Author: chasdarwin

Active in Americans United, Center For Inquiry, and ACLU

Republicans vs. Medicare

And if Democrats don’t get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

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Krugman, NY Times:

Don’t cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.” So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis. And irony died.

Now, Mr. Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare — death panels! — have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What’s amazing, however, is that they’re getting away with it.

Why is this amazing? It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare — and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts.

After all, you could explain this about-face by supposing that Republicans have had a change of heart, that they have finally realized just how much good Medicare does. And if you believe that, I’ve got some mortgage-backed securities you might want to buy.

No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program. And the process of dismantling would begin with spending cuts of about $650 billion over the next decade. Math is hard, but I do believe that’s more than the roughly $400 billion (not $500 billion) in Medicare savings projected for the Democratic health bills.

What I’m talking about here is the “Roadmap for America’s Future,” the budget plan recently released by Representative Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee. Other leading Republicans have been bobbing and weaving on the official status of this proposal, but it’s pretty clear that Mr. Ryan’s vision does, in fact, represent what the G.O.P. would try to do if it returns to power.

The broad picture that emerges from the “roadmap” is of an economic agenda that hasn’t changed one iota in response to the economic failures of the Bush years. In particular, Mr. Ryan offers a plan for Social Security privatization that is basically identical to the Bush proposals of five years ago.

But what’s really worth noting, given the way the G.O.P. has campaigned against health care reform, is what Mr. Ryan proposes doing with and to Medicare.

In the Ryan proposal, nobody currently under the age of 55 would be covered by Medicare as it now exists. Instead, people would receive vouchers and be told to buy their own insurance. And even this new, privatized version of Medicare would erode over time because the value of these vouchers would almost surely lag ever further behind the actual cost of health insurance. By the time Americans now in their 20s or 30s reached the age of eligibility, there wouldn’t be much of a Medicare program left.

But what about those who already are covered by Medicare, or will enter the program over the next decade? You’re safe, says the roadmap; you’ll still be eligible for traditional Medicare. Except, that is, for the fact that the plan “strengthens the current program with changes such as income-relating drug benefit premiums to ensure long-term sustainability.”

If this sounds like deliberately confusing gobbledygook, that’s because it is. Fortunately, the Congressional Budget Office, which has done an evaluation of the roadmap, offers a translation: “Some higher-income enrollees would pay higher premiums, and some program payments would be reduced.” In short, there would be Medicare cuts.

And it’s possible to back out the size of those cuts from the budget office analysis, which compares the Ryan proposal with a “baseline” representing current policy. As I’ve already said, the total over the next decade comes to about $650 billion — substantially bigger than the Medicare savings in the Democratic bills.

The bottom line, then, is that the crusade against health reform has relied, crucially, on utter hypocrisy: Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings — savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

And if Democrats don’t get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/12/opinion/12krugman.html?em

New WashPost Poll: Two-Thirds of Voters Say Pass Comprehensive Reform

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by MCJoan

”

Americans spread the blame when it comes to the lack of cooperation in Washington, and, in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, most want the two sides to keep working to pass comprehensive health-care reform.

Nearly six in 10 in the new poll say the Republicans aren’t doing enough to forge compromise with President Obama on important issues; more than four in 10 see Obama as doing too little to get GOP support. Among independents, 56 percent see the Republicans in Congress as too unbending and 50 percent say so of the president; 28 percent of independents say both sides are doing too little to find agreement.

WaPo poll

Look at that graph–63 percent want comprehensive reform to pass, and more Independents want to see it pass than Republicans want to see it fail. But a note of caution, while the blame is primarily falling on Republicans now, ultimately the blame will be shared if it fails, and the bulk of it would fall on Obama and the Dems, since they are in charge.”

see: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/2/9/835523/-New-WaPo-Poll:-Two-Thirds-of-Voters-Say-Pass-Comprehensive-Reform

Emphasis Mine.

Republicans on WRONG side of Public Opinion

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From Nate Silver, on

One of the more commonplace assertions among pundits on the center-right — made rather carelessly by Victor Davis Hanson and more thoughtfully by Jay Cost, is that agenda put forward by Obama and the Democrats is overwhelmingly unpopular and that Democrats are simply getting their comeuppance for having pushed such a liberal set of reforms forward. These claims, however, rely on selective evidence, invariably citing policies like health care and the GM bailouts which are indeed unpopular (strongly so, in some cases), while ignoring many other issues on which Obama has been on the right side of public opinion.

In fact, a more objective and equivocal evaluation of public opinion on more than two dozen specific issues finds that the Republican Congress has far more often been on the wrong side of it. Attempting to be as comprehensive as possible, I’ve identified 25 issues that Obama and the Democrats have made an affirmative effort to push forward since taking office a year ago, and summarized public opinion on each of them. Most of the numbers that I’ve cited come from PollingReport.com.

see:http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/republicans-not-obama-more-often-on.html

Emphasis Mine

Off Message on health care insurance reform

only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats’ bill

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From FiveThirtyEight:

“Polling in the last several days has carried some blunt reminders that the public isn’t nearly as well-informed as the Beltway conventional wisdom might hold.

