Dysfunctional Politics Begets Suicidal Policies

America is in a whole lotta trouble, but I'm not telling you anything you didn't already know.

We unleash the so-called free market, and then once that free market has destroyed millions of lives and livelihoods, government must come to the rescue to save the system from itself.  And once the oil company despoils the oceans with millions of gallons of black goop, or the criminally greedy mining company allows its workers to perish in an unsafe mine, government must intervene to restore a regulatory framework and rein in corporate excess.

And yet, the guardians of the status quo would seemingly fight reform, even if it meant bringing down the entire country.

The standoff in the Senate over the extension of unemployment benefits is a perfect example of the depths of the problem.  To be sure, they did pass unemployment benefits for the 2.5 million people whose checks ran out in May.  But there will be another standoff in the months to come.  And the fundamentals of the political dysfunction will be the same.

In a normal world, helping out distressed families in a virtual depression is a no-brainer.  It is the right thing to do from a moral standpoint, but it also makes good sense to use unemployment benefits to help stimulate an anemic economy.

But Congress, particularly in the Senate side, is being held hostage by a minority party that clings to a failed economic philosophy known as trickle-down economics.  This is the theory that if you give the wealthy more money in the form of tax cuts, subsidies, corporate welfare and the like, those benefits will trickle down to the lower rungs of the population, and everyone will be happy and prosper in the end.  Remember the Reagan years?  In simpler lay terms, trickle down is also known as theft.

That is what the $1.6 trillion in Bush tax cuts have amounted to--theft of the middle and working classes, the poor, and everyone else at the bottom.  The top 1 percent now owns about 35 percent of America's wealth, and the top 20 percent owns 85 percent.

This gross disparity was exacerbated by horrendous policies such as the Bush tax cuts, of which half went to the top 5 percent of U.S. households, while the bottom 60 percent of Americans received a mere 15 percent of the leftovers.  No investment, no economic growth, no jobs--just highway robbery, the way it was meant to be in the first place.

The Republican party faithful care little about the lives of everyday people. But they do care about their corporate benefactors.  They claim to care so much about deficit reduction that they do not want to extend unemployment benefits, yet they want to extend the very tax cuts that wrecked the U.S. economy.  Three GOP-inspired policies-- financial ruin, the senseless yet costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and tax cuts for the rich--put us in this mess that turned a Clinton-era surplus into a $1.4 trillion deficit.

And yet, we're in a recession, a Great Recession, and perhaps even for another ten years.  This year, foreclosures could reach one million or more.  Still, conservatives are on the deficit reduction bandwagon.  The Obama administration, having learned nothing from the lessons of history, is drinking the Hooverade as well, saying there is "no great appetite" for aid to the states.

Now that's just dumb.  Stressing deficits over job creation is suicidal in a broke economy.  This strategy speaks to an administration that, however brilliant and accomplished, expends too much energy appeasing its adversaries and protecting those of its advisors who rate in the mediocre-to-incompetent range, even as it throws good people under the bus amidst right-wing smear campaigns.

Speaking of good people, it is speculated that the Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will use his authority under the newly-minted financial reform and block Elizabeth Warren as head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Perhaps he doesn't want anyone to learn where the bodies are buried, in a metaphorical sense, and he knows the Harvard law professor will protect consumers and not allow banks to continue their abusive practices.  For an administration that has backtracked and settled for second best when faced with the prospects of great reform (i.e., single payer and the public option in the healthcare debate) this would be the last straw.  But time will tell.

In the meantime, when presented with viable options to fix our problems, there is this tendency for America to take the road to ruin.  You have no choice but to come to this conclusion when you look at this country's military spending. While other nations seek to achieve economic and technological superiority, the United States aspires to win the Cold War.

Expensive, deadly and pointless, America's exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan, at a price tag of $1 trillion, have amounted to the second most expensive military action after World War II.  And with hundreds of military bases around the world, the U.S. spends far more on its military than any other nation, and about as much as all other nations combined, for that matter.      

Slaves to our dysfunctional politics, America treats a dysfunctional and racist movement as legitimate.  We walk a fine line when dealing with the Tea Party--pay too much attention and we give them more publicity than they deserve, but ignore them and we fail to learn the lessons of our troubled racial history.  But in any case we must "refudiate" them.

Not actually a movement, the Tea Party is little more than a corporate lobbyist-supported project of the GOP, with a pseudo-populist overlay.  Their aversion to taxes, to government spending, social programs such as universal healthcare, and their visceral hatred of a black president, have their origins in the Republican Southern Strategy.

