Grumbling Toward Excellence

Unfortunately, this means that when I encounter something in the campaign’s positions that’s harmful to a community that I care about, such as gay people, disabled people, and people who might ever need medical care, the campaign either intends or accepts those harms.  They are choosing them and therefore responsible for them; the implications of the campaign’s rhetoric and the consequences of the campaign’s positions are not accidents.

The idea that I should “be supportive” and “work with the campaign” for positive change or wait until after Clinton is elected to raise my points are both predicated, at least in part, on the idea that that persuasion is possible, but that requires both that it’s possible to bring new information or insight to the campaign that they don’t already have, and that they’re not already committed to their positions.  I’m not capable of imagining them as incompetent enough for that to be possible.

So if when it seems that I act as though Clinton is doing or allowing harmful things on purpose, it’s because the alternative is that it’s happening by accident, and I respect her far too much to consider that.

If a student can’t find suitable work, simply doesn’t make enough at work, or has personal or family concerns that make them unable to work such as a disability or family members requiring care, then they’re still just going to have to take out loans to cover their contribution if they can.  Except now instead of recognizing that for the necessity that it sometimes is, this plan facilitates blaming students for not cooperating with the plan and getting a job.

If I was tasked with interpreting this in the least helpful way possible like some kind of malevolent fey or a Republican committee member, here are a few weaknesses I could exploit and how I might do it:

If I wanted to be incredibly punitive, and let’s face it, in this scenario that’s my job, there’s nothing here that precludes making a student ineligible for the rest of the program if they don’t have a job.  It’s just as simple as arguing that no wages means no expected student contribution and that having no calculated ESC should be treated exactly the same as not having a EFC from the FAFSA and render the student ineligible.  

I could even argue that like the FAFSA’s EFC it should be based on the last year’s taxes, so that it’s basically impossible for students who need financial aide to go directly to college.

If that seems unfair, I could argue it should be reimbursement based so that they have to pay tuition in cash first, and then get reimbursed once their taxes come in and allow the calculations to be completed.  That could put up a huge barrier to access while I get to claim it’s kinder than the last proposal.

If I don’t succeed in claiming that students who don’t have jobs shouldn’t be eligible for aide, I can still use this plan in such a way that many people would still need to take out loans.

Is this 10 hours/week of work during school or 10 hours/week for the entire year?  Does it include summer and intersession courses or not?  I would be sure to insist that it meant 10hr/week year round with no vacation and that it only applied to two semesters per year of funding.  I know that’s not appropriate for many students, especially vulnerable students, and if I stick to the semester language hard enough I might manage to make things more difficult for schools on the quarter system or any other non-semester-based program.

Is it 10 hours of work at minimum wage?  Federal or state? What about people who make the tipped minimum wage?

In addition to the obvious, like insisting that this be based on at least the local non-tipped minimum wage, why stick to minimum wage at all?  

Some people get minimum wage jobs in college but others get much more lucrative jobs.  Those people aren’t really contributing the wages of 10 hours a week if everyone pays the same amount.  But if we base the expectation on individual wages, then people might choose a lower-paying job so their contribution would be less.  That’s a welfare trap and we can’t have that!  So clearly we need to base the student’s contribution on what the student could be making regardless of what they actually choose to earn.

Of course I would argue that the way you calculate a student’s contribution from part time work is by pro-rating their expected earnings, which you should obviously calculate as some fraction of starting wages for graduates who get in-field jobs.  Per school, or per state, or nationally, whichever I can work to my advantage.  And of course, as the student persists through school that fraction should go up.  Someone who has completed their junior year of college is 75% graduate and should make 75% as much as a graduate, right?

The appeal of a family-based organizing strategy is easy to see.  Instead of having roughly 300 million adults to manage, you have somewhat more than half that number in families to manage instead.  Then, if you want to help children it’s easy to use their parents as a proxy for that.  When delivering aide and services and collecting statistics you just go through the family.

Families aren’t just a paperwork construct either, obviously.  An unemployed single parent and a stay-at-home parent with spouse or partner support are of course in very different situations.  If you decide you want to start means-testing benefits,  you’ve got to come up with some kind of way to account for those differences.

That’s how the problems start to creep in.  Because now that services are being delivered to the “family” instead of to the individual, and means are being tested against the family instead of the individual, how you define family affects people’s real lives.

If you’re a closeted college student, the price of coming out could be your access to student aide.  If your parents refuse to sign your FAFSA then you don’t qualify for federal student aide or almost any need-based aide at any level.