We’ve repeatedly highlighted Kaiser’s health care polling, which revealed that only about half of the public knows about many of the key provisions that are in the Democrats’ bill, such as coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, a Pew poll this week found that only 26 percent of Americans know that it takes 60 votes to overcome a Senate filibuster — and only 32 percent know that Senate GOPers voted unanimously against the Democrats’ health care plan. And a Rasmussen poll of likely voters found that only 21 percent of them believe that the Democrats have cut taxes for “95% of working families”, a fact which is probably true.

I don’t particularly blame the public for this. The number of politics “fans” probably numbers somewhere on the order of 10 or 20 million out of a country of 250 million adults. Most people have lives and have better things to do than to follow politics all the time. They pay quite a bit of attention during Presidential elections and, I would argue, make reasonably sophisticated decisions. But outside of that, most people aren’t watching MSNBC or Fox News every evening or logging onto the Washington Post or FiveThirtyEight. They’re developing impressions based on limited information, often gleaned from partisan news sources and politicians who have an incentive to tell them anything but the truth.

But right now it’s Democrats who are behind the 8-ball — and the extent to which voters are disengaged from each twist and turn of the news cycle is not liable to change any time soon. And what these semi-informed voters have mostly seen from the Democrats is a series of mixed messages. On health care, between people attacking the policy from the right and from the left, very rarely have positive messages about the bill had the chance to penetrate through the media morass. On the economy, the Democrats have had to do a weird tapdance between highlighting, on the one hand, their sensitivity to the depth of our economic problems and the need for further stimulus, and on the other, the fact that many economic indicators (although not employment) do indeed show a recovery underway. On process issues, the public has mostly observed Democrats fighting with one another, and messages about Republican obstructionism were liable to fall flat when — until about 10 days ago — the Democrats had a 60-seat majority in the Senate, however dysfunctionally so. Lastly, the White House’s meta-message about “post-partisanship” is a difficult one to maintain in the face of actual policy-making, since in a rather literal sense, Republicans can brand any policy as “partisan” simply by opposing it, however moderate it might in fact be.

In contrast to the vapid media narrative about the “perpetual campaign”, the Democrats have perhaps not been sensitive enough to how their messaging might play with the sort of mainstream voters who might read a newspaper or turn on CNN once or twice a month, but not more often, or who consume news from only one or two sources, but not others — descriptions that apply to most of the people that will turn out to vote in November.

What can Democrats do differently? Unfortunately, this is not such an easy question to answer. But from the White House’s perspective, the most obvious solution would be to behave more decisively. Don’t let policies like the public option twist in the wind: embrace them, or press forward without them, but either way, remind the House and the Senate that having a 3-month fight about the issue will leave the Democrats as a whole much worse off, regardless of how the dispute is resolved. Endorse some relatively specific version of financial reform, a policy that polls overwhelmingly well in the abstract but which the details of which are banal and which will easily bore and confuse the public.

And all Democrats need to realize, meanwhile, that sometimes the message isn’t going to sink in until the sixth or seventh time that you repeat it. Before Tuesday’s State of the Union, for instance, the White House had almost literally never mentioned that the stimulus contained a huge tax cut — they shouldn’t expect the public to believe it any more than Warner Brothers should expect a ton of people to go out and see their new movie if they only begin advertising it 48 hours beforehand.

Rather, the Democrats need to figure out what their November messages are now and begin planting seeds for them now. You want to run on Republican obstructionism? Well then, don’t neglect the golden opportunities that the Republicans are providing you with today, such as when they voted unanimously in the Senate against re-imposing pay-go rules or unanimously in the House against a very centrist financial regulation package. How many people know that House Republicans voted 174-0 against a jobs bill? It’s probably not even 20 percent or 30 percent — more like 2 or 3 percent, at best. The DNC, DCCC, DSCC, and sympathetic groups like unions should be blasting out advertisements whenever the Republicans cast a vote like this.

With respect to the economy, the Democrats are still largely at the whim of the business cycle, since they may lack the political capital to pass policies through the Congress which could substantively impact the numbers by November. But if it were me, I would err a little bit less on the side of caution in highlighting numbers like, for instance, the 5.7 percent GDP growth that the country experienced in the 4Q. It’s not that I expect these messages to be winners now; rather, it’s that you want to plant the seed with the public for the fall. Otherwise, it may feel like too little too late when the employment numbers turn positive too, and the public may believe that the recovery occurred in spite of, not because of, the stimulus.

If Democrats have any skepticism about this, they need only look back to the year or two that have just elapsed. Republicans were crowing about socialism and government takeovers way back in the summer of 2008, and opposing virtually every policy that the Democrats put forth from the first meeting of the 111th Congress last January — a time when Obama’s approval had been in the high 60s. At first, those messages weren’t working for them — they were particularly ineffectual, for instance, for the McCain campaign, and there were lots of stories in the spring about the number of people who identified as Republican slipping to all-time lows. But the GOP stuck by their messaging strategy, and it has allowed them to frame everything that has come thereafter in ways that are more resonant with the public. Had the economy recovered sooner, perhaps this would have been a spectacular failure. But they at least did a very, very good job of poising themselves to take advantage of the downside case.

