Reconsider Columbus Day

Sad News

The words aren't flowing today so I'll paraphrase someone who was intimately acquainted with loss:

Edward Kennedy "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him...pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world..."

Robert Novak

Lest we forget...

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Illegitimate Concerns

From Campbell Brown to Jon Stewart to Barack Obama himself, the recent recipe for dealing with the crazies and operatives who’ve dominated the coverage of the health care debate appears to be as follows: Separate the fear mongering about death panels and such nonsense from the “legitimate” concerns about cost, being able to keep one’s current insurance, etc. Then, having sorted one from the other, dismiss the first and address the latter.

I suspect this will work, if by “work” one means helping pave the way to getting some version of a bill passed when Congress returns to session.

But we shouldn’t forget that at the end of the day, the only legitimate concern in the health care debate is this: Will anyone who needs to see a physician or receive a medical procedure be able to get treatment at a nearby health care facility without worrying about how to pay for it?

If the answer is “No”—and it looks like that’s what it will be—then illegitimate concerns will have once again carried the day.

BO's Health Care Reform: Settling for Less

When the makers of the animated film The Incredibles wanted a visceral symbol for our society’s moral turpitude they knew exactly what to do: depict an insurance company executive--single-minded in the pursuit of profit and lacking even the slightest glimmer of sympathy for his fellow humans. The message was so clear that a four-year-old could get it: the only way that insurers make money is by denying claims and coverage to those who need help.

So why is it that on an issue that everybody “gets” immediately, do the big corporate players, including the insurance industry, have the upper hand? Well, as even Frank Rich has now come to see, it’s because those on whom so many counted to smite the mighty, have instead been brokering deals:

As Congressional Quarterly reported last week, industry groups contributed almost $1.8 million in the first six months of 2009 alone to the 18 House members of both parties supervising health care reform, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer among them.

Add to that the fact that, as OpenSecrets.org has reported, candidate Obama was by far the greatest beneficiary of contributions from the health care sector and the hash being made of health care reform was a foregone conclusion.

To be sure, as many have pointed out, the obnoxious opposition to health care that has torpedoed many townhall meetings was largely manufactured by corporate lobbyists. Even so, the real problem was with the townhalls themselves, which were little more than Administration efforts to palm off the mystery meat in the various congressional health insurance reform bills as the high quality stuff of truly democratic health care. It’s hard to imagine shouting down the wingnuts and paid corporate operatives with chants that amount to “We want Spam!” Yet as even Rich acknowledges in observing that some form of health care reform is likely to pass, Spam is what we’re going to get.

When an Obama-enabler like Rich allows himself to voice a “fear . . . that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy,” it is tempting to believe that a moment of Liberal /Left-reckoning regarding Obama might be at hand. But two other columns from the Times indicate otherwise.

First, Paul Krugman’s “Averting the Worst” column on Obama’s flawed effort to fix the economy illustrates how difficult it is for Obama’s liberal critics to avoid being boxed in to muttering the mush-mouthed mantra of what Obama support has always been: a plaintive wail that the other guys would have been worse.

Then there’s Barbara Ehrenreich’s indignant account of what amounts to a legislative and policy war against the poor being carried out by states and municipalities across the country. After cataloging the despicable ways that poor people in this country are treated, Ehrenreich’s column concludes:

Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.

I have no doubt that Ehrenreich truly believes that we could “afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty”—but what the hell does this really mean? Let’s roll back poverty rates to what they were two years ago? Whoop-dee-frickin'-doo! But that’s not even where the piece ultimately comes down. Despite the fact that her guy is now in office, Ehrenreich would be content, for the moment, with treating the poor a little better.

What ever else this is, it’s unmistakably a way of telling the guy in charge just how little you’d settle for. And to extend Rich’s somewhat homophobic metaphor, if you tell the big guy on the block that he can punk you for a quarter, don’t be surprised if he pays you only a dime, or perhaps nothing at all, because he probably thinks, when all is said and done, that’s what you wanted in the first place.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Finally warm enough to take him to the lake and let him play in the water. I can't believe I just wrote that on the last day of July in Chicago. What happened to summer?

Them That's Got Shall Get...

If you were wondering how wealth, income, and power have been, and still are, distributed in the USA than have a look-see at an article by Professor G. William Domhoff, available at the Sociology Dept. at UC Santa Cruz. I've excerpted some of the more upsetting paragraphs, tables, and figures below.

In the United States, wealth is highly concentrated in a relatively few hands. As of 2004, the top 1% of households (the upper class) owned 34.3% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 50.3%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 85%, leaving only 15% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers).

