People Before Profit blog

A question of fairness: rights for gay couples

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 05:02:00 +0000

Opinion

Increasingly, Americans are discovering that gay couples can be good neighbors who work, pay taxes, and contribute to their communities just like other couples. The vast majority of Americans support the kind of legal protections that domestic partnerships or civil unions can provide, such as the right to visit a partner in a hospital or share health insurance.

This growing acceptance has so alarmed some leaders of the extreme right that they are raising hysterical red flags, claiming that these steps toward basic fairness and decency are somehow going to destroy the institution of marriage. Last month, Sandy Rios, the president of Concerned Women for America, argued that “[Traditional marriage] is the very underpinning of civilization. If we remove those foundations, our entire civilization will come crumbling down.”

But the “marriage protection” movement is a smokescreen. It is true that many Americans are wrestling with the concept of extending the rights, responsibilities, and legal protections of civil marriage to same-sex couples. Congress and a number of states have passed so-called Defense of Marriage laws. But there is nothing close to a consensus for rolling back the progress we have made toward equality in the name of “protecting” marriage.

Yet that is exactly what the self-proclaimed defenders of marriage want to do – and even worse, they want to enshrine discrimination in the U.S. Constitution in the form of a constitutional amendment.

Advocates for equality are strongly fighting the unprecedented step of amending the Constitution to ensure that one group of Americans is denied equal protection of the laws – other constitutional amendments have expanded freedom, not contracted it.

At the same time, gay couples are challenging inequality in the courts. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is expected to rule soon on whether same-gender couples are entitled to civil marriage licenses in the case “Goodridge v. Department of Public Health.” [Editor’s note: this article was written before the court ruling in favor of equal marriage rights for gay couples.] If the court affirms this right, rhetoric from groups like Rios’ will only intensify. In fact, the Associated Press reports that many prominent far-right groups plan to make “protecting” marriage their number one social issue in the 2004 election. To accomplish this, they are intentionally blurring the distinction between civil marriage and the religious sacraments of marriage.

Everyone – including gay rights advocates and their opponents – can find safe harbor in the religious liberty protections of the First Amendment. The First Amendment prohibits the government from compelling any religious group to perform a marriage ceremony between any two people, and at the same time prohibits legislatures from denying equality under the law to any group of Americans based on others’ religious beliefs.

The fact is, granting legal recognition to lesbian and gay relationships would have no effect whatsoever on the ability of churches and other houses of worship to define for themselves what relationships they will bless.

Civil marriage is an institution that establishes legal rights and responsibilities. People who are married by a judge, without any religious institution blessing their relationship, have exactly the same rights under the law as people who marry in a church. Some religious communities do not recognize divorce and remarriage and do not bless such unions, yet the law grants remarried people the same legal rights of civil marriage.

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states cannot refuse the rights of civil marriage to interracial couples. Some churches, legislators, and judges based their opposition to interracial marriage on their religious beliefs, and no church was forced to marry such couples. But no state could deny them protection under the law.

The institution of marriage did not come crumbling down after that 1967 ruling, nor will it come crumbling down when we acknowledge that gay and lesbian Americans should enjoy the same rights under the law that other Americans have. Our society is made stronger when couples choose to establish their commitment in legally sanctioned unions. We will be stronger when every family is protected in law. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the fair thing to do.

Ralph G. Neas is president of People For the American Way, www.pfaw.org.

The dump-Bush strategy for independent media

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 06:13:00 +0000

Opinion

The right wing’s media strategy to slant the odds in the upcoming 2004 elections will draw from its familiar bag of tricks, with help from its ultra-wealthy friends. This time, it has more position and more muscle to fix the rules and buy off the power players. Pro-people movements won’t beat it in that game, but we need to understand its media strategy to best overcome it.

In the American political system for over half a century, the media are the general managers of public opinion, and TV is their biggest boss. This administration’s tribute to boss TV was to try and hand over billions in local media profits on an FCC platter. It tried to fix the rules of industry so the biggest of the giants can squash competition and buy up local media like never before. It never expected the massive public outcry that exposed and, so far, halted the FCC action mid-theft.

Bush’s fight on behalf of media monopoly corporations wins him more than their profit-gorged thanks (he leans on Wall Street for the really big chunks of campaign money). His real payoff is that these same few media empires have more power than any other corporation or institution to determine what happens on Election Day. And with every day of monopoly media, more and more minds are herded into an ever-smaller arena of thought with higher walls keeping out non-monopoly viewpoints. Within this narrowing zone, the right wing can execute its media strategy to win power.

