Save Fort Ross

The crisis forced California Government to dramatically cut down the funds for the State Parks and so Fort Ross State Historic Park is now in danger of being closed. We understand that this was unfortunate and hard decision that our lawmakers had to make but Fort Ross is not just "another" typical State Park where you can bring your family for a weekend to relax and grill some sausages - it's part of our American History.

In nowadays American and Russian visitors, volunteers, and helpers come to "Fort Ross", the museum under the sky. The park is open for Cultural Heritage Days and is the point where two cultures interweave naturally. There people from many backgrounds meet, and the relaxed and beautiful site of the open air museum helps to promote understanding between nations.

This place is especially important for the young generation. There are interactive educational programs for children. As a part of the overnight trips at Fort Ross, students, dressed in XIX century costumes, adopt the names of people who lived in the settlement and study this page of local and Russian history through enacting various aspects of the life at this time. American youth get to know more about the different people who lived here; and Russian children who live in America feel their roots and their belonging to the rich Russian culture through Fort Ross.

This is our responsibility to preserve the memory about the people who lived in California before us and to pass this information to our children. Please sign the following simple petition to save this beautiful piece of our history: http://makefortrossnationalmonument.us/index.html

Amercative

a•mer•ca•tive (uh mer' kuh tiv'), adj. 1. Characterized by a distinct influence of culture or way of thinking typical or stereotypical to the United States of America. An amercative policy. Amercative shopping is not affordable in Europe. Note: distinguished from American in that to be American is to be made in America or to be patriotic to America: a positive connotation. -tively adv., -tiveness noun.

There is no i between the r and c.

wis•to•des•sa•meing (wis' tuh dess' suh ming), n. 1. A misunderstanding which leads to a positive result. I met my wife Brandy through a wistodessameing, when I asked for a glass of liquor at the bar. -meings pl.

pange (panj') n. sing. 1. Trousers. This pange is too tight around the waste. panges pl.

hal•few (ha' fyoo) adj. 1. One and a half; half of three. I'll be there in a halfew hours. Also, hafew.

Students and Workers Unite for Human Rights

Can you imagine peasants and nobles from medieval Europe laying down their class differences to fight for better treatment of the peasants from the clergy? How about white southerners and undocumented Mexican immigrants joining forces to squeeze rights for the immigrants out of the government? Just this kind of interclass cooperation has been happening at both Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the University of California in Davis (UCD). Unionized workers in both universities had recognized that they were not being treated fairly by their employers and deserved higher wages and benefits, and both schools’ students immediately picked up the message. They joined hands with the workers to fight the administration and try to get the improvements in working conditions that the workers wanted. The fact that university students are supposed to be regarded as a different class than low wage workers is incongruous with the other fact that these two groups cooperated so fully and willingly to fight for better wages and conditions of the workers. But against all odds this cooperation went above and beyond expectations, gaining significant victories for both campaigns in the name of social justice. The breaking down of this social barrier between meritorious university students and low-wage or poverty level workers catalyzed an extremely efficient way to fight for a cause both of those groups viewed as just. The following comparative case study will explore the two aforementioned struggles and demonstrate how the worker-student relationship made these struggles a success.

In early 2007, the Associated Students of the University of California at Davis (ASUCD) passed a resolution that promoted higher wages and benefits to workers in the food service sector of the University. Their reasoning was simple: not only had all of the other UC’s switched from contracting their food service to university employment, but merely the fact of their being subcontracted makes them unique as employees of the University who cannot unionize and have few other privileges that UC employees enjoy. Students had helped workers organize a team to talk to the administration of the university, but the workers were denied UCD employment, setting the foundation for a labor movement. Throughout most of the first half of 2007, the students and workers campaigned by spreading information to other students and residents of the town, and held protests, at one of which 24 students were arrested while demonstrating. In response, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a nationwide union with over 1.6 million members which represents workers employed directly by the university, began to actively endorse the movement, putting even more pressure on the University. The Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef resisted the movement, claiming that a shift of such magnitude would cost millions of dollars, which would raise student fees, but justice-driven students demonstrated that they would prefer their workers to be well treated to having a lower tuition. After a final climactic protest and march on campus, the University at last began to take steps to resolve the conflict, culminating in an agreement signed in April of 2008 between AFSCME and UCD which helped raise food service workers’ wages by $1 to $3 an hour, and saw a stronger health care coverage and a monthly stipend of $100 to help offset the cost of living for the workers. The debate’s outstanding brevity and the fact that a strike was not needed to win the campaign shows that this was a very successful struggle.

Just short of ten years earlier, a longer, similar, but much more serious campaign had been launched on the opposite side of the nation at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With the passing of a new resolution, the Cambridge City Council mandated a living wage of $10 per hour for all public workers, and encouraged all private companies to follow suit. The Harvard Corporation did not even cast a sideways glance at this ruling and continued as before. In response, students at the university organized the Living wage campaign to pressure the university to negotiate a better deal for the workers. Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss tell us that “in April 2001, Harvard students had engaged in the longest sit-in in the university’s history, spending three weeks occupying the office of the former president. They demanded a living wage for Harvard’s service workers―the janitors, food servers, and security guards―many of whom were working two and three jobs to support their families” (p. 171). The mission statement of the Living wage campaign itself points out how unacceptable it is that “few of the service workers at Harvard share in [its] health: many struggle to raise their families as the richest university in the world pays them poverty wages. … At any time in the past 360 years, Harvard could have implemented decent payment standards on its own. Its failure to do so reflects a serious disregard for the well-being of its workers, and sends the clear message that Harvard values profit over human dignity” (p. 1). Eventually, Harvard would allow a so-called “Katz Committee” to be formed out of some of the sitters-in to recommend changes in its policies. Although many of the recommendations of this committee were controversially inadequate, the struggle won several notable improvements. Guards’ and Janitors’ wages go up to between $11.35 and $13.50, and dining service workers’ wages become $10.85 per hour. Although the latter is still below Cambridge’s living wage ordinance at the time (of $11.11), it is a significant improvement to the earlier level of $9.