Besides illustrating the significance of home ownership as a measure of wealth, the graph also shows how much worse Black and Latino households are faring overall, whether we are talking about income or net worth. In 2004, the average white household had 10 times as much total wealth as the average African-American household, and 21 times as much as the average Latino household. If we exclude home equity from the calculations and consider only financial wealth, the ratios are more startling: 120:1 and 360:1, respectively. Extrapolating from these figures, we see that 69% of white families' wealth is in the form of their principal residence; for Blacks and Hispanics, the figures are 97% and 98%, respectively.

Here are some dramatic facts that sum up how the wealth distribution became even more concentrated between 1983 and 2004, in good part due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and the defeat of labor unions: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%. A whopping 94% went to the top 20%, which of course means that the bottom 80% received only 6% of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s (Wolff, 2007).

(snip)

It's even more revealing to compare the actual rates of increase of the salaries of CEOs and ordinary workers; from 1990 to 2005, CEOs' pay increased almost 300% (adjusted for inflation), while production workers gained a scant 4.3%. The purchasing power of the federal minimum wage actually declined by 9.3%, when inflation is taken into account. These startling results are illustrated in Figure 7.

ht to alr

Atonement

Watching The Fog of War for the second time around, I couldn't help but wonder: is this watery-eyed man in Rumsfield's future? Twenty, or so years, down the road will he subject himself to hours of interviews on his many errors in the Iraq war?

As of today confirmed deaths in the Iraq War stand at just over 4,300, a far cry from the over 25,000 who died during McNamara's seven-year term as Secretary of Defense. This isn't to say that fewer deaths should lay more lightly on Rumsfield's conscience, but rather that, as much as we make easy comparisons between the Iraq War and the Vietnam War, those of us who are for the first time grappling with a war with significant casualties have no concept of the ultimate blood cost of a protracted, and ultimately futile, conflict.

The Fog of War, and McNamara himself, frustrates our need for a complete mea culpa. In so many ways he remained to the end a Washington bureaucrat, rationalizing at the same time he chided those who rationalized war, and, at times, flatly refusing to address the issue of his own guilt. However, throughout the documentary he numbers the dead, numbers them and draws comparisons to the populations of American cities. For a cracker-jack statistician the way he recalls those numbers speaks of a mind who never stops seeing the loss of life, never stops wondering how many had to die.

McNamara strikes me as someone who desperately wanted forgiveness and yet was enough of a realist not to ask for it. Yet, he spent his years following his time attacking poverty, the nuclear arms race, and, ultimately, the culture of war itself. It's difficult to know how to weigh the actions of his later years with those of his sojourn at the Pentagon; for at the end of the day how do you weigh a few good works against the thousands of lives either lost or irrevocably damaged by your actions?

Atonement works great in theology but it is pretty much impossible in real life. Asking regular human beings to have enough grace to forgive on that scale is too much. So I don't want to make excuses nor suggest that in attempting to atone for his crimes McNamara deserves a break. At the same time in measuring him against others of his ilk--his contemporary Henry Kissinger for one and those who followed, Cheney and Rumsfield-- McNamara's dedication to atoning for his crimes raises him above those others merely in the recognition of having done egregious wrongs. That recognition seems such a small thing yet is so rare amongst those who recklessly drive us into deadly and morally compromising situations. In our time we are faced either with silence (Colin Powell) or a flat denial of any wrongdoing. Cheney's callousness is so despicable as to suggest a certain joy in the chaos he creates. It shouldn't be so much to ask for those in power to recognize that their actions have consequences. It shouldn't, but it is.

McNamara offered himself up as a cautionary tale in 2003, the same year we invaded Iraq, possibly in the vain hope that the mess we're in could be avoided. I think that all by itself, while many might say it is 40 years too late, is worthy of our consideration if not our absolution.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Happy Father's Day Weekend!

Ian Frazier says it best.

O my children, you are disobedient. For when I tell you what you must do, you argue and dispute hotly even to the littlest detail; and when I do not accede, you cry out, and hit and kick. Yes, and even sometimes do you spit, and shout "stupid-head" and other blasphemies, and hit and kick the wall and the molding thereof when you are sent to the corner. And though the law teaches that no one shall be sent to the corner for more minutes than he has years of age, yet I would leave you there all day, so mighty am I in anger. But upon being sent to the corner you ask straightaway, "Can I come out?" and I reply, "No, you may not come out." And again you ask, and again I give the same reply. But when you ask again a third time, then you may come out.

