The Supreme Court, Legislative Obstructionism, and Presidential Dictatorship

Before commentary, a bit of recent personal history: from December 28th through the Virginia Democratic Primary (March 1st, Super Tuesday), I was employed by Bernie 2016, my main goal since leaving my position as an Assistant Professor at Colgate nearly a year ago.  I was the Field Organizer (lowest rung of the ladder) for "V1D," an area of Virginia centered in Charlottesville, where Jasmine & I moved at the end of last summer, and including a huge swath of 16 surrounding counties.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.  I did a huge amount of work, I learned a huge amount about campaigns and campaign work in the trenches, met hundreds of wonderful volunteers, and saw lots of parts of Virginia that I never otherwise would have seen.  In the end, Bernie lost the Virginia primary by 29%, but in V1D turf, he only lost by 3%, and we won 7 of the 17 counties (in all, Bernie won 15 out of Virginia's 143 counties) in the turf.  My volunteers did an amazing job.  I was super-exhausted by the end of my "deployment," which lasted a week or so after the primary campaign itself.  During my employment, as a functionary of the Bernie Campaign, I could not blog, or even comment much on facebook, since I'd be seen as an official representative the campaign--even if I were blogging about something totally unrelated (as I am today).

Now, however, that I am no longer professionally attached to Bernie 2016, I am free to present my opinions again.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Juan Linz wrote in the 1990s of the "Perils of Presidentialism," that in democracies where power is increasingly centered in a directly elected executive, there is a great danger of instability, and also of presidents taking on so much authority that democracy is seriously threatened.  Guillermo O'Donnell had similar worries over "Delegative Democracy," a version of a democracy where the one-shot election of a chief executive (the moment of "delegation" by the people) was seen as so centrally decisive that all parts of the system waited for their decisions on that single mandate every half-decade or so.  If and when, during the course of his or her term, such a president came informally to be seen as a lame duck, no business could get done until another president took over.  If a country faced a crisis during such a period, but nobody thought the sitting president carried the mantle of mandate to take dramatic steps, the country would languish in crisis with the looming threat of extra-constitutional methods of getting a new president "early."

Both of these worries imply a legislature where nothing important can be decided, which cannot originate policy or act as a political agent and "first-mover," but must merely re-act to whatever the super-empowered executive does.  How a legislature comes to be so weak and vestigial is an important question.  In some cases, especially in very new democracies, an incredibly weak or "rubber-stamp" legislature is written into the constitution.  But all constitutions are "living documents," and the informal patterns and traditions that grow up are more powerful than the written rules themselves.

In the United States, the oldest and most vibrant democracy in the world, we are seeing a pattern of legislative-executive interaction that promotes this vestigialization of the legislature, and ironically, it is emerges from the legislature itself, and in particular from the party that opposes the president.

In an interview from October 23rd, 2010, then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed that the most important thing his party could achieve would be to make Barack Obama a one-term president.  This quote has gotten plenty of air-time as evidence of how terribly recalcitrant McConnell and the Republican Party are, of their prioritizing political victory over the nation's business, of the mindlessness of their opposition to our country's first African-American president.

But in hindsight, it's more than that: it is an indicator of the party's acceptance of the proposition that no policy change can happen in a way that it desires unless it holds the presidency: the soon-to-be Tea Party wave sweeping Republicans into the majority in the House would not give Republicans leverage enough to work with Obama to get something they wanted out of negotiated policies, nor would the 2014 takeover of the Senate.

The Republican Party has shown that no matter how much power it has in the legislature, it expects to get zero done while a Democrat sits in the White House.  The party would rather shut down the government, perhaps drive the country into loan default (hardly a "fiscally responsible" move), and obstruct any major legislation than use its legislative power to get something out working together with a Democratic president.

Nowhere is this self-minimization of the legislative branch more evident than in the response to the president's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.  We now see the next shoe dropping in the path the Republican party has put us on to a delegative democracy, like those O'Donnell saw unfolding in the early 1990s in places like Perú, Venezuela, and Russia: 

The Republican leader apparently goes beyond accepting the idea that a legislative majority cannot fruitfully initiate new policy, or cooperate with a president from the other party, but even a presdient with over 20% of his term remaining is not endowed with a mandate to fulfill his constitutional duty of nominating someone to fill a vacancy in the judicial branch.  And indeed, when we consider the huge backlog of judicial and even executive branch appointments that the Republicans have stalled through Obama's two (count 'em: 2!) terms in office, we see that perhaps in the mind of Republican leaders, only at the very beginning of a four-year term in office does enough "delegative" authority attach to the president, from winning a quadrennial election, to actual carry out any policy change or appoint key figures as required by the constitution.

