Simply regulating pollution will never really stop it. Mari Margil of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund discusses why we need a fundamental change in the way we use law to protect nature.
The environmental movement, with its army of professional advocates, lawyers, grassroots campaigners, and dedicated funders, has been around for decades. Yet nearly every biological indicator shows a planet in crisis—and poised to unravel faster as climate change disrupts already-shaky ecosystem functions.
Mari Margil, associate director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) believes it’s time for different tactics. The nonprofit agency used to work within the body of existing environmental law—helping impacted residents file lawsuits or appeal corporate permits—to protect communities from environmental damage. But a series of blocked efforts, often made worse by the very agencies meant to protect the environment, convinced the group that more fundamental changes were necessary.
“Our system of environmental laws and regulations don’t actually protect the environment,” says CELDF’s Mari Margil. “At best, they merely slow the rate of its destruction … We weren’t helping anyone protect anything.”
The organization has since changed its goals, working with citizens from all over North and South America to literally rewrite local laws in ways that allow people to speak up for their communities, watersheds, forests, and air.
According to Margil, anemic environmental laws spring from the fact that nature has no constitutional rights. CELDF has taken a local approach to reversing this structural blind spot, drafting ordinances for townships from New England to Pennsylvania to Washington State that:
Give communities legal authority to say “No” to unwanted corporate activities;
Recognize the rights of nature;
Strip corporations of their constitutional rights.
In one landmark victory, the town of Barnstead, New Hampshire, voted 135 to 1 to ban the privatization of their freshwater by encroaching corporate interests—the first community in the nation to do so. Other towns have followed, stripping corporations of the rights of personhood and recognizing the rights of communities to self-govern. In 2008, with legal advice from CELDF, Ecuador recognized the right of nature to exist and persist in its national constitution.
This video was produced by Bioneers, a nonprofit organization that provides a forum and hub for social and scientific innovators.
Interested? Communities Take on Corporate Power People across the country are taking our founding documents at their word, declaring citizens’ right and duty to protect nature and community.
Before running off trying to counter the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), we ought to sort out what this decision does and does not do.
The Citizens United decision does make our democracy theme park a little worse, the way having an atomic bomb dropped on your own house would be slightly worse than having it dropped on your neighbor’s. But despite dire claims that the decision is the nail in the coffin of our democracy, that it will shake the current election system to its core, and so on, the case changes very little of our current situation.
Just how teensy a change it will bring can be illustrated by looking at one of the cases overruled by Citizens United: the 1990 Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce[ 1 ] case, hailed by many as a ray of hope in the morass of campaign finance reform efforts. Austin affirmed an extremely mild Michigan law[ 2 ] that essentially prevented the Michigan Chamber of Commerce (one type of nonprofit corporation) from spending general funds to support or oppose a political candidate. That law specifically defined person to include corporations[ 3 ].
The Austin case accepts that money equals speech (following the Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo[ 4 ] ), that corporations can spend treasury funds on initiatives and referendums, and that political action committees (PACs) using segregated funds are legal and constitutional. Austin also affirms that corporations are “persons” with constitutional rights, and that they have both First Amendment speech rights, and Fourteenth Amendment equal protection rights. That such a case is regarded as the Magna Carta of campaign reform efforts must leave corporate counsel hiding their smirks.
The recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United is a gift to the right wing, all right, but not the way many pundits claim. It is a gift to the right wing because of the way that many in the mainstream media have reacted to it, in full frontal denial that it is a red herring.
Let’s review where we were before the Citizens United case was decided. After the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act[ 5 ] (BCRA) went into effect, the public no longer had reason to suspect that corporate lobbying, campaign contributions, or corporate cash affected elected officials’ votes on legislation or positions on issues. The M-F Act transformed elections into paragons of open discussion, free sharing of ideas, thoughtful parrying, and heartfelt non-partisan pro-civic engagement orgies. Right?
Look at any index: the role of money in elections, voting records that mirror campaign contribution patterns, the quality of debate, or the proportion of legislation clearly designed to benefit some corporate interest group. McCain-Feingold recalibrated, rearranged, and redecorated the loopholes used to determine how election money flows and is tallied. It did not eliminate that money, or the influence it reflects. For a current example unrelated to the Citizens United case, look over the Valentine’s Day New York Times front-page article on corporate influence on the Congressional Black Caucus[ 6 ].
The previous major national paroxysm of campaign reform was hardly more effective. The main claim to fame of the Federal Election Campaign Act (passed 1971; amended 1974; shredded in the 1976 Valeo decision; liquefied in the 1978 Bellotti ruling[ 7 ]) was legalizing the PAC (Political Action Committee). Doubtless, those of us old enough to have lived through the Nixon years will recall a sudden elevation of the quality of elections and political discussion, and correlative diminution of political corruption in the years after its passage. Nope.
Legislation (the FEC Act in the 1970s, McCain-Feingold in 2002) that makes minor adjustments to a thoroughly corporate-dominated corrupt system should not be expected to resolve major problems. If insanity is defined as expecting different results while doing the same thing over and over, surely we are getting dangerously close with campaign reform efforts.
As the Citizens United case was being heard in the fall of 2009, I noted the Supreme Court’s false framing: “Must we limit speech in order to have free and fair elections? Or, must we accept corporation-dominated political debate in order to preserve free speech? This false dilemma disappears if we reject corporate personhood–the idea that corporations have constitutional rights. Only if we pretend that corporations are “persons” under the Constitution, is limiting corporate “speech” a constitutional infringement.”[ 8 ].
After the Citizens United ruling, this is still true. Corporations function like retroviruses, taking over the rights and protections that we wrote for humans, and then using them against us, their human hosts. The opinion of the Court is chock full of paeans to the nobility and preciousness of unfettered free speech—of corporations. Rights we the people fought for—at the cost of much life, liberty, and happiness—are now used with great (and seemingly invisible) regularity to shield corporations from government “interference.”
Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards’s proposed Constitutional Amendment[ 9 ]), inspired by the Citizens United decision, would guarantee that “Congress and the states may regulate the expenditure of funds for political speech by any corporation, limited liability company, or other corporate entity.” Would this amendment end corporate domination of our political process? Clearly not. The “corporation” or “corporate entity” referred to ALREADY has constitutional rights and other constitutional protections, a circumstance Edwards’s proffered amendment does nothing to alter.
Since the 1870s and 1880s, federal judges have worked hand-in-hand with corporate counsel to haul into place the edifice of constitutional protections that exempt corporations from the authority of the very states that created them. These protections are the linchpin of corporate power, and the cornerstones of our democracy theme park. Rather than overstating the significance of the Citizens United decision, offering measures that tiptoe around the fundamental problem, and wallowing in the usual moaning and groaning about corporate influence, let’s address the problem directly, something we should have done generations ago.
Peek outside the democracy theme park, and repeat after me: Only if we pretend that corporations are “persons” under the Constitution, is limiting corporate “speech” a constitutional infringement.
And kick that red herring out of the way.
Corporate anthropologist Jane Anne Morris’s recent book,Gaveling Down the Rabble: How “Free Trade” is Stealing Our Democracy (Apex Press, 2008) is cited in an amicus brief filed in support of the Federal Elections Commission in the Citizens United case. She is working on a book about the Supreme Court.
How do the countries of the rest of the industrialized world manage to provide health care for all of their citizens for 9 or 10 percent of GDP while the United States spent 17.3 percent of GDP in 2009, and is on track — even with the current proposals under consideration — to reach as much as one-third of GDP by 2050?
Apparently, in the rest of the “club of affluent countries” (excluding the US), national policy embodies the wisdom that an unregulated market is moderately efficient at producing profits but not at producing a fair distribution of social goods.
Kuttner explains:
In all of the debates about health care reform, one of the stubborn realities is that neither the Obama plan, nor any of the Republican alternatives, will seriously alter the trajectory of relentless cost-escalation in health care. If you look at the Administration’s own projections of federal deficits in the next decade and after 2020, virtually all of the alarming growth in deficit spending is Medicare and Medicaid.
… The consensus among the usual policy experts is that there is no good solution. The march of technology and demography will just continue to raise health costs.
But you can reach that conclusion only by ignoring how the rest of the club of affluent countries manages to insure everyone for 9 or 10 percent of GDP, and have a healthier and longer-lived population, to boot. They do it, of course, through universal, socialized insurance.
… The Canadians do it with a single payer system for the insurance part, but physicians are private. The Brits have an integrated National Health Service. The Germans achieve near-universal coverage through a system of nonprofit health insurance plans.
What every other nation has in common is that they have taken the commercialism out of their health systems. As a consequence, they can direct health spending to areas of medical need rather than letting the market direct health dollars to areas of greatest profit. And with everyone covered, they can use highly cost-effective strategies for prevention, wellness, and public health. That’s how you cover everyone for ten percent of GDP.
Kuttner has become uncharacteristically pessimistic. He feels that Obama has pretty much blown his best chance to succeed at health care reform.
We stand at a critical point in human cultural evolution. Going back to the old normal where peace is just an interval between wars is not an option; what we need is a fundamental cultural transformation.
As Einstein said, we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them. If we think only in terms of the conventional cultural and economic categories—right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, capitalist vs. socialist, and so on—we cannot move forward. What we need is to look at social systems from a new perspective that can help us build not only a nuclear-free world but also the better world we so urgently want and need. I believe we must change our underlying social configuration: We must transition from a system of domination to one of partnership.
My Passion and My Work
I was born in Europe, in Vienna, at a time of massive regression to the domination side of the partnership/domination continuum: the rise of the Nazis, first in Germany and then in my native Austria. So from one day to the next, my whole world was rent asunder. My parents and I became hunted, with license to kill. I watched with horror on Crystal Night—so called because of all the glass that was shattered in Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues—as a gang of Gestapo men broke into out home and dragged my father away. As a little girl, I witnessed brutality and violence.
But I also witnessed something else that night that made an equally profound impression on me: what I today call spiritual courage. We’ve been taught to think of courage as the courage to go out and kill the enemy. But spiritual courage is a much more deeply human courage. It’s the courage to stand up against injustice out of love. My mother could have been killed for demanding that my father be given back to her; many people were killed that night. But by a miracle she did obtain my father’s release—yes, some money eventually passed hands, but it would not have happened had she not stood up to the Nazis. So we were able to escape to Cuba, and I grew up in the industrial slums of Havana, because the Nazis confiscated everything my parents owned. And it was there that I learned that most of my family—aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents—were murdered by the Nazis.
These traumatic experiences led me to questions most of us have asked at some time in our lives: Does it have to be this way? Why is there so much injustice, cruelty, violence, and destructiveness, when we humans also have such a great capacity, as I saw in my mother, for caring, for courage, for love? Is it, as we’re often told, inevitable, just human nature? Or are there alternatives—and if so, what are they?
These questions eventually led to my research. I found very early I simply could not find answers to them in terms of the old social categories (right vs. left, religious vs. secular, Eastern vs. Western, capitalist vs. socialist, and so forth). These categories just look at this or that aspect of a social system, never its fundamental configuration. None of them answer the most critical question for our future: the question of what kinds of beliefs, values, and institutions support our enormous human capacities for caring, for consciousness, for creativity, for sensitivity—the capacities that are most developed in our species, that make us uniquely human—and which promote capacities we also have for cruelty, selfishness, and violence. Neuroscience teaches us that we humans are genetically capable of many different kinds of behaviors, but our experiences profoundly affect which of those genetic possibilities are expressed.
Connecting the Dots
I look for patterns, drawing from a large set of data that cuts across cultures and periods of history. It then becomes possible to see social configurations that had not been visible looking at only a part of social systems—configurations that kept repeating themselves. There were no names for them, so I called one the Domination System and the other the Partnership System.
