In a time when half of all U.S. bankruptcies are caused by overwhelming medical bills by predatory hospitals, it’s important for patients to understand their rights. Thankfully there are also lawsuits afoot to curb the practice of price-gouging the uninsured. Is there any greater rankism than business syndicates that take advantage of their power over medical treatment, maintaining control over decisions that could have life and death consequences?

This article on hazing gets to the heart of why rankism has now become a pressing social issue:

No one forgets such humiliating lessons on coercion, intimidation and submission. They can be reapplied at other settings on other vulnerable people, such as at a prison in Iraq.

Athletes should be encouraged to think about the ramifications of their actions beyond the game field.

The average American worker would have to work 51 centuries to earn what the highest paid U.S. CEOs make in a year. Raiding their sofas for change would probably solve world hunger.

Take action to tie the minimum wage to Congressional pay increases right here.

Perhaps while they are enabling the majority of Americans to earn a basic livelihood, Congress will consider taking a serious look at executive pay. Hopefully the Enron verdict will usher in a new era of corporate accountability for gross inequities in workplace compensation.

In the U.S. Alaa Ahmed Seif Al Islam would be a celebrated public intellectual, and would probably be a highly paid consultant. He’s an award-winning journalist-blogger, open source developer, and a human rights activist. On May 7, 2006, Alaa was beaten and jailed for participating in a protest to support a free, independent judiciary in Egypt.

The blogosphere has been abuzz with the hope that the combined efforts of online activists might be able to free Alaa. Journalactivist Jon Garfunkel has done some excellent in-depth analysis of the various strategies attempted by online activists, including his own foray into purchasing Google AdWords. Garfunkel makes an important observation: while online activists may get swept up in the crowd cause of the moment, their attention span is notoriously short. They don’t follow up on whether their effort actually worked. Alaa is still in jail.

In the U.S., nothing brings out the policy wonks like the subject of health care. The profits of the health care industry have been soaring, while the legions of uninsured has reached a staggering 48 million.

One under-explored angle on this problem is the culture of rankism that infects the medical community and plagues the major health care organizations in the U.S. While Britain has engaged the medical community in a public discussion of physician-on-physician bullying, similar concerns in the U.S. have been downplayed. However, the U.S. public is slowly coming to realize that dysfunctional administration profoundly influences the delivery of health care and leads to many unnecessary deaths every year.

Interestingly, the controversy over investment in a national EMR, has opened a wedge between traditional physician interest groups and the advancement of technology, which has allowed a few mavericks to break ranks and debunk the myths that have granted the MDeities fate-making powers over those in need of medical care.

Mounting evidence of medical student abuse (particularly in regard to women), suggest that subjection to hazing in medical school shapes physician attitudes about rank and entitlement later in their career. As long as rankist practices and traditions remained hidden behind the cloak of “professional matters”, there could be no public comment on the gross social and organizational distortions created by physician culture. Now, as the death toll mounts, it has become evident that medical student abuse and endemic rankism in health care organizations are problems that demand public attention and legislative oversight.

Democrats acknowledge the need to clarify their core values. Crashing the Gate by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulistas Zuniga calls for a conceptual breakthrough, but the grassroots/netroots process it describes falls short of providing the unifying idea that Democrats seek.

What basic, compelling idea can do for Democrats today what “The New Deal” did for FDR; what “The Great Society” did for LBJ? Can progressives create a slogan to match the conservatives: “lower taxes”, “less government”, “strong defense”, “family values”?

They can do so with a word. That word is “Dignity.”

From that word comes a unifying slogan: “Dignity For All.”

The idea of a universal right to dignity seems too simple to pull together the disparate elements of this divided nation, but it’s not. Dignity is what people want, on the left, on the right, and most importantly, in the vast, non-ideological middle.

Dignity is not negotiable. People will stand up for their dignity and once they’re on their feet, they’ll insist on justice.

Two hundred years of blood-soaked history have shown that there is no direct path from Liberty to Justice. But if we interpose a steppingstone, we can build a bridge to justice. The name of that stone is “Dignity.” By establishing the right to dignity, and then enacting legislation that protects everyone’s dignity on equal terms, we can deliver on this country’s founding promise of “liberty and justice for all.”

A dignitarian society pulls what’s best from the three broad strands of civic culture that have dominated politics since the French Revolution—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The stranglehold that these ideals exert on the contemporary imagination is a major source of the incivility that infects our politics today.

Conservatives see themselves as Liberty’s defenders; progressives pride themselves as the champions of Equality. Both parties promise Fraternity, but neither delivers.

Dignity is more encompassing than Liberty, Equality, or Fraternity. It’s the missing link that restored will yield an electoral mandate that heralds an historic extension of “liberty and justice for all.”

The politics of dignity puts the “We” back in “We the People.” It spans the conservative-liberal divide. It closes the ideological fissures that separate libertarian, egalitarian, and communitarian philosophies, breaking the stalemate that has stalled the advance of justice since the 1960s.

A dignitarian society does not tolerate indignity—towards anyone. When this principle is translated into policy, it rules out acceptance of a permanent underclass. It disallows prejudice and discrimination toward all the groups that have rallied around the various flags of identity politics. It makes a woman’s right to choose and gays’ right to marry self-evident. It proclaims everyone’s right to a sustainable environment.

The disparate interest groups that make up the Democratic Party will not be able to unite until they have identified their common foe. That foe is not conservatives or conservatism. It is indignity.

