The Lives of Women

[Content Note: Threat of sexual violence; abuse; misogyny.]

This morning, I read this Twitter moment in which a woman recounts her experience of being tricked and creeped-on and intimidated by a man who came to her house ostensibly to purchase an appliance.

It reminded me of the time a plumber came to my house and was thoroughly menacing, which I recounted in a thread:

This thread reminded me of the time a plumber kept trying to corner me in my bathroom, while I was showing him where the problem sink was. The flash of frustrated anger in his eyes when he realized there was a back door that I could slip through (and did).

Men often accuse women of jumping to the worst conclusions, but I kept trying to convince myself he was just "awkward" not creepy, even as he escalated. He complimented my tattoos, while leering at me. He kept talking about my hair. And then he started trying to corner me.

I honestly don't know what would have happened if there hadn't been another door in that bathroom, around a corner, which he hadn't yet seen. I could only get to it by allowing him to think he was cornering me, and it was terrifying.

After he was done with his work, he lingered in my kitchen, leaning on my counter, "doing paperwork." He kept looking around and finding things on which to comment, like the Hillary flyer on my fridge. (This was during the election.)

He talked shit about her. He liked Trump. He licked his lips. I tried to remain as jolly as fucking possible. By this point, my dog was at my side, just looking at him. He kept glancing at her. When I knew he was intimidated by her, I told him to wrap it up. "It's time to leave."

And when he finally left, I slumped in a heap, while the adrenaline drained from my body. I just sat on the floor in the entryway, with my dog lying across my lap, for a long time.

This, friends, was not the only bad/scary experience I've had with men coming to the house in a professional capacity while I'm home alone. It was just the most recent one.

This is something about which I would love to not have anxiety. But some number of men being inappropriate while in my home on a repair/delivery/maintenance job has made that impossible. Having dogs helps.

I knew I'd mentioned this story at Shakesville soon after it had happened, but that I had concealed the extent of it. I went back to find it: "He also stared at my boobs a lot, and commented on my tattoos. I smiled and I said thank you, and he used the excuse of trying to guess how old they were to stare at them a little longer. I made polite conversation, with my back to a closed door. Holding his gaze, like two people just happily chatting, I reached for the doorknob behind my back and held onto it, just in case."

The "just in case" actually happened, but I ended the story there. Like Hannah Gadsby in Nanette, confessing she had minimized a story of an anti-gay assault to make it a palatable joke.

Perhaps part of me was trying to make the story more palatable, but mostly I was trying to avoid precisely the response I got on Twitter today: "I hope that you reported him."

Because I didn't.

And I felt ashamed about that.

So I made it sound like something less bad had happened to me, so no one would blame me for not reporting him.

But I know that I shouldn't feel bad about that. I've tried reporting abusive men before. It has never gone well.

I reported rape to the police and to school authorities and to adults who were meant to protect me, and nothing happened, except that it made my rapist vengeful. I reported sexual harassment to an employer, only to have the only female veep side with the women and get forced out of the firm. I reported abusive repairmen to their boss, only to have him tell me that I was being a real bitch. I reported online threats to my life to federal authorities and was told to go to local police who told me to go to federal authorities. I report (only extreme) abuse on social media and get told more times than not that it doesn't violate the terms of service.

Et cetera ad infinitum.

Today, I replied: "I did not. Because: 1. He kept talking about coming back to my house, which felt menacing. 2. I have learned from experience that reporting a man for being creepy/inappropriate doesn't result in any real consequences for him. It just pisses off a man who knows where you live. I know some people will get angry at me, reading that. I will advise you to redirect your ire where it actually belongs: The institutions that repeatedly protect men when women do try to report them and expose those women to retributive harm. See: The latest SCOTUS battle."

The truth is, I did have to turn that handle and walk through that door to get away from a plumber who was scaring me. And the truth is, I did not report him, because I was scared he would come back if I did, since I have learned that reporting puts me at more risk and does not diminish the risk for other women.

What I did was tell everyone I know locally not to use that plumbing service, and tell them to pass it on. The whisper network. Because official channels don't save us. So we have to save each other.

Anyway. Here is a thread to talk about the things that have happened to you, and the stories you haven't told, or minimized when you did tell them, because you were afraid. Afraid of being hurt, and then afraid of being shamed.

If you need to.

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Victim-Blaming People in Debt Never Changes

Maria LaMagna at MarketWatch: Americans Now Have the Highest Credit-Card Debt in U.S. History.

American consumers just hit a scary milestone.

They now collectively have the most outstanding revolving debt — often summarized as credit card debt — in U.S. history, according to a report Monday released by the Federal Reserve. Americans had $1.021 trillion in outstanding revolving credit in June 2017. This beats the previous record in April 2008, when consumers had a collective $1.02 trillion in outstanding credit revolving credit.

"This record should serve as a wake-up call to Americans to focus on their credit card debt," said Matt Schulz, a senior industry analyst at CreditCards.com, a credit card website. "Even if you feel your debt is manageable right now, know that you could be one unexpected emergency away from real trouble."

What terrific advice! I hope everyone appreciates being advised to "wake up" and "focus" on your credit card debt.

Where can I sign up to be a senior industry analyst earning a fat paycheck dispensing useful financial tips like "get your shit together, losers"?

Early last year, a survey found that 56 percent of Americans had "less than $1,000 in their checking and savings accounts combined," and 25 percent had "less than $100 to their name." The same survey found that 38 percent "would pay less than their full credit card balance" that month.

That is not a country comprised of people who aren't focused on their credit card debt and are unaware that they "could be one unexpected emergency away from real trouble."

To the absolute contrary, their debt and lack of savings is something on which many people find it difficult not to focus, to the exclusion of everything else, including fleeting moments of joy.

But articles which invisibilize the millions of people who are consumed with trying to get out of debt, in order to shame and scold the capricious strawpeople who carelessly rack up escalating debt buying #YOLO hoodies, are a fixture of the financial sector. Here, for example, is a piece I wrote in 2013, about an article shaming people for stealing from their own futures in order to survive in the here and now.

And the reason they are a fixture is because the people who read the financial pages are the corporatists, the robber barons, the union-busters, the predatory lenders, and the legislators whose unfettered avarice is the genesis of this sickening precarity — and it soothes their filthy souls to read fairy tales about their victims' weakness.

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Individual Solutions to Systemic Problems Don't Work, Even When You're a Former President

I can't believe this is the fourth post I'm writing about this—"this" being President Obama's $400,000 speaking fee for delivering a keynote at a healthcare conference—but here we are.

[Content Note: Video may autoplay at link] Senator Bernie Sanders further criticized President Obama, calling his decision "distateful."

Sen. Bernie Sanders believes former President Barack Obama's plan to receive $400,000 for speaking at a September Wall Street health conference is "distasteful," The Vermont Independent reported Friday.

Speaking with CNN's Suzanne Malveaux, Sanders labeled the transaction "not a good idea" and said he was "sorry President Obama made that choice."
"I just think it does not look good," Sanders said. "I just think it is distasteful — not a good idea that he did that."

..."Look, Barack Obama is a friend of mine, and I think he and his family represented us for eight years with dignity and intelligence," Sanders said. "But I think at a time when we have so much income and wealth inequality ... I think it just does not look good."

"It's not a good idea, and I'm sorry President Obama made that choice," he added.

