal felony, accused of seeking to tamper with the office telephone system of Senator Mary L. Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana. Two of them were impersonating repairmen in the senator’s New Orleans office and were caught after being asked for identification. Mr. O’Keefe said Friday that the four men had been trying to determine whether Ms. Landrieu was avoiding constituent complaints about the Senate health care bill after her phone system was jammed in December. (Her office said no calls had been intentionally avoided.) On reflection, he said in a statement, “I could have used a different approach to this investigation.”

It's funny, right?  I mean, you're suspicious that a Senator is lying about "phone problems" and so you dress up as phone repairmen and ask the staff what problems they're having with the phones.  If you're lucky, you catch them saying "we're not having problems."  Hilarious. But it's not journalism, is it?  It's protest and activism and possibly even a joke and this is where O'Keefe steps over the line of "funny" and "right on" into "stupid" and "send him to jail." There is very little that I would be willing to die for, but our right to protest power while getting a laugh is worth dying for.  We have an obligation to point out the abuse of power.  We have a sacred duty as citizens to do so in the most entertaining manner possible. I myself have staged drag queen bake sales for peace or dressed up like an ultra conservative housewife who believes all our rights should be based on our marital status, including our right to vote. But I have never pretended as if this is "true" or "journalism."  It's protest.  That's the point.  It's clearly absurd.  Even the people who are the butt of my jokes--like Family Research Council representatives responding to my "Heterosexuals for Mandatory Marriage Manifesto"-- know that it's a joke and that the joke's on them. O'Keefe's protests cross the line between staged absurdity and absurd entrapment.  They are less a question of First Amendment rights and more "Boy, do you know there is such a thing as ETHICS, even with your enemies?" So although I support O'Keefe's right to stage as many absurd protests as possible, to throw metaphorical and even actual pies in the faces of his enemies, I must draw the line at presenting these protests as journalism.  I must also draw the line at breaking and entering under false pretenses. There is nothing wrong with standing up in public space and screaming "look the Emperor has no clothes."  There is something sleazy about sneaking into the Emperor's closet with a hidden camera. So although I hope O'Keefe and his merry band of ultra-right pranksters get off with a slap on the wrist, I also hope they learn that there is a difference between protest and journalism, staged absurdity and truthful reporting. And that they learn the lesson that even our worst enemies deserve to be let in on the joke, especially because the joke is on them.

Santa Obama, why are you giving us a lump of coal this year?

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Last week I was asked by a radio show host whether the "Left" was digging it's own grave by being so critical of the Obama administration and the Dems in charge of Congress.  Today we have news that we don't need to dig our own grave, because Obama has done it again.  Promised us change, made pretty speeches, then actually reinforced the current status quo better than a Republican could ever do. In other words, Santa Obama has delivered a big fat piece of coal to us for the Holidays.  Wrapped up nicely in Copenhagen, Obama will tell us the coal is a huge gift, a big agreement that will save us from global warming, but it's a lie.  Just like the health care bill will make things worse, just as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will bankrupt us and destroy any hopes of America being a "force of good" in the world, the agreement from Copenhagen will sink us, literally, under the melting polar ice caps. Here's what Bill McKibbon had to say about it.

(Obama) blew up the United Nations... The clear point is, you poor nations can spout off all you want ... But when you get too close to the center of things that count--the fossil fuel that's at the center of our economy--you can forget about it. We're not interested. You're a bother, and when you sink beneath the waves we don't want to hear much about it. The dearest hope of the American right for fifty years was essentially realized because in the end coal is at the center of America's economy...(Obama) formed a league of super-polluters, and would-be super-polluters. China, the U.S., and India don't want anyone controlling their use of coal in any meaningful way. It is a coalition of foxes who will together govern the henhouse. It is no accident that the targets are weak to nonexistent. We don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves with targets, he said. Indeed. And now imagine what this agreement will look like with the next Republican president. ... George Bush couldn't have done this--the reaction would have been too great. Obama has taken the mandate that progressives worked their hearts out to give him, and used it to gut the ideas that progressives have held most dear. The ice caps won't be the only things we lose with this deal.

Copenhagen Talks End With Agreement, But No Binding Deal: So, How Screwed Are We? | Environment | AlterNet. And here's what Greenpeace had to say about the Copenhagen agreement.

