Knocked Up, Locked Up

The war on women is moving on up the stream at a rapid clip. The issue of women testing positive for drugs and/or/both alcohol when pregnant is the latest and greatest way to ensure that we are kept home knocked up and locked up behind the stove or behind bars, whichever.

The irony is that while the laws discussed in the below editorial and this article in Rolling Stone about this new war (move on past the rape one as we all need to) discusses how these laws are largely directed to the poor who are also the more highly prescribed people when it comes to opiates during pregnancy. Irony or is that a conflict of interest? So the Doctor gives you Percocet for the pain and in turn you become addicted, test positive and the OB/GYN calls the cops. I see this very Lion King and circle of life.

And add to that the many women are still shackled during labor and in turn during birth. Nothing says this bitch might escape during labor. Further indignities and shame is what our prison system is all about. Well mostly it is about profit the rest is a bonus!

How Not to Protect Pregnant Women

By DEBORAH TUERKHEIMER
APRIL 13, 2015
The New York Times
Opinion

CHICAGO — IN the wake of a savage attack on a pregnant woman and the removal of her fetus, Colorado lawmakers are planning to introduce a bill that would criminalize fetal homicide. If the bill passes, the state would join nearly 40 others that make fetuses a distinct class of victims. (The federal Unborn Victims of Violence Act of 2004 similarly makes it a crime to kill or injure a fetus in certain circumstances.)

This would not be the first time that lawmakers exploited an extraordinary incident of violence against a pregnant woman to promote the rights of fetal victims. In 2009, Indiana, for example, passed a draconian fetal homicide law after a horrific shooting of a bank teller who was pregnant with twins.

This type of legislation, however, is not about protecting the rights and well-being of the pregnant woman. Rather the reverse: The risk is that, without statutory reform, the pregnant woman as a category of victim will remain overlooked, while the fetus gets special protection.

Opposition to the creation of fetal victimhood has focused largely on the threat to abortion rights. This is a legitimate concern, but affording victim status to a fetus has implications beyond the erosion of abortion rights. Legally severing a fetus from the pregnant woman has the effect of pitting her interests against the fetus’s.

Over time, this move has increased the state’s power to interfere in the lives of pregnant women. Hence the experience of Alicia Beltran, who, in Wisconsin in 2013, during the second trimester of her pregnancy, was arrested and forced to enter inpatient drug treatment for a past pill addiction.

Granting personhood to fetuses makes women criminally responsible, not only for the life of the fetus, but also for its well-being. This is a particularly high burden. Pregnancy in our society tends to be idealized and women counted on to provide a perfect uterine environment.

Fetal rights can be employed to justify punishing any deviation from this standard. This is not hypothetical: Pregnant women have already been prosecuted for using drugs, refusing a cesarean section, having sex against a doctor’s recommendation and attempting suicide.

Prosecutors could, in theory, use the notion of “prenatal abuse” to pursue pregnant women who consumed too little folic acid; neglected exercise; gained too much or too little weight; continued on a course of anti-depressants; or had a stressful job. Under the mantle of fetal protection, pregnancy could become subject not only to criminal sanction but to pervasive state regulation.

In reality, those who are targeted by government intervention on behalf of the unborn tend to be the vulnerable and marginalized. In recent decades, hundreds of women, disproportionately low-income and African-American, have been prosecuted or subjected to court orders over behaviors like drug use that are considered a risk to developing fetuses. Often, these women are themselves victims of violence during pregnancy.

Of course, the impulse to punish violence against pregnant women differently is widely shared and understandable. In the case of the Colorado stabbing, the victim, Michelle Wilkins, suffered an injury that was entirely entwined with her pregnancy, an injury not specified in the statutes covering assault and attempted murder that already carry lengthy prison sentences.

Granting fetuses victim status, however, does not address the core harm. When violence is done to a pregnant woman, her reproductive freedom is trampled.

A woman who is assaulted while pregnant reasonably fears the consequences for a pregnancy that she has chosen to carry to term. Abuse during pregnancy can cause miscarriage and stillbirth, as well as maternal substance use, delayed entry into prenatal care and low birth weight. The victim’s interest in her developing fetus is thus violated.

The law should provide a remedy. Reform matters because abuse of pregnant women is so common. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that more than 300,000 pregnant women a year are victims of domestic violence. Unlike headline-grabbing cases like the Colorado attack, violence against pregnant women is usually inflicted not by strangers, but by current or former partners.

Yet the criminal law largely fails to account for how the fact of pregnancy defines the harm experienced by these women. Instead, Congress and most states have passed feticide laws. (A few states simply apply tougher penalties for existing offenses if the death or injury of a pregnant victim is involved.)

Only a few jurisdictions criminalize acts that cause a pregnant woman to lose her pregnancy. In 2013, Colorado enacted a crime of “unlawful termination of pregnancy” that expressly recognizes the pregnant woman as the victim of violence. Other states should follow suit and reject the wrongheaded logic of maternal-fetal conflict behind the new Colorado proposal.

That would be a start, but not sufficient. Cases of violence against pregnant women that don’t involve loss of pregnancy still lie largely beyond the reach of the law. A separate crime of assault on a pregnant woman would establish that a woman has a stake in her pregnancy, an interest worth protecting.

The War on Poors

As a Woman I would agree that there is a seeming war directed at our gender but it is also not gender specific, as in the case of men vs. women, it is about women who are poor.  70% of the poor are often in homes headed by women, so the majority of the poor is seemingly women.  But add to that the fact that many of the women are also minority in race that adds to the mix.

This is not just a war on women it is a war on the “poors.” You can call it the middle class, an utterly non existent minority, the “working” poor or the 99% or the 47%, whatever you call it, label it, this is a war on those who are not earning sufficient enough income to support their family, themselves, their homes, their communities and these children that seem to be the white flag waved to somehow excuse, explain or justify why every single assault, grenade and in turn legal decision is made.

In the last few weeks we have seen only one minority group succeed – our Gay brother and sisters. And while I applaud it I think it was largely the fact that that group touches many lives regardless of income, so to ensure that they are legally, and in turn financially (the most important reason as they are highly politically active) secure was essential to that ultimate decision.  Not to downgrade the level of import but there is always a secondary reason behind why anything is done in this Country.  

It cannot be overlooked as it was in the same week the Voter’s Right Act was decimated,  Affirmative Action was also put into play.  So while equality was given on one hand it was taken away by another.  Give and take as they say.

But look at the other way the “Poors” are ensured that their place and role in society is secured.  Denial of bank accounts.    Or how about College Aid discrimination.   Or we have the fact that the Government is also contributing to further denigration of stability in both working peoples lives and the economy as we move again to further sequestration.  The furlough plan that will do nothing but end up adding ultimately to layoffs and more unemployment

As President Obama stood in a warehouse applauding Amazon and their recent announcement of a hiring spree, the unspoken side was that the jobs were $11/hour jobs that were well documented in a Mother Jones article on how Amazon circumvents labor laws and the employees that are not in fact Amazon employees at all.  Ah pop the Champagne!

Broken, Busted, Beyond Repair. If you break you buy it. We built it, we own it, we have to fix it. But there is no one who seems willing or able to do the job. Odd as there are over 15 million people who would love to have that or any job.

The article below is a “sobering” one in both title and fact. So stop up that Champagne and realize that it may be a bit soon to celebrate.  The War on the Poors is just in cease fire mode for now, but in September it will be back on. Suit up or move to Estonia, things could be worse. 

Inequality in America: The Data Is Sobering

By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: July 30, 2013

Despite its riches, in many areas the United States looks depressingly backward. Addressing that will take more than the president’s words.”

The link below shows the variances in the United States to other Countries. Hey we beat Estonia!

Graphic

Measuring Us Against the World

The good news is that President Obama appears to have decided to devote the rest of his presidency to trying to tackle the forces behind the yawning inequities that have hamstrung social and economic mobility, eroding the living standards of the middle class.

The bad news is that he may not be up to the task.

Consider the ideas he outlined during his speech at Knox College last week. Some are old. Some are new. Some are good, some less so. But the main problem with the set is that the politically feasible — those that he articulated with the most specificity — are the least likely to change the nation’s economic dynamics.

Connecting the nation’s schools to broadband is a good idea. So is tweaking the tax code to help ordinary Americans save for retirement.

Measured against what the president called “the forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades,” however, they are less than overwhelming.

The president’s most powerful proposals, by contrast — including investment in infrastructure, a higher minimum wage and universal preschool for 4-year-olds — remain as unlikely as ever to emerge from the nation’s partisan divide.

Many opponents simply reject Mr. Obama’s basic premise. Some researchers on the right of the political spectrum argue that inequality is not, in fact, gaping. Others contend that middle class stagnation is a myth concocted by the left to justify retro government activism à la 1970s.

After the president’s speech, the conservative blogger James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute posted on Twitter: “I feel like I am in Middle-earth hearing about return of Sauron.”

The problem is that weaving modest policy proposals through the tiny spaces allowed by the nation’s partisan stalemate is unlikely to bear much fruit. A better strategy might be to articulate — forcefully — the nature of the problem and build a political consensus that would ultimately lead to long-delayed changes to American society.