Again, this is an "optics" argument: It "doesn't look good." And, again, Sanders is positioning himself in the role of arbiter. He's "sorry President Obama made that choice," as though it's his place to apologize for, or express regret about, the decision someone else made for themselves, no less a Black man.

I did a short thread about this on Twitter over the weekend, which resulted in the expected embarrassing invocations of Hillary Clinton, despite the fact she is completely irrelevant to the conversation (except insofar as people only seemed to get agitated about speaking fees set and earned by white men when a woman and a Black man started earning them).

There were also the tired accusations that I'm "defending Wall Street," coupled with the usual insistence that Wall Street is unique in its oppressive business practices.

In short, there wasn't a coherent argument for why President Obama should not take this speaking fee, aside from the "optics" of taking it from an industry which engages in oppressive business practices.

And while I certainly agree that the financial industry is disproportionately empowered to affect our lives—and have written once or twice or three hundred times about the hideous cost to average people of irresponsible deregulation, predatory and exploitative business practices, systemic bigotry in the financial industry, and the prioritization of profits over people's lives—I also have a more nuanced view of accepting payment from a single firm that is part of "Wall Street," for a variety of reasons, including:

1. Wall Street is routinely spoken about as though it's a monolith, but that is not accurate. Despite the lax legislation that empowers disgraceful business practices, not all firms leverage that legislation to enact the maximum allowable abuses, which is not incidental.

Further, "Wall Street" has become a shorthand for a financial industry model that destroys working class people's lives, which disappears the many working class people who are employed by "Wall Street," most of whom are women and people of color. Receptionists, low-level admin staff, cleaning crews, service staff, maintenance crews. All those big buildings have enormous numbers of support staff. Additionally, demo and construction crews employed for the interior construction jobs when interior spaces are trashed for remodels.

There are also many middle-class people who fill "Wall Street" jobs, who themselves in large numbers object strongly to the business practices of the industry by which they're employed.

Reflexive hostility to "Wall Street," and anyone who accepts a paycheck from "Wall Street," relies on generalizations that demonize workers for whom the people making those broadsides assert they are advocating.

There are ways to resist the oppressive business practices of the financial industry that do not rely on such erasure and demonization.

2. The financial industry is hardly the only industry with detestable business practices that must be challenged in ways more meaningful than a single person not accepting payment for his or her work.

"Wall Street" comes in for outsized criticism because its businesses practices affect everyone, including white men, which is attached to this idea that economic equality (again, not the same as economic justice) is the magic potion to solve all problems, which is itself used to justify a lack of intersectional analysis in economic policy.

There are a vast number of entrenched industries which have—and have been built and sustained on—institutional bigotry against marginalized people. People like President Obama, for instance. Ahem.

And, if optics matter, it "doesn't look good" when all the other industries that engage in exploitative and exclusionary businesses practices are ignored in order to focus on the one industry that also harms white men outside that industry in a way most other industries don't.

But, aside from optics, it isn't good to hold a marginalized person, even a former president, to a standard of rejecting payment from an industry that causes harm when virtually every industry in our capitalist system has caused (and continues to cause) harm to people like him.

3. Even if all the above didn't matter, there is this: Individual solutions to system problems don't work. That is a phrase I've used a lot around here over the years—because it's a central precept of meaningful resistance to institutional oppression(s).

A single person, not even one with as much privilege and influence as President Obama, can individually solve a systemic problem. The avarice and abuse endemic to the financial industry is a problem that needs to be solved. It will not be solved by any single person declining a speaking fee from a single entity within that industry.

Especially not a person from a community with a historic and persistent wealth gap, which was created by design.

Even if one is insistent on (unreasonably) arguing that President Obama has to be first in a series of rejections (that won't fundamentally alter the financial industry's business practices, which are largely defined by Congressional legislation), that argument ignores the message that President Obama stands to convey by not declining this speaking fee: That Black people are worthy and deserving of the same opportunities as white people are.

We must be honest here: The call on President Obama to reject a large speaking fee, based on standards set by white men over decades, is to ask him to set aside a meaningful message about Black equality in favor of a symbolic message to an industry that gets disproportionate focus because it harms white men, too.

And I know (believe me, I know) that many people will push back on that, and argue some variation on "taking money from Wall Street isn't the kind of equality anyone should want," but you can't simultaneously argue that "Wall Street" is of such enormous significance that it must be uniquely resisted and that visible exclusion on "Wall Street" doesn't matter.

If it's that important, then the message of equal opportunities in that space matters. Which is not incompatible with the argument that the rules governing the business practices in that space also need to change.

Individual solutions to system problems don't work. It's on all of us to advocate for change, not down to one man.

But putting the onus exclusively on one man is a pretty nifty way of absolving oneself of having to do anything meaningful. Pointing the finger at him is a lot easier than getting involved in the slow, deliberate, and often frustrating business of finding real solutions to injustice.

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I Write Letters

Dear Assholes Who Tell Me to Focus on Donald Trump and Stop Talking About Hillary Clinton:

Shut. The fuck. Up.

Let me expand on that thought…

1. I am a grown-ass woman of 42 years old, who has been writing about politics and culture for 13 years. I am eminently capable of holding multiple thoughts in my head at once, multitasking, and prioritizing my time and energy as I see fit. I will focus on whatever I damn well want to focus on and you can keep your unsolicited opinions to yourself.

2. Just since the election, I have written over 350 pieces about Donald Trump, including a comprehensive daily compendium of Trump news, detailing as many news items about the Trump administration as I am able, every single day. I'm fairly certain you're not doing anywhere near that amount of work covering Donald Trump, so don't tell me that my focus on Trump is insufficient.

3. LOL at your lack of self-awareness. Hectoring strangers is time you could be spending focused on Trump.

4. I will never get over the election, for reasons I have already explained. But most of the writing I'm doing about Hillary Clinton now isn't about the election, per se. It's about the way the election is being remembered.

There is a gross national gaslighting happening, as the vast majority of election postmortems engage in a sickening erasure of Clinton's strengths, her supporters' enthusiasm, the incredible history that was made, the breathtaking misogyny that was unleashed against Clinton and her visible supporters, and the harassment that kept many of her supporters silent, replacing these realities with an insistence that she was a "shitty" candidate to neuter the grave import of Russian interference, James Comey's shocking unprofessionalism, and Donald Trump's cynical appeal to white supremacy.

We are being asked to ignore that the 2016 election was a referendum on how this nation values women, as we had a choice between a proudly feminist candidate and a confessed serial sex abuser, and instead to swallow bullshit revisionist trash about how Hillary Clinton ran a "doomed campaign."

We are being asked to forget that Trump oversaw rallies at which his supporters chanted "Lock her up!" and wore shirts bearing caricatures of Clinton exhorting violence and/or using rank misogynist epithets. And that Trump himself stood on stage beside her and called her a "nasty woman." That he accused her of playing the "woman card."

We are being asked to discount aggressive media bias, which resulted in billions of dollars of free advertising for Trump. And to discount that bigotry was the primary indicator of a vote for Trump among his supporters, while Clinton ran a campaign that centered diversity, garnering 94% of votes cast by Black women, who are the backbone of the Democratic Party.

We are being asked to agree that she was just a terrible, flawed candidate and a terrible, flawed human being, despite the fact that she won the popular vote, getting more votes than any white man in history.

And despite the fact that many of us see parts of ourselves in her.

