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It seems as though Congress and the Bush administration are nearing approval of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout package. It was clear from the get go that low- and middle-income people were not going to be the winners here, no matter the specifics of the package; some details that are coming out now about the current state of the deal are only confirming that prediction. From the Washington Post:

Democrats also made a number of concessions, abandoning demands that bankruptcy judges be empowered to modify home mortgages on primary residences for people in foreclosure. They also agreed not to dedicate a portion of any profits from the bailout program to an affordable housing fund that Republicans claimed would primarily assist social service organizations that support the Democratic Party, the official said.

The New York Times does report that the package “requires the government to use its new role as owner of distressed mortgage-backed securities to make more aggressive efforts to prevent home foreclosures,” but reaffirms that “some Democrats had sought to direct 20 percent of any such profits [from the governmental purchase of assets at prices lower than they may one day be worth] to help create affordable housing, but Republicans opposed that and demanded that all profits be returned to the Treasury.”

I don’t claim to be any expert on economics, but it seems to me that the benefit to normal working Americans (i.e. “Main Street”) will be quite limited. The whole rigmarole about taxpayers (hopefully) being repayed for the bailout through the government receiving equity stakes in rescued companies is cold comfort given that we can’t trust or expect the government to spend that recovered money on things that actually help improve the lives of low- and middle-income Americans, like education, health care, affordable housing, or welfare.

Well, I should be clear - corporate welfare is a-ok, as this entire bailout package demonstrates. But welfare for individuals and families who are just trying to survive? Nah, that kind of welfare doesn’t fly, nor does the affordable housing that might help rescue them from this collapsing housing market. So Wall Street screws working-class Americans with the sub-prime mortgage fiasco, which then backfires and contributes to Wall Street getting screwed, and then Wall Street are the only ones who can really count on being bailed out? Sounds like a big ol’ FAIL to me.

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch

Yesterday I watched the live video feed of a Global Health working session at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. (The press can’t attend the actual working sessions, so we had to sit and watch from the press room.) A bit of background - at the CGI Annual Meetings, government, corporate, and NGO leaders get together to discuss major world issues and figure out ways to tackle them. Each day they break out into working sessions, each one devoted to one of this year’s four focus areas: Poverty Alleviation, Energy and Climate Change, Education, and Global Health. This particular Global Health working session was entitled “Healthy Transitions for Adolescent Girls,” which immediately jumped out at me as a topic of great interest, both personally and for folks at Feministe.

The working session started off with a panel discussion between Bene Madunagu, co-founder of the extraordinary Girls’ Power Initiative and professor of botany at the University of Calabar in Nigeria; Ashley Judd, actress and board member of Population Services International (PSI); Maria Eitel, President of the Nike Foundation and Vice-President of Nike, Inc; and moderator Felicia Marie Knaul, Senior Economist at the Fundación Mexicana para la Salud and Director of their Health and Competitiveness Initiative. Right off the bat, the makeup of this group made the panel a unique one at the CGI in that it was entirely comprised of women. Predictably, most of the other other panels at the Meeting are either all or predominantly male, the Global Health and Education working sessions being the only exceptions. Note that neither exception is one of the plenaries, the big highlight events of the Meeting. In fact, at the Luncheon Plenary today, moderator Mary Robinson (former President of Ireland) pointed out the gender disparity and said she would do her best to represent women in the discussion; the panelists at that plenary were again all male.

While it was refreshing to see an all women panel for this working session, there were other dynamics that didn’t sit quite as well with me but which were also exemplary of the dynamics of this entire Meeting. The conversation was primarily focused on girls living in poverty in Africa and Southeast Asia; except for Madunagu, none of the panelists could have possibly ever been an adolescent girl growing up facing the conditions and issues that they described. The rest of the panelists were all North American, wealthy, well-educated white women. Although throughout the panel they spoke of worthy work, goals, and ideas, they were also speaking from a place of extreme privilege relative to the girls of whom they spoke. This dynamic - those with extreme privilege discussing and trying to figure out the problems of the oppressed and extremely underprivileged in the complete absence of those people who are being discussed - never sits quite well with me, even when “good work” is being done. And unfortunately, it is a dynamic that has characterized the entire CGI.