If you’re a closeted college student, the price could be your access to affordable healthcare.  The ACA made it easier for families to keep their children on the family insurance plan while in school, but the cost to keep an additional dependent on most family plans is much lower than the cost for that individual to get their own plan.  Kicking off a child may save the parents no money, but it creates a much higher cost for the student.

If you’re a college student, it’s much harder to obtain SNAP benefits than if you simply weren’t in school, regardless of your income.

These are all based on the idea that a young person’s family has a responsibility to fund and support their education.  The problem is, the young person has little-to-no recourse if their family, as understood by these laws, simply chooses not to do so.   This puts enormous pressure on students to comply with their families.

Want to leave the family religion?  Want to come out? Want to transition? Want to date someone of whom your family won’t approve?  Just want to change your major?  You’d better weigh honest self-expression against the potential loss of government benefits and subsidies that could come with upsetting your family.

Although I hear it clearly stated less often outside disability circles, the government also has the idea that a sick or disabled person’s family are responsible for caring for them.  Except in this case, they often don’t just mean “fund care” or “arrange care” but actually deliver it.  Some disabled people are inappropriately tethered to family caregivers because the aide they need is only available for family caregivers, not to them as individuals.  Others can’t get married even though they’d like to because that would interfere with benefits they need.  Not just cash benefits, but access to healthcare and other services.

Each of these problems might be individually fixable, and we might be constantly vigilant to expand the definition of ‘family’ as needed.  That’ll keep everyone busy forever but it won’t fix the underlying problem.

There’s no such thing as LGBT-friendly family values in government because the organizing principle of “family” is an abstraction and LGBT people in particular, but marginalized people in general, will always be at risk of falling through the fuzzy borders of that abstraction.  An ally might support the idea of “Family values” for the best of reasons, but that still enables others to use them as a weapon even if the ally doesn’t like or support it.

Continuing support of DOMA to head off a constitutional amendment might be a valid compromise, but using a speech to sign on to the opposition’s arguments about traditional marriage, while also invoking the horrors of "out of wedlock birth” and divorce isn’t a compromise.  It’s not pork, it’s not a horse trade, it doesn’t help anyone on the opposition or advance any of their objectives except by harming Clinton and the Democrat’s ability to take a different position later.

There’s nothing whatsoever stopping anyone who likes from playing that clip and claiming that it shows that Clinton believes everything in it.  If she really didn’t, then this is self-sabotage on such a level that it’s difficult for me to come up with everyday analogues.  “The dealer promised to give me the car for cheap if I gave him a taped [false] confession that I stole it!” is about the closest I can come.

I can hear some people asking, “What if she really did believe that but then changed her mind.”  And her personal thoughts and feelings may have changed and good for her as a person.  But there’s no clip, no statement out there that I can find where she acknowledges these remarks and says she’s changed her position.  Keep in mind that she gave her famous “gay rights are human rights” speech while still in opposition to gay marriage, which means it can be reasoned that she doesn’t think marriage is a human right.  Even today, she describes marriage as a “right of citizenship” not as a human right.

Rape in media is often a stand in for something too horrible to be properly imagined.  The audience's discomfort and difficulty with imagining that part of the character's life stands in for the character's own discomfort and difficulty with having experienced it.  Putting something in a character’s experience that the reader can’t or won’t imagine is a way of othering that character, distancing the reader from them even if they are a POV character.  There’s certainly a place for characters that make readers aware of their own biases through their reaction to them, but this must be done with extreme care.  If it is meant to extend the reader’s empathy, which it should be, then the story needs to embrace the uncomfortable parts of the character’s experiences, not avoid them.

When done badly, this can be lazy and hurtful.  Creating characters that rely on the audience’s aversion to them or their backstory runs the risk of validating that discomfort, which can easily be turned on actual survivors.

Worse still, if you're a member of the audience who doesn't have the luxury of being unable to imagine rape, then the character and probably the whole work  is unlikely to resonate with you.  At best the character will seem hollow and unbelievable.  At worst, it may leave you feeling alienated, too different to be properly rendered.

Rape as a generic stand in for the most horrible thing you can live through also does everyone a disservice.  The scale human tragedy does not run in full “murder > rape > theft > romantic rejection” and many people will not find their experiences anywhere on that scale, while survivors can find such a narrow range trivializing. 

Rape, though terrible, is not the only thing that can color someone's entire life.  Instead of writing lazily about a character with rape in their past, write about a character who has, despite their best efforts, fallen out of love, or someone who struggles with not loving someone who loves them very much.  Write someone realizes that they don't really want what they've spent their life working for, or who spends every day working to live up to an ideal they don't even believe in.  Write someone who lives when they were prepared to die.  Write someone who outlives their happy ending.