Right-wing pro-corporate extremism gets power over the public by triangulating three deadly dimensions – fear, ignorance and hate.

In California, the right turned reality on its head. First, Gray Davis was framed for the state’s fearsome economic problems. Then, media ignored the fact that the state’s crisis came from Bush’s pro-corporate federal policies. Third, Arnold groped at hatred using male-dominant posturing and making attacks on Native American Indians for not paying their “fair share.” Sadly, fear, ignorance and hate combined in Arnold’s favor.

Other examples of this disinformation drive are many – like Iraq’s “imminent threat” and “weapons of mass destruction,” and Bush’s “mission accomplished.” Yet in the barrage of big lies, the electorate has not fallen to the right but is near evenly split with Bush’s popularity plummeting. Progressive media strategy that aims at the center can help further break right-wing disinformation triangulation by being a source of hope, truth and unity.

The right aims its media strategy primarily at the political center. The hardest independent media challenge in the dump-Bush effort is to move that center. That’s where we can reach the undecideds, show hope to frustrated voters and non-voters, outrage the complacent with the truth of Bush’s disastrous policies, and create an undeniable groundswell. Independent media need to understand and respond to the hopes of the center, and be real with regular people in terms that move them to action.

Real lasting change obtains from small shifts in large groups. The broad cross-section of the political center is where millions of people can come to see through the economic and social agenda of the right. Moving the political center to vote for administration change will shift the whole arena towards more basic and lasting social progress.

Corporate media help right-wing victory by contributing to voter cynicism and discouragement. Voter turnout will be especially pivotal in ’04. Independent media strategy needs to “leave no voter behind.” With the stakes as high as the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush, there’s no room for discounting voters based on prejudice or formula. Millions of undecided, independent and even Republican voters are wondering where the country is heading, and might easily unite for a vision of progressive change.

The struggle for independent media and against corporate control of the truth is a growing and important movement, as proven by the huge turnout at last week’s Conference on Media Reform. Helping voter turnout, voter education and a defeat for Bush are natural tasks for independent media, alongside of movements for peace, anti-globalization, and the environment, for labor, women’s and civil rights and justice.

Defeating Bush will be an uplifting turning point in grassroots political education. It will advance the battle to rein in the giant media monsters and create a counterforce of truth in the hands of movements for social progress.

Noel Rabinowitz is communications director of the Communist Party USA. He can be reached at noel@cpusa.org

Du Bois before Lenin

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 06:08:00 +0000

Opinion

This year marked the centenary of W.E.B. Du Bois’ most famous book, Souls of Black Folk. It fell in a year wracked by warfare and capitalist deceit. The fraud of weapons of mass destruction sent our troops into battle against a people who have suffered the ravages of an uncertain history for at least a century. The gains of the war came quickly for global corporations who earned no-bid contracts to reconstruct a devastated country. The invisible hand came in quickly after the visible fist.

In 1920, in his Darkwater, Du Bois offered this antiwar credo: “I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong, and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.”

At a conference in Spring 2003 to honor Souls, the Native American literary critic and co-author of Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee, Robert Allen Warrior, quoted the lines from Darkwater. A hush fell over the room. Then there were murmurs of assent. Warrior, like many of us, refused to allow Du Bois to become a toothless cultural icon. We could not simply talk about “double consciousness,” Jim Crow and history – we had to also engage with his politics.

Du Bois was always an internationalist. In Souls, he wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.” The color-line is not the cord that holds people enslaved in the U.S. alone, but it is the chain that binds the world to service the social process called imperialism. Du Bois recognized the salience of imperialism, and, in 1915, two years before Lenin’s Imperialism, he offered his own sophisticated theory of how racism, war and socio-economic theft operated.

The growth of monopoly capitalism alongside liberal democracy within Europe and the U.S. led to the creation of a labor aristocracy, what Du Bois called “democratic despotism.” The uneven union of labor and capital within Europe and the U.S. drew them into an intra-national fight with each other over the spoils of the world, mainly the “darker nations of the world – Asia and Africa, South and Central America, the West Indies and the Islands of the South Seas.” “The present world war,” Du Bois continued, referring to World War I, “is, then, the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations. These associations, grown jealous and suspicious at the division of spoils of trade-empire, are fighting to enlarge their respective shares; they look for expansion, not in Europe but in Asia, and particularly in Africa.”

