Stating the Obvious

This bit of "news analysis" from the New York Times tells us what we already know: while defying expectations by getting his agenda through Congress, Obama is simultaneously alienating the voters he and his party need to hold Congress come November. I would submit, however, that the political problem only seems to result from Obama's aggressive legislative agenda. The primary difficulty is that unemployment remains close to 10%. It is axiomatic that when such high levels of unemployment obtain at election time, the party in power is going to get smacked.

Paul Krugman had something to say about this almost a year ago. Krugman was arguing for further stimulus spending, suggesting that lingering unemployment--which PK believed could be mitigated by mo' money--would hamstring Obama's legislative ambitions. The good news is that BHO has to a certain extent defied Krugman's expectations, but the economist/columnist's basic critique remains sound: the lack of attention to the unemployment problem is going to hurt the Democrats politically. What's frustrating is that the Republican line of attack, the one that seems to be working, namely that government is doing/spending too much is 180 degrees backwards. Voters seem to be saying, "I'm troubled by continued high unemployment, therefore I want a government that does less."

Sigh.

The chief frustration of life as a citizen in a democracy is the sheer irrationality of so many of one's countrymen.

Give Early, Give Often

I have already made one donation to the House Democratic reelection committee and will soon make another. I encourage all US citizens reading this who have any funds to spare to do likewise. The logic is simple:

• A Republican take-over of the House will be bad for America.
• Cash sways elections.
• Ergo, my financial contribution to the campaigns of threatened Democratic congresspeople is good for America and, by extension, good for the rest of the world.

Before you write out a check to OXFAM or the Sierra Club or National Public Radio, consider that the fate of poor Africans, the environment and public broadcasting will all be quite directly and negatively impacted should the GOP gain a majority in the House of Representatives. The Repubs are already doing their damnedest to hamstring the Obama Administration's efforts at reform. Imagine what damage these vandals will inflict should they be able to block all legislation coming out of the House.

Midterm Worries

I'm just back from a two-week jaunt Stateside. I celebrated Independence Day--on July 3, for some reason--in Williston, Vermont and watched several candidates for high office (VT governor, US House of Reps, US Senate) march in the town parade waving the flag and passing out stickers. It was interesting to me that none of the candidates seemed to identify himself by party, though that probably has more to do with Vermont's unique local political geography than anything broader. What struck me more powerfully, both in Williston and elsewhere on my trip, was how big and pervasive a show electoral politics is in America as compared with Australia.

I watched and read several news stories about how my Democrats are getting set up for a trouncing this November. It seems inevitable to me that we would. Historically a 10% unemployment rate has always been a killer for the party in power. What's so frustrating is the sheer irrationality of voting for a Republican in the present cycle. Their message seems to be: Tired of congressional gridlock? Vote for the party that authored it! Frustrated by the faltering economy? Vote for the party that has consistently opposed efforts to provide relief!

E.J Dionne says that the Democrats are in a catch-22 having to choose whether to move left to energize the base and alienate independents or move right and alienate the base. I say the only thing for Democrats to do is speak the truth loudly and often.

Beat Me To It

It seems a Tax Me Party already exists. Good on 'em!

taxmeparty.org

Tax Me!

The perpetrators of the Tea Party--the Boston Tea Party, back in 1773--cried, "No taxation without representation!" What if now we turned that on its head? What if we wrote/phoned/emailed our Congresswomen and Congressmen saying, "No representation--at least, not by you--without taxation!"

I for one would be quite pleased to pay a higher marginal tax rate--in fact I do pay a higher rate of close to 50%, but in Australia, not the USA--if it meant a more progressive tax system with a better-functioning government, better able to provide needed services and better able to regulate business and industry so as to protect the commonwealth.

This could be the start of a movement: The Pro Tax Party... Tax Us in Texas... Tax US...

How They Roll in Australia

You get up early to watch the Socceroos fall short of the World Cup round of sixteen--or, in my case, stay up late to watch the USA snatch victory from the jaws of defeat--turn on the Today show only to learn that there's a leadership challenge with the ruling Australian Labour Party, then check the net at your morning coffee break and learn that wham! bam! Australia has a new head of state, or a new Prime Minister at least. (Technically speaking Oz's head of state is the Governor General, appointed by QE-II, but I couldn't even tell you the Governor General's name.) The basic plot line is that Kevin Rudd's poll numbers have been tanking and the ALP leadership didn't see Kev as a horse that was going to carry them through the next federal election which comes no later than April of next year, and so, Goodfellas-style, they capped him just when he--and the general public--least expected it.

To me, though, aside from the giddy thrill of contrasting this nearly instantaneous change of national leadership with the 24 month extravaganza that characterizes the my native America's presidential elections, the interesting questions are where and how Rudd went wrong and why over no more than the past 3 or 4 months he has become so exceedingly unpopular. It's a pretty confusing picture. It seems that some are angry at him for abandoning his cap-and-trade carbon pricing scheme, and yet in seeming conflict with such green opposition, people seem nonplussed with his latest policy initiative, a massive "super tax" on mining industry profits. I suspect that the Venn diagram of those who both support cap-and-trade and stand in opposition to the mining tax is small indeed, but that may be precisely the problem. Rudd alienated both the latte-drinking urbanites by chucking the emissions trading scheme, driving them over to the Green Party--ironic since it was opposition from the Senate Greens who felt the ETS didn't set strict enough carbon targets that put the final nail in its coffin--and the working-class miners' union types who have been persuaded by management propaganda that the super tax is going to cost jobs. I do wonder too how much of it is simply the fact that Rudd is personally not all that likable, coming off like a pedantic, annoying, prickly little nerd. It is no accident that Tony Abbot, the leader of the Liberal (read conservative) Party opposition has been getting himself photographed doing things like surfing and finishing an Iron Man triathalon. Too bad for him that he has ears like a pair of satellite dishes and a tendency to get himself tongue tied at the very moment when he should be driving the message home.

McCrystal

Obama needs to fire his lanky ass.  

One shouldn't generalize, but it seems to me that this is what you should expect when you give Special Forces too much rope.  They're just too cool for school.  

Energy Independence/Global Warming

The BP Gulf disaster has people--notably President Obama--buzzing about the pressing need for energy independence.  Al Gore used the opportunity to write an essay in The New Republic calling for an aggressive move toward a carbon tax so as to wean ourselves from dependence on coal and oil.  Today TNR published a counterpoint blog post which makes the good point that as sure as we can be that global warming will occur, predictions as to the dire consequences for human civilization are far less certain.  The IPCC's worst case scenario suggests that a 4C increase in average global temperature over the next century would lead to a shocking 3% reduction in global GDP as compared to what it would be without any warming at all.   

These are difficult numbers to ignore.  I continue to believe that we need to take efforts to price fossil fuels in such a way as to factor in their adverse environmental effects.  This means some sort of carbon tax.  (Whether you call it a tax or cap-and-trade, it's still a tax.) But if global warming is unlikely to destroy civilization, wrecking our economy to get to carbon-neutral status ASAP doesn't make much sense.  One has the feeling that what a lot of the more committed anti-climate change advocates like Gore and Bill McKibben are getting worked up about has more to do with a sentimental, aesthetic sense that it is bad for humankind to exert such profound effects on global ecosystems than any clear belief that global warming is going to cause civilization to collapse. 