Hear me, O my children, for the bills they kill me. I pay and pay again, even to the twelfth time in a year, and yet again they mount higher than before. For our health, that we may be covered, I give six hundred and twenty talents twelve times in a year; but even this covers not the fifteen hundred deductible for each member of the family within a calendar year. And yet for ordinary visits we still are not covered, nor for many medicines, nor for the teeth within our mouths. Guess not at what rage is in my mind, for surely you cannot know.

For I will come to you at the first of the month and at the fifteenth of the month with the bills and a great whining and moan. And when the month of taxes comes, I will decry the wrong and unfairness of it, and mourn with wine and ashtrays, and rend my receipts. And you shall remember that I am that I am: before, after, and until you are twenty-one. Hear me then, and avoid me in my wrath, O children of me

Obama's Panderer's Box...

...is always open.

When David Horowitz is complimenting you, it's way past time to trash the preferences and uninstall the software.

Michael Smith at Stop Me Before I Vote Again describes Obama's Cairo speech as an "...emetic concoction of falsehood, sanctimony, and hypocrisy..."

The whole sick-making performance is like this -- Parson Obama, master of the drone aircraft and the cluster bomb for six days in the week, ascends the pulpit on the seventh and tells everybody -- well, almost everybody -- to renounce violence.

On Obie's one hand, the Israelis. On his other, the Palestinians. Obie weighs, Obie judges, Obie sits on the throne and apportions the deservedness and destiny of nations. So let it be written! So let it be done!

[snip]

The qualities that his admirers admired him for -- intelligence, moral seriousness, high purpose, the whole Eagle Scout package -- curdle, it seems, once mixed with actual power, into a filthy foetid smarmy preacherly pustular effluvium worthy of Woodrow Wilson himself.

Obama and his administration are not really change agents. They are more like grand cosmeticians trying, and possibly succeeding, at putting lipstick on the pig that is the United States (to borrow a phrase from the whole McCain/Palin episode). No one will buy the line about the USA not being a self-serving empire, but they'll appreciate the effort.

Dear Mr. President

It's always heartening to find that there are many who are not hoodwinked by the rhetoric:

Mr. Obama,
You are a fine speechmaker and have helped the government and people of the U.S.A. generally feel a more sincere and positive connection to the civilized world than they have had a right to feel in recent years. However, to name a few of what I honestly feel are dangerously misguided positions of yours that will allow the black mark on our nation’s legacy to further stain its way towards becoming a permanent scar:

1) Afghanistan is not a “good” war.
2) The government and people of Israel ought not be held in higher esteem than those of any other nation.
3) Most importantly, you should not let Cheney, G.W. Bush, and other immoral, murderous criminals in their administration off the hook. You and your relatively new government are, it is hoped, better than Gerald Ford and his government, who unforgivably pardoned the wretched criminal Richard Nixon for somewhat less significant wrongdoings and betrayals of the people of this and other countries than Cheney and company are guilty of.

Mr. Cheney,
Please return to cuddling up on your immense pile of blood-soaked plunder and go back to sleep. You are a lying, mercenary, savagely cruel, shameless coward. You were a child once; please remember that there are children and families of these children in the United States of America and in the rest of the world who suffer long-lasting harm from your merciless, uncompassionate words and actions, and from your continuing unrepentant espousal of the same.

V.M.

Umm...V.M. is Viggo Mortensen.

Friday Malamute Blogging

Finally warm enough to drink water with two feet. He kept batting at the reflection of himself, or something, in the water. I couldn't get a pic of that. Maybe next time.

Stupid and Contagious

(click on image for a larger version)

From the Center for Economic and Policy Research

This report finds that the U.S. is the only country among 22 countries ranked highly in terms of economic and human development that does not guarantee that workers receive paid sick days or paid sick leave. Under current U.S. labor law, employers are not required to provide short-term paid sick days or longer-term paid sick leave. By relying solely on voluntary employer policies to provide paid sick days or leave to employees, tens of millions of U.S. workers are without paid sick days or leave. As a result, each year millions of American workers go to work sick, lowering productivity and potentially spreading illness to their coworkers and customers.

"Not really any surprise here, but it's nice to have the numbers."

thanks A.

Friday Malamute Blogging

He's very sweet after a long walk by the lake, otherwise he's cranky.

Seoul Music

...or as Maurice White would say "Can I get a right-on?"

