Alien vs. Predator, or, Why Liberals Lose When They Take on Corporate Power: Part I

All right, it's the moment you've been waiting for. I've been explaining why "liberal" is not a badge of shame (as the O'Reillys and Limbaughs of the world would have it be) but the name of an honorable tradition of thought about freedom, justice, and the pursuit of happiness. So why don't I call myself a liberal? What more do I want?

Plenty! Let's remember what liberalism has always been about: liberty, the freedom to make a good life of one's own design. And let's recall the strategy that liberals have used since the late nineteenth century to ensure liberty. Modern liberals use state power to check and constrain the power of capitalism, which they see as posing the greatest threat to our ability to live free and flourish. 

Does the strategy of posing state power against corporate power work? Only if we control the state AND state power is stronger than the power of capitalism. But neither of these is true.

Do We Control the State?

The primary tool of democracy is elections. Leave aside all the questions about stolen or fraudulent elections that agitated so many of my friends in 2000 and 2004, and even the voter repression tactics the Republicans practiced in 2008 and 2012. When elections run right, are they a powerful enough tool so we, the people, can use them to get the government we want?

Edward S. Greenberg once asked "what parties and elections would have to look like if they were to truly be vehicles by which political decision makers were kept responsible and responsive to the American people" (The American Political System: A Radical Approach, 1989). I like his answers.

1. Candidates and parties should present clear policy choices to the American people, and these policy choices should concern important issues.

2. Once elected, officials should try to carry out promises made during the campaign.

3. Once elected, officials should be able to transform campaign promises into binding public policy.

4. Elections should strongly influence the behavior of those elites responsible for making public policy.

It's not clear that ANY of these four conditions are met in America.

1. Sure, the last presidential race presented us with clear choices on some crucial issues. Some of these choices were very narrow, however.  Should we keep on using drone strikes abroad and surveillance at home at the current, unprecedented level, or become even more aggressive?  Should we cripple the economic recovery through across-the-board federal budget cuts or by targeted cuts?  For most of us (and especially for the poor and the unemployed), these are not choices but threats.

Meanwhile, out of 535 Congressional elections, only a handful were seriously contested. Bottom line: if you wanted to change the way government works by finding enough candidates who agreed with you and electing them into office, you were out of luck.

2. Do candidates try to keep their campaign promises? The answer seems to be, "When they must." But LBJ ran promising "no wider war" in Vietnam and then sent tens of thousands more troops. Ford (an unelected president) pardoned Nixon after swearing not to. Reagan ran against "big government" and created the biggest budget deficits in history, before the current administration! George H.W. Bush famously promised "no new taxes," but bowed to reality and broke his promise. Clinton ran on "putting people first," but as Bob Woodward documented, he actually put the needs of bond markets first--he cut social programs that help the many and the vulnerable in order to shrink the budget deficit, pleasing the few and the rich.

George W. was the dangerous exception to the rule. If we hadn't stopped him from keeping his campaign promises, God help us!  Obama was very careful to raise hope without making very many promises.  He also has the built-in excuse that whatever he tries to do, the Republicans automatically oppose.

3. American government is set up to keep elected officials from making broad changes in policy. Most of the time, control of the three branches of government is split between the two major parties. When the national government is split, it's difficult to make dramatic changes on issues people know and care about.

When the Presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court are all dominated by people from one side of the political spectrum, they still have a tough time making changes. Each branch is protective of its own powers and jealous of giving too much to either of the others. They compete as much as they coordinate, despite party. Besides, as we have seen in the recent NSA scandal, the Republican Party includes moralists and libertarians (and some out-and-out fascists). The Democrats house technocrats, progressives, and socialists. Party affiliation doesn't make them concert their efforts around one platform. Most are too busy calculating what will ensure their own personal re-election!

