Originally published in Socialist Worker.
Gary Lapon reports on a horrific police beating in Springfield, Mass., caught on videotape--and the months-long inaction of police and city officials.
A VIDEO released last week shows how a routine traffic stop by local police for a dragging muffler last November turned into a nightmare for Melvin Jones III.
Jones, an African American and resident of Springfield, Mass., was pulled over on November 27--and ended up in the hospital with severe injuries to his face, after he was beaten by Jeffrey Asher, a white police officer with a history of brutality against African Americans.
The video, which was posted online, was only just released after being quietly held "in the hands of law enforcement and city officials for several weeks," according to Masslive.com/The Republican newspaper.
It shows Asher striking Jones, who was unarmed, repeatedly with a flashlight, at least 18 times, according to my count. Although not visible on tape after that point, it appears that police continued to beat Jones, since a bystander can be heard to exclaim, "They're still...they're beating him with the flashlight."
A woman, possibly his companion Malika Barnett, the driver of the car, can be heard yelling, "Please don't" and one of the officers apparently called Jones a "nigger"--a male bystander can be heard saying "Somebody called him a fucking nigger."
The arc of the light and the loud, sickening "thwack" from each blow of the flashlight suggest that Asher was hitting Jones, who was being restrained by multiple white officers, with full force. Asher resumes hitting Jones multiple times, for a total of at least four separate stretches of beatings.
While an injured, possibly unconscious Jones is lying motionless on the ground, surrounded by six police officers, one of the officers yells, likely about Barnett, "Fuck her, lock her up, too!"
Finally, paramedics arrive to take Jones to the hospital. Jones suffered a broken finger and fractures to the bones in his face, which required reconstructive surgery and left him partially blind in one eye.
According to Masslive.com, "Jones is charged with three counts of felony narcotics possession, resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer. The police report of the incident says the struggle ensued when Jones, who acted suspiciously during a traffic stop on Rifle Street, attempted to flee and then grabbed one of the officer's guns. The report states that Asher struck Jones with his flashlight in order to 'disorientate him' as the officers attempted to take him into custody."
But this conflicts with the video evidence showing Asher repeatedly hitting Jones while Jones is surrounded by several officers, apparently restrained. What's more, Masslive reported, the police report "doesn't indicate any injuries to the officers."
Jones' father, Melvin Jones Jr., told Masslive.com, "The way they wrote the report is not the way the video shows it, and it's not the way that it was told to me by various people who were witnesses."
Jones Jr. continued, "They beat him like a wild animal...I counted 17 or 18 times they clubbed him with that flashlight. Those officers have no regard for human life."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THIS ISN'T the first time that Officer Jeffrey Asher, who is under internal investigation for this incident, has been accused of brutality against African Americans. Nor is it the first time that other officers of the Springfield Police Department have been involved in cases of racist attacks on African American residents.
According to Masslive.com, Asher, who was president of his class at the police academy, was accused of beating Michael J. Cuzzone after the man's friend got into an argument with Asher's father. The city settled with Cuzzone for $75,000.
In 1997, Asher "was caught on videotape" (as shown here in local news footage) kicking Roy Parker, another African American victim who was brutalized while he was already handcuffed and held down by other officers.
Asher was "cleared of any criminal wrongdoing by a judge who said he had used reasonable force," according to Masslive.com. While he was "suspended for one year and ordered to undergo sensitivity training...a labor arbitrator later reduced Asher's suspension from 12 to six months and awarded him about $20,000 in back pay" saying he'd been punished "too harshly," the Web site reported.
In 2004, Asher was among four white police officers who beat Douglas Greer, a Black charter school principal, as he suffered a diabetic attack in his car at a Springfield gas station. According to a 2004 article in The Republican, "a man who said he witnessed the incident told investigators...that he saw police officers beating Greer with a chrome flashlight."
The Police Commission voted 3-2 to find "no probable cause to pursue disciplinary action against" against Asher and the other officers. The City of Springfield settled a civil lawsuit with Greer in 2007 for $180,000.
In addition to Asher, one of the officers accused of beating Greer was "James L. Shewchuck, accused of helping to organize a support party for another officer ultimately cleared in the fatal shooting of a Black motorist who was driving a van falsely reported stolen in 1994," Masslive.com reported.
The party was for Officer Donald Brown, who was accused of shooting to death Benjamin Schoolfield, an unarmed 20-year-old Black man. The charges against Brown were dropped, as well--and the city later settled with Schoolfield's family for $700,000.
According to a 1994 New York Times article, the Western Massachusetts Order of Black Officers stated that "during the party last month, a ham was presented to [Brown]...a ritual gift of Old South vigilantes." Rev. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr.--then the executive director of the NAACP--told the Times that he heard of the ritual when he was growing up in eastern North Carolina. "It's something that white vigilantes would be rewarded with sometimes for committing acts of racial violence," Chavis said.
According to the Times, invitations to the party that were posted at police headquarters read: "Congratulate Don on a job well done (Keep up the good work)."
So Asher is only one high-profile member of a police force that has a long history of wrongdoing and a disturbing culture of tolerance for--if not outright support of--racist violence against African Americans.
For over a month--until Masslive.com published the video of the assault last week--city and police officials in Springfield, who had the video, made no mention of it or the investigation.
This lack of transparency is consistent with the city's pattern of keeping violent, racist cops on the streets, choosing to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers' dollars to settle with victims and their families rather than firing cops like Asher and Brown when they beat--or in the latter case, kill--African American residents who they claim to "protect and serve."
The beating of Melvin Jones III by Springfield police is yet another reminder that institutional racism is alive and well in the U.S.--and that police and government officials are unwilling to take concrete steps to reign in police officers who terrorize Black communities.
Too often, African American victims of police brutality end up dead at the hands of police who are not held accountable for their actions. Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell and Oscar Grant III are examples of police killings of Black people thrust into the national spotlight because activists refused to allow their deaths to go unnoticed.
According to a 2006 United Nations Human Rights Committee report, "The 'War on Terror' has created a generalized climate of impunity for law enforcement officers, and contributed to the erosion of what few accountability mechanisms exist for civilian control over law enforcement agencies. As a result, police brutality and abuse persist unabated and undeterred across the country."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
MASSLIVE.COM reported that Police Commissioner William J. Fitchet--who has had sole discretion to discipline officers involved in incidents of brutality since the abolition of the Police Commission in 2005--told 150 outraged community members at a forum on Friday, "We will get to the truth...you have got to have faith."
But some Springfield residents aren't taking Fitchet at his word, understanding that unless they take action, Springfield police will continue to terrorize African Americans.
On January 11, about 30 people gathered in front of the Federal building in downtown Springfield to demand justice for Melvin Jones III and call for an end to police brutality. The rally was called by ARISE for Social Justice and joined by members of Out Now, a local LGBTQ youth group; the International Socialist Organization; and Western Mass. Copwatch.
Behzad Samimi, a Springfield resident, connected the beating of Jones to the charges against Jason Vassell, an African American former University of Massachusetts student, who faces decades behind bars if convicted of charges stemming from his self-defense against two white men who attacked him in his dorm room while yelling racial slurs.
"It's a travesty of justice when a victim of a hate crime faces prison while repeat offenders are encouraged and get away with it, over and over," Samimi said. "All of these instances of racial profiling and hate crimes are connected...We the community must speak up and demand accountability and transparency."
