Ending too-big-to-fail

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) emphasizes in an interview with GRITtv’s Laura Flanders , the four largest U.S. financial institutions have more than $7 trillion in assets—that’s over half the size of the entire U.S. economy. With that kind of political and economic muscle, banks can influence just about any financial reform that makes it through Congress simply by intimidating the regulators who try to implement them.

If we want to fix the banking system, we have to break up the banks into smaller firms that can fail without wreaking havoc on the economy. The current bill would not break up the banks, but Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Ted Kaufman (D-DE) have introduced an excellent amendment that would do just that.

Keep it simple

Writing for The American Prospect, economist Robert Johnson proposes a few other critical changes. In principle, banking is not a terribly complicated business—you borrow money at low interest rates, lend it out at higher interest rates, and keep the difference as profit. But Wall Street has grown very powerful by injecting needless complexity into the business, everywhere from consumer credit cards to derivatives and securities.

Complexity makes it easier for banks to overcharge their customers—it’s no accident that the fine print on your credit card agreements are next to impossible to decipher. It also makes it harder for regulators to identify and crack down on abuses, or recognize risks to the economy.

Congress can counter this willful deception by imposing straightforward, loophole-free consumer protections, like a cap on interest rates, and by standardizing financial contracts between banks and requiring them to be traded openly on transparent exchanges. Yes, bank profitability will take a hit, but our economy will be safer.

Close derivatives loopholes

Over-the-counter derivatives are a prime example of unnecessary complications. This market is enormously abusive—the alleged Goldman Sachs fraud occurred here—and nearly all of it is unregulated. As I emphasize for AlterNet, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) authored a great bill reining in the sector, but a few key elements of her proposal were thrown out last week when her bill was combined with a weaker bill from Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT).

Lincoln’s bill gave both courts and regulators expansive powers to enforce new rules reining in the derivatives market. But the new Dodd-Lincoln mash-up jettisons much of that language, blocking regulators from bringing legal actions against banks that violate the rules, and explicitly declaring that even illegal trades are still valid. Even though the trades are illegal, banks can still collect on them as if they were perfectly acceptable. These provisions take a lot of wind out of the reforms—if the new regulations cannot be effectively enforced, there’s no point in having them at all.

In a piece for The Washington Independent, Annie Lowry highlights a clever deception from the bank lobby on derivatives reform. 90 per cent of the derivatives market consists of financial firms placing bets with other financial firms. About 10 percent of the market consists of non-financial companies hedging against legitimate risk—airlines protecting themselves against an increase in the price of fuel, for instance. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the bank lobby have been deploying some of these legitimate “end users” to fight reform, arguing that it will increase their cost of doing business.

As Lowry notes, there is no reason for end-users to be worried. They’re exempted from the reforms. What’s more, if they are not exempted from the regulations, these end users they might actually benefit from lower prices established by increased transparency.

Fighting Fraud

Christopher Hayes notes for The Nation, financial reform isn’t the only battle to be waged for a fair economy. Much of the banking system is built on outright fraud:

The earliest chronicles of the meltdown tended to portray it as a tale of groupthink and mania, of hubris and shortsightedness: all these smart people got it wrong! And while that’s certainly true for many, it grows clearer by the day that a lot of people on Wall Street realized early on that the entire enterprise was headed for a crash and responded by smashing and grabbing all they could carry.

Holding Wall Street accountable doesn’t just mean implementing better, safer rules of the road. It also means prosecuting those who violated even the lax rules during the heyday of the housing bubble.

Lest we forget, our economy is still struggling to recover from Wall Street’s mess. In a piece for In These Times, David Moberg chronicles the horrific toll of unaffordable mortgages. The problem is no longer limited to subprime loans—as home prices continue to slip and unemployment remains near triple-digits, more and more borrowers find themselves on the brink.

There are several good options for averting foreclosures, as Moberg notes. Congress could create a new agency that buys up mortgages at their current market rate and modifies them for borrowers. Since plunging home values have reduced the value of the mortgage, this plan would force banks to take a loss, and then remove them from the negotiation process to prevent them from further abusing borrowers.

Second, Congress can also change the bankruptcy laws to allow judges to modify mortgages for borrowers. Unlike every other form of credit, mortgage debt is currently excluded from bankruptcy, meaning that even if borrowers file for it, they cannot get relief on their mortgages. Third, Congress can require banks to allow troubled borrowers to rent their homes at a market rate for at least five years. Banks don’t want to be landlords, so this plan would give borrowers greater leverage over banks that are reluctant to modify their loans.

Any of these policies would work. But Congress has been reluctant to act, even in the face of millions of foreclosures, and the Obama administration has not pressed them on it. There is a remarkable disparity between the plight of borrowers and big banks. Banks and borrowers alike were hit hard by the housing downturn, but when big banks needed help, it came fast and furious. Borrowers are still waiting.

As Moberg emphasizes, the government did not ignore troubled homeowners in prior crises. During the Great Depression, we bought up millions of loans through the Home Owners Loan Corp., and ultimately turned a profit on the effort.

Wall Street reform is critical and necessary. Nothing about it will make the financial elite happy—they’ve prospered on the outrages embedded in the current system, and they are not going to give them up without a fight. If Congress is going to help homeowners, it’s going to take strong leadership from Obama and a willingness to go after the bank lobby head-on. Let’s hope they’ve got the will to do it. The future of American prosperity is at stake.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.