Now it’s incumbent upon the Democrats to poise themselves to take advantage of the upside case. Political time is moving faster and faster, and it goes without saying that a lot could change between now and November. But precisely because the public is so bombarded with information, it may be all the more important to develop a proactive rather than reactive messaging strategy, and to implement it sooner rather than later.

(Emphasis mine).

Misinformation leads to misunderstanding – again!

public’s lack of robust support for healthcare reform legislation is based on misunderstanding

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Health Care Information Gap

From Fivethirtyeight:

” It’s rare that I disagree with Gallup’s straight-shooting Frank Newport, but I don’t think the data he’s citing in this blog post (from a Gallup survey conducted in November) does much at all to contradict the notion that a substantial amount of the opposition to health care reform is based on misinformation:

[Obama and Gibbs reinforce] the same talking point: The public’s lack of robust support for healthcare reform legislation is based on misunderstanding engendered by the debate, the process, and the strong forces arrayed against the bill.

We don’t necessarily see it in the data. When we ask Americans why they oppose healthcare legislation, the two dominant responses are: “cost” and “too much government involvement.” Neither of these objection categories reflect — at least not directly — a failure to understand the specifics of what is in the bill. Or personal self-interest. The objections appear to be more global in nature.

Here, again, is the survey that Newport refers to; it asked an open-ended question about what “concerns” people had about the health care bills and then broke those numbers down between those people who supported the bill and those who opposed it. I’ve reproduced their numbers below the fold.

There are relatively few items in this tally that unambiguously reflect either legitimate reasons for opposing the health care bill or unambiguously reflect false beliefs. The former category would probably include: “Overall costs to government, taxpayers” (7 percent of those opposed to the bill), increased taxes (5 percent), “how it will be paid for” (3 percent), and the individual mandate (3 percent). Perhaps also the public option belongs here (7 percent) — it was still “alive” at the time Gallup’s survey was conducted (although there are a lot of people who don’t know exactly what the public option is). If we do count it, these probably legitimate concerns amount to about 25 percent of those opposed to the bill, or 12 percent of the country overall.

On the other hand, there are also relatively few concerns that unambiguously seem to point toward false information. “Coverage for illegal immigrants” (4 percent of those opposed to the bill) is probably one. Items like “ability to get needed care”/rationing/wait times (4 percent), “being able to see current doctors” (3 percent) and “effect on quality of care” (8 percent) most likely also fit into this category, although even here there is some ambiguity.

And in most other cases, there is a lot of ambiguity. The largest single reason for opposition that Gallup identifies — 28 percent of those opposed to the bill — is what they call “government-run healthcare / bureaucracy / socialized medicine / government takeover”. Perhaps there are a few people in this group who have legitimate worries about the government’s ability to effectively regulate insurers or believe that the imposition of additional rules and regulations may carry unintended or undesirable consequences. But phrases like “socalized medicine” and “government takeover” are talking points that more likely than not are symptomatic of incorrect beliefs about what the health care bill would actually do.

A lot of categories are like this. The category “effect on senior citizens/Medicare” (5 percent) for instance — does this reflect legitimate concerns about the savings that the bill would try to achieve in Medicare, or people worried about death panels and the plug being pulled on granny?

Finally, there are quite a few people who don’t know why they’re opposed — 9 percent of those opposed can’t cite a reason at all, another 6 percent simply say they don’t understand the bill, and a further 9 percent say “costs”, but don’t specify which type of costs they’re concerned with.

This isn’t really a criticism of Gallup’s survey — unlike the Kaiser poll that I’ve cited frequently, they weren’t really trying to test people’s knowledge about the bill. But also for that reason, it can’t really be used to refute Kaiser’s data. People, to use Newport’s term, may have concerns which are “more global in nature” — but why do they have those concerns? (If I ask you: “why do you oppose the health care bill” and you say “because it’s bad”, we haven’t really learned anything.)

In a perfect world, indeed, what I’d like to see is a survey that even more explicitly related people’s knowledge about the bill to their beliefs and overall impressions about it. You might ask a battery of questions related to:

— Overall support/opposition to the bill.
— Knowledge of bill contents.
— General beliefs about the bill (e.g. effect on coverage, costs, premiums, etc.)
— Self-rating of informedness (about the bill and about politics in general)
— Change in support based after being read various descriptions of the bill.
— Volume and type of news sources consumed.
— General political ideology.
— Demographics.