Holly Richardson of ARISE, who organized the protest, said that beyond calling for the firing of officer Asher, protesters are demanding "a real, transparent civilian police review board" with the power to discipline police officers when they commit acts of brutality. Currently, "the board can only make recommendations, and they conduct their meetings behind closed doors," Richardson said. "The police end up monitoring themselves, which is never effective."
Richardson said ARISE and its allies plan to continue organizing to keep pressure on the city to hold Asher and the other officers accountable, address the issue of police brutality and "get at the root cause, which is institutionalized racism."
Shortly after the rally, Fitchet and Mayor Dominic Sarno announced guidelines for a "new civilian police commission" that, "if approved, it will have disciplinary authority." This is a step in the right direction, although it remains to be seen if this commission will be representative of those targeted by police brutality, and how transparent and effective it will be in practice.
However, even if it is all of these things, it won't be nearly enough. None of the officers on the scene at the beating of Melvin Jones III can be seen on the tape making any attempt to stop Asher. Greater civilian oversight is welcome, but further steps are needed to address the racist culture of the Springfield Police Department.
The announcement from the mayor and the police commissioner shows that the city is on the defensive and will grant reforms if pressured. That they waited over a month to take action, and only did so after the tape became public and the community responded with outrage shows that continued pressure is necessary to hold city and police officials accountable.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Taking the next step for equality
Published in Socialist Worker.
Community activists and students from five area colleges came together December 8 in Amherst, Mass., to hear presentations on the "state of LGBT inequality." The meeting was organized by the Western Massachusetts chapter of Equality Across America and took up a range of issues, including LGBT bashing and hate crimes legislation; employment discrimination and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; the "don't ask, don't tell" policy"; transgender inequality; same-sex marriage; and the need to change a section of Massachusetts law that associates homosexuality with pedophilia.
Gary Lapon, a founding member of the chapter and member of the International Socialist Organization, gave this talk titled "Why we need a movement."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THESE ARE difficult times. It has been more than 40 years since the Stonewall Rebellion launched the modern LGBT movement, and there is still pervasive social and institutional inequality.
However, the laws on the books are out of sync with public opinion. Some 89 percent of people in the U.S. oppose employment discrimination against LGBT people; two-thirds favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military; and over 50 percent support same-sex partnerships with the same rights and benefits as marriage. While only 40 percent of people support same-sex marriage, this is one-third more than the 30 percent who supported it five years ago.
And that is in the absence of a mass movement unapologetically demanding LGBT equality, which would do a lot to shift public opinion.
There are over 30 million LGBT people in this country, and tens of millions more who are allies. The contradiction between the laws on the books and the actual and potential public support for LGBT equality is wide enough to drive a movement through. If just a fraction of those people devoted themselves to the struggle for equality, we could build a movement involving hundreds of thousands of people.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ALMOST A year into the first term of President Barack Obama, with Democratic super-majorities in the House and Senate, it is clear that LGBT equality will not be handed down from on high. We must struggle for it from below. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "Without struggle, there is no progress."
This is why we organized buses to bring 150 people from Western Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., on October 11 for the National Equality March, joining a quarter of a million people to march on the Capitol building to demand full equality for LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states--now!
Many of the leading LGBT rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), opposed the march until the last minute, only offering limited support when it became clear the march was going to be a success. Many said it would be a waste of resources. Others, like openly gay Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, said it would have no impact--that the only thing we would be putting pressure on is "the grass."
However, after years of leading a state-by-state struggle for marriage equality and spending tens of millions of dollars--such as the $40 million spent on the failed effort to defeat Proposition 8 in California (including television ads that didn't even mention the word "gay"), as well as millions in campaign contributions to Democrats who do not support full equality--what has the corporate-sponsored "Gay, Inc." gotten us?
Marriage equality has been won in seven states, but it has been taken away in two, Maine and California, where a slim majority of voters were able to strip same-sex couples of their civil rights. And even in states like Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal, without over 1,000 federal benefits, it's still "separate and unequal."
We need a new strategy, one that sets as its goal full equality on the federal level, with no compromises and no more waiting and begging for crumbs. Like march organizer David Mixner said, we're equal, and we need to begin to act like it and demand our rights now!
President Obama was elected last year because his message of change, which included verbal support for LGBT rights, inspired LGBT people, youth and people of color to turn out to vote for him in record numbers. But what has he done? Of the dozens of items on the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's checklist of "low-hanging fruit"--steps towards equality that Obama could make with the stroke of a pen, including outlawing discrimination against transgender people in federal employment and recognition of homeless LGBT youth--only one has been checked off so far: more accurate accounting of same sex-couples on the census.
In the lead-up to the vote on Question 1 to repeal marriage equality in Maine this November, when asked where he stood, Attorney General Eric Holder--whose Justice Department in June, less than two weeks after Obama declared it LGBT Pride Month, defended the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in court by effectively comparing same-sex marriage to incest--said he didn't know enough to have a position.
Obama, who has said he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, had nothing to say about Question 1, and the day before the election, Obama's former campaign organization e-mailed Maine Democrats--asking them to call people in New Jersey to support Gov. Jon Corzine, with no mention of the marriage vote in Maine.
The Obama administration didn't step in to support marriage equality in New York, which was defeated last week after several Democrats voted against equality, and despite an international outcry over Bill 18 in Uganda, which would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or death, the Obama administration has yet to release a statement of condemnation. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THIS IS nothing new. In 1960, Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected having promised African Americans that he would oppose Jim Crow discrimination. However, like Obama, Kennedy did little unless he was forced to act. Instead, he attempted to keep the civil rights movement in check, and to negotiate with and appease bigots such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
He only intervened to protect activists from racist Southern brutality when the movement was able to thrust the issue into the national spotlight, making inaction no longer an option. In many cases, FBI agents and federal marshals stood by and watched as local and state police violated the constitutional rights of civil rights activists.
In fact, it wasn't until 1963, when thousands of Blacks led by Martin Luther King Jr. faced Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses to win a victory against segregation--exposing the brutality of Jim Crow racism to the eyes of the country and the world--that JFK introduced the Civil Rights Act that was enacted the next year. And it wasn't just Birmingham; there were marches, sit-ins and other campaigns in hundreds of cities and towns across the South, a mass movement involving thousands upon thousands of people.
The African American civil rights movement teaches us lessons that are vital for the success of our struggle for LGBT civil rights today--that it is possible for a mass movement of ordinary people, through determined action and effective leadership, motivated by love and a desire for equality, to triumph over the forces of bigotry and hatred, against odds greater than those that we face now; that we cannot rely on politicians to grant us equal rights, but that we must rely on ourselves to win them.
Politicians will not act in our favor unless they see that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action, a calculation based on conditions it is up to us to create. The civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win unless we are clear that we cannot wait--that we must unapologetically demand full equality now. To quote Frederick Douglass again, "Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
And the civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win city by city, and state by state. We face federal inequality, so we must build a movement that demands equality on the federal level.
Finally, we must forge unity and solidarity. Shamefully, some, such as Barney Frank and the HRC, have argued that it is "more realistic" to win civil rights for LGB people by leaving our transgender brothers and sisters behind. This has created justifiable resentment within the trans community, and we should strive to make Equality Across America an organization that is genuinely inclusive of trans people, and uncompromising when it comes to their civil rights and demands.
We should also reject other divisive ideas--such as those that scapegoated African Americans for the passage of Proposition 8--and build a movement that is inclusive of LGBT people of color and their demands. Both of these will require more than lip service: we will only forge these alliances by standing in concrete solidarity with movements for trans rights and racial justice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHILE THE civil rights movement could rely on the Black church to provide the movement with a framework, resources and a new generation of talented leaders like King, there is not an analogous institution in the LGBT community. However, as King wrote in "Why We Can't Wait," "Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually producing solutions. The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that enables them to perceive and capture the appropriate weapons to carve out their destiny."