Finally, if the federal government seems united, then state and local governments can oppose and at least delay the national agenda. Look at Massachusetts with gay marriage, California with medical marijuana and tough clean air standards, or southern states' opposition to civil right and anti-poverty legislation and programs. For better or worse, we live in a system of fragmented state power. And this is the tool we want to use to humanize an entire economic system based on self-interest?

4. Even if we had competitive elections with choices that reflect what people truly need--and politicians tried to keep the promises that got them elected--and government weren't set up to impede the progress of any dramatic changes--most of the choices that affect our daily lives are not made by government. Quoting Greenberg again, "Elections hardly affect decisions relating to the location of businesses, the growth of cities, the development of technology, the center of work, the shape of educational experience, or the distribution of wealth and income."

Beyond Wishful Thinking

It's still worth fighting elections to put candidates in office who can use state power for what it's worth. But it's not worth as much as we imagine. We are strangers in our own land, and when liberals think they can address the alienation of vast parts of the population through another law or another policy, they are engaged in the wishful thinking that has become another synonym for "liberal."

Obama's Two Speeches

Last night, President Obama's State of the Union address was a tale of two speeches.  The first one was disappointing.  The second offered signs of hope.

 


The beginning of the speech was a fairly routine laundry list of Obama's legislative agenda.  I agreed with a lot of it, and I was dismayed that Obama gives so much credence to the talk about cutting the deficit.  That is bad policy, and it undermines the rest of his policies. 

But the problem with Obama's first speech was not any of the particular policies he enunciated.  The main thing was that it was a list.  Lists by their nature are uninspiring.  We write down lists precisely because unless we keep referring to them, we'll forget what's on them. They are not inherently memorable.  They are not self-enforcing.  Obama kept saying, "Let's get it done."  But to-do lists never get done unless the people who can make them happen are motivated to do so.

The people who can make Obama's agenda happen are...the people.  Obama needed to motivate and activate his supporters, the ones who elected him and want great things from him. People in Congress are not opposed to "getting things done."  Many of them (including some in his own party) are opposed to his specific agenda.  To keep the heat on Congress, and to overcome the determined opposition, he needed to give the "hope and change" constituency a rallying cry and a framework within which they could unite and work together.  Did he do that?

The second speech offered the rallying cry: "They deserve a vote."  Obama was most directly talking about victims of gun violence, who deserve to have legislation aimed at preventing future tragedies debated and voted up or down, not smothered in committee or squelched through the filibuster. 

But in context, that theme is broader.  It singles out an increasingly isolated group of conservative white men and their allies who are out of step with the country on issue after issue and yet use their positions of power to block action.  By not even allowing the proposals to come up for a vote, they say to the rest of the country--the 47% that Romney wrote off, or the 99% who have not gained an inch and have even lost ground for the past thirty years--"We know what's good for you.  Your concerns don't matter."

Obama won the election in part by telling a diverse range of people that their concerns DO matter.  At the end of that speech, he repeated that vision of America as a place where people have to be listened to.  Sometimes, we call that vision democracy.  It is Obama's winning message, and his best hope for getting the power of the people behind him.

What "Means Testing" Means for Average Americans

Usually, giving more to people who have less already is considered a progressive idea.  But according to today's Boston Globe:

1. Romney wants to give fewer Social Security and Medicare dollars to higher-income people.
2. Obama wants to keep  the benefits the same but make higher-income people pay more for them up front, in taxes.
3. Many progressives don't want to see either!  How can this be?

 "Means testing"--basing our eligibility for benefits on our income or wealth--is a great idea in the abstract.  Why give either millionaire who's running for President any benefits that they don't really need, for instance?  We could certainly find other uses for the money.

Historically, though, Social Security and Medicare were popular precisely because everyone paid in and everyone took out.  These "social insurance" programs look more like cooperative saving for the future than like handouts, and that's made them politically strong.  When Tea Party types hold signs that say, "Keep your government hands off my Social Security," they are terribly confused (since Social Security IS a government program)--but at the same time, they are showing how powerful the appeal of universal programs can be.

