Eugene Robinson's case for passing the Senate bill.

An excerpt from yesterday's Rachel Maddow Show (a show I've seldom seen since I don't have cable [and I probably wouldn't watch these kinds of shows much if I did] but I must say that last night's episode was good television), in which The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson argues that passing this massively flawed bill is better than not passing anything. I agree with nearly every aspect of his analysis:

Glenn Greenwald: Don't kid yourself; this is the bill Obama wanted all along.

Although I have stated that, lousy as it is, I would prefer that the Senate bill pass -- and although I this is still my position -- I must confess that I have begun to feel increasingly icky about what the bill has lately become. So it goes.

It's an awfully difficult time not to be extremely frustrated by the seeming impotence of the Democratic Party as well as disappointed with Obama. I, for one, never lost sight of the fact that the president is a centrist and a pragmatist and that his attachment to various financial and corporate paymasters is inextricable. It's just that, somehow, I must not have remembered just how far right the putative "center" has become in our corporatist nation state. It's not pretty.

But, more than that, I think I had the feeling that Obama would be able to pull off his role -- precarious and self-contradictory though it may be by definition -- with a bit more...I don't know...panache? I mean, in moments at which he looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests, he really looks like a cynical, calculating servant of corporate interests. I'm led to wonder why that is. I think it's because of the kinds of posturing that Obama has to do in order to throw bones to the 'progressive' left wing base, while simultaneously keeping the insurance and pharmacological industries happy.

And, as regards this very posturing in application to the matter of a "public option," it looks as if Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald has got Obama's number:

[C]ontrary to Obama's occasional public statements in support of a public option, the White House clearly intended from the start that the final health care reform bill would contain no such provision and was actively and privately participating in efforts to shape a final bill without it.  From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN).  Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it.  The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse. As was painfully predictable all along, the final bill will not have any form of public option, nor will it include the wildly popular expansion of Medicare coverage.  Obama supporters are eager to depict the White House as nothing more than a helpless victim in all of this -- the President so deeply wanted a more progressive bill but was sadly thwarted in his noble efforts by those inhumane, corrupt Congressional "centrists."  Right.  The evidence was overwhelming from the start that the White House was not only indifferent, but opposed, to the provisions most important to progressives.  The administration is getting the bill which they, more or less, wanted from the start -- the one that is a huge boon to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry.

Greenwald praises Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold for pointing this out:

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), among the most vocal supporters of the public option, said it would be unfair to blame Lieberman for its apparent demise. Feingold said that responsibility ultimately rests with President Barack Obama and he could have insisted on a higher standard for the legislation.

"This bill appears to be legislation that the president wanted in the first place, so I don’t think focusing it on Lieberman really hits the truth," said Feingold. "I think they could have been higher. I certainly think a stronger bill would have been better in every respect."

Seems convincing to me, and if it's true, it isn't all that surprising. But it's still dismaying to see how hamfistedly the Obama administration seems to be in dealing with this stuff. What a mess.....

As matters stand, I still think the bill in its present decimated form is better than no bill and here's why: In almost all of the complaints from the so-called 'progressive' left about this bill, I have not heard a single serious reference to the impact of this law upon poor people. Where are the anti-poverty advocates, and why shouldn't a serious discussion of the problems with his bill include a discussion of poverty? Almost all of the criticism has to do with middle-class concerns and middle-class problems.

Doesn't this bill still help people who can't currently afford ANY health insurance, and shouldn't that be the main priority? Please, if anyone knows more about this angle, fill me in. Nobody seems to be talking about it.

Obama: the bargain, the moment of truth and health care.

I've been asked by one of our favorite readers if I might weigh in as to my thoughts on President Obama's health care speech of last Wednesday. Here's my long-winded (but I hope not pedantic or, uh, boring...) reply.

In approaching the health care address, as in approaching all things Obama-related, I divide my assessments into two distinct categories: (1) substantive and (2) operational.

By the first category, I mean, you know, the content: What does it say as a matter of pure policy?, etc., etc. By the second, I refer to the impact and significance that the speech would appear to have operationally, specifically with respect to its embeddedness within salient and underlying political contingencies and discourses.

Some background for my thinking:

Obama differs from other presidents of my lifetime in that he has, in fact, managed to surprise me by occasionally saying something so smart and incisive that it strikes me as something more than simply operational or tactical. In fact, I'm convinced that that's what made Obama appealing to people on the left in the first place: At his best, he offers us much-needed relief from the interminable Samuel Beckett-speak of 20th Century Presidential Personae -- cant that has been particularly excruciating over the course of the previous four presidencies.

Obama speaks and thinks in a way that makes sense to us: It's partly a generational/demographic thing, and it's partly a matter of sheer charisma. It's could even be bollocks: he's got them. (Bollocks are testicles, kiddies.) Not compared to Theodore Roosevelt, maybe, but compared to pretty much any president since JFK. Of course, considering the competition, that's maybe not saying a whole lot...