Don't believe the hype, there is nothing fair, ambitious or legally binding about this deal.  The job of world leaders is not done. Today they shamefully failed to save us all from the effects of catastrophic climate change."

Santa Obama, baby?  Maybe you didn't get our list?  Maybe you thought we said "We want things to stay exactly the same and therefore continue to get worse" when what we actually wrote on our list was "CHANGE"? I know that your little helpers in Congress are really no help at all, and I know we should have stopped believing in Holiday Magic a long time ago, but Santa Obama, a lump of coal wrapped up and labeled "stop global warming"? Santa Obama, next year can you just give me some diamond jewelry instead?

Seriously sick health care legislation

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The media (myself included) is trying to create drama about whether or not health legislation will pass before the Christmas break.  You know what?  You should ignore it.  Whatever compromised, meaningless bill passes at this point, it's not going to help the problems of the American health care system and it will probably, if you can imagine such a thing, make it worse. How did this happen?  Was it the damn GOP with their pro-big Pharma policies?  Nope.  It was the damn liberals- the muddled, middle who speak out of both sides of their mouths on any single issue because they labor under the delusion that good leadership is making compromise after compromise. Want to end the war?  Support Obama's dramatic increase in troops.  Want to fix health care?  Take the only thing that would fix health care- single payer- and take it off the table from the very beginning. Then try to pass some weird hybrid called "the public option," let the Republicans accuse you of being Commies, let huge insurance and drug companies set the terms of the debate, and end up with a bill that will please no one, but will be sold to the American public as "sweeping" and "historical." According to the Times, Mr. Obama said “The final bill won’t include everything that everybody wants,” Mr. Obama said. “No bill can do that.” Obama Health Care Meeting Aims to Rally Senators - NYTimes.com. And according to the Huffington Post, Obama actually believes his "base" (meaning Progressives) will forgive the wars and the banker bailouts if he just gets health care reform through.  But health care reform that's sick- and not in the excellent sense of the word- but the Michael Moore "Sicko" sense of the word- is not going to make anyone happy. According to Senator Bernie Sanders, there will be an amendment proposed for single payer health care, but

As a result of the power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, this amendment will not pass or even get very many votes.  Nonetheless, given the view of millions of us that a single-payer approach is the ONLY WAY this country will ever provide comprehensive, cost-effective health care to all its citizens, this is an important step forward.

I don't know whether an amendment with no votes is an important step forward or not.  An important step forward would be realizing that the Dems ARE the problem.   Muddled middling liberals are the ones who killed the health care reform that would work- a single payer system where we ALL use the same system and therefore costs are kept down and medicine is not for profit- and then transformed it into something so complex, so confusing that most of us tuned the debate out or forgot what "public option" was and how it differed from"single payer." But there's a huge difference.  A public option was never going to be outside of the "for profit" insurance industry that pays its CEOs like Wall Street fat cats and makes decisions on what medical procedures are necessary (rather than our doctors making those decisions).  A public option was not gong to actually reduce the costs of for profit insurance or for profit medicine. And so we tuned out, let the complexities of the whole debate get away from us, and now will be told that whatever passes, even though it is pretty likely to be a train wreck as a piece of legislation, we should rejoice at the brilliance that is the Liberal Democratic Obama movement in this country. Americans beware.  There was NEVER a progressive debate about health care reform.  Yet mark my words,  single payer health care will get singled out as a socialist plot that brought us the mess that will still be health care in ten years. If we learn anything from the health care debacle, it's that middle of the road Dems, with their endless need to compromise real change, are not going to do anything but represent the interests of big business and big military just like their supposed "enemies," the GOP. This is some sick health care legislation and an even sicker political system.