What's that?  Those are difficult to write properly?  They're complex distractions from the story that you wanted to tell?

Then so is rape.

I believe marriage is not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman. 

...the fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman, going back into the midst of history...

...its primary, principal role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society into which they become adults.

Now, if we were really concerned about marriage and the fact that so many marriages today end in divorce, and so many children are then put into the incredibly difficult position of having to live with the consequences of divorce, ...

If one looks at the consequences of the numbers of divorces, the breakup of the traditional family, you could make an argument for that.

... marriage was under pressure over the last decades because of changing roles, because of changing decisions, because of the laws in the States that were making it easier for people--husbands, wives, mothers, and fathers--to get divorced

problem and the difficulties that clearly have been visited upon adults certainly but principally children because of the ease of divorce in this society over the last decade.

We could stand on this floor for hours talking about the importance of marriage, the significance of the role of marriage in not only bringing children into the world but enabling them to be successful citizens in the world. How many of us have struggled for years to deal with the consequences of illegitimacy, of out-of-wedlock births, of divorce, of the kinds of anomie and disassociation that too many children experienced because of that.

I think that if we were really concerned about marriage and that we believed it had a role in the Federal Constitution, we have been missing in action. We should have been in this Chamber trying to amend our Constitution to take away at the very first blush the idea of no-fault divorce, ... We did not do that, did we? Can any of us stand here and feel good about all of the social consequences, the economic consequences? 

We know divorce leads to a lowered standard of living for women and children.

Hillary will:

Realize the promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This is meaningless.  If you just don’t like the issue, then the promise of the ADA is that you just won’t have to talk about it again for a while.

Improve access to meaningful and gainful employment for people with disabilities. 

By doing what?  In response to which existing barriers?  This offers no kind of insight at all.  Also, since it includes no kinds of definitions or metrics it’s open to cynical and perverse kinds of success.  For example, it could be said that everyone who can apply for a job has access to it.  This could be gamed by pressuring people to apply for jobs they can’t actually accept, don’t actually want, and almost surely won’t get.  This kind of coerced “job search” behavior is already seen in other aid programs in the U.S. and elsewhere.

I don’t think this is a good focus.  If “housing first” responses to homelessness offer any insight, it’s a reminder that people do better when their needs are met first and then expectations are raised.  A job-centered approach to dealing with disability can put people into jobs that aren’t appropriate for them, that they don’t want, that they can’t leave, or that they don’t have the support to keep.  

Even if the intention is good, a job-centered focus invites the idea that people need a job to earn the support they need to live their lives, or get and keep a job.

Provide tax relief to help the millions of families caring for aging relatives or family members with chronic illnesses or disabilities.

I’m holding my thoughts on this one until the end. 

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was a tremendous step forward. It opened educational opportunities to all Americans, expanded transportation, made sure everyone can enter buildings, and ensured that no one would be turned down for a job because of a disability. Hillary is committed to realizing the promise of the ADA and continuing to expand opportunity for all Americans. 

This is misleading.  The foundation of disability services in public education is the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA), now known as  Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)  The EHA dates from the  70′s and the ADA doesn’t even have a section on education, although education is considered a public accommodation.  

Accessible buildings and transit are still unfulfilled dream.  For example, according to the Chicago Transit Authority, here, only about 70% of the CTA’s train stations are accessible.  I’d say that counts as both transit that might not be usable and buildings that disabled people might not be able to enter.  If a disabled person faces some kind of barrier access barrier often the only path, if any, the ADA offers them is to wait.  The ADA did start things crawling in a better direction, but an act that answers major questions with “wait,” - and an indefinite time at that - doesn’t “make sure” of anything.

Hillary has spent her life fighting for the rights of Americans with disabilities.

Hillary’s first job out of law school was with the Children’s Defense Fund, and one of her first tasks was going door to door to figure out why so many children were missing school. She discovered that many parents were not sending their children to school because schools did not accommodate disabilities.

The evidence she helped gather was presented to Congress, and built the case for passage of the law that ensures all children with disabilities have access to school. 

It’s interesting to note that this says nothing about Clinton’s intentions when doing these things, feelings about them, or insights from doing them.  Her job asked her to gather some data, and then someone else used that data to do something.  Both are related to disability but offer nothing about Clinton or what she would do.  If someone asks my thoughts on coffee, mentioning that my last office had coffee isn’t really an answer.  Although Clinton should be well aware that the education law her work was used to support almost certainly wasn’t the ADA, which was passed in 1990 while she graduated law school in 1973, and this puts the previous quote in a more negative light.