Although these two movements were nearly a decade apart, there were many things that they had in common, especially those that brought success. One of the contributing factors to the campaigns’ widespread popularity was the social capital, or connexions to vital organizations, that they both had. At UC Davis, the local union representing workers at UC Davis endorsed the food service workers and their student proponents, and indeed had been trying to push for the same results before the student campaign had started, albeit with little success. Alex Gourevitch, in his article “Awakening the Giant: How the Living Wage Movement Received Progressive Politics” tells us that this factor was even more substantial at Harvard, because the Living wage campaign “received tremendous support from labor―every local union in Cambridge endorsed the students. The local Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) 26, representing the dining hall workers, went a step further, authorizing a strike to support the sit-in, electing the sitters-in honorary members of the union, and voting to make academic immunity for the students a key bargaining point during June contract renegotiations,” and that “[w]hile students and labor were the most visibly active members of the living wage campaign at Harvard, civil rights groups and the religious left added key support” (p. 1). This broad base of contacts allowed both groups to do tremendous outreach and pressure their respective universities, which proved enough in the case of UC Davis to rule out even the necessity of a strike having to occur.

Another factor that the two campaigns had in common was their tremendous leverage based on how much they can threaten the university with. Even though at UC Davis, the campaign only concerned the food service workers, a work stoppage by these employees would be devastating. It would mean that all of the students living in the dormitories at the University would not be able to feed themselves where they most often eat―there are no kitchens inside of the dorms themselves, and no other nearby cheap food alternatives. But this would go beyond simply threatening to cause students severe discomfort. This would immediately travel to parents, who would become outraged that they are putting in tens of thousands of dollars per student to a university, and in return their children are being starved and mistreated. With this much leverage the university feels very threatened and even if they are trying to resist the change in the early stages, if a strike did happen they would try to resolve it at all costs. At Harvard the situation is even more drastic―the food service would stop, a lack of janitors would cause dirt and mess to build up to grotesque levels, and the absence of security forces would allow the entire campus to descend into mayhem―it would be like pulling the bottom out from underneath Harvard and letting its insides spill out. These services are so essential to the universities that without them they not only cannot operate, but pose a risk to the community of students living on the premises, and the threat of a strike by these workers was so unacceptable that the university would basically have to take whatever the workers wanted if it came down to a strike.

The last and arguably most vital point of similarity was the huge role that students had played in both of these campaigns. Alex Gourevitch explains that “the issue resonates with students because it is their tuition that universities are using to pay campus workers poverty wages, and many are unwilling to be implicated in injustice within their own community” (p. 1). Fantasia and Voss go on to say “it was a struggle that students initiated on their own, from their contact with service workers at the university, and that conjoined the tactics of the student movement with the immediate concerns not of the students themselves, but of a working class that is normally invisible on the academic radar screen” (p. 172). Though this latter quote is in reference to the living wage campaign at Harvard it applies to UC Davis just the same―the students are more likely to see the suffering of workers as a social justice issue needing immediate resolution than as a positive effect on their tuition prices. This cross-class sentiment provides a very powerful ally to workers―students have social and cultural capital that workers don’t, they have a much broader knowledge base as students, and are usually a lot more resourceful and have more free time than workers. This enables them to form such things as campaigns and teams to do sit-ins and disseminate information to the broader public on the workers’ behalf. Without the help of students, non-unionized workers at UC Davis may not have even had the right to organize, much less the resources, because since Sodexho (their subcontracting company) is a nation-wide firm, they would have had to gain the approval of more than half of all the workers employed by this giant to unionize at UC Davis, and most of these other people may not even have heard of such a place. (In fact, Sodexho was one of the subcontracting companies that workers at Harvard were having grievances with in the other campaign!) But with the help and outreach of students, especially students who were also employees of the universities, outreach became very real and the progress moved much more swiftly than many other unions in the United States.

So where does this all lead us? Fantasia and Voss perceptively point out that “Both examples are indicative of an emergent social movement that appears capable of dismantling powerful social barriers” (p. 172). And once these barriers are dismantled, groups with completely different long-term goals can nevertheless come together to fight for the same thing, joining hands and heads in the name of justice. Unlike most unions and strikes involving people from the same trade and the same class, movements like these allow much more widely dispersed skills and information to come into play―something that does not exist at the workplace but is desperately needed in a labor union. The concept is very simple and optimistic: once a social barrier is struck down and people can intermingle, they can accomplish unfathomable victories. The conclusion, therefore is that the more social barriers we break down, the farther we can advance as a nation in not only social justice, but technology, economy, and peace.

Bibliography

Fantasia, Rick. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement. University of California Press, Berkeley: 2004..

Gourevitch, Alex. “Awakening the Giant: How the Living Wage Movement Revived Progressive Politics.”

“A Brief History of the Living Wage Debate at Harvard.”                                                  < http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/timeline.html>

Lapin, Lisa. “Better pay, benefits for food service employees under new agreement.” Sept. 17, 2007. < http://www.dateline.ucdavis.edu/dl_detail.lasso?id=9695>

Robertson, Kathy. “UC Davis to hire Sodexho food-service employees.” Sacramento Business Journal. Thursday, April 17, 2008.
< http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2008/04/14/daily56.html>

“Food worker employment.” The Aggie. Apr. 24, 2008. < http://theaggie.org/article/479>

Kelly-Sneed, Caitlin. “University to employ food-service workers.” The Aggie. Apr. 21, 2008. < http://theaggie.org/article/421>

“Harvard Living Wage Campaign.”
< http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~pslm/livingwage/timeline.html>

Heterosexist Hollywood: A Study of Its Effect on the Public

Film is one of the most widespread forms of entertainment in the world, and not surprisingly, it affects how people view the world very significantly. Although everybody knows that film is most commonly fictionalized, there are still aspects of it that affect people’s opinions on almost subconscious levels. For example, if no film ever showed women being in charge of men, people would start to believe that this is how the real world works as well and take this sexist viewpoint out of the cinemas and into their daily lives. Homosexuality is one such issue in film. It is still a hot debate topic today, and in the past it has been completely banned by censors. Has there been any homosexual influence on Hollywood in the past century of filmmaking? And conversely, how has Hollywood influenced the population’s perception of this issue?