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© Davidson Loehr 2010

If there is one thing we know about religion, it is that the United States is far more religious than any European country.  80 percent of us tell pollsters we’re “Christian,” and over 90% of us tell them we believe in God; 40% are regular church-goers.  Megachurches may look like metastasized malls, and their message may often be hyped-up watered-down feel-good, but the crowd size says it’s working well enough to draw many thousands of people a week.  As a nation, we trust in God – it even says so on our money.

However, when you start asking how many people actually attend church, it’s a much different picture.  Researchers counting actual church attendance in more than 300,000 Christian congregations totaled 52 million people, or 17.7 percent of the American population in 2004.[1] About 82% do not attend church regularly.

The fastest growing faith groups in the country are atheists and nonbelievers. In just the eleven years from 1990 to 2001, they more than doubled, from 14 million to 29 million, from 8% of the country to 14 percent. There are more than twice as many nonbelievers and atheists as there are evangelicals.[2] Since it’s hard to believe everyone would have the nerve to tell a pollster they were an atheist or nonbeliever, the real figures are almost certainly higher. We don’t read this in the media because there are no savvy or powerful groups pushing the story.  In the Southern Baptist Church, baptisms of people in the eighteen to thirty-four age group fell 40 percent, from 100,000 in 1980 to 60,000 in 2005.  Most of these data come from evangelicals and others “inside” religion, not from Christian-haters. From 2000 to 2005, church attendance declined in all fifty states, and the states with the biggest decline were in the New England region: a traditional bastion of church-going.[3] When asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, non-Christians rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower.[4]

When religion scholars wave these data off by saying (correctly) that churches are always being born and dying, they’re failing to mention that these times of death and resurrection are occurring within the much deeper fact that religion in America has been in steady decline since the 1800s.  America churches have not kept up with population growth in over a century.[5]

Current Critiques of Religion

Religion’s protective halo has been dissolved by the acids of time and moral scandals around sexual hypocrisy and abuse.  Critics are rushing to pile on churches the way predators take out the weakest members of the herd.  We’re no longer surprised to read broad and blunt assessments like these:

1.            “There’s no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ.  The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying.”

2.            “Open heartedness, compassion — it’s a capacity from birth. It must be possible to increase that.  The majority of the 6 billion people [on Earth], I think, you can count as non-believers. We must find ways and means for promotion of these values” among these non-believers.

3.            “A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us.  The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western [culture]….  Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society.  The post-Christian narrative … is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step.”

4.            “Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making.”

5.            “Both papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy require widespread and unchallenged ignorance to sustain their claims to power. Both are doomed as viable alternatives for the long- range future of anyone.”

6.            “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values.  Democracy requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason.”

Most readers can guess these statements came from some of the “new atheists” – Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher and lesser-known enemies of religion.

But no.  These six quotations come from, in order, Pope Benedict XVI,[6] the Dalai Lama,[7] Dr. R. Albert Mohler Jr. (President of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, KY – one of the world’s largest),[8] religion scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong,[9] retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong,[10] and President Barack Obama.[11] The background against which religion is viewed has changed.  Prominent people on the inside of religion have acknowledged what pundits won’t notice: our religions are becoming – and for growing numbers have already become – increasingly irrelevant to our lives.  This is true of both supernatural religions promising eternal life elsewhere and later, megachurch preachers that downplay the supernatural afterlives in favor of their here-and-now prosperity gospel, and liberal religions seeking wisdom for living here and now (or at least a hideout where they can find like-minded people).

Some may wish we could return to an imaginary yesteryear when everyone who mattered believed the same thing, and their beliefs held our world together, but we know it won’t happen.  We can’t unlearn the industrial and scientific revolutions any more than we could wish away evolution, a 4-1/2 billion-year-old Earth, and a nearly fourteen billion year old universe.  Nor can we unlearn what we have learned about mythology, the history of religions, and the broad theistic, polytheistic and non-theistic array of healthy beliefs serving people in the worldwide smorgasbord.  Religious beliefs are matters of personal taste, not wildly incongruent factual claims.

Today’s greatest awakening seems to be among the “church alumni” who are leaving the churches in droves.  American Christian churches lose six thousand members a day: more than 2 million people a year,[12] while the U.S. population increases by 3.3 million a year.  America and religion are heading in opposite directions.

Within Roman Catholicism alone, nuns have been an endangered species for decades, and the ratio of congregants to priests gets larger each year.  Nationwide, 1,200 priests retire or die each year, while only about 450 are ordained to take their place.[13] We’re seldom told that all the Catholics in the U.S. represent just seven percent of the world’s Catholics.  Catholicism has become a third world religion, and the gap between what professors and priests know, and what people in the pews hear, dwarfs the Grand Canyon.  Even now, few Catholics are aware that in 1999, Pope John Paul II said that “heaven” was not a place, but a state of mind.  That kind of candor, while admired by liberal theologians, is not likely to play well in the demographics of the Church’s Third World future — if it would even sit well for many who attend Catholic churches in the U.S.[14]

Christmas and Easter, Christianity’s two highest holy days — both adopted from far older faiths — have morphed into high-profit days for merchants.  Almost all the Christmas and Easter decorations — as well as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and the rest of our holidays — are put up and paid for by merchants, not churches.  These decorations and ads for shoppers may best be seen as “bait” cast by merchants.  Large chains like Wal-Mart can make a third of their annual revenue during the Christmas shopping season, where Santa Claus replaced Jesus long ago.