I remember during the presidential primaries or something, I was explaining to my friend what I thought was actually potentially fresh and worthwhile about Obama, and I phrased it this way:

If you're not going to go out there and actively work to usher in The Revolution, then Obama's your man. In other words: OK, if you want to vote for Kucinich, do it. if you want to vote for Nader, do it. (I did that once and have no regrets.) I applaud you. If you want to start a new, intelligent leftish political movement, then go for it. God knows, we could use something like that. These are worthwhile and commendable projects.

But, I continued, if not -- i.e., if you're going to participate in the political system, warts (of which there are many) and all -- then Obama represents the closest thing to a genuinely progressive force that the political system can in fact, in this moment and time, successfully produce. Vote for Obama, and you'll know that at least you're supporting without a doubt the best thing that our tattered, and bought-and-sold-many-times-over political system can deliver.

Obama was and is NOT Dennis Kucinich. He's not Ralph Nader, and he's not Jimmy Carter. That is part of the point of Obama being Obama: He's not a lost cause and doesn't represent lost causes. He's a winner. He's one of the Beautiful People, with all of the good and bad that comes along with that.

Obama can and does play ball with the big boys. He is and always has been a political realist, and he sold himself to us as a political realist. He beat the Clintons not just because he represented a superior political vision (which he did, by an infinitesimal degree of difference), but because he out-smarted the Clintons.

It wasn't just luck that turned John McCain's campaign into such a disaster: It was the Obama campaign's tactical superiority: Out-flanking your opponent, faking him out, making him sweat over -- and waste money in -- the wrong state at the wrong time, by deliberately sending misleading signals about your own campaign's concerns.

Within a day of the McCain campaign's having trotted out Sarah Palin (as I remarked on that occasion), it dawned upon me: the Republicans are throwing the election.

In retrospect, it seems clear to me that part of the reason this happened is because the Obama campaign forced them into retreating. And: prevailing rhetoric and received wisdom aside, the GOP is still in retreat, if not chaos.

The trouble is that Obama's victory meant -- and means -- that those of us on the left who brought him to office would have to come face-to-face with the limitations of our screwed up and corrupt system, limitations that we didn't really have to face up to in the same way when we were toiling under the tyranny of the Bush/Cheney cabal. With those guys, we could take out our frustration on the other side, for stealing elections. We could decry the stupidity and self-centeredness of the idiots who actually preferred those asshole to Gore or Kerry (not that we loved those guys either...), who at least could speak in complete sentences.

It seems perverse to put it this way, but in Bush/Cheney, we had on our hands a fine distraction that was from the real culprits of the demise of the United States: our nightmare of a de-funded public infrastructure, the menace of neoliberalism and public-private partnerships, a completely unregulated financial sector, masses of political and economic capital concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, the deterioration of the trustworthy news and information (not that we ever had much of that...), the calcification of class, status and racial divisions, a powerful neoconservative lobby, etc., etc., etc....

And so, entirely contrary to the conventional wisdom about Obama being a man who delivers pretty speeches, all form and no substance, for the first time in a long time we have a president who -- for better and, undoubtedly, for worse -- is something more than merely a symbol: He embodies the limited reach of the political left. Or, rather: Obama is the closest thing we have and can have to left-minded president.

And the ugly thing that nobody wants to face up to is that "the left" by this definition -- that is, the left, insofar as the left subsists in the realm of the possible -- is not very damn far left. It is to this phenomenon that I am referring with the titular "moment of truth."

It is this structural limitation that we see embodied in Obama. For a president is more than merely a man: he is a nexus of powerful political and financial interests. Just look at how people become president, what processes make it possible.

Presidents must, of necessity, be products of the status quo. Whether or not they are able (like the aforementioned Teddy Roosevelt and a few others), over the course of their tenure in the Oval Office, to become an active force in transcending or transforming the very status quo that produced them is a function of innumerable factors that lie outside of the control of a single man, and even outside of the control -- contrary to the view favored by conspiracy theorists -- of any single group of interested parties.

In any event, it is the left of -- appallingly -- Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, of Arne Duncan and the Clintons and Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. I mean, that's what passes for the left.

But people who get mad at Obama for this fact -- as we all do -- are wasting their energy, and they are pointing their finger at the wrong person. Obama is exactly what he said he was and exactly what we knew he would be. Even if we didn't know we knew it.

Sometimes it's not an easy thing to digest. Obama's not a hypocrite. To the extent that anyone has expected Obama's political program to be genuinely progressive, she has been kidding herself.

And so, anyway, that brings us back to Wednesday's health care speech. Here's what I thought: Substantively, it contained the inevitable disappointments and a few very positive developments. On the disappointment side, it seemed pretty eager to chuck the so-called "public option," but that was all but sure to happen. And anyway, I'm not all that convinced it makes much of a difference, considering that the government already owns all sorts of stuff that it doesn't own "on paper," like the big banks and the auto industry. So, when it comes down to it, what difference does it make what it's "called"? Now, being the tenacious opponent of neoliberalism that I am, I reserve the right to change my mind on that one, if, let's say, all health care is going to end up being "left to the market to...urm...solve." But even were that the case it wouldn't be anything new: It describes precisely the horrible non- system that we have now. Other substantive disappointments include Obama's continued pandering to senior citizens -- although somewhat less shamelessly than on previous occasions -- and that inevitable fact that Obama had to make a point of declaring a policy of 'fiscal prudence', especially as regards the federal deficit, which was politically a necessary move, but is also as far as I'm concerned completely bogus (like all claims within the bogus field of economics).