Getting the swine-flu vaccine in Canada or why the US needs socialized medicine

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Yesterday my daughters and I went to a vaccination center in Montreal and got the swine flu vaccine.  We are not Canadian residents, but we're living in Montreal for most of this year.  When I called the very helpful (and bilingual) hot line number at "Pandemic Canada" and explained our unusual situation, the woman was extremely helpful.  I asked if there was some way we could pay for the vaccine or do it privately because I didn't want to abuse the largess of the Canadian government.  She answered that there was no way to do the vaccine privately since it is only available free and at the vaccination clinics. So we traveled to a clinic, presented some documents that showed we are living in Montreal for now, and they got us a shot, along with the hundreds of other people there, in less than ten minutes.  It was efficient and free. Cut to the US, where my children and I live most of the time.  The vaccine is still in very short supply, often impossible to get.  There are no free clinics in the city where i live, let alone a push to get everyone vaccinated because the vaccine itself is in short supply.  According to press reports,

The best protective measure to prevent the spread of the flu is vaccination, but the swine flu vaccine is still in short supply. Shipments are picking up speed, but most communities have nowhere near the amount of vaccine they had expected to have by now, and no clear idea of when they will have enough to offer it to everyone who wants it.

This is sad because the threat of swine flu hasn't disappeared.

Since the virus - a form of influenza Type A, subtype H1N1 - was first identified in the United States in April, the swine flu has infected at least 30 million Americans and killed about 4,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2009/12/04/MNN11AULI6.DTL#ixzz0YjXokVTk

Swine flu abates, but experts urge preparedness. What exactly happened in the US that most Americans do not have access to the vaccine? Part of it has got to be greed (it always is when we leave it up to the market).  But the other part is what can be called the problem of elite networks.  Instead of the federal government setting up centers, running huge propaganda campaigns to encourage people to get the vaccine, and making it widely available and free, they let the local authorities make the arrangements.  The result is a system of privilege and elite access that is typical for this country. Talking to a friend at an private university in the US, I asked if she will get the vaccine.  "Oh, we go the vaccine back in October.  Because someone at the university has connections to the CDC."  What? Before pregnant women and young children got the shot, privileged university students and employees got it because of connections?  Somebody went to Harvard Medical School or whatever elite school with someone else and therefore got access to the vaccine before everyone else? Cut back to Canada.  In Montreal, first young children, people with compromised immune systems and pregnant women.  Then elementary school-aged kids.  Then 11-19 year-olds.   Then everyone else.  Including 3 foreigners with no insurance cards.  But Canadians understand our situation.  They understand that as Americans we would have trouble getting the vaccine at home, since the US is  more 3rd World than first when it comes to health care.  People with money and connections  get access first and foremost and the rest of us are left behind.  According to the 2000 World Health Organization rankings, the US was 37th.  Obviously such ranking systems are flawed, BUT there we are, below Costa Rica. The inability of the US health care system or the federal government to deliver free and fair access to the threat of a pandemic flu should have Americans angry and demanding universal coverage. But it doesn't.  Instead  average Americans, fed a steady diet of stupidity by Fox News, are responding by believing universal health care to be a "threat" to the "American way."  Instead of caring about themselves or their fellow Americans, they protest, scream, yell, and in Arizona,work to change the state constitutions so no person or employer can be "forced" to have health care. What the US really needs before the swine flu vaccine, before health care for all, is an education in critical thinking.  The first things average Americans who see universal health care as a threat need is to be able to ask questions about who benefits and who doesn't from the current system. US health care is the best in the world for the rich among us.  But for the rest of us, we can't even get a vaccine against a pandemic flu.   And in Canada, which supposedly has a scary and awful health care system, a huge chunk of the population is getting vaccinated free and fairly.