It is in our primary human relations—within our families and friendships, the relations that are still not taken into account in most analyses of society—that people first learn (on the most basic neural level, as we today know from neuroscience) what is considered normal or abnormal, moral or immoral, possible or impossible.
If children grow up in cultures or subcultures where violence in families is accepted as normal, even moral, what do they learn? The lesson is simple, isn’t it? It’s that it’s OK to use violence to impose one’s will on others, both in intimate relationships and international ones.
I want to illustrate this with two cultures. One is Western, the other is Eastern; one is secular, the other religious; one is technologically developed, the other isn’t: the Nazis in Germany and the Taliban in Afghanistan. From a conventional perspective, they are totally different. But if you look at these two cultures from the perspective of the partnership/domination continuum, you see a configuration. Both are extremely warlike and authoritarian. And for both, a top priority is returning to a traditional family—their code word for a rigidly male-dominated, authoritarian, highly punitive family.
Now, this is not coincidental. Nor is it coincidental that these kinds of societies idealize warfare, even consider it holy. Neither is it coincidental that in these kinds of cultures masculinity is equated with domination and violence at the same time that women and anything stereotypically considered feminine, such as caring and nonviolence, are devalued.
I want to emphasize that this has nothing to do with anything inherent in women or men, as we can see today when more and more men are fathering in the nurturing way mothering is supposed to be done, and women are entering what were once considered strictly male preserves. But these are dominator gender stereotypes that many of us—both men and women—are trying to leave behind.
If we are to build cultures of peace, we have to start talking about something that still makes many people uncomfortable: gender. We might as well put that on the table; people don’t want to talk about gender, do they? But let’s also remember what the great sociologist Louis Wirth said: that the most important things about a society are those that people are uncomfortable talking about. We saw that with race: Only as we started to talk about it did we begin to move forward. We’re beginning to talk more about gender, and starting to move forward, but much too slowly.
This is important for many reasons, including the fact that it is through dominator norms for gender that children learn another important lesson: to equate difference (beginning with the most fundamental difference in our species between female and male) with superiority or inferiority, with dominating or being dominated, with being served or serving. And they acquire this mental and emotional map before their brains are fully developed (we know today that our brains don’t fully develop until our twenties), so they then can automatically apply it to any other difference, be it a different race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
The Economics of Domination and Partnership
The roles and relations of the two halves of humanity can no longer be considered “just a women’s issue” (though we’re half of humanity, that phrase again shows how we’ve been conditioned to devalue women and anything associated with women). In reality, gender roles and relations affect everything about a society from its institutions (for example, whether families are more democratic or authoritarian) to its guiding system of values.
Let me give you an example from economics. Most of us would never think economics has anything to do with gender. At most, we think this refers to the workplace gender discrimination we’re finally beginning to talk about. But actually it goes much, much deeper. Economics has huge systemic effects.
Have you ever wondered, for instance, why it is that so many politicians always find money for weapons, for wars, and for prisons, but when it comes to funding health care, child care, and other “soft” or caring activities, they have no money? Nor do they have money for keeping a clean and healthy natural environment—rather like the “women’s work” of keeping a clean and healthy home environment.
Underlying these seemingly irrational priorities is a gendered system of valuations we’ve inherited from earlier, more domination-oriented times. To meet the challenges we face, we must make this visible.
Neoliberalism is actually a regression to dominator economics: to a top-down economic system where trickle down economics is really a continuation of dominator traditions, where those on the bottom are socialized to content themselves with the scraps dropping from the opulent tables of those on top.
This is an ancient economics of domination, which transcends labels like capitalism and socialism. Indeed, the two large-scale applications of socialism, the USSR and China, also turned into domination systems, highly authoritarian and violent, with horrendous environmental problems, because the underlying social system did not shift from domination to partnership.
That’s not to say we should discard everything from capitalism and socialism. We need to retain and strengthen the partnership elements in both the market and government economies and leave the domination elements behind. But we need to go further to what I have called a “caring economics.”
Now, isn’t it interesting that when we put “caring” and “economics” in the same sentence, people tend to do a double take? We’ve been told that caring policies and practices may sound good, but they’re just not economically effective. In reality, study after study shows that investing in caring for people and nature is extremely effective—not only in human and environmental terms, but in purely financial terms.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Finland suffered from poverty and famine. Today, these nations are invariably in the highest ranks not only of United Nations Human Development Reports but of the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness reports. This is largely due to the fact that their norm became a more caring economics, a more caring society.
These nations have government-supported childcare, universal healthcare, stipends to help families care for children, elder care with dignity, generous paid parental leave. In short, they economically support caring work in both the market and the household. As a result, they have very long life spans, very low poverty rates, very low crime rates, and a generally high standard of living for all. They are also in the forefront of moving toward sustainable energy and invest a larger proportion of their GDP in helping people in the developing world than other nations.
They are not ideal nations, but they have moved farther than most contemporary nations to the partnership side of the partnership-domination continuum. They have more democracy and equality in both the family and the state. They have been in the forefront of trying to leave behind traditions of violence inherent in domination systems. For example, they pioneered the first peace studies and the first laws prohibiting physical discipline of children in families. And, in contrast to domination systems that subordinate the female half of humanity to the male half, they have a much more equal partnership between women and men. For example, approximately 40 percent of their national legislators are female.
As the status of women rises, men no longer find it such a threat to their status, to their masculinity, to also embrace more caring practices and policies. These nations also have a strong movement to disentangle masculinity from its dominator equation with conquest and violence, including a strong movement for men to take responsibility for violence against women and children.
Between child-battering, wife-beating, sexual abuse of children, rape, bride burnings sexual mutilation of girls and women, so-called honor killings, and other horrors, the number of lives taken and blighted by intimate violence worldwide are much greater than those taken by armed conflict. And yet this violence is still largely invisible.