Means testing Social Security and Medicare would make them look more like programs for the poor, including food stamps, Medicaid, and TANF.  Now, I am all in favor of these programs, but many Americans are not.  So, means testing the programs would deprive them of political support.  That's why many progressives will fight to keep them universal--even if that means an older Mitt Romney and Barack Obama will be entitled to Medicare.

The Limits of Power

Americans confuse freedom with a never-ending abundance of goods. As the economic power of the U.S. has declined, we have naively relied on military power to keep the goods flowing. But this has cost us our real freedom: freedom from an imperial presidency that keeps spilling the blood of our own citizens (and the citizens of many other nations) in a fruitless attempt to create a permanent American empire. We need to get over our illusions and embrace what's really possible and necessary. Ending the threat of nuclear war, for instance, is achievable in a way that ending terrorism is not.

These are the lessons that Andrew J. Bacevich wants us to learn. His short book The Limits of Power lays them out in clear language, with compelling examples, in a factual manner but with the courage to point out when American policy is stupid, or absurd, or self-destructive. Bacevich has the experience to write this book. He retired from the Army at the rank of lieutenant colonel and now teaches history at Boston University. He also possesses the moral authority. His son, Andrew Jr., followed his father's path into the military and died in Iraq in 2007.

I tremendously respect Bacevich's honesty, intelligence, and well-placed outrage. He is politically conservative and intellectually rooted in Reinhold Niebuhr and the "enlightened realism" school of foreign policy, whereas I am a man of the Left and rooted in Marx and the analysis of imperialism that grew up in the U.S. around the Vietnam War, but we both see the folly of this country's course in foreign affairs.

Where I think Bacevich falls short is that he roots this problem in a moral failing. Using 19th-century language, he accuses Americans of "profligacy," meaning a wasteful addiction to consumption without any regard for the consequences for ourselves or others in the long term. I can't argue with that as a description, but it falls short as an analysis. Why has our culture grown in this direction? Isn't it because corporate capitalism requires an endlessly expanding market of people to buy things they had no idea they needed before they were produced? When people stop spending more than they can afford, this economy falters, meaning people get thrown out of work. Pretty soon, they can afford even less...and so it goes.

It's not a moral failing that makes the pursuit of abundance the goal of U.S. foreign policy. It's a contradiction within our economic system. Bacevich speaks eloquently about the limits of power, but he does not observe the limits of capitalism that have pushed us toward using power willy-nilly as a last resort to avoid economic decline. It will take more than sermons about profligacy to change something that's so fundamental to the way work, investment, consumption, leisure, and political power are all organized in this country.

It may take a catastrophe. I hope not, and if we avoid a catastrophe, it's because people like Bacevich sounded the trumpet for a new way of thinking. Even if he hasn't totally achieved that himself, he deserves thanks--and your reading time. (You can also see an interview with him on Democracy Now!)

The Audacity of Disappointment

Why are we so disappointed with Barack Obama? A recent piece in the Boston Globe blamed it on our brains. "Research suggests that even when people know that someone has nothing but bad options to choose from, they still blame the decider for a bad outcome." Even worse: as time goes on, we think in more and more glowing terms about "what might have been if different decisions had been made, different policies pursued, or different politicians elected," and therefore feel even more disappointed with what actually happened.

The psychological explanation of "the big letdown" is a conservative explanation. It implies that things never could have been as much better as we think. Hope and change are delusions. As Hegel said, what is, is right--because TINA (There Is No Alternative).

How about a political explanation instead? We are disappointed with Obama because as a candidate, he seemed to get it that radical change in this country is urgently needed, and then as President, he forgot all about that. We are disappointed because he and his advisors said, in so many words, that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste--and then proceed to waste it, by failing to explain to the country what got us into this mess and what it would take to get us out, permanently. We are disappointed because it doesn't matter what options it seemed he had: the reason we elected him was to create new options. We are disappointed even if we knew all along ( as many of us did, and wrote) that Obama was a cautious technocrat by training and inclination. We are disappointed because we need and deserve better--and because not to be disappointed would be to accept the unacceptable state of affairs in which we continue to live.