I’m not going to design a whole survey in a blog post, but you get the general picture. You’d need to design the survey fairly carefully, but you could probably get pretty close to an objective answer about how much of the opposition to the bill (and the support for it) was indeed based on false beliefs about its contents.

see:http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/02/health-care-information-gap-more.html

(Emphasis mine)

California Journal: 20 – 30 jan 2010

chasdarwin1 Comment

California Journal

Wednesday 20 Jan 2010

Sharon & I flew Continental from Hopkins (CLE) to LAX., where we walked through a dark, wet area to finally locate our rental Ford Focus, and using – for the first time in our lives a GPS -headed to our LA headquarters, which was the Residence Inn in Beverley Hills.  Ate corned beef sandwiches and chicken noodle soup at Factors Deli (http://www.factorsdeli.com/) – a real (think J) deli across the street.

Thursday 21

Using  GPS again- as well as Google maps – we went to the Petersen Auto Museum.  Supped at Jar on Wilshire($).  The web site said “business casual”, but I’d call hoodies  and jeans “after school casual”.  Worked out in hotel gym.

Friday 22

Raining, so we went to Beverly Center – an indoor mall (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Center).  Bought for me a top at the Ferrari store.  Supped at Grace (also $).  Worked out in hotel gym.

Saturday 23

Sunny.  Went to the Getty Center, a complex of museum buildings in the hills. Reminisced with Rembrandt, made an impression on Monet, etc. Lunched there ($).  Supped at Cafe del Ray in the Marina Del Ray – a location which brought me back to the early seventies.  As we left, a Ferrari, a Bentley, and a Maserati were valet parked by the door, turning green with envy at our Focus’s lower fuel consumption.

Sunday 24

Our motivation for the excursion was a memorial service for my late friend Anne Marie Staas Niedorf, held at a quaint facility called the Ebell of Los Angeles – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebell_of_Los_Angeles.  The service alone was worth the trip.  Among the high points was the singing of K.B. Solomon – http://web.mac.com/kbsolomon/Site/About_KB_Solomon.html.  Many testimonials, much adulation.  In the chapter “Begin with the End in Mind” in “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People”, author Stephen R. Covey asks us to imagine what our friend and colleagues would say about us at our funeral: Anne Marie was indeed a highly successful person.
See: https://charlog.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/remembering-anne-marie-niedorf/
We ate at the Farm on S. Beverly.

Monday 25

We drove out of LA up I405 to I5 and on across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.  Scenic, pleasant drive, took less than six hours.  Into the City and onto our Hotel, the Argonaut, at Fisherman’s Wharf.  Raining.  Walked to supper in a restaurant in Ghiradelli Square.

Tuesday 26

Walked around the Cannery neighbourhood, and bought “Game Change” at a Border’s (which did not have anything on Paul Robeson).  Took two touristy tours in double decked buses: the down town tour and then the evening tour.  I could smell brake linings while on a few of the downhills, which are as steep as some coasters.  Great tour guide (Keith Oshins).  Ate at a waterfront touristy place in the neighbourhood.  N.B.: If the word ‘Victorian’ were not so pejorative, I would have appreciated the houses more.  Worked out in hotel gym.

Wednesday 27

Tremont met Kelly’s Island for us on Wednesday, as we took a tour to Sasualito, across the Bay, accomplished by way of that magnificent erection known as the Golden Gate Bridge.  (If it were in Cleveland, the critics would say looks like part of the rust belt.)  The Ferric oxide look was not a prominent sight in Sausalito, where trendy shops and eateries thrive on tourism.  I asked a tour guide if the Bridge were a WPA project, and he asked me what that was(?!?). BTW: It is.  N.B.: Tremont is a trendy area on the near WestSide of Cleveland where art shops and eateries abound, and Kelly’s Island is in Western Lake Erie. Turned in our rented car, as it was of no value.  Supped at a great restaurant on the Wharf. ($)  Then we went to BuenaVista, which has some claim to Irish Coffee in the USA.  Sat with a couple of brits who were great company.  Place was straight, great, and jumping.  The IC was small, and not as good as my friends make in Western Cuyahoga County.  Worked out in hotel gym.

Thursday 28

We took a cable car to Union Square, where we admired the works of local artists, looked in exclusive shops featuring over-priced merchandise for sale to under-taxed yuppies, and saw no trade unionists.  We lunched at Nieman Marcus, where we were under dressed.  Then we took the Park tour on the bus.  Supped at an Italian named restaurant on the Wharf.  Visited a bar next to our hotel, at which the owner had a collection of Studebakers.  As my dad had a 1954 Coupe and 1955 sedan, I was interested and talked with him.  He recognized that the car picture on my phone was of a Mini (1960).  Worked out in hotel gym.

Friday 29

Tour of 3 Sonoma wineries (no boxed wines there!) and then we went to the City Lights bookstore -http://www.citylights.com/, where all old beatniks come to die.  We bought a book on Paul Robeson, and also Howard Zinn’s history.  Place was quaint, left progressive, and manifestly devoid of Neocon’s. Ate in China town.

Saturday 30

Parked outside of our hotel was an Icon of the ’60’s: a VW MicroBus (1964).  Original color, but not original paint.  As we passed through the Marina district, the harbor was filled with sails – must have been a regatta.

Flew Continental back to Hopkins, supped at Frank and Pauly’s, and that was the vacation that was.