It could go something like this:

The United States remains among the richest countries in the world. National income per person trails only that of Norway, Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland and Hong Kong. Yet despite its riches, in many areas the United States looks surprisingly, depressingly backward.

Infant and maternal mortality are the highest among advanced nations. So is the mortality rate of children under the age of 20. Life expectancy — at birth and at age 60 — is among the lowest.

Teenage pregnancy rates are not only higher than in other rich nations, they are higher than in Kazakhstan and Burundi. The United States has the highest rate of children living with a single parent among the industrialized nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Within the organization, only in Turkey, Mexico and Poland do more children live in poor homes.

These statistics may appear unrelated to the president’s vision of a society cleaved between a sliver of haves reaping ever-fatter rewards and hordes of have-nots who haven’t had a shot at a better life in at least a decade.

But they are intimately related not only to the problem but also to the nation’s willingness to solve it. They underscore how early underprivileged Americans fall behind.

America’s gaping inequality shows up everywhere, beyond the statistics for income. Rich families invest more in their children’s education. Educational opportunities are stacked against the poor and middle class: 60 percent of disadvantaged children go to disadvantaged schools with fewer and lower quality resources, according to a report on educational disparities.

Unsurprisingly, literacy is more lopsided than in most other industrial nations, according to international tests of 15-year-olds carried out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The gap between the top American scorers — at the 90th percentile of the distribution — and those in the middle is about as big as the gap between the average score in the United States and Azerbaijan.

In a globalized, high-tech world in which education has become a central determinant of economic success, it is hardly surprising that the prosperity of American children is more dependent on the prosperity of their parents than that of children in most other advanced countries.

How concerned is the American political system about these gaps? One way to look at it is by the effect of government actions on social outcomes. Take poverty. The United States has the 17th-highest poverty rate in the O.E.C.D., measured as the share of people who make do with less than half the median income, ranking around the middle of the pack.

If the same variable is measured after taking into account the effect of taxes and government spending programs, the American poverty rate jumps to fifth-worst.

And despite the president’s fiscal stimulus law, which lifted government spending in 2009 and 2010, the United States ranks among the bottom third of nations in the O.E.C.D. in terms of outlays on social programs — unemployment insurance, day care and the like — to help families deal with economic stress.

You would think Americans must be tiring of their lack of progress. The disposable income of families in the middle of the income distribution shrank by 4 percent between 2000 and 2010, according to data compiled by the O.E.C.D. In Australia, by contrast, it increased 40 percent. Middle-income Germans, Dutch, French, Danes, Norwegians and even Mexicans gained more ground.

And indeed Americans are tiring of it. Over half — 52 percent — say that the government should redistribute wealth by taxing the rich more, according to a Gallup poll in April, the highest share since Gallup first asked the question in 1998.

So there is reason to believe that a more forceful campaign against inequality than Mr. Obama has articulated so far would resonate. The United States is a rich country. Perhaps someday soon it will start behaving like one.

Ugly comparisons but hey that Estonia

Women, It Never Ends

This article is from yesterday’s New York Times and it seems to validate my feelings that having a Vagina is and of itself is high risk.

Much is discussed on this blog and in the media about the “war on women” and to summarize some of the current battles ongoing:

• Reproductive rights
• Rape and Assault in the Military
• Right to Combat on the Front Lines (considering that most of our Women Warriors are fighting their colleagues off, this should not even be debated)
• “Entitlements” such as day care, maternity leave, federal assistance for food, medical care, Education
• Health Care – women have and do pay higher premiums 
• Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence 
• Equal Pay 

My current Attorney (I think this one is number 3 that I have actually paid and still retain) said to me regarding my “alleged” assault;  if I took a lie detector and could show that I was telling the truth about the night in question and was willing to enter therapy for my “at risk” lifestyle I could resolve my legal matters.  Yes my “at risk” lifestyle of dating and going out with a man, whom I knew and dated in the past,  for a drink,  which he drugged and then took me somewhere for 3 hours without my knowledge or consent.    Sure and I will pay for all that too. Ironic is that it was also I who paid for the drugged drink and his too! That is a hell of a tab!

Yes I am the one with the “at risk” lifestyle, having a vagina in the world right now seems to be very risky. 

And then comes this that further actually supports this notion. The article below shows that most women when they get ovarian cancer don’t get the appropriate medical care and treatment needed that would enable them to survive the disease.  I wonder if Lance Armstrong would have survived his ball cancer with or without performance enhancing drugs if this was the protocol for men?  Just a thought.

What is more disturbing is the Medical Industrial Complex don’t give a shit. They go ahead chop, dice and dissect without regret and without concern.  Regardless of the kind of care you receive the bill is still the same – outrageous.  What the article neglects to mention are the costs associated with either the inadequate and inferior care versus the superior and therefore competent care.  I would love to see those itemized bills, including the 10K Aspirin.  And the article neglects to mention that many women cannot afford to do that shopping to find that kind of care.  Ah I remember when Mitt Romney suggested that as an option in getting care.  I wonder if bartering would also work?  Another wonderful suggestion from other Candidates for office a few years ago.

We have a broken system. Broken, shattered with its own cancer.  I don’t fear the disease as much as I fear the care givers that are in line to help me.  They are utterly incompetent and dangerous. There is your “at risk” behavior.  Perhaps they would take a lie detector before they ever lay a hand on me with their butchery. 

Widespread Flaws Found in Ovarian Cancer Treatment

By DENISE GRADY
Published: March 11. 2013

Most women with ovarian cancer receive inadequate care and miss out on treatments that could add a year or more to their lives, a new study has found.

The results highlight what many experts say is a neglected problem: widespread, persistent flaws in the care of women with this disease, which kills 15,000 a year in the United States. About 22,000 new cases are diagnosed annually, most of them discovered at an advanced stage and needing aggressive treatment. Worldwide, there are about 200,000 new cases a year.

Cancer specialists around the country say the main reason for the poor care is that most women are treated by doctors and hospitals that see few cases of the disease and lack expertise in the complex surgery and chemotherapy that can prolong life.

“If we could just make sure that women get to the people who are trained to take care of them, the impact would be much greater than that of any new chemotherapy drug or biological agent,” said Dr. Robert E. Bristow, the director of gynecologic oncology at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author of the new study presented on Monday at a meeting of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology in Los Angeles.

The study found that only a little more than a third of patients received the best possible care, confirming a troubling pattern that other studies have also documented.

Karen Mason, 61, from Pitman, N.J., had been a nurse for 28 years when she was found to have ovarian cancer in 2001. She scheduled surgery with her gynecologist, who was not a cancer surgeon.

But her sisters would not allow it. They had gone on the Internet, and became convinced — rightly, according to experts — that she should go to a major cancer center.

“They took the reins out of my hands,” Ms. Mason said.

She wound up having a long, complicated and successful operation performed by a gynecologic oncologist, which she does not believe her gynecologist could have done.

Dr. Barbara A. Goff, a professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Washington, in Seattle, who was not part of Dr. Bristow’s study, said the problem with ovarian cancer care was clear: “We’re not making the most use of things that we know work well.”

What works best is meticulous, extensive surgery and aggressive chemotherapy. Ovarian cancer spreads inside the abdomen, and studies have shown that survival improves if women have surgery called debulking, to remove all visible traces of the disease. Taking out as much cancer as possible gives the drugs a better chance of killing whatever is left. The surgery may involve removing the spleen, parts of the intestine, stomach and other organs, as well as the reproductive system.

The operations should be done by gynecologic oncologists, said Dr. Deborah Armstrong of Johns Hopkins University, who is not a surgeon. But many women, she said, are operated on by general surgeons and gynecologists.

Some women prefer the obstetricians who delivered their children. Many are desperate to start treatment and think there is no time to find a specialist. Some do not know that gynecologic oncologists exist. Some inexperienced doctors may find the cancer unexpectedly during surgery and try to remove it, but not do a thorough job.

“If this was breast cancer, and two-thirds of women were not getting guideline care that improves survival, you know what kind of hue and cry there would be,” said Dr. Armstrong, who was not involved in the study. But in ovarian cancer, she said: “There’s not as big an advocacy community. The women are a little older, sicker and less prone to be activists.”

One patient advocacy group, the Ovarian Cancer National Alliance, ranks the availability of a gynecologic oncologist as one of its criteria in comparing the quality of care among states.

Surgeons who lack expertise in ovarian cancer should refer women to specialists if the women are suspected to have the disease, but often do not, Dr. Goff said.

Dr. Bristow’s research, which has been submitted to a medical journal but not yet published, was based on the medical records of 13,321 women with ovarian cancer diagnosed from 1999 to 2006 in California. They had the most common type, called epithelial. Only 37 percent received treatment that adhered to guidelines set by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, an alliance of 21 major cancer centers with expert panels that analyze research and recommend treatments. The guidelines for ovarian cancer specify surgical procedures and chemotherapy, depending on the stage of the disease.

