* Stop occupying and attacking the Middle East and South Asia.
* Stop supporting vicious and authoritarian regimes (e.g. the Saudi Arabian terror state) there.
* Stop backing Israel's criminal and brutal occupation and apartheid policies toward the Palestinians.
Let's ring out 2009 with the words of Martin Luther King quoted by Street:
"The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.' This business of burning human beings with napalm... of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Martin Luther King
"I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for people." - Katharine Hepburn, Ladies' Home Journal, October 1991
It's been a good decade for the Pentagon. The most recent numbers from Capitol Hill indicate that Pentagon spending (counting Iraq and Afghanistan) will reach over $630 billion in 2010. And that doesn’t even include the billions set aside for building new military facilities and sustaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
But even without counting the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense budget has been moving relentlessly upward since 2001. Pentagon budget authority has jumped from $296 billion in 2001 to $513 billion in 2009, a 73% increase. And again, that's not even counting the over $1 trillion in taxpayer money that has been thrown at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if those wars had never happened, the Pentagon would still be racking up huge increases year after year after year.
And perhaps most disturbing of all, the Pentagon budget increased for every year of the first decade of the 21st century, an unprecedented run that didn't even happen in the World War II era, much less during Korea or Vietnam. And if the government's current plans are carried out, there will be yearly increases in military spending for at least another decade.
We have a permanent war budget, and most of it isn't even being used to fight wars — it's mostly a giveaway to the Pentagon and its favorite contractors.
It was a decade with basically zero job creation. O.K., the headline employment number for December 2009 will be slightly higher than that for December 1999, but only slightly. And private-sector employment has actually declined — the first decade on record in which that happened.
It was a decade with zero economic gains for the typical family. Actually, even at the height of the alleged "Bush boom," in 2007, median household income adjusted for inflation was lower than it had been in 1999. And you know what happened next.
It was a decade of zero gains for homeowners, even if they bought early: right now housing prices, adjusted for inflation, are roughly back to where they were at the beginning of the decade. And for those who bought in the decade's middle years — when all the serious people ridiculed warnings that housing prices made no sense, that we were in the middle of a gigantic bubble — well, I feel your pain. Almost a quarter of all mortgages in America, and 45 percent of mortgages in Florida, are underwater, with owners owing more than their houses are worth.
Last and least for most Americans — but a big deal for retirement accounts, not to mention the talking heads on financial TV — it was a decade of zero gains for stocks, even without taking inflation into account. Remember the excitement when the Dow first topped 10,000, and best-selling books like "Dow 36,000" predicted that the good times would just keep rolling? Well, that was back in 1999. Last week the market closed at 10,520.
So there was a whole lot of nothing going on in measures of economic progress or success. Funny how that happened.
For as the decade began, there was an overwhelming sense of economic triumphalism in America's business and political establishments, a belief that we — more than anyone else in the world — knew what we were doing.
Let me quote from a speech that Lawrence Summers, then deputy Treasury secretary (and now the Obama administration's top economist), gave in 1999. "If you ask why the American financial system succeeds," he said, "at least my reading of the history would be that there is no innovation more important than that of generally accepted accounting principles: it means that every investor gets to see information presented on a comparable basis; that there is discipline on company managements in the way they report and monitor their activities." And he went on to declare that there is "an ongoing process that really is what makes our capital market work and work as stably as it does."
So here's what Mr. Summers — and, to be fair, just about everyone in a policy-making position at the time — believed in 1999: America has honest corporate accounting; this lets investors make good decisions, and also forces management to behave responsibly; and the result is a stable, well-functioning financial system.
What percentage of all this turned out to be true? Zero.
His new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, is a devastating critique of the contemporary government of the United States -- including what has happened to it in recent years and what must be done if it is not to disappear into history along with its classic totalitarian predecessors: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia. The hour is very late and the possibility that the American people might pay attention to what is wrong and take the difficult steps to avoid a national Gotterdmmerung are remote, but Wolin's is the best analysis of why the presidential election of 2008 probably will not do anything to mitigate our fate. This book demonstrates why political science, properly practiced, is the master social science.
Michael Scherer: What do you make of President Obama’s approach to Iraq and Afghanistan now that he’s in office?
Ron Paul: Every bit as bad as the last administration, maybe even worse. Because he’s not getting out of Iraq, that’s a pretense. And he’s expanding rapidly what’s happening in Afghanistan. He’s continuing the bombing of Pakistan, he has not changed his attitude about Iran. They’re talking about denying any shipments of gasoline to the people of Iran just to further antagonize the situation. What he is doing is a little more dangerous because he has neutralized the anti-war left. The antiwar left has just left. At least Bush was honest, I mean he was upfront. He believed in pre-emptive preventive war but everybody was hopeful that Obama would do differently, but he hasn’t. So he has quieted down the left and there is a very weak anti-war movement in this country now. And that obviously is something I hope to participate in reviving and it has to be coming from the old right as well as true progressives who believe that all this warmongering and killing makes no sense whatsoever.
For me, it is the same collection of traits that made him a great candidate that have made him a poor leader.
1) He has great intrapersonal intelligence (he knows who he is and how to modulate his thoughts and feeling), which is what made him a candidate who rarely made mistakes on the campaign trail. This makes him seem aloof and withdrawn as President.
2) He also great interpersonal intelligence (an ability to connect with people) that allows him to deliver very moving speeches on topics he is passionate about (such as his Philadelphia race speech). But as a leader, he is crippled by his need to build consensus and avoid conflict.
3) [...] His belief in working together seems to prevent him from leading from his internal sense of what is right. And his distaste for conflict keeps him from engaging directly in the fray, which is what we need him to do.