Lee Atwater taught them well, though he repented on his deathbed.  Taxes, big government, social programs, all of these were code words for fear of black people, when it was no longer acceptable to use the "N" word.  Atwater was able to finesse the racist sensibilities of the Dixiecrat legacy in order to secure Republican victories.  The strategy worked, but the moderates left the policy and the base remained.  Some of the base has aligned with white supremacists, militias and jingoists, with a hate group helping to write Arizona's anti-immigrant law, and white supremacists donating money to defend the law.  These are the folks who are providing the energy in the Republican Party today, and some conservative politicians hope to harness this energy, racism and all.  

So, the question is, why does America allow dysfunctional politics to result in horrible, even suicidal policies?  The question is not rhetorical, I really want to know.              

Obama's last stand on health care reform

From theGrio:

For good or for bad, and hopefully for good, this is a big week for the future of health care reform. On Thursday, President Obama will hold his bipartisan health care summit, during which he will certainly seek his ever-elusive goal of bipartisanship. The president will also have an opportunity to further isolate his Republican obstructionist opponents--provided he takes the opportunity, and the GOP takes the bait. And just days before, the president unveiled his own health care plan, signaling his willingness to provide some direction and leadership on his signature campaign issue.

If health care reform legislation eventually passes, this week may well have been the reason. Either way, the Obama administration's strategy up to this point, or lack thereof, provides a valuable lesson in how not to promote a health care plan.

The president unveiled his own 11-page health care plan, which is available online. The plan would extend coverage to 31 million people, ramp up regulations on the health insurance companies, and replace the Senate's proposed tax on high-cost insurance plans with a tax on the wealthy. Other highlights of the Obama plan include the following:
-An end to discrimination based on pre-existing conditions

-Extension of Medicaid, but the elimination of Sen. Ben Nelson's $100 million Medicaid funding deal for Nebraska

-State-based exchanges, as opposed to national, would allow consumers to purchase and compare insurance plans

-A national insurance authority would help states fight unreasonable insurance rate hikes

-The plan would close the "donut hole" gap in the Medicare prescription drug plan

-Penalties if people do not buy insurance, with income-based subsidies if they cannot afford coverage

-An end to anti-competitive practices by drug companies that keep cheaper generic drugs off the market

-A voluntary, long-term insurance option for people with disabilities

-Scholarships, loan repayment and other incentives to promote the expansion of the health care workforce

-Reauthorization of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act will improve health care for 1.9 million Native Americans


In addition to the plan, the President supports legislation removing antitrust exemption for the insurance industry.

For the first time in a while, Obama is taking the lead and seizing the reins in the health care debate. But it took a long time to get here. The administration has been criticized for over-learning the lessons from the failed Clinton health care plan. President Clinton's attempt at universal health care failed because they kept Congress out of the loop. Obama, on the other hand, took a step back while a dysfunctional, lobbyist-loving Congress shaped the legislation on its own, with no guidance from the White House. The congressional sausage-making process turned people off, and Obama lost popularity with his base for not acting like the agent of change he was in the 2008 campaign.

Conspicuously absent from the Obama plan is the much beloved and ever-popular public option. The president chose to pitch his proposal as a foundation that legislators can amend and build upon. However, the administration has risked alienating its base of Democrats and Independents by announcing it ditched the public option because of a concern the votes are not there in the Senate. This comes despite 23 senators signing onto Sen. Michael Bennett's (D-Colorado) letter to Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada), calling for a public option through reconciliation.

Critics charge that the President has made too many concessions in order to attract Republican support he will never win over. Progressive Change Campaig co-founder Adam Green said in response that "The White House obviously has a loser mentality -- but America rallies around winners. Polls show that in state after state, voters hate the Senate bill and overwhelmingly want a public option, even if passed with zero Republican votes."

Green's group is targeting seven lawmakers who have not yet signed on to the Bennett letter, as insurance giant Wellpoint is poised to hike rates by double digits in at least 11 states, including the lawmakers' respective states. Susan Bayh, Sen. Evan Bayh's (D-Indiana) wife is a Wellpoint board member, and has made millions of dollars in that capacity.

Republicans will likely use the summit to brand the President's plan as expensive and more government expansion, and push for a private-sector alternative to reduce costs and increase coverage--as if the private sector has served Americans so well when it comes to health insurance.

GOP reactions to the Obama plan were predictable. House minority leader John Boehner, who criticized the House health bill as too long to read, criticized the President's plan for being too short. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor rejected the President's proposal, calling the bill a "non-starter" and expressing little hope for a bipartisan agreement. "The president insists on bringing back a bill that the American people have resoundingly rejected," he said. The White House challenged the Republicans to offer their own proposal.