Surgeons who operated on 10 or more women a year for ovarian cancer, and hospitals that treated 20 or more a year, were more likely to stick to the guidelines, the study found. And their patients lived longer. Among women with advanced disease — the stage at which ovarian cancer is usually first found — 35 percent survived at least five years if their care met the guidelines, compared with 25 percent of those whose care fell short.

But most of the women in the study, more than 80 percent, were treated by what the researchers called “low-volume” providers — surgeons with 10 or fewer cases a year, and hospitals with 20 or fewer.

Dr. Bristow said women should ask surgeons how often they operate on women with ovarian cancer and how often they achieve complete debulking. But he also acknowledged that many patients hesitate to ask for fear of offending the doctor who may operate on them.

Ovarian cancer has unusual traits that make it more treatable than some other cancers. It is less likely to spread through the bloodstream and lymph system to distant organs like the lungs and brain. The tumors do spread, but usually within the abdomen and pelvis, where they tend to coat other organs but not eat into them and destroy them, said Dr. Matthew A. Powell, a gynecologic oncologist and associate professor at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

And most ovarian cancers are extremely sensitive to chemotherapy, experts said.

In 2006, a study was published that many doctors thought would change the field forever. It compared standard intravenous chemotherapy with a regimen that pumped the drugs directly into the abdomen. The test regimen was highly toxic, and not all patients could tolerate it. But median survival on it was 65.6 months, compared with 49.7 months on the standard treatment — a survival difference of 15.9 months.

The gain was huge, almost unheard of. New cancer drugs are often approved if they buy patients just a few months. The test treatment — called intraperitoneal, or IP therapy — did not even use new drugs. It just gave the old ones in a different way. Several previous studies had had similar findings for IP therapy, but the 2006 study, led by Dr. Armstrong, had the most definitive results.

The National Cancer Institute took a rare step, one it reserves for major advances. It issued a “clinical announcement” to encourage doctors to use the IP treatment, and to urge patients to ask about it. Cancer specialists predicted that the announcement would lead to widespread changes in treatment. Expert guidelines said it should be offered to every patient considered strong enough to endure it.

Seven years later, Dr. Armstrong and other physicians said, IP therapy still has not caught on.

Part of the reason may involve money, Dr. Armstrong said. With IP chemotherapy, patients also need a lot of intravenous fluids, which means unusually long treatment sessions. Oncologists are paid for treatments, not for time, so for those in private practice, long sessions can eat away at income.

“You don’t make a lot of money with somebody in the chair getting IV fluids,” Dr. Armstrong said. “Chair time is money. I’m being a cynic here, but I think that is part of the issue.”

Dr. Goff said: “Where I live, in the Pacific Northwest, IP chemotherapy is pretty much only being done in the major medical centers, and by very few private-practice oncologists. Many say it’s too difficult, and they don’t even offer it to patients, which I think is unethical.”

Ms. Mason had six hours of surgery at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, with a gynecologic oncologist. The cancer had spread to lymph nodes, and was Stage 3. The surgeon removed her ovaries, fallopian tubes, various lymph nodes, uterus, cervix and omentum (part of the tissue that lines the inside of the abdomen).

“Ovarian cancer looks like Rice Krispies all over the place,” Ms. Mason said. “She spent most of the time picking out each little visible Rice Krispy, and left nothing behind that she could see with her naked eye.”

Then, Ms. Mason had chemotherapy (not IP, because it was not being done at the time). The disease has not recurred. Had she stuck with the first doctor, she believes, “I would be gone.”

“I feel so strongly about letting women know that you need to get to a center of excellence,” Ms. Mason said. “It’s shocking to think it’s still not happening.”

Living In a Barbie World

So I am reading Builder Online and I nearly sustained another Traumatic Brain Injury from smashing my head against the desk.

The full article is here and it is of course written by a man so its focus is of course less on reality and more on fantasy. And it is a Real Estate site and nothing says predator and money more than the same group who targeted lower income individuals into buying homes they could ill afford. But hey who is pointing fingers and laying blame here? Not me says Ayn Rand. 

As an ABB (aging boomer broad) who fits into that interesting description “Barbie” woman, I can assure you buying a home is not on the agenda.  In fact owing a Barbie Car is not on my agenda either. Which is a good thing as I can’t afford the Barbie garage either, the Barbie insurance, gas or upkeep of either the house or the car.  So I am less Barbie, more Midge, Barbie’s best friend who was oddly less attractive as well; its always that way,  seen the movie Bridesmaids?

The article states that more Women are “childless” and are living on their own. He particularly notes the dream demographic, and given that we are referencing Barbie that is not surprising, are women 25-34.  Good to know that once again we Boomers who invented “don’t trust anyone over 30” would come back and bite us in the ass. Well Karma is a bitch, not shocking her name is Barbie.

So in historical analysis women are buying more homes because women are remaining unmarried and childless. Okay, isn’t that what we all want?  Well no, in fact many States are going out their way to ensure that options, such as child bearing, becomes increasingly difficult.  And we have challenges to the notion of what defines Marriage in this country which means Ken, Barbie might be more than BFF to Midge, so let’s take that option of the table as well.

The idea that Women are getting more Education and graduating College in higher numbers doesn’t mean Women are earning more.  While home ownership may have changed real wages in comparison have not.   We had to have President Obama sign the Lily Ledbetter Act to ensure parity in wages, an issue that should have been resolved DECADES ago in the Equal Pay Act, but no.  And we have further challenges to Women’s security in the Violence Against Women Act as a debatable subject and a law that has lapsed. So the War on Women it’s here, it’s Afghanistan, it’s in India.  It is Global. Well Barbie was a traveler but with house payments, and that college debt she is toting as well,  she might have to make it a Staycation.

Then I read this article in the WSJ about America’s falling birth rates.  And by those the WSJ means white women, aka Barbie.  And they somehow connect that women’s Vagina’s as incoming only is a part of the problem in our failing Economy and if somehow we just had more babies, innovation, economic security and other social ills would all be resolved by an increasing birth rate. Well there is one good thing about being an ABB, finally!

There is not a day that goes by that I don’t read about an act of violence towards women. And that word violence has a broad meaning. And I am one broad who means it.  The amount of Rape, Assault, Discrimination and references to women that border on disturbingly antiquated and outdated continue well into the 21st Century.   We have elected Representatives saying such phrases as “legitimate rape” and children of rape part of God’s plan- Rape is excused however;  young Athletes coddled and protected by Schools and Adults when they commit crimes; towns in places like North Dakota that women are unsafe in.  Is this America really?

Ken we have a problem here. It is not Barbie it’s you.

Let’s Hope 13 is Lucky

I am going with yes it will be, after 2012 and the global drama that marked that year its time to make 13 a lucky number.

So to mark a year that I wish was never was, I have come up with a Top 12 list.  Part year end review, part resolutions, it marks the moments in the year that are promises to move onward and forward.  We should always aspire to do such in all of our lives regardless of the year or the number.

1.  Avoid the word “Green”  Thanks to the most poorly written law of last year, Marijuana is legal in Washington State and (hopefully my future State home, Colorado). I cannot comment on Colorado but when I realized what a good idea wrapped in bad law I had flashbacks to another one that I have mixed feelings about – Affordable Care Act aka “Obamacare.” 

Because green is now another euphemism for MJ, Ganja, Mary Jane or whatever the kids today say, I have had hundreds of calls asking if they can “find their right shade of green.”  Add to that the irony that my business number begins with 420.  You have no idea.  New business, new year and green is just a color in my closet.

Green in the industry is like many words,  it’s overused and its meaning has been Greenwashed. So this baby is out with the green water.

2.  Social Media and Apps.  This is another overused form of nonsense that I have never really got but I tried I really did.   The obsession with both have people unable to walk the streets without a phone in their hand and they are not talking on it but to it.  Try a real conversation.  And the other is the overwhelming need to find ways of more subliminal advertising buried within some faux concept or idea.  I think there is enough advertising and stuff to buy but apparently having it utterly in every way and aspect in your life is not enough.   The same people who have the arrogant audacity to say to me they don’t watch TV its nothing but ads carries a phone that is what? Nothing but ads.  Good luck with it. 

3.  Move.  I need to move.  Starting now by moving on. 

4. Keep standing. After what happened to me this year I have never been more determined to remain standing. The idea of being taken to the horror that was Harborview on a stretcher ever again is enough for me to welcome the idea of becoming a Vampire to ensure this. 

5. War on Women.  It’s not.  It is a war on the “Poors”.  And women are largely in that category, along with Minorities, Immigrants and Gays, there is a fear by the another vaguely designated group called the “white establishment” that they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.  Well I have been there, done that, read the book, seen the movie and bought the t-shirt. Anyone who has lived through the 60s, 70s and 80s have seen all of the above attacked, marginalized and still come out fighting.  There is safety if not power in numbers. Come together, right now, you and me. 

I never want to see this Sandra Fluke person on TV again, btw.  This girl, a student at a very prestigious law school, has the audacity to claim insult because a fat blowhard, Rush Limbaugh, called her a slut.   Lady my mother used to say “sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you.” 