4) Contrary to the tag of Socialist the right keeps throwing at him, or maybe because of it, Obama has constructed an economic policy that is more friendly to business than G.W. Bush ever thought of being. [...]
5) Finally, I think Obama is paralyzed by his desire to appear in control and unruffled by the challenges he inherited as president (to be fair, he inherited unprecedented challenges both in the economic collapse and in the social divisions). As a candidate he seemed to be a man who cared about the lowest among us, but as president he has attempted to straddle the divide between liberalism (people suffer as a result of inequities in the system) and conservatism (people suffer as a result of their own weakness or laziness) and as a result has done little to help those who are suffering most in this economic climate.
What we have seen so far (in my opinion) from Obama as a leader is a failure to understand his role. If I were his life coach, I would be asking him to assert more of his intrapersonal intelligence in terms of following his heart and gut and to redirect his interpersonal intelligence toward getting people (the Congress, for example) to do what he wants, rather than letting them do the work (which is bound to be corrupted by special interests, as we have seen in the health care debate) and trying to avoid conflict.
Given all the burgeoning crises in the United States and the world, the only global military and economic superpower (albeit in serious deficit straits) needs a transforming leader, when, at best, it has a transactional leader in the White House.
I say "at best," because President Obama displays an uncanny inability to deal. He is not even anywhere near Lyndon Baines Johnson in that regard. This lack is due more to his personality than to his character.
His is a concessionary demeanor, an aversion to conflict and to taking on entrenched power, a devotee of harmony ideology not because he doesn't believe in necessary re-directions, but because he does not project the strength of his beliefs and willingness to draw the line—here and no further—as did Ronald Reagan or FDR.
[...]
He cannot transform his hope and change slogan into meaningful policies if he signals that he can be had on one issue after another by being desperate to get any legislation so long as he can give it the right public relations label.
Most importantly, The President cannot be a transforming leader if he turns his back on the liberal and progressive constituency that elected him because he thinks they have nowhere to go.
He must give visibility to their expectations of him, including access to many cabinet secretaries and regulatory agency heads who have been reluctant even to meet with civic leaders, unlike the open doors regularly available to the corporatists and their lobbyists.
"Personality," "character," pretty soon they become indistinguishable and very resistant to both "hope and change."
Can you imagine Obama taking on an issue the way Nader took on Detroit and corporate America?
...all enlightened and honest people should try to be as good as they can, and not even good in all respects, but only in one; namely, in observing one of the most elementary virtues — to be honest, and not to lie, but to act and speak so that your motives should be intelligible to an affectionate seven-year old-boy; to act so that your boy should not say, “But why, papa, did you say so-and-so, and now you do and say something quite different?” This method seems very weak, and yet I am convinced that it is this method, and this method only, that has moved humanity since the race began. Only because there were straight men, truthful and courageous, who made no concessions that infringed their dignity as men, have all those beneficent revolutions been accomplished of which mankind now have the advantage, from the abolition of torture and slavery up to liberty of speech and of conscience. Nor can this be otherwise, for what conscience (the highest forefeeling man possesses of the truth accessible to him) demands, is always, and in all respects, the activity most fruitful and most necessary for humanity at the given time. Only a man who lives according to his conscience can have influence on people, and only activity that accords with one’s conscience can be useful.
...how can a believing Christian, or even a skeptic, involuntarily permeated by the Christian ideals of human brotherhood and love which have inspired the works of the philosophers, moralists and artists of our time, — how can such take a gun, or stand by a cannon, and aim at a crowd of his fellowmen, desiring to kill as many of them as possible?
What has caused, and still causes, this surprising phenomenon that people suffering from the abuse of power which they themselves tolerate and support, do not free themselves in the most simple and easy way from all the disasters brought about by power ; that is to say, do not simply cease obeying it? And not only do not act thus, but go on doing the very things that deprive them of physical and mental well-being; that is to say, either continue to obey the existing power, or establish another similar force-using power, and obey that?
Why is this so? People feel that their unhappy position is the result of violence, and are dimly aware that to get rid of their misery they need freedom ; but, strange to say, to get rid of violence and gain freedom, they seek, invent and use all sorts of measures: mutiny, change of rulers, alterations of Government, all kinds of Constitutions, new arrangements between different States, Colonial policies, enrollment of the unemployed, trusts, social organisations — everything but the one thing that would most simply, easily, and surely free them from all their distresses: the refusal to submit to power.
The time for exhortation is over. FDR didn't exhort robber barons to stem the redistribution of wealth from working Americans to the upper 1 percent, and neither did his fifth cousin Teddy. Both men told the most powerful men in the United States that they weren't going to rip off the American people any more, and they stopped backed up their words with actions. Teddy Roosevelt was clear that capital gains taxes should be high relative to income taxes because we should reward work, not "gambling in stocks." This President just doesn't have the stomach to make anyone do anything they don't want to do (except women to have unwanted babies because they can't afford an abortion or live in a red state and don't have an employer who offers insurance), and his advisors are enabling his most troubling character flaw, his conflict-avoidance.
Like most Americans I talk to, when I see the president on television, I now turn change the channel the same way I did with Bush. With Bush, I couldn't stand his speeches because I knew he meant what he said. I knew he was going to follow through with one ignorant, dangerous, or misguided policy after another. With Obama, I can't stand them because I realize he doesn't mean what he says -- or if he does, he just doesn't have the fire in his belly to follow through. He can't seem to muster the passion to fight for any of what he believes in, whatever that is. He'd make a great queen -- his ceremonial addresses are magnificent -- but he prefers to fly Air Force One at 60,000 feet and "stay above the fray."