That last one? It's a biggie. There are millions and millions of Hillary Clinton supporters—especially, though not exclusively, people from marginalized populations—who saw in her some piece of their own lives, who had maybe never seen that before in a presidential candidate.

Maybe it was her indomitable spirit, her persistence in overcoming obstacles set in her path by misogynist creeps; maybe it was her pragmatic progressivism; maybe it was the model she set balancing career and family; maybe it was her dorky humor; maybe it was her wonkiness; maybe it was her diplomatic finesse; maybe it was her tenacity; maybe it was the way she advocates for children; maybe it was her willingness to blaze a trail for women; maybe it was her courage; maybe it was some other part of her, or some combination of lots of these things.

Not everyone who supported Clinton saw pieces of themselves in her, but a whole goddamn lot of us did. And when we are asked to concede that her downfall is exclusively—or even primarily—attributable to her own catastrophic flaws, that being the most qualified candidate ever to run and making history and commandingly winning the popular vote don't matter, we are being asked to concede that we aren't good enough, either.

We are being asked to participate in gaslighting that is used against us all the time, with the express purpose of making marginalized people individually responsible for their own defeats.

So that we never have to look too carefully at institutional bigotries.

When you tell me to "move on," to "get over it," to stop focusing on Hillary Clinton, you are asking me to accept this national gaslighting; you are asking me to tacitly approve, with my silence, of the tactic of holding a woman personally responsible not just for her own failures, but also for everyone else's; of rewriting history in a way that ensures we are doomed to repeat it.

Not just against presidential candidates, but against all women (and other marginalized people), who are routinely held responsible for systemic bias.

You are thus asking me to participate in my own marginalization, and that is a request I will not accommodate.

No Love,
Liss

P.S. This, too.

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The Republicans Unveil Their Obamacare Replacement Plan, and It Is Utter Garbage

Last night, House Republicans unveiled their Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) replacement plan, the text of which can be read here and here (PDF).

They also issued a summary document (PDF), titled "House Republicans Deliver on President Trump's Health Care Promise," which right from the start is a lie, because Trump's healthcare promise was "I am going to take care of everybody" and "The government's gonna pay for it."

Instead, the Republicans have delivered a devastatingly horrendous plan that relies on insufficient tax credits, health savings accounts, block grants to Medicaid, and promises that can't be kept without mandated coverage, e.g. no exclusion for preexisting conditions.

And instead of mandating coverage (which is what funds coverage for the people who need it the most), they are proposing an incredible 30% surcharge on premiums for a year on "anyone who goes without health coverage for two months or more." So, instead of incentivizing purchasing health insurance, they're proposing a steep punishment for anyone who doesn't/can't purchase it.

The one-third of Americans who don't know that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act are the same thing are about to find out.

— Melissa McEwan (@Shakestweetz) March 6, 2017

Meanwhile, as Judd Legum notes, Republicans "released their Obamacare replacement without a CBO score which tells you: 1. How much the plan costs, 2. How many people would be covered." Because their plan is garbage, and they know it. They "delayed an earlier roll out because the CBO score was so bad. Instead of improving the bill, they just released it without a score."

They have zero facts on their side. They absolutely cannot promise that their plan will cover more people or control costs better than the Affordable Care Act. (Because it won't.) All they have is lies about the Affordable Care Act, which Trump continued to tell as he celebrated the replacement rollout this morning on Twitter.

Our wonderful new Healthcare Bill is now out for review and negotiation. ObamaCare is a complete and total disaster - is imploding fast!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 7, 2017

But perhaps nothing more pointedly reveals how despicable this healthcare plan is, and how cruel the instincts behind it, than this comment from Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz on CNN's New Day this morning:

GOP Rep. Chaffetz: Americans may need to choose between "new iphone... they just love" and investing in health care https://t.co/5Hxwn2uOl5

— New Day (@NewDay) March 7, 2017

Anchor Alisyn Camerota: But access for lower income Americans doesn't equal coverage.

Chaffetz: Well, we're getting rid of the individual mandate. We're getting rid of those things that people said that they don't want. And you know what? Americans have choices. And they've gotta make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they wanna go spend hundreds of dollars of that, maybe they should invest it in their own healthcare. They've gotta make those decisions themselves.

We already knew that Republicans don't regard healthcare as a right, but Chaffetz confirms that in the bluntest of ways. Healthcare is something in which people need to invest.

The thing is, investing is something that only people with discretionary (excess) income can afford to do. When people with limited income make choices about how to spend their money, it isn't between "that new iPhone" and the hot new tech IPO; it's between this necessary thing and that necessary thing.

And, not for nothing, but the cost of a new iPhone won't cover a year's worth of healthcare. Someone has to be spending a whole lot of money on things they don't need in order to cover healthcare costs under the GOP's plan. And, you know, sometimes people actually need a new cellphone, and the difference in cost between an iPhone and the cheapest smartphone is even less money to "invest."

Once again, Republican policy is predicated on this erroneous notion that everyone has enough money, if only they'd just spend it on the "right" things. That the only real problem is bad individual choices. And that systemic problems like the federal minimum wage not being anything close to a liveable wage (thanks to Republicans) are somehow irrelevant.

They are not irrelevant.

So now we come to the resistance. We've got to resist this legislative nightmare with everything we've got. There are already four Republican Senators who have taken issue with one part of the plan (the unwinding of the Medicare expansion), so if Rob Portman (Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia), Cory Gardner (Colorado), or Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) is your senator, press them hard to reject this proposal. And if you've got a different Republican Senator, raise their concern with your senator.

Republicans and Democrats need to hear our objections to this horrendous plan. And they need to know that if they cast a vote for it, they'll lose our votes in the next election.

It is not hyperbole to say this is a matter of life and death. Republicans don't care about people's lives, but they do care about votes. Time to make a whole lot of noise.

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LOL WHUT

[Content Note: Misogyny.]

GOP presidential candidate and corporate power-failure Carly Fiorina has been subjected to a number of misogynist attacks, especially regarding her appearance, during this campaign (often from fellow candidate Donald Trump). Which is completely shitty. There is plenty for which to criticize Fiorina on the merits; anyone who has to resort to criticizing her appearance is a lazy, uninformed, misogynistic asshole.

But, while I will defend Fiorina against misogynist attacks, just as I defend Clinton, because that's how feminism works, Fiorina, who positions herself as an Exceptional Woman in every conceivable way, won't even recognize that what happens to her happens to other women, to an absolutely incredible, laughable degree:

Fox News host John Roberts pointed out that hosts of ABC's The View had said that Fiorina looked "demented" because she forced herself to smile throughout the Republican presidential debate.

"Is there a double standard here for Republican women?" Roberts asked. "I can't imagine that they would say things like that about Hillary Clinton."

"Oh, ya think? Yeah," Fiorina replied. "I think there’s a double standard… There is nothing more threatening to the liberal media in general and to Hillary Clinton in particular than a conservative woman. So, of course there's a double standard."

"Conservative women from Sarah Palin to Michele Bachmann to Carly Fiorina are long used to this," she added.

Carly Fiorina thinks that Hillary Clinton hasn't been subjected to attacks on the basis of her appearance?! LOL FOREVERRRRRR. Either Fiorina literally hasn't even the most basic familiarity with US politics even as she is trying to run for the nation's highest office, or she is just a shameless goddamn liar.