Du Bois further cautioned us against a peace movement that confines itself “chiefly to figures about the cost of war and platitudes on humanity. What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand million in diamonds and cocoa?” Instead, he wrote, we need to fight for the creation of global democracy. “For a world just emerging from the rough chains of an almost universal poverty, and faced by the temptations of luxury and indulgence through the enslavement of defenseless men, there is but one adequate method of salvation – the giving of democratic weapons of self-defense to the defenseless.”

Our American Lenin had a simple program against imperialism: the demand for global democracy. “Democracy,” he wrote, “is a method of doing the impossible.” Struggle then, not just for democracy within the U.S., but for democracy around the world, democracy without limit.

Vijay Prashad is the author of Keeping Up with the Dow Joneses: Debt, Prison, Workfare (South End Press). He can be reached at pww@pww.org

Capitalism is corrupting medical science

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 09:49:00 +0000

Opinion

Profitability for drug companies is high. Nine percent of the income of Fortune 500 drug companies went for profits in 1970, 18 percent in 2002. To keep profits up, the industry strives for “vertical integration” to control drug production, from research idea to consumer purchase. Along the line, companies bend the results of scientific research.

Writing for medical journalists in the Nieman Reports (Summer 2003), John Abramson, a family physician turned writer, passes on some tips for accuracy. In the process he provides a glimpse into the world of commercialized scientific research.

His subject is a November 2002 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) article that advocates testing for the C-reactive protein (CRP) – usually a test for inflammation – to identify people at risk for cardiovascular disease. The study of 28,000 women suggests that women with the highest CRP levels – the top 20 percent – face a 2.3 times greater likelihood of suffering heart disease than the 20 percent with the lowest levels.

The media reported the study as a scientific breakthrough, enabling physicians to identify people at cardiac risk through CRP measurements and then treat them with cholesterol-lowering drugs. Abramson believes that reporters jumped the gun.

He notes that the NEJM article makes no mention of the fact that the high-risk women – the top 20 percent – suffered only 2.3 episodes of cardiovascular disease per 1,000 women, per year, compared to one episode per 1,000 among the 20 percent at lowest risk. Terminology used in the article – “2.3 times more likely” – greatly exaggerates the actual findings.

Further, Abramson recommends, reporters should consider authors’ affiliations with industry. Manufacturers of drugs and medical products fund 70 percent of current clinical research. Studies show that findings published by researchers with company connections are almost four times more likely to favor industry products than research done independently. The lead author of the NEJM article holds patents on tests for inflammation used to identify cardiac risk.

He says reporters should search out scientists’ undisclosed conflicts of interest. Two of the NEJM article’s authors turn out to have conducted research funded by a manufacturer of a drug for lowering cholesterol. Four days after publication, the AstraZeneca company announced a project designed to find out whether its new cholesterol-lowering drug would be effective in protecting people with elevated CRP levels from heart disease. The lead author had already been hired by AstraZeneca to direct the study.

The NEJM is often described in the press as “prestigious” or “august.” For U.S. physicians, its respectability is unquestioned. The possibility that an article in that journal is tainted places the NEJM’s reliability in doubt.

Abramson, looking at the tip of an iceberg equivalent, hints that the big problem is baleful collusion between money interests and medical research.

The 1980 Bayh-Dole Law set the stage for medical centers to farm out research to corporations by allowing university recipients of federal grants to secure patents for their discoveries and to market them. Industry support for university research doubled between 1980 and 2001. Financially strapped university hospitals seek out stipends from drug companies in return for exclusive access to, or a first look at, their research. Recently, drug companies have established “contract research organizations” to conduct clinical trials and hire researchers, including university scientists, as direct employees.

Concerned medical leaders complain that with industry pulling the strings, research findings may be doctored. For example, negative results go unpublished, and data may not be shared with the scientific community. Companies hire prominent scientists to ghostwrite reports of other researchers’ work. Research findings that suggest possible harm to patients has been lost, or reinterpreted, or withheld from publication. Drug companies promulgate favorable research findings without scientific validation. Hired scientists design skewed research projects to produce findings that meet company needs. Academic researchers take in generous fees, receive stock options, and sit on company boards. Review boards set up by public agencies and specialty societies to provide physicians with unbiased treatment recommendations are now populated by physicians in the pay of drug companies.