It's All About the Congress

In a post entitled "Liberal Despair and the Cult of the Presidency" Jon Chait at TNR argues--correctly, in my opinion--that liberals who are disappointed by Obama's presidential performance misunderstand the powers--and lack of power--of the presidency. The Congress is where it's at if you want to get anything done. Which is why another TNR post by William Galston predicting an GOP takeover in the House is so chilling.

Here's an email solicitation I received from the DNC:

Aaron -- Yesterday, Republican Congressman Joe Barton, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, issued an outrageous personal apology to BP and slammed the President for his efforts to hold them accountable. Worse, if the GOP wins back the House, Barton is the guy who could be in charge of regulating the oil industry. Think about it: In the Gulf right now, jobs are being lost, ecosystems are being destroyed, an entire way of life is being upended. And Joe Barton is apologizing to the oil company that caused the disaster. We're whipping together an ad as fast as possible to make sure voters know exactly whose side Barton and the GOP are on and to demand they stop apologizing to big oil, but we need your help to get it on the air. If you're as furious as I am, will you chip in $5 to help us fight back? https://my.democrats.org/BartonAd Thanks, Brad Brad Woodhouse Communications Director Democratic National Committee

You see? THIS is the problem with money in American politics. I'm disposed to agree with Mr. Woodhouse. Joe Barton's apology to BP was despicable. But when every communication finishes with a request for cash, it undermines the message. I get annoyed just like I used to get annoyed with a semi-homeless guy named June Bug who frequented my neighborhood in North Carolina. It's like, "I'm sympathetic to your plight, June Bug. It doesn't even bother me that you're going to use whatever money I give you to buy beer. That's just how it is. But seriously, man, do you have to put your hand out every time we meet?"

I'll give the DNC five dollars. (Actually, I'll give them $100.) I do want the Democrats to hold onto the House. But we have to recognize that this constant need to beg for money on the part of our politicians is degrading to them, to us and to the quality of our political culture.

Krugman on Calls for Fiscal Austerity

"How bad will it be? Will it really be 1937 all over again? I don’t know. What I do know is that economic policy around the world has taken a major wrong turn, and that the odds of a prolonged slump are rising by the day."

The Guilded Age

Here's a letter I'm posting to my representatives. Feel free to cut and paste.

Dear Senator/Congressman:

Events of the past year including the recent round of state primary elections have made me increasingly concerned about the role that money plays in our nation’s electoral politics. I am worried about the Supreme Court’s apparent intention, manifested in several recent decisions, to neuter any effort on the part of the states to limit the distorting effects of corporate funds and individual fortunes upon our elections. If it is the case, as it seems to be, that millions spent on television advertising can tip the balance in an election and, what’s more, that the requirement that they raise and spend millions in order to compete with rich individuals and big corporate spenders keeps many worthy, non-wealthy candidates from entering politics in the first place, to the degree that we are unable to regulate the ways and amounts in which money is spent in our elections, our democracy is damaged.

I won’t waste your time with any legal or philosophical arguments as to why the Supreme Court is wrong on these or related matters, though I do believe that there are several such arguments to be made. Rather, I would encourage you to take up the mantle of campaign finance reform and pass the legislation required to counter Citizens United v. FEC and the Court’s other similarly noxious rulings. If a campaign finance bill can be crafted that answers the Court’s concerns and at the same time restores or, better, improves upon McCain-Feingold, then do it. If the only way to skin the campaign finance cat is to pass a constitutional amendment, then do that.

America, it seems, has entered a second Gilded Age ushered in by George W. Bush and his Republican Congress, now abetted by the Republican-majority Supreme Court, by obstructionist Republicans in the Senate, and by a few Democrats besides. The first Gilded Age was bad for democracy and bad for the common man. So far it doesn’t appear that in either respect the second will be much better.

Kind regards,
Aaron Walton

Second Try

So, I've had calls from some quarters--one quarter at least--to start up the blog again. Lord knows there's enough news out of the States to set me off on a rant or two. Financial reform...the Supreme Court's continuing campaign to gift wrap American electoral politics in their entirety and hand them over to corporations and rich individuals...the BP spill...the languishing economy and the vanishing likelihood of any further stimulus...this limp-wristed energy bill Obama was out shilling for last night which is sadly probably the best thing that can make it out of the Senate right now, which is to say the best that can make it out of the Senate ever. (Does anyone think our legislative gridlock will get better after November?)

I've been watching Jon Stewart's Daily Show here on Australia's ABC2. It's shown every night at 7PM on a five or six hour delay. Tonight Mr. Stewart cast Barack Obama as Frodo Baggins, a good man corrupted by power, for Obama's failure to dismantle Bush's extralegal anti-terror apparatus. He has been egually as harsh on Obama for his apparently easygoing response to the oil spill. Let me say two things in response to Mr. Stewart, my fellow William & Mary alumnus: First, just as many of Stewart's conservative critics argue, he has a tendency to get high up on a moral high horse, but then the instant he encounters any push-back he claims that he's just an entertainer, that nothing he says has any serious political content. Second, Stewart, like many of us, asks too much of the president, of any president.

Obama's ability to fix the oil mess is limited. Even more importantly, his ability to get meaningful reform through Congress is even more severely limited. I'm not exactly jumping for joy over Obama's performance this first year and a half of his presidency, but I rather imagine it's in the nature of things for a left-leaning Democrat such as myself to be disappointed by my Democratic presidents. By 2000 Clinton had me thinking along with Ralph Nader that there was no meaningful distinction between a prospective Al Gore presidency and a George W Bush presidency. (I voted for Gore anyway in the belief that a Nader presidency would be worse than either of the alternatives.) What has me more frustrated than Obama is our feckless legislative branch. The Senate needs to be shaken out of its stupor. So what if the Dems have lost their filibuster-proof majority. Bring the legislation forward anyway! Make the bastards filibuster! Make the Republicans stand up all night and all day reading the goddamn phone book into the Congressional Record and then have to go home to their constituencies and explain why they acted to obstruct the next defense appropriation or whatever other bit of crucial business their heroic blockade wouldn't let through.

Shutting Down

Anyone coming to this blog now will note that it has been weeks since I last posted. I've been trying to decide what to do with the thing. The truth is there aren't many of you out there reading it, mostly my friends and family and a few who find the site through unrelated web searches--"aaron lee walton conviction," "geelong hospital nurse." This site was intended as an experiment to find out whether or not I could recruit interested readers and commentators and hopefully motivate a few to get involved politically. As such, it has now shown itself to be a failed experiment. Writing of the kind I've been posting here requires too much time an effort for me to be doing it for an audience only of people who know me, and not even that many of them.

I'll leave the site up. The links are useful. Probably also when I write letters to my congresspeople I'll post them here, but no more regular posts.

Adios.

Less with Less

For the past few months I have been working my way through "The Wire" on DVD, a tv series I cannot recommend more highly provided one has a stomach for frequent though not overly graphic violence and constant profanity. For those not familiar with it, on a surface level the show is about drug dealers and the cops who try to put them in jail in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, but on a deeper level it is about failing institutions and the people they leave behind.