When religions can’t even attract people with promises of getting to live for millions or billions of years in a members-only heaven elsewhere and later, they are in dire straits.  Think about it: if people actually believed they could live forever elsewhere and later, simply by following the teachings and beliefs of one of the 38,000 Christian sects in the world, church attendance would approach 100 percent, the pews filled with hopeful and desperate people.  But as their behavior shows, they don’t believe the supernatural stories.

More than 60 years ago, theologian Rudolf Bultmann anticipated this.  He noted that the passage of time had “demythologized” biblical religion, and asked what, if anything, a demythologized Christianity still offered to modern people.  The continually decreasing number of people in churches suggests that if religion has a useful message, they aren’t hearing anything that makes them want to go to church.  Almost all of these observations have come from “insiders” – people friendly to religion, not church-haters.  To say the “evangelical nation” is falling,[15] or the American churches are “in crisis”[16] is like wondering if all the glaciers might be looking a bit smaller.

But Seriously: Homeland Security?

This is where theologians and religions could learn a lot from Homeland Security. Moving from a broad philosophical perspective to a clear down-to-earth factual situation that sheds light on the biggest problem in American religion today, here’s a real-world problem with clear parallels to religion:

A local police officer radioed late one night to his dispatcher that he had just seen a state highway patrol officer’s car with a door open stopped along a highway.  The officer said he was going to go back to make sure the patrolman was OK.  That patrolman was lying in a ditch, barely alive, having been shot eight times with a rifle.  The local police dispatcher decided to use plain English rather than code in broadcasting a call for help.

Had she said “10-33,” her department’s code for “officer down,” it would have meant something very different to the Missouri Highway Patrol: “traffic backup.” Instead, every state trooper within miles responded, and the officer lived.  Being able to communicate quickly and effectively in ordinary language can mean the difference between life and death – both literally and metaphorically.

9-11 and the Katrina disaster in New Orleans showed dramatically that different police and emergency units simply can’t communicate in those old-timey code languages, because different agencies use different codes.  Federal officials from the department of Homeland Security are now requiring that police officers use plain talk rather than their “10-codes” when responding to a crisis involving multiple agencies.

The people who need to know what’s going on can’t communicate because they speak different dialects.  If the matter is important, they must be able to say what they mean in ordinary language.  So if federal Homeland Security officials have their way, the next time a police officer arrives on the scene, he’ll simply radio back “I understand” instead of “10-4.”[17]

When applied to the world of God-talk, the lessons from Homeland Security are revolutionary, crossing over the threshold to secular religion in ordinary language.  In ecumenical or inter-religious discussions – or efforts to reach the tens of millions with no brand-name religion — theologians and preachers need to be able to explain what on earth they mean by words like God, Sin, Repentance, Salvation, Grace and the rest if they are to rescue the messages of their religion from jargonian captivity.

A century or two ago, preachers could rely on most people accepting the supernatural world picture in which phrases like “He ascended to Heaven” were coherent.  But that’s no longer true, when the majority of our planet’s six billion people are, as the Dalai Lama put it, “non-believers.”

If it’s important that police and emergency services be able to communicate in plain talk, it is equally important in discussions of religion, ethics, moral courage, and character formation.  Ordinary language includes the people that jargon excludes, and builds bridges rather than linguistic walls.

Though it may seem rude to say so, god-talk is no more sacred than 10-4 talk.  It’s merely the medium, not the message.  When it no longer communicates life-giving messages to all those trying to reconnect with all the people seeking wisdom for living more authentically here and now rather than elsewhere and later, it needs to be translated into this-worldly ordinary language.  Expecting theologians and preachers to speak in plain talk rather than Capitalized Words may be naive. But if they can’t, history may well see them as accomplices in the ongoing death of a Christianity that is relevant to this world.

(2101 words)

AUTHOR BIO:  Davidson Loehr’s unique perspective comes more from his range of life experiences than from his formal education.  Before  attending graduate school, he had been a musician, a combat photographer and press officer in Vietnam, owner of a photography studio in Ann Arbor, then a carpenter and drunk.  Between 1979 and 1986, he earned a Master’s and Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago in methods of studying religion, theology, the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of science, with an additional focus on language philosophy.  His 1988 dissertation was The Legitimate Heir to Theology: A Study of Ludwig Wittgenstein.  In 1986 he began a 23-year career as a Unitarian minister.  He has one book, America, Fascism & God: Sermons from a Heretical Preacher, (Chelsea Green, 2005).  He retired from the ministry in 2009, and is now building a platform to become involved in national discussions of religion, science and culture. He is halfway through his next book, The Rise of Secular Religion in America.

Davidson Loehr

dloehr@austin.rr.com

Austin, Texas

[2] Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, p. 53.

[3] David T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis (Zondervan, 2008), p. 37.

[4] Wicker, p. 143.

[5] Olson, pp. 144-145.

[6] Sydney Morning Herald, July 28, 2005 (http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/western-churches-a-dying-breed-pope/2005/07/28/1122143939067.html)

[7] A version of this speech appeared in MIT Tech Talk on May 6, 2009.

[8] Quoted in “The End of Christian America,” by Jon Meacham, Newsweek magazine, April 13, 2009.

