Endangered Species: Workers with Pensions

A Nearly Extinct Animal

Employees with pensions are not quite dinosaurs yet, we are probably more in the category of the spotted owl. Our rapidly diminishing group now consists almost entirely of unionized public sector employees, working people who earned all kinds of benefits for simply doing their jobs over a long period of time and then, obligingly, getting old.

I think of my pension as an inheritance of sorts, a kind of consolation prize when friends talk about their windfalls from dead relatives. It may not be much, but it arrives each month without any effort on my part allowing me to sit and my computer and feel like a paid writer.

Sunday, I was chatting with a realtor at a Berkeley street fair who appeared to be around my age. Her reaction to my obvious delight at being retired was one I have encountered often. It involves an enthusiastic proclamation of job love coupled with a desire to work until reaching death's door. I have no reason not to believe her. I know Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court feels this way as well. Republicans and some Democrats have even kicked around raising the retirement age so folks can enjoy their jobs well into their dotage. 

But many working-class folks have stressful, demeaning jobs that, as the body ages, wring the very life and spirit from them. It is not a blessing to be forced to perform this type of work until 70 years of age. Part of the conundrum professors and doctors, lawyers and CEOs face is that the simple fact of admitting that work is a moderately unpleasant chore for the majority of workers underlines a hard truth of capitalism:  in order for some people to excel at fulfilling and meaningful work, many others have to service them and their needs. They used to need to make the goods as well but this is less of an issue now that the manufacturing industry is drying up.

I am extremely grateful that I snagged one of the last working-class gems of a bygone era but also very depressed that the welfare of the generations behind me will be left up to chance. Those with prudent and frugal relatives or prominent families may have something to fall back on. But regular working people's options are being sharply reigned in by feeding frenzy of plutocratic capitalism. 

Newsflash! Lesbians are Women

In this day and age the title of this post seems ridiculous to have to justify. Of course lesbians are women. You would think this bit of information is quite obvious but, reading the articles about women and their/our issues, this point gets lost. It would be impossible to itemize the deluge of writing about "women's issues," that pours out from keyboard across the country, which excludes queer women, placing us outside their purview.

As a current example, examine the sections of that ever-popular leftist online news source, The Huffington Post which, quite recently, added the section, "Gay Voices." They had a "Women" category but everybody knows that "women's issues" involve men: dating them, marrying them, making babies with them, looking attractive for them, conversing with them, you get my drift. Articles about females very rarely include any references to those of that gender who are queer. In "Gay Voices" finally we see some articles about lesbians specifically. We take it for granted that those could never be applicable to any kind of universal human condition. After all what could we possibly extrapolate from a bunch of queers about life in the USA?

Alternet approaches the situation a bit differently. Under their Rights category they have separate sections for Civil Liberties and Gender. Queer rights pieces can and do occupy either of these classifications. But when the article is specifically about "women" the issues of lesbians are not dealt with. Smaller online news sites don't have categories at all. But that decision, which, depending on how it's approached, can be viewed either as a glaring absence or a window onto a less discriminatory future, doesn't seem to help much with inclusivity.

The film industry has a similar take. In "Women's Films," that particular genre that feature a group of women, the writers will sometimes install a token dyke, much in the same way they insert a woman of color. But you can be assured that the lesbian's character development and personal issues will get short shrift compared to the other characters in these movies.

What the world has yet to come to terms with is that lesbians are women. Perhaps the fear of the queer that was instilled in my generation will be carried within each member until death. But, on the bright side, there are girls being born every minute. Hopefully they will grow up in a society with fewer limitations on all their decisions including those regarding gender.

Where the Sustainability Movement Falters...

Of late, I have been participating in a resilience circle. These groups are organized offshoots of the "sustainability" movement whose goal is to create a local, independent economy which can but does not necessarily use currency as a standard of exchange. Theirs is a noble and idealistic vision. But alone, it is not viable for scattered people and communities. The struggle is as unattainable as trying to bring socialism in one fragment of a country in a rabidly capitalist world.

We dare not underestimate the raw power of capital and its well-armed defenders. The magnitude of the force and repression unleashed against the Occupy Movement, particularly in the United States, is just one small example of what we're up against. This once sleeping dog will not settle back into slumber without a fight. People who desire a more humane and interractive world have to actively battle for it on many fronts. The economic struggle is significant, the environmental struggle absolutely critical but these two alone are not enough.