David Simon, the ex-Baltimore Sun crime reporter who created "The Wire" has a new show on HBO about New Orleans called "The Treme." On the occasion of its premiere, The New Yorker reran a 2007 profile of Simon by Margaret Talbot which I read with interest. Simon is quoted as saying, "Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”

He was talking about the downsizing of his newspaper, but it seems to me that for the past twenty or thirty years the more-with-less canard has been aggressively foisted upon the whole of American society by Republicans and business-oriented, DLC-type Democrats alike.

Democrats need to stop shying away from the class warfare, wealth-redistribution charge. Damn right that policies such as health care reform and repeal of the Bush tax cuts seek to redistribute wealth. But so did the Bush tax cuts. The only difference is the direction in which the wealth flows. Democrats need openly and unabashedly to work to reverse the marked growth in wealth inequality over the past thirty years. Democrats need to take off their managers' hats, asking for more with less, and start offering us more with more.

Omnidirectional Placation

In his NYT review of New Yorker editor David Remnick's new book profiling Barrack Obama, Garry Wills offers the following in conclusion:

Obama’s strategy everywhere before entering the White House was one of omnidirectional placation. It had always worked. Why should he abandon, at this point, a method of such proved effectiveness? Yet success at winning acceptance may not be what is called for in a leader moving through a time of peril. To disarm fears of change (the first African-­American presidency is, in itself, a big jolt of change), Obama has stressed continuity. Though he first became known as a critic of the war in Iraq, he has kept aspects or offshoots of Bush’s war on terror — possible future “renditions” (kidnappings on foreign soil), trials of suspected terrorists in military tribunals, no investigations of torture, an expanded Afghan commitment, though he promised to avoid “a dumb war.” He appointed as his vice president and secretary of state people who voted for the Iraq war, and as secretary of defense and presiding generals people who conducted or defended that war.

To cope with the financial crisis, he turned to Messrs. Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, who were involved in fomenting the crisis. To launch reform of medical care, he huddled with the American Medical Association, big pharmaceutical companies and insurance firms, and announced that his effort had their backing (the best position to be in for stabbing purposes, which they did month after month). All these things speak to Obama’s concern with continuity and placation. But continuity easily turns into inertia, as we found when Obama wasted the first year of his term, the optimum time for getting things done. He may have drunk his own Kool-Aid — believing that his election could of itself usher in a post-racial, post-partisan, post-red-state and blue-state era. That is a change no one should ever have believed in. The price of winningness can be losing; and that, in this scary time, is enough to break the heart of hope.

This, to me, seems spot on.  It may have been strategically necessary in his 2008 campaign for Barrack Obama to avoid any utterance that might cause him to be dismissed as an angry black man. If Remnick is to be believed--Remnick as characterized by Wills; I haven't read the book, just the review--Obama has been angling to disarm the opposition with his charm and calm good sense his entire life.  The problem now--our problem--is that the opposition are swine, impervious either to charm or good sense.  At this stage the nation doesn't need a placater in the White House, the nation needs an angry black man.  An angry man at least.

Letter in Support of CLEAR

I've sent the following letter to my NC Senators, Burr (R) and Hagan (D) encouraging them to get behind Cantwell's and Collins's Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal act. I'm sending a version of this one to the White House as well. Early indications are that Obama will support the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill, which is unfortunate. I would have thought that after last summer's health care morass, the President would have seen the virtues of clarity and simplicity. The Republicans will have a hard time demagouging CLEAR. For one thing, it is co-sponsored by one of their own. Secondly--and more importantly--it is just 39 pages long. There's nothing hiding there. It won't be hard to counter their lies with references to the text of the bill itself.
Anyway, I encourage you to cut, paste and edit it as you see fit to send to your representatives in Congress and whomever else you think it might be useful to influence.

Dear Senator:

In the strongest way possible I wish to encourage you to lend your support to the Collins-Cantwell CLEAR Act bill. I have read the text of the bill in its entirety--the first time in my life I have ever done such a thing--and I am confident that more than any other measure under discussion the CLEAR Act will lessen the risk of dangerous climate change, will start America on a path to a more sustainable energy economy, and at the same time will minimize the economic harm to average citizens. Moreover, it is a political winner. Why in the world would you NOT support a bill that has bipartisan sponsorship, provides a rigorous framework for needed reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and at the same time will put a monthly check in the mailbox of every single one of your constituents that will put the vast majority of them at break-even or even better with respect to expenditures on energy?

I am a physician, a graduate of Duke University School of Medicine and Duke's internal medicine residency program. In my work I refer to scientific literature on a daily basis. I am familiar with the forms and methods of science. I have made a hobby of familiarizing myself with the science of climate change, and through such study I have been as strongly convinced that if left unchecked anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will lead to potentially catastrophic global warming as I am that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer or that an elevated serum cholesterol leads to an increased risk of coronary artery disease. The time to act was five years ago. To dither around with pork-laden energy bills such as the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman proposal that do little to nothing to limit carbon emissions is worse than doing nothing at all, since the passage of such a measure would give us a false sense of accomplishment and would set back the timetable for meaningful action on climate change by years--years that we do not have. One might envision even more effective climate change mitigation schemes than Collins's and Cantwell's, but they are not before the Senate. Please, stop wasting America's and the world's time. Bring CLEAR to a vote and vote it into law.

Kind regards,
Aaron Walton

The Choice is CLEAR

Bill McKibben has an article in the current issue of The New Republic that has brought my attention to the Carbon Limits and Energy for America's Renewal (CLEAR) Act, introduced in the Senate by Susan Collins (R, Maine) and Maria Cantwell (D, Washington). The text of the bill--all 39 pages of it--is available here. I encourage you to read it as I have done.

Collins' and Cantwell's approach to limitation of greenhouse emissions is simple and effective. The government sells carbon production permits to CO2 producers and then distributes the proceeds to, well, everyone with a monthly dividend check. The quantity of permitted carbon production is ratcheted down on a defined schedule over the next 40 years to meet a defined set of emissions targets. The cost of energy would necessarily increase under this scheme, but for the majority of energy users, the increase would be mostly offset by the monthly cash dividend. Only the biggest energy hogs would feel the hurt. Also, there would be an incentive for all of us to become more energy-efficient, since reduced usage would free up more of that monthly money to use for other purposes.

According to McKibben, the Collins/Cantwell CLEAR bill has no suction in Washington right now. Many, including many of the larger environmental lobbying organizations, are throwing their weight behind the Graham-Kerry-Leiberman energy bill monstrosity that Sen. Kerry admits himself does little if anything to address climate change. Call it the politics of the possible. But just because it is possible to shovel a big burlap sack full of horse manure and plunk it in the middle of your living room doesn't mean it's desirable to do so. There is no reason that CLEAR should not appeal to the majority of average Americans--it is good for the environment and it pays cash money every month. There is equally little reason that the Graham-Kerry-Leiberman bill should appeal to anyone except possibly the energy industry who, while they actually would prefer no regulation whatsoever may feel that with the bill's passage, they have dodged a bullet--a CLEAR bullet.

I'll be back soon with a letter to my Senators on CLEAR. In the mean time I encourage you to write one of your own. Who do these guys and gals think they represent? Us? Or Big Coal and Big Oil?