Conservative radio entertainer Rush Limbaugh provided the most controversial reactions to health care reform, characterizing the reform effort as "a civil rights bill" and "reparations." "The rich are going to stop getting all the good stuff, we're gonna take -- this is income redistribution, this is returning the nation's wealth to its quote-unquote rightful owners," Limbaugh said. "This is a civil rights bill. This is reparations, whatever you want to call it."

Limbaugh's opposition to health reform on racial grounds mirrors both the racially-charged, anti-health care tea party movement, not to mention the traditional conservative resistance to taxes and social programs. Through the use of the race card and a Southern Strategy, Republicans won over white voters by opposing social programs on the grounds that they would benefit African-Americans. It was a strategy perfected by the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater.

Accounting for one-sixth of the U.S. economy, health care is an important issue. Prohibitive medical costs literally cripple struggling families that cannot afford to get sick. A Harvard Medical School study found that 45,000 people die each year because they lack health insurance. "I'm most concerned about the 47 million people in the nation who are uninsured," Roslyn Brock, the new NAACP chair, recently said. "I would hope that our Congress, working with the [Obama] administration, would recommit themselves to ensure comprehensive and affordable health care for all Americans."

In 2008, 7.3 million African-Americans were uninsured. Patients of color are less likely to receive the same quality medical care as whites, and blacks die of cancer at a higher rate than whites, even with equal care. Further, black doctors are underrepresented, accounting for under 8 percent of first-year medical students, although African-Americans are 15 percent of the population.

At the same time, the health care debate has sucked all of the air out of the political room, and the Congressional Black Caucus has expressed frustration of late that high unemployment in black and low-income communities received little attention in the latest jobs legislation.

Hopefully the time spent on health care reform will translate into rewards for the American public, and a second political wind for the Obama White House. We should find out soon. What happens next will be a crucial test as to whether the President can get the job done, and successfully promote big legislation on other pressing issues in the future.

Southern states 'opted-out' of civil rights too

From theGrio: 

http://www.thegrio.com/2009/10/southern-states-opted-out-of-civil-rights-too.php

America Needs A True Revolution Of Values

As you probably heard, the Values Voters Summit was recently held in Washington, DC. What exactly is a values voter, and who exactly decides on the definition of a values voter?

In the Orwellian world of conservative-Republican-Christian-fringe doublespeak, the goal is to confuse, obfuscate, distort and deceive. Concepts are intentionally misnamed to suggest a completely opposite meaning. So, universal health care is characterized as “fascism”. Disdain for women’s reproductive rights is called “pro-life”. Denial of rights to same-sex couples becomes “the protection of marriage”. And rejection of evolution and the teaching of creationism in public schools fall under “religious liberty”. Given these twisted definitions of reality coming from the Far Right, it stands to reason that I am skeptical of their definition of values - presumably “family” values - or values voters for that matter.

The list of confirmed and invited guest speakers at the summit reads like a who’s who of the usual tea partying suspects: opportunistic, empty-suit G.O.P. politicians, and washed-up and recycled “rising stars” holding their finger to the wind; secessionist sympathizers and bellicose, blowhard news entertainers; immigrant haters and Obama haters; homophobic ex-beauty pageant contestants and the Bible-thumping, self-righteous moralizers and demonizers, and the like.

And who made Carrie Prejean and Mike Huckabee the experts on values? What can Sen. Jim DeMint, Bill O’Reilly or Rep. Michele Bachmann teach me on the subject of values, or anything of any importance for that matter? I’m not sure. I shall search elsewhere for my values, thank you very much.

One person I will consult is Martin Luther King. The angry mobs of his day labeled him a communist. He talked about the need for a revolution of values. Specifically, he said:

…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

In today’s post-bubble reality called the Great Recession, Dr. King’s words resonate more than ever. As a rabbi reminded me recently in her Rosh Hashanah sermon, these days we have been forced to live with less, to make our lives fuller with less. For many Americans, it was a summer of stay-at-home vacations. People now have to dig deep within, to give more of themselves to their communities and the institutions that matter to them.

Yet during the times of plenty, although many more people were happy, empty values were allowed to thrive. Before the recession hit, Gordon Gekko and his philosophy of “greed is good” were provided a safe haven. The people who could steal the most were hailed as heroes - the best and the brightest, standard-bearers of the American Dream, the people we wanted to become. And surely, someone out there believed that they needed a fifth mansion, yacht or car to make them even happier than their first four.

Yet, in those times of empty economic calories, of massive profits extracted through paper shuffling and smoke and mirrors, there were multitudes who did not share in the wealth. These silent suffering people had been rendered invisible. The prevailing values had dictated that the wealthy few should take all of the economic spoils. The poor are as they always have been - poor and becoming even poorer. And the middle class is, at best, like the proverbial hamster on the treadmill, spinning wheels yet gaining no ground. In a worst case scenario, the people in the middle are joining the ranks of the poor, and there is no middle left.

