Elections Expert Sal Magallanez Speaks at Activist-San Diego

Warns About How Easy It Is to Rig a Computer-Counted Election

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

While the Right-wing media fuss about the voter-registration campaign of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the forged registrations paid ACORN street employees allegedly turned in for Mickey Mouse and various football stars, progressives remain concerned about the real threat to election integrity: the use of computer voting systems running proprietary software and the ease with which they can be “hacked” to alter the outcome of an election. Activist San Diego featured this issue at their regular monthly meeting Monday, October 13 at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest, presenting the film Hacking Democracy — a 2006 HBO documentary featuring Bev Harris and her fellow activists in the Black Box Voting group — and live speaker Sal Magallanez, a local election consultant for the Democratic Party.

Magallanez has quite a résumé on elections-related issues, having worked with or consulted for national organizations like Save Our Vote, Verified Voting Foundation and Help America Audit. He also joked that he spent 2 1/2 years in Berlin with the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe — “I call those my spy years,” he said — but his current affiliation is with the Election Integrity Institute, a local group that monitors San Diego elections and meets once a month with San Diego County Registrar of Voters Deborah Seiler. After a movie particularly exposing the flaws of Diebold Elections Systems hardware and software, Magallanez opened his presentation with an exposé of the connections Seiler and her chief deputy, Michael Vu, have with Diebold and the so-called “successor company” they spun off their elections division to in 2007, Premier Election Solutions.

“Deborah Seiler, our registrar of voters, was previously the salesperson who sold these machines on behalf of Diebold,” Magallanez explained. “Michael Vu, who was the registrar in Cuyahoga County, Ohio in 2004” — where, many progressives believe and the film Hacking Democracy strongly suggests, John Kerry was done out of the presidency by faulty and misallocated Diebold voting machines — “decided that no votes would be counted at individual precincts.” The reason that’s important, according to Magallanez, is that by eliminating the vote counts at individual precincts, Seiler and Vu deprived the system of an important check on the accuracy of the final count from the Registrar of Voters’ central computer.

Instead, he said, “you voted, and the only thing they reconciled at the precinct level was how many ballots they issued versus how many came back. They brought all the ballots to the Registrar of Voters and ran them on their scanners, recording the votes on memory cards which they took into a computer room where we are not allowed to enter. Then they announced what the votes were by precincts. We demand that the ballots be counted at the precincts first. That doesn’t happen.”

Magallanez listed other abuses in San Diego County under both Seiler and her predecessors, which he’s seen as an official observer for the Democratic Party. In 1996, he said, he saw the computer running GEMS— the proprietary software program at the heart of Diebold’s (now Premier’s) vote tabulation system — crash six times in half an hour. “The person in charge told everyone to take a lunch break while he fixed the computer,” Magallanez recalled. Later they found out that the reason the computer had crashed was that GEMS was simply overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of data coming in at once as the ballots were counted and the results sent from precincts to the GEMS computer.

Last February, he said, an even more serious potential breach of vote security occurred. The boxes containing the actual ballots are supposed to be sealed in at least three prominent places — not to keep anyone from breaking into the ballot boxes but at least to make it obvious if someone has tried. “In February 2008 I saw the ballot boxes coming in unsealed, and there were no signatures on them to tell which people had handled the boxes,” Magallanez explained. “There are 1,650 precincts in San Diego County and during the early returns, in which about 100 precincts came in, 24 boxes came in without signatures, seals or both. There’s no procedure to handle a box without a seal any differently from a box with a seal. We don’t know where the ballots inside those boxes came from.”

Another abuse Magallanez reported is going on in San Diego County is “voter purging” or “caging.” “Caging,” Magallanez explained, is illegal if done by political parties but legal if done by elections officials. It means mailing out cards to the addresses of registered voters, with instructions to send them back either to confirm their registrations or to apply for vote-by-mail ballots. The trick behind it is that the cards are marked “Do Not Forward” — so if any of the cards are returned by the post office for any reason, the registrar assumes that the person no longer lives at that address and therefore can legally be dropped from the voter rolls.

“We’ve already had three rounds of voter purging,” Magallanez said. “They did a purge in September 2007 and another one in February 2008, and in February 2008 there were 15,000 fewer voters for the Democratic Party even though we’d been doing a major registration drive. They deleted 100,000 names before the February primary and another 35,000 before June. Postcards have just gone out, so expect to have another 30,000 people thrown off the rolls before November.”

According to Magallanez, many of the victims of caging and purging are college students, whose votes the Democrats are trying to protect. “The Registrar of Voters is setting it up so students who live in dorms have to re-register if they’re in a different dorm room this semester from last,” he explained. Another problem with student voters is that many are still registered in their parents’ home cities or counties rather than in San Diego. Magellanes’ recommendation to them is to get a vote-by-mail ballot from their home city or county, and to make sure they mail it before October 30 to ensure that it gets back by election day — as it must in order for it to count.

Magallanez criticized the San Diego County Registrar of Voters for encouraging students to vote on campus with so-called “provisional ballots.” Provisional ballots, a creation of the “Help America Vote Act” passed early in the Bush II administration after the fiasco of Florida, 2000, are given to people whose registrations are in question on the day of the election. People can vote these ballots and have them set aside to be counted if they meet the registration requirements after all — but Magellanez warned that 13 percent of all provisional ballots will never be counted. In Ohio in 2004, he explained, “180,000 provisional ballots were not counted. They said it didn’t matter whether they counted them or not because John Kerry still wouldn’t have won the state.”

The San Diego County Registrar of Voters is making some minor improvements in security for this November’s election, Magellanez said. “We’ve been told the poll workers will not be able to take the voting machines home overnight the day before the election,” he explained. “They’re locked in a security cabinet, but the ‘lock’ is just a piece of plastic. They’re putting chemical seals at all the most sensitive points that will void the machines if they are touched.” But Magellanez remains suspicious of the overall accuracy and reliability of the machines, as well as whether or not they’re part of a network.

The last point is important because registrars and other elections officials who use computerized systems say they can’t be hacked into because they’re not connected to the Internet. But, Magellanez said, “I asked all the elections officials what each cable at the end of the machine is connected to, and they wouldn’t explain where one cable — a USB cable — went.” What’s more, he added, “in 2004 we found in the logs of the GEMS computer the name ‘Everett’ and a phone number. Everett, Washington is the location of the headquarters of Microsoft. We said, ‘You guys said this wasn’t on a network, and this looks like a modem calling Microsoft.’ Deborah Seiler said, ‘That’s just the phone number of a guy named Everett who works in this office.’”

Another security issue Magellanez has raised with San Diego County’s elections office is the location of the “spoiled” check on the absentee ballot. Right now there’s a check box on the outside of the envelope that you can mark if you spoiled your ballot and want another one so you can fill it out correctly so you can still vote. Magellanez wants that box on the inside so that elections officials can’t just check the “spoiled” box themselves and have an excuse not to count ballots from a part of the county not likely to be for their favored candidates.

Former San Diego City Councilmember Floyd Morrow attended the meeting and said he’d lost a close election because the Registrar of Voters certified the result — i.e., declared it official — before the recount was finished. “That shifted the burden of proof on me to prove they were wroing, which would have been a $50,000-$80,000 lawsuit,” he said. “So I abandoned it, and then they sued me for the $28,000 they spent on the recount.” He won the suit but didn’t win the election, even though the recount showed that he should have. Morrow, who ran for Mayor of San Diego in the primary earlier this year, said that in that election “the Registrar of Voters sat on the same numbers most of the evening” and announced the winners in the city election when only one-third of the precincts in San Diego’s city limits had been counted.

Magellanez said that things like that happen because “the Registrar of Voters says their job is to please the media. The law says they have to certify the election within 28 days, but they say they need to certify the result the very next day for the convenience of the media. It’s our vote, not the media’s, and it’s our rights they should be protecting.” He closed by saying his presentation “was not designed to discourage people or make them feel demoralized,” and suggested that voters concerned about their registration status order ballots by mail, fill them out before the October 20 registration deadline and turn them in personally to the Registrar of Voters’ office, “so if there’s a problem with your registration, you find out about it before you can’t re-register.”

“Bleeding Kansas”: Another MOXIE Triumph

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

MOXIE Theatre’s new production, Kathryn Walat’s Bleeding Kansas, vividly dramatizes a little-known part of American history: the dress rehearsal for the Civil War that took place in the mid-1850’s in the newly organized territory of Kansas. Senator Stephen A. Douglas (D-Illinois), hungry for the presidency and anxious to come up with a compromise on slavery that would satisfy both the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party, pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress in 1854. The bill divided the Nebraska Territory into two halves, Nebraska and Kansas, and said that they would become either free or slave states depending on how their residents voted. It also repealed the Missouri Compromise, passed in 1820, which had restricted slavery’s expansion north of a specified line (36° 30’ latitude) and which many Northerners — including a little-known Illinois railroad lawyer and one-term Congressmember named Abraham Lincoln — believed had settled the question of slavery once and for all.

Douglas justified the Kansas-Nebraska Act on what he called “the Great Principle of Popular Sovereignty.” His opponents ridiculed it as “squatter sovereignty” and predicted that it would lead to both sides in the slavery debate “packing” the new territories with their own partisans and fighting the free vs. slave battle not with ballots, but with knives and guns. They were right. Organized by Missouri Senator David Atchison, gangs of armed Missouri whites — called “border ruffians,” first by their opponents and then by themselves — charged across the border into Kansas to stake out the territory for slavery. White Northern “free-soilers” responded by smuggling out letters describing the carnage being wreaked upon them by Missouri’s invaders, and ultimately they took up arms themselves. Anti-slavery activist John Brown, whose adult sons had already settled in Kansas, became convinced by the attacks on free-soilers there that nonviolent resistance to the slave power was futile and only violence could dislodge the slave power. Brown came to Kansas himself, and he and his family brutally put their principles into action.