[9] From an interchange with biologist Richard Dawkins in the September 12, 2009 issue of The Wall Street Journal in the “Life & Style Essays.”

[10] Bishop John Shelby Spong in Resurrection: Myth or Reality? (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 99.)

[11] From Obama’s “Call to Renewal” address on May 28, 2006.  The full address is at http://obama.senate.gov/speech/060628-call_to_renewal/

[12] Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation (HarperOne, 2008), p. ix.

[13] CBS Evening News, July 17, 2007

[14] July 21, 1999.  Google pope 1999 heaven for dozens of sources and commentary.

[15] Christine Wicker, ibid.

[16] David T. Olson, ibid.

z[17]  See “10 codes going away?” in Police Link, December 13, 2009 by John Scheibe. http://policelink.monster.com/news/articles/128269-10-codes-going-away.

I find myself somewhat depressed by what’s going on in this moment. A year ago, millions of us watched with great hope the inauguration of President Obama. I did not expect him to be a miracle worker, given the overwhelming crises he inherited from George Bush — an economic meltdown, two wars, an out-of-control deficit, and a crisis of faith in our government and public institutions. The Office of the President had lost all credibility as the multiple lies and manipulations of the Bush-Cheney administration brought our country to its knees.

President Obama had a full-blown mess on his hands. He needed to prioritize saving the economy, ending the wars, combating terrorism, enacting health care reform, and restoring trust in the government before he could get to the main issues I wanted as a reproductive justice activist. I fully understood that we had elected a neo-liberal to beat back a neo-fascist agenda. So his support for Wall Street, for corporations, for moneyed interests — while disappointing — was not surprising. He had to have centrist, pro-business politics to get elected. After all, this is the America I know, love, and criticize.

Loretta Ross: The Economic and Racial Dynamics of Abortion
The author talks about the racial and economic dynamics of abortion, STDs, teen pregnancy and health care.

What was truly disappointing was the way President Obama flinched every time support for abortion came up in policy debates — from the stimulus bill to healthcare reform. As Sharon Camp from the Guttmacher Institute puts it, “He can’t make eye contact with abortion,” an observation those of us in the reproductive justice movement can’t help but agree with. His failure to stand up for the human rights of women — and to trust us — began to make me wonder about his commitment to those of us who were his core constituents and helped elect him. He’s like the prom date I had last night who can’t remember my name this morning.

In many ways, his failure of leadership on abortion rights has made things worse. In the healthcare reform debates, we have Democratic politicians increasing restrictions on access to abortion. President Obama openly supported the Hyde Amendment prohibiting the use of federal funds for abortions for poor women, women in the military, and women receiving healthcare from the Indian Health Service. Instead of dismantling Hyde, he’s defending it, while not understanding that a country that can be persuaded that poor women are second class citizens who don’t deserve funding for abortions can morph into a country that believes that all poor people don’t deserve funding for healthcare at all.

So as I continue SisterSong’s work of building a movement of women of color for reproductive justice, I wonder what the New Year will bring. Will we finally begin to see White House leadership help us save the lives of women of color who desperately need us to stand up for them? Will national political leaders wake up to the reality that poor women and rural women in states like Kentucky suffer most when the federal government compromises on access to reproductive health care? Will President Obama offer policies to substantiate his brilliant rhetoric? Will he support our human rights to have children, or to not have children? To parent our children in safe and healthy environments which are the cornerstones of reproductive justice?

The tea baggers on the right who loathe his agenda are the least of his problems. The diminishing faith among those in his core base should really worry him. How can we be motivated to come out to the polls when we doubt whether our needs are his priority?

Cassandra Brawley went into labor two and a half years ago at the Washington State Corrections Center for Women on a Friday the 13^th. Though she was experiencing distress – her water broke and she was leaking bloody discharge – and she repeatedly expressed to prison officials that“something was wrong”, still her pleas went largely ignored. After three days of labor pain and obvious suffering, Cassandra was shackled for transport to the hospital where she would eventually undergo an emergency cesarean section.

“The belly chain was wrapped around me until they admitted me into the hospital. And then they shackled my foot to the bed while I was having labor contractions,” Brawley told me.

As a medium security prisoner, convicted of second-degree theft, Brawley was not considered a threat to herself or others. She had never been convicted of a violent crime and was an exemplary prisoner. Still, Brawley was kept chained and shackled to the bed for hours during painful labor contractions and while she was given an epidural.

According to a complaint filed in court by the women’s rights advocacy organization Legal Voice against the Washington State Department of Corrections, on Brawley’s behalf, “A physician attempted to induce labor by breaking the amniotic sac, but found the sac empty.” Brawley was immediately wheeled down to surgery to undergo an emergency c-section – still in ankle chains. It was only at the command of the physician performing the surgery that she was unshackled – and then only until the surgery was complete.

“They shackled my foot to the bed right after the c-section was over. It was awful. And 18 hours after I gave birth to my son, you know how you have to get up and walk around so you don’t get blood clots? The first time I stood up and tried to walk, they shackled my feet together,” said Brawley.

In fact, Brawley was kept shackled to the bed throughout her entire 3 days in the hospital.

Legal Voice claims that the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC) violated Ms. Brawley’s constitutional rights when they shackled Brawley during labor, in opposition to its own policy and are bringing her case to court.