Summary: Great things to do while we are still young enough to do them. Shall we say: Adventure before dementia?  Got in some quality in-flight reading.  LA was good; SF was great.  Did not do Chocolate or Alcatraz – the later was government housing for behaviourally challenged; the former was insalubrious.  When we got back home, we saw more ladies who get three squares a day, if you know what I mean, and that is good.

Young people CAN make a difference

The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies

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[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn  (Who died this week) was fired from Spelman College, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day — the students graduating today. It’s a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is at war — still another war, war after war — and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.

But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.

I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do — enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said:

The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That’s when democracy came alive.

I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam — bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers — it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end.

The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do — to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.

Remember Tolstoy’s story, “The Death of Ivan Illych.” A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write against war and militarism….

The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:

You really haven’t been a virgin for so long.
It’s ludicrous to keep up the pretext

You’ve slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you’ve taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows

Being one of the world’s big vampires,
Why don’t you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a “good war,” but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. If we want a world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are considered as our children, then war — in which children are always the greatest casualties — cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems…

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap. My hope for you is a good life.

Howard Zinn is the author with Anthony Arnove of the just published Voices of a People’s History of the United States (Seven Stories Press) and of the international best-selling A People’s History of the United States.

Copyright 2005 Howard Zinn

see:http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/2728/\

(Emphasis Mine)

an election

It was not a referendum on Barack Obama,

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Frank Rich, NY Times.

“It was not a referendum on Barack Obama,who in every poll remains one of the most popular politicians in America. It was not a rejection of universal health care, which Massachusetts mandated (with Scott Brown’s State Senate vote) in 2006. It was not a harbinger of a resurgent G.O.P., whose numbers remain in the toilet. Brown had the good sense not to identify himself as a Republican in either his campaign advertising or his victory speech.

And yet Tuesday’s special election was a dire omen for this White House. If the administration sticks to this trajectory, all bets are off for the political future of a president who rode into office blessed with more high hopes, good will and serious promise than any in modern memory. It’s time for him to stop deluding himself. Yes, last week’s political obituaries were ludicrously premature. Obama’s 50-ish percent first-anniversary approval rating matches not just Carter’s but Reagan’s. (Bushes 41 and 43 both skyrocketed in Year One.) Still, minor adjustments can’t right what’s wrong.

Obama’s plight has been unchanged for months. Neither in action nor in message is he in front of the anger roiling a country where high unemployment remains unchecked and spiraling foreclosures are demolishing the bedrock American dream of home ownership. The president is no longer seen as a savior but as a captive of the interests who ginned up the mess and still profit, hugely, from it.

That’s no place for any politician of any party or ideology to be. There’s a reason why the otherwise antithetical Leno and Conan camps are united in their derision of NBC’s titans. A TV network has become a handy proxy for every mismanaged, greedy, disloyal and unaccountable corporation in our dysfunctional economy. It’s a business culture where the rich and well-connected get richer while the employees, shareholders and customers get the shaft. And the conviction that the game is fixed is nonpartisan. If the tea party right and populist left agree on anything, it’s that big bailed-out banks have and will get away with murder while we pay the bill on credit cards — with ever-rising fees.

see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/opinion/24Rich.html

The GOP and demented politics are to Blame

assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a “fantastic proliferation of mass media.”

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A light in the darkness, from Bill Moyers Journal.

In the following interview Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas” and “The Wrecking Crew,” talk about why conservatives can get away with blaming Obama for the past decade of conservative failures.

Bill Moyers: There were hands in the air in Washington this week, but it wasn’t a stickup. The new Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, appointed by Congress to find out how America got rolled, began hearings this week. These four are not the victims of one of the greatest bank heists in history – they’re the perpetrators, bankers so sleek and crafty they got off with the loot in broad daylight, and then sweet talked the government into taxing us to pay it back.

Watching that scene on the opening day of the hearings, it was hard enough to believe that almost a year has passed since Barack Obama raised his hand, too — taking the oath of office to become our 44th President. Even harder to remember what America looked like before Obama, because we’ve also been robbed of memory, assaulted by what the Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz described as a “fantastic proliferation of mass media.” We live in a time “characterized by a refusal to remember.” Inconvenient facts simply disappear down the memory hole, as in George Orwell’s novel, “1984.”

President Obama’s made plenty of mistakes during his first year, and we’ve critiqued them frequently here on the JOURNAL, but hardly anyone talks any more about what happened in the years before. He inherited from George W. Bush the biggest financial debacle since the Great Depression, along with two unpopular and costly wars, and a dysfunctional

and demoralized government.

It’s important to remember those years, a time that has been characterized by the historian Thomas Frank, as “A Low, Dishonest Decade.” He’s here to talk about them with me. Thomas Frank is editor of the recently relaunched BAFFLER magazine, a literary journal; a contributing editor of HARPER’S; a weekly columnist for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; and the author of ONE MARKET UNDER GOD, the bestselling WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? and his latest bestseller, THE WRECKING CREW, now out in paperback. Good to have you back.

