“3 Enemas Later, Still No Drugs”: Inequality Is Also About Dignity, Humanity And Access To Justice
If you think that protests about overzealous law enforcement are over the top, listen to what unfolded when the police suspected that David Eckert, 54, was hiding drugs in his rectum.
Eckert is a shy junk dealer struggling to get by in Hidalgo County, N.M. He lives a working-class life, drives a 16-year-old pickup and was convicted in 2008 of methamphetamine possession.
Police officers, suspecting he might still be involved in drugs, asked him to step out of his pickup early last year after stopping him for a supposed traffic violation. No drugs or weapons were found on Eckert or in his truck, but a police dog showed interest in the vehicle and an officer wrote that Eckert’s posture was “erect and he kept his legs together.”
That led the police to speculate that he might be hiding drugs internally, so they took him in handcuffs to a nearby hospital emergency room and asked the doctor, Adam Ash, to conduct a forcible search of his rectum. Dr. Ash refused, saying it would be unethical.
“I was pretty sure it was the wrong thing to do,” Dr. Ash told me. “It was not medically indicated.”
Eckert, protesting all the while, says he asked to make a phone call but was told that he had no right to do so because he hadn’t actually been arrested. The police then drove Eckert 50 miles to the emergency room of the Gila Regional Medical Center, where doctors took X-rays of Eckert’s abdomen and performed a rectal examination. No drugs were found, so doctors performed a second rectal exam, again unavailing.
Doctors then gave Eckert an enema and forced him to have a bowel movement in the presence of a nurse and policeman, according to a lawsuit that Eckert filed. When no narcotics were found, a second enema was administered. Then a third.
The police left the privacy curtain open, so that Eckert’s searches were public, the lawsuit says.
After hours of fruitless searches, police and doctors arranged another X-ray and finally anesthetized Eckert and performed a colonoscopy.
“Nothing was found inside of Mr. Eckert,” the police report notes. So after he woke up, he was released — after 13 hours, two rectal exams, three enemas, two X-rays and a colonoscopy.
The hospital ended up billing Eckert $6,000.
When I came across this case, it seemed far-fetched to me — more like rape than law enforcement. But the authorities, hospital and doctors all refused to comment, and, a few days ago, the city and county settled the lawsuit by paying Eckert $1.6 million.
This wasn’t a unique case. A few months earlier, a man named Timothy Young who lives nearby says that police officers pulled him over, forcibly strip-searched him in a parking lot and then took him to a hospital for a forced X-ray and rectal examination while he was handcuffed. Nothing was found, so he was released — only to receive a hospital bill.
And a few weeks before Eckert’s ordeal, a 54-year-old American woman crossing from Mexico into El Paso was strip-searched and taken to the University Medical Center of El Paso. She says in a lawsuit that, over six hours, she was shackled to an examination table and subjected to rectal and vaginal examinations — with the door open to compound her humiliation. After a final X-ray and CT scan, all of which turned up nothing, she was released — and billed for the procedures.
Joseph P. Kennedy, Eckert’s lawyer, notes that such abuses are not random but are disproportionately directed at those on the bottom rungs of society. “It’s a socioeconomic issue,” he said. “It’s the indignities forced on people who are not articulate, not educated and don’t have access to legal services.”
Police are caught in a difficult balancing act, and obviously the abuse of Eckert isn’t representative. But it is emblematic of something much larger in America, a kind of inequality that isn’t economic and that we don’t much talk about.
It’s the kind of inequality that lies behind police stops for “driving while black,” or unequal implementation of stop-and-frisk policies, or “zero tolerance” school discipline codes that lead many low-income children to be suspended.
This inequality has a racial element to it, but it is also about social class (Eckert is white but struggling financially). This is about Americans living in different worlds. If you’re a middle-class reader, you probably see the justice system as protective. If you’re a young man of color, you may see it as threatening.