Commenting on the general state of U.S. health care, in an interview with Harvard Magazine, Abramson says we “tend to treat disease downstream, at the end stage – [which] happens to be the most profitable one. If you have a disease that is profitable to treat, the best place in the world to be is the United States …The medical enterprise pretends to care about our health, but it cares much more about corporate well-being.” Abramson notes that profiteering “is the job of private enterprise. But we’re expecting private enterprise to do something it can’t do and doesn’t want to do.” Karl Marx would agree.

What then about people’s needs, about science in the public interest? Medical scientists, practitioners, even company executives, have to work under the prevailing rules of capitalism. But choices are available. They can leave the field entirely, or remain captive to an ethos based on greed, or they can opt for rules that promote equity, indeed for a new set of principles that serve people rather than profit.

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a part-time pediatrician in rural Maine. He can be reached at pww@pww.org

Lying is a way of life in the Bush administration

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 09:34:00 +0000

Opinion

District Council 1707 has hundreds of members living and working in the area referred to as “ground zero.” Our offices are on the north side of Canal Street, the northern boundary of the area directly affected by 9/11. It has now been revealed that the Bush administration’s assurances of the safety of the air and the environment were lies. The EPA has prepared a report revealing that dioxins and other pollutants were present in the highest concentrations ever recorded. The workers and inhabitants in the area were encouraged to go back to live and work amidst the poisonous dust in upholstered furniture and carpets and air conditioning ducts.

The lies that will produce sickness and death as a result of people going back into the area are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) read into the Congressional Record a report on how the Bush administration has manipulated, distorted, or interfered with science on health, environmental, and other key issues. The issues they lie about are:

• abstinence-only education • agricultural pollution • Arctic National Wildlife Refuge • breast cancer • condoms • drinking water • education policy • environmental health • food safety • global warming • HIV/AIDS • lead poisoning • missile defense • oil and gas • prescription drug advertising • reproductive health • stem cells • substance abuse • wetlands • workplace safety • Yellowstone National Park.

These lies and distortions serve various constituencies on the right in addition to Bush’s corporate cronies. For instance, propagating the lie that having an abortion increases the chances of breast cancer is aimed to bolster the anti-abortion movement.

Bush’s biggest lie of all was claiming that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, a lie he used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Indeed, this is an administration that rode into office on a lie: “I was elected.” The realization that theirs was a minority view, however, made them resort to lying as an everyday expedient. This administration has, in and around it, a cabal of right-wing extremists that have espoused a philosophy that legitimizes lying as a necessary tool.

These advisors – Paul Wolfowitz is a leading example – are known as neo-cons and they all are disciples of a deceased University of Chicago professor named Leo Strauss. Strauss was very concerned about protecting society (the wealthy) from the multitude (that’s us) and to do this, he maintained, we have to understand that deception (lies) is the norm in political life.

It appears that the ability to lie, distort and twist the truth is a necessary part of the applicant’s resume to get hired by Bush. An instructive case in this regard is that of the Secretary of Education, Dr. Rod Paige, the former superintendent of education in Houston. Bush lauded Paige as the miracle-maker in improving the education system in Houston. Paige left Houston claiming that the dropout rate for high schools was 1.5 percent. When the state did an audit after Paige left, the audit showed a dropout rate of close to 40 percent. Paige was able to get principals to lie by removing tenure protections and forcing everybody to be rehired every year.

Of course Bush & Co. have other strings to their bow. If you are not in a position to lie convincingly then you stonewall. The White House refused to make public the list of the energy plutocrats that met with Vice President Dick Cheney right after they took office. This meeting occurred even before the plastic covers were taken off the new office furniture. Just one result of that meeting was Enron and the theft of millions of dollars from California ratepayers.

Another example of stonewalling important public issues is the matter of disclosing the number and severity of the wounded American soldiers brought back from Iraq. The highest estimates from observers are anywhere from 4,000 to 8,000. Bush is not only hiding the numbers; he has been able to hide the wounded themselves. There has been virtually no media coverage of the wounded, and that can’t be an accident. There is another figure that’s being kept from the public: the number of Iraqis killed since the start of the invasion.

It is when that stonewall crumbles that a lie is necessary. So, lacking an effective lie detector, how is one to know when Bush is lying? The answer is simple. When his lips are moving.

David Buxenbaum is a trade unionist. This column originally appeared in the Oct/Nov issue of AFSCME District Council 1707’s publication, DC1707 Voice.