We Are NOT Out of Iraq

President Obama's declaration last week that combat operations in Iraq have ended is just as big a lie as President Bush's banner, "Mission Accomplished." Your tax dollars and mine are still paying to defend a government in Baghdad made up of warlords who have the same approach to women that the Taliban does. The money is not going to GI's anymore. It is going to mercenaries.

As Derrick Jackson pointed out in the Boston Globe, as the regular military stood down, the shadow military stood up.

A July report from the Congressional Research Service indicates that the number of private security personnel has risen by 26 percent during the drawdown. The report also says there are 11,600 private security forces in Iraq operating under the Department of Defense, a number corroborated by the federal bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting. So the total US security force level in Iraq — both military and private — is around 64,000.

Regular U.S. troops and spies have treated Iraqis in ways that poisoned the name of the U.S.: remember Abu Ghraib? What do we think will happen when soldiers-for-hire, including the infamous Blackwater under its new name of Xe, are in charge of U.S. interests in the country?

We in the U.S. may want to "turn the page" on Iraq, but our debt to the Iraqi people is still on the books.

Stigma against Abortion: What's to Oppose in the New Health Care Bill. part IV

Abortion is a legal right. What's more, it gives women the opportunity to refuse to give their bodies to pregnancies they don't want, or spend years raising children they may not have the money or the will to raise. No man has to make that choice: the least we can do is support women in the choices they make. Yet the new mandatory health insurance bill passed by Democrats in Congress and signed into law by President Obama paints a scarlet letter on women who choose abortion.

Sharon Lerner wrote in The Nation:

When the debate moved to the Senate... another Democrat, Ben Nelson, led the charge to restrict abortion coverage, proposing an amendment requiring any woman who wants insurance to cover the procedure to write a separate check for that premium. The Nelson Amendment also requires health plans to keep funds for abortion separate.

Apparently, there is no problem with funding agencies that bomb civilians and torture prisoners, but health plans that pay for women to exercise their legal rights are so shameful the government of the people, by the people, and for the people cannot be seen to support them. This is a tremendous step backward for women's rights and health, as well as for equality in America.

What's to Like about the New Health Insurance Bill

How should we regard the new health insurance bill that President Obama just signed into law? On Monday, I gave an overview. For the next few days, let's go into the details.

Compared with the system we have now, there's plenty to like about the new plan. Based on a summary in the Boston Globe, here are some of the good points:

More money for states to pay for poor people's health insurance. "Massachusetts would receive a $2 billion boost in Medicaid assistance over 10 years to help pay for insurance coverage for low-income residents." Medicaid plans let poor people get decent health care they couldn't afford otherwise.

More money to help moderate-income people pay for their own health insurance. "Tax credits are provided to help pay for insurance, and that aid is available for people with incomes up to four times the federal poverty level, which is $88,2oo for a family of four and $43,32o for an individual."

Fewer denials of coverage. "The measure would prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage because of a preexisting condition," within six months for children and by 2014 for adults. It also lets young adults stay on their parents' plans until they turn 26 (meaning fewer will go without health insurance), and it makes sure Medicare pays for elders' prescription drugs (eliminating the "doughnut hole" in which, if you paid more than $2,700 a year for prescriptions, you were on your own until your expenses mounted to $6,200). People with pre-existing health problems, young people, and seniors make up a large part of the population! They will all be better off because of these provisions.

Coverage for legal immigrants. Currently, the federal government provides no help at all to legal immigrants seeking health insurance. In 2014, under the new bill, the feds would send money to state governments like Massachusetts which choose to subsidize health insurance for low- and moderate- income legal immigrants the same way as they subsidize low- and moderate-income American citizens.