Why cosmetic surgery shouldn ' t be taxed

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Tucked into the heath care bill is a seemingly reasonable tax on cosmetic surgery.  It's an easy tax to support, like taxes on cigarettes and sodas.  After all, cosmetic procedures are completely unnecessary to our health, by definition, and- like cigarettes and sodas- potentially harmful.  But none of these products are distributed evenly in the population.  In fact, they all tend to be consumed by poor and working class Americans more than the rich and educated ones.  And therefore taxing any of these products is always regressive, a larger burden on the poor than the rich. Oh, I know.  Everyone thinks it's rich starlets who get boob jobs and aging starlets who get facelifts.  But look around.  See that cosmetic surgeon down the street?  The walk-in Botox clinic next door?  That's because cosmetic surgery spread from the rich and famous to the rest of us because of increasing access to credit.  That's right- the deregulation of banking that happened in the 1980s meant more and more Americans were taking out credit- either on credit cards or with medical credit companies like GE's "CareCredit." What this means is that cosmetic surgery is now primarily consumed not by the rich, but by the working and lower-middle classes, sometimes even by the poor.  According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year.  About 70% of it is consumed by people who make less than $60,000 a year. It is mostly women (90%) and mostly white, middle-aged women (80% and between 35-55 years old). In my own research for my book (American Plastic, Beacon 2010) I met police officers, teachers, bank tellers and real estate agents.  I also met recent college graduates with $100,000 in student loans taking on even more credit because "I'm going to die in debt anyway so what difference does it make if I take out $10,000 more?" You may think these women are greedy or stupid to take on debt, often with interest rates approaching 30%, to reshape their bodies.  But they're not. In fact, they are rational economic actors who understand that looking "better" really can lead to more success in the job market and the romance market.  What these women don't understand- what few of us understand- is debt.  You sign on the dotted line for your boob job at $8000 but you don't realize you'll end up paying almost twice that much if you can't put any money down.  Easy for Hollywood starlets to plunk their cash down for new boobs, but for the rest of us, taking on debt for a better body is risky business. If the government wants to control cosmetic surgery, then the answer is to re-regulate the banking industry so these medical credit loans don't exist.  And the other answer is to tax the obscene amounts of wealth being made by the likes of GE, who is selling medical credit to people who cannot afford it.  Or the cosmetic surgeons income as part of an overall progressive income tax on the top earners. But to tax working and middle-class women who have been part of the 80% of Americans getting worse off in the past 30 years is wrong.  These women understand that looking better can lead to a better life.  These women are poorer than they used to be.  And not terribly powerful.  That's why they're easy to single out.  Why make abortion a part of health care.  Or boob jobs?   Like much of the health care reform being discussed, a tax on cosmetic surgery is unfair to women and unfair to the working class because they're exactly who is not represented in Congress. Besides, let's face it, the government will never be able to decide what is "cosmetic" and what is "necessary" anyway.  If someone is so depressed about the size of their boobs or their nose of their back fat that they stop going to work or school, is the surgery necessary?  If a facelift will keep a husband's financial support, is it necessary?   Are breast implants after cancer necessary?  What about lifting up sagging flaps of skin after weight lost?  What about stomach stapling for weight loss in the first place? "Necessary" is an impossible word when it comes to cosmetic surgery because ultimately, almost none of it is necessary for pure physical survival, but we are social animals who increasingly depend on "first impressions" to survive. The only thing that is necessary is to pass  health care reform that doesn't imagine the needs of women and working Americans as "unnecessary." Cosmetic Tax in Reid Health Bill Has Some Doctors Worried and Confused - ABC News.