Unlike what many people have come to believe, homosexual connotations and actual queer themes have been present in film since its very beginning. At the earliest stages in Film history in the beginning of the twentieth century, people’s views of homosexuality were completely different than what they are today. It was the general opinion of the public that homosexuality is linked to gender identity, and that the reason for the same sex attraction had its roots in a supposed desire to be of the other sex. Harry Benshoff summarizes in Queer Images that “homosexual men supposedly wanted to be women and homosexual women wanted to be men.” (21) For example, it was not considered strange or wrong for two men to dance with each other or even kiss, as long as they still looked masculine. The online article “Homosexuality in Hollywood” explains that “One of the earliest surviving motion picture images is a primitive test made at Thomas Edison’s studio, in which two men dance together while a third plays the fiddle.” (1) People believed that it only became “perverted” if there was gender-switching, such as a man wearing a dress.

This ignorance to see the connotations of the general public and the powers responsible for production of film created a kind of innocent era of filming where it was neither illegal nor condemnable to film homosexuality, since all film was still in a kind of experimental stage at that point. Benshoff notes that this innocence was then easily taken advantage of by directors such as “Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross (1932) [which] make[s] homosexuality surprisingly overt. … Roman emperor Nero fits easily into the pansy stereotype … [while] Empress Poppaea demands that one of her female friends disrobes and shares her bath.” In fact, there were even positive responses. “Homosexuality in Hollywood” remarks that “a woman dressed like a man—like Marlene Dietrich in ‘Morocco’ (1930)—the audience loves and thinks that is sexy.” (1)

However, this innocence was not long-lived. The United States was still a deeply religious nation and its ethics and morals stated that homosexuality is an abomination and will not be tolerated. The article “Homosexuality in Film” explains that “powerful forces were already at work. Religious and women’s groups had been protesting the movies’ permissiveness throughout the twenties and thirties, lobbying for federal censorship of the movies.” (2) Although the federal government didn’t respond to these pleas, the film producers themselves tried to create censorship guidelines, such as the Hayes Code. Joseph Boggs connects the issue in The Art of Watching Films when he writes that “Hays and his staff first reacted to state and local censorship by codifying the most frequent objections to film content and advising member companies on what to avoid.” (514) The Hays code, along with suppressing many other aspects of film, tried to ultimately scour any reference to homosexuality, or as it said, “sexual perversion” from motion picture.

Even though the success of these measures was not absolute, it had very saddening long-standing consequences. It tried to purge all images of “sexual perversion”, especially positive ones, but at the same time it was impossible to exclude all references to gay subculture in film, because all types of culture naturally make their way into film. The film Celluloid Closet explains that “For all its efforts, the Production Code didn’t erase homosexuals from the screen—it just made them harder to find. And now they had a new identity: as cold-blooded villains.” (Scene 7) Film, one of the most influencial communications media in the public at the time, was telling America that homosexuals are heartless and insane, and this message was taken in by straight and gay folk alike. Homosexuals began to be more afraid than ever to accept themselves for who they were because they believed that would mean that they would become murderous maniacs that try to force others to be gay as well. This was actually one of many stereotypes Hollywood imposed on minorities during this period to try to belittle them and single them out. In fact, many of these villified homosexuals were women ending up behind bars or in cages like animals. The Celluloid Closet explains that “These women were a warning to ladies, to just watch it and get back to the kitchen, where God meant them to be.”

On the other hand, Benshoff reveals that

“Queer images did not completely disappear after 1934 … Often, because Code officials were lacking any understanding of the era’s queer subcultures, they missed more subtle instances. For example, while Code administrators were ever watchful to censor the word pansy from proposed film scripts, the newer use of the word gay seems to have slipped through on occasion.” (30)

This is a very crucial point, because it emphasizes the capability of the culture to persevere in the face of adverse suppression. “Homosexuality in Hollywood” states that “Hollywood had learned to write movies between the lines, and some members of the audience had learned to watch them that way.” (2) The fact that it was possible to sneak in gay references even when they were actively being “scoured” from cinema served as a model for future hope of gay rights movements, the first glint of  hope amidst extreme hatred and prejudice.

In addition to this, foreign film industries had started letting down their own boundaries, creating competition for Production Code Hollywood. “Homosexuality in Film” recounts that “a film came out of Great Britain in which an explicitly gay (or at least bisexual) character actually stands up to fight the system that oppresses homosexuals.” (4) Because of this, Hollywood filmmakers tried to attract their own audiences with more adult themes, and eventually they had circumvented most of the code. Even though this was not a victory for gay rights in film directly, it was a step that began reverting all of the ignorance and hate that America had shrouded itself in during the Code era.

Then, after the Second World War, something strange began to happen. After this catastrophic war, people realized that not everything might be as it should be in America and many people started to voice their opinions. All kinds of minorities began to gain more rights, like African-Americans and women. But, at the same time, the subject of homosexuality seemed to go even further into the closet. Benshoff writes, “Male homosexuality was especially egregious to a nation obsessed with its own masculinity (or potential lack thereof). Homosexuals were branded ‘sex murderers’ in the press, a sort of human plague that was threatening to destroy the very foundations of society.” (87)  This mindset stayed with Hollywood well past the World War into the sixties with producers and other officials choosing to ignore the gay liberation movement that was gaining prominence so quickly.

However, this period did not last forever, and finally began to subside after the Stonewall Riots of 1969, in which the members of a gay bar called Stonewall chose to resist yet another in a long series of raids by the New York Police Force on queer establishments. The riots reached national level of popularity and kicked off a cascade of events granting queers many rights they had not had previously. Fortunately, the film industry finally relized the cultural representation that Hollywood was trying to cling to was extremely outdated, and released two revolutionary films—The Killing of Sister Gorge and The Boys in the Band, both of which present homosexuality as a part of life for the characters along with the problems they must encounter because of it, rather than making the characters themselves and their queer identities problems of the plot. These two films were the prototype for the first gay feature fiction films that followed inevitably, but were not such themselves because in the end they did treat the subject of homosexuality as something negative and something that puts a dark stain on one’s life.

