H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007

`Subtitle J–Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism

`SEC. 899A. DEFINITIONS.

`For purposes of this subtitle:

`(1) COMMISSION- The term `Commission’ means the National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism established under section 899C.

`(2) VIOLENT RADICALIZATION- The term `violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

`(3) HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term `homegrown terrorism’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

`(4) IDEOLOGICALLY BASED VIOLENCE- The term `ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.

Just. Go. Read.

So I had to write a quick response paper on a video about porn. Since I am swamped with homework and cleaning, I thought I’d share it with you all (all 3 of you out there).

Remember, it’s a quick academic paper so there is no snark.

As a feminist, I am torn on the issue of pornography. On one hand I believe that anyone has the right to do whatever they wish with their own body provided it does not hurt another person. I also know that the only industries where women consistently make more money than men are sex work and modeling, and I am loath to take away that opportunity from someone when they may have no other opportunities to support themselves or their families. On the other hand, most women who work in the sex industry are treated atrociously and that treatment only seems to get worse as women in general acquire more sexual agency in the world. The more control women have in their own sexual choices, the more violent and degrading porn becomes towards women.

Porn is part of culture and a reaction to it. Every culture seems to have it’s own niche in the porn world. In America porn, gangbangs and violent blowjobs are common enough to make up the bulk of mainstream pornography. Female gratification rarely enters into the mix. In Latin America, porn often focuses on men performing oral sex on women, something that is rarely seen in American porn. The Latin idea of machismo may play into that by making female desire and orgasms taboo and therefore erotic. In America where women have more agency and female orgasms are (hopefully) a regular part of sex, porn pushes the limit by punishing women for having sexual agency. It is as if they are saying “you like having one penis- here have 12 and see how you like that”.

Porn is profitable, but it is only profitable when it provides something that people cannot get on their own. When sexual mores are such that only missionary penis in vagina intercourse is acceptable, profits will be made by having porn that includes oral sex and varying positions. Where women are considered to not like or want sex, women in porn will be sexually assertive “bad girls”. Where women are allowed to own their desire and expect mutual satisfaction, porn will punish women for being assertive. It is no more surprising to me that big business is involved in porn than it is that the robber barons of the early 1900’s made money off the opium trade. The difference now is that porn is as easy to get as checking your email, and that makes porn aesthetics much more prevalent in general society.

You can see the influence of porn in our current society by the prevalence of pubic hair removal in both men and women. What started as a way for porn movies to show more detail in close ups has become almost a requirement for women. They are now marketing waxing and hair removal kits to girls as young as 12, girls who hopefully have neither seen porn or had sex. Also profitable are clothing lines that claim to empower girls while they dress like porn stars and classes for girls in pole dancing (all marketed to children). The blowback from this has been “modesty” movements that seek to return girls to the status of being sexual gatekeepers with no sexual agency of their own. Neither of these situations is acceptable.

I aced my econ midterm. I made nice with my professors. I got a shit load of stuff done. I was also given a documentary about porn by one of my proffs to watch and write a response paper on over the weekend. Sweet.

Anyways, when I was in Mexico the Naughty Professor and I got a guilty little kick playing a game called “spot the racist advertising”. This is a game that will not disappointed my friends. For example…..For the non-Spanish speakers- the sign is supposed to say Precios Chinos, Precios Baratos (or Chinese prices, cheap prices) but instead they go for racism as humor and make fun of a Chinese Spanish speakers accent by replacing all the Rs with Ls. How very Jerry Lewis of them. (Picture is of a scoreboard for a Mexican baseball field- I cannot recommend Mexican baseball games enough. They have much better food).

But it gets better. Today I found an Italian version of a commercial I saw in Mexico that made me drop my jaw and say “Ningún usted no!” (Oh no you didn’t!)

Sorry for the crappy link to Youtube- there wasn’t an embed link and I am not as tech savvy as I like to pretend

Sitting in the hallway outside of the econ classes today were two young white women.

YWW1 :Did you read that thing for class?
YWW2: It’s not due till tomorrow.
YWW1: No, it’s totally due today.
YWW2: Fuck! What was it about?
YWW1: It’s about how white people are privileged and get all the stuff.
YWW2: Seriously, that’s like so so so biased! Oh my god!
YWW1: It’s even worse- it was written by a white woman.