THOMAS FRANK: It’s my pleasure, Bill.

BILL MOYERS: How is it that the people who are responsible for the mess that Obama inherited are getting away with demonizing him when he’s only had less than a year to clean it up. Let me show you just a sample of commentators railing against the President.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: President Obama and the Democrats are destroying the US economy. They are purposefully doing it, I believe.

GLENN BECK: This is a well-thought out plan to collapse the economy as we know it.

JONATHAN HOENIG: The president has, I think if you listen to what he says, a hatred for capitalism. Where do jobs come from? They don’t come from the government, they come from the profit seeking self-interest, from what I hear and see, the President never misses an opportunity to smear and [no audio] slap!

RUSH LIMBAUGH: This guy is a coward. He does not have the gonads or the spine to even stand up and accept what he’s doing! All of this is his doing. He cannot even probably say, you should like this — you may not like this, but I’m telling you it’s the best thing for you, it’s the best thing for me. No! He knows it’s a disaster, he has to slough this off, on his previous– or his predecessor, the previous administration.

SEAN HANNITY: It’s his stimulus. It’s his record deficit spending. He quadrupled the debt in a year. You know, how many more are the Democrats going to say, “Well, it’s George Bush’s fault”? This is Obama’s economy now.

BILL MOYERS: What goes through your mind as a historian when you watch that?

THOMAS FRANK: Well, that is America for you. I mean, that is the, sort of the demented logic of our politics. Is that now– Obama’s been President for a year. And he will come before the public in the fall, you know, having to defend all of these terrible things. That’s how our politics works in this country.

BILL MOYERS: But you called it demented. I mean, you know, demented means crazy, mad. Mad and crazy enough to cause us to forget the world before Obama?

THOMAS FRANK: I’ll give you an example what I mean. So, I was on a radio show the other day with a tea party leader, you know, one of these protest leaders. And he seemed like a good guy. But what he did say that struck me was he said he was really against monopoly, you know? And we’re laboring under all these monopolies, all these concentrated powers here in America. And what we need to do is get back to free markets. And then we can do away with that. And it was mind-blowing.

Because if you look back any further than the Obama Administration, since, I mean, 1980 in this country, we have been in the grip of, you know, of this pursuit of ever-purer free markets. That’s what American politics has been about. That’s what has delivered this, you know, the awful circumstances that we find ourselves in today. And to think that that’s what’s missing, that’s what we need to get back to, is–

BILL MOYERS: That’s more than nostalgia. What is that?

THOMAS FRANK: Well, that’s the disease of our time. You know, that sort of instant forgetting.

BILL MOYERS: But what does it do to our politics when the very spokesmen for what some people have called a decade of conservative failure. I mean, remember before Obama, they turned a budget surplus into a deficit. They took us to war on fraudulent pretenses. They borrowed money to fight it. They presided over a stalemate in Afghanistan. They trashed the Constitution. They presided over the weakest economy in decades–

THOMAS FRANK: Not weak for everybody.

BILL MOYERS: No, no.

THOMAS FRANK: Some people did really well.

BILL MOYERS: Okay, they compiled the worst track record on jobs in decades. And they ended up with the worst stock market in decades. I mean, it was a decade of conservative failure. And yet, Obama’s their villain?

THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters that you’ve described. And I would add to them things like the, what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And the Madoff scandal on Wall Street. And, you know, on and on and on. The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay.

All of these things that we remember from the last decade. I mean, some of them that we’re forgetting. Like who remembers all the scandals over earmarking, anymore? And who remembers all the scandals over Iraq reconstruction? All that, you know, disastrous, when we would hand it off to a private contractor to rebuild Iraq. And it would, you know, of course, it would fail.

Those things have all sort of been dwarfed by the economic disaster and the wreckage on Wall Street. But I would say to you that all of these things that we’re describing here are of a piece. And that they all flow from the same ideas. And those ideas are the sort of conservative attitude towards government. And conservative attitudes towards governance. Okay?

….

What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they’re in power deliver government failure.

BILL MOYERS: Not merely from incompetence, you say, but from ideology, from philosophy, from a view of the world.

THOMAS FRANK: And sometimes from design.

BILL MOYERS: From design? What do you mean?

THOMAS FRANK: Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don’t believe in the mission.

And the result is that it doesn’t– they don’t enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I’m smiling, because it’s kind of amusing. It was like an old spy magazine prank.

They made up these horrendous labor violations around the country and phoned them in as complaints to the Department of Labor to see what they would do, okay? They responded to one out of ten of these, you know, where they called in as like, “Well, we got, you know, kids working in a meat packing plant during school hours. You know, can you, you going to do anything about that?” “No.” Or you look at something like the Securities and Exchange Commission. These guys are supposed to be regulating, you know, the investment banks, okay? Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, that sort of thing. These guys were so under-funded, and not just under-funded, but you had people in charge of it who didn’t believe in regulating Wall Street.

BILL MOYERS: So, they made the Securities and Exchange Commission a laughing stock, if you will. They really did.