Queer Directors

The kind of homophobic attitude Hollywood had throughout the Production Code era and the Postwar era would make you think that every single movie director was a heterosexual homophobe. But this is a very transparent assumption, because in fact there were plenty of producers that tried to sneak in gay content into their movies.  According to the article “Film Directors” on www.glbtq.com, “It has sometimes been said that the lesbianism of Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979) afforded her a certain license as ‘one of the boys’ in a fiercely male dominated profession,” and that she was “one of only two successful female directors in Hollywood's Golden Era.” Though she had many difficulties achieving this high rank, it cannot be debated that she was an extremely successful, and yet queer film director.

And even directors such as James Whale, who were unapologetically open about their sexuality, were still able to produce films under Hollywood’s name before their careers inevitably fell apart because of their notoriety. In fact, James Whale himself directed the highly regarded and yet overtly queer horror film Bride of Frankenstein (1935).

So a conclusion can be made from these facts: even while Hollywood thought they were scouring out all queer images from their exclusive industry, gay directors were almost proliferating in their backyard and infusing many of the most well-known movies with queer subtexts that undermined the entire philosophy. This counterbalancing of ideals provided a check on the power of Hollywood to influence the feelings of its audiences about homosexuality, and gave the queer movement more time to develop and settle into the picture.

Queer Actors

While directors control the film backstage, actors create what the audiences will see, and what else, if not this, influences an audience’s opinion? One of the most important queer actors of film is Rudolph Valentino. This man was the one and only male icon of his era of film (the silent era). According to the article “Valentino, Rudolph (1985-1926),” from the website www.glbtq.com, “His androgynous persona, at once assertively virile and gracefully sensitive, threatened traditional images of American masculinity in a crucial period of cultural change.”

Another important actor to mention is Clifton Webb whose career spanned the 40s and 50s. This actor, as the article “Webb, Clifton” from the same website states, “had the charisma and authority to single-handedly rescue the sissy from secondary roles; he is either the star or a major player in all of his films that followed.” This is crucial because the sissy—an effeminate male character—was one of the only representations of queers in Hollywood movies at the time, and certainly the most obvious. For gay audiences to see the sissy rise to leading roles was a very reassuring and hopeful change, albeit the fact that a sissy is still a sissy.

Conclusion

Throughoug the early and middle parts of the century, Hollywood, after realizing its undeniable presence, attempted to remove all queer references from its films. We have seen that the goal of these actions the hope that a lack of such ideas in film will have a direct consequences on the real world because film has such a big impact on viewers’ lives. We may be prone to believe that Hollywood succeeded in this heterosexist mission because of all the repression of queers that has been clearly present during this time period. However, upon more careful analysis, we find that this is not true, because where acknowledging the presence of homosexuality is concerned, the public has been and always will be ahead of the cinema. The fact that Hollywood’s officials chose to ignore the growing openness of the public for no less than twenty years did not affect this growth. What we must deduce from this goes back to the very fundamental concept of the entertainment industry—the purpose of which is to entertain the public. And the only way the public can be entertained is by displaying what the public wants to see or is used to seeing (and even that is stretching it). Therefore, it is impossible for Hollywood to be used as a tool for forcing the public to think a certain way unless the public itself chooses this path. It is not the producers that have tried to ban homosexuality from the screen, but rather the queer community that has succeeded in melting the strong stereotypes about it, one by one, to the point where soon Hollywood will portray people of all sexualities and gender identities in an unbiased, natural way.

Bibliography

Benshoff, Harry. Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America.Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, Inc. New York: 2006.

Boggs, Joseph. The Art of Watching Films. McGraw Hill. Boston: 2004.

Epstein, Rob. The Celluloid Closet (film). Brillstein-Grey Entertainment. 1996.

“Homosexuality in Film.” , 2007.

“Homosexuality in Hollywood.” 2004.

“Film Directors.” <>, glbtq, inc. 2002. 

Civics Final Paper

Picture this: it is 3 AM and you are sound asleep like any other night. You’ve worked hard all day like any other day trying to keep your family fed. Suddenly, pounding on the door wakes up you up. As soon as you open the door, a policeman grabs you, handcuffs you, muffles you and takes you away for no reason you can think of to a detainment chamber. You have no idea how long you will be forced to stay there, how you will be treated, if you can contact anyone, but more importantly, why you are there in the first place. Does this sound unfair and ridiculous? It does, and this does not happen often in the USA because Americans are protected against this by the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment states that

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”[1]

This is a vital human right, because it helps maintain a restriction on the government that prevents it from freely invading people’s privacy—something done in socialism but not in democracy. As an activist, I believe that if I were living in a place where the effects of this amendment were not manifest in any form, I would be instantly subject to the ramifications of a ransacking of my house to find evidence that I am a dissenter from the views of the government. With the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, I feel that I have more liberty to express myself and fight for what I believe is justice (in addition to help from other amendments, like the First Amendment.). However, after working hard to create a more effective protection of privacy for citizens by making decisions in favour of the Fourth Amendment, the government has taken away much of the amendment’s power, and has been consistently and unconstitutionally ignoring its provisions.

The history of searches and seizures goes back hundreds of years. In fact, the first recorded case dates back as far as 1335 in a case involving counterfeit money. [2] The power of search and seizure continued to grow without inhibition by royal and parliamentary decree all the way until 1688, the Glorious Revolution. “William of Orange, the new monarch, persuaded Parliament to abolish one tax because the searches required for its enforcements were ‘a badge of slavery upon the whole people.’”[3]

One of the most despised manifestations of search and seizure was called a writ of assistance, which is a document issued by a judge that allows a law enforcement officer to basically ransack any place whenever he feels like it is necessary—at his own discretion. This was a perfect pathway to the abuse of this power, and officers would search people’s homes for made up reasons if they were offended by that person or any similar scenario. Even when England outlawed the use of these documents at home, they were still widely used in the Colonies to harass the Colonists.

