Heidi Li's Potpourri

A letter to President Obama (or should I say "Jock in Chief")?

Dear President Obama:

One of your Cabinet Secretaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is striking a chord with women abroad and at home as she mixes in, with her discussion of global warming and economic security, the issue of women's empowerment, as a matter of democracy and social justice. Might you consider taking a lesson from the Secretary of State? If you did, you would incorporate her message about the importance of women to democratic politics and economic security into every aspect of your own programs and many of your public statements.

Those of us interested in the emancipation of American women would be delighted to hear you echo Secretary Clinton when she states, "I think that it’s imperative that nations like ours stand up for the rights of women. It is not ancillary to our progress; it is central" or "We have to highlight the importance of inclusion for women. We have to make clear that no democracy can exist without women’s full participation; no economy can be truly a free market without women involved." (Secretary Clinton, February 20, 2009).

You, Mr. President, are in a flurry of summits, initiatives, and speeches, leading up to the announcement of your budget this Thursday, February 26, 2009. Those who wonder whether you understand the significance of women in the U.S. economy need to hear you speak at home in terms your Secretary of State speaks abroad. We need to hear this partly because many of us doubt whether you are as forward thinking about women's issues as we would expect a Democratic president who will be seeking our votes again ought to be but also because we doubt you are as forward thinking about economic matters as we expect a Democratic president to be. Women do not dominate the boardrooms and executive suites of Fortune 500 companies; they do depend heavily on Social Security; they are a major source of small business initiatives in this country. When you discuss "entitlements" or "business" this means something different to the majority of women than it does to the majority of men.

Even in symbolic ways, we need you to do better if you want us to trust your commitment to women's empowerment. Just recently you cooperated with Men's Journal, a men's lifestyle magazine, that along with so many other publications, decided to devote a cover story to you. This is the cover:

For those who cannot read the headline, running alongside a photo of you holding a football in your hands, it says: "Barack Obama, Jock in Chief: His Moves, His Trash Talk & His Weekly Power Basketball Game."

Mr. President, I am not sure whether you are proud of being depicted as a trash-talking jock-in-chief - that seems to me to fulfill both sexist and racist stereotypes you yourself might find personally offensive. But the magazine editors certainly mean this headline to be laudatory, although they would never write the same sort of headline about a woman president or cabinet secretary and mean it to have the connotations of hipness and coolness they meant this one to carry. ("Trash-talking" is not a phrase used to praise powerfully positioned women.)

You, Mr. President, could by word and deed use your bully pulpit to discourage this sort of sexist pigeonholing not only of yourself but therefore of what power is supposed to look like or be like. I have written before about the need for you to convene a Presidential Empowerment of Women Advisory Board, to be as significant and influential with you as you suggest your PERAB and PIAB (Economic Recovery and Intelligence boards, respectively). This is becoming more urgent, not less. If you want the American economy and American democracy to remain strong, you must empower the 51 percent of the population who are women to participate as fully and on fair terms in our society.

Yours truly,

Heidi Li Feldman, founder and president, 51 Percent

Try squaring this circle

Two headlines, side by side, at Rasmussen:

38% Say Stimulus Plan Will Help Economy

Following Passage of Stimulus Bill, Consumer Confidence Falls to Record Low

I understand that one could tell a statistician's story that would make sense of these headlines and some others on Rasmussen's home page today, such as: Confidence in U.S. Banking System Plummets
and
Voters Predicted Congress Would Approve Stimulus Package Without Reading It

But to me, this sounds like a population in panic, mistrustful and nervous about its government and its banking system. When people are gripped by fear they do not reason coherently. In any event one could believe the latest measures by our Congress, taken at the urging of President Obama, will do some good but not very much. This is sort of how I think of Jimmy Carter's entire domestic-side Presidency. Maybe some of what Carter urged did some good, but not very much. And that's part of why he ended up a one-term wonder. (True enough, the Iran hostage rescue debacle didn't help either.)