So as we discuss inequality in America, let’s remember that the divide is measured in more than dollars. It’s also about something as fundamental as our dignity, our humanity and our access to justice; it’s about the right of working stiffs not to endure forced colonoscopies.
By: Nicholas D. Kristof, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 25, 2014
“Raising The Minimum Is The Bare Minimum”: What America Needs Is To Shift Income From Capital To Labor
In 1995, when John Sweeney ran the first and as-yet-only insurgent campaign for the presidency of the AFL-CIO, his platform took the form of a book entitled America Needs a Raise. If that title rang true in 1995, it clangs with deafening authority today.
Which leads us to the only problem with the current campaigns to raise the minimum wage: It’s not just workers at the low end of the wage scale who need a raise. It’s not just the work of the bottom 9 percent of labor force that is undervalued. It’s the work of the bottom 90 percent.
Conservatives who oppose raising the minimum wage argue that we need to address the decline of the family and the failure of the schools if we are to arrest the income decline at the bottom of the economic ladder. But how then to explain the income stagnation of those who are, say, on the 85th rung of a 100-rung ladder? How does the decline of the family explain why all gains in productivity now go to the richest 10 percent of Americans only? And are teachers unions really to blame for the fact that wages now constitute the lowest share of Gross Domestic Product since the government started measuring shares, and that corporate profits now constitute the highest share?
We need to raise the minimum wage, but that’s only the start. Even more fundamentally, we must reverse the deeper and more profound redistribution of wealth that has now plagued the nation for several decades: that from capital to labor.
For as income from work declines for the nation as a whole—inflation-adjusted median hourly wages are now more than $1.50 lower than they were in 1972—income from investment soars. The stock markets are hitting record highs, and major corporations are using the $1.5 trillion they have lying around to raise not wages but dividends. They are also using some of that cash to buy back their own stock, which raises the value of the outstanding shares, to which, happily, most CEO’s compensation packages are linked.
The institutions that once ensured that American workers actually got their share of the pie—unions—have been so thoroughly battered down that they can no longer effectively bargain for raises. That leaves that other instrument of the popular will— the state—as the sole remaining institution that can bargain for workers. That’s why the minimum wage, the living wage and the Earned Income Tax Credit have taken on a greater significance than they previously held: They not only raise the incomes of the poor, but are the last remaining vehicles for raising wages.
That’s why just stopping with raising the minimum, important though that be to the nation’s economic and moral health, is nowhere near enough. Making it safe again for workers to try to join unions is a necessity, too, but that’s a fight that labor has been waging for half-a-century with nothing to show for it. The left needs to battle on other fronts as well.
We could begin by shifting the tax burden from labor to capital—after all, income in America has long been shifted from labor to capital. We could abolish the payroll tax on the first $25,000 that people make, substituting for it a higher threshold on taxable income. We could raise the tax rates on capital gains and dividends not just to the same levels as income derived from work but higher still. And we could explicitly designate some of the revenue from capital income to go to a much expanded Earned Income Tax Credit—expanded not just by making the payments more generous, but also by raising the criterion for eligibility well above the government’s poverty threshold.
By explicitly taking back from capital some of the wealth it has taken from labor, government would begin to address the root causes of economic inequality. Not all of them, to be sure: The stratospheric salaries that top corporate executives and Wall Street traders command aren’t capital income as such. One way to rein in executive pay might be to set corporate tax rates by the size of the gap between top executives’ and median workers’ pay, the data on which the Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to make public under the terms of Dodd-Frank. Or it might be to set corporate tax rates based whether the corporation has a stakeholder or a shareholder board. In Germany, corporations are required to have equal numbers of employee and management representatives on their boards, which has effectively reduced CEO pay at most German companies to a multiple of 10 or 12 times that of its median employee, not the 200 or 300 times that’s the norm in the U.S.