It's a Question of Fairness

Money managers at private equity funds, aka "hedge" funds, benefit from a tax loophole that allows them to treat the bulk of their generous earnings--including the lion's share made up by fees--as long-term capital gains, taxed at a rate of 15% instead of the 35% they would pay if taxed along with their high-earning peers in businesses and professions other than private investments. The NY Times addresses the issue in this editorial as did James Surowiecki in a New Yorker article a few weeks back.

Rather than restate what other writers have already said better than I can, I will instead reproduce a letter on the subject that I've written to my North Carolina senators, Richard Burr (R) and Kay Hagan (D). I encourage all of you to use the Contact Your Elected Officials link in the sidebar to send a similar letter to your representatives in the Senate. Feel free to cut and paste my letter and modify it as you see fit:

Dear Senator:

It has come to my attention that the managers at private equity funds are subject to a uniquely beneficial tax loophole that allows them to treat the bulk of their income as capital gains, taxed at an absurdly low 15%, even though the money on which the gains are realized is not their own and their income is, in reality, a commission fee, not different in kind from the commission a car salesman receives from an auto dealership upon closing a sale on a used car. The used car salesman’s income is taxed like any other earned income, so why not the fund manager’s?

If you have not read the editorial on the subject in the April 3 issue of the New York Times, I encourage you to do so. That piece indicates that the hold-up to closing this loophole lies in the Senate, the House having already more than once approved measures that would address the problem. You need to take action on this. See to it that a measure closing this tax loophole is brought to a vote, then vote to approve it. Quite simply, it is a question of fairness. How can we take seriously your efforts to better regulate the financial industry so as to prevent future financial and economic crises when you cannot take simple action to see to it that some of those very same individuals who contributed most to the crisis of 2007/2008 are not asked to pay their fair share to the very government that benefitted them so handsomely with bailout money?

I am watching your votes, and I am publicizing this letter and your actions on my blog, www.onedigusteddemocrat.blogspot.com.

Kind regards,

Aaron Walton

Noise

The header of today's NT Times "Bloggingheads" video caught my eye: Avent-Garde Politics. Two political journalists, one from Fox News, one from The Washington Times were going to debate the proposition that the Democratic Party is now ignoring the concerns of ordinary Americans in favor of the avent-garde politics of the title. (Guess which reporter from which news organization was arguing which position.) I listened for about thirty seconds before I determined that both debaters are FOS.

Look, it isn't hard for anyone to figure out where I come down on this question. Health care reform is the quintessence of a policy initiative that addresses the concerns of ordinary Americans. To the degree that ordinary Americans are skeptical of the Democratic health reform law, it is because the Republican Party has been successful in its despicable attempt to deceive ordinary Americans about what health reform actually does and does not accomplish. What I'm reacting to is that the first thing out of the Washington Times' Democrat's mouth was a comment about attending liberal think-tank cocktail parties! I cut the video off right there.

You know and I know which of our major political parties tends to represent the interests of ordinary Americans and which tends to represent the interests of elites. What might be less clear is how easy it is for Democratic leaders to shank the ball and wind up in the rough of liberal think tank cocktail parties and thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraisers. This is all a distracting noise that makes it hard for either party to represent the true interests of ordinary Americans.

What is needed:

• Direct involvement from the party rank-and-file


• Close monitoring of the flows of money and influence


• Electoral punishment of Democratic party officials who fail to represent the interests of ordinary Americans


• Lobbying reform


• Campaign finance reform
  

Fatalism or Fervor

For a Nobel Prize-winning academic, Paul Krugman has a remarkable talent for breaking issues down to their essence and making a simple, powerful case. In yesterday’s column he argues forcefully for strong financial regulation, suggesting that Barney Frank’s bill, which as already passed the House, is preferable to Chris Dodd’s (weaker) bill which has yet to clear the Senate. This is all well and good, and I urge everyone to write his/her elected representatives—Senators especially—to tell them how if we’re going to offer financial institutions de facto guarantees of bailouts in the event of their impending failure, they MUST submit to increased regulation so as to mitigate financial risk.

But I don’t want to talk any more about financial regulatory reform today; I want to talk more about climate change and about whether it makes any sense politically or personally to push for mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions.

Here’s a list of things I believe related to climate change:

1. If current trends in human energy production and utilization continue without modification, the earth’s climate will warm dramatically over the next century.


2. Local effects of global warming are difficult to predict but likely will be significant and potentially disastrous.


3. If it were possible to avoid such a potential disaster without serious disruption to our way of life, it would be desirable to do so.


4. Meaningful action against climate change can take place only at a national and international level. In other words, it is only through the creation of new laws and new international treaties that human beings have any chance of forestalling dangerous climate change.


5. Meaningful action against climate change may not be achievable without serious disruption to our economies and our way of life. (For example, if beginning tomorrow, every motor vehicle on the face of the planet started driving half as much as it drives today and stuck to this reduced mileage indefinitely, that would only account for approximately 10% of the CO2 emissions reductions required to keep atmospheric CO2 under 450ppm at 2050.)


6. Given the difficulty of meaningful action and the likelihood of serious disruptions to our economies and our way of life, it is likely that useful climate change mitigation cannot be achieved, and it is likely that it will be actively disadvantageous to any individual, party or nation who aggressively pursues climate change mitigation in the face of general lack of action. (see Tragedy of the Commons.)


7. The scariest potential consequences of global warming all have to do with geopolitical instability and war, therefore the creation and improvement of structures to deal with mass migrations, conflict, and public health as well as efforts directed at nuclear arms reduction and anti-proliferation may be the most realistic and cost-effective ways to prevent a climate change disaster of world-historical proportions.


8. A massive investment in advanced energy technology research and development such as that called for by Bill Gates would likely be of short-term economic and political benefit and has a chance of forestalling the worst effects of our continued reliance on fossil fuels.
   

So I guess what I’ve done here is argue myself away from “fervor” regarding climate change and closer to “fatalism,” though maybe not all the way there. I don’t believe that the worst possible effects of CO2-induced global warming are inevitable, nor do I believe that there is nothing we can do to improve the situation. The minimum we should expect of our political leaders is that they acknowledge publicly and repeatedly that global warming is coming, that it is caused by human action and that it is likely to be a big deal. We should expect our leaders to call for reasonable sacrifices on the part of citizens to mitigate greenhouse emissions and should ask for the creation of new relevant laws so long as they are not unduly disruptive to our economies. We should also be willing to knowledge that such efforts may still be insufficient and should prepare ourselves and our institutions to deal with the climate change that almost certainly will be coming.

Unconstitutional (2)

Today's NY Times has solicited opinions from a handful of legal scholars on the (un)constituionality of the health insurance reform law.

The view most favorable to the law's constitutionality--and the view that to me seems the least tortured--is that the "mandate" is nothing more than a new tax, a tax from which those who purchase private health insurance are exempt.

It does, however, seem entirely conceivable that the current Supreme Court will not see things this way. Let Roberts et al overturn the bill, I say. Sic semper tyranis! Let freedom ring, and all that. I should be free to die prematurely of untreated chronic disease because my employer can't afford group health insurance, shouldn't I? It would be the quintecence of tyranny for the government to force me to purchase health cover, wouldn't it? I mean, holy habeus corpus, Batman, they might as well just throw me in jail!

Obstructionism

from today's NY Times:

"A leading Republican predicted Sunday that President Obama's appointment of 15 officials while sidestepping Senate confirmation would make it more difficult to get bipartisan support for future legislation."