In a society that values property rights over people, families are thrown into the streets for the sake of predatory corporate profit. Everyday people must choose between paying for food, rent and health care. The sick are allowed to die because they could not afford to get sick in the first place. Young people are saddled with obscene levels of college debt, yet cannot find jobs to pay off their mortgage-sized tuition loans.

Then there’s the environment. After thousands of years of respecting the land and acting in concert with it, something has gone awry. A few weeks ago I was invited to attend the International Energy Conference at the United Nations. There was a lot of good values talk there - about green jobs, the need for sustainable sources of energy, and empowering poor communities and developing nations through renewable energy technologies. The production-consumption model of economic growth has run its course. Taking, making and wasting for the needs of 1 billion people - at the expense of the remaining 5 billion - has damaged the Earth’s ecosystems, depleted its natural resources, and fueled political instability around the globe. “Oh, mercy mercy me. Oh, things ain’t what they used to be” as Marvin Gaye used to sing. “Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas. Fish full of mercury.”

I can guarantee that the participants in the Values Voters Summit did not hold these family values in high regard--of social, economic or environmental justice -- even though they claim to be religious and know God personally.

Apparently, there are many types of values out there, or at least they are packaged and promoted as such. To be sure, no one should claim a monopoly on them. But in the end, we must decide which values are meaningful to us, and which values should guide our government and our society. We can find values anywhere, including a down-and-dirty, anti-Obama tea party, or at the white-collar, business suit version that just took place in Washington. That does not mean we want to claim them as our own.

(From BlackCommentator.com.)

Healthcare Reform Is America's Anti-Theft Device

James Baldwin warned: “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

These poignant words come to mind when I think about that freak show, that hot mess that has passed for a dialogue on healthcare reform this past summer. On the one hand, the Obama administration - overlearning from the heavy-handed mistakes the Clintons made on healthcare reform - wasted time and lost control of the narrative. Seemingly unsure of what it wanted in terms of policy, this White House stood on the sidelines and allowed Congress to draft the legislation and create a huge mess. Fixing the healthcare system was the cornerstone of the President’s election campaign. Nonetheless, he has appeared too lackadaisical and too indifferent - too eager to compromise with Republicans too early in the game, and for little or nothing in return. In the end, Obama’s team came off looking like amateurs, the high school debate team, or student body president.

On the other hand, with a vacuum of leadership created by Obama, the health insurance lobby was given the opportunity to spread their street money and run amok.  Over three-quarters of the American people want a public option, that is, a choice between private health insurance and a government-run insurance plan that would create competition and lower costs. But the lawmakers who were purchased by the insurance companies - Democrats and Republicans - say there will be no public option. These senators and representatives get their money from one group and their votes from another. We know which group really counts. We’re not talking about democracy, but rather American-style capitalism. Money talks, and, well, you know the rest.

And the insurance companies have tapped into the anger of the unwashed fringes, and harnessed their rage at the town hall meetings - the tea-baggers and the militias, the birthers and the white nationalists, the jingoists and the secessionists. These folks don’t know the first thing about healthcare, but they do know that they hate government, they hate Obama, and they believe he is a foreigner and an illegitimate leader. And a communist Nazi Muslim terrorist. They won’t allow a black man to indoctrinate their children, nor will they allow one of them to take over their country.

Once again, moneyed interests use regular common folk - suckers that they are - to act against their own best interests. Rich Southerners had poor whites fight and die to maintain a system of slavery that rendered their labor unnecessary. During the struggles of the labor movement, corporations hired hooligans to beat up and shoot workers who attempted to organize. Appeals to white-skin privilege kept white workers from organizing with workers of color to better everyone’s station in life. And today, particularly in states with the lowest educational and health standards, working class people who constitute the Republican party “base” fight alongside the corporations to keep healthcare expensive and inaccessible. Billy Bob is as dumb as bricks, and proud of it.

The mobilization against healthcare reform has taught us several things:

First of all, the Republican Party is, collectively, coo coo for cocoa puffs. The moderates, the reasonable people, the intelligent ones who are fond of book-learnin’, and those free of mental defect bolted from the GOP. The Southern Strategy (a raw political appeal to white racist voters, which was perfected by the late GOP operative Lee Atwater) turned a reliable election-winning formula into a liability when Obama came on the scene. The base of the party is now mostly white, Southern, Christian fundamentalist and uneducated, and apparently delusional and unstable. A shrinking demographic, there aren’t enough of them to win a national election. Yet, the Republicans cling to their base. Rather than repudiate the people who believe Obama is a foreign citizen and an illegitimate leader who should be stopped if not killed (yes I said it), the Republicans encourage these gun-toting thugs, these brown shirts with their threats of violence. The decisive issue for them didn’t necessarily have to be healthcare, but healthcare did the trick. The main point is that for the radical conservatives, government is the enemy they treat with utter contempt. And they hate government so much that they try to destroy the country whenever they get into office. Enactment of real health reform will further marginalize the GOP, and render them irrelevant for generations.

