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Category: Environment

Bush’s Last Minute Regulations: They Go Beyond Abortion and Birth Control

Though just last week I got really pissed off at Tim Dickinson’s Rolling Stone piece on Proposition 8, this week he has a really good article about all of the last-minute regulations Bush is putting into place as he walks out the White House door.  Of course, we know all about the anti-choice HHS rule . . . but there’s a lot more than that.

While every modern president has implemented last-minute regulations, Bush is rolling them out at a record pace — nearly twice as many as Clinton, and five times more than Reagan. “The administration is handing out final favors to its friends,” says Véronique de Rugy, a scholar at George Mason University who has tracked six decades of midnight regulations. “They couldn’t do it earlier — there would have been too many political repercussions. But with the Republicans having lost seats in Congress and the presidency changing parties, Bush has nothing left to lose.”

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Meeting Bill Clinton

Me and Bill Clinton

(Note: details of the meeting follow my personal narrative!)

A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to represent Feministe as a credentialed blogger at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, which kicks off today in NYC. I was psyched, a tad skeptical, and more than a tad nervous all at once. I’ve never been invited to participate in anything as A Blogger, much less something this high-profile. I tend to think of myself as a relatively little fish in the blogosea, and all sorts of self-doubt about whether I was really qualified for this or deserved it started running through my head.

All of this anxiety was amped up exponentially when I got the additional invite to participate in a blogger meeting with President Bill Clinton before the start of the CGI meeting. I responded to the invite right away, but then all that doubt flooded in I nearly wrote back and said never mind. I mean, really – was I good enough or important enough to deserve a spot?

But then I thought to my self, now hold up, Jack. These doubts were certainly due in part to the sorts of insecurities that everyone gets from time to time about their skills, and also due in part to some rational acknowledgment of the fact that, for sure, I haven’t busted ass posting or networking or engaging in the public discourse as much as some other folks out there, so I’m understandably gonna be smaller potatoes. But I think they were also fueled in no small part by internalization of the sort of dynamics that permeate the blogosphere as much as the rest of the world; dynamics of privilege and power that automatically lend higher degrees of traction, legitimacy, or “authority” (as Technocrati puts it) to certain voices than to others for reasons entirely apart from the quality and quantity of their thoughts and words. The kind of dynamics, for example, that led to a 2006 blogger meeting with Bill Clinton being all white (and that helped this year’s meeting be predominantly white, too.) [1] Internalization is all about oppressed people learning to help keep themselves down, so I checked myself and decided not to help out on that count.

There was also an entirely different set of misgivings: how would I reconcile my politics with this meeting?

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Sarah Palin and the Drink America’s Milkshake Party

Within twenty-four hours of Obama’s history-making speech, McCain made another historical announcement, the addition of the first female vice-presidential candidate for a major American party since the Mondale-Ferraro ticket. And just as in the case with Mondale, many pundits view the addition of Palin to the Republican ticket as a gamble, or as one commenter put it, “doubling down.” There are many feminist implications to the nomination, made particularly interesting by the failed Clinton campaign, because it’s clear that the conservative strategy is not only to ride Clinton’s historical coattails, but also to mock the sexism in the liberal camp that has divided the party for decades.

Many liberals are concerned about picking on Palin the person as opposed to attacking Palin the politician. One of the problems with Palin is that her executive resume is so thin there isn’t a whole lot to critique. We know by now that she has a reputation for being a reformer and a whistleblower, which is meant to compliment McCain’s old reputation as a maverick. [Though curiously McCain is stepping back on his old ideals and marching in line with his presidential predecessors, even resorting to the old Bush-Cheney fallback of arresting protestors before his political events, or merely relocating them, to give the appearance of being uncontroversial. Oh, and Palin may also be cool with socially-conservative censorship. So very maverick-y.]

So here is Palin on the issues:

Perhaps the most brilliant part of putting Palin on the Republican ticket is that her milkshake brings the oil-hungry wing of the GOP to the yard. The Republicans have been dead set on drilling in Alaska for the last decade. Conservatives decry the use of alternative fuel sources, pushing the theory that to achieve energy independence we must start drilling on American soil. McCain has touted his record in support for alternative energy sources, but the addition of Palin and her obnoxious eagerness to drill in her home state makes this stance a wash. Or as D puts it,

…she puts the lie to McCain’s support for alternative and renewable energy. Palin got a gas pipeline deal — which everyone knew would happen one way or another — but hasn’t departed from the Alaskan motif of sucking everything from the ground before the communists come to snatch our guns away and turn the entire state into a park. She’ll be a boon to the Drill Now/Drink America’ Milkshake sloganeering that McCain will continue to push until November.