"I basically concluded that maybe we should just pass this thing. ... If the Republicans hate it, there must be some good in it." - Howard Dean, December 22, 2009
This year, Christmas Eve falls on the 3,000th day that U.S. forces have been in Afghanistan, as well as the 30th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of the very same nation. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was a disaster and they proved that you cannot win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people through troop surges, and continued occupation.
It is critical to note that while we do not view this as an occupation of Afghanistan, it is clear that the people of Afghanistan view our presence as just that. Please watch this extraordinary video, and then read my blog post on Huffington Post and Daily Kos where I explain further how you can help pressure Congress to end this war of occupation. -Congressman Eric Massa
In spite of my lifelong commitment to pacifism, I initially supported America's current war in Afghanistan...at least to the extent that I accepted the premise that the Taliban's sponsorship of Al-Qaeda--the organization that claimed responsibility for perpetrating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001--made that regime a potentially legitimate target of American military response to those attacks; and I hoped that, given the best of circumstances, our action in Afghanistan might ultimately redress a human rights disaster to which we had long turned a blind eye.
I dared to hope--contrary to my own convictions, centuries of historical precedent, and the abysmal leadership of under which we were launching such a questionable enterprise--that our decisive involvement there would somehow bring some measure of stability, justice, and maybe even prosperity to one of the most troubled regions of the earth. I should have known better, and I did, but I dared to hope nonetheless...
Whether as a result of greed, gross mismanagement, tragic distraction, or sheer inevitability, the United States, its European allies, and the local administration that we've supported have failed to meet any of our stated objectives. Al-Qaeda is no longer a nation-based organization, it's a transnational force that's ideologically and strategically profiting from what they continue to perceive as estern interference in the Muslim world; Pakistan is and always has been obsessed with maintaining their own perilous leverage against India; and the Afghan people have long lost whatever hope and support they may have had in our involvement in their country. They do not want us there.
There is no way to "win" in Afghanistan: this is a war that they and we cannot afford, and it's time to face that reality. There are ways that we and other nations can ameliorate and possibly repair some of the damage that has been done, but continued military action is not one of them. One way or another, it's time to go.
The great western conflation of democracy with capitalism originated with the crisis of European feudalism and the great European and North American bourgeois revolutions of the 17th to l9th centuries. It reached its officially disseminated pinnacle with the Cold War, when U.S. propaganda proclaimed an all-or-nothing global division and struggle between "free world" capitalism headquartered in Washington, DC and expansionist "communist" totalitarianism headquartered in Moscow. This Cold War doctrine provided ideological cover for U. S. sponsorship of numerous pro-capitalist / pro-globalization dictatorships throughout the world. It also disguised the real nature of leading First World states. Beneath outwardly democratic political processes and generally strong civil liberties, those states were fundamentally subject to the command of centralized, hierarchical corporate power and great monied wealth-a condition that persists well into the "post-Cold War era."
This persistence is particularly clear within the supposed national homeland (now as during the Cold War era) of "democratic values." In telling the Chicago Economic Club why "the international community" (the world's leading industrial states, that is) should not shy away from "intervening" in the internal affairs of (as in bombing) "rogue" states like Iraq and Serbia last April, British Prime Minister Tony Blair argued that "when regimes are based on minority rule, they lose their legitimacy." Yet, while Blair would never dream of describing his senior partner the United States as a "minority"-ruled "regime," American reformers express widespread popular sentiment when they describe U.S. elections as de facto "wealth primaries." American candidates without vast financial resources or access to such resources can generally forget about being taken seriously in money- and media-driven campaigns. As most Americans see it, the democratic ideal of "one person, one vote," is negated by the harsh realities of "dollar democracy" and the "golden rule" ("those who have the gold rule"). The candidate-selection and policymaking processes belong primarily to the top 10 percent of Americans that own 73.2 percent of American wealth.
Patriotism today is the cruel tradition of an outlived period, which exists not merely by its inertia, but because the governments and ruling classes, aware that not their power only, but their very existence, depends upon it, persistently excite and maintain it among the people, both by cunning and violence.
[...]
The government assures the people that they are in danger from the invasion of another nation, or from foes in their midst, and that the only way to escape this danger is by the slavish obedience of the people to their government. This fact is seen most prominently during revolutions and dictatorships, but it exists always and everywhere that the power of the government exists. Every government explains its existence, and justifies its deeds of violence, by the argument that if it did not exist the condition of things would be very much worse. After assuring the people of its danger the government subordinates it to control, and when in this condition compels it to attack some other nation. And thus the assurance of the government is corroborated in the eyes of the people, as to the danger of attack from other nations. "Divide et impera."
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish enthralment to those in power. And as such it is recommended wherever it is preached.
Patriotism is slavery.
[...]
If people would only speak what they think, and not what they do not think, all the superstitions emanating from patriotism would at once drop away with the cruel feelings and violence founded upon it. The hatred and animosity between nations and peoples, fanned by their governments, would cease; the extolling of military heroism, that is of murder, would be at an end; and, what is of most importance, respect for authorities, abandonment to them of the fruits of one's labour, and subordination to them, would cease, since there is no other reason for them but patriotism. And if merely this were to take place, that vast mass of feeble people who are controlled by externals - would sway at once to the side of the new public opinion, which should reign henceforth in place of the old.