If your question is, "Will anybody be better off under the new bill than they were before?", then the answer is, "Yes, lots of people will." And I agree with columnist Scot Lehigh that Obama and the Democrats need to go on tour to promote it. They should use every mass marketing and social networking trick in the book to spread the word and build support for the bill.

That doesn't mean I think it's a good bill. Why? Come back tomorrow to find out.

The Blessing and the Curse of the Health Insurance Bill

Democrats will say that the health insurance bill which passed the House of Representatives last night is a historic expansion of the right to health care. Republicans will say that it's full of loopholes and sweetheart deals and that it costs too much.

They're both right.

We in Massachusetts have lived under something a lot like the new federal health insurance system. We are in a privileged position to tell the rest of the nation what to expect. Over the coming days and weeks, I will try to do just that.

Here's a hint at what you're likely to hear from me. I work in an anti-poverty agency, and the way that both the Massachusetts and the federal bill expand high-quality care to the poorest of the poor is something I can applaud. Plus, everyone can be happy that insurance companies will have to cover people regardless of pre-existing conditions--and that they have to cease and desist dropping people's coverage once they get sick. These are real gains.

For people who are not among the poorest, this bill is bait and switch. It promises health care, but only delivers on health insurance, mostly at our own expense. The kinds of health insurance that many working poor and even middle-income people will be forced to buy won't help them with the things they need most: doctor visits, preventive care, prescription drugs. Instead, they'll be required to send their hard-earned money to fatten insurance company profits for policies that only kick in when they have medical emergencies. By delivering new customers to already-wealthy insurance companies while not paying attention to the daily needs of the working and middle classes, Obama and the Democrats are creating a constituency that will blame them, think of them as out of touch, and be open to manipulators like Scott Brown.

The country would be better off if our rulers had passed the Medicare-for-all type system that most people want. It would include everybody, meet all their basic needs, and cost much less. But it was never seriously discussed. That's why we're left picking out crumbs of good news on a day when we should have been able to feast on victory.

Where's the Outrage--and Where Should It Be?

Money is not the issue. Power is.

A year after causing the biggest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, corporate chieftains are paying themselves big bonuses again. Many of them get more in bonuses than you or I earn in salary or wages all year. The Obama administration is mildly chiding them. Some columnists (like the Boston Globe's Derrick Jackson) are calling it an outrage. But what they are looking at is just the symptom, not the disease.

Why do corporate CEO's, top managers, and boards get to decide what to pay one another, in an orgy of "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours"? Why does the finance industry get to accept billions in bailout money from you and me, then refuse to lend to people with good credit, including the small business around the corner? Why, when the U.S. government just saved corporate capitalism from a complete breakdown, does the government still defer to the corporate capitalists who steered us into the ditch to begin with?

Corporations in this country are more powerful than the people we elect to represent our interests. Until we squarely face that problem, shouting about exorbitant bonuses is just a way of letting off steam.

Obama Living Up to Expectations (which is not saying much)

I am getting tired of hearing how disappointed my liberal friends are with Obama. I am not disappointed, for two reasons. He is precisely the kind of cautious, technocratic middle-of-the-roader he has been all along. And: electing a President is not the same thing as changing the system.

If you want real health care (not some bogus "reform"), you're going to have to agitate, organize, mobilize, stomp, shout, lobby, and in general do all those activist things that have gone out of fashion. Facebook Causes are no substitute for the real thing!

Argentina, and Chile, Cry for the U.S.!

When a democratically elected government replaced the brutal military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, it took years for the full truth about the former regime's tortures and murders of political opponents to see the light of day. The restoration of democracy was too fragile, and the country was too divided, to withstand an investigation immediately.

Do we live in Chile? President Obama has refused to set up an independent truth commission to find out exactly how much blood is on our hands because of the Bush/Cheney programs of "enhanced interrogation" (torture) and "rendition" (torture by other nations as subcontractors to the U.S.). He has resisted Congressional efforts to get to the bottom of it. It's true that he released more documents about waterboarding than we had ever seen before, and he has said he will not stand in the way if the Justice Department decides there are criminal cases to pursue. But his insistence on looking forward, not back, runs the risk of making him an accomplice after the fact.

