that settles...something

It's hard to make heads or tails out of the recent decision by the California Nurses Association to affiliate with the AFL-CIO. It doesn't help that this news isn't getting a whole lot of attention, even though it could have fairly profound consequences for both healthcare organizing and healthcare policy going forward. Not having a cohesive opinion on this, I'll just throw out some stuff to consider.

- The CNA has historically prided itself on its independence, touting its ability to rise above labor politics, bureaucracy, etc. to advocate aggressively on behalf of nurses and patients. The independence also allowed the union to maintain a sometimes-criticized purity in terms of its membership -- only nurses. Ask a PCA or an animal care tech. how nurses view other folks "lower" down the hospital chain and you'll get an idea what I'm talking about. I'm not saying that purity's necessarily good or bad, nor is it unique to the CNA among AFL affiliates, but nurses will have to know that most of their per capita dues are going outside the profession and outside the hospital.

- Will this limit their remarkable political effectiveness? Being subsumed by the bureaucracy (and sluggishness) of AFL-CIO politics could weaken and slow down anyone. If done smartly, the added AFL-CIO resources could make the CNA an even bigger player in both statewide and national politics. We'll see.

- Is this going to help or hurt their national organizing ambitions? I think their independence and RN focus generally helped them organize in other states, but I don't know much about their campaigns. I don't totally see why someone would want to join the AFL-CIO right now, since -- apart from the newly-joined CNA -- very few of the affiliated unions are actually growing or attempting to do so in a strategic manner. In my admittedly biased view, the most dynamic and promising national organizing campaigns are being conducted by Change to Win affiliates: Justice for Janitors, Hotel Workers Rising, the Teamsters Port Campaign, Walmart, etc. And many of the natural allies for those campaigns are represented by (or in bargaining relationships with) SEIU in the healthcare industry. CNA and SIEU may still have some animus left over despite their partnership, but joint organizing within the same federation would certainly solve a lot more raiding problems than getting on opposite sides.

- Is the AFL-CIO's position on healthcare reform enough of a reason to affiliate? I actually think this makes some good sense. The AFL will strengthen its position by adding thousands of union nurses and experienced healthcare advocates, and the CNA will probably get more influence in what happens nationally than they previously had.

Is this getting boring for anyone else? It's boring me. I'm out.

velveeta = still gross

Kraft is finally going to split off from Altria (aka Phillip Morris USA). According to the NYT, Altria and Wall Street expect this to offer yet another boon to the morally bankrupt individuals and ethically compromised mutual funds that invest in Big Tobacco. The NYT and tobacco PR execs took the opportunity to explain why tobacco, as an investment vehicle, is basically impervious to government regulation, litigation, public opinion, and health concerns. David Adelman of Morgan Stanley noted that "people like to smoke...it's enjoyable and there's not an alternative product."

Well...that's just because you can't (yet) sell stock in living an extra 10 years. But, with all due respect to Adelman's market savvy, I don't agree that there's not an alternative product, and frozen dinners provide a poor analogy. For one thing, frozen dinners aren't just about food cost, they're about storage convenience, shelf-life, and preparation time. If frozen dinners become too expensive, people will certainly switch to another product, but only if it also possesses those other key characteristics.

It's the same with cigarettes. There's more too them than nicoteine delivery, obviously. There's a ritual/habitual aspect, and a social cache as well. I don't smoke, so that's just what I observe, but there may be (there likely is) even more there. Saying that there isn't an alternative product seems simplistic to me. To me, the market elasticity of cigarettes (that people will buy them regardless of price hikes) does less to demonstrate their addictive quality than it does to dramatize these intangible aspects. So, two conclusions:

1) I believe the addictive nature of cigarettes, as well as their other characteristics, could well be replicated in an alternative product.

2) The elasticity of cigarettes may be due in part to a hidden cost that hasn't made its way into public consciousness. Forget about the eleven minutes you lose each time you smoke -- getting treatment for heart disease or lung cancer is expensive.

Also a fun fact from the NYT article: I'd never heard of this Vice Fund before, but if you check out their website, it's pretty entertaining. Like they specifically set out to see how much morally reprehensible ideology they could cram into one website. Blech.

Don't be a (TARGET)

So, I was having a terrific morning. Sitting at the iMac, multigrain flakes before me, last night's episode of Friday Night Lights playing to psych me up for work. Then I get on BART, to find yet another thinly-veiled abstinence poster. It's the usual stuff: "Defend your future...stay away from drinking, drugs, teen sex...only YOU can decide that you matter." The best part? "Don't be a (TARGET)," with a little bullseye. I assume the end of that sentence is "...for Satan's crossbow."

