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Yeah. After all, what does a career statesman have that Demi Moore doesn’t have? Sheesh.

In California’s Capital, Treetops and Grassroots Politics
by Seth Sandronsky

World attention. That’s what the inauguration on Mon., Nov. 17 of Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger has brought to Sacramento, the Golden State’s capital.

World media is focused on many details of the film actor turned politician. He is the man of the hour, the GOP’s “white knight” set to begin a housecleaning of state government.

Balance California’s budget. Enhance public schools.

Revive business profits. Cut government red tape.

Meanwhile, a contradictory trend for improved governance is also moving forward, though with far less attention. Just blocks away from the state capitol on Nov. 13, the Sacramento City Council voted 8-1 to approve a resolution to symbolically oppose the USA Patriot Act, signed swiftly into law after the East Coast terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Sacramento now joins 208 other communities across America taking a stand against the Patriot Act, crafted to battle terrorism by increasing the government’s power at all levels over the public, with and without its knowledge. Presumably, this is the best way to proceed in the post-9/11 war on terror.

In my hometown, the city council vote on Nov. 13 was due in big part to the mobilization of the Sacramento Coalition to Stop the Patriot Act. It had no bulging bank account to spread the word, just the energy of people who value the freedom to disagree with the powers that be.

In contrast, large cash defined Schwarzenegger’s recall campaign. He borrowed and spent millions of dollars to unseat the Democratic governor.

Lacking big bucks, Sacramento’s anti-Patriot Act coalition includes folks of many backgrounds and interests working together to strengthen civil liberties as a widespread U.S.-led attack on terrorists, real and imagined, proceeds. In contrast, protecting constitutional freedoms during the current era of the criminal justice crackdown on terror is not much on the radar screen of the new governor.

But that can change, as such treetops politicians have done in the past. To that end, more than 100 people waited in line outside the Sacramento City Council chambers for over two hours, while an equal number sat inside it before the recent Patriot Act debate and vote.

One person waiting in the chill of the night was from Fresno, a Central Valley city where the freedom to publicly criticize U.S. foreign policy of preventive war after 9/11 is at-risk. Case in point is law enforcement infiltrating of Peace Fresno, an anti-war group.

Members of the group were “recently shocked when they found out that one of their participants, Aaron Stokes, died in a motorcycle accident,” noted an Oct. 9 report by Democracy Now!, the national news show hosted by journalist Amy Goodman on the Pacifica radio network. “An obituary published in the local newspaper in late August showed Aaron’s picture.

“But the name under the picture was not Aaron Stokes. It was Aaron Kilner - an undercover detective who was working for the Fresno County Sheriff’s department. He was also a member of the local anti-terrorism unit.”

In George W. Bush’s America, people who back the settling of disputes between nations without using armed forces have become a target of government snoops. And American taxpayers are footing the bill for such surveillance.

Consider grants totaling $725 million to cities across America to “boost counter-terror efforts and to respond to terrorist attacks more effectively,” noted a report in the Financial Times of Nov. 14. “The money, which is earmarked for the next fiscal year, comes on top of $800 million already disbursed to U.S. cities this year as the Department of Homeland Security steps up efforts to involve the country’s cities and municipalities in counter-terrorism.”

This trend of law enforcement spending is also Keynesian stimulus to prime the pump of a slow/no growth U.S. economy. Such government investment can counter the national downturn that has caused the shedding of millions of jobs under the Bush White House.

Against the backdrop of growing government power over regular people, global media have been converging on Sacramento to cover the historic swearing-in of the action film actor who won the recent gubernatorial recall vote. Mass media are giddily detailing Schwarzenegger’s past exploits on and off the film set.

Who from Hollywood and Wall St. will attend his inauguration? Such journalism can also be a diversion from the Patriot Act-driven attempt to intimidate some Americans into political submission.

Unwilling to live their lives in fear, Patriot Act dissidents in Sacramento and nationwide have created a popular movement of mutual aid to protect the Constitution, and the public. This movement, itself part of the anti-Iraq occupation mobilization, is gathering momentum.

Call it a blossoming vision of liberty and security from the grassroots. Call it democracy in action.

Seth Sandronsky is a member of Sacramento Area Peace Action and co-editor with Because People Matter, Sacramento’s progressive paper. He can be reached at: ssandron@hotmail.com.

Published on Monday, February 27, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Camp Casey and Germany
by Cindy Sheehan

I have been invited to speak to the European Union Parliament in March in Strasbourg, France. My message will be one of peace and non-violent unity against the out of control murderous and disastrous policies of the Bush Administration. I wrote extensively about meeting with other world leaders in my article, “Friends don’t let Friends Commit War Crimes.”

