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Ending Gerrymandering: Power to the People

Poor Lee county is a mixture of a prosperous college town and a run-down old mill town; rural areas facing extreme poverty; and sitting not far north of the Alabama black belt counties. As a result, if you look at the House districting map of Lee county, you'll see that we're carved up into six different fiefdoms for the state House of Representatives, you see that we have six different districts of the state House of Representatives, with lines running straight through the middle of towns to carve out safe districts. And Lee isn't unique: we're just part of a larger problem (look at the Birmingham district in Jefferson County and the surrounding area). This carved-up districting process establishes fiefdoms for dynastic state legislators; if you get elected enough to be in the legislature at the time of a census, you get to redraw the map for your own re-election. And gee whillikers, the people writing the rule book keep winning from census to census.

In the aptly-named How to Rig an Election, the [Economist][] examines America's peculiar system of legislative redistricting, in which the lines are drawn and redrawn state-by-state according to partisan power politics. District gerrymandering gives state legislators the tools for egregious incumbent-protection schemes, which decimate the possibility of competitive races and completely invert democratic control of governance. The corrupt gerrymandering of safe districts means that legislators pick their voters, instead of voters picking their legislators.

So how can we fight back and reclaim the power from the careerist political hacks?

The Economist suggests a more European style of redistricting, Putting it into cleaner hands such as bipartisan commissions or neutral civil servants. But this isn't going to help matters any. The problem is the power that rests in the hands of experts who know how to tweak and twist and manipulate the demographic data to shore up power. Ameliorating the direct interest of personal power by taking it out of the hands of the legislators themselves helps a little, but it doesn't remove the process from partisan or bureaucratic power politics. Strategic interests don't disappear when you switch over to an army of bureaucratic civil servant tweakers.

Our reluctance to challenge the arrogance of careerist bureaucratic "experts" has limited our ability to see other answers. But it is precisely expertise that is the problem. This doesn't mean that the people drawing the lines should be stupid; it means that they shouldn't be professionals who have invested their efforts in the art of twisting, tweaking, and manipulating districting lines.

So here's how we reform redistricting

  • First, completely overhaul how districting is done in the first place. State legislature districting should only be done within a county: each county gets one state senator, and a number of state representatives proportional to its population. Because they're elected at the county level, district lines can only be drawn within the county, and you have no more gerrymandering across county lines. Also, since this scheme will generally increase the number of senators and representatives, it will also make legislators more responsive and representative towards individual constituents.

  • Set strict guidelines for the shapes of districts which prevent egregious gerrymandering.

  • Now ditch the legislators, ditch the bureaucrats. Instead, bring the people into the process. Create a process for selecting committees of randomly-chosen ordinary citizens who will be charged with redrawing the districts in a rational manner. For the state House of Representatives, districting can be done with citizens from the county represented. For the US House of Representatives, districting can be done with a larger committee of citizens cluster-sampled from across the state.

  • Make the entire process open to the public, with media coverage and input from citizens not on the committee.

While this will help a great deal, fixing districting is hardly the be-all and end-all of democratic reform. To challenge the dynastic power of entrenched legislators, more will have to be done.

  • Ensure that no candidate ever runs unopposed: give voters the option to vote None of the Above in any given race. If NOTA prevents a candidate from getting a majority of the vote, then the election is scuttled and new candidates run for the position.

  • Implement legislative term limits, to break up the power of dynastic candidates. If they can't stay in office from one redistricting to another, there's no point in trying to mainpulate it in your favor.

  • Obliterate ballot access restrictions which prevent non-Demopublican parties and independent candidates from getting on the ballot. Every citizen needs to feel empowered to run for office and alternative viewpoints need to be included in the discourse: giving an up-down decision on the pre-selected favorite of the Party elite is democracy as it was practiced in the Soviet Union. It's not a real choice.