An important turning point in American history with respect to this protection came from James Otis. The death of King George II automatically caused all writs of assistance to expire and caused them to have to be reissued under the new king. James Otis petitioned the Massachussetts government not to hand out these writs because of their severe encroachment into people’s privacy, which was supported and passed into law by the Massachussetts General Assembly.[4] The governor, however, who was loyal to the King, overturned this law, which was extremely unpopular with his subjects. This act is claimed by some to be the spark of the Revolution.[5] In fact, the Declaration of Independence mentions the harassment of the Colonists by the King as one of its grievances. The Fourth Amendment was created in order to protect the people of the new United States from a repeat of this.

Laws by Congress

Congress has passed two consecutive acts that severely cripple the freedoms granted by the Fourth Amendment. The first act is called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. After Nixon’s violation of the Fourth Amendment by spying on political and activist groups using federal money, much investigation was done into the legality of cases such as this. It was after this that Congress passed this act, which in effect legalised what Nixon did under the condition that the judicial and congressional branches are made aware of each such move in due course, meaning that if it threatened national security, the government didn’t have to declare the action until much later. In addition, this act changes the conditions needed to issue a warrant from the Fourth Amendment. While traditionally, warrants issued upon “probable cause” have had to be based on evidence that the person was comitting a criminal act, the FISA court can now issue a warrant if the US government can prove that the person they are asking a warrant for is merely affiliated with a foreign power.[6]

FISA and a few other acts are all detriments to the Fourth Amendment, but they maintain that information obtained by warrants granted in this way is not constitutionally acceptable to be used in criminal court cases. However, a bigger change came when Congress issued the PATRIOT Act. The act was hastily passed by Congress in response to 9/11 as a means of fighting terrorism, by lowering restrictions and protections on intelligence gathering. This enables law enforcement to search different electronic media like email and phone calls, and also makes it much easier for the government to detain people that it suspects are associated with terrorism. In addition, this act requires using evidence gathered in ways conflicting with the Fourth Amendment in criminal cases, unlike all the acts preceding it. The Patriot act all but completely dismantled the Fourth Amendment, because it creates a much lower standard for “unreasonable search and seizure”—many people would consider that an assumption of terrorist affiliations is an unreasonable cause to seize one’s property; and it creates easily navigable loopholes to avoid the need for obtaining a warrant to conduct these actions. These are the two provisions given by the Fourth Amendment, and they are both nearly nullified by the Patriot Act.

Executive Branch Policies

The Executive Branch has instituded many policies that are largely unknown to the general public which, among other egregious offenses, overtly violate the provisions of the Fourth Amendment. Called Covert Operations, these policies are the Executive Branch’s way of attempting to preserve national security with radical measures that it does not disclose to the other Branches of government until much later. Among operations that bring down the Fourth Amendment are ones such as MKULTRA, which centered around investigating mind control techniques to gain information about the enemy. This is an unlawful extortion of information that tries to directly invade personal security of an individual to extract the information. Not only are these operations unconstitutional, but just the fact that they are kept away from the public makes it clear that the government is scheming against the will of the people. If the government is supposed to represent what its people need and want, then everything the government does should be known and monitored.

Another project that undermines the Fourth Amendment is the Guantanamo Bay military base. This was established on the land of Haiti and never returned to its original owner. Now, it is used as a holding ground for detainees under the excuse that since it is not on US soil but still a US prefecture, neither the bill of rights, nor the Geneva Convention applies there. However, there are known cases of US Citizens that have been taken by force from their homes and families to this facility and detained for an arbitrarily long amount of time without any kinds of rights that are Constitutionally provided to all citizens.[7] Not even the USA PATRIOT Act is as blatant of a defiance of Fourth Amendment rights than this facility, which undermines the very foundations of the Constitution.

Supreme Court Cases

As we have so far seen, the US government seems to have a trend of wearing down Fourth Amendment restrictions. However, the Supreme Court, as its fundamental duty, is opposed to such avoidance of Constitutional law, which is clear through rulings it has made with regard to the Fourth Amendment.

In Chimel vs. California, a man was arrested, and then the officers entered his house. Ignoring the felon’s denial to “look around” the officers proceeded to thoroughly search his home, and find incriminating evidence. After the man sued for Fourth Amendment rights, the Supreme Court ruled that the arrest was valid because the police had an arrest warrant, but the evidence found in his house was taken unconstitutionally, since the officers had no search warrant to look through the suspect’s house. The Supreme Court then went on to define that it was only permissible for officers to search in the area immediately around the suspect after arrest, and not in his or her home.[8]

An important case of this is Mapp vs. Ohio, in which police officers, after a denial of entry by Mrs. Mapp to search her house for another suspect, broke into her house, handcuffed her to her bed, and searched the entire residence without a search warrant. They found some material that they decided was obscene, and arrested her. The Ohio state court upheld the arrest and gave Mrs. Mapp eight years in prison. However, the United States Supreme Court heard Mapp’s lawyer’s appeal four years later, and ruled that the evidence was found unconstitutionally. Then they also ruled that this kind of evidence cannot be used as legal evidence in State court cases, and not only federal court cases as was the previous rule.[9] This is a prime example of the Supreme Court trying to uphold the Constitution by making restrictions on the other branches, known as checks and balances, to prevent them from corrupting their power.

This important decision is actually upholding an earlier Supreme Court decision which introduced the exclusionary rule, in which evidence unlawfully seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is not permitted to beused as such against a defendant in a federal court of law. This ruling took another important step and enforced this protection for every possible criminal case.

Conclusion

Although the Supreme Court’s rulings are in favour of supporting the Fourth Amendment, it is not enough to protect the rights of US Citizens. The other two branches of government—Congress and the Executive Branch—are both allowing laws and policies to slip through that undermine this fundamental right. It is very alarming to see how little is being done about cases such as Guantanamo Bay, which are not only unconstitutional, but are basic human rights violations. It is imperative that the actions taken by the government to create encroachments on our rights such as this are reversed and properly punished, because  if it is not, then the United States is at great risk of losing progressively more and more of its restrictions that protect its people, and can turn into an imperialist dictatorship that claims to be waging a war on terror while ruling by means of terror itself. The Fourth Amendment was created to protect the people from the government, and the government must be forced to uphold this principle.