Our job is to make it visible. If we really want a more peaceful world, we can’t just tack that on to a system that idealizes violence as “masculine” and devalues caring and nonviolence as “feminine.”
Building Cultures of Equity and Peace
Let’s join together and move into that second phase of the peace movement: that integrated phase that takes into account the whole of human relations, from intimate to international. Let us muster the spiritual courage to challenge traditions of domination and violence in our primary human relations – the formative relations between women and men and parents and children.
Let us work for systemic change, for the new norms that will enable a future where all children, both girls and boys, can realize their enormous human potentials for consciousness, creativity, and caring.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Riane Eisler adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from the speech she gave while accepting the Distinguished Peace Leadership Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Dr. Eisler is a social scientist, attorney, and social activist best known as author of the international bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Futureand The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics. She is president of the Center for Partnership Studies and is included in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers, as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King. Her website is www.rianeeisler.com.
Now that the radical majority on the Supreme Court — the activist conservative judges — have overturned a century of precedent and settled law with their decision in Citizens United v FEC, they may soon have an opportunity to overturn the longstanding use of the Commerce Clause as the basis for federal environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.
… there are signs that Chief Justice Roberts might rule that the Commerce Clause cannot be the basis for federal environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. While serving on an appeals court in 2003, Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion, saying that the Commerce Clause did not allow the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service to impose regulations on a California developer to protect habitat for an endangered toad. Roberts said the case was not about interstate commerce; it merely concerned “a hapless toad, that for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California.”
Libertarian and rightwing groups are arguing against the Commerce Clause in environmental cases in lower courts, hoping to push it to Roberts’ Supreme Court. The leading green law firm, Earthjustice, has warned that Roberts seems to have “an ideological agenda” for overturning environmental laws based on the Commerce Clause.
On Nov. 5, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, took the podium at a Republican rally, waved a document defiantly and declared:”This is my copy of the Constitution, and I’m going to stand here with the Founding Fathers who wrote in the Preamble, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ” Mr. Boehner was encouraging participants to protest the pending House vote for health care reform by demanding their constitutional right to make medical decisions.
Pop quiz: What’s wrong with this picture?
If you said that there is no explicit constitutional right to make medical decisions, you score some points. If you said that the passage Mr. Boehner quotes is from the Declaration of Independence you get an A. If you also noted that the quotation is not even from the Declaration’s preamble, you earn extra credit.
Mr. Boehner is not the first opinion leader to confuse the Constitution with the Declaration, nor is he apt to be the last. Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, for example, said, “As our Constitution declares, we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights ” Of course, Mr. Boehner, unlike Mr. Falwell, entered the profession by promising to protect the Constitution.
Mr. Boehner noted his 19 years of public service, yet how could he protect the Constitution when he can’t distinguish it from the Declaration? Indeed, how many public servants, for whom an oath to the Constitution is an entrance requirement, know the document well enough to protect it? Judging from the foregoing, from political rhetoric in media and from many anecdotes, one suspects that constitutional literacy is too low. This is a problem for sworn professionals who cannot protect what they don’t know, and it is a problem for the ordinary citizen who, in a democracy, is supposed to be running the country through informed voting and participation in public conversations.
The value of constitutional literacy and the lack of it are obvious, the nature of it less so. What are the minimum conditions for constitutional literacy? This should be the topic of public conversation and consensus. To that end, here are some preliminary suggestions that distinguish eight levels of constitutional literacy. At each level, one should know:
* The basic difference between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. One establishes a government, the other doesn’t. One rests on man-made law, the other on natural law; one posits only conferred rights, the other posits inalienable rights.
* The age and basic anatomy of the Constitution. When was it ratified? (1788.) How many articles are there? (Seven.) How many Amendments? (27.) What, in general, is each about?
* Certain significant details from the articles and the amendments, such as the basic requirements for being elected to, appointed to, or removed from federal office.
* Most details of each article and amendment and the history surrounding its creation and ratification, including the history of democracy and republicanism.
* The more important arguments for the various elements of the Constitution, such as those found in the Federalist Papers.
* The more famous court cases and their implications for public policy, such as Marbury v. Madison (1803), Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and Roe v. Wade (1973).
* Key disagreements about the nature of law, rights and justice, and which theories about each are reflected in the Constitution as opposed to the Declaration or other important American documents — such as Marbury v. Madison, which has led some to conclude that judges make law.
* The history of and theories about constitutional interpretation. At this level, disagreement may be due to philosophical or political differences, rather than constitutional illiteracy. Thus, it is fair to call both JusticeAntonin Scalia and Justice Stephen Breyer constitutional scholars, yet they frequently disagree on the meaning of key constitutional passages or of their application to a specific court case.
From the opening of the constitutional convention to the present, political conversation in the U.S. has been raucous, robust and often significant in its impact on public policy and on individuals’ lives. How much better would things be if a majority of the participants in this conversation were constitutionally literate?
Christopher Dreisbach is chairman of the Department of Applied Ethics and Humanities in the Division of Public Safety Leadership at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. His e-mail is cdreisbach@jhu.edu.
What sort of fire burns in the heart of this soft-spoken, thoughtful pediatrician that would lead her to choose arrest, a course of action that she later admitted was very frightening?
Here’s some background, from the transcript of Bill Moyers’ recent interview with Doctor Flowers:
BILL MOYERS: Make me an offer I can’t refuse. That’s what President Obama said, when he talks about health care reform during his State of the Union last week.
PRESIDENT OBAMA : If anyone from either party has a better approach that will bring down premiums, bring down the deficit, cover the uninsured, strengthen medicare for seniors and stop insurance company abuses, let me know. Let me know. Let me know. I’m eager to see it.
BILL MOYERS: Dr. Margaret Flowers took him at his word.
MALE VOICE (of Secret Service guard at White House gate): Can I help you?