Currently, the Washington state DOC policy allows shackling of pregnant women in the third trimester only and not during labor and delivery but Sara Ainsworth, the lawyer spearheading Brawley’s case, is also involved in a legislative effort to ensure a complete prohibition on shackling of pregnant women in Washington state.

“It defies common sense to risk a pregnant woman’s health, safety and dignity by shackling her while she’s in the process of giving birth,” says Ainsworth.

The Senate version of HB 2747 dropped on Monday, January 18^th, 2010 and prohibits Washington state correctional facilities of any kind from shackling pregnant incarcerated women or youth except in “extraordinary circumstances, where a corrections officer makes an individualized determination that restraints are necessary” to prevent escape or the woman from injuring herself or others. In this scenario, however, the least restrictive restraints must be used and if a medical professional or youth requests that the restraints not be used, the corrections officer must immediately remove them. Shackles may never be used on pregnant prisoners, as outlined in the bill, during labor, delivery and the post-partum recovery period with no exceptions and pertains to all institutions from juvenile detention centers and municipal jails to state prisons.

“We’re lobbying for the broadest protection possible. One reason that it is important to limit restraints throughout pregnancy is to avoid the situation where a corrections official is deciding whether or not someone is in labor and using their own judgment to decide whether or not someone should be shackled,” Ainsworth told me.

If the legislation passes, Washington will become the seventh state in the country to ban the use of restraints on pregnant and laboring incarcerated women. Most recently, New York, New Mexico and Texas have all passed laws prohibiting the use of shackles on pregnant women in nearly all circumstances. Thanks in large part to the Rebecca Project the Federal Bureau of Prisons has a policy against shackling pregnant women as well.

Malika Saada Saar, Executive Director of the Rebecca Project, writes on RH Reality Check that, “The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in September 2008 ended shackling mothers as a matter of routine course in all federal correctional facilities.”

State governments have found the practice to be cruel and unusual punishment, inhumane, degrading and a violation of human rights standards. And medical organizations from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Public Health Association to the American College of Nurse Midwives (ACNM) have forcefully condemned the practice as wholly unsafe for both mother and baby.

Tina Johnson, Certified Nurse-Midwife and the Director of Professional Practice and Health Policy at ACNM told me, “Under no circumstances should a woman be confined in a way that inhibits her ability to safely delivery her baby. Labor and birth are active, physical processes that require the fetus to work with the mother’s body in maneuvering through the birth canal. A woman should not lie on her back during labor, as this can severely restrict blood flow to the placenta. In addition, there are certain complications, such as hemorrhage…in which the ability to reposition quickly is critical to facilitating a safe outcome.”

Johnson is clear: “Shackling a woman during pregnancy is cruel, inhumane and unsafe.”

Just ask Kimberly Mays.

“I felt like an animal giving birth in front of its human masters,” Mays told me over the phone.

On August 2, 2000, Mays went into labor at the Washington State Corrections Center for Women.

“Before being transported by ambulance, I was shackled – both hands and feet. I was pretty scared, even though this was not my first time giving birth to a child. I was shackled to the ambulance bed all the way to St. Joseph’s Hospital [in Tacoma, WA], in excruciating pain…

When I got to the labor room, I thought some reprieve from the shackles would occur. On the contrary, only the leg shackles were removed so I could be examined and one wrist was shackled to the bed.”

Mays remained shackled during labor and delivery, screaming in pain. According to Mays, the attending nurse “forcefully covered” her mouth to get her to stop screaming.

“Instead of a mother who was about to give birth, I lost all sense of dignity and self-respect,” she wrote in her birth story, sent to me via email.

After giving birth, Mays remained shackled to the bed, either by one arm or one leg – only unlocked to go to the bathroom or to shower.

Simply, Kimberly writes, “That experience was the most demoralizing event in my entire life.”

Mays, like Brawley, was incarcerated for a non-violent offense and held as a minimum-security prisoner. Brawley told me, “I was a model prisoner and had not one single infraction while in prison. I took every self-help course. I was in college in prison and going to church three times a week.”

Today Kimberly Mays is two-quarters shy of earning a Masters in Public Administration at the Evergreen State College in Washington State. She serves on several boards for organizations “that serve our most marginalized citizens” and is a mother to ten children.

Mays recently testified at the hearing for the Senate bill in the Washington state legislature and says that she hopes her story “will help to alleviate the disgraceful practice of shackling women during labor, which in turn will help alleviate the negative behaviors of prison guards and hospital staff toward women who give birth while incarcerated.”

But hopefully both Mays and Brawley’s stories will do even more than that. The power to change these policies lies not only in the obvious pain and suffering of these two women but in what their stories can excavate about why exactly this practice is needed at all.

When asked if there has ever been a case recorded of an incarcerated woman in labor ever attempting to escape or posing a threat to herself or others in the United States, Sara Ainsworth told me, “We have heard no stories of any incidents in our state – ever.”

The Seattle-based website Publicola reported on the lack of any real opposition to the Washington state bill at the hearing this month:

“Some law enforcement lobbyists, like Jo Arlow of the Washington Association of Sheriffs & Police Chiefs raised concerns about the language of the bill. She said there are rare circumstances where restraint might be necessary for safety’s sake (though she couldn’t actually produce an example of such a case when asked), but overall her group supports the bill.”

The Women in Prison Project in New York City calls shackling “unnecessary” as women cannot run with any significant level of speed during labor or after delivery and therefore are not a flight risk. An informational document from the project states:

“New York City jail policies restricting restraints have been in effect for 20 years without incidents of escape or harm to staff.”