Since November of 2008, when California's Proposition 8 banned gay marriage, tens of thousands took to the streets in California and across the country. This setback became a step forward: the launching of a new grassroots movement for LGBT equality. New organizations were founded by young people new to the struggle, as well as by seasoned activists reenergized by the explosion of anger following this bigoted attack on the rights of LGBT people.
Groups like One Struggle, One Fight in San Francisco have engaged in civil disobedience--for example, when hundreds shut down Van Ness Avenue, which leads to the Golden Gate Bridge, after the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. In San Diego, the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality staged a sit-in in a marriage license office to protest the California Supreme Court's upholding of Prop 8, where dozens of activists listened to a reading of Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
In Chicago, LGBT rights activists have forged alliances with immigrant rights and labor activists, standing in solidarity with Republic Windows & Doors workers who staged the first successful factory occupation in the U.S. since the 1930s. And on October 11, a quarter of a million people descended on Washington, D.D. to demand full LGBT equality, in a march organized by grassroots activists on a shoestring budget, without corporate sponsorship and without the assistance of mainstream LGBT organizations.
Now, we are taking the next step with the founding of Equality Across America. All around the country, including here in Western Massachusetts, dozens of groups of activists who built the march have founded chapters of Equality Across America (EAA), united around a single demand: full equality for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people--now! Regional conferences are being planned for this spring to build EAA, meet with one another and figure out how we can work together to win our demands.
Millions of people are on our side, and millions more will question their homophobia and transphobia if we build a movement to challenge them, just as the civil rights movement changed millions of minds about racism.
We can draw on the rich history of struggles against oppression: the civil rights movement, LGBT struggles of the past, the women's rights movement and the labor movement, among others. And we will have to create new strategies and tactics specific to today: sit-ins at marriage license offices, protests, campaigns to win support from student governments and other organizations, putting pressure on politicians, utilizing the media and creating our own media to get our message out.
We can and have sought allies from other struggles both locally and nationally, but it is critical that we maintain our political independence--that we do not support politicians who refuse to stand up for our rights. Like one popular sign at the National Equality March said: "Attention Democrats: the gay ATM is closed," and since then, a campaign has begun to cease all contributions to Democrats until they take concrete action on LGBT equality.
We must build a mass, independent, democratic, unapologetic movement from below, and to do that, we need you, your friends, fellow students, co-workers and thousands more people we have yet to meet. Join us not as passive supporters, but as agents in the shaping of our own collective destiny. History is on our side, and it shows us that such a movement can be built--despite what our high school textbooks tell us, history is made not by a few "great men," but by ordinary people who stand up and demand their rights.
We have come a long way. There are LGBT people today who remember when homosexuality was considered by psychiatrists to be a mental illness. Today, millions live out and proud, and millions more consider homophobia and transphobia to be unacceptable. We have a long struggle ahead, but we will get there. I hope you will join us in taking the next step on the road to equality together.
Community activists and students from five area colleges came together December 8 in Amherst, Mass., to hear presentations on the "state of LGBT inequality." The meeting was organized by the Western Massachusetts chapter of Equality Across America and took up a range of issues, including LGBT bashing and hate crimes legislation; employment discrimination and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act; the "don't ask, don't tell" policy"; transgender inequality; same-sex marriage; and the need to change a section of Massachusetts law that associates homosexuality with pedophilia.
Gary Lapon, a founding member of the chapter and member of the International Socialist Organization, gave this talk titled "Why we need a movement."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THESE ARE difficult times. It has been more than 40 years since the Stonewall Rebellion launched the modern LGBT movement, and there is still pervasive social and institutional inequality.
However, the laws on the books are out of sync with public opinion. Some 89 percent of people in the U.S. oppose employment discrimination against LGBT people; two-thirds favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military; and over 50 percent support same-sex partnerships with the same rights and benefits as marriage. While only 40 percent of people support same-sex marriage, this is one-third more than the 30 percent who supported it five years ago.
And that is in the absence of a mass movement unapologetically demanding LGBT equality, which would do a lot to shift public opinion.
There are over 30 million LGBT people in this country, and tens of millions more who are allies. The contradiction between the laws on the books and the actual and potential public support for LGBT equality is wide enough to drive a movement through. If just a fraction of those people devoted themselves to the struggle for equality, we could build a movement involving hundreds of thousands of people.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ALMOST A year into the first term of President Barack Obama, with Democratic super-majorities in the House and Senate, it is clear that LGBT equality will not be handed down from on high. We must struggle for it from below. As the abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "Without struggle, there is no progress."
This is why we organized buses to bring 150 people from Western Massachusetts to Washington, D.C., on October 11 for the National Equality March, joining a quarter of a million people to march on the Capitol building to demand full equality for LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states--now!
Many of the leading LGBT rights organizations, such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), opposed the march until the last minute, only offering limited support when it became clear the march was going to be a success. Many said it would be a waste of resources. Others, like openly gay Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, said it would have no impact--that the only thing we would be putting pressure on is "the grass."
However, after years of leading a state-by-state struggle for marriage equality and spending tens of millions of dollars--such as the $40 million spent on the failed effort to defeat Proposition 8 in California (including television ads that didn't even mention the word "gay"), as well as millions in campaign contributions to Democrats who do not support full equality--what has the corporate-sponsored "Gay, Inc." gotten us?
Marriage equality has been won in seven states, but it has been taken away in two, Maine and California, where a slim majority of voters were able to strip same-sex couples of their civil rights. And even in states like Massachusetts, where same-sex marriage is legal, without over 1,000 federal benefits, it's still "separate and unequal."
We need a new strategy, one that sets as its goal full equality on the federal level, with no compromises and no more waiting and begging for crumbs. Like march organizer David Mixner said, we're equal, and we need to begin to act like it and demand our rights now!
President Obama was elected last year because his message of change, which included verbal support for LGBT rights, inspired LGBT people, youth and people of color to turn out to vote for him in record numbers. But what has he done? Of the dozens of items on the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's checklist of "low-hanging fruit"--steps towards equality that Obama could make with the stroke of a pen, including outlawing discrimination against transgender people in federal employment and recognition of homeless LGBT youth--only one has been checked off so far: more accurate accounting of same sex-couples on the census.
In the lead-up to the vote on Question 1 to repeal marriage equality in Maine this November, when asked where he stood, Attorney General Eric Holder--whose Justice Department in June, less than two weeks after Obama declared it LGBT Pride Month, defended the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act in court by effectively comparing same-sex marriage to incest--said he didn't know enough to have a position.
Obama, who has said he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, had nothing to say about Question 1, and the day before the election, Obama's former campaign organization e-mailed Maine Democrats--asking them to call people in New Jersey to support Gov. Jon Corzine, with no mention of the marriage vote in Maine.
The Obama administration didn't step in to support marriage equality in New York, which was defeated last week after several Democrats voted against equality, and despite an international outcry over Bill 18 in Uganda, which would make homosexuality punishable by life imprisonment or death, the Obama administration has yet to release a statement of condemnation. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, "There comes a time when silence is betrayal."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
THIS IS nothing new. In 1960, Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected having promised African Americans that he would oppose Jim Crow discrimination. However, like Obama, Kennedy did little unless he was forced to act. Instead, he attempted to keep the civil rights movement in check, and to negotiate with and appease bigots such as Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
He only intervened to protect activists from racist Southern brutality when the movement was able to thrust the issue into the national spotlight, making inaction no longer an option. In many cases, FBI agents and federal marshals stood by and watched as local and state police violated the constitutional rights of civil rights activists.