Another dynamic that’s been in effect throughout this Meeting was exemplified by Nike’s Maria Eitel’s presence on the panel. Nike has been frequently criticized for human rights and labor rights violations, including a 2008 Australian news investigation into human trafficking and forced labor by a Nike contractor in Malaysia. So, while Eitel said a great many things that I appreciated and agreed with, and while the Nike Foundation is doing good work (such as their Girls Count initiative and The Girl Effect campaign that Eitel discussed at length), both Nike and Eitel personally have also been responsible for and benefited from abuse, exploitation, and oppression. Time and time again at the CGI, I’ve cringed at this contradiction: politicians and corporations who have used and continue to use their considerable power and privilege in unjust ways here using it to try to change the world for the better. How can we reconcile those things? Can we reconcile those things?

Anyhow - that’s a whole other blog post (which I’m planning to write at the end of the CGI.)

Despite these dynamics, the discussion (which you can watch on the CGI website) was actually really interesting and engaging. The panel took a very holistic approach to the topic, focusing not simply on physical health but on the mental and educational well being of young women. It was exciting to hear Bene Madunagu talk about her program, Girls’ Power Initiative, both as a success story and a model for other work that can be done to help empower adolescent girls and improve their lives. She spoke of how important it us not only to focus on the challenges that society imposes on these girls, but also on their amazing resourcefulness and generosity. Madunagu continually spoke of how young women can themselves become change agents, transforming the norms of their society and thereby breaking down those socially imposed challenges. I appreciated this message so much because it stressed that the girls themselves could do so much to change their own communities and societies when given the right resources and messages of empowerment and self-worth. Madunagu spoke of how it’s not only the girls themselves that benefit and are changed by the program, but also their parents, their male siblings and relatives, and eventually their entire communities; the larger paradigm of sexism and devaluation of women and girls begins to shift.

The other panelists’ comments reflected these ideas. Eitel spoke extensively of the “girl effect”: if you invest in a girl, you invest not only in her life, but in the lives of her entire family, her community, and her country. Eitel said that the Nike Foundation realized that investing in adolescent girls was the best investment they could make in order to change the game and change the world. While it was a little weird to hear girls spoken of as an “investment,” this also reflected an unfortunate reality - that girls are often viewed as either burdens or commodities that can be traded to sustain the livelihood of a family.

One of the points I appreciated hearing most was Eitel’s insistence that simply focusing on girls’ education without addressing the other factors contributing to her poverty and the poverty of her family and community would never work, because those factors are constantly pulling her away from education. For families enduring extreme poverty, there is no clear economic reward in a girl getting an education; the short term gain is to be had by girls staying in the home and working, or alternatively using their bodies as commodities either through sex work or marriage. By working to address the factors contributing to poverty, girls are able to get their education, stay healthy, and put off marriage and child-bearing until they are older - all things that, in turn, benefit their families and help keep them healthier and more stable in the long term.

These are just some of the ideas that the panel discussed; I encourage folks to check out the video of the discussion to hear more of what was said.

After the panelists’ discussion, the room broke into smaller groups to strategize concrete plans and next steps for improving the lives of adolescent girls. Afterward, the facilitator reported back on some of the common themes and specific ideas that the group had come up with. Common themes: including boys and families in the equation: “bring girls in, do not kick boys out” (interesting that this was the first common theme presented, as if empowering girls implies a disempowerment of boys is imminent); assisting girls within their current cultural framework, with a longer term goal of change social norms (cynical about whether that means the imposition or normalization of Western culture and values); using tech and the internet to connect girls and allow them to tell stories; developing international and national curriculum around women’s rights, sexuality, and business; and promoting powerful role models - politicians, community leaders, midwives, and world leaders. Specific ideas: having a Nobel Peace Summit focused on girls and inviting global leaders - the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Oprah Winfrey were mentioned; using the world’s attention on futbol, the World Cup and Nike to use ads to promote girls’ issues in all countries; using conditional cash incentives to encourage families to keep their daughters in school; establishing a code of conduct for corporations around fair treatment of and investment in girls in local communities; and an international Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Frankly? I was unimpressed by the ideas they came up with. They’re all fine, but not particularly concrete or innovative, and few were focused on tackling the root causes of the challenges that adolescent girls face. Was this all that this room of intelligent, powerful people could come up with? Might they have done better if they could remotely relate to the situations that these girls are in? What do you think?

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch

Panel’s about to start, so check out the live blogging with other bloggers after the jump!