Kempf gets it: The rising sea level is a direct consequence of rising inequality. Yet the knights of the new world order, like George Bush, Al Gore, or the CEO of a multi-national that is telling you to reduce your carbon footprint from their private jet, want you to believe the solution lies with turning our fate over to enlightened business chieftains. It was, let’s remember, that supreme hot-air salesman, Mr. Gore, who sold us the fable of “free trade,” forcing the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) down our throats. Thanks to Al’s NAFTA, we’re all sucking diesel soot from tractor trailers hauling cheap goods to Wal-Mart, where now laid-off workers from shut-down US factories shop for bargains. It was Gore who ran a crusade against environmental and safety regulations in the Clinton Administration, all in the name of “efficient” (translation: corporate-friendly) government. Dubya Bush only took Al’s get-out-of-the-way-of-markets philosophy to its nasty conclusion.
When the anti-regulation, free-market psychosis leads to illness in our environment, the two connected forces—grotesque market profiteering and planetary corrosion—are made to seem innocuously distinct. Kempf shows us that they are just two arms of the same beast. He suggests we wise up, and quick. The ultimate obstacle to Earth’s salvation is our own naiveté.
The 2000s could be termed a lost decade for the U.S. economy.
The average American's annual income stood at $39,446 as of October 2009, up only 5.3% in inflation-adjusted terms from the end of the 1990s.
That's the slowest growth registered in at least six decades. The average person's net worth fell 13% through September 2009 as stock and home prices plunged. The S&P 500 delivered an inflation-adjusted total return of negative 30% through November 2009.
Meanwhile, income inequality grew. Although it's still too early to gauge the full effect of the most recent financial crisis, as of 2007, the highest-earning 0.1% of the population accounted for 8.2% of all pre-tax income, according to economists Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley. That was up from 6.6% in 1999, and the highest level since 1917.
Land of the free to exploit, home of the greedy rich.
I'm not sure we can clean them up but, while we're waiting for the revolution, we can exercise our power as consumers to force companies to behave in the ways we want them to behave.
Marx says you have labor power. You also have wage power, the ability to spend (or withhold) your earnings in the marketplace as you see fit. Your purchasing power isn't only about how much you can spend, it is also the inextinguishable ability to spend money in meaningful, society-altering ways. Indeed, businesses love to say that you, the consumer, are king and that the products and services in the marketplace reflect your consumer choices. They do!
Doesn't that make you feel powerful? What are you going to do with all that power?
Josh Catone has compiled a list of sites to visit to learn more about the companies and products we allow into our lives. Use it! (I advise using the Good Guide with extreme caution - they give high rankings to far too many products from giant corporations and don't do enough to distinguish those products from the ones that come from more socially-responsible companies. Organic and non-organic foods can achieve the same score! That's reprehensible.). Use the excellent data supplied by the Environmental Working Group to make more informed decisions about the products you buy.
"Ethical Consumerism is an important movement toward corporate reform, through which individuals recognize their own role in systems of oppression, and take personal steps toward resistance and positive change." - Knowmore.org
Hey! You are not a helpless cog in the corporate machine! Every dime you spend speaks volumes. Volumes! After your blog is dismissed, your liberal opinion deemed whiny, your harassing petitions and emails relegated to some governmental spam quarantine, your pocketbook will continue to speak. Every day. Loud and clear!
Are you listening to Seeing Red Radio? The latest edition features Alison Smith (SWP) on Copenhagen and, as always, great musical interludes.
Rustbelt Radical points to some socialist coverage of Copenhagen.
Will nature survive human nature? Can we avert the climate crisis? Do we avert wars? Genocide? Mass starvation? The past is prologue. What makes anyone think we can collectively transcend our deeply selfish impulses to heal the natural balances we have thrown out of whack? In a world where capitalism is triumphant, billions subscribe to countless religious panaceas, and world population approaches 7 billion, effective action on climate change seems a bridge too far.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end.
Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
As a rule of thumb, consciousness tends to lag behind historical events. Most people, including those on the left, are reacting to today's crisis through the lenses of the 1980s when American capitalism still had a lot more leeway. In the past 20 years or so, the structural contradictions of the system have grown more pronounced while its ability to bottle up discontent through concessions has decreased. This is a function of the system's inability to provide well-paying jobs in a manufacturing-based economy, the hallmark of FDR's New Deal.
Eventually we will see explosive reactions to the inexorable rise of class divisions such as the kind seen in student protests in California against tuition hikes. Attacks on Social Security, Medicare, unemployment benefits, and other "entitlements" will create the kind of antagonisms that made the New Deal or more radical alternatives inevitable. This time we must find a way to create a viable radical alternative in order to move to a more just and rational system on a permanent basis. There is no karma that condemns us to repeat the past, thank goodness.
I would like to see us have a national debate on the following proposition:
Resolved that the U.S. Senate is not serving the people well and should be abolished.
I will take the affirmative, making the following case:
The Senate is the result of a compromise in drawing up the Constitution, between the larger states which wanted a legislative body based on population and the smaller states which wanted a legislative body with an equal number of members from each state. So we got both, and on balance, it was worth creating a Senate to gain a Constitution.
But, it has become a very serious threat to our ability to meet the constitutional mandate to "establish justice, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
An example of this threat, currently in the news, is the success of Sen. Joseph Lieberman in preventing a Senate vote on any bill which does not meet the requirements of the private health insurance industry. He is able to do so because Senate rules require 60 votes to curb a filibuster and limit debate.
There is nothing in the Constitution about the 60-vote rule. It's just that -- a rule, which could be changed any day by two-thirds of the members present and voting, but a rule which serves the purposes of enough senators it is not likely to be voted out any time soon.
Designed to resist change
The Senate has 100 members. It's a small club with many perks and rewards. Members, in their own interest, are sensitive about offending other members.
And, the Senate is not designed to tinker with the status quo, even when voters have decided that tinkering is in order. Senators serve six-year terms. One-third of the Senate is elected at each general election, which means that two-thirds of the Senate stays in office after every election.