In fact, it wasn't until 1963, when thousands of Blacks led by Martin Luther King Jr. faced Bull Connor's police dogs and fire hoses to win a victory against segregation--exposing the brutality of Jim Crow racism to the eyes of the country and the world--that JFK introduced the Civil Rights Act that was enacted the next year. And it wasn't just Birmingham; there were marches, sit-ins and other campaigns in hundreds of cities and towns across the South, a mass movement involving thousands upon thousands of people.
The African American civil rights movement teaches us lessons that are vital for the success of our struggle for LGBT civil rights today--that it is possible for a mass movement of ordinary people, through determined action and effective leadership, motivated by love and a desire for equality, to triumph over the forces of bigotry and hatred, against odds greater than those that we face now; that we cannot rely on politicians to grant us equal rights, but that we must rely on ourselves to win them.
Politicians will not act in our favor unless they see that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of action, a calculation based on conditions it is up to us to create. The civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win unless we are clear that we cannot wait--that we must unapologetically demand full equality now. To quote Frederick Douglass again, "Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
And the civil rights movement taught us that we cannot win city by city, and state by state. We face federal inequality, so we must build a movement that demands equality on the federal level.
Finally, we must forge unity and solidarity. Shamefully, some, such as Barney Frank and the HRC, have argued that it is "more realistic" to win civil rights for LGB people by leaving our transgender brothers and sisters behind. This has created justifiable resentment within the trans community, and we should strive to make Equality Across America an organization that is genuinely inclusive of trans people, and uncompromising when it comes to their civil rights and demands.
We should also reject other divisive ideas--such as those that scapegoated African Americans for the passage of Proposition 8--and build a movement that is inclusive of LGBT people of color and their demands. Both of these will require more than lip service: we will only forge these alliances by standing in concrete solidarity with movements for trans rights and racial justice.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHILE THE civil rights movement could rely on the Black church to provide the movement with a framework, resources and a new generation of talented leaders like King, there is not an analogous institution in the LGBT community. However, as King wrote in "Why We Can't Wait," "Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually producing solutions. The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that enables them to perceive and capture the appropriate weapons to carve out their destiny."
Since November of 2008, when California's Proposition 8 banned gay marriage, tens of thousands took to the streets in California and across the country. This setback became a step forward: the launching of a new grassroots movement for LGBT equality. New organizations were founded by young people new to the struggle, as well as by seasoned activists reenergized by the explosion of anger following this bigoted attack on the rights of LGBT people.
Groups like One Struggle, One Fight in San Francisco have engaged in civil disobedience--for example, when hundreds shut down Van Ness Avenue, which leads to the Golden Gate Bridge, after the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. In San Diego, the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality staged a sit-in in a marriage license office to protest the California Supreme Court's upholding of Prop 8, where dozens of activists listened to a reading of Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
In Chicago, LGBT rights activists have forged alliances with immigrant rights and labor activists, standing in solidarity with Republic Windows & Doors workers who staged the first successful factory occupation in the U.S. since the 1930s. And on October 11, a quarter of a million people descended on Washington, D.D. to demand full LGBT equality, in a march organized by grassroots activists on a shoestring budget, without corporate sponsorship and without the assistance of mainstream LGBT organizations.
Now, we are taking the next step with the founding of Equality Across America. All around the country, including here in Western Massachusetts, dozens of groups of activists who built the march have founded chapters of Equality Across America (EAA), united around a single demand: full equality for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people--now! Regional conferences are being planned for this spring to build EAA, meet with one another and figure out how we can work together to win our demands.
Millions of people are on our side, and millions more will question their homophobia and transphobia if we build a movement to challenge them, just as the civil rights movement changed millions of minds about racism.
We can draw on the rich history of struggles against oppression: the civil rights movement, LGBT struggles of the past, the women's rights movement and the labor movement, among others. And we will have to create new strategies and tactics specific to today: sit-ins at marriage license offices, protests, campaigns to win support from student governments and other organizations, putting pressure on politicians, utilizing the media and creating our own media to get our message out.
We can and have sought allies from other struggles both locally and nationally, but it is critical that we maintain our political independence--that we do not support politicians who refuse to stand up for our rights. Like one popular sign at the National Equality March said: "Attention Democrats: the gay ATM is closed," and since then, a campaign has begun to cease all contributions to Democrats until they take concrete action on LGBT equality.
We must build a mass, independent, democratic, unapologetic movement from below, and to do that, we need you, your friends, fellow students, co-workers and thousands more people we have yet to meet. Join us not as passive supporters, but as agents in the shaping of our own collective destiny. History is on our side, and it shows us that such a movement can be built--despite what our high school textbooks tell us, history is made not by a few "great men," but by ordinary people who stand up and demand their rights.
We have come a long way. There are LGBT people today who remember when homosexuality was considered by psychiatrists to be a mental illness. Today, millions live out and proud, and millions more consider homophobia and transphobia to be unacceptable. We have a long struggle ahead, but we will get there. I hope you will join us in taking the next step on the road to equality together.
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Facing cuts instead of "reform"
Published in Socialist Worker.
I WORK in health care in Massachusetts, where the "reform" enacted several years ago is supposed to be the model for national proposals.
There has been a perfect storm of bad news this week that shows how twisted the government's priorities are, and exposes the lie that measures--like in Massachusetts, which requires the uninsured to purchase private health insurance--will provide health care for all.
This week, Barack Obama announced that 30,000 more troops will be sent to Afghanistan, an unjust occupation. The U.S. has no right to occupy Afghanistan or anywhere else, and more troops will mean more injury and death for Afghan civilians and U.S. soldiers.
At a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year, this will increase spending by $30 billion. Money that should be used to build is being used to destroy, and to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the bombs that are being dropped abroad are exploding at home.
Last month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities announced that 35 states face additional mid-fiscal year shortfalls of a total of about $32 billion.
The $30 billion that will go to escalate the war in Afghanistan could have been used to prevent the further budget cuts that will come as a result of these shortfalls--as could the over $32 billion in bonuses paid out this year by the top nine banks, as they profit from taxpayer bailouts.
Here in Massachusetts, there is a budget shortfall of $600 million. This will mean cuts in services to the most vulnerable. Here are some proposed cuts:
-- MassHealth, which is expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income people, will only provide adult dental coverage for cleanings and extractions (pulling teeth). So if you are poor and you have a cavity, if you can't afford to pay the full cost of a filling (which most poor and working people can't), your only option is to have the tooth pulled. This will have a devastating impact on quality of life, employability and self-esteem, as people will literally lose their teeth (and lack coverage for dentures).
-- MassHealth is also cutting the hours of services from personal care assistants (PCAs), who provide assistance to the elderly and the disabled that is critical in allowing them to stay in their homes and live independent lives. Many people will be forced to leave their homes and enter nursing homes and other facilities, and many of the PCAs themselves, already grossly underpaid, will lose their jobs.
-- This comes on top of cuts to other vital services for low-income people. For example, Gov. Deval Patrick is cutting $4.4 million to the Child Care Resource and Referral program, which in 2008 provided child care vouchers for 57,000 children in low-income working families so that their parents can work.