Why cosmetic surgery shouldn ' t be taxed

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Tucked into the heath care bill is a seemingly reasonable tax on cosmetic surgery.  It's an easy tax to support, like taxes on cigarettes and sodas.  After all, cosmetic procedures are completely unnecessary to our health, by definition, and- like cigarettes and sodas- potentially harmful.  But none of these products are distributed evenly in the population.  In fact, they all tend to be consumed by poor and working class Americans more than the rich and educated ones.  And therefore taxing any of these products is always regressive, a larger burden on the poor than the rich. Oh, I know.  Everyone thinks it's rich starlets who get boob jobs and aging starlets who get facelifts.  But look around.  See that cosmetic surgeon down the street?  The walk-in Botox clinic next door?  That's because cosmetic surgery spread from the rich and famous to the rest of us because of increasing access to credit.  That's right- the deregulation of banking that happened in the 1980s meant more and more Americans were taking out credit- either on credit cards or with medical credit companies like GE's "CareCredit." What this means is that cosmetic surgery is now primarily consumed not by the rich, but by the working and lower-middle classes, sometimes even by the poor.  According to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), about 1/3 of cosmetic surgery is consumed by people who make less than $30,000 a year.  About 70% of it is consumed by people who make less than $60,000 a year. It is mostly women (90%) and mostly white, middle-aged women (80% and between 35-55 years old). In my own research for my book (American Plastic, Beacon 2010) I met police officers, teachers, bank tellers and real estate agents.  I also met recent college graduates with $100,000 in student loans taking on even more credit because "I'm going to die in debt anyway so what difference does it make if I take out $10,000 more?" You may think these women are greedy or stupid to take on debt, often with interest rates approaching 30%, to reshape their bodies.  But they're not. In fact, they are rational economic actors who understand that looking "better" really can lead to more success in the job market and the romance market.  What these women don't understand- what few of us understand- is debt.  You sign on the dotted line for your boob job at $8000 but you don't realize you'll end up paying almost twice that much if you can't put any money down.  Easy for Hollywood starlets to plunk their cash down for new boobs, but for the rest of us, taking on debt for a better body is risky business. If the government wants to control cosmetic surgery, then the answer is to re-regulate the banking industry so these medical credit loans don't exist.  And the other answer is to tax the obscene amounts of wealth being made by the likes of GE, who is selling medical credit to people who cannot afford it.  Or the cosmetic surgeons income as part of an overall progressive income tax on the top earners. But to tax working and middle-class women who have been part of the 80% of Americans getting worse off in the past 30 years is wrong.  These women understand that looking better can lead to a better life.  These women are poorer than they used to be.  And not terribly powerful.  That's why they're easy to single out.  Why make abortion a part of health care.  Or boob jobs?   Like much of the health care reform being discussed, a tax on cosmetic surgery is unfair to women and unfair to the working class because they're exactly who is not represented in Congress. Besides, let's face it, the government will never be able to decide what is "cosmetic" and what is "necessary" anyway.  If someone is so depressed about the size of their boobs or their nose of their back fat that they stop going to work or school, is the surgery necessary?  If a facelift will keep a husband's financial support, is it necessary?   Are breast implants after cancer necessary?  What about lifting up sagging flaps of skin after weight lost?  What about stomach stapling for weight loss in the first place? "Necessary" is an impossible word when it comes to cosmetic surgery because ultimately, almost none of it is necessary for pure physical survival, but we are social animals who increasingly depend on "first impressions" to survive. The only thing that is necessary is to pass  health care reform that doesn't imagine the needs of women and working Americans as "unnecessary." Cosmetic Tax in Reid Health Bill Has Some Doctors Worried and Confused - ABC News.

Short people got no reason to live and other ideas for health reform

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Remember that Randy Newman song "Short People"?  "Short people got no reason to live... Well, I dont want no short people`round here..."  Sure, the song is actually meant in support of diversity because it includes the lyrics "short people are just the same as you and I," but who notices that sentiment when the lyrics that really stick out are about how short people

got little grubby little fingers and dirty little minds Theyre gonna get you every time Well, I dont want no short people Dont want no short peopleDont want no short people round here"?

Daniel Engber, a senior editor at Slate, suggested in yesterday's NY Times that there should be a war on shortness, just like there's a war on obesity since both are more or less impossible wars to win, but both are measures of poverty and its associated health risks.  Also, both shortness and obesity lead to a predictable list of coronary diseases.

Controlling our country’s height may be just as plausible — or implausible — as controlling its weight. It’s true that someone who is fat can lose weight on purpose, while a short adult can’t do anything to gain height. Yet instances of radical, lasting weight loss are exceedingly rare...

Given how hard it can be to lose weight, a realistic war on obesity starts to look a lot like a war on shortness. In both cases, we’re dealing with a complex function of genetics, social class and poor health in childhood.

Mr. Engbar assures us that:

None of these policies treat body size as an end in itself. We would never just prescribe growth hormones and bariatric surgery to every child who doesn’t fit a tall, slender mold. Obesity and shortness are society-wide measurements, not reflections of individual virtue or good health. To that end, our goal should be to improve the quality of life for children. If we can manage that, they just might end up a little taller — and thinner too.