I have never heard such outrage and again why I am distancing myself from Social Moronia because another woman claimed the same outrage over a man who was her “cyber” boyfriend.  You have got to be kidding me. 

Both women share two things in common. They were insulted by men whom they had never met and they are both attention whores.  Yes I called them names too!  Honestly this is insane to think that being called a name is akin to what women who have been in abusive relationships, harmed by parents, caregivers or raped and assaulted physically.

If the young woman in India who died “last year” been so lucky. If the women and girls killed in Afghanistan had been so lucky killed for going to school.  If health care aids in Pakistan who are trying to save lives by giving children in their communities life saving drugs been so lucky.   Even I as I still try to resolve what happened to me that fateful night of February 8, still think I am lucky to be alive to allow me the opportunity to resolve it.

So when I see such absurdity by women who attach themselves to this via their tangential connection to some idiot who called them names, I cannot support this notion of a war on women.  We are a much larger community and we need to see our struggles in relation to those around us.  We are in this together. When separate we are weaker,  together we are stronger.  

The writer Junot Diaz was on Moyers and Co. and he makes salient points about this need to self identify is a reason to self isolate and in turn not find company and support with those are the same but “different.”  The show link is here.  Watch and listen.  Two things in the Polaroid Nation are tough to do but give it a try.  

That is my top 5 Resolutions for now.  I think having resolve is why I still stand. I  have given myself an “A” for effort for I have done this mostly “alone” in “anger” but I am still “alive.”

Defense of Women

I am not sure I am of late the biggest advocate of women.  But when it comes to our Military, I have great respect for the women in our Armed Services.  They have enormous odds to overcome when entering a field long dominated by men and a culture that advocates violence as a means to survival.  That is really what it means to be in war, kill or be killed. When you hear of Troops speak of their experience in war zones they often speak of their comrades with a respect and admiration that crosses into immense dedication and devotion. They are your “brothers in arms”  Well today those brothers are often sisters and unfortunately that familial respect does not extend to the women with whom they serve.

Much was made about the removal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the affects it would have on the morality of the troops and here we are a year later with little or no fallback regarding that policy. Well it goes to show that men have no problem sharing a bunk or a tank with one of the same gender regardless of sexuality.  The truth cannot be said about women.

The article below shows that little has been made with regards to women in the Military. They are still largely victims of sexual assault, aggression and overall discrimination and when all else fails they are “don’t tell don’t ask” when it comes to seeking resolution.  Well it is pretty much the same in the regular world.  A system dominated by men is not one open to hearing about the predilections and depravity of their fellow men.   And that extends to the Sandusky scandal of Penn State and in England with the current story about the late television star, Jimmy Savile,  and his decades of sexual molesting children and the subsequent supression  of the story by the BBC.

But in all honesty the most “Mr Yuck” faces I receive when discussing my assault are from women. I believe that while men are shamed, women are simply so afraid that they cannot react sanely or rationally about this when they are simply relieved its not them and afraid it could be.  Not that its an excuse or explanation why I find women so incredibly unkind but it seems reasonable.

War on women its not just by men.

Military Has Not Solved Problem of Sexual Assault, Women Say 

By James Risen

Published November 2, 2012

WASHINGTON — Jennifer Smith, an Air Force technical sergeant, walked into the office of a senior officer at Kunsan Air Base in South Korea with an armful of paperwork. Instead of signing the documents, she said, he insisted that she sit down. “He said to me, ‘It’s Friday afternoon, why don’t you take off your blouse and get comfortable?’ ” Sergeant Smith recalled.

In Germany, a master sergeant who offered to escort her home tried to sexually assault her, she said, and was deterred only when co-workers intervened. At Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, where she eventually complained about pornography and other graphic material on her unit’s computers, a supervisor warned her to keep quiet, she said. 

During her 17-year career as an enlisted woman performing administrative work for Air Force fighter squadrons, Sergeant Smith said, she has endured repeated sexual assaults and harassment. She said she has decided to speak out now after keeping silent for many years because senior officers were involved or appeared to tolerate improper behavior by fighter pilots, one of the military’s most elite groups. 

“I learned quickly that the enlisted females who do well are the ones who keep their mouths shut,” said Sergeant Smith, who filed a formal complaint last month charging that the Air Force has turned a blind eye to pervasive sexual attacks and harassment against women. “It’s a career ender to come forward.” 

The Air Force declined to comment on her allegations, citing privacy laws, but said it acts to combat such misconduct. “The goal for sexual assault in the United States Air Force is zero,” Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, the Air Force chief of staff, said in a written statement. “If you’re a commander or a supervisor and you are not directly and aggressively involved in speaking up about this issue in your unit, then you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” 

Faced with lawsuits and mounting evidence of widespread sexual abuse in the military, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta acknowledged this year that the number of sexual assaults in the military is probably far higher than the official statistics show, because so many episodes are covered up. More than 3,000 sexual assault cases were reported in 2011 throughout all of the military services, but Mr. Panetta said that the actual figures could be as high as 19,000. 

The Defense Department has found that about one in three women in the military has been sexually assaulted, compared with one in six civilian women. About 20 percent of female veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan have experienced some form of sexual assault or related trauma, according to the Veterans Administration. “Despite the implementation of prevention programs and improved reporting mechanisms, female soldiers continue to experience sexual harassment and assault and are reluctant to report incidences,” a 2011 Labor Department report concluded. 

Susan Burke, a Washington lawyer representing women who said they were victims of sexual assault or harassment and who have filed a series of lawsuits against the Pentagon beginning last year, said that since then more than 500 additional women, including Sergeant Smith, and a few men, have contacted her for help. 

The Air Force and other services have instituted programs to deter abuses and discipline those who commit them. But Sergeant Smith, who is still on active duty with the 20th Fighter Wing at Shaw, and others in the Air Force said that many women are skeptical. 

Air Force Technical Sgt. Kimberly Davis, assigned to Stewart Air National Guard Base in New York, said that after she reported being raped, officers on the base, including one assigned to handle sexual assault cases, conspired to cover up the episode. “The sexual assault program in the Air Force is a joke,” she said. 

Lola Miles, a former Air Force helicopter mechanic at Hurlburt Field in Florida, said that when she told senior officers that a male co-worker had repeatedly hit her at work and made vulgar remarks to her, they joked about it. Instead of taking action against her co-worker, she said, the leaders in her unit sought to discredit her and force her out of the Air Force. Both she and Sergeant Davis have filed lawsuits against the Air Force. 

Sergeant Smith, 35, has worked with fighter squadrons inside the United States and overseas for most of her career. Her account of abuse suggests that more than 20 years after Tailhook, the infamous 1991 scandal involving Navy fighter pilots, little has changed in the insular fighter pilot culture.

“They can’t deal with women in fighter squadrons,” Sergeant Smith said. “The military is going ahead with getting rid of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ but they still aren’t even ready to deal with women.

“The pilots know we think of them like our heroes,” she added. “It’s just a game to them, really.”

Sergeant Smith’s allegations could not be independently confirmed because she had not formally reported the episodes, many of which happened years ago, until now. Several other people in the Air Force who she said knew of some of the episodes, including her husband, who is an enlisted man in the 20th Fighter Wing, declined to be interviewed for this article, citing fears of retribution. Her wing commander, Col. Clay W. Hall, did not address any specifics, but said in a written statement: “We take these matters with utmost seriousness. All allegations of misconduct are investigated immediately and actions are taken appropriately.” 

Sergeant Smith’s written administrative complaint filed with the Air Force notes that she has consistently received high marks in performance reviews. She joined the Air Force in 1995, out of high school in Salamanca, N.Y. The next year, during her first overseas temporary duty assignment at Sembach Air Base in Germany, she was assaulted by a master sergeant in his room after a night of drinking, she said. Male co-workers who came to the rescue warned that the sergeant had a reputation for preying on young enlisted women, she said. 

At Kunsan in South Korea in 2001, Sergeant Smith said, she was walking in the America Town bar district near the base when a group of fighter pilots rushed out of a bar, carried her inside and threw her on top of a table. About 30 pilots crowded around. She had been caught up in a “sweep,” when fighter pilots grab women off the street for “naming ceremonies,” or drinking parties to celebrate a pilot’s new nickname. “Some of the pilots called Kunsan ‘the land of do as you please,’ ” Sergeant Smith said. “They could get away with anything.” 

That same year, while attending a party at the base commander’s home at Kunsan, several pilots grabbed her and bound her and a pilot together with duct tape despite her resistance, she said. Twenty or more pilots gathered around, but nothing was done to stop it. 

When she was transferred to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, Sergeant Smith, by then married to the enlisted man in her unit, attended a family event in 2003 with the squadron at the Arizona Diamondbacks stadium, where an Air Force pilot made sexual remarks to her in front of her husband. The couple went back to the base and complained to the operations director of their squadron about the harassment she endured, she said. 

Nothing came of it, but when she arrived at her next assignment at Shaw, a supervisor pulled her aside and said she had a reputation for being too outspoken. “He said he wanted to make sure I understood my place in the world, and if not, things could be harder on me,” she recalled. 