The Republican agenda of the last six years has made frightening progress in establishing new patterns and traditions in America's democracy: a legislature cannot fruitfully initiate new policy or even work with an executive to make headway on the policy goals of its members if it faces a president from a different party; and now, a president should not even fulfill the duties a constitution charges him or her with if a new election looms within a year (or more?).  

Regardless of who is elected as president in the fall of 2016, these patterns, if they become institutionalized, will endow that person with a terrifying degree of informal mandate come January 20, 2017, since there will be so much waiting for his or her attention, and the tacit acceptance that nothing can be decided before that day will put everything in his or her hands--probably much more than ought to be.  Moreover, unless the legislature is controlled by the same party, the pattern would make us expect merely war and stalemate between legislature and executive until Jan 20, 2021, when we'll have a new president (unless we impeach the one elected in 2016).  And finally, regardless of legislative or executive party control, this new pattern would make us expect no government action at all after a certain honeymoon period in the new president's term.  How long will that period be?  2 years?  Should we expect it to even last until the campaigns for the 2018 midterm election get under way?  100 days?

The United States is the oldest and most stable democracy in the world--it also happens to be my favorite.  But the patterns and informal institutions set in place by Republican reactions to the presidency of Barack Obama threaten to make it unrecognizable a decade from now--and perhaps no more a democracy than places like Venezuela and Russia.

How Planned Parenthood Prevents Abortions and Why Robert Dear is Not Unlike a Jihadi

Reading about the recent violence at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado, and noting that one of the three people killed was a mother of two children (the other two were a female Iraq War vet and a male police officer), and remembering that this is one of many attacks, some physical/martial, many political, against this non-profit organization, I have been thinking about what Planned Parenthood really does and what it has done for me during my reproductive years.

Before Obamacare, healthcare was even less affordable and obtainable than it is now, when I find myself in my second month of no coverage despite being enrolled in Medicaid. From the time I turned 18 in 2000 until ACA was passed, birth control generally cost around $50 a month, and not all types were fully or even partially covered by all health insurance plans, to say nothing of buying the pills (and obtaining the prescription as well as the required pap test) without insurance, which could easily run towards $1000 a year. That all health insurance plans must cover birth control under the Affordable Care Act is a very good thing: it is not easy to budget for even an extra $15 a month let alone $50, and certainly no one with health insurance (which has such incentive to keep health costs down, and pregnancy is hugely expensive) should be choosing between birth control and any other necessity.

I have used a non-Planned Parenthood gynecologist only a few times in my life, and the expense has always driven me back to Planned Parenthood, where I knew I would never be denied care or a birth control prescription, and where I knew my privacy would be respected. Staying not pregnant is time-consuming and expensive. I am not sure how many men realize that to obtain a BCP script, a woman needs a yearly pelvic exam and pap smear, which take time, are rather invasive (I think a lot of women find it mainly humiliating, actually, and having it performed by a man can feel quite psychologically uncomfortable), and even with insurance can have a copay of a hundred dollars or more. If this exam turns up any question of HPV, and up to 75% of people of reproductive age have it at some point in their lives, follow-up exams, often involving biopsy, cryocautery and other procedures can be involved. All of these have co-pays (or out-of-pocket) and require time (usually off work), can cause pain and require some recovery, and this can happen far more than once. Not that I am opposed to these procedures; they can save lives that otherwise would be lost to cervical cancer (which is caused by some strains of HPV but does not result from most cases of HPV), and prior to the introduction of Gardisil in 2006 was the only way of preventing cervical cancer. But the fact remains that in most heterosexual, committed relationships the burden of preventing pregnancy is on women, and it is a disproportional burden indeed. That is before you consider women who are abandoned by their partners to deal with pregnancy and STD prevention or treatment alone. So when I think of men, whether they be politicians or men teetering on the edge of mental health (if there is a difference) who have the temerity to pass judgment on how women pursue reproductive health, and to call non-profit organizations, 80% of whose business is administering birth control, to testify before Congress to defend themselves against falsified and partisan accusations, it makes me sick with contempt for the bullying attitude that it is all too acceptable in our society to take against any group you aren't a part of and don't understand.

What do the other 20% of services administered by Planned Parenthood represent? 3% are abortions and the rest are mostly STD testing and treatment, cancer screenings like the pelvic exams I have had and the mammograms (or mammogram referrals) I will one day no doubt get there, since referrals, like appointments with gynecologists, psychiatrists, and increasingly any private practice doctors, take a ruinously long time to obtain, and of course it is often the costliest doctors, or those who accept the fewest, or no, forms of insurance, who have the earliest availability.