Substantively speaking, the best -- or most encouraging -- thing about the speech in my opinion had to do with the fact that it went some way toward framing health insurance reform in moral terms, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the Alpha and Omega of the health care issue. But, hey, that's me.

More important was that the speech was, operationally speaking, a bit of a masterstroke, as far as I'm concerned. As I've mentioned in the past, I'm fairly certain that the whole right-wing circus show of last month -- a.k.a., neo-Nazis at town hall meetings -- was something that the Obama administration and the Dems generally not only welcomed but allowed to crest (and then some!).

In the grand scheme of things, this 'August strategy' has served Obama and the Dems well in that it has:

1. linked perceptions of any putative 'Republican position' on health care to the handiwork of the Southern Racist Right,
   
   
2. galvanized the Democratic base through its visceral, disgusted reaction to the aforementioned SRR, and
   
   
3. fostered the commonsense presumption among 'mainstream Americans' (read: the upper-middle class suburban people who voted Obama into office in the first place and on whose support his health care agenda turns) that opposition to any moderate-yet-ambitious (read: Obamian) reform measure is identified primarily with people who are 'outside the mainstream' (read: poor, uneducated white trash, with whom upper-middle class suburbanites do not wish to be identified [and who pay their high property taxes for this very reason!]).

Therefore, the reason I think Obama's speech was an operational masterstroke has a great deal to do with its timing. The right-wing cant had escalated marvelously. A healthcare reform opponent performed a Heil Hitler salute in response to an Israeli man's impassioned advocacy of reform. Banners displaying images of Barack Obama with a Hitler mustache superimposed upon his upper-lip. The (hilarious) Barney Frank thing. Anti-reform protesters wielding loaded firearms in the vicinity of the President of the United States.

It had all lingered just long enough at its vomit-inducing stage, and Obama, who has been holding back and eluding the spotlight -- "But, Mr. President: your poll numbers!" -- and at the perfect moment, does a commendable job of delivering what might stand as among the skilled rhetorician's most-impressive-yet feats of oratory:

That large-heartedness -- that concern and regard for the plight of others -- is not a partisan feeling. It's not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character -- our ability to stand in other people's shoes; a recognition that we are all in this together, and when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand; a belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgment that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.

This has always been the history of our progress. In 1935, when over half of our seniors could not support themselves and millions had seen their savings wiped away, there were those who argued that Social Security would lead to socialism, but the men and women of Congress stood fast, and we are all the better for it. In 1965, when some argued that Medicare represented a government takeover of health care, members of Congress -- Democrats and Republicans -- did not back down. They joined together so that all of us could enter our golden years with some basic peace of mind.

You see, our predecessors understood that government could not, and should not, solve every problem. They understood that there are instances when the gains in security from government action are not worth the added constraints on our freedom. But they also understood that the danger of too much government is matched by the perils of too little; that without the leavening hand of wise policy, markets can crash, monopolies can stifle competition, the vulnerable can be exploited. And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter -- that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

That was true then. It remains true today. I understand how difficult this health care debate has been. I know that many in this country are deeply skeptical that government is looking out for them. I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road -- to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.

But that is not what the moment calls for. That's not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. (Applause.) I still believe -- I still believe that we can act when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test.

Because that's who we are. That is our calling. That is our character. Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America. (Applause.)

I'm just as cynical as the next man, but I must say, this is some quality stuff.

If nothing else, it makes the Fox News thugs look one-foot-tall.*


________________
* In addition, that is, to sounding -- and being -- dumb.

Analysis of Obama's health care address.

I've been laboring over a couple of posts that will probably never see the light of day because they're too meandering and/or abstruse (even by my usual standards). So that's why I haven't posted anything in a few days. Anyway. So,

Sean Quinn of FiveThirtyEight.com has written a cogent analysis of President Obama's Wednesday night address before a joint session of Congress on the subject of new health care legislation:

My initial reaction to reading and then watching President Obama’s speech last night was that it was a very strong speech, one even more effectively delivered than written. There were two notable “show, don’t tell” moments that I thought were particularly helpful on the President’s behalf.

First was the high-profile, notorious Joe Wilson moment, a serious breach of decorum (in the U.S.) that served to underscore the exact point Obama had been making: we’d like to have a substantive contribution from Republicans, not the lying – his word – histrionic nihilism we’ve been seeing. Cue Joe Wilson with lying histrionics. Well done, Joe. It pissed people off, made a money-bomb for his opponent Ron Miller, and was similar to the way Dems (although certainly not Republicans) reacted to Sarah Palin’s acid floor speech at the convention on Sept 2, 2008. We saw the few Republicans who were in field offices last year motivated by Palin’s presence on the ticket but not McCain’s; we also saw many more people showing up to Obama offices in part galvanized by opposition to her sneering speech (and overall Palinosity).