She said she finally got fed up and decided to go public after discovering large collections of pornography and other sexually graphic and offensive materials stored on the unit’s computers and in a vault supposedly reserved for classified documents at Shaw. She complained to senior officers, who promised they would get rid of the materials, but then did nothing. 

“I’ve been able to serve my country, but I’ve also had to put up with a lot,” the sergeant said. “I want it to be changed.”

Priorities People!

The Business section of the New York Times framed itself with two articles that I found amusing. The one is Wall Street Pay is still too big to fail. The other was about the drop in Governmental support for children, from Education to Medicine. You know the one’s that are used in every single scenario, justification or explanation. “We must do this for future generations”

This is ironic when it actually comes to doing anything for any generation other than the Greatest one. Its not Boomers actually the ones running amok with the complaints. Take a good close look at the ages of some of the largest complainers about the current state of America, they are all well past 70 and are inordinately wealthy and secure from ever needing a safety net for they or theirs. Their future generations are quite secure thank you very much but it sounds good on paper.

I reprint them both. What more can I say. I have said it before. The boomers against women’s reproductive rights are because they came of age when theirs weren’t secure so why bother; they are just reaching Social Security or sold their house during the boon so they are financially safe and secure; their health care is secure thanks to Medicare and they were likely not part of the big 401K debacle so they have pensions and secure income. They are just fine. They like their Greatest Generation counterparts have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, neglecting to mention they came of an age and time when Government was in its biggest boon in building a secure safety nets and business was doing just great with no global competition so what is the problem right?

This is the Me Me Mine Generation and they have passed that skill on well. I cannot wait to see the incestuous community reality show on Bravo about the Silicon Valley youth just looking for their million one startup at a time. I should make about one episode before longing for the Housewives of some City to remind me why there is a war on women.

A Bigger Paycheck on Wall Stree

By SUSANNE CRAIG and BEN PROTESS

Outside the New York Stock Exchange in the financial district, where jobs have been pared back. It still pays to be on Wall Street.

The financial industry in New York has slashed jobs by the thousands over the last two years. For those who remain, annual compensation in total is at near-record levels, according to a report released Tuesday by the New York State comptroller.

Since the financial crisis, Wall Street firms have wrestled with two competing market forces. Faced with a heavier regulatory burden, a lethargic economic recovery and the loss of once-big moneymakers like complex derivatives tied to mortgages, the banks have instead tried to cut their biggest expense: people. Yet there persists a view on Wall Street that profits can’t come simply by holding the line on costs — big pay is still needed to lure talent from other firms.

Toward that end, firms have sought to cut jobs and noncompensation expenses rather than compensation itself. Both Goldman Sachs and Bank of America have announced big noncompensation cost-cutting efforts over the past year, for example.

The result is that compensation over all continues to rise even as some shareholders press firms to cut costs further amid weak profit growth. (Nearly half of all revenue on Wall Street is earmarked for compensation; in 2009, Morgan Stanley, which was hit harder during the crisis than most of its rivals, found itself paying out a record 62 percent of its net revenue in compensation and benefits. That number has since come down.)

The report showed that total compensation on Wall Street last year rose 4 percent, to more than $60 billion. That was higher than any total except those in 2007 and 2008 — before the financial crisis fully took its toll on pay.

The average pay package of securities industry employees in New York State was $362,950, up 16.6 percent over the last two years.

“It’s good work if you can get it,” said Thomas P. DiNapoli, the comptroller.

The results are sure to raise eyebrows on Main Street and in Washington, where lavish pay packages have come under attack since the crisis.

Still, the report provides only a snapshot of Wall Street’s finances. The wage data largely covers 2011. With the third quarter in the books, Wall Street firms will soon begin figuring out their bonus pool and how to distribute it. For some Wall Street professionals, the year-end bonus can easily account for more than half their total compensation.

Yet expectations for this year appear to be high, according to another study out on Tuesday. Some 48 percent of 911 Wall Street employees surveyed by eFinancialCareers.com said they felt their bonuses this year would higher than in 2011. That was an increase from 2011, when 41 percent of survey respondents said they believed their annual bonus would increase.

There, the comptroller’s report was not encouraging, saying that a survey it took earlier in the year suggested that Wall Street’s total cash bonus pool for 2012 was likely to decline for the second consecutive year.

The comptroller’s report attested to the importance of financial services to New York City. Financial jobs accounted for nearly a quarter of all private sector wages paid in the city last year, even though they accounted for just a fraction, 5.3 percent, of the city’s private sector jobs.

Over all, the annual report depicted a cloudy outlook for the financial industry and its thousands of employees.

“The securities industry remains in transition and volatility in profits and employment show that we have not yet reached the new normal,” Mr. DiNapoli said.

After posting a “disappointing” $7.7 billion in earnings last year, Wall Street in the first half of 2012 earned $10.5 billion, he said. The industry “is on pace” to earn more than $15 billion by the end of the year.

But even with some signs of improvement, Wall Street is rapidly shedding jobs. The austerity efforts have claimed 1,200 positions so far this year, according to the report. Mr. DiNapoli estimated that the industry lost more than 20,000 jobs since late 2007.

“In the short run, as a way to keep profits up, the firms will drive down costs and that will mean contraction in the work force,” Mr. DiNapoli said.

Goldman Sachs had 32,300 on the payroll at the end of its second quarter in June, down 3,200 people from the year-ago period. Bank of America has cut 12,624 employees over the past year, leaving it with 275,460 people.

Banks have also taken aim at lavish cash bonuses. The comptroller in February estimated that cash bonuses declined 13.5 percent, to $19.7 billion.

As Wall Street reins in cash payouts to top executives, the banks have been encouraged to reward employees with more stock and other long-term compensation. Some people argue that such a move discourages outsize risk-taking and ties an employee’s interest to the long-term health of the bank.

While pay remains high across the board, senior executive pay has fallen since the financial crisis. In 2007, the year before the financial crisis, Goldman’s chief executive, Lloyd C. Blankfein, made $68.5 million. In 2011 he took home $12 million.

For an executive like Mr. Blankfein, $12 million may be a pay cut, but it is still a princely sum compared with other industries. Between 2009 and 2011, compensation in the securities industry grew at an average annual rate of 8.7 percent, outpacing 5.3 percent for the rest of the private sector.

“Whether you love or hate people on Wall Street, they are spending money that is driving our economy,” Mr. DiNapoli said.

Cutbacks and the Fate of the Young

By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: October 9, 2012

During the presidential debate last week, Mitt Romney reminded us that it is our children, and grandchildren, who will end up paying for our budget deficits. His comment about the immorality of passing on such a large bill is a welcome reminder that our generation bears responsibility for the well-being of the next.

But the nation’s growing debt is not the only threat to our children’s future. We need a broader debate about how to ensure that the next generation — the children of today and the taxpaying adults of tomorrow — have a fair shot at prosperity.

Right now, the next generation is getting shortchanged all around, with children too often treated as an afterthought in policies meant to appeal to their elders. The United States tolerates the highest rate of child poverty in the developed world. Yet federal expenditures on children — including everything from their share of Medicaid and the earned-income tax credit to targeted efforts like child nutrition and education programs — fell 1 percent last year and will fall an additional 4 percent this year, to $428 billion, according to estimates by the Urban Institute based on the Congressional Budget Office’s projections.

The federal government spent $8 billion less on child health last year than it did the previous year, as fiscal stimulus programs to combat the Great Recession were phased out. It cut aid to states to pay for primary education by about the same amount.

The states, which provide more than 60 percent of the total government dollars spent on children, aren’t in great shape either. According to the Urban Institute’s estimates, state and municipal spending on children fell in each of the last three years.

And the outlook is not much better for the coming decade. Despite health care reform, which will lead to coverage for millions of uninsured children, the Urban Institute forecasts that federal expenditures on children — including direct spending and tax breaks — will shrink to about 2.3 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2022, from 3 percent last year.

Children have needs besides sound fiscal accounts. Deprived childhoods lay the groundwork for future social ills. We have the third-worst rate of infant mortality among 30 industrialized countries and the second-highest teenage pregnancy rate, after Mexico. We’re in the bottom quarter of countries in terms of literacy. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, half of American children born to low-income parents grow up to be low-income adults.

Investing in children is not just a matter of fairness but of economic vitality. Early interventions to help disadvantaged children can have an enormous return. They improve children’s cognitive and social abilities. They promote healthy behavior. They increase productivity and reduce crime. Investing in education is about as good an investment as a society can make.

With all the concern about the next generation’s fiscal future, these investments are falling by the wayside. If Mr. Romney becomes the next president and delivers on his promise to cap federal spending at 20 percent of the nation’s economic product while increasing the defense budget, programs for youth are bound to shrink even below the Urban Institute’s estimates.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, if Mr. Romney spared those 55 and over from any changes to Medicare or Social Security, as his campaign has promised, spending on everything else would have to be cut by more than $6 trillion from 2014 to 2022. The center did not specify how this would affect the young. But a repeal of health care reform would drastically reduce health benefits. The budget for Medicaid, which is the biggest federal program serving children, would be cut by almost $2 trillion over 10 years.