Idea Lab - Should a War on Shortness Be One of the Goals of Health Care Reform? - NYTimes.com. This is where the article skates onto thin ice.  As a culture, we most certainly believe that obesity and yes, shortness, are "reflections of individual virtue or good health."  Furthermore, we are prescribing growth hormones and even bariatric surgery (stomach stapling) for young people.  The reason for this is simple: eugenics. Eugenics is an ideology that insists that our physical manifestations represent our innate goodness (or evil).  As an ideology it was extremely popular in the US among both scientists and people in the first half of the 20th century. Eugenics, like the physical fitness movements of the early 20^th century, believed that modernity created physical decay, and that this physical decay was a threat to the nation.  The response in the US was mass sterilization of “imbeciles” and the “unfit,” as well as family planning campaigns, sports, and an effort to strengthen the nation one individual at a time.  By the time Adolf Hitler adopted eugenics for his own Final Solution, it was already an internationally accepted scientific belief and a popular one. But in America, especially by the 1930s, eugenicists were embracing both a hereditary model (genes) and an environmental one (improve yourself).  In perhaps a uniquely American way, with the emphasis on the possibility of success with enough hard work, eugenics became not just about birth, but about lifestyle.  Eugenics American-style worked for the reproduction of the perfect baby, but also to convince adults to adopt new regimes of fitness, health, and beauty. Indeed, it made total sense for a famous eugenicist like Albert E. Wiggam to judge the 1929 Miss Universe pageant since beauty was both a sign of genetic superiority and something we have to work at. Today we live in a culture where both shortness and obesity are reviled as signs of poverty.  Make them go away and you just might succeed.  Success is not related to ability per se, but ability in the right package. But in the same way that eugenics as an ideology can lead to horrible crimes against humanity, eugenics as the basis of health care can lead to many unnecessary deaths.  The research on weight, despite all the hysteria over fat, is fairly clear that "ideal weight" is in fact not that ideal.  The people most likely to survive long term are neither obese nor ideal, but rather "chubby" (one weight category over ideal). How is it possible that we all know fat is bad, but science is showing that fat might be good?  Because of ideology.  An ideology that says thin and tall are good.  An ideology that believes that our inner nature is written on our physical selves.  An ideology of eugenics- wishing the short and the fat would go away. A truly healthy country does indeed fight poverty and try to educate its citizens.  A truly healthy country also acknowledges that there is truly a diversity of the human form.

Great whites and the real danger to American democracy

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In the controversy over health care debates, a lot of working class white folks are showing their racial resentment and their ignorance.  This fact is evident whenever someone says something stupid about "death panels" or compares Obama to Hitler.  This sort of working class white paranoia is being brought to a boiling point by right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and astroturf growers like Dick Armey. As Tim Wise, one of the country's foremost critics of white privilege, pointed out on CNN, it's impossible to not see the health care debates as a public space in which working whites are expressing race paranoia.  They fear that their centuries of white privilege, what David Roediger called "the wages of whiteness," are being threatened by the Obama administration. YouTube - cnn - tim wise: "race is a factor". It's not that Tim Wise and the rest of the media commentators are wrong.  There is a white uprising going on, the uprising is scary, and right wing commentators are fomenting it.  But what if that's not the real danger to American democracy.  What if the real danger is much scarier and much more difficult to see, given the murky waters in which they like to swim.  What if the real danger to American democracy is not working class and ignorant white folks who yell things like "keep the government out of my Medicare" but a group of elite and extremely wealthy "great whites" who would never make a public spectacle of themselves on the evening news? The stories I am about to relate have been slightly altered to protect the innocent and the guilty, but they are true and truly frightening. I know a young man who is the product of extreme wealth and privilege.  The kind of wealthy, white Southern gentleman who went to an extremely expensive and prestigious boarding school and now attends a similarly expensive college.  He drives a car that costs more than my annual salary.  The young man is a racist.  He has actually argued that Blacks were better off during slavery.  But besides being a racist, he is also  tall and handsome and, not surprisingly, has an equally privileged girlfriend.  This is where things get scary: the girlfriend's father is an extremely successful businessman in a Southern state.  The young man was extremely excited the first time he visited there because the businessman has several barns where he is warehousing enough firearms and ammunition to start the next Civil War.  The stockpiling of such huge amounts of weaponry began, of course, with Obama's election. I know an extremely prominent plastic surgeon in a Northern city filled with a lot of extremely prominent plastic surgeons.  She too is ridiculously wealthy, tall, beautiful, and a racist.   I must have accidentally gotten on her private email list (perhaps I gave her a card at a conference while researching my book on cosmetic surgery).  She sends out regular missives about fighting the Democrats.  In her latest one, she compares Nancy Pelosi to a dictator, a despot, and a Queen.  Why?  Because of Pelosi's support of the Obama healthcare agenda, an agenda that the plastic surgeon has also compared to the Nazi's Final Solution. How many of these Great Whites are swimming about I cannot say.  I have to assume that if someone like me, who lives in a veritable shark cage of liberal institutions and progressive neighborhoods, has bumped into a couple of Great Whites, then there are a lot of them out there.  But the media is too busy focusing on the loud and ridiculous whites.  The ones so clearly working against their own economic interests because they so crave the wages of whiteness.  Most historians of whiteness argue that these wages were "paid" in a sense to working whites in order to keep them allied with the wealthy and against African Americans.   But what about the people who actually pay the wages of whiteness?  The invisible white elites who are willing to share some of the privileges of racial hierarchy without extending anything like economic security or even health care to their brothers and sisters in racism? All summer, whenever I read about the health care debates,  the theme song from Jaws starts playing in my head.  I can't help being afraid that the media is paying too much attention to the sand sharks while real danger is lurking all around.