  • Similarly, institute ballot reforms such as Instant Runoff Voting, which will empower independents and third parties by destroying the wasting your vote and lesser of two evils arguments. IRV allows for preferential voting, where if no-one gets a clear majority of the vote, the second (and if necessary, third, fourth, etc.) choices of the voters still count towards choosing the winner.

  • Empower citizens to go over the heads of the state legislature to the people themselves. Institute a voter initiative process so that action doesn't have to be filtered through the whims of legislative power.

  • Empowering citizens also involves the creation of participatory, local spaces for citizen organization and power. This means forming neighborhood assemblies and interest-based caucuses of citizens, which can pass resolutions, organize cooperative mutual aid in the use of money and goods, and open up a space for people to work at running their own lives.

The Betrayal of Women in Iran

Last year, Iran was terrorized by the serial murder of 21 women in prostitution, most of them in the Shi'ite holy city of Mashhad, over the course of 12 months. On July 26, 2001, the spider-killer Saeed Hanayi was finally arrested by Iranian police. He confessed to murdering 16 of the women and raping 13 of his victims before he killed them, and said he would have gladly murdered 150 if the police hadn't stopped him. He was hanged for his crimes in April of this year.

The Iranian police, of course, were doing what they could to stand up for the victims of this slaughter. The day before Hanayi was arrested, with credible information that a gang had been involved in some of the crimes, police took decisive action to stop the slaughter. No, they didn't arrest the suspected murderers; they arrested about 500 women in prostitution in Mashhad and threw them in prison [IranMania News]. On July 29, the followed it up by arresting 32 more in northwestern Iran.

Immediately after Hanayi's arrest and confession, the religious conservatives who hold absolute power to direct the civil government, showed their commitment to humane government and women's rights by writing in Jomhuri Eslami (which speaks for the religious ruler Ayatollah Khamenei): Who is to be judged in Mashhad? Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption? That's right: they stood by a serial murderer who had strangled 16 women, because he did not spill the blood of innocents.

Update: By a freak coincidence, today the Mashhad police decided to re-affirm their commitment to imprisoning and punishing women for trying to survive. They arrested 44 women in prostitution in a crackdown on vice in the holy city. Since the majority of the 148 people arrested are apparently men, it seems that the government is at least arresting pimps as well, which is better than we ordinarily do in the United States. But does the attention focus on the 104 men who are exploiting women whose only crime is trying to survive in hard economic times? Of course not. What's important to the Iranian police is that:

The police are ready to pick up all street women and prostitutes in less than 72 hours across the country, he added.

On the other hand, apparently they couldn't be bothered to pick up a serial murderer for over a year.

There are a few still in the Left who continue to believe that any regime which opposes American imperialism is, ipso facto, good, no matter what horrors it perpetrates against its own people. The poster-child for the sociopathic Left, for the past 25 years, has been the Islamic Revolution in Iran. I've even met male Leftists who claimed that the Islamic Revolution was a revolution for women's rights. Well, look, it's certainly true that the Shah's blood-soaked tyranny in Iran was oppressive to women. However, this revolutionary Islamic Republic has a theocratic government which praises serial murderers of women in prostitution, and young women are burning themselves to death at increasing rates due out of poverty, desperation, and political oppression. It is high past time we asked: Whose Revolution was this? When women played a central role in the fight against the patriarchal tyranny of the Shah, was this what they were fighting for?

For further reading:

Government and the pink-collar ghetto

Pretty much every time Wendy McElroy writes a column, you can expect three things.

  1. Insightful and provocative analysis of the ways in which male-dominated, top-down patriarchal government hurts women
  2. Lack of understanding of ways in which non-governmental power and hierarchy hurts women
  3. Uncalled-for swipes at other feminists and failure to differentiate feminism from the male Left

Her column on Unlocking the Potential of America's Pink Collar Workers is a classic example. Based in part around a response to Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, McElroy analyzes how the government works to create and shore up the walls around the pink collar ghetto by preventing women from getting ahead through legally imposed barriers to work and individual initiative. She has a lot of good points.