There is good reason to be worried about our long-term budget deficits. They are indeed projected to be huge — driven mostly by the growing health care spending of an aging population. Medicare will absorb about 6.7 percent of the nation’s economic output by 2037, up from 3.7 percent today, under the most likely situation laid out by the Congressional Budget Office.

Though President Obama and Mr. Romney acknowledge the American economy can’t afford that, they have each devoted a big chunk of their campaigns to convincing seniors that their benefits will not be compromised. Social Security and Medicare “are bedrock commitments that America makes to its seniors,” President Obama said in a speech to the AARP last month. The Republican vice-presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, told the same gathering, “Medicare is a promise, and we will keep it.” The generation whose taxes will be footing the bill in 2037 doesn’t get the same type of commitment.

Isabel Sawhill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a co-director of its Center on Children and Families, argues it is time to reconsider the intergenerational deal that has held since Social Security’s inception in the 1930s. The assumption behind it was that working-age Americans could support their children and every senior would be able to retire at age 65.

Today, this compact is under strain. Health spending has skyrocketed while middle-class wages have failed to keep up with the cost of living. The old are living longer and collecting more benefits than before. Even under new measures of poverty that account for seniors’ high medical spending, poverty rates among children have surpassed deprivation among the old. Seniors, Ms. Sawhill suggests, could shoulder more costs so that more of the money from working Americans could be devoted to the young.

There are ways to do this while still protecting the most vulnerable seniors. Social Security benefits could be indexed to slow their growth for high-income seniors. Wealthier retirees might bear a larger share of their medical expenses. The retirement age could be raised.

The challenge isn’t going to get any easier as we keep aging and medical costs keep rising faster than economic growth. But so far the presidential candidates have stopped short of any fundamental change to the longstanding generational compact.

Mr. Obama proposes to address the problem by raising taxes on the rich. He hopes the Affordable Care Act can wring a lot of excess from our health care system — reducing Medicare costs along the way. The plan is likely to come up short, however. The efficiency gains remain hypothetical. And while raising more money from high-income Americans is a first step, most economists believe that to avoid cuts in health benefits the government must raise taxes on the middle class.

Mr. Romney’s plan could be more radical: replacing Medicare with vouchers for Americans to buy health insurance and capping the vouchers to control spending directly. But he has already said he would exempt most of the baby boom generation from his reforms. And he has been careful not to disclose any details — repudiating earlier proposals from his running mate that would have raised how much seniors pay out of pocket, fearful of an intense reaction.

If the next generation is going to be handed the bill for our budget deficits, we might as well make the investments needed to help it bear the burden. So far, we seem on track to bequeath our children a double whammy: a mountain of debt and substantial program cuts that will undermine their ability to shoulder it when their time comes.

The Battle Rages On

As this is the War on Women I have wondered who the perpetrators are. I have seen high profile dustups between highly successful women debating the nonsense of what defines “having it all.” Then we had the war of the words between two very different but still intelligent women selling us not on why they would make great First Ladies but why their husbands would be the best at their jobs, relegating themselves to the secondary position as supportive first mate. Then we have women debating other women over their own personal reproductive right while also decrying the role of Government in a person’s private life.

I recall all of these same debates and they are not new. I thought we were done with them and had moved past it but not so. As I have found out that many of the most condemnation I faced has come from women. So I will frequently point out that this army is not one gender divided. Its generational, political, economical or ideological. I find that when a person, regardless of gender, has never experienced/heard/know of anything outside their comfort range aka “bubbleator” they have no way of effectively communicating. So we have a massive divide in this country that gender is just a part.

The editorial below is about this myth that women are having it all at the decline of men. When you simply read the basic facts, the real numbers and truths they belie the believe or misconception that women are the winners in this “man-cession.” It appears that everything is the same as it always was. Shock no.

It has gotten worse when it comes to working with men. It was not that before the economic collapse and its why I had to rethink what I wanted to do with my business and why ironically I am going back to Education. After a while you simply get tired of climbing mountains alone. I have no desire however to return to public education and would prefer a secondary alternative environment that is more voc than tech. I still believe in the vocational sector and there is room there for all regardless of gender. I am way over the term “consultant” and have long preferred “educator” as that is really what understanding sustainability is – an educational one, teaching others and in turn enabling and empowering them to make independent decisions and choices. I am constantly learning and in turn I would much rather share what I learn then “tell” anyone this is how it should be done. Perhaps that is why more women are Teachers.

I put the article below and have highlighted what I think is relevant to the essentials. And I do believe that much of the resolutions and solutions are going to have to come from women frankly. There are few mentors and teachers to help women assume roles of leadership. And why? Because women see each other as competitors not collaborators. When you see an enemy instead of an ally you have what we have, women beneath the ceiling rather than above it. And when its acceptable for women to not take on a stronger role speaking of their accomplishments and their choices in ways that are honest regarding the bigger picture we will continue to hear only sound bites that are not filling. And this also relates to the men in the home. Why should men be seen as less for also making choices that are less than “traditional.” We all make choices but the penalties for women are often impossible to overcome.

Its why I am sure that women are so much more than “moms in chief”. We need to get past that to just being a woman in chief.

The Myth of Male Decline
By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Published: September 29, 2012 235

SCROLL through the titles and subtitles of recent books, and you will read that women have become “The Richer Sex,” that “The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” and that we may even be seeing “The End of Men.” Several of the authors of these books posit that we are on the verge of a “new majority of female breadwinners,” where middle-class wives lord over their husbands while demoralized single men take refuge in perpetual adolescence.

How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology, occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only 17 percent of Congress?

These books and the cultural anxiety they represent reflect, but exaggerate, a transformation in the distribution of power over the past half-century. Fifty years ago, every male American was entitled to what the sociologist R. W. Connell called a “patriarchal dividend” — a lifelong affirmative-action program for men.

The size of that dividend varied according to race and class, but all men could count on women’s being excluded from the most desirable jobs and promotions in their line of work, so the average male high school graduate earned more than the average female college graduate working the same hours. At home, the patriarchal dividend gave husbands the right to decide where the family would live and to make unilateral financial decisions. Male privilege even trumped female consent to sex, so marital rape was not a crime.

The curtailment of such male entitlements and the expansion of women’s legal and economic rights have transformed American life, but they have hardly produced a matriarchy. Indeed, in many arenas the progress of women has actually stalled over the past 15 years.

Let’s begin by determining which is “the richer sex.”

Women’s real wages have been rising for decades, while the real wages of most men have stagnated or fallen. But women’s wages started from a much lower base, artificially held down by discrimination. Despite their relative improvement, women’s average earnings are still lower than men’s and women remain more likely to be poor.

Today women make up almost 40 percent of full-time workers in management. But the median wages of female managers are just 73 percent of what male managers earn. And although women have significantly increased their representation among high earners in America over the past half-century, only 4 percent of the C.E.O.’s in Fortune’s top 1,000 companies are female.

What we are seeing is a convergence in economic fortunes, not female ascendance. Between 2010 and 2011, men and women working full time year-round both experienced a 2.5 percent decline in income. Men suffered roughly 80 percent of the job losses at the beginning of the 2007 recession. But the ripple effect of the recession then led to cutbacks in government jobs that hit women disproportionately. As of June 2012, men had regained 46.2 percent of the jobs they lost in the recession, while women had regained 38.7 percent of their lost jobs.

The 1970s and 1980s brought an impressive reduction in job segregation by gender, especially in middle-class occupations. But the sociologists David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman report that progress slowed in the 1990s and has all but stopped since 2000. For example, the percentage of female electrical engineers doubled in each decade in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But in the two decades since 1990 it has increased by only a single percentage point, leaving women at just 10 percent of the total.

Some fields have become even more gender-segregated. In 1980, 75 percent of primary school teachers and 64 percent of social workers were women. Today women make up 80 and 81 percent of those fields. Studies show that as occupations gain a higher percentage of female workers, the pay for those jobs goes down relative to wages in similarly skilled jobs that remain bastions of male employment.

Proponents of the “women as the richer sex” scenario often note that in several metropolitan areas, never-married childless women in their 20s now earn more, on average, than their male age-mates.

But this is because of the demographic anomaly that such areas have exceptionally large percentages of highly educated single white women and young, poorly educated, low-wage Latino men. Earning more than a man with less education is not the same as earning as much as an equally educated man.

Among never-married, childless 22- to 30-year-old metropolitan-area workers with the same educational credentials, males out-earn females in every category, according to a reanalysis of census data to be presented next month at Boston University by Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. Similarly, a 2010 Catalyst survey found that female M.B.A.’s were paid an average of $4,600 less than men in starting salaries and continue to be outpaced by men in rank and salary growth throughout their careers, even if they remain childless.

Among married couples when both partners are employed, wives earned an average of 38.5 percent of family income in 2010. In that year nearly 30 percent of working wives out-earned their working husbands, a huge increase from just 4 percent in 1970. But when we include all married-couple families, not just dual-earner ones, the economic clout of wives looks a lot weaker.