How terrible are the crimes of the CIA under the last administration, anyway? According to Jane Mayer in The New Yorker:

The C.I.A. has apparently done nothing to penalize the officer who oversaw one of the most notorious renditions—that of a German car salesman named Khaled el-Masri. He was abducted while on a holiday in Macedonia, and flown by the agency to Afghanistan, where he was detained in a dungeon for five months without charges, before being released. From the start, the rendition team suspected that his case was one of mistaken identity. But the C.I.A. officer in charge at Langley—the agency asked that the officer’s name be withheld—insisted that Masri be further interrogated. “She just looked in her crystal ball and it said that he was bad,” a colleague recalls. Masri says that he was chained in a freezing cell with no bed, and given water so putrid that he could smell it across the room. He was threatened and stripped, and could hear other detainees crying all around him. After several weeks, the C.I.A. officer in charge learned that Masri’s German passport was not a forgery, as was originally suspected, and that he was not the terror suspect the agency thought he was. (The names were similar.) Even so, the officer in charge refused to release him. Eventually, Masri went on a hunger strike, losing sixty pounds. Skeptics in the agency went directly over the officer’s head to Tenet, who realized that his agency had been brutalizing an innocent man. Masri was released after a hundred and forty-nine days. But the officer in charge was not disciplined; in fact, a former colleague says, “she’s been promoted—twice.” Masri, meanwhile, has been unable to sue the U.S. government for either an apology or damages, because the courts consider the very existence of rendition a state secret—a position that the Obama Justice Department has so far supported.

If Obama believes he has no choice but to do this, cry for the United States and its victims!

Morphing into "Bush Light" on Security Issues

There's more than the proverbial dime's worth of difference between Obama and Bush on domestic policy. In fact, for the anti-poverty agency where I work, there's hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference! But on the questions of intervention abroad and secrecy at home, Obama is rapidly acquiring the taste for an imperial presidency that characterized the previous administration.

Item: wars of choice. Bush famously sent American men and women into the line of fire in Iraq on a fool's errand. There were no weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had no alliance and very little in common, and Iraq did not threaten the U.S. But the new administration is getting ready for an expanded war in Afghanistan, where U.S. intervention thus far has shifted control from one set of warlords (the Taliban) to another (the Northern Alliance) without making any permanent improvement in the lives of Afghanis and where civil war as soon as the U.S. pulls out seems inevitable.

Obama is also sending money to Pakistan, which more than any other country has offered aid and comfort to al-Qaeda. If Obama has good reasons to believe that the Pakistani military and secret police have changed tunes and now regard al-Qaeda as more of a threat to them than India, he hasn't shared those reasons with the public.

Item: Guantanamo. (Not "Gitmo," an ugly name invented by people who have no respect for the country of Cuba, part of which the U.S. has occupied for decades--imagine if the Cubans had a military base in Baja California!) Obama has pledged to close the prison camp there, site for torture and war crimes that should make all Americans ashamed. Yet he is letting NIMBY opposition keep him from transferring prisoners to U.S. soil to stand trial, and threatening to hold those trials in military commissions that Bush created, not in U.S. courts where a fair trial could be guaranteed. He is also ignoring the well-documented phenomenon of people being held in Guantanamo (and other secret prisons) for no damn reason whatever--just because some local U.S. ally whom they had offended put the "terrorist" label on their heads.

Item: secrecy and assertions of executive privilege. The Obama administration refuses to release logs of visitors to the White House. Dick Cheney took the same stand when he cut deals with the energy industry in secret meetings. The Obama administration also refuses to publish photos of U.S. soldiers, mercenaries, and spies torturing Iraqis or to prosecute torturers. And Obama wants to reserve the right to wiretap people and then try them on the basis of secret evidence. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

President Obama’s administration has told a federal judge in San Francisco that it does not have to release top-secret documents connected to a wiretapping case in which a branch of an Islamic charity in Oregon is suing the government, reports the Associated Press.