So I have used Planned Parenthood for what 97% of all its services represent, and that is why I have never had to be  a part of the 3% statistic that represents the abortions they perform. During times in my life (like now) when I have had no health coverage, and even times when getting an appointment with a gynecologist would take too long or my prescription simply cost too much, Planned Parenthood was there to subsidize my care and make it possible for me to not only prevent pregnancy before I was ready for it, but screen for cancer and other reproductive dangers while they were still treatable. The fact is that the vast majority of women go to Planned Parenthood to avoid having abortions, not to have them. Personally, I do not believe that women who themselves judge that they cannot care for a child should be forced to carry that child to term or go through the torment of giving their children up for adoption, and I believe safe abortions should be legal as a measure that protects women's health and which promotes the care of children who already exist: 61% of all women terminating a pregnancy already have at least one child. The fact is, nobody, not even me, despite my very-high-indeed horse, knows what is going on for any individual that belongs to a given group, but we are all too eager to recommend, support, and in some cases take drastic, dreadful, hypocritical action to force prohibitions on groups we don't belong too. We see this in Donald Trump's comments about immigration policy, which many Americans agree with (as do Europeans!), and we see it in the discourse on abortion. This has become not only so nasty, but so much the purview of abstract political debate, that it is now regular, no matter who you are, how uninformed you are, or how distant your life experience is from that of most people the conversation is about and affects, to not only take rigid political stances on this "issue," but to position it as the single issue that will decide your vote.

I think one of the great false premises of the abortion debate is that there is some group, let's call it pro-choice, which approves of abortion. I don't think there are many people who really approve of abortion as a form of birth control to be embraced, and I'm certainly not one. But to act like there are no circumstances that women can find themselves in when an abortion is the best outcome they can hope for is, unfortunately, wrong. We do not have a society in which poor families and single mothers are supported; it is not possible to raise healthy kids by yourself when you have to work for $7.50 an hour at more than one job so your employer isn't obligated to give you health benefits. Many people do not have computers, internet access, or even public libraries to figure out how to apply for insurance through the state-run health exchanges, where they might discover they qualify for Medicaid. Women who seek abortions are, at least most of the time, some of the most vulnerable members of our incredibly unequal society, and as so often happens to victims of an unequal system, it is the most powerful who control not only their access to abortion, but also to birth control, health care, and benefits for their children. Behind all of this we see, yet again, that the rich and powerful take an attitude of moral superiority towards the poor and vulnerable: the discourse frames abortion as a moral outrage whose perpetrators must be fought. These are the same terms that Islamic fundamentalists use to rouse vulnerable, poor, often mentally unstable young people to violence against unknown individuals that form part of a group they can easily vilify from the outside: Westerners, Christians, Parisians. Belonging to one or more of those groups, or moving in them freely, it's obvious to us that those individuals, now dead or wounded, were innocent, but it's so easy, and feels so good, to vilify, and there's a heavy dose of endorphins spilled in pulling triggers. If you want to eliminate abortion, immigration, or terrorism, you're just going to have to make the world a better place, and that will mean loosening a lot of tightly-closed fists.

Berning CVA

Canvassing in Culpeper VA Sat, Nov 14: Charlottesville Bernie troops provide reinforcements for the local Bernie outpost!

So the blog's been a bit moribund recently, alas!  Why?  Basically, because we've been so busy!  Jasmine & I both applying for lots of part-time work--looks like I'll be an Adjunct Prof of Economics for Piedmont Virginia Community College in the spring semester . . . unless something more compelling comes up before my background check clears.

But much more than professional activities, we've been busy with Bernie volunteering!  Apart from diving into organizational work of the Charlottesville & Central VA for Bernie volunteer group, we've been getting out the word collecting signatures for Bernie to get on the VA ballot.  The state actually has one of the higher bars to getting on the primary ballot (in fact, in 2012 Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum & other Republicans failed to make it on the ballot, leaving the Republican field to just Mitt Romney & Ron Paul).

On Election Day here in VA, when the entire state senate was up for re-election (and where Democrats put up the feeblest of efforts against Republican gerrymandering), Jasmine & I trolled our local polling places with Rachel, another Bernie volunteer, collecting well over a hundred signatures. We also collected a few nasty comments about Mao Zedong as well as accusations of the purveyance of male bovine excrement, due in part to a deficit of wisdom owing to our failure to have been born when Barry Goldwater was running for president.  We later learned that the precinct where we were (Baker-Butler elementary school, our own polling place, though we became Virginia residents too late to vote in the election) is the most conservative in Albemarle County (where Democrats swept the County board of Commissioners elections).  In other precincts around the city & county, our colleagues found lots of people willing to sign for Bernie: over 1,150 just from our Charlottesville group (Bernie apparently needs 5,000 for the whole state).