This morning I woke up far earlier than usual (6AM!) to get up to the 8am press meeting at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting. It’s been a really interesting, crazy time so far, starting from when I first arrived. When I came to Monday’s blogger meeting with Bill Clinton, I was surprised at how relaxed the security was for the meeting. Not so today. Getting into the Sheraton meant passing through the highest level of security I’ve ever experienced. This ranged from the no-tech to the highest of the high tech: manual bag search, walking through a sensor that detected the RFID inside of my press badge and instantly displayed my name and picture on a connected laptop, a metal detector, a handheld wand that could detect the RFID in my badge, AND some weird thing that seemed to take both normal pictures and x-ray type body scans. All to be expected given the number of world leaders, politicians, celebrities, and corporate leaders at the event, but still a bit unnerving. Past the doors, security has been pretty tight as well, with the press being carefully corralled and guided away from any mingling with the Important People.

I’ve spent most of my day in the press room with both bloggers and the more traditional media. These groups don’t mix that much. No matter, because it’s been fun to meet all of the other bloggers who are here and attach faces to names and the words they write. I do keep hoping that Amy Goodman or Juan Gonzalez will walk up into the press room, but I don’t think that’s too likely.

Deanna and I liveblogged the Opening Plenary, which was chock full of celebrities, dignitaries, and noble ideas; check the record of the liveblogging for details. Afterwards, I attended the press conference with Lance Armstrong, where he announced the creation of the Livestrong Global Cancer Awareness Campaign as well as details his return to cycling, which he described as another way to raise international awareness of cancer: “While my intention is to train and compete as fiercely as I always have, this time I will gauge victory by how much progress woe make against cancer, a disease that will claim 8 million lives this year alone.”

Afterwards there was lunch (during which I was reminded that I like the idea of roast beef far more than I like the reality of roast beef), followed by the working sessions in which all of the bigwigs who are gathered here get down to business and try to come up with concrete ways to tackle issues of poverty, energy and climate change, education, and global health. I watched and listened to the live feed of the Global Health working session, the theme of which was “Healthy Transitions for Adolescent Girls.” The conversation and discussion that came afterward were fascinating, and I’ll be posting about it shortly. Next, a panel on philanthropy with Bill Clinton and Bill Gates (!), then home. Whew!

Here with Deanna live blogging the Opening Plenary through CoverItNow. On the schedule: Bill Clinton, Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan, Bono (yes, of U2), Al Gore, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, E. Neville Isdell (chairman of Coca-Cola). Check it out under the jump

(Note: details of the meeting follow my personal narrative!)

A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to represent Feministe as a credentialed blogger at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, which kicks off today in NYC. I was psyched, a tad skeptical, and more than a tad nervous all at once. I’ve never been invited to participate in anything as A Blogger, much less something this high-profile. I tend to think of myself as a relatively little fish in the blogosea, and all sorts of self-doubt about whether I was really qualified for this or deserved it started running through my head.

All of this anxiety was amped up exponentially when I got the additional invite to participate in a blogger meeting with President Bill Clinton before the start of the CGI meeting. I responded to the invite right away, but then all that doubt flooded in I nearly wrote back and said never mind. I mean, really - was I good enough or important enough to deserve a spot?

But then I thought to my self, now hold up, Jack. These doubts were certainly due in part to the sorts of insecurities that everyone gets from time to time about their skills, and also due in part to some rational acknowledgment of the fact that, for sure, I haven’t busted ass posting or networking or engaging in the public discourse as much as some other folks out there, so I’m understandably gonna be smaller potatoes. But I think they were also fueled in no small part by internalization of the sort of dynamics that permeate the blogosphere as much as the rest of the world; dynamics of privilege and power that automatically lend higher degrees of traction, legitimacy, or “authority” (as Technocrati puts it) to certain voices than to others for reasons entirely apart from the quality and quantity of their thoughts and words. The kind of dynamics, for example, that led to a 2006 blogger meeting with Bill Clinton being all white (and that helped this year’s meeting be predominantly white, too.) [1] Internalization is all about oppressed people learning to help keep themselves down, so I checked myself and decided not to help out on that count.

There was also an entirely different set of misgivings: how would I reconcile my politics with this meeting? After eight years of Dubya “President Clinton” has such a nice, nostalgic ring to it, and yeah, he did some good stuff while president and has done a whole lot more good stuff since leaving office (his attack dog role during Hillary’s campaign aside). The Clinton Global Initiative itself is an example of that “good stuff” (though the question remains whether efforts at change from the top down and coming from people and entities with significant investments in globalization and capitalism will really benefit the people at the bottom.) But we gotta be real - his administration yielded beaucoup bad shit that is still messing up our world today, from the Defense of Marriage Act to NAFTA to welfare “reform” to the continuation of US imperialist practices to repealing Glass-Steagall (which may have led in part to our current financial crisis) to the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (which is in part to blame for the impending execution of Troy Anthony Davis), and the list goes on.