DR. MARGARET FLOWERS: Well, last night the President gave his State of the Union address, and I’m a physician. I’m the Congressional Fellow with Physicians for National Health Program.
BILL MOYERS: The very next day she was outside the White House with a letter urging the President to revive the idea of single-payer healthcare. Medicare for all.
MALE VOICE: We can’t accept anything, so you’ll have to send it through the mail.
BILL MOYERS: The Secret Service turned Dr. Flowers away, but she didn’t give up. She tried again the next day in Baltimore, where once again, President Obama made his offer to hear ideas on health reform and once again, she tried to deliver her letter.
DR. MARGARET FLOWERS: Is there somebody here who’s in charge that can have somebody who’s a representative of the President, come and take this?
BILL MOYERS: This time, she and her colleague, Dr. Carol Paris, refused to move when security told them to, because Dr. Flowers said, “We didn’t want to continue to be excluded, marginalized and ignored.”
They were arrested.
DR. MARGARET FLOWERS: And we haven’t been heard. They continue to exclude us.
BILL MOYERS: When I saw pictures of Margaret Flowers being led away, I remembered those famous words attributed to another Margaret, the anthropologist Margaret Mead who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Later, in the interview with Moyers, Doctor Flowers explains the problem with the current system that led her to conclude that single-payer is the best answer:
BILL MOYERS: Why did you feel you weren’t able to do the medicine you wanted to do, because of the health care system?
DR. MARGARET FLOWERS: Well, it started when I was working in the rural hospital where I was. And when we would admit a patient to the hospital, the first person that would come to visit us was someone from utilization review, which is the group that interfaces with the insurance company. And they would say, “You have this many days to make this patient better. This is how many days they’ve been authorized for.” And what we often found is that didn’t match the number of days that we felt the patient needed to be in the hospital. So it puts you in a really uncomfortable position of, do you send a child home before they’re ready? And then in private practices it’s the same kind of thing, you see a patient, you determine what’s the best treatment, and then the insurance company says, “No they can’t have that test” or can’t have that medicine. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t based on what the patients need. It was based on what the insurance companies could get away with.
BILL MOYERS: Was there the eureka moment?
DR. MARGARET FLOWERS: It was a eureka moment when our office manager sat down with us in our practice and said, “Okay, if we want to keep in business, this is what you need to do. You can only see one well child a day, and the rest of the patients have to all be sick patients that you can churn through this many patients each hour.” And if your patient happens to bring up something else that’s bothering them, you have to ask them to reschedule and come back to talk about that other thing, which means they have to take, you know, more time off of work and continue to carry that worry with them, while they’re waiting for the next appointment. That just wasn’t why I went into medicine. I like the relationship that I have with patients. I want to take care of them. And when you build that relationship with your patient and you get to know them, you can provide the best care for them, not the way things are right now.
BILL MOYERS: But you know, you didn’t go into medicine to get arrested. And yet there you are, on the– out there being handcuffed and led away?
DR. MARGARET FLOWERS: Yeah, I never really dreamed that this was a path that I would go down. I mean, I’m a mother. Good citizen in my community. But it came to a point where that was the only way that we could have our voice heard. We were being completely excluded, when we tried the traditional avenues of having our voice heard. We were just put aside.
This is an excellent, fascinating interview with an ordinary American citizen who shows us that ordinary citizens can become extraordinary when the times call for it.
Policyholders are incensed over rate hikes of as much as 39%, which they say come on top of similar increases last year. State insurance regulators say they’ll investigate.
February 04, 2010 | By Duke Helfand
California’s largest for-profit health insurer is moving to dramatically raise rates for customers with individual policies, setting off a furor among policyholders and prompting state insurance regulators to investigate.
Anthem Blue Cross is telling many of its approximately 800,000 customers who buy individual coverage — people not covered by group rates — that its prices will go up March 1 and may be adjusted “more frequently” than its typical yearly increases.
How families are achieving ecological, social, and economic transformation… starting under their own roofs.
by Shannon Hayes
Long before we could pronounce Betty Friedan’s last name, Americans from my generation felt her impact. Many of us born in the mid-1970s learned from our parents and our teachers that women no longer needed to stay home, that there were professional opportunities awaiting us. In my own school experience, homemaking, like farming, gained a reputation as a vocation for the scholastically impaired. Those of us with academic promise learned that we could do whatever we put our minds to, whether it was conquering the world or saving the world. I was personally interested in saving the world. That path eventually led me to conclude that homemaking would play a major role toward achieving that goal.
My own farming background led me to pursue advanced degrees in the field of sustainable agriculture, with a powerful interest in the local food movement. By the time my Ph.D. was conferred, I was married, and I was in a state of confusion. The more I understood about the importance of small farms and the nutritional, ecological, and social value of local food, the more I questioned the value of a 9-to-5 job. If my husband and I both worked and had children, it appeared that our family’s ecological impact would be considerable. We’d require two cars, professional wardrobes, convenience foods to make up for lost time in the kitchen … and we’d have to buy, rather than produce, harvest, and store, our own food.
The economics didn’t work out, either. When we crunched the numbers, our gross incomes from two careers would have been high, but the cost of living was also considerable, especially when daycare was figured into the calculation. Abandoning the job market, we re-joined my parents on our small grassfed livestock farm and became homemakers. For almost ten years now, we’ve been able to eat locally and organically, support local businesses, avoid big box stores, save money, and support a family of four on less than $45,000 per year.
Wondering if my family was a freaky aberration to the conventional American culture, I decided to post a notice on my webpage, looking to connect with other ecologically minded homemakers. My fingers trembled on the keyboard as I typed the notice. What, exactly, would be the repercussions for taking a pro-homemaker stand and seeking out others? Was encouraging a Radical Homemaking movement going to unravel all the social advancements that have been made in the last 40-plus years? Women, after all, have been the homemakers since the beginning of time. Or so I thought.