And even in our precinct we gathered over a hundred signatures and even got about half a dozen names of people local to this part of the county who want to join the offshoot Bernie group we're trying to start: Albemarle North for Bernie.  We have our second meeting this week at a volunteer's house in the beautiful town of Barboursville, where the pretty terrific and famous wine is made.

And we've found other outlets for our enthusiasm for the political revolution--such as the Charlottesville Raise Up for $15 minimum wage rally, where we showed up in Bernie paraphernalia and got to speak to the crowd, and even made it onto local TV, NBC 29 (about 20 seconds in)

and into the local paper, the Daily Progress, where Jasmine was quoted extensively, following her comments at the rally about the insecurity of non-benefit, temporary work, like the adjuncting she did at Colgate.

In general, it's exciting how vibrant a community we've found around here, and how much people like us seem to be accepted into at least certain quite politically active sectors--like the county Democratic party, one of whose vice chairs wanted to have coffee with me after meeting at the polls and invited me to their monthly meeting.

The abundance of dynamic grassroots political and social activism that we've found in Virginia could be due to many factors.  That Virginia is a purple state in flux, where Democrats and others on the left perceive chances to change things in the coming years, may inspire the openness to new actors & allies that they know such change will require.  This itself undoubtedly stems from a huge difference with Central New York: Central Virginia (and the whole state, really) is an area that is growing, on the upswing, and as new people arrive, looking for new opportunities, the ferment only feeds upon itself.  Central New York, by contrast, is decades into a demographic & economic decline, with young people, activists, and entrepreneurs (political, business, or otherwise) often needing to go afield for opportunities if they don't already have a secure place in the region's economic, political, or social structure.  Hamilton, NY has been lucky to attract a notable exception in the past several years in Good Nature Brewing, and its success and planned expansion do incite hope that more people will buck the trend by investing in Central New York, which those who have managed to make a solvent life there know has much to offer.

Of course, Charlottesville is exceptional in many ways, too: one of the wealthiest and most liberal areas of "non"-Northern Virginia, it's a hotbed for all kind of social, artistic, and political activities (and with the persistent delight of Southern courtesy that sets it apart from a Cambridge, MA or Brooklyn).

Culpeper, Virginia, by comparison, an hour up the road towards DC, is neither as prosperous nor as liberal.  Jasmine & I got to experience it yesterday when we drove there with some other local Charlottesville Bernie-supporters to join the lone member of the Culpeper for Bernie group, Earl (see the photo above), in collecting signatures at the farmers' market.  Culpeper is in Virginia's 7th Congressional District (one that's gerrymandered even more Republican than our 5th District) and no surprise it was the most in need of more signatures to be collected for the campaign.  The farmers' market was not nearly as active as what we've seen in Charlottesville, or in Hamilton (even though Culpeper has about 5x the population of the latter!), and it was a scrabble to get many signatures.

Interestingly, we got a bunch of signatures from people who said they're hardly regular Democratic voters, but want "anybody but Hillary" to be the next president.  Depending on which of the current occupants of the Republican clown-car gets nominated for president next summer, a Democratic nomination of Bernie Sanders could well generate a curious new phenomena: the Bernie Republican, foil of the famous Reagan Democrat.  We'll see.

But yesterday's jaunt was important for reasons besides just the signatures: one was helping Earl (and a couple of people who came out of the woodwork as potential Bernie volunteers) shore up his own sense of a movement for Bernie.  If there really is to be major political change in this country, a movement, then it's going to take people moving, at least for a few hours, a day, or a weekend: going physically to places where the movement is not as strong, and spreading the word, wearing the T-shirt, putting a human face to the concept of "Democratic Socialism" (which, after going over it with the chair of economics at PVCC, we decided is really just a brand of Keynesiansm).

And that's why we're here in Virginia, with no jobs, trying to get something started.  I was really excited this weekend by the people we met--vendors in the Farmers' Market who donated parmesan bread to the Bernie volunteers, an African American lady from a local church who's really excited for Bernie (and told us that she thinks her community might be holding its collective nose if Hillary is the name next to "D" on the ballot next fall), several Spanish-speakers who were  not registered to vote, but had clearly never been approached before in this country as members of a civic polity, and even some of the anti-Bernie people who were interested to mix it up a bit.  People like us--not just me & Jasmine, but everybody in the picture above--getting out there, talking to strangers, believing that there's more on offer for America than dynasties, elites who "know better," and apathy of the masses, and putting themselves on the line for something are what it will take to give the lie to the easy rationalization that Bernie can't win (which is in many cases = "we're stuck with the mediocrity we've got").  We can do it--not for Bernie, but for the sake of this country, and a people that need to wake up and realize that they can take back their own democracy.