It is imperative that we also organize ourselves against the hatred that is tossed out for our consumption, like a wad of raw meat in order to divert the attention of the underclass and manipulate us into taking out our frustration on one another.

We are given all kinds of targets to keep us busy with hatred and suspicion: immigrants, people of color, women, LGBT folks, Muslims, Jews, atheists and agnostics, even the nebulous category, "intellectuals." To ignore organized prejudice when it rears its ugly head is a huge omission that will defeat our struggle.

I used to mollify myself by calling up that myth, made popular in the book and movie "Exodus," that the people of Denmark all wore yellow stars so the Nazi couldn't pick out and round up Danish Jews. It is a noble, heart-warming story but, like many stories, it is fiction. Nonetheless, we will all have to emulate this fictitious example of our higher nature on the streets and in our communities as certain groups are singled out for mistreatment both by law as well as by lack of legal protection.

Examples of organized lawlessness include the fact African-Americans have served as a kind of shooting gallery for police of late making it clear that some people are more expendable than others. Lack of legal protection has splintered immigrant families, singled out LGBT people for all kinds of discrimination. Laws against rights have prevented many couples from marrying and are now beginning to target women's control of their/our own bodies. Workers, now desperate for jobs, are losing benefits, pensions job security and any control over the conditions in which they work.

No one person can change these terrible injustices alone. We must have an agenda, a complete program that includes both the environment and its people. Doing so requires a discipline, an inclusion and a unity that we didn't have in the seventies when we tried so hard to change the world. We can and must learn from these mistakes. We may not have a second chance.  

Indigenous Identity and Elizabeth Warren

Cherokee NC--West of Asheville

One of the big controversies now circling around this upcoming election is from Massachussets where Scott Brown is trying to smear working people's financial advocate and Harvard Law School professor, Elizabeth Warren. The big reveal is simply the fact that she has listed her racial identiy as Native American and claims a grandmother of Cherokee/Delaware descent. Warren was born in Oklahoma, a place with a very large indigenous population.

Native American ancestry is pervasive in this country and is, probably more than other ethnicities, a complicated business. Tribes, who sometimes share profits from gambling enterprises and other financial stipends, have a convoluted system of "enrollment" which involves things like percentage of native blood and other markers for inclusion.

As a full-blooded, not quite passing, member of the Russian-Jewish tribe, I have attended many pow-wows and other indigenous gatherings. At these events it is impossible not to notice the large number of people of all colors who identify themselves as having native ancestry. While some folks resemble relatives of the chief with the feathered headdress on the US nickel, many more do not.

When I was a young person in the feminist movement, we talked a lot about race. Ther was one woman, my age, who identified herself as Native American. She had pale skin and light brown hair and looked like any other WASP to me. I asked her about her identity one day after a meeting. She said simply, "I grew up on a reservation in North Dakota." I realized then that when it comes to racial identity, visual perception is only a small piece of a much larger story.

The toll of passing should not be underestimated. In accounts of Jews in Europe during the Nazi era, many who later suffered the greatest amount of psychological damage were those who "successfully" passed for Aryan. With the definition of Jewish descent consisting of only grandparent, I'm sure that Jewish faces were not readily apparent. The entire concept of "race" in modern society is no more than a social construct, albeit an extremely powerful one.

Elizabeth Warren's work in setting up the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has been dedicated to helping families decimated by foreclosures and unemployment has been absolutely stellar. She stands up to the hegemony of big business with a clearly populist voice. As far as her ethnic ancestry is concerned I need only to quote Rhett Butler, "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn."

Class Consciousness and Pride

Mitt Romney's obnoxious plutocratic ramblings combined with the one year birthday of the Occupy Movement have got me ruminating about rising class consciousness in America, specifically my own. 

I was raised to believe that ours is a classless society and anyone at all can make it here with a little elbow grease and some sturdy bootstraps. My father was a salesman and my mother, a secretary. I knew that my family was deeply in debt because whenever they gave me a credit card to buy clothes, it would get repossessed by the cashier. 