Given all of that, it felt weird to be headed to this meeting. Compounding that was the knowledge that this wouldn’t be a completely free format where we’d all get to ask incisive and aggressive questions about anything we wished; this would definitely be a more friendly format, focused on the CGI specifically, and both of those factors would limit how much we could call Clinton out for anything. Beyond that, there’s just something squicky about being in a situation where you grin like a star-struck fool in a photo with a man who represents and is even responsible for so much of what you find to be wrong with this country.

But in the end I went, and as you can see, I was a bit of a grinning star-struck fool despite never quite forgetting who I was sitting next to here. And I was literally sitting next to him the whole time. After all of us bloggers gathered in the lobby of the Sheraton, were escorted up to the right floor, walked unwittingly past President Uribe of Colombia (!) and led to a too-small holding room while Clinton finished up a meeting with newly-elected President Fernando Lugo of Paraguay (!!!), we were finally led past stone-faced Secret Service agents into a larger suite where the meeting itself would soon take place. As we filed in and began to take seats in the circle of cushy chairs and couches that were arranged for us, I heard Clinton’s unmistakable voice off to the side someplace, a voice that I’d been hearing regularly for the better part of my life but only on the TV or radio. And that’s when it really hit me - whoa, I’m about to talk to Bill Clinton!

Then Deanna Zandt of Alternet pointed out that I had unwittingly sat in the chair directly next to the empty one reserved for Clinton, triggering a moment of intense panic in which I nearly bolted from my seat but didn’t, because there he was, and it was time to smile, shake hands, and get down to business.

Clinton was utterly charming, eloquent, and clearly an incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable man (again inspiring wistful nostalgia after these eight long years of Bush.) He was also very affable and casual, which was great because it allowed me to sit about a foot away from him for around an hour without feeling totally freaked out the entire time. He started out by talking about having just met with Presidents Uribe and Lugo, enthusiastically telling us about how Lugo’s recent election makes him the first Paraguayan president in over forty years to not come from one conservative ruling party. I was excited to hear him speak highly of Lugo. After Solana Larsen of Global Voices asked about how the world and corporate leaders in attendance were selected - Clinton said that the heads of state are largely self-selected and come depending on what’s going on for them at home and whether it makes sense, and that corporations are chosen based on their work in one of the focus areas of the CGI - I asked Clinton what he thought about the recent resurgence of the left across Latin America and the US government and media’s rather hostile response, especially towards easily demonized figures like Chavez, Castro, and more recently, Bolivia’s Evo Morales. I pointed out that relatively few of Latin America’s left-leaning leaders were present at the CGI (really only Guatemala’s president Alvaro Colom, since Lugo is unable to attend the CGI meeting itself).

Clinton responded by saying that Morales has actually been to the CGI Meeting twice in the past, which I was happy to hear (and of course, Morales’ absence this year is understandable given what’s going on in Bolivia right now.) Clinton talked about one of the projects that’s come out of the CGI is a collaboration between Cisco Systems and Bolivia to enable distance learning through software that is translated into indigenous languages. Clinton then expressed his belief that it is necessary that the next U.S. administration make a “serious effort” to reach out to Latin America “across the board,” saying that such action is necessary because those countries are our neighbors and our friends. He stressed the need of the U.S. to help Latin America on issues like clean energy, education, and health care. As throughout the meeting, Clinton focused on the clean energy issue, here as a means to economic independence for Latin America, specifically the Caribbean. He spoke of the “economic bondage” that Caribbean nations endure because they need to import all of their energy at high cost, and asserted that energy independence through investment in clean, sustainable sources should be possible for Puerto Rico (which he called “one of our own”), the Dominican Republic, and even Haiti. He also mentioned the need for the U.S. to offer significant assistance to Haiti after the hurricane devastation that the island has seen recently, and said that the ability to stop the complete eradication of the rainforests depends in part on energy sustainability. (The man knew how to stay on message!)