This could cripple this critical program, with devastating results. Child care is so expensive that workers facing low wages and cuts in hours will have to choose between quitting their jobs or leaving their children unattended or in other unsafe environments. And child care workers, also underpaid, will be laid off.
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WHAT KIND of a life can one have with no teeth and no dentures to replace them? Why should disabled people who are perfectly capable of living independent lives be denied the services they need to do so? What kind of future will children have after spending their early years left at home without proper supervision just so their parents can work to feed them? And what chance do laid-off child care workers and PCAs have, given that there are six people applying for each job opening and their wages are low enough to make survival, let alone saving, difficult?
It doesn't have to be this way.
A recent article in the Atlantic shows that those who will suffer from these cuts can unite and fight back. The article profiles a Massachusetts man named George Birk, who suffered brain damage after being hit by a car when he was a child. He is able to work and live on his own today, but only because of state mental health services that were on the chopping block recently.
Instead of letting the state cut the funding that allows George and people like him to live in the community, instead of in an institutional setting, George and 800 other clients and mental health workers marched on the Department of Mental Health and the State House to protest the cuts. Governor Patrick ended up not cutting that funding.
We can't let the government get away with cutting education, health care, social and human services, and the jobs of the workers who provide them. Students, professors and workers in California are standing together, as did clients and mental health workers in Massachusetts.
It's going to take a mass movement to prevent and reverse these cuts, and the way to build that movement is to protest and resist, to force the cuts and their devastating impact out of the shadowy backrooms of state bureaucracies and into the light of day, where they are visible to the majority of people in this country--people who are sick and tired of money going to line the pockets of already wealthy and to kill people overseas, while we are expected to do more with less here at home.
I WORK in health care in Massachusetts, where the "reform" enacted several years ago is supposed to be the model for national proposals.
There has been a perfect storm of bad news this week that shows how twisted the government's priorities are, and exposes the lie that measures--like in Massachusetts, which requires the uninsured to purchase private health insurance--will provide health care for all.
This week, Barack Obama announced that 30,000 more troops will be sent to Afghanistan, an unjust occupation. The U.S. has no right to occupy Afghanistan or anywhere else, and more troops will mean more injury and death for Afghan civilians and U.S. soldiers.
At a cost of about $1 million per soldier per year, this will increase spending by $30 billion. Money that should be used to build is being used to destroy, and to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the bombs that are being dropped abroad are exploding at home.
Last month, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities announced that 35 states face additional mid-fiscal year shortfalls of a total of about $32 billion.
The $30 billion that will go to escalate the war in Afghanistan could have been used to prevent the further budget cuts that will come as a result of these shortfalls--as could the over $32 billion in bonuses paid out this year by the top nine banks, as they profit from taxpayer bailouts.
Here in Massachusetts, there is a budget shortfall of $600 million. This will mean cuts in services to the most vulnerable. Here are some proposed cuts:
-- MassHealth, which is expanded Medicaid coverage for low-income people, will only provide adult dental coverage for cleanings and extractions (pulling teeth). So if you are poor and you have a cavity, if you can't afford to pay the full cost of a filling (which most poor and working people can't), your only option is to have the tooth pulled. This will have a devastating impact on quality of life, employability and self-esteem, as people will literally lose their teeth (and lack coverage for dentures).
-- MassHealth is also cutting the hours of services from personal care assistants (PCAs), who provide assistance to the elderly and the disabled that is critical in allowing them to stay in their homes and live independent lives. Many people will be forced to leave their homes and enter nursing homes and other facilities, and many of the PCAs themselves, already grossly underpaid, will lose their jobs.
-- This comes on top of cuts to other vital services for low-income people. For example, Gov. Deval Patrick is cutting $4.4 million to the Child Care Resource and Referral program, which in 2008 provided child care vouchers for 57,000 children in low-income working families so that their parents can work.
This could cripple this critical program, with devastating results. Child care is so expensive that workers facing low wages and cuts in hours will have to choose between quitting their jobs or leaving their children unattended or in other unsafe environments. And child care workers, also underpaid, will be laid off.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
WHAT KIND of a life can one have with no teeth and no dentures to replace them? Why should disabled people who are perfectly capable of living independent lives be denied the services they need to do so? What kind of future will children have after spending their early years left at home without proper supervision just so their parents can work to feed them? And what chance do laid-off child care workers and PCAs have, given that there are six people applying for each job opening and their wages are low enough to make survival, let alone saving, difficult?
It doesn't have to be this way.
A recent article in the Atlantic shows that those who will suffer from these cuts can unite and fight back. The article profiles a Massachusetts man named George Birk, who suffered brain damage after being hit by a car when he was a child. He is able to work and live on his own today, but only because of state mental health services that were on the chopping block recently.
Instead of letting the state cut the funding that allows George and people like him to live in the community, instead of in an institutional setting, George and 800 other clients and mental health workers marched on the Department of Mental Health and the State House to protest the cuts. Governor Patrick ended up not cutting that funding.
We can't let the government get away with cutting education, health care, social and human services, and the jobs of the workers who provide them. Students, professors and workers in California are standing together, as did clients and mental health workers in Massachusetts.
It's going to take a mass movement to prevent and reverse these cuts, and the way to build that movement is to protest and resist, to force the cuts and their devastating impact out of the shadowy backrooms of state bureaucracies and into the light of day, where they are visible to the majority of people in this country--people who are sick and tired of money going to line the pockets of already wealthy and to kill people overseas, while we are expected to do more with less here at home.
Monday, November 16, 2009
Wall Street swine and the vaccine scandal
Published in Socialist Worker.
IT WAS adding insult and injury to injury.
With hospitals, doctor's offices, clinics and schools around the country waiting on scarce supplies of the swine flu vaccine, Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup ordered up more than 1,000 doses between them for company doctors to administer to their employees in New York City.
Distribution of the vaccine is a national scandal, but people's anger was compounded by the news that the banksters jumped to the head of the line. "Wall Street banks have already taken so much from us," John VanDeventer of the Service Employees International Union wrote on the union's Web site. "They've taken trillions of our tax dollars. They've taken away people's homes who are struggling to pay the bills. But they should not be allowed to take away our health and well-being."
But as disgusting as Wall Street's arrogant behavior is, the bigger picture is more serious and much scarier--thousands of people are dying preventable deaths, and millions are becoming seriously ill because the U.S. government's response to the swine flu pandemic relies on a for-profit pharmaceutical industry that prioritizes profits over people and a public health infrastructure that has been gutted by budget cuts.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 3,900 U.S. residents have died from swine flu--the strain of the flu virus officially known as H1N1--since April (540 of them children). That's almost four times higher than previous death toll announced by the CDC--and meanwhile, only 5 percent of Americans report having received the vaccine. Even before the Centers' dramatically higher death tolls were released, President Obama declared a national state of emergency because of the pandemic.
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HOW DID this happen? A recent USA Today/Gallup poll found [1] that "58 percent place a great deal or moderate amount of the blame for the lack of vaccine on the federal government...and 62 percent blame drug companies."
President Obama promised in July that 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine would be available by the end of October. The Department of Health and Human Services revised that estimate to 40 million and then to 28 million--enough doses for just 17.6 percent of the 159 million Americans considered to be at high risk for swine flu.
The government had plenty of time to prepare. Scientists have been predicting this crisis for years--a virulent strain of the flu virus among animals developing into a strain that affects humans, and spreading rapidly because no one has immunity to it. The specific form of H1N1 that made the jump to humans was discovered in pigs in 1998.
