Government

Today, January 22, is a very important day for many of us around the world…the day of the U.S. Supreme Court’s momentous ruling in Roe versus Wade. A triumph for so many U.S. women and their families.

I’ve been a donor to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America for years and years and years. I’m a proud board member of Planned Parenthood of Southern New England (PPSNE). And my life partner and I just changed our will to include PPSNE.

“Care. No matter what.” That is the promise of the Planned Parenthood movement worldwide. It’s a promise made every day to the women, men, and young people who rely on their personal right to make their own decisions.

Family planning is a deeply personal and often complex decision. None of us knows the personal situation of another. As we in the Planned Parenthood movement say, “I am not in her shoes. Ultimately, decisions about whether to choose adoption, end a pregnancy, or raise a child must be left to a woman, her family, and her faith, with the counsel of her doctor or health care provider.”

An issue yesterday, still today…and tomorrow, too.

• Watch this 90-second animated video, Not In Her Shoes. The video gives some great tips about how to encourage people to have an authentic conversation about difficult issues.
• Watch Forty Years Safe and Legal.This 4-minute video honoring the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade features archival footage, historical photos, news clips, and new interview footage with Sarah Weddington and Cecile Richards.
• Read Gail Collins’  great column in the New York Times. Watch this episode of the  NBC show Parenthood, which prominently and sensitively featured Planned Parenthood. Read the Salon article about the amazing Parenthood episode. Read this MSNBC article about the public’s strong support for abortion rights. And read this eye-opening report by the Guttmacher Institute about restrictions on abortion access across the United States.

Save and legal is the key. That’s what the U.S. Supreme Court decided on January 22, 1973. Thank you for that decision.

And now what? Continued vigilance. Continued commitment. Safe and legal forever and everywhere.

Sexism: I’m the founder of the Women’s Fund of Rhode Island…leveling the playing field for women and girls. Despite progress, it’s still a disadvantage to be a woman in every country in the world, including the United States. In fact, the most gender equitable country in the world is Iceland.

Check out the commentary on this article, “11 Qualities of a Perfect Woman.”  Check out the film “Miss Representation,” which explores how the media’s misrepresentations of women produce underrepresentation of women in positions of power and influence. Read Gail Collins’ 01-10-13 column in the New York Times, “The Woes of Roe.” Ask yourself – and your legislators – “What Happened to the Violence Against Women Act?”

All this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. We have to keep fighting to level the playing field for women and girls. It’s called social justice and basic human rights!

Gun control: I am so tired of guns in the U.S. I’m so tired of the ranting and raving about “protecting myself” so I’m gonna have a gun. And if everyone had had a gun in the Aurora cinema, everyone could have stopped that guy. Really? With all your training from the NRA, you could distinguish the good guys and the bad guy? Or would there be some innocents shot, too?

I subscribe to Reader Supported News, a great compiler of news articles in the U.S. and elsewhere. Check out Juan Cole’s article “Gun Murders vs. Terrorism by the Numbers.” Read Bill Moyers’ commentary about guns. Read Robert Reich’s article “Debt Ceiling and Guns, “Using Presidential Authority.” Go for it even more, Mr. President! How about Tom Engelhardt’s article “The Pentagon as a Global NRA.” By the way, apparently the NRA was not always so ridiculous about gun control. Check out Jill Lepore’s article in The New Yorker, “Battleground America.”

Always remember, the U.S. spends something like 7 times more money on defense than multiple other countries combined. Golly gosh… I am so pleased that we can kill so many more people so many times – and destroy entire countries and societies. Thank heavens we can! Yippee!

By the way, reading Cole’s article reminds me: how about ending this stupid war on terror. Wars are supposed to have an end. Enough with the war. Terrorism won’t end. It’s with us forever. Consider it a police action. And enough with the absurd theatre of airport security and screening. What a bunch of crap. Let’s not forget “The Colossal Blunder That is the Iraq War.”

And let’s end another war, the war against drugs. Oh please. All the research says that the war on drugs didn’t work, isn’t working, doesn’t work, and won’t work. How ironic is it that the U.S. provides the guns (gun control anyone?) for the cartels to fight the war for drugs? And U.S. prisons are full of marijuana smokers or small sellers. And most of them are not white. Racism anyone? By the way, why is President Obama so bothered by decriminalizing marijuana? Read Naomi Wolf’s article in the U.K.’s Guardian.