The second “show, don’t tell” moment was the one on the issue of tort reform that Republicans hold dear. When Obama mentioned this subject and suggested a practical approach that accounted for across-the-aisle concerns, Republicans cheered. Obama continued, engaged by their cheering, and within his body language and tone of voice it struck me that he seemed to have shifted into live negotiation rather than a one-way speech. Optically, it was a show of good faith that seemed to give truth to his offer of open-doorism. It was a visceral, good guy, higher ground moment.

Read the rest of Quinn's piece here.

And here's a decent reflection in Salon.com.

The trouble with phony multiculturalism.

I happened upon an item on CNN.com that illustrates what I shall call phony multiculturalism. I shall define phony multiculturalism as the cynical and superficial brand of multiculturalism that is promoted by the corporate/political oligarchy for purposes of marketing/propaganda.

The item concerns a Photoshop mishap in a Microsoft advertising campaign. Take a look at the two photographs in question. The first comes from an advertisement tailored to an American market. The second is an altered version of the same photograph, intended for a Polish market (apparently Polish people haven't yet caught on to the superiority of the Macintosh):

Kinda disturbing, no? I mean, it's bad enough that they replaced the head of a creepily smiling black man with the head of a creepily smiling white man. But to add insult to -- as it were -- injury, the white guy's head is the wrong size and is contorted such that it looks like he doesn't have a neck.

I realize that this is for the damn Poles, but still....

Here's an excerpt from the article, titled Microsoft apologizes for gaffe in online ad:

SEATTLE, Washington (CNN) -- Software giant Microsoft apologized Wednesday for the apparent bad judgment that led to the head of a black model being swapped for that of a white model in an online advertisement.

The ad -- which showed three business people, one Asian, one white and one black -- was altered on Microsoft's Web site for Poland to place the head of a white man on a black man's body.

"We apologized, fixed the error and we are looking into how it happened," said Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman.

He said that because the company was still reviewing how the swap occurred he could not comment further.

Okay. So, this is typical a PR/damage control cant. But just consider for a moment how completely dishonest this claim is: They are "looking into" how it happened?

How it happened is, of course, obvious:

The business Web site CNET.com, which first published reports of the swap, wrote that the change in models may have been made with the "racially homogeneous" Polish market in mind.

So, Microsoft created an alternative version of the image in its efforts to "target" the Polish market, such as it is... This wasn't an "error." Nor was it really a "gaffe." The only mistake that Microsoft made was getting caught. The "gaffe" is that, embarrassingly, some graphic designer did a sloppy enough job that people noticed.

What's actually unsettling to people about this might be a more fundamental problem: There's a level at which such portrayals of diversity function to perpetuate the illusion that actual diversity is far more common than it really is.

To the extent to which this illusion is perpetuated, this species of multiculturalism creates a decline in the impetus or perceived necessity for measures bringing into effect actual multiculturalism.

I think that witnessing the shenanigans of Microsoft's marketing department somehow spotlights this problem. In other words, it reminds us that, in the hands of publicly traded corporations, such warm-and-fuzzy phenomena as multiculturalism, environmentalism and healthcare always function first and foremost as tools to be used in the service of making money.

And making money will always be, by definition, a conservative enterprise.

Robert Reich poses a very good question about health care reform.

Why is the so-called "Gang of Six" -- a group of six senators, three Democrats and three Republicans (two of whom are on the extreme/fringe Right) who sit on a committee devoted not to health care but to finance -- deciding the fate of health reform for the entire country? Is "bipartisanship" that important? Don't the Dems, uh, have a majority in both houses and control the White House? Is it just the power of lobbyists, or have the Republican Brownshirts succeed utterly and finally in poisoning the well of civil discourse? Thomas Jefferson would be proud of you, Rush Limbaugh. Jolly good show...

Why the Gang of Six is Deciding Health Care for Three Hundred Million of Us

HYPOCRITES!!! (Part III)

Finally a journalist read by more than five people has given some attention to the hypocrisy of Right wing assholes who decry as "socialistic" the very idea of government-funded healthcare.

The article Health Care Hypocrisy: Many of the pundits attacking government health insurance rely on government health insurance for their own families, written by Daniel Gross, appears in Slate:

As we've noted before, if you add the failure of employer-linked health care with Medicare, Medicaid, government employment, and the military, a huge chunk of Americans already have taxpayer-funded health care. It's a diverse lot. Rich old people and poor kids, university professors, congressmen, teachers, DMV clerks and their families. Pretty much everybody you see on CNBC yelling about socialism? Their parents and grandparents (if they're still living) get taxpayer-funded health insurance. Mine do. Charles Grassley, the septuagenarian Iowan who is doing his darnedest to torpedo meaningful health care form, has it. Arthur Laffer, the 69-year-old economist who went on television and suggested that Medicare isn't a government health care program, is eligible for Medicare. Dick Armey, who spent many years teaching at a state university and served several terms in Congress, has had taxpayer-funded health insurance for much of his adult life. Same for Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich. Democratic senators like Max Baucus, Kent Conrad, and Ben Nelson? Yes, yes, and yes. Law professors at the University of Tennessee have it. The employees of George Mason University, which houses the free-market Mercatus Center, do, too. Policy analyst Betsy McCaughey, currently reprising her 1990s role of health care bamboozler, will be eligible for it in a few years' time.

