Month: June 2009

The measure of terrorism's success

The Tiller family has announced that it is closing Dr. Tiller’s clinic. The terrorists have won, and that assassination has succeeded in doing what it was meant to do. I’m sure the murderer is very happy tonight.

The bottom line on right wing terrorism against abortion rights is that it’s succeeding and has been for some time. Take a good hard look at the chart at the top and try and tell me otherwise. And when it comes to late term abortions, well, Tiller was one of the very few who still provided the service. According to Tiller, speaking in March before his assassination, he was one of only three doctors left in the US doing such abortions. Now there are two. If those numbers are right, one third of all abortion doctors doing these abortions were just killed.

In the aftermath of Tiller’s death, I heard a lot of progressives talking about how the anti-abortion folks were losing. The bottom line is that they’re winning. It is harder to get abortions than it was 5 years ago, or 10 years ago, or 25 years ago. Abortion access peaked in 1982 and has been declining ever since. Consider that the US population has increased by approximately 30% since 1982. At the same time the number of providers has dropped by over a third.

Now, most types of abortion violence had been in a slow, long term decline (the exception is burglary) so there’s certainly some reason for optimism. At the same time I strongly suspect that anti-abortion violence will rise, along with other types of right wing terrorism, during Obama’s administration.

The larger point is simpler. It’s harder to get an abortion than it has ever been since Roe vs. Wade, because there are just less doctors who perform abortions. Until more doctors step up and start providing abortions, especially late term abortions, this will continue. It’s hard to blame doctors for not being willing to provide abortions. Not only could you be killed for doing so, your family will be stalked and perhaps harmed, your clinic will be burglarized, you will be subject to constant legal harassment and your life will, in general, be made a living hell along with the lives of your family, friends and associates.

It’s a lot to ask of someone. But this comes back to the truth of rights. You have no rights that people aren’t willing to suffer and die for. Rights that someone won’t put their life on the line for will be taken away by people who are willing to resort to intimidation, violence and to push for laws which take those rights away.

So the questions, then are these:

1) Where are the doctors who are willing to risk their lives, the lives of their families, and to endure constant harassment to ensure that women keep this right, not just in theory, but in practice?

2) Where are the mass of people who will provide money, aid, and physical protection to the doctors who put their lives on the line? Yes, they exist even now, but obviously there aren’t enough of them, because the number of abortion providers keeps going down.

Is this a right you’re willing to risk your life to keep? If enough people don’t answer that question yes, then you will continue to lose it.

Chart Source

Cross posted at Crooks and Liars.

Job Report: Better than expected

By Ian Welsh

On June 5, 2009

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As everyone probably knows by now, the job report was better than expected (certainly better than I would have predicted), with the payroll survey showing only 345,000 job losses, which compared to last month’s 506,000 looks pretty good. Of course, 220,000 of this came from increases in jobs due to the birth/death model. I haven’t, as a rule, hammered the birth/death model the way some other econobloggers have, but I’ll just point out what should be obvious: there is no way that unreported new businesses are being created in excess of lost businesses right now. It’s not happening. So those 220,000 jobs don’t exist except in some statisticians fevered imagination. That said, the news is still good, because the birth/death model was around in prior months too.

Overall job losses for the duration of the downturn are still horrific, and in particular the manufacturing industry, which lost jobs virtually all through the last “expansion” continues to take it on the chin. Since these are generally relatively good jobs, and since they also tend more towards being export jobs, this is worrisome.

The only sectors which actually added employees last month were general retail stores, and health and education. Health and education, of course, means government. General retail stores is a good sign, but the numbers aren’t all that large, and in the face of continued job losses and tightening credit, I’m less than convinced that consumer spending is not going to drop again.

The primary negative factors I see still operating are twofold. First, I expect another massive round of mortgage defaults, and second I expect to see municipalities and States start doing some very significant layoffs. If health and education were to start losing significant jobs, that would be a significant blow.

On the plus side, the majority of the stimulus is still to come, and the massive amounts of money pumped into the financial system are obviously having some mitigating effects.

I’m going to hold steady on my long term prediction that employment will not recover before the next recession, and that median disposable income is going to decline over the length of this economic cycle.