Yes, like most Americans,  my family spent a lot of time worrying about money and how they would pay their bills. But we lived with most of the trappings of middle class society: a mortgaged house, financed cars, a refrigerator full of food and a large wardrobe of second-hand and bargain basement clothing. Looking back on it now, I see a lower middle class (upper working-class?) family that had bought into the American dream at the expense of their own personal peace of mind.

The upper middle class kids at school did not accept me or my group of friends but, with my rebellious nature, I perceived that as a badge of honor. It's only recently that I have begun to explore the feelings of inferiority that I've harbored and internalized. 

In personal terms, coming to terms with class and vowing to fight for equality for all is a positive thing. It is true that the early acquiring of awareness sometimes translates into resentment of those whose situation was cushier, more supportive, different. In any movement for liberation, a degree of hostility always plays a role in the early stages of consciousness.I experienced this both as an activist in the women's movement and the LGBT movement. Awakening is often born with pain. Later, realization dawns that feelings of inferiority do not indicate actual inferiority. Hopefully then it becomes possible to move on. 

The scars of our early lives follow us everywhere. Sometimes, when I'm depressed, I believe that part of me still lives in high school. The trick is to acknowledge those feelings when they arise, let them wash over me, and then to let them go. Or let them provide the impetus to do something even more productive like write about them. 

Chicago Teachers Strike Hope in the Hearts of Workers

Chicago Teachers
and Supporters

Who would have the chutzpah to go out on strike in a vicious anti-worker climate like this? The answer, has now been made loud and clear as the Chicago Teachers with support from their union and a large percentage of parents in their districts is out on strike for a third day.

Wages are not even their main grievance. They are protesting the pressure to teach solely to obtain test scores rather than overall education. Teaching has become a humiliation fest for those educators in the most difficult schools where getting students to memorize answers and inane details of a culturally insensitive exam has become increasingly irrelevant. One of the latest techniques in New York City has been to publish the names of teachers along with their test scores in the paper.

Other issues of concern include unwieldy class size, lack of job security (teachers have been turned into temp workers), the rising cost of health care and the attempted privatization of the US education system by the spread of charter schools that employ young, non-certified idealists for a couple of years until they are burned out and move on to their "real" careers.

Obama, contrary to Romney's statements, has not expressed support for the strike and, in past speeches, has echoed the prevailing opinion that teachers' concern for these issues along with fair pay, job security, healthcare and pension benefits is nothing but selfish blather. Perpetuating this attitude of bullying and mistreating teachers is his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Now, as the mayor of Chicago, Emanuel has been a driving force behind the vilification of unions and the teachers they represent.

A system that treats its teachers as no more than machine parts, a collection of implements of instruction that can be used and discarded, will not encourage a generation to engage in critical thinking and analysis. It will only serve to create a minimally literate underclass and deepen the ever-widening abyss of economic inequality.

So onward Chicago teachers! We wish you the best and are inspired by your determination.

Obama Shines With More Promises

Obama's Many
Colors

My Grandma used to say, "If wishes were horses than beggars would ride." With the advent of cars that slogan became dated, but even so, her point was evident. Obama's words shone with promise last night, a good start, but unfortunately given the nature of capitalism they are no more than words.

I was pleased to see him mobilizing the 99% and holding the line on continued tax cuts for the wealthy. He mentioned scapegoating with a list that included immigrants and even gays and I love the way many speakers have quoted Romney's brilliant statement about if you need money to start a business, just ask your parents. 

But what can the Democrats do, besides play a good verbal game, that can actually change working people's lives for the better. Obama could have instituted a single-payer health care system instead of making deals with big pharma to fund the insurance companies. He could have sent corporate criminals to jail and closed Guantanamo. Not issuing death warrants for Americans abroad to be assassinated without trial would have been a nice touch. And forcing banks to modify home loans instead of going full speed ahead with foreclosures could have saved a lot of heartache.

Yes, it matters who is selected for the Supreme Court. It matters that  people of color are not deterred from voting, immigrants be treated fairly and queer folks be accepted as full citizens. But as long as the destruction of unions and middle-class jobs is allowed to proceed unimpeded, as long as corporations are people and our country is committed to endless and ever-increasing warfare, the unobstructed economic down-slide of the US into a third world economy will continue.