He, Lindsay Graham, is joking right? 'Bipartisan support...' That's comedy, right?

A priority for the Senate has to be fixing its rules. Executive branch appointments have piled up to a ridiculous degree, to the point where critical departments such as Treasury lack the management capacity to do their jobs. Some of the blame has to go to the Obama administration itself; they've been unusually slow in naming appointments, possibly to do with their unusually stringent vetting process. But despite how slow Obama has been in naming executive branch appointments, approvals have still piled up in the Senate thanks entirely to Republican obstructionism. The GOP has used every arcane trick in the Senate rule book to block approvals. We can huff and puff and scream at these spoilsport losers, but the only real answer is to change the rules to make such monkey-wrenching impossible.

Krugman on Republican Extremism

From yesterday's column:

"In the short run, Republican extremism may be good for Democrats, to the extent that it prompts a voter backlash. But in the long run, it’s a very bad thing for America. We need to have two reasonable, rational parties in this country. And right now we don’t."

The first sentence echoes what I said here. I don't know what I think about the rest of the quoted paragraph. Do we need two reasonable, rational parties? It seems to me that one reasonable, rational party is quite enough so long as that party holds power. William F. Buckley Jr. struck me as the very personification of reason and rationality, and yet I wouldn't want him or anyone who thought remotely like him in office setting policy. I'd rather have my conservative opponents acting like a pack of crazed buffoons than smart, suave, Mephistophelean Buckley clones. Crazed buffoons are easier to beat.

The other advantage to the extreme rightward shift of the GOP is that it lessens the degree to which Democrats need to cater to the middle. To the degree that the Republican Party starts to look like the political wing of the Michigan Militia, Democrats can pursue an activist, progressive agenda without fear that they'll lose centrist voters to the Republicans.

To hell with bipartisan cooperation! The Republicans cannot be negotiated with, lets crush them instead.

Where to From Here?

How quickly the complexion of things changes. A month ago--heck, a week ago--the pundits were chattering on about how Obama had overreached here and made his case poorly there and how the Democrats were certain to lose the House in November and leave Obama a lame duck before he could even get started. Now the "news analysis" pages are lit up with praise for the Democrats' historic achievement with health care reform and asking what the next big legislation will be.

It seems that financial regulatory reform is going to be the next big thing and will likely come down the pike fairly soon. Chris Dodd's bill has already cleared the Senate Banking Comittee, and is on its way to the Senate floor. The Republicans could, of course, filibuster, but one wonders how keen they are to be seen to carrying the big banks' water. So some kind of financial regulation is likely to emerge and get signed into law... I don't know enough about the subject to have an opinion on whether Dodd's bill goes far enough. My uninformed hunch is that, rather like health care reform, it's a big step in the right direction but one that doesn't quite get all the way home.

What I want to know more, though, is when are we going to hear more about climate change? My fear is that we're going to have to wait a long time before carbon emissions reduction gets back on the agenda. To make the case for CO2 emissions reduction, you have to make the case for sacrifice--on everyone's part--and sacrifice is a hard sell at the best of times, much less when you're facing 10% unemployment and double digit budget shortfalls across the board. The thing is, we may not have time to wait for the economic climate to improve. Depending on who you read and how big a factor you believe methane clathrates in the Siberian permafrost will be, we might have as little as five years before global warming becomes a runaway train and it no longer makes any difference at all whether we adopt a cap-and-trade plan, a carbon tax or stick with business as usual.

The Copenhagen climate conference was a dud. The best that came out of it was an agreement to acknowledge the existence of the global warming problem. And yet had the US come with a greenhouse emissions scheme enshrined in law, indications were that China may--underline 'may'--have been willing to talk turkey on a binding emissions reduction treaty. And yet I fully understand that going into a Congressional election having voted 'yes' on legislation that doubles your constituents' electric power bills and the price of gasoline would be political suicide. I don't know how to overcome this impasse. The fact remains that it is going to be very difficult to persuade the general public that climate change will be a life- and civilization-threatening disaster until actually begins to draw blood--by which time it will be too late to forestall.

Maybe Al Gore should go back and run for the Senate again. How much more good could he do on the global warming front with the power directly to craft legislation then he does now by jetting around the world giving PowerPoint presentations and testifying before the Congress of which he once was a member? To bad that neither of Tennessee's Republican Senators are up for reelection in 2010. Would Gore consider a run for the House? Seriously, why the hell not?

Unconstitutional...

Fourteen states have filed lawsuits over health insurance reform, all based on the claim that the law's requirement that everyone purchase insurance is unconstitutional. Republican attorneys general of Florida, Alabama, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington, as well as the Democratic attorney general of Louisiana have all filed suit, and one supposes that with a 5-to-4 Republican majority on the Supreme Court--and if you believe that the SCOTUS is a "non-partisan" institution, I have some reclaimed swampland in Florida I'd love to sell you--there's some chance the law might get overturned.

Bring it on, I say. Such a turn of events would be...clarifying. For one thing, it would give the lie to the idea of Roberts et al eschewing judicial activism and legislation from the bench. For another, it would lend momentum to the push for even more meaningful, comprehensive health care reform:

"So, you say it's unconstitutional for the government to force you to buy private health insurance? All righty, then. How about instead we just abolish private health insurance altogether and expand Medicare to cover the entire population? Would you call that unconstitutional? How so? Is it unconstitutional for Medicare to provide insurance coverage for your grandmother right now? If not, then why should it be unconstitutional for Medicare to cover you and your children too?"

Essentialism

George Packer blogging on the House health care vote over at The New Yorker:

"The Democrats’ speeches were hardly inspiring. Nancy Pelosi...is a poor public speaker, and most of her colleagues managed to turn high political drama into garbled litanies of policy prescriptions. The Democrats are as averse to boiling things down to their essence as the Republicans are addicted to it."

Too true.

One gets the feeling that maybe, just maybe left-of-center politicians are beginning to get the idea that it will help more than it will hurt to speak about how wrong the Republican opposition is, wrong morally, intellectually and pragmatically too, wrong in every way that it is possible to be wrong. And yet still no one on the left seems quite able just to break it down and call a spade a spade. Obama has his moments, but especially when he's off script he all to easily slips into Gore-esque policy-heavy wonkese.

We need Democratic candidates to get out on the stump slinging fire and brimstone:

"In this election you have a choice between two candidates and two conflicting philosophies. And just in case any of you may feel unsure about the nature of that choice, let me make it clear for you. Over there you see a candidate who believes that the government is evil, that anything the government does to regulate the activities of rich men and giant corporations is an abomination before God. With me you stand with a man who knows that the government is nothing more and nothing less than all of us working together towards a common goal. Government is not evil. It is no worse--and no better--than we are ourselves.