I see this stuff around all the time, and it's definitely part of our national culture now, thanks to Bush, Tommy Thompson, and the Christian right. What bugged me so much this morning, apart from the fact that abstinence-only doesn't work, and that it promotes rampant misinformation, and that it definitely doesn't work unless you at least mention the concept of not having sex, is that I've always been proud of California for being the only state never to take federal funding for abstinence-only education programs. As Planned Parenthood's Mary Jane Wagle wrote in her op-ed to the LA Times a while back, abstinence-only education is like a driver's ed class where the teachers show students scary photos of accidents but never tell them to how to buckle a seatbelt.

But it kind of defeats the purpose if HHS and regressive school districts can take the back door and contract directly with all these unctuously named groups like Teen Esteem and FirstResort. Despite a 2004 California law that mandates comprehensive sex education (including birth control & abortion), the abstinence-only movement is still making gains in places like Fremont, Concord, Mt. Diablo, and Newark (not to mention all over central and southern CA). Hence the poster on BART. It was produced by a non-profit CBO called Await and Find, for which a more appropriate title would be "Await (Three Weeks) and Find (Out if You Got Pregnant)."

On a related topic: did anyone else feel mildly jealous of other teenagers pledging abstinence, like their opportunities for casual sex were so myriad that they had to make a formal, public vow in order to avoid it? When I was sixteen years old I didn't need Teen Esteem to make sure I remained abstinent: I worked on the literary magazine, had a job at the Mall, and played clarinet in a youth orchestra. The whole "not having sex" thing was pretty well taken care of.

That would have been a good slogan for the orchestra, by the way:

"El Camino Youth Symphony: It'll take your kid at least two extra years to get laid."

arnold gets his ass beat by a bunch of girls

More or less.

For 10 years members of the California Nurses Association -- who are incredible and will stomp you into the dirt if you fuck with them -- lobbied for a nurse-to-patient staffing ratio in California hospitals, and in January of last year they won. For every six patients, one nurse. This was under our Totally-Recalled former Gov. Gray Davis. Then Schwartzenegger came in and used an executive order to implement emergency regulation, effectively preventing the ratio from being enforced, as well as guaranteeing that it would not drop to 5:1 in January 2005 as expected. It didn't help that Schwartzenegger publicly reffered to nurses as "special interests" while dismissing them. Oakland Children's Hospital Nurse Martha Kuhl told Newsweek: "I spent my day treating kids with cancer. I guess you could call that my special interest."
SNAP!

So the CNA sued, and for the last two months they have been targeting Schwartzenegger in force. Last Friday, Judge Judy Holzer Hersher issued an injunction against the emergency regulation, and told Arnold that instead of appealing he should just go sit in the back of the class and babble incoherently about steroids like an idiot. It's possible I was reading between the lines a little there.

Three significant things:

1) Patients and nurses are safer. More staff means less overworked nurses, better hospital security, safer medical procedures, etc. Incidentally, less overworked nurses means less turnover, so the sustainability of the job may begin to alleviate current nursing shortages.

2) This union knows how to put a militant legislative campaign together. There are all kinds of lessons here, including effective public targeting and an excellent message campaign.

3) Schwartzenegger is getting weaker. His efforts to subvert the legislature are now pissing off plenty of folks besides Sacramento lawmakers. Groups like the CNA are becoming a backbone in what will be a difficult effort to unseat this guy in November. Nurses, firefighters, teachers -- they can sway California pretty hard when they want to, especially when they coordinate a sophisticated media campaign.

I'm dying to see this guy eat it, so the topic of him eating it will likely come up again on the New Plastic Weblog.

Don't eff with the CNA.

this is the matter with kansas

Kansas's Attorney General Phill Kline, that's two "l's," is demanding records from Kansas abortion clinics. Kline has subpoenaed all abortion records for patients under 16 and patients receiving late-term abortions. At a press conference yesterday, Kline explained that "as the state's chief law enforcement official it is my obligation to investigate child rape in order to protect Kansas children."

Okay, I'm going to try to give this claim honest consideration, ignoring the fact that this guy is a virulent anti-abortion advocate and that he may be investigated for violating the Kansas Open Meetings Act.

Well, maybe I'm not.

But I will point out some things which don't seem to be receiving much coverage on this.

Obviously, Kline is practicing misdirection, trying to package his assault on late-term abortions behind the more media-friendly child abuse prevention issue. But the two concerns are completely separate, with different circumstances for patients and different laws governing them. Even in Kansas, it seems like the precedent requiring healthcare providers to release records is much more potent in abuse or neglect cases than in cases involving "illegal" abortion. The latter is even shakier when you consider that Kansas law permits late-term abortions if the mother-s health is threatened -- which gives pro-choice doctors some leeway and makes the concept of "illegal" late-term abortions more subjective.