As secretary of state, Hillary worked to build strong support for the United States to join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. But despite a broad, bipartisan coalition, the Republican-controlled Senate blocked its passage. 

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this information; it’s another thing her job asked her to do.  Some examples of her advocacy might show me the kinds of arguments she’ll use and the principles guiding it, but that’s not not here.  Without it, functionally, this is about what Republicans did, not what Clinton did.  It’s not relevant here.

Now, 25 years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Hillary recognizes that there is still much work to do, including improving access to meaningful and gainful employment for people with disabilities. Too many Americans with disabilities continue to be left out of the workforce, and for those who are employed, too many are in under-stimulating jobs that don't fully allow them to use their talents.

As discussed above, this holds out a job as the most important thing people with disabilities need.  I also find it patronizing to mention that many disabled people are in “under-stimulating jobs.”  Jobs aren’t entertainment and many very necessary jobs are dull.  Is the same level of concern going to be expressed for the multitudes of able-bodied employees working “under-stimulating” jobs?  Even before wages are mentioned?  Google suggests no, the only place she’s associated with that phrase is on workers with disabilities.

Provide tax relief to help the millions of families caring for aging relatives or family members with chronic illnesses or disabilities.

Here we are, on a page about disability rights, talking about benefits to family caregivers.  This is the only particular action suggested on the entire page, and it’s focus isn’t on disabled people.

This appeals directly to a toxic narrative that prioritizes the “sacrifices” of family caregivers over the needs of people with disabilities.  It reinforces the idea that disabled people can’t advocate for themselves, and are both a burden to and the property of their families.

It’s entirely possible to appreciate the support that many disabled people are fortunate enough to receive from their families and still think this is hurtful.

What about disabled people who don’t have home support?

What about disabled people with supportive families who need care that their family can’t provide?

Does a family-caregiver centered model ever limit a disabled person’s ability to live separate from their family when they might otherwise want and be able to?  If so, is this acceptable?

This isn’t even an effective way of benefiting caregivers.  It does nothing to address concerns about working conditions, hours, and wages for caregivers and it does nothing to reduce the work that family caregivers have to do to support their disabled relatives.  

I know this is unclear, let me try again.  The work of a caregiver is supporting someone with an illness or disability.  If you want to make things easier for them, then the best way to do that is to take on some of that work by supporting people with chronic illness and disability.  Throwing them a tax break is a way of commending their “sacrifice” without addressing their situation at all.

Perhaps that’s still not intuitive enough, let me try again one more time.

The rights of disabled people belong to disabled people, not to their caregivers and not to their families.

Conclusions

There are no statistics on this page, there are no dollar amounts, there are no timelines, there are no examples of specific problems that Clinton wants to focus on, and only one actual policy change suggested.  That change isn’t even about disabled people, it’s about their family caregivers.

“We have to end the flood of secret, unaccountable money that is distorting our elections, corrupting our political system, and drowning out the voices of too many everyday Americans. Our democracy should be about expanding the franchise, not charging an entrance fee.”

HILLARY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2015

I don’t think that the “secret, unaccountable” part of the problem is necessarily connected to the “flood” part of the problem.  As secretive as some large political spenders are, their secrecy overall doesn’t reliably stand up over time and I don’t think the public exposures have discouraged any of them from continuing to spend large sums of money influencing politics.

Removing secrecy from political spending doesn’t constrain what big spenders can do with their money in any way.  It doesn’t give them any less reason to make outsize donations or give politicians any reason to be less concerned with large donors and more concerned with ordinary constituents.  I can’t imagine what kind of entrance fee it would reduce.

That being said, I’m not a supporter of financial secrecy in general so I’m fine with this idea by itself, as misplaced as it is in this context.

Hillary is calling for aggressive campaign finance reform to end the stranglehold that wealthy interests have over our political system and restore a government of, by, and for the people—not just the wealthy and well-connected. Her proposals will curb the outsized influence of big money in American politics, shine a light on secret spending, and institute real reforms to raise the voices of regular voters.

This is very similar to the paragraph above with some lead-in to the bullet list below.  I think it can only be considered fully in light of those bullet points, so I’ll discuss it in my conclusion.

On to the list:

Overturn Citizens United. Hillary will appoint Supreme Court justices who value the right to vote over the right of billionaires to buy elections. She’ll push for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United in order to restore the role of everyday voters in elections.