Obvious? Yes. But it's still worth pointing out. All these people rely on—or have relied on—the government to pick up the tab for their health care and for their health insurance. And that hasn't caused euthanasia or the abolition of private property. Funny how you don't hear any complaints from worthies about taxpayer-funded health insurance when it's covering them, their staffs, and their loved ones. For many of these people, especially the older ones, there literally is no affordable alternative. Insurance companies prefer to insure healthy people, not sick people—that's how they make money. And older people are more likely to run into health trouble requiring expensive care. Dick Armey, who is suing to get out from under the tyranny of Medicare, is apparently under the illusion that insurance companies are really eager to cover 69-year-old men at a low cost. House Minority Leader John Boehner is a 59-year-old smoker whose skin has an orange hue. What do you think Aetna would charge him per month for a good policy?

Thank god for Daniel Gross: A journalist who tells the truth.

Robert Reich speaks the truth.

You remember him, right? He was Secretary of Labor under Clinton, and represented the sensible (Leftier) wing of that administration. In his blog, Reich advises us on How To Fight Heathcare Fearmongers and Demagogues.

Why are these meetings brimming with so much anger? Because Republican Astroturfers have joined the same old right-wing broadcast demagogues that have been spewing hate and fear for years, to create a tempest.

But why are they getting away with it? Why aren't progressives -- indeed, why aren't ordinary citizens -- taking the meetings back?

Mainly because there's still no healthcare plan. All we have are some initial markups from several congressional committees, which differ from one another in significant ways. The White House is waiting to see what emerges from the House and Senate before insisting on what it wants, maybe in conference committee.

But that's the problem: It's always easier to stir up fear and anger against something that's amorphous than to stir up enthusiasm for it.

I have been thinking and saying this a hundred billion times lately. Particularly after news leaked of the administration's icky deal with Big Pharma, in the absence of a guarnatee that there will be a public health insurance option as a part of the plan, how the hell can anyone get enthusiastic about the plan? Other than in a negative direction against the fearmongering thugs?

Anyway, Reich's commentary is definitely worth reading in its entirety.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics.

At the conclusion of Part I of this discussion, I mentioned the hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of Republicans who oppose a public health insurance option, yet have nothing negative to say about Medicare and Social Security, which, when combined with Medicaid, represent by far the most expensive government entitlement programs currently in existence.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, would never be caught opposing these unfunded programs because they are massively popular with the most active and influential sectors of the electorate: the elderly. As the Baby Boomers continue to age -- and increasingly bottleneck the system -- this popularity of these programs is unlikely to decline.

So, somehow, these government-administered entitlements do not get mentioned in the same breath as Congressional/Obamian health insurance reform when hard-Right ideologues and thugs hit the pavement or spread lies over the Internet about death panels and whatnot.

Thing is: Many of those who decry health reform as "socialistic" are themselves willing and continuing recipients of Medicare and Social Security Benefits. Thus, I should like suggest that these people are a bunch of crusty old self-centered whiners and liars, and that we ought to declare a generational war!

Doesn't it shame them that they would deny to succeeding generations the same entitlements from which they themselves have benefited, from the Social Security Act to the GI Bill to Medicare to Medicaid, up to and including the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit for those 65 years of age and older that was passed, without funding and in between the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy ever to be passed into law?

Nothing -- including military spending! -- even comes close to the costliness of these programs. Apparently, Americans 65 and older are simply more deserving of this bounty than those of my generation. My generation, by contrast, has been weathering an inhospitable economic and educational environment. Ours is an age in which the notion of class mobility has long been a cruel joke. Our experience is one of the accumulation of debts, of forgoing health insurance, of meager opportunities.

I'm not arguing that the Great Depression was a walk in the park. I am, however, arguing that, in the wake of the Social Security Act, the radical expansion of opportunities for higher education represented in the GI Bill and in the proliferation of colleges and universities in order to accommodate the Baby Boom, the United States enjoyed a sustained period of economic, social and cultural progress.

Anyway, in my limited experience with such things, the clearest, most objective and most focused discussion of the recent political-historical context of Republican flip-flopping on government-coordinated public health insurance plans is contained in a recent episode of the PBS series Frontline, titled: Ten Trillion and Counting. (You may wish to click here for a link to streaming video of the entire episode, which is well worth your time.)

The piece actually tackles the subject of the United States' skyrocketing national debt. but its discussion of George W. Bush's passage of Medicare Part D -- sandwiched between the passage of the two largest tax cuts for the wealthy in United States history -- could not be more relevant to our present discussion. Here is that section of the episode:



Here's part of the transcript:

FORREST SAWYER: It finally passed by five votes.
[on camera] Why would a small government conservative initiate a program that is so massive?
JACKIE CALMES, The New York Times: Politics.
FORREST SAWYER: What do you mean?
JACKIE CALMES: There's no group that votes at the rate and in the numbers as those over 55, and 65 and over certainly. And Democrats, as well as Republicans, want to please seniors, and that's why our entire budget is tilted towards programs for seniors.
FORREST SAWYER: [voice-over] The reason that the Bush administration could pass Medicare part D was that the Republican Congress in 2002 had let a rule called "pay as you go" lapse. It was a rule established by the first President Bush and a Democratic Congress to enforce fiscal discipline.
GREGG IP: His father endured some very serious political pain to do the right thing to get the deficit down. And one of the steps was that a rule called "pay-go," or pay as you go. And this rule basically meant that if you wanted to introduce a new tax cut or a new spending program, you had to find a way to pay for it with an offsetting tax increase or spending cut. Well, in 2002, that rule expired.
ALICE RIVLIN, Dir., Office of Management & Budget, 1994-96: In the Clinton years, we had the "pay-go" rule, pay as you go, and that meant we couldn't pass a lot of good-sounding ideas, including Medicare prescription drugs. It's not that nobody thought of that in the '90s. A lot of people thought of it. But we couldn't pay for it. To pay for it, we would have had to have done a tax increase or cut out some other spending in major proportions, and nobody wanted to do that, so we didn't do it.
FORREST SAWYER: But the Bush administration did do it. With "pay-go" no longer restraining spending, they had pushed through Medicare part D, a program that's projected over time to cost as much as $8 trillion.
DAVID WESSEL: They did not come up with a way to raise taxes or cut spending somewhere else to pay for it, so they just passed this thing. It goes into law. It's a promise to elderly people that we'll pay- subsidize their drugs, and we borrow every year to pay for it. And in the end, it's more expensive than the war in Iraq because the war in Iraq ends at some point. Certainly, it will end now that Obama's president. But the prescription drug benefit will go on forever.
FORREST SAWYER: It will go on forever because it's a promise made by the federal government to its citizens. Seniors are entitled to this benefit, just the as they are entitled to Social Security and Medicare itself. These entitlements are all enormously popular, but they're also enormously expensive. Medicare part D alone will cost $60 billion this year.
JACKIE CALMES: The expense of that over time, unfunded liabilities for the government, at a time when more people are reaching retirement age and qualifying for Medicare, added more to the long-term obligations of the government than all of Social Security.
FORREST SAWYER: Medicare part D was the largest spending bill the president signed, but there were dozens of others. During his first five years as president, with a Republican-controlled House and Senate, George Bush never vetoed a spending bill. Fiscal conservatives in his own party accused him of being the biggest spender since World War II.

I think this is worth bringing up next time one finds himself in a bar, confronted by someone who insists that Obama is a socialist or that the Democrats are the big spenders... It was, after all, Bill Clinton who balanced the budget.

LIAR!!!: GOP stance on Medicare vs. "Government Health Care"

By way of The Huffington Post:

Excerpts from the accompanying article:

Lawrence O'Donnell interviewed Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) in a devastating segment on "Hardball" on Friday, implying that the conservative congressman was a hypocrite for opposing a public option yet refusing to cut government-run health-care programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

O'Donnell repeatedly pushed the conservative Congressman to give a straight answer about what federal entitlements he would cut. Culberson refused to give a response for several minutes before finally admitting that he would have voted for Social Security and Medicare despite the fact that they are government-run health-care systems.

[...]

O'Donnell [asked] Culberson: "If Medicare is not socialism, why don't we just delete the over-65 part of Medicare and make it available to everyone? What's your argument against that?"

[...]

An exasperated O'Donnell asked the Congressman: "You know that Medicare is a completely government-run health care system and yet you're saying you would have voted for it."

Culberson's response: "Yes"

By the end, O'Donnell accused Culberson of hypocrisy and more:

"You lie to America about the evils of government-run health care because you people, not one of you liars about government health care is willing to repeal Medicare, to stand up and be consistent... 'I hate government health care so I want to repeal Medicare'... That is a lie that you perpetrate every day."

Has the Obama administration already sold us out to 'Big Pharma'?

According to a document apparently leaked to The Huffington Post, it looks like a definite possibility.

So, as I've been saying repeatedly: It's kind of hard to galvanize enthusiasm among those on the Left for health care reform (or "health insurance reform" as the Dems have now decided to characterize it -- not a very good sign...) if in the end we're really just talking about some piece of shit neoliberal industrial re-shifting.

If there turns out to be no public option on the table, that's basically the straw that will break the camel's back as far as I'm concerned. I'll still be quick to point out what a bunch of liars and hacks the Republican so-called response is, but that's about it.

To his credit, Obama is doing exactly what he said he would be doing, which is forging compromises and getting the ball rolling on matters that are way way way overdue. But if this reform plan ends up doing nothing to lower the costs of prescriptions and care and to finally stick it to the 100% parasitic health insurance industry, then I'm basically just going to retreat back into my world of bleeding heart utopian daydreaming and soporific 12-string acoustic guitar arpeggios. That'll be it for giving a shit about politics. At least until the fascists start taking over for real......

Maybe I'm in a bit of a down mood. Gotta go watch some House.

A heroic moment in conversation with the Deranged Right on health care.

Anecdote time.

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, a longtime friend of Crib From This, recently found himself at one of his local watering holes, engaged in a political conversation with his

good friend who also happens to be rightist ideologue, who claimed that there was a provision in the Congressional/Obama Health Care reform proposal that allows for abortions of people up to fifteen years old. Whew!