One significant reason for this beyond a woman’s absolute inability to do much more than push, groan and focus on the birthing process during labor is that the majority of incarcerated women in the U.S. are in prison for non-violent crimes.

According to the Women’s Prison Association’s Institute on Women & Criminal Justice, two-thirds of women in prison are there for non-violent offenses. Both drug-related crimes and property offenses make up this 2/3 number. A report put out by the National Institute of Corrections in 2003, written by Barbara Owen & Stephanie Covington, notes that “the majority of incarcerated women are in for first-time, non violent offenses.”

The number of women in prison is only increasing. Over the last thirty years, the female prison population has grown more than 800% while the number of men in prison has grown by only half that.

With 5 percent of incarcerated women in the U.S. pregnant, and the number of women in prison increasing, it’s critical that as a country we make some clear decisions about the ways in which we treat pregnant women and their newborn babies. If our goals are to protect the health and safety of pregnant women and their babies rather than endanger, and ensure the best possible health outcome for mother and child regardless of whether a woman is incarcerated at the time of her labor or not, then we are failing, overall, as a nation.

Let’s review then:

Pregnant and laboring women are proven not to be safety or flight risks. Medical and health professionals from obstetricians to nurse-midwives consider the practice of shackling pregnant and laboring women harmful to womens’ and newborns’ health. Keeping women in ankle, arm and belly restraints while pregnant and/or laboring a federal court has now ruled unconstitutional, while six states have banned the practice. Finally, women themselves are speaking up and letting the world know that being shackled during pregnancy and birth is nothing short of inhumane, robbing them of their self-dignity and human rights.

A sea change is on the horizon in the ways in which we think about this issue. It is likely that Washington State will pass a bill for the Governor to sign. The Rebecca Project continues its campaign, on a national level, against shackling with the work of its unlikely yet powerful collection of anti-shackling allies. Cassandra’s trial is set for June of this year where a judge will hear her case against the Washington State Department of Corrections. Through all of this, both Cassandra and Kim continue their work as mothers like any and all of us, tending to the children who came into this world unaware of the struggle and injustice that surrounded them. But for these two women and so many others in this country, their stories of giving birth in chains will never leave them.

“I am not a worthless piece of trash, but rather a valuable asset to people, families, and the community at large, “ says Kimberly Mays.

Many AIDS advocates are expressing concern about President Barack Obama’s commitment to combating the epidemic, on the heels of a State of the Union that downplayed the urgency of federal healthcare reform and proposed freezing much government discretionary spending.

While Obama pushed for the passage of healthcare reform, the ask was buried 31 minutes into his speech. That timing felt ominous, given that on Wednesday Nancy Pelosi suggested passing healthcare reform in pieces. There has been some talk of only passing the popular parts of healthcare reform, such as regulations on the private insurance industry. But AIDS advocates say that would be horrendous news for people with AIDS and other disenfranchised people.

"We’re not the popular provisions," said Robert Greenwald, executive director of the Treatment Access Expansion Project. "There’s no question that this comprehensive package is the best we’ve seen in 50 years. We need to remove barriers to Medicaid and Medicare. I don’t think many of those things will happen if what we just see is incremental reform."

Christine Campbell, Vice President for National Advocacy and Organizing at Housing Works agreed. "The majority of this bill takes us strides above where we are. Democrats and Republicans in Congress just need to do their jobs."

People with AIDS in the United States are poorer than the general population and also less likely to have adequate health care. Forty-five percent of people with HIV/AIDS in the United States have incomes under $10,000 a year, and 50 percent lack regular medical coverage. The situation is even more dire for people with hepatitis C, who aren’t co-infected don’t have access to the Ryan White CARE Act safety net.

Campbell and AIDS advocates are recommending the House pass the Senate version of the bill, as imperfect as it is. The Senate bill doesn’t include a public option so people who purchase healthcare must go through an insurance company. The Senate version also includes a provision to appease anti-abortion supporters that would require people to purchase specific abortion-only coverage separately from their regular premiums.

Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist who has been critical of Obama’s policies, said that even though he thinks there are parts of the Senate healthcare reform bill that "stink", he thinks it should still be passed.

"The bill is terrible compared to what it could be but it’s better than nothing basically," Gonsalves said. "I think they should pass this with a reconciliation fix."

Gonsalves expressed concerned with Obama’s commitment to the issue. "He said we can’t give up healthcare now. But he’s taken the backseat."

The HIV Healthcare Access Group sent a letter to House leadership calling on them to pass healthcare reform that includes a largely federally funded expansion of Medicaid to low income individuals; an exchange or regulated marketplace for the uninsured and the under-insured to purchase health insurance; generous subsidies to make coverage affordable for those who need it; stricter regulations that govern the private market preventing discrimination; an investment in reorienting our health system to focus on prevention and public health and critical measures to address primary care and public health medical workforce shortages.

Discretionary spending

Another problematic part of Obama’s agenda was his call for a three-year freeze in spending that wasn’t related to national security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. A freeze could impact housing, federal aid, health care and other programs essential to poor people with HIV/AIDS, and other disenfranchised people.

"This is a hare-brained idea," Gonsalves said. "Obama’s throwing a bone at Kent Conrad on the backs of poor people."