President Obama needs to stabilize the fear that he unleashed in his inaugural address and his primetime press conference. Maybe he thought being grim and scary would ensure action - it worked for Bush when he wanted to send U.S. troops to Iraq - but grim and scared people do not function well in most social environments.

For a friend: What it is like to be a liberal law professor in Washington, DC in February 2009

Dear friend,
You asked whether I was finding it easier to be a liberal who was not enthusiastic about President Obama's candidacy and is not enthusiastic about his administration. The short answer: no. The problem is both due to external circumstances and internal ones. I've never been a left-leaner who takes pride in being left of the mainstream Democratic establishment. But this year, as the race narrowed down to Clinton and Obama, it was clear to me to that the more liberal candidate was Clinton: the candidate more interested in a politics favoring the middle-class, especially the lower middle class, and the poor; the candidate more interested in separation between church and state; the candidate more interested in gay rights and women's rights and economic justice. The candidate who understood that Kumbaya is not popular song in Washington, D.C. and for good reason: politics is not nonpartisan: it is fight, rooted in competing visions of social good and the means to achieve it.

I work at a place of higher education where it was unfashionable to support Clinton's candidacy, on the widely broadcast assumption that no liberal could prefer any other candidate to a viable black Democratic candidate. There were some underlying messages broadcast along with this: that it was "cool" to support a relatively young black man who liked sports while it was "shrill" to support a slightly older white woman who liked her daughter and her friends. Indeed as time went on, the misogyny of the academy, which is a topic for another time, became more and more apparent.

I started this blog with the intention of giving those friends and family interested in the volunteering I did for then-Senator Clinton's campaign a way of opting in to updates. I told almost nobody at work about the blog or the extent of the blogging because it was so obviously assumed by every colleague around me (except for those encountered at Clinton events, where we greeted each other with happy surprise) that we must all be on the same side and that meant the Obama side. Work is enough of a stressful environment (that's why it is called work, after all) that I did not have the interest or the energy to forcefully object to this blind assumption.

I did occasionally express my frustrations with the DNC and the way it rigged its convention, its refusal to follow its own rules. This usually provoked hostility. I think some of that hostility had to do with the fact that, since I am a member of law school faculty, the criticism hit home: law professors - full fledged ones - tend to take pride in due and fair process. To be reminded that the Democratic Party had engaged in the same sort of hijinks that so offended my colleagues when performed by the Republican Party did not make people happy.

Part of my coping strategy was to put my head and heart into my teaching and scholarship and try to tune out the political noise, which was very loud. The line between work and politics at a "liberal" law school in Washington D.C. is very thin. The strategy has been effective for my teaching and scholarship. But just as so many people feel irreparable rifts with friends who could not accept that they would not support Senator Obama, I feel a rift - I don't know if it will be irreparable - with an institution that felt so comfortable silencing anybody who supported Senator Clinton.

Coming up is our faculty retreat. Part of its theme is "reflections on the presidential election." I will have a better idea of how things are after this event, because I will see if I can talk about the misogyny during the election and the centrism (even economic and social right tilt) of the current Democratic administration without getting the same blowback that went on prior to the general election. Maybe it will be easier for people to hear about these concerns now that a Democrat is safely ensconced in the White House. They, like me, were so ready for an end to the Bush years, and maybe any questioning of whether the ends justified the means or even whether the the means were regrettable was too scary or painful or threatening before President Obama actually won. I confess I am nervous about voicing my views at the retreat. Yet if I do not, then I am not being fair to my colleagues who may not realize just how antagonistic they seemed to any Democrat who did not share their faith in party and candidate Obama.

President Obama: no Lyndon Johnson, no Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I am still trying to figure out how a Democrat who won the presidency by a large margin, got into office, with the entire country knowing that we needed action from the Federal government has managed to squander the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a systematic domestic agenda at which social justice and welfare are front and center. I knew President Obama was not the most liberal or progressive of the Democratic contenders for the presidency - and I wondered often as the campaign proceeded just how liberal or progressive he was at all. I did not prefer the content of John McCain's views to whatever I could glean the content of "hope"/"change" was.