"Over there you see a candidate who believes that wealth is created solely by individuals. He does not see that rich men and corporations are free to earn their billions only because we, the people of the United States of America, grant them leave to do so. He denies the existence of such a thing as the social contract. He denies that you, the people who constitute the government of the USA have any right whatsoever to a share of the profits of any of the great corporations which thrive only because you have granted them permission to thrive. If you give that man a chance, he will end taxation. Sounds good, right? 'No taxes! Money for everybody!' But who will reap the lion's share of the benefits? You? Hell, no! It'll be Exxon making out like a fox in the hen-house. And Halliburton. And Dow Chemical. And Goldman-Sachs, and so-on and so-on. Meanwhile that candidate and his cronies are going to cut your health coverage down to nothing; they're going to deny your children an education; they're going to deny your cities money to build roads and parks and public transportation systems; they're going to deny your democratically elected government the financial means to do any good for anybody at all. Hell, the only thing he will be willing to spend money on will be prisons--just so when we finish slamming shut the door of opportunity on the most troubled young people among us we have a big enough hole in which to lock them up and throw away the key."

Tactical Lessons

John Judis has an informative post up on The New Republic website today that describes some of the work done by liberal activists in support of insurance reform. Appropriately he talks about Obama's somewhat belated but no less critical efforts to take the case for reform directly to the people with a series of speeches, but he also talks about how liberal organizations like MoveOn.org and Health Care for America NOW! pressured wavering Democratic representatives with television ads and threats of funding primary challengers.

Jonathan Chait has written a somewhat less cogent post, also on TNR, mulling over whether Clintonism is or isn't dead. He describes Clintonism in political science terms as being an application of "median voter theory" which holds that the most powerful voter, i.e. the voter with the power to flip an election one way or another, is the voter whose views place him smack dab at the center of the political spectrum. Clinton and his compadres held that the best, possibly the only way for Democrats to win elections in a post-Reagan universe was to abandon any and all policy initiatives that didn't appeal directly to that median voter. I don't know whether or not Clintonism is dead, but I sure as hell hope so. I'm all in favor of compromises where compromise is due, but if you compromise everything to the will of some fictional average voter as defined by opion polls, what are you and what do you have to offer?

Let's have more of the kind of activism described in Judis' post--both from the President and from the party rank and file. The middle is nowhere. Better to lose an election than to make yourself into a fickle, ill-defined nulity. The "median voter" is the median voter because he doesn't know what in hell he wants. A true leader knows what's right and shows all who will follow how to get there.

Tell It, Paul!

Paul Krugman is hot in today's column, "Fear Strikes Out." He draws a contrast between the two major parties. On the one hand you have President Obama at the head of the Democratic Party, appealing to all that is sane and good and generous in us and on the other hand the Republicans, personified by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley and the Tea Party protesters appealing to all that bent, craven, stingy and hateful.

None of this is new, of course. Reagan was better at the think-positive rhetoric than the current crop of GOP troglodytes--"It's morning in America!"--but Ronnie sowed fear and suspicion with the best of them. Remember welfare queens? And as Krugman points out in this very column, then California governor Reagan declaimed that the institution of Medicare would spell the end of the American way of life. I remember a black classmate of mine named Adrienne at my elementary school in Virginia who on March 30, 1981 ran down the corridor shouting, "Reagan got shot! Reagan got shot! I hope he's dead!" While I did not then and do not now wish death or physical violence on any person including Ronald Reagan or any of the current crop of Republican leaders, I will say that even at the age of eleven, Adrienne knew the score. She could read the code as well as any of Ronnie's placard-bearing constituents and could tell how little Reagan and his followers cared about her and her kind. What's remarkable to me is how little things have changed in this regard in the past thirty years. It's as if the election of a president who is not only--relatively speaking--a progressive, but a black progressive has stirred up a lot of truly foul sludge from the bottom of the barrel.

It's a good thing in the long run. Get the shit out in the open, I say. Get the bastards so spitting mad that they show their true colors. I can only add that it's a good thing we have people like Paul Krugman to shine a spotlight on them when they let their pants down. I just wish more politicians would follow suit. Obama doesn't have to be so damn nice to the Republicans. He ribbed them a little in the State of the Union, but it was a good-natured ribbing, like a joke between friends that don't always see eye to eye. The Republicans are not Obama's friends, and his assumption that at least a few of them could be won over with charm and reason very nearly cost him his great health care achievement.

But for now let's give three cheers that heath insurance reform did make it through. It is a great achievement for Obama, for the 111th Congress and for the nation.

Hip-hip, hooray!

Hip-hip, hooray!

Hip-hip, hooray!

Can They or Can't They?

The big vote is today. Something I read a few days ago suggested that the Dems wouldn't take it to a floor vote unless they had the votes in hand. Let's hope so.

Not that the legislation on the floor will fix it, but I don't think Americans have any idea just how screwed up their health care system is compared with others in the industrialized world. Within the last twelve hours a loved one of mine, not an American herself though with travel insurance, spent four hours waiting to get seen in an ER at a major hospital in a large American city. She was charged $350 up front, and when she asked for her credit card slip back after she decided to bag it and seek treatment elsewhere (In the end she copped free and timely treatment from a colleague at the medical conference she is attending) they told her they couldn't get the slip back; it was in a locked container. Just to be clear, the place was not crowded. In the four hours she waited, two other patients were called back for assessment.

Contrast this to the time a few months back when I stepped on a rusty nail. I needed the wound peeked at and a tetanus booster. I drove to Geelong Hospital here in Geelong, Australia, showed my Australian Medicare card, and the clerk noted down my details--no billing details required as public hospitals in Australia are funded by tax dollars and offer FREE medical care to all comers. The triage nurse looked at my foot then sent me to fast track, where I waited five minutes at most to get seen by a doctor. The medical assessment was efficient, largely because it wasn't encumbered by a lot of minimum requirements for billing. The doc simply looked at my foot, said the wound was shallow and wouldn't need antibiotics, then gave me my tetanus booster. I was in and out in twenty minutes tops. I have been a doctor and a patient in both the USA and Australia, and I can assure you that this sort of cheap, speedy, no bullsh** medical care can be found in only one of the two and it ain't the Land of the Free.

I'd challenge any conservative opponent of health reform who mouths the talking point about America's health care system being "the best in the world" as to what his measure of quality is. Life expectancy? Nah. Infant mortality? Nope. Patient satisfaction? No way. Value for money? Not even close. Absence of death panels? Well, it's true that this is no such thing in America but I don't know that it's a useful comparator. I've worked in Australian public hospitals for close to a decade. I've searched high and low and I've never seen a death panel. Not one.

The Money Problem

Michael Tomasky has published a solid if somewhat dry article in the current New York Review of Books entitled "The Money Fighting Health Care Reform." Somewhat frustratingly to this reform-obsessed liberal, he opens with a little I-told-you-so in which he rehashes an argument he made in 2008 to the effect that for his first year in office Obama should focus like Clinton's laser beam on the economy and specifically on jobs and defer any major initiatives until he had satisfied the voting public that he was a good economic steward. That's as it may be. This sort of politics-as-sport, Monday morning quarterbacking is exactly what I intend avoid in this blog, and so I will--avoid it I mean. It's the meat of Tomasky's piece, a heavily referenced catalog of the sources and targets of the literally hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into lobbying Congress on health care just over the past year that gets me riled up. Appropriately, he raises a question as to whether Congress is capable anymore of the kinds of sweeping reforms it passed in number in the 1960s and early 70s, and he cites two things, procedural rules such as the Senate cloture rule and the exponential growth in lobbying expenditures, as being key factors in preventing Congress from again becoming the progressive institution it was forty five years ago.