During the '08 election, 114 (!!!) incidents of misogyny directed at Hillary Clinton, many of them about her appearance, were documented in this space alone. There are even more since I started the Hillary Sexism Watch label in 2013. Clinton has been subjected to mockery of her appearance since she was the First Lady of Arkansas.

I've got news for Carly Fiorina: If you really don't know that, then you aren't qualified to lead this country. Period. And if you do know about it, and frankly I don't know how you couldn't, unless you've been living on another planet for three decades, then it doesn't do you any fucking good to lie about it.

Individual solutions to systemic problems don't work, Ms. Fiorina. It's a truth about your garbage policies, and it's a truth about your identity. Just because you don't want to be victimized by the Patriarchy, just because you want to pretend the Patriarchy doesn't even exist, doesn't make it so. You can't exceptionalize yourself out of the realities of womanhood, lady.

Because the Patriarchy won't let you.

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Clinton to Unveil Student Loan Reform Proposal

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

I'm really glad the Democrats are seriously talking about this:

After the dust settles from the Republican debate and before she breaks from the campaign trail for her Hamptons vacation, Hillary Clinton on Monday will roll out what is expected to be the most detailed and costly plank of her campaign: her policy proposals for student loan reform.

"This will be the big ticket item," a source with knowledge of her rollout said, noting that in terms of her federal budgetary priorities, her plan for student loans will involve the largest investment. The source said the hope was to create a "mandate to act on college affordability"...

As part of her plan, Clinton is expected to unveil a federal-state partnership to increase funding for public colleges and universities, several sources said. The proposal is expected to create an incentive system for states to increase their investments in higher education — a commitment to increasing public college funding would trigger further investment from the federal government, reducing tuition overall and, more specifically, the portion financed by the student.

One comparison that has been made is to President Barack Obama's Race to the Top initiative, an almost $5 billion Education Department grant unveiled in 2009 for public schools, which creates incentives for how to deliver quality education.

Clinton is also expected to announce a proposal aimed at easing the financial burden for students who attend historically black colleges, a campaign source said. Her advisers have also discussed creating a bill of rights for student loan carriers and risk-sharing for colleges, which means schools could be penalized when students default or can't repay their loans.

...Both of Clinton's Democratic challengers have proposed some form of "free" college. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed making college tuition-free and providing $70 billion a year – two-thirds from the federal government, with states picking up the rest – to cover public college and university tuition and fees. But that proposal doesn't go far enough for some progressives, because it doesn't cover the full cost of attendance. Under Sanders' scenario, students would still be on the hook for necessary expenses – textbooks, room and board and other costs of attendance that aren't built into tuition and fees.

Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has made "debt-free education" a centerpiece of his run, promising to reduce or freeze public tuition rates, allow student loan refinancing and expand income-based repayment programs as part of a larger plan. States would play a role, too: to help colleges maintain quality, they'd have to sustain funding efforts, with help from federal matching grants.

Clinton's proposal is expected to provide more granular detail.

...Clinton's policy team for months has been conducting weekly calls and meetings with policy experts on the issue and devoted more time to the roll-out of student loan reform than to any other policy agenda.

So, one thing I don't see here—and I don't know if that's because it isn't being considered or because it just included in the teaser leaks—is loan forgiveness, partial or total, for people currently struggling because of existing student debt. I'll obviously be very interested to see what Clinton's plan does, if anything, for those repaying student loans now.

O'Malley has at least talked about "student loan refinancing" and "income-based repayment programs," but I don't know if that goes far enough. Still, it's better than nothing.

I don't mind Sanders' plan for tuition-free education, just because it isn't inclusive of room, board, and materials. Because that is way better than nothing. My major concern with Sanders' plan is that I feel like it has zero chance of passing through Congress.

Clinton's plan, at least from the sound of it (like O'Malley's), is less radical but also more likely to be realized.

All of that said, none of these proposals address the larger problem we're facing around higher education: Just like everyone needed to get a mortgage and buy a house a decade ago, now everyone needs to get student loans and buy an education. There's always some fucking one-size-fits-all solution being peddled to USians to mask the realities that our economy is a house of cards, the population has gone lopsided as Baby Boomers age, there just aren't enough jobs anymore, and there's a cavernous class divide facilitated by middle class-destroying economic policies that are promoted by politicians in both parties even as they propose individual solutions on how to get and stay in the middle class. Buy a house! (Whoops.) Buy an education! (Whoops.)

Individual solutions to systemic problems don't work, and telling young people to get an education at any cost, when the cost demonstrably includes for many of them fucking their adult lives before they've even started, is an individual solution to a systemic problem that's about trade policies, taxation, demographics, domestic spending priorities, and a whole host of other lumbering national issues over which an entire generation of young people has no control, no less any one individual young person.

What power the people had has been sold away.

US voters have sold away their standard of living, their quality of education, their jobs, their worker protections, their civil liberties, their social safety net, their national security, their environment, their economy, their very democracy itself—all in exchange for the gossamer promise of individual success, even though a society of disconnected individuals without responsibility for one another isn't a society at all.

And so the younger generations are left a broken nation, told to make their way with mortgaged bootstraps, to which has been pinned a notice of foreclosure.

All of which is inextricably tied to our failure to acknowledge that every job should earn a livable wage for the person who fills it.

We're stuck in this place in which people are told they need to get a college degree in order to make a decent living (and in most cases do), but then the allegedly decent living they were supposed to earn is frequently undermined by significant margins care of crushing student loan debt.

Especially when a college degree is now the prerequisite to get in the door of many jobs where a college degree isn't even really necessary. It's just a very expensive piece of paper that many employers use to judge potential employees based on their ability to buy that expensive piece of paper.

It isn't right, or fair, that a degree from an accredited university on a résumé makes a significantly different impression to most potential employers, irrespective of the relevance of that degree to the position, than "Self-Awarded Degree of General Education from Free Public Library" does.

And it isn't right, or fair, that people's intelligence is judged by acquiring that paper, when I know lots of very smart people who did not attend university, or didn't graduate, and I know lots of assholes who have more degrees than a thermometer. I don't think there's only one path in this life, and I don't mistake education for intelligence (or decency).

But so it is: University degrees are used as shorthand. And so lots and lots of people feel they have to have them, including many people who can't afford them.

Anyway.

My point is: Yes, student loan reform, please. But also? Reform our ideas about what college degrees mean plus livable goddamned wages for anyone who works.

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An Observation

[Content Note: Choice policing.]

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People Are Assholes

[Content Note: Body policing; disablism; culture of judgment.]

Going around the internetz today are pictures of actress Renée Zellweger at last night's 2014 Elle Women in Hollywood Awards. I'm not going to link to any of the articles featuring the images; they're easy enough to find if you really want to see them. Simply, Zellweger looks different; her face no longer looks like it did earlier in her career—a face once described by Jim Carrey's character in her film Me, Myself & Irene as "Your squinty eyes and your face all pursed up like you just sucked a lemon."

In the back of the lint trap, I recall having read or seen something about Zellweger years ago that suggested she had trichiasis, eyelashes growing inward back toward the eye, and might need surgery to correct it. I can't find the source now, so it's just one of those things stuck in the back of my brain. I don't know if it's true; I don't know if it was the reason for her alleged recent eye surgery; I don't know if it was a reason offered, once upon a time, for a potential eye surgery to avoid charges of vanity.