As Mike Davis, author of The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu [2], wrote in an article for SocialistWorker.org earlier this year [3], "[T]he central paradox of this swine flu panic is that while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted." Researchers, Davis said, "urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu. That admonition, of course, went unheeded in a Washington."
The federal government, which can find trillions of dollars for the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and to bail out Wall Street, hasn't devoted enough resources to build the public health infrastructure necessary to develop and distribute vaccines to protect the population. Instead, it relies on the pharmaceutical industry.
The government awarded $2 billion in contracts for the production of 195 million doses of H1N1 vaccine to the for-profit pharmaceutical companies Norvartis, Sanofi-aventis, GlaxoSmithKline, CSL Limited and MedImmune--but these companies so far have delivered just 20 percent of the original order.
As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in an article on TomDispatch.com [4], the shortage is due to complications involving these companies' use of outdated technology from the 1950s, which involves growing vaccine in chicken eggs.
Rather than invest in developing more efficient, reliable and effective ways to manufacture vaccines, which "can be tricky and less than maximally profitable to manufacture...Big Pharma...[traditionally prefers] to manufacture drugs for such plagues as erectile dysfunction, social anxiety, and restless leg syndrome," Ehrenreich wrote.
Congress--which voted to cut federal funding to ACORN after a handful of its employees were caught on tape offering advice on how to evade taxes to a couple right-wingers--has so far remained silent about the federal government's contract with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which has a long history of wrongdoing.
In 2003, GSK paid an $88 million fine for overcharging the government's Medicaid health program for low-income people, and in 2007, it paid an Internal Revenue Service fine of $3.1 billion after allegedly using "transfer pricing" to dodge paying billions in taxes, the largest tax settlement in history. And in 2008, an FDA official accused GSK of attempting to "sugar-coat" the increased risk of suicide among children taking its anti-depressant Paxil.
Exacerbating the vaccine shortage is the inability of state and local health departments to effectively distribute what has been produced. According to Reuters [5], Dr. Anne Schuchat of the CDC told a Senate health subcommittee that her agency has had difficulties reaching state and local health officials who are on furlough because of budget cuts that have come as a result of state budget shortfalls--in a system already weakened by 15,000 job cuts over the past two years.
But there's one player in all this that isn't suffering--the pharmaceutical industry. The drug giants stand to make a hefty profit off of swine flu vaccines--estimates range from $7.6 billion to $18 billion in sales worldwide, depending on severity of the pandemic.
Meanwhile, people are waiting in long lines for hours for vaccines that haven't been produced or distributed. In late October, ABC News reported on a typical scene [6]: hundreds lined up starting at 9 a.m. at a makeshift clinic in a Chicago school, scheduled to open at 3 p.m., only to be turned away 30 minutes after the clinic opened because there weren't enough doses to go around.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
SOME PEOPLE have drawn comparisons between the government's botched handling of the pandemic and its failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Another parallel to Katrina is apparent when you see who is most impacted by swine flu. According to the New York Daily News [7], "[H]alf of the H1N1 children's deaths between April and August were among African Americans and Hispanics," though these groups account for only around one-third of children in the U.S.
Like the poor and mostly African American residents of New Orleans left behind to endure the Katrina disaster, poverty and racism are the main factors behind why Blacks and Latinos are at greater risk for complications arising from swine flu. According to USA Today, these groups are "four times more likely [than whites] to be hospitalized with the virus."
Not only are African Americans at greater risk, they are less likely to seek or receive the vaccine. According to the Los Angeles Times [8], "African Americans received 2.57 percent of the initial 60,773 vaccinations [in LA County], although they make up about 9 percent of the county population."
Loretta Jones of Healthy African American Families in South LA blames the low turnout on distrust of the health care system. One stark reason for that distrust, Jones said, was the "Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which lasted from 1932 to 1972, in which federal researchers withheld treatment from Black men." But, said Jones, "it's more than the legacy of Tuskegee--it's a whole lifetime of poor access to health care."
Like the uninsured patient who goes to the dentist with a toothache, only to discover a mouth full of decay, the swine flu pandemic has revealed the consequences of decades of privatization and cuts to public health and social services--with the effects hitting working-class people, and especially people of color, hardest.
Instead of vaccinating the swine on Wall Street, the government should tax them and use the revenues to produce vaccines and other drugs that are accessible and affordable for all.
- [1] http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-11-10-swineflupoll10_ST_N.htm
- [2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FMonster-Our-Door-Global-Threat%2Fdp%2F0805081917%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1240810647%26sr%3D8-2&tag=socialistwork-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325
- [3] http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/27/capitalism-and-the-flu
- [4] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175134/barbara_ehrenreich_why_your_child_may_not_get_a_swine_flu_shot_soon
- [5] http://www.reuters.com/article/internal_ReutersNewsRoom_ExclusivesAndWins_MOLT/idUSTRE5A557920091110
- [6] http://abcnews.go.com/WN/SwineFluNews/swine-flu-vaccine-lines-hours/story?id=8930589
- [7] http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/10/07/2009-10-07_unspoken_minority_toll_swine_flus_bigger_impact_on_blacks_and_hispanics_is_not_b.html
- [8] http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-me-minority-flu-vaccine11-2009nov11,0,6574467.story
- [9] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0
Thursday, November 5, 2009
DC March for Equality: A Success
Published in the Rainbow Times
by J.M. Sorrell and Gary Lapon
JM:
Early last summer, I heard that a grassroots national march was being considered for LGBT equality in DC. My immediate internal response was to feel we should have a bus from western Massachusetts. A woman I met at a rally suggested I contact Gary Lapon, an ally and a socialist, to help with organizing.
We met regularly and began spreading the word. Before I knew it, Gary reserved TWO buses and was convinced they would be filled. He met with Five College students, and helped inspire a third bus (Hampshire College).
My two jobs precluded me from going to DC, so I was happy to support the process and be with Gary in spirit. Gary did fill those buses, and I suspect there is no stopping him as the work continues. He is one of my heroes. I asked him these questions:
JM: Describe your interest in the march. How did you come to this place?
I was excited by the response to the passage of Proposition 8, which took away same-sex marriage in California. Tens of thousands of predominately young people took to the streets in anger in California, joined by similar numbers across the country. I take a principled stand against all forms of oppression and believe that real change requires the self-activity of regular people, so I was inspired by reports of a new, youthful, diverse, largely working class LGBT movement and wanted to help it take the next step: a national march for full civil equality.
The contradiction between growing support for LGBT equality and the discrimination still on the books at the federal, state, and local level is large enough to drive a movement through, and given the hopes and confidence of a young generation that just played a leading role in electing an African American President in a country based on slavery, I became convinced that the potential exists to build a new civil rights movement for LGBT equality.
I met a wonderful group of activists who came together to make this happen; the Rainbow Times, Pride & Joy, Out For Reel film festival, and Amherst Community Television all provided us with free publicity, which is greatly appreciated.
JM: What excited you the most about your experience at the DC march/rally? Any surprises?
I was surprised by the turnout of over 200,000 people. The march was organized in large part by new activists with limited resources, only 1 paid organizer, less than $250,000, no corporate sponsorship, and very little assistance or support from mainstream LGBT rights organizations.
Given these factors, I thought that 50,000 would be a success. That so many people came out is a testament to effectiveness of independent grassroots organizing, and the demand – full civil equality for LGBT people in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states, now – resonated with people who, as lead march organizer Sherry Wolf writes, are sick of “begging for crumbs.”