Both Atchison and Brown appear as on-stage characters in Bleeding Kansas — the title is how the Kansas massacres were described in newspapers at the time — but the focus is on a handful of fictional characters caught up in the maelstrom. Hannah Rose Allen (Jennifer Eve Thorn) is an abolitionist schoolteacher from New England who comes to Kansas to support the anti-slavery campaign (even though, as a woman, she can’t vote) and teach once the dust settles and schools can open. Kittson “Kitty” Clarke (Jo Anne Glover) is the wife of free-soil farmer George Clarke (David S. Humphrey); grief-stricken by the death of their daughter Flora, they have moved from Indiana to Kansas not to be part of a great political struggle but simply to claim and work a farm. Edwin Redpath (Christopher Buess) is a border ruffian who comes to fight for slavery but also develops a sort of Romeo-and-Juliet attachment to Hannah Rose. Josiah Nichols (Mark Petrich) is a fellow farmer and a neighbor of the Clarkes; he’s a Missourian and therefore pro-slavery but, like the Clarkes on the other side, he isn’t militant about it.

Walat’s script occasionally falls into the didacticism that’s the trap of political playwrights, and it’s hard to believe that anybody in the U.S. outside a college faculty was as literate in the 1850’s as Hannah Rose appears in her letters to her sister Abigail (which she delivers as soliloquies during the play), but for the most part she’s written a tough, moving drama that vividly brings home the anguish of ordinary citizens caught up in someone else’s war. It’s Kansas in the 1850’s but it could be Bosnia, Kosovo or Rwanda in the 1990’s or Iraq today. MOXIE is presenting this as an election-themed play — it closes November 2, two days before the final vote, and is advertised as “one play you MUST see before Election Day!” — but the issues it raises are broader than that: whether anyone is truly “innocent” in a war zone, whether violence is ever an acceptable means to settle a political conflict, and above all the tragedy of people who just want to do their jobs, bring their crops in and raise their families in the middle of people who want to kill them for reasons of “principle.”

MOXIE’s artistic director, Delicia Turner Sonnenberg, directed this production. She grabs hold of Walat’s script and produces a high-tension staging that maintains the necessary intensity throughout. She and George Yé, credited in the program with “combat,” are especially good at the action scenes; when various characters emerge battered and bloodied, you believe it. The leads, Thorn and Glover — two of the women who co-founded MOXIE with Sonnenberg — deliver tough, no-nonsense performances. Thorn, though confronted with the preachiest dialogue in Walat’s play, delivers the proper air of self-assurance as well as the pompousness all too common in real-life ideologues. Glover is even better: playing a woman whose life has already been wrenched apart by the death of her daughter and will soon be tried even more traumatically, she turns in a gripping performance as the anxious, edgy woman overwhelmed by circumstances and determined to fight back.

The men are almost as good. David S. Humphrey (the only Actors’ Equity member in the cast) is tall, handsome (even in the unflattering 19th century costumes) and a bit gawky, and perfectly communicates the good-natured gentleness and ineffectuality of a man who doesn’t know the first thing about farming and, though he’s against slavery, shares the racism of the Southerners and doesn’t want any Black people, slave or free, in the state. (This is historically accurate; when Kansas finally entered the Union as a free state in 1861, the state constitution barred free Blacks from emigrating to the state and all Blacks from voting.) Christopher Buess gives most of his performance with his body language, literally and figuratively swaying back and forth between his pro-slavery convictions and his growing attractions to Hannah Rose. Mark Petrich as Josiah is well cast as yet another ordinary character whose love and gentleness shine through even though he believes (purely intellectually, since he doesn’t own slaves and could never afford to) in the South’s disgusting “peculiar institution.”

Scenic designer Jerry Sonnenberg (the director’s husband) gives us an enviably solid-looking set consisting of a well-constructed log cabin -— though not so well-constructed that we can’t believe it when the characters complain that wind blows through the cracks between the logs — a floor of actual soil and a large painted backdrop representing an expanse of sky. Jennifer Brawn Gittings’ costumes look credible as mid-19th century wear and Amy Chini’s props contain only one obvious anachronism: the modern-day cans the characters use as drinking cups. Jason Connors is credited with composition and sound design; most of the music is the rather scratchy-sounding fiddle playing that famously accompanied Ken Burns’ The Civil War documentary, though the only player credited is cellist Erica Erenyi. Lighting designer Jason Bleber isn’t afraid to make the lights bright when they should be, and he’s good at using spots to isolate the important action on stage.

MOXIE’s mission is to present plays with powerful, non-traditional views of women, and as in their previous productions they’ve achieved that big-time here. The final image (reproduced in the poster) of Thorn and Glover, sleeping on the same pallet, back to front, each with a rifle, is itself a chilling summation not only of the play’s theme but also of how being in the middle of a combat zone has changed their characters. Bleeding Kansas is a gut-wrenching, tear-jerking drama that grabs the emotions. Its story offers plenty of parallels to present-day political and ethical issues (in the intermission many audience members were talking more about the current financial crisis and the upcoming election than they were about the play itself) but it doesn’t hit us over the head with them. Its characters aren’t Brechtian archetypes but believable flesh-and-blood human beings for whom we root and with whom we suffer. Kathryn Walat has delivered a powerful play, and MOXIE has done it full justice in its production. It’s not just a must-see before the election; it would be a must-see any time.

MOXIE Theatre’s production of Kathryn Walat’s Bleeding Kansas runs through Sunday, November 2 at Diversionary Theatre, 4545 Park Boulevard in University Heights. Performances are 8 p.m. Thurs.-Sat. and 2 p.m. Sun. The Thurs., Oct. 16 and Fri., Oct. 17 performances are low-priced “pay what you can” previews. To purchase tickets, or for more information, call (619) 275-0332 or visit www.moxietheatre.com

A Modest Proposal: Let’s Have a New President November 5

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

As I write this (Sunday, October 11) the United States of America is in economic free-fall. The only reason the stock market hasn’t fallen to record lows in the last two days is it’s been the weekend and it hasn’t been open. Banks are either being taken over by the federal government or forced into shotgun mergers with their bigger brethren to save them from the consequences of years of speculation in home loans. Businesses accustomed to borrowing money for day-to-day operations now find themselves unable to finance themselves and in imminent danger of going under and taking their employees with them. Homeowners watch in panic as their mortgages “reset” just as other expenses like food and gas threaten the precarious financial equilibrium they’ve been able to achieve in an era in which real wages have steadily gone down every year but two (1999 and 2000) since 1971.

At the same time, nothing the political system does seems able to stanch the economic hemorrhaging. A $600 “stimulus” check to each taxpayer, which was supposed to encourage discretionary spending, for most of its recipients just got soaked up by food, gas and outstanding credit card bills. A $700 billion “bailout” package to save the Wall Street financial firms from the consequences of their speculatory orgies hasn’t even had a chance to go into effect before the markets have voted it down. The latest proposal is for government to purchase equity shares in banks directly — something it hasn’t done since the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed — but even that idea has had little apparent effect on the utter devastation of investor and consumer confidence in our economic future.

I believe at least part of the problem has to do with the timing of the crash: right in the home stretch of a Presidential election. George W. Bush is the lamest of lame ducks, vainly trying to influence a nation that has stopped listening to him. He’s spent all his political capital on keeping the funding taps open for his immoral and destructive war in Iraq and winning Congressional approval for open-ended wiretapping, torture and all the other accoutrements of the so-called “unitary executive” — the Presidential dictatorship he and vice-president Dick Cheney came into office to establish. With the presidency hobbled and people awaiting with baited breath the outcome of the election to determine Bush’s successor, we cannot afford the traditional 2 1/2-month lag time between the election and the swearing-in of the new President.

We need a new President. Not on January 20, 2009: NOW. Accordingly, I call on President Bush and Vice-President Cheney immediately to offer their resignations, to be effective November 5, 2008. I further call on Congress to pass a bill suspending the existing law regarding presidential succession and stipulating that in case of a vacancy in the presidency and vice-presidency between November 4, 2008 and January 20, 2009, the presumptive winners of the November 4 election shall immediately take over as president and vice-president. The law can also interpret the constitutional requirement that the members of the Electoral College “meet in their respective states” to vote for president and vice-president to include teleconferencing or video conferencing and casting ballots electronically. (Why should a 21st century republic be hobbled by 18th century technology?)

Installing the newly elected President and Vice-President within a day or so of the November 4 election won’t be a panacea, but at least it will allow our newly elected leaders to “hit the ground running” and get to work on solving this devastating economic crisis IMMEDIATELY. It will avoid a potential catastrophe that America hasn’t faced since the 4 1/2-month lag time between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, which allowed the Southern states to secede and ensured that Lincoln’s task would be to win a civil war, when if he could have taken office earlier he might have been able to short-circuit one.

Marriage: Some Good News, More Bad News

By MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Thursday, October 10 was both a good day and a bad day for the movement to grant marriage equality to same-sex couples in the U.S. The good news was that the Supreme Court of Connecticut, by the same narrow 4-3 margin as the high courts in Massachusetts and California, interpreted their state’s constitution to require that their state not only grant to same-sex couples “civil unions” with the same rights and responsibilities of married heterosexual couples, but that they must allow same-sex couples to marry on an identical basis to opposite-sex couples.

The arguments on both sides were pretty much the same as in California’s case. The majority said that even if the institutions were otherwise identical, calling the system for giving legal recognitions to same-sex couples “civil unions” and the one for opposite-sex couples “marriage” is discriminatory because “the very existence of the classification [‘civil union’] gives credence to the perception that separate treatment is warranted for the same illegitimate reasons that gave rise to the past discrimination in the first place. … [T]here is no doubt that civil unions enjoy a lesser status in our society than marriage.”