Great whites and the real danger to American democracy

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

In the controversy over health care debates, a lot of working class white folks are showing their racial resentment and their ignorance.  This fact is evident whenever someone says something stupid about "death panels" or compares Obama to Hitler.  This sort of working class white paranoia is being brought to a boiling point by right-wing talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh and astroturf growers like Dick Armey. As Tim Wise, one of the country's foremost critics of white privilege, pointed out on CNN, it's impossible to not see the health care debates as a public space in which working whites are expressing race paranoia.  They fear that their centuries of white privilege, what David Roediger called "the wages of whiteness," are being threatened by the Obama administration. YouTube - cnn - tim wise: "race is a factor". It's not that Tim Wise and the rest of the media commentators are wrong.  There is a white uprising going on, the uprising is scary, and right wing commentators are fomenting it.  But what if that's not the real danger to American democracy.  What if the real danger is much scarier and much more difficult to see, given the murky waters in which they like to swim.  What if the real danger to American democracy is not working class and ignorant white folks who yell things like "keep the government out of my Medicare" but a group of elite and extremely wealthy "great whites" who would never make a public spectacle of themselves on the evening news? The stories I am about to relate have been slightly altered to protect the innocent and the guilty, but they are true and truly frightening. I know a young man who is the product of extreme wealth and privilege.  The kind of wealthy, white Southern gentleman who went to an extremely expensive and prestigious boarding school and now attends a similarly expensive college.  He drives a car that costs more than my annual salary.  The young man is a racist.  He has actually argued that Blacks were better off during slavery.  But besides being a racist, he is also  tall and handsome and, not surprisingly, has an equally privileged girlfriend.  This is where things get scary: the girlfriend's father is an extremely successful businessman in a Southern state.  The young man was extremely excited the first time he visited there because the businessman has several barns where he is warehousing enough firearms and ammunition to start the next Civil War.  The stockpiling of such huge amounts of weaponry began, of course, with Obama's election. I know an extremely prominent plastic surgeon in a Northern city filled with a lot of extremely prominent plastic surgeons.  She too is ridiculously wealthy, tall, beautiful, and a racist.   I must have accidentally gotten on her private email list (perhaps I gave her a card at a conference while researching my book on cosmetic surgery).  She sends out regular missives about fighting the Democrats.  In her latest one, she compares Nancy Pelosi to a dictator, a despot, and a Queen.  Why?  Because of Pelosi's support of the Obama healthcare agenda, an agenda that the plastic surgeon has also compared to the Nazi's Final Solution. How many of these Great Whites are swimming about I cannot say.  I have to assume that if someone like me, who lives in a veritable shark cage of liberal institutions and progressive neighborhoods, has bumped into a couple of Great Whites, then there are a lot of them out there.  But the media is too busy focusing on the loud and ridiculous whites.  The ones so clearly working against their own economic interests because they so crave the wages of whiteness.  Most historians of whiteness argue that these wages were "paid" in a sense to working whites in order to keep them allied with the wealthy and against African Americans.   But what about the people who actually pay the wages of whiteness?  The invisible white elites who are willing to share some of the privileges of racial hierarchy without extending anything like economic security or even health care to their brothers and sisters in racism? All summer, whenever I read about the health care debates,  the theme song from Jaws starts playing in my head.  I can't help being afraid that the media is paying too much attention to the sand sharks while real danger is lurking all around.