In only 20 percent of all married-couple families does the wife earn half or more of all family income, according to Professor Cohen, and in 35 percent of marriages, the wife earns less than 10 percent.

Once they have children, wives usually fall further behind their husbands in earnings, partly because they are more likely to temporarily quit work or cut back when workplace policies make it hard for both parents to work full time and still meet family obligations.

But this also reflects prejudice against working mothers. A few years ago, researchers at Cornell constructed fake résumés, identical in all respects except parental status. They asked college students to evaluate the fitness of candidates for employment or promotion. Mothers were much less likely to be hired. If hired, they were offered, on average, $11,000 less in starting salary and were much less likely to be deemed deserving of promotion.

The researchers also submitted similar résumés in response to more than 600 actual job advertisements. Applicants identified as childless received twice as many callbacks as the supposed mothers.

Much has been made of the gender gap in educational achievement. Girls have long done better in school than boys, and women have now pulled ahead of men in completing college. Today women earn almost 60 percent of college degrees, up from one-third in 1960.

The largest educational gender gap is among families in the top 25 percent of the earnings distribution, where women lead men by 13 percent in graduation rates, compared to just a 2 percent advantage for women from the lowest income families.

But at all income levels, women are still concentrated in traditionally female areas of study. Gender integration of college majors has stalled since the mid-1990s, and in some fields, women have even lost ground. Between 1970 and 1985, women’s share of computer and information sciences degrees rose from 14 percent to 37 percent. But by 2008 women had fallen back to 18 percent.

According to the N.Y.U. sociologist Paula England, a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families, most women, despite earning higher grades, seem to be educating themselves for occupations that systematically pay less.

Even women’s greater educational achievement stems partly from continuing gender inequities. Women get a smaller payoff than men for earning a high school degree, but a bigger payoff for completing college. This is not because of their higher grade point averages, the economist Christopher Dougherty concludes, but because women seem to need more education simply to counteract the impact of traditional job discrimination and traditional female career choices.

If the ascent of women has been much exaggerated, so has the descent of men. Men’s irresponsibility and bad behavior is now a stock theme in popular culture. But there has always been a subset of men who engage in crude, coercive and exploitative behavior. What’s different today is that it’s harder for men to get away with such behavior in long-term relationships. Women no longer feel compelled to put up with it and the legal system no longer condones it. The result is that many guys who would have been obnoxious husbands, behaving badly behind closed doors, are now obnoxious singles, trumpeting their bad behavior on YouTube.

Their boorishness may be pathetic, but it’s much less destructive than the masculine misbehavior of yore. Most men are in fact behaving better than ever. Domestic violence rates have been halved since 1993, while rapes and sexual assaults against women have fallen by 70 percent in that time. In recent decades, husbands have doubled their share of housework and tripled their share of child care. And this change is not confined to highly educated men.

Among dual-earner couples, husbands with the least education do as much or more housework than their more educated counterparts. Men who have made these adjustments report happier marriages — and better sex lives.

ONE thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood. Men are now experiencing a set of limits — externally enforced as well as self-imposed — strikingly similar to the ones Betty Friedan set out to combat in 1963, when she identified a “feminine mystique” that constrained women’s self-image and options.

Although men don’t face the same discriminatory laws as women did 50 years ago, they do face an equally restrictive gender mystique.

Just as the feminine mystique discouraged women in the 1950s and 1960s from improving their education or job prospects, on the assumption that a man would always provide for them, the masculine mystique encourages men to neglect their own self-improvement on the assumption that sooner or later their “manliness” will be rewarded.

According to a 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans now believe that a college education is necessary for a woman to get ahead in life today, but only 68 percent think that is true for men. And just as the feminine mystique exposed girls to ridicule and harassment if they excelled at “unladylike” activities like math or sports, the masculine mystique leads to bullying and ostracism of boys who engage in “girlie” activities like studying hard and behaving well in school. One result is that men account for only 2 percent of kindergarten and preschool teachers, 3 percent of dental assistants and 9 percent of registered nurses.

The masculine mystique is institutionalized in work structures, according to three new studies forthcoming in the Journal of Social Issues. Just as women who display “masculine” ambitions or behaviors on the job are often penalized, so are men who engage in traditionally female behaviors, like prioritizing family involvement. Men who take an active role in child care and housework at home are more likely than other men to be harassed at work.

Men who request family leave are often viewed as weak or uncompetitive and face a greater risk of being demoted or downsized. And men who have ever quit work for family reasons end up earning significantly less than other male employees, even when controlling for the effects of age, race, education, occupation, seniority and work hours. Now men need to liberate themselves from the pressure to prove their masculinity. Contrary to the fears of some pundits, the ascent of women does not portend the end of men. It offers a new beginning for both. But women’s progress by itself is not a panacea for America’s inequities. The closer we get to achieving equality of opportunity between the sexes, the more clearly we can see that the next major obstacle to improving the well-being of most men and women is the growing socioeconomic inequality within each sex.

The Safety Net of Entitlement

Unless you actually need a safety net you presume it is there like a life raft, safety vest or floatation device that somehow appears like an oxygen mask when a plane begins to lose pressure. You want to believe right?

Actually the truth is no, no it doesn’t. To actually use it you have to actually get to it much like the emergency exit. And if you can’t manage to access or actually operate that said exit then you are as they say SOL… straight out of luck.

When I began to realize the depth and nature of my injuries I went in search of said safety nets. I presumed that they would be easy to find and that there would be a multitude of people willing and able to manage that said door since it was a little heavy and awkward right at the moment.

I found out that not only does that net have some fissures it has chasms that you fall utterly through.

I found a TBI group that has support networks for those with varying kinds of Traumatic Brain Injury. Like the net this is widely vast type of injury that covers a large spectrum and type. There are those with medical injuries from illnesses such as Strokes, Illness from fluid build up, damage from birth, closed head injuries and open head ones as well, such as from bullets. The kind that most of our Troops have, the sports players have and mine from auto accidents are called closed head injuries. Any time you hit the brain hard enough to generate a good shaking where you are concussed you are now a member of the TBI club. The level of injury is determined by the Glasgow Coma Scale which determines the level of severity and in turn the need for medical assessment.

I went to three of my local meet ups. I found that in Seattle we have the same 5-6 individuals who are consistently at all of them. Two Stroke victims, a brain damage at birth, a bullet wound to the head by a young man who was sitting in his living room at the time and a couple of others whose nature of how the injury was sustained was unclear. There was a caregiver of an adult son who one day fell ill at his job the result of an infection and one occasion two victims of assault that rendered them injured in the brain. Bringing literally meaning to having one’s brain beaten out.

The two individuals that I met who were “victims” a term that applies to my TBI as well and one I don’t wear well, were a young gay man who was coming out of a bar one night and yes “gay bashed” and another a woman whose partner had severely beaten her in a domestic assault. The war on women coming home.

I sat there listening to their stories and related to their fear and their anger. They were mostly frightened as was I regarding the future. Where does one get help regarding medical needs, housing, food, etc. The woman who was the result of a domestic assault fit into the category that I call the 0%, the no ones. A woman of a certain age (cough cough) who was single but had a grown child and no other family. She and her partner were opening a Marijuana supply store for those in need of medical drugs. I can see the eye rolling and clucking right now. The immediate blame laying, excuse generating and “if only” nonsense that accompanies this revelation. Certainly if she was a mainstream ordinary individual this would never happen… slut, moron, druggie. And yes this comes from anyone of any political stripe. I live in “Liberal” Seattle and first question I get is “did you know the guy?” Being judgmental is not the provenance of just Conservatives I can assure you.

She also had what is secondary brain injury. The wonderful and competent Harborview where I was taken and thankfully survived not due to anything they did, failed to remove the blood from the brain the first time and she became infected again and had to have another surgery. I am sure that they have taken absolutely no responsibility for that whatever but hey you can always sue right? Again I have said that it is extremely difficult and when you are the SINK in that situation finding legal support and well the ability to actually get help at all is a farce.

She was struggling to pay rent and literally keep her head above water. The wonderful Social Worker who was assigned to her from Harborview was useless. Again shocking not. Mine signed my legal rights away. They must be a crackerjack team there. She had no idea where to get aid or how to even sign up for Federal Disability. She was on the “lists” for Government housing and was getting food stamps. For SINK’s or 0% that is $200 bucks a month in assistance and $75 bucks for food. I look forward to Mark Bittman and Mario Battali to show how impossible it is to actually live and eat off that. She had no legal help to fill in and assist on the SSDI and any other sources of income. But wait she had a daughter right? Right who is like many young people barely keeping herself afloat in this economy. You could feel her pain and her confusion. This woman was once a Bookkeeper and her quest to find a “next of kin” so needed for identity in this country she found a man who convinced her to open a Medical Marijuana store. This is the new way to sell drugs legally. Gee it beats the sex trade or standing on a corner. Once the business was up and running he decided the conventional way of taking over the business was too complicated so he did another kind of corporate raid. She is lucky to be alive but she has lost everything.