The Connecticut court majority also held that sexual orientation constitutes a “suspect class” deserving of “strict scrutiny,” the highest level of civil-rights protection U.S. law affords and one which the U.S. Supreme Court gives to only one classification, race. The dissenters, like the ones in California, argued that classifications based on sexual orientation don’t deserve strict scrutiny and that in the long run it is the people, both directly at the ballot box and indirectly through their elected representatives, who should be the ultimate arbiters of whether same-sex couples deserve access to the right of marriage.

The bad news is that within the space of three weeks, the battle at the polls in California over Proposition 8 — a radical Right-sponsored initiative to reverse the California Supreme Court’s ruling and declare that only marriage between one man and one woman shall be recognized in this state — has turned decisively against us. The SurveyUSA poll done for KPIX Channel 5, the CBS-affiliated TV station in San Francisco, puts the initiative ahead 47 to 42 percent among likely voters — a dramatic reversal of the five-point margin against it the same poll found only eleven days earlier. A similar poll from another firm, Lake Research, shows Proposition 8 ahead 47 to 43 percent.

What happened in the meantime was that the Yes on 8 forces got their TV ad campaign up and running — and, in common with most Right-wing rhetoric these days, it was based on fear. Fear that churches will lose their tax-exempt status if they continue to speak out against same-sex marriage. Fear that schools will teach their students that same-sex marriage is an acceptable social institution. (One item on the pro-8 Web site, www.protectmarriage.com, is headlined, “First-Graders Taken to San Francisco City Hall for Gay Wedding.”) What’s more, the Yes on 8 campaign now has $12 million in the bank and the No on 8 campaign has just $1 million — which, barring a major infusion of cash from big-pocketed donors to the No on 8 campaign, means that the Yes side’s message of fear and hatred will drown out the No side’s message of love and acceptance, and voters will vote their fears and pass the initiative overwhelmingly.

We know all too well where the Yes on 8 side’s money came from. Massive infusion of cash from churches and religious organizations, including the Mormon church (whose founder, Joseph Smith, Jr., may actually have performed same-sex weddings) and the Roman Catholic Knights of Columbus, gave them a $25 million war chest of which so far they’ve only spent half. So has Focus on the Family, the Colorado-based radical-Right powerhouse that launched Proposition 8 in the first place. Prominent businesspeople, many of whom make much of their money from the Queer community, have also donated.

At the same time, according to a dispatch from Eric Resnick for the LOOP E-magazine, many wealthy Queer celebrities — including ones like Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell who actually married their partners in California — haven’t given a dime to preserve the rights they exploited. “Elton John and Melissa Etheridge, two of the best-known and wealthiest LGBT people in popular music, have also not donated, nor have directors Gus Van Sant, Joel Schumacher and Bryan Singer, or producers Greg Berlanti of Brothers and Sisters or Marc Cherry of Desperate Housewives,” Resnick reported. While straight stars like Brad Pitt (whose own problems with heterosexual relationships have been reported — and probably exaggerated — by the tabloids) have given generously to No on 8, most of Hollywood’s Queer Glitterati are hors de combat on this one.

What’s even more ominous for the future of same-sex marriage in the U.S. is that the gain of support for Proposition 8 occurred almost entirely among young voters (ages 18 to 34). Before this poll, marriage equality advocates had always assumed that the youth were on our side; that even if today’s cohort of voters was against same-sex marriage, the bigots would slowly die off and eventually there would be a clear majority on our side as young people, raised in an atmosphere of live-and-let-live acceptance of Queer people, entered voting age and replaced them.

Well, as on so many issues the Left sat on its hands and hoped, and the Right put their noses to the grindstone and organized. An October 10 dispatch on the Christian Newswire by Trish Teves [http://www.protectmarriage.com/article/traditional-marriage-initiative-makes-gains-with-young-voters] boasts that the Yes on 8 forces have set up a special Web site to appeal to youth directly, iProtectMarriage.com, which “directs users to MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and BlueChowder, encouraging young people to register to vote, get informed about Prop. 8, and tell their friends to vote Yes on 8.” As a result, according to the SurveyUSA poll, voters 18 to 34 are now MORE likely than older voters to support Proposition 8 — 53 percent in favor to 39 percent opposed.

It’s likely that the Connecticut high court ruling will also be nullified at the polls — and, unlike in California, that may happen before it even has a chance to take effect. That’s because of a provision in the Connecticut constitution that requires voters to decide, at 20-year intervals, whether to hold a constitutional convention to revise it. The 20-year vote just happens to be taking place this year — and even before the Connecticut Supreme Court issued its ruling, marriage equality opponents had grabbed hold of the convention vote and were promoting it as a surrogate initiative against same-sex marriage and possibly against civil unions as well.

The pollsters in California warn that the totals on Proposition 8 are still volatile and the Yes side doesn’t have it in the bag any more than the No side did when they were ahead in the polls. Nonetheless, the trends are ominous. In only one U.S. state — Arizona — have voters ever defeated an initiative aimed at limiting marriage to one man and one woman, and the radical Right in Arizona has put the issue on the ballot again this year with the full support of their senior senator, Republican Presidential nominee John McCain, who’s filmed TV commercials promoting it. Every other state whose people have had the chance to vote on this issue has rejected marriage equality for same-sex couples, usually by overwhelming margins — like the 22 percent by which California voters affirmed that marriage should only be between one man and one woman in March 2000, the last time they had a chance to weigh in on this issue.

Marriage equality advocates like to argue that basic human rights should be beyond the judgment of the majority to bestow or take away. Idealistically, that’s correct; but as the late Senator Eugene McCarthy said in defending the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the law can never get too far ahead of the people or the law will not be respected. The trick, McCarthy added, was to push the law JUST far enough ahead of popular prejudices that it will be accepted and will advance civil rights. If California voters pass Proposition 8 and Connecticut voters endorse a constitutional convention to repeal their high court’s marriage equality decision, it will be proof positive that in lobbying for domestic partnerships and civil unions, Queer rights advocates were pushing the envelope far enough — and by demanding marriage, they pushed it too far and lost the respect and support of the people.

Today we face a political emergency in the Queer community. The defeat of Proposition 8 by all legal means available is our immediate priority. NOTHING — not even the Presidential election — is more important. Passage of Proposition 8 will kill the chances of same-sex marriage anywhere in the U.S. outside of a state or two in New England forever — or at least long enough that no one now living will see it. The future of Queer equality will be far better if Proposition 8 is defeated and John McCain is the next President than if it passes and Barack Obama is the next President. Accordingly, the Queer community nationwide in the U.S. should divert ALL its resources into a massive campaign to raise a war chest capable of matching that of the Proposition 8 supporters and defeating this initiative at the polls while there is still a chance to do so.

If, despite our best efforts, Proposition 8 passes, we should accept the will of the people of America’s largest (and one of its most liberal) states and abandon the demand for marriage equality. We should instead concentrate on an incremental strategy to expand our separate institutions, domestic partnerships and civil unions, to cover more and more people and give more and more of the rights of marriage. Proposition 8 is the deal-breaker, the vote that will determine whether or not marriage equality for same-sex couples EVER becomes a reality in the United States. Our opponents understand that and are acting accordingly. Are we?

Obama, McCain, Biden, Palin: What They’re Really Saying in the Debates

commentary portion by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

The most recent televised debate between Senators Barack Obama and John McCain October 7 was fascinating less for what got said — largely as a result of the big-money power that hangs over American politics and finances both major parties, there was only a narrow range of opinions and ideas they could express and as a result, the substance of their remarks was very much alike — than for the manners they gave off as they spoke. It was astonishingly ironic that McCain promoted himself as the “cool hand on the tiller” needed to conduct an effective foreign policy when for the entire debate it was Obama, not McCain, who was “cool.”

Obama was reasoned, calm, patient and sat respectfully at his desk when McCain spoke. McCain was crotchety, irritable, nervous and contemptuous, refusing to refer to Obama by name and looking surprisingly flustered, as if he can’t bear the idea that this tall, dark and handsome twerp is the only obstacle standing between him and the presidency. Obama seems to have that effect on his political opponents — Hillary Clinton was getting similarly flustered towards the end of their battle for the Democratic nomination — which might actually be a good reason to vote for him.

McCain expresses shock and disapproval at Obama’s willingness to negotiate with less-than-friendly world leaders like Iraq president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il “without preconditions” — which is basically Bush Administration “code” for the remarkable idea that a visit from a U.S. head of state is a benediction, a reward, to be bestowed only on other world leaders who already agree with us and are doing what we tell them to do. Frankly, if Obama can get under the skin of John McCain and Hillary Clinton as effectively as he has, it sounds to me like he’s the one we want across the negotiating table from folks like Ahmadinejad or Kim.

In some ways, the vice-presidential debate October 2 was a good deal more interesting than either of the encounters between the candidates at the top of the ticket. Whereas Obama, in my view, won both debates with McCain on points, Sarah Palin completely and utterly trounced Joe Biden by playing the “folksy” card to perfection. The V-P debate was like a real-life version of a Frank Capra movie, with Palin as a distaff James Stewart playing Everyperson — “Ms. Smith Goes to Washington” or “It’s a Wonderful Life in Alaska” — while Biden, who made some surprising boners (like naming the wrong article in the Constitution that deals with the executive branch and not even venturing a guess as to the name of the U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan — Palin gave a name and it was wrong), played into Palin’s script by projecting the veiled contempt of the patrician. Throughout the debate, Biden rose above the American voters and said, “Look at me and all the wonderful things I’m going to do for you.” Palin spoke to them at their level and said, “Look at me: I AM you.”