But it seems like a possibility worth mentioning. Because I can pull up stories of other actors and actresses whose faces have changed for health reasons, like the amazing Kathleen Turner, who famously weathered nasty commentary about her weight gain and rumors about drug addiction and alcoholism for years before disclosing that she had rheumatoid arthritis, the steroids prescribed for which caused changes in her appearance. And I don't think that famous people owe us disclosure of health issues, no matter how major or minor they may seem to us.

Famous people also don't owe us an explanation as to why they decide to have cosmetic surgery.

I don't care why Renée Zellweger got surgery on her eyes, provided she did, except insomuch as I hope that she didn't feel obliged to do it because of the gross culture of judgment that has scrutinized and discussed and criticized her appearance for the entirety of her career.

(And no doubt before she was famous, too, on a more intimate scale.)

Predictably, the comments on these articles are the grossest of the gross. Zellweger is unrecognizable. She is hideous. She is vain. Et cetera. I don't need to recount them, because we know the entire song and all its cruel verses and vile refrain by heart.

So, for a moment, let us imagine that Renée Zellweger's primary reason for supposedly getting cosmetic surgery was because of decades of ridicule and venom about the shape of her eyes.

I did this for you, and now you mock me for doing it.

That is a cycle of abuse, being played out in public as a fun game for the abusers.

One might be inclined to argue: That's why celebrities shouldn't change their features, because people will never be happy, will never stop judging them.

But you know my position on that sort of argument: As long as unrealistic expectations of women exist, we shouldn't be punishing the women who try to meet them.

Or tasking them with finding individual solutions to this pervasive, aggressive, overwhelming systemic problem.

Perhaps Zellweger just felt obliged to have cosmetic surgery, if she did, to stay relevant in a career that is profoundly hostile to older women. As a response to unfathomably unfair expectations to defy time and the reality of human existence, a woman who makes the decision to get cosmetic surgery or fillers is making a valid and entirely understandable choice.

Especially when the alternative is: No more career for you bye-bye.

Of course the women who have cosmetic procedures to try to attain the Impossible Beauty Standards demanded by their horrible industry are then punished for doing it, if there is any evidence at all they've done it.

None of this is fair. It's not fair to judge Zellweger if she got cosmetic surgery for health reasons, for reasons of pleasing fans, for reasons of employment, for some combination thereof, for some other reason(s) altogether.

Renée Zellweger looks different now. The only reaction any of us need to have to that is: "Oh. Okay."

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Two Americas

[Content Note: Class warfare; bootstraps rhetoric.]

Or what feels, truly, like two different planets, sometimes. The planet on which people live who understand the reality of being unemployed in the US, and the planet on which Republicans live. Paul Krugman:

Last week John Boehner, the speaker of the House, explained to an audience at the American Enterprise Institute what's holding back employment in America: laziness. People, he said, have "this idea" that "I really don't have to work. I don't really want to do this. I think I'd rather just sit around." Holy 47 percent, Batman!

It's hardly the first time a prominent conservative has said something along these lines. Ever since a financial crisis plunged us into recession it has been a nonstop refrain on the right that the unemployed aren't trying hard enough, that they are taking it easy thanks to generous unemployment benefits, which are constantly characterized as "paying people not to work." And the urge to blame the victims of a depressed economy has proved impervious to logic and evidence.

But it's still amazing — and revealing — to hear this line being repeated now. For the blame-the-victim crowd has gotten everything it wanted: Benefits, especially for the long-term unemployed, have been slashed or eliminated.

...I don't know how many people realize just how successful the campaign against any kind of relief for those who can't find jobs has been. But it's a striking picture. ...[E]xtended benefits for the long-term unemployed have been eliminated — and in some states the duration of benefits has been slashed even further.

The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades. The total value of unemployment benefits is less than 0.25 percent of G.D.P., half what it was in 2003, when the unemployment rate was roughly the same as it is now. It's not hyperbole to say that America has abandoned its out-of-work citizens.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

The people who constantly bray this fairy tale of lazy moochers who cruise through life on government benefits are so out of touch with multiple realities—how difficult it is to secure long-term payments (e.g. disability); how difficult it is to live on government welfare; how many people who desperately need welfare aren't getting it because they don't qualify; how many people are desperate for work they can do; how many places in the US simply don't have enough jobs with livable wages to support the community anymore—that their ignorance, willful or otherwise, would be laughable if it weren't so unfathomably harmful.

And then there is this: Poverty is extremely difficult. It is stressful, demoralizing, exhausting. Poverty is not for lazy people. No one is getting rich, or even living a carefree life, on the paltry sums that constitute government benefits in the US.

The only lazy people in this discussion are the ones who repeat ad nauseam the reprehensible lie that unemployed people are shiftless takers, because that's a hell of a lot easier than just admitting their theory that making life difficult for unemployed people will force them to "get a job" is rank garbage.

Like the rest of their fantastical contentions underwriting their contemptible policies.

[Related Reading: $10.10.]

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Today in Rape Culture

[Content Note: Rape culture; tasking women with rape prevention.]

Via Lauren Chief Elk, I learned of a new nail polish called Undercover Cover, developed by four male students at North Carolina State University, which can detect some common "date rape drugs" in drinks. The product, like other similar "rape prevention tools" which have come before, is being hailed as an awesome new rape prevention strategy.

Yeah. I have a couple of problems with that. Tara Culp-Ressler does a good job of compiling some of the obvious objections being made by anti-rape activists.

Like: Once again, potential victims are being tasked with rape prevention.

Like: Once again, we're preemptively blaming victims. (How long before a woman who is sexually assaulted after being drugged is asked why she wasn't wearing nail polish that could have prevented it?)

Like: Once again, we're focusing on women detecting roofies, rather than the men who put roofies in drinks in the first place.

Like: "Activists point out that most students are assaulted by people they know in environments where they feel comfortable—situations when wearing anti-rape nail polish doesn't necessarily make sense. Plus, the vast majority of those assaults don't involve date rape drugs in the first place. According to a 2007 study from the National Institute for Justice, just about 2.4 percent of female undergrads who had been sexually assaulted suspected they had been slipped a drug."

Like: Someone who is determined to rape will find a way to rape.

Like: Being able to detect roofies in your drink only protects you; the person who put them there can move on to someone who isn't wearing nail polish.

There are so many reasons that this is problematic, and they all boil down to this: Individual solutions to systemic problems don't work. It's true whether we're talking about unemployment, childcare options, or rape prevention.

You can't bootstrap your way out of being raped.

And let us all take a moment to appreciate that we're being told to buy something to prevent rape. Of course. Because the market solves everything. The market has never met a problem that screaming "bootstraps!" and admonishing crass consumerism can't fix.

(I'm not knocking anyone who would find a use for this product. I think there are some women who might find it useful, and that's fine. I just don't want to ignore the implication of the people selling it equating "tasking potential victims with prevention" with "empowerment." And I don't want to ignore the implication that a product which tasks potential victims with prevention gets way more attention than any anti-rape initiative aimed at men.)

The narrative that if only you try hard enough and use this great new tool and that awesome new strategy and avoid doing these things but always do those things, even when those things are totally contradictory, you can avoid being raped is utter bullshit.

What determines whether someone is raped is [CN: description of assaults] the presence of a rapist who is determined to rape you.