And interestingly enough, Palin is quite literally in bed with Big Oil — her husband Todd Palin is a long-time employee of BP.

The other curious thing about Palin’s relationship to Big Oil and the GOP is that one of her most successful pieces of legislation as governor is the ACES program, a tax on Big Oil. The three basic provisions for this tax plan included an increase on taxes of oil profits, a windfall provision that raised taxes after a certain benchmark, and a tax floor that guaranteed the oil companies would still pay 10% on the price of each barrel even if the cost per barrel went below a certain benchmark. The program was very successful, producing much more revenue for Alaska than anyone, including Palin, expected. As a certain sort of socialist liberal, I have no problem with this legislation. But hey, a tax hike is a tax hike.

If Palin were a Democrat, this is the kind of jeremiad you’d be hearing from Rush Limbaugh and Grover Norquist, but instead of talk about looting American businesses and destroying incentives to invest, we get crickets. Norquist doesn’t even mention taxes here and Limbaugh, who’s been talking up Palin for a while, doesn’t either. “Babies, guns, Jesus. Hot damn!” was his reaction yesterday.

So: one of the first things Palin did after she took office was to propose a big tax increase that included a windfall profits tax on the oil industry. I don’t have a big problem with that, and I’m sure the McCain campaign will eventually treat us all to a blizzard of spin about why her tax increase wasn’t really a tax increase. But facts are stubborn things…

Further back in her career as mayor of Wasilla, “Palin, who portrays herself as a fiscal conservative, racked up nearly $20 million in long-term debt as mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla — that amounts to $3,000 per resident. She argues that the debt was needed to fund improvements.”

In short, Palin’s relationship to the GOP’s traditional platform — less government, less taxes — is slippery at best, certainly making her a gamble for the fiscally-concerned wing of the Republican party. But many are saying that Palin is really meant to galvanize the socially-concerned wing of the Republican party, the “babies, guns, and Jesus” wing, as Limbaugh puts it.

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South Central Farm to Forever 21?

This just in: Turns out the former site of the South Central Farm – where low-income, indigenous/immigrant Latino farmers grew food in the midst of a toxic industrial area for 14 years before being evicted two summers ago in one of the saddest, most maddening examples of private business interests trumping community and environmental good that I’ve ever personally witnessed – is being developed as a Forever 21 warehouse.

You know, that clothing company that was the subject of a national boycott for exploitative labor practices a few years ago? Turns out LA’s supposedly progressive mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa – who campaigned at the then-flourishing farm several years ago and claimed to support it, only to fail to find a way to help save it despite massive community (and celebrity) support, clear social and environmental benefits, and his own celebrated promises to “green LA”—“has received nearly $1.3 million in contributions and commitments from Forever 21 and its executives over the past two years.”

The former site of the South Central Farm has sat vacant for the past two years. The South Central Farmers are now growing food at a new site about an hour outside of LA. They sell food at several farmers’ markets in the area, and they recently set up a CSA. 

(Background: A few years ago, I wrote several articles about the South Central Farm for the late and lamented NewStandard, including this history of how the community has used the land since 1985.)

The War Over Women’s Bodies

I want to write a longer post about this, but unfortunately time does not permit. So, a question: Why are progressive publications buying into the right-wing xenophobic frame on birth rates?

That story argues that babies are the new weapons of war — that military supremacy doesn’t do it. And it begins with the example of Kosovo:

The Serb/Albanian conflict offers damn near perfect lab conditions to prove my case that birth rate trumps military prowess these days, because the Serbs always beat the Albanians in battle, yet they’ve lost their homeland, Kosovo. Here again, we can blame Woodrow Wilson and his talk about “rights.” In places where tribes hate each other, a tribe that outbreeds its rival will become the majority, even if it can’t fight. So, after generations of skulking at home making babies, letting the Serbs do the fighting, the Albanians finally became the majority in Kosovo and therefore the official “good guys,” being oppressed by the official “bad guys,” the Serbs. At least that’s the way the nave American Wilsonian types like Clinton saw it. So when the Serbs fought back against an Albanian rebellion in Kosovo, and dared to beat the Albanians, Clinton decided to bomb the Serbs into letting go of Kosovo, the ancient heartland of a Christian nation that had spent its blood holding off the Turks for hundreds of years.