Bibliography

“Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969)”,

David, Andrew. Famous Supreme Court Cases. Learner Publications Company, Minneapolis: 1980. (50)

De la Pena, Nonny. Unconstitutional. (2004)

Lasson, Nelson B. (1937). The History and Development of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Johns Hopkins Press. 

Napolitano, Andrew. “Congress is Gutting the Fourth Amendment.” 2006

Newman, Robert K. The Constitution and Its Amendments. Macmillan Reference USA, New York: 1999.

"The Constitution of the United States," Amendment 4.

 

 

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[1] "The Constitution of the United States," Amendment 4.

[2] Newman, Robert K. The Constitution and Its Amendments. Macmillan Reference USA, New York: 1999.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Lasson, Nelson B. (1937). The History and Development of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Johns Hopkins Press. 

[6] Napolitano, Andrew. “Congress is Gutting the Fourth Amendment.” 2006

[7] De la Pena, Nonny. Unconstitutional. (2004)

[8] “Chimel v. California, 395 U.S. 752 (1969)”,

[9] David, Andrew. Famous Supreme Court Cases. Learner Publications Company, Minneapolis: 1980. (50)

Anna Eschoo Bills Opinions

1) Abortion
Abortion Pain Bill
Official title: HR 6099: To ensure that women seeking an abortion are fully informed regarding the pain experienced by their unborn child.

Summary: This bill would require hospitals or physicians to give the woman wanting an abortion a brochure that warns her of the possibility that the unborn fetus over 20 weeks old will experience pain during the abortion. It should be noted that the woman must sign a document in order to waive the receipt of the brochure, rather than suggesting that the woman may receive one if she wants.

Rep. Eshoo voted “Nay” on this bill.

I think that she did the right thing. I think the creators of this bill probably aimed to dissuade a woman from abortion by making her feel guilty about it, even though it was a choice that she has already decided was necessary.

 

2) Civil Liberties and Civil Rights

Reporter’s Source Confidentiality Guidelines

Official Title: HR 2102: To maintain the free flow of information to the public by providing conditions for the federally compelled disclosure of information by certain persons connected with the news media.

Summary: This bill prohibits from any federal organization such as a communications service provider from forcing a reporter to show or demonstrate any media he or she is providing to his or her customers for any reason except in certain extreme cases.

Anna Eshoo voted “Yea” on this bill.

I agree with her choice because if it was legal for such a federal organization to evaluate the reporter’s product, they could easily censor it and create propaganda and misleading within the public.

 

3) Immigration

Immigration Law Enforcement Act of 2006

Official Title: HR 6095: To affirm the inherent authority of State and local law enforcement to assist in the enforcement of immigration laws, to provide for effective prosecution of alien smugglers, and to reform immigration litigation procedures.

Summary: This bill lets government officials arrest, detain, interrogate, etc. any “illegal aliens” or people who have been “smuggled” into the country and also clarifies litigation issues about it.

Eshoo votes “Nay”

I feel that this bill is harsh on said “illegal aliens,” but I personally do not have a stance on whether we should dispose of them or let them stay in America yet.

 

4) Sexual Orientation

Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007

Official title: HR 1592: To provide Federal assistance to States, local jurisdictions, and Indian tribes to prosecute hate crimes, and for other purposes.

Summary: This bill amends the federal definition of a “hate crime” to include sexual orientation and gender identity as one of the protected classes.

Rep. Eshoo voted “Yea”

I wholeheartedly agree with this bill since it impacts me directly. I am now more protected than I was previously.

The Continuum of United States Foreign Polity: A Ranking of the Effectiveness of US Actions

••••

(Averages)

 

Explanation of bullet points:

Meaning, in order from left to right

•National Security •Democracy •World Peace •Aid to People in Need

Color Coding

•Failed •Somewhat Successful •Extremely Effective

 

USAID •••• (12 points)

USAID is a programme started under the Marshall Plan whose objective is to provide aid to developing countries and people in need. According to Wikipedia, “USAID advances U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting economic growth, agriculture and trade; health; democracy, conflict prevention, and humanitarian assistance.” It has provided countries in need with 0.17% of its Gross National Income, a whopping $23.53 billion in 2006. The program makes certain that all of its actions are easily accessible information.

USAID promotes national security by attempting to stabilizes countries where there may be radical movements because of lack of an acceptable lifestyle, and by being generous to other nations it helps keep the US image positive. The program upholds democracy by attempting to finance operations necessary for a democratic process where otherwise a nation would not be able to. The program unquestionably promotes world peace and aids those in need because that is what it was created to do and it has clearly been the only target of its funding and resources.

 

Marshall Plan •••• (11)

The Marshall Plan was a program hosted by the United States in which they granted 13 billion dollars of economic aid to many Western European countries after the second World War. By the time the plan came to a conclusion every country that it had helped except Germany had economically grown beyond pre-war levels. It also had an essential role to starting European integration by erasing tariffs and trade boundaries.

The plan indirectly helped national security by preventing the nations the US aided from becoming communist, since the nations knew the US is against communism and wouldn’t give them aid otherwise. It helped to support democracy because it gave the countries a peaceful means of rehabilitating instead of a revolution like the Russian or French revolutions. Both world peace and aid to others were achieved with great success by the Marshall plan because it created a greater alliance between the European nations and it directly aided them to recover from the War.

 

Spanish-American War •••• (10)

The Spanish-American War of 1898 started off as excitement by the American population about liberating the Spanish colonies in the Mediterranean that had been struggling for independence. After Spain refused to peacefully resolve the Cuban fight for independence, and America heard of riots in Havana, the US government deployed the USS Maine to patrol the waters around Cuba. Unexpectedly the ship exploded and along with muckraking that accused Spain of horrible atrocities, the US government decided to go to war. 109 days later after a few decisive naval victories at Cuba and the Philippines the Treaty of Paris was signed and the United States won the war.