I assumed that President Obama had a domestic agenda that he would promote and actually, although I felt that the way the nomination had been rigged in Denver, the Democratic Party did not deserve to have its candidate with the general election, I did assume that the Party establishment's favored son would actually fight for its causes.

But if we examine how President Obama has handled TARP-part 2, it seems like he has no plan and certainly not one that puts domestic justice and welfare front and center. Read this for a good take on the situation. Best quote: "On the domestic issues Mr. Obama ran and won on — health care, education, climate change, rebalancing the distribution of wealth — the legislation does little more than promise there will be more to come."

Tim Geithner; Herbert Hoover - Depression revisited (bumped and updated)

I am not an economist, and do not purport to have expertise in the field. I offer this post based on the claims of Paul Krugman and Barack Obama that the fiscal crisis facing the United States and its citizens today is more comparable to the conditions of the Great Depression than any other crisis faced since then. If that is true, no wonder I find the details of whiz-kid tax evader Tim Geithner's newly renamed Financial Stability Act personally depressing. So, by the way, does Wall Street.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner announced a vast new rescue plan for the financial sector. Stocks plunged following the unveiling of the program to use $1.5 trillion or more in public and private funds to bail out banks and financial institutions and thaw frozen credit markets. The plan would create a $500 billion fund to buy up toxic bank assets such as bad real estate loans and commit up to $1 trillion to reopen lending markets for consumer, student, small business, auto and commercial loans.

The Dow Jones industrial average was down 383 points in afternoon trading. The tech-heavy Nasdaq plummeted 63 points, and the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index dropped 43 points.

(source)

Here are the highlights of the Geithner plan, according to The New York Times:

Now, read these excerpts from an overview of the Hoover administration's approach to the Great Depression, which set in 6 to 8 years before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was first elected.

A) "The slump in automobile sales was paralleled by the decline in the construction of new housing, causing unemployment in the building trades. Fewer suburban houses meant fewer markets for appliances, wall coverings, and other activities related to home building."

B) "The economy was in trouble but people, dazzled by a surging stock market, ignored it.
The consumer economy was slowing as incomes skewed to the rich. In 1929, the richest 10% of families received 39% of disposal personal income while the bottom 10% only got 2%."

C) "People seemed to be forgetting that capitalism needs to expand, that demand for housing, clothes, automobiles, stoves, and many other consumer goods generates demand in other sectors of the economy. But mass production necessitates mass consumption. Mass consumption necessitates an income distribution that allows consumers to buy. Without the appropriate income distribution, warehouses will burst at their seams and production lines will clog."

D) "Many of the wealthy, as well as others, joined the speculative stock market sending stock prices to greater and greater without regard to company performance; In October, 1929, the bubble burst. The crash meant the tremendous loss of capital as prices declined $74 billion from 1929 to 1932 and the repatriation of much of US investment abroad."

E) "As historians Peter N. Carroll and David W. Noble note, Hoover feared that the collapse of the large corporations would bring down the entire US capitalist system. After all, one percent of the banks held 50% of banking assets. Three corporations—Ford, Chrysler, General Motors—manufactured 85% of the automobiles sold in the US. Chain stores dominated retail sales and their difficulties had national repercussions.

Business and industry met the crisis as they had always done—they cut production, lowered wages, reduced working hours, and fired workers. Unemployment rose from 1.5 million in 1929 to 13 million in 1933, a figure which represented 25% of the labor force. Even such a high percentage hid the dimensions of the problem because it did not what percentage had been forced the part-time work. Industrial wages fell from $425 a week to $17 a week, a decline of 32%."

F) "To help the situation, the Hoover administration sept close to a billion dollars in public works programs but he would not go further. Nor would he argue for direct relief to the unemployed and starving because he feared that doing so would corrupt them."