The Origins of Homemaking: A vocation for both sexes
Upon further investigation, I learned that the household did not become the “woman’s sphere” until the Industrial Revolution. A search for the origin of the word housewife traces it back to the thirteenth century, as the feudal period was coming to an end in Europe and the first signs of a middle class were popping up. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan explains that housewives were wedded to husbands, whose name came from hus, an old spelling of house, and bonded. Husbands were bonded to houses, rather than to lords. Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land. While there was a division of labor among the sexes in these early households, there was also an equal distribution of domestic work. Once the Industrial Revolution happened, however, things changed. Men left the household to work for wages, which were then used to purchase goods and services that they were no longer home to provide. Indeed, the men were the first to lose their domestic skills as successive generations forgot how to butcher the family hog, how to sew leather, how to chop firewood.
As the Industrial Revolution forged on and crossed the ocean to America, men and women eventually stopped working together to provide for their household sustenance. They developed their separate spheres—man in the factory, woman in the home. The more a man worked outside the home, the more the household would have to buy in order to have needs met. Soon the factories were able to fabricate products to supplant the housewives’ duties as well. The housewife’s primary function ultimately became chauffeur and consumer. The household was no longer a unit of production. It was a unit of consumption.
Housewife’s Syndrome
The effect on the American housewife was devastating. In 1963, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, documenting for the first time “the problem that has no name,” Housewife’s Syndrome, where American girls grew up fantasizing about finding their husbands, buying their dream homes and appliances, popping out babies, and living happily ever after. In truth, pointed out Friedan, happily-ever-after never came. Countless women suffered from depression and nervous breakdowns as they faced the endless meaningless tasks of shopping and driving children hither and yon. They never had opportunities to fulfill their highest potential, to challenge themselves, to feel as though they were truly contributing to society beyond wielding the credit card to keep the consumer culture humming. Friedan’s book sent women to work in droves. And corporate America seized upon a golden opportunity to secure a cheaper workforce and offer countless products to use up their paychecks.
Before long, the second family income was no longer an option. In the minds of many, it was a necessity. Homemaking, like eating organic foods, seemed a luxury to be enjoyed only by those wives whose husbands garnered substantial earnings, enabling them to drive their children to school rather than put them on a bus, enroll them in endless enrichment activities, oversee their educational careers, and prepare them for entry into elite colleges in order to win a leg-up in a competitive workforce. At the other extreme, homemaking was seen as the realm of the ultra-religious, where women accepted the role of Biblical “Help Meets” to their husbands. They cooked, cleaned, toiled, served and remained silent and powerless. My husband and I fell into neither category, and I suspected there were more like us.
Meet the Radical Homemakers
I was right. I received hundreds of letters from rural, suburban, and city folks alike. Some ascribed to specific religious faiths, others did not. As long as the home showed no signs of domination or oppression, I was interested in learning more about them. I selected twenty households from my pile, plotted them on a map across the United States, and set about visiting each of them to see what homemaking could look like when men and women shared both power and responsibility. Curious to see if Radical Homemaking was a venture suited to more than just women in married couples, I visited with single parents, stay-at-home dads, widows, and divorcées. I spent time in families with and without children.
A glance into America’s past suggests that homemaking could play a big part in addressing the ecological, economic and social crises of our present time. Homemakers have played a powerful role during several critical periods in our nation’s history. By making use of locally available resources, they made the boycotts leading up to the American Revolution possible. They played a critical role in the foundational civic education required to launch a young democratic nation. They were driving forces behind both the abolition and suffrage movements.
Homemakers today could have a similar influence. The Radical Homemakers I interviewed had chosen to make family, community, social justice, and the health of the planet the governing principles of their lives. They rejected any form of labor or the expenditure of any resource that did not honor these tenets. For about 5,000 years, our culture has been hostage to a form of organization by domination that fails to honor our living systems, under which “he who holds the gold makes the rules.” By contrast, the Radical Homemakers are using life skills and relationships as replacements for gold, on the premise that he or she who doesn’t need the gold can change the rules. The greater one’s domestic skills, be they to plant a garden, grow tomatoes on an apartment balcony, mend a shirt, repair an appliance, provide one’s own entertainment, cook and preserve a local harvest, or care for children and loved ones, the less dependent one is on the gold.
By virtue of these skills, the Radical Homemakers I interviewed were building a great bridge from our existing extractive economy—where corporate wealth has been regarded as the foundation of economic health, where mining our Earth’s resources and exploiting our international neighbors have been acceptable costs of doing business—to a life serving economy, where the goal is, in the words of David Korten, to generate a living for all, rather than a killing for a few; where our resources are sustained, our waters are kept clean, our air pure, and families and can lead meaningful lives. In situations where one person was still required to work out of the home in the conventional extractive economy, homemakers were able to redirect the family’s financial, social and temporal resources toward building the life-serving economy. In most cases, however, the homemakers’ skills were so considerable that, while members of the household might hold jobs (more often than not they ran their own businesses), the financial needs of the family were so small that no one in the family was forced to accept any employment that did not honor the four tenets of family, community, social justice and ecological sustainability.
While all the families had some form of income that entered their lives, they were not a privileged set by any means. Most of the families I interviewed were living with a sense of abundance at about 200 percent of the federal poverty level. That’s a little over $40,000 for a family of four, about 37 percent below the national median family income, and 45 percent below the median income for married couple families. Some lived on considerably less, few had appreciably more. Not surprisingly, those with the lowest incomes had mastered the most domestic skills and had developed the most innovative approaches to living.
Rethinking the Impossible
The Radical Homemakers were skilled at the mental exercise of rethinking the “givens” of our society and coming to the following conclusions: nobody (who matters) cares what (or if) you drive; housing does not have to cost more than a single moderate income can afford (and can even cost less); it is okay to accept help from family and friends, to let go of the perceived ideal of independence and strive instead for interdependence; health can be achieved without making monthly payments to an insurance company; child care is not a fixed cost; education can be acquired for free; and retirement is possible, regardless of income.