After this, the discussion moved to the current economic situation in the U.S., about which Clinton went on at length. I’m not going to discuss that in great detail here because I’m sure that other bloggers will (and a few already have - check out Kim Pearson at BlogHer, Emily Douglas at RH Reality Check, and Jamie Zimmerman at New America.) It was a really engrossing conversation, and one that actually helped to clarify the whole economic morass for me. I appreciated Clinton’s insistence that any bailout must respond to the needs of Main Street as well as Wall Street. When asked by Dana Goldstein of The American Prospect whether Clinton has rethought the deregulation that took place during his presidency in light of the current crisis, Clinton responded that he thinks his administration should have done a better job of reigning in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and should have pressed for more regulation of derivatives, but refuted criticism of the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, saying that the repeal actually helped lessen the crisis by allowing Bank of America to take over Merrill Lynch. This was actually the point on which I disagreed with him most throughout the entire night; I won’t claim that economics are my strong point, but from much of the analysis I’ve heard of late, I just don’t buy that.

There were also questions about offshore drilling from a blogger from Treehugger and Deanna, to which Clinton responded that while drilling is essentially inevitable at this point despite not being an “information-based thing,” given that offshore drilling is only going to yield mere months’ worth of oil years down the pike. He insisted that since it’s inevitable, we need to make sure it’s done as carefully as possible to avoid damage to the environment and that we (meaning Democrats and progressives) use the concession as leverage to get things that really will make an environmental difference - for example, increasing the time limit on tax credits for wind and solar power from 3 years to 6-10 years and investing in a modernized electric grid to allow for efficient transmission of clean energy.

After about an hour of conversation, one of Clinton’s aides started signaling that we needed to wrap up. A bunch of us, including myself, crowded around for quick pics with the Pres. I told myself that I was doing it because my parents would kill me if I had the opportunity to take a picture with Clinton and didn’t, but I know it was kinda for me, too. Then we walked out past those Secret Service agents again, took the elevator down to the lobby, and were ejected into the real world again in a bit of a daze for the surreality of the experience we’d just had. All in all, it was a pretty incredible time, and for all of my political misgivings, I’m glad I went.

I’ll be covering the rest of the Clinton Global Initiative throughout the week, so check back for more on what looks to be an exciting and impressive program. I’ll also be adding links here to other folks’ accounts of the night. And sorry to any bloggers whose questions I didn’t get to attribute - it’s just because I don’t know who you are! So let me know and I’ll fill that in.

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch

[1] And though I should probably let sleeping dragons lie, before someone says “Oh but POC bloggers were invited to that meeting but they just couldn’t/didn’t go so IT IS ALL OKAY,” let’s just acknowledge that there were probably white bloggers who were invited and couldn’t go, either, so that doesn’t neatly explain away the disparity. If the ratio of white bloggers to bloggers of color who were invited was less skewed than it probably was, then the room probably wouldn’t have wound up being so white. And even if that disproportionality was unintentional, it was a reflection of the general racial tilt of the “A-list” blogosphere, which is most certainly shaped by racism and classism.

For all the talk about the historic nature of the Clinton (woman!) and Obama (Black!) campaigns that’s gone on in the mainstream media for the past year, you might not have any idea that a third, equally unprecedented ticket was being run: Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente, the presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the Green Party. This is the first all women of color presidential ticket in the history of the United States. Now, I understand that a nomination’s historical importance and newsworthiness tends to be defined by the likelihood of its success - or, as is often the case, by the degree to which people decide to blame the Democratic party’s failures on the Greens. Yet one would hope that in between all of the celebrity gossip and other tripe that makes it onto the news regularly, the mainstream media would find a little more time to devote to a presidential ticket that is unique not only for its makeup but also for the platform it’s running on, a platform that offers a radically different choice from the rightly-named corporate parties that dominate the politics of this nation.

But predictably, the mainstream media has almost completely ignored the McKinney/Clemente ticket. When they won the Green nomination, there were a few articles here, a few news reports here, most of them focusing more on the candidates’ chances of being “spoilers” in the upcoming election rather than focusing on, you know, their positions or platform or qualifications, all of which the MSM apparently deems irrelevant. Most of what I’ve heard about McKinney and Clemente has come from the blogosphere, and even here, coverage is slim. The majority of the mentions I’ve seen have been about McKinney being a possible alternative vote for Clinton supporters who don’t want to vote for Obama, and even there, McKinney is discussed less often than John McCain as the alternate vote. Even right here on Feministe (if my memory and our search tool are working properly), McKinney’s candidacy hasn’t been mentioned in an actual post, only in the comments.