G) "Hoover and the Republicans saw aid to corporations as being different. Whereas they believed that helping the individual citizen weather the Depression would corrupt him or her, aiding corporations and other business was different. To many, it appeared that the Republicans were only interested in the rich. The newly-created Reconstruction Finance Corporation aided only the large corporations.

Hoover broke precedent because the national government assumed some responsibility for what happens during an economic depression but he was not willing to go far enough. He believed that the depression was part of the normal business cycle and had been caused by international factors and not US ones. to him, 'prosperity was just around the corner.' The best thing for the country to do would be to wait the crisis out."

I am in no position to know just how deeply or robustly FDR's New Deal reforms have insulated us from a new Great Depression. But with a Nobel Laureate and the President of the United States telling me that we are in a state of disaster, I find it depressing that the Treasury Secretary's plan sounds much more Hooverian than FDR-like.

I know the economy is not going to do an about face on a dime. I do not need Secretary Geithner or President Obama to tell me that. But with trillions of dollars going to banking corporations and relatively little aid going to those who are rapidly falling into more dire straits than they imagined possible, I cannot help but feel as so many of us did when George W. Bush whisked us into war in Iraq. In the words of author Anne Lamott: "I don't know who on the left can lead us away from the craziness and the barbarity: I've very confused now."

Lamott wrote those words when she was criticizing George W. Bush for deceiving the American people. Sauce for Bush should be sauce for Obama. One problem with the Geithner plan is "lack of transparency". Deception: a post-partisan kind of thing.

Wanted: domestic Cabinet Secretaries for Obama's executive branch

It turns out to to be tough for the executive branch to get much accomplished when the cabinet is riddled with vacancies.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered office in 1933, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, which is generally dated as lasting from 1929 through the early 1940s. One commentator dates 1933, the year of Roosevelt's first Inauguration, as "the worst point in the depression, more than 15 million Americans—one-quarter of the nation’s workforce—were unemployed." Neither Herbert Hoover, Roosevelt's presidential predecessor nor the 1920s-earlier 1930s U.S. Congress had had any success in blunting the effects of the economic catastrophe, let alone getting at its causes.

Given this background, it is practically boring that the moment Roosevelt hit Washington, DC he arrived with domestic cabinet positions filled, and backups for at the ready for those who had to depart unexpectedly. Quite possibly because of his extensive experience in government, federal and state, Roosevelt realized that the executive is a branch of government, not a one-man operation - a multi-faceted wing of the government each part of which requires personpower and leadership. This all sounds obvious, I know.  Obvious, that is, until one realizes that as of February 7, 2009, the President who has taken office under economic circumstances that have been compared to those under which Roosevelt took office has still not filled three major domestic/economic cabinet positions: Labor, Commerce, and Health and Human Services. Furthermore, that President, Barack Obama, apparently had no backups in two cases, Bill Richardson and Tom Daschle where the nominees' problems were on the much vaunted transition team's radar, although apparently not high enough to attract the notice one might have expected.

FDR's first 100 days (which actually date from the time Congress convened after his inauguration) gained momentum from the very quick passage of a bill he had ready to send to Congress immediately,

When Congress met on March 9, F.D.R.’s Emergency Banking Act was introduced in the House with the ink still wet. There were no committee hearings, no debate, no amendments. The measure was whooped through with bipartisan support and no roll call. Most members had not read the bill, and took on faith what the leadership presented. Three hours later the bill passed the Senate (73-7), and an hour later Roosevelt added his signature. The entire legislative process, from the bill’s introduction in the House to the president’s signature, took less than six hours. (source)

The Emergency Banking Act of 1933 tackled one discrete part of the bleak economic situation, in two steps:

• Legalized President Roosevelt's decision to declare a national banking holiday.
• Permitted the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) to appoint a conservator with powers of receivership over all national banks threatened with suspension.

It was not an omnibus  attempted cure-all. Perhaps this is why leadership from both parties could digest it  and rally their legislative troops around. When Roosevelt called Congress into Session, passing this Act was his only immediate objective. It was only because this Act passed so swiftly that Roosevelt was able to get more New Deal banking and finance legislation underway. Within the first 100 days, Roosevelt was able to act on the momentum garnered from the quick passage of the Banking Act. He sent numerous stimulus sand relief bills to Congress, going one category or problem at a time, which diminished opportunities for time-consuming logrolling and bickering.