This war was very quick, easy, and mostly light-hearted for America, and had many positive consequences. From the standpoint of national security, the war helped to unite the north and south after the Civil War by providing them a common enemy, and helped to integrate the Black population into society by allowing them to fight for the homeland alongside whites. From the standpoint of democracy, the United States freed five colonies from imperial Spain and allowed Cuba to elect their own government, although it did keep three as US colonies. From a standpoint of world peace—it was indeed a war, but it was short and had relatively few casualties, and it served to resolve conflicts between Spain and its colonies by separating them. Finally, the US aided at least Cuba and Puerto Rico, where citizens were looking for a turnover of Spanish power. The Philippines sought this as well but when the US replaced the Spanish as oppressors they were not pleased.

 

National Security Council •••• (10)

The Council was created by the National Security Act under president Truman and is the main medium through which staff members can discuss national security and foreign policy matters with the President. The decision making process of the council has become less and less formal and regulated, while the influence of the council has become stronger and reached farther than ever. Throughout its history, the NSC served as the center for all operations regarding foreign policy and national security that the United States has made, including Cold War and post-Cold War invasions.

Though many of the decisions of the NSC have had almost disasterous consequences, many others have served their purpose, and many others still have gone beyond expectations, such as the Peace Corps. So far, national security has been very heavily monitored, so the goal of the national security council has been mostly achieved. This by its very nature supports democracy as the nation that harbours one of the most prolific democracies in the world is kept secure from other ideologies. In addition, the council has passed many decisions, such as the Marshall Plan, that provide very generous aid to peoples that are genuinely in need. However, all three of these things must be taken with a grain of salt for they are done very haphazardly and with many grave and unforgiveable errors, and because of these errors, world peace has been greatly compromised more than once. Therefore, the NSC is a very dangerous, but essential instrument.

 

Détente •••• (8)

Détente was a period during the Cold War where both Superpowers realized that the hostilities were negatively affecting their economies and that there would really be no benefit to waging a war against the other side. Consequently, both sides started trying to loosen tensions and begin negotiating. The first treaty to be signed was the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 which was the beginning of the period, and several other important treaties such as SALT I were signed. However, by 1979, Détente began to unravel with the hostage crisis in the Iranian revolution, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan followed by US financially aiding Pakistan to oppose communism. Because of this, many planned treaties were abandoned and tensions increased yet again.

Détente was a very good idea on both superpowers’ parts, but in the end it was only marginally successful at maintaining national security by slightly curbing the nuclear arms race, and equally slightly effective at promoting world peace because even during the peak of good relations each side still had missiles pointed at each other and the Vietnam War was raging throughout the entire period. The goal of supporting democracy wasn’t achieved because the United States increased relations with a communist country. However, the United States did send vast shipments of grain to the Soviet Union to help them after the failure of kolkhoz, so providing aid to people in need was visibly effective.

 

Cuban Missile Crisis •••• (6)

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a confrontation between the United States, Soviet Union and Cuba during the cold war with the climax of the crisis beginning on October 15, 1962 when United States discovered the missile silos and bases being build on the island of Cuba and then came to a conclusion two weeks later on October 28 when the two superpowers agreed to dismantle all missiles in Cuba.

The actions that Kennedy took during the Cuban Missile Crisis did maintain national security, as he quarantined Cuba in order to prevent the Soviet Union from putting more missiles there. However, the way he treated Cuba—not even noticing them or asking them of what they wanted to do with their own country—cannot be viewed as upholding democracy, and furthermore, his threats to the Soviet Union are anything but an attempt to promote world peace. Finally, providing aid to people in need is not even an applicable goal of this action because the United States cannot be bothered by people in need when we are about to get nuked… right?

 

Iraq War •••• (5)

            The Iraq War is a US-led invasion of Iraq by several different nations. The basis for the invasion was that Iraq posessed and was actively developing weapons of mass destruction and that this was a direct threat to the United States in many ways. However, the weapons of mass destruction were never found in the country even though it was the most heavily investigated case of all time. After the defeat of the Iraq military, the US coalition occupied Iraq and tried to establish a democracy, but many sectarian groups started violences agains the occupation. Estimates of people killed range from 150,000 to over a million, and the cost to the US budget is between 3 and 5 trillion dollars.

From a perspective of national security, the Iraq War was not a good move. Not only did we risk the Iraq government striking us with the supposed weapons of mass destruction, but in the end it was uncovered that there were no such weapons in the first place so the invasion was completely unnecessary. Second, the occupation claims to have attempted to institute democracy to the country, but there is a difference between “supporting” it and imposing it on those that don’t want it, which was evident by the mass insurgency that started happening. Promoting world peace is completely out of the question since an invasion is anything but peaceful, and aid to people in need was completely forgotten as the coalition forces heedlessly killed many of those people in need in Iraq.

 

The War on Terror •••• (4)

This is a series of operations undertaken by the United States after the September 11 attacks in order to eliminate all possible global terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda, with the first being the invasion of Afghanistan by the United States. The war has been going on for more than seven years with no end in sight all over the world. Not only has this been a terrible strain on both our country and the rest of the world, especially economically, but it is also regarded as unproductive. Many experts say that it has actually served to consolidate the opposition to the US, to aid terrorist recruitment, and to increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks.

Though based on a need to maintain national security, the war on terror in many ways has only made it worse—by having a lack of success in the middle east, by heavily straining our economy, by exporting troops and power overseas making our nation less defended on the home front. Though the war on terror tries to promote democracy by fighting against terror dictatorships and the like, it fails by collapsing any type of democracy extant in a country the US invades, and even installing new dictatorships. By the constant warfare and invasion, world peace is heavily compromised by this war on terror, and many people are needlessly killed and left completely neglected.

Life’s Appearance was Elegant and Probable

There are many theories as to how life got its start on Earth. Whether it was by intelligent design, evolution, comets or space aliens—the same problems tends to pervade each hypothesis.  The first problem (with theories such as evolution) is the very beginning of life. Sure, evolution accounts for every subsequent stage, but how indeed was the first life form created? And the second problem is the probability factor of any theory. For those such as space aliens or even intelligent design, there is no proof of the cause itself, much less a way to determine if it really was the cause of life. Other theories are more susceptible to such ponderings. So was life probable or not, and how so? These questions are at the heart of any scientist seeking to find the origin of living existence, and rightly so.

