Goodbye and good riddance - The demise of Dr. Laura's career

My favorite Jewish radio shock-jock, Howard Stern, left terrestrial radio for the satellite variety a few years ago and I haven't heard from him since. Last week, my second-favorite Jewish radio shock-jock, Dr. Laura Schlesinger, announced that her radio show will end this year. She'll probably move to XM or Sirius and, like Howard, Artie, Gary, Robin, and Fred, be gone from my life forever. On the plus side, paid subscription is the best protection against a young person hearing the good doctor's adult-themed advice without the filter of a loving parent. On the minus side, I will have to endure afternoon traffic jams without the entertainment of Dr. Laura's particular brand of crazy.

Unlike Howard Stern, Laura Schlesinger isn't leaving by choice. She's leaving because 10 years after her homophobia made her TV show un-marketable, she had a racially insensitive on-air meltdown. Two of her biggest radio sponsors have dropped her (and essentially ended her career) now that the whole world knows that she's not just a homophobe, she's a racist homophobe. I hope her demotion to satellite and the giant pay cut she has to take when she walks away from her nationally syndicated radio show remind her that her job is to help people, not to make "philosophical points" about racial slurs.

Dr. Laura's shtick is that she's already done all the scandalous, depraved, immoral things her callers are doing, so she understands them. She claims the moral authority to judge other people, particularly women, because she doesn't do those things any more. She believes in honoring your father and mother, the absolute sanctity of the husband/wife relationship, and that raising children is the most important job in the world. She approaches everything from a conservative religious point of view with no gray areas — which accounts for her motto ("now go do the right thing") and makes for amazing radio when people call in to be scolded.

This recent drama started when a black woman married to a white man called the show looking for advice about a neighbor. The caller said, "Every time he comes over, it's always a black comment. It's, 'Oh, well, how do you black people like doing this?' And, 'Do black people really like doing that?'"

The Dr. Laura I know would have advised this woman to tell her husband either that neighbor cuts it out or he is no longer welcome in their house. Her actual response was, "I don't think that's racist." She followed up with, "When somebody says, 'What do blacks think?' say, 'This is what I think. This is what I read that if you take a poll the majority of blacks think this.' Answer the question and discuss the issue… . We have to be able to discuss these things. We're people."

Putting aside the fact that she was wrong (ascribing a behavior or characteristic to an individual based exclusively and only on race is, by definition, racist), that doesn't seem like a career-ending statement. If not for what she said right after "I don't think that's racist," it wouldn't have been. But this was Dr. Laura's next complete sentence, "Without giving much thought, a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply 'cause he was half-black. Didn't matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That's not a surprise." So much for trying to help people.

When the caller mentioned the "n word," Dr. Laura stopped being a radio psychologist altogether and became a confused, old, white woman who doesn't get it saying, "Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger. I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it's affectionate. It's very confusing." Then she went to a commercial.

She came back on the air with that same caller who said, "I was a little caught back by the n-word that you spewed out, I have to be honest with you. But my point is, race relations … since Obama's been in office … racism has come to another level that's unacceptable."

Dr. Laura's response was, "Yeah. We've got a black man as president, and we have more complaining about racism than ever. I mean, I think that's hilarious." Then, in response to a question about whether or not it's OK to use the word in question, Schlesinger said, "It depends how it's said. Black guys talking to each other seem to think it's OK." When the obvious difference between herself and "black guys" was pointed out, Dr. Laura said, "Oh, I see. So, a word is restricted to race. Got it. Can't do much about that."

The only reasons a white person would make a philosophical point (in the form of a complaint) about this racial slur are they're either trying to protect black people from being insulted by other black people or they want to reserve the right to use the word themselves. Either way, it's the wrong thing to do. So there actually is something that can be done when it comes to a discussion about the "n word." Stay out of it.

Unemployment forcing us to forge new identities - The social costs of joblessness

I’ve been an independent contractor for most of my life, and I’ve always believed my work speaks for itself. I’ve also refused to compromise my dignity or my self-respect in order to remain employed by people who didn’t appreciate how hard I worked for them. I once told a brokerage firm that wanted me to shave my goatee, “I’m only here eight hours a day. The other sixteen, I’m going to look the way I want to look.” Over the years, this mentality would lead to the occasional period of joblessness (who knew?). The minuses of being young and out of work – getting by with a little help from my friends, couch-surfing, and constant anxiety over money – are obvious. On the plus side, however, I was unemployed, evicted, broke, and stressed out way before it became fashionable.

Since corporate America has no interest in hiring back the millions of workers it laid off in the past few years, it’s clear that some aspects of the Great Recession are going to be with us for a while – namely, chronic unemployment as the bastard child of outsourcing and a globalized economy. So we’re all going to have to get used to higher (read: European) unemployment rates for the foreseeable future. In response, we’ll need to move away from this exclusively American cultural idea of defining ourselves by what we do for a living and toward a more enlightened (read: European) style of relating to each other as individuals, not as holders of job titles.