On the negative side, she also just ignores the degree to which historical power and hierarchy outside of government also constrains low-income women. Her flippant dismissal of sexual harassment law is an obvious example—yes, investing economic resources into creating a workplace more free of sexual harassment does cost money and work that could be otherwise spent. But that doesn't mean that if you stopped spending that money, women would suddenly flood into the workplace. The new jobs that were created would predominantly be filled by men—since sexual harassment is most prevalent in workplaces where most of the workers are men—and women would be driven out and kept out of these workplaces because of the fact that, well, sexual harassment is rampant in the workplace.

Similarly, although McElroy appreciates that Ehrenreich is in touch with the realities facing working-class women, she accuses her of allowing moral squeamishness to get in the way of seeing real solutions. For example, McElroy writes:

And, yet, after working as a cleaning woman for her book, Ehrenreich, in an article in Harper's magazine, asked readers not to hire maids. Almost everyone complains about violent video games, but paid housecleaning has the same consequence-abolishing effect. ... A servant economy breeds callousness, she wrote.

So to protect the moral sensibilities of the middle class, Ehrenreich wants people to unemploy poor women who are working to feed their children. Instead of honest work she would offer these women a more humane welfare system.

But wait, that's not what Ehrenreich said. She doesn't want women who are working in domestic labor to be unemployed and put on welfare. She's saying that there's a real, pernicious, political cause and effect in the employment of low-income women as domestic servants, and the callousness and dehumanization of women in poverty that it breeds in the rich (in Nickel and Dimed, she details how bosses made sure to rotate employees at each house and minimize contact between clients and workers, so that individuals never emerge as sympathetic persons in the eyes of clients, and how workers would be on the point of passing out because of company rules that no food or water pass a maid's mouth while she was in a client's house).

McElroy should understand that Ehrenreich is calling here for a reinvestment of economic energies: so that the upper-class people do their own cleaning, and invest their money into other enterprises, and open up opportunities to work for lower-income women other than cleaning up after the rich while having most of your labor going to pay the salary of a shitty, exploitative boss.

McElroy also accuses middle-class feminists of pushing for laws which constrain women from entering the workplace as employees or entrepreneurs. She claims that Most feminist policies harm the very women they should be protecting -- pink-collar workers — and the solutions they offer to poor women are part of what is creating their poverty. But this just ain't true. It's true of the male Left, which has long favored so-called protective labor legislation which simply cuts women out of numerous sectors of the workforce which the male-dominated AFL-line labor movment thought was too dangerous (and too lucrative) for women. But second-wave feminists fought these restrictions, often at great cost to their former alliances with the labor movement. They've fought to decriminalize prostitution, so that women are not thrown in prison for doing what they need to do in order to survive. McElroy asserts that feminists never seem to call for less government regulation, especially in the workplace. But in fact, although feminists have fought for many rules on workplace standards, just as often they have fought against sexist legislation which cuts women out of economic opportunities in order to protect them.

Where McElroy's column is at its best, however, and Ehrenreich's book is at its weakest, is on the issue of barriers which constrain women's initiative to the boss-dominated world of the Pink Collar ghetto labor marketplace. Ludicrous government-imposed barriers against so much as starting a hair-braiding business out of your own home (or selling garden vegetables out of your truck) establish a system in which you either rent your labor out to a (usually male) boss, or else you starve. Is it any surprise that when the victims of this economic ghettoization don't have other options, bosses can afford to pay them so little?

So what must we do? It is way, way past time to get the government out of centralized command-and-control which restricts capital to those who are already economically and politically well-connected.

  • Abolish business licensing fees. $100 makes no difference to Starbucks, but a lot more to someone just starting a new food co-op or taxi service.