THOMAS FRANK: Right. Well, there’s these horrible stories that came out. Once Bush was out, there was a study done of the SEC, as well. These people didn’t even have like their own functioning photocopiers, okay? So, we’re talking about the lawyers that are supposed to be protecting us from Wall Street. And they have to go stand in line at Kinko’s to do their own photocopying. And they’re going up against the best paid, you know, best educated lawyers on planet Earth, who represent the investment banks. And they’re supposed to be defending us.

BILL MOYERS: The curious thing about this is that you and I and my audience knows that our ancestors believed that capitalism needed to be supervised. But when the conservatives came to power, they begin to muzzle the watchdog.

THOMAS FRANK: Yeah. Well, or you know, do away with it altogether, de-fund it. Look, the beginning in the 1980s, President Reagan came to office and came to power, and you remember the kind of rhetoric that he used to use in denouncing the Federal workforce. He hated the Federal workforce. And this is an article of faith among conservatives.

There’s something called the pay gap that they used to talk about a lot in Washington, D.C. Which is, back in the ’50s, ’60s, and up into the 1970s, Federal workers were paid a comparable amount to what people in the private sector earned. Okay? So, if you’re a lawyer working for the government, you got about as much as a lawyer working in the private sector.

Not as much, because government benefits are considered to be much better. Okay. Under Reagan, you had this huge gap open up between Federal workers and the private sector. I asked around. And I found out a government attorney makes $140,000 a year on retirement. After he’s been there all his life. In the private sector law firm in Washington, you’d be making $160,000 starting salary. That’s first year. Right out of law school.

BILL MOYERS: So what’s the consequence of this pay gap you described? Or, do we get inferior government because of it?

THOMAS FRANK: Absolutely. It keeps the best and the brightest out of government service, unless you’re really dedicated to a cause.

But let me go one step further with this, Bill. When I say this is done by design, I’m not exaggerating. And this is one of the more surprising things that I found when I was doing the research for “The Wrecking Crew,” is that there’s a whole conservative literature on why you want second-rate people in government, or third-rate.

THOMAS FRANK: Yes. And we can summarize that very briefly. That the market is the, you know, is the universal principle of human civilization. And that government is a kind of interloper, if not a, you know, criminal gang. And getting in the way.

BILL MOYERS: But we saw with this collapse and this bailout, we saw the failure of that.

THOMAS FRANK: Of course.

BILL MOYERS: And yet there’s no sense of contrition. What’s amazing to me, and you wrote this, that the very people who brought us this decade of conservative failures, the party of Palin, Beck, Hannity, Abramoff, Rove, DeLay, Kristol, O’Reilly, just might stage a comeback.

THOMAS FRANK: I think they might. I think there’s a very strong chance of that.

BILL MOYERS: After only 11 months out of power, because of the record. I mean–

THOMAS FRANK: Look, well, the stuff–

BILL MOYERS: –it’s crazy.

THOMAS FRANK: –the stuff we’ve been talking about here today. The stuff in “The Wrecking Crew,” that’s all forgotten. The financial crisis had that effect of– that stuff is now off the– down the memory hole.

BILL MOYERS: Do you really think they believe that unfettered capitalism, unregulated markets, will deliver an ideal democracy and prosperity for everybody?

THOMAS FRANK: No, I don’t. I think that they believe that, and to some degree, they’re sincere in that belief. But the conservative movement in Washington, I’m not talking about grassroots voters in Kansas here. I’m talking about the conservative movement in Washington. And the whole constellation of think tanks and lobby shops and not-for-profits. And, you know, newspapers and fundraisers and all of this stuff.

They believe this is an industry, okay? This is an industry that churns out this product. And one of the things that, I mean, it’s one of the things that they’re doing now is they excommunicate George W. Bush, deeply unpopular, so therefore, not a true conservative, right? So, that way they get to start over fresh. The problem with George W. Bush, the reason we’re in such a deep hole is that we never went far enough.

As Tom DeLay has said, in his newspaper column, and I’m paraphrasing here. The problem with conservatism isn’t that it was tried and failed. It’s that it never really got– we never really tried it in the first place. So, what we have to do — and I’ve heard, conservatives have said this. “What we have to do is go back and deregulate all the way. We have to, you know, slash government. We have to tear that thing down. That’s what it’s all about.”

And the amazing thing about this. This allows them to represent themselves as dissidents against the sort of established order in Washington. Even though they ran the established order for years and years and years and years.

BILL MOYERS: Here’s something else that’s bizarre to me. And I wonder what you think about it, as a historian. I mean, right after the failed terrorist threat of Christmas, Obama’s critics went to work scrubbing what happened when the Bush White House was out to lunch in the weeks and days leading up to 9/11.

I mean, you know, there were terrorists sneaking into the country. There were warnings from the intelligence community about something– an attack on an American city coming. And that’s all been flushed down the memory hole. Giuliani goes on the air and says, “We didn’t have any terrorist attacks when Bush was President.”