I was excited to collaborate with the Graduate Employees' Organization (UAW Local 2322) at UMass Amherst, whose financial support was essential. Christopher Sweetapple, a GEO organizer who played a leading role, explained the need for labor to support LGBT equality:
“Economic justice is crucial to fighting all other forms of oppression, and thus unions like ours support the struggles of many minorities--LGBT people against homo/transphobia, but also the struggles of non-whites against persistent racial oppression, women against...misogyny and people of differing physical abilities to find accommodation and respect in society...second, there are members within our unions--gay men, trans and bisexual people, lesbians-- who suffer from legalized discrimination right now...”
Also inspiring was the talent and enthusiasm of students from UMass and Hampshire College. Madeline Burrows, Hampshire class of 2013 and a leader in bringing a bus of over 50 Hampshire students, explained:
“This generation of students [faces] a looming contradiction: we’ve grown up in a society far more open to sexuality and gender variance than ever before, but LGBT Americans lack basic civil rights. With huge budget cuts less students are able to afford college...lacking job security due to discrimination takes on a whole new meaning in this economic crisis. Students played a leading role in the sit-ins that sparked the civil rights movement that overthrew Jim Crow in the 1960s, and students today are playing a leading role in initiating building a civil rights front on college campuses across the country.”
JM: What now?
The next step is to build a local chapter of Equality Across America (over 20 of us are already involved), composed of students and others, to continue to educate, agitate, and organize for LGBT civil rights.
We need your talent and energy, whether you're LGBT or an ally, a student or a worker, an experienced activist or someone getting involved for the first time. Join us and let's make history by making LGBT inequality history!
Check us out online at equalitywmass.blogspot.com and get involved in our era's civil rights movement!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Betting on our deaths
Originally published at Socialist Worker. Also published at Dissident Voice.
WITH THE home mortgage crisis dragging along, consumer borrowing still lagging, and crises looming in other sectors like commercial real estate, Wall Street is desperate for a new product to kick-start securities markets.
It appears as though the savior may be riding in on a pale horse.
According to a September 5 New York Times article, banks like Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs are exploring new investment schemes that involve buying up life insurance policies from sick and elderly people, bundling them into huge securities, and selling shares in the securities to investors.
Buying shares is essentially a bet--that the people whose insurance policies on which the securities are based will die "on time" or earlier than expected. According to the Times, "The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return--though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money."
Just when it seemed impossible for Wall Street--still counting the trillions in taxpayer dollars it received in a government bailout to save it from collapse--to sink any lower, greed came to the rescue with the development of a grim new market.
As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere."
Now, the financial crisis has driven capitalists to the nursing and retirement homes, and to the bedsides of the sick and dying.
The credit rating agency DBRS--whose Senior Vice President Kathleen Tillwitz informed the Times that "our phones have been ringing off the hook with inquiries"--is studying how to rate pools of life insurance policies. The main challenge is figuring out how to pool people together. As the Times wrote:
The solution? A bond made up of life settlements would ideally have policies from people with a range of diseases--leukemia, lung cancer, heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's. That is because if too many people with leukemia are in the securitization portfolio, and a cure is developed, the value of the bond would plummet.
If the sub-prime mortgage market boom is any indication, an increased demand for existing life insurance policies spurred by increased securitization would lead to widespread abuse and fraud--with insurers faced with the same incentives that encouraged mortgage brokers to deceive borrowers with "teaser" interest rates that ballooned several years into repayment.
In this case, the victims would be the elderly, the sick, and those who depend on life insurance benefit payouts in the case of the death of a loved one.
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A FURTHER element of instability would be added if life insurance-backed securities take off--the likely proliferation of illegal "stranger-owned life insurance" or "STOLI" policies.
A STOLI is a policy created when a broker or investor convinces someone, usually a senior citizen, to take out a life insurance policy, with the promise to sell it quickly for a one-time payment. According to Reuters, "The death benefits are immediately transferred to investors, usually hedge funds."
The securitization of life insurance policies would likely lead to an increase in the number of illegal STOLIs, once the banks exhaust the possibilities of buying up existing, legitimate policies to package into securities. In turn, insurance companies would have an incentive to crack down on this practice to avoid paying death benefits to the investors, leaving the market prone to crisis.
Other challenges for a credit rating agency like DBRS include figuring out what "would happen if health reform passed, for example, and better care for a large number of Americans meant that people generally started living longer? Or if a magic-bullet cure for all types of cancer was developed?" These eventualities, while prolonging and improving the lives of millions, would be bad for investors' bottom line.
The "potential risk for investors," the Times continued, is that "some people could live far longer than expected. It is not just a hypothetical risk. That is what happened in the 1980s, when new treatments prolonged the life of AIDS patients. Investors who bought their policies on the expectation that the most victims would die within two years ended up losing money."
According to an ABC News story:
The industry for selling life insurance [policies to investors] first sprang up
during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s. "Companies loved AIDS because it was
a predictable death sentence," says Gloria Wolk, a life-settlement expert who
learned about the practice while volunteering at AIDS services clinics. "The
shorter and more certain the life expectancy, the higher the returns promised to
investors and the greater the lump sum offered to patients. It was a grim mix of
free-market capitalism and human mortality."
Wolk nevertheless said she "saw the industry make a huge difference in the lives of terminally ill patients and their families"--by providing victims with funds to pay for the exorbitant health care and other costs associated with dying from AIDS, while it was ignored a government run by Ronald Reagan.
The only conceivable defense of the practice of bundling life insurance policies into securities and selling them to investors to profit from the deaths of policyholders is that it enables those who sell their policies to get more than they would if they simply sold policies back to the insurance company.
But this option is only attractive because health care costs in the U.S. place quality care out of reach--for the nearly 50 million people without health insurance, and for tens of millions more who are insured, but can't afford the co-pays and deductibles that pile up when they get sick or injured.
Similarly, for the elderly whose retirement savings have been eroded by the current crisis, the inadequacy of Social Security, and by the long-term shift defined-benefit pension plans to 401(k)s based on the stock market, the main reason most would be tempted to sell their life insurance policies is that our government neglects to provide a decent standard of living for elderly workers who have outlived their usefulness to the exploiting class.
In other words, the market for securities backed by life insurance policies depends on the absence of universal single-payer health care for all and the lack of a sufficient social safety net for senior citizens.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ALMOST AS disturbing as first-tier financial institutions betting on death is the matter-of-fact reporting of the New York Times.
The Times article, titled "Wall Street Pursues Profit in Bundles of Life Insurance," ignores completely the question of the morality of human beings gambling on the lives of others, indexing the sick based on the nature of their affliction and when it is likely to kill them, and crossing their fingers that no cure for cancer is discovered. This is a brilliant illustration of Marx's assertion that capitalism "has left no other bond between [people] than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment.""
It says a lot about capitalist society's brutality and indifference to human life that the newspaper of record could cover this story without pause, going no deeper than the pros and cons from the perspective of investors--while "Ads by Google" accompany the story, inviting readers to "sell your life insurance policy" and "find low cost life insurance."
Nor does the Times question the logic of devoting massive wealth to a market that creates no new value in the form of goods or services, and is of no use to anyone but the few who will profit from it.
According to the Times article, there are $26 trillion in life insurance policies in the U.S, and "some in the industry predict the market [for life-insurance-backed securities] could reach $500 billion." That sum is nearly three times the total of all the budget shortfalls of every state government for fiscal year 2010.
A just society based on human need would use that $500 billion to preserve and expand essential services that are on the chopping block as states balance their budgets.