Here's the thing about rapists: They rape people. They rape people who are strong and people who are weak, people who are clever and people who are foolish, people who fight back and people who submit just to get it over with, people who are sexually active and people who are not, people who have been sexually assaulted before and people who have not, people who rich and people who are poor, people who are young and people who are old, people who are tall and people who are short, people who are fat and people who are thin, people who are blind and people who are sighted, people who are deaf and people who can hear, people of every race and shape and size and ability and circumstance. The only thing that the victim of every rapist shares in common is the bad fucking luck of being in the presence of a rapist.

Rapists are determined to rape. And if no one drinks a rapist's poisoned drink, then he'll find another way to obtain his victims.

Victim-blaming is based on the damnably fucked-up notion that people (and women in particular) allow themselves to be victimized by virtue of carelessness or stupidity, and they need to be warned and educated and lectured and hectored and cajoled and shamed into never being victims (again).

No.

Our culture creates rapists—and they create victims. No one has ever been a victim of rape, until they had the bad fucking luck of being in the presence of a rapist.

Enough victim blaming. Enough.

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Welp

[Content Note: Disablism; guns; misogyny; racism.]

Here is just a whole article about how Congress is too fucking useless to do anything about gun reform, so they're once again fixing to pretend like they still have a purpose on the planet by talking about mental healthcare reform in the wake of another mass shooting.

I encourage you to read the entire article, because there's a lot to talk about but I'm only going to highlight one part:

"Our mental health system has failed and more families have been destroyed because Washington hasn't had the courage to fix it," Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., said in a statement over the weekend after the shooting. "How many more people must lose their lives before we take action on addressing cases of serious mental illness?"

...Murphy says his bill would also expand access to psychiatric treatment and it would encourage states to set a new standard for committing people — the need for treatment, not that they present an imminent danger. It would also make it easier for family members to take action.

It would also make it easier for family members to take action to commit people who need treatment. The idea here, of course, is that we're meant to imagine that Elliot Rodger could have been stopped if only his family had been empowered to commit him. We're meant to imagine that every man who picks up a gun and kills a lot of people could be stopped if only their families are empowered to commit them.

This is a dangerous, and disablist, fantasy.

It is also tasking individuals with finding solutions to systemic problems, which doesn't work. It never works.

Even if we imagine that committing Elliot Rodger would have stopped his crime; even if we imagine that traditional mental healthcare could have meaningfully addressed the violent misogyny and racism underwriting his killing spree; even if we imagine that some finite consignment to a mental healthcare facility would have "fixed" him; even if we imagine that there was a law that empowered his family and that his family made use of that legal power and that Rodger was compliant with therapy into which he was forced against his will; even if we imagine all of these things in this one specific instance, we are required to cast aside everything we know about how our culture works.

And one of the key cultural habits which we are obliged to ignore to imagine that this sort of legislation could work is that "mental illness" is often deployed as an excuse on behalf of murderous misogynists and racists, and routinely deployed to discredit women and/or people of color who are addressing misogynist and/or racist harm done to us.

It isn't MRAs and PUAs and other lifestyle misogynists and chronic harassers and vengeful abusers who are called "crazy" by society; it's the women who are their targets. It's the woman who raise our voices in opposition to misogyny and harassment.

We are the ones who are seen as "crazy." As "hysterical." As "narcissists." As "delusional." As "paranoid." We are the ones who are dismissed out of hand by law enforcement, by human resources departments, by friends and family. We are the ones accused of seeing things that aren't there.

This is the reality of the culture into which Congress wants to unleash legislation empowering families to forcibly commit people they believe are in need of treatment—a culture in which patriarchal and white supremacist beliefs and behaviors are the norm, and challenging them gets you called nuts.

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Assvertising

[Content Note: Classism; victim-blaming.]

Two different-sex couples sit in a park having a picnic. One couple, both of whom appear to be white, is dressed in "fancy" sweaters and slacks; the other couple, a man who appears to be white and an Asian woman, are dressed down in a hoodie and cardigan, respectively. They are all young, thin, and kyriarchetypically attractive.

Fancy Couple is drinking from glassware and a ceramic pitcher. Casual Couple is drinking from red plastic party cups and a plastic thermos.

"It's so good to see you guys," says Fancy Woman. "So, what's up?" Fancy Couple pulls lobsters from a picnic basket.

"Well," says Casual Woman, "we finally bought a place."

"Holy cow!" exclaims Fancy Woman.

"You seriously have enough saved to do that?" asks Fancy Man, holding a lobster in his hand.

"We've been putting a little aside each month," says Casual Man, and Casual Woman nods.

When we cut back to Fancy Couple, they're face-down in massage chairs getting massaged by handsome white blond masseurs, and they're eating the lobsters with their bare hands. "Geez!" says Fancy Woman. "By the end of the month, we have nothing left to save!"

"Yeah," says Fancy Man. "I have no idea where it goes!"

"Well," says Casual Woman, "you're spending a lot...? On—"

"Oh. Ah. Mm," groans Fancy Man, his mouth full of lobster, as he gets massaged, totally ignoring Casual Woman.

"Is it good?" asks Fancy Woman. He responds with more groans. Casual Couple exchange a WTF look.

Suddenly Fancy Couple are in a hot air balloon basket and start to lift off. "How is my account overdrawn?!" wonders Fancy Woman.

Over the image of a hot air balloon, a male voiceover says, "When it comes to financial stability, don't get left behind. Get tools and tips for saving at Feed the Pig dot org."

Text indicates that the ad comes care of the Ad Council and AICPA, which is the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Shaker speedbudget sent me this advertisement with the following text, which I am sharing with her permission: "I saw this horrible ad about saving money last night, and I was ready to throw something at the dang TV. I am living paycheck to paycheck, and it's not because I'm out spending money on lobsters and massages. It's because I don't make enough money to last me from paycheck to paycheck. I have student loan debt and credit card debt from when I was in said school just trying to feed myself. This ad also completely elides the fact that wages have been stagnant for 30 years now while the cost of living has gone up."

This ad is shitty for a whole lot of reasons, not least of which is because it evokes the trope of the irresponsible, extravagant spender living well beyond hir means, which became ubiquitous in public discussions of bankruptcies and home foreclosures at the height of the recession, as a means of redirecting accountability onto individuals and their frivolous spending habits while deflecting corporate responsibility for spiraling healthcare costs and predatory lending, just for a start.

And, yes, it is a big universe, and within it there are people who are financially irresponsible, but mostly these failures are the result of systemic problems, and tropes about failures of "personal responsibility" are the way in which we collectively continue to task individuals with finding solutions to those systemic problems.

It's important to call this bootstraps bullshit out every time we see it.

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Working Poor and Mendacious Narratives

[Content Note: Class warfare; food insecurity.]

Anyone who has been paying attention to the world around them and the people in it almost certainly already knows this, and anyone who is resistant to facts that might undermine their self-aggrandizing cruelty won't fucking care, but here it is anyway:

A report from Feeding America on food insecurity and food costs in the United States sheds new light on the real targets of the conservative media's crusade against food stamps.

...[The reality is] that almost 41% of recipients live in a household with earnings, and according to the USDA program fraud is below one cent on the dollar.

Feeding America's report on the county and congressional district level food insecurity and county food costs in the United States paints a startlingly different picture of the food insecure than the one the right-wing media typically pushes. Feeding America found that more than 47 million people in the United States are food-insecure, meaning that they have "limited or uncertain access to adequate food," and that 16 million of those people are children. On average, about 71% of the food-insecure throughout the country fall below 185% of the poverty line, making them eligible to receive SNAP benefits.