I think this should alleviate some conservative fears about the indoctrination methods of the uber-liberal ivory tower. You can lead the privileged white girls to water- but you can’t make them think!

People “are hardwired to”. Generally used by evolutionary psychologists, misogynists and overall asswipes.

For example “Men aren’t hard-wired to follow women into danger.”

Lemme tell ya folks- there are only a handful of things that people are actually hardwired to do.
Breathe, eat, sleep, fuck, shit, piss and drink. That’s all folks.

Not really, but that’s what I’m writing about right now.

So why doesn’t private health care work?

A little econ 101- people make rational choices based on the information they have. The more perfect the information, the better the choices. With perfect information, supply and demand work to keep prices competitive.

Unlike shopping for apples or cars, we do not generally know how much health care we are going to need or what we are going to need it to cover. We also don’t get much of a choice in what our plans will be because they are decided on by human resource managers long before we ever sign up for it. Human resource managers also don’t know how much coverage we are going to need, all they know is that they need to find the lowest priced plan for the business.

Comparing plans is more like comparing all fruit for price, quality, size , nutritional value, and calories instead of comparing the quality of one apple to another. It’s not even apples and oranges, it’s every damn fruit there is.

Just a few things you would be looking for as a private individual shopping for health insurance:

• Price
• Type (PPO, HMO, Fee for Service)
• OOP (or out of pocket costs) like copays, coinsurance, deductibles
• Prescription coverage (do they cover the drugs you currently take- will the new formulary that comes out every year cover it next year, will they cover drugs that you might take in the future, do they have a maximum benefit amount, is there a maximum out of pocket cost for you)
• Do you get to keep your current doctor, will you need to find a new one. How far away are the doctors. Can you get in to see them quickly or is there a wait. How about specialists- do you have to be referred or can you self refer?
• Does it cover the things you need now (birth control and family planning, pregnancy, chiropractics, physical therapy, mental health) Are there waiting periods for pre-existing conditions?
• Will it cover things you need in the future? Will you reach your lifetime limit of care?

Since we don’t have crystal balls, it’s that last one that screws us up sometimes. With life insurance, you know that someday you will die and you know exactly what the insurance company will pay out. With car insurance, you may never be in an accident but you know if you can afford the risk of not carrying full coverage to pay off your car if it’s totaled in a wreck. You also know what the legal limits of insurance you must carry are.

With health insurance, you never know when you are going to need it and how much you are going to need, but in everyone’s life there is some point when they will need to see a doctor.

Health insurance plans don’t all cover the same things at the same levels. If they did, there would be real competition in the market because people would have perfect information regardless of what their future needs might be. But instead we play the health care shell game. Coverage changes from year to year and plan to plan and prices rise because there isn’t enough information for consumers to effectively shop for coverage.

Universal coverage changes that system. A government may not know exactly who is going to get cancer or have a massive car accident, but they do know about how many people will. And from that they can effectively keep prices for services competitive and can change what is covered based on trends in what services are needed. This is the exact reverse of what normally happens in the free market because normally it is individuals who know what they are going to need well before government does. I can tell you how many new pairs of jeans or shoes my Kid may go through this year, how much I need to budget for coffee and milk to keep myself charming and erudite, but I have no idea if we are going to have a major medical issue this year.

In universal health care, the government creates one giant pool of of consumers (everyone) and one giant pool of providers (every doctor, nurse, hospital and clinic). Competition then comes in by making sure that providers are supplying the best care in order to keep consumers coming to them instead of providers providing the cheapest care so that the insurance companies will keep them in their network.

Or how to create class warfare without really trying.

Welfare programs are kept strictly limited to the very poorest people for a reason. Once something becomes a universal program (like say social security or free public education for K-12) it is nearly impossible to kill. Conservatives know this. As long as a program is kept restricted to the very bottom of society, the middle class can see itself as benevolent when the mood strikes and will also be less concerned when those programs are de-funded or scrapped altogether.