Supreme court decisions include reasoning about what is allowed and not allowed and why.  You need to be very explicit about what you think the new guidelines should be, or you might get a new rule that’s technically overturns the old one but doesn’t prevent any of the bad behavior or outcomes you didn’t like, or even makes them worse.  The page doesn’t say what the new guidelines should be.

If we get a new ruling that says existing disclosure laws aren’t strong enough, and nothing else, is that a victory?  What if the new rule requires stricter disclosure but weakens or eliminates existing rules against collusion between independent groups and campaigns, or eliminates more spending caps?  Would it be acceptable to eliminate onerous voter ID requirements in return for any of those rulings?

It’s very unclear what she’s asking for here so it’s very unclear what constitutes success or failure.  There are any number of ways to technically succeed at this but fail to change anything.  I do not approve of that, it makes me uncomfortable.

The page doesn’t propose any text for the constitutional amendment or say what it should try to accomplish or how.  What’s she going to try and focus on, and how far is she interested in going?  It’s impossible to guess how I even feel about the proposed amendment if she won’t even say what she wants it to say.  That also makes me uncomfortable.

End secret, unaccountable money in politics. Hillary will push for legislation to require outside groups to publicly disclose significant political spending. And until Congress acts, she'll sign an executive order requiring federal government contractors to do the same. Hillary will also promote an SEC rule requiring publicly traded companies to disclose political spending to shareholders.

That’s fine by itself, but has the limitations and limitations and relevance issues that I outlined above.

Amplify the voices of everyday Americans. Hillary will establish a small-donor matching system for presidential and congressional elections to incentivize small donors to participate in elections, and encourage candidates to spend more time engaging a representative cross-section of voters.

Okay, I have lots of questions about the scope of this proposal:  Does it apply to primary elections?  Does it apply to donors to elections for positions that won’t represent them?  And so on.  I just want to mention that they exist and then ignore them for now.

I don’t see any way a program like this would change the behavior of any candidate.  Even if you increase the value of small donors as a group until they make up the majority of funding for any given race, the value of individual small donors is still going to be much smaller than the value of any large donor.  You have to pick donors to call, you have to pick donors to invite to your fundraisers, you have to make choices about who to spend time and attention on.  Matching small donations will not change the rank order of donor value at all.

What about altering the value of small donors as a class?  Okay, we might see some larger scale outreach to small donors.  More rallies, and what have you.  That might be a general social good if it makes people feel more engaged and represented, and I’m in favor of things that increase political engagement;  however,  I don’t think it will solve any problems, and not the topical problems with the influence of money in politics or big spenders in particular.  It just gets more people to put more money into politics.

The problem is not that ordinary donors don’t see their candidates enough.  The problem is that candidates, and elected officials, don’t see their ordinary constituents enough.  Addressing ordinary donors as a class is never comparable to addressing large donors as individuals.  If you are a large donor it is entirely likely that you will get a a phone call from your candidate. The more you give the more likely it is that the candidate will know your voice, your face, your issues, and they will certainly know that they’ll probably have to interact with you again.  You’re real to them.  If you are instead one of hundreds or thousands of ordinary donors in a crowd at a rally or town hall, you’re probably not real to them and they don’t have to assume they’ll ever see or hear from you again.

I am extremely suspicious of something that increases the amount of money in politics and encourages ordinary people to donate without actually reducing the power of large donors.  Trying to make people feel invested in something and ensnare them in the sunk cost fallacy is something that scammers do.  This proposal strongly reminds me of the idea that we needed to get ordinary people involved in the stock market, and allowing people to invest their own retirement savings in the stock market.  I consider that to have been an epic failure and I don’t think the pattern should be repeated.  Clinton may feel differently, but she has made no case at all.

Conclusions

This page and the summary paragraph mix several related but distinct issues including financial secrecy and the impact of money on politics and - just a little bit - voting rights together.  Combined with the fact that it isn’t very specific about what it’s asking for this means that it’s possible to interpret even ordinary policy churn as a success.  It seems to mention financial secrecy in political donations disproportionately often and as I have mentioned I don’t think that would help at all.  I worry that this is a tactic so that effectively meaningless changes can be made and cast as a strong success. 

I think that saying you want to appoint judges who will support voting rights over money in politics but not what kind of guidelines you think would be better is evasive. As is proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn a specific supreme court decision but not on what grounds it should do that or what it should say.  Proposing Federal small donor matching without even a suggestion of an explanation of what impact that would have on any of the problems described is also evasive and creates the potential for exploitation I described above.