Second, President Obama might not be up to the task, at least as things stand. I say this as someone who believes he must succeed if this nation is to succeed. But if the President cannot put up a good fight on the primary issue that put him in office - his mother died of cancer from a lack of medical coverage - when will he? What about future battles? Obama was elected on promises of bold change, not tweaking around the edges of pernicious institutions, or a willingness to comfort those forces that are hurting the public. On the campaign trail, he said himself that if he were to start from scratch, he would create a single-payer health insurance system, which would eliminate private insurers. So why protect those insurers now?

In 2008, the people did not vote for a Rodney King, can’t-we-all-just-get-along-for-the-sake-of-bipartisanship approach to government. Roosevelt didn’t get the New Deal passed that way, and Johnson surely didn’t pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act that way. These presidents prevailed because they got all the troops in line, and they moved forward without trying to butter up their adversaries, whose votes they would never hope to get.

To be sure, Obama got his start as a community organizer. Yet, most of Obama’s crew in the White House seems to consist of Wall Street hacks, apologists and enablers. Lots of bailout funds for banks. And “Green Jobs” czar Van Jones (one of the few movement progressives in the White House with authentic community bona fides) resigned in the face of attacks from Fox News jester Glenn Beck. Jones apparently was provided with no backup from the administration. One must wonder if the administration thinks it can throw all progressives under the bus the way it just did to Van Jones.

Third, never underestimate the depths of American greed. With plans afoot to place one-sixth of the nation’s economy back into the hands of ordinary people, we should expect a fight. Private health insurance companies serve no legitimate purpose. About fifty million people cannot afford them. If you can afford them, you give them your money for the sole purpose of medical care. And when you need medical treatment, they decide whether that money should go towards your treatment. In effect, they make their money by preventing you from getting the care you need. They profit from your continued agony, and in many cases, your imminent death. Only in America will people justify the continued existence of private healthcare insurers, and making a buck over what should be the guaranteed right of access to healthcare. As Bill Moyers recently noted about America’s dysfunctional behavior, “we should be treating health as a condition, not a commodity.” American-style, predatory capitalism is built upon winners and losers, a survival of the fittest mentality. That approach is incompatible with the best interests of society as far as health and social welfare are concerned.

Once again we are witnessing, firsthand, the conflicting American impulses of expanding rights to the people on the one hand, and robbing them blind on the other. America fell because of greed, the bottom line, and the eternal quest for profits above all else. We are witnessing the greatest upward redistribution of wealth in American history, with the greatest gap between rich and poor since the Great Depression. Official unemployment flirts with the 10% mark. Meanwhile, the real unemployment rate, which includes those who stopped looking for jobs, and the underemployed who are forced to settle for part-time work, is close to 17%. Wages and benefits are decreasing. More than 35 million people are on food stamps, and 40% of recipients are working families. More than 1 million schoolchildren in the land of plenty are homeless. And even the most creditworthy borrowers are falling behind on their credit card and mortgage payments.

A primary reason for this economic suffering is that corporations, particularly health insurance companies, are stealing our money. They have more of it because we have less. Unregulated and emboldened, they became far too powerful, just like the 1920s. Insurance companies are enjoying record profits because of ever-increasing premiums, and families are going bankrupt because they cannot afford to get sick.

If healthcare reform is to succeed, its proponents must reframe the issue as one of nationwide criminality. The current health insurance system is a recurring act of national theft. These corporations are feeding off America like vultures, robbing from common people and crippling us in our ability to live our lives with happiness, security and dignity. Reform of the system, with a public option, is like an anti-theft device for the country, pure and simple.

And this time, we cannot blame the sideshow that is the Republican Party. We know about their agitation at the town hall meetings. Plus, they’re greedy and care little about the needs of everyday people, or using government as a tool for positive social change. But most of all, the GOP is not in power. The Democrats control the White House, a huge majority in the House of Representatives, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. The Democrats’ problem is that they do not have the will. As a corporatist party like the Republicans, they depend on the sponsorship and patronage of those financial interests that are causing our collective suffering. The will of the people be damned. If Obama refuses to change this reality in the party which he leads, then he is just another politician who, as Hillary Clinton once said, gives good speeches.

And yet, it was predictable that this day would come at some point, that the base would have to hold the President’s feet to the fire, and show that they are for real. Perhaps he is begging the base to provide the cover he needs to “make me do it”, as F.D.R. once said.