Labor Mobility in America -or- the Cost of Becoming Virginia Jews

In my CRV, I'm apparently Virginia Jew #5159

Anyone who knows me knows that as a Jew, I could be considered a disappointment.  I wasn't bar mitzvahed, have never practiced the religion, can barely get past "baruch atah adonai . . ." and by the rules of the Mishnah, probably couldn't even count as a Jew unless I converted (my mom was born "Woods").  

But with a name like Daniel Jacob Epstein . . . well?  The Virginia DMV seems to have seen me coming and acknowledged us as members of the tribe (in her Camry, Jasmine Epstein is #5158).  I guess I'd like to think that I'm about as Jewish as Bernie Sanders, and perhaps that's good enough for government work.

Religion is not the topic of this blog post, though: it's about the cost of moving around the country.  

In theories of free market capitalism, resources (capital, labor, land, etc) are put to the most efficient (read: profitable) use when there are as few impediments as possible to their being deployed wherever they will fetch the highest prices.  In the case of capital, we have all kinds of laws, judicial infrastructure, and entire administrative divisions of government (SEC, FDIC, Federal Reserve, etc) devoted to smoothing out the functioning of markets so that the process of moving capital around is easy and cheap.

What about opportunities for labor to fetch the highest prices?  Especially in a country the size of the United States, for people to get the best jobs (which could be the highest paid, or the job for which the enjoyment of the job + the salary & benefits = the best return on the time & effort they put in), they often have to move somewhere else.

Of course, this explains why every ten years, states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan get apportioned fewer Congressional reps, and states like Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and California get more.  Indeed, driving through some of the cities of upstate NY (Utica, Oneida, Amsterdam), it's clear that people have been voting with their feet (or U-Hauls) for any number of reasons as the rust belt empties of inhabitants, but better employment opportunity is a big one.

But moving can be expensive--it's a big investment to pull up stakes in search of better opportunity.  Nonetheless, it's the American way: "Westward the wagons" and all that.  And if you're poor, or unemployed, it's not only a good way to improve your economic lot, but it's the key way that free market capitalist economics would prescribe.  And indeed, if a "flexible labor market" (minimizing barriers to people finding the jobs where their labor is deployed most efficiently, whether by facilitating businesses' ability to fire workers whose labor they are unable to deploy efficiently, or by facilitating workers' capacity to leave one situation for another where their labor fetches a better price) works they way that free market economics claims it does, then this process also should promote people getting out of poverty ("up by the bootstraps") and indeed reducing government expenditures on things like unemployment, foodstamps, and other means-tested benefits.

But while making easier to move about the country should have every advantage in a free-market economy, the United States have made it rather costly in a number of ways.

The Commonwealth of Virginia's legislature, for example, has mandated a number of fees for operating a vehicle in the state, here see the ones we paid to become VJW 5158 & 5159:

Title Fees for titling car in VA $10 x 2 cars =	$20
Minimum sales tax on $500 intra-family car sale =	$75
Safety Inspection $16 x 2 cars =	$32
Vehicle Registration 2yrs (w/discount) $79.50 x 2 cars =	$159
Out of State License conversion $32 x 2 drivers =	$64
Grand Total fees extracted from us by the Commonwealth of Virginia DMV =	$350

Now, for me & Jasmine, these fees are affordable, an expected cost of moving to this state in search of better ways to employ ourselves, and one of the reasons we saved up money before making this move.  And in truth, part of the reason we have to pay as much as we did is how privileged we are: a two-car couple (though with teenagers--the CRV is 12 y.o. and the Camry 18--we're hardly the most privileged of car owners), and in fact our second car is Jasmine's old one that we got from her parents for a nominal price (our good fortune).  Titling it under a new name, we had to pay a sales tax of $75 on the $500 purchase price (the tax rate is 4.1%, but there is a minimum payment amount that effectively meant we paid 15%!); had we not had the good fortune for Richard & Linda to let the Camry go for a song, we wouldn't be paying the fees for a second car at all!  And we could have registered our cars for only one year, instead of two, though the multi-year discount meant that latter was more economical, in the long run.

In the end, we could afford all of these fees, but imagine the situation of people with less means, who weren't lucky enough have a job that enabled them to save up like we could.  A family with two working parents might easily need two cars if they each had to work; the fees for operating vehicles in Virginia would be pretty steep for a family with an income of $2,500/mo (the SNAP cut-off--which two minimum wage jobs barely add up to, before taxes).  And why should there be a minimum payment for auto sales tax: if a someone can only afford to buy a car that costs $500 or $1,000, why are they paying the same sales tax as a car that costs nearly $2,000 (this applies even to Virginians who never cross state lines when buying cars).