A moment of (ex)Catholic reflection

So what has struck me most about the Miss California thing is what it says about that strain of Protestantism. There's nothing special about the fact that she did the softcore photos; that hardly registers on the hypocrisy scale any more -- not after legions of Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader prayer leaders, dope fiend anti-drug crusaders, barely closeted gay ministers
denouncing homosexuality, etc. And the cute little "whore next door" thing -- e.g., Hooters -- has long been a staple form of respectable titillation among the holyroller set, even down to slutting up the barely post-toddler girls for those hideous child pageants. I used to think of this as a distinctly southern phenomenon, and I guess I still do, even though its range has broadened greatly. In this regard one strain of California is the biggest, boldest southern state, a semi-autonomous, or at least closed, republic of parvenu okies. (I suspect in Miss CA's case that a little unraveling would find some Cajun roots not very far back, and Cajuns who'd become holyrollers at that.) A few years ago, with Engels and Mencken on my mind, I watched one of those wedding preparation shows that featured a former Miss Mobile who had washed out at the Miss Alabama pageant and her minor league baseball player boyfriend, who was from either CA or one of those big, empty states out West. Part of what was going on was clearly that her wedding was to be her consolation victory pageant, and she planned it accordingly. A leitmotif, though, was that they were both celibate holyrollers and were going to have sex for the first time in their lives after the wedding. The guy seemed like he could be deeply closeted even to himself, but she was a different story. The show was an hour-long pricktease. She kept winking and making coy references to what she was going to give him on their wedding night, pulling up the skirt of the wedding gown to show the garter, flexing her hotness for the camera and the like. It was extraordinary.

What most intrigued me about Miss CA's reaction to discovery of the photos is the way her first move has been to do damage control to protect her brand-- going first and without modification by attempt to explain them away or defend her morality -- to try to preempt their circulation by insisting that she was a minor when they were taken. Here she'd just set herself up to become a star on the right-wing Christian circuit as a sexy little kewpie-doll martyr to the fags and liberals and the like, and she may have rushed straight to her Jimmy Swaggart moment before she even got the career off the ground. Makes you wonder how many years of him and Jim Bakker we'd have been spared if you tube had been around.

For this kind of holyroller, apparently, God -- or Jesus -- is that little ventriloquist's dummy or imaginary Friend you carry around with you to tell you, and of course anyone who might even hint otherwise, that whatever you do -- whatever nasty prejudices you hold, whatever meanspirited actions you undertake or endorse, whatever apparent hypocrisy you may display, whatever you calculate to be in your narrowest and most immediate self-interest at the moment, whatever unreflected-upon impulses you act on no matter how outrageously they seem to contradict "principles" or "values" you parade around in public or what harm they might inflict on others -- you're fine, Saved, elect, and that, therefore, your qualifications for passing peremptory judgment on others based on your superiority as His one true Xtian are in no way compromised or impaired.

I suspect that only the deeply stupid (e.g., GWB, Palin), or psychotic, can take solace in so obviously self-serving a fairy tale, and only the deeply immoral (e.g., ditto) would want or need to do so.

A.

Thanks, Professor Reed

Confederate History Month?

Last week Georgia Governor, Sonny "chickenshit" Perdue signed into law a bill permanently designating that:

every April “shall be set aside to celebrate the Confederate States of America, its history, those who served in its armed forces and government,” and all those who contributed “to the cause which they held so dear.”

I would think that this news would cause more than a ripple of interest and derision in the 21st century, or are we now celebrating slave owners in our brand new "post-black"— "post-race" world?

This excellent column goes on to quote the Vice President of the Confederate States, Alexander Stephens, a Georgian:

“Our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists among us — the proper status of the negro in our civilization. … was the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution...
...[the Confederacy’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”

Most of those who supported the Confederacy and secession unambiguously supported slavery and this should be pointed out at every opportunity during the month of April in Georgia. It should be noted that not all white southerners aligned themselves with secessionists, and it is those whites who resisted the tyranny of the Confederate majority before and during the war, and who fought against white supremacy and for black political rights in the Reconstruction period following the war who deserve commemoration.

with the professor

Another Promise Bites the Dust

I think that the current NAFTA regime lacks the worker and environmental protections that are necessary for the long-term prosperity of both America and its trading partners. I would therefore favor, at minimum, a significant renegotiation of NAFTA and the terms of the President’s fast track authority.





Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Tuesday he is ``delighted'' the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama has closed the door to reopening the North American Free Trade Agreement.

U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk told reporters in a conference call on Monday that it is not necessary to renegotiate NAFTA to honour Obama's campaign promise to add stronger labour and environmental provisions.

``The president has said we will look at all options,''Kirk said. ``But I think they can be addressed without having to reopen the agreement.''