THOMAS FRANK: Yeah, and that’s another– we also forget the anthrax episode which happened right after 9/11. Look, this is not an argument that I have made. That other people have– that all of these things need to be added to the list of government failures. And if you want to talk why does government fail? You know, there’s two answers out there.

One is the conservative answer. Government fails because that’s the nature of government to fail. And if you want to look a little bit deeper, you know, why does government fail? Because government has been systematically destroyed. When we, whether you’re talking about the, you know, the pay gap and making– deliberately making government an unattractive career option. Or you’re talking about outsourcing.

This is another conservative strategy for dealing with the state. If you hate and despise government employees. And you understand them as, you know, unbelievable human wickedness, right? What do you do about them? Well, the answer’s obvious. And at the same time, you believe in the market. You believe that private industry does everything better. You outsource the Federal workforce.

BILL MOYERS: Have we reached a stage where you make things bad enough that people despair and then you manipulate their despair into– to your own advantage in the next election?

THOMAS FRANK: It’s a cynical town, Washington, D.C. And the conservative movement tends to be deeply, deeply, deeply cynical about government. Now, it’s also, I mean, deeply idealistic about the market. I mean, the market can do no wrong, almost by definition. But government they regard as a criminal gang. I mean, many, many conservatives have compared– oh, they always do, compare government to criminals. All the time.

Taxation is a form of theft. It’s as bad as a mugger in the street saying, “Give me your money.” And America is pretty much unique among the nations in that our political system, half of our political system is basically dedicated to the destruction of the government from within. I don’t know any other country where that’s the case. But there’s plenty of countries where government works really, really well. I mean, even, for God’s sake, in India, you know, which we don’t think of as being an advanced industrial society, their banks didn’t all go bust in the latest downturn. Now, why is that?

Because their equivalent of the Federal Reserve was not, you know, deregulating, stopping enforcement. They weren’t doing any of those things. They were keeping a very tight lid on it. Government can work. It works all the time.

BILL MOYERS: You wrote “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Let me ask you to broaden that canvas and ask, with the answer to the question, what’s the matter with America that we tolerate all of this?

THOMAS FRANK: I think a large part of it is that– well, it’s the chronic historical forgetting, you know? We just elected Barack Obama in this– you know, he had quite a mandate. You know, biggest majority of any President since Reagan. And now a year later, and the public is already turning on him. And that’s a part of the problem.

But, you know, another part of it is that the conservative argument about government and freedom is very compelling when they say that something like, you know, the national, you know, any proposal for a national health program is a violation of our freedom. Americans don’t like to hear that their freedom is being violated. That is a hot button argument. Now, the obvious– look, there’s an obvious response that Democrats could make. Which is no, this is a way of growing our freedom. This will actually expand human freedom, not limit it. They never say that.

BILL MOYERS: Why? So, part of the problem with America is the Democratic Party?

THOMAS FRANK: A huge part of the problem, because look, the conservatives have for decades now made their– the whole point of their party is to attack government, attack the state, encourage cynicism about government. And then wreck it when they’re in charge, right?

Democrats never defend the state. They never come out and say, “No, no. It’s important to have, you know, government. It’s important to have a Department of Labor. These are, you know, having government actually– a good government increases your freedom. It doesn’t ruin it.” They never fight back consistently.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

THOMAS FRANK: I think they’re– some of them do. You’ve got members of Congress here and there that do. But by and large, the prominent leading Democrats in our society don’t do that. Why is that? Because I think that would get them in trouble with their funders. I mean, the power of money is huge in the political system. You know, despite all the efforts that have been made over the years to get money out of politics. It’s still immensely powerful.

BILL MOYERS: The book is Thomas Frank, “The Wrecking Crew.” The literary journal is “The Baffler.” Congratulations on both of them. And thanks for being with me on the Journal.

THOMAS FRANK: It was my pleasure.

Bill Moyers is president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

© 2010 Bill Moyers Journal All rights reserved.
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A time not for retreat

chasdarwinLeave a comment

As one who labors for social and economic justice and other Progressive causes, and who has experienced many of life’s vicissitudes, I am not willing to give up our goals based on the results of the special election of Jan 19, 2010.

o Because the campaign was not well run from the Democratic side, it is not valid to draw many conclusions on the mind sets of the voters – Fox News etc, to the contrary.

o It is also not correct, because of the turn out, to interpret these special results as a general message.

(A poll (DFA) commissioned from Research 2000 taken immediately after voting ended on Tuesday night in Massachusetts. The results send a clear message to Democrats in Washington: Be bold, fight for more change — not less, and pass healthcare with a public option.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/21/coakley-could-have-won-if_n_431942.html)

It is correct to:

o Inventory our positives, our achievements, and our assets.

o Assess our goals, identify the obstacles, and formulate a plan to achieve them: Yes We Still Can!

“I am not discouraged by Tuesday’s election results. Actually, I’m energized and I want you to be, too. Working America is demanding major change NOW—not timid, go-slow, partial solutions.” -Richard Trumka Pres. AFL-CIO

“ It is for us … to be dedicated here to the unfinished work …. thus far so nobly advanced…to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ” (Lincoln)