The vice-presidential debate was also the only one that directly addressed a Queer-rights issue: marriage equality and the legal recognition of rights for same-sex couples. Both Biden and Palin came out at the same place — both willing to grant Gay and Lesbian couples equal rights but NOT to call it “marriage” — but from two quite different directions. Biden actually said that he and Obama “do support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same Constitutional benefits as a relationship” before he backtracked, first restricting those rights to what’s generally specified in domestic-partnership legislation and then saying flat-out he was against legal recognition of civil marriage for same-sex couples.

Biden also said that “in an Obama/Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction, from a Constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint, between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple” — ignoring the fact that the only way to insure “absolutely no distinction” is either to open civil marriage, so-called, to Queer couples or rename the legal recognition of ALL couples “domestic partnerships” or “civil unions” and reserve the word “marriage” for the religious solemnization of a relationship, which under the free exercise clause of the First Amendment churches may choose to offer to same-sex partners or not.

On the other hand, Biden also inexplicably said that “[neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining, from a civil side, what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically a decision to be able to be left to the faiths and people who practice their faiths, the determination [of] what you call it.” To which I can only respond: what on earth do “the faiths and people who practice their faiths” have to do with whether same-sex couples are entitled to CIVIL rights. Apparently it’s just fine with Joe Biden that the law continues to grant special rights to the religions that DON’T recognize marriage equality for same-sex and to discriminate against those that do — as well as against people like myself (though not my husband!) who don’t believe in any “faith” or God at all. But then, ever since I was less than one year old and the words “under God” were inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance, my country has been telling me that as an atheist I am a second-class citizen and incapable of true loyalty to this country.

•••••

Vice-Presidential Debate: Sarah Palin vs. Joe Biden, October 2, 2008 (excerpts)

Gwen Ifill [moderator]: The next round of questions starts with you, Senator Biden. Do you support, as they do in Alaska, granting benefits to same-sex couples?

Joe Biden: Absolutely. Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely, positively. Look, in an Obama/Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction, from a Constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint, between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple. The fact of the matter is that under the Constitution, we should be granted — same-sex couples should be able to have visitation rights in the hospital, joint ownership of property, life insurance policies, etc. That’s only fair. It’s what the Constitution calls for.

And so we do support, we do support, making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same Constitutional benefits as a relationship — property rights, the rights of visitation, the rights of insurance, the rights of ownership — as heterosexual couples do.

Ifill: Governor, would you support expanding that beyond Alaska to the rest of the nation?

Sarah Palin: Well, not if it grows closer and closer towards redefining the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman, and unfortunately that’s sometimes where those steps lead. But I also want to clarify, if there’s any kind of suggestion at all from my answer that I would be anything but tolerant of adults in America choosing their partners, choosing relationships that they deem best for themselves.

You know, I am tolerant, and I have a very diverse family and group of friends, and even within that group you would see some who may not agree with me on this issue, some very dear friends who don’t agree with me on this issue. But in that tolerance, also, no one would ever propose, not in a McCain/Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed, being negotiated, between parties.

But I will tell Americans straight up that I don’t support defining marriage as anything but between one man and one woman. And I think through nuances, we could go round and round about what that actually means. But I’m being as straight-up with Americans as I can in my non-support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage.

Ifill: Let’s try to avoid nuance, Senator.

Biden: For that I would be grateful.

Ifill: Do you support Gay marriage?

Biden: No. [Neither] Barack Obama nor I support redefining, from a civil side, what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically a decision to be able to be left to the faiths and people who practice their faiths, the determination [of] what you call it. The bottom line is — and I’m glad to hear this from the Governor. I take her at her word, obviously — that she thinks there should be no civil-rights distinction whatever between a committed Gay couple and a committed heterosexual couple. If that’s the case, we really don’t have a difference.

Ifill [to Palin]: Is that what you said?

Palin: Your question to him was whether he supported Gay marriage, and my answer is the same as his, and it is that I do not.

Ifill: Wonderful. You agree. On that note, let’s move to foreign policy.

“Wrecking Crew” Author Thomas Frank Speaks at City College

Exposes How Capitalism Destroys Good Government — and What We Can Do

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Photo: Thomas Frank, by Wendy Edelberg.

Thomas Frank is known for bitter social commentaries about the Right-wing ideology of “One Market Under God” — as he called it in the title of one of his books — and the ruin it’s made of America’s economic and political life, but when he appeared October 5 at San Diego City College as part of the third annual City Book Fair, he couldn’t have been more chipper. Part of that, he admitted after he spoke, was that he was on the final leg of his current book tour. But he was also guardedly optimistic that America’s current economic crisis might finally destroy the mystique of The Market and open possibilities for a liberal revival in the U.S. “This looks like the end times for American capitalism — or at least another wrenching crisis that we have to rescue it from so it can screw us again,” said Frank.

Born in 1965 — which, as Frank ruefully notes in his current book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, looked like the high point of American liberalism but turned out merely to be the sunset before the darkness — Frank first achieved prominence as a social commentator in the early 1990’s with his magazine The Baffler. In that publication, and his first book The Conquest of Cool, Frank noted that not only had the lag time between the development of an authentic form of youth rebellion and its co-optation and capture by capitalists eager to turn it into a profit-making product shrunk to virtually nothing, but capitalists marketing to youths had figured out how to invent their own trends and recruit supposedly representative young people to help them.

Frank followed this with his book One Market Under God, a broader critique of the way market ideology and the worship of the corporate rich had come to dominate American economic thought. He recalled that the book came about from watching the business channel CNBC in the late 1990’s. “They had a feature called ‘CEO Money Meter’ where you could rejoice as your favorite CEO made more money,” he recalled — a form of CEO-worship that ended, Frank added, “the moment Henry Paulson said ‘$700 billion’” as the price tag of his economic bailout plan.

His next book was the best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas?, in which he traveled back to the state where he’d been born and tried to analyze how and why it had been transformed from a bastion of agrarian radicalism to a haven for anti-abortion activists and libertarian as well as social-conservative Rightists. Few books have been so misunderstood as What’s the Matter with Kansas? The sound-bite version of Frank’s analysis, repeated again and again by political pundits on cable TV news and talk radio, was that Midwestern rural Americans had been fooled by a Right-wing political, social and religious machine into voting against their economic interests by being riled up about “cultural” or “values” issues like abortion and Queer rights.

What Frank actually said was that both the Republican and Democratic parties had so totally bought into the pro-corporate line of deregulation and The Market that there was no longer any real difference between them on economic issues — and therefore the Kansas voters he surveyed were rationally and even nobly voting their consciences on the cultural issues on which the parties still differed. Indeed, in a portion of the book that almost never gets quoted, Frank expressed his admiration for the will, commitment and self-sacrificing spirit of Kansas’s grass-roots anti-abortion activists, even though he made clear his utter loathing for their cause.

Frank’s latest book, The Wrecking Crew — the one he was at City College to promote — isn’t about the grass-roots citizen activists of the Right, but about the leaders who created the modern conservative coalition, established its principles and tactics, raised funds for it from the businessmen who were its natural constituency — and made tons of money for themselves in the process. Early on in the book he writes, “There are plenty of good conservative individuals, honorable folks who would never participate in the sort of corruption we have watched unfold over the last few years” — but, unlike What’s the Matter with Kansas?, The Wrecking Crew isn’t about them.

Instead, it’s about the ideologues of the modern-day Right, the business owners and executives who funded them, and how they created a corrupt state because, Frank argues, that’s precisely what the Right wants. Frank locates the beginnings of modern-day capitalist corruption with Northern capitalism’s decisive victory over the Southern land- and slave-based aristocracy in the Civil War. Many of the people who became the fabled “robber barons” of the rest of the 19th century had begun, Frank said, by fleecing the government as war suppliers — and they went right on behaving the same way after the war ended.

“In March 1868 Jay Gould set forth for Albany, New York [the state capital] with a suitcase full of cash,” Frank recalled. “He was struggling with Cornelius ‘Commodore’ Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad. Vanderbilt wanted the railroad and Gould was holding him off with an illegal strategy. Each side bought their own New York state legislators and judges. Fabulous stories were told about the sums they were willing to spend. This was the golden age of American capitalism, and our country worshiped entrepreneurs and spun theories to tell us why the Market’s way was God’s way. For everyone else, unregulated capitalism meant toxic food, insane economic booms and busts, and bitter labor battles and strikes. The logic of entrepreneurship ruled American politics.” Those, Frank said, are the “good old days” modern-day conservatives want to restore.

According to Frank, the excesses of the late 19th century capitalists brought forth various movements to “reform” the system — “but they couldn’t figure out how to do it,” he explained. “They set up a nonpartisan civil service, but nothing worked. They figured the problem was much deeper; you cannot bring political corruption to heel without bringing capitalism to heel.” In The Wrecking Crew, Frank quotes Louis D. Brandeis, who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson and served until 1941, usually dissenting from his Republican brethren’s opinions favoring business over labor and consumers, as saying, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

“Today we are learning these lessons all over again,” Frank told his audience at City College. “The principal players in the Enron and Jack Abramoff scandals [Abramoff, the College Republicans organizer turned super-lobbyist turned convict, looms large in The Wrecking Crew] were all true believers in the Market. There are theorists who believe there’s nothing wrong with insider trading, price-fixing and bribery. Our country worships billionaires, and the top 1 percent of the population makes as much as the bottom 50 percent. Our politicians of both [major] parties gush over the prospect of ‘market government.’”

One of the favored tactics of Market conservatives — in both parties, but particularly among Republicans — is to sabotage attempts to regulate business by appointing pro-Market ideologues to run those agencies. “Governments routinely appoint individual people to run regulatory agencies who are hostile to the missions of those agencies,” Frank said. “The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) let investment bankers run wild, and they destroyed themselves. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) came to regard the airlines — not the public — as their ‘customers.’” (So, though Frank didn’t mention it, did the staff members of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration with the pharmaceutical companies — who, under current law, actually pay “fees” to fund most of the budget of the agency which supposedly regulates them.)