The Kosovo Albanians proved that military skill doesn’t matter, because they tried and failed to conquer Kosovo the old-fashioned way: armed rebellion by the Kosovo Liberation Army. It was a wipeout: local Serb militias, a bunch of tired middle-aged part-timers and cops, crushed the KLA. What happened next is a beautiful illustration of the way losers win these days: the Albanians took the bodies of KLA men who’d been killed in battle, stripped all weapons and ammo from them, and showed them to gullible Western reporters as victims of a Serb “massacre.” It was a massacre, all right, but only because the KLA couldn’t fight worth a damn. Alive and armed, they were a joke; dead and disarmed, they helped win Kosovo by making their side the “victims,” which led directly to U.S. military intervention.

To win the way the Albanians won in Kosovo, you need to make a lot of babies. It’s that simple. And to see how it works, you have to drop the namby-pamby liberal idea that people only have babies out of “love.” In lots of places on this planet, baby-making is a form of weapons production.

…yeah.

I’m not going to get into the historical revisionism there, but I will point to this ridiculous quote:

Ah, birth rate — funny how it’s become such a taboo subject for both Left and Right. The Lefties wouldn’t dream of telling third-world people to limit their baby-making, and most right wingers can’t bring themselves to endorse birth control even if it could slow the destruction of their own countries.

That gets to the heart of the problem: The author is concerned that “third-world” women having babies will challenge Western hegemony and white supremacy. That, to him, is terrifying.

Read the whole article if you want to get increasingly irritated. And it you really feel like throwing something, check out the comments. My favorite one is about how we should forcibly sterilize all women after their second child.

A lot of commenters, not surprisingly, fell back on environmentalist arguments when promoting limiting the birth rate. And I am all for women choosing to limit the number of children they have out of concern for the environment. But that’s if they choose. Women have more or fewer children for all kinds of reasons; ain’t nothing wrong with factoring in environmental issues. While I recognize that more people means more strain on the environment, our massive consumption problems are far more pressing than choosing to have three kids instead of two. Americans are some of the most wasteful people in the planet. I’d be a lot more comfortable spending our time and money on things like better public transportation and sustainable energy resources than on scolding women for their choices (or forcing them into particular choices). I’d rather create a system where women had more options, not fewer — because as experience has shown, when women have the option of controlling the number and spacing of their children, they do. And when Americans — often wealthier Americans — are consuming far more than their share of the world’s resources, I don’t have much patience for Chicken Little cries that we’re being “out-bred” by women in developing countries. I have even less patience for men who are primarily worried about challenges to a system of white male supremacy, and want to use women’s bodies as means of producing (or cutting off production of) arrows for their war.

I also don’t have much patience for women’s bodies being used as the battleground for all of this. Yes, there are valid environmental concerns. But pinning the responsibility — and the burden — on women is a mistake. Women’s bodies are already the locus for too many cultural, religious and political battles. Progressives shouldn’t be adding to that.

The Story of Stuff

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch.

Every morning I seem to find some distraction on the Internet that leads to me running out the door far later than I should have left or starting my work day woefully off schedule. Usually the distraction is something like Scramble on Facebook, but this morning’s distraction was enriching and enlightening enough that I don’t feel so bad about running late (and running even later in order to share it with you folks.) A friend of mine (thanks, Eli!) linked to The Story of Stuff, a short documentary on the insidious processes that go into consumption as we know it. The video has been online since December 2007 and has apparently had 2 million viewers so I risk recommending it to a bunch of folks who’ve already seen it, but I hadn’t and I thought it important to share.

Annie Leonard, a scholar who has done many years of research on consumerism, development, sustainability, and environmental health, guides us through the linear process that drives the material economy – extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal – exposing the many moments in the process that are often left out of the big picture but which are often most telling of the damage occurs within each of these steps. I’ve seen and read many things about consumption and its effects on our world, but this movie broke things down in a clearer, more complete and more urgent way than I’ve seen before. Leonard does a good job of bringing to light the environmental, health, labor, globalization and other social justice problems inherent to the system of consumption.