Now I get that this lack of coverage is to be expected, especially if you’re measuring a candidate’s importance or significance by their likelihood to win come November. McKinney and Clemente won’t be in the White House come January, and I’m sure they both understand that. However, the actual presidency is not the only thing at stake here, especially for the Greens and more generally for the future of third parties in this country. In an interview with Newsweek (subtitled “Will a third-party candidate be a ’spoiler’?”), McKinney discusses another important and far more feasible goal (emphasis mine):

There are currently about 200 members of the Green Party who are elected officials. These are mostly local elections. The Green Party does not yet have representation on the federal level, but it’s quite a successful “minor” party. With 5 percent of the electorate, it can move from minor party status to major party status [and qualify the Green Party for federal funds]. So our goal is to get onto as many ballots as we can, since then achieving a 5 percent goal becomes possible. When I got to Washington D.C., I realized that public policy was made around the table. The 5 percent puts another seat at the table.

As Obama continues to hedge, flip-flop, and trend right on a variety of issues, and as McCain continues to be his usually sucky self, it becomes clearer and clearer that another seat at the table, a true alternative to corporate politics as usual, is desperately needed. And while even 5 percent of the vote is an uphill battle for McKinney, Clemente, and the rest of the Greens, it isn’t impossible. Such a victory would be huge, a major step in breaking this country away from the two-party system that time and time again shows itself to be severely lacking for people who believe in true peace and true justice.

But who’s gonna vote for them? As I listened to a great Democracy Now! interview with McKinney and Clemente a few weeks ago, I asked myself whether I might wind up pulling their lever come November. Every time Obama says or does something disappointing, depressing, or downright angering, I think about the fact that there is an alternative ticket out there that would allow me to vote for women of color whose platform I almost entirely agree with and who are completely outside of the corporate, military, and neoliberal interests that hold so much sway over both mainstream parties.

And yet, I hesitate, even though I live in a state where the Democrats are unlikely to have much trouble, [(the Dems have done a really good job in scaring us all about the third-party “spoiler affect”); even though I’m reminded every day that despite all of the things I like about Obama, there’s still a lot I don’t like; even though I know that people with politics like mine can’t count on much more from the Democrats than we can from the Republicans and that true alternatives are absolutely essential; and even though it would be pretty amazing to pull the lever for a ticket comprised of a Black woman and a Boricua woman; still, I hesitate, without any reason for my hesitation that doesn’t sound kinda bogus when I say it aloud.

Maybe it feels somewhat traitorous to not pull the lever for the first person of color who actually has an excellent chance of winning; maybe it’s just nicer-feeling to pull the lever for anyone who has a shot of winning as opposed to settling for smaller victories like the 5 percent; maybe I’ve even caught myself indulging in internalized sexist and racist bullshit by thinking about how “unpresidential” these two seem and sound (a really fucked up and disturbing moment for me); maybe I’ve drank too much of the Dem Kool-Aid about how third parties won’t ever be relevant unless they’re messing things up and getting Republicans voted in and how the Democrats are my only hope for anything approaching a left-leaning political party that can actually win. Yeah: bogus, bogus, bogus.

So how will I wind up voting come November? I still don’t know, and I’m not sure that I’ll know until I step through that curtain and actually pull one of those levers. But one thing I do know: I’m not going to allow the corporate parties, the mainstream and alternative media, or even the blogosphere to let me forget that there are two amazing women of color with right-on politics running alongside the men who are getting all the attention as per usual.

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch

I’ll admit it: I couldn’t help but get a bit happy when I heard that California was legalizing same-sex marriage. And today, when I heard about the first couples in line to enjoy their new rights, couples like Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin who got married again after their 2004 marriage was declared invalid, my heart was kinda warmed. After all, politics aside, it’s beautiful to see people celebrate and commemorate their love, out in the open, and with a long-awaited sense of equality and societal recognition. It’s hard for me not to get a little bit sentimental and proud in the most rainbow-flag-waving sense of the word.

But it didn’t take long for that warmth to turn chill and that pride to shrivel up completely when I read this article from the LA Times:

The gay and lesbian couples who packed a Hollywood auditorium last week had come seeking information about California’s new marriage policies. But they also got some unsolicited advice.

Be aware.

Images from gay weddings, said Lorri L. Jean, chief executive of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, could be used by opponents in a campaign designed to convince California voters that gays and lesbians should not have the right to marry. Those getting married, she cautioned, should never lose sight of what they might be supplying the other side.