My message to the EU will focus on “we the people” forcing the leaders of all countries to work diplomatically and peacefully to solve problems. It is time we reach across artificial borders of lines drawn on a map to forge bonds of love and friendship with all members of humanity no matter what color, religion, language group or nationality that other person is. Killing other members of the human race is barbaric and abhorrent and should never be used to solve conflicts. This is so important with the current beating of the war drums against Iran, and we must not let off the President of Iran for his inflammatory and non-peaceful statements. The wonderful and innocent citizens of Iran don’t deserve the fate that the undeserving citizens of Iraq received and are receiving on a daily basis still.

In the frenzy and excitement of my trip to France and Germany, some well meaning pacifists in the area have scheduled me to set up a Camp Casey outside of Landsthul, Germany, in front of the military hospital. I won’t agree to do that.

The Camp Casey movement is pro-peace and pro-soldier. We love our troops so much that we want them to come home alive from the fiasco in the Middle East.

Camp Caseys have been set up all over the USA and the world and they are set up in front of the seats of power. The politicians and the war machine got us into this war, our soldiers are trying to protect each other and do the best that they can do under horrifically difficult circumstances.

The Camp Casey in Germany could be moved to a place where people with decision making power can see it. The soldiers have very little to say in their fates after they enlist (which is an entirely different subject) but especially the ones who have already been wounded in the service of their country…no matter how evil and greed-serving the phony mission is.

Let’s set up Camp Caseys in front of recruiter’s offices to stop our children from even enlisting to wear a uniform for the war profiteers. Let’s set up Camp Caseys in front of the Pentagon…Congress…Congressional offices…embassies…the White House…propaganda media centers…war profiteers…President’s vacation homes…Karl Rove’s DC home…the list for valid protest locations is endless…but not in front of our troops.

Our struggle is with the industrial military complex and the people who put our soldiers in harm’s way in the first place for no valid reason and who are keeping them in harm’s way despite all evidence that this war is a nightmare and a mistake.

Let’s leave our soldiers out of our protests. They have been put through so much by their commander in chief and his callous cronies already.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was killed in Iraq on April 04, 2004; Founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace (www.GSFP.org) and author of Not One More Mother’s Child. Cindy is also the very proud mother of Carly, Andy, and Janey Sheehan who hold down the fort in Vacaville, California.

VAN JONES: Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for office priding himself on how he had been advocate for inner city kids and he has done all of this for inner city kids and he did a ballot measure to help inner city kids. Well, this is an opportunity for Arnold Schwarzenegger to actually stand up for inner city kids who are being beaten and brutalized and mistreated by people on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s payroll — the people who are working at the California Youth Authority. And he has said nothing. He has convened a little blue ribbon commission to talk about it. But so far, we have seen no action from this governor.

The true hero is Senator Romero, the Latina legislator, who has stood up to the prison guard union. She has demanded hearings and she has been driving forward, along with grassroots organizations, this cause. But we have heard nothing encouraging from this so-called action hero.

Let’s see some heroic action for the kids in CYA, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

AMY GOODMAN: Van Jones, has the fact that this is a presidential election year focused any attention on this nationally? For example, where does the democratic candidate, John Kerry, stand on this issue?

VAN JONES: Well, I mean, so far, we have heard nothing encouraging from John Kerry on the question of juvenile or criminal justice. I think he’s trying to duck it. The true heroes in the fight are the grassroots people as they have always been.

We have Kim Magillicuddy and Javier Starring in Los Angeles leading the fight down there working with young kids directly who have been impacted, who can speak for themselves. We have the Prison Law Office that has filed lawsuits here. The National Council on Crime and Delinquency. Sandy Close from “The Beat Within.” Sue Burell, one of the staunch heroes at the Youth Law Center. David Steinhart who has been a warrior for us in Sacramento. The Lets Get Free youth.

You can go on and on and on naming the heroes of the grassroots level who have been providing this fight and finally now are getting some attention. You cannot name, with the exception of Senator Romero, more than one or two elected officials who, even now, will take a public stand on the side of these kids. And, John Kerry, the next time he comes to California, if he fails to speak out about this, I think it will send a very, very bad sign.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060213/pollitt

subject to Debate by Katha Pollitt
Prochoice Puritans

[from the February 13, 2006 issue]

Do you think abortion is tragic and terrible and wrong, that Roe v. Wade went too far and that the prochoice movement is elitist, unfeeling, overbearing, overreaching and quite possibly dead? In the current debate over abortion, that makes you a prochoicer. As the nation passes the thirty-third anniversary of Roe, it is hard to find anyone who will say a good word in public for abortion rights, let alone for abortion itself. Abortion has become a bit like flag-burning–something that offends all right-thinking people but needs to be legal for reasons of abstract principle (”choice”). Unwanted pregnancy has become like, I don’t know, smoking crack: the mark of a weak, undisciplined person of the lower orders.