  • Ditch the arcane, massive, and hyper-bureaucratic zoning laws which favor sprawled-out cities with big centralized stores, and which criminalize working out of your own home

  • Loosen the government-supported stranglehold of big banks on capital. Loosen the regulatory reins on credit unions and microfinance institutions, so that affordable, worker-friendly banking is available to more people in more communities

  • Finally, drop the current welfare-to-work welfare deform program. We no longer have a welfare system, but rather a government-sponsored temp agency for shitty dead-end labor which won't pay the rent. Government-controlled welfare should ultimately be abolished in favor of a voluntary system of mutual aid in the community. However, in the meantime, we can give people on welfare some breathing room.

    The system should not penalize people for choosing to spend time going to college or University (currently, this is not counted as work and so it counts against you).

    Also, it needs to stop monomaniacally focusing on shipping unemployed women off into available low-income jobs, After they are dumped into a minimum wage job and taken off the rolls, the state gets a fat credit from the federal government, but the woman still can't pay the rent. Instead, it should provide help with finding jobs and also provide help and resources for starting your own small individual or co-operative businesses and wisely choosing how to invest your money, avoid debt, and generally provide resources for women to make themselves self-sufficient, rather than job-dependent.

For further reading:

Where The Money Is In the Queer Community

Discussions about economic class and sexual orientation have often operated on the assumption - supposedly with a statistical basis - that gay people are at least as affluent, or more affluent, than straight people. However, an article on "The truth about GLBT income" by Grant Lukenbill [Gay.com] sets the record straight: the studies are based on flawed sampling and manipulation of data.

Here's what actually happens: statistically, on average, gay male couples have more income than heterosexual couples. This much of the newspaper reports are true.

But just a cotton-pickin' minute. Of course gay male couples make more money. Men make more money than women. So of course a household with two men makes more money than a household with a woman and a man. And, in turn, lesbian couples make even less than heterosexual couples. The issue here has nothing much to do with sexuality in the first place, and everything to do with the sexual politics of the job market. Many other similar errors disclose themselves; for example, gay male couples make more than heterosexual couples, but heterosexual people are more likely to live in couples than are gay men.

On full consideration of the data, Lukenbill argues,

The wealthiest proportion of gay Americans is a minority of older, dual income-earning, white-male households in the country's largest urban areas. These men are an important minority within a minority, no doubt, but one that represents only a fraction of the overall gay and lesbian population.

Anyone who thinks--or reports--otherwise doesn't know what the numbers really say.

For further reading:

  • GT 2/16/2002 Alabama Lags Nation in Pay Equity, and the wage gap map of the U.S.

Here We Go Again – Frat Racism at Syracuse

You know, you'd think that after blackface party costumes at an Auburn fraternity became a scandal in the national newsmedia, frat boys would learn that blackface is not all that good of an idea as a prank costume.

If you did, you thought wrong. In what seems to have been a conscious decision to further shatter my faith in the basic human capacity to learn from past experience, Aaron Levine, a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, went on his fraternity bar-hopping party dressed in blackface [Syracuse Daily Orange], in what he claims was a Tiger Woods costume.

After student protests, the case was referred to the Office of Judicial Affairs. Levine faces possible expulsion from the school for violation of the Code of Student Conduct and the fraternity faces possible suspension.

The protesting students also demanded structural changes to school policy to improve the institutional racial environment, including new policies for reporting and punishing similar incidents, diversity training for students and employees, and reinstatement of the Black Student Union Building and Black Panhellenic House.

Meanwhile, Levine has said the following in his defense:

  • The my one black friend thought it was O.K. excuse -- According to Levine, he asked a Black fraternity brother (SAE is predominantly white) whether the costume was offensive, and he said it was not. Whenever there's a scandal over a blackface costume I see this same excuse and I still can't figure out why anyone even bothers offering it. So your one Black friend thought it was O.K. Fine -- but your one Black friend does not think or speak for all Black people in the world. This is mind-numbingly obvious and yet they go on using this excuse as if it meant something. I have to wonder whether it's really just a way of saying Hey, man, some of my best friends are black rather than actually responding to the person offended.