Although Obama mentioned global AIDS in his State of the Union Address in the context of U.S.‘s global commitment, he has already essentially flatfunded global AIDS spending, even though Congress authorized $50 billion for PEPFAR over five years.

A rally was organized by Health GAP Wednesday near the White House calling on Obama to rethink this proposal, as well as a Campaign to End AIDS-organized phone zap of the White House.

After some listserv chatter questioning whether a protest was necessary, Housing Works President and CEO Charles King defended the "preemptive strike," saying, "The truth is that the Obama administration is already not delivering on global AIDS and we have no idea whatsoever what their intentions are on the domestic front. They have done a good job of collecting information and making people feel like they have been heard. We still don’t know that they have been really listening, and we probably won’t know until the budget is out."

Although some advocates speculated there may be some efforts to shield HIV/AIDS programs from some of the cuts, broader hits to the social services will be devastating both to people with HIV as well.

"There may be some efforts to carve out HIV from the freeze," said David Munar, vice president for policy and communications at AIDS Foundation of Chicago. "But any cuts to health and human services programs, be it Head Start or cuts to the CDC budget, will be harmful for people with HIV."

In September 2008, then-Candidate Obama, in his first Presidential debate with Senator John McCain, pounced on his rival when McCain raised the hard-hearted suggestion of freezing all government spending with the exception of defense, entitlement programs, and veteran’s affairs, to reduce the deficit.

Obama countered with a now-famous and punchy one liner: “The problem is you’re using a hatchet when you need a scalpel.”

This week, the President seems to have taken up the hatchet and embraced the McCain approach. It’s not quite his “read my lips” moment, but it has – at best – the potential for the most fundamental of disappointments.

The issue is that the President’s retort was not just a really well constructed and pithy punch to McCain’s cold-as-steel demeanor – an appeal from the compassionate candidate who knew and understood the challenges of the everyday American. No, it was, first and foremost, a profoundly moral statement. It was meant to underscore that the President viewed domestic needs as not just important, but a fulfillment of the social contract we have with one another as Americans and he saw a federal government shirking its responsibilities at home. It was the modern equivalent of President Lincoln’s line that the role of government is “to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they can not, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”

Obama’s quip underscored that the government was not performing its primary function in the way Lincoln described. In fact, Obama went on to say that “There are some programs that are very important that are currently underfunded,” Obama said.

The real truth is that the President has not really, fully taken up the McCain proposition. Not fully. The President will not propose that everything – every line in the federal budget – get frozen in time for his proposed three-year timeframe. Instead, there will be a mixture of things that are cut, flat funded, or even given increases. And while such outcomes are always the product of the budget process, the 2011 federal budget he will propose next week is unique in that wherever programs fall along the fault lines of the top line spending freeze, it will say volumes about the moral vision of the President and his Administration.

For those of us who work on behalf of sexual and reproductive health who have one hand in public health and the other in social justice, we’re nervous. We’re nervous because the issues we care about most have languished for the better part of a decade as the federal government failed to meet the unmet need to secure sexual health in our country. Instead, STD prevention and services funding has stalled, causing clinic closures and impacting the ability of people to access prevention and treatment. HIV funding has fared a bit better, yet people with HIV or AIDS are once again on lists across the country waiting for government support to access live-saving medications. Family planning funding has limped along but its increases – when they came – paled in comparison to the billion dollars spent on wasteful programs like abstinence-only-until-marriage during the same time period. This has created the most striking lack of adequate services from coast to coast. So no one should wonder why we have 19 million new cases of STDs every year, or an HIV epidemic worse than we ever thought possible, or rising rates of teen and unintended pregnancies.

This week, the President also made one of the most remarkable statements of any President in recent memory when he said, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” I don’t think it was the insincere gesture of a politician struggling for purpose or seeking consolation. This is the real thing. It is character in the truest sense of the word and the same type of self-sacrifice that forces this good man to make the tough decisions for a nation that, in the end, may ultimately cost him another term – including his decision to fix the fiscally bankrupt house of government he inherited from a previous Administration.

But that tough decision needs to recognize that our public health system in states across the country, as well as our sense of social justice, demands that the budget the President proposes not shirk from the moral obligation to do the right thing on sexual health. Sure, discretionary spending is rather small in the overall picture, but it is the critical source of funding for sexual health programs. We simply cannot afford a cut from the budget scalpel anywhere on sexual and reproductive health programs.

Anywhere.

It’s about time. Or has the time already passed?

Yes, there is enormous popular anger against Wall Street and the bailouts. However, the deepest anger is rooted in the enormous fears and hardships caused by the lack of jobs. Obama is responding with a call for another stimulus in the form tax breaks for small businesses and for the weatherization of homes. Not good enough. The scale and scope of his proposals are unlikely to alleviate enough of the pain and suffering experienced by jobless Americans. Unfortunately, the Administration does not realize how deeply the crisis of employment is built into our billionaire bailout society.

So what should Obama do?

Declare a national jobs emergency. Then tie taxes on Wall Street’s bonuses directly to job creation on Main Street. Make it simple. Make it fair. Make it fast.

Instead of taxing the banks through his proposed complex asset liability tax which most Americans really don’t understand (and which will be lobbied into Swiss cheese), he should slap a windfall profits tax on the $150 billion record bonus pool, which every American can grasp. (Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s bill for a 75 percent bonus tax is waiting for Obama’s support.)