In 2008, Americans elected a Democratic president and a House with a sizable Democratic majority, and, surprisingly, against the predictions of nearly all the experts, unseated enough Republicans to give Democrats a substantial majority in the Senate, but not enough to avoid the 60-vote rule.
The platforms of the major parties were quite clear about their position on health insurance change, as were the campaign statements of most candidates, so there is no doubt what the voters wanted, and they got it from the president and the House, but not the Senate.
Now, it can be argued that Senate opponents of health insurance reform are voting for what they believe to be in the best interest of the nation, and that is surely true for some of them. But it is surely not true for others. They are voting for what is in the best interest of their major donors.
And this is only one of many examples which could be cited.
Another timely one is restoring financial regulations necessary to prevent another and worse crash than the one from which we may be recovering. The president is in favor. The House has passed a pretty decent bill. The Senate has done nothing. Wall Street speculators are still free to gamble with our money.
A history of obstructionism
And you can go back further. After World War I, the Senate kept the United States from joining the League of Nations, which might -- and I stress might -- have been able to find a way to stop Hitler from conquering most of Europe and precipitating World War II.
[...]
I understand that abolition of the Senate is not likely to happen because it could be done only by amending the Constitution, which would require approval of 38 states.
But, it's worth discussing because, if enough voters get riled up, they might persuade senators to make some very useful changes in the rules and bring the Senate into the 21st century.
"We were making wild and crazy love before the ice had settled in our drinks. It was only two weeks, but we loved. God how we loved. Until you had to go back home to your children. And though it's hard to remember your name, and even your face, I remember it was really beautiful each time." -Suzanne Somers
Having, for a little while, the hope of a public option and a medicare extension was really beautiful, wasn't it? God how we hoped it would come true. But we all have to go back to reality eventually and forget the fantasies we impose on the Congress of the United States, a Congress which could no more pass a public option than it could stop wearing flag lapel pins and funding endless war.
After this week's death-of-health-care-reform news, I'm blogging to you from somewhere between depression and acceptance(thank you, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross).
Denial (this isn't happening!)
Anger (why is this happening?)
Bargaining (I promise I'll be a better person if you bring the public option back!)
Depression (I don't care anymore about your stinking bill.)
Acceptance (I'm ready for whatever shit you send our way next.)
"As I've often told Ginsberg, you can't blame the President for the state of the country, it's always the poets' fault. You can't expect politicians to come up with a vision, they don't have it in them. Poets have to come up with the vision and they have to turn it on so it sparks and catches hold." - Ken Kesey
McNally: My fiancee said the saddest moment for her was watching how excited people were the night Barack Obama was elected. Share a little bit about your feelings that night and your feelings today.
West: I was ready because I draw a radical distinction between the symbolic and the substantial. As a critical supporter of Barack Obama, engaged in over 50 events for him from Iowa to Ohio, I knew that at a symbolic level something could happen that was unprecedented. And it did happen. At that symbolic level, I can understand the tears, I can understand the jubilation, I can understand the euphoria. But I always knew there was a sense in which he, now heading the American empire, was tied to the shadow government, tied to CIA, FBI, tied to the establishment waiting to embrace him. It was clear when he chose his economic team, when he chose his foreign policy team, he was choosing, of course, the recycled neo-liberals and recycled neo-Clintonites that substantially you're going to end up with these technocratic policies that consider poor people and working people as afterthoughts. Beginning with bankers, beginning with elites.
Symbolically, black man breaks through makes you want to break dance. So, yes, we have to be able to relate to both of these. So I resonate with your dear fiancee, because the hopes that were generated and the call for change, and then we end up with this recycled neo-liberalism. There's no fundamental change at all.
That's very real, but I think we do have to understand we had to bring the age of Reagan to a close. We had to bring the era of conservatism to a close. And then you try to unleash new possibilities. Of course, the question now is, how do we keep our fellow citizens awakened so it goes beyond the campaign for a candidate and really begin engaging in grassroots organizing and mobilizing.
McNally: I'm more disheartened these days than I was during the eight years of Bush. During those eight years I expected nothing. I was surprised by almost nothing. We fought, we did what we could But I feel a little sadness in my soul as I watch this one. You've said that Obama's looking at the wrong Lincoln and I think of Roosevelt who shows so well in Michael Moore's movie when he declares the New Bill of Rights.
[T]his entire conference is an elaborate sham, where the organizers have known all along that they’re heading for a very different world than the one they’re supposedly creating. It’s intellectual dishonesty of a very high order, and with very high consequences."
Why do they bother having climate conferences where the outcome is preordained? Is it the free trip? The parties?
Naomi Klein captures the spirit of the conference:
The image from the Bella Center that will forever stay with me is seeing security guards refuse entry to Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, who has been fighting Shell and other oil giants in the Niger Delta for decades, losing friends like Ken Saro Wiwa to the struggle and being jailed himself. Meanwhile, the oil execs walk the halls of the Bella Center with impunity.
I LOVE discovering new blogs. Here's one I will be visiting regularly called I Cite (by Jodi Dean, a college professor who teaches political theory, author of Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies - only $75 in cloth!):
Escalating war in Afghanistan (in the name of peace!), failure to prosecute torturers, failure to reign in Wall Street (in the name of helping Main Street!), failure to deliver on climate, support for the worst in Haiti, and failure to deliver adequate health care. And all this with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate.