  • The you're taking this way too far excuse -- Everything's being blown out of proportion, Levine said. It's hard to please the mob. I'll talk to any individual. This excuse is useful to Levine -- it lets him pretend that he is the martyr of an irrational mob rather than actually personally engaging with the people who are confronting him. Well, look, I understand the feeling that this has gone way further than you ever meant it to go. But that's the nature of the beast. When you offend someone, you don't get to choose just how much s/he is supposed to be offended. If you've offended someone, your job is to take accountability for what you've done, to personally engage with them and understand where they are coming from.

    This seems to come from a general misunderstanding of what it means when a person's speech or actions are offensive. Now, people can certainly be intentionally offensive--think of the average grade school bully. But most of life is not like this. If it was only what people intended that could be offensive, then a lot fewer people would be offended, because most of the time people don't intend to piss each other off. But most of the time, what's offensive has nothing to do with what the person intended; it has to do with what s/he was willing to ignore. In dressing up in blackface for shits and giggles, Levine surely didn't intend to piss everyone off, but he was ignoring a long and bloody history of brutal racism behind blackface. And that is offensive, not just to people of color, but to anyone with a sense of history and a hope for racial justice. Which brings us to...

  • The I am too stupid to take responsibility for my actions excuse -- Levine said he had no knowledge of the history of blackface. Well, I guess that's obvious. But rather than getting defensive and protesting his innocence, Levine ought to take this as an opportunity to educate himself about why the hell people are so pissed off at him. There is a history to these images. They are not just obsolete ephemera flashing across a History Channel documentary. For more on blackface humor and the history of white supremacy behind it, I recommend Bryan Thomas's column Bamboozled: A True Story [Bryan Thomas. Talk.], and Spike Lee's spectacular film Bamboozled.

How much longer is it going to take before Universities start getting serious about promoting diversity and undermining institutional racism in their campus culture? We shouldn't have to wait for scandalous incidents like this one to realize that, in a culture where white privilege deeply shapes the composition and direction of most campus cultures, we need to take some serious steps to open up the University as a space in which students of color can participate. Students of color need spaces such as multicultural center buildings, where they can come together to build their voice and strength for participation in the campus community. Administrators and faculty need to prioritize programs which educate students about the history of race in American culture and politics, and which facilitate greater understanding and openness across racial/ethnic lines. Given the relationship between race and economic class, they also need to talk seriously about making college more affordable and a better experience for low-income students. Administrators need to get serious in holding the organizations and individuals responsible for hate images responsible, but what's far more important than that is that they also work towards creating and maintaining a campus environment in which people actually understand something about race and white students don't just think that throwing around casual racism is O.K.

(In related news, Auburn may be faltering or even failing in this regard, despite the bold promises administration made after our own blackface scandal hit the national airwaves. But that is another story entirely; watch this space for the upcoming story on developments in Auburn.)

And for God's sake, how much longer is it going to take historically white fraternities to realize how much it hurts them, as people and as an organization, to allow this kind of institutionalized racism to fester in their houses? Every few months another incident like this happens. It hits the news, people yell, the frat boys get punished, and then it happens again at another frat house somewhere else in the country. Or it even happens again at another frat house on the same campus, as if no-one in the historically white Greek system had ever figured out that this might just not be cool with other people. I mean, Christ, even amoebas can learn through operant conditioning. Can't we expect at least that much cognitive functioning from frat boys?

For further reading:

  • GT 11/14/2001 Auburn chapter of Delta Sigma Phi dissolved, and how anti-Southern prejudice undermines the struggle for change in the North and South
  • GT 11/14/2001 Auburn chapter of Beta Theta Pi dissolved, and commentary on the moral crippling of laid-back liberalism
  • GT 11/9/01 the broader context of racism in Auburn
  • GT 11/6/2001, the original report on the Halloween blackface incident
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