But none of this could have been accomplished so quickly or effectively if Roosevelt had to do all the work of the executive branch alone. Although the number of cabinet positions in 1933 were fewer than today, Roosevelt had all his filled, by people who knew him well. Here is the starting line-up of those who filled domestic positions and were responsible for drafting and implementing the legislation of the first 100 days:

Secretary of the Interior
Harold L. Ickes (1933 - 1945)

Secretary of Commerce
Daniel C. Roper (1933 - 1938)

Secretary of the Treasury
William H. Woodin (1933 - 1933 [resigned due to illness]) • Henry Morgenthau Jr. (1934 - 1945)

Attorney General
Homer S. Cummings (1933 - 1939)

Secretary of Agriculture
Henry A. Wallace (1933 - 1940)

Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins (1933 - 1945)

In 100 days, this group, working with Congress, accomplished more to restore Americans' confidence in the economy and the government than Herbert Hoover's administration had in the previous 4 years. Not that Hoover made NO effort. He put forth and signed into law one of the original trickle-down (to write anachronistically) pieces of economic fix-it legislation:

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) Act of 1932

• Provided loans to banks, savings banks, building and loan associations, credit banks, industrial banks, mutual savings banks, and life insurance companies.
• Made loans to railroads, many of which could not meet their bonded indebtedness payments.

The U.S. government further nationalizes over religion, liberalism takes another hit

The proper relationship between markets and governments in a liberal state is a debatable one. Adam Smith, generally understood to be one of the major progenitors of modern laisezz faire economic-political theory, did not advocate for the absence of the government intervention in economic affairs. Indeed he felt that the state, via law, would be required to create efficient markets because, in the era in which he wrote, professions and financial institutions were dominated by private parties who had not achieved that domination through economic division of labor and competition - the hallmarks of the Smithean classical economic theory. Rather, professions and financial institutions were dominated by guilds and churches, among other groups, who had achieved their economic position not by virtue of serving the economic interests of the community well, but as a side-effect or perk of attaining power in other ways. Smith's economic theory qualifies as liberal not because it advocates minimal government intervention in economic affairs, but because of its egalitarianism: Smith argued that in order to create equal opportunity for individuals pursuing their economic self-interest (which he believed would have the fortuitious effect of creating an overall efficient wealth creating economy), power had to be removed from the special interest groups of his day (the guilds, the churches, etc.) that denied that equal opportunity on grounds that had nothing to do with economic interests (e.g. excluding some people from some sorts of jobs on the grounds of the religion) or with simply shoring up economic self interest that was not being exercised within a system likely to maximize overall wealth creation.

Today, President Obama has signed an executive order creating "a revamped White House office for religion-based and neighborhood programs, expanding an initiative started by the Bush administration that provides government support — and financing — to religious and charitable organizations that deliver social services." (See this New York Times article, also reprinted after the jump in this post for all quotations).

This is precisely the inverse of a Smithean approach to government and the economy. Wholly apart from questions related to the constitutionality of the expanded office and its powers, this inversion must be noted on grounds of its illiberalism. What the expanded office does is to advantage certain groups - faith-based ones - not on grounds of the likelihood of their contributing to efficient wealth production, but on the grounds that the President believes they are "good" and will do "good":

“No matter how much money we invest or how sensibly we design our policies, the change that Americans are looking for will not come from government alone,” Mr. Obama said. “There is a force for good greater than government.”

Whether or not one agrees with President Obama's metaphysics (if by forces for good he is referencing supernatural beings) or his confidence in the beneficence of organized religious groups (including, see article, The Church of Scientiology) has nothing to do with the illiberalism of the government funding religious groups to expand their resources for “to lift up those who have fallen on hard times,” as President Obama put it.