I know I'm the brokenest of all the broken records that have ever been broken, but the incessant yammering about "bootstraps" and "takers" and "moochers" and people who can't be "convinced" to "take personal responsibility and care for their lives" is FUCKING GARBAGE.

Indecent, dishonest, execrable, inexcusable garbage.

I have nothing but voluminous contempt for anyone who barfs up this resoundingly discredited garbage, who scapegoats working people who don't have enough to eat as lazy, system-gaming scoundrels, in a futile bid to mask their reprehensible agenda of "reducing dependence on government"—a gross euphemism for vile social Darwinism justified by bullshit beliefs about bootstraps and fairy tales about how people earn what they deserve, designed to ensure that the wealthiest fuckers in the wealthiest nation don't have to pay a penny more in taxes in order that the workers they exploit to become billionaires might have enough food to stay alive and drag their exhausted, malnourished asses to jobs that won't pay them a livable wage, because profits are more important than people.

This isn't, and will never be, about whether people are working hard enough.

This is about the fact that Republicans think people aren't entitled to food. And they're too cowardly to say it plainly. So they tell lies about lazy people who game the system—a breathtaking bit of projection that would be laughable, if only it weren't so fucking tragic.

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Dispatches from the 99%

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

The LA Times has a piece today by Walter Hamilton about how the "number of Californians 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes has surged in recent years" as a result of the recession, long-term unemployment, and raising housing costs.

For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.

The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data.

"The numbers are pretty amazing," Wallace said. "It's an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They're mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They've got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents' homes."

Many more young adults live with their parents than those in their 50s and early 60s live with theirs. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 1.6 million Californians have taken up residence in their childhood bedrooms, according to the data.

Though that's a 33% jump from 2006, the pace is half that of the 50 to 64 age group.

The surge in middle-aged people moving in with parents reflects the grim economic reality that has taken hold in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

I just don't know (I mean, I know intellectually; I just don't know emotionally) how the wealthiest and most influential USians look at stories like these and continue to disgorge epic amounts of horseshit about bootstraps from their filthy mouths. This is not about individual people making bad choices. This is about a system that is catastrophically broken.

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This Is Not a Solution; This Is the Problem.

[Content Note: Misogynoir; class warfare; systemic abuse.]

The Myth of Bootstraps goes something like this: I never got any help from anyone. I achieved my American Dream all on my own, through hard work. I got an education, I saved my money, I worked hard, I took risks, and I never complained or blamed anyone else when I failed, and every time I fell, I picked myself up by my bootstraps and just worked even harder. No one helped me.

This is almost always a lie.

There are vanishingly few people who have never had help from anyone—who never had family members who helped them, or friends, or colleagues, or teachers.

Who never benefited from government programs that made sure they had electricity, or mail, or passable roads, or clean drinking water, or food, or shelter, or healthcare, or a loan.

Who never had any kind of privilege from which they benefited, even if they didn't actively try to trade on it.

Who never had an opportunity they saw as luck which was really someone, somewhere, making a decision that benefited them.

Who never had friends to help them move, so they didn't have to pay for movers. Who never inherited a couch, so they didn't have to pay for a couch. Who never got hand-me-down clothes from a cousin, so their parents could afford piano lessons. Who never had shoes that fit and weren't leaky, when the kid down the street didn't.

Most, maybe all, of the people who say they never got any help from anyone are taking a lot of help for granted.

They imagine that everyone has the same basic foundations that they had—and, if you point out to them that these kids over here live in an area rife with environmental pollutants that have been shown to affect growth or brain function or breathing capacity, they will simply sniff with indifference and declare that those things don't matter. That government regulations which protect some living spaces and abandon others to poisons isn't help.

The government giving you money to eat is a hand-out. The government giving you regulations that protect the air you breathe is, at best, nothing of value—and, at worst, a job-killing regulation that impedes the success of people who want to get rich dumping toxins into the ground where people getting hand-outs live.

When people really don't have any help from anyone, it doesn't look like gold-plated car elevators. It looks like this: Arizona Mother Arrested after Leaving Kids in Car During Job Interview.

Shanesha Taylor is a homeless, single mother of 2 children, who was arrested for child abuse this week. Taylor left her children, ages 6 and 2 years old, in her Dodge Durango while she attended a job interview in Scottsdale, Arizona.

A passerby found the children in the car, with the engine turned off and the windows cracked open. Once Taylor returned to the car, 45 minutes later, she informed the police officer that she did not have a babysitter for her children.

"She was upset. This is a sad situation all around. She said she was homeless. She needed the job. Obviously not getting the job. So it's just a sad situation," said Scottsdale Police Sergeant Mark Clark.

She was arrested and booked into jail for child abuse.

Her children are now in CPS custody.

At the link, Taylor is seen in her mugshot, tears streaming down her cheeks.

The bootstrappers will argue that she should have found someone to watch her kids. Everyone has someone they can ask to watch their kids. No. Not everyone does. That's what really having no help from anyone looks like.

People who don't have family they can ask usually have neighbors, but Taylor is homeless. Or co-workers, but Taylor is jobless. Or someone they can pay, but Taylor has no money. With whom could she leave her children? There is no free daycare offered by the government—the same government that is trying to force women to have as many children as possible.

She and her children need food and shelter. She needs a job to provide food and shelter. She needs to go on an interview to get a job to provide food and shelter. She needs to leave her children somewhere while she goes on an interview to get a job to provide food and shelter.

She doesn't have anywhere to leave them. She leaves them in the car, because it is her only option. And she is arrested and her children removed from her care.

Nothing makes sense about indefinitely separating Taylor from her children, as punishment from her leaving them for 45 minutes. But criminalization is the only solution we have. We offer jail, instead of help.

Last fall, I read this story in the local paper: "Poor school attendance leads to charges against parent." That story, too, features a mugshot of a black mother, looking grieved. Because of her son's truancy—he had 19 unexcused absences and was tardy 30 times during the school year—Moina Lucious was arrested, charged with a felony count of neglect, and faced six month to three years in prison.

There were no details in the story about what may have been happening in this family's life that was contributing to the truancy. (I will also note that excused absences cost money; if your kid is sick, and you can't afford to take hir to the doctor, your kid might stay sick for longer, and you also don't have a doctor's note to provide to the school.) Naturally, we're meant to assume that Lucious is just a Terrible Mother, but I can imagine about 2,000 reasons why this could have been happening when support from her community might have solved the problem.

In a way that sending her to prison never will.

What if all the taxpayer money that's used arresting, processing, probably public defending, possibly trying, and maybe jailing women like Taylor and Lucious were instead used toward social programs that would have supported them in the first place?

The people who claim to never have had any help from anyone are the same people who tend to criticize "government hand-outs" and talk about the social safety net like it's a giant waste of taxpayer money—a "wealth redistribution program" to steal rich folks' money and give it to the poor.

(They're also the most likely to say shit like, "Don't have kids if you can't take care of them," while they simultaneously support policy that seeks to deny women control over our reproduction.)

But people need help. Everyone needs help. And not everyone is fortunate enough to have the kind of help that is so reliable it's possible to dismiss it out of hand as not even having been help at all.

This is what really having no help looks like. We don't actually reward not having help in this country; we criminalize it.

And that's not a solution. It's the problem.

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I'm Not Lovin' It

[Content Note: Worker exploitation.]