"I think people are pissed right now less at the fact that they didn't get what they wanted, and more at the fact that they feel like their people didn't really fight for it. Leaders don't always get what they want. But people recognize when true leaders at least give it a shot." - TPM Reader
"Our challenge to you, to the President, to the Senate and to the House of Representatives is to fight. Now, more than ever, all of us must stand up, remember what health insurance reform is all about, and fight like hell to deliver real and meaningful reform to the American people." - Andy Stern, SEIU
What am I saying? The prospects of Democratic leadership on this issue now, at five minutes to the midnight of Obama's X-Mas deadline for signing this massive cave-in into law, are absolutely zero. The most we can hope for is Bernie Sanders' defection and a crushing defeat for this stinking mediocrity of a bill.
I think this result on health care is all about Obama seeking to be above the fray on everything.
He absolutely refuses to get dirty on ANY issue. He asks other people to do his fighting. Always. During the campaign, it was all about us. That was his way of saying that he can’t be BOTHERED to take a principled stand. He is a follower at heart. He'll go whichever way the wind blows and he could care less if it blows left or right. He was caught up in the anti-Bush sentiment and now he's caught up in the anti-deficit sentiment and tomorrow he'll be caught up in something else. Underneath it all is nothing but the principle-free will to survive politically. At least you can say about Lieberman that he is willing to take risks. Obama is risk-averse to the very core.
The Democrats consider forcing everyone to buy private insurance, which is unlikely to cover you in extremes, to be a step forward. It is, for the insurance companies; but not for me, as one of the forty-some million uninsured Americans.
[...]
This bill is certainly historic, in other words, but not in a positive way. It’s a holiday gift to the insurance and drug industries, following on the lavish presents bestowed earlier on the perpetrators of the recent financial farce. Remember, after all, that the Democrats handed $787 billion to Wall Street firms and their bankers and insurers, precisely the culprits in the disastrous chicanery that led to the bubble that ruined so many. Now the same folks are handing billions per year for the foreseeable future to the drug and insurance companies, without even a hint of a means of riding herd on those vicious organizations. Or as Jim Dean at Democracy for America puts it,
…the bill doesn’t actually “cover” 30 million more Americans — instead it makes them criminals if they don’t buy insurance from the same companies that got us into this mess.
[...]
...Obama is the main reason the bill sucks so much. He started by taking the only reasonable option off the table; then he exerted no leadership to force things, whether by gambling on pressure through stating publicly what he wanted, or working behind the scenes for a consistent goal. By making it clear that all he wanted was some bill, he created the situation in which there was no threat of extreme actions from the left, only from the right. Thus Snowe and Lieberman can affect the content of the bill, but Feingold and Sanders can’t. If he had ever come strongly for a public option, there’d be one in the bill. If he’d supported anything at all, it would be in the bill. But he didn’t, because the only thing he really wants is whatever gets the votes.
If they pass a bill similar to the current Senate version, I’ll be rooting for the Democrats to lose Congress again.
"...Obama is the main reason the bill sucks so much. He started by taking the only reasonable option off the table; then he exerted no leadership to force things, whether by gambling on pressure through stating publicly what he wanted, or working behind the scenes for a consistent goal." - Chuck Dupree
A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints.
[...]
Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
[...]
Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.
"Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits."
Democrat Jerry Brown may still be the presumed front-runner in next year's California governor's race, but a new poll indicates he shouldn't take that position for granted.
A survey released Wednesday by the Public Policy Institute of California shows Brown would best any of the three Republicans vying for their party's nomination but would not have a 50 percent majority against any of them.
In a matchup against billionaire former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman, Brown leads just 43 percent to 37 percent.
If I were a senator, I would not vote for the current health-care bill. Any measure that expands private insurers' monopoly over health care and transfers millions of taxpayer dollars to private corporations is not real health-care reform. Real reform would insert competition into insurance markets, force insurers to cut unnecessary administrative expenses and spend health-care dollars caring for people. Real reform would significantly lower costs, improve the delivery of health care and give all Americans a meaningful choice of coverage. The current Senate bill accomplishes none of these.
Real health-care reform is supposed to eliminate discrimination based on preexisting conditions. But the legislation allows insurance companies to charge older Americans up to three times as much as younger Americans, pricing them out of coverage. The bill was supposed to give Americans choices about what kind of system they wanted to enroll in. Instead, it fines Americans if they do not sign up with an insurance company, which may take up to 30 percent of your premium dollars and spend it on CEO salaries -- in the range of $20 million a year -- and on return on equity for the company's shareholders. Few Americans will see any benefit until 2014, by which time premiums are likely to have doubled. In short, the winners in this bill are insurance companies; the American taxpayer is about to be fleeced with a bailout in a situation that dwarfs even what happened at AIG.
From the very beginning of this debate, progressives have argued that a public option or a Medicare buy-in would restore competition and hold the private health insurance industry accountable. Progressives understood that a public plan would give Americans real choices about what kind of system they wanted to be in and how they wanted to spend their money. Yet Washington has decided, once again, that the American people cannot be trusted to choose for themselves. Your money goes to insurers, whether or not you want it to.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance rose last week, the government said Thursday. Analysts had expected a decline.
There were 480,000 initial job claims filed in the week ended Dec. 12, up 7,000 from the previous week's revised 473,000, the Labor Department said.
What's going on? I thought capitalists were the saviors of the world, job creators who can magically wipe out unemployment and deliver a worker heaven-on-earth.
All we had to do to make this happen was privatize everything and cut taxes.
Consider a family of 4 making $66,150–a family at 300% of the poverty level and therefore, hypothetically, at least, “subsidized.” That family would be expected to pay $6482.70 (in today’s dollars) for premiums–or $540 a month. But that family could be required to pay $7973 out of pocket for copays and so on. So if that family had a significant–but not catastrophic–medical event, it would be asked to pay its insurer almost 22% of its income to cover health care. Several months ago, I showed why this was a recipe for continued medical bankruptcy (though the numbers have changed somewhat). But here’s another way to think about it. Senate Democrats are requiring middle class families to give the proceeds of over a month of their work to a private corporation–one allowed to make 15% or maybe even 25% profit on the proceeds of their labor.