Frank cited a recent story about staff members on an obscure agency within the Interior Department charged with regulating oil companies’ performance on leases on public lands — the ones Republicans like John McCain and Sarah Palin want to expand dramatically with their chants of “drill, baby, drill” — whose members routinely had sex with employees of the oil companies they were supposedly regulating. Thus, Frank said, they were not only figuratively but “literally in bed with industry representatives.”

According to Frank, the assault on government by the Right-wing activists, philosophers and businesspeople he refers to as “the wrecking crew” is total and multi-faceted — and, in one of the most controversial assertions in his book, Frank says the incompetence of Right-wing government we have seen in the Bush administration is intentional. Frank claims that the Right doesn’t want a government that functions efficiently in the service of free-market ideology, just as they don’t want one that functions efficiently in the service of liberal reforms. Rather, they want a government that barely functions at all — so not only does it not get in the way of businesspeople, but eventually it destroys the public’s confidence in their ability to clean things up by electing different officeholders.

One of Frank’s most interesting sources for that is an article called “A Plea for Inefficiency in Government” that appeared in 1928 in Nation’s Business, the house organ of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The piece was an interview with the Chamber’s then-president, defense contractor Homer Ferguson. “The best public servant is the worst one,” Ferguson said. “A thoroughly first-rate man in public service is corrosive. He eats holes in our liberties. The better he is, and the longer he stays, the greater the danger. If he is an enthusiast — a bright-eyed madman who is frantic to make this the finest government in the world — the Black Plague is a house pet by comparison.”

“For decades after the 1929 crash,” Frank writes in The Wrecking Crew, “the nation ignored the Chamber’s plea for lousy government, bent instead on using government to build a more equitable society. Through depression and war and postwar boom, the civil service continued to grow, hitting its postwar peak in 1968. Conservative Washington, however, is Homer Ferguson’s kind of place, a point made quite explicitly in 1987 by the conservative pundit Doug Bandow, once a special assistant to President Reagan, who announced that for conservatives, ‘excellence in government’ was not an acceptable goal.”

“We shouldn’t want a proficient public sector,” Frank quotes Bandow as saying. “Given that government absorbs and redistributes wealth rather than creates it, we desperately need to keep the very best people out in the private sector where they can do the most good. … The definition of public service should be doing what is right, not doing anything well.”

Frank describes many ways the Right has sought to destroy the U.S. civil service, from imposing loyalty oaths (like twenty-something Regent University graduate Monica Goodling’s infamous question to people who wanted to be U.S. Attorneys under the Bush administration, “What is it about George W. Bush that makes you want to serve him?”) to slashing its pay and benefits to reassigning and demoting civil servants who haven’t got the message that it is now businesspeople and the corporate rich, not the rest of the public, who are their agencies’ “customers.”

But the Right’s most far-reaching way of eliminating competence in the civil service, Frank argued, is to get rid of large chunks of it altogether by “outsourcing” its functions to the private sector. Frank said that’s even happening in the recently approved $700 billion economic bailout, in which executives of the very Wall Street firms that are being bailed out have been hired by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as “consultants” to determine which loans and other assets he will buy with the money, and which he will let fail.

“Massive outsourcing is what the Bush administration is about,” Frank said. “It’s a ripoff of gigantic proportions. In all three Bush administration initiatives — the Department of Homeland Security, the reconstruction after Hurricane Katrina, and the war in Iraq — it’s been a botch. Today the Defense and Homeland Security departments accept contracts so badly written, they seem devices to sluice out money [from taxpayers], and since the contractors are private companies there isn’t any oversight. One of the strange things conservatives did when they had control of Congress was get rid of the agencies that were supposed to supervise contracts. Even the main agency that was supposed to supervise outsourcing was outsourced.”

Frank also discussed the so-called “revolving door,” through which government employees and even elected officials gain lucrative jobs with the companies they formerly regulated — and their colleagues left behind get the message that if they, too, go easy on industry they’ll also be able to get cushier and better-paying jobs in the private sector. The “revolving door” has spun for decades, but under the Bush administration it’s spun far faster than it ever did before. “The people who wrote the prescription-drug Medicare plan [which specifically forbade the government from negotiating with drug companies for lower prices] were plucked from private industry and went right back there once they were done,” Frank explained. “Fifteen people involved in that plan went through that door, including the head of the House committee that considered it, Billy Tauzin, who was hired to be the head of lobbying for Big Pharma at $2 million a year.”

Virtually all the modern Right’s strategies serve a dual purpose, Frank said. Not only do they get government out of the way of The Market and the “right” of business to make profits whatever the social cost, they also “defund the Left” — a phrase coined by long-term radical-Right activist Grover Norquist early in his career — by draining the potential sources of funding for any movement opposing the Right’s agenda. So-called “tort reform” not only shields companies from having to pay civil verdicts for unsafe products or working conditions, it severely cuts the income of trial lawyers and thus their ability to donate to liberal causes and Democratic politicians. Attacking the labor movement not only allows business to drive down the costs of labor and avoid having to spend money fixing unsafe working conditions, it also slashes the money available to unions and forces them to remain on the defensive, unable to attack the political Right.

The result of all this, Frank said, has been to turn the U.S. from a country in which prosperity was widely shared to one in which inequality of wealth and income has already reached Third World levels — and is still growing. “In 1965, when I came into the world, America was enjoying a period of unparalleled prosperity,” he said. “The gross domestic product (GDP) grew 6.5 percent per year, as opposed to 2 percent in the best years of conservative government. That growth was in accord with an economic principle of ‘a growing abundance, widely shared.’ Taxes were high, regulations onerous, and J. Paul Getty, the richest man in the world, was bitter because the average man could enjoy the luxuries the rich had once had to themselves.” Indeed, Frank recalled, during the liberal era economists simply assumed that gains in productivity translated into increases in workers’ wages.

Today, by contrast, “American productivity gallops along but only the people at the top benefits. Think of what it costs to build us another billionaire: the sudden outbreaks of deadly food poisoning, the train derailments, the deadly mine accidents, the stock market that shakes and shimmies, the tap water that’s unfit to drink, the mysterious workplace diseases that it turns out upon investigation could have been easily avoided at only a slight expense to management. But all of these things are made possible, and even unavoidable, by a philosophy of government that regards business as its only important constituent.”

Asked whether there will be any meaningful change if the Democrats win this year’s elections, Frank used the question to illustrate how the Right has sought to make these changes permanent and wipe out the ability of any competing political movement to undo them. “Barack Obama has been moving Left lately as the economy collapses,” Frank acknowledged. “He’s starting to talk like Franklin Roosevelt — and that’s what he has to do to win. He’ll have a Democratic Congress. He’ll have 100 days and he will be able to crack down on outsourcing.” But, Frank argued, President Obama will run smack into the reality that the Right has put the government so deeply in debt that even if he wants to enact a liberal agenda, he won’t be able to.

Frank described the huge budget deficits run up by the last three Republican presidents as the ultimate “defund the Left” strategy. “I don’t have a problem with deficit spending, but it has to be responsible and intelligent,” Frank said. “Under Reagan, the Right figured out that deficits make a fantastic weapon against liberals. They dumped the whole thing in the lap of Bill Clinton, and it made it impossible for him to do any of the liberal things he’d promised. You guys can want national health care — the idea that a family must declare bankruptcy because their kids get sick is horrible — but the enormous budget deficit takes national health care off the table,”

Asked whether the $700 billion bailout will make a difference for anybody who makes less than $40,000 per year, Frank replied, “People have been screwed already. Unemployment is 6 percent and rising. Food is much more expensive, and farmers are not benefiting from the higher food prices because it’s all going to the middlemen. Productivity keeps going up and workers’ wages are flat. The whole economy is structured to screw average people.”

The only way that’s going to change, Frank said, is if ordinary people somehow get together and build the same kinds of mass social movements that moved American politics to the Left in the 1890’s, the 1930’s and the 1960’s. “We were moving towards social democracy because we had movements,” he explained: “labor movements, farmers’ movements, civil rights movements. We didn’t get good wages or Social Security because politicians gave them to us. We got them because we had a social movement pushing for that. That movement is moribund, while the Right’s social movement just keeps on chugging. They’re an outgrowth of business and they will never be without resources. We’ve learned a lesson in the last 30 years: if you give those people an inch, they will screw us.”

Iraq Vet Paul Rieckhoff Speaks at City College

Also Executive Director of Iraq, Afghanistan Veterans’ Group

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Photo: Paul Rieckhoff’s enlistment photo, January 1999. Courtesy of Paul Rieckhoff.

“‘George Bush had better be fucking right,’” begins Iraq War veteran Paul Rieckhoff’s book about his in-country experiences, Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Façades in Iraq: A Soldier’s Perspective. “That’s how I began my journal on April 3, 2003. Writing in pencil in an Army-issue notebook with mint green pages, leaning in on deliberate, hard letters, I underlined ‘better’ and penciled over the words again until they wore through the tactically colored paper.”

“I wrote this book because I got pissed off,” Rieckhoff told an audience at San Diego City College for the third annual City Book Fair October 4. “It didn’t really start out as a book. It started out as a series of letters to my girlfriend, some of it written by flashlight, some of it literally by glow sticks, trying to put down on paper just what I and my soldiers were going through. I was in Iraq in 2003-2004, for about the first year of the war. I was a platoon leader, so I had 38 grunts under my command in central Baghdad for about a year. These letters were kind of like therapy for me, cathartic, whatever you want to call it. It was a way for me to try to chronicle my experiences and just explain all the stuff that was going on in my unit and in my head.”