On the New York Times op-ed page, William Saletan argues that prochoicers should concede that “abortion is bad, and the ideal number of abortions is zero,” and calls for “an explicit pro-choice war on the abortion rate.” Sounding a “clear anti-abortion message,” prochoicers should promote a basket of “solutions” to unintended pregnancy: the Prevention First Act, which calls for federal funding for family planning programs; expanded access to health insurance and emergency contraception; comprehensive sex education. “Some pro-choice activists” are even “pushing for more contraceptive diligence in the abortion counseling process, especially on the part of those women who come back for a second abortion.” Give those sluts the lecture they deserve.

Saletan is a very shrewd analyst of political framing. Indeed, plenty of Democrats have already picked up the “I hate abortion” mantra. I seem always to be reading calls from prochoicers to antichoicers to work together on contraception. Calling their bluff sounds so clever. Why isn’t it working?

The problem is, although of course many abortion opponents support birth control, the organized antichoice movement hates it. To the movement, the most effective birth control methods–the Pill, emergency contraception, the IUD–are “abortifacients” and “mini-abortions,” and even barrier methods like the condom promote a “contraceptive mentality”: a selfish, licentious attitude that leads straight to abortion hell. Wherever antichoicers have political power, they’ve slashed funds for family-planning clinics, passed laws enabling pharmacists to deny women EC and the Pill and promoted abstinence-only sex ed that tells kids condoms don’t work. In 2003 the Republican-controlled Missouri state legislature handed over the entire state family-planning budget for poor women to “abortion alternatives” centers. Among antichoicers, the political will to mount a significant public-health campaign for contraception, safe sex and accurate information simply does not exist. Democrats for Life of America is pushing “95-10,” a plan they claim would reduce abortions by 95 percent in ten years. It doesn’t even mention birth control. And that’s the liberals!

And there’s another problem, too. Inevitably, attacking abortion as a great evil means attacking providers and patients. If abortion is so bad, why not stigmatize the doctors who perform them? Deny the clinic a permit in your town? Make women feel guilty and ashamed for choosing it and make them sweat so they won’t screw up again? Ironically, improvements in contraception have made unwanted pregnancy look more like a personal failing. “Why was I so careful? Because I never wanted to have an abortion,” wrote 32-year-old Laurie Gigliotti in response to Saletan’s op-ed, describing her super-vigilant approach to safe sex. You can just see how unwanted pregnancy will join obesity and smoking as unacceptable behavior in polite society. But how is all this censoriousness supposed to help women control their fertility? If half of all pregnancies are unplanned, it doesn’t make sense to treat them as individual sins.

Fact is, there will never be zero abortions. Half the women who abort are using birth control already–there are no perfect methods or perfect people, except maybe Laurie Gigliotti. Even in small, tidy, prosperous Sweden and the Netherlands, there are abortions. So how can there be zero abortions in America, with our ramshackle healthcare system, our millions of poor people, our high school graduates who can’t even read a prescription information sheet?

The trouble with thinking in terms of zero abortions is that you make abortion so hateful you do the antichoicers’ work for them. You accept that the zygote/embryo/fetus has some kind of claim to be born. You start making madonna-whore distinctions. In the New York Times Magazine Eyal Press, a contributing writer to this magazine, writes of his father, a heroically brave and dedicated abortion doctor: “Had the women…been free-love advocates for whom the procedure seemed a mere matter of convenience, he would not have been so angry” at the antichoice protesters who hounded him and his patients. Why not? Because a sexy single woman should suffer for not suffering? Nobody’s proposing the walk of shame for men who don’t or won’t use condoms, or stern lectures for them in the clinic waiting room either.

In 1989 a number of polls asked respondents whether abortion should be legal or not depending on the reason for seeking it. After life/health, rape/incest and fetal deformity, majorities of Americans disapproved of every reason on the list: can’t afford a child (40 percent approval), too many children (40 percent), emotional strain (35 percent), to finish school (28 percent), not married (25 percent). Assuming opinion hasn’t drastically changed, most Americans think women should be denied abortions for the reasons the vast majority of procedures are performed. They think women should carry unwanted children to term, even if they can’t support them, have no partner, have to drop out of school, shortchange their other children or can’t cope emotionally. Now, maybe those respondents don’t really want abortion to be illegal so much as they want to express their disapproval.

Either way, these answers don’t suggest to me that injecting more antiabortion moralism into the debate will help keep abortion legal and accessible. I’d say it is too moralistic already.