If Virginia needs more resources to fix its roads and run its Motor Vehicle bureaucracy (where, I have to note, all the people we ran across were kind, helpful, and extremely efficient), why not take them out of income tax dollars paid mostly by people not in poverty, instead of multiplying "fees" that, while they apply to everyone, hit the poor and those who are moving house much more heavily than the wealthy and the comfortable?

As with Jasmine's non-transferable New York Medicaid, the United States are (plural) a pain for poor people: the "federal" system that empowers states to each set up their own special bureaucracies, redundant inspections (the Camry had to be re-inspected for Virginia, even though New Jersey had given it a clean bill of health 'til 2017 just a couple of months ago), and other powers that state governments claim a "right" to makes labor mobility in this country a costly prospect, especially for those in most want of economic opportunity.  Proportionately to income, this is the hardest for the poorest Americans--another way in which the system we have in our country today makes pulling oneself or one's family "up by the bootstraps" most difficult for those at the very bottom of the ladder.

Democracy in America: Civil Society, Academic department meetings, and Insurgent political campaigns

With apologies to U Chicago Press, whose image I am using.

So, after a long series of over-loaded trips for two aging Japanese stalwarts (a '97 Toyota Camry, to be rewarded with some expensive exhaust work; and an '03 Honda CRV), Jasmine & I arrived at our cabin, on the outskirts of Charlottesville over a week ago.  Since Virginia isn't into profusions of municipal governing bodies (the opposite of New York!), we live in no town or city, but Albemarle County is our only governing entity under the level of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  I'll have to rhapsodize about the idylls of county living in another post, though (as well as tell other news): this one is about organizing for Bernie.

So I was involved in CNY for Bernie, based in Hamilton, in the couple of months before leaving, although peripherally, since I knew I was leaving.  I was also in touch with a group in Baldwinsville, NY, and like to think I helped inspire them to get their group off the ground.  

Volunteering for Bernie, it turns out, is do-it-yourself, at least at this point in the campaign.  Nobody from the campaign (still thinly staffed outside IA & NH) will tell you what to do, organize events, or lead.  You have to be the change you've been waiting for, and lead yourself.

Arriving in CVA (as I've gathered the Charlottesville region is known), Jasmine & I attended our first Bernie event just three days later, a Happy Hour at the local bar Firefly.  We met a number of enthusiastic Bernie supporters, including some students half our (my) age or younger, and a number of other enthusiasts from local activists to entrepreneurial pet-sitters to old-hands of VA politics known to chew the fat with the likes of Bob Goodlatte.

One fascinating dynamic, though, common to both groups, is how hard it is to run a meeting.  In fact, as an outsider trying to participate without elbowing my way in, it was clear that these group, full of goodwill and energy, and a lot of fellow-feeling, have as many impediments to administrative accomplishment & efficiency as any department or program at Colgate University!

Having cogitated at length upon (not to mention contributed to) the function & dysfunction of multiple such committees at Colgate, I often thought to myself, "Well, this must be so dysfunctional because we're a bunch of professors; how can we hope to achieve administrative functionality and positive group dynamics when they are the very things that are dis-incentivized by academia."  But if this is true, then a sample of academics should perform much worse administratively than any randomly-met group of individuals.  But two such (in CNY & CVA) randomly drawn groups (selected purely on being pro-Bernie) seem to evince the same difficulties, of getting hung-up on the short term, or even terminologies, sidetracked by emotional commitments, failure to listen to each other, tendency to speak out of a feeling of needing to speak, rather than to move the group towards a goal, and oversensitivitiy to "authoritarian" leadership tendencies in running a meeting, among others.

This presents a dangerous power imbalance in society: if groups of citizens met for bringing change to a politics that serves the status quo; groups of academics who devote themselves to wisdom & expertise in fields that could serve society; or other collections of individuals not already part of the power-structure of the managerial class (which extends from government through private business, higher education, and even established NGOs and non-profits) cannot get their act together and organize themselves, then the organizations of that power-structure will never face the kind of challenge that can hold them accountable.

This is true of university administrations vis-à-vis faculties, workers vis-à-vis employers, union members vis-à-vis union leaders, HOA or Condo Association members vis-à-vis their boards, and of course, citizens vis-à-vis their governments, not to mention a plethora of other cases where the advantages of the already-empowered are amplified by their fewness in number and honed administrative experience.  