When Rieckhoff returned home, he didn’t plan on writing a book based on this material — but his then-girlfriend had saved all the letters, burned them to a CD and gave them to him. Then two other people told him that his interest in political activism around veterans’ issues would probably be helped if he assembled the stories in his letters and wrote a book about his experiences. In addition to being an author, Rieckhoff is the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), a broad-based group of veterans of America’s most recent and ongoing wars that lobbies Congress for veterans’ benefits, including improved Veterans’ Administration (VA) medical care and a stronger GI Bill of Rights with more college funding.

“No matter how you feel about the war, you have a responsibility to take care of the veterans,” Rieckhoff said. In his presentation, he carefully avoided saying one way or the other whether he feels the war was right, and he made clear that his group — unlike the Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) — doesn’t do counter-recruiting or otherwise attempt to discourage people from enlisting. But he said at least part of his motivation for writing his book and working with IAVA was to make sure that the experience of Viet Nam veterans — often treated as scapegoats as the public turned against their war — isn’t repeated.

Though he’s glad to see that three of the four major-party nominees for president and vice-president have sons in the military (“skin in the game,” Rieckhoff called it), he worries about how “veterans become chew toys or political props” in political campaigns. “My story is just a piece of the puzzle,” Rieckhoff explained. “I get sick of policy wonks and Bill O’Reilly talking about the war as if they were policy experts. I think the 19-year-old machine gunner in my unit is more up on the Bush Doctrine than most of the folks in Washington.”

Rieckhoff spent most of his war stationed in an area of Baghdad designated “Sector 17,” which (as he described it in his book) “covered the neighborhoods of al-Wasiriyah and Maghreb, and cut across part of the wealthy Sunni neighborhood of al-Adamiyah. It was bracketed by two bridges that crossed the Tigris [River] to the north and south, and contained a number of key strategic targets. Three ministries — Finance, Health and Labor. Four international embassies — Italian, Indian, Lebanese, and Turkish. And the gem of the sector, Medical City, the largest medical complex in all of Iraq. The ministries had been effectively taken out by the Air Force. The embassies were totally untouched. Medical City was somewhere in between.”

In his book, Rieckhoff describes his unit’s life in Sector 17 as alternating between three assignments: checkpoints, patrols and guard duty. At City College he read a section of his book describing checkpoint duty. Checkpoints are one of the most controversial aspects of the occupation because they restrict the movements of ordinary Iraqis and make it possible for U.S. soldiers to mistake innocent Iraqi civilians for resistance fighters and kill them. In a portion of the book Rieckhoff read at City College, he described what he, his men and any other U.S. soldiers who staff checkpoints are up against.

“Traveling at thirty miles per hour, a car covers 50 meters in three seconds,” Rieckhoff explained. “You have three seconds. Every one of us had three seconds to decide the fate of our platoon, or the fate of a family of Iraqis. We have rules of engagement, and know that the enemy doesn’t play by them. Shoot too late and your squad is torn apart by a car bomb. Shoot too early and you kill an innocent family of five and end up rotting in a military prison for the rest of your life. … During my time in Iraq, my men and I were on all sides of the equation. But I never had a soldier killed or wounded on a checkpoint. Never.”

In retrospect, Rieckhoff told his City College audience, “I’m amazed at how callous and how focused we were, and the magnitude of what we’re asking these 19-year-old machine gunners to do, especially on third, fourth or fifth tours of duty.” But he said another purpose of his book was “to put a face on Iraqis,” because they’ve largely been ignored in the discussion on the war in the U.S. even though they’re both the people we’re presumably fighting the war to “liberate” and its principal victims. “Many Americans think that all Iraqis are running around RPG’s” [rocket-propelled grenade launchers, a principal weapon of the Iraqi insurgency], Rieckhoff said. “Some are, but some are teachers and doctors.”

Many of the duties of Rieckhoff’s unit put him in direct contact with Iraqis. Part of his job was to help train the new Iraqi army — which, he noted ruefully, has been going better since he left. Another was “to provide protection for the Iraqi interpreters, who were left behind by the State Department.” Though Rieckhoff praised both American servicemembers and the Iraqis they worked with for learning much of each other’s languages quickly, the American units were still largely dependent on interpreters to communicate with other Iraqis — and the insurgency has gone out of its way to target and kill interpreters. The State Department has been notoriously tight-assed about giving visas to Iraqi interpreters fleeing the country, but Rieckhoff boasted that two of the interpreters who worked with his unit “are already in the U.S., and there’s a third we’re trying to get out now.”

Much of Rieckhoff’s presentation focused on the issues raised by IAVA, and in particular the high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental issues faced by returning Iraq War veterans. “One-third of veterans are dealing with mental issues, and a large part of our work is dealing with those issues and getting more mental health care,” Rieckhoff said. “We’re launching a pretty epic campaign on mental-health injuries, in association with the Ad Council, targeted at veterans, their families and the general public. A ‘mental injury’ is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation — combat — and we shouldn’t let it go any more than we’d ignore a shrapnel wound.”

Asked why many returning veterans themselves are unwilling to seek help for mental illnesses, Rieckhoff said, “It’s a toughness environment. We’re fighting against the military’s culture of strength and fighting on regardless. To his credit, Defense Secretary Bill Gates has tried to change the culture.” One of Gates’s reforms, Rieckhoff explained, was to remove from the application for security clearances the question, “Have you ever been treated for a mental illness?,” which encouraged people who had been either to lie about it or to drop the process out of a conviction that if they admitted it, they’d never get the clearance and their chances for advancement in the military would be over.

Rieckhoff also confirmed reports in magazines like The Nation and The New Yorker that VA doctors are being pressured not to diagnose Iraq War veterans with PTSD, but instead to claim that they had “pre-existing mental conditions” before they deployed and therefore the VA shouldn’t have to cover them. “A Marine who had an RPG blow up next to his head was diagnosed with a ‘pre-existing stress disorder,’” Rieckhoff said — mocking the diagnosis by pointing out that somehow the Marine was considered mentally fit when he enlisted in the first place and again when he was sent into combat. He said his group has “10 demands for the next president” — and “PTSD and disability reform are at the top of the list.”

One of the programs his group has is a voter guide rating all 535 members of Congress on veterans’ issues, which was officially released on October 7 — three days after Rieckhoff spoke — and is available online at www.veteranreportcard.org. According to the score card, California’s two senators, Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both had perfect records on the issues IAVA identified as important — mainly improvements in the GI Bill and veterans’ health care. Of San Diego’s five House members, Democrat Susan Davis also had a perfect score, 15 points.

San Diego’s other Democrat, Bob Filner, and North County Republican Brian Bilbray both scored 12 points. Filner lost points for failing to vote for the first post-9/11 GI Bill (though he’s voted for an IAVA-supported version twice since) or to expand veterans’ benefits, and Bilbray opposed a 2007 bill expanding veterans’ health care (though he voted for a similar bill in 2008) and supporting a weak GI Bill IAVA and all other veterans’ organizations opposed (though, again, he later reversed course and voted for a veteran-supported version). Darrell Issa scored 10 points, and the worst record among San Diego Congressmembers was by self-proclaimed “friend of the military” Duncan Hunter, who missed three crucial votes on veterans’ issues altogether and voted against IAVA on four of the 11 votes he did attend.

Another irony is that, even though he’s basing much of his Presidential campaign on having served in the military and behaved heroically during 5 1/2 years of incarceration as a prisoner of war in North Viet Nam, John McCain’s record on IAVA’s score card is surprisingly poor — only 3 out of the maximum 11 possible for a Senator. “McCain missed 63 percent of the veterans’ votes,” Rieckhoff said. “He missed more votes than Tim Johnson, who was in a coma. McCain has tremendous support among older veterans. He’s got the military experience and a son in the Marine Corps.” Barack Obama’s record is better, though not great — 7 out of a possible 11 (Illinois’ other Senator, Richard Durbin — also a Democrat — got a perfect score) — but, Rieckhoff acknowledged, Obama “was out in front on Walter Reed [the troubled military hospital exposed as offering horribly substandard care] and the GI Bill.”

Asked his opinion about how the war in Iraq is going now and how it’s likely to go in the future, Rieckhoff said, “Quick analysis: Violence has dropped dramatically, especially in Baghdad and al-Anbar province. Why that’s happened hasn’t been addressed. It had to do with the ‘Sunni Awakening’ [the decision by leaders of Sunni tribes, especially in Baghdad and Anbar, to turn against the so-called ‘al-Qaeda in Iraq’ and fight with the Americans against them], Muqtada al-Sadr [Shi’a cleric and militia leader] hitting the pause button, and huge swaths of people who have been internally displaced or have left the country It’s still not sustainable. The Sunny army won’t feel good about being answerable to a Shi’a government. I don’t think it’s all won or all lost. It’s going to be a rollercoaster.” As for Afghanistan, Rieckhoff said that this war has dropped so completely off the political and social radar screen that a lot of people who served there call it “Forgottistan.”

Rieckhoff also fielded a question about whether active-duty servicepeople stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan will be able to vote in this year’s election. He said his group had confronted Veterans’ Administration head Jim Peake, “who wanted to keep voter registration off of VA facilities on the ground that it was ‘partisan.’” Rieckhoff noted another attempt to disenfranchise servicemembers — a new law in Ohio that said you couldn’t register to vote and request an absentee ballot at the same time, which according to Rieckhoff “would have disenfranchised about 46,000 people” if his group hadn’t successfully challenged it.

Asked about his group’s relations with the official military and older veterans’ organizations, Rieckhoff said that groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) “realize that we’re not going away. We’re a cross between VFW and Facebook. Big Army, the Department of Defense and Congress can’t ignore us. A member of our organization meets with the VA every two months. They’re listening, but the big gap is still with the President. We need a President who will make veterans’ issues a priority all the time, not just on July 4 or when it’s politically convenient.”