It’s one thing to require a citizen to pay taxes–to pay into the commons. It’s another thing to require taxpayers to pay a private corporation, and to have up to 25% of that go to paying for luxuries like private jets and gyms for the company CEOs.
It’s the same kind of deal peasants made under feudalism: some proportion of their labor in exchange for protection (in this case, from bankruptcy from health problems, though the bill doesn’t actually require the private corporations to deliver that much protection).In this case, the federal government becomes an appendage to do collections for the corporations.
Mind you, not only will citizens be required to pay private corporations. But middle class citizens may be required to pay more to these private corporations than they pay in federal and state taxes. Using these numbers, this middle class family of four will pay roughly 15% in federal, state, and social security taxes. This family will pay around $10,015 for their share of the commons–paying for defense, roads, some policing, and their social safety net share. That’s 15% of their income. They will, at a minimum, be asked to pay 9.8% of their income to the insurance company. And if they have a significant medical event, they’ll pay 22%–far, far more than they’ll pay into the commons. So it’s bad enough that this bill would require citizens to pay a tithe to a corporation. It’s far worse when you consider that some citizens would pay more in their corporate tithe than they would to the commons.
“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program. I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.” – Barack Obama, 2003
LIAR!
What has he NOT lied about? That’s what I want to know. Does he have a single truthful bone in his body? Or is he LIES all the way through?
“I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody.”
He sees no reason why the U.S. can't have health care for all? I can see the reason.
It's the FRAUD staring him in the mirror every morning.
Who make money from war Who make dough from fear and lies Who want the world like it is Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror violence, and hunger and poverty.
Who is the ruler of Hell? Who is the most powerful
Virtually everywhere in the world people tend to be more educated than their parents. This is no longer true in the United States. A report by the American Association of State Colleges and Universities indicates that the U.S. is one of only two nations on Earth in which people aged 25 to 34 have lower educational attainment than their parents.
...the socialist critique of capitalism has rarely seemed more relevant than it does at the moment. In a world where 447 billionaires own property equal to the annual income of fully half of humankind; in which one billion people live in what the World Bank terms “absolute poverty”; where more than 100 million children labour in sweatshops; where environmental devastation escalates at an alarming rate; and where the oppression of women, people of colour, lesbians and gay men, aboriginals, and people living with AIDS shows no sign of lightening; in such a world the socialist critique of exploitation, inequality and oppression takes on particular urgency.
At its birth, socialism was the banner under which working people resisted the horrors of the factory system and demanded a new society of equality, justice, freedom and prosperity. Socialism promised the emancipation of labour, a society founded on workers’ control where labour would be transformed from drudgery done in the pursuit of profit into collective activity done in the service of human needs. Early socialists looked forward to a world society free of nationalism and war, a world without gender and racial inequalities; they envisioned a cooperative and democratic society run by and for the majority. Rather than autoritarian regimes that deny even the most elementary democratic rights, socialism was understood as a new society of freedom.
[...]
The democratic and socialist restructuring of society remains, as it was in Marx’s day, the most pressing task confronting humanity.
"As it currently stands, the Senate bill will be disastrous for most Americans because it will force everyone to buy private medical insurance, while allowing insurers to charge whatever they want without fear of competition."
Berkeley’s Markos Moulitsas, founder and publisher of the wildly political blog Daily Kos, is making a convincing argument for why the Senate health-care bill should be killed now that Joe Lieberman has gutted its most important reforms. Moulitsas argues that the bill should only go forward if the individual insurance mandates are removed.
As it currently stands, the Senate bill will be disastrous for most Americans because it will force everyone to buy private medical insurance, while allowing insurers to charge whatever they want without fear of competition. They’ll also be free to raise insurance rates on everyone as high as they want in order to pay for insuring people they don’t want to insure. In other words, everyone’s costs will go through the roof, thereby providing a huge gift to the insurance industry.
President Obama and leading Democrats are urging passage of the deeply flawed bill in apparent hopes of salvaging a political victory. But when voters realize how bad this bill really is — that they’ll be forced under the law to buy private insurance policies at astronomical prices, then the damage to the Democrats and to the country will be devastating.
And Obama and the Democrats need to finally stand up to Lieberman for threatening to stand with Republicans and block health-care reform, thereby killing the public option, which would have provided competition to private insurers, and the Medicare Buy-In compromise, which would have given people aged 55 to 64 access to Medicare. In other words, Lieberman, who is beholden to the insurance industry and is still angry about progressive Democrats running a candidate against him in the 2006 primary, single-handedly wrecked health-care reform and deserves to pay the price.
Walk away? Not a chance. When the bill did something for Americans, it had no support. Now that the bill has been gutted, it will pass. The bigger the corporate giveaway, the greater the Senate buy-in. Full steam ahead!
I hope it fails and I hope those who wanted a public option or single payer vote against it. I don't want to see Americans mandatorily held hostage to the whims of health insurance companies for the foreseeable future.
I'd rather see a piecemeal solution than more insurance industry control over our lives.
Howard Dean:
“This is essentially the collapse of health care reform in the United States Senate. Honestly the best thing to do right now is kill the Senate bill, go back to the House, start the reconciliation process, where you only need 51 votes and it would be a much simpler bill.”