But in the words of E. E. Schattschneider, "The only defense against organization is counterorganization" (Party Government, 1942; p. 44).  In truth, this is no more or less than a call for Americans (or anybody) dissatisfied with a status quo that seems not serve the common good to return to the roots that Tocqueville found when criss-crossing this country in the early 19th century:

Tocqueville found that everywhere in America, groups of citizens were always organizing and learning how to run a meeting, how to work together in a group over time, how to act collectively.  Even the most Rugged Individualists in what were then the "western" states would get together and discuss, work in groups, solve problems, and advance collective goals.  The only cure for not knowing how to run a meeting is to keep holding meetings and try to learn how to run them better--or identify someone with the knack for it, and help them learn.

Unfortunately for Democracy in America, today in this country so many of us are so busy with our own individual or family demands, desires, and responsibilities, that hardly anybody wants to join groups that hold regular meetings anymore.  We're happy to send checks (or simply donate online) to the social causes or political campaigns we support, but this does not teach us the skills to actually enact democracy--it is not participation.

Tocqueville worried that democracy in any country might lead to tyranny and violence, as it had in Revolutionary France.  The rare genius of America that he found was that so many citizens were involved in enacting democracy, practicing citizenship, so that those who made it to the top could be restrained by masses of educated, activist, and administratively well-versed citizens who themselves committed to holding the powerful accountable.  These were not the masses of Europe who transformed into mobs bringing a bloody dictator like Napoleon Bonaparte to power (Vladimir Lenin?  Mao Zedong?).

Today, we have dissatisfaction with leadership in both our political parties, and in other spheres of the society, as well.  But how much of it inspires the patience and self-sacrifice of . . . going to meetings?  It seems all too little--much more goes into the shouting, posturing, and anger that could bring an American Napoleon to power--perhaps Donald Trump?

Is It a State's Right Whether I Get Pregnant?

In truth, the title of this post should be, Is It a State's Right to Decide How and How Much it Costs for Me to Not Get Pregnant? A good subtitle might be: Make BCP OTC. Something I didn't know about Medicaid until I was on it for a second year is that because it is administered by states, a person's Medicaid benefits are only good in the state in which they applied for and were awarded them. That means that, because I recently moved from New York to Virginia, I am unable to use my health insurance to pay for my birth control pill prescription, which runs $35-50 retail, if I fill the prescription outside of New York State. And because we did not have the foresight to apply for insurance through the VA exchange earlier (we would have had to do it by Sept. 15th, 30 days before moving, in order for me to be covered in VA now) I will have no usable insurance (EMT driver, can you get on 81 N?) until December 1st.

To ice them cookies, pharmacies are not allowed to mail prescriptions being paid for with Medicaid out-of -state, presumably to prevent fraudulent purchases of the birth control pill by Virginians, Marylanders, Blue Hens, etc. from the good pharmacies of New York. The choice I have, then, is to pester people I'm not that close to in New York to pick up and mail me my prescription, pay retail in VA (have I mentioned we're on a budget?), or use condoms, which are not that cheap, and certainly not that fun, but they are over-the-counter. All those other miracle drugs for not getting pregnant, such as the patch, the injection, the implants, are all prescription-only. Short of that it's rhythm method and rubbers.

We've discussed the moral double-standards that exist in this country for poor people, and to be on Medicaid, you have to be poor. I have qualified for it for the last year and a half, during which I was adjuncting at Colgate and thus poor. As a nation, we do seem to be comfortable with the government adjudicating how women go about not getting pregnant: anyone (who has the money) can use condoms, and anyone who has access to a doctor to give a prescription can use the pill and other hormonal birth control options that are more desirable, practical, and far more effective than condoms for a number of reasons you have probably already worked out yourself. 

Since the Affordable Care Act passed, a person on Medicaid can get a doctor’s appointment, prescription for BCP and have it filled with no out of pocket expenses--but with considerable bureaucratic and practical hoops to jump through. And even those of us on Medicaid who are most adept at navigating those hoops can get caught in a predicament that amounts to embarrassing yourself just to rely upon the kindness of acquaintances, paying more money than you can afford, or going without. This can happen because we allow these programs, deemed constitutional and essential by three branches of the federal government, to be administered by states as a prerequisite to states accepting them, and the result is that a person availing themselves of a federal program is extremely limited in care not only by what providers will see them (another horror story for another post) or how long they have to wait for that care, but by where they find themselves when that care is required.