If we want to address economic equality, we need to follow the money. In recent decades, as a result not just of globalization and technology but also of the decline of unions and the rising political power of the rich, the money has almost entirely gone to the rich—in the current recovery, fully 95 percent of income growth to the top 1 percent. So by all means, raise the minimum wage. But don’t stop there.
By: Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect, January 22, 2014
“A Moral Issue”: Blacks, Latinos To Pay Disproportionate Price Over Blocked Medicaid Expansion
Minorities are disproportionately affected by 25 states’ decision to opt out of Medicaid expansion, a report finds.
Blacks make up 13 percent of the nation’s population but will represent 27 percent of those who will lose out on Medicaid coverage because of these states’ refusal to expand the program’s eligibility to the national standard under Obamacare, according to the 11th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. State of the Dream Report.
Latinos make up 15 percent of the population and 21 percent of the coverage gap. Whites, meanwhile, will be underrepresented—they are 65 percent of the population but have only 47 percent in the gap.
Had the Affordable Care Act been fully implemented, half of the 50 million people who were uninsured before the 2010 law was passed would gain access to coverage through the state and federal health insurance exchanges or the Medicaid expansion. Because of the 2012 Supreme Court decision that ruled states’ expansion of the program optional, 25 states have chosen not to expand Medicaid to include wage earners up to 138 percent of the federal poverty line.
The Medicaid coverage gap will leave out 5 million of the 10 million who would have gained coverage, exacerbating existing racial health disparities in the United States, a focus of Thursday’s report from the equal-rights group United for a Fair Economy.
Poor blacks are 7.3 times—and poor Latinos 5.7 times—as likely as poor whites to live in high-poverty neighborhoods that aggravate health problems. That gap is because of minorities’ limited access to health services and good food, as well as the great stresses from crime and racism, according to the report.
The data also find that 29 percent of Latinos, 19 percent of blacks, 15 percent of Asians, and 11 percent of whites were uninsured in 2012.
Republican governors are leading many of the states that have declined to expand the entitlement program. The federal government has committed to paying 100 percent of the expansion for the first few years, but the governors say they fear the feds will go back on their word, leaving states with unsustainable budget costs.
Other GOP governors have declined to expand the program out of ideological objections to an expansion of the nation’s social safety net.
The report’s authors are frustrated by the blocked expansion.
“With no expanded Medicaid, and little or no assistance to purchase insurance in the health exchanges, the actions of these elected leaders in these states are creating a vast hole in the new health care law—a 25-state coverage gap—through which nearly 5 million low income Americans will now fall,” UFE writes.
“Access to health care is, first and foremost, a moral issue,” the report continues. “It’s a question of right and wrong. Tolerating vast inequalities in health and health care along the lines of race or class sends the disturbing message that we as a society value the lives of people in various groups differently.”
Despite the blocked Medicaid expansion, the Affordable Care Act diminishes the racial health gap by expanding programs to promote diversity in health professions; supports cultural competency training to help doctors communicate with patients of color; and establishes research initiatives to explore the cause of health inequality. It also allows people with preexisting conditions—more common in impoverished neighborhoods due to the quality of life—to gain access to coverage.
But some people who do not have health insurance will continue to live without it. Others will be ineligible because of their immigration status. Still others won’t qualify because of their employment situation. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to work in lower-wage or part-time jobs where they are less likely to receive employer-sponsored coverage.
In addition to the lack of insurance and access to affordable health services, residential segregation and the stress of living in poverty are primary factors contributing to poor health in the black and Latino communities. Those types of communities are commonly found in “food deserts,” or areas of the country where people have little access to a grocery store with fresh produce and instead are surrounded by fast food joints. The report says that half of black neighborhoods lack a full-service grocery.
Among UFE’s recommendations to permanently close the racial health gap are the continued pursuit of a single-payer, universal health insurance system, where employment and work situations would no longer play a role in access, quality, and cost of care. They also, of course, hope to see all 50 states expand Medicaid and take the lead on fully implementing and supporting the Affordable Care Act.