Sitting close to his husband-to-be in the audience, hairstylist Kendall Hamilton nodded and said he knew just what she meant. No “guys showing up in gowns,” he said.

The article goes on to discuss how “proponents of same-sex marriage are now taking care to emphasize mainstream unions.”

Many of the … early weddings around the state were also of long-term couples who could have been selected by central casting to appear both nonthreatening and mainstream.

And as the SF Gate reports, even the gay-marriage-themed window displays are being engineered to be as normative as possible:

In window one: two men on a wedding cake, one in a $6,000 Brioni tuxedo, the other in a $4,000 Belvest tux.

In window two: two women, one in a black Roberto Cavalli skirt tuxedo ($3,655) and the other in a $1,900 Catherine Regehr white dress.

“Describe them as straightforward,” [San Francisco clothier Wilkes] Bashford said. “I definitely did not want them to be camp.”

That’s right, folks: no camp here. No gender non-conformity, either. And definitely no guys in gowns.

Why? Because the marriage equality movement is largely predicated on the notion that us queers are just like “everyone else,” meaning mostly white, mostly middle-class or up, gender conforming monogamists. You know, the non-threatening queers. The rest of us should apparently find a nice closet to go hide in for a while, lest we threaten the rights that are apparently meant for the more upstanding, respectable members of the LGsomeotherlessimportantletters community.

(more…)

Cross-posted at AngryBrownButch.

Every morning I seem to find some distraction on the Internet that leads to me running out the door far later than I should have left or starting my work day woefully off schedule. Usually the distraction is something like Scramble on Facebook, but this morning’s distraction was enriching and enlightening enough that I don’t feel so bad about running late (and running even later in order to share it with you folks.) A friend of mine (thanks, Eli!) linked to The Story of Stuff, a short documentary on the insidious processes that go into consumption as we know it. The video has been online since December 2007 and has apparently had 2 million viewers so I risk recommending it to a bunch of folks who’ve already seen it, but I hadn’t and I thought it important to share.

Annie Leonard, a scholar who has done many years of research on consumerism, development, sustainability, and environmental health, guides us through the linear process that drives the material economy - extraction, production, distribution, consumption, and disposal - exposing the many moments in the process that are often left out of the big picture but which are often most telling of the damage occurs within each of these steps. I’ve seen and read many things about consumption and its effects on our world, but this movie broke things down in a clearer, more complete and more urgent way than I’ve seen before. Leonard does a good job of bringing to light the environmental, health, labor, globalization and other social justice problems inherent to the system of consumption.

Some of the facts that Leonard cites are truly frightening. One fact that I’d never heard before and found particularly shocking: when talking about the countless toxic chemicals used in production and therefore brought into our homes and our bodies, Leonard says:

Do you know what is the food at the top of the food chain with the highest levels of many toxic contaminants? Human breast milk. That means that we’ve reached a point where the smallest members of our societies - our babies - are getting the highest lifetime dose of toxic chemicals from breast feeding from their mothers. Is that not an incredible violation?

I appreciated that Leonard called this a “violation,” because that’s precisely what it is. We have allowed corporations and complicit governments to violate our very bodies, as well as our environment and countless cultures and communities, simply in order to give us cheaper, more consumable products.* Leonard thankfully goes on to stress that “breast feeding is still best,” but as someone who plans to probably give birth and subsequently breast feed, that fact about the toxicity of breast milk is frightening and enraging. It really does feel like a violation - corporations and the government have allowed this shit to get into me.

Of course, there’s a large degree of agency here - we, primarily meaning Americans and other westerners, have a tremendous responsibility to reject the system of capitalism and consumption that got us into this mess. We need to wake up to the realities of what cheap, easy, and disposable all really mean in the long run - as Leonard says, someone, or more accurately many someones, are paying the real price for all of that cheap crap that many of us in the U.S. can buy easily thanks to our huge privilege relative to the rest of the world. Sometimes the people paying the price are far away and look nothing like (some of) us, but sometimes, as with toxic breast milk, we’re also paying directly and dearly. And whether we pay or someone else pays the immediate and direct costs, when it comes to the destruction of the earth, we’re all most definitely going to pay up sooner rather than later. And therefore we who live in the countries that use and abuse and benefit from the system of consumption the most have an urgent responsibility to do something about it.