One final thought…all the secrecy about security. Check out this RSN article by Daniel Ellsberg, “Secrecy and National Security Whistleblowing.” Another by the way: Daniel Ellsberg is one of my heroes.

Okay, it’s Friday night. Close to 8 p.m. in my office and home. I’m stopping now. I’m thinking of dinner and some frivolous movie. Family time. Personal time. And since I’ve ranted and raved in this blog, maybe I won’t do that with Tom this evening.

Please can we fight for change? This is the war need to fight – here at home…the fight for social justice…the war against the war against women…racism…the fight to protect without guns…and so much more.

My life partner, Tom, made an interesting statement yesterday: “Capitalism is NOT democracy.” Obvious, I guess. But in the U.S. – or certainly with certain people and candidates and companies and political parties – capitalism and democracy are pretty much interchangeable.

Here’s what Wikipedia says: “Capitalism is an economic system that is based on private ownership of the means of production and the creation of goods and services for profit.” And what about democracy? “Democracy is a form of government in which all eligible citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives.”

Sure. Yes. Capitalism is good. But not always and not totally. Good government ensures that capitalism doesn’t infringe on democracy. Good government compensates for the ills of capitalism that threaten democracy.

But government doesn’t so much compensate for the ills of capitalism in the U.S. Not anymore. And this election is yet another test of how U.S. citizens will respond to what’s happening in this country. Sadly, I don’t have too much hope.

Check out these marvelous articles in Reader Supported News.

— “…the biggest underlying problem America faces – the unprecedented concentration of wealth and power at the very top that’s determining our economy and destroying our democracy…” From economist Robert Reich.

— “…killing the American dream…” From author and activisit Naomi Wolf.

— “we now have a record of what our modern day wealthy gentry really thinks of the rest of us…” From Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.

Your religion cannot stop me from choosing. Your religion cannot deny science and facts. Your religion cannot guide my country.

Do you remember what Senator John F. Kennedy said in 1960, speaking to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association? “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute – where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act… I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish – where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source…”

I don’t want to know about the religious faith of any candidate for any office or the religion of any public official. I am offended when I hear elected officials say, “God bless America.” Enough. Separate church and state.

Here’s an interesting perspective: The NRA doesn’t concern itself with gun violence. The NRA’s focus is selling more guns. I heard this insight in a conversation about the NRA on the Callie Crosley Show, WGBH, August 9, 2012.

And here’s a powerful description of what happens here in the U.S.: “Another Mass Killing Shocks America. Why?” That from Gary Younge in the August 13/20, 2012 issue of The Nation.

Younge talks about all the gun killing in the U.S., “a wretched yet constant feature of American life.” For example, there are 90 guns for every 100 people in the U.S., the highest concentration in the world. Guns kill 85 people daily in the U.S. However, Younge does note that access to guns “does not, by itself, lead to gun crime.”

But, “what links America’s high concentration of guns and relatively high level of guns deaths are the country’s high levels of inequality, segregation and poverty. For in countries with at least two of those features…you will find higher levels of gun deaths…. America is the only place in the Western world that has both rampant inequality and ample access to guns…. [and] a healthcare system in which large numbers of people are deprived of the mental health facilities they need, and you have laboratory conditions for sustained outbreaks of social violence involving guns.”

Younge ends this sad article with the following: “The shock resides not in the fact that a lrage number of people have been killed by a gunman – that happens every night in America – but that every now and then, the wrong people have died in the wrong place.” The movie theatre in Aurora, for example.

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1. The U.S. is near the bottom of the developed world in children’s health and safety. Yes, that is a fact. In things like infant mortality, immunization, and death from accidents, we’re ranked 21 in the OECD nations (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).

2.The U.S. betrays the young people we’ve told to stay in school, go to college. College debt is crippling our youth. The U.S. Congress won’t reduce the interest rates, and colleges increase tuition.

3. Home ownership – the main source of middle-class wealth – has mostly been destroyed.

4. Our prisons are more full than any other country. And prisons are there for smoking marijuana. But the robber barons of Wall Street…they keep getting their big pay packages and no prison time.

5. And healthcare isn’t a basic human right in the U.S. Healthcare is in every other civilized country. Here, you get what you pay for. Sometimes it feels like that’s the way the U.S. works: If you can pay for it, you get it. But if you can’t pay for it, you’re screwed.