First, let us consider the theory that Harold Urey and Stanley Miller researched. “They passed an electric discharge through the flask containing the atmosphere to simulate lightning … After a week, Urey and Miller … found that the water contained large amounts of amino acids, … nucleic acids, sugars, and fats.”[i] This experiment demonstrated that it is not in fact impossible to create organic compounds from inorganic ones, given the right conditions. And, according to Panno, “Given the conditions of that period [prebiotic Earth], it now seems almost inevitable that such molecules would be synthesized.”[ii] This experiment, however, does not provide an example of how this organic matter could have replicated itself, not even mentioning creating living cells. To begin countering this flaw, another hypothesis is coupled. Since neither DNA nor proteins can both replicate and catalyze reactions simultaneously, scientists proposed that most of the matter created by these random lightning storms was RNA, which can perform both functions. “Ribozymes [an RNA molecule capable of enzymatic activity], assembled in the prebiotic oceans, could not only replicate themselves but also could have catalyzed the formation of specific proteins, which in turn could have functioned as structural proteins or enzymes.”[iii] So we have one hypothesis that states that organic matter was created from inorganic matter by random lightning bolts, and another that says that RNA became the dominant molecule of this organic matter. This still does not address the question of how actual cells came into being, as well as others. Before this adventure delves even deeper into improbability, a different opinion is called upon.

Though one of the mainstream theories, this Urey-Miller series of hypotheses may not be at all likely. The Scientific American explains that “In recent years … researchers have envisioned that life’s ingredients might have accumulated in … rocks, like gray volcanic pumice, [which] are laced with air pockets created when gases expanded inside the rock while it was still molten. … Given enough time and enough chambers, serendipity might have produced a combination o fmolecules that would eventually deserve to be called ‘living.’”^iv Hazen goes on to explain many different ways in which minerals could have helped creating a stable beginning for life. In addition to creating pockets for cells, rocks could have acted as scaffolding in layered minerals that prevents the breakup of large molecules in early-earth conditions, and participated in vital reactions, such as crystal lattices aligning amino acids to form peptide bonds. Nick Lane in his book Power, Sex, Suicide elaborates on a very stunning and elegant example of the role of minerals. “[Mineral] bubbles were probably formed … by the mixing of two chemically different fluids: hot, reduced, alkaline waters that seeped up from deep in the crust, and the more oxidized and acidic ocean waters above, containing carbon dioxide and iron salts. Iron-sulphur  minerals … would have precipitated into microscopic bubbly membranes at the mixing zone.”^v This theory is so elegant because it helps to explain a number of questions, which all stem from the same problem—life’s common ancestor. The problem is that prokaryotes are in two fundamentally different domains: archaea and bacteria. The differences between them are so numerous that it is hard to imagine a common ancestor for them, but there was one (called LUCA—the Last Universal Common Ancestor of all known life on earth.)  After a lot of research and comparing data, it was determined that both photosynthesis and fermentation are too complex of processes to have been part of LUCA, but the last remaining option of respiration at first seems no less complex. However, “Although respiration is far more complex than fermentation today, when pared down to its essentials it is actually far simpler: respiration requires electron transport (basically just a redox reaction), a membrane, a proton pump, and an ATPase, whereas fermentation requires at least a dozen enzymes working in sequence.”^vi  So how does this relate to the iron-sulphur minerals? Simlpy enough: another vast difference between archaea and bacteria are their membrane structures, which leads scientists to believe that LUCA didn’t have either type of membrane. If the iron-sulphur mineral bubbles could act as such membranes, it would be fairly easy to apply the other ingredients of respiration to their structure: an ATPase across the bubble canopy would create a passage for electrons, and the environment of this primordial mineral formation would have already had a huge difference in charge because of the reduced alkaline waters from the crust mixing with the oxidized and acidic ocean waters.  Thus, it is one of the best explanations as to why archaea and bacteria are so different and how they could have possibly had a common ancestor.

The iron-sulphur mineral bubble theory is a very convincing candidate for the origin of life—not only because it explains previously unanswered questions, but because it is very probable, and we once again turn to Nick Lane, the author of the theory, to explain how probable it is. He suggests to

“Think about what is happening here. Such conditions could not have been rare on the early earth. … Volcanic seepage sites must have existed across much of the surface of the earth. … The formation of many millions of tiny cells, bounded by iron-sulphur membranes, requires no more than a difference in redox state and acidity between the oceans and the volcanic fluids emanating from deep in the crust—a difference that certainly existed. … UV rays [from the sun] split water and oxidize iron … The ocean becomes gradually oxidized relative to the more reduced conditions in the mantle. According to the basic rules of chemistry, the mixing zone inevitably forms natural cells, replete with their own chemiosmotic and redox gradients.”^vii

These conditions are not only probable but they must have been in constant existence, unlike the fragility of something like a primordial soup or an RNA world. And if all the cells really need is an ATPase in the iron-sulphur membrane, it would be easy to imagine that perhaps more than one such bubble trapped this essential protein from the environment created by a Miller-Urey type of process, and was able to begin respiration and other chemical reactions that would eventually lead to life itself. With the iron-sulphur mineral bubble theory, I can now reasonably conclude that the appearance of processes performing chemical reactions that aid to propagate the same processes (which is one of the definitions of early life) was probable, if not inevitable on the early earth.

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[i] Panno, Joseph. The Cell. Facts on File, Inc. 2005, p. 4.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Panno, Joseph. The Cell. Facts on File, Inc. 2005, p. 11.

^iv Hazen, Robert M. “Life’s Rocky Start.” The Scientific American, 2001, p. 79

^v Lane, Nick. Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. Oxford University Press. Oxford, UK: 2005, p. 100, 102.

^vi Ibid., p. 98.

^vii Ibid., p. 103