McDonald's employees in New York, Michigan, and California have filed class-action lawsuits alleging that their employer has engaged in wage theft:

The suits allege that McDonald's has forced employees to work off the clock, not paid them overtime and struck hours off their time cards.

The suits were announced in a conference call led by the workers' lawyers and organizers of the union-backed campaign to raise fast food wages across the country.

"We've uncovered several unlawful schemes, but they all share a common purpose -- to drive labor costs down by stealing wages from McDonald's workers," said Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon LLP, an attorney who represents California workers.

Workers in California claim that McDonald's and its franchisees did not pay them for all of the hours they worked, and did not give them timely breaks.

The employees in Michigan allege that they would start getting paid only when customers walked into the restaurants, even if they showed up to work hours earlier.

New York McDonald's workers, who filed their case in federal court, claim the fast food chain did not reimburse them for the cost of cleaning uniforms. They say it drives some workers' real wages below the minimum wage, which is a violation of federal labor law.

These claims violate the federal Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which sets minimum wage, overtime pay, record-keeping and other standards for workers across the country.

...Since 1985, the Labor Department has found that McDonald's and its franchises have had to pay back wages more than 300 times for FSLA violations.

If your lived experience is anything like mine, you have heard Bootstraps Bullshitters say fully one billion times some variation on "those lazy bums should get off their butts and get a job at McDonald's" given any opportunity to comment on people who are unemployed, poor, on welfare, on disability, or in any other circumstance that people who will never have to work at McDonald's view as a contemptible refusal to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and stop being moochers blah blah fart.

McDonald's is always, always, the go-to job for this sort of rhetoric. "Well, if it were me, I'd LOWER MYSELF to work at McDonald's before I'd ACCEPT HANDOUTS FROM THE GOVERNMENT," bellow undilutedly privileged dipshits as they buy shiny new Cadillac ELRs with their seven-figure bonuses made possible by a taxpayer-funded bailout.

Anyway.

That fairy tale is some rancid garbage even without knowing what it's like to be employed at McDonald's—but it's extra vile on a sesame seed bun when people invoke McDonald's even despite the fact that working there full-time is no guarantee that you'll get paid for full-time work, which is to say nothing about the fact that they don't even pay a livable wage in the first place.

Sure. Go work on McDonald's, American Dreamers. Good luck with all that.

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Triggered, Continued

[Content Note: Narratives of oversensitivity; discussion of being triggered.]

The debate about trigger warnings and content notes (TWs/CNs) continues today, much of it surrounding a piece on the subject Jill Filipovic published at The Guardian entitled: "We've Gone Too Far with Trigger Warnings."

I don't really have much to add to what I already wrote yesterday, but here are a couple quick additional thoughts in response to some of the ongoing debate:

1. I keep seeing this phrase "gone too far." Too far for whom? Certainly not the people for whom TWs/CNs are useful, and might mean the difference between having a public panic attack and not having a public panic attack.

2. Having PTSD or other trauma-induced mental illness isn't a "vulnerability." That's a disablist mischaracterization.

3. The "infantilization" argument, which asserts that TWs/CNs treat readers, students, etc. like babies or weaklings, is really contemptuous of readers who appreciate TWs/CNs and the choice they provide. Offering choice doesn't diminish agency. Quite the opposite.

4. A frequent frame I'm seeing is that people who use TWs/CNs and people who have PTSD or other trauma-induced mental illness are mutually exclusive groups. To the contrary, often the people most invested in providing TWs/CNs to readers, students, friends, whomever are people who themselves experience triggers.

5. I really dislike the compilations of supposedly absurd TWs/CNs. What might appear "extreme" may be a writer's consideration for a specific reader. If you interact with your community a lot, you might be more aware of individual readers' needs. And dismissing attempts and sensitivity and inclusivity as nothing but "performativity" is shitty. Not for nothing, but I never get more fucking vile harassment than when I draw boundaries in this space to reduce harm for marginalized groups (which sometimes includes me and sometimes doesn't, depending on the situation). I know there are people who perform social justice crusader roles for cookies or whatever, but I can't imagine maintaining that facade for long unless this stuff really means something to you, because the cost is steep.

6. I don't understand this "you can't predict every single trigger ever" argument against the use of TWs/CNs. Because you might fail someone, you just resolve to definitely fail everyone? Okay.

7. The old HOW DO YOU EVEN EXIST IN THE WORLD? chestnut is flying fast and furious. You know—that ubiquitous exasperated rhetorical aimed at people who are triggered by stuff that most other people aren't. Well, here's the thing: For some people, existing in this world is actually very difficult.

And if you are someone who has survived abuse, or neglect, or poverty, or illness, or systemic oppression, or any one or more of the number of things that can leave someone with lingering consequences of trauma, but you've managed to survive without any triggers, or you've managed to find the resources and support and safety and space you needed to move beyond them, then good for you. You are very lucky.

I am very lucky. I am still occasionally triggered, but nothing like I was 20 years ago, where I was just emerging from three years of profound sexual abuse and felt like a raw nerve walking through the world. Part of that was my determination to process what had happened to me, and part of it was the hard work of doing that processing, and part of it was the sheer stupid luck of having the resources and support and safety and space I have needed, which sometimes just meant having a friend in the right place at the right time.

What if I'd not had this friend or that friend in the right place at the right time? During a rough month, or a single terrible afternoon? I dunno.

All I know is that if nothing ever happened to you that was bad enough to leave you traumatized, lucky you. And if something bad happened but you have survived it and/or processed it trigger-free, lucky you. And anyone who didn't isn't weak or damaged or oversensitive or too goddamn fragile for the world. They're unlucky.

If you understand why conservatives telling people without boots to pull up their bootstraps is indecent garbage, then it shouldn't be too difficult for you to understand why sneering at someone with triggers "I got over it" is indecent garbage, too.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Quote of the Day

"Some on the left have always tried to introduce a more class-conscious style of politics. These efforts never pan out. America has always done better, liberals have always done better, when we are all focused on opportunity and mobility, not inequality, on individual and family aspiration, not class-consciousness."—David Brooks, in his latest garbage column for the New York Times.

LOL. Shut up, David Brooks.

Dean Baker's response to this hogwash is perfect: "Funny, I thought Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act (i.e. the 40-hour workweek), the National Labor Relations Board, and other products of the New Deal were pretty big accomplishments. Much of this was done quite explicitly with a sense of class consciousness. These were all measures that were backed by mass movements that sought to ensure that working people got their share of the economic pie."

Brooks wants us to stop talking about class and start focusing on "individual and family aspiration," because then we can keep having terrific conversations about how some individuals and families aren't "aspiring" hard enough, or don't have the right aspirations, or whatever.

It's a lot tougher to victim-blame when you're not tasking individuals with finding solutions to systemtic problems.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Quote of the Day

[Content Note: Fat hatred.]

This inspires me to point something out to my more liberal readers. Remember that particularly clueless right-wing acquaintance of yours? The one who believes that anybody in America can become rich, because he thinks about poverty in a completely unscientific, anecdotal way, which allows him to treat the exceptional case as typical? The one who can't seem to understand the simplest structural arguments about the nature of social inequality?

The next time you see some fat people and get disgusted by their failure to "take care of themselves," think about your clueless friend.

—Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth.

This is actually an old quote from a column Campos wrote back when he was writing for the Rocky Mountain News (and the column itself no longer appears to be online), but I like to whip it out from time to time because YES.

Fat bootstraps, friends.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!