Don’t get me wrong, I love America, I think we Americans are pretty awesome, and I don’t want us to become European. I just think that sometimes our status as the world’s lone superpower and the most prosperous nation ever makes us lose sight of how young we are as a culture. Keep in mind that America as we know it has been around for about fifty years; and there are shops in Italy full of antiques older than this country. While we’ve always made it easy for the capitalists to capitalize, it took us until 1935 to realize that we also had to provide some sort of income for people who are too old to work and support themselves; it took us until 1964 to grant equal protection under the law for everyone; and it wasn’t until 1965 that we decided to provide heath insurance for people too old to be able to get an affordable policy. Before we put the safety net of Social Security and Medicare under the high-wire that is the American job market, untold millions of people fell to their economic death when they could no longer work.

And we know the financial costs of long-term unemployment can be devastating. As foreclosures piled up in recent years (one in four mortgages are underwater), some communities have been left with streets where only a few families remain in their homes. The economic chain of events is predictable: prices of the foreclosed properties drop, dragging down the values of other houses on their streets and in their towns, leaving local governments with less tax revenue at the same time they’re under more pressure to provide services. But as bad as those costs are, the long-term emotional damage to workers (read: your friends and family) could prove to be much, much worse.

The John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University conducted a survey to measure the effect unemployment has on worker’s attitudes – and the findings were pretty scary. Respondents said they’d felt or had experienced anxiety, helplessness, depression, and stress. They talked about strained relationships, problems sleeping, and avoiding social situations. A lot of people felt that the advanced degrees they’d worked so hard to earn were “useless” or caused employers to think they're overqualified; which is tragic considering the fact that the unemployment rate goes up as a worker’s education level goes down. Many said they have questioned their self-identity after they had allowed their professional careers to define them.

In this new era of chronic joblessness, we have to start adapting our personal behavior and our social customs. It’s important to realize that it’s very likely the person we’re talking to hates his or her job (and hates talking about it), doesn’t have a job, may have been recently laid off, or is about to be laid off. There is even a chance, as embarrassing as it is in this economy, that person may be independently wealthy and doesn’t need to work. Either way, it’s rude to ask, “So what do you do?” It’s better to start a conversation with “How do you know the host?” or “What brings you here today?” Like they do in Europe. We have to change our identity-via-occupation culture or risk creating a permanent underclass of desperate, depressed, transient, unemployed workers.

As scary as it is, we will have to start thinking of ourselves as the people we see when we look in the mirror, not the people we become when we clock in at work.

Waiting out the old guard - No future for SMRR

I've had issues with Santa Monicans for Renters' Rights (SMRR), the we're-the-only-game-in-town political party that basically controls the City Council, the Rent Control Board, the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, and Santa Monica College. I thought it was absurd for an organization of 4,000 people to be empowered to make decisions for a city with some 90,000 residents. That was before the annual SMRR convention revealed the actual math of the organization and its power structure. Since then, I've become convinced that as a progressive democratic political organization, SMRR has gone past absurd and is now totally ridiculous.

Over the course of four hours, it became apparent that only a small minority of delegates to the convention are actual renters. In addition to its core constituency being under-represented, this once progressive organization hypocritically voted to support a tax that isn't — with some members of those notorious Steering/Executive Committee's chastising the delegate who asked whether or not the tax could be considered progressive.

The real fireworks of the day happened once all the voting was over and the delegates had spoken. Candidates who were well known, well organized, or well liked had handled their business and got what they came for. The delegates to the convention specifically rejected other hopefuls, however, some with long histories of SMRR endorsements. Many delegates stayed all day in order to vote against candidates they didn't support (it got so bad for people like Oscar de la Torre and Pam O'Connor that neither could get to 100 votes in the later rounds). That was when some delegates began questioning Patricia Hoffman, one of the party's leaders. They wanted to know whether or not it was possible to prevent the Steering Committee from undermining the work they had done to keep de la Torre and O'Connor from being endorsed by the organization.

Her words that day and the committee's actions since have answered that question with an unequivocal "No!" which they will attempt to sugarcoat by drawing the distinction (without a difference) between "endorsing" and "supporting" O'Connor, de la Torre, and Ralph Mechur. But neither the Steering Committee nor the candidates in question will be able to change the math of that minuscule support; which came from only about 85 delegates and eight committee members.

Hoffman's letter to the editor of your Daily Press last Thursday was incredibly revealing. She said, "There is a small steering committee of dedicated members who spend hundreds of hours annually working on issues in our city, as well as on regional and state issues affecting us. … When the convention fails to endorse a full slate, the steering committee is charged with determining … if it wants to add candidates to fill the slate. This allows those of us who work hardest on tenant issues to use our judgment on how best to protect tenants."