$3.47 billion was spent lobbying the federal government--mostly Congress--in 2009, a record. $544 million of that was spent by the health sector, with $267 million spent by the pharmaceutical industry alone. These figures include money paid to lobbyists in salary and expenses for lobbying-related activities such as dinners, conferences and junkets attended by public officials as well as individual campaign contributions and industry-sponsored issue ads. One fact that I found most telling is that a full ten percent of registered lobbyists are former Congressional employees including staffers and several former Representatives. Forget about how it might influence a Congressman for him to be wined and dined by some industry shill at a golf retreat on Hilton Head, how much more influential must it be if he knows that should he lose his reelection bid or should he decide to retire early from electoral politics, he can sell access for a high six-figure salary and not even have to worry about jetting home from Washington for face-time with his constituents?

It seems to me that this last part of it would be easy enough to fix. Just pass a law banning any Congressperson or staffer from acting as a lobbyist for a fixed period of time after leaving office. Five years, maybe? Maybe ten? Of course the folks most adversely effected by such a law are the ones who'd have to pass it, so don't hold your breath. And then this Roberts Court would just as likely overturn it anyway. As we now know, corporations are people and spending money is a speech act subject to First Amendment protections.

Here are some useful links suggest to me by the article:

Center for Responsive Politics aka OpenSecrets.org

Common Cause

Contact Undecided Representatives

The New York Times has put up a running tally of House of Rep votes on health reform. Find the link here.

Do not delay, if your representative is on the list of undecideds, use this Contact Your Elected Officials link and email or phone him or her NOW.

Just Do It

According to the NY Times a "new rift" has emerged over Medicare payments to states, complicating the push to lock in the 216 votes needed for passage of health care reform this weekend, this on the heels of a somewhat less anxious article yesterday talking about the House Democratic leadership's discussions about how to triage "no" votes, i.e. which Democratic Congressmen in marginal seats will be granted dispensation to vote against the bill.

I understand that this sort of gamesmanship is part of the deal. Congresspeople each represent a single district, not the nation as a whole and not the Party either. They at least need to appear as if they're doing all they can to get the most for their districts and their states. I get that. I just hope that the undecided Democrats in the House understand that now is their party's shot, their one and only. As I asked my Democratic Representative in an email, if the Democratic Party can't take advantage of holding both the White House and the biggest legislative majority in a generation, what good is it?

Health care reform...just do it.

The Republican Way of Wrecking Government

Today, the recently elected Republican governor of New Jersey, Christopher Christie, announced a new budget for his state that proposes to close an $11 billion deficit exclusively by cutting services while making no attempt to raise revenue through increased taxes. His plan includes an $820 million cut in aid to schools.

“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of smaller government that lives within its means,” Christie said.

Could there be a better illustration of the Republican strategy? It goes like this:

A. In times of plenty, cut tax rates to absurdly low levels. Fix it so that the cuts lopsidedly favor corporations and wealthy individuals while simultaneously mouthing populist rhetoric about letting the working man hold on to his hard-earned dollar. No one will complain—yet—because as long as the economy remains strong, so will revenues, and demand for government services will remain relatively slight.

B. When economic growth slows and government revenue declines and state and Federal deficits balloon, as predictably they will, begin to intone righteously about “spendthrift government” and “tax-and-spend liberals” and to call for “government that lives within its means.”

C. Use every ounce of political power you can accrue—such as the governorship of the state of New Jersey—to cut the government down to as close to nothing as you can take it, all on the premise that you’ve been left with no choice by the spendthrift liberals who proceeded you.

What do you call it when a man would cut close to a billion dollars of funding for the education of the children of his state and yet won’t lift a finger to raise additional, existing revenue from the numerous billionaires and giant corporations that make their homes within his jurisdiction? I have a word for it: EVIL.

You want to talk about “death panels”? How many more kids in Newark or Camden or Atlantic City will die young of drugs, AIDS or gunshot wounds because Christie can’t find it within himself to tap Merck or American Cyanimid for an extra few hundred million dollars? It isn't like they haven't got it. The economy is growing again, right? Wealth is being created in New Jersey. Do businesses in the Garden State not think that they have an interest in seeing to it that the state's young receive a decent education? Do they think life will be better for their employees if New Jersey's streets are crowded with homeless schizophrenics who can no longer receive treatment at shuttered psychiatric clinics and hospitals?

I lived in Namibia for a time. Namibia has one of the highest per-capita GDPs in Africa, but it also has one of the most unequal wealth distributions of any country in the world. One can live in first-world luxury in Windhoek, the capital. There are plenty of Mercs and Land Rovers on the road. You can work out on the StairMaster at a Virgin health club which is attached to a shopping mall that rivals anything in suburban America. But across the street from the health club is a public high school that is in a state of total decay. School employees and boarding students live in unheated cinderblock dorms surrounded by shards of shattered glass from the windows, most of which have long since been broken. Few can afford the pay-as-you-go electricity and so cook their meals over fires of scrap wood. Weeds grow up through the basketball courts and a layer of dust coats every surface in the classrooms which are empty except for a collection of broken-down old desks dating from the 1970s. Further down the road, along the edge of town the numerous poor live in windowless boxes made of corrugated steel. Streams of raw sewage run down the hillsides, and these unfortunate people—who constitute a majority of Namibia’s population—are dying by the truckload of HIV and TB, so much so as to give Namibia one of the lowest life expectancies in the world.

I'd like to ask Governor Christie what his model is for America’s future? I know he doesn’t take anyplace like Sweden or even Germany for a model. Those places are too “socialist.” But would he adopt Namibia as a model for America’s future? I doubt it. At least he wouldn’t admit as much. And yet, when you get behind the moralistic rhetoric of self-reliance, this is exactly what Christie and other Republicans are calling for, a country where the rich cling to every last dollar they can get their hands on and step across the prostrate bodies of the poor, the uneducated and the lame while they, the little kings and queens, make their way to their next gala ball. In other words, he wants America to be like Namibia.

The Taliban

A friend of mine suggested that I was going too hard on Democrats and that I should focus more of my animosity on the GOP. A Google search on "disgusted Democrat" will get you ten posts from conservative blogs about this or that nominal Dem who has jumped ship to the Republican Party in "disgust," usually over Obama administration policy. In light of these too points, I feel the need to make it plain that my own "disgust" with the Democratic Party stems purely from what I see as its failure to answer the Republican threat with enough clarity, consistency and force.

The Republican Party of today is dangerous, genuinely dangerous to our people's continued well-being. I don't argue that the GOP will institute a fascist takeover of the US or that they would support a Taliban-style Christian theocracy, but that doesn't make the threat any less real. The GOP has devolved into an organization whose motivating goal is the destruction of the Federal Government of the United States as a force for doing, well, anything. And the Republicans don't have to stage a revolution to accomplish this goal. They don't have to go into the streets. They simply bankrupt the government with absurd tax cuts and unfunded wars, use the Senate rules to block any legistlation coming out of that body, and use their majority on the Supreme Court to hamstring the government's ability to regulate industry. The Republicans aren't terrorists, but they are saboteurs. Earth First could learn a lot from the GOP about effective monkey-wrenching.