That's where we are at. Not anything remotely resembling socialized medicine but a system reinvigorated by millions of American hostages to the for-profit insurance industry. No Medicare buy-in. No public option. Just another sell-out.
As the health-care reform debate boiled over this week, so did WellPoint's stock price. Shares of the Indianapolis-based health insurance giant surged to a 52-week high Thursday as the prospects for a new government-run 'public option' health plan faded amid intense Senate debate.
WellPoint rivals Cigna and UnitedHealth Group also hit 52-week highs. It's a sign, more than one observer suggested, of victory for private health insurers, which strenuously fought the public option. ... Through the first nine months of 2009, the health services and HMO industry has spent $52.8 million and used 988 lobbyists, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That's almost 12 percent more than the amount spent during the same time period in 2008" (Lee, 12/11).
I think the Center for Responsive Politics can conclude unequivocally that responsiveness is not a problem for members of Congress.
"Under a newly passed law, Danish police can preemptively arrest and detain anyone for up to twelve hours who they believe is likely to break the law in the near future." - Democracy Now!
"As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: 'You’re acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted.'” — Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report
The leverage that Lieberman and other “centrists” have obtained on this issue (and on climate change) stems from a demonstrated willingness to embrace sociopathic indifference to the human cost of their actions.
Bush's ex-lapdog has to be one of the most despised Democrats ever (he once called himself a Democrat). At some point, Democratic leadership decided it was more important to bow and scrape before Holy Joe than stand for something. This went to Lieberman's head. Their cowardice produced a monster. Maybe a little of the hatred that goes his way ought also to be directed at Senator “I don’t have anyone that I have worked harder with, have more respect for in the Senate than Joe Lieberman" Reid and courtier Emanuel, the dogs who regularly lick his highness's slippers.
Tomorrow, the President will meet with heads of the country’s biggest banks and Summers told me the White House has a blunt message: “President Obama is going to be talking with them about what they can do to support enhanced lending to customers across the country.
"We were there for them. And the banks need to do everything they can to be sure they're there for customers across this country.”
I haven't written because I got new glasses—what geek would be without them. Unfortunately, at my age, single vision lenses didn't work. (Have you ever tried to write blog posts with a 52 point font? Not fun.)
Stella's New Specs
But, hey! I remembered I could use a pair of old glasses. So I CAN still blog. (Phew!) I'll be back, frequently. Thankfully, Ahnold won't.
Tom H. Hastings finds numerous errors in Obama's tough 'n' tender Nobel speech:
Because he cited Gandhi as an influence then attempted to repudiate Gandhi. He cited Dr. King as not merely an influence but as sine qua non to his, Obama's, very presidency—and then called King's methods unworkable for a head of state.
Because he said, "A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies." Any good student in my field would be on Full Factoid Alert upon hearing that. In fact, where nonviolence was attempted against the Nazis it succeeded. Ask the Norwegian teachers, the brave exemplars of nonviolent resistance to Quisling's Hitlerism. Some of those teachers perished in Arctic prison camps rather than teach Nazism and Vidkun Quisling eventually blamed those teachers for his failure to change Norwegian culture. Ask the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men whose husbands were rounded up into a prison on the Rosenstrausse, just four blocks from SS headquarters, and whose brave nonviolent siege upon that building led to negotiations with the Nazis and the release of their husbands. Ask the Jewish descendants of the 7,000+ Danish Jews who were saved from the round-up order by non-Jewish Danes, or ask the great-granddaughters of the Jews saved in Le Chambon, France, at great risk to the local descendants of the Huguenots who sheltered them. Yes, these were sporadic and admittedly counterintuitive methods—organized nonviolence versus Nazis—but Peace Studies scholarship has given us a glimmer of the possibilities of such an apparently quixotic strategy and no one who is getting solid advice from anyone in that field would make such a categorical misstatement as Obama did. Certainly I would expect my Intro to Nonviolence students to make a different argument by midterms at the latest.
Because President Obama said, "I believe that all nations, strong and weak alike, must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." My students know that civilians are legally protected and yet President Obama has presided over unmanned drone missile attacks that have killed an estimated 800 civilians, including children. These attacks not only elicit scorn and derision from indigenous Taliban forces as evidence that Obama's military is too cowardly to come meet them, they are illegal and are used as recruiting points for both the Taliban insurgency and al-Qa'ida terrorists. Peace Studies students know all this, and much more, about the fallacies, hypocritical stances and reversals of fact proffered in Oslo by our president.
Our president likes to play loose with the facts in order to score rhetorical points, just like George W. Bush. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama likes to score rhetorical points with both parties.
He clearly did not want to appear too liberal, so he went schizophrenic, praising war and peace. The mainstream media swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
Obama's wishy-washiness is never going to bring real change and will only serve to prop up the status quo, which is endless war and massive inequality and government support for runaway greed.
He likes too many things just the way they are. It's just the way he is.
Just as the rich feel entitled to their tax cuts, I feel entitled to Social Security. I will not stand for its destruction or take the "cushioned" blow of "reform" as anything other than a complete betrayal by the Democrats. If you cut or privatize Social Security, you will never get my vote again.
He absolutely refuses to get dirty on ANY issue. He asks other people to do his fighting. Always. During the campaign, it was all about us. That was his way of saying that he can’t be BOTHERED to take a principled stand. He is a follower at heart. He'll go whichever way the wind blows and he could care less if it blows left or right. He was caught up in the anti-Bush sentiment and now he's caught up in the anti-deficit sentiment and tomorrow he'll be caught up in something else. Underneath it all is nothing but the principle-free will to survive politically. At least you can say about Lieberman that he is willing to take risks. Obama is risk-averse to the very core.
Such a president does not deserve another term.