The other individual was a young man who literally brings meaning to the term “gay bashed” Coming out of a bar in his home town of Providence, a well known town for being gay friendly or not given this story, was assaulted by those less friendly. He sustained a secondary injury when he was later robbed and assaulted again. See when you have Traumatic Brain Injury your wounds not always visible but it to those predatory types it takes a few minutes to realize that this possible “victim” has a multitude of problems or issues that makes taking advantage very easy. Secondary injuries are also common because you don’t realize the nature of how severe you injured and you see this high risk behavior most often in Sports and the Military.

So the safety nets that you think are there… they aren’t. If you can’t operate that ER door you need to change seats. And when you are a SINK, a single income, no kids kind of person you find out the hard way that door is heavy.

But much is made of these “entitlements” and how the lazy, the corrupt or the unwilling are taking advantage. Really? Try getting them and then once you do managing with them. All of your accounts, personal finances must be disclosed and monitored. Anyone who helps you get by are also subject to interrogation. You must be utterly destitute and have no resources or support of any kind to actually get and keep any of these “entitlements”. All of your finances must be exhausted and any earnings will be subsequently deducted from them in turn. So if you make money selling stuff on Ebay its deducted from any benefits provided. Quid pro quo.

So when you think that poor people are getting more than their fair share… think of the equivalent of the rich and their taxes. They have more and pay less. When you are poor and you get more you get less. Same equation different affect.

But its good to believe that people will help. That someone will help. The next question I get after “did you know him” is “do you have family” We all apparently believe that we all have family able and willing to help. Another misnomer when you are a SINK or 0%. That is our safety net the nuclear family. And that is why our current climate is so hostile to anyone who doesn’t fit the convention. Be the rule not the exception or you will find yourself without anyone to hold that net.

WOW Just WOW

What we have now labeled the War on Women seems to center around reproductive rights. Yes there is the issue of equal pay and the Lily Ledbetter Act intended to ensure equal pay for equal work. Technically didn’t that exist with the Equal Rights Act? Now here were are 40 years later actually signing that into law. And when it comes right down to it is basically an idea, an intent. To actually prove, to demonstrate harm, illegality or wrongness, the “victim” must prove that it was done. Good luck with that.

As I have found demonstrating and proving you have been damaged or been discriminated against is nearly impossible. The class action suit levied against WalMart which was thrown out by the Supreme Court shows that when all is in the hands of men, issues about women are often dropped.

And we have the infamous cat fight between two successful women. Really all this was was one woman’s comment that we can’t have it all and another going sure you can if you ask for it. I wrote about this little dustup in my Tiger Mother Cat Fight post that women are not in a collective sisterhood at all regardless of their stature and position in life.

So really what defines the War on Women? For some its reproductive/health rights, for others its about the need to have equal pay, equal work, equal opportunity, for others is trying to make ends meet when being the sole provider for one’s family. Like anyone regardless of gender, color or creed, you know all that stuff in the Constitution that gets paraded and bandied about when necessary.

There has always been a war on people who don’t fit the conventional images of what is America. An oddly provincial and Puritanical view. We have never as a Country really been a country whose Church is separate from the State despite all the proclamations of such.

As a result we have a very traditional views of what comprises family, faith, and society. The war on women is one that has been going on for over 30 years. It has been ongoing at at times much like the Middle East, a tempering of the kettle but still always on the edge of boiling over.

When you have a Patriarchal society as we do and does Europe, despite Angela Merkyl ever seeming dominant presence, you have men fearing what the fear most, a lack of sexual opportunity. That was the push for birth control and abortion, the ability to have sex without procreation and in turn commitment. And in turn its now men who wish to rescind that right. Shocking no, surprising yes. The idea is that once the free market on free vagina was shut down then women and men would be forced to cohabitate and cojoin in a nuclear family, thereby freeing up the State from having to pay for all the needs and demands single women (and children) make upon the system.

The idea is simple – its women causing all these problems and if they were just married this wouldn’t happen. The same drugs men created to free sexuality and invented the date rape drugs to make even easier to do it have now realized the Pandora’s box they opened and now wish to close it. Barn door meet horse.

Ask women about how expensive, difficult it is to find child care? But don’t worry if they were at home this is not a problem. Ask women about making ends meet? Don’t worry if they were married this is not a problem. Not enough jobs? If women didn’t need or were working, not a problem. The problems in Education? Well if women were home minding their children schools would be fine and that they had no unions, collective bargaining or well decent pay.. but hey that is just a bonus in this war. Ask women about violence or harm to women? Don’t worry if they were home and not out on the street dressed like a slut not a problem. In this utopia women are Mrs. Better Crocker Cleaver whose husband’s who are good enough, smart enough and make enough money to keep the family in delicious cakes. Its a great fantasy that along with Horatio Alger is a unicorn myth.

Women have resigned themselves that if we just danced faster it will all be fine. We are the strong, the powerful, the real power behind the throne. We heard that many times at both Conventions. Still we are just behind the throne not actually in it or even next to it.

I have hard time when women think that being called names by a man is an attack or some type of violence towards them. The reason that is I assume is because most actual communication and encounters with others is in print or online now. So most assaults are volley’s back and forth across the interwebs like a tennis ball between the Williams sisters.

Women don’t actually speak to each other or do anything for each other except say such platitudes as “I have your back” or “you go girl” as if that is what one needs to carry on and push that front line army forward. When was the last time you actually asked a woman friend what they needed? Minded her children for an hour to let her have time alone? Took her to coffee and you vented and laughed or even made a Betty Crocker cake to say “this is the best I can do but its for you”

We don’t speak to each other anymore. We think that by “hash tagging” “liking” “blogging” and railing against the enemy we are somehow united in this war. A real army is well ask men. They have experience in that and in turn they actually know how to wage a war.

Patriarchal Norms Still Shape Family Care

By NANCY FOLBRE

Many women are rightfully proud of fulfilling responsibilities for family care. At the Republican convention, Ann Romney spoke of the mothers holding our nation together. At the Democratic convention, Michelle Obama referred to herself as “mom in chief.” Both vouched for their husbands as good fathers and good men.

Yet neither woman moved beyond a self-description as wife and mother, perhaps because both feared alienating swing voters if they did so.

It’s easy to find references to patriarchs, patriarchy or patriarchal attitudes in reporting on other countries. Yet these terms seem largely absent from discussions of current economic and political debates in the United States.

Perhaps they are no longer applicable. Or perhaps we mistakenly assume their irrelevance.

Here are some examples of recent usage in The New York Times: Osama Bin Laden was a patriarch. Patriarchal values are discouraging educated women’s labor-force participation in Dubai. Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood is “committed to upholding traditional and patriarchal values around a woman’s place in society, and many Egyptian women need no convincing.”

Considerable evidence suggests that a significant percentage of Americans are also committed to upholding traditional and patriarchal values around a woman’s place in society and that many American women need no convincing.

In 1998, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, declared that a wife should “graciously submit” to her husband’s leadership. In 2000, shortly after the convention declared its opposition to women as pastors, former President Jimmy Carter severed his longstanding ties with the group. Official Southern Baptist doctrine remains largely unchanged today.

The Mormon Church, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, holds similar views on wifely submission and imposes even stricter curbs on women’s access to positions of spiritual leadership. The church actively campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment and excommunicated its most visible Mormon spokeswoman.

Not all members of these religious groups agree with official doctrines, and the rise of feminist Mormon bloggers represents a particularly fascinating example of dissent. Southern Baptists and Mormons are not the only two religious groups in the United States that embrace patriarchal values. But their ideological convergence could help explain why most of the Christian Right supports Mitt Romney.

It could also help explain why political allegiances are not as strongly affected by household wealth and income as we might expect. The political analyst and linguist George Lakoff describes Republicans as the Disciplinarian Father party and Democrats as the Nurturing Parent party.

A simpler description, occasionally invoked in this year’s presidential campaign, is the Daddy party versus the Mommy party. This description, related to but distinct from the gender gap, helps explain the relevance of patriarchy or “rule of the fathers.”

Traditional patriarchal systems restrict women’s legal and economic rights. Even in countries like the United States, in which women enjoy virtually equal opportunities outside the home, patriarchal norms assign them primary responsibility for family care.

Such norms continue to exercise a powerful influence. In 2010, the General Social Survey asked a representative sample of Americans whether they agreed that “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” About 35 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed.

The sociologists David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman show that levels of agreement with this statement in the General Social Survey diminished steadily between 1977 and 1993 but have changed little since then. Gender differences in likelihood of agreement are smaller than differences based on age and educational attainment.

Many women enjoy new economic opportunities, sometimes gaining the confidence to flout traditional gender norms. But their very success has elicited a cultural reaction and led some to declare the “end of men.”

Maybe we should try to end patriarchal norms instead. We could start by defining family care as a challenging and important achievement for everyone rather than a sacred obligation for women alone.

Easier said than done — but it would help if our presidential candidates spoke out on this issue. I’d like to hear more about their possible differences of opinion.