As for domestic skills, the range of talents held by these households was as varied as the day is long. Many kept gardens, but not all. Some gardened on city rooftops, some on country acres, some in suburban yards. Some were wizards at car and appliance repairs. Others could sew. Some could build and fix houses; some kept livestock. Others crafted furniture, played music, or wrote. All could cook. (Really well, as my waistline will attest.) None of them could do everything. No one was completely self-sufficient, an independent island separate from the rest of the world. Thus the universal skills that they all possessed were far more complex than simply knowing how to can green beans or build a root cellar. In order to make it as homemakers, these people had to be wizards at nurturing relationships and working with family and community. They needed an intimate understanding of the life-serving economy, where a paycheck is not always exchanged for all services rendered. They needed to be their own teachers—to pursue their educations throughout life, forever learning new ways to do more, create more, give more.
In addition, the happiest among them were successful at setting realistic expectations for themselves. They did not live in impeccably clean houses on manicured estates. They saw their homes as living systems and accepted the flux, flow, dirt, and chaos that are a natural part of that. They were masters at redefining pleasure not as something that should be bought in the consumer marketplace, but as something that could be created, no matter how much or how little money they had in their pockets. And above all, they were fearless. They did not let themselves be bullied by the conventional ideals regarding money, status, or material possessions. These families did not see their homes as a refuge from the world. Rather, each home was the center for social change, the starting point from which a better life would ripple out for everyone.
Home is where the great change will begin. It is not where it ends. Once we feel sufficiently proficient with our domestic skills, few of us will be content to simply practice them to the end of our days. Many of us will strive for more, to bring more beauty to the world, to bring about greater social change, to make life better for our neighbors, to contribute our creative powers to the building of a new, brighter, more sustainable, and happier future. That is precisely the great work we should all be tackling. If we start by focusing our energies on our domestic lives, we will do more than reduce our ecological impact and help create a living for all. We will craft a safe, nurturing place from which this great creative work can happen.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons License
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Most commentary I’ve heard concerning the ongoing collapse of print journalism focuses on the need for a new pricing model, or some way to “monetize” web content. Media scholars Robert McChesney and John Nichols, in their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again, suggest a more radical solution, one that’s closer to the free-press vision of the Founders. The authors’ ideas are “radical” in the sense of “returning to the roots.”
David Brancaccio interviewed the two authors for a recent episode (“Saving American Journalism“) of NOW on PBS (linked page includes full video of the interview). Here are some highlights (from the transcript) of this fascinating interview:
BRANCACCIO: … Thanks for doing this. All right, Robert McChesney, the state of newspaper journalism right now, and I guess we could say it’s in a bad stretch? That would be one phrase. Some have said total collapse. Is that fair?
MCCHESNEY: Very fair.
BRANCACCIO: Really?
MCCHESNEY: Oh absolutely. If you look at it—the journalism that we knew growing up … It’s not gonna exist in ten years.
BRANCACCIO: Well, John Nichols, the—the stakes are high here. I saw this prediction a few months ago, but that—that the New York Times could go belly-up. Someone was counting the months. That may be a little unreasonable. But that’s what we’re talking about?
NICHOLS: It’s absolutely what we’re talking about. Understand that—we, in the last year, have seen major daily newspapers, the New York Timeses of communities around the country go down. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer shu—shut down, the Rocky Mountain News, great historic newspapers. And this is not really the core of the problem. The core of the problem is the papers that are staying open, but doing massive layoffs. You cannot maintain journalism when you are literally laying off at—at major daily newspapers dozens, even hundreds of reporters. If this keeps going, we’re gonna create the perfect model for a propaganda state. The perfect model for a propaganda state is very, very few—independent journalists—independent sources of news out there, but—a need for news, a demand for information. And then what—who fills that vacuum? Well, naturally—the government and big corporations.
BRANCACCIO: Now most of those watching with have a sense of why. The Internet came in. Craigslist took all the classified ads that generated so much money for journalism. But let’s move on from the why. There may not be newsprint on the front door but digital will ride to the rescue. We’ll save some trees, Bob.
MCCHESNEY: Well, the problem with that is that journalism is—requires journalists. It requires editors. It requires fact-checkers. It requires institutional resources to protect the news operation from interference, be it corporate or governmental, so it can be independent. And there’s no evidence that this technology, the Internet, will provide that at all. In fact—the evidence is already pretty clear that if we’re gonna sit around and wait for the digital realm to recreate what we’re losing, it’s not coming in the foreseeable future, if ever. And so there’s really—the hope that the Internet’s gonna set us free. There’s really much more of a faith-based—view of the problem than a reality-based one.
BRANCACCIO: But—but John, you must have some faith in the notion of free enterprise, America’s innovative capacity. I mean, the digital universe presents enormous opportunities. Won’t someone soon figure this out, how to bring money into journalism?
NICHOLS: … we’re losing 1000 newspaper employees a month in layoffs, firings. We’re having major newspapers closing. There is absolutely no evidence, and I want to underline that. No evidence that what we’re losing is being replaced on the net. Some of these newspapers that have closed down have said, “Well, we’re gonna maintain an Internet presence.” But the number of people that they are employing on the Internet, compared to what they were employing in print, is often at—a one on the Internet to 20 when they were in print.
BRANCACCIO: If the old media crumbles, particularly newspapers, then who is gonna actually do the original journalism that allows, what, democracy to flourish?
NICHOLS: There’s a new Pew study, from Baltimore, Maryland. And they looked at a week in Baltimore. They said, “Well, who’s—who’s generating the stories? What—what type of media’s giving us the stories?” 96 percent, even in this state of decline for old media—96 percent were coming from old media. Only four percent from the Internet.