What is the source of indignity? The precise and universal cause of indignity is the abuse of power. Make a list of the most distressing issues of recent years: corporate corruption, the Katrina catastrophe, sexual abuse by clergy, Abu Ghraib, domestic spying, persistent poverty, etc. Every one of them can be traced to an abuse of power by individuals entrusted with high rank.

However principled their cause, progressives can’t present themselves as the party of dignity so long as they reserve the right to treat their opposite numbers with indignity. Treating political opponents in a condescending manner is counterproductive and self-sabotaging. A great many of those who’ve been voting Republican feel that political elites, intellectuals, liberals, and the media look down on them. It’s a charge that sticks because there’s truth in it.

Crashing the Gate notes that progressive interest groups can and do pay employees less than conservative groups because they compensate with a moral premium. But when the coin of the progressive realm is moral superiority, the result is disdain for the very people progressives seek to represent, and this undercuts their message.

How would a society that prioritizes dignity differ from ones shaped by ideologies that accentuate liberty, equality, or fraternity? The difference is one of nuance, not opposition, for a dignitarian society combines the strengths of all three traditions.

A dignitarian society promotes individual freedom, but it tempers the uninhibited free market with institutions of social responsibility that insure that economic power does not confer unwarranted educational or political advantages. For example, you shouldn’t have to be rich to attend good schools, or command a fortune to stand for office.

A dignitarian society provides real equality of opportunity. In a dignitarian society, loss of social mobility, let alone division into master and servant classes, is unacceptable. There’s a way out of poverty in a dignitarian society. Everyone earns a living wage and has access to quality health care.

The politics of dignity sees democracy as a work in progress. Democracy’s next step - one that will enlarge liberty, deliver justice, and foster fraternity - is building a dignitarian society.

Dignity is an idea whose time has come. Under its flag, we can mobilize the energy not merely to win at the polls, but to win with a mandate to fulfill our nation’s promise - “Dignity For All.”

Hillary Clinton is on the right track in regard to minimum wage. This idea is a yet another wonderful offshoot of the SIEU’s “Since Sliced Bread” contest. If you click on the link, it will take you to a handy action form to let the your Congressional representatives know you support this idea.

One of the interesting arguments in Crashing the Gate is that the progressive organizations offer their employees a sense of moral superiority to compensate for poor pay (exacerbated by crushing debts). However, the exercise of that moral superiority offends the very disenfrachised poor that progressives seek to represent.

The discussion of the moral-superiority-instead-of-pay trade off should be extended far beyond the operation of political parties. Academia should shoulder a huge part of the blame for recasting moral superiority as pay. For instance, in the University of California system, where doctoral students are dramatically underfunded and at high risk for attrition, the graduate student instructors at U.C. Berkeley have attempted to strike for better pay. The response of the university administration has always been to whip up parental outrage and make a moral claim that teaching is a spiritual calling. Many departments parcel out the scarce teaching positions so that graduate students only get an income for one semester out of the year: when students question the expectation that they take out loans to make up the difference (steadily adding up over the course of 10+ years), administrators tell them that they should just be happy they got into such a competitive university. Meanwhile tenured professors get the benefit of exploiting their students’ professional skillset for a fraction of market value. This is a moral-superiority-instead-of-pay argument. As the University of California pushes their no-pay-for-calling message year after year, while drawing a student body with a strong commitment to social justice, is it any wonder the products of that education have been conditioned to expect moral positioning as a substitute for pay?

While university administers admonish teachers for being overly-concerned about money, a series of investigations and audits have recently revealed that the executives in the University of California system were wildly over-compensated. It’s hard for those underpaid, steeped-in-moral-entitlement workers that academia has been pumping out to ignore this level of hypocrisy. The rich are apparently getting richer while manipulating the moral values of struggling students.

Another tributary stream of the moral para-economy occurs in the gendered approach to compensation in the corporate world. Women are highly susceptible to moral arguments to discriminate against themselves in salary negotiations. While it’s easy to blame individual women for failing to stick up for themselves, the sheer force of numbers suggest that women en masse have been encouraged to view opportunities for moral superiority as a tempting substitute for monetary pay.

The moral para-economy can be viewed as an aspect of the problem of rankism. No matter how much the powers and the interests try to convince people of their inherent inferiority in order to exploit their lowered expectations, the hallmark of progressive civilization is the underlying assumption that we all have equal value as human beings. As financial and social inequalities escalate, the demand for moral privilege expands to compensate. As the beneficiaries of material inegalitarianism defend their advantages, the moral claims get louder. In this respect, it doesn’t matter whether your gang colors are Red or Blue: poor Republicans and poor Democrats both demand the moral high ground to compensate for the material distortions of our society.

If Democrats are still looking for a core value that everyone can get behind, it’s worth considering rankism as a primary threat to building an inclusive “reality-based” community.

I learned this morning that Carl Robert Frederick, founder of The American Pro Se Association passed away on Monday. The APSA web site is a godsend for people of little means who suddenly find themselves embroiled in the court system. (For those interested, HALT is also a terrific resource).

Frederick dedicated many years of his life to helping people understand the legal system at a time when the legal system has become all but inaccessible to to most citizens. He also advocated for mandatory high school level law courses. This is a worthy goal, and I hope his friends, family, and fellow travelers continue the effort. As long as the majority of the citizenry find the legal system incompehensible and unaffordable, there will be no chance for equitable justice in this country.

Thank you Chetan Dhruve for pointing out this recent Harvard study on the ubiquity of poor management. As Dhruve points out, the Harvard solutions are a bit pedestrian, and they might actually contribute to demotivation if the over-inspirational manager comes across as a fake and a manipulator.

In other news, it’s not often that you see a coach sanctioned for bullying.