Let’s look at Social Security. Social Security is the third rail of politics- touch it and die. Bush only thought he could get privatization of Social Security though because he had a Republican House and Senate and a large number of younger Gen Xers that think that Social Security isn’t going to be around for them anyways- why pay into it now. Even with that- privatizing Social Security was a no-go. It is a universal program, meaning everyone regardless of income gets some benefit from it. There is no means testing (though certain Republicans have floated that idea too) because everyone pays into it and even the richest of the rich get some benefit. Fair- absolutely. They may not need the money, but they paid into it too.

Now let’s look at 2 programs that do basically the same thing- they provide people with no job a small income for a limited amount of time- Unemployment insurance and TANF (Temporary Aid for Needy Families). Unemployment is mostly not means tested. The amount of savings, investments, property that you own makes no difference in whether or not you’ll receive Unemployment. If your spouse or children work- that makes no difference to Unemployment. If you receive child support- that makes no difference to Unemployment. You simply have to have been laid off from your job and have worked enough hours to have paid into the system. And you have to certify every week that you have looked for work. You don’t even have to go into the unemployment office most of the time, just keep a log of where you applied and submit it when asked.

TANF on the other hand is means tested. You cannot own a newer car, have money in savings, a 401K, a retirement fund. You must be flat broke. No one in your home can have any sort of income. If you get child support- it will go to pay back your TANF grant before it goes to you. You must agree to participate in a job search program of no less than 35 hours a week. You must be in the Welfare office everyday looking for work and participating in really asinine programs to teach you how to be “professional”. You must agree to having a whole hell of a lot of your life examined by a caseworker.

TANF has had it’s programs slashed while the participants requirements have increased. Unemployment, not so much. We don’t hear much about the Unemployment Kings taking our hard earned money and spending it on beer and hot rods, but we hear a whole hell of a lot about the worthless single moms on Welfare. Welfare is not universal, but unemployment is for anyone who has been laid off.

So passing SCHIP 10 years ago when it was just supposed to be for kids whose parents were too wealthy for Medicaid (most people who are not on Welfare, including those on Unemployment are too wealthy for Medicaid) but too poor to afford insurance on their own was easy. It’s still keeping the means test pretty strict. But once you start including more middle class families, it starts to look more like a universal program. And universal programs generally grow (hello Medicare Drug plans) not shrink.

So when you hear a Republican crying about how SCHIP would cover “wealthy families” what you are really hearing is “and once those families realize it works better than our for profit system, we are never getting rid of it”. It’s much easier to take from the poor than it is to take from everyone.

So I was talking to a couple of student council reps from work the other day (Student Council votes on the funds that pay for my position) and for the 4th time in 4 years I was asked if I would be willing to work more hours if they approved it in the budget.

Of course I would. My willingness and availability has never been the problem with keeping the lab open more hours. The problem is that the school (which is very quietly run by a private company and not by the state) keeps certain employees like lab monitors and tutors in a Walmart style part time ghetto. I am not allowed to work more the 16 hours a week because then the school would have to provide benefits. If I work more the 16 hours a week- I will be fired, period. I am also not eligible for merit or cost of living raises.

So I told the student council people this. I didn’t tell them that last year I did the math to figure out what it would cost to employ me full time including benefits. The income increase would only be about $10,000 per year (a huge amount for me but not so much on the grand scale) but the benefits increase would add a minimum of $12,000 per year. That would mean tripling the tech fees that the students pay each quarter – from about 30 dollars a quarter to over 90.

Now if they just wanted to increase the weekly lab hours to 24, I’m fine with that. I don’t really want to work full time and I could live on 24 hours a week. But even with an 8 hour weekly increase the $12000 in benefits still applies. Without benefits, the cost to the students in increased tech fees is less than $10 per quarter. With benefits, the increase in fees is over $42 per quarter.

If insurance was universal, then the students could get what they want (more lab hours), I could get what I want (more hours worked and a bigger paycheck and healthcare) and the school would be able to retain experienced tutors and lab personnel rather than having a high turnover rate ( I know at least a few tutors who have moved to the UW because the pay and benefits are better and when I did my little temp position there I was very well taken care of).
This is not a problem that is unique to public education, in fact it more of a problem in the private sector. To keep qualified employees you need to provide benefits, but the cost of health insurance is climbing so fast that it puts an unfair burden on businesses. (I know- I’m a pinko progressive, who would have thought I’d be talking about business needs). How can we expect business to keep hiring people if the cost of health care makes the cost of labor unbearable?