And—they suggest that as the amount of coverage by traditional media, they—particularly the Baltimore Sun has declined dramatically that more and more, the stories are driven by official sources, be they governmental or corporate. Only about 14 percent of the stories in the—in the study were generated by reporters going out and, you know, digging, finding something and putting it on the agenda.
Mc Chesney and Nichols talk about a solution.
MCCHESNEY: … the smart way to look at it historically, and what we do in our work is to view the advertising era as the anomaly, not as the rule. But we had this era for 100 years, roughly, where advertising put up the money to provide the best—majority revenues that paid for journalism in this country. It paid for it from the late 19th century on. And we assume that was the natural order. Now we’re beginning to see, now that advertisers have other choices … They’re moving into other ways to reach their target audiences… we’re entering a new era where we have to face up to the reality that journalism isn’t a profitable enterprise… if we’re gonna have journalism, we have to face that truth and understand it as the founders of this republic did. It’s a public good. It requires public subsidies or it won’t exist.
NICHOLS: … public engagement in making sure that we have the delivery of this public good is as American as apple pie. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, sat around in the early days of the republic—a republic that I might emphasize was founded, in large part, by journalists, people like Tom Paine—they sat around in the early days of the republic and said, “How do we create a civic and Democratic life that isn’t just a reflection of Great Britain, of—of the colonial powers? The way we’re going to do that is to make sure that we have many, many sources of information, that we have a competitive, free and independent, a wild, cacophonous media. And the way that’s gonna happen is not by waiting for the quote-and-quote, ‘market,’ to give us that. We are going to do postal subsidies.”
… Those subsidies, the postal subsidies especially, helped to foster the abolitionist press. The abolitionist press challenged the great sin of the founding of this republic. A time when in the U.S. Congress, that it was—it was not permitted to debate slavery. And so, we can have a dissident, challenging—anti-government press, operating within a system of subsidies. It is very possible. In fact, it happens in countries all over the world.
MCCHESNEY: And the contemporary examples we see that are striking about this come in Western Europe and Scandinavia, which have enormous printing subsidies similar in cash value to the early republic in this country—of public media, of journalism, of newspapers. And yet managed to have the freest commercial news—private news media in the world, according to Freedom House. I mean, these are the places you go for the least amount of government censorship, a private news media, is in the countries with the heaviest public subsidies of broadcasting and—media.
Before running off trying to counter the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC), we ought to sort out what this decision does and does not do.
I was born in Europe, in Vienna, at a time of massive regression to the domination side of the partnership/domination continuum: the rise of the Nazis, first in Germany and then in my native Austria. So from one day to the next, my whole world was rent asunder. My parents and I became hunted, with license to kill. I watched with horror on Crystal Night—so called because of all the glass that was shattered in Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues—as a gang of Gestapo men broke into out home and dragged my father away. As a little girl, I witnessed brutality and violence.
If children grow up in cultures or subcultures where violence in families is accepted as normal, even moral, what do they learn? The lesson is simple, isn’t it? It’s that it’s OK to use violence to impose one’s will on others, both in intimate relationships and international ones.
Now that the radical majority on the Supreme Court — the activist conservative judges — have overturned a century of precedent and settled law with their decision in Citizens United v FEC, they may soon have an opportunity to overturn the longstanding use of the Commerce Clause as the basis for federal environmental laws such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.
See full article in 
Upon further investigation, I learned that the household did not become the “woman’s sphere” until the Industrial Revolution. A search for the origin of the word housewife traces it back to the thirteenth century, as the feudal period was coming to an end in Europe and the first signs of a middle class were popping up. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan explains that housewives were wedded to husbands, whose name came from hus, an old spelling of house, and bonded. Husbands were bonded to houses, rather than to lords. Housewives and husbands were free people, who owned their own homes and lived off their land. While there was a division of labor among the sexes in these early households, there was also an equal distribution of domestic work. Once the Industrial Revolution happened, however, things changed. Men left the household to work for wages, which were then used to purchase goods and services that they were no longer home to provide. Indeed, the men were the first to lose their 
Before long, the second family income was no longer an option. In the minds of many, it was a necessity. Homemaking, like eating organic foods, seemed a luxury to be enjoyed only by those wives whose husbands garnered substantial earnings, enabling them to drive their children to school rather than put them on a bus, enroll them in endless enrichment activities, oversee their educational careers, and prepare them for entry into elite colleges 
As for domestic skills, the range of talents held by these households was as varied as the day is long. Many kept gardens, but not all. Some gardened on city rooftops, some on country acres, some in suburban yards. Some were wizards at car and appliance repairs. Others could sew. Some could build and fix houses; some kept livestock. Others crafted furniture, played music, or wrote. All could cook. (Really well, as my waistline will attest.) None of them could do everything. No one was completely self-sufficient, an independent island separate from the rest of the world. Thus the universal skills that they all possessed were far more complex than simply knowing how to 
NICHOLS: It’s absolutely what we’re talking about. Understand that—we, in the last year, have seen major daily newspapers, the New York Timeses of communities around the country go down. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer shu—shut down, the Rocky Mountain News, great historic newspapers. And this is not really the core of the problem. The core of the problem is the papers that are staying open, but doing massive layoffs. You cannot maintain journalism when you are literally laying off at—at major daily newspapers dozens, even hundreds of reporters. If this keeps going, we’re gonna create the perfect model for a propaganda state. The perfect model for a propaganda state is very, very few—independent journalists—independent sources of news out there, but—a need for news, a demand for information. And then what—who fills that vacuum? Well, naturally—the government and big corporations.
NICHOLS: … we’re losing 1000 newspaper employees a month in layoffs, firings. We’re having major newspapers closing. There is absolutely no evidence, and I want to underline that. No evidence that what we’re losing is being replaced on the net. Some of these newspapers that have closed down have said, “Well, we’re gonna maintain an Internet presence.” But the number of people that they are employing on the Internet, compared to what they were employing in print, is often at—a one on the Internet to 20 when they were in print.