The judge told the government in May he would punish it if it did not devise a plan for how the suit could go forward without the release of the documents, the news agency reports. However, the prosecution already had possession of the documents for a short time, when the Treasury Department inadvertently released them. The government has since taken them back.

The al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, whose Oregon chapter is now closed, was designated as an organization that supports terrorism by the federal government in 2004. The documents are a phone log documenting wiretapping of members of the charity, the news agency reports. It says the government did not obtain permission from a judge to place the wiretaps.

Feeling Ill about Health Care Debate

Following the health care debate is enough to make you sick.

Here in Massachusetts, supporters of the state's mandatory health insurance plan talk about how many people now have insurance and how much money that's going to save the hospitals and the state treasury. Critics mostly talk about the cost of the plan and how, soon, paying for those who can't pay for themselves will drive the state to the poorhouse. Some point out that businesses are providing their employees with health insurance plans that don't meet the minimum standards set out in state law, and daring the state to catch them.

All this is beside the point. The goal should not be to provide people with health insurance but to ensure their right to health care. Plans that cost low- to middle-income households a lot of money up front--plans with a high deductible, to use the industry's bland euphemism--insure coverage without care. And that leaves people just as sick as they were before, just a little poorer.

At the federal level, besides using Massachusetts as a model (!), Obama is doing the usual liberal dance: offering something that makes him feel good but doesn't do the job.

• "President Obama will sign a presidential memorandum today to extend benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, administration officials said last night, but he will stop short of pledging full health insurance benefits," reports the Boston Globe.
• "A key Senate committee voted yesterday to expand a children's health insurance program to cover an additional 4 million uninsured children," but that still leaves many uninsured, and it says nothing about what happens to children when their parents fall ill.
• The current debate is over whether the federal plan should include a "public option." Proponents say that a public plan would give people more choices--which is only meaningful if the choices are any good, and if they differ in significant ways. They also say competition from a public plan would force private insurers to find ways to cut costs. Critics say the public plan could get a public subsidy and put private insurers out of business.

"In response, Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, has proposed setting ground rules for a public plan that would force it to compete on a level playing field with private insurers." In other words, get rid of the main reason for having a public plan in the first place, its ability to serve huge numbers of people at low cost!

Schumer is no different from the leader of his party in this respect. President Obama has done all but take a blood oath that his plan is not a "Trojan horse" leading the way for a single-payer system. That's exactly what's wrong with it! Single-payer means everybody gets health insurance as a right, the same as the right to vote or the right to a public education. The fact that the Democrats are falling all over themselves to rule out a single-payer solution is what's so sickening about what passes for a health care debate.

A Bad Week for Liberal Idealists

I feel bad for my liberal friends today, especially for those people (young and old) who thought electing Barack Obama as President would make the U.S. a different country.

Item: "President Obama's decision to overhaul and restart the Bush administration's military tribunals for Guantanamo Bay terrorism detainees won support from congressional Republicans yesterday, but deepened his estrangement from the liberal activists who helped sweep him into office."

Item: "KABUL - Human Rights Watch accused the US military of not doing enough to reduce civilian casualties during battles in Afghanistan and called yesterday for changes to prevent civilian deaths like those earlier this month."

Item: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi either knew about the torture of prisoners by waterboarding and said nothing at the time, or else she let the CIA fob off a bunch of misleading statements and significant omissions on as an official report. Either way, she made the Democrats complicit with the Bush administration in committing war crimes.

It's gotten to the point where political cartoonist Rob Rogers shows Obama reading all-too-familiar phrases from the Bush teleprompter!