If one of the tasks for our society is to aid those who have fallen on hard times, we have two established, liberal ways to accomplish that task. We can entrust the job to the market, assuming that entrepeneurs will find a way to serve their own economic interest while helping others. Indeed, many mega-churches can be understood as doing just just this: they participate in the supply-and-demand cycle for charitable services, often advantaged by all sorts of tax-exemptions, not just on income but on property owned. Or we can choose to add social safety nets officiated over by civil servants acting directly on behalf of the state.

The Time article notes: "In announcing the expansion of the religion office, Mr. Obama did not settle the biggest question: Can religious groups that receive federal money for social service programs hire only those who share their faith?"

Sometimes a conspicuous lack of an answer tells us more than any answer could. The fact that this question - whether faith-based organizations who receive direct government funding to engage in economic activity may discriminate on the basis in their own hiring practices - has not been giving a resounding no tells us that there is not even aspiration to liberalism in this effort to further meld government and religion in this country. Recall, Smith specifically objected to the negative that churches had on the creation of efficient provision of goods and services because churches imposed noneconomically relevant criteria who could participate in the provision of those goods and services. President Obama's new office flies in the face of this point.

Perhaps this is why his executive order was signed stealthily, "away from the view of television cameras or an audience"?

The trouble with appointing tax evaders to high positions in government: its a rule of law thing

I wish people would stop telling me to be relieved that President Obama is not President Bush. I detested President Bush, and I detested him from the moment he arrived on the national scene, from the way he ran his campaign which led us to the debacle of an election stolen in Florida (decided by 547 votes in the state George's brother was then Governor; and a long-time Bush supporter designed a confusing ballot and refused to go through the sort of recount that Al Franken is now having to endure); a campaign filled with bait and switch promises (viz: local control over schools, only to be followed by the No Child Left Behind Act: one of the greatest federal government takeovers of local affairs in recent memory.) But these bad-faith measures were just the prelude to an administration that pursued an agenda of putting the President and the executive branch above the law: George W. Bush personally committed war crimes, had his administration engage in illegal surveillance of American citizens, directed his Justice department to come up with justifications for U.S. violations of international law, tolerated or encouraged a host of troubling cronyistic contacts and relationships between his vice-president and members of the energy industries, tolerated or encouraged his justice department to go after government lawyers for their political positions, encouraged the expansion of executive privilege to cover the the office of the vice-president in unprecedented ways, and used various suspect methods (e.g. substituting executive regulation for legislation) to flout the separation of powers and checks and balances built in to the structure of the U.S. Constitution. George W. Bush was shady and underhanded, rivaled in recent times only by Richard M. Nixon, who was literally a crook.

I have no idea whether Barack H. Obama will turn out to be more or less unscrupulous than George W. Bush, more or less interested in the rule of law, and the place of the executive branch in American constitutional democracy. But less than a month into the new administration and, sure, I'm relieved that Obama isn't Bush, but I am not at all persuaded that he is going to be qualitatively more honest, in better faith, and more sensitive to the ideal of a government of laws rather than persons.

Coming into his presidency, Barack H. Obama showed a willingness to bend rules to gain office, and not just when he accepted 20 delegates from a state in which he never even ran, but going all the way back to Chicago. ("As a community organizer, he had helped register thousands of voters. But when it came time to run for office, he employed Chicago rules to invalidate the voting petition signatures of three of his challengers." (source)) So far, his vetting failed to catch problems with at least three high level appointments (Bill Richardson, Tim Geithner, Tom Daschle) and even when ethical concerns have arisen about others (Jon Favreau) he's done nothing.

Obama's treatment of Geithner and Daschle particularly distresses me. Both are sophisticated, well-educated people, people who know when to get tax advice, people who understand the distinction between legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion and presumably how to work with an accountant to make sure that they are erring, if err they must, on the side of an abundance of law-abidingness. Both have had held fiscal policy-making positions. Each was found to have broken the tax laws. The Geithner strategy  - apologize, act contrite, claim embarrassment, apologize some more - is now being used by Daschle (go here for a round-up  of media reaction), who we are assured has not only the solid backing of Senate Democrats but enjoys President Obama's absolute support, as of today, Monday, February 2.