One thing is for sure: If the Democratic base does not force the Democrats to pass real deal health reform as they promised, then the Democrats will be finished. And maybe that is the price we must pay for progressive ideals to survive.

(Published in BlackCommentator.com.  Click here to listen to an analysis of President Obama's healthcare address by four BlackCommentator.com editorial board members.)

Time For Obama To Get Tough On Healthcare (Us Too)

If the ruckus over healthcare reform has taught us one thing, it is that bipartisanship is a dream that never will be fulfilled. And so what if it isn’t?

We must admit, President Obama gave it his best. He went to Washington with an olive branch, with a desire to find common ground with people of different political persuasions, to include everyone in the process. But what he has learned, hopefully, is that bipartisanship is but a means to an end. And in the end, you cannot broker or negotiate with people who have no intent to negotiate, and who really aim to bring you down and destroy you.

Such is the case with healthcare reform, the jewel in the crown for the Obama administration. The president made this the centerpiece of his agenda of change and bold leadership. If done the right way, the nation would succeed in putting the health insurance companies in check, cut the cost of healthcare dramatically, and make healthcare a universal right, like all of those “socialist” countries (the rest of the industrialized world, that is). If the American system of healthcare delivery is so great, why do we have 47 million uninsured people? Why does the U.S. have a higher rate of infant mortality than 28 other countries? Why did 1,500 people recently wait in long lines in Los Angeles for free dental care, eye exams and medical exams?

Of course, the best way of achieving insurance reform is a single-payer system, which would eliminate the intermediary insurance companies entirely. This measure would save the country around $400 billion per year in administrative costs, in other words, all the money they’ve been stealing from us. If you don’t do that right away, the next best thing is a public option, which would allow for a cheaper government-run health plan that people could choose instead of costly private insurance.

Now, when you propose to stop the thieves from stealing your money, the thieves will do whatever they can to maintain their ability to steal. This is natural and expected. The Republican Party and the health insurance industry (with the help of right-wing media) have utilized the militias, the Patriots, the Birthers and the other Obama-haters in order to stop the train of reform. These are the people who have disrupted healthcare town hall meetings—and in some cases brought pistols and semiautomatic assault rifles to presidential events—because they hate government and they want their country back (translated: no more Black presidents).

The response from the Obama administration has been all-too gentlemanly at best, naïve at worst, as if we’re all just playing a friendly game of dominoes at the family cookout. Obama was far too willing to compromise too early, to sell the house to try to gain a few Republican votes that never would materialize. The GOP and their allies have no interest in bipartisanship. Their only goal is to bring down any healthcare reform legislation, and bring down the Obama presidency with it. Of course, it doesn’t help any when you have moderate and conservative “Blue Dog” Democrats standing in the way, their only distinction being that they took more of the insurance lobbyist money than other Democrats.

With Democratic control of the House, the Senate and the White House, exactly when would we achieve universal healthcare, if not now? This moment is important not only because of the immediate matter at hand, but because it will define the rest of this administration, and its ability to get anything done. You don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, and you don’t bring pork chops to a knife fight.

Obama must succeed. If he loses this battle, we all lose. He is poised to become one of the great presidents, and already has achieved more than many of them. But if he cannot succeed on his cornerstone issue of national healthcare—or at best ends up with a phony reform package with no teeth— he will be unable to achieve much else. He will do what average presidents do, such as give medals to boy scouts or something, host Easter egg hunts on the White House lawn, and receive foreign heads of state for photo ops. And that is not what millions of people voted for in November 2008.

At the same time, if we’ve learned anything else, it is that politics is not a spectator sport. Government requires active participation from the public, and vocal demands that certain things get done. The election should have provided more than enough evidence that people want change. But in a nation that is used to pimping whatever it can to make a buck, change is hard to get. It looks like it is time to take to the streets. Obama must get tough, but supporters of a progressive agenda must do so as well.

Lou Dobbs, Lobbyists, and Lynchmobs United Against Obama

Freedom of speech is a beautiful thing. But inciting a riot with corporate underwriting and support of the mainstream media is a completely different thing. Add to that the endorsement of a major political party, and what you have is a danger to our democracy.

That is what comes to mind when I look at this crazy Birther movement, those people who refuse to believe that President Obama is a U.S. citizen, and demand that he produce his “real” birth certificate that shows he is Kenyan, or Arab, or Martian, or whatever. At the same time, there is the unwashed, thuggish opposition to healthcare reform- the angry people who are disrupting town hall meetings throughout the nation, hanging lawmakers in effigy and threatening the safety and lives of members of Congress.