All of this leads to a default conservative outcome, and as ultra-conservative as can be: the only way to have sex for free is to have it unprotected. Every other way you need a dollar in your pocket and/or a primary care physician. The implication of such a state of affairs is that those with more access to money and resources deserve more choice in their reproductive health than those who have less. Dan, who already buys his health insurance through the NY State exchange, was able to get a free flu shot while we were at Walgreens figuring out another thing we're going to have to make lemonade out of for the next three months, but as a Medicaid patient I would have had to pay for that too. And as we know, as a man Dan cannot get the pill; it's all on me, as it is for many women when they so understandably fail, even once, to make sure they are medically infertile when they end up having sex under any circumstances and find themselves where so many politicians seem to believe, if you follow the logical outcomes of the policies they support, is where they belong: pregnant and taking responsibility.

Birth Control Pill Over-the-Counter and federally-administered Medicaid are women's rights and social justice issues. The cheaper, preferably free, and easier to obtain reproductive health needs are, the better for some of our most vulnerable populations.

Living in Virginia: Our Nature Walk to Target

One thing that Google can ruin for you is the mystery of the woods. How, for example, would the Blair Witch Project have worked if the characters had had iPhones? As my Dad pointed out, since it took place in Maryland, they could have just walked ten miles in one direction and exhausted the hypotenuse of any wooded area in that state, but an instant birds-eye image plus satellite-sourced globally-positioned directions for how to get out? We don't have iPhones, but after three days and a lengthy Sunday visit from a Comcast guy, we did manage to get wifi in our new house.

Dan and I just moved to a cabin about eight miles north of Charlottesville, VA, near the virtual and physical "community" of Forest Lakes. Mainly, this seems to be a housing development and a Nextdoor website, but that's what often stands in for the more ineffable forms of community these days, particularly for the affluent. We are living in the same cabin I lived in my third year in grad school, and one thing I valued about it, besides its seclusion in the woods despite proximity to town, was the trails in the woods right behind the house for convenient, idyllic (light) exercise. I knew there was a housing development not far beyond the woods on my landlords' property, but in my year of living here I never went there, partly because why go there? and mainly because I wanted to feel that the woods were vaster, denser, and even more dangerous than they were, that getting lost was possible. Dan did not seem to have that orientation, because the first thing he did was to Google Map the trails behind the cabin and create a route by which we walked through them to cross a small stream to the housing complex, walk through it to a shopping center, cross 29 and end up at Target.

So we did it, equipped with backpacks to carry the cat food, kitty litter and groceries we planned to buy at Target, and not wearing the stylish workout clothes that we quickly realized are the uniform of people off in the day in and around Forest Lakes. The part of the trip that went through the woods was mercilessly short. Before ten minutes were out, we were climbing up a little hill to the housing complex and passing through its maze of streets named nonsense combinations of real but unrelated nouns like "Waterhill" and "Valleycross" and lined with pumpkin lanterns to indicate who would be offering candy on Halloween (most of them...second trip?). Pacing the housing complex was the longest and weirdest part of the to and fro journeys, and several women we passed (though for as many houses as we walked by we saw very few, perhaps five, people total) were inspired to say hello to us in a high, paranoid tone that seemed to indicate surveillance and (passive) aggression. Wearing our sweats, crappy sneakers, and backpacks, we must have looked like the contemporary suburban answer to the hobo.

After passing the swim and tennis club, two fast food restaurants, a bank and the entrance to a Food Lion, we got to 29, a divided highway (General Lee Highway) that's pretty busy as the main route into and out of Charlottesville. Here's where Dan lost his nerve, suggesting that we cross at a light where there would be no crosswalk anyway because people don't walk here. You're immediately suspicious to everyone if you do, so you might was well lean into it. What would Lee have done? The right move seemed to be to "dash" across 29, which was pretty easy, and then to climb up Target's landscaping to the back of the store, which conspicuously does not have an entrance. In fact it has several doors warning "no entrance." Once we were on the sidewalk again, I found out that we were not alone: three men with sacks and old sneakers were climbing up too, and I wondered, did these men also dash across 29? Are they also modern-day vagrants?

Actually they were Target's landscapers, but they seemed mildly inspired by our presence in Target's hindquarters, even if they had not figured out the details of how we came to be there, which would be a hard thing to guess. I've personally never met anyone with ideas like Dan's, so how could they guess his reasoning? I can barely figure it out even now. Inside, we cut about the most eccentric figures probably ever seen in the Hollymead Target at an hour on Monday indisputably owned by the affluent white stay-at-home mother. Buying 31 pounds of cat supplies did not seem to diminish this impression.

After that long walk with the strange interactions, the dashing across a highway, and the heavy backpacks, it was nice to have wild-caught tuna sandwiches with arugula and white wine and watch Columbo streaming before our first Charlottesville Bernie meeting that afternoon. The woods were emptied of a great deal of their mystery, but that was a tenuous mystery from the beginning, and the mysteries of suburbia are robust and I think only on the ascent.