A just society based on human need would devote those resources not to betting on death, but providing top quality care to the sick, researching new cures and treatments (and making them available to all), and ensuring that the elderly live the last years of their lives in dignity and security.
According to the economic "experts," the U.S. economy is beginning to "recover." But the very nature of the recovery--a return to big bonuses and salaries for Wall Street executives alongside deepening and sustained unemployment, cuts in social services and health care "reform" that amounts to a massive government handout to the health insurance industry--demolishes any idea that the U.S. is not a class society.
It is time to build the socialist alternative. Our lives and dignity depend on it.
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Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Time to march for LGBT rights
Originally published in Socialist Worker.
MARK SNYDER of QueerToday.com asks "Why the National Equality March?" pointing to the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC) recent endorsement of the march, the lack of a day dedicated to HIV/AIDS issues, and the fact that "the resources that support the infrastructure of" the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community are incredibly drained.
I appreciate that Snyder is raising these issues, because I believe they illustrate why it is so important to go all out to mobilize people to go to Washington, D.C., for the October 11 march.
The first point to make is that, in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8, there has been a significant resurgence of activism around LGBT rights--from protests to civil disobedience to the formation of new grassroots organizations, often organized by, and including, thousands of people who have never engaged in activism before.
As socialists and leftists, we should be supportive of this and get involved, which we have done and are doing by organizing for the National Equality March (NEM). The NEM, which is being built by many of the people and organizations drawn in by this resurgence, is a fantastic opportunity to bring these new forces together to demand civil equality, get a sense of our numbers and strength, draw new people in, and make new connections to strengthen already existing and build new grassroots organizations in our local communities to continue the struggle on October 12 and beyond.
We are not simply organizing to protest, but protesting to organize, using the march to get more people involved in the struggle for LGBT civil rights and LGBT liberation.
Snyder is right to point out, if I am correct in assuming that he means funds available for political organizing and social, health and community services, that the resources that form the infrastructure of the LGBT community are drained.
That's all the more reason to put what resources we can muster into getting more people and organizations together, and building a movement that can put significant pressure on Obama and Congress to force them to pass reforms granting not just civil equality but also demanding funding for services that would benefit the LGBT community (and beyond).
And if you look at the list of endorsements on the NEM Web site, you'll notice that it has brought together a diverse array of organizations that represent a broad range of oppressed and exploited people (labor, immigrants, LGBT, African Americans, etc.). This march is a positive step in the direction of the formation of the broad left that is necessary to build the infrastructure and develop the resources we need to win the changes our communities desperately need, changes qualitatively beyond those we can make by being conservative hoarding the few resources we have now.
Third, it's important to make a statement on the national level, to put pressure on Obama for his inaction on LGBT issues and to raise awareness of the true extent of civil inequality that LGBT people face in this country.
For example, many people I've been talking with about the march were not aware, and were outraged to find out, that employment discrimination against LGBT people is still legal in most states. Eighty-nine percent of U.S. residents oppose such discrimination, so the contradiction between that and the laws on the books in states across the country represents the potential for a mass movement. If even a fraction of these people become involved in the struggle for equality, that's still millions of people--a leap forward from where we are today.
Finally, the HRC has recently endorsed the march. I think that the HRC leadership realizes that this march has real potential, because it represents the desires (for uncompromising, full civil equality now) of millions of people, including HRC supporters. HRC has said that they want the marchers to go back to their communities and become citizen lobbyists.
I think that a better strategy for winning LGBT rights is to become grassroots activists, independent of the Democratic Party, and to link this struggle to those of all the oppressed and exploited. But I will still march with HRC to demand full civil equality for LGBT people, while maintaining my political independence and expressing my views. In fact, I think it's vital that I and other socialists be there, so that our politics get a hearing, not just those advocating support for and working with the Democratic Party.
Thousands of people, many of them new to activism and open to different ideas on how to achieve equality for LGBT people and beyond, will be marching on Washington, D.C., on October 11.
It is up to us to be there, to be vocal about what we think it will take to win the change we really need and, as Harvey Milk was fond of saying, to recruit them to our movement.
I hope to see you in D.C. this October!
MARK SNYDER of QueerToday.com asks "Why the National Equality March?" pointing to the Human Rights Campaign's (HRC) recent endorsement of the march, the lack of a day dedicated to HIV/AIDS issues, and the fact that "the resources that support the infrastructure of" the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community are incredibly drained.
I appreciate that Snyder is raising these issues, because I believe they illustrate why it is so important to go all out to mobilize people to go to Washington, D.C., for the October 11 march.
The first point to make is that, in the wake of the passage of Proposition 8, there has been a significant resurgence of activism around LGBT rights--from protests to civil disobedience to the formation of new grassroots organizations, often organized by, and including, thousands of people who have never engaged in activism before.
As socialists and leftists, we should be supportive of this and get involved, which we have done and are doing by organizing for the National Equality March (NEM). The NEM, which is being built by many of the people and organizations drawn in by this resurgence, is a fantastic opportunity to bring these new forces together to demand civil equality, get a sense of our numbers and strength, draw new people in, and make new connections to strengthen already existing and build new grassroots organizations in our local communities to continue the struggle on October 12 and beyond.
We are not simply organizing to protest, but protesting to organize, using the march to get more people involved in the struggle for LGBT civil rights and LGBT liberation.
Snyder is right to point out, if I am correct in assuming that he means funds available for political organizing and social, health and community services, that the resources that form the infrastructure of the LGBT community are drained.
That's all the more reason to put what resources we can muster into getting more people and organizations together, and building a movement that can put significant pressure on Obama and Congress to force them to pass reforms granting not just civil equality but also demanding funding for services that would benefit the LGBT community (and beyond).
And if you look at the list of endorsements on the NEM Web site, you'll notice that it has brought together a diverse array of organizations that represent a broad range of oppressed and exploited people (labor, immigrants, LGBT, African Americans, etc.). This march is a positive step in the direction of the formation of the broad left that is necessary to build the infrastructure and develop the resources we need to win the changes our communities desperately need, changes qualitatively beyond those we can make by being conservative hoarding the few resources we have now.
Third, it's important to make a statement on the national level, to put pressure on Obama for his inaction on LGBT issues and to raise awareness of the true extent of civil inequality that LGBT people face in this country.
For example, many people I've been talking with about the march were not aware, and were outraged to find out, that employment discrimination against LGBT people is still legal in most states. Eighty-nine percent of U.S. residents oppose such discrimination, so the contradiction between that and the laws on the books in states across the country represents the potential for a mass movement. If even a fraction of these people become involved in the struggle for equality, that's still millions of people--a leap forward from where we are today.
Finally, the HRC has recently endorsed the march. I think that the HRC leadership realizes that this march has real potential, because it represents the desires (for uncompromising, full civil equality now) of millions of people, including HRC supporters. HRC has said that they want the marchers to go back to their communities and become citizen lobbyists.
I think that a better strategy for winning LGBT rights is to become grassroots activists, independent of the Democratic Party, and to link this struggle to those of all the oppressed and exploited. But I will still march with HRC to demand full civil equality for LGBT people, while maintaining my political independence and expressing my views. In fact, I think it's vital that I and other socialists be there, so that our politics get a hearing, not just those advocating support for and working with the Democratic Party.
Thousands of people, many of them new to activism and open to different ideas on how to achieve equality for LGBT people and beyond, will be marching on Washington, D.C., on October 11.
It is up to us to be there, to be vocal about what we think it will take to win the change we really need and, as Harvey Milk was fond of saying, to recruit them to our movement.
I hope to see you in D.C. this October!
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