In the wake of the 2004 election, Democrats have embarked on an orgy of what the linguist George Lakoff calls “reframing”–repositioning their policies linguistically to give them mass moral appeal. Prime candidate for a values makeover? Abortion, of course. It’s as if the party, with its longstanding, if lukewarm, support for reproductive rights, were a family photo with Uncle Lou the molester right in the middle. Maybe if we cropped it to put him way off to the side? Or Photoshopped a big shadow onto his face? Or just decided to pretend he was nice Uncle Max? In “The Foreign Language of Choice,” posted on AlterNet, Lakoff writes that he doesn’t like “choice”–too consumerist. In fact, he doesn’t even like “abortion”–too negative. He wants to “reparse” abortion in four ways. Dems should talk about it as an aspect of personal freedom from government interference, and as the regrettable outcome of right-wing opposition to sex ed and contraception. They should reclaim “life” by talking about the fact that “the United States has the highest rate of infant mortality in the industrialized world,” thanks to poverty and lack of healthcare, which are the fault of conservatives, “who have been killing babies–real babies…[who] have been born and who people want and love” and damaging their health through anti-environmental policies that put toxins in mother’s milk. Finally, they should talk about the thousands of women each year who become pregnant from rape: “Should the federal government force a woman to bear the child of her rapist?”

George Lakoff is really smart and eager to help, so why does this way of talking about “medical operations to end a pregnancy” make me want to reparse myself to a desert island? Is it the sly reference to rape victims coerced by the “federal government,” object of much red-state loathing, when surely he knows that the relevant policies–on giving out emergency contraception in ERs for example, or using Medicaid funds for abortions–are set at the state level, like most abortion laws? Is it the singling out of rape victims as uniquely deserving, which tacitly accepts the conservative “frame” of abortion as a way for sluts to evade the wages of sin? In fact, most American voters who favor abortion restrictions already make an exception for rape. The ones who don’t–the 11 percent who would ban abortion completely–have already framed it to their satisfaction: Yes, the government should force rape victims to carry to term because the “child” should not be murdered for its father’s crime.

Perhaps I’m naïve, but I keep thinking that reframing misses the point, which is to speak clearly from a moral center–precisely not to mince words and change the subject and turn the tables. I keep thinking that people are so disgusted by politics that the field is open for progressives who use plain language and stick to their guns and convey that they are real people, at home in their skin, and not a collection of blow-dried focus-grouped holograms. I think this despite ample evidence to the contrary, like the successful Republican reframings of the estate tax as the “death tax” and George W. Bush as a salt-of-the-earth rancher. But honestly: They say abortion, we say mercury in the breast milk? What if anti-choicers suggest going halfsies? Some abortion opponents–progressive evangelicals, seamless-garment Catholics–do care about babies after they are born.

Still, reframing proceeds apace. Hillary Clinton talks about abortion as sorrow, while calling on Republicans to join her in passing the Prevention First Act promoting contraception and, with Patty Murray, going after acting FDA head Lester Crawford for failing to make emergency contraception available over the counter. Howard Dean says he wants the “pro-life” vote, and before you know it anti-choice Democrats get the nod to run for the Senate–Bob Casey in Pennsylvania and Jim Langevin in Rhode Island (who has since bowed out). NARAL, or, as it has reframed itself, NARAL Pro-choice America, placed an ad in The Weekly Standard calling for the right to “Please, Help Us Prevent Abortion” through better access to birth control. Responding to a poll showing that only 22 percent of Americans say abortion should be “generally available,” NARAL is emphasizing “freedom and responsibility”–birth control, sex ed, emergency contraception. Responsibility is surely a bedrock American value. The trouble is, as William Saletan pointed out in a perceptive column on Slate, it means different things to different people. It can mean moral autonomy and free will, or it can mean suffering the consequences, accepting punishment. To NARAL “freedom and responsibility” means knowing your body and using contraception, with EC or abortion as unmentioned backup; to an anti-choicer, the same words might mean abstinence, with childbirth as the price of getting carried away.

There’s a word that doesn’t show up much in the new abortion frames: women. Maybe it doesn’t poll well. “Reframing” abortion is actually a kind of deframing, a way of taking it out of its real-life context, which is the experience of women, their bodies, their healthcare, their struggles, the caring work our society expects them to do for free. Lynn Paltrow, the brilliant lawyer who runs National Advocates for Pregnant Women, thinks the way to win grassroots support for abortion rights is to connect it to the whole range of reproductive and maternal rights: the right to have a home birth, to refuse a Caesarean section, to know that a miscarriage or stillbirth–or simply taking a drink–will not land you in jail. The same ideology of fetal protection that anti-choicers wield against abortion is used against women with wanted pregnancies. More broadly, Paltrow argues that the right to abortion would have more support if it were presented as just one of the things women need to care for their families, along with paid maternity leave, childcare, quality healthcare for all, economic and social support for mothers and children, strong environmental policies that protect fetuses and children.

But when was the last time you heard a Democrat talk about paid maternity leave? It’s been reframed right out of the picture.