These two groups are cut from the same cloth-a white sheet, that is. They are among the right-wing hate groups that were the subject of a report by the Department of Homeland Security called “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” The report warned that the current recession and the election of a Black president have provided recruitment opportunities for White supremacist and radical right-wing groups. The current environment could lead to confrontations between these extremists and government authorities, such as the Oklahoma City bombing and other examples of domestic terrorism in the 1990s.

These right-wing, anti-government groups are united by their hatred of immigration and Latinos, their hostility towards gun control legislation, and their racial resentment towards President Obama. Those sentiments were on full display at the McCain-Palin campaign rallies in 2008, in which crowd participants called Obama a terrorist and a traitor, carried around Obama monkey dolls and called for his death. And the sentiments were on display at the tea parties, with their abundance of racist, anti-Obama signs. It is no accident that hate crimes and hate groups have increased in recent times, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. James Von Brunn, the White supremacist who opened fire and killed a security officer at the National Holocaust Museum was part of the Birther movement, which itself has racist and anti-Semitic roots. And the President receives 30 death threats a day, posing a challenge to the Secret Service charged with protecting him.

The tea parties were an example of “astroturfing”: top-down, corporate-sponsored activities disguised as a grassroots movement. Two of the lobbying organizations that orchestrated the tea parties include FreedomWorks (a conservative action group led by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey), and the free-market group Americans For Prosperity. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, these two entities are also involved in the orchestrated fringe opposition to healthcare. They provide the loud protestors who disrupt healthcare town hall meetings for the sole purpose of shutting off debate. Americans For Prosperity, for example, operates under the front group Patients United Now. And another anti-healthcare reform group, Conservatives For Patients’ Rights (CPR), has claimed responsibility for recruiting Tea Party activists and other third parties to disrupt the town hall meetings. CPR operates in conjunction with the people who brought you the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth during the 2004 presidential campaign. CPR is operated by George W. Bush business partner and private healthcare executive Rick Scott, who was forced to pay an unprecedented $1.7 billion settlement for defrauding taxpayers.

These activities should be denounced, but instead have earned the blessings of the Republican Party. Consorting with Birthers, tea-baggers, fringe hate groups and angry mobs is the way of the new GOP. And the new GOP is actually the old GOP on steroids. A party that thrived for years on the Southern Strategy-appealing to White racism for votes-the Republicans have little else but a Southern Strategy left. Divested of any real ideas and lacking broad-based support, the GOP lost a presidential election, holds a minority in both houses of Congress, and is facing long-term minority party status. They appeal to their shrinking Neanderthal base by displaying their disdain for Latinos and Latino judges, in the face of rapidly shifting demographics. Their base cannot undo the election that placed Obama in office, and they cannot keep back the winds of change that have swept through Washington and the country. Their only alternative is to hate the man for what he is, to question his American-ness, and to stop his administration and its agenda of universal healthcare.

Trying to fight progress, the GOP base is now reduced to playing the role of Bubba, that character from 1950s central casting who was always on hand to beat up a civil rights worker at the segregated lunch counter.

And mainstream media court jesters-cable TV entertainers such as CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck of Fox News- use the airwaves to legitimize the hate groups, with the apparent support of their respective corporate networks. Dobbs expressed his support for the Birther movement, and Beck charged that Obama hates White people. We would expect nothing else from Fox. But CNN-which touts its journalistic professionalism-cannot claim to be the network of “Black In America”, “Latino In America” or “Generation Islam” while also harboring and enabling an extremist sympathizer such as Dobbs. The Southern Poverty Law Center called on CNN to oust Dobbs for his racism and questioning of Obama’s citizenship, but he remains on the network.

Protest and dissent have played an invaluable role in American history. However, so too has the extralegal presence of the lynchmob. What is passing as the current public “discourse” regarding healthcare reform has only served to elevate the lynchmob. Fortunately, the Democrats have caught on. Hopefully it is not too late.

The Unbridled Free Market Suffocates Democracy

Industrial Workers of the World, 1911

By David A. Love
Published in The Black Commentator

September 20, 2007

The recent decision by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee to hold an investigation into the collapse of a Utah coal mine, amid allegations that six miners were buried alive due to a desire by the mining company to maximize profits, not to mention lax federal regulators and an administration that was rewarded handsomely by the mining industry, is further proof that corporate greed is hurting the country. The pursuit of profit above all else, including the interests of people, unbridled, unchecked and unregulated, is an internal threat to democracy. Corporations have a stranglehold on America. They are sucking all the air out of democracy, or what is left of it, making it difficult for the rest of us to breathe freely.

The evidence of this crisis abounds:

• Foreclosures are on the rise, as unscrupulous, predatory lenders, who took advantage of average citizens of meager means, seek a bailout, now that the subprime mortgage market has bottomed out.

• Hard-earned pensions are eviscerated.