Some of the facts that Leonard cites are truly frightening. One fact that I’d never heard before and found particularly shocking: when talking about the countless toxic chemicals used in production and therefore brought into our homes and our bodies, Leonard says:

Do you know what is the food at the top of the food chain with the highest levels of many toxic contaminants? Human breast milk. That means that we’ve reached a point where the smallest members of our societies – our babies – are getting the highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from breast feeding from their mothers. Is that not an incredible violation?

I appreciated that Leonard called this a “violation,” because that’s precisely what it is. We have allowed corporations and complicit governments to violate our very bodies, as well as our environment and countless cultures and communities, simply in order to give us cheaper, more consumable products.* Leonard thankfully goes on to stress that “breast feeding is still best,” but as someone who plans to probably give birth and subsequently breast feed, that fact about the toxicity of breast milk is frightening and enraging. It really does feel like a violation – corporations and the government have allowed this shit to get into me.

Of course, there’s a large degree of agency here – we, primarily meaning Americans and other westerners, have a tremendous responsibility to reject the system of capitalism and consumption that got us into this mess. We need to wake up to the realities of what cheap, easy, and disposable all really mean in the long run – as Leonard says, someone, or more accurately many someones, are paying the real price for all of that cheap crap that many of us in the U.S. can buy easily thanks to our huge privilege relative to the rest of the world. Sometimes the people paying the price are far away and look nothing like (some of) us, but sometimes, as with toxic breast milk, we’re also paying directly and dearly. And whether we pay or someone else pays the immediate and direct costs, when it comes to the destruction of the earth, we’re all most definitely going to pay up sooner rather than later. And therefore we who live in the countries that use and abuse and benefit from the system of consumption the most have an urgent responsibility to do something about it.

Unfortunately, that responsibility and our agency to act on it are both so limited by our lack of information. The true costs of American-style production and consumption were never covered in my schooling, nor are they something that make it into the mainstream media with any depth or sufficiency. It’s easy to go through life just not knowing or even questioning how our actions and our consumption are part of a much larger system with far-reaching effects, and the profiteering corporations are more than happy to keep it that way. In such a dearth of information and truth, resources like this movie are vital and can go a long way towards providing the knowledge people need in order to understand what this culture of consumption is doing to them as individuals, to their communities, to other people, and to the environment.

Of course, it’s hard to figure out what the hell to do after looking at a video like that. I appreciate that the Story of Stuff site provides “10 Little and Big Things You Can Do”, along with a resources page that includes recommended reading and links to NGOs working on these issues.

* Note that for the most part this doesn’t mean “better” products in terms of durability and sustainability; Leonard also states that only 1% of consumer products are still actually in use just six months from the date of purchase, which boggles the mind.

Reclaim the Oil

A friend of mine sends on the following message:

Apologies for the short notice but we just found out that ExxonMobil is sponsoring tomorrow’s Go Green Earth Day Festival in McCarren Park. ExxonMobil is also responsible for the largest oil spill in America’s history, larger than the Exxon Valdez, just meters away from where the festival will be taking place!

Other festival sponsors include BP America, Waste Management, and Forest City Ratner Company (responsible for the Atlantic Yards project). These companies are no friend to our community, and no friend to the environment.

Please join the Greenpoint SuperFUNd SuperFriendz in taking immediate action.

NOW: Send an automatic email letter expressing your outrage to the powers that be:http://stage.citizenspeak.org/node/1268

SATURDAY (tomorrow): Join us at McCarren Park for a protest rally. We’re calling on YOU to help reclaim Earth Day from the greenwashers and reclaim the oil from McCarren Park!

Reclaim the Oil!
Saturday, April 19, 11am
Meet at Driggs and N. 12th
By the dog run

There’s oil a plenty underfoot and we oil men will be on hand with rig, drills, and buckets to reclaim our oil and our earth (day).

Dear Exxon, We Drink Your Milkshake!!!!

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About Greenwashing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenwash
The term is generally used when significantly more money or time has been spent advertising being green (that is, operating with consideration for the environment), rather than spending resources on environmentally sound practices. This is often portrayed by changing the name or label of a product, to give the feeling of nature, for example putting an image of a forest on a bottle of harmful chemicals. Environmentalists often use greenwashing to describe the actions of energy companies, which are traditionally the largest polluters.

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About the Greenpoint ExxonMobil Oil Spill:
http://www.greenpointvexxon.com/

Between 17 and 30 million gallons of oil lie beneath North Brooklyn. See here for oodles of press coverage: http://www.greenpointvexxon.com/index.htm#press

Love it.