Read the details in Pal Buchheit’s column, “Common Dreams,” May 19, 2012. “Five Facts That Put America to Shame.” Subscribe to Reader-Supported News.

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Have you read Growing Philanthropy in the U.S. yet? Lots of interesting insights. Lots of challenges for you, your organization, and the sector.

This report came out of a summit in June 2011, put together by Adrian Sargeant, leading fundraising researcher. I participated along with 30+ other people.

Here are the 4 major themes:

1. Enhancing the quality of donor relationships.

2. Developing public trust and confidence.

3. Identifying new audiences, channels, and forms of giving with strong potential for growth.

4. Improving the quality of fundraising training and development.

Read the full report, posted on my website. Read the executive summary. Start talking! Host a conversation with your fundraising colleagues through your AFP or AHP or CASE chapter / region or any other professional association. That’s what AFP RI did. Talk about the findings with your development staff and your board’s fund development committee. Explore. Talk. Learn. Change.

Great comments by Adam Gopnik in the May 7, 2012 New Yorker, “Vive la France.” Anti-European sentiment in the U.S. And not just with the “right” but also with the “left.” The Americans keep talking about the possible dissolution of the European Union. Hey, people. Wake up. The EU is good stuff, smart stuff, a model.

Gopnik observes that the American tone – about all the stuff happening in Europe – is “oddly punitive…as though the EU had been the product of some Brussels bureaucrat’s utopian folly rather than a miracle of coexistence wrought by a handful of quiet visionaries after more than fifty years of catastrophe.”

To paraphrase Gopnick, stop thinking about the Euro exchange rate or the Greek deficit. The number to remember when it comes to Europe? 60 million. Approximately 60 million Europeans were killed between 1914 and 1945 – in those two world wars that divided the continent.

“Social democracy in Europe, embodied by its union, has been one of the greatest successes in history…. A continent torn by the two most horrible wars in history achieved a remarkable half century of peace and prosperity, based on a marriage of liberalism properly so called (individual freedoms, including the entrepreneurial kind) and socialism rightly so ordered (as an equitable care for the common good.)”

That’s the European Union. An extraordinary experiment. An extraordinarily successful experiment.

The U.S. should admire and respect this fact. The U.S. should cheer this example.

Read the column. Read past the early paragraphs about Sarkozy and Hollande. Read about the EU.

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“The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

And that atttitude produces such extreme dysfunction that the U.S. political system cannot “deal constructively” with the challenges that face our country.

So say Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, political scientists. The two have been studying Washington politics and the U.S. Congress for more than 40 years. Generally, their writings criticize both parties. But in a Washington Post article of April 28, 2012, they write a very compelling article that, quite simply, is pretty darn scary.

How have we gotten here as a country? What happened within the Republican Party that has moved it beyond any sense of reason to work collaboratively to confront the problems we face as a country?

Mann and Ornstein explain the situation like this:

— The realignment of the South, moving away from the Democrats after the civil rights revolution.

— Mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973 Roe versus Wade decision by the Supreme Court.

— Anti-tax movement launched in California – Proposition 13 – in 1978

— Media changes like the rise of conservative talk radio in 1989, Fox News, and right-wing blogs.

But…and this is a very interesting “but.” Mann and Ornstein note that the most powerful push to the right comes from Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

When Gingrich entered Congress in 1979, he initiated a strategy to convince voters that anyone would be better than the incumbents. Within 16 years – both a short and long time, I think – he got people to run against Washington, Democrats, and Congress.

Norquist, of course, founded Americans for Tax Reform. His Taxpayer Protection Pledge “binds signers to never support a tax increase.” Norquist’s pledge doesn’t even allow the closing of tax loopholes. And Republicans sign it. Those running for office sign it in order to get elected. Those in office sign it to stay in office.

Norquist is just a citizen, like you and me. He isn’t an elected official. He isn’t giving mega bucks to campaigns. He’s just soooo powerful.

Is there hope for change? Mann and Ornstein think things will get work after the 2012 elections. Mann and Ornstein observe: “If our democracy is to regain its health and vitality, the culture and ideological center of the Republican Party must change.”

That means that you and I have the power. We the voters.

It’s not okay for Congress to be dysfunctional. It’s not okay for elected officials to despise one party so much that you simply put a stop to governing. It’s not okay for voters to get so frustrated that they don’t vote.

This is not the way to run a country.

I read this article because I subscribe to Reader Supported News. It’s free. It’s informative. Check it out yourself.

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