They also propose increasing funding to permanently fund Medicaid at the federal level, heighten funding for outreach and education efforts, and allow undocumented immigrants to take part in the system. More systemic policies—more diverse housing, improved access to services in areas of extreme poverty, raising the minimum wage—would also help address the disparity between the races in overall population health.
By: Clara Ritger, The National Journal, January 16, 2014
“The Undeserving Rich”: Capitalism As Currently Constituted Is Undermining The Foundations Of Middle-Class Society
The reality of rising American inequality is stark. Since the late 1970s real wages for the bottom half of the work force have stagnated or fallen, while the incomes of the top 1 percent have nearly quadrupled (and the incomes of the top 0.1 percent have risen even more). While we can and should have a serious debate about what to do about this situation, the simple fact — American capitalism as currently constituted is undermining the foundations of middle-class society — shouldn’t be up for argument.
But it is, of course. Partly this reflects Upton Sinclair’s famous dictum: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. But it also, I think, reflects distaste for the implications of the numbers, which seem almost like an open invitation to class warfare — or, if you prefer, a demonstration that class warfare is already underway, with the plutocrats on offense.
The result has been a determined campaign of statistical obfuscation. At its cruder end this campaign comes close to outright falsification; at its more sophisticated end it involves using fancy footwork to propagate what I think of as the myth of the deserving rich.
For an example of de facto falsification, one need look no further than a recent column by Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, which first accused President Obama (wrongly) of making a factual error, then proceeded to assert that rising inequality was no big deal, because everyone has been making big gains. Why, incomes for the bottom fifth of the U.S. population have risen 186 percent since 1979!
If this sounds wrong to you, it should: that’s a nominal number, not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on The Journal’s website.
O.K., that’s what crude obfuscation looks like. What about the fancier version?
I’ve noted before that conservatives seem fixated on the notion that poverty is basically the result of character problems among the poor. This may once have had a grain of truth to it, but for the past three decades and more the main obstacle facing the poor has been the lack of jobs paying decent wages. But the myth of the undeserving poor persists, and so does a counterpart myth, that of the deserving rich.
The story goes like this: America’s affluent are affluent because they made the right lifestyle choices. They got themselves good educations, they got and stayed married, and so on. Basically, affluence is a reward for adhering to the Victorian virtues.
What’s wrong with this story? Even on its own terms, it postulates opportunities that don’t exist. For example, how are children of the poor, or even the working class, supposed to get a good education in an era of declining support for and sharply rising tuition at public universities? Even social indicators like family stability are, to an important extent, economic phenomena: nothing takes a toll on family values like lack of employment opportunities.
But the main thing about this myth is that it misidentifies the winners from growing inequality. White-collar professionals, even if married to each other, are only doing O.K. The big winners are a much smaller group. The Occupy movement popularized the concept of the “1 percent,” which is a good shorthand for the rising elite, but if anything includes too many people: most of the gains of the top 1 percent have in fact gone to an even tinier elite, the top 0.1 percent.
And who are these lucky few? Mainly they’re executives of some kind, especially, although not only, in finance. You can argue about whether these people deserve to be paid so well, but one thing is clear: They didn’t get where they are simply by being prudent, clean and sober.
So how can the myth of the deserving rich be sustained? Mainly through a strategy of distortion by dilution. You almost never see apologists for inequality willing to talk about the 1 percent, let alone the really big winners. Instead, they talk about the top 20 percent, or at best the top 5 percent. These may sound like innocent choices, but they’re not, because they involve lumping in married lawyers with the wolves of Wall Street. The DiCaprio movie of that name, by the way, is wildly popular with finance types, who cheer on the title character — another clue to the realities of our new Gilded Age.
Again, I know that these realities make some people, not all of them hired guns for the plutocracy, uncomfortable, and they’d prefer to paint a different picture. But even if the facts have a well-known populist bias, they’re still the facts — and they must be faced.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 19, 2014
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