• College students cannot afford an education, and amass prohibitive amounts of debt, as tuition rises far above the inflation rate.



• The $85 billion student loan industry makes inside deals with college officials.

The U.S. is the only nation in the developed world without free universal health coverage. Nearly 47 million Americans, or 16 percent of the population, were without health insurance in 2005. And the Bush administration plans to cut the State Children's Health Insurance Program, a popular federally-funded initiative that provides coverage to six million children.

One of the main points of Michael Moore's film, Sicko, is that the collusion between politicians and the healthcare industry is a barrier to having a free and universal health system. Moore's exposé on the crisis of health insurance in America is an indictment of the healthcare corporations that deny medical treatment to the ill, and allow people to die, all for the sake of profits.

Meanwhile, the world's most advanced nation has a crumbling infrastructure. The deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis, and the breaking of the levees in New Orleans two years earlier, occurred in the midst of a war in Iraq that could cost the taxpayers as much as $1.5 trillion.

That unpopular war has been promulgated by an administration with more than tenuous ties to the oil and defense industries, and war profiteers such as Halliburton. The president, an oil man in tune with the financial interests of that business, repudiated the Kyoto Protocol and the scientific realities of global warming, and allowed the clock to tick on climate change.

Overcrowded prisons are bursting at the seams and prison spending exceeds funding for education in state budgets throughout the country. Encouraging economic development through the captivity of others is an unseemly activity. The for-profit prison industry trades on Wall Street, as did, years earlier, businesses involved in the slave trade. With factory jobs exported overseas, spanking new prisons built in predominantly white communities — filled disproportionately with men of color from the inner cities — are the new company town.

During the Jim Crow era, a collusion of lawmakers, law enforcement and industry resulted in the convict lease system. Unjust and arbitrary laws resulted in incarceration and forced labor for poor former slaves, and profits for industry. Similarly, today's special interests favor draconian get-tough-on-crime drug policies that target and warehouse African Americans and Latinos. These policies fail to address rehabilitation and the root causes of society's ills, but fuel the burgeoning $60 billion a year prison engine.

Meanwhile, Bush's pro-business Supreme Court has made it more difficult for employees to sue for discrimination, has overturned a century-old antitrust precedent that barred price-fixing collusion between manufacturers and retailers, and tossed out damages awarded to the widow of a smoker, against Philip Morris. Globalization has meant a downward shift in wages, outsourcing, poisonous food imports and lead toys from China.

Something is wrong in the self-described land of opportunity. Although Americans are the hardest working people on the planet, the American Dream, it appears, is elusive. As the Pew Charitable Trusts recently reported, there is far less economic mobility in the United States than was previously thought. In fact, America is less economically mobile than many other nations, including Canada, France, the Scandinavian countries, and Germany. As the United States is experiencing the most dramatic shift in wealth in the nation's history, exacerbated and hastened by Bush's regressive policies, never have so few owned so much. And never has an administration manipulated the apparatus of government to such an extent for its own financial and political gain.

Median household income has declined over the past three decades, and the present generation is worse off than the generation that preceded it. Between 1972 and 2001, the income of people in the top 1 percent grew by 87 percent. For people at the very top - the 99.99th percentile - the income gain was 181 percent. By contrast, the bottom 20 percent grew by only 3 percent.
The top 1 percent of households owns almost twice as much of the nation's corporate wealth as they did 15 years ago. Between 1978 and 2005, CEO pay increased from 35 times an average worker's pay to 262 times, making more in an hour than a worker makes in a month. Meanwhile, in 2004, 23 million people used food stamps, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up from 17 million in 2000.

Perhaps the most troubling and most significant chapter of the G.O.P. legacy has been the attempt to erase all traces of the New Deal and the Civil Rights era. Denigrated and dismissed by conservatives as archaic and part of the bloated welfare state, the New Deal provided the nation with Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission, relief for the poor and unemployed, and public works and jobs programs. This represented government intervention that served to balance the power relationship among business, labor and agriculture. The New Deal provided relief, recovery and reform for an economic system run amok. It saved Americans from capitalism and the effects of an unfettered and unregulated free market, and saved capitalism from itself.

But nowadays, who will save the people, and democracy, from capitalism? For all of its lofty democratic rhetoric, the U.S. is turning into an oligarchy, and the concerns of people are taking a back seat to the needs of corporations. Surely, there are higher values than profit for profit's sake, in a nation that has profited from just about everything, including human bondage, war and misery. Morality dictates a higher standard.

On April 4, 1967, at a meeting at Riverside Church in New York, Dr. Martin Luther King said, "we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered." Although America has failed to heed Dr. King's words 40 years later, perhaps it is not too late.

Copyright © 2007 by David A. Love