Is this all a big surprise? It shouldn't be. As far back as June 2006, Obama revealed himself to be cautious in temperament, conservative in morality, non-confrontational, willing to test the limits of the possible but ready to retreat at the first sign that he'd gone too far. If we sit back and let the right wing exert all the pressure, Obama will do what's expedient and not what's really needed. As for the Democrats in Congress, they have always been more concerned about getting back their majority than about repairing the damage to the country that first the Clinton, then the Bush administrations created.

Liberals, this is your chance to give up wishful thinking. If you want progressive policies, you need to build a progressive movement. Putting new faces into office simply means hearing new voices try to explain why the U.S. has to keep pursuing failed and immoral policies. The officeholders are the ones who have to start hearing from us for a change!

Impunity

I am not surprised that Obama is not going to prosecute the people who told George W. Bush what he wanted to hear: that it was legal to strip people naked and leave them in freezing cold interrogation rooms, or pour water down their throats until they nearly died from drowning. The right thing to do would be to prosecute Bush, Cheney, the Office of Legal Counsel who advised them, and the CIA and military people who carried out the torture, for conspiracy to violate human rights. It will not happen. I am not surprised, but I am dismayed, disheartened, and a bit more afraid of this government even than before. Tell me again that they are there to protect us.

Yes, Mr. President, There is a Habeas Corpus

You can't call someone a terror suspect, lock him up, and throw away the key, whether the prison is in Guantanamo, Cuba or Bagram, Afghanistan.

Duh!

It's alarming that the Obama administration agreed with the Bush administration "that the Bagram prisoners were not entitled to question their detention in civil courts," according to an article in today's Boston Globe. Didn't Obama say we should elect him because of his good judgment? What kind of judgment does it demonstrate when he asserts the same kind of dictatorial powers that we have fought against for the last eight years?

A Life Sentence for Vets

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, was blunt about psychological and family problems of vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan--including high rates of homelessness.

"This is not a 10-year problem. It is a 50- or 60- or 70-year problem."

Think about that. The decision to go to war means condemning a certain number of the men and women in uniform to a lifetime of suffering. We call them heroes, but we punish them with a life sentence--them, their spouses, their children, and everyone who loves them and is forced to watch them struggle with horrors most of us will never see.

Think about it again, hard, whenever you imagine the U.S. using military force again. President Obama, think about that when you calculate your troop increases in Afghanistan. Know that when we go to war, we make our own soldiers the enemy. What is there in the world that could justify doing that to our friends, neighbors, and countrymen and women? How dare we?

Ghost Wars, part I

Payback is a poor excuse for a foreign policy. That's one of the lessons I derive from reading Steve Coll's Ghost Wars : The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

I'm only 2/3 of the way through this very detailed history, but some things are already clear. One is that in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to ensure it would have a friendly government in a strategically located country, the U.S. was still licking its wounds from Vietnam. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor, was still viewing the Soviets as the people who invaded Eastern Europe. The Carter administration felt betrayed by the Soviet move, and they took it personally. They saw Afghanistan not as a country of its own, with a people whose destiny mattered, but as a place where they could get back at the U.S.S.R. and humiliate them as the U.S. had been humiliated earlier in the decade.

The U.S. armed violent Islamic fundamentalists to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. With what result? Some of those became the warlords who carved up Afghanistan in the 1980's and early 1990's, after Gorbachev decided the war in Afghanistan was unwinnable: Hekmatyar, Massoud, etc. Some became the jihadists who replaced those warlords. We know them as the Taliban.

For over two decades, to spite the Soviet Union, the U.S. condemned Afghanistan to civil war and chaos. President Obama today is making tough choices (and I believe, wrong choices) about sending troops to Afghanistan partly because of the problems the U.S. made.

We did not create those problems all by ourselves, however. That's the subject of a future post.

Socialism, Reagan-style

It helps to have a historical memory! Republicans are calling Obama's recovery plan "socialist" in part because it raises taxes on the rich. But it doesn't raise them anywhere near as high as they were under Republican presidents Ronald Reagan or Richard Nixon. They don't make Republicans like they used to! Or socialists, for that matter!