For the record, that's the co-chair of SMRR telling its members that "dedicated" people who "work hardest on tenant issues" know what's best for you; so sit down and be quiet.

A tiny town like ours having a political party in the first place makes as much sense as Somalia having a space program. We live in a place where you are as likely as not to bump into the school board president at the Twilight Dance Series on a Thursday night or a City Council member at a Farmers' Market on a Saturday morning; and we live in a time when information is available instantly. There can't be that many of us who need SMRR to tell us how to vote.

A while ago, I asked for 600 people to join me in creating a New Energy Caucus within SMRR. I've changed my mind. Clearly SMRR's power structure (the five people on the Executive Committee) is a monolith that has never considered, much less planned for, intra-organizational disagreement or the orderly transfer of power. So instead of working to bring new energy to life, the best thing for the rest of us to do is wait for the old energy to die — and for this formerly proud, progressive, democratic, people's organization to die with it.

Obama betting on the American worker - Previewing the 2010 mid-term elections

Do you remember Barack Obama circa January of 2009? He was the man who had crushed the Clintons and bested the Bushes on his way to the White House, the most inspiring presidential candidate any of us had ever seen, the bane of Republican and FOX News existence, and the leader of the fired-up-and-ready-to-go Democratic Party. Do you miss him? Well, I have good news: He's back, he's better than ever, and his sights are set on the mid-term elections.

I caught the first glimpse of the Campaigner in Chief on Thursday as I was watching "The View" on TiVo. It was the first time a sitting president had appeared on daytime TV since the George and Laura Bush interview with Dr. Phil and I couldn't help thinking, "Why is he on that couch?"

About halfway through the show, I realized he came to debut the theme we'll be hearing during the fall campaign to a relatively friendly crowd (Elisabeth Hasselbeck's disrespect aside). After defending the decision to bail out Chrysler and GM, he said, "The one thing I want to just tell everybody here in this audience is: don't bet against American workers. Don't bet against American ingenuity. We still have the best workers in the world, the best technology in the world, the best universities in the world. And if we get our mojo back over the next several months, then I am absolutely confident that we are going to be doing terrific."

That same theme came up the next day at a Chrysler plant in Detroit. President Obama was defending those bailouts again when he said, "There were leaders of the 'just say no' crowd in Washington. They were saying … standing by the auto industry would guarantee failure. One of them called it 'the worst investment you could possibly make.' They said we should just walk away and let those jobs go. I wish they were standing here today. I wish they could see what I'm seeing in this plant and talk to the workers who are here taking pride in building a world-class vehicle. I don't think they'd be willing to look you in the eye and say that you were a bad investment. They might just come around if they were standing here and admit that by standing by a great American industry and the good people who work for it, that we did the right thing. It's hard for them to say that. You know, they don't like admitting when I do the right thing. But they might have had to admit it. And I want all of you to know, I will bet on the American worker any day of the week!"

Later that day, he visited a GM plant in Hamtrack, Mich. where he stood in front of a Chevy Volt and previewed a little more of the offensive strategy. "Now, let's be clear, we're not out of the woods yet." He said, "We're going to have to make sure the government, business — everybody is working in the same direction. We've got to export more. We can't just buy from other countries; we got to sell to other countries. And that means we've got to make sure that our trade deals are fair. But let me tell you when I look out at this plant, and I look out at all of you, it gives me hope. It confirms my conviction: don't bet against the American worker! Don't bet against the American people!"

Once could be a fluke; but twice is a trend, and three times is a reasonable certainty. I'm reasonably certain this is what we're going to be hearing for the next couple of months.

The Republicans are also testing their campaign themes; and they've decided to go with two main messages. The first is that deficits are so terrible that the federal government should never spend money it doesn't have — even on unemployment insurance payments for millions of American workers. The second is that tax cuts for a few very wealthy people should be extended, despite the fact that doing so would add trillions of dollars to the deficit. It seems like these two ideas wouldn't go together, and that's because they don't.

But when you're talking about the Republican leadership, you're not dealing with people who care too much about things like consistency or principle. They only care about getting elected. Back in 2002, then Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said the deficits from the second Bush tax cut would threaten the economy. Vice President Dick Cheney let him know what was the top priority by saying, "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. We won the mid-terms."

We're all living with consequences of that Bush team's economic policies and we can all agree it would have been a good idea to try a different approach. Yet when National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions was asked what Republicans would do if they were in power, his answer was, "We need to go back to the exact same agenda" of the Bush administration.

With a choice between betting on Bush policies and betting on the American worker, it's reasonably certain President Obama's Democratic party will hold on to control of Congress for two more years.