Now, I am happy to remark that the Obama administration has taken steps to bring the U.S. more in line with international law. But President Obama's consistent support for would-be office-holders who engage in inappropriate, unethical, illegal conduct does not bode well for those of us who really did want a different kind of politics in this country. I simply do not believe that there is nobody else who could head the Department of Health and Human Services other than somebody who evaded paying over $100,000 in taxes.

Oh, and yes, I do think there is a double standard at work here. Secretary of State Clinton was incredibly wise and politically adept to start early in working out disclosure arrangements regarding President Clinton's Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative. But note: she anticipated the problems and questions and dealt with them beforehand, knowing that the boys' club was unlikely to close ranks around her had she not handled the issues forthrightly and adroitly. Meanwhile, for Daschle and Geithner the treatment is like that of small boys caught with their hand in the cookie jar: the men of Washington - and note the it is the men of the Senate, especially Harry Reid, and the man who is President, Barack Obama - who are quick to say of Geithner and Daschle the equivalent of "boys will be boys":  these guys are good guys. Yes, tax evasion is bad (Reid and Obama cannot seem to quite bring themselves to say "illegal") but as long as Geithner and Daschle know how to act contrite and express embarrassment, they really ought to get the jobs they want. But this is no way to create a sense of respect for the rule of law, that respect that George W. Bush never displayed. To restore respect is a tough task and it requires demonstrating little tolerance for those who break laws directly relevant to the responsibilities of the offices they seek.

Women need an emancipation movement of their own, and no, we do not see it being headed up by Republicans or by Mr. Obama

And, now, because we have actually managed to begin to create a community so that not every one of us must reinvent the wheel in the reaction to each new episode of sexist and misogynistic politicians-with-tin-ears, I can simply refer you to this post from Uppity Woman, in which she neatly peels the layers of hypocrisy emanating from the Republican Party and the Democratic President when it comes to issues of equal pay for equal work.

I will simply chip in these two cents (they'd be about 2.5 cents in men's wages): Although I'm certainly happy to see the Lilly Ledbetter bill signed into law and although I'm all for applauding real displays of leadership when and if President Obama displays them, his signing of this bill is not an occasion of such leadership. He's said nothing about pressing forward on the larger issue of equal pay for equal work and what the government could do about it. He's ignored calls from every quarter to create anything like a Presidential Empowerment of Woman Advisory Board (PEWAB), such as I have mentioned, or a Commission on Women as has been proposed by WomenCount.

If our Secretary of State realizes the justice and economic good sense of full and equal empowerment of women abroad, how come our President cannot wake up to that goal here at home?

Feminists do not horse-trade women's rights to care for their bodies for Republican votes

A week or so into our new Presidential administration, and the strange sensation of living in a universe that only partially intersects that of many people I would formerly have have considered obvious political allies continues. Starting yesterday and on through today I began receiving messages from blogger friends and then from NOW-NY and then Planned Parenthood, that something very strange seemed to be happening with the economic stimulus bill. Apparently President Obama (who neither NOW nor Planned Parenthood can bring themselves to name as part of the problem, although Planned Parenthood does suggest calling the White House) and Congressional Democrats are willing to curry votes from Republicans on the Hill by cutting the Medicaid Family Planning State Option from the stimulus package the Congress is hoping to have ready for presidential signing by mid-Februrary. The Medicaid Family Planning State option is a provision that would provide health care coverage for 2.3 million low-income women, according to Planned Parenthood, by "allow[ing] states to expand their Medicaid family planning services, including cancer screenings and other preventive care, to more women in need, without having to go through the burdensome Medicaid waiver process." Or as the National Women's Law Center puts it, "In a disappointing move, the economic recovery package will not include a provision to make it easier for states to make family planning services more accessible and affordable to the millions of women and families who depend on them. The Medicaid Family Planning State Option would have allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility for family planning services without having to obtain a federal waiver."  Meanwhile, when I went to look at the January 28 New York Times print edition to for details, I found no mention of this ditching of the Family Planning option until deep into one of the three stories on the stimulus package, mentioned in passing in a vague paragraph on page A16 of the Washington print edition of the Times:

As the House version of the legislation came to the floor on Tuesday, Democrats stripped from it a provision that Republicans had ridiculed as having nothing to do with economic stimulus, one expanding federal Medicaid coverage of family planning services. (The Congressional Budget Officehad estimated that the provision would actually save the government $200 million over five years by reducing pregnancy and postnatal-care expenses.)

Then, as I sat down to compose my thoughts about this latest bit of chicanery over women's bodies, things turned a bit more surreal. Apparently, despite its reported spike in subscriptions, Ms. Magazine has enough leftover editions of its inaugural issue - you know, the one with this patently ridiculous cover, to just today be offering me more "one more chance" to own the cover in poster size.

Please note: no way in hell does a feminist look like a person who is willing to horse-trade funds for family planning benefits under Medicaid to placate Republicans, who will do anything to beat back money for family planning which they are trying as quickly as possible to turn into an epithet. Family planning is a good idea. So is birth control in most people's lives. So, in some cases, is access to safe and legal abortion. Family planning, birth control, access to safe and legal abortions: these are not dirty words. They are real world, practical options - options needed, at least as options, by all women if they are to be truly autonomous actors in our society; and therefore options that must be as available to those whose health insurance is provided by the government as to those whose insurance is provided by private insurers.

Here's a little trick used by many who teach property law across the country. Most first year law students arrive in their Property Law courses with two visions of what property is: either the stuff they just put away in their dorm rooms or a field in the country somewhere. So we law professors often start by telling them that no,that isn't property at all. What property really is, is the set of entitlements and rights any particular person or the state has to control or use the stuff they just put their dorm rooms or the field in the country. In other words, property is a bundle of say-so's over what happens to the bits and pieces in the world. Who gets to say what about what happens to what what bits and pieces makes up the law of property. Today's casebooks tend to leave out the statutes and cases that blatantly assumed that women and black men were bits and pieces that were just as much the objects of debates about particular say-so's - cases about the details of chattel marriage (e.g. since a husband controlled all of his wife's legal rights, could she ever charge him with rape?) and chattel slavery (e.g., since a slave owner controlled absolutely the working conditions of slaves, could a slave owner be charged with murder for  willfully and knowingly depriving slaves of adequate rest or water thereby leading to their deaths?). Property casebooks tend to leave out these cases because it is rightly considered unacceptable to conceive of women and black men as the equivalent of the stuff in the dorm room or the field in the countryside. So, especially when it comes to chattel slavery, current law school curricula focus on the law that removed blacks from the status of chattel and recognized them as persons, not property.

Because there has never been a legal seismic shift in the status of women in this country - nothing comparable to a Civil War leading to an Emancipation Proclamation or the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution or the myriad of statutes and regulations passed to make the guarantees of these Amendments a reality - there is no natural place in law school curricula to address the halting transition our society is making toward giving women full say-so over their own bodies and the opportunity and means to give that say-so tangible effect.  Some family law courses consider the question; some specialized courses in feminist legal studies do. But even the most aspirational of law school curricula still must work from the law as it is, not as we would have it be. And the fact remains that women have not been liberated from the shackles legally imposed on them.

If President Obama and the Democratic Congress were to horse-trade away men's rights to control their health care, I am confident that there would be hue and cry. But this is because the baseline assumption in our society is that men are entitled to control their own bodies.  No man of any color is the property of the state, nor may the state dole out its aid starting from the presumption that the state has more say so over men's bodies then men themselves do.

But since President Obama has decreed "there's not a minute to spare" before he gets the stimulus package he is willing to settle for, apparently he has not a minute to spare to fight for the women's rights and resources to control and care for their bodies.