But, moving on to the child abuse issue, the rationale is that in Kansas any sex under the age of 16 constitutes a sex crime, and thus pregnancy would provide evidence of child rape. It's not at all clear to me how possessing evidence that a crime occurred will help the A.G. prosecute that crime, unless the clinic releases literally every personal detail they have on their patients, including their sexual history, who paid for treatment, previous jobs, marital status, other medical information -- all things that, while they might help a little, don't seem to justify a subpoena, especially when it will violate medical privacy. It still seems a roundabout way of prosecuting child abuse crimes, compared to the more traditional alternatives.

For one thing, while underage pregnancy may equal evidence of sexual abuse in Kansas, it's obviously not the only evidence. Especially since instances of sexual abuse may not result in pregancy for underage girls, definitely will not in underage boys, and (with apologies in advance for this observation) will also not result in pregnancy for pre-pubescents.

I guess my point is not to minimize the evidence Kline has subpoenaed, but rather to put its magnitude in perspective. (like that? that's a little ivy league bullshit spin for you to enjoy) It seems significant to me that Kline hasn't embarked on a broader campaign to stop child abuse. It would be equally questionable, but Kline hasn't taken the next "logical" step and attempted to subpoena OB/GYN records of underage pregnancies carried to term. Nor has he subpoenaed school guidance counselor records or depositions from 7th-grade living-skills students. I wouldn't put it past him, though. Nor has he, to the best of my limited knowledge, made a public show of pursuing more traditional routes to preventing child abuse. In fact, I'd guess that he's a strong opponent of health education and counseling in Kansas public schools. So all this prompts us, rightly, to wonder how committed Kline truly is to his stated cause. I think his motives are a little closer to what we might suspect -- he's waging a war on the precious few pro-choice doctors and clinics left in Kansas.

That's nice. This guy needs to stop using his position to persecute women and concentrate on spelling his goddamn name correctly.

let the cockroaches debate it when we're gone

Rockridge has an article by OB/GYN Lisa Littman that uses George Lakoff's parental political models -- Strict Father and Nurturing Parent -- to explain why we're not winning the abortion argument, and how we can. As my post's title implies, I think this bad boy isn't going anywhere in the near (or distant) future, but Littman's piece is persuasive, compelling, and clearly argued. It also demonstrates the (already self-evident) potential in Lakoff's work for progressive messaging.

Here's the basic thrust of Littman's argument.

This debate is how we approach the issue of unintended pregnancy: Prevention or Punishment. The Prevention Approach is about supporting policies that prevent unwanted pregnancies and decrease abortions while the Punishment Approach is about supporting policies that increase unintended pregnancies and increase abortions in order to punish people for having sex. The difference in approach reflects the difference in our values.

By defining the abortion debate terms of our values, we can show the difference between Prevention and Punishment values, policies, and goals. This will allow us to steer the discussion back to the relevant abortion question and allow us to have an honest debate. An honest debate is the kind that we can win.

I think that Littman's suggested method, to define the policies and values associated with prevention and compare them with the policies and values associated with punishment, is an excellent way of reclaiming some ground on this debate. In particular, it offers a calm and respectful way for us to demonstrate how little use conservatives have for the basic human rights of women, and allows us to tie that to the abortion debate without having to jump too deep into the dangerous waters of gender politics or religious orthodoxy.

Okay, so is it possible to convince the American public that the real abortion debate is not about who chooses when life begins, but about what to do with unintended pregnancy? Murder, and its righteous revenge, have a lot more political draw than the acknowledgment and confrontation of unseemly social problems. And when conservatives can harness the blight of "unwanted pregnancy" to minority, low-income, inner-city women, they've got the American electorate right where they want it: in that hypocritical pocket that makes us vote to punish something we're afraid of, something that might affect us if we're not careful. As in, "If we just vote it away, then at least we have a public record of our immunity." A reasoned debate about current abortion policy simply cannot compete with the magnetic draw of that expiatory opportunity.

Which is not to say that Littman's wrong. I just prefer to read her suggestions about a "debate over what to do with unintended pregnancy" as a call for us to directly confront American women with the realities of the problem, and make all the ways in which it affects them abundantly clear. I think we have to follow the Republican model and systematically divorce it from other segments of our public platform (i.e. discontinue arguments about abortion as an aspect of equal opportunity), and instead fight the war on the ground and in the churches, schools, and healthcare facilities. At the same time, we can systematize our message to make abortion an issue of responsibility, of SOCIETAL responsibility, that will carry more weight than arguments of free choice or equal opportunity.

People need to accept that this argument, like flag-burning, will be around forever. True reproductive rights, on the other hand, are in immediate danger of extinction. And preserving them means maintaining and increasing the electoral draw of pro-choice policy, not retreating from it. We're not going to win this argument, ever, but we have to participate.