Whew, indeed! But that's the kind of dissembling that is so incomprehensible that even the person who believes he believes it can't actually, at the end of the day, believe it.

I mean... Cause, how would that work, exactly? Kind of difficult to picture... That's what happens, Republicans, when you simply memorize talking points without actually thinking through what (or, for that matter, whether) they mean!!

But wait: It gets better! I give you, the Crib From This community, courtesy of Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, the Deranged Dixiecrat Right in its full glory:

Also, we were at a bar and a random drunk dude came to our table and my friend and he struck up a conversation and he happened to also be a rightist ideologue who predicted (with my friend) that Obama was leading the United States into the worst depression in history AND that we would have another Civil War within the next two years. Whew!

Yes, you read correctly. This man thinks that there's going to be another CIVIL WAR within the NEXT TWO YEARS! To which our correspondent, Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, responded, in the heroic moment to which our title refers:

When the guy brought up the Civil War thing, I said: "Yeah, if it happens, it will because of people like YOU."

YYYYEEEEESSSSS!!! And Gypsy Sun knocks one clean out of the park!!!

I think that I am not the only one for whom the Rightist rhetoric is increasingly alarming/disconcerting: Where does this venom and hatred come from? Why are so many people making themselves impossible to talk to? What's behind all this? Just incoherent hatred of taxes?

(Incoherent because Medicare, Medicaid & Social Security combined are currently by far the biggest national expense, and we are borrowing trillions of dollars from China to pay for it, instead of just taxing the Viagra-addled dicks off of those crusty old bastards!!! ["Greatest Generation," MY ASS!!!!?])

Just racism? Just propaganda about "socialism" and whatever? What the hell is behind this out-of-control turn that Rightist rhetoric has taken?

A few Right-wing apologists say: "These health care protests are no worse than the Left-wing protests during the lead up to the Iraq War!"

But that's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Why is it a stretch? Because nobody took those war protesters seriously. Tell me I'm crazy, but that seems fairly obvious to me.... Was there any moment during the run-up to Iraq upon which you recall thinking: "Maybe we're not really going to go to war??!!!"

No. The Iraq War was a done deal, long before it was even mentioned to the American People, and we all knew that at the time. The Right-wing anti-health care astroturf campaign, by contrast, threatens to derail the entire debate.

But, I repeat: What the hell is behind the disturbing militarization of Rightist rhetoric?

Gypsy Sun and Rainbows weighs in:

Yeah, kind of brings us back to our Sarah Palin debate. Since this health care stuff began, I think I am beginning to understand your concern [about the Right's increasingly ominous and irresponsible rhetoric]. Death Panels? It's been debunked, but people still believe it. Same with Obama's birth certificate thing.

Right. What I personally find alarming is the sheer number of people who seem to be obsessed fanatically with these kinds of bizarre things.

Now, admittedly, I've never exactly met these people, but from what you and some others have said, it seems like a lot of the people saying this type of thing are people of whom you'd expect different -- more sober and less hysterical -- behavior.

Fortunately, unlike the health care nut jobs, I gather that the "birthers," as people seem to be calling them, are not exactly ever going to have the numbers to make anybody have to care about their bullshit, which I think makes it unquestionably a GOOD thing for the Democrats and for Obama: Even though all of the rhetoric and posturing is extremely unsettling, it definitely helps keep the Republican't Party* submerged in its present untrustworthy/uneducated/fanatic/non-mainstream cesspool.

By the way, although by no means do I wish to legitimize these so-called 'birthers', I would like to point out that there is so much evidence out there at present of Obama's having been born in Hawaii that it is almost unbelievable that anyone -- even mentally unbalanced people -- could actually continue to harbor doubts about this.

Specifically, in addition to all of the other evidence, there are numerous clippings from different Hawaii newspapers announcing Obama's birth!

Click here to see one of them. Ha ha ha!! Are there people who actually see stuff like this and STILL BELIEVE that he wasn't born in Hawaii??



___________________
* I just thought this up as I typed it. I'm sure I can't be the first. It's just too obvious.

HYPOCRITES!! (Part I): Health care, ideology and rhetoric.

The elegantly monikered and frequently brilliant blog Phuck Politics brings to our attention a highly entertaining and singularly infuriating exercise in Far-Right talking points.

You know what talking points are, right? They're these bullet-pointed 'arguments' circulated among Far-Right activists, politicians, Fox News-"personalities" and, of course, the Brownshirts that have been doing their inbred, mouth-breathingly thuggish best to carry out the bidding of demagogues and insurance industry brass alike. Their goal?: to interrupt 'town hall meetings' that are being held by congressmen in their home districts in order to discuss health reform.

This is a phenomenon to which we may refer as "astroturfing," or perhaps with still greater accuracy as "astroweeding."

Anyway, Phuck Politics shares with us the talking points that are being advanced by something called the Liberty Counsel (sounds friendly enough: Who doesn't like liberty??!!), which is apparently the Joseph Goebbels-like misinformation-propagating arm of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University:

Sec. 59B, Pg. 170, Line 1 – Any NONRESIDENT alien is exempt from individual taxes. (Americans will pay for their health care.)