Regarding how to reach out to veterans and not make them feel like pariahs for having fought in an unpopular war (as many Viet Nam vets were treated), Rieckhoff challenged the City College professors in attendance to “ask veterans to come to your classrooms and communities. Make it a welcoming event. Don’t ask them, ‘How many people have you killed?,” or, ‘Who are you voting for?’ We’re not all villains and we’re not all victims. Maybe you should donate time to a VA hospital, or mow the lawn of a deployed National Guardsperson.”

The U.S Economy on FIRE

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN, Editor

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Ever heard of FIRE? It’s an acronym for Finance, Investment and Real Estate, the sort of economic activity that has become the most important part of the U.S. economy. San Diegans know to their cost how dangerous fires can be — great swaths of this county burned in 2003 and again in 2007 — but the losses of life, property and environment from real fires pale by comparison to the likely result of the conflagration sweeping through the FIRE sector of this country’s economy.

If you read the mainstream media, you’ll be told that today’s U.S. economic crisis started with the collapse of a boom in housing prices fueled by so-called “subprime mortgages,” housing loans given to people who couldn’t really afford to buy houses at low “teaser” interest rates that increased — “reset” — in a few years. The trick was to refinance the loan before it reset — which was built on the assumption that housing prices would always rise. When they stopped rising last year, hundreds of thousands of Americans were faced with foreclosure — and when they lost their homes, the values of their neighbors’ homes also went down and millions of homeowners who’d avoided the pitfall of subprime borrowing nonetheless found themselves owing more on their houses than they were now worth.

But the real roots of today’s crisis stretch back much farther — to the early 1970’s. As a result of reforms instituted to fight the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the successful economic stimulation from the deficit spending that financed America’s participation in World War II, the U.S. had achieved a surprising degree of economic stability for a capitalist country. In the 1950’s, American workers (white male ones, anyway) got high wages, good benefits and seemingly lifelong job security. One-third of the U.S. workforce was represented by labor unions — the highest percentage in this nation’s history — and this helped boost the earnings of nonunion workers as well. Depression-era reforms like the Glass-Steagall Act of 1934, which forbade consumer banks, investment banks and stock brokerages from being parts of the same company, worked to block the kinds of stock manipulations and outright scams that had led to the 1929 stock market crash that sparked the Depression in the first place.

Things started to change in the 1960’s. President Lyndon Johnson’s well-intentioned effort to extend the benefits of the New Deal to the people of color who’d been excluded from it, and the flamboyant “counter-culture” of the white youths of the decade, sparked a racist and cultural backlash that evaporated the New Deal coalition which had made the Democrats the majority party since 1932. At the same time, Johnson’s attempt to finance the Viet Nam war without a permanent tax increase undid the fragile bonds that had held the 1950’s economy together and created the phenomenon known as “stagflation” — in which prices rose (inflation) without boosting economic growth or improving wages (stagnation).

The result was a political revolution in which, between them, Republican Richard Nixon and independent George Wallace won 57 percent of the 1968 presidential vote between them, to 43 percent for Democrat Hubert Humphrey. This was the sign that American politics had “realigned” in a strongly Right-wing direction, confirmed in the 1972 election in which Nixon stigmatized Democrat George McGovern as the candidate of “acid, amnesty and abortion” and demolished him at the polls, 61 to 39 percent. Ever since, American Presidential politics have been dominated by a coalition of the libertarian Right, committed to reversing the New Deal and returning to the unregulated “free-market” economics that brought about the depressions of 1873, 1893 and 1929; and cultural “social conservatives” determined to squash the new career, lifestyle and sexual freedoms women and Queers claimed in the 1960’s and early 1970’s.

In the early 1970’s, America’s corporate ruling elite decided to use these political changes to stop real growth in wages and income for most Americans and grab more resources and profits for themselves. Promoting deregulation and the “free market,” they have successfully driven down real wages for U.S. workers every year since 1973, with just two exceptions: 1999 and 2000, the last years of the Internet boom and the Clinton administration. They have put through so-called “free trade” agreements under which they’ve shipped almost all of America’s once-mighty manufacturing base overseas to countries like Mexico and China, whose governments actively suppress labor organizing and enforce sweatshop conditions. They’ve busted so many unions that the organized share of America’s private-sector workforce has fallen from one-third to less than 8 percent — indeed, if it weren’t for unions’ success in organizing government workers there wouldn’t be a labor movement in this country anymore — and they’ve essentially forced women into the workforce by driving wages so low it’s no longer possible to do the middle-class lifestyle on just one income.

The response of American workers has been to take on more debt. The U.S. now has a negative net savings rate — which means we’re spending more than the total value our economy creates. Much of the borrowing has taken the form of credit cards, but those in the American working class who were lucky enough to buy a home before the corporate elites began their relentless assaults on our incomes saw it as a less dangerous way of leveraging themselves than living on credit. Lulled by the myth that “home prices only go one way — up,” throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s homeowners essentially used their residences as ATM’s, confident that they could borrow against their equity and be able to refinance whenever the added debt threatened their ability to make their payments.

Now that the gravy train of ever-increasing home values has come to a shuddering halt, the reaction of our corporate-dominated government has been to use tax money to bail out the corporate elites, particularly all those people in the FIRE sector who cooked up ever more elaborate investment schemes to fleece ordinary people out of more and more money. The estimated cost of the “bipartisan” bailout currently being proposed by the Bush administration and “debated” by the Congress with the same unseemly haste with which they passed the constitution-destroying USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11 is $700 billion — about one-third the estimated value of the entire U.S. economy. What’s more, none of that is going to go directly to working people or jeopardized homeowners. Rather, it’s going to go to the giant banking/investment/brokerage firms that formed when Congress repealed the Glass-Steagall Act in 1996 and therefore gave the green light for today’s financiers to pull the same shenanigans their forebears had in the 1920’s, with the same destructive results.

The corporate elites and their handmaidens in both major U.S. political parties (the deregulation frenzy actually began in the late 1970’s, when Democrat Jimmy Carter was president and Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress) have been able to pull this off because there isn’t an organized mass Left to stop them. In the 1930’s there were large socialist and communist parties in the U.S. as well as populist leaders like Huey Long and Francis Townsend who openly questioned the assumptions of capitalism and attracted mass followings to movements dedicated to redistributing wealth and income to working people. In the 1960’s there was no longer a mass American Left — the persecutions of the McCarthy era had taken care of that — but there were strong civil-rights movements among people of color and a so-called “New Left” incubating on college campuses that showed potential in rebuilding it. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed he had planned a giant “Poor People’s Campaign” to use his favorite tactic — massive nonviolent protests — to attack not only racial discrimination but the fundamental injustices of capitalism itself.

With nothing to fear from a mass Left, and with politicians utterly beholden to them for the money to fund their campaigns and stay in office, corporate elites can now order policies from Congress and the state legislatures with the same confidence of getting exactly what they want as fast-food patrons order meals at McDonald’s. They can win so-called “tax relief” from a government willing to sweeten the pot with $600 rebate checks for working taxpayers while the corporations and their wealthy owners rake in millions and decimate the government’s ability to finance real reform. They can deregulate the media industry to ensure that most Americans hear only the pro-capitalist, pro-corporate, pro-“free market” ideas they want them to hear. They can get passage of a draconian bankruptcy bill severely restricting the ability of working people to restart their lives after debts — mostly health-care bills, which are the cause of over half the bankruptcy filings in the U.S. today — sink them. And when they start to lose the game, they can plead that they are “too big to fail” and the government has to bail them out at ordinary taxpayers’ expense.

It would be easy enough to list the economic reforms needed to fix the structural problems that have led to the impending firestorm of the American economy. Among them would be reinstatement of Glass-Steagall; aggressive antitrust action to break up the huge financial conglomerates; passage of the card-check bill so employers would have to recognize a union as soon as a majority of their workers joined one; abolition of complicated so-called “derivative” securities and regulation to ensure transparency in the financial markets; a sweeping reform of global trade agreements so they benefit working people instead of economic elites; a universal single-payer health care system so Americans no longer have to fear that illness will destroy them financially; and, above all, a U.S. industrial policy to ensure that our economy is once again based on the actual creation of value through goods and services, not the socially worthless speculations by which the FIRE crowd make their money.

But none of these are possible in a political system in which both major parties are dependent on corporate contributions to stay in business. Real reform will go beyond economic measures and will probably require amendments to the Constitution to reverse two of the most obnoxious U.S. Supreme Court decisions of all time: the 1886 ruling that declared that corporations are “persons” and therefore have the same civil rights as flesh-and-blood humans; and the 1976 ruling limiting restrictions on political campaign funding on the ground that money is “speech” under the First Amendment. As long as corporations and wealthy individuals have almost unlimited ability to fund American politics — either directly through campaign contributions or indirectly through “soft money” or “independent expenditures” — and as long as there is no mass Left capable of scaring the capitalist elites into believing that their entire system may collapse if it doesn’t reform — U.S. politics will continue to favor the rich and campaigns will continue to be fought over the cultural or “values” issues on which the Republican and Democratic parties still differ.

SAM WARREN:

Speaks Oct. 3 at the Center on Surviving Tijuana’s Jails

by LEO E. LAURENCE

Copyright © 2008 by Leo E. Laurence • All rights reserved

Photo: U.S. Navy sailor Kenneth Walton (right) photographs a cell inside La Ocho jail in Tijuana between the downtown police station and the city’s fire station No. 1.