If I have been relatively silent on the evils of the Republican movement, it's because I don't believe that they can be persuaded. There's no point in arguing with them. Sure, their "policies" are completely incoherent and in the long run will bear disastrous consequences, but if a man is completely irrational showing him where his logic breaks down is a wasted effort; he's already demonstrated that he is immune to logic. Defeating Republicans in debate might make us feel good, but it does little to advance the goal of an effective, responsive Federal Government that enacts progressive policies to better Americans' lives. We have to beat these bastards at the polls.

Onward!

Vote Smart...and Tough

I'm including a link to Project Vote Smart in the sidebar. This is a great tool for finding out exactly how your elected officials are voting and, at least officially, what they're saying too. I've used it to learn more about my Democratic Congressman David Price. I've learned that unless I learn something about Price that I don't know, I can, in good conscience, work for his reelection. His votes have been on the right side of most of the issues I care about. Moreover, he has come out with a speech castigating the Supreme Court for its terrible, antidemocratic ruling overturning the McCain-Feingold law that had banned corporations from financing political campaigns, and has introduced legislation to take one small step towards mitigating this judicial tsunami by requiring the sponsors of political advertising to identify themselves.

I encourage everyone to take a look at Project Vote Smart to find out where his or her elected officials stand. If you're represented by a Republican, get down to your Democratic Party precinct to find out what you can do to unseat him. If you're represented by a Democrat whose record of votes, speeches and position papers demonstrates that he is a Democrat in name only (Joe Lieberman, I'm looking at you), then don't wait, start talking to everyone you know about alternative candidates who might be positioned to mount a primary challenge.

"But wait," you say, "do we really want to further jeopardize Democratic majorities in Congress by mounting a bunch of primary challenges? Aren't most of these blue dog Republocrats from marginal, right-leaning districts ripe for GOP takeover?" Yes, they are. And yes, if such right-wing Democrats get challenged from the left, it will make it harder for them to win reelection. To which, I say, "Good riddance." If the Congress fails to accomplish a damn thing, as it's threatening to do right now, better that failure be on Republican hands. A voting majority is useless if the members of that majority won't vote with the majority. We need Democrats unafraid to support an activist government, not panderers willing to make any and every concession to conservative, Republican demands simply to keep their seats.

Things I Believe

I believe that far from being a threat to our well-being, the democratically elected government of the United States of America is the only means by which many of the most pressing problems we face as a people can successfully be addressed.

I believe that as it has developed over the past fifty years, the Republican Party has devolved into an organization that seeks almost as a matter of principle actively to undermine the effective workings of the government.

I believe that the rules of the United States Congress and, in particular, the Senate must be modified in such a way as to prevent the Congress from being held hostage by intransigent electoral minorities.

I believe that within the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court and as amended by the people of the United States, a way must be found to limit the distorting effects of money on our local, state and national elections.

I believe that corruption encompasses more than simply the taking of bribes and kickbacks and refers more broadly to an official’s favoring of his own interests and those of his associates to the detriment of others to whom he owes a duty such as his constituents and the nation as a whole.

I believe that, so defined, corruption exists within the United States government and that if and when we see corruption, we fail to name it at our peril.

I believe that our democracy is not in any way inevitable but that instead it is contingent upon our own efforts, good will and good character.

I believe that the time to act is now.

Voting Records/Health Care Reform

Beyond doubt the health care reform bill passed by the Senate and now awaiting ratification in the House is imperfect. Many of us--me included--favor a Medicare-for-all, single-payer solution, but it is apparent that such sweeping reform is, for the moment at least, out of reach. Even a public option in the current market-based approach is apparently a bridge too far. I'm not happy about it, but I can accept it as the hand we've been dealt. What I can't accept is Democratic Congresspeople who can't find the wherewithal to vote even this limited reform through.

Whether or not reform passes (again) in the House, keep a close eye on how your Representative votes. If he/she is a Democrat and cannot muster the party loyalty to pass it, he doesn't deserve his seat and should be challenged in this year's primary. And if, heaven forbid, it doesn't even come to a vote, then we Dems must do a detailed postmortem and vigorously punish those responsible.

The Coffee Party

The existence of The Coffee Party has just come to my attention.

From the CP homepage: "We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans."

Damn straight.

Why This is Not Just Another Blog About Politics

Too much online political commentary is just about showing off the commentator's acumen, putting on display all of the commentator's arcane knowledge and securing kudos for making accurate predictions. I'll have none of that here. This is not a site for political junkies. This is a site for Democrats who want to take action and move their party and the nation in the direction we all understand that it needs to go.

I'm happy for anyone to comment on anything she or he reads here, but I'd be happier if she used the Contact Your Elected Officials link in the sidebar and sent her comments to a person in power. This blog is premised on the belief that speech equals a kind of action, but we recognize that speech will be ineffectual unless it is brought to bear in the right places.

One Disgusted Democrat

Times are tough for anti-corporate, big-government-loving, social-welfare-fixated progressive Democrat like me. The shine is off the Obama administration after a year of too much money for banks, too few jobs for the jobless, too little action in Congress and too infrequent communication from the White House. The Democrats in Congress act as if they're in the minority, running scared of their own shadow, meanwhile the Republicans perfect their strategy of pure negation.

In such a climate, what is two-fisted progressive to do? I toyed with the idea of starting a third political party of my own, dedicated to the proposition that the GOP has degenerated into a frankly pernicious force in American life, a party so utterly bankrupt that any attempt to deal with them in good faith--as Democrats to this day seem hellbent on doing--was self-defeating. I batted the third party idea around for a couple weeks, conducted a straw poll on the idea of a few similarly liberal-minded Internet friends of mine as well as a Democrats Abroad listserv. Soon, however, I came to recognize that third parties are doomed from their inception. Neither they nor their members will ever accrue any real power to change things. Moreover, I don't have any major disagreement with the general thrust of Democratic Party policy-making, at least as it is articulated by some of its more liberal adherents. The thing that drove me to the brink of fringe-party madness is the rank cowardice and mealymouthed inconstancy the Democrats displayed in the wake of Scott Brown's win in Massachusetts. I thought, "What, our majority drops to 59/41 and we just fold up our tent? We just let the Repubs strut around like this single-state victory, born out of Martha Coakley's hubris and Brown's good looks as much as anything else, gives them some kind of mandate? Here is one more Republican lie to go with all the others, and we just sit here and eat it? How can I be a part of this party of milquetoasts?"

The answer, of course, is that I can and I will for no other reason that I have no other choice. If America is ever to see universal health insurance coverage or an effective response to global climate change or any number of lesser but still significant improvements in our lives, it will be at the hands of Democrats. They're the only game in town. That doesn't mean, though, that every cowardly, uninspired schmuck of a Democratic incumbent needs to be supported in his bid for reelection. If the crazies of the Republican right can drag their officials rightward with primary election challenges and occasionally topple an incumbent altogether, there is no reason that progressives of the Democratic left can't do the same. If I lived stateside (I don't), I'd be going to precinct meetings, doing as much as I could to agitate within the Democratic Party for an aggressive response to the Republican threat. The time for deal-making and triangulation is over. What's at stake is our leaders' ability to govern in such a way as to address the problems that face us in a meaningful way. The Republicans don't want any governance at all. To paraphrase conservative stalwart Grover Norquist, they want to shrink the government to such point as it can easily "be drowned in a bathtub."