Sec. 1177, Pg. 354 – Government will RESTRICT enrollment of special needs people! “Extension of Authority of Special Needs Plans to Restrict Enrollment.”

Sec. 1233, Pg. 425, Lines 4-12 – Government mandates Advance (Death) Care Planning consultation. Think Senior Citizens and end of life. END-OF-LIFE COUNSELING. SOME IN THE ADMINISTRATION HAVE ALREADY DISCUSSED RATIONING HEALTH CARE FOR THE ELDERLY.

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

The late, windy Jerry "Tushy-Faced" Falwell. May he rest in piss.

The reader will observe that Phuck Politics has some astute and howlingly funny things to say about this, including an imaginative description of the type of dialogue that must have gone down among the Liberty Council staffers when they were cooking this stuff up.

I wish to weigh in specifically on the fourth item listed above, which for my money is the most ermm...side-splittingly hilarious. The idea of referring to health clinics as "health" clinics... Wow!

Let's have another look!:

Sec. 2511, Pg. 992 – Government will establish school-based “health” clinics. Your children will be indoctrinated and your grandchildren may be aborted!

This takes the idea of seeing the world through the prism of ideology to its paranoiac limits.

I mean...really. Were the (il)logic of this statement to edge a fraction-of-an-inch further in the direction of mechanical-pre-judgment of empirical reality, it would represent a brand new pathology, wherein bigotry, myopia, resentment and rank stupidity begin to chew away not only at its believer's capacity to relate to the world around him -- which clearly is already on the skids -- but at one another.

The myopia begins to resent the bigotry, the bigotry looks askance at the myopia, and all the while, the stupidity reproduces itself like a cancer, slowly reducing the entire thing into a kind of droopy incoherence.

There is something so reprehensible about this rhetoric, something so completely offensive and prejudiced and pathetic and self-serving and self-undermining and willfully dumb, that it becomes almost beautiful. The sheer absurdity of questioning the very notion that health clinics are concerned with health!

The nerve displayed in this deployment of the word "indoctrinated," which reads not so much as a shocking revelation, but as a casual aside. Like: Oh yeah, of course these supposed "health" clinics are actually no more than "indoctrination" clinics!!! Indoctrinated into what? Into viewing the practice of medicine as based upon empirical science?

And then, to top it all off with what could only be called an astonishing feat of transgression-for-transgression's-sake: "your grandchildren may be aborted"!

Round of applause, please!!!

Think about this for a moment.....while keeping in mind, of course, that it is not the sort of provocation that is designed to make people think. The fear that's being expressed here is that the reader's son's and daughter's daughter's yet-to-be-conceived-unborn child may be aborted.

This begs the question: What kind of children are the reader's sons and daughters raising? Don't they learn about abstinence at their Bible Camp??? Are America's preteen Evangelicals having wild parties with the close-dancing and the listening to that race-music?

One rather suspects that this particular exercise in Right-wing hysteria is directed against the idea of public schooling in general more than against the idea of having health clinics in those schools. Let us take a look at a few quotations on the subject of public education, from Rev. Falwell, Herr Hitler and President Jefferson:

I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be! -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

The idea of separation of Church and State was invented by the Devil to keep Christians from running their own country. -- Rev. Jerry Falwell

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith.... We need believing people. -- Adolf Hitler

Education is here placed among the articles of public care, not that it would be proposed to take its ordinary branches out of the hands of private enterprise, which manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal; but a public institution can alone supply those sciences which, though rarely called for, are yet necessary to complete the circle, all the parts of which contribute to the improvement of the country, and some of them to its preservation. -- Thomas Jefferson

A bill for the more general diffusion of learning... proposed to divide every county into wards of five or six miles square;... to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at an University where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts. -- Thomas Jefferson

Hmmm... Looks like we have some disagreement here. Between Founding Father Thomas Jefferson in favor of public education and the dynamic duo of Rev. Falwell and Herr Hitler against.

But back to the talking points: Such is their unsurpassed incoherence that the only comparison I can come up with is to a black hole: the vortex at which space and time and light and matter and mass all collapse upon and within themselves. (Or something like that.....)

Come to think of it, doesn't this artist's rendition of a black hole a whole lot like the images adorning the covers of books published by weirdo Right-wing nut-job literalist Southern Evangelical religious people? You know, like one of those ultra-cheesy depictions of the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation or whatever?

Anyway, in the second part of this discussion, to be titled "HYPOCRITES!! (Part II): Health care, Medicare Part D and generational politics," I shall explain why this ludicrous Republican rhetoric opposing health care reform is truly and deeply hypocritical: Have you considered the fact that the people objecting most strongly to health care reform are precisely those who benefit the most from Medicare?

And Medicare is the single most costly government program in existence, far exceeding anything else, including military spending?

That's right, people over the age of 65, many of whom live in the South, are the recipients of the most expensive public program in existence. The same people who are so fervently opposed to Obama's 'socialistic' proposal for a public health insurance program that would compete with the private insurers....

The expense of this government program increased by several orders of magnitude when George W. Bush signed Medicare Part D, which is the prescription drug benefit, without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it, and sandwiched between the two biggest tax cuts for the wealthy in American history??