Simply existing alive for a “gringo” inside Tijuana’s notoriously corrupt jails was nothing short of a miracle, a living hell, and Gay American writer/publisher Sam Warren of San Diego did it. He’ll discuss his experience and the book he wrote about it, Tales from the Tijuana Jails, Friday, October 3, 7 to 9 p.m. at the Community Resource Room (library) of the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community Center, 3909 Centre Street in Hillcrest.

The recent riot at the Baja California state prison in La Mesa — east of downtown Tijuana — rings familiar tales: prison guards who beat and kill inmates supported by corrupt top officials (now fu-gitives) that resulted in three deaths. One inmate was beaten and his body burned.

Warren’s startling story — that includes that notorious La Mesa state prison — was first published in a two-volume set. They were recently revised and republished in the single-volume Tales From the Tijuana Jails.

It’s easy to read, and the stench of urine and corrupt jailers reeks off every page.

Warren’s story seems so true. I know from personal experience because I had served for years as a bombero, a uniformed Mexican firefighter in the Tijuana’s Departmento de Bomberos.

I worked for years inside a fire station located adjacent to the jail that once incarcerated Warren. At night, sleeping in the second-story dormitory of my fire station, I could hear what went on in the jail next door. Only a wall separately the second-floor firefighter’s dormitory from the jail cells in which he was later incarcerated.

Warren’s book is real; ugly, brutal and total reality.

Warren is the former publisher of the Santa Ana Journal and the former editor of the Uptown San Diego Examiner which later merged into The Metropolitan. He had long been involved in Gay life in Tijuana and helped launch Frontera Gay with the late Emilio Velasquez, one of the city’s most famous Gay activists.

Warren was arrested at his eight-bedroom bed-and-breakfast hacienda with servant’s quarters not far from the beach in La Playa, due west of Tijuana. “For four years, I lived like a king,” he writes in Tales from the Tijuana Jails.

But, a young man in the house was actually only 17 and Warren got busted by the police for “everything they could think of” (which is exactly what is done by U.S. prosecutors).

His book is actually about three jails: the infamous La Ocho (The Eight) city jail at Ave. Consti-tucion and Calle Ocho, squeezed between the main downtown police station and the city’s Fire Station #1.

Later, Warren was transferred to El Pueblito (Little Town) in the La Mesa district of Tijuana, on the city’s east side (where I served as a firefighter in the city’s La Mesa Station #2).

His last “jail” was actually a prison called El Hongo (fungus or mushroom) and was located 35 miles east of Tecate in the high desert.

The book is actually dozens and dozens of vignettes of his experiences in those jails, some of which are only a few paragraphs long. There is no plot, and sometimes the huge number of short stories gets monotonous. Warren could have cut a full third, and still had a fascinating book to read.

Despite the fact that he was living in Mexico, he seems to have had difficulty becoming an Anglo-Mexican.

“One thing that is hard for me to understand is the rivalry among all the Mexican law enforcement and judicial agencies,” he writes, as if he didn’t comprehend the local culture. He obviously never became “Mexicanized,” as I did as a bombero (firefighter).

He writes freely about the drug situation in the jails.

“The drug lords and their henchmen lived in relative comfort … Once I saw (in El Pueblito) even had a Jacuzzi. They could walk around with or without their bodyguards and not worry about having their gold chains ripped off.

“No one in their right minds, including the guards, would fool with the drug lords. I don’t see why they call them ‘lords.’ They were merely successful drug dealers,” Warren wrote.

Merely???

As a Gay man, I expected to read descriptions of the Mexican men he met in jail, and some of the sex there. But there is very little of that in the book,.

His book, however, does include this story, atypical for an expose of Mexican jails.

“This had nothing to do with crime or corruption (in the jails) but I thought it so interesting I would include it in the book. One of the guys told me the story of how his grandfather, who had a small ranch in southern Mexico, adapted a wagon he could use to travel on rails when infrequent trains were not scheduled to run. The grandfather used it to take his farm produce into town to sell.

“The rails were in much better condition than the dirt roads. The Mexicans are very good at what we called in the military ‘field expedience,’ or in civilian life ‘jury-rigging.’ When something wears out in the U.S., we throw it away. Mexicans fix it or adapt it to some other use.”

Oddly, for someone who lived in Tijuana, that’s one of the kindest thoughts Warren writes about Mexico.

His 360-page book lists for $19.95 and is available at www.Amazon.com and www.bookwarren.com. The author can be reached at sam@bookwarren.com.

For comment, contact Leo E. Laurence at leopowerhere@msn.com or call (619) 757-4909

Critical Condition: The Human Cost of the U.S. Health Care System

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Sunday, October 5 at 10:30 p.m. KPBS-TV in San Diego (on-air channel 15, cable channel 11) will air Critical Condition, a documentary about the plight of Americans without health insurance. Produced and directed by Roger Weisberg for the PBS P.O.V. series, Critical Condition is a 10-hankie tear-jerker centering around four individuals:

• Joe Stornaiuolo, hotel doorman who gets diabetes and edema, can no longer do his job, then gets fired and loses his health coverage just before all the major conditions kick in;

• Karen Dove, who suspects she has cancer and spends several months just going from doctor to doctor looking for one who will see her even long enough to diagnose her instead of turning her away because she can’t pay for care, finally finds an oncologist willing to give her tests and finds — you guessed it — that in the meantime while she was going through the financial rigmarole the cancer spread from something that could have been treated relatively easy to one that has metastatized;

• Hector Cardenas, a warehouse manager in Los Angeles who gets diabetes and gangrene in his foot, tries desperately to hold on to his job because he knows that if he loses it he’ll lose health coverage, opts to have the foot amputated because his doctors promise him that if he does they’ll have him up and working in a month whereas if he lets them try to save his foot it’ll take several months and his boss will let him go in the meantime, only he loses the bet — he gets the foot cut off and still has to wait four or five months, loses his job and has to worry about the cost of his future care, including the succession of prostheses he needs to regain mobility (there’s a poignant scene in which he attends the wedding of his son — oddly, he’s a good-looking man and seems so much younger than he is that at first it’s a shock that he has a grown son — but in a wheelchair, so he can’t stand up for the ceremony or dance with the bride or his own wife); and

• Carlos Benitez, a documented immigrant from Mexico who’s taken U.S. citizenship and works in a restaurant but doesn’t get health insurance from his employer (actually he did originally, but he gave it up when all they were giving him was over-the-counter drugs and he figured he could save money by just buying them himself) and so is S.O.L. when the bones in his back start to fuse and put him in 15 years of unbearable pain (though not in so much pain that he can’t have sex: at the end of the program his wife is visibly pregnant), finds that the operation needed to fix him (he’s literally turning into a hunchback — the first real one I can ever recall seeing in the film — and losing several inches off his height) will cost over $150,000 and his doctors aren’t willing to perform it because his ability to pay is dubious; later he goes to Mexico and finds that there the drugs he needs costs about one-tenth of what they do on this side of the border and the operation would only cost $40,000 (which is still $40,000 more than he can spare for it, of course), and he finally gets the operation but only due to the persistence of a UCLA doctor he meets at a “health fair” and who finds two surgeons willing to do the operation on him for free as a community-service gesture.

Critical Condition is clearly propaganda for a single-payer health care system, though Weisberg is careful to keep it from being too in-your-face and only allow a couple of his subjects to hint that it would be nice if this country had a system where people were covered automatically as a right. He trots out the usual statistics that the U.S. spends more money on health care than any other country in the world but we do far worse in infant mortality, chronic disease rates and conventional measures of health outcomes than other countries that have single-payer or some other system (like the German “sickness funds,” which probably come closest of any country in the world to what Hillary Clinton infamously proposed in 1993-94) that ensures universal coverage and eliminates private profit.

When Michael Moore made Sicko — also a pro-single payer film and one considerably more in-your-face than Critical Condition — the story broke that several health insurance companies were trying to get his interviewees to recant what they’d told him on camera and, as a lure for them to do so, offering them one year’s free health care — a truly disgusting illustration of how much health care has become a commodity, and one from which insurance companies and HMO’s profit from not providing. At a preview screening at the San Diego Public Library on September 7, Critical Condition was introduced by nurse Hugh Moore, representing the pro-single payer organization Health Care for All, and at one point he said that we don’t ration police or fire services on the basis of ability to pay, so why should we ration health care that way?

Alas, if anything the U.S. is moving in the direction of rationing police and fire protection by ability to pay, thanks to the relatively new phenomenon of firms selling security and firefighting services on an insurance basis — “Well, if there’s a crime or a fire at your house, we’ll come out; we’ll just ignore your neighbors who aren’t paying us.” The trend, at least in this country, is against society-wide solutions like single-payer and towards the commodification of everything — the idea that The Market should rule all and those who don’t have the financial resources to pay for the basic necessities of life should just go without and, if need be, die and decrease the surplus population. (The reference to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — a story that, intriguingly, was just hijacked by Right-wing movie producer David Zucker of the Airplane! spoofs for An American Carol, the story of a Michael Moore-ish filmmaker who’s induced to “reform” after he proposes abolishing the Fourth of July holiday — was fully intentional.)

Many people at the library screening had horror stories of their own about the health-care system. While the film presented insurance as a sort of health-access panacea, anyone who’s had to battle with insurance companies and deal with their arbitrary denials of claims (sometimes after they’ve actually paid the service provider, so they seek reimbursement from the patient!) knows better. So do people like one woman in the audience who’s had exactly the opposite problem: she had such generous insurance that her doctors larded on procedure after procedure, some of them threatening to her health, just to worm more money out of the insurance companies. This is why it was it grimly amusing when John McCain said during his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, “My health care plan will make it easier for more Americans to find and keep good health care insurance. [Barack Obama’s] plan will force small businesses to cut jobs, reduce wages, and force families into a government run health care system where a bureaucrat stands between you and your doctor” — as opposed to all the private bureaucrats who stand between insured patients and their doctors now!