Bankruptcies Due to Healthcare Costs up to 60%

By Ian Welsh

On June 4, 2009

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And even more damningly, 75% of those had health insurance. This is up from 50% of bankruptcies just a few years ago.

Meanwhile, in Washington, Single Payor healthcare, which would end this, is “off the table” and a public insurance “option” is under attack, and even if it gets into the final plan, will probably be so crippled by restrictions that it is no better than private insurance.

Current proposals seem to center around the “car inssurance model”, which is to say, you will be forced to buy insurance. Yes, there will be some subsidies, but do you trust them to be sufficient? I don’t, and if you do, well, I have a bridge to nowhere you should consider buying.

Health insurance costs are crippling America. GM and Chrysler probably wouldn’t have gone bankrupt if there had been single payor universal healthcare, for example. People are forced to stay in jobs they hate, and not move into jobs they would prefer to do (and thus be better at) because they need to keep their insurance. This directly reduces productivity, decreases the number of new businesses created (since creating a business will leave you uninsured) and reduces innovation. Countries with universal healthcare pay, on average, 1/3rd less per capita than Americans. That additional money can be used for other purposes: like good internet, or high speed trains, drug benefits or an industrial policy. Americans, instead, spend more and get worse health care on virtually every metric. You don’t live as long, you’re not as healthy, and when you get sick it destroys your finances, often for life.

Here’s my prediction: whatever health care “reform” you get from Obama and this Congress is going to be a half-hearted piece of suck, because it won’t sufficiently (or at all) cut out the private insurance companies. The public option, if it exists, will be a crippled piece of crap, won’t work well, and will be used to discredit the idea that the government can provide health care cheaper than the private sector.

If the goal was to make a system which worked, the US would simply either copy a system which does work (Germany’s or France’s, say) or it would just extend Medicare to everyone, and allow private insurers to do top-up insurance. Oh, and it would allow Medicare to negotiate with drug companies, and to choose its own formulary.

Instead, what will happen, is a program which amounts to a massive forced subsidy of the private insurance industry.

None of this should be a surprise. Obama never promised anything better during the campaign, and since he has a record of not even living up to his campaign promises, why would you expect this to be any better?

[h/t Americablog]

The Cost Of Forgetting Life Before Roe

By Ian Welsh

On June 1, 2009

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The abortion rights debate looks different for people old enough to remember the days of back alley abortions.

Case in point: the other day my my father brought up American politics, since he’s knows it’s my job to follow it (and since we don’t much agree on Canadian politics.) He’s a conservative guy, votes for the Conservative party routinely, likes to call himself “the last Victorian” though he really isn’t. Still, he’s no liberal and he’s pushing 80.

I filled him in on Sarah Palin, in particular, and mentioned she was against all abortion except if the mother’s life is at risk.

His voice turned incredulous and he said, “Don’t people remember what it was like when abortion was illegal? Women with coathangers up their….” His voice trailed off.

After a few moments he continued again, now angry. “How can these people be so stupid? Don’t they know what it was like? All the women who died?”

All I could really say was this: “People don’t learn from other people’s mistakes. Only their own. The generation that remembers what it was like, your generation, is mostly gone. The younger folks, they don’t remember, they don’t know. They don’t understand how bad it was, how many women died, how horrible it was. They weren’t there, and for some reason they won’t listen to those few who were. Those who remember. Those who know.”

The thing that saddens me the most about humanity, that worries me the most, is this shocking inability to understand anything unless they’ve experienced it themself. Wisdom is learning from other people’s mistakes.

It seems like every good thing that was done by older generations is being undone, step by step, by fools who weren’t there, don’t remember, and can’t learn. They stripped the protections meant to stop mass bank failures and a new depression and they keep trying to make sure that women will die in droves by getting rid of the right to safe, legal abortion.

So no, Dad, they don’t remember. If people like Palin and McCain have their way, the horrors you remember from your youth will start happening again. The battles your generation fought, the victories you handed to us, your children and grandchildren, we will squander and have to earn yet again.

And if we do fail to hold onto what you gave us, a lot of women will die because of our stupidity.

(Originally posted Sept. 15th, 2008. It seems worth re-posting today.)

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: June 2009

Anti-Abortion Terrorism Chalks Up Another Success

Job Report: Better than expected

Bankruptcies Due to Healthcare Costs up to 60%

The Cost Of Forgetting Life Before Roe