It’s not hard to connect the dots: That bonus money comes directly and indirectly from taxpayer bailouts to Wall Street. That’s our money. Take it back and create jobs with it.

At the same time, President Obama should announce the creation of a million-person weatherization corps to insulate every American home, business and public building. The energy efficiency benefits would be wonderful to reduce carbon emissions, global warming, and oil imports. (Do the math: 75 percent windfall profits tax on $150 billion bonus pool equals $112.5 billion. At $100,000 per job including benefits, administration and supplies, you could create more than one million green weatherization jobs.)

But the key is putting one million people to work on this vital national security task before November – that is before corporate donations unleashed by the Supreme Court make a mockery of elections.

Let’s keep in mind how we got here. For thirty years the financial lobbyists and their willing partners in Congress and the White House engaged in an orgy of deregulation and tax reform, resulting in wealth accumulation in the hands of a few. So much money accumulated with the wealthy, that they literally ran out of investments in tangible assets in the real economy. Wall Street solved that problem by creating a menagerie of deregulated fantasy finance instruments that sucked up the surplus wealth and earned Wall Street more profits that ever before. (Summers and Geithner were avid cheerleaders for this process.) The process of securitization and derivatives was creating an upside down pyramid of synthetic instruments leveraged on top of risky assets like subprime loans, which in turn created an enormous housing bubble. (And before that the dot.com bubble, the savings and loan crisis, and so on–it should be clear by now that we’re dealing with a distended financial sector that inherently builds bubbles.)

The one clear plus was that the artificial housing bubble also created jobs in the housing supplies, construction, and financial industries, even as our manufacturing sector was dismantled piece by piece and moved to low-wage areas around the world. Average wages stagnated and declined, but Americans, overall, were working.

It’s now clear that that these jobs and faux prosperity were built on financial rot. As soon as housing prices stopped rising, the entire upside down pyramid of leveraged assets came crashing down. The financial sector froze and threw the world economy to the brink of another Great Depression. The real economy, starved for credit, went into an immediate tailspin and unemployment shot through the roof. There are now nearly 30 million Americans without jobs or forced into part-time work.

The theory of recovery adopted both by the Bush and the Obama administrations was this: stabilize the financial sector with enormous bailouts to stop the financial implosion and provide stimulus bills to kick-start the real economy. This combination was supposed to lead to a rapid recovery both for financial assets (including our 401ks and pensions) and for the creation of real jobs.

It didn’t quite work out that way. The financial sector, which is still living off an array of hidden government guarantees, asset purchases, and cheap money, is making enormous profits again. (If you want to see clearly how TARP is just a small part of the Wall Street bailout package, take your blood pressure pills and go look at Nomi Prins’s excellent accounting.) Meanwhile the real jobless rate is well over 17 percent.

And just to rub it so it really stings, Wall Street has the chutzpah to award itself a record bonus pool of $150 billion during the worst economic year since the Great Depression. This pool would be a negative number were it not for trillions of dollars of taxpayer welfare for Wall Street. In our new billionaire bailout society,

Wall Street’s elites have the ability to restart its speculative money-making games without loaning money to Main Street’s businesses. They have a slew of ways to game the system so that the federal money and support flows into their bonus pools. Loan making is still declining even as their profits rise, making a mockery of their role as distributors of capital to the real economy. It is highly questionable if these non-lending financial firms are producing any economic worth at all for our economy.

So Obama is stuck with a bailout and stimulus package that only half worked. At an enormous long-term cost, it may have succeeded to stabilize the financial system and to avoid another Great Depression, at least for now. But it failed to create sufficient jobs to make up for the crater in our economy created by Wall Street’s speculative crash. So he needs to directly put Americans to work unless he and the Democrats want to lose their jobs as well. Although the most efficient means to create one million weatherization jobs would be through direct public employment (like a new WPA), the anti-government mood requires that we use as many private contractors as possible. That kind of government funded/private contractor partnership should be able to cut through the ideological barriers because Americans will understand that employing people in useful jobs is fundamentally worthwhile. We need to save energy. We need work. And, we need to make the bankers, who so recently wrecked our economy, pay for it.

This will never happen unless the President stays on message every day. He also needs to act as if we were in a dire national jobs emergency, which we are. It was telling to watch the President at his recent town hall meeting in Elyria, Ohio. Although the session was billed as a jobs event, he revealed his real concerns when he concluded with a call for health care reform and energy legislation. As important as those issues are to all of us, he’ll never get there unless he focuses on jobs, jobs and more jobs until we are working again. At the same time, the President should challenge the “do nothing” Republicans and their blue-dog Democratic cousins to put up or shut up on jobs. If they refuse to pass the needed legislation, the President should redirect unspent funds from other programs to combat the jobs emergency. No one will blame him for playing hard ball on jobs creation.

Is it realistic to create a million jobs in a short period of time? We’ll never know unless someone tries. But if we limit ourselves to advocating only what seems realistic, here’s the sickening reality that awaits us: bankers walking off with record bonuses during a year in which they nearly destroyed our economy, and during a year in which we bailed them out with trillions of dollars of taxpayer welfare. It would be an important morale booster for the country to create green jobs – one million of them -by November.

Isn’t that change we can believe in?

Les Leopold is the author of The Looting of America: How Wall Street’s Game of Fantasy Finance destroyed our Jobs, Pensions and Prosperity, and What We Can Do About, Chelsea Green Publishing, June 2009.