Unfortunately, that responsibility and our agency to act on it are both so limited by our lack of information. The true costs of American-style production and consumption were never covered in my schooling, nor are they something that make it into the mainstream media with any depth or sufficiency. It’s easy to go through life just not knowing or even questioning how our actions and our consumption are part of a much larger system with far-reaching effects, and the profiteering corporations are more than happy to keep it that way. In such a dearth of information and truth, resources like this movie are vital and can go a long way towards providing the knowledge people need in order to understand what this culture of consumption is doing to them as individuals, to their communities, to other people, and to the environment.

Of course, it’s hard to figure out what the hell to do after looking at a video like that. I appreciate that the Story of Stuff site provides “10 Little and Big Things You Can Do”, along with a resources page that includes recommended reading and links to NGOs working on these issues.

* Note that for the most part this doesn’t mean “better” products in terms of durability and sustainability; Leonard also states that only 1% of consumer products are still actually in use just six months from the date of purchase, which boggles the mind.

When Jill asked me to come on as a regular blogger for Feministe, one question/concern that I had for her was about the type of stuff I could post here. Feministe is, of course, centered around feminism, so I asked whether it’s all right for me to post things that aren’t explicitly related to feminism or women. I think that I asked this more for reassurance than out of any real confusion, since I’ve read (and appreciated) many Feministe posts that don’t focus centrally on feminism. Jill gave me the reassurance that I’d hoped for - that I’m free to post what I’d like - which made me feel more confident about joining the team.

Interestingly, just as I was having this exchange with Jill, some conversations about what is or is not a feminist issue and what should or should not be posted on feminist blogs, specifically with regards to posts about the Sean Bell verdict on Feministing and here on Feministe. I made the mistake of wading somewhat clumsily into the fray and getting told to fuck off within two comments (ah, how I missed the blogosphere…) That wasn’t the most enriching experience, but it did drive home the concern with which I came to this blog.

I’m happy and excited to be joining an explicitly feminist and feminist-centric blog. But I wouldn’t be if my participation was predicated at leaving parts of my self - my identities and my politics - at the door. I live and function in this world in large part a as a woman, but also as a person of color, a Puerto Rican, a queer person, a genderqueer butch. These identities don’t merely intersect; they overlap, and they change each other in the overlapping. As I said over in that ill-fated comments thread, my entire identity is more than the sum of its parts; the overlap creates something new, something intrinsically meshed that can’t just be spliced apart into neat, discrete categories.

Likewise, my politics are interconnected. I can look at my politics and point out some different, distinct threads - “Oh, that’s a feminist politic right there; and that one, that’s anti-racist; and this one here’s trans positive.” But things aren’t always so discrete. I find few issues to be purely feminist, or purely about race or class or anything else. Just as I, as a person, am multi-dimensional and made of many different identities and experiences, my political perspective is a tightly-woven tapestry of the many issues that are important to me. My feminism informs my anti-racism, which informs my anti-classism, which informs my anti-imperialism, which all inform everything else. If I were to try to pull out one pure discrete thread, I think the whole damn thing would start to unravel. Remove one thread and the rest would be incomplete and may not hold together.

I can’t see what would be gained, then, by having me and the other bloggers here set aside all issues that are important to me yet not (obviously, on their face) related to women when blogging at Feministe. Some might argue that it would provide a space more purely and exclusively devoted to feminism; I, however, would argue that it would lop off great big important pieces of what shapes the feminism and larger politics of me and the other writers here.

I also think that if we were made to focus only on what affects women because they’re women, it would be easy to slide into the same traps that drove feminists of color away from second wave feminism, that drove some of them to even separate themselves from the entire term “feminist” and take on a new one, “womanist,” that they could define for themselves. Assertions like apostate’s that feminism must be “race-neutral” eerily echo the sorts of assertions that drove many women of color away from feminism back then, and I think that they’ll only serve to drive many women of color - and other women who refuse to segment themselves or their politics artificially - away now. Check it, y’all - those days aren’t behind us. They’re still here. I’m barely getting clued into the blogosphere again and already I’ve read two women of color talking about how they have already or are considering shedding the label “feminist” (here and here.)

Well, it’s 1:31am and I feel like I’m beginning to ramble. I’d hoped to start my blogging here at Feministe off with something a bit stronger, more cohesive, more focused. But maybe I just needed to get all that off my chest before I could really get down to